Nine days after the funeral, the hospital called and said Jack’s personal belongings were ready to be collected.
I almost didn’t go.
In the end I went because leaving them there felt like leaving a part of him behind.
When I arrived, a nurse had carefully packed everything into a canvas bag and handed it to me at the desk.
I could see a sweater folded on top.
A woman’s sweater, soft gray wool, neatly done.
It wasn’t mine.
I pulled it out and said, “Excuse me, I think there’s been a mix-up. This isn’t Jack’s, and it isn’t mine.”
The nurse frowned gently and checked the name on the bag.
“No, that came from your husband’s room. It belonged to the woman who kept visiting him. Wasn’t she a relative of yours?”
I nearly fainted right there at the desk.
Because Jack had grown up an orphan.
He had no family left in the world — that was the great sorrow of his life, the thing he carried like a stone in his pocket.
And my family would certainly have told me if one of them had been sitting at his bedside.
“How often did she come?” I asked.
The nurse thought about it, and I watched her decide to be honest.
“I’d never seen her before all this. But in the last few weeks, she was here almost every day. Sometimes she stayed after visiting hours. We let her, because — well. Because he lit up when she came.”
He lit up.
My dying husband lit up for a woman whose name I did not know.
You can imagine what a wife thinks, standing in a hospital lobby six months pregnant, holding another woman’s sweater.
I didn’t want to believe the worst.
But grief and suspicion are a terrible pair, and they had already moved into my chest together and started rearranging the furniture.
Underneath the sweater, at the very bottom of the bag, I found one more thing.
A small paper crane.
Folded out of a hospital menu, careful and precise, the wings pressed sharp with a fingernail.
I had no idea what it meant.
I turned it over and over in my fingers, and something about it made my throat close, though I couldn’t have told you why.
I begged the nurse to help me understand who the woman was.
I must have looked wild, because after a moment she went and found a kind administrator, who let me see a few seconds of footage from a hallway camera.
