Between Floors

(Possible birth trauma sensitive content)

I nearly tripped over my own feet, the squeak of my shoe against the floor pulled me back into reality. I pressed the elevator button and started thinking about dinner. To the world it was midnight, but to me it was time to eat. As hungry as I was, it all seemed like a chore. The door opened and I stepped in, pressing G and closing my eyes. My body felt every hour of overtime I had squeezed onto this pay. The hospital had become strangely familiar over the years, almost like a second home. Lately though it felt like a home I had outgrown. The light flickered, making the fluorescent beam feel welcome through the darkness. The elevator opened and I reached into my purse for my car keys. Taking three or four steps, I tuned back in, pausing from my thoughts of pesto or tomato sauce and suddenly I realized I wasn’t headed to my car. I turned around, looking down the vacant hall at the elevator and read the sign above. Through the flickering light and the glow of the exit sign my eyes adjusted to what I was reading. LABOUR AND DELIVERY. I picked the pace up, annoyed that I’d pressed the wrong button and put another 3 minutes in this place that Id never get back. I stepped backward into the elevator and pressed G again. Once, then again, harder as if the first press hadn’t understood me. The doors closed in unison with my celebratory sigh. I watched the numbers descend. Four. Three. Two. G . Ding. The doors opened. LABOUR AND DELIVERY. This time I didn’t step out. My bag started to feel heavy, and I couldn’t help but to feel the irony of taking the easy way out. Its only four floors, my karma for not meeting twenty thousand steps. I made the decision to re open the door seconds before it shut. I saw the exit sign and the relief bells rang, dinner demands seemed further away, I’ll eat in my dreams I said to myself, I just want my bed. The stairwell was old; it reminded me of an underground parking garage. The stairs of concrete are my new yellow brick road and right now there’s no place like home. At least Id have something to talk about in the breakroom tomorrow. I got to G and pushed open the heavy fire door. All it took was one step forward to see what I thought I saw- LABOUR AND DELIVERY. Before panic could fully wash over me, I heard a sound in the distance. It was faint and steady like the ticking of a clock, no more like a whoosh. It isn’t until then that I called out a meek “hello” and realized there is nobody else around. I never come to this floor, but surely, I’d imagined it livelier than this. I followed the sound. Four-fourteen, four- fifteen, four-sixteen I read aloud as I walked, searching for a reasonable explanation. Suddenly, the sound seemed to be following me. Light spilled from beneath a door to my right. I could no longer quiet my mind with possible explanations- I needed answers. Is this what Francine from Health and Wellness meant by workplace exhaustion? The thought disappeared when I opened the door. The room was completely empty, but it didn’t look clean. A dull haze hung in the air, and everything seemed strangely dated. Where was everyone? Only the unease answered. In the centre of the room where the bed should have been, a tiny bracelet caught my attention. I picked it up, tracing the plastic circles with my fingers, turning it until I saw the numbers – not just any numbers, 04/23/88. My birthday. Strange, coincidental, or both. My brain didn’t give me enough time to decide before the panic set in. My heart was beating faster now, the sound was closer, almost feeling in rhythm with my own heartbeat. I dropped the bracelet and darted out of the room. As the door shut, the lights shut off too. Walking more quickly now, it felt as though my search for something, someone intensified. I looked up and saw the same three-room numbers again. It felt as though the hallway never ended, but every time I looked up it was the same three rooms. The whoosh was louder now, almost as though it were galloping, amplified by the silence surrounding it. I reached up in the back of my hair, for my bobby pin. Almost as quickly as my curls fell, shaking I carved an x into the door of room 414. I ran down the hall until I couldn’t any longer. I looked up, my eyes expecting to see my landmark X before my brain could weigh in and I indeed did- only this wasn’t the same x I had just carved minutes ago. It looked worn, as though it had been there for decades. I ran my fingers over the lines, trying to find any trace of evidence to substantiate my inner knowing. The light from under the door emerged again as I followed the sound that demanded my attention. This time when I entered the room, I saw a woman lying in the bed, her face turned away and her hair partially covering it. The rhythmic whoosh that had been guiding me was clear and radiating through a monitor- 168bpm. There is an organized chaos surrounding her and although scared, I’m drawn closer. I stare for what feels like an eternity before recognizing what I see. The brown, smooth martini olive shaped birthmark right under her thumb, the crease of sincerity between her eyebrows. I had watched that face sleeping across from me on trains, busy in the kitchen, leaning over birthday cakes…that same face turning away when she hid her fears. This time I didn’t run from the sound. I stepped closer to the bed. On the table beside her was a chart, its pages yellowed at the edges. I recognized my mother’s name before I read the date beneath it. April 23rd, 1988. The room tilted. I gripped the bedrail, but my hand slipped and it did little to steady me. This wasn’t a memory. It couldn’t be. I had no memory of this room, of these walls, or of the fear carved into my mother’s younger face. Her eyes opened and she looked directly at me. “There you are”, she whispered. The monitor quickened. One hundred and seventy. One hundred and eighty. The whoosh filled the room, no longer distant. What felt like a mystery now felt innately familiar. It was a heartbeat, small, frantic and fighting. Mine. A cry broke through the room, it was a version of my mother’s voice I had not experienced before. I turned toward the sound and saw a bassinet where the empty space had been. Inside, beneath a thin hospital blanket was a baby wearing the bracelet I had dropped in the hall. Her lips were blue. Her tiny chest still. “No”, I whispered. My mother began to cry. “Please don’t take her”. The words echoed and stretched as if they were finally finding their way from somewhere they were stuck for so long. Footsteps thundered beyond the door. Voices shouted words I couldn’t understand, but nobody entered. The room was waiting for me. I reached into the bassinet and placed two fingers against the baby’s chest, feeling the slightest flutter. “Stay”, I begged her. “Please stay”. The inhale filled my lungs as I watched her take a breath. The monitor released one deafening whoosh, and every light in the room went out. When they came back on, I was standing inside the elevator with my hand pressed against my own chest. The doors opened onto the ground floor. Behind me the numbers glowed normally: four, three, two, G. A security guard looked up from his desk. “You alright?” he asked. “That elevator stalled for almost a minute”. I nodded, though my legs were shaking. As I stepped into the lobby, something fell from around my wrist. A faded plastic hospital bracelet. Outside, the skies were cotton candy coloured, and dawn had begun to break. For the first time, I wondered whether I had been trying to leave the hospital, or whether some forgotten part of me had spent my entire life trying to find its way out. I got in my car and headed into the light. Tomato sauce it was.