Jared is Dead

Mary sat still as a statue. Her typically frenzied headspace was quiet, placid, felt stuffed with polyester batting and fiberglass insulation. One thought too many, and it might cause a spark and the whole thing would go up instantly in flames. There was only space enough for one idea, one truth, one memory: Jared is dead.

The room around her smelled like Doritos and hand sanitizer. Mary was dimly aware that names were being announced over a speaker, but never focused her attention enough to distinguish who was being called or where to. A flat screen TV mounted high on the wall and tilted slightly downward flashed faces or maybe nature scenes. Even though Mary’s eyes were locked, unblinking, on its smudged surface, she didn’t register what was happening there. 

She was one of a handful of people scattered among two dozen or so seats in the St. John’s Hopsital ICU waiting area. She kept an upright posture, effortless after a childhood spent at the dance studio and 15 years of yoga as an adult. The others’ heads were cranked down at their phone screens, spines drooping like thirsty flowers. That’s how anyone waiting anywhere tends to behave. Even driving a car, people get bored and have to check notifications or scroll through feeds just to get a fix of dopamine.

It was a Saturday afternoon. A few hours earlier, Mary had made a grocery list in her phone’s Notes app and texted her sister Catherine about seeing a movie together that evening. But now she sat in a hospital and Jared was dead. 

When the doctor told her, Mary crumpled. Her muscles lost their tone and she sank to the floor in a pile on herself. She heard a loud wail, a scream, sobbing, someone shouting “No!” There was snot and tears and spit and a little bile or something covering her face and the front of her jacket. Not five feet away, Jared just laid there; he didn’t wake up from all the ruckus she was making. He was tucked cozy into that bed under the horribly scratchy white blankets. 

He was always such a sound sleeper, could drop right into it as soon as he closed his eyes. She’d groan in annoyance when he’d start snoring a few minutes after lights out. Mary would toss and turn a bit, he’d keep sawing logs. Most nights she’d tip toe out to the couch where she could bathe her face in the blue light of her phone screen until her eyelids closed under their own weight.

If she’d had the capacity to think beyond the only truth that mattered to her, she might have wondered what would happen to his body. How long would they leave it in room 418? Would it stay at the hospital? Get transferred to a morgue? Do morgues even still exist or are they just a vestige of the past that serve as useful settings in police procedurals? Who would call his parents to deliver the horrific news? How does one go about planning a funeral for the person they had intended to live beside for the next half-century? 

Many religious and spiritual traditions believe that there is an energy within each person that is their essence. Call it a soul, a spirit, a Self, whatever. Followers of such traditions might consider that Mary’s internal light had been so snuffed out by her husband’s unexpected death that her soul-spirit-Self had no choice but to ring the alarm and knock her from her catatonia. There’s little other reason that one could conjure for what might have nudged her toward an alternate reality, shining a light through her otherwise gauzy mind that maybe this was all some kind of practical joke.

Was Jared dead? 

She blinked a few times quickly, relieving her dried eyes and with that motion, began to scan the room for cameras. Of course, nowadays they can hide cameras anywhere, even in eyeglass frames. Maybe there was one planted in the doctor’s stethoscope, to capture Mary’s face as she received the news. Or in the pen that the nurse handed her once she finally got back on her feet, tied to the lucite clipboard that held a form she had to sign to confirm his death. How silly, she was too under duress to read what she signed, but it became clear now that it was probably a release waiver for the hidden camera reality show she was on – some new-fangled iteration of Candid Camera. Jared was always playing tricks on her and she was rarely in the mood for it, but nothing had ever gone this far. 

She reattached her gaze to the TV, but this time she wasn’t paying attention because she was too busy trying to put the rest of the pieces together. She felt a little flip in her stomach, an excited anxiety – one of anticipation rather than dread. Soon Jared would emerge from the nurse’s desk, maybe in a hospital robe. He’d have his big goofy grin on his face, smiling so widely that his eyes would be nearly shut – she loved when he looked so happy! And after the editors cut it together for TV, they’d play some swelling string music as Mary and Jared reunited. She’d run to him and clutch him tightly, crying again, but this time tears of relief. He would grip her tightly, whisper “I’m sorry we scared you” against her ear and then kiss the top of her head while she cried into his chest.

After Mary recovered from the emotional whiplash of realizing that her husband’s death was all a ruse and he was actually alive and well, a real doctor would emerge with even better news. The doctor would tell Mary that she was pregnant! They’d explain that the hospital had a new technology that can detect hormonal levels in saliva. They’d explain that they had swabbed hers from Jared’s cheek, deposited by what she thought was their final kiss. It would truly be a miracle because Mary had been told two years ago that she was infertile. She and Jared wanted to be parents and were saving up for adoption. Now they could use that money to jump start a college fund for the baby growing within her.

This time Jared would be the one to collapse, to have the emotional response. A marching band would emerge from the nearby elevator bank, balloons attached to their belts and confetti dropping from the ceiling. A clown on stilts would present the overjoyed couple with an oversized check for – well she wouldn’t be able to count all the zeroes amid the excitement! The people waiting in the waiting room with her, the nurses at the nurses station, the patients waddling down the hall with their IV racks would all – in an amazingly synchronized fashion – peel their faces off, revealing that this whole time they were Mary’s and Jared’s family and friends in disguise. They were all in on it, too! 

Every problem Mary could count in her life would be resolved. She would be at peace, finally. Could taper off the SSRI she’d be on for the majority of her life. She’d be able to quit her mind-numbing job at the County Assessor’s office. Jared could finally launch his startup. She would be able to eat well, exercise, meditate, and journal. She would spend quality time with her husband because life can slip through your fingers if you don’t pay attention.

As this flashed in her mind’s eye, the nurses kept droning names through the PA system and someone in the corner of the room kept sneezing and Mary felt a sharp stab of panic right behind her belly button. How long had she been sitting there? Why hadn’t Jared emerged yet?

Of course: she needed to keep up with appearances, needed to go outside to call someone. Isn’t that what one should do when their spouse dies suddenly? Shouldn’t they go find some privacy and call someone to help them figure out how to put one foot in front of the other? Find someone to explain what needed to be done? Find someone who could hold them and comfort them?

If this was going to be some big reality reveal, she figured it might all hinge on her leaving this space. The crew would need to reset. She needed to go outside to call Catherine and explain this horrid situation. Surely, Catherine was waiting, waiting, waiting, watching her phone. Feeling phantom vibrations, so sure that Mary would have called her by now. Catherine nervously biting her thumbnail, afraid that maybe Jared hadn’t gone through with it. Or that maybe the hoax had sent Mary into some kind of medical emergency, she was always so sensitive, so reactive. She couldn’t handle being frightened. Why had Jared even thought this would be a good idea? Why hadn’t she stopped him, protected her sister? 

So Mary took a deep breath and pushed herself up from the chair. She was always nervous if she knew she was being watched, as she knew now. She smiled, forcing her lips to stay pursed, as she passed the other people waiting in the lounge, trying to get a good look at each person’s eyes to see if Catherine was among them. Her stomach flipped again and she felt tense as she forced her head to stay looking straight forward, giving the crew all the time they needed to get ready for her return and for the big reveal. 

But where could she go for this call? She was on the fourth floor, and pretty sure there were at least two elevator cars of performers waiting. She didn’t want to ruin her own surprise. Of course, they couldn’t have known that she would have figured it all out yet, so the producers would have prepared for anything. Which meant they would have predicted that she’d head for the elevator at some point. So she kept walking toward them.

Wouldn’t you know, one of the elevators had a piece of printer paper taped to it that read NOT IN SERVICE, scrawled in Sharpie (probably by some production assistant dressed in scrubs to blend in). Mary pressed the bottom button to call an elevator and bit down on the insides of her cheeks to suppress the toothy smile she felt pushing its way across her face. Her stomach butterflies were all aflutter, and she felt relieved to know that if she were to faint, as she had done a few times in her life, she was in a safe place.

The ding of an arriving elevator car shook her from her reverie and as the doors slid open she saw a janitor with a large cart. How convenient, indeed, that this janitor was planning to get off at the fourth floor. She gave him a wink, couldn’t help herself, and let him pass with the large utility cart carrying a mop, a trash can, piles of linens and boxes of single-use personal protective equipment. She wondered if the contraption wasn’t just a well-designed decoy that was hiding other materials or maybe even her non-dead husband.

No matter. She stepped in and pushed the button with a 1 and a star on it and began her descent to the main hospital lobby. She had to remain as calm as possible, assuming there was a hidden camera in the elevator, and she would exit the building before calling Catherine to tell her the news. It was all she could do not to explode from the impending relief. 

As the box she was in came to rest on the ground and Mary awaited the gliding split of the doors before her, she felt her stomach continue to drop. Her body became suddenly heavy and as the bustling lobby and its sick-green fluorescent lights summoned her from the elevator, a fresh thought entered her mind: Jared is dead.