Chapter Six: Waiting Room

Jordan's pov 

The chairs in the third floor waiting room were the kind of blue that hospitals think is calming and isn't. I'd been in one for forty minutes and my leg hadn't stopped bouncing the entire time.

"Excuse me." I caught a nurse walking past with a clipboard, her scrubs printed with little cartoon sunflowers that felt insulting given the circumstances. "Sorry, hi, I'm Jordan Reyes, my mom is back there, Renata Reyes, she came in for a follow up and they took her back almost an hour ago and nobody's told me anything."

"Let me check for you, hon."

She didn't check for me. She walked to the desk, said something to another nurse, and came back with the exact same face she'd left with.

"Dr. Osei is still with her. Shouldn't be much longer."

"That's what you said forty minutes ago."

"I know it's hard to wait. I promise someone will come get you the second there's news."

She was gone before I could ask what kind of news. Good news doesn't usually need a promise attached to it. I sat back down and pulled my phone out and called the oncology desk directly, the number I'd saved into my contacts three weeks ago under the name DR OSEI OFFICE in all caps like shouting it would make them answer faster.

It rang four times and went to a voicemail box that was full.

"Are you kidding me," I said, out loud, to nobody, and the guy two chairs down glanced up from his magazine and then very deliberately looked back down at it.

I got up because sitting still had stopped being an option my body would agree to. I paced the short hallway between the waiting room and the vending machines, past a watercolor painting of a lighthouse that somebody had clearly chosen because it was supposed to feel hopeful, past a sign that said QUIET PLEASE, RECOVERY IN PROGRESS that I was definitely violating with the sound of my own shoes on the tile.

I had a dollar in my pocket, crumpled soft from being folded and refolded a hundred times, and I fed it into the vending machine because my hands needed something to do that wasn't calling anyone else and scaring them too.

B4. Peanut butter crackers. My mom's favorite, which I hadn't even clocked until the coil started to turn and I watched the little orange package tip forward and get stuck, hanging there by one corner, refusing to fall.

"Oh, come on." I hit the side of the machine with the flat of my hand, once, not hard, just enough to feel like I'd done something. The crackers didn't move. "Come on, man, I don't need this today."

I hit it again. Nothing.

I stood there staring at a stuck bag of peanut butter crackers like it was the single most important object in the entire hospital, because it was easier than standing there thinking about what was happening behind a set of double doors forty feet away, and some very quiet, very honest part of my brain understood that if I could just get the crackers to fall, everything else might be okay too. Which wasn't true. Which wasn't how any of this worked. I knew that. I hit the machine a third time anyway.

I gave up and walked back to the waiting room with my dollar gone and nothing to show for it, and I sat back down and pulled my phone out again, and this time I opened Eli's contact and let my thumb hover over the call button.

He would come. That wasn't even a question. If I called him right now and said one word, hospital, he'd be in his car before I finished the sentence, he'd blow through every yellow light between his house and here, he'd sit in this exact ugly blue chair next to me for as long as it took, because that's who he'd been to me since we were seven years old building a fort out of couch cushions in his basement.

But what if it was nothing. What if I called him, panicked him for nothing, and it turned out to be some benign thing, a cyst, a scare, and I'd made him drop whatever he was doing with Mia today, whatever that whole mess with the text and the pregnancy had turned into, just because I couldn't sit in a waiting room by myself for an hour like an adult.

I put the phone back in my pocket.

"You can do this by yourself," I said, quiet, mostly to convince my own hands to stop shaking. "It's probably nothing. People get called back for follow ups all the time and it's nothing."

I didn't believe myself. I don't think I'd believed myself about anything related to my mom's health in about three weeks, not since the first appointment where the doctor's face had done a thing I still couldn't fully describe, a kind of careful blankness that felt worse than if she'd just looked worried.

I checked the clock on the wall. 4:52. I'd lost track of how long I'd been sitting there.

I thought about my mom, alone in some exam room in a paper gown, probably making a joke to whatever nurse was in there with her, because that's what she did, she made jokes in the worst moments, she'd made a joke at my grandmother's funeral that had gotten half the church laughing through their tears, and some part of me desperately hoped she was doing that right now, cracking wise about the tissue paper gown or the cold stethoscope, because if she still had it in her to joke, that had to mean something. That had to mean it wasn't as bad as the shaking in my hands thought it was.

I texted her. "You good in there? I brought you your crackers but the machine ate them, I'm gonna have words with hospital management."

No response. She always texted back within a minute, even mid conversation, even at church, my mother had never once in her life let a text sit unanswered longer than she could help.

Five minutes went by. Then ten.

I stood up again. Sat back down. Stood up. The guy with the magazine had left at some point and I hadn't even noticed, and now I was alone in the waiting room with the hum of the fluorescent lights and the distant beep of something down the hall that I made myself stop trying to interpret, because everything in a hospital sounds like an alarm if you're scared enough, even the ones that are just a door needing to be shut properly.

I pulled up Eli's contact one more time. My thumb hovered over the call button again, and this time I actually pressed it, actually let it start to ring, one tone, and I panicked and hung up before it could connect, my heart going so hard I could feel it in my throat.

"Jordan?"

I looked up so fast I nearly dropped the phone.

Dr. Osei was standing in the doorway to the waiting room, still in her white coat, a folder pressed against her chest like she was holding something in instead of just carrying it, and her face had that same careful blankness from three weeks ago, except worse now, worse because it wasn't careful anymore, it had cracked just slightly at the edges into something that looked almost like sympathy.

"Can you come with me," she said. "We have your mother's biopsy results."