I can imagine how it looked from her side.

She did not understand the request.

She heard it, she just did not understand it.

There was a voice that echoed through some sort of radio in the hallway outside.  It had the sound of a tin can reverberating.  Muffle muffle muffle.  That’s what it sounded like.  The words were inaudible.  She barely even noticed that.  Those were the sounds in the background.  The foreground was dull pastel colors painted to make any pain of loss seem less dark.

Is this the room they always use?  She wondered how many people had come through here, for a few hours, for a few days.  She had only been in the room for a few minutes.  She had only been in there long enough to see him.

The woman in the white lab coat repeated it. “Can I talk to you outside, ma’am?”

She looked upward as she exhaled what ever air she had been holding.  There were several light tubes above them, sealed behind a type of thin metal grate and shatterproof plexiglass.  She heard them more so than she saw them.  The lights seemed to hum like a fan turned up in the summer months with the window open.

It all felt so far away.

The room’s lighting does not seem to come from the ducts of fluorescents at all.  The white walls of the room seemed lit on their own accord.

The illumination from above seemed to be nothing more than that; a blot of the ceiling that had been blotted out with an uncomfortable glow.  The inset plexiglass created halos; the type of bright lights that glared as if looking too high into the sky — however, these lights provide no heat.  It was the opposite.

The lighting above felt cold.

She did not understand so many things in that moment.  She did not understand how he had got here.  She did not understand why on this day, this day out of all days, she had left her cellphone in the car and did not go back to it until after lunch.

There were only 3 missed calls. There were no voicemails. There were no texts.  None were from his number.  

She did not understand what those three phone calls could have said.  She did not understand how they knew where she worked or why the police officer had to come up to her office during a meeting in the all-glass conference room when it would have been just as easy and definitely more appropriate for the human resource department to interrupt the conference and send her down to meet the officer in the lobby.  She did not understand the room they were now in and from where the white lab coat was now leading her out.

She could not take her eyes off of his outline.

He was a mass with a silhouette that matched his former shoulders.  Stripped of all his personal clothes, slouched forward facing the opposite wall wearing the issued fabrics and identification band.  His back was bare and arched. Again.

The woman behind the white lab coat must have noticed the emotional delay.  She moved her stance to more closely intervene between the sight of the woman and the shape on the hospital bed. 

The lights were made brighter by the far wall of the room.  That wall was made of the type of metal seen in warehouses and in the car chases in movies or in energy drink commercials.  The metal is folded over itself and hangs loose.

It is the type of metal that is made to be safe even in collisions.  It is a safety metal.  Safe in the same way that the other walls were covered in knits of soft sheets.

She peered at what was behind the doctor’s stance.  From behind the line that had formed down the white lab coat, she could see her husband slouched forward on the heightened cot.  No pillow.  No sheets.  Just a lump. Again.

“Can we talk outside, please?”

“Yes,” the woman who had taken a car frantically from her downtown office said, “Yes, of course.”

The woman in the white coat scanned her key card to unlock the reinforced door and held it open for her to walk through.   The lab coat was a tall but thin doctor with strait hair.

She held a blue folder in front of her with both of her hands gently across her abdomen.  Her hair may have once been a very light yellow once upon a time.   She had glasses hanging on a string that swung around and down her v-neck.  The frames were thin, but she was not wearing them until after she was of the room. 

The door shut.  The doctor put her glasses on.

Once on the closing side of the door, the shape didn’t budge.

On the other side, she forced herself not to raise a hand to her mouth.

She realized she had walked past an armed guard stationed out side the door.

There was so much that she did not understand.  There was so much that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to understand.

The hallway of the complex was a dim white with handrails against every wall and there were way-point stations across several intersections where aisle met aisle.

She had gotten lost on the way there.  It was the surrounding activity.  The woman in the examiner’s coat had to repeat her question as the door closed behind them. She waited until they finally made eye contact.  The other had been lost in the commotion of the hallway.  

“Here, let’s sit down,” the white lab coat said to her, but she was surprised that the seats were right there, right in the hall way, right next to the armed security guard.

She sat.

The white lab coat leaned forward just enough as to let their palms rest on her knees.

“I want to say he did the right thing,” she began again.  Her white coat covered a casual yet professional attire.  Somehow, it wasn’t what she expected of a doctor.  Or at least, this type of doctor.  What type of doctor is she?  Her hair was brown and straight and cut into bangs over her eye brows.  She was pretty.  It was her small symmetrical nose placed right in between her large eyes.

She looked as empathetic as she sounded.  Her neckless was thin but bright silver, and it landed long over her neck at the same angle as her wine colored low collared shirt.  Her pants were pressed and hung above her ankle.  She sounded like she knew what was happening to him.  She sounded like she had seen this before.  So she listened to the white lab coat.

“I want to say that I think he survived with you in mind,” the doctor continued.

I know, she wanted to say over and over.  I know.

At least, that is how I imagined it looked from her side.