The Night Shift

By two in the morning, the fourth floor belonged to Celia. The visitors had long gone, the corridor lights had been dimmed, and the hospital had settled into its night sounds: the hum of machines, the squeak of her own shoes, the elevator sighing somewhere below. Eleven years of nights had taught her that darkness changes people. Patients who were brave at noon grew frightened at three, and people who had said nothing all day suddenly wanted to talk. Most of what she did between midnight and dawn appeared in no report: she warmed blankets, refilled water jugs and lowered her voice until it was hardly a voice at all.

In room two, Mrs. Abernathy rang her bell, as she did every night, to ask what time it was. Celia told her, and then, as she did every night, left the door open a hand's width, so that a stripe of light from the corridor lay across the floor. In room four, a student pretended to be asleep whenever she passed, while the glow of a phone leaked out from under his blanket; she pretended not to notice. In room five, a woman had fallen asleep in the chair beside her mother's bed, hours after visiting time had ended. The rules said she should be sent home; Celia fetched a blanket instead.

Mr. Haddad in room six was going home in the morning, and he was wide awake. He did not need anything, he said; it was simply that his body had never been told he had retired. For thirty-one years he had driven the early bus on the river line, and his day had started at four. "I used to wonder about the ones who got on at the hospital stop around seven," he told her when she stopped to check on him. "Coats over their uniforms, half asleep already. I never knew where you'd all been." He looked around the dim room. "So this is where."

He told her about one young nurse who used to fall asleep against the window every morning before the bus reached the bridge. He had started taking the corners more gently so that she would not wake, and at the flower market he would call out the name of the stop until she opened her eyes. "Did she ever thank you?" Celia asked. "She never knew," he said, as if that were the whole point.

Celia did not answer at once. For eleven years she had taken the river line home, and at first she had slept through most of the journey. She remembered, vaguely, a voice calling out her stop, and she had always assumed that the driver did it for everyone. She opened her mouth to tell him, and then closed it again. It might have been her. It might just as easily have been any of a dozen tired women in blue, and she found that she preferred it that way.

Toward six, the windows turned from black to gray, and the floor began to fill with the noises of the day: carts, telephones, the bright voices of the morning staff. Celia finished her paperwork and handed over her patients one by one. When she looked in on Mr. Haddad before leaving, he was asleep at last, one hand resting on a newspaper he had not read. In her notes for the day nurse, she added a line that no textbook had taught her: "Let him sleep. He has had enough early mornings."

Outside, the city was going to work. Celia caught the river line at the hospital stop, sat by the window and told herself, as she did every morning, that she would stay awake. She did not. When she opened her eyes, the bus was standing at the flower market with its doors open, and the driver, a young man whose name she had never thought to ask, was watching her in his mirror. "Your stop," he said, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Perhaps it was. She had not woken once on the way, and she was almost sure that somebody had taken the corners gently.