Off the Elevator

He stepped off the elevator with purpose as if he had been there before. As he exited to the left, Leon scanned quickly for signs. He saw the room number and discovered he had luckily picked the right direction. His wife was waiting in her hospital room. Leon quietly opened the door and found Janie was sleeping. He went back out to pace the halls.

The hospital had an art collection that would fetch a fortune. From photography to watercolors, each piece was unique and beautiful. He hardly cared about art, but right now, he needed a distraction. Janie had come in with some heart issues, which seemed strange to Leon. She was only twenty-seven and in great shape. The doctor would be meeting with them in ten minutes to give them her test results.

Leon felt he was too young to worry about his wife’s health, or his for that matter. Suddenly finding himself in a hospital this large was starting to get him to reassess how he cooked their meals and the amount of takeout they ordered.

Leon stopped his pacing. A photography piece had caught his attention. The photographer looked to be on a cliff in Scotland or Iceland looking out from green grass to a gray Atlantic. The ocean seemed choppy, much like his life at this moment. On the horizon, a ship was practically blending in with the clouds. The sun was trying to peek through, but the thick clouds were nearly the same color as the dirty sails on the ship. Leon stood there, struck by the beauty and feeling the picture summed him up at that moment. His wife’s diagnosis was like the ship. It had been out of sight for so long, but now it was beginning to become clear on the horizon. Their lives were choppy at the moment but perhaps the sun could peek through.

Leon checked his watch. His daydream had nearly made him late, and he quickly returned to his wife’s room. He pushed open the door, waking Janie from her nap.

“Is he here?” She asked.

Leon checked his watch again. “He should be here any minute.”

A few minutes later, the doctor came in with a smile on his face. “It’s not often I get to deliver news like this,” he said. “It turns out your heart was acting that way because you are pregnant. We did a pregnancy test as an afterthought, but it was the only positive result on any test. Everything else looked good as well.”

The couple looked at each other dumbstruck. They had tried for years and only recently accepted what the doctors had told them. It was not possible for Janie to have children. Soon their looks of shock turned to joy, and Leon was hit by one of his favorite quotes.

It had been in a list on his phone since he had read what Zora Neale Hurston wrote. “Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”

It seemed that just as Leon was going to give up on the ship of children in his life and look away, Janie and Leon had blinked and missed the ship's landing, never quite giving up, but tabling their hopes for a time. Leon took his wife back to the picture on the wall and wrote down the name of the photographer and the title she had given her piece. Leon had an order to make and thought the picture would look perfect above the crib.