I have spent a lot of hours in waiting rooms this year.
Not my own. Hers. The particular experience of a waiting room that is not for you, where you are in the chairs on behalf of someone who is through the door, where the magazines are from seasons ago and the chairs are the chairs that waiting rooms always have, slightly too firm, slightly too close together, arranged in the configuration of people who are all trying not to make eye contact with each other’s worry.
I have learned to bring a book.
Not to read, exactly. To have. To hold. To look at when the waiting becomes the kind of waiting that needs somewhere for the eyes to go that is not the door or the clock or the other faces doing the same calculation I am doing, which is: how long, and: is long good or bad, and: should I ask someone, and: asking someone will not make the long shorter so perhaps I should just sit here with the book and the not-quite-reading and let the time do what time does, which is pass, which it always does, which I keep needing to remind myself of.
A woman sat down beside me once and said: is it your mum?
I said yes. She said: mine too. And we sat there, two daughters in waiting room chairs with books we were not reading, in the particular solidarity of women who are doing this, who are in the chairs, who drove the car and held the coat and filled out the forms and are now in the chairs waiting for someone to come through a door and tell them something that will either relieve them or require them to hold more than they were holding before.
We did not exchange names. We did not need to.
We were the same person in two chairs. We were every daughter in every waiting room, doing the only thing left to do once you have done everything that can be done, which is to stay. Which is to be in the chair. Which is to be the person who is here, in the room, present, ready, waiting.
Her mother came through the door first. She stood up quickly, the book sliding off her lap, and I saw her face do the thing that faces do when the person you love comes back, the small involuntary softening of relief. She caught my eye as they left. I nodded. She nodded.
That was enough. That was the whole of it.
