The Escape
by Cati Porter
—83 patients evacuated from Riverside skilled
nursing home after coronavirus outbreak
My father-in-law Jay died in our driveway
but don’t worry — it was only a temporary death
and eventually, he recovered enough that
he was moved to “rehab”, that limbo
which is neither hospital nor hostel, unlovely quarters
where nurses care 24/7 for the infirm
living stranded between this world, and the next.
There, at Magnolia Rehab, the corridors are
lined with wheeled beds, slight bodies,
faces turned toward or away from the light,
expressionless, panicked, or more often, pained,
and the entirety of the facility permeated by
that sour-sweet stench of the body’s unspooling.
I help him into his wheelchair— mostly able, just
a heart attack, mind still intact, but now
cotton-gowned, a bow at the neck— and we roll
down the hall onto the patio to sit among
the green-songed birds, beneath the peeling arbor,
to plot his escape, hoping toward home.
But now the years are gone, and so is he, when
the news breaks that for two long days at his
former rehab, the staff has failed to show for work,
and suddenly I am haunted again by those living
ghosts, now thick with the specter of phlegm and fever.
The next morning, streets are closed as
fifty-three ambulances take them away.
