Am I the asshole for telling a homeless woman that I didn’t know her – when she was sitting right in front of me and I knew exactly who she was?
I (28M) have been working ER intake at St. Benedicts for three years. Long shifts, bad lighting, the same rotating cast of people in crisis. I have a mortgage I share with my girlfriend, Donna (27F), and I’ve been putting money away every month for a reason I’ll get to. My whole family thinks I handled this wrong. My coworkers are split. I can’t stop thinking about it.
My mother, Patrice, left when I was nine. Not a slow drift – she packed a bag on a Tuesday and was gone by the time I got home from school. My dad, Frank, raised me and my younger sister Bree alone. We didn’t hear from Patrice for years. Then a card at my high school graduation with no return address. Then nothing. I built a life around the nothing. I told myself it was fine. I told myself I was fine.
Last Thursday I was doing intake and a woman came in on a gurney – hypothermia, malnutrition, a cut on her forehead from a fall. The paramedic said she was found behind the parking structure on Fifth. No ID. When they wheeled her past the desk, I looked up.
I knew her immediately.
She was older, weathered in a way that made me feel sick to look at, but it was her. The same jaw, the same ears. I used to trace those ears when I was little and couldn’t sleep.
The attending came over and asked if she’d said anything to indicate next of kin. I said no.
He asked me to run her prints through the system for an ID. I said I would.
I sat at that desk for forty-five minutes and I did not run them.
A nurse named Gwen eventually pulled up the chair next to me and said, “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I said, “I’m fine.”
Patrice was in bay four, twenty feet away, getting an IV and warm blankets, and I sat at my desk and did my other work and I told myself this was not my problem. She made her choice nineteen years ago. I didn’t owe her a name. I didn’t owe her a son.
Then my shift ended. I clocked out. I walked to my car.
I sat in the parking structure for twenty minutes and I thought about the fact that I had been putting money away every month for the last two years. Not for a house upgrade. Not for a vacation. For her – because somewhere in the back of my head I always thought that one day I’d need to help her, and I wanted to be ready.
I went back inside.
Bay four was empty.
Gwen was at the station and she said they’d discharged her – she’d walked out AMA, no name on file, no contact information.
I asked which direction she went.
Gwen looked at me for a second and then she said, “Honey, she asked about you.”
My stomach dropped.
“She saw your name tag when they brought her in. She asked me if you were – she said your full name. First and last. And I told her I couldn’t share staff information.”
I said, “What did she say after that?”
Gwen reached into her pocket and handed me a folded piece of paper.
The Note
I stood at the nurses’ station and I did not open it.
Gwen went back to her charts. The ER was doing its usual thing – someone coughing behind curtain two, a kid crying somewhere down the hall, the overhead lights doing that flicker they’ve done for as long as I’ve worked there. I held the paper with both hands and I thought: I could throw this away right now and no one would say a word.
I put it in my jacket pocket.
Drove home. Donna was already in bed, the lamp on her side still on, a book open on her chest. She looked up when I came in and she said, “Long one?”
I said, “Yeah.”
I did not tell her about Patrice. I’m not sure why. Maybe because saying it out loud would make it a thing that happened instead of a thing I could still decide had not happened. I changed clothes in the bathroom and got into bed and stared at the ceiling for what felt like two hours.
The note was in my jacket pocket in the hallway.
I got up at 2 a.m. and read it at the kitchen table.
Her handwriting was bad. Shaky. She’d written on the back of a hospital intake form they must have given her to fill out. The front side was blank – she hadn’t filled any of it out. On the back, in pencil, she’d written:
I know you saw me. I understand. I’m sorry for everything. Don’t look for me.
That was it. Twelve words of apology for nineteen years. No explanation. No ask. Not even a name signed at the bottom, like she wasn’t sure she had the right to use it.
I folded it back up and put it on the table and I went and sat on the couch in the dark.
What Frank Said
I called my dad the next morning. Frank is sixty-one, still works the same shipping dock he’s worked since I was in middle school, gets up at four-thirty every day without an alarm. He answered on the second ring because he’s always up.
I told him what happened.
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I checked the phone to see if the call had dropped.
Then he said, “You went back for her.”
I said, “She was already gone.”
He said, “But you went back.”
I didn’t know what to do with that so I just sat with it.
He asked if she looked okay. I told him the truth – that she didn’t, that she was hypothermic and malnourished and had a cut on her head, that she’d walked out before they could do much more than warm her up. He made a sound I couldn’t quite read. Not grief exactly. Not satisfaction. Something in between.
“Your sister’s going to want to know,” he said.
“I know.”
“You going to tell her?”
I said I didn’t know yet. Bree is twenty-five and she has a harder time with the Patrice stuff than I do. Or maybe she has an easier time – she never really built the wall I built, just stayed angry instead, which is a different kind of protection. I wasn’t sure how she’d take it. I still wasn’t sure how I was taking it.
Frank said, “You didn’t do anything wrong. Just so you know. Whatever you decide.”
He’s said that exact thing to me maybe four times in my life, and each time it’s been about something I did that I wasn’t sure about. He said it when I quit the pre-med track sophomore year. He said it when I told him about Donna. He said it when I stopped going to church.
He always means it. That’s the thing about Frank. He always means it.
The Money
Here’s the part I haven’t told most people.
The account I’ve been building for two years – it’s got about eleven thousand dollars in it. I’ve been putting in three hundred a month, sometimes more when I can swing it. I opened it the week after I turned twenty-six, after I saw a woman outside a CVS who looked a little like Patrice and had a bad night about it. I thought: if she shows up, if she’s in trouble, I don’t want to be empty-handed. I don’t want to be in a position where I have to choose between helping her and surviving myself.
Donna knows about the account. She thinks it’s an emergency fund. Which it is, technically. Just not the kind she thinks.
I’ve been lying about that for two years. Not in a big way, not in a way that’s hurt us. But I’ve been lying.
And now Patrice has walked out of St. Benedicts and disappeared back into whatever she came from, and I have eleven thousand dollars sitting in an account that was always for her, and she told me not to look for her, and I don’t know what to do with any of it.
What My Coworkers Think
Word got around. It always does in an ER. I don’t know exactly what Gwen said or to who, but by Saturday two different people had come up to me separately and given me the look. You know the look. The one that means they have an opinion and they’re deciding whether you’re the kind of person they can say it to.
Marcus, who does overnight intake on weekends, said, “Bro, you didn’t owe her anything. She left. You don’t get to walk back into someone’s life just because you ended up at their hospital.”
A travel nurse named Deborah, who’s been at St. B’s for about four months and doesn’t know me well enough to have an opinion, said, “She was a patient. She needed help. You withheld it.”
I said, “She got help. She got warmed up, she got fluids, she walked out on her own.”
Deborah said, “You know what I mean.”
I do know what she means. I’ve been an intake worker for three years. I know what it means to run prints and what it means to not run them. There’s a version of this where I flagged her, where she got a social worker, where someone found her a bed somewhere for the winter. I didn’t do that. I made a choice.
I’m not going to pretend the choice was clean.
What Bree Said
I told Bree on Sunday. She drove over, which I didn’t ask her to do – I’d texted her and she just showed up forty minutes later with coffee she’d already mostly drunk on the way.
She sat at my kitchen table, the same table where I’d read the note at 2 a.m., and I told her the whole thing.
When I got to the part about the note she put her coffee down.
“She said don’t look for her?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to, aren’t you.”
It wasn’t a question.
I said, “I don’t know.”
Bree picked her coffee back up. She looked out the window at the backyard, which is dead and brown right now, mid-January, nothing out there worth looking at. She said, “She asked about you. Not me. She saw your name tag and she asked about you.”
I said, “I know.”
“She didn’t know I existed, or she didn’t care, or she didn’t ask.”
There it was.
I said, “Bree.”
She said, “I’m fine. I’m just saying. She walked out on both of us and when she ended up in your hospital she asked about you. Not me.” She paused. “So if you go look for her, I need you to know that I’m not going to be part of that. I love you. But I’m not doing it.”
I said I understood.
She stayed for another hour anyway. We talked about other stuff – her job, a guy she’s been seeing named Dennis who sounds fine, a trip she’s thinking about taking in the spring. Normal stuff. Before she left she hugged me in the doorway for a few seconds longer than usual, and then she drove away.
Bay Four
I went back to St. B’s on Monday, my next shift. Walked past bay four on my way to intake.
There’s nothing in bay four right now. The curtain is pushed to one side. The bed’s stripped, the equipment’s wiped down and reset. It looks like every other bay.
I stood there for maybe ten seconds and then I went to my desk and I started my shift.
The note is still on my kitchen table. I haven’t moved it. Donna asked about it once and I said it was something from work and she didn’t push, which is either a sign of trust or a sign that we’ve both gotten a little too comfortable with not pushing.
The account has eleven thousand and change in it.
The woman who wrote don’t look for me in pencil on the back of a hospital form is somewhere in this city right now. Or she’s not. I have no way of knowing.
I don’t know if I’m the asshole. I think maybe the question is wrong. I think there are things that happen to you when you’re nine years old that don’t fit into asshole or not asshole. They just fit into this happened and you’re still carrying it and now what.
I haven’t touched the account.
I haven’t looked for her.
I haven’t thrown the note away.
—
If this one got into your chest a little, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
For more raw stories about unexpected encounters, you might relate to Someone Knocked on My Door and I Hadn’t Told Anyone Where I Lived or even My Dad Showed Up After Eleven Years. I Shut the Door in His Face..
