The Last Ward

My mother passed on the evening of Mother’s Day, 2009, in a nursing home on the outskirts of a small coastal town. She had been fading for months, her lungs slowly filling with fluid, her breath a ragged whisper. She had always been terrified of dying near my brother’s birthday, which fell on the tenth of May, and my father’s death anniversary on the eighth. She fought hard, willing herself to hold on, but the cancer was relentless. She slipped away just before midnight, and I was at her bedside, holding her hand.

Three weeks later, I was admitted to the same nursing home, not for something as dramatic as pneumonia, but for a severe respiratory infection that had settled in my chest. The place was old, built in the 1960s, with long, linoleum-floored corridors that smelled of antiseptic and stale soup. My mother’s room had been on the third floor, but I was placed on the second, in a wing that was mostly empty due to budget cuts. The night staff were overworked, often leaving the floor unattended for long stretches.

One night, I woke up gasping for air. My oxygen tubing had slipped off the nasal cannula and onto the floor. I fumbled for the call button, but it had fallen off the bed. I got up, dizzy, and tried to find it, my hand sliding along the wall. The room was dark, lit only by a dim nightlight. I stumbled into the hallway, expecting to see a nurse, but the corridor was silent and empty. I called out, but my voice was hoarse and weak. I decided to walk to the nurses’ station, but the station was deserted.

Then I heard a sound from the far end of the hall: a rhythmic tapping, like a cane hitting the floor. An old woman emerged from the shadows, leaning on a wooden cane. She wore a tattered floral robe that looked like something from decades ago. She came closer, and I saw her face: pale, sunken, with milky eyes. ‘Are you looking for your line?’ she asked, her voice a dry rasp. She pointed a gnarled finger toward a room at the end of the hall. ‘I saw them take it in there.’

I thanked her and shuffled toward the door. It was ajar, and I pushed it open. Inside, the room was freezing. A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling, casting harsh shadows. On a metal table lay my oxygen tubing, coiled like a dead snake. But as I reached for it, the door swung shut behind me. I turned and saw the old woman standing inside, a smile stretching her thin lips. ‘You shouldn’t have come to this floor,’ she said. ‘This is where they keep the ones who went too soon.’

I tried to back away, but my legs felt heavy. The old woman raised her cane, and I saw it was not wood but bone, with a carved grip shaped like a skull. She brought it down on the table with a sharp crack. The lights flickered. I heard my mother’s voice, whispering my name, coming from the corner of the room. I turned and saw a figure sitting in a wheelchair, but when I blinked, it was just a pile of sheets.

The old woman was gone. I grabbed my tubing and rushed out, but the hallway was longer than before, and the doors all looked identical. I ran, my heart pounding, until I reached a room with a window. Outside, I saw the nurse’s parking lot, but the cars were covered in a thick layer of dust. A calendar on the wall read May 9th, but the year was 1983. I froze. I had stumbled into a time before my mother was even sick, a time when this building was a proper hospital.

I found a stairwell and climbed, desperate to reach the ground floor. But each flight ended on the same hall, with the same old woman leaning on her bone cane, laughing softly. ‘You can’t leave,’ she said. ‘You have to stay until the line is reconnected.’ And in that moment, I understood. She was not a ghost of a stranger. She was the physical form of the ward’s despair, the embodiment of all the patients who had died alone in these rooms, their calls unanswered. My mother had been one of them, and now I was being offered a place by her side.

I collapsed to my knees, accepting my fate. The old woman knelt beside me and placed her cold hand on my forehead. ‘You’ll see her soon,’ she cooed. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I was back in my bed, my oxygen tubing firmly in place, the room bathed in pale morning light. A nurse stood over me, checking my vitals. ‘You gave us a scare,’ she said. ‘You were out for hours.’ I asked about the old woman, but the nurse looked puzzled. ‘There’s no one here like that,’ she replied. ‘This floor has been closed for years.’ But on the bedside table, I saw a single gray hair, coiled in a perfect spiral, and when I picked it up, it was not hair, but a thin, bone-colored thread.

I was discharged a week later, but I never told anyone what I had seen. Yet every Mother’s Day, when I close my eyes, I feel the old woman’s hand on my forehead, and I hear my mother’s voice, not from beyond the grave, but from the hollow space between the floors, waiting for me to return to the last ward.