Someone Was Making the Bed

I’d been working the night shift at the nursing home for two months. Twenty-two, taken a semester off to make some money. Winter of 2017, a five-story facility on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. The east wing, fourth floor — the unit for residents who couldn’t move on their own. That was mine.

Nights are simple. Every two hours you do your rounds: reposition them, change them, check their breathing. By around three in the morning everyone’s down deep, and I’d sit at the station at the end of the hall and doze. After a month nothing scared me anymore. A place that close to death, I was tense at first, but people get used to anything.

That night, around two thirty, a sound came from 412.

Rustle. Rustle. The sound of sheets being smoothed. That particular sound of a stiff hospital sheet getting pulled flat, the corners folded and tucked under the mattress. I know that sound. I make it dozens of times a day.

412 was a double. Window bed, Mrs. Alden. The bed by the door had been empty three days. The previous resident had passed and they hadn’t moved anyone new in. It was empty.

The sound was coming from that empty bed.

At first I figured Mrs. Alden was shifting in her sleep. But Mrs. Alden couldn’t roll over on her own. And the sound was too clean. Sheet pulled flat, snapped out sharp, corner folded and tucked. Someone was making that bed up with real care. An empty bed.

I got up and went to 412. The door was shut. The sound kept going inside. Rustle, snap, rustle.

I opened the door.

The sound stopped dead. The light was off. The hall light slanted in and I could see Mrs. Alden by the window. Asleep. The empty bed by the door was sunk in dark — and someone was standing there. Beside the bed. Bent at the waist, still holding the corner of the sheet.

Tall. Its back was to me. Not a gown, not scrubs — just gray. The head nearly grazed the ceiling, and the bend at the waist was too deep. A person folded over that far, the face should touch the knees. But its upper body just curved smooth and hung down flat across the bed.

I hit the light.

No one. Just the empty bed. But the sheet — it had just been made. On that bed left bare three days, nothing but the mattress. A fresh sheet laid down, pulled tight. The corners folded knife-sharp and tucked under. The exact textbook angle I do better than anybody.

I know where that sheet came from. The sheets are in the linen cart at the end of the hall. The locked cart. That night the cart was locked, and it was locked in the morning too.

The strange part was the sheet was wet. Damp. If someone had been lying there, it’s the middle — the hips or the back — that soaks through. But the wet spot was the pillow. The pillow, and above it. Not where a head rests — higher than a head. The end of the sheet up near the headboard, against the wall. If someone had laid their head there, it would mean they were taller than the bed was long.

I went back to the station and sat without moving until morning. It wasn’t that my legs wouldn’t work. It was that if I moved, I thought it would start again.

At handoff I told the next aide not to touch the empty bed in 412. She asked why. I just said do it. Three days later she pulled me aside and asked: didn’t you ever hear sheets being made up in that empty bed around dawn? She’d heard it. Went in and found the bed made.

I learned a few days later who the bed was being made for. That week a new resident moved into the door bed in 412. He passed the first night. In that neatly made bed.

After that, whenever an empty bed got made up in the night, we’d strip it all back down. Because if you left it made, within a few days someone moved into it. And whoever moved in didn’t last long.

The last time I worked that job was the following spring. The night before I quit, I heard rustling somewhere again. I didn’t go look. I didn’t go look. Because if I found out which bed it was, I’d know who was going to die next.