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table. “I can lock you in, if that’s what you want. Do you want me to lock you in?”
    “All right.” You can never be locked in, only locked out, she reasons. “I’ll be very neat,” she tells him.
    The man finishes sweeping and ties up several garbage bags, turning to her every so often to see ifshe is still there. Libby tries to smile, but can’t quite pull one off. Her body feels leaden and she’s struck with the terrible feeling that maybe she, too, is dying. She pats her ears and then feels her neck for enlarged lymph nodes. Reaching into one of the zippered pockets, she pulls out the vitamins and dumps a couple on her tongue. She unzips another pocket and washes them down with a V-8, then unzips another pocket and nibbles on a cookie. She slides her hand under the sweatshirt and does a discreet mini breast exam.
    As soon as the man leaves, she separates the whites and darks, gathers her quarters and gets three loads going. She stretches out on the folding table, looks over at the sloshing, soapy water and feels a kind of hope. Please God, she thinks. She doesn’t wish for anything in particular, just that things remain as they are a while longer; she simply needs to be suspended in the moment. Time, she believes, is a kind of hope.
    The police escort her back to the nurses’ station, where the nurses gather around her. There’s whispering. The elderly laundry attendant confides, not quietly, that “she looked like a crazy to me.” Dumpy Downer impatiently eyes the small crowd and moves toward Libby, touching her elbow.
    “I need to speak with you and your father,” he says.
    “What about my laundry?” Libby asks, looking at the cops, then the nurses and then the mean-spiritedlaundry attendant. Everyone talks at once, and the cop’s radio sputters at noisy intervals. “We know her. It’s fine,” the friendly nurse says. “There’s no need to make a fuss,” the boisterous nurse says. Dumpy Downer is now yanking on her arm. Finally, the cops and nurses wind up flirting with each other as Libby is pulled into her dad’s room, and the door is closed behind them.
    The bottom line, begins Dumpy Downer, is that her dad can’t live without a ventilator. His lungs can’t do it. They’ve made every effort. Sad to say, but there’s no justification for keeping him in the CCU. He’ll have to go upstairs to the ventilator wing. The doctor frowns. He’s been through so much. There is another option. They can put him on a morphine drip, make him as comfortable as possible, turn off the ventilator and leave it in God’s hands. Libby reels, feeling static travel up her neck and gather in her head. She slumps into a chair. God, she thinks; what does He have to do with it, the slacker. Staring at Dumpy Downer’s round, freckled head, she can tell he’s not a believer. He believes in medicine, and medicine’s failed here. Well, off to the ventilator wing.
    “Let’s turn off this goddamn thing,” her dad writes on his pad. He’s sitting up, a picture of health. You flip the switch on invalids; her dad looks as if he could be going to the grocery store. Really, if anyone were to ask, she would have thought that a dying personwould be half-gone, unrecognizable, yet her dad is here, terribly present, cocking his head to the side when he hears something dumb. When a vein quivers beneath his eye, he reaches up to touch it.
    “Think good and hard,” the doctor says, with a finger raised for emphasis. “Good luck, sir.”
    The doctor shuts the door behind him, and Libby and her dad are left staring at each other. “What an asshole,” her dad mouths. She sobs, lowering her head to the bed, and she feels his fingers dance across her hair, light and graceful as Fred Astaire. They are quiet for some time. Finally, she closes her eyes and almost reaches sleep, but at the last second she rushes back from it and lifts her head.
    He’s laughing without sound. On his pad he’s written, “Would you want to go