The woman lying in room 418 at Baptist Hospital in Pensacola had my name on the plastic band around her wrist, my insurance number in the chart at the foot of her bed, and a face I had never seen in my life. I am Janice Whitley, seventy years old, and I stood in the doorway in my gray cardigan, with a security officer on one side and a nurse on the other, and with my heart pounding against the pain in my chest that had brought me to the emergency room an hour earlier. In the chair beside the bed, with his cell phone in his hand, sat my son in law, Trent.
Trent rose from the chair, and his face did a strange thing. It tried to smile, and then it tried to frown, and in the end it did neither. He is forty four years old, a handsome man with a good haircut who sells boats in Gulf Breeze and who has been married to my daughter Kelly for fifteen years. “Janice,” he said, “there must be some mistake. This is a friend of the family who needed help. I did not want to bother you.” The woman in the bed pulled the sheet up to her chin.
The nurse, a sharp, tired woman named Marguerite, checked the chart and then looked at me over her glasses. The patient in 418 had been admitted three days earlier for a surgery that cost forty one thousand dollars, billed to my insurance and to the long term care policy that my late husband Roy had bought for me in 2008. The surgery was real. The patient was not me. I felt my knees turn to water, and Marguerite put an arm around my waist and led me to a chair in the hall.
A hospital wristband with her own name gave one grandmother the length of a night shift to bring her son in law back to the truth in Pensacola.
I gave my terms sitting in that hallway chair with a paper cup of water in my shaking hand and the officer standing beside me. “Trent, you will sit down on that bench, and you will not leave this floor. I am calling my daughter Kelly in Atlanta, and she is going to hear every word of this on speakerphone. Then you will tell the hospital, and the officer, and me, who this woman is, and how long you have been using my name, and what else you have taken. I have all night.”
Trent sat down on the bench as though his strings had been cut, and the voice of Kelly crackled from the speaker, thin and frightened. “Trent?” she said. “What is she talking about?” He looked at the floor. “The woman is my sister Rhonda,” he said at last. “She has no insurance, and she needed an operation. I thought, Janice never uses her policy, and she will never find out. I used your number and your birth date. I also borrowed against the long term care policy of Roy, a hundred and ten thousand dollars, for the boat dealership. I was going to pay it back.”
But the shame was too heavy, and Trent could not bear to hear his wife breathe on the other end of the line. He suddenly sprang up from the bench, snatched my handbag from the chair beside me, the one with my identification card and the policy papers that proved what he had done, and bolted for the stairwell at the end of the hall, meaning to throw them out of a window on the stairs. The officer lunged. Marguerite cried out. And in the stairwell door stood two orderlies, pushing a gurney.
Trent stopped at the stairwell door with my handbag in his arms, the gurney blocking the way, one orderly on each side, the officer and Marguerite closing in from behind, and the light of the hallway fluorescent tubes flickering over his stricken face. One of the orderlies, a broad young man called Darnell, spoke in his slow church voice. “Sir, you should give that lady her bag. She has had a long night, and so have we.” Trent stood for a long moment. Then he knelt, put the handbag on the floor of the corridor, and bowed his head over it.
The consequences were practical and sad. Rhonda was discharged to a payment plan with the hospital, and the charges against her were reduced because she had not forged anything herself. Trent was charged with fraud and identity theft, and he lost his job at the boat dealership. Kelly drove down from Atlanta the next morning, and she sat on my sofa and cried for an hour. Then she said she would be staying with me for a while, and we ordered a pizza and watched an old movie, the way we used to do when she was twelve.
In the name of my husband Roy, who passed in 2014, I started the Roy Whitley Fund. It pays for help with medical bills and legal help for older people whose names have been used for care they never received, in Escambia, Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and twenty three people clear false charges and resolved two million dollars of billing errors. One was an eighty one year old retired shipyard welder from Milton who held up the corrected statement and told the volunteer he had slept with an unpaid bill on his chest for three years.
On a mild evening in November, I sat on the porch of my house in Pensacola with a cup of tea, with my daughter Kelly beside me in a rocking chair and a blanket over both our knees. The sun slid down behind the live oaks, and the Spanish moss swayed in the breeze. She took my hand. “Mama,” she said, “thank you for not shutting the door on me.” I squeezed her fingers, and I told her that a door can be closed on a man, but never on a daughter.
