by Billy Coffey
He reaches to touch my face and my heart bursts, too big for my small body. I look into his eyes and think to myself that this is love and this is companionship and I have never been alone.
Never.
I walk toward Elizabeth.
She opens her arms to greet me.
The man smiles.
34
Jake
I awoke to a different kind of light sometime later, this one darker and colder. Emptier, even. The evening sun was dipping westward, its orange glow casting its good-bye kiss against the facing mountains, leaving me to wonder if I’d just missed one day or more. Noises entered through an open door to the hallway—phones rang, nurses gossiped. Shadows walked past. I felt my face where the man had touched me and reveled in a memory that would never fade. Kim came to give me comfort I no longer needed and to officially welcome me back to the world.
“Hey big guy,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” I answered. I tried lifting my head but couldn’t. The bandages were off but the heaviness remained. I lay there in my bed and took mental stock of my body, then smiled. The weight resided solely from the neck up. My heart was light.
Kim began her routine checks, everything from my IVs to the fluffiness of my pillow. She seemed slower this time, though still deliberate. Then she rested a hand atop my bandaged head.
“You’ll do anything to get out of talking to Jake, won’t you?” she whispered.
“Don’t tell me I missed him.”
“You did.”
“Well now, isn’t that a shame?”
Kim smiled and said, “It is, isn’t it? But he’ll be back soon enough. You had me pretty worried for a while there, Andy. Thought for a minute there was a little more wrong with you than we thought.”
“There was,” I said. “But whatever little more that was wrong with me is better now. Promise.”
“You let me be the judge of that.” Kim adjusted the blanket that she herself had draped over me while I was (gone? I thought. Was I gone? And to where?) unconscious.“I swear,” she said, “these docs don’t know what the heck they’re doing. I tried to tell them that was too big a dose for you, and with your head injury to boot. But they’ve backed off now. Everything should be fine. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, Kim,” I said. “Tired, but I’d say that was to be expected given the circumstances.”
She pushed a button and raised the upper half of the bed. “Vision okay? Anything blurry?”
“I can honestly say that I’ve never seen things more clearly than I do right now.” I smiled as I said those words, knowing the truth of that statement was something that would be lost to her even if I tried to explain it.
“Good. And I promise, no more…episodes…for you.”
I knew then. Knew that to Kim and the doctors Elizabeth had been a ghost, more anesthetic than angel. Something I had conjured through the magic of medicine and a misfire of neurons. Kim had visited me through the night. She had lingered at the door on her way out with those looks of concern. I had brushed them aside, thinking they had been given for my appearance and not my actions. It had never occurred to me before that Elizabeth had never spoken to Kim nor Kim to Elizabeth. Why would they? To Kim, that chair had been empty all night. Whatever conversation she overheard from her desk or her rounds was completely one-sided. Just Crazy Old Andy, acting like himself. Kim confessed that not only had there been no one in my room, the hospital employed no in-house counselors at all. The only constant between her recollections and mine was the wooden box that sat on the table by my bed. Someone brought it the day after I arrived, she said. Kim didn’t know who, but she knew it hadn’t been touched since.
I didn’t believe her—couldn’t—though everything I saw told me she was right.
“Who were you talking to all night, Andy?” she asked.
“I’m not sure who she was,” I answered. And despite the madness Kim would believe me to be suffering and the brokenness she wouldn’t know I carried within, I added, “But I loved her.”
I fought the notion it had all been a lie. The human mind may be a powerful thing, but I could not believe it was so powerful as to produce something—someone—so real and so perfect. Someone so needed. No, I thought. It was more an impossibility that Elizabeth was not real than that she was. Because if Kim was right, if Elizabeth had been an invention and nothing more, than perhaps so too was the Old Man. And as I lightly touched my face, I feared that meant the man hammering upon the anvil was a mere figment as well.
I needed to believe they weren’t, that they were real and that the truest things in this life were the things we could prove not with our eyes, but with the heart alone.
I needed to believe the world was not solid.
“I’m glad you’re back,” she said.
“Me, too.” And with a wonder I never thought possible, I meant those words.
“Rest, okay? I’ll be back soon.”
Kim moved toward the door. Her steps weren’t as clipped and purposeful as I’d seen them before. I thought that perhaps the heaviness that had fallen off of me was making its way to her.
“Kim?” I asked.
“Yes?”
I didn’t know how to say what needed to be said. What I knew I should. “I always saw my loneliness as God’s will. I just thought I was one of those people who wasn’t supposed to find love. But it wasn’t God’s will that kept me away from loving someone, it was just my fear. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
Kim leaned on the door. Her hand wiped at the corner of her eye. She tried to hide it by pushing her hair behind an ear in the next motion.
“Thank you, Andy,” she said.
*
A day passed.
There were doctors and tests and orders for both rest and motion. I took walks when I could, inching my way up and down the hallway in search of the legs I once had. I don’t mind saying many of those walks were taken with the hopes I’d catch a fleeting glimpse of a woman with long brown hair and glasses. I never did. Elizabeth was gone, left to wander in either a corner of my mind or a corner of heaven. I began to prefer my mind. She’d be closer there. I spent long hours listening to the television and staring at the empty chair beside my bed.
I couldn’t avoid Jake any longer. He arrived that afternoon with his notebook, a pen, and a look of absolute sorrow on his face for both what had happened and what still was. He had a look of someone who had just realized that what he’d found wasn’t what he was looking for. I went through everything that happened that night, leaving out only the Old Man (for obvious reasons) and Eric’s last words. I figured Jake didn’t need to know that, and he didn’t ask. It was his turn then to fill me in on everything that had happened after. The town was scared, he said. They were all holding out for things to get back to normal, but he wasn’t sure if it ever would.
“What about Taylor?” I asked him.
Jake’s eyes looked from me toward the doorway. “I got the state police lookin’ for him,” he said, “and I’m lookin’, too. My guess is they’ll get him. He’ll be anywhere but around town. They’re watchin’ his aunt’s house. That’s where he stayed.”
“Where’s he from?”
Jake shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. I wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but I knew he didn’t particularly care to say it. It was a surreal moment between us. Jake was interviewing me, and yet he was the nervous one.
“Happy Hollow,” he said.
“Happy Hollow?”
He stared at the doorway again, and I followed his gaze. There was only the emptiness of the hallway and Kim’s desk on the other side. She was on the phone. With Owen, I thought.
“Someone out there, Jake?”
“No,” he said, but I thought—to him, at least—there was. “I’m sorry, Andy. About all of this. Feels like the world’s just gone crazy. I’m fightin’ not to think there ain’t no hope left.”
“I think there’s always hope,”
I said.
He looked at my box on the table. “I see you got that, huh?”
“You bring this to me?”
Jake shook his head. “Eric’s brother. Calls himself Jabber, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Called and said it was important to you and that you’d probably like it close, so I met him down at the gas station and fetched it for him. Not really procedure, but I figured I could bend the rules.”
“I appreciate that, Jake,” I said.
Jake tapped me on the leg with his notebook and said he’d be praying for me. “Folks say Taylor’s got the Devil in him, Andy. That he’s plain evil. I’m gonna get him. I swear to you I will. And I’ll see that he pays for what he’s done.”
“I’ll be prayin’ for you too, Jake. Don’t know why this happened, and maybe we never will. But I think everything has its reasons, however hard they may be. I hear the world’s not solid.”
Jake looked toward the door once more and said, “I’m hearin’ the same thing.”
Jake said much to me after that. Things he asked me not to share, and I will not. I suppose that’s his story to tell, if he has a mind to tell it. I told him I would pray. He said he would do the same. Then he and whatever his mind saw at the doorway left me to my empty room.
35
Paper Angels
I took one last walk the night before I was to be released. I called it a victory lap to the nurses at the station, and I believed it was. I had neither conquered nor vanquished, but I had endured. Maybe that was all that mattered. It was our grip on life that spoke most of who we were.
I made my last stop the nurses’ station, where Kim was still trying to catch up after arriving a half hour late for her shift. Late, she said, because Owen had driven her to work. One good-bye kiss had turned into ten, and time had a way of sneaking off and hiding when love came calling. Then I walked back into my room and stopped at the door, jarred by what I was seeing. Had it not been for the metal cart parked just inside, I would have fallen. Instead I gripped it and steeled myself at what was in front of me.
Someone was in the chair by my bed.
“Elizabeth?” I asked. Pleaded. Prayed. “Is that you?”
The figure moved from the shadows and into the light shining from above the bed. The face that appeared was a sorrowed mix of old and young.
“Mr. Andy?” it said.
I moved closer. “Jabber?”
Jabber rose from the chair. Halfway toward me he stretched out his arms. I caught him in mine and we stood there, his knees buckling against me as he let out nearly four days of grief and anger. I held him up, surprised at my strength. My eyes were open and staring not at him but at my hands resting on his back.
“Come sit down,” I told him. “Come on.”
We walked to my bed and I sat him down in the chair. Jabber wiped his eyes and brushed back his shaggy hair.
“How are you, Jabber?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said. Then the tears began again, a torrent that rushed from him and seemed never ending. I kept my hand on him and squeezed, just as Elizabeth had done for me. “Sorry,” he finally said. “Ain’t right what happened. You okay?”
“I’m fine, Jabber. Promise. Doc says I’ll be getting out of here tomorrow.”
He nodded. “Good. Good. Sorry I didn’t come sooner. Came by once. You were asleep. Things have been rough. Funeral and all.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I know you had a lot to deal with.”
Jabber’s eyes said more than any words could. They seemed bigger somehow, like something had just jumped in front of him and yelled Boo! The boyish sparkle was gone, replaced not by a hard stare but an empty gaze. He had the look of someone who’d just lost everything. It was a look I knew well.
“Funeral was yesterday,” he finally said. “Lots of people there. Kids from school, even folks from Mattingly. Was real nice.”
“Wanted to thank you for bringing me this,” I said, looking at my box on the stand beside me. “Really came in handy.”
“I knew you liked it,” Jabber said. “Sorta why I’m here. Wondering could you do me a favor.”
“Sure,” I said.
Jabber stared at the ground. “Wonder could you let me have his key chain. Don’t know why. I got the money he owes you.”
“Jabber,” I said, “don’t worry about that.”
I reached over to open the box but found the key chain beside it. My mind raced, wondering if I had somehow sat it there or if someone else had, then handed him the key chain. “I’m pretty sure he’d want you to have it.”
Jabber turned the key chain over in his hand and gripped it like a lifeline, the one thing that kept him from being swept away.
“I loved him,” he said.
“I loved him, too.”
“He was the best thing in my life. He was like my daddy and my mama and my brother all at once. He was my best friend.”
“How’s your mom?” I asked him.
Jabber grew silent again, still studying the tops of his shoes. He shrugged. “Hasn’t been home much. Said she couldn’t be around me because I remind her of Eric. I think she blames me because I stayed home that night. I think she might tell me to leave.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She wanted Eric and me out before. Her boyfriend doesn’t like us. This might be her reason to do it.”
“If you were there with us, nothing would be different,” I said. “It was just his time, Jabber.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“I don’t really understand it, either. But I’m trying. I think Eric had a light to shine, and I think he shined it. And I think he did such a good job at it that God called him home.”
“He’d have been a good missionary,” Jabber said.
“I think he was just that. I know it. And don’t you worry. I’m gonna help you out, Jabber. I’m gonna do everything I can. We’ll figure this all out.”
Jabber looked at me and asked the question that he both so needed and was so afraid to have answered.
“What am I supposed to do next? I feel like everything’s over. Like…I died inside.”
He looked down again. I held my words until he raised his chin. “You have, I think,” I said. “But life is full of births and deaths. Things end so other things can begin. What’s taken from you God will give back a hundredfold. Your troubles make your faith, Jabber. You need to find that faith now.”
“I don’t believe like Eric did. I went to church with him some, but not always. He said God had all the answers. Don’t know about that.”
“I think we’ll both always have our share of questions.” I stared at my box on the table beside us and knew that was true. “And I think those questions will always have a little hurt to them. But I think in that hurt is the closest thing to truth we can ever find in this life. Don’t you worry. We’re gonna get through this together. As long as you don’t mind having to keep an eye on a bald old man.”
Jabber smiled as much as he was able. “Thanks, Mr. Andy,” he said. He held up the key chain. “And thanks for this.”
“He’d want you to have it, Jabber. And thanks for bringing my box. It helped.”
“Guess I’ll head out before they kick me out,” he said, though he didn’t move.
There was a torment inside him, one that burned and smoked and let out tiny wisps in his speech. I wanted to reach out for him, to tell him there could never be another to him like Eric, just as there could never be another to me like my mother, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find another to help bear the heavy load life had given him. I wanted to reach out, but I knew he had to reach out as well. True understanding is always met in the middle, not on the ends. I could offer my help, but Jabber had to accept it. He had to take down his wall. And the first bricks were dislodged with his next words.
“Got a ride in the morning?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Thought I’d just ask Jake.�
��
“I’d come get you, if you want. Maybe we could talk some.”
“That’d be just fine, Jabber. Just fine.”
Jabber then rose to leave and gave me a hug. Even managed to slap me on the back. It was a sign he was in better spirits, at least for the time being. Still, I knew the road ahead for Jabber would be a difficult one. His life had been stripped bare of good. He could easily go the way of his mother and choose numbness over pain. Jabber needed someone who could convince him otherwise. He needed a friend. Someone he could depend upon.
He needed an angel.
Jabber left with the promise that he’d return bright and early the next day. My eyes settled upon the empty chair in front of me. I didn’t know what had been real and what had been imagined, but I knew that wherever the words Elizabeth had spoken to me had come from, they had been true. I would need them. Them and more.
“Mr. Andy?”
I turned toward the door. “Yeah, Jabber?”
“Forgot to give you this. Found it stuck down in the cushion when I sat down.”
Jabber dug into his pocket. Out came a folded sheet of carefully cut paper.
Elizabeth’s paper.
36
The Beginning
After days of what felt like constant tears, I still found more to shed when Jabber handed me the paper and left. They dripped from my eyes and fell onto my arms, leaving me breathless and limp. It was a baptism in salty water, and I gave myself over to it. One final drowning of the old man—and the Old Man—in order to bring birth to the new.
I embraced my tears, and they became neither pain nor confusion, but joy.
Elizabeth was real.
She had sat with me by my bed. Had held and comforted me. She had looked into my eyes and seen my hidden self, and she had smiled and deemed me worthy of that smile. She had taken the brokenness of my life and pieced it together with her gentleness and had returned it remade with purpose and meaning.