by Lisa Wingate
What do I do?
Tell me what to do!
Blinking hard, I looked for an exit sign, watched for something, anything ahead. Please . . . something. A hospital, a police car, somebody . . .
Somebody help. . . .
A truck in the left lane backed off, and a gap opened. I watched it grow wider. I couldn’t exit from there, but I could stop the car, try to get J. Norm out onto the grass in the middle of the road, yell for help.
Would somebody help? Would somebody stop?
Please, somebody. Please . . .
I turned the wheels, moved into the empty space, bumped over the line of reflectors onto the shoulder, stopped on the grass just before a bridge, my foot shaking so hard it would barely press the brake.
Grabbing my seat belt, I pulled and tugged, tried to push the button. My fingers were useless, numb. The seat belt came free. I opened the door, stumbled into the ditch, ran through the grass, the wildflowers pulling at my shoes.
“J. Norm, J. Norm!” My voice was high and raw, not loud enough for anyone to hear over the traffic as I yanked open the passenger-side door, leaned in to undo the seat belt, tried to pull J. Norm out. He was too heavy, wedged in too tight. Tears blurred everything. I ran to the side of the road, waving my arms, screaming, “Somebody! Somebody help me!”
Chapter 23
J. Norman Alvord
There was a light nearby, so bright it was blinding. The light was beautiful, the beams radiating outward from a single center. Something was moving against its glow, crossing back and forth, but I couldn’t make it out, couldn’t see into the light.
I closed my eyes, opened them again, tried to clear my vision. My eyelids were stiff, swollen, grainy, but this place was warm, quiet, comfortable. White. Had I found my way to heaven, after all? Had grace brought me here, even though I’d allowed myself to become a bitter, irreverent old man? Had I been forgiven for all the ways in which I was a failure as a father, a husband, a human being?
I had a sense of someone female close by. A sigh hovered in the air, a soft, familiar sound, and then the clinking of jewelry. Was that Annalee? Was she here?
I tried to say her name, to call her to me, but my mouth was dry, my throat packed in cotton. I felt as if I were drifting, my body floating, then landing in a soft place, then floating again.
I swallowed hard, tried to say, Annalee? But the word was little more than a rough croak, a coarse bit of sound. The light shifted, and I could hear her coming closer, her clothes rustling. Instinctively, I was afraid. Where was I and who was out there?
I tried again to call her, but I produced nothing more than, “Nnnul-eee.” I could see her now, silhouetted against the brightness. Annalee. The light behind her shifted, dots of shadow moving, swaying. Leaves. The shadows of leaves. Were there trees in heaven?
“Ssshhh,” she whispered. “Everything’s fine now.” And then just as quickly, she was gone, and I knew I was alone in the room.
I gave up trying to hold my eyes open, took in the sounds and scents instead. I was in a hospital. The room was strangely quiet, though—no beeping pulse oximeter. No blood-pressure cuff pumping up, then counting down.
I pushed my eyes open again, rolled my head to the other side, made out what I could. A wall, a closet, a door, a chair, a dresser. A room arranged for long-term occupancy, not a temporary stay.
A nursing home.
I was in a nursing home.
Fear splintered through me, a hail of broken glass. How had this happened? How had I come to be here? I tried to remember, struggled to drag together the bits and pieces of my mind, but all was scattered, flitting this way and that in a fog. The house with the seven chairs, the iron finial bearing a lion’s head, a book . . . a book of some sort. An important book . . .
What did the book say?
Deborah. Deborah had threatened to take my house, to move me out of my home and into the Villas. It’s for your own good, she’d said.
Had she done this to me? Had she brought me here, dumped me like an old hound left behind by a family that no longer wanted to bother?
I mustered my strength, called out. A voice answered, “Hang on a minute, there, fella. You’re all right.” The voice was a man’s. “Let me get on over there and push your button to call up a nurse.” Something clattered through the doorway, scraping the frame, then squeaked across the room. A head bobbed past, only slightly above the footboard as I struggled to blink the film from my eyes. I couldn’t make out features—just gray hair, and as he came closer, a wheelchair. He made his way to the side of the bed, patted my arm, then stretched toward something. A soft electronic bell chimed once. He patted my arm again, left his hand there. “Mary’ll be here in a minute. She’s one of the best nurses in all a’ Dallas. You’ll see. You been a model patient so far, but you don’t talk much.” He chuckled at his own joke, and I felt him clasping my fingers, shaking my hand. “Claude Fisher. Pleased to meet ya. I volunteer here Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Used to live here, but I met myself a hot chick, got married, and moved out. This is a good place, though. The nurses take fine care of folks.”
I pulled in a breath, swallowed past the drought in my mouth, tried to force my swollen tongue to conform to two words: “How . . . h-howww l-l-long?”
“Oh, around two weeks,” Claude Fisher answered. “Don’t know how long you were in the hospital before that, though. They brung you here from someplace in Houston.”
“W-weeks?” Weeks . . . perhaps longer? By now, Deborah might have sold my house, disposed of all my things, had her way.
The panic returned, stronger this time.
Another person entered the room, walked across it. A woman, blond, young, pretty, I thought, though I couldn’t see her clearly. She leaned over the bed, took my wrist, and measured my pulse.
“He’s awake,” Claude said. “Ain’t that great?”
“How are you feeling, Mr. Alvord?” The nurse spoke loudly, yet her voice was gentle, as if she spent much of her time soothing people.
“Irrr-ty.” Thirsty.
She left, went into the bathroom, ran water, came back and dripped some water from a straw into my mouth. I lapped at it like a man in the desert, but felt it escaping down the side of my face. The nurse wiped it with a tissue. “Don’t be in such a hurry. It’s okay. I’m right here.”
It’s okay. I’m right here. There was a girl. I remembered her saying that to me, her fingers intertwined with mine. Epiphany. I recalled her now. I closed my eyes, trying to piece together more.
“Claude, could you stay with him a minute while I go call Dr. Barnhill to tell him Mr. Alvord is awake?” She left without waiting for an answer.
Claude moved in again, patting my hand, then rubbing it between his palms, as if to keep me from drifting away. “You been in a coma. A real, live Sleepin’ Beauty. You remember any of that?”
I shook my head slightly, but I was starting to remember, to pull the threads together a bit at a time. But for the weariness in my body and the strange, stale taste in my mouth, I would have said that the smattering of events I remembered had happened just a day ago, or two. But you don’t land in a nursing home overnight. Time had passed . . . weeks, according to Claude Fisher. As he offered comfort and assurances, I tried to conjure a logical pattern of events. Epiphany, the trip, a hotel, a bite of cinnamon roll that seemed to sit on my chest with the heaviness of a cinder block . . .
A busy highway . . . so much traffic . . .
A car accident? Had I been in a car accident?
I worked to push the question past my lips, struggling to make Claude understand it. In the time it took, another question was brewing. If there had been an accident, where was Epiphany? Had she been injured? I remembered her being in the car, calling my name, and then darkness closing around me like the pinwheel shutter on a camera, narrowing from all directions.
Claude chuckled when he finally discerned the question I was working so hard to voice. “No, friend, it wasn’t a
car accident. It was your ticker.” He patted his chest. “Your heart. You had a heart attack. I been through one myself, few years back, so I know what that’s like, but I woke up after mine. Some folks don’t, though. You’re lucky. They were gettin’ worried you might not ever come to, but here you are. The nurses didn’t tell me your private business, by the way. But you keep your ears open around here, you’ll figure out things. I heard the doctor talking to your daughter when they brung you in.”
I heard the doctor talking to your daughter. . . . I wanted to ask about the conversation, to question Claude as to exactly what Deborah had said, to see if I could read between the lines and discern my reality. Did Deborah come often? Had she mentioned my house? Where was Epiphany? Did Epiphany visit here and stand over my bed, wondering if I would awaken? How had we ended up on the highway together? Where were we going?
To a hospital . . . I remembered going to a hospital to visit a woman. Something about a blue dresser. And there was a house. . . .
Bits and pieces returned, scraps of memory. My head throbbed, whirling and clicking, a phonograph too tightly wound. I closed my eyes, sank into the pillow.
“There’s the doc,” Claude said. “Must’ve been his day to make rounds. Hey, Doc! We got a live one here. Sleepin’ Beauty just woke up.”
After that, the day passed in a muddle of medical jargon, and waking, and sleeping, whispered conversations about recovery, therapy, and deprivation of the brain during the heart attack. They wondered how completely I was able to understand them and how completely I would recover. In the afternoon, a therapist attempted to test my cognitive abilities. She cheered every task I was able to complete and pronounced me a star patient for being able to muster a modicum of words. She seemed to indicate that my future looked promising. In all the hoopla, one thing was missing. There was no indication of Deborah rushing to my bedside, euphoric at the idea that I’d finally awakened.
The nurse made repeated promises that my daughter would be arriving soon, but Deborah did not come. Nor was there any sign of Epiphany, which concerned me even more, particularly as I began reconstructing the details of our trip. We’d been partners, cohorts, amateur sleuths, and fugitives on the lam together. She wouldn’t have abandoned me here in this nursing home unless something was very wrong.
Unless she had no choice . . . or she wasn’t near here.
Had she run away?
Was she all right?
I attempted to ask the questions as the day went on, but I couldn’t pronounce Epiphany’s name correctly, and no one seemed to recognize it. I tried not to think the worst. Between waking and sleeping and working to control spongy, uncooperative muscles, I watched the door and thought alternately of Epiphany and of Deborah.
As evening began closing in, the nurse, Mary, became flustered by my continual attempt at questions. “Your daughter’s out of town,” she said, settling her fingers tenderly over mine and giving an apologetic squeeze. “Her office couldn’t reach her, but they’ve left a voice mail on her cell. I’m sure she’ll pick up the message soon. She’ll be so thrilled. She’s been really worried about you.” Her kind blue eyes flitted away, betraying a caution she didn’t want me to see. Undoubtedly, it is unhealthy for a coma patient to discover on his first day back that no one cares if he wakes up.
“I want . . . to sss-see . . . mmm-my . . .” The fog was thickening in my brain this evening, making the words more difficult to find and to form. I sounded like a drunk on a park bench. I had the drunk’s headache, as well. “M-my law-yer.” If I could have dredged up the name, I would have given it to her, insisted that she write it down and look up the number. Even a prisoner in jail is given the right to one phone call. Surely a patient in the nursing home deserved that much.
In the hall, an old woman was pacing and raving like a lunatic, crying out that someone had stolen her china and silver, and then alternately calling for someone named Felix. Perhaps Deborah had deposited me in the dementia ward.
Mary cocked an ear to the sound, then turned back to me. “I’m sorry about Mrs. Klemp. She’s having a tough time, and we haven’t had the heart to move her to the Alzheimer’s wing. She’s been here six years.”
Six years . . . Something inside me clenched. I’d be better off never having awakened.
“I’m going off duty now.” Mary adjusted my sheets. “Ifeoma will be coming on. She’ll take good care of you. As soon as we hear from your daughter, she’ll let you know. Would you like the TV on for a while?”
“H-oh-gan’s Heroes,” I answered bleakly, but the words were slurred. I ended up with Extreme Home Makeover on the TV.
I watched two and a half episodes before sinking into sleep.
When I awoke, it was morning. I knew this without looking. Pink light filtered against my eyelids. I opened them and scanned the room, uncertain at first where I was, and then remembering. The recollection was a blow. I closed my eyes again, but I wasn’t sleepy. Just weary. Weary in mind, and body, and spirit.
An old hymn ran through my mind. One of the women sang it in the kitchen of the VanDraan house, “I’ll Fly Away.”
I wanted to fly away. I wanted to fly away like a rocket, streaking through the atmosphere, from the known to what is beyond. I’d always been a man to lean on science more than faith, to rely on what could be plotted, and predicted, and explained with the proper equation.
But science was of no use to me now. It could not bring me from this place to the next, from Earth to heaven.
Lean not on thine own understanding. Perhaps this was my mistake—the casual forgetting of that one little verse, repeated so often as I sat in catechism classes, drawing diagrams in the corners of my papers. Perhaps I’d been stubborn, shortsighted, arrogant. But lying here in this bed, I had no way to help myself. I had little choice but to make contact with God, to rely on prayer.
Seems like that’s a bad time to start . . . Epiphany had said when I’d flippantly espoused my intention not to return to church until I arrived there in a coffin.
Out of the mouths of babes.
In my pain and my arrogance, I’d left myself alone in this little room.
So completely alone . . .
Closing my eyes again, I attempted to consider, perhaps with not as much determination as I should have afforded, how a fitting prayer would be worded at this point. What should I pray for? My health, my recovery, so that I could continue to fight for my home? My freedom, so that I could find Epiphany and attempt to undo whatever damage I had done? Answers, so that I could solve the mysteries of my past?
A miracle?
Should I pray for a miracle?
Such was probably too much to expect for a man in my position. Miracles involved faith and supplication—two qualities in which I had never excelled.
But then again, there was no other viable contingency plan at this juncture, and so I made an attempt at prayer, in the way a catechism student might, when given it for an assignment.
Father in heaven,
Please take up this struggle where I have failed in it. Please do not let this journey have been for naught. I need to know the truth before I die, and I need to leave things well with Deborah and with Epiphany. If I’ve lacked in anything in life, it has been in the asking for help when I needed it and in the believing of things I could not prove.
I’m asking now, which ultimately means that I do believe.
And perhaps that I’m at the point of desperation.
You accept prayers from both perspectives, I suspect. Thank you for accepting this one.
The end . . .
I mean . . . Amen.
I waited then, through the nurse’s morning rounds and breakfast and a meeting with an occupational therapist. The staff changed, the third shift leaving and Mary returning. “Your daughter called,” she announced. “She’s trapped in a storm in Kansas City, but she’ll be here as soon as she can get a flight out.”
Deborah arrived later that day, rushing in the door, haggard a
nd breathless, travel-weary. She stopped at the sight of me sitting up in bed, blinked, and dropped her chin a bit, as if she hadn’t really expected to find me functioning. In that instant when she was off guard, I tried to read her emotions. What lay beyond her obvious surprise? Disappointment? Happiness? Reservation?
Was she mulling through the eventualities, thinking, What do I do with him now that he’s back among the living? The doctor and the occupational therapist had given me reason to hope that I could expect a fairly full recovery, with some continuing therapy. An emergency surgery after the heart attack had opened the blocked coronary arteries and placed two stents. Deborah must have consented to the procedure when I was unable to consent to it myself. Why would she have done that if she only wanted to put me away?
I thought of the prayer earlier. I needed to leave things well with Deborah. . . .
Only a fool prays in one direction and walks in another.
I put on a smile—sort of a slow, clumsy, lopsided thing, as my muscles were slack from lack of use. I lifted a hand toward her. It had a bit of a shriveled look, but it could have been holding an olive branch.
Deborah stood frozen in place, seeming uncertain, afraid to come closer. Her lips pursed, she swallowed, took a pair of sunglasses dangling from her fingers, and hooked them over her purse strap without looking at it. “They called me . . .” The sentence seemed unfinished, as if she didn’t know what else to add. She took a tiny step, then halted.
A lifetime passed through my mind, the memories pungent and sweet and painful. Deborah as a baby, our firstborn. Deborah as a toddler, independent, curious, persnickety in her choices of food and playthings. Deborah as a teenager, stubborn, smart, difficult. Deborah as a young woman, opinionated, obstinate, accomplished. Deborah as a bride, beautiful on the beach in a simple white cotton dress. And now this Deborah, a woman in the middle of her life, still watching me from a distance. How many times had she taken a step in my direction only to find me brushing on by? How many times had I failed to see it, failed to see her? Failed at the most important thing of all?