by P. D. Cacek
“But, ma’am.”
“Please, let him go.”
Nora watched their eyes shift toward Dr. Cross, who must have nodded because they moved back. Moving slowly and making hushing sounds, she walked to the bed and pulled the sheet down off his face.
“Shh, shh now,” she whispered, patting his chest. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. Shh.”
Henry looked up at her and took her hand. His skin was warm and she recognized the feel of it against her own.
“P-p-please, where’s my mama?”
“I don’t know, baby, but we’ll find her.” She looked up. “Won’t we, Martin?”
Dr. Cross nodded and motioned everyone out of the room, leaving Nora alone with the man who used to be Henry.
“I’ll be right back, with…another doctor, if that’s okay?”
He didn’t wait for Nora’s answer and that was fine with her, because she had more important things to think about at the moment. When she was sure they were alone, Nora opened her purse and gently wiped away his tears with one of the lavender-scented handkerchiefs she’d started carrying since her first visit.
When Martin had come for her, telling her Henry was dead, she thought she’d finally have to use the handkerchief for herself. But it was better this way, even if Henry was crying and confused, he was alive.
And that meant Henry hadn’t died. No one wakes up after they die except the Good Lord Jesus Christ and that was only because He’d been the Son of God. Henry was only the son of Leonard and Rosalind Rollins, so he couldn’t have been dead.
Martin just made a mistake, that was all.
Just a mistake.
“I want my mama,” Henry said in his tiny little voice and Nora stopped wondering about what happened and smiled at him.
“Poor baby,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay, I promise. I’ll take care of you.”
Henry wiped his nose on the sleeve of his pajama top.
“Do you know where my mama is? She told me to go outside because I was singing too loud and she’s gonna have a baby and I think Howdy’s a good name or maybe Summerfallwinterspring if it’s a girl and I’m gonna be the big brother but Mama gets tired and told me to go out so I got my bike and I did and big brothers can ride in the street and….”
Henry took a deep breath, ready to continue, when Nora saw him look at the door and shrink back against the pillow, pulling the sheet back up toward his face. “I don’t like them. They’re scary.”
Nora turned to see Dr. Cross standing in the doorway with another man: white, middle-aged and paunchy in a pale gray business suit, slightly stooped-shouldered and balding but with a kind face. The man looked at Henry and smiled.
“Make ’em go ’way,” Henry told her, pulling at the sheet again as the two men entered the room.
“Miss Nora, this is Dr. Ellison. Dr. Ellison is the staff psychologist here at the hospital. I’d like him to look at—”
“No doctors!” Henry suddenly grabbed Nora’s arm, pulling her to him, and she gasped before she could stop herself. She’d forgotten how strong he was.
“Miss Nora?”
“I’m fine, Martin.”
“No doctors,” Henry hissed, his face all but buried in her side. “Doctors give shots.”
“Oh, but I’m not that kind of doctor,” Dr. Ellison said, taking another step closer. He had a slight Irish or Scottish accent, Nora couldn’t decide which.
“No?”
“No.”
“Promise?” Henry said, and the doctor walked to the foot of the bed and made an X over the front of his suit coat.
“Promise and cross my heart, hope to kiss a duck.”
Henry giggled. Nora couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him do that, or if he ever had.
“I’m Dr. Ellison. Can I talk to you for a little bit?”
Henry nodded but wouldn’t let go of Nora’s arm. “No shots?”
Dr. Ellison laughed softly and raised both hands. He carried a small digital recorder in one hand similar to the one Marjorie had given Henry the Christmas after he’d been diagnosed – so he could keep his memories close.
“No shots,” Dr. Ellison said, “but maybe a cookie afterward…if you’re good.”
Henry immediately let go of Nora’s arm and sat up straight in the bed she’d been told he died in, hands folded in his lap. “I’m good.”
Dr. Ellison chuckled again and motioned Nora out of the way before he brought up a chair and sat down.
“Well, now,” he said, turning on the recorder and placing it on the bed next to Henry, “as I already told you, my name is Dr. Ellison, so I guess I need to ask your name, right?”
“Right!” Henry lifted his chin. “My name’s Timothy Patrick O’Neal…but everyone calls me Timmy.”
Dr. Ellison extended his hand. “Hello, Timmy.”
“Hello, Dr. Ellison.”
Henry pumped the doctor’s hand three times – up down, up down, up down – then folded his hands back in his lap.
“Very good. Now, Timmy, do you know where you are?”
Henry shook his head.
“You’re in a hospital.” Henry’s eyes widened. “Do you know why?”
Henry shook his head. “Where’s my mama?”
“I’m not sure, Timmy. What’s your mama’s name?”
“Mama.”
Nora pressed the handkerchief to her lips.
“Okay, but what does your daddy call her?”
“Oh! Honey.”
“Ah.” Dr. Ellison turned toward Nora. “This may take a while.”
Dr. Cross came up and touched Nora’s arm.
“Why don’t we head down to the café and get some coffee? I don’t know about you, Miss Nora, but I could sure use some.”
Nora nodded and followed Dr. Cross to the door where she stopped and turned around. “I’ll be back in a little while, Hen— Timmy.”
“’Kay.”
Henry didn’t look at her when he answered. He was sitting up straight and tall and giving his full attention to everything Dr. Ellison had to say.
Like a good little boy.
Dr. Cross didn’t say anything as they left and walked down the hall and it was only when the two of them were alone in the elevator that Nora finally found the right words to ask.
“Why did you tell me he was dead, Martin?”
“Because he was, Miss Nora.”
“Then how do you explain this?”
When the elevator doors opened, Dr. Cross stepped back and let her exit first. “I can’t, Miss Nora, but I really wish I could.”
Dr. Ellison couldn’t answer the question either when he joined them twenty minutes later. He was, however, smiling from ear to ear.
“Your husband’s amazing, Mrs. Rollins, absolutely amazing. Marty, are you sure he has Alzheimer’s?”
Marty? Nora stirred the cream into her second cup of coffee and kept quiet.
“Oh, come on, Barney, you know better than to ask that. Of course he had…has Alzheimer’s, and he coded and was pronounced and—” He glanced at Nora and quickly looked away. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
Dr. Ellison looked down at the digital recorder in his hand and shook his head. “About his spontaneous…recovery, no, except to say that it does happen from time to time. But as for his current state of mind….” He smiled. “Well, other than repeating myself about how amazing I think he is…. Mrs. Rollins, do you know if Henry had any boyhood friends or relatives named Timmy?”
Nora set her spoon aside and looked up. “He might have. I know he doesn’t have any family named Timmy, but I don’t know about friends.”
Dr. Ellison slipped the recorder into the inside pocket of his suit coat and leaned forward, clasping his hands together on the tablet
op the same way Henry had.
“Mrs. Rollins, your husband believes he’s a six-year-old boy named Timmy who is about to become a big brother and wants to name his sibling after the characters on the old Howdy Doody show. My God, Howdy Doody…I haven’t thought about him or Buffalo Bob in decades.” Clearing his throat, he looked at Nora. “I need to ask Dr. Cross a few things that might be a bit uncomfortable for you to hear, Mrs. Rollins, so if you’ll excuse us.”
Dr. Cross pushed away from the table, about to stand, when Nora shook her head.
“It’s all right, Martin,” she said. “I’d like to know too.”
Dr. Cross took a small notebook from his coat pocket and opened it up. He held it in front of him the way Nora’s mother used to hold her prayer book every Sunday in church – fingers splayed to hold it up and using only her thumbs to turn and hold down the pages.
“See, this is why I love you, Marty,” Dr. Ellison said. “As young and computer savvy as you are, you still write things down on paper.”
Nodding without looking up, Dr. Cross took a deep breath and began reading.
“The patient – ” he didn’t use Henry’s name and Nora knew that was for her benefit “ – began showing signs of respiratory distress at 15:30 and, in accordance with the DNR order, was made as comfortable as possible. I stayed with him until he stabilized, after which I ordered that he be checked every fifteen minutes and left to continue my rounds. At 16:15 I was paged back to the patient’s room on a Code Blue. I arrived to find that the patient had coded and declared time of death at 16:22.” Closing the notebook, he looked up. “I’m so sorry, Miss Nora.”
“Thank you, Martin. But are you sure he died?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But he’s alive now.”
“Yes, ma’am, he is.” Dr. Cross shook his head. “I just don’t know why.”
“There are,” Dr. Ellison said, “a number of well-documented cases of people who’ve come back with claims of near-death experiences.”
“Yes, but those are incidents where there’d been medical intervention. That wasn’t the case this time, Barney.” Dr. Cross sounded angry but Nora knew it was probably like when Henry got angry, back when Hank was around – you got angry so you wouldn’t sound scared. “And those so-called experiences are probably nothing more than hallucinations created by a lack of oxygen to the brain.”
“Very possibly, but these people were all declared clinically dead, correct?” Dr. Ellison asked.
“Yes.”
“With no outward or inward signs of life, right?”
“Yes, but….”
“And then they woke up.”
Dr. Cross leaned forward, keeping his voice low. “But they didn’t wake up claiming to be someone else, did they?”
“No, they didn’t, but generally people who claim near-death experiences aren’t suffering from Alzheimer’s. I think Henry’s still here.” Dr. Ellison tapped a finger to his forehead.
“But why does he think he’s a little boy?” Nora asked.
“Why not?” Dr. Ellison replied. “What better way to deal with an illness that reduces us to children than to become a child? Timothy Patrick O’Neal is a perfectly nice little boy of six who loves Howdy Doody and riding his bike and lives with his mom and dad in a yellow house in Long Beach. I even have an address because his mother taught him to memorize it in case he ever got lost. Henry never lived in Long Beach, did he?”
“No.”
“Absolutely fascinating.”
Nora was glad the man found it so. “But he died.”
“Yes, technically. Henry died – ” he shot Dr. Cross a look, “ – more or less. Mrs. Rollins, when was your husband born? His full birth date – month, day, year.”
“May 20th, 1936.”
“Timmy’s birthday, he told me, is June 10th, 1950. Does that date mean anything to you?”
“No, it doesn’t. But he’s...Henry’s all right?”
“Well.” The new doctor, Dr. Ellison, licked his lips. “Timmy’s all right. I’m not sure how long this new identity will last, but until Henry comes back, we need to accept this Timmy persona.” He smiled. “At one point he asked me why he looked different and I really didn’t know what to say, so I just told him that he’d been sick for a very, very long time and that seemed all the explanation he needed. Your husband thinks he’s a child, Mrs. Rollins, and children have a remarkable capacity to accept things on faith.”
“I see. Now if you’ll both excuse me,” Nora said and stood up. “I need to get back to my husband.”
Both men stood up but didn’t try to stop her.
“Did you give him a cookie?” she asked Dr. Ellison.
“Cookie? Oh.” Dr. Ellison smiled sheepishly. “No, I forgot…sorry.”
“Don’t fret, I’ll get one for him.”
The café’s selection of cookies came down to a choice between oatmeal-raisin, sugar and something called a ‘gluten-free/lactose-free honeycake’ that looked like an undercooked pancake. Nora bought two sugar cookies and decided right then and there that the first thing she’d do when she got home that night was bake up a batch of chocolate-chip cookies.
Because what little boy – even a little boy in an old man’s body – didn’t like chocolate-chip cookies?
He was watching cartoons when she got back in the room.
“Mickey Mouse! Look at the colors!” he said, pointing, his eyes never leaving the screen. “M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E! Mickey’s pants are RED! He has RED pants and YELLOW shoes!”
Nora glanced at the screen and tried to remember if Mickey Mouse had been in color back in the fifties when Marjorie had been a member of the Mickey Mouse Fan Club.
“Very nice. Look what I have,” she said and folded back the napkin she’d wrapped around the cookies. “Just like Dr. Ellison promised.”
Henry’s eyes shifted away from the television just long enough to see what it was she was holding.
“COOKIES! Gimme!”
Smiling, Nora placed the cookies into his outstretched hand and turned around the chair Dr. Ellison had been sitting in so she could watch Mickey Mouse with the little boy named Timothy Patrick O’Neal who used to be her husband, Henry.
Chapter Eighteen
Dr. Palmer cleared his throat. “Time of death, 15:30. She’s gone, Danny, I’m sorry.”
Danny squeezed her hand and wondered if he was.
“I love you,” he whispered.
And it squeezed back.
Danny felt every muscle in his body tighten, trapping him inside his own skin as his throat struggled to expel an involuntary gasp. If he’d been able to move, he would have grabbed the closest doctor or nurse by the front of their scrubs and shouted, “She just moved. Did you see that? She just moved.”
But he knew that was impossible. Sara was dead, had been dead long before they turned off the machines. He knew that, so all he could do was stand there and watch her hand squeeze his again.
It wasn’t possible, but this time one of the nurses saw it too.
“Oh my God. Doctor? I— She moved.”
Danny shook his head. “No, she’s dead.”
Then she moaned and someone pulled him away.
“We have a heartbeat. It’s weak, but…her blood pressure’s coming up. Jesus Christ, it’s 120/80. It’s normal.”
“Sara’s dead!” he shouted and they all stopped and looked at him, then Dr. Palmer shouted for someone to get him a fresh gown and gloves and to get ‘him’ out of there.
Him. Danny. Widower. Emily’s father.
Get him out of there.
One of the nurses took Danny’s arm and led him away.
“But she’s dead,” Danny told the nurse who escorted him from the OR. “She died on the kitchen floor.”
The nurse nodded and kept repeating “
I know, I know,” but wouldn’t let Danny stop moving or turn around until she’d pushed him out the double automatic doors at the end of the surgical hall. Letting go, she held up both gloved hands as if she expected him to try to run back to the OR and took a step back as the doors began to swing shut.
“The doctor will talk to you after he—” But the doors closed before she had a chance to finish what she was going to say.
Danny stood facing the doors until an orderly asked if he needed help and he asked for directions to the NICU.
He’d forgotten to take off the disposable scrubs and hat and booties, but no one seemed to mind. It was a hospital, after all, and Sara was dead.
Sara had to be dead.
Danny found his and Sara’s parents huddled in front of the NICU nursery window – tapping on the glass, making goo-goo sounds, mouthing words and gesturing to the nurse who’d wheeled Emily’s incubator up to the window, and taking pictures just like every other new grandparent.
As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, because nothing had; babies are born and people die every minute of every day.
Sara was dead.
Danny turned and left the NICU without them seeing him and went to the visitors’ waiting room, where he sat in a chair in the corner that was farthest from both the wall-mounted flat-screen television and the receptionist’s desk. There were others in the room besides him – families, older couples, a few bored children kicking chair legs, men and women of various ages who, like him, sat alone and waited for their names to be called.
They came and went while Danny sat and waited his turn.
It was only after his mother found him, frantic and red-faced, that he realized he hadn’t told the receptionist he was there.
“My God, didn’t you hear them paging you?”
Danny rubbed his eyes until they throbbed. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Come on, Danny, get up.” She grabbed his wrist and pulled. “You have to come with me right now.”
He was sure she didn’t know her nails were sinking into his wrist, but he didn’t mention it because the pain helped clear his head. And when it did he knew where she was taking him.