Ring of Light

by Isobel Bird

  “Right,” said Sophia. “Although in this case I don’t think you caused any problems. I think you just expected too much.”

  “So if it’s possible to do healing magic that works, isn’t there something I could do for Aunt Netty?” Kate asked.

  Sophia looked thoughtful. “Yes,” she said. “There is. But it’s risky.”

  “I don’t care,” Kate said. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

  “We have a lot of talented healers in our group,” Sophia continued. “We’ve often done healing rituals for people, either in our various covens or in the community.”

  “You mean we could do a group ritual?” Kate asked.

  Sophia nodded. “It might help. As you know, the more people you have working on a spell the more powerful it can be.”

  “So why is that risky?” Kate asked. “It sounds great to me.”

  “You’re forgetting what I said earlier,” Sophia responded. “You need to ask your aunt if it’s what she wants.”

  All of a sudden Kate understood what Sophia was saying. If she wanted to help Aunt Netty, she had to tell her about her involvement in witchcraft.

  CHAPTER 14

  “You’re sure slow today,” Annie commented as she walked with Ben down the hallway of Shady Hills toward the physical therapy room. “Didn’t you get enough sleep last night?”

  “I’m old,” Ben groused. “I sleep a lot. I’m like a bear. I need a good ten hours or I don’t feel right.”

  “In that case you must not have had a good night’s sleep since about 1958,” teased Annie.

  Ben humphed at her, but she knew he wasn’t angry. He enjoyed her company. In fact, she’d pretty much been assigned to him ever since the staff learned that she had made friends with the old man. They were all perfectly happy to pawn him off on her, as all of them had had more than their share of run-ins with Ben since he’d come to the nursing home.

  When they entered the physical therapy room, the aide looked up. “Well, well, well,” he said brightly. “It’s Mr. Rowe. How are you this morning?”

  “Old!” Ben bellowed. “How do you think I am?”

  “Well, let’s see if we can’t get you feeling better,” the young man said.

  “I didn’t say I felt bad,” Mr. Rowe said. “I just said I was old. And you’d better not pull on my knee the way you did last time. I couldn’t walk for two days after you manhandled me.”

  Annie giggled to herself. She knew Ben was putting on a show for her. The fact was that Karl, the physical therapist, was actually a really nice guy. Ben went to him three times a week because of his bad knee, which caused him a lot of pain.

  “I’ll be gentle with you,” Karl said as Ben sat down.

  “I’ll come back for you in an hour,” Annie said to her friend. She leaned down and added in a whisper, “Try not to scare him, okay?”

  Ben waved her away, but he smiled as he did it. Annie left him there and went back to changing the sheets on the beds. She was enjoying it more now that she’d been there for a while. Besides Ben, she had made friends with a lot of the residents, and now they talked to her as she pushed the laundry cart up and down the halls.

  “Hi, Annie,” said Mrs. Pennington in room 312.

  “Hi,” Annie said back. “How’s your bird today?”

  “Oh, fine,” the old woman answered. “Listen to him sing.”

  Annie paused outside her door, listening to the chirping coming from inside. Mrs. Pennington had a blue parakeet that she kept in a cage, and it was her pride and joy.

  “Ulysses is really going at it today,” she told Annie. “I think he must like you. He starts up whenever he hears the cart coming.”

  “He probably just thinks it’s dinner coming,” Annie joked as she continued on her way.

  Shady Hills was becoming a very special place to her. She knew a lot of the people by name, and she had started to learn their stories. She had discovered that a lot of the old people had led really interesting lives and that they loved it when someone asked them about themselves. She spent most of her free time talking to one person or another, hearing about what they had done when they were younger and finding out all kinds of fascinating things.

  Mr. Torrance in room 167, for example, had once been an actor in silent films. Miss Grace in 233 had been one of the first women news reporters on the radio. The more questions she asked, the more Annie realized that the residents of Shady Hills weren’t just people who had been thrown away or who had slipped between the cracks. They were people with thoughts and ideas and memories, and all they wanted was someone to talk to them. For one reason or another they had ended up there, usually because they had no family who could take care of them. But each of them was like a book waiting to be opened and enjoyed, and Annie was enjoying reading each of them.

  Ben, of course, was her favorite. She loved the time she spent with him, and of all the residents she felt the closest to him. Since their talk on Sunday he hadn’t said anything else about Violet or about his past, but talking about it had changed many things for Annie, and she appreciated his talking to her that way.

  She thought about how quickly her life had changed as she stripped the sheets from a bed and put new ones on. In just over a week she had completely changed her view of Shady Hills. She didn’t even notice the smell anymore. To her it had become just another part of the place, just like the green tiles in the hallway, the squeaky wheel on the laundry cart, and Mrs. Abercrombie’s clipboard. She was glad she had volunteered there, and she was looking forward to being there for as long as she could.

  Suddenly her thoughts were interrupted by a commotion in the hallway. She went to the door of the room she was in and looked out. Several nurses, including Mrs. Abercrombie, were scuttling down the corridor. They had anxious expressions on their faces, and they seemed to be in a terrible hurry.

  “What’s going on?” Annie asked one of the nurses as she passed by.

  “A guest has collapsed,” she said.

  Annie left the laundry cart and followed the nurse, thinking that she might be able to help if they needed an extra pair of hands. As they passed the doors of the rooms she saw some of the residents peering out, looking concerned.

  “Who is it?” one of the old women asked Annie.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m sure it will be fine.”

  She rounded the corner behind the nurse and stopped dead. The nurses were all running into the physical therapy room. After a long horrible moment of not being able to move, Annie ran after them.

  When she stepped inside she saw someone lying on the floor. Karl was bent over the figure, and several of the nurses were also on the ground. People were calling out, and their mingled voices added to the confusion. But although she didn’t know what was going on, Annie was sure of one thing—it was Ben they were talking about.

  “What happened?” Mrs. Abercrombie asked Karl.

  “He collapsed,” Karl told her. “He was walking on the treadmill over there, and he just crumpled.”

  “Someone call 911,” another of the nurses said.

  “We already have,” answered someone else. “They’re on their way.”

  Annie was paralyzed with fear. She wanted to step closer and see if Ben was breathing, but she didn’t dare. Besides, she didn’t want to get in the way. Karl was bending over Ben’s face, and it looked like he was performing CPR on him.

  There was a clattering in the hallway, and a man in uniform burst through the door. “Clear the room,” he cried out as Annie realized that he was an EMT.

  Two other technicians followed behind him, carrying medical kits. Annie and the nurses left the room, and the last technician in shut the door behind her, closing them out. The nurses, however, remained clustered around the door, looking at one another.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Annie asked, finally finding her voice.

  “They’ll do everything they can for him,” one of the nurses assured her.

  “Bu
t what’s wrong with him?” Annie asked.

  Mrs. Abercrombie came and put her arm around Annie’s shoulder. “We won’t know for a while,” she said. “I know this sounds impossible, but it would be best if you went back to work. It will help calm the other guests.”

  Annie nodded. Feeling dazed, she walked back to the room she had left when she’d heard the noise. The bed was still half finished, and numbly she took up the sheet and tucked it in. She didn’t even think about what she was doing, she just did it. When she was done she moved on to the next room.

  “Who was it, dear?” asked a woman in a wheelchair who passed the door on her way somewhere else.

  “Ben Rowe,” Annie informed her.

  The woman sighed.

  “But I’m sure he’ll be okay,” Annie added quickly, not wanting her to get the wrong idea. After all, the EMTs were still doing their jobs.

  The woman gave Annie a little smile and wheeled off. Annie turned to her work and concentrated on making the bed. It was easier than worrying about Ben. That was up to someone else now. All she could do was wait.

  She finished one floor and started on the next. Room after room went by without word from Mrs. Abercrombie. What can they be doing to him? Annie wondered as she dumped dirty sheets into the hamper and picked up yet another set of clean ones. It had been almost an hour since the technicians had arrived. Surely if something was terribly wrong they would have taken Ben away by now. She reassured herself by thinking that probably he had just been overtired and fainted.

  She entered the next room. When she looked, she was surprised to see that it was Ben’s. She hadn’t even thought about what floor she was on or where she was. But there she was, standing in the middle of his room with the freshly painted walls, the cheerful curtains, and the new bedspread she’d picked out for him just the day before.

  She went to the bed and stripped it. Then, very carefully, she remade it using new sheets. She wanted her friend to have somewhere nice to sleep when he came back upstairs. She hoped that he wouldn’t have to go to the hospital and that soon he could be resting comfortably in his own bed. Maybe she could even read to him and tell him how he’d given her a scare. He’d probably like knowing that he frightened me, she thought as she folded the top sheet over and pulled the comforter up over it.

  On her way out she stopped and picked up the framed photo on the dresser. She looked at Ben and Tad, smiling, and she felt better. Ben looked happy in the picture. Even though she knew he missed his brother terribly, it made her feel good to think that maybe she had filled a little tiny place in Ben’s heart that had been left empty by his brother’s death. She knew that he had helped her erase a little bit of the pain caused by losing her parents, and she hoped she had done the same for him.

  She went back into the hall, where she saw Mrs. Abercrombie walking toward her. She waited until the other woman reached her before asking, “How is he?”

  The nurse looked at her kindly. “I’m afraid he died, Annie.”

  Annie felt as if she’d been slapped. The hallway lurched, and she gripped the side of the laundry cart frantically. She felt Mrs. Abercrombie steady her, and she leaned against the wall to steady herself.

  “How?” she said, unable to get any other words out.

  The nurse sighed. “He had a heart attack,” she said.

  Suddenly, Annie thought about how tired Ben had looked over the past few days. Why hadn’t she said anything to the nurses?

  “He hadn’t been feeling well,” she told Mrs. Abercrombie, even though it was too late.

  “He had a heart condition,” the nurse informed her. “He was on medication for it. Apparently, it finally was just too much for him.”

  “It was the treadmill,” said Annie angrily. “He shouldn’t have been on it.”

  Mrs. Abercrombie shook her head. “That was just coincidental,” she said. “If it hadn’t been that it would have been something else. Ben’s heart just wasn’t working right anymore.”

  Annie looked into the nurse’s face and knew that she was telling the truth. The woman’s eyes were sad and kind, and it was too much for Annie to take. She started crying, loudly and fiercely.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. “He was finally starting to enjoy himself. He was going to come to my house this Sunday for dinner.”

  She felt like a baby, crying and saying whatever came into her mind. But she couldn’t stop. There was a horrible pain tearing through her, and she needed to let it out. When Mrs. Abercrombie hugged her, she began to wail.

  “He can’t be gone,” she said as the nurse stroked her hair and told her it would be okay. “He just can’t be.”

  Suddenly she was six years old again. She was standing in the garden of her family’s house in San Francisco while flames came out of the windows and a neighbor held her and told her that everything would be okay. But things hadn’t been okay. Her parents had died. And things weren’t okay now because Ben was dead and the friendship they’d been building was suddenly over before it could even really begin. It was happening all over again, and she couldn’t take it.

  She slumped to the floor, the nurse holding her as her body collapsed. She leaned against the wall and let the tears come. They ran down her face and fell onto her shirt, and she did nothing to wipe them away. She needed to cry. She needed to grieve. Thinking about Ben, gone, was too much.

  “I didn’t even get to say good-bye to him,” she said to Mrs. Abercrombie, but really speaking to herself. “I didn’t get enough time with him. I didn’t get to tell him how much I liked being his friend.”

  “I think he knew,” the nurse said, crouching down and wiping Annie’s face with a handkerchief. “I think he knew exactly how you felt about him.”

  But Annie wouldn’t be comforted. Her hurt was too new, too fresh. She needed to cry much more, and she did. The nurse let her sit there while she shook and sobbed, sometimes rubbing her eyes but mostly just letting the tears fall where they may. She didn’t care how she looked or who saw her. She missed her friend. She missed him more than she had missed anything or anyone in a long time. She felt as if a wonderful new present she’d been given had been snatched away from her before she’d had a chance to enjoy it properly.

  “You should probably go home for the day,” Mrs. Abercrombie said after Annie had been crying for ten minutes. “Would you like me to drive you?”

  Annie nodded. “Thank you,” she said. The idea of having to ride the bus was too horrifying, not because she was afraid people would think badly of her but because she knew that if she saw anyone who reminded her of Ben she would start crying all over again.

  The nurse helped her up and walked with her back to the office, where Annie grabbed her things. Mrs. Abercrombie told another nurse to take over for her, and she walked Annie out. In order to get to the front door they had to pass the physical therapy room, and Annie was relieved that the door had been shut again.

  “Is he in there?” she asked as they passed it.

  Mrs. Abercrombie shook her head. “The EMTs took him to the hospital in the ambulance,” she said.

  Annie nodded. At least someone is taking care of him, she thought as they left the building. She wished it could be her, but she was glad that Ben was at least off the floor and being looked after.

  Mrs. Abercrombie drove her home, with Annie giving her directions in a tired voice. She was worn out from sobbing so much, and she was exhausted from unhappiness. It still all seemed like a terrible dream, and she kept hoping she would wake up and find herself in bed with the alarm ringing and her aunt calling her to breakfast.

  “I’ve seen a lot of guests die in all the years I’ve been in this business,” Mrs. Abercrombie said as they sat waiting at a light. “It never gets easier.”

  Annie didn’t say anything. She couldn’t explain to the nurse just what Ben Rowe had meant to her, what he still meant to her, even though she had known him for only a few days. He hadn’t been just a patient, or just another bed whose sheets
needed changing. He’d been someone she’d been looking forward to knowing for a long time. But now he was gone, just like that, and she couldn’t get him back. All those chances she’d thought she’d had to know him better were gone in an instant.

  “I know this won’t help right now,” the nurse said. “But try to think of Ben the way he was when you saw him at his happiest. That’s the way he would want you to remember him. Then again,” she added, “since it’s Ben Rowe we’re talking about, maybe he’d prefer it if you remembered him at his crankiest moment.”

  Annie laughed in spite of her sadness. She looked over at Mrs. Abercrombie.

  “It would be hard to pick just one,” she said.

  When they reached Annie’s house, Mrs. Abercrombie said, “Take the day off tomorrow. I’ll call you to let you know about funeral arrangements.”

  “I didn’t think there would be one,” Annie said, surprised. “He didn’t have any family, did he?”

  The nurse shook her head. “No, but all the guests receive services as part of their stay with us.”

  Annie nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”

  Mrs. Abercrombie drove away, and Annie let herself into the house. Her aunt and Meg were gone, but there was a note for her on the kitchen counter.

  Annie:

  Kate called. Said she had big news.

  We’ll be back around 6:00 for dinner.

  AS (and Meg)

  Annie put the note in her pocket and went upstairs to call Kate. Whatever Kate’s news was, she hoped it was better than hers.

  CHAPTER 15

  T.J. was playing when Cooper arrived at his house. He was listening to a tape they’d made of a song they were working on, and he was playing his bass line along with her guitar. His long fingers moved up and down the neck of his bass quickly and confidently, and Cooper stood in the doorway watching him for a few minutes before he even noticed she was there.