“Can I help you?” the nurse at the nurses’ station asked Allison.
“Yes, I’m here to see Vicky Dooley. She was moved here from ICU earlier today.”
“Oh, yes, she’s in room 3305.”
Allison thanked her and asked to speak with Vicky’s nurse. She had a moment of apprehension when the harried looking middle-aged woman who was her nurse approached. The state of Vicky’s health it seemed was so precarious and could change so suddenly. The fear came to her off and on again last night that Vicky might die before Allison had a chance to tell her she had forgiven her; or at least was trying to forgive her. Allison was awash with relief when the nurse informed her that Vicky was continuing to improve.
“Thank God,” Allison said and realized this wasn’t just a phrase she thoughtlessly threw out there as she was so prone to do. It was heartfelt. “I think I just prayed,” Allison said. The nurse smiled as if she understood. Medical people must become accustomed, Allison thought, to these spontaneous outbursts of prayer; what with all this life, death, and brushes with the supernatural constantly buzzing around them.
The nurse then went on to tell Allison that if Vicky continued to improve she would probably be discharged in two to three days. Something about this didn’t sit well with Allison. Although her recovery seemed nothing short of miraculous it just seemed too soon.
“But she has cirrhosis of the liver,” Allison protested. “And it’s my understanding she’s in the advanced stages.”
“Yes, I know,” the nurse said sounding a little defeated and frustrated as she bit back the words on her tongue before she had a chance to say them. She didn’t need to say anything. Allison understood. This was the way of the world and the way of the health care system. A homeless person with no insurance, no Medicaid, she had already overstayed her welcome. Practically anyone would have by this point. She knew that Mercy Hospital had a poor fund, but how much could possibly be allotted to a hospital stay going into its second week? Then there was the problem of what to do with Vicky after discharge.
“She’s homeless for crying out loud. And in poor health. What’s to become of her?”
“I wish I could say. Her cousin, Mister…”
“Miner. Robert Miner.”
“Yes, that’s it. He’s going to speak with one of our social workers. In fact, he may have already. He was here earlier and said he’d return later this evening. Interesting character!”
“Yes, I remember him from years ago,” She wondered if Bobby would be a help or hindrance. She almost superstitiously associated him with bad luck for Vicky.”
Vicky was not only awake but out of bed and sitting in a chair. Color had returned to her cheeks and her eyes were bright and alert. Her face looked surprisingly radiant as if the grime, filth, and residue of disease had been somehow scrubbed off. Her hair, though much thinner than what Allison remembered, had been washed and neatly combed. There was even a trace of the old auburn detected amidst the drab grey strands. Yes, she was older, yes she was worn and frail; but so much of the old Vicky shone through that there was no way not to recognize her in the immediacy of that moment when Allison stepped into the room.
It was similar to what Allison had experienced at so many high school reunions. The old familiar faces from years past looked the same as they once did. It seemed particularly true of those she had once been close with, as if the bond of friendship created a sort of agelessness in the mind’s eye. But she knew this was only an illusion and not reality. And so it was with Vicky. She was the same old girl… until she smiled. Perhaps it was because she was missing a front tooth and so badly in need of dental work, but there was something more, something so fundamentally changed in that smile. It was then the illusion was shattered and Allison brought back to present day reality.
“Well, look at you! If you aren’t the comeback kid!” Allison said.
“Hey girl! Forgive me for not standing up but I don’t want to show my ass, if you get what I mean. It might make me em-bare-assed!” Together they laughed, spontaneously and joyfully, like they did so many years ago, like no time had passed at all.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Allison said, only now remembering the gift bag which hung about her wrist all this time. “I got you a gift.”
“What’s the occasion? It ain’t my birthday and it ain’t Christmas yet.”
“It’s a get well gift.”
“But you already got me one. The plant,” she said referring to the plant on the bedside table, the helium balloon still floating only a tiny bit deflated.
“But I wanted you to have one where you’d actually be awake and conscious when you received it.”
“I get what ya mean. I was pretty ding-dang out of it there for a while. Wasn’t I?”
“Yes, you were. Do you remember anything?”
“Just you being there by my bedside. I don’t remember nothin’ you said but I do remember you seemed kinda upset.”
“I swear that plant has grown since yesterday,” Allison said changing the subject. Focusing intently on the plant she noticed the stems were in fact drooping less and the leaves seemed to be reaching out more, leaning in the direction of the window and the sunlight. “You been talking to that plant, haven’t you?”
“We been conversing all day–better conversationalist than my roommate,” Vicky said in a half whisper motioning to the curtain that separated her bed from the one on the back end of the room.
“You still got that green thumb, Vicky. You always had such a way with living things. Here… before I forget,” Allison said handing her the gift bag, “your second gift.”
Vicky responded with such gleeful surprise, like a kid as she received the bag, opened and read the enclosed card, and pulled out the neatly layered and fluffed tissue paper to retrieve the gift at the bottom of the bag.
“It’s beautiful.” Tears instantly began pooling in Vicky’s eyes as she held up a lavender night gown and matching robe.
“Well, I remembered you liked purple. Figured you might like that more than the standard hospital gown,” she said, grateful that Vicky didn’t see the gift as a charitable offering as she had feared.
Just then a moaning sound ensued from behind the curtain on the back side of the room. It threw Allison off for a moment until she remembered there was another patient sharing the room with Vicky. The moan was one of pain and it was increasing in volume.
“Can I ring the nurse for you, darlin’?” Vicky said to the unknown person behind the curtain, and Allison marveled at how she could go from heart wrenchingly pitiful to funny and seemingly so within just twenty-four short hours. “Would you grab that nurse call device off my bed for me?” Vicky asked Allison, her old self entirely back again.
“Well, that’s nice of you Vicky,” Allison said handing her the nurse call.
“No, it ain’t,” Vicky said in a mischievous little whisper. “I just wanna shut her up. She kept me up half the night.” Vicky paged the nurse and with the speaker button pushed down she said, “It ain’t for me it’s for my roommate. You need to get in here with some Demerol ASAP. And in my opinion she needs a higher dose.
“They’re comin’ darlin’, they’re comin’! Just you hang in there,” Vicky hollered over to the curtain in a voice which Allison thought a bit too loud. Surprisingly, the moaning lowered somewhat in volume.
“So…,” Allison said motioning to the gown in Vicky’s lap. “You think it’s the right size?” She recalled what a hard time she had deciding on the size. It had to be small enough so that it wouldn’t slip off Vicky’s emaciated shoulders or hang like a formless drape about her sunken in chest; yet big enough to fit around her distended middle.
“Yeah, I think it’ll fit,” Vicky said holding the gown up in front of her.
“You sure? Because if it doesn’t I can exchange it.”
“It’s cool. Wish I could try it on now but I’m kinda plugged in if you get what I’m sayin’,” she said referring to the IV. “It’s enough of
an ordeal just to change from one backless nightie to the next. But anyhow, like I was sayin’, I really think it’s beautiful. I…I,” Vicky’s words got choked off by a surge of emotions.
“Vicky…please,” Allison said feeling a little embarrassed by the unnecessary show of gratitude. “It’s not much. I mean, I got a pretty good deal on it,” Allison said double checking the gown and robe to make sure she’d cut off the tags marked with the final clearance price. “And besides, I had to…” She stopped herself… get you something…for Chrissake, Vicky, I had to get you something.
Allison stopped the words that echoed through her mind from slipping out. Of course, this was her guilt offering. When you don’t know what else to do for someone, offer them a gift. And what could she do for Vicky? And why should she? And why on earth did she feel so compelled to anyway? She went over it and over it last night as she tossed and turned in her bed. Unable to sleep, she decided to pray. She dropped to her knees, hurting torso and all, and said the only prayer she knew… the Lord’s Prayer. The words “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” stuck in her throat. She had to let Vicky know she had forgiven her, or was at least trying to forgive her, and she had to get the contents of that hope chest to her. She knew she had to do these two things, beyond that, she had no idea.
“Had to what?” Vicky said bringing Allison back to the present.
“I had to get you something.” Allison pulled the other chair in the room around so that they could sit face to face; close enough so that their knees were practically touching. She took Vicky’s frail hand in hers and said, “Vicky, consider this gift a peace offering. I’ve been angry with you for a long time; long before the car wreck, ever since my wedding day to be exact. I want you to know I forgive you. For everything. When you wear this gown and robe I want you to remember that you’re forgiven.”
It was a peculiar moment for it seemed to Allison that with her words and Vicky’s tears, God stepped into this sad little institutional room for a moment and offered full and free forgiveness to Vicky for all the thoughtless, irresponsible, hurtful, and deceitful things she’d ever done. Allison couldn’t help it. Her eyes welled up with tears too.
“I didn’t think you ever could,” Vicky said daubing at her damp eyes and cheeks with a tissue. “What I did at your wedding was bad enough. But then I almost kill you… and your son. Hurt so many people and couldn’t even kill myself… How’s your boy?”
“He’s fine. He broke his nose but it’s healing. You know how young people are, they bounce right back. He may have a slightly crooked nose before it’s all said and done, but I keep trying to convince him that it’ll make him look rugged and adventurous, like Clint Eastwood.”
“He ain’t buyin’ it is he?”
“Well, no, he already inherited his father’s Roman nose and I really don’t think he wants it to stand out anymore than it already does.”
“And how about you? How you getting along?”
“Oh, fine. I’m healing. Not as quickly as my son but then that’s to be expected.”
“You cracked a rib, didn’t ya?”
“You do remember some things from yesterday’s visit.”
“I guess I do. Mostly I remember you kneeling by my bed and crying. I thought you said you forgive me. I wasn’t for sure. This morning I thought maybe it was just a dream. But then here you are and you really have forgiven me,” Vicky said, breaking into a strange, demented, wounded animal-like cry. Allison didn’t know how to take Vicky’s emotions which were too raw and real at this moment.
The sound of the moaning from Vicky’s roommate began to increase again in intensity and volume, as if this roommate was competing with the sound of Vicky’s weeping. The situation struck Allison as absurdly funny and soon she couldn’t restrain the laughter that this odd cacophonic dual of agony caused.
Vicky kept trying to reach for something on her bedside table in between the great heaving aftermath of sobs and intermittent laughter that came with her own realization of the absurdity of the situation. She was just weak enough to be unable to stretch that far.
“What is it, Vicky? What do you need?”
“CD player,” she stammered in between gasps for air.
Allison tried to reach but realized her cracked rib and sore torso wouldn’t let her stretch that far either; not without getting out of her chair, that is.
“We really are a pair aren’t we?” Allison said with one gigantic heave-ho push on the arms of her chair in order to catapult herself up. She stepped closer to the table and immediately recognized the small boom box that had once belonged to her oldest son Matthew. The red strip of tape with the name “Matt H.” printed upon it was still there on the back. Not sure what to say or do, she looked to Vicky for instructions.
“Just push play,” Vicky said wiping her reddened nose. “She likes it…. my roommate. Calms her down.”
Allison saw it then, the CD case sitting next to the boom box. She pushed play and lifted the case to see what it was they were about to hear. Pavarotti at the Met. And then on the floor next to the bedside table she saw another gift bag, smaller than the one she had given, a crinkled cellophane wrapper with a bright orange sticker affixed to it overflowed from the top of the bag along side tissue paper. Hers was not the only gift Vicky had received, and of course there was only one possible person she could have received it from. The realization along with the first few strains of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma caused tears to well up in Allison’s eyes. Vicky looked at her as if she knew. Allison quickly grabbed a tissue out of her pocket and began blotting compulsively under her eyes, first under the one eye then under the other, as if to stop the tears and send them back from where they came.
“You know, I never much cared for opera. Except of course for Puccini. I love Puccini,” Allison said with a defensive little chuckle. She remembered how Frank had bought her all of Puccini’s works, including a recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma. He’d taken her to La Boheme and Madame Butterfly and she was enthralled for a change; unlike the heavy hard to listen to symphonies that she got dragged to where she spent the evening restlessly shifting around in her seat and struggling to stay wake. Those Puccini operas were different. Beautiful. Beautiful, but oh, so sad. They agreed on that musically; that and the Swing, Big Band era dance music. Damnit! Those Puccini operas were ours. Bastard! Allison thought as she blew out hard through her nose into the tissue.
“Allie, don’t be miffed at Francis, I mean Frank.”
“I’m not miffed.”
“Like hell you ain’t! Sit down,” the old Vicky was back and in charge as usual.
Allison slowly lowered herself into the chair, careful to bend at the knees instead of the waist so she wouldn’t put strain on her ribcage. She seemed to feel the effects of the broken rib more when she was in an emotional state.
“Look at me, Al! Look at me! He don’t love me no more. You don’t got noth… I mean, you don’t have anything to be jealous of,” she said correcting herself the way she used to.
“I’m afraid he don’t love me no more either,” Allison said.
“Quit talkin’ like a dang hillbilly! You know as well as I do a double negative makes a positive. Now listen that’s a lot of horse crap and you know it.”
Allison looked at Vicky and with the reemergence of her old self she looked startlingly more like the Vicky she once knew than ever before. Perhaps Frank saw her that way too, like how she saw her old friends at the high school reunions. The illusion of agelessness. Maybe it affected him too, so that he didn’t see a haggard, sickly old woman with missing teeth and bad color. Maybe he only saw the memory of that beautiful red head when he looked at her.
“Now listen here, Allison, and listen good. A week ago at this time I had no reason to live. So I’m layin’ here in this hospital bed, goin’ through withdrawal, half outta my mind, wishin’ I was dead. There didn’t seem to be no… any reason to keep fighting. Until Franci
s walked in the room. It shocked me really, the way it made me feel to see him again after all these years. It kinda woke me up; like I was dead but then I came back to life. And I believed, if just for a little bitty second, that there was another reason to live besides drinking. I remembered what it felt like to love somebody. And I wanted to live again.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Vicky.”
“Stay with me, Allie,” Vicky said as lucid as can be. “So after I see Francis I get this fight back in me, but then yesterday I feel myself slip away again. And I’m fighting it and I’m fighting it and I’m trying with all my might to grab hold of something, some reason to keep breathing in and out. And then you come and see me. And there it was again.”
“There what was again?”
“Love. And I thought maybe God hasn’t given up on me. Only one thing cures a problem as big as the one I got and that’s love. Frank bringing me music; you being here after what I did to you, your forgiveness, the plant, the gown, your offering to help – it’s all love and I gotta stay alive long enough to… give it back somehow. Oh God, I hope it’s not too late.”
Allison looked at that sad sick face that sat before her and saw the tears pooling once again in Vicky’s eyes. These tears were different, more subdued, more tired and weighed down, sadder and deeper, all the way down to the core of her being. Layers and layers of regret were buried beneath those tears, and it seemed it would take ages to sift through that salty ocean and finally get to the bottom.
“And then I realized somethin’ else,” Vicky said collecting her thoughts and pulling her emotions back in with a sigh. “Something about you and Francis. If you two could just wake up again, like how I did, and remember what it was like to love and be loved. I mean really remember. If I could help you remember somehow.
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