One Night Two Souls Went Walking

by Ellen Cooney

  When I knew I would stay, I tried to blame it on falling in love with a room and my part in making it.

  The chapel. It’s not everything but it’s a lot. I had taken up the cause of the renovations, so that the original box of a room expanded and turned into something that didn’t look corporate, like a small, midlevel conference room that for some odd reason had chapel stuff inside.

  I saw it turn into an airy, gentle sanctuary, sending out a message of, “Come on in, everyone’s welcome, sit down and take a break from all the rest of this place.”

  I chose the new colors myself: pale mauve and a creamy almost yellow, the walls in two tones, replacing a cold, hard white that was merely several coats of a primer. Ordinary lighting fixtures became electric candles in sconces; the wood was upgraded to solid, friendly oak. The simplicity and the warmth, I’m proud of—the chapel became a home to me, not only for all the vigils that go on there, or the services when a service is called for, or regular meditations with Buddhists and all the rest of our gatherings, or the hours of sitting with someone in the shock of new grief, or the hope that a grief won’t be coming.

  I rest there. I have napped there and I take off my shoes if I lie down on a pew, my jacket bunched up as a pillow. It’s the zero on a number line to me. It’s the fixed, still point in an always spinning world where we see things and hear things and smell things and know things the outside world does not.

  “We’re sorry to give you bad news, but people here just aren’t into chaplains anymore, not that we’re saying we think you’re completely obsolete,” said the office in charge of the cuts, in more or less those words.

  There was some type of study, carried out without telling us. Our resistance was futile. Our tries for outside funding were not successful.

  That office is the same one I had hounded for chapel money. The faces are different now. The new ones are neither friendly nor hostile. They speak in voices neither soft nor loud, as if they took classes in how to talk all day in one tone only.

  One of the lay chaplains who lost his job claimed he had counted how many offices there were for everyone who had nothing to do with healing and caring for patients. He said there were more for “the corporate business of the hospital” than for anything else. I don’t know if he was exaggerating.

  The head of my department in his usual way of being who he is advised me to remember we are ministers and Please do not walk around mad like you’re marching in a protest, because it’s our job to make the thing we call hope, and it’s our job to make some light when light is absent, and look, here we still are, like the spruces and pines and hemlocks that didn’t get chain-sawed, and we’re listening to the wounded and sick, to families in waiting rooms, to volunteers who read and sing and put on puppet shows for children who will not outlive their childhoods, and also to a nurse, an aide, a doctor, an EMT, a firefighter, a cop, who has just seen something they can’t speak of, because words will not come to their mouths, because they need instead to bow their heads with a chaplain and privately, safely weep, before standing back up and returning to duty.

  It was now eleven o’clock. Showtime, as I used to once say.

  Six

  I am loved in my family in a sticky, primal way where one day they’re all ganging up on me for being so different from them, and the next, they’re gladly turning their eyes my way, because I entered a room where they are, and the pieces that did not fit together in a whole became suddenly whole, and all right again.

  If I didn’t resemble them physically, I would have thought I’d been adopted.

  They will never stop calling me the baby. Or their pinkie, like I’m the tiny finger on a hand that does not have a thumb.

  I was a late-born. My sister and brothers are so much older, it had seemed, when they all showed up for some school event, I was being raised by a team made up of a grandmother, a grandfather, an aunt, two uncles.

  They have big personalities. They make noise. They are shockingly, robustly athletic. In the house where I grew up, stopwatches were in the silverware drawer, swimming goggles on a coat rack, trophies on shelves that in another house might hold books—and those trophies bore everyone’s name but mine. I used to trip all the time on their skates, racquets, balls, helmets, sticks, cleats, bicycle gear, ski boots, golf bags, gym bags.

  I never felt an urge to take up a sport or remain in a room where a game was on television. I liked the Olympics for the processions and flags. Until I was well into school, I liked being brought to the golf club my parents still belong to. I made friends with groundskeepers, and they let me run around in the mists of a morning, barefoot in the grass, slipping on poop of the geese who had not been run off the greens, laughing when I took a tumble, lying in the grass as the dew seeped into me, then jumping up when I saw a crew cart on the way. I’d fist my hand and stick out my thumb like a baby hitchhiker.

  My family loves birthdays and so did I until the birthday was mine and I was turning thirty.

  I did not see it coming that thirty would be a wall I hit when I didn’t know a wall was right in front of me. Where was everything I had thought I would have by now—a husband, a little house with a yard, a baby in a sling at my chest? And I’d bring my baby to work sometimes when maternity leave was over? What about all of that?

  I had not been lucky with boyfriends, not in the sense of “this is going to last.”

  My sister showed up in my office one day, when I was running out of being in my twenties. No one else was around. She brought me an extra-large baggie of her homemade granola, to which she had added, special for me, chocolate chunks and salted pecans. Of course I was aware that something was up.

  She wanted to take my photo, just to do it. No reason, except that she was looking through family pictures and didn’t find any of me she liked, and please would I cooperate? Please would I smile?

  She and I aren’t sisters who go out and do things together. A week or two can pass by when we have no contact. We do not have talks with a beginning and end, a hello and good-bye. There has always been one conversation only, no matter the subject, left off and picked up, her and me, as if time doesn’t matter between us.

  She had never mentioned her interest in putting me online on a dating site, but I know her.

  She said, “Brush your hair and take off your collar.” She had read somewhere that men on dating sites would rather not respond to a woman in one, even men who themselves wear a collar.

  There wasn’t a photo. She wanted to take back the granola. But I’d already put it in a drawer, which I stood in front of so she couldn’t open it.

  I did not want a party for my thirtieth birthday. Everyone knew that. I wanted to go to work and go home with Chinese takeout and a bottle of wine and watch some sad old movies I’d seen before, so I didn’t have to wonder what would happen or how they’d end, and I could just sit there and be sad.

  Then there they were, on a Saturday at two in the afternoon. My department was having a special meeting that began with friendly cheers to me for the day. Then around our conference table we were all in serious moods. We were going over new disaster protocols: who would do what, who would go where, who would be able to double-shift if called for, and who wouldn’t.

  There they actually were, walking in, the whole original unit, having not brought my brother-in-law, my sisters-in-law, and at least a few of my nieces and nephews, which they had thought about doing, but felt it might all be a bit too much.

  They brought a sheet cake, chocolate with buttercream frosting, my favorite. I could not believe how glad I was that the candles weren’t those tricksters where you blow and they don’t go out. I fell for it before because they always said that this time, they weren’t using the joke ones.

  The cake was made by a professional baker. The message written on the frosting was in letters made of dark chocolate, all capitals.

  the

  REV

  is

  30!!!

  The zero in the “3
0” was a pink-frosting heart. My colleagues were up on their feet like they were welcoming a team of champions. How could I have kept it a secret I belonged to these people?

  And soon it was a party in there. Of course they took over. They did that everywhere. It was jokes and sports talk and how my hair was always frizzy since I had hair on my head at all, and I was such a surprise of a baby, honest to God, my mother was amazed to find out she was pregnant—she’d thought menopause was starting early. And this and that and oh my God, did I ever talk at work about the bombshell I dropped about converting to being a Protestant and going to seminary?

  Shocking was the word for it. Always as far as it was known, on both sides of the family, everyone was a Catholic—not what you’d call regular practitioners, to be honest about it. However, that wasn’t the reason for the shock. Had I let on I used to be wild? Was it clear to everyone at the medical center that I probably didn’t even believe in any sort of actual, organized, regular religion, but that was okay because there needs to be chaplains for people who march to the beat of a different drummer, not that I’m basically a pagan with a white band around my neck?

  “This can’t be happening,” I said to myself, after eating some cake.

  So there was the “us” of the other chaplains and the “us” of my family and they meshed into each other to make one large “US” and they were looking at me like I was one of those fantastical beasts on the poster that should have been allowed to stay on that wall instead of a national park. Like if I were a dog I’d be Bobo Boy.

  One thing about Bobo Boy was that he never doubted himself. He never wondered if the way he did things might not be the best way his type of things should be done. He was an artist at being a therapy dog.

  I actually was saying to myself, “Maybe I’m an artist of a chaplain,” as if that would make it okay to be outside the us-ness.

  Afterward, I escaped to the chapel and sank down in a pew. I’d only recently started thinking about the renovations project. The chapel was its same old businessy self: an afterthought of a space, meeting the minimum of a requirement.

  The sugar buzz from the cake did not last long. I leaned back in the pew, letting myself drift. Just a rest.

  I made it hard to love me. They’d told me so. All of them, many times.

  Why do you have to make it so hard to love you?

  No one would ever explain what that meant. I was supposed to know already. Just by being who I am.

  It can be lonely for me in my family.

  I’d been at the medical center a year or so when my sister and brothers pulled me aside at a holiday gathering to tell me I needed to stop sharing so much information about my job. Our parents didn’t want to mention it so they took it on themselves—could I ease up on the downer details? Did I have any idea how much I bummed everyone out? Could I put myself in their shoes and realize how they felt when they called me to ask how my day was and “someone passed” was part of the answer? Or there was a shooting or a fire or someone attacked someone with a knife, or someone very old and very sick and all alone pretended they didn’t care they had no visitors?

  My sister has a friend whose brother is a pathologist. Their family had to do the same thing with him they were doing with me, I was told. They’d be sitting around a table digging into their turkey and dressing and he’d talk about guts and someone’s pancreas or something, and there would be puking.

  Sometimes after a night shift when I’m in my bed trying to fall asleep in a hurry, my brain turns traitor on me and I’m stuck in a storm of images, like a movie on hyper-fast-forward: quick, flashing sights, memory sights, a patient I thought I’d forgotten, a bloody sheet, the face of a man in the moment he gets the news he’s now a widower. Sometimes, almost asleep, I feel the hurt of “Don’t tell us about your job unless it’s nice stuff,” and I half-awake dream I’m walking a hall filled with rooms in which certain memories of the last few years are stored, still raw to me, still fresh. I could call this hall “Rooms of Situations I Would Never Tell My Family About, Not That They’d Want to Know.”

  In one room was a woman who’d been trapped in her house in a fire, and I was her chaplain. In moments of consciousness, all she said to me was how much she wished the firefighters had not saved her.

  In another was a little boy whose father had forgotten to lock away his gun, and also to make sure it wasn’t loaded. I was that child’s chaplain. He was four years old. I had bowed low over him so he could pat my hair. My frizz for some reason had made him smile. For a while, it had seemed he’d pull through, but then he didn’t.

  In another was a girl of twelve. A few of her girl classmates poured a bucket of urine on her, after boys lined up secretly to pee in it, because wouldn’t it be so funny, like something in Carrie? The girl went home and took a shower. Wearing only a towel, she ran out of her house, into the path of a moving car the driver had no time to stop. By the time I arrived at her bedside, it was too late. I was chaplain to her parents instead, listening to them ask me to pray that the people in the car that day would forgive their daughter for putting them through such an experience. After I did so, please, would I pray even harder that everyone who had teased her and mocked her and peed in the pail would go to hell and never ever get out, in case hell turned out to be a place you could eventually leave?

  But I wasn’t at home in bed. I could not allow such images to take up space in my head today, sleepy as I was.

  I tried to think instead about how good it felt to imagine fixing up the chapel. An adjoining room was a vacated office space I’d make a case for taking over. It felt good to imagine a wall being sledgehammered down, particles of sheet rock dust swirling.

  I sat there. Just a little rest, in the stillness. I didn’t know I’d closed my eyes until I was blinking them open and looking at a pale, skinny guy I had not heard walk in. He was standing nearby, staring down at me, smiling at me. He looked as young as if he’d graduated from high school five minutes ago.

  “Hi,” he said. “Were you, like, praying? Because if you were, I’ll just back off and you can get back to it.”

  A quiet gravity was in his voice, which perhaps had been part of him his whole life. The first thing I noticed was that sense you get meeting someone you know right away does not make fun of other people. I thought of an expression I’d often heard from nurses briefing me on a new, young patient, sometimes even a child. A compliment, always said with admiration: “an old soul.”

  I didn’t mind that he thought I was praying.

  “I was looking for a chaplain,” he said. “You think you might have a couple minutes?”

  This was Plummy. But he didn’t have that nickname yet. He would give it to himself, for my utterance only, because the plum is my favorite fruit and his favorite thing to lick the juice of off my lips. He was a senior in college. He would soon be off to grad school.

  He had come to the medical center to interview staffers in trauma and recovery room situations.

  His theory was that people just coming to consciousness from trauma or surgery might blurt out something weird that happened to them while they were out of it. Maybe, he theorized, patients who were talking, lying-down zombies would tell things to, like, a nurse, in a raw, uncensored way, before they had the time to reflect on it and decide they’d keep it to themselves, because no one would believe them. Or they’d tell it later, so it would fit in with normal stuff people say when they think about going to heaven.

  “Near-death experiences” was a phrase he did not like to use. He liked the other one: “out of body.” But actually he called them oobs.

  He had gathered no data. He’d been totally cold-shouldered. He had almost ignored the advice from a nurse, who he thought felt sorry for him, to go find a chaplain instead, since chaplains don’t have the option of saying things like, “Do not even try to be bothering me.”

  The medical center is not, he found, user-friendly in terms of signs and directories saying where things are. Three
people he stopped for directions to Pastoral Care didn’t know where it was. But the fourth pointed him in the direction of the chapel.

  I slid over in the pew and he sat down beside me, the space between us about the length of a standard ruler, which immediately felt to me like too many wasted inches.

  He was into the science of the human brain, he told me. He already had the credits to finish college, which he had started early. But he was sticking around to finish some projects. He kind of didn’t have that much of a social life. He kind of already had his name on a couple of papers published in, like, decent journals, and did I ever have a patient tell me about an oob?

  Personally, he had never experienced any such thing. So he could be objective. It happened that the library in the town where he grew up subscribed to science journals no one else poked around in. That came to a stop by the time he was a teenager, but he had been looking for something in science that was mysterious and unexplained. He kept randomly discovering stuff about things unknown about the human brain.

  Where he grew up, and inside his own home, there was an awful lot of discrimination against you if you were really smart, like you had a disability, or you needed to go through some kind of rehab so you would grow up to be like everyone else.

  I think we both knew in a couple of minutes we were going to go to bed with each other. I think we knew it before I mentioned it was my birthday, and also before the inches between us grew a little bit shorter, and he surprised me by asking, “Why do you look so sad?”

  I argued that I didn’t look sad, as if he shouldn’t believe his own eyes. I had nothing to tell him about personally hearing of an oob.

  “Brains are so awesome!” he told me.

  He loved researching oobs. They come from neurons and wiring! People have computers in their heads running programs that kick in at just the right time, programs they don’t know are even there! But all the same it’s unbelievably scientifically mysterious and so cool!