One Night Two Souls Went Walking

by Ellen Cooney

  “The colors in here are nice,” she said.

  “I think so too.”

  “The walls, I mean, they’re just right. But I never know what to call the color that’s not yellow. I never know if it’s mawve, or mohve.”

  She pronounced the aw and the oh distinctly. The sounds, to my ears, were weighted with the meaning of whatever she wasn’t yet saying.

  “I generally go with mahve,” I said, holding back from mentioning that I was the one who chose the paint.

  “I heard it was pretty dismal in here, but they renovated it. Were you around before they fixed it up?”

  “I was.”

  “How do you like the night life?”

  “I’m still getting used to it.”

  There was a long intake of breath. A getting ready. Physicians are terrible at talking about themselves when something is the matter with them personally.

  But probably they say the same thing about chaplains.

  “I’ll be leaving here soon,” said the resident.

  Doctor Brown Hair, I’ll call her.

  “I’ve had an offer in a practice I’d been hoping for, so I don’t think we’ll have a chance to cross paths again. Do you mind, Reverend, if I say I need you to tell me we’re speaking in confidence?”

  “It doesn’t need to be said. But yes, if you want to hear it, anything you tell me is mine only to know about.”

  “Thank you.”

  She had been staring straight ahead, but now she turned slightly toward me. What happened to her—what she did—was a story that she seemed to have gone over in her head many times, practicing the telling, perhaps wondering if it would ever be anywhere except inside herself.

  “I’ve been hiding this in my soul,” she said. “But all of a sudden, tonight, I just felt, I don’t know why, I’d better come out with it.”

  It happened several months ago. December. She had a few days off and she was desperate to get away somewhere alone, somewhere not too far away, where she knew no one. She couldn’t afford much of a vacation, even a brief one. So when her old college roommate offered her the use of a condo she owned with her husband, near a ski resort, she jumped at the chance.

  Doctor Brown Hair was not a skier and had no interest in trying it out. But she was eager to visit the resort for its restaurant, spa, and heated pool. Her friend had given her a day pass and her own account information, as a Christmas present, and felt happy to do so because now she wouldn’t have to think of a gift for someone who lived most of her life inside a hospital dressed in garments that looked like pajamas.

  The morning was glorious: winter in a sunlit valley heaped with powdery snow, mountains wherever you looked, the temperature well above freezing. The resort had different levels depending on price, and she was bound for everything that was posh and most expensive.

  Her spirits were as soaring as the peaks. She packed her carryall with her bathing suit, pool gear, and sweats in case she felt like working out in their gym, a paperback novel for lounging poolside, and her iPod, loaded with two new albums she’d been looking forward to.

  When she arrived at the resort, she checked in and decided to start at the juice bar, then have a massage and a facial, as the pool was being cleaned. She was just a few feet away from the entrance to the spa when the background music coming out softly, from speakers placed everywhere, came suddenly to a stop. It was chamber music stuff, lots of violins and cellos, where the cellos aren’t ever depressing. You didn’t realize you were listening to it until you weren’t.

  An announcement was being made.

  There had been an accident on one of the slopes, involving multiple skiers. Was anyone present at the resort a doctor? Or any sort of medical professional? If so, please will you hasten to the foot of that slope and announce yourself to the gentleman in the orange parka with the vest that says he’s the leader of the response team?

  Doctor Brown Hair stood there clutching her bag. She had not zipped it closed. She stared down at the pair of her bathing caps. One was Lycra—that is, fabric. The other one, silicone, was a hood with a chin strap. She hadn’t yet decided what she’d do in terms of laps. Before medical school, from the age of twelve, she had been a competitive swimmer. Her best stroke was the butterfly. She had hordes of trophies. But she’d been thinking about an easy time in the water that day; maybe she’d stick to aqua-jogging.

  Then she zipped the bag shut. She could not remember how she signed herself in. She might have put an “MD” after her name. Just to do it. She was almost through with her residency. She had earned that title.

  She found the lobby deserted. It was easy to look at the guest book on the counter. Hers was the last signature.

  It was only her name, she saw. No telltale initials. She picked up a nearby pen and wrote her name again, this time as a checking-out. She put the time of the checkout earlier than it was. It looked as if she had only been in the resort a total of three minutes.

  She exited by a side door and hurried to her car, in an area that wasn’t near the slope of the accident. When she drove away, it was the same as if the announcement had never been made.

  Setting her GPS for a town a few miles away, she realized she was remarkably calm. She was simply someone who had changed her mind about how she would spend her day. If there were ambulance and police sirens shattering the peace of that valley, she never heard them. She had blocked out sound.

  “Too bad the resort didn’t work out for me, when I was so looking forward to it,” she was saying to herself.

  The town turned out to be pleasantly old-fashioned. She shopped for new boots she put on in the store; her old ones were pretty worn down. She visited the local historical museum, then had lunch in a diner, treating herself to onion rings with her burger and two slices of banana cream pie. Then she discovered a movie theater, an independent one, another preservation, as if the year were in the nineteen-fifties; they were showing a double feature that afternoon. Both were movies she hadn’t seen, because who has time for movies, doing what she does?

  It was dusk when she drove back to the condo. At no time did she turn on her radio for news. She went to bed early and slept deeply until midmorning.

  Before leaving the condo, she laundered and dried the sheets and remade the bed. She did not turn on the television. She did not go online. On her drive home, she plugged in her iPod. She took back roads and stopped a few times in coffee shops and restaurants that looked appealing.

  Then she picked her life back up where she’d left off. Talking to her friend, she was full of gratitude, exclaiming how much she had loved her vacation. She described her day in the town, and only brought up the resort as an offhand comment. “Oh, I decided I wanted to be out in the world,” she had said. Her friend didn’t say anything about a ski accident, not then.

  But about a week later, the friend phoned to say it was too bad she hadn’t been there: a skier approaching the base of an intermediate slope, at too fast a speed, had collided with another. That impact caused yet another person to be injured, like a three-car highway accident.

  That slope is notorious for mishaps, the friend had declared. People who belong on a beginner’s trail are always overestimating their abilities. And then they keep refusing to wear protective headgear.

  Doctor Brown Hair didn’t question her friend about details of the injuries or what came of the three skiers involved. It seemed the resort was spending money to hush it up, not for the first time, in fact. The official story was that something minor had taken place.

  The friend and her husband had just decided to put the condo on the market. Did Doctor Brown Hair want one more trip there before it was sold?

  She did not. But after that conversation, she put her still-new boots in a plastic bag and dropped the bag in a Goodwill donation box. She had found herself unable to look at them.

  “You see, Reverend,” she said, “what I’m talking about is, I have no idea if I might have saved a life. I don’t even know if a life
was lost. Or if I could’ve prevented an injury from being worse.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I don’t think my friend would mention ski helmets if someone hadn’t been … well, you know what I mean.”

  I could almost hear the announcement breaking in to the background music. And the plea. Is anyone a doctor? Will you come right away?

  I wondered what I might have done in that position if a chaplain was being requested. I looked at the candle lamp to the right of the hyacinths, then the one to the left. They were in sync. Their batteries came from the same pack, put in at the same time, seconds apart. My first night on the night shift, I’d taken care of that, even though I’d known there was still a lot of life in them. I had wanted the feel of something extra, as if anything can shine brighter when batteries are brand new.

  I said, “It seems to me you feel that you committed a crime.”

  She was taken by surprise, by that. Then she said, “Not a crime. A sin.”

  “In the last few years, how many hours a week have you been on duty?”

  The physician laughed. It was a harsh, hard sound. “Who keeps track? I don’t know.”

  “A rough estimate. An average.”

  “Seventy, maybe. Or ninety, I don’t know.”

  “How long have your shifts been? Sometimes were they longer than the length of a day?”

  “Oh, you know the answers to these questions, Reverend.”

  That was true. I once came upon an intern in an elevator, upright, leaned against the back wall, alone. He was fast asleep. A partially eaten sub was poking up from a pocket of his short white lab jacket. The car smelled like tuna salad. I didn’t get on; I opted for the stairs. A little while later, I pushed for an elevator to leave the floor I’d gone to, and there he still was, with other people aboard, everyone quiet, leaving him be. Again I took the stairs, afraid that one more person pushing in might wake him.

  I told this to Doctor Brown Hair, and she said, “In my first year, I sometimes thought I might die if I had to go into a room and see one more patient. But you’ve heard all this before. I can’t be the first one talking like this to you.”

  “You’re not,” I said, leaning toward her, lightly touching the back of her hand as it rested on the seat of the pew. I patted that hand like I’d pat a dog.

  I said, “Did you ever meet Bobo Boy? He used to work here.”

  “The therapy dog? Really odd looking? I haven’t seen him around.”

  “He died, but that’s not why I mentioned him. One day, he was led to the room of a woman who was beaten badly, viciously. She wasn’t allowed visitors. Her assailant was a relative and he hadn’t been found yet.”

  “Was that the woman whose husband hit her with a pipe?”

  “No, it was a woman who was beaten with fists and kicks. She was unresponsive, and it seemed Bobo Boy might at least distract her. But he wouldn’t go into that room. He lay down on the floor and just wouldn’t. A doctor who thought he knew a lot about dogs picked him up to carry him in—the guy couldn’t stand it that a command was being disobeyed. He felt Bobo Boy was committing the sin of dereliction of duty, which to be fair, is kind of accurate. I mean, with all his training and everything, and knowing his responsibilities. But Bobo yelped his head off and finally his handler took over. He’d had too much, the handler said. He’d just had too, too much. Even Jesus had to take a rest now and then, she told that doctor. What Bobo had to do was get out of the hospital and run around and be a dog and dig a hole or something.”

  “But it’s not the same thing,” Doctor Brown Hair said, almost cutting me off. “Animals don’t sin. It’s a human thing only. You’d never be able to convince me otherwise.”

  “Okay. Do you think he should have been ashamed of himself? He really did carry on. Imagine a dog screaming in a unit because he needed a break from his job.”

  “Why are you asking me that? Shouldn’t you be telling me God forgives me?”

  “I don’t think this is about God. The forgive part, I mean.”

  Then I said, “Bobo Boy was great at his job. He had every right to be …”

  “Human?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  She glanced at her watch. A new lightness came into her voice. “Oh, Reverend, I have to go! Good-night! I really have to rush!”

  She turned in the doorway to wave to me. I sat there for a little while longer, listening to the stillness.

  Bobo Boy never refused to enter the room of a patient. The woman who’d been beaten so badly had wanted to adopt him and bring him home with her. Once, he vomited on her blanket. She’d been secretly feeding him from her trays. It turned out he didn’t do well with Jell-O—at least, not the type cut up in cubes and served on a plate in different flavors, orange and lime and cherry and lemon.

  He didn’t feel ashamed of that, I’d heard. The evidence of how he felt about puking was in the fact he next attempted to eat it. As dogs do. He had felt it was an injustice when his handler grabbed him and stopped him.

  Once, I remembered, before we came under attack by the budget ax, and there was time in daylight to sit and talk, my boss, the Head, sat down with me to talk about ministers and being willing to say sometimes the things that need to be said, depending on a particular situation. He and I were recently chaplains together to the family of a young woman who had been placed on life support, after a shooting in a grocery store where a heavily armed former employee rushed in and opened fire. The young woman was one of half a dozen victims, five of whom had died where they had fallen. She was the manager of the produce section. She had shielded with her body another young woman, who was wearing a baby in a sling. She was a hero. Her family would not consider an end to life support. The woman would never come back to life.

  A strange thing is that I have no memory of what I said to that family. It’s gone. At the time I’d been double-shifting to cover for a colleague who was ill. I only remember that the Head, who knew the woman and the family, had left the talking to me. And I remember that the woman made that grocery store buy vegetables from local growers, and was a serious gardener herself.

  The Head and I were with the woman’s brother when it came time to let her go. The rest of the family had not felt able to watch it happen. I don’t remember that either, only the fact I was there.

  In that talk, the Head asked me if I had to learn to tell certain things at certain times to people I was ministering to—things that might not exactly be based on factual reality.

  He seemed to be asking if I’d studied such a skill when I was being educated, being trained.

  I had shaken my head no.

  “So saying what has to be said is natural, like your curls?”

  “It just comes to me, so I guess, yes,” I had answered. “I would actually love to have straight hair.”

  And he had told me he hoped that I would always wake up in the morning to give myself the news all over again that I am blessed to be who I am, doing what I do how I do it. He was blessed to have hired me, he had told me, like he didn’t know I knew I was not at the top of the list made by others on the hiring committee. I didn’t do well in the interviews. The Head was the only one who loved the way I answered the question of, Why do I wear a collar, when most chaplains no longer do?

  “I like to wear a collar the way I like to have a neck,” I had said, quietly, gravely, calmly, telling the truth right down to the roots of its realness. If that had blown the job for me, I was willing to risk it.

  Now I rose slowly to my feet in the wake of my lie to Doctor Brown Hair. I went to the pot of flowers and touched the soil to see if it needed watering. It didn’t. The Quakers had that covered. I could not believe how glad it made me feel.

  Fourteen

  Here was the box of a room that’s my office. Here was my desk, computer, and chair, one chair only, because this is a getaway for me. There in a corner was the metal filing cabinet containing extra collars and two changes of clothes, folded
up as if meant for a suitcase.

  Books were stacked somewhat untidily on a pair of wall shelves. The blinds on the one window were drawn, their slats closed tightly. I kept meaning to hang things on the walls, maybe some prints from a museum shop, but I’d never gotten around to it. When the poster of the beautiful weird animals went down in that waiting room, I’d tried to track it down so I could have it. I had failed.

  It didn’t feel strange to be here in the middle of the night alone, like a department of one. Someone had placed a carton of milk in our little fridge, and there was plenty left, so I didn’t have to drink my coffee black. The fridge had nothing to eat. But in our supplies closet, as usual, there was a tin of excellent shortbread cookies—a regular contribution from a fellow chaplain who had not lost his job. He had learned to make them while attending seminary in Scotland.

  On the shelf by the coffee machine, there used to be a crowd of mugs. Seeing how few were left made my chest cramp up, like the place in my chest where my heart is, was feeling some actual pain.

  My own mug was a gift from the daughter of an elderly man I once sat with. It’s big and wide, earthenware, simple, in a color of yellow-tan that looks like ground, powdery ginger.

  The daughter had come looking for me one day. Having wandered into Pastoral Care, she found me drinking afternoon tea from a paper cup. I’d never remembered to bring in a real one.

  Please would the curly-gingery-haired chaplain sit for a while with her dad?

  The elderly man had asked for me in exactly that way. I had only visited him briefly before. He had not been open to a talk with a member of the clergy.

  The daughter had been staying closely by him, knowing how sick he was. But she’d slipped away to go home for a rest. Her father did not start acting weirdly until after she’d left the hospital. Now that she’d been summoned back, she was alarmed.

  I suddenly remembered all of this. What had happened.

  Maybe, at the time, I didn’t believe it, as if the event took place in a dream. Afterward I never thought about it again. Until now.