by Ellen Cooney
“Someone found him sleeping under a bush in their neighborhood, Reverend, and lucky for him, they knew about our agency. They had a feeling he’d be good in hospitals.”
If Eddie knew he was being talked about, he gave no clue. An intern was walking by with a food tray. A tiny trickle of drool began to appear on his muzzle, and he quickly licked it away.
“Why did they have the feeling?” I said. “Was it a guess? Or was it maybe some instinct?”
“Both, actually. But it was more, he was in rough shape. Someone wasn’t good to him. We had a fundraiser for his vet bills. I’d rather not get into the details, okay?”
“I understand.”
The handler was patting herself on her belly now. When she said, “Hush, no worries, everything’s all right,” she was speaking to her baby.
To me she said, “We put up notices all over the place, and online too, about a lost boxer, but we didn’t find whomever it was he used to be with. We weren’t giving him back, of course. We wanted to have that person arrested. What I’m trying to say is, everyone knew he’d be our new star, because he knows what it’s like to be the one in the bed, all hooked up to stuff.”
“He doesn’t show it.”
“No scars, I know. He’s a really strong guy.”
I was quiet a moment, absorbing this news. Then I said, “I bet you know about all the animal shelter places around here.”
“Pretty much.”
“Do you know of a place that’s sort of isolated? I mean, it’s around lots of trees. A wooden structure, cheerful looking. It has walls like a barn. There’s a main section and two wings.”
“Do you remember it from a long time ago, or something?”
“Kind of,” I said. “I don’t know its name or where it is exactly.”
“Sorry, it’s not ringing any bells for me. I really have to leave now. See you later?”
“Yes. I’m sorry I missed Bobo Boy’s burial. I wanted to be here.”
“It was nice. We brought Eddie and he peed around that tree something like ten times. He’s different from Bobo Boy totally. But we try not to compare. Bye, Reverend.”
Eddie did not look back at me as he trotted away.
I spotted a woman in Food Services pushing a cart toward an elevator. It was not a food truck for patients. There were bottles of water and plates of fruit and pastries, bound for an early meeting in a conference room. The woman looked friendly, in a middle-age, matronly way. She was crisp and neat in her uniform of loose pants and an overblouse.
Casually, I made it seem I just happened to be headed in that direction.
“Hi, Reverend,” the woman said. “You’re awful early today.”
“I’m on nights now.”
“Well, I know who you are. I heard you’ve been calling May Jeffries at the rehab. She’s a real special lady.”
“Oh, she is. I wish I could visit her. If only I had more time in my days.”
“She knows that,” the woman said. “Help yourself! I’m looking the other way!”
The elevator was opening, so I acted fast, snagging water, a banana, and a blueberry muffin. I thanked the woman warmly, then leaned by a window to have this meal standing up.
I made a note to myself to tell May Jeffries about being allowed to steal from the cart. The rehab center where she was a patient was too far away for me to fit in a visit. But I called her every evening, usually as it was getting dark.
This woman’s heart had never given her trouble, until it suddenly did. The surgery she required was complicated. When I became her chaplain, post-surgery, she was still in peril, hanging on with everything she had.
What she wanted was a picking up of her spirits. She felt that she and I had something in common. One of us was a feeder of hospital bodies, the other of hospital souls.
“Souls have to eat or else they shrivel like a raisin in the sun,” she liked to say.
She belonged to a Baptist church. Her own pastor came often to the medical center—but she wanted me around anyway.
She was in her late fifties. She looked and sounded much, much older. She’d grown up in a world of harshness, of many different kinds of deprivation, and of many harms to her body and soul. Inside herself, she was a cactus in a desert, as she’d put it to me: the kind of cactus that flowers fantastically, but will prick you if you mess with her.
May Jeffries had worked here in Food Services a long time. She supervised tray lines. Under her uniform, she often wore T-shirts bearing the face of Barack Obama—she’d unbutton her top to show it off whenever she had a new one.
When she found out about Guy run and his name tag, she wanted to wear a big one saying, “PROUDLY BIRACIAL BUT REALLY BLACK LIKE OBAMA.”
But then she had her heart attack.
The chapel was where we met, not long after the renovations. Somehow she’d heard I’d had a hand in that, and she decided to bring me food. Once a week, on Tuesday afternoons, when the kitchen director was absent for a regular upper-staff meeting, I received a phone call from her, instructing me to go to my office. It was a ritual. May Jeffries—and she was always called by her full name—made it seem she had a regular appointment with me, confidentially.
Probably everyone in Pastoral Care knew what was what. In she would come, a very stout woman, wrapped in her beloved, woolly, royal-blue poncho, and bearing the L. L. Bean canvas bag she carried with her everywhere, monogrammed with an “M” and a “J.”
In that tote, wrapped in foil, still warm, would be a plate or a bowl of whatever the cooks had made for the kitchen people, in the break between lunch and dinner while their director was away. These meals were most definitely not meals that were given to patients. And there was always a dessert.
“Feed my damn soul and pick up my damn spirits,” she had said to me in the ICU. “And don’t tell me not to say damn to a reverend. They split open my chest. I can say any damn thing I want.”
So I talked and talked to her, about all sorts of things—whatever came to me—until I became a listener. I learned that May Jeffries, in all her roundness, all her fleshiness, took sailing lessons in a community boating program at a lake, when all her life previously, her idea of being outdoors was to hurry back inside.
“Fat people can sail,” she told me. “The boat didn’t sink when I got on.”
One day at home, she explained, she was clicking around television shows, as usual. She landed on a program about sailing at the very moment the battery in the remote went dead. She was about to get up off her couch and go find another battery, but instead, she found herself watching the show—really watching it.
Somehow, that program spoke to her and woke her up.
She joined the adult swim-lessons program at a YMCA, and stuck up for herself when they wanted to put her in the special water aerobics class for weight-loss people.
Her dream was that, one day, she’d be able to buy herself a Sunfish. You could get them cheaply when the boating program held a sales day for the ones they were cutting from their fleet. She had already decided the colors of the sail: splashes of orange and green and red and yellow, the same colors of the gelatins that went on trays, over and over and over, every day.
I almost had told her that Bobo Boy threw up Jell-O on a patient’s bed and tried to eat it. But I stopped myself.
Lately she’d been reading about wind. She’d never been much for cruising around in what she called “Cyberland,” but she had a new iPad: a gift from people in the kitchen, which I’d contributed to, because of course they came and hit me up, knowing I was a beneficiary of hers.
Ancient people believed gods were in the wind!
How could she never have known that before?
She loved the prayers and the hymns of her church—the hymns especially—and now she had a whole other addition to the interior life of her own spirit. She made a private prayer for herself. She imagined herself a long, long time ago dweller at the side of the same lake where her lessons took place.
> Her prayer was addressed to Wind. She had spoken it to me often, sometimes on the phone when she had gone through another bad day in rehab. She felt that ancient people must have been on familiar terms with their gods, seeing as how there were manifestations of them everywhere, and you could see or hear or touch them, or feel them on your skin.
Oh please come on now, Wind, and blow some life into my sails, as I surely can’t do it myself, big of a mouth as I have.
I had her voice in my head, saying those words. I found a trash bin and a recycle bin for the banana peel and the water bottle. Then I went online on my phone. I did a search for animal shelters within a wide radius of the medical center. For ten minutes I scrolled and clicked, giving up when it occurred to me I was wasting time. My shift wasn’t over. What was I going to do about the broken submarine?
I had no idea. I would have to just hope that the right thing to say would come to me before I returned to the librarian’s room. At this moment, in the wake of the prayer of May Jeffries, life in my sails, there came to me the memory of another woman who had me paged, to be with her during a time before she delivered her baby.
Two obstetricians I know, married to each other, have a daughter in real estate. This daughter wanted me to sit with her when she was hospitalized for frightening complications. Like the woman with Eddie; it was her first pregnancy.
She didn’t want her parents hovering—they knew too much; they could not hide their anxiety. Her husband, an investments banker, had been convicted for some sort of fraud, a shock to them all; her divorce was newly final.
This was, for me, during the time of Green Man, and I was in love. I had just bought a book that was basically an encyclopedia about ancient-to-modern plants that grow in the wild and have medicinal uses. I had brought it to work with me, as if I actually had time to take a break and read. But I had liked to have it in my desk. So I brought it along to the woman’s room.
I had thought I might dip into it in case she was napping or drowsed off. But I read aloud to her when she expressed an interest: angelica root, dogbane, woundwort, periwinkle, valerian. I went back the next day, and the day after that, and did the same.
Later, I wasn’t sure if I made a difference in what she was going through, but when I visited her as a new mom, her baby in her arms, healthy as healthy can be, she told me that she’d heard from her parents where I lived, and she felt I should quit being someone who rented a little space in a massive complex. I should buy myself a house.
I had not mentioned anything to her about my apartment, or anything about myself at all. The information had come from her parents.
She wanted to find a house for me. She promised she’d never make me go around viewing properties I would never choose to even enter. She’d handle everything, and she’d give me a great deal on her own commission, and I was not to put up an argument about that.
I thanked her. I assured her I did not need a house. I almost blurted it out that I would be living where Green Man was, and why.
I wondered if I still had her card somewhere. But she wouldn’t be a problem to find.
It felt strange to think about the future. To have a tiny sort of glimmer I had one.
Twenty-three
I looked in on the surfer and again found a pale thin boy of a sleeper. He didn’t know it was morning. His drapes were closed. He didn’t know I was watching him.
If his breakfast arrived before he woke, his tray would not be left. He was monitored—as if nurses and aides weren’t in and out of his room all the time. When he stirred, he would not be left alone.
I knew from other mornings that when he started waking, drifting in that twilight between the here of the hospital and the there in his head, he didn’t immediately remember his brokenness. He didn’t know he had traveled east, ascended a rock cliff, stood on a rock that gave way, and stayed alive when no one else did.
It was still all new to him. He wouldn’t know what happened to his body until he had to find out all over again. Needing to pee, he would start to make a move to get up, to swing his legs over the edge of the bed, and then his legs would not move.
Sometimes his wailing was high in pitch, as if his voice belonged to a suddenly frightened baby.
Sometimes the wailing was low and choppy, like a boy going through his voice change.
Sometimes, the one at his side when he woke was me.
I thought of Plummy. I almost grabbed my phone to get in touch with him. Not to talk about oobs that weren’t oobs, or the submarine movie he loved, or anything else about this night.
And not to talk about “us” and how we needed at last to quit each other.
Germany has mountains! The Alps! I basically don’t know anything about geography, but I didn’t have to Google “dangerous cliffs in Germany” to know I was right about that. I felt a powerful desire to tell Plummy to make sure he did not go out somewhere in his faraway country and climb any sort of rocky elevation whatsoever, even though he’d never even imagine himself doing such a thing. His idea of doing anything athletic is, having sex. I wondered if he was sleeping with someone he hadn’t told me about. Maybe a scientist, a logical woman. Maybe one of the neurologists he was consulting with.
I gave myself a poke, back out of my imagination.
On slept the surfer. He was a lonely boy who took to the waves and found something sacred. Who would love him, after he left the medical center?
Please someone love this boy, I was saying, as a prayer into the future.
“Waves are still holy,” I whispered to him, like the words could seep inside him, and stay.
Twenty-four
She was waiting for me in the hall, having somehow tracked me down: a girl of nineteen or so, her presence a shock, like a figure cut out of a painting and placed in another, of a totally different place, a totally different everything. You admired the surprise while being baffled—now I knew why people reacted to Bobo Boy the way they often did. I almost expected the phantom of him to trot toward us, tail up, wagging a greeting. I had the feeling this girl would have seen him as clearly as I would.
Yes, I was the chaplain of the woman from the nursing home who passed away in the night. Did she want to sit somewhere privately with me?
She did not, but thanks for asking. She only had a few minutes to spare. We edged ourselves over to a corner to stay out of the way.
“Are you a reverend, like ordained and everything?”
I nodded.
“You don’t look like one.”
“You’re not the first to say so,” I said, warming to her. “Please tell me how I can help you.”
“I’m Tiffy,” she said.
It was not a statement of introduction. It was a label placed on information she thought I knew.
“Actually, it’s Tiffany Dawn. I mean, if that’s how she put it. I used to tell her all the time to cut it out. It sounds like a dish detergent. Or one of those horrible room deodorizers you plug into a wall.”
“I think it’s a pretty name,” I said.
“So did she.”
I could not tell this girl Mrs. Copp hadn’t spoken of her. She seemed so sure. I’m Tiffy, and of course you know who I am and of course I would take up some space in that old woman’s mind in her last hour.
I said, “Did you come to identify her?”
“Oh, no. That wouldn’t be up to me. I caught a ride with them, though.”
Was she a member of Mrs. Copp’s family?
I did not have the sense her outfit was something thrown together first thing in the morning, maybe after a phone call: hard news, news of a death. I felt she dressed this way regularly. A girlishness was all over her. She was fully still being a teenager, dragging it out about having to grow all the way up. I thought of myself, and what a hurry I’d been in.
And she was beautiful. She was truly, stunningly beautiful. Her voice held no accent. I made a guess that in Mrs. Copp’s family a baby had been born whose parents were, one, white, and two, Hi
spanic, perhaps Puerto Rican.
The fact that I was going to have to lie to her was apparent to me almost immediately. Looking at her was like looking at the child Tony and Maria could have had in West Side Story, if they’d run away from home, and if Maria in the movie had been cast as a beautiful woman who was actually Puerto Rican. Which is not to say this girl didn’t look a little bit like Natalie Wood. She did.
And she was doing her best to hide it. I was certain she did so on purpose. Nothing about her was insecure, unconfident. I saw a toughness. I saw hurt below the toughness and more toughness below the hurt. I saw self-protectiveness, stubbornness. She wanted me to tell her about Mrs. Copp’s death, but not really, not specifics.
She was tall and slender—I had to tip back my head to speak to her. Despite the newness of spring, she wore a short, summery, wide-skirted dress that in a smaller size could have been worn by a little girl decked out for a party. The dress was cheerfully pink, like cotton candy. Her legs were in black tights. Her shoes were Mary Janes. Her jean jacket was baggy and far from clean. Her only makeup was very thick mascara, in what seemed to be multiple layers, expertly applied, and lipstick that looked like too much white coating of a sunblock. Her long, dark hair was held back on the sides with barrettes that displayed her as Goth: wide leather clasp-ons decorated with a silver skull and crossbones.
You might think her ear piercings held earrings that were small silver crosses, but they were daggers. The midline was too high. The points at the bottoms were sharp.
She was asking me, Did Mrs. Copp suffer? Did it happen quickly? Was she freaked out from being brought to a hospital?
“She was peaceful,” I said. “It happened a little while after she arrived.”
The girl didn’t know about the stroke.
“Was it her heart?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“But you were right there, right?”
“I was. She never left the ER. I knew she didn’t want to be admitted as a patient.”
