Chapter six Nano

 Chapter six

Visiting hours

     Patricia Hollins Kraft left the patient's room that afternoon with the strangest feeling. She felt honestly that her mother was trying to tell her something, through this old lady who was slowly deteriorating in the retirement home that Patricia spent much of her time at. She did not know what the story meant but remembered now, a week later, that it was important for Ms. Ellis to get the story out. She had wanted to share it with her. She only remembered this because this morning, while at the senior center attached to this retirement home, as Patricia was stacking chairs and folding bingo tables, Ms. Ellis walked in from the hallway. Peeked in, was more like it, all one hundred and six pounds of her fragile body taking those baby shuffles forward through the double doors in order to look up at Patricia and smile.

     “Still working all alone?” she asked.

     “I suppose.” Patricia withdrew her silent exasperated sigh. Inside her first reaction tended to fall toward oh god they found me. Almost immediately she countered that thought with the realization that she decided to be here with these patients, and why become frustrated at them when they were doing the best they could. So Patricia smiled at Ms. Ellis, and was ready to ask her how she was doing.

     “You're always doing something around here.” Ms. Ellis had stated first, while Patricia was still sorting out her thoughts. “It's nice of you to do all this for us.”

     “Thank you Ms. Ellis.” Patricia didn't scream it so it was unlikely, from across the spacious banquet hall, that she was heard, but she conveyed the message through smiling teeth. She always hoped so, anyway.

     “It was nice to talk to you the other day, too. I always remember what my pastor told me; when you have a unique experience from god, don't hide it. Tell it”.

     “Well, thank you for sharing your story with me, Ms. Ellis.” And at that moment there, Patricia Hollins remembered the story, and the feeling she had listening to Ms. Ellis talking, that her mother was trying to tell her something even though it all seemed unrelated. And noting how surprised she was that Ms. Ellis, ninety three years old now, a bit senile and recently losing her driving privileges but still living independently, remembered Patricia right away, and remembered the conversation. Ms. Ellis would usually come around and remember some thing about Patricia, once in a while even calling her by name. But never out of the blue like that, and never in a different setting. This all caused Patricia to review the story she was told in more detail, wondering if it meant anything at all.

     It was only a week earlier. This was the middle of winter now, and her mom had been gone a few months. Spring time was getting close and the plan was to scatter her mom's ashes into the ocean. Patricia's world had changed with her mom's passing, but she would not consider it a complete upheaval. It did seem to shift though, sideways, as if on a parallel plane to her previous existence. If she tried to explain that to somebody they most likely wouldn't know what she meant. When she had returned home after her mom was cremated, Patricia Hollins Kraft found herself getting involved with Hospice, and a certain nurse in particular. With the care they had given to her mother in those last few weeks, Patricia felt like she needed to do something in return. That lead her almost immediately to helping out at the senior center, volunteering with bingo and with setting up activities for the neighborhood senior.

     Attached to this private center was the retirement home that ran the center. Not a huge facility comparatively, with forty beds downstairs and another fifteen small apartments upstairs for independent living, it was nevertheless enough to support the senior center and to outreach into the aging community around it. Patricia Kraft, a nursing degree earned and quickly ignored twenty years prior, was offered a real job at the home and accepted. The past year for her had been one of accepting change, of going with the flow and finding a spiritual center, wherever that center lead her. Her life was imitating her meditation process, in other words, and it was all so far so good for Patricia. Her degree too old and her training lapsed, Patricia was unable to perform those functions but it was planned for her new employer to help her update her licensing and to complete some training, and Patricia was hired more as an outreach director. Outreach, it seemed, was an industry code word for sales person.

     But this job had lead her to meeting Miss Ellie, a retired art teacher who was now confined to her wheelchair, and Mr. Sprintz, a sly old devil who liked to accidentally bump his hands into the girls behinds. There was also Miss Eleanor and Mr. Fitzgerald, seeing each other on the side, at eighty something acting as if they were still in high school sneaking off from a dance. And of course Ms. Nettie Ellis, one of the more confused residents, which lead to many of the others, resident and staff, to avoid her when they could. Patricia fit into this category well enough but she was also paid to reach out to her and she spent time with Nettie, at least occasionally, one on one, to evaluate how she was doing. Nettie Ellis was one to wander around as well, just walk the halls and look for conversation.

     “I get so lonely.” Ms. Ellis told to Patricia that afternoon. “And they can be so”, there was a pause here while Ms. Ellis gathered her thought, “clicky. Or they have their partners. You know?”

Patricia smiled but stayed wordless. It was about five o'clock now, and she was tired and ready to leave and head home, a bubble bath and a mystery novel waiting for her on this mid week afternoon. Patricia was not that interested in hearing again about the other residents here, Ms. Ellis's neighbors, who may or may not of avoided Ms. Ellis when they saw her coming.

     Patricia had come up to fix her telephone, which was working fine and Ms. Ellis was repeatedly trained to hit only one button, the answer button, when it rang, and not two, as she demonstrated again to Patricia, how she always pressed this button (on the left, which said talk) and then that button (on the right, which used to be red and said end on it, blurred by the continued friction of fingerprint to rubber). “How come it's changed, all of a sudden?” Ms. Ellis had asked her a few moments ago.

     “I don't know, Ms. Ellis. But it will work again for you.”

     “You're so good to me. Thank you deary”

     “You're always welcome, Ms. Ellis.” Patricia turned away from the kitchen counter, into the hallway, where a photograph of a young lady, thirteen or fourteen perhaps, posed with who appeared to be her father, had struck Patricia's field of vision. “Is that your daughter?” she asked and thought immediately that she would regret asking.

     “Why are you asking about my daughter?”

     “I was just wondering. She looks quite lovely.”

     “Oh she was gorgeous you know. All the boys were after her, even with her problem.” Patty tried to remember the files. Miss Nettie's daughter, Lilian, lived in Michigan. Or maybe Minnesota. She never came out here and Patty had no reason to talk to her, but as far as she gathered in the office, there was no problem with the daughter, who must have been sixty years or seventy years old herself now.

     “Bi-Polar,” Ms. Ellis continued. “That's what they call it. Oh it was such a shame. Wait, I have another picture.” Patricia inwardly moaned. She felt like a bad person for this, but she figured it was just human. Patricia forgot how long these conversations, not only with this resident but most of them, could go on for. Patricia followed Ms. Ellis into the bedroom now.

     “Where is it?” she asked herself. “There she is” she beamed with pride at the other picture, sitting on the bedside nightstand. Ms. Ellis turned and began shuffling out of the room, Patricia backing up to stay out of the way and to follow again. “Thanks for showing me the pictures, Ms. Ellis.”

     “Oh what a shame. You know? She was a wonderful girl. She went to church and she was such a good girl, until that disease and they had to, you know, take out all her blood and that.” Patricia tried to imagine why they would do a transfusion for bi-polar disorder, and couldn't. “Such a good Christian girl. Are you Christian?”

     Patricia paused, “Sort of. I guess.” They had reached the living room by now, the entire apartment having been visited now, between the kitchen and the bedroom and the living and dining combined space. Patricia came across yet another picture that struck her vision and paused. This was a photo of two kids kneeling on a back step, facing each other. The bottom two thirds of a screen door behind them.

     “I have to tell you that story.” She was beside Patricia now, pointing at the photograph, her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. Patricia smiled as she glanced toward this senior citizen. “Harry bought that house for ten thousand dollars after the war. He took that money bless his heart, and bought me a little house.” Ms. Ellis's voice had rose to a little girl's squeak by now and Patty found it adorable. “That day, the day we took that picture I won't forget it. That's my boy and that's my daughter and look you see me and Harry in the reflection.” And sure enough, having missed it earlier, you could see two adults smiling in the screen door. Patty imagined it as something similar to that mirror in Harry Potter, when he saw his parent's reflection in it with his own. Because it did not seem to be there moments before, and even now, studying it, Patricia was not sure if they were inside the house looking out through the screen, or reflected images from the photographer's point of view, onto the glass door in front of the screen. Patricia wondered as well where was the photographer.

    

     "That day, I know you have to leave but let me tell you the story, dear.”

     “It's fine, Ms. Ellis. Tell me your story.” And it was fine and it was at this point when Patty had that first feeling. And it wasn't a voice that said Listen and it wasn't that it was not a voice that said that. It wasn't something she heard but it was something she felt.

     “You are such a sweet heart let me tell you. They are all so, into themselves downstairs. Or their partners. And there's nobody like me here to talk to. But anyway the day that photograph was taken I had just come home, it was from the grocery store, and I left Chris alone there and I had just put down my groceries when we took that picture and he was crying! Only a minute before he was crying” And Ms. Ellis put her knuckle up to her eyelid and twisted it to demonstrate crying for Patricia, “And I said what's wrong baby. And you know, all the kids they would tease him and push him around because he waited for the special bus and they couldn't go on the special bus and the other boys were jealous. And they pushed him around and he was crying. He was six in this picture. And his sister was four, I think.

     “And I said to him, I said, Christopher, maybe you just have to hit them back. You know?” The last question was directed at Patricia, who only nodded. And Patricia, meanwhile, was taking baby steps toward the front door while listening to the story. “And you know what he said to me?” Ms. Nettie Ellis took a gentle hold of Patricia's arm. “He said I can't do that. They're my fwends. And he said it just like that, too They're my fwends.” Tears were beginning to well up in Ms. Ellis's eyes and maybe even trying to form in Patricia's own eyes. “Can you believe that? He was such a good Christian boy. Are you Christian, Patricia? You are, I can see it in your eyes.” Patricia, not being denominational at all and not even completely spiritual anyway, remained silent. “I ask because I have to tell you this story.” And again, Patricia couldn't help herself but she really wanted to get out now. And again, more gently than last time, the idea of Listen came into her head. And she wondered now for the first time if this was some god thing, or some message from her mom. “My pastor told me When you have a remarkable story, you have to share it. And it was later when that boy, and his momma was dying, you remember I told you, what was that disease? I don't know, but they replaced all her blood and they gave her all that medicine but she wasn't going to live. So I had to go to the hospital and that little boy said he would wait there for his mommy. So I saw my sister at the hospital and I saw her die. I was there, I had to be there for her, you know.” As she paused, only briefly mind you, in her story, Patricia, meanwhile, was trying to establish, continuity number one, as this was getting confusing even for someone in their nineties, and what lesson she was supposed to be listening for, number two.

     “And I wasn't supposed to have him, you know. They said my hips were too small and they wouldn't be able to deliver him. And you know what they did? Because I was in there and I saw the bright light and I felt that peace, and that serenity, and I woke up and there was my baby boy. And they brought him to me and they said it was like magic, because I wasn't supposed to be able to deliver him, and that nurse, she came in and she was crying and she said to me I don't know what to say. But you weren't supposed to live, and the baby wasn't supposed to live and all of a sudden, he was through, Ms. Ellis. And they brought my boy into me and There's my sweet little boy.” And again, Ms. Ellis had dry tears in her eyes as she took another small breath and continued.

     “So let me tell you I am there in the hospital and I see the bright light and when I wake up all of a sudden he is there again, and how wonderful. I am at peace with the world and I have to share that with the world, and his momma is dying in the other room, and she was my twin you know?”

     “You had a twin?” Patricia did not know why she felt the need to finally interject herself into this story, but that thought struck her for some reason.

     “I had a twin. And she died when she was twenty six, and I was there with her and when she died I went to the other room, and her little boy was there, my little boy, who was not supposed to be born and he says I know momma and I say how do you know? I just left there and she just died and he says to me momma told me she died and she was all in white and she was beautiful. And we went down the hall and he keeps pointing and saying there's momma. There's momma and there are angels in the world, and you are one of them. And I had to share that with you.” Ms. Ellis, surprisingly, ended with a gentle smile, and her eyes, peaceful as they were, still seemed to be screaming at Patricia to Listen to me.

     “Ms. Ellis, Thank you for sharing with me.”

     “You are such a sweetheart. You know that and I will see you later dear.”

Patricia left and did not promptly forget all of this, but just could not comprehend enough of it to keep pondering it. Even later, now in fact, after again running into Ms. Ellis unexpectedly, being forced again to confront the thoughts, she hadn't a clue what to make of any of it. It seemed unfair for god to come give her a message that was indistinguishable from background noise. If you want my attention, god, she thought, just tell me straight out. Or her mother, for that matter. Whoever it was trying to get her attention from beyond, using the elderly like that as a conduit, should have done a better job at it. That, in any case, was the thought that Patricia carried into sleep with her that night.