Two

Caroline Brodie was watching General Hospital in her room at Magnolia Manor Nursing Home. The door opened and Mona Scales, the director, burst in without knocking. Two orderlies followed her, wheeling a sheet-covered gurney.

“Guess who has a new roomie?” she said.

“Not me, I hope,” Caroline said.

“Now, Mrs. Brodie, don’t be a sourpuss. Surely you can use the company. And this roommate will be very quiet. Emily’s from the Verandah Wing.”

“Then what’s she doing here?”

Magnolia Manor Nursing Home in Birmingham, Alabama, had two wings, the Terrace and the Verandah. The Terrace Wing was for residents who still had enough vinegar left in them to play Parcheesi in the parlor or take their bland meals in the dining room. The Verandah Wing, on the other hand, was the dying wing of the facility. Patients there were bedridden or spent their last days strapped into chairs in the hallways, staring at blank walls.

“The Verandah Wing is a bit overcrowded right now. You won’t even know Emily is here.”

Caroline turned her attention back to her televi­sion program; she had no interest in Emily, whoever she was.

“I don’t know why you keep it so dark in here.” Mona adjusted the blinds. “It’s so gloomy.”

“And what’s wrong with gloom?” Caroline shielded her eyes from the sunlight trickling through the slats, causing a glare on the television screen. Her attention was drawn to the bed near the window, where Mona and the orderlies was situating her new roommate.

She’d expected someone gray and shriveled, ten breaths away from a toe tag. Instead, her roommate looked to be in her mid twenties. Her eyes were a bright blue and stared straight ahead; her brow was pale and unwrinkled.

“What’s she doing here?” Caroline said.

Mona made a minor adjustment to the thermostat. “Emily’s been with us for almost a year now. She’s a Jane Doe.”

“Pretty white lady like that and nobody claiming her? Doesn’t seem normal.”

“Emily is a special case,” Mona said. “Poor thing was found badly beaten in an alley, and so far, nobody has come to claim her. Supposedly she had a bit of a drug problem. Crack is what I was told. Some even say she used to stand in front of a pawnshop on First Avenue...soliciting.”

Both the words “crack” and “soliciting” were said with a hushed voice.

Caroline pointed a finger at her new roommate. “Why is she staring like that?”

“Emily is in a persistent vegetative state,” Mona said. “She’s always asleep, which makes her the ideal roommate.”

“Ain’t no such thing,” Caroline said.

“You’ll be nice to Emily, won’t you, Caroline?”

What was she going to do? Ask the zombie to play a game of gin rummy? Caroline decided Mona’s question was too silly to merit an answer and pretended to be deeply en­grossed in a commercial for Swiffer mops.

 

 

For an entire week Caroline kept a wide berth from Emily. She didn’t adjust the blinds (even though they sometimes allowed in too much sun), nor did she water the African violets on the windowsill even though they were wilting.

Both were on her roommate’s side of the room. The woman never made a sound, no moans in the night or snores. She just kept staring at the tea-colored stain on the ceiling, eyes welled with fat, wet tears that never evap­orated. Caroline discovered they weren’t real tears; a nurse’s aide squirted liquid from a bottle into Emily’s eyes every day so they wouldn’t dry out.

She consid­ered asking to be moved next door to share quarters with Hilda Castello. She wondered which would be worse, hearing the oc­casional shrieks from Hilda—an eighty-nine-year-old Alzheim­er’s patient who always clutched a soiled Raggedy Ann doll—or sharing her space with a silent sheet-covered mound.

But as time wore on, curiosity gradually replaced her fears. Caroline started sitting beside Emily, watching the blanket rise and fall with her breath and gazing into her empty eyes. She kept testing her, not quite believing someone could sleep so soundly with her eyes wide open. She waved a hand close to her face to see if Emily would blink, and she dropped books on the floor to see if she’d startle. Sometimes, when Caroline felt especially brazen, she’d come nose to nose with her roommate, observing every pore in Emily’s face as well as the fine little hairs in her nostrils. Now and then she would jump back in fright, imagining Emily jerking her arms straight out and seizing Caroline’s neck like a creature in a fright flick.

Emily’s eyes were as electric blue as window cleaner. Her hair, cut ragged by the nurse’s aide, was wheat-colored and wavy. Her skin had been out of the sun so long it was bluish white, like milk out of a cow’s udder.

“You don’t look like a streetwalker,” Caroline said.

Maybe if Emily were wearing stiletto heels and crushed-velvet hot pants, she’d look exactly like a street­walker, but in her flannel nightgown and long white elastic stockings she looked more like a sleeping princess.

Caroline decided to reject Emily’s whoring history and invent more glamorous backgrounds for her. One day she imagined Emily as a missing heiress; the next, a silver-scaled mermaid fished from the sea. Sometimes she was a beautiful alien from another planet whose spacecraft had made a crash landing on Earth.

She also started talking regularly to Emily. Every evening at midnight, Caroline turned her clock radio to Minerva, her favorite show, and she began to direct her comments to her roommate.

“I’m in a terrible fix, Minerva,” the first caller said.

A smile flitted across Caroline’s face, and she rocked faster in her chair in anticipation of the caller’s miserable tale. Most of the callers on Minerva’s show were suffering from some heartache or another. The sorrier the story, the more Caroline lapped it up.

“What’s the trouble, sweetie?” Minerva said. She always so sounded sugary sweet.

“I’m seven months pregnant,” the caller said. “And my baby’s daddy, Robbie, is dating my best friend.”

“‘My baby’s daddy,’” Caroline said with a frown. “They didn’t have that expression in my day. When I was a girl, if a woman had a baby, the baby’s daddy was her husband.”

The caller went on about how much she loved Robbie, even though it sounded as if the boy de­served to be tied to the back of a pickup truck and drug around town. Minerva made a few sympathetic clucking sounds and asked the caller what song she wanted to hear.

“‘Hit the Road, Jack’ is what she should be requesting,” Caroline said. She tossed a glance at Emily. “Ain’t that right, Sleeping Beauty?”

Emily, of course, didn’t say a word; she just kept staring at the ceiling.

The next caller used the moniker “Alone in Atlanta.”

“Are you there, caller?” Minerva said.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Alone said in a faltering bari­tone. There was a clattering noise and the musical sound of phone buttons being pressed.

“Alone, are you still with us?” Minerva said.

“I just dropped the phone in the ficus plant,” said the caller. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. This is crazy.”

“What’s crazy?” Minerva asked.

“This show. I mean...the show isn’t crazy. Me calling the show is what’s crazy. I feel like Tom Hanks in that movie…” There was more fumbling with the phone.

“Sleepless in Seattle? With Megan Ryan?” Minerva said. She seemed amused by the clumsy caller.

“I guess so. Truth is I don’t go so much for love stories, Meredith. I’m more of a James Bond kind of guy.”

“What’s on your mind tonight, Alone?” Minerva asked, her tone more businesslike after having been called the wrong name by Alone in Atlanta.

Alone’s voice got softer and more tentative. “I’ve experi­enced a…What I mean to say is I’ve lost...” He cleared his throat noisily. “Someone important to me. It’s been over a year now.”

“Would you like to tell us what happened?” Minerva asked.

“It’s complicated. I don’t know why I’m calling. I happened to catch the show last night when I was looking for the ball game and I thought, geez, that Meredith sounds like a good egg. Here she is listening to complete strangers while they go on and on about their—”

“Minerva, Alone. My name is Minerva.”

“Minerva! See, I’m usually good with names, but I can’t seem to think straight lately. It’s been over a year and you’d guess after all that time...I just wanted to talk with some­body about how much I...miss her.” He paused. “Listen to me. Spilling my guts on the radio.”

‘That’s what we’re here for,” Minerva said. She seemed to have forgiven the caller for mixing up her name. “Is there a special request you’d like to hear tonight? A song to help you get through this difficult time?”

“Let me think for a...I’m not up on all the pop songs. I’m more of a jazz fan. John Coltrane, that sort of thing. Tell you what. Is there a song about going back in time? That’s what I want. I just wish I could turn back the clock a year and go back to the best time in my life.”

Best for you, maybe, but not for her, Caroline thought. Otherwise why did she leave? Caroline knew a thing or two about no-good men driving women away.

“I’m sorry about your troubles, Alone,” Minerva said. “I hope this song helps.” After a moment, Cher started singing “If I Could Turn Back Time.”

“Sentimental claptrap,” Caroline grumbled.

After the radio show was over she gabbed to Emily until she was cross-eyed with exhaustion. Caroline had never en­countered such a willing listener.

“Did I ever tell you what that pitiful excuse for a husband of mine did the day our son was born? Well, maybe I did, but it bears repeating. Went to a pit-bull fight. While I bled and moaned in agony, he lost two hundred dollars on a dog named Dirty Harry.”

It got to the point where Caroline told Emily things she’d never told another living soul. Like how the baby, whom she’d named Russell, had been a stillborn, and she’d held on to him until he was stiff and cold, refusing to let go until one of the nurses begged her. Or how she didn’t shed one single tear for her husband, Max, when he died, and instead drank an entire bottle of Muscatel after she’d gotten home from his funeral. Talking to Emily was like airing out a room that had been shut tight for years.

As Caroline’s attachment to Emily grew, so did her concern for her health. One afternoon when Poppy, the physical thera­pist, came in, Caroline quizzed her about her roommate’s con­dition.

“Look here. There must be something you can do to wake that gal up. What does her doctor say?”

“Don’t you worry yourself about her, ma’am,” Poppy said brusquely. “She’s not your concern.”

She moved Emily’s right foot back and forth and didn’t bother to turn her head to ad­dress Caroline.

Caroline expected as much. Poppy was a snappish girl whose personality didn’t match her cheery name. Cruella or Brumhilda would have been a better fit.

Mona, the nursing home director, was more helpful. When Caroline mentioned she wanted to learn about Emily’s disor­der, Mona taught her how to Google for information on the computer in the activity room.

Caroline spent several sessions at the slow-as-molasses PC, learning what she could about vegetative states and traumatic brain injuries. While the aging machine clicked and whirred, she read several articles that claimed the longer a person stayed unconscious, the less likely he or she would ever wake up. There was scant hope held out for those who had been trapped in unresponsive states for more than a few weeks.

She scrolled past the gloom-and-doom information and nosed around for some encouraging news. There was a woman in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who’d gone into a vegetative state after a difficult childbirth. Sixteen years passed, and she finally woke up and spoke to the nurses who were changing her bed sheets.

Most medical professionals gave up on patients who were unresponsive for long periods of time, but after hours of searching, Caroline found an article by a Dr. Irving Frost, who believed stimulating the five senses of his patients helped to rouse them from their vegetative states.

Frost said that health practitioners should try clapping two blocks of wood near a patient’s ear or touching the patient’s fingers and toes with ice cubes.

Finally there was something she could do for Emily— something that might actually help her. As soon as Caroline returned to her room, she threw herself into a program de­signed to awaken her sleeping roommate.

She’d learned hearing was the first sense to return in unconscious patients, so she talked to Emily until her throat ached—giving a running commentary on TV shows and reading to her from the latest Soap Opera Digest or Reader’s Digest. She also shook a bottle of calcium tablets near Emily’s ear before she took a dose each morning, and then sprayed the room with witch hazel and Secret deodorant. After meals, she smuggled lemon slices from her iced tea back to the room so she could dribble the juice on Emily’s parched lips. In the evenings, she’d run the bristles of her hairbrush lightly along Emily’s arms and legs and then she’d massage them until the ache in her ar­thritic fingers grew too sharp to ignore and damp patches of nightdress clung to her skin.

“I like a good sweat,” she said after a rigorous session of kneading her roommate’s floppy extremities. “It’s a sign of being alive.”

As she settled back into her chair, a low moan rumbled from her bowels.

“Another sign of life,” Caroline said. She flapped the air with a corner of her gown. “Good thing you sleep so soundly.”

The last thing she did every night was sing: “Inky Dinky parlez vous.” It was a song the kids used to sing when Caroline worked in the lunchroom of Harriet Tubman Middle School, taught to them by the French teacher. The middle-school students would often change the words, substituting “potty poo” for parlez vous.

Caroline sang off-key and entirely too loud, reasoning such terrible caterwauling would penetrate Emily’s skull and possibly jar something loose. She could only hope and pray.