Write for me!
The male voice called out to Ronnie very clearly, startling her from her alcohol-induced haze.
Ever since she had returned to her parents' house after the hospital visit, she had been determined to get as as intoxicated as possible. But all of the booze in the world could not make her forget the horrors she had faced last night.
Elizabeth Hannah, her grandmother, was on a death watch at Baylor Hospital in Dallas. At the age of eighty eight, she was finally succumbing to her battle with Alzheimer's...a war that had lasted over ten years. As time went by, she had been unable to care for herself and had been only a shell of the woman that Ronnie remembered as her grandmother. Neither her grandfather nor her mother wanted to put Elizabeth in a nursing home. Every holiday, her grandmother would become a little bit more lost to the world of her past. She would talk to her dead sister and her dead cats. She would forget Ronnie's name and her mother's name. As the disease progressed, she ultimately lost the ability to talk, mumbling incoherently. She could not walk or go to the bathroom by herself. In short, she had become as helpless as a baby.
Two nights ago, Elizabeth had suffered a stroke which resulted in her falling into a coma. There was nothing anyone in the hospital could do for her. She was too elderly to make a recovery. As long as she was alive, she was doomed to remain in a comatose state. There were only two options: to put her on life support or to allow her to pass on. Everyone in the family agreed for the latter option. It was her time.
All IV tubes and oxygen tanks were removed.
Now there was nothing to do but wait for the inevitable.
Last night, Ronnie volunteered to stay with her grandmother at the hospital, allowing the rest of the family to get a much needed break from their vigil. All agreed that Elizabeth should not die alone without a family member present. Those seven or eight hours were pure hell for Ronnie.
If only she could get her grandmother's skeletal face out of her memory...
If only she could stop hearing those gasps for breath...
If only she could forget how the nurses would inject a steady flow of morphine into her grandmother's worn veins in order to keep her body from spasmodically twitching as she neared death...
Ronnie could not look at her grandmother for over a few minutes at a time. She could not bear seeing the beautiful woman she remembered come to such a state. And she hated herself for thinking that her grandmother was starting to look progressively ghoulish as she slowly starved to death...like something out of a Stephen King novel. The more she tried to push that thought out of her mind, the more stubbornly it clung in her conscience.
Trying to abolish such morbid thoughts, Ronnie tried to find other things to do to occupy her time. She worked crossword puzzles, but none of the answers seemed to come. She attempted to read her novel, but that was even more of a hopeless cause. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but the back-breaking chair in the hospital room did not allow for that. She walked about the stark white corridors and hallways, but there wasn't much of anywhere to go in a hospital at three o'clock in the morning.
The litany repeated over and over in her head: Please, Grandma, please die. End your suffering and regain your dignity. Please die...please...
The nurse had said that it was okay to talk to her...that "the hearing is the last to go". Ronnie went over to her grandmother and took her hand. Elizabeth's fingers closed over her own, but she suspected that that was an involuntary response...much like what a newborn baby would do.
"Grandma?" she asked.
But she could not say anything else for she became choked with tears. Then she cursed herself for being a weak coward. Did her grandmother know she was there? Was she upset with her for not talking to her while she was dying? For hardly being able to look at her?
Now at last in the privacy of her parents' home, she could weep and wail to her heart's content. She could curse and scream at God without any sympathetic looks from hospital employees or sanctimonious speeches from the hospital parson. She did not care to hear some stranger lecture her with "ours is not to reason why". All she knew was that her grandmother had never hurt a living soul. And yet there she was, dying with agonizing slowness. Life had never been easy for Elizabeth.
Ronnie wanted to cry, but the irony never seemed to end. She was all cried out.
So she took another swig of the bottle of Southern Comfort that she had stolen from her father's private bar, hoping to drown away her misery.
Write, Veronica. It will help you, I promise...
And now she was hearing voices in her head! She hadn't had that much to drink!
Obviously, she was tired and overwrought from her all night stay at the hospital. And now, rather than getting her few hours of precious sleep, she was hallucinating or having a nervous breakdown or something.
The phone rang, startling her to awareness.
"Hello, Ronnie..."
It was her father. There was only one reason that he could be calling right now.
"Is she dead?"
"She passed away a half hour ago."
"Okay." Not a very intelligent response, but she didn't know what else to say.
"We still have to clear up some details here at the hospital. Are you all right by yourself there at the house?"
"Sure," she said, trying not to betray the crack in her voice as she felt her inner hysteria beginning to mount.
"It was for the best, Ronnie."
"I know."
"Okay. See you soon."
"Yeah."
As soon as she hung up the phone, she ran into the guest bedroom and collapsed upon the bed in tears. Somehow, the alcohol did not numb the pain but just worked as a depressant. Once the sobs started, they would not stop.
Do not torture yourself with blame, Veronica. Elizabeth wants you to remember the good times.
"Shut up!" Ronnie screamed, covering her ears. "Shut up!"
After a few moments, once she had somewhat calmed, the voice sang a lullaby to her.
Come, little leaf, said the wind one day.
Come over the meadow with me and play.
Put on your dresses of red and gold.
Summer is gone and the wind blows cold.
That was a song her grandmother used to sing to her when she was a baby! She hadn't thought of that song for ages. Ronnie did not have enough presence of mind to question the beautiful eerie voice. She just let the softly sung words comfort her, slowly lulling her to sleep.
Ronnie slept a dreamless sleep for about eight or nine hours, waking up on her own.
There was a message from her father on the answering machine. Damn, she hadn't even heard the phone ring!
"Hi, Ronnie. Guess you're still asleep. We're stopping at Denny's to get a bite. We'll bring you home something. Okay?"
That meant that they would probably be back here soon.
She showered and slipped on a pair of sweats, feeling much better than she had. Amazing how a little sleep could do wonders! And her drinking binge didn't even leave so much as a headache. She just felt relaxed and comfortably numb.
Reaching for her parents' laptop, she signed onto the Internet, preparing to surf herself into oblivion or until her parents came home...whichever happened first.
But before surfing, she needed to check her e-mail. It was her last semester at the university. Although this was a family emergency, she would still pay a hefty price for missing so many classes this late in the term. The great halls of Academia had no sympathy for minor problems such as death and pain. Luckily, she had the foresight to call one classmate per class to update her with class notes and such.
Immediately, an Instant Message popped up on the screen before she even had a chance to look at her e-mail.
Erik: Write for me.
What the hell? That was the same thing her imaginary voice had said to her.
Ron2812: Who are you?
Erik: Your muse. Or your ghost. Whichever you prefer.
What a nutcase! The crazy guys were always attracted to her, even in cyberspace!
She typed an angry response.
Ron2812: I can hear the cuckoo singing in the cuckoo-berry tree!
Erik: I do not understand what you mean.
"I mean you are a psychotic escaped from some mental institution, you weirdo!"
Erik: True. I suppose I am rather an insane escape artist, but fortunately I have never been incarcerated.
How did he know what she had said out loud?
Ronnie stood up and looked about the room. She walked all through the large house. Mentally, she checked off every room. No one in the bathroom, the living room, the computer room, the kitchen, her parent's room, her grandparents' room, her grandparents' bathroom, the basement, the attic...
Nothing.
It was quiet, very quiet, almost spookily so.
She looked into the backyard.
"No one but us, Pookie," she said to her grandfather's dog. But even Pookie was acting sort of strange, sniffing about curiously. The little black curly-haired mutt, usually always running and jumping about all over the grass, was standing as still as a statue with a paw up in the air.
Why did she suddenly feel the hairs at the back of her neck rise?
Nervously, Ronnie returned to her computer.
Ron2812: What am I supposed to write?
Erik: Remember the play?
