Somebody

There is a person across the hall who keeps saying Somebody please help me. They say somebody like it is both a specific person and anyone at all, so persistent and ignored, I wonder if it’s in my own head. The voice is just a notch above a craggly whisper like a ghost in a cave, or a figure at the end of a long dark hallway. “Sssssome-bod-aaaay!” I lean towards the door to see if I can hear it again. “Please!” more scratchy gasp, “I’m all alone… No one’s here…Where am I? Somebody! Isn’t anyone there?”

I start to get up, I can’t not, but then it’s quiet. I walk to the door and lean my ear. Out in the hallway is the usual hubbub, the nurse station, the food tray delivery, someone wheeling cleaning supplies. Then I see Janice, the nurse who looks mean but isn’t, “Okay, Miss Edna, it’s okay baby, we’re here. We’re coming.” she calls out, but keeps walking past the door. I see her stop in someone else’s room and then come back out and greet another nurse. A few minutes later Janice comes back with a wheel chair and then a few minutes after that, she pushes Miss Edna out into the hall. “You stay here, baby, I’ll go get your breakfast.”

Miss Edna has a red baseball jacket and sweatpants. Her feet in new white sneakers hang like a skeleton’s. She has a grown-out perm, coral lipstick and glasses the size of small tv screens. Her chin is on her chest but her gaze is outward, “Sssssome…” she says again, to anyone, “Is this where I am?” She is in the thick of things; people walk around her, hurry past, swish by, she lifts her eyes but not her head. “Where did the one go?”

My mom is leaving today so Janice came in to say goodbye. She was out of her uniform and dressed in regular clothes. She put her purse and jacket down on the side table and came and took my mom’s hands. “I hear you get to go home today,” she says.

“Yeah,” my mom says. “Thanks for stopping by.” They are staring at each other and smiling. “I love you,” my mom says.

“I love you too,” Janice says. I wonder for a moment how many people she says I love you to and all I can say is even if it’s a million, she means it. She is nodding at my mom, saying something. Who knows what it is. They are both nodding. There are no words.

I love you, my mom says again.

“You’re a good person,” Janice says. She looks at me and then back at my mom, “She feels my spirit.”

I nod. We had been talking about feeling a person’s spirit the other day, especially when they are singing.

“Yes she does,” Janice says looking back to my mom. She is still holding my mom’s hands and swinging them a little. My mom’s hands are more bone than skin.

I was thinking about how the skin and body changes in your lifetime, how it starts out so luscious and juicy and goes gangly and agile, then curvy and sexual, then droopy and doughy, then shriveled and dry. Like a tree or a piece of fruit, anything out of the ground. From the air through water and fire and back to the ground again.

At the end of the day I carry the last of my mom’s things down to the car. I say goodbye to all the nurses, smile at the other family members there for their first day of visiting. Miss Edna is back in her room calling out again like a baby in the night: Somebody help. Come get me. Please. Why am I here all alone?