Elaine’s Gift

Excerpt

Elaine’s Gift
Victoria St. Michael © 2023
All Rights Reserved

As Kit steps out of the Uber into the howling wind and rain, the little voice in her head begs her to turn back. Wouldn’t you be so much more comfortable in bed, the voice asks, filling her with anxiety. Curiosity killed the cat, isn’t that what they say?

Kit shoves the voice into a box in the back of her mind and puts it on a shelf. Now muffled by her resolve, the voice continues to whine in the background as she fights desperately to ignore it. The urge to return to the car and head straight back home to her dusty, leaky apartment is overwhelming, but Kit gives the driver a quick wave and sloshes through the deep puddles to the sidewalk.

Ice cold water seeps through the worn-out soles of her boots as she clutches a little black notebook, no bigger than the palm of her hand, tightly to her chest. Kit has no idea how the book came to be in her possession, only that she had been meant to find it. It had been propped up on her bedside table when she had awoken this morning. Only four pages had been written on, the rest were blank.

The brief note scrawled in Elaine’s familiar, barely legible handwriting on the fourth page is imprinted in her mind. Kit had stared at it for so long that she had unconsciously memorized it:

Miss me? Eleanor Roosevelt said the purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. So, go live. I love you; I’ll see you in Paris. – E

Paris, Kit thinks bitterly to herself, another dream we were forced to put away on a shelf, left up there to collect dust. It’s just like E to be so frustratingly whimsical. Already slick with rain, the leather-bound cover of the notebook sends tiny shock waves from Kit’s fingertips to her chest. I can’t turn back, she tells herself. I have to do this. For her.

The hospital looms ahead, a pitch-black monster silhouetted against the angry storm clouds clogging the evening sky. Kit hates hospitals, this one more than most. She has not been here since that day and had not planned on ever returning if she could help it. And yet here I am, all because of this stupid book. She curses her own morbid curiosity.

Kit steels herself against the stinging wind and trudges up the steps into the fluorescent lights of the hospital lobby. She shakes droplets of rainwater off the notebook in her hands and opens it to the first page, feeling her pulse quicken as she reads the name and address written there:

Ridgeview Trinity Hospital: 394 Ridgeview Rd. Room 317, Thomas Greene.

It’s eerie, seeing Elaine’s loopy, slanted letters written so plainly on the page. Haunting. It’s something that Kit had never expected to see again. A hollow pain begins throbbing from somewhere deep in her chest. Kit remembers how Elaine used to say her thoughts flew by too rapidly for her hand to possibly keep up. She wonders when Elaine had written the note and tries to imagine her wife’s dainty porcelain hand gripping the pen. A tangible memory to hold onto.

Somewhere in her mind, Kit wonders why Elaine had even bothered to write down the hospital’s address. They had both learned it by heart, by the end.

She approaches the nurses’ station. Ridgeview is a small hospital; Kit could likely find Room 317 on her own, but she figures it would be more polite to ask. The nurse seated at the desk looks up from her book with surprise.

“Kit! I wasn’t expecting to see you here so soon. It’s a terrible night to be out and about! How are you holding up?”

Kit ignores the question.

“I’m looking for Room 317. I’m here to see,” she checks the name written in the book again, “uh, Thomas Greene?”

The nurse looks confused for a moment; then her face lights up. “Oh, that’s wonderful to hear. Tom never gets any visitors! This will make his night. Technically visiting hours ended at five, but I think we can make an exception. Tom has no family that we know of. Not even a next of kin, the poor man. Let’s go see if he’s awake, shall we?”

The nurse stands and hurries down the hall, gesturing for Kit to follow.

As they pass through a familiar set of double doors and under a glowing LED sign advertising the “Robert Davies Cancer Unit,” Kit tries to ignore the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Her spine tingles with dread. I never wanted to come back here.

The hall seemingly stretches on for miles. Kit’s eyes are fixed straight ahead. She doesn’t want to think about the pain and heartache that lies on the other side of each door they pass. When they reach the end of the hallway, the nurse knocks gently on the last door. She is met with silence, so she opens it and peers inside.

“Tom, are you awake? You have a visitor,” the nurse calls softly.

“Eh?” grunts a wheezing voice from within the dimly lit room. “Who in their right mind…? Is it a debt collector?”

The nurse simply chuckles and opens the door, gesturing for Kit to go inside. “Good luck with that one,” she says with a good-natured chuckle. “Call if you need anything at all.” The nurse gives Kit one last sweet smile and returns to the nurses’ station.

Kit takes a deep breath and enters the room with no idea what is waiting for her inside. It’s a single room. This guy is either well off financially, Kit tells herself, or he’s reaching the end of his prognosis. Although she and Elaine hadn’t been able to afford one, the hospital had moved E to a single room in the days before…the end. To give them both some privacy, apparently.

The old man propped up by pillows in the bed looks to be on the brink of death. He is pale and skeletal, his skin grey and translucent. The dozens of machines surrounding his bedside blink and buzz. Kit can see the individual bones of his fingers beneath his papery skin, and his collar bones jut out from beneath his blue hospital gown. Age spots speckle his bald head, and his eyes gleam with that familiar glassy, faraway look.

This tugs at the fragile strings of Kit’s memory, threatening to unravel her. The box on the shelf in her mind where she had stuffed that petulant, dissenting voice begins to rattle. I’m still here. Once again, she fights the urge to turn around and go home.

“Who are you?” the man wheezes, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth. He removes the mask with shaking fingers to reveal a scowl on his thin, wrinkled lips. “If you’re selling something, I don’t want it.”

“My name is Kit,” she replies, stammering as she tries to recover her voice. “Are you Thomas Greene?”

“As far as I know. I go by Tom, though, not Thomas,” he replies, sinking back into his pillows. “Why don’t you bring me those tissues over there and sit down, so you can tell me what you’re doing here?”

Tom points to a box of Kleenex on a table by the wall. She retrieves the box and sets it on the tray next to his uneaten dinner, sitting tentatively on the edge of the chair by his bed. He blows his nose weakly and drops the used tissue into the bin next to his bed.

“Are you not going to eat that?” she asks, pointing to the tray of untouched food.

“No point,” he says, waving dismissively with one shaking hand. He replaces the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, muffling his voice once again. “Look at me, do I look hungry? It’s almost my time to go, I can feel it. If that don’t make a man lose his appetite, I don’t know what would. Plus, the food here is terrible. Now what do you need? Get on with it before I up and die on you.”

Kit isn’t sure whether or not this is meant to be a joke. Some joke, she scoffs silently to herself. Still, the corners of her mouth flicker as she pieces together what she is going to say next in a way that, hopefully, won’t make her seem absolutely insane. “I found this book. I think it belongs—er, belonged—to my wife,” she explains. “I was hoping you could maybe tell me why I’m here.”

Kit takes the black book out of her pocket and shows him the page where his name and room number are written. She expects some kind of reaction to the words “my wife,” but it doesn’t seem to phase the old man in the slightest. She breathes a discreet sigh of relief.

After examining the page for a moment, Tom once again removes the oxygen mask and sets it down next to the tissues.

“Well, that does seem to be my name, doesn’t it?” he replies, his expression thoughtful. “But that’s pretty well the extent of what I know. Do I know your wife?”

“Her name is—was—Elaine. Elaine Barrows.” The name on Kit’s tongue puts a chalky, stale taste in her mouth. She hasn’t said Elaine’s name out loud in over a month, not even at the funeral. Already, it feels foreign on her lips.

To her surprise, Tom’s eyes light up and a crooked grin appears on his thin, frail face. He claps his hands together and lets out a barking laugh. The unexpected sound makes her jump. “Elaine Barrows, my songbird!” he crows. Suddenly, he appears years younger. “We used to sit together during treatment sometimes. Keep each other company. Nasty stuff, chemotherapy. I’m glad I gave it up. She’d sing to me to pass the time, sometimes. She knew all the old classics, really took me back. Nice kid.”

There’s a sharp pang in Kit’s heart. Why did it pain her so, to hear other people talk about her? She didn’t sing professionally or anything, but boy, did Elaine love it. She would often break into song in the shower, or while cooking or cleaning the house. Whenever Kit would have a particularly bad bout of writer’s block, or if the money was scarce and the stress was high, Elaine would make up these ridiculous songs about whatever was going on at the time. For a few brief moments, everything seemed like it would be all right.

Except everything didn’t turn out all right. Not even a bit.

Kit’s grief sits coiled like a massive snake in the pit of her stomach, twisting and writhing uncomfortably. She had spent the last month pretending the snake didn’t exist, pushing it down more and more until she felt nothing at all. Starving it. But the snake is awake now. It wraps itself around her insides, squeezing. Suffocating. Flooding her with the grief she had tried so hard to suppress. Kit feels like she may be sick.

But Tom is still chattering away, as if he has been imbued with new life. “I haven’t seen the little songbird in some time,” he’s saying. “Not since I quit the chemo. I figure my last days on God’s green earth should be pain-free. I’d say I’ve earned it, wouldn’t you?”

Tom pauses for a moment, noticing the haunted expression on Kit’s face. He offers her a gentle look. “Elaine talked about you a lot, you know, always going on about her wife, the writer,” he says. “I was never much of a reader myself, always preferred to work with my hands. How is my songbird holding up these days, anyway? Sticking with the treatment, is she? I’d like to see her again…before I go.”

Kit stares down at her boots, tears welling up in her eyes. She hasn’t been able to say the words to herself yet, much less out loud to a stranger. It’s not lost on her that they are sitting a few doors down from the same room where Elaine had taken her last breaths, only weeks before.

“She, uh, she’s gone,” Kit replies in a broken voice, barely above a whisper. Her brain stumbles over the words. “She…died…about a month ago.”

“Well now, I’m sorry to hear that,” Tom murmurs, his voice once again muffled by his oxygen mask. Unexpectedly, he rests one frail hand on Kit’s knee, a feather light touch. “Shame, that is. She was only a young pup.”

Kit nods silently, afraid that if she were to speak, she would fall apart in front of this stranger. Yes, twenty-seven was far too young. Too young to leave Kit to survive the rest of her life alone, without the love of her life. Without Elaine. The snake squeezes harder, sinking its fangs straight into her heart. She takes a shaky breath but is unable to speak.

“Beautiful name, Elaine. Old fashioned, like me. Classic,” Tom continues, when it becomes clear that Kit isn’t going to answer. He takes a few deep gulps from his oxygen mask. “You don’t see many young people with names like that anymore.”

“No,” Kit replies after a moment. “It’s French. It means a bright, shining light.”

A fitting name. Elaine is—was—a bright, shining light. Kit suppresses a sob.

“I remember,” says Tom. “I did love that voice of hers. Brought me back to before. Before I lost Maxie, before the divorce. Before the War, even.”

“Was Maxie your wife?” Kit asks, desperately wanting to change the subject. Tom lets out another wheezing bark of a laugh and takes another rattling breath through his mask.

“Hell no,” he laughs. “My divorce wasn’t what you’d call a loss. Maxie was my dog. A mutt through and through, but I think he must’a had some Bernese Mountain Dog in him, because he was big as all hell. I took that dog with me everywhere I went until the day he died. I still think of him every day. I found him after Gertie left me – that’s my wife. My ex-wife, I mean. After the War, I came home to no job and no decent prospects. This country don’t give two shits about us vets. Some thanks, huh? Anyhow, eventually we lost the house and one thing led to another, and Gertie left. Can’t say I blame her.”

“I found Maxie about fifteen years ago. He found me, more like, one night I was sleeping down under the bridge on Fourth. Snuggled right up to me, fleas and all. Kept me warm all night. We were two peas in a pod after that, the old mutt never left my side.”

Kit sits up straighter in her chair. She doesn’t know why this man is telling her his life’s story, but strangely she doesn’t mind. In fact, she finds herself feeling thankful. Kit had always harboured strong opinions about the greed and romanticization of war, but meetings like this reminded her of the human element of the discussion. It’s a conversation that rarely receives the nuance it deserves. Elaine always used to say black and white thinking would be the death of compassion. Right again, E.