WHO’S TO SAY? 

When I left—on such a soft breeze—the silence surprised me after all that to-do wheeling me into

surgery through those halls that emit a breeze when you’re lying on the gurney and moving fast. I suppose it amounted to no more than a transfer from one type of breeze to another. Two doctors in green were scrubbing up. A rupture, they said. They were in so wistful a hurry that in less than a minute I didn’t see them at all.

#

Far too many people waiting around, down the hall, talking, with not one of them really aware of what’s happening. I do not refer to surgery as what’s happening but to something much bigger which I don’t much understand as yet myself.

My breathing seems nonexistent as I lift myself up, to the scent of lilacs out of season. These people seem not to notice the scent, or notice me moving about. What are all these people waiting around thinking about me anyway? Do they recollect my culinary skills? What about the roses from my garden? And the latest poem I wrote? Or is it money they’re thinking of? Let me get away.

I waft myself about the hall. Between and above shoulders that will be in black tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the day after that. One shoulder seems familiar. I pause. . . . He makes a keen quarter turn of his head, looking into space just a bit lower than his own head, as if he senses something going by. I am the one going by him. I wait a moment. But we don’t connect. I wonder who he is. Light red hair he has, a full head of it and curly. Did he ever love me? Did I love him? As I turn away, it seems as if I drop off a heavy burden. Something is gone. I imagine bones or flesh but both of those are still in the room I just left, not with me.

I’m outside now. Not waiting for a call back. They don’t know. They think I’m still lying there on that operating table, wearing one of those hospital gowns with the little blue doodads all over it. I scan the high building I’ve just escaped from, set among numerous other such buildings, taking up umpteen city blocks. At least Hopkins is one of the best in the world to escape from. I mean the best in which to be operated on and then escape from. I waft myself again to maneuver around the oldest building there, built in 1889, that contains just inside the original main entrance a bigger than life-size marble likeness of Christ. It looks just like Him from Sunday School days. But it dawns on me my wafting is only room-high or less: I cannot really fly.

I begin my journey not knowing where I am going. Still on the hospital campus, I stay close to the brick wall along the right edge of a sidewalk, hoping not to be noticed. But what can be noticed? I’m not visible.

Then two big fellows approaching and carrying arms of books seem to take the entire pavement for themselves. One brushes against me and sends me spinning. News to me that I can spin.

“Hey!” He looks back, addressing me.  

“I think I’ve just seen a ghost,” he says to his companion.

“How so, Derek?” the other asks.

“Well, I don’t see a solid thing but I ran into something. Something that wasn’t there. What could it be but a ghost?”

“What would Prof Tucker say to that?”

“I am going by evidence, just like the book says, and I say I ran into something that was not there! Didn’t you see anything?”

“No, Derek, and I didn’t feel anything either. You’ve been studying too hard.”

They cross the parking lot diagonally, the companion leading the way and Derek dragging along, still looking back at the spot where I was last . . . felt.

That’s how I know what I really am; that I’ve lived only twenty-nine years on this earth. But where’s the bright light people who died and lived to tell say they saw? Perhaps there’s something I must do to gain that honor. Everything that went wrong to fix.

Suddenly a siren startles me. I’m somehow carried along to the water’s edge of Chesapeake Bay where a blue helicopter waits on its pad. I see the flight aces in their black uniforms rush to their jobs. Someone somewhere needs them. I watch them take off and an idea strikes me. If I can’t fly, why not fly anyway . . . on an airplane?

#

Before an airport finds me, I run right into vertical iron bars that look regimental to me. Because of the guards? What are they guarding? Beyond the bars . . . oh . . . what a splendid sight! A big white building with columns. I recognize it, but I’ve never seen it in my . . . other life. Just on film and in history books. I suppose I could hop over the bars or even slide through and have a good look inside the edifice. But what would I do if I ran into Mr. Lincoln? Or one of the others? I don’t recall which others. But aren’t they ghosts enough for such a majestic place? I have jobs to do and I head south.

#

A bit of Millay’s poetry speaks aloud . . . or I think it does . . . as I squeeze on board. “. . . there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, No matter where it’s going.” Only I say plane, not train. No one seems to hear me; so, I conclude I’m not really speaking. Bump. Bump. Bump. I’m bumping into everyone. They look right at me to apologize and see nothing. We land in Nashville.

#

In no time I see into a window of the Bolton house. Well over a hundred years old now. They are, the Boltons, not the house. My father leaves me there one morning while he studies John Bolton’s sick trees. I go along to see the new house that is not quite built. The Boltons are camping out in it. I stand at their window to watch my father through the glass. The hot water with lemon and honey that the Boltons drink at breakfast scents up the air. It surely settles into the unvarnished wood surfaces in the house and will be there forever. Somehow I know that at this age . . . like a poem . . .  brewing; the scent settling there . . . in the wood . . . forever. But what is important is the Boltons do not offer the little child even a snippet of toast, a child who has been taught not to ask. Their toast is with jam, red colored. They have no children. They don’t know that tiny girls, age three plus three months, are almost always hungry. Almost always.

The journey here tonight is to forgive them. I do forgive them, though I must have done so years ago. In another minute I’m in the graveyard where John Bolton and his wife Effie lie buried and I say goodbye. I will not frequent graveyards. I don’t like them, particularly after dark. Many humans think we belong in graveyards, but that’s not true. I’m a bit scared in a graveyard. Scared of people trying to scare up a ghost. My departure from this place is as fast as I can get away.

#

Soon I find a town at the foot of the Smokies where we lived. Once. I was in second grade. This is where I told a lie—the only one I ever told knowingly in my life. Probably only because I was punished. Severely. For the lie. My parents never knew why I lied. No explanation was asked for. I did not know why myself till many years later. Why I lied.

That day I had begged to wear my new patent leather Mary Janes to school. Mother finally acceded. That’s a good word—acceded. But she demanded a promise from me: I would not get the shoes dirty or damaged in any way. I promised, truly intending to keep that promise.

But it rained that afternoon before school was out. Our house was one of two new houses on a back street where the road was not yet paved. Ruts in the lane where a corner would someday materialize had filled with rainwater. Someone had dumped fireplace ashes here and there. I stopped to figure out just where to step. Some of the finer cinders made mounds that looked like stepping stones. I would step on those and keep my new shoes out of the water. I did just that. The mounds turned out to be as soft as whipped cream and my Mary Janes swallowed up the stuff.

When I got home, Father was already there from his office. My parents asked what happened to my shoes. I told them a boy playing around the corner with his little bucket and tiny shovel had covered my shoes with the muck, my older brother’s favorite word. (I did not know what muck meant, but it seemed to fit everything, according to bro.) Father disappeared for a few minutes and returned. He asked me to go with him to the corner. The shape of my new shoes on the mounds was generous evidence of my lie. That spanking went on and on and on and on. That is why I keep my promises today and do not lie.

#

I was in my second year of college when I realized the reason for that lie. In an elective class of creative writing, our first surprise assignment was to write in thirty-five minutes a true episode from our childhood that had shaped a trait of character that could help us become good writers. I sat and thought while others wrote with amazing intensity. What were they doing, writing fiction instead of fact? The clock on the wall ticked away each idea that came to mind even though I knew what I must write, to be honest. Truth. Truth to live by. While I made up half-lies for fiction.  

At ten minutes till the fatal moment, I began a private cry as my fountain pen started to move across the page. Others had finished their assignments and were leaving the room. I didn’t look up at them but I sensed them leaving. I felt their looks burning the back of my neck with little pinpricks of superiority.

My handwriting was almost illegible when I turned in my two pages, with apology, as I looked up at the clock. Fifteen minutes late.

“It’s okay. This is my last class today,” the professor said. “I don’t have to be anywhere else for another hour. I have kept busy reading the papers that have come in.” He smiled.

He placed my paper on top of the others and stood. He was nice to wait for me to finish my paper. Many professors call time and students suffer the consequence. I wrote about my very first short story—in second grade—about how I learned to tell the truth for the rest of my life. I stuffed my tear-stained tissues into my sweater’s pocket, too embarrassed to drop them into the trash basket beside the professor’s desk, and left the room. He left too, but went in the opposite direction.

#

On Monday the professor returned the papers, all of which he said he had read himself, not an assistant. He announced he had given only one A.

“This A goes to a student who demonstrates at this point in the course the most promise for a successful career in writing. Next time it may be someone else. Keep writing every day and try to—try hard to avoid clichés and those -ly how something does adverbs.” He frowned and then clucked.

Our papers were folded down the middle with the grades tucked inside them. When he handed me mine, I slipped it into my notebook without a glance. I knew I had not made the A. After all, I was an art major, not a writing major.

That night I found my A and ached anew for not being able to tell my parents why I lied. I was trying to write then, in second grade, without pen or paper, and did not really know how. Except to lie. I now glanced at the stack of drawings from an art class, all of which had A- or B grades. It had not hurt to sketch the bridge (that the art instructor said looked too realistic) or the man playing an accordion (with too much detail to his old shoestrings). I was not the least bit receptive in any class to a grade below A period. So, art classes did not hurt as writing did. I determined to see what I could really do with writing, which so far, had hurt. Perhaps that’s what it takes. To write. Hurt. Hemingway came to mind, something about an unhappy childhood being the greatest training for a writer. But that did not fit my situation. I’d had a happy childhood making fiction in my head. I remember writing a child’s story with hundreds of fireflies in a cone design blinking like a nervous Christmas tree. Why did I imagine that? Was I not happy otherwise? As I see it now, perhaps creating fiction made me happy.

I had used the word acceded in my paper and the professor made a note in the margin “excellent word choice.” I almost missed his note at the bottom of page two:

“Why not come to see me to talk about your gift for writing? You are surely at an advanced level, an adept?” That sentence ended with a question mark.

I did as he asked and eventually he turned me into a famous author. Last year I won a Pulitzer, one of the youngest writers ever to do so. Maybe the very youngest.

#

I can’t seem to remember everything—now in this new milieu—that I should remember. Perhaps earthly memory is supposed to fade away. That would make sense. But I want to remember!

However there are other jobs to tend to tonight. So, I just wish it and touch my father’s tombstone—touch somehow—and know that people are waiting, perhaps not aware that I am dead.

#

I hurry to the Tomlinson house, where at a birthday party for one of his six children, the father had flirted with my thirteen-year-old sister in a kissing game. I understood it at nine (because I read books), while Lucy (who read no books), had no idea that kiss was wrong. That father was not supposed to play the game in the first place. But he did. When he saw Lucy was playing it. This was a time when such conduct was not acceptable. By most people’s standards. But the Tomlinsons were different from the rest of us in a number of ways. Came from somewhere else, they did.

Tonight their house is dark. Not a window shows lamplight. The electric power must have an outage, as the wind is whipping up a gale.

However, somebody is on the front porch, perhaps anticipating the storm. Two somebodies. I sylph down to their level and startle them. They may think it’s the rattle of leaves. But there aren’t any leaves lying around to rattle. Maybe these two see white. Ordinarily, mortals think white when we pass by and prefer their Halloween pranks in white. But this is no ordinary passing by. . . . It’s my inauguration ceremony.

I chuckle. Can they hear me? I never heard of ghosts chuckling. Actually, I’ve never known anything about ghosts before. Maybe they do chuckle whenever there is anything on earth to chuckle about.

Now, about this couple. They don’t converse, even with interjections. I surprise myself by shedding beside me a pale splash of yellow with its pivoting like a Japanese fan closing. The yellow may be so pale that it looks white to them. Then it disappears. They don’t know what they saw and I don’t know how it worked.

The scent of wax myrtle foliage pervades the air. They smell it too, but they don’t know where it’s coming from. Not from their part of the country.

The air is colder. The woman folds her arms across her breast. Why doesn’t the man put his arms about her to keep her warm? I remember arms around me. . . . Someone’s. . . . But whose? . . . I fold my imaginary arms about myself to suggest they follow the idea—I watch as the man folds his arms around her—and for it to mean something for good. The wax myrtle gets stronger, till they’ll never forget this moment. Never.

#

There is the Jackson house to see. She has moved. I don’t know how long it takes a private plane to fly from San Francisco to Honolulu, but this one appealed to me for it is carrying sixteen couples on their way to a Lions Club convention. One couple’s little son, about ten years old, goes along and sits beside me in front of his parents. After take-off, he begins trying to put his feet onto my seat. He can’t. His shoes always hit something that stops him. He looks at the seat and tries again. No luck. He isn’t paying for my seat and neither am I, but if humans had bought every seat on the plane, I would stand all the way to Honolulu. But now for Molly Mae Jackson.   

Who would ever dream the daughter of a one-man-grocery-store clerk in our residential community would end up here in this paradise? She sat in front of me in fifth grade and always looked back at my sketching. I’m here to apologize to her. Once, when she was staring at my drawing a flight of stairs—just six steps really but done with perfect perspectives—I said to her, “Turn around.” That was mean. I want to make it up to her. But how? I’m not a fairy god-mother. Thank God for that. I’m just an invisible soul wandering around on the earth, not just on land but by air, while others are about to put the hospital-grade cotton sheet over my face.

The paid passengers buckle their seat belts, for we are to land soon, and then the Captain suggests it again with greater emphasis. We are running into trouble! Pandemonium breaks out. Something fell off the plane and then another one did. The Captain says for us to brace ourselves: the Coast Guard is on its way! The Co-Pilot comes back to sit with the little boy but he can’t fit into the seat beside the boy. So, as he is squirming about, I manage to escape into the aisle.

           We land in the ocean and the Coast Guard rescues all on board. Except me.

#

Without a seatbelt, I am thrown about and in seconds am away from the wreckage. I am spinning—yes, I can spin without help from schoolboys, spin in a whirlpool like a volcanic eruption some distance from land. It’s small and wet but powerful enough to hold me right there and I don’t make progress. I  . . . struggle . . . unable to make the beach . . . and sink lower and lower, twirling in a vortex that seeks to pull me . . . under. I get weaker and weaker . . . with Molly Mae Jackson on my mind. I must get to her . . . and apologize. Molly Mae . . . Molly Mae . . . I sink even lower . . . and can hardly breathe. Coast . . . Guard . . .  I . . . can’t . . . brea . . .

#

My eyes open a tiny slit to see an expanse of faces hovering close to mine, faces without noses and without mouths, but with huge eyes under goggles. The better to see you with, Grandma says. These aliens have been beating on my chest and I’m too tired to fight back. I am so tired. So tired. I sigh deeply.  

“She’s alive!” one male voice says.

Silence reigns. Then a soft click as if a voice recorder were turned on. I’m used to that slight noise. I recognize it when one clicks on.

“Give her space,” says another.

Hands are on my throat, both wrists, and I think both ankles, feeling for a pulse.

“Good! She’s going to be all right,” came from the first doctor.

They seem to have lowered their masks to their necks and have earth noses and earth mouths. A hubbub of noises starts up. Something metal is pushed aside. A drawer shuts. Water is running. Someone peels off plastic gloves with a snap. Drops them into a receptacle. But I don’t hear grandma again.

“Five minutes and 33 seconds that was,” came from a female singsong voice.

“What was?” That was from the man with the familiar shoulders who has just come rushing into the operating room, summoned, it seems. He comes over to me.

“That’s how long she was . . . uh . . . not alive,” the female voice said. 

“Charmaine . . . Charmaine, my darling, my love!” He didn’t make a big to-do about things. Maybe I just heard these words through his face. His eyes. But mine were still closed. In any case, I felt him saying these words. Just to me.

#

So, that’s what dying is like, I think. But I suppose I have to fix all those things . . . all those things that are wrong, to see the bright light. I must see Molly Mae.

I speak her name.

“Who is Molly Mae?” a second female voice asked.

“She . . . she . . .”

“Please, don’t make her talk. Let her rest.” That was the guy who kissed me and who called me his darling. He is holding my hand, kisses it, and holds it against his jaw. He needs a shave. He’s been here a long time.

A lab technician comes in. I can tell what he is by what he says.

“Negative.” He passes someone a paper. It crackles on contact with the other’s hand.

“Wonderful! A major surgery and resuscitation and you’re going to be all right!”

“Will I?” I ask.

“Yes, you are. Your husband is right here beside you, and your mother. They’ve been here in the waiting room all this time, waiting for you to come through this.”

“But I wasn’t here.”

“Then where were you, Mrs. Van Sinderen?”

“I . . . I was almost to Hawaii, I think, but I went down in a whirlpool and didn’t breathe anymore.”

I know the doctors are not looking at each other, questioning my words, but each one is posing as if expecting the other to look at him to question my words. These guys stand on a mountain of egoism or perhaps of hubris. But they are the best in the world. They can work miracles.

“How did you get there?” Number one asks.

“Oh . . . I was just there, sort of floated there, I think. Couldn’t land, caught up in that . . . But I died before I went there.”

“How do you know you . . . died?”

“I bumped into a guy who said he’d seen a ghost. Two med students, I think they were. One called Drink or something like that. Drink or Break. But now I recall his name had two syllables. Drinker? Silly name.”

In sotto voce one doctor says to another, “We’ll find those guys and hear what they have to say.”

“Doctors, isn’t that enough for now?” That is my husband Roger’s voice. Roger with the familiar shoulders. “Let her rest.”

But I wonder why I cannot remember Roger the same way I remember my parents and others from my childhood. Because I didn’t know him then? During my childhood? Was that it? And perhaps the first memory to fade away? That’s something to think about.

My husband says, “When she’s completely recovered from all this, I’m sure she’ll be only too happy to write the whole story for you.” He gives my hand a soft squeeze.

My eyes open wider. I see them all. Three busy nurses, one of them male, keeping an eye on me. The lab man still there almost transfixed. My mother Anna who gives me a kiss as if nothing unusual has happened, for this is Charmie, always doing the unusual. But she hugs me a clinging hug.

“Why do I feel so tired and sore?” I ask, holding on to my Mother’s hand.

The head doctor takes a stance. “My dear Charmaine Van Sinderen! You’ve had a burst appendix. We fixed that this morning, but then your heart gave out.”

I interrupt. “This morning?”

“Yes, that surgery happened this morning. The heart gave out right after.”

“What is it now, night? It was night just minutes ago. Where I was.”

“No, it’s only half past three in the afternoon. You were resuscitated. We beat on you for five minutes and . . . it just wasn’t your time to go.”

I try to adjust the top of my gown and find it loose, my arms free but needing a little help. A nurse comes to assist me.

The doctor continues. “You’re still with us.”

He pulls my ear a mite, and then adds “Now you’re going into Coronary Care for a short period of time with nurses around the clock. But that surgery on your appendix will take some time to heal. But rest assured all of us are on call at any time. I don’t think you’ll need us, but nurse Sandy is going to order you a nice bowl of soup right away.”

I reached for this doctor’s hand, too full of gratitude to talk, and then shook hands with everyone else in the room, including the maintenance crew who had come to strip and clean the place, ending with my hand in both of Roger’s hands. I began to remember him more as the minutes passed.

He walked beside my gurney and held my hand. Tight. I looked into his blue eyes and at his red curly hair and recalled the day I met him. He gave me the only A in the class. And now, in this fresh gown with different doodads on it, purple this time, I was already feeling a new story—a hazy one at the moment, just one line of thought—one about Roger’s sensing something pass by him, smaller than he, right after I died—when we didn’t connect. How did he realize that anything was passing by?