Ghost Heartbeats

It’s raining. It’s always raining when I drive to the nursing home. 

The gutters in this town are full of pine needles, cigarette butts, Diet Coke cans, and sometimes shoes. When it doesn’t rain, townies float the river with Coors and sunburns. Everything knows how to float. 

In the corner of the lobby, a woman sits in a wheelchair hunched over a baby doll. She is cooing to it and stroking its plastic head lovingly. 

Other patients are slowly scooting themselves down the hallways using their socked-feet to move them along. Three nurses stand huddled at their station. One nurse is one folding stained white rags. The other two are whispering loudly about co-workers and patient medication. 

The receptionist strolls by me and I smile. She looks down at my sweatpants. They have USC, University of Southern California, written on them.

She points her red-nailed finger at my thighs.

“Jeans tomorrow,” she says disapprovingly, “and stop lying to yourself.”

I am standing just inside the locked door. You need a code to open it.

It is my first day back at the nursing home. I wasted all but one of my sick days to drive my little sister to college. 

After we carried all of the huge cardboard boxes into her new room she cried and asked me to stay. The way she looked at me haunted me the entire drive back.

The Christmas decorations, little paper reindeer above the doorways, are still up, even though Christmas was four days ago. We couldn’t have a tree because the patients might hurt themselves if they yanked on it or broke ornaments.

“Wow, you look terrible! Couldn’t handle the big city?” Roger’s teasing voice causes me to jump. 

His thinning ginger hair and janitor uniform come into the corner of my vision. I whirl around.

“I’ve only been gone a week,” I reply. "And you still look like Yosemite Sam.” 

His red hair and mustache have always reminded me of the cartoon character. At least, I like to tell him that.

He sticks out his tongue.

Roger says he hated me when we first met two years ago. But I know that our friendship thrives now, here at the nursing home.

He stops mopping and walks over to whisper in my ear. “You know you look good, right?” 

I roll my eyes and walk down the dingy, almost-dirty, beige hallway towards my boss’s office. 

I’m listening to the sounds of the nursing home. It always seemed to have a heartbeat, but now the bum-bum bum-bum echoes.

Maybe it is just the rolling wheels of a hospital bed or the slamming of a cabinet door in the kitchen. Whatever it is, it haunts me.

I watch my shoes as I walk. They squeak against Roger’s waxed floor.

I wonder if the nurses are right to stare at Roger and me. They gossip about the friendship growing between the balding janitor and the 19-year-old activity director. Sometimes, even I wonder what his intentions are.

As I walk, I glance into every room. Two years, and I still haven’t been able to train myself not to be curious.

In one room, a woman coughs violently into a Styrofoam cup. A nurse stands over her, rubbing her back. She slams the door when she sees me staring. The nurses think I am nosy. 

Another room has a TV playing telenovelas. I peek in. Ms. Joline is staring at the wall instead of the TV.

She gives me a small wave. Ms. Joline is one of the only patients who remembers me.

With some patients, I start over every day. I am always forced to be the young, new employee. I introduce myself over and over again. In a way, the feeling of starting over every day is refreshing. 

In the next room there is a man sitting in his wheelchair. He is completely naked. I hear a nurse over the speaker say Mr. Jones has taken his clothes off again. Nurse Jackson, please report to room 301. 

The room at the end of the hallway holds a single, empty bed. It smells fresher than the others. The tightly pulled sheets look recent. My heart drops as I realize that someone has just died.

Tomorrow, maybe even tonight, a new patient will be moved in. Sometimes I think about ghosts. Maybe some patients are stuck here, even after death, forced to roam the halls unnoticed and empty. 

My boss’s office is across from the game room. I walk in without knocking.

“There she is!” Beth yells. “How was the trip?”

“Fine,” I say, hugging her.

She hands me the schedule for January.

“It’s blank for you to fill up, except for the monthly birthday party and the fishing trip,” she says.

I thank her and grab a Snickers bar from her mini fridge. I know she has put them there for me. She knows I like them frozen. 

I take the blank schedule into the game room and start filling in activities. Bingo on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Wheelchair Jazzercise and collaging on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Local musician concerts on Saturdays. Church service on Sundays. 

Because it is Friday, I call the usual violinist and ask him to come in tomorrow night.

Beth pops her head into the game room. “Can you go sit with Mr. Charles?” she asks.

I nod, and she smiles and walks back into her office. My stomach clenches. 

Mr. Charles lives on the bottom floor. He is in such pain that his body has folded in on itself. His arms are bent to his chest. His mouth is disfigured into a constant worried circle. His neck is turned to an impossible angle. 

But his appearance is not what scares me.

Mr. Charles lives on the bottom floor with the few other patients who don’t notice his screaming. 

The bottom floor patients are spirits. Their wheelchairs seem to be filled with air rather than bodies. Their existence gives “ghosts” a new definition. 

You can hear Mr. Charles’s screams and wails from the second flight of stairs. They sound hollow and hopeless. 

The nurses say pain medication doesn’t affect him the way it needs to. The amount his body can handle is never enough to stop the pain. 

They’ve tried keeping a nurse in his room constantly. They’ve tried wheeling a TV into his room and playing his favorite movies for comfort. Nothing helps.

The only time they’ve ever seen a family member is when the doctor tried upping the amount of pain medication he takes daily.

He didn’t scream because he was too doped up to do things like keep his eyes open or eat. 

His son came to change the dosage. He said the amount was inhumane. 

I remember what Thersea told me the first and only other time I have ever visited Mr. Charles. “He can’t hurt you, honey, not all folded up like that.”

I wasn’t scared of his intentions. I was scared of making his pain worse. 

When I visited him for the first time, I just sat. I was too afraid to hold his hand. So, I tried to make sure he could see that I was there.

No matter what I did, his yells only stopped for him to take a breath. At times I knew he was attempting to say words. When I didn’t understand he became angry and yelled more. 

Beth came to help me try and figure out what he was saying. After an hour or so, we left. We never could understand what he was trying to say. 

That night, she called and told me that she had gone back to his room. She had finally figured out what his mangled yells meant. 

He had wanted the nurses to put his pants on. He was only wearing a hospital gown. If a young woman was going to be spending time in his room, he wanted to look decent.

Beth wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with him. Patient confidentiality is one thing Beth doesn’t stretch for me. If I don’t have to know it, she doesn’t tell me.

She is my only chance at understanding the nursing home from the inside out. Still, she said she couldn’t give me patient information just because I wanted to know. As activity director, my knowledge of a patient’s disease wasn’t vital. 

I spent hours researching conditions he could be suffering from. I found articles on dementia, telling me how people would slowly lose their memories. 

I learned about sundowner’s syndrome, where people get more and more confused as the day goes on.

But I didn’t find anything concrete, nothing that sounded like it fit perfectly. After all, I couldn’t diagnose him myself.

Now, as I make my way down to the bottom floor, I still feel like an outsider. It’s like I’m some volunteer, who just comes in to do what she can and leaves without ever knowing what’s really going on. 

I have forgotten how animalistic his yells are, painful and rough, almost growling. I grimace as the raw, unforgiving sound rolls through the hallways. Fear oozes through my skin as sweat.

I pull To Kill a Mockingbird out of my bag just as I enter his room. Mr. Charles screams loudly as I pull a chair next to his bed.

His eyes lock with mine and he howls. He is trying to speak. His speech and voice have worsened over the short week I have been gone.

I open the book and begin to read aloud. He wails for an entire chapter.

At some points, he is so loud that I know he cannot hear my voice anymore. After nine pages, I stop. I am afraid of causing him more distress.

“I’ll leave,” I whisper, the quietest thing in the room.

Mr. Charles yelps, and I remember my sister’s face as I walked out of her dorm room.

She is sixteen, graduated early, and somehow, she seems like the older sibling. I imagine what she is doing right now.

Maybe studying. Maybe lining her eyes in gray for her first college party. Maybe watching a movie and sharing takeout with her roommate.

I walk back up the stairs through the lobby. I keep going until I’m out the door. I go to the burger place across the street.

I don’t come back after my lunch break.

I come in late the next day. That morning, I called Beth to tell her I have not been feeling well. It’s true, for the most part.

She reminds me that I’ve used my last sick day. She tells me I better start wearing a mask if I keep catching colds from the patients.

Thunder cracks and rain pounds on me as I struggle to open the nursing home door. I punch the code into the keypad, yet the door doesn’t budge.

The door has to be locked to avoid the possibility of mentally impaired patients leaving without supervision. It shouldn’t keep employees out, though.

I sigh angrily. My clothes and hair are soaked through and heavy.

Finally, the door opens from the inside. Roger peeks his head out.

“Sorry ma’am. Visiting hours don’t start until two. So I can’t let you in unless you work here. Since I didn’t see you here yesterday during the dinner shift, I assume you don’t,” he says.

“I get it,” I say sarcastically. “You changed the code and told everyone but me.”

Roger’s smile falls and he hesitates.

“I told you I was going to change it yesterday,” he finally says, hurt that I didn’t remember.

“It’s cold,” I plead.

“How’s your sister doing?”

The rain pours. 

“You’re just trying to distract me so I get wetter,” I answer.

“Have you thought about applying anywhere yourself? Harvard?”

“Now you’re just being mean,” I whisper.

“I remember what you said to me the first day you got here,” he says. “‘I’m just taking a year off, to get on my feet, to decide where I want to go.’” He quotes my words back to me.

Embarrassed for being embarrassed, I drop my eyes to his feet. He has me trapped.

I can hardly remember the girl who told Roger her big elaborate plan that day.

I remember Roger calling me brave. He said I had guts to work in a place like this. Especially while all my friends went off to live their lives. 

Roger continues, “What happened to ‘a year’? It’s been close to three! You can’t honestly think this is the best place for you to be spending your life.”

My face goes hot. I’m on fire, and the rain cannot put me out. 

“Move!” I yell.

Roger speaks quietly. “You were moving so fast and had so much going for you. Now it’s like you want to be stuck.”

Thunder growls menacingly. Roger steps back enough that I can walk into the lobby.

One of the nurses sees my drenched clothing. She rolls her eyes and points to the stack of towels at her station.

I use one to dry off, ignoring Roger’s comments until he gets the hint and sulks away to disinfect something.

My parents met when they were sophomores at USC. My dad was a business major, and my mom studied painting.

Their views of the world were so different. My mother was a pessimist at heart, believing nothing good would ever happen. My father was a machine, never stopping, always taking on more.

It was what they call “love at first fight.”

Now, dad has articles about his accounting firm in the L.A. Times. Mom sold a $4,000 painting last week.

When I was growing up, all they talked about was how much I was going to love USC. How I would walk onto campus, and it would just feel right. 

I spent my senior year in the backseats of townie boys’ trucks. Or floating the river in big yellow tubes with girls who’d dropped out as juniors.

My best friend graduated two years before me. She never left town. She got a job at the Dollar Tree and still works there now.

Mom and Dad hate that type of kid. The ones who linger, staying around with no real plan, until they’re suddenly married and having babies of their own. The ones who don’t know how to leave.

I think I wanted mom and dad to hate me too. 

The early decision deadline for USC came and went. I still hadn’t said a word about USC. My parents sat me down and asked to read my application essay. 

For months after I told them I never applied, they drowned me. Words poured out of their mouths like never-ending streams of water. “You can still apply regular decision,” were the only words I heard. 

Finally, I looked them in their big, successful eyes, and said, “I don’t want to be like you.” They cried.

That was it. 

“How are you feeling?” Beth asks when she finds me with my towel in the lobby.

“So much better,” I lie.

“The violin guy is here. What’s his name?” she asks.

“Jared,” I answer. “Who do we need to wheel up?”

“Everyone’s already in the game room waiting, but I thought we’d wheel Mr. Charles up. In his bed, of course.”

“Why?” I ask before thinking. After all, we’ve never brought him out before because of his pain.

Beth stares at me and sighs loudly.

She leans in. “You know he doesn’t have much time left. The nurses keep telling me that I can’t do anything. They say, ‘You and your little assistant need to do the work you’re supposed to do and stop stepping on everyone’s toes,’ but really I think they feel guilty. He’s going to die so soon, and they haven’t been able to bring him relief.”

“I’m not an assistant,” I say.

“That’s what I keep telling them,” she replies.

We glance at the nurse’s counter behind us. One of them glares at us. 

Beth snatches my hand. She pulls me down the stairwell towards Mr. Charles’s room.

“Hey, Mr. Charles!” Beth says brightly through his wails.

He seems more distant today. His eyes are clouded. Even his voice is less pointed, more gurgling. 

Beth begins pulling his bed out of the room. I push from the opposite end. My knuckles turn pale as his pain worsens with every bump.

When we arrive at the game room, everyone, including Jared and a few nurses, is waiting. We wheel Mr. Charles into the room. Jared grimaces. I am not the only coward.

“Well let’s get started,” Jared says through Mr. Charles’s screams.

Jared pulls out his violin, and begins playing a slow, loud country tune. As the music gets louder, Mr. Charles’s screams seem to slow.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. I see healthier residents staring at him, whispering under their breath. Suddenly, I am overwhelmed by anger.

They are lucky to be in the condition they are. They are lucky that their families visit weekly, or at all.

“Hey!” I hear someone whisper loudly from the hallway.

It’s Roger, standing outside the game room. He’s holding a paper cup full of Burger King fries.  

He knows they’re my favorite. He knows he stepped over the line. His jokes are my life raft.

I leave Mr. Charles’s side for a moment to walk into the hallway. Roger hands me the cup of fries.

“You’re such a softie,” I say, crunching on a fry.

Roger pulls out a leather wallet and flips it open. In one of the clear pockets is a picture of a woman with long, curly dark hair and a frown.

“My wife,” he says. “She left around the time you started working here. She took my daughter with her.”

He flips to another picture of a girl, probably about sixteen. She looks just like her mother.

I look at the picture, and then up to Roger’s crinkled eyes. He looks at his daughter in wonderment.

“You both have the same fire lit deep in your belly,” he says.

I bump his shoulder with mine, and he instantly becomes the Roger I know again.

“I was thinking I might apply to the University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA is close to my sister,” I tell him. 

Roger only smiles.

Inside the game room, Jared is playing hard. His violin belts out beautiful, concise notes. 

Mr. Charles yells even louder. Suddenly, the song ends. Just as it does, Mr. Charles becomes completely silent. 

The room is filled with sharp absence of sound. I am the only one who moves.

I run back into the game room, leaving Roger in the hallway, just as Jared begins the next song. 

Mr. Charles is safe and wide eyed. Relief floods my chest. 

After a few seconds, Mr. Charles starts to yell again. He takes a breath between each howl, but his sounds have changed. They are even more raw, scratchier, more pleading. 

I glance down at him and am startled to see tears flowing from his squinted eyes. All the months he’s spent screaming, he has never once cried. 

He is no longer yelping in pain, but now sobbing from the beauty of the music. Jared continues playing, but glances over to smile at Mr. Charles. 

The music flows into the hallway. When I look, Roger is smiling at me. 

Mr. Charles cries louder, but even the nurses aren’t bothered by his emotion. He’s finally out of that room. He’s finally among people who aren’t just with him to change the sheets or push buttons on the monitor next to his bed.

I reach out and take his hand.

Two months later Mr. Charles dies, and I quit my job.

I guess we were both invisible. We let a place like the nursing home mold us into ghosts that still had heartbeats. 

UCLA didn't accept me, but a daycare center thirty minutes away from my sister gave me a paid internship. 

My parents say I’m just doing the same thing in a different city. I think of it as starting over.

This is helping the new instead of the old. Both equally as important but so different. 

I hope Mr. Charles’s ghost haunts me for a bit. I think he would like L.A. 

Roger helps me pack up my stuff. I promise to visit often. We both know I won’t.

“Usually, people say ‘this is it’ when it’s time to say goodbye,” he says, leaning through the car window.

“Nothing is ending, Yosemite.” I say and pull out of the driveway.