Hallways

Jack’s knee bobbled up and down as he tapped his heel on the floor. He was listening to the music playing quietly from the speaker above — U2’s “With or Without You — but his foot tapping was much too fast to coincide with the song. It was a nervous habit, and a bad one if he were to believe what he had always been told. Of course that had never kept him from doing it. At the moment he did not much care what anyone thought even if it did cause the receptionist’s desk to lightly shake. She gave him a look which he did not hesitate to return. If she has a problem with it she could tell maintenance to build sturdier floors. If ever there was a place for nervous foot tapping, this was it.

Jack moved his eyes back to the floor which is where they had been for most of the last forty-five minutes — or however long it was since he had arrived. The carpet was a dulling blue. Several dark splotches told him that he was far from the first to be sitting in this chair in the middle of the night with a cheap cup of coffee. Jack highly doubted that he would be the last either.

The phone call had come shortly after midnight. Jack was alone in his one room apartment and had just dozed off to sleep while watching Netflix. He answered absentmindedly but was able to confirm that he was, in fact, Jack Elliott — he knew at least that much. It took him a couple moments to figure out exactly what the woman on the other end of the line was saying.

“Sir, your mother Samantha Elliott has had a stroke…” The woman kept talking but Jack did not hear her.

“Which hospital is she at?” he finally interrupted.

“Good Samaritan on 10th.”

Jack hung up the phone, unsure if the woman was done. The car ride was a blur. He could not entirely remember the route he took to get to the hospital. Instead of the information his eyes were giving him, Jack’s mind was set on Mom.

There was a reason he hadn’t spoken to her in years.

At her age and her weight it was a miracle this hadn’t happened before.

As Jack sat in the waiting room tapping his knee, the one thing he couldn’t figure out was why —why — did he get the call? He had nothing to do with her. He wanted nothing to do with her. She didn’t take care of him when he was a kid and she had better not think he would take care of her now.

Jack replayed in his mind the last time he had spoken to her. She had called him over to haul her old refrigerator away. Begrudgingly he agreed to it without complaining. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and he did not have much else to do. As always the house had smelled of smoke and cheap beer. Some man that he had never met was sprawled on the couch watching baseball. The man never said a word to Jack. He looked plenty healthy enough to have done the chore on his own.

“You never call,” Mom had said accusingly. And that was when the fight started.

Jack would never understand why she would have expected him to call. There was nothing to say except the truth. The truth was she was a white-trash, lousy mom who never saw anything more in her two kids than a couple tax credits. The truth was he should have done what his little sister, Kelly, had done years ago and race out of town to never come back.

Well, he never got out of town — hence his sitting in the ER waiting room in his unwashed jeans and ripped up plaid shirt. But that was the last time he had answered when she called. If it had been her calling that night, he never would have answered it.

“Excuse me,” A woman’s voice said to his right.

Jack looked up to see a rather short, stubby woman in her fifties standing by the chair beside him. Her face was almost as round as the lenses of her glasses. With no make-up and her thin, graying hair out of place, Jack assumed she had experienced a similar nighttime interruption as he had.

“Yes?” Jack said, failing to keep the impatience off his voice.

“Would you happen to be Jack Elliott?”

“Yes?”

“Hi,” the woman said extending her hand, “My name is Sara Thompson, I’m the pastor of your mother’s church.”

Jack hesitantly shook her hand, which was surprisingly cold. He then noticed she wore a badge with her picture and the title “Clergy” underneath it.

“May I have a seat?” She asked.

Jack would rather she didn’t but he nodded anyway. It seemed to take the woman longer than he would have expected to sit. By the look of her face he guessed that her knees were hurting. When she was finally seated she let out a long sigh.

“I didn’t even realize Mom went to church — never did when we were growing up.”

“Oh, she comes off and on.”

“Just enough to feel good about herself, I’m sure.” Jack said as he resumed his knee tapping, “She ain’t no saint that’s for sure.”

The preacher seemed to ignore the comment. She sat silently beside him for a moment or two which gave Jack hope that she would leave him in peace. He realized that would not be the case when he saw out of the corner of his eye that she was looking right at him. Finally she spoke up and asked, “How are you doing, Jack?”

Jack let out a sigh as he leaned back and turned his attention to the ceiling. Unsurprisingly there were signs of leaking.

“I’m great,” was all he said.

“Your mom had a stroke, Jack.”

Jack looked at the preacher again. She was still staring right at him. There was boldness in her eyes he was only accustomed to seeing when he was about to enter a bar fight. Yet instead of a loosening rage, her eyes held something akin to compassion. Her words echoed again in his mind — “Your mom had a stroke.” The words forced him to remember and think about why he was sitting in this godforsaken place.

“I know,” Jack said, “I know.”

“So can I ask you again — how are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Jack realized he was starting to raise his voice. He took a moment to compose himself before asking, “How much do you know about my mom?”

“I’m sure not nearly as much as you do. So tell me, what do I need to know?”

The question caught Jack off guard. Where could he even begin? The late, drunken nights? The countless boyfriends who beat the shit out of him? How him and Kelly always had to sign each other’s papers for school because Mom would forget? How she had kicked him out of the house at 16 because she found a six pack in his room — despite the fact that he had gotten it from her flavor-of-the-month boyfriend? Jack assumed there was no sanitized, safe-for-church version of the story.

“Mom…” Jack searched for the words, “Well, she was Mom and I guess that’s the best I could say for her.”

The preacher nodded her head as if she understood exactly what he meant. She didn’t say anything in reply and yet kept looking at him as if she expected he had more to say when he didn’t. Jack searched for words as he noticed that Bono’s voice had been replaced with Steve Perry singing, “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Finally Jack said, “We haven’t spoken in five years so you might know her better now than I do. For some reason I’m still listed as her emergency contact — and so I’m here.”

“So you are,”

“And why are you here?” Jack realized his voice had again grown louder than he intended.

“I got a call from one of the chaplains. He knew I had been meeting with Sam and thought I might want to come down.”

“You’ve been meeting with Mom?”

“Once a month for not quite a year,” She said with a nod.

“What about?”

“A lot of things. Technically I can’t tell you — confidentiality — but I assume you know most of it.”

“At least she feels guilty,” Jack said with a certain amount of victory. He felt the way he typically would when he won an argument with one of his buddies.

“You’re mom has always felt guilty Jack. She probably would have been a much better mother if she didn’t. The problem is she never did anything with that guilt so unfortunately you and Kelly got the bad end of it. I am sorry, Jack.”

She would have been a much better mom if didn’t do a lot of the things she did. But all Jack said was, “That was all a long time ago.”

“And time doesn’t heal all wounds, no matter what they say.”

Jack once again bit his lip to keep himself from saying what he wanted to say — mind your own damn business. The preacher was truly being kind. He just wasn’t in the mood for kindness. Instead he said, “In a few minutes someone’s going to come out of that door there and tell me how Mom’s doing — and I can’t even tell you what I want them to say.”

Silence fell over them. Jack wasn’t sure why he had said it. He meant it but it wasn’t really this preacher’s business. He glanced to his right hesitantly to see if she was still looking at him. He quickly turned his face back to the floor when he saw that she was. Damn it — she hadn’t taken her eyes off him from the moment she walked in the room.

“You see that hallway over there,” She said pointing to the entrance of the waiting room. “I walk that hallway quite a bit — comes with the job. The first time I walked that hallway was 20 years ago. I hadn’t been in town two weeks when I got a call that one of the matriarchs of the church had taken a bad fall. I sat right here in this room, prayed with the family, and then stood back as they were given the news that she had broken her hip — a death sentence for a woman her age.

“A couple years later I was wheeled down that same hallway by my husband as I was about to deliver our baby girl. We had pretty much given up on the idea of having kids when, for whatever reason, the Lord decided to give us one. She’s at home right now studying for an AP test she has tomorrow.

“About five years ago, I walked down that hallway when I received the phone call that my husband had been in an accident. I sat in the corner over there until the doctor called me and Anna over to tell me I would never see my husband again and that she would never see her daddy again.”

A tear fell down her cheek as she continued to share. “Last year I walked down that hallway to visit a boy in the church who was battling leukemia. I prayed for him and he got better. He pitched for the church soft-ball team last month. Got a call from his mom yesterday that the cancer’s back. I imagine I’ll be walking that same hallway soon to pray for him once again.

“The point is, Jack — when I walk that hallway I never know what I’m going to find. Never know what room I’m going to enter or how I’m going to feel when I leave it. I’ve come to find I never really leave the hallways. None of us are ever certain what’s around the next corner, what’s going to happen, how we’re going to feel about it. We get moments of joy and life — others of death. You’re in the hallways, Jack. We all are. You’ll only find what you’re going to find when you get there.”

Jack noticed that his knee had stopped shaking before he noticed a tear forming in his eye. He could not remember the last time he had cried. He was not sure if the tear was for himself or for the preacher. Either way, he wiped it away quickly hoping that she wouldn’t notice.

“How long does the hallway go?” He asked.

She did not have time to answer before Jack once again heard his name. He looked up and noticed a doctor standing in the doorway. He got up and hesitated, looking to the preacher to see if she would be coming with him.

“Go ahead,” she said with a wave, “This is your place now, not mine. I’m here if you need me. Are you okay?”

“I guess I’ll know when I get there.”