The Lost Goodbye

‘He’s dying.’

Jo looked up at the lady in the wheelchair, one hand buried deep in Benny’s fur. It was so thick, a grassland of curling black hair. ‘Check his mouth,’ Ms. Darrow said with a slurp of her tea. Her chair squeaked and some tea splashed on the floor.

Jo let go of Benny. His big brown eyes followed her movements, questioning nothing. She pushed Benny’s food bowl towards him with her sneaker, filled with kibble and dashes of peanut butter. After a long moment of panting uncertainly by the bowl, he swung away and flopped down at Ms. Darrow’s feet.

Jo did a double take. The chair was now winged; a sumptuous, comfortable cream. Ms. Darrow’s feet rested on a soft footstool. 

Jo clutched her badge, dragging the lanyard around her neck. The string burned her nape. ‘See you,’ she said. Benny’s tail wriggled - not wagged, she noted. Ms. Darrow raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t forget to close the door,’ she said. Jo blinked - and a small fire crackled awake beside the old woman. ‘I hate getting up.’

*

When Jo jolted awake, her pillow was wet. She could still feel the tang of the dog’s leftover mess in her nose. The visit was by no means her worst yet, but there was something about the finality of the lady’s words, her deadpan statement about the dog’s impending death that made Jo turn back into her pillow and screw up her face to squeeze all the tears out.

Ms. Darrow, she thought. Ms. Darrow. I wonder where I dreamed that name from. She didn’t tell me.

A familiar feeling of frustration made itself known in her grinding teeth. She could not pinpoint when she’d begun traveling to other people’s dreams through her own, but she had done it enough times now to know that particular room, with the winged chair and sounds of slurped tea and Benny’s big, sad eyes - she would never go back again.

Pushing the remnants of the dream away, Jo slipped out of bed and padded through her flat. The toilet let out a satisfying roar when she flushed. Her teeth shone after a crisp brushing. The coffee machine whirred to life like clockwork.

Jo watched her hand reach for the coffee-pot. It went through the handle. She cried out, clutching the counter - and fell through.

A gasping Jo slammed her calves against the mattress and lay panting, staring at her low ceiling. 

She ran to the kitchen and switched the coffee machine on. It spluttered angrily, spewing hot water from a minuscule crack. A droplet hit her bare arm and she yelped.

Not dreaming anymore. Jo gingerly lifted the pot, well aware from past mishaps that the handle could break away. She watched its sellotaped edge moisten with steam from her old mug. 

She had never dreamed herself into two places during one sleep. Jo ran her palm over her eyes, feeling fine lines around her eyes. A dry patch of skin grazed her fingertips and she found herself recalling the dog’s soft, thick fur. It had felt so real...like she had actually been there, right in that room with the woman and the magic chair and the fire Jo had willed into existence for their comfort.

As if to answer her, a sharp bark - 

Jo whipped around. There was no one there, but a stray sneaker quivered on the floor. Its ends glimmered with saliva. 

Jo looked down at her own feet. One was encased in the sneaker’s twin. A wave of wooziness overcame her, and when she looked up again, she was staring into Benny’s big brown eyes.

Salt stung her nose. Seagulls circled her head, on the lookout for any food she had about her person. Jo raised a hand to shade her eyes, but there was no one for miles around, just her and Benny. The sea roared and fell beside them, but the water was clear, glimmering in the sunlight.

Benny gently licked her hand. ‘Pet him,’ a quavery voice urged. Jo squinted into the sea - a moment later, the old woman emerged from the surf. She was hunched and shrivelled. Wet sand dripped like loosening skin from her twisted limbs.

‘He wants to say goodbye. Pet him.’

Jo screamed, backed away and tripped over Benny. The moment Jo’s head hit the ground, she woke up in bed again, wet with grit and terror. Her fist was clenched around something slimy.

The sand. What was happening? At no point in her REM-travails had Jo ever been able to physically experience the dreams, let alone bring back a souvenir. She gingerly opened her palm. It was stained with blood. 

Jo reared back in horror, checking herself all over. No cuts, no wounds - nothing on the seat of her pants. She examined her hand more closely: the blood had splattered in so many little dots that it had appeared at first glance like a one large smear. Now she could see minuscule flecks lined with something grey, almost viscous as she spread her fingers apart.

‘Can you believe they get it too?’ Jo’s heart slammed into her chest. Ms. Darrow - no, I don’t know if that’s her name-  sat next to Jo. The old woman looked younger than she had on the beach, but there was a strange translucent air about her, like she would evaporate into wisps of air if Jo touched her.

So, Jo didn’t. ‘I’m awake,’ she told her. ‘You’re not allowed to visit me if I’m not asleep.’ ‘Says who?’ the woman asked, arching an eyebrow. ‘Look around you.’ And sure enough, they were no longer in Jo’s bedroom. Instead, Jo found herself clutching at the railing of a vast barge as they sailed down a sinuous green river. The sky was dull-grey; they were the only ones on the boat.

Jo glanced into the river. Its glittering surface, coiling like a slow serpent’s scales, mesmerized her. She was dazed, unable to look away and dipping a careless hand into its oily depths....

A silvery snout rose and clamped its ghost-teeth around her hand. 

‘Let me go!’ Jo cried, utterly terrified. A tinny whine rose from the water, growing into a whistling shriek that matched hers. ‘Let me go, let me GO!’

‘Pet him! PET HIM!’ The old woman roared back. Her shoulders were splitting open; the steel arms of a wheelchair shone through in a mess of torn tendons. The woman’s head cracked sideways.

Jo could feel her toenails scrabble for the rough wood of the barge floor. Splinters sliced through her soles, drawing blood. ‘Who are you?’ she screamed back at the woman. ‘What do you want?’

‘PET HIM!’

‘NO!’

Jaws dragged Jo over the edge. Thick, syrupy water entered her nose, mouth, lungs - and with a twist of her swollen tongue, Jo found herself ripping her bedsheets as she fought the dream off. Even as she heaved for air, sweat-soaked in her nightgown, she could feel it sluice through her veins, forcing its way around every vital cortex in her head.

Darrow.

Suddenly, Jo leapt out of bed. Or at least she tried - she slipped sideways onto the floor with an enormous crash. At once, two nursing assistants burst into the room. ‘Ms. Nesbitt!’ 

‘I’m fine,’ Jo said. ‘Get my chair.’

The younger assistant of the two, a sweet boy in pink scrubs, immediately scrambled to help her. His colleague stopped him. ‘And where do you think you’re going, Joanna?’

Jo had never liked this straightlaced bitch. ‘Is the service not today?’ she asked coldly.

Both assistants stared. ‘You knew him?’ the boy asked. Jo remembered now that he was quite new, barely a month in her godforsaken nursing home. 

‘I did.’

‘Joanna - well - I’m glad you’re feeling better, but are you sure?’ The other assistant asked, chagrined. ‘I know you were close, and this could upset - you already fell out of bed now -’

‘Shut the fuck up and take me.’ It was the most lucid command she had issued in a long time. Since she had shut herself away, away from the diagnosis and its reminder of how death stalked the purest and freshest souls, regardless of their youth.

The boy, watching this interaction, found his voice. ‘We should,’ he said firmly to his supervisor. She sighed. They wheeled Jo out of her room. As it rattled along, Jo felt the pain from her fall seep into her bones but her mind had never been clearer.

The residents of the Darrow Convalescent Home shuffled in serene hordes out of the way as the nursing assistants rushed the chair through its corridors. They zipped by a large pink memorial poster board with a picture of a young man, barely in his twenty-fifth year. He was dressed in pink scrubs, his eyes big and a limpid brown. In his hand, he held a peanut butter sandwich and his mouth was open, tongue thrust out jocularly to show a chewed-up mess.

Benny Coleman, 1995-2021. 

Junior Nursing Assistant at Darrow Convalescent Home for the Elderly and Disabled.

Son, brother, employee and friend.

“How lucky we are to have someone that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

Even Jo knew that the Home had not bothered to come up with an original epitaph. She thought about how he would giggle if he could see it.  

‘You know,’ Jo told her own young assistant. ‘He always wanted me to make his favorite PB&J. Even when my hands kept getting butter on them instead of the bread.’ The nurse smiled at her. 

'And coffee,' said Jo. 'Always in that old pot. He broke it but I was never angry.'

Once more, Jo recalled how affectionate she’d been towards the dog in the dream, how warmly she had hugged; how she’d scritched it thoroughly between the ears. A tear ran down her cheek but she knew she’d expressed her penultimate farewell. All she needed to attend was the final send-off

The older nurse timidly ventured a question, as though scared Jo would attack from the wheelchair. By now, Jo felt almost kindly towards her.

‘What made you come to - what made you change your mind?’

‘Didn't really want to,’ Jo responded, though her mind had begun to take flight again. ‘I went away for a bit but I got lost. I needed to chase myself down to say goodbye.'