The Bork Of Christmas

“Ma’am, animals are not allowed in the hospital.”

I stopped, and stared at the nurse. She was coming out of my son’s room, and she looked very upset. Which considering Jeffry had been in a persistent vegetative state for a week would normally alarm me. Except she was obviously not upset at something that had happened, but upset at me. Personally.

I stopped. I’d been home, to shower and change clothes for the first time in two days, and Bill had gone to work for a day just to make sure nothing was on fire there. Why was the nurse mad at me? She was middle aged, with fading blond hair, wearing scrubs with a candy cane pattern and her name tag, unbelievably, read Karen.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. I craned my neck around her, as she stood at the door, and saw Jeffrey was still as he had been, pale, with bandages on his head, instead of his shock of brown hair in perpetual disarray. All the machines around him were beeping as they’d been. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Your dog,” Karen, the nurse said, with withering disdain. “Your dog was here with your son while you were gone.”

“We don’t have a dog!” If I could unpack it there would be a lot more to say to that. We’d always meant to have a dog, but we’d moved so much it had never happened. Last Christmas, we’d given fourteen-year-old Jeffrey a stuffed spaniel doll, for the do he’d always wanted but we’d never given him.

Nurse Karen gave me a dubious look, like she knew I really had a dog I wasn’t admitting to, and probably was secreting him into the hospital in the pocket of my jacket. “There was a dog on your son’s bed,” she said. “A brown and white spaniel.”

I frowned at her. “Then I think you have a problem in the hospital.” And then I walked around her to the bed.

The room was very silent, except for the electronic bleeps and gurgles of the equipment connected to Jeffrey. And my heart squeezed.

He looked so pale and so still. I remembered the times when he was little and I couldn’t wait till he was asleep. All the tiptoeing around, trying not to wake him up. And now I’d give anything to see him wake up and yell at me.

Bill must have come in while I was staring, because he said, behind me, “You know what I’d like most of all?”

I turned my head. “For him to wake up and yell at us?”

“No,” he said. “Well, yes, but… If it must be like this…” He swallowed so hard I heard it. “If he must die, then I would like to have a do over. To have more time. If all the time we were going to have Jeffrey was fourteen years and no more, I’d like to have worked less. To have spent more time with him. Playing trains when he was little. Going for walks. Just… hanging out.”

I stepped back to lean into him. “I know what you mean, but if you’d done that we wouldn’t have been able to provide for him. He wouldn’t have had all the toys he had. We wouldn’t have lived in the kind of house we did. He wouldn’t have had the friends he had–” I paused.

“Which means he wouldn’t have been in the car accident, with his friends’ mom driving, and the car packed with teens?”

I sighed. “We can’t do that. We can’t go back and redo things. There would have been other problems and other regrets if we’d done that.” Because I didn’t know what else to do, I walked to the bed, and started arranging the thin, nasty-feeling blanket over my son. And paused. “There’s … dog hair on this blanket.”

Bill blinked at me. “That’s funny. As I was leaving, I thought I saw a dog. Like…. I thought I saw Fuzzy, come to life. I swear he passed me in the hall but when I turned around he wasn’t there.” He made a sound that was a laugh, except there was no joy at all in it. “If I had only one wish, I’d go back in time, not moved the last two times and gotten Jeffrey a dog when he was nine, back in Elmheim, where we had the fenced backyard.”

“I don’t think we can wish for time travel,” I said. “And I don’t think Fuzzy took living form to come visit Jeffrey.”

“No. Probably not.” He swallowed again. “You know, the docs say we should let him go. Just turn off the machines.”

“I know,” I said. “Perhaps we can wait just one more day. Just past tomorrow. Past Christmas day.”

Bill sighed. I knew why. Every day Jeffrey stayed connected, it meant another million dollars or so. If the health insurance didn’t pay out for the days above doctor recommendation, we’d be paying for it the rest of our lives.

Bill squeezed my shoulder, as though he could hear my thoughts. “What else are we going to spend the money on? I know we wanted many, but we only ever had Jeffrey. He’s all we have.”

Everyone who has had a loved one in the hospital, struggling between life and death, knows the next day and a half. Which is a good thing, because I don’t think I could tell you what happened. I must have eaten, because I don’t remember being hungry. And I probably dozed in the uncomfortable straight backed chairs of the waiting room. I almost for sure walked around, because I’d catch myself doing it, now and then.

Bill and I didn’t talk. Not even when we were together. There was nothing to say. We were both too busy wishing for the impossible.

I found myself on Christmas day sitting at one of the grey formica tables, in the cafeteria. There was a little paper Christmas tree in the middle of the table. I had a half-filled coffee cup between my hands. I had no memory of having drank any coffee.

It was years since I last prayed. I’d been taught to pray as a little kid, but then my teenage doubts and adult skepticism had intruded. I still loved the story of the child who was God in the flesh, born in an humble stable. I loved the shepherds and the ox and all the little sheep. But I hadn’t believed enough to address a creator, or to ask for anything.

But now I found myself wondering where Jeffrey would go if he died. If there was something else. He was just a kid. He was quite likely to go right if they told him to go left, to go up fi they told him to go down. Simply because he was trying to be himself and he didn’t know what that was except “not what people tell me to be.” And perhaps that’s what I’d done for so long. Perhaps there was nothing there to ask help from. But if there was–

One thing was for sure. We were past what we could ask of medicine and science. The doctor had told us Jeffrey would die. Was dead already, except for the machines breathing for him.

I looked up feeling stupid, staring at the ceiling of the cafeteria. It was a stupid textured popcorn ceiling of seventies vintage, and looking grey and dingy, but I thought up at it, anyway, “God, if you’re up there, give us time. Time to see Jeffrey grown up. Time to get to know him. Time to–” I sighed. “We’ll get him a dog. We’ll spend time with him. We’ll try to give him all the connections we haven’t before. I promise. We’ll change our way of life. We only have one child, but we’ll make space for him in our lives, anyway.”

There was no sound of trumpets, no big response. Well, did I expect one?

The coffee in the cup was cold, but I drank it anyway. We only had twelve hours with Jeffrey, they were supposed to come and disconnect him early morning. I’d go back and watch him sleep, like I used to do when he was a baby.

As I neared the room, I heard a snuffle, and hope shot through me. Jeffrey had woken up!

I walked into the room and stopped, stock still. On the bed was a brown and white spaniel. He was doing that thing that dogs do with their butts when they’re happy. You know what I mean. He was wagging his whole butt not just his tail. And he kept nudging Jeffrey’s hand, and doing it again. Every time he nudged Jeffrey’s hand he must have disturbed some sensor, because something beeped angrily.

I stopped, stuck between removing the dog before he hurt Jeffrey and shock the dog was there at all.

“I said, no dogs in the hospital,” Karen said behind me.

I turned back “It’s not our dog.”

“Then why is he here?”

“I don’t know. You tell me why–” I stopped because she looked like she was in utter shock, mouth half open, staring. I turned back. The dog was gone.

He hadn’t gone past us, but he was gone. I rushed to the bed, started straightening the covers, as though the dog could be hidden under them.

“Mom?” Jeffrey said. I looked up. He was blinking and looked pretty groggy. His voice sounded awful too, raspy and hoarse.

“Yeah,” I said. “Jeffrey. You’re awake Jeffrey.”

He gave me a dopey smile. “I dreamed Fuzzy and I were playing on this big backyard.” Then he tried to look serious. “I mean, Fuzzy was a real dog and we were playing and–“

I nodded. I couldn’t speak.

It was a long road back. A year of physical therapy and treatment.

And then one day coming out of a physical therapy appointment, there was a dog waiting by our SUV in the parking lot. He was…. I suppose a chocolate and white spaniel. Except he was so dirty we thought he was yellow and black.

We’d tried really. I mean, we weren’t going to steal someone’s dog. We took him home and washed him three times. In doggy shampoo once, twice in dawn, and then, on the advice of our vet, had rubbed corn starch into his fur and brushed it out again and again and again.

When it was done, yeah, he was a purebred and a youngish dog, probably not fully out of puppyhood. He acted like he belonged to Jeffrey too.

We put up posters, and called all the sites that monitor lost pets. And we had him scanned but he didn’t have a chip. Oh, and he acted like he belonged to Jeffrey.

Well…. Our condo in an high rise in Denver Colorado was no place for a dog. But the dog was helping Jeffrey more than all the therapies. So we looked for a house in the suburbs, one with a fenced yard.

The Christmas two years after Jeffrey had woken up, you could barely tell he’d ever been in the accident. I was cooking Christmas dinner and looking out the kitchen window, at Jeffrey and Fuzzy in the backyard.

“He looks exactly like the dog in the hospital,” Bill said.

“He does?” I said. Then “I mean, he does, but when did you see him?”

“He came to get me in the cafeteria when Jeffrey woke up. He stood there bork, bork, borking, like Fuzzy does when he wants attention.” We’d early on decided that Fuzzy didn’t bark, he borked. It was very clear that was the sound he made. “And he wouldn’t let anyone catch him till I followed him. But then he disappeared at the door to the room.”

I frowned. “Do you think Fuzzy traveled back in time to wake Jeffrey? Is that what you’re saying?”

He grinned. “No. Or perhaps yes. I don’t know. Perhaps dogs travel outside time. I mean, we never figured out how Fuzzy found us, or where he came from. Perhaps–“

“Perhaps he came to give us more time. Real time with our son?”

Bill put his arm around my shoulders, which impaired my ability to drain the potatoes, but I wasn’t going to complain.

“Perhaps. Perhaps he came to bork up at us and give us a lot more Christmases.”

Outside, Fuzzy was dancing in front of Jeffrey, doing the whole butt waggle while Jeffrey held Fuzzy’s toy cow up, then threw it.

Fuzzy ran after it, then caught it and tossed it in the air ecstatically. Then turned and bork bork borked in joy, before picking up the cow and bringing it to Jeffrey and dancing in front of him begging him to throw it.

Where does dog start and angel end. I was told angel meant messenger. And Fuzzy was surely a messenger. We’d got the best miracle of all. We had time. And this time we would not waste it.

*Sorry this so late. It is part of the Winter Fundraiser.

I’’m running a mid winter fundraiser for the blog. You know why.

There’s a Give Send Go for the Winter Fundraiser and well, if you need anything else including a snail mail address, please go here.

But I don’t like to ask for money without giving something back.

It is also my Christmas gift to you. I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve been doing readings and short stories, to feel I’m giving something back for my Winter fundraiser. (There will be dog story either tonight or tomorrow. Was going to be tonight, but my kid informed me he’s taking me to a movie this afternoon, so I guess not? Anyway, since we’ve been having a furry Christmas season, this one will be The Bork of Christmas. But yesterday one of you contacted me asking for a link to the reading I did for my substack subscribers (I intend to do three a month for paid, one for free. In case I haven’t got around to doing chapters, because well… maybe next year will be better? I’ll try at least. Anyway, right now the ones out are all free and I see no reason not to share the links here. So, hold up.

READINGS:

The Littlest Nightmare.

Tic Toc.

Call the Mom Squad

Short stories, so far:

Claws For Christmas

A Squirrel for Christmas

The Chinchilla Of Hope.)

I’ll post something tomorrow, but not a full post. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and happy first day of Hanukah. May your day be happy and full of love. -SAH)