Young Writers Society

Help

Adrian walk into the lobby. Theres Harley, the nice young male nurse, watching the Packers Seahawks game, with a dozen bewildered, confused elderly folks onlooking. Scratching their heads. Ready for the day to end. Ready for their lives to end.

“Let’s go pack!” Harley says. He is a little startled to see another young man like himself there on a Sunday, unpaid.

“Aaron Rodgers went to Chico you know?” Harley states.

“Butte. Its a community college right near Chico, though. Went to Cal, too,” Adrian quickly shoots back.

“Oh yeah, Chico, too, though..”

“Oh yeah…” Adrian knows he is wrong but he let’s him think he is right. Anything for Harley to treat his poor grandma with special care.

Adrian peaks his head in, cautiously, to his grandma Elizabeth’s room. He always calls her Nanny, though.

“Please god help me,” she pleads.

A nurse was attempting to put her pants on.

“Jesus Christ” he mutters in disgusted worry. “ I mean.. Sorry, I’m his grandson. I’ll come back in a minute…

Grandma , everything is ok. Everything is gong to be ok.”

“No it’s not,” she replies.

Adrian slouches in a chair submerged in a lobby with old, smelly people.

“Is that guy good?” John, a long time resident, points at the amateur guitar player hired for the day, who would soon end up at a place something like this one.

“I don’t know , I haven’t heard him yet” Adrian replies.

“Well, if he’s not we’ll get rid of him. Sorry I’m crazy,” he says cynically.

“Aren’t we all?”

John laughs in confirmation, like I was his pupil of life and I understood something the rest of the class didn’t, and strolls away.

Adrian brings his Nanny her old peace march magazine and photos, which he know she is proud of, and sticks her seldom used glasses on her face. They are dusty and stuffed in her bedside drawer, by a nurse who would never ask if she wants to read. She squints and gazes at an old picture of herself, letting her eyes recalibrate like an old camera. The photos only makes her think of her current, worn out self.

“My hair is white now”, she says sadly.

“My hair is going to be white one day, too. That’s how life is..” Arian returns.

“Your hair will be white. I should be the one saying that to you....”

“You just did.”

They stare at each other.

“Help me....help me!” Her hands are really shaking now. It is her favorite phrase to say now and every one in the nursing home knows her by it, like its her trademark. Her tourettic catchphrase.

“Does saying that really help you that much? Is it really that hard for you not to say it? You have roommates.” Adrian peers over at her two half alive roommates. He realizes that they don’t mind it. One of them is silently peering at him, with the look of introspective jealousy, of a mother who misses her children, who doesn’t get to see them anymore.

“Help me,” Nanny whispers. “Is it better if I say it like this? Can you not hear me now?”

“Not as much. Yeah. That’s perfect. That’s acceptable.”

“Help me...I’m..I’m helping.”

Adrian laughs and smiles at her ironic wordplay. He’s not sure if its intentional or unintentional. Probably the latter.

He lays at the foot of her nurse home bed, that has never felt another human other than her lay on it, like he used to when he was a kid. He pats her, and rub her just as she would do to comfort him during his hard adolescent struggles. Life comes at you fast, and before you know it, roles are reversed. He tears up watching her shaky hands stuff her favorite snack, popcorn, in her mouth. He thinks, in a position like hers full of pain and the horror of the unknown, how could she still enjoy something as simple as snacking on stale popcorn?

“I finally found out what I want to do with my life” Adrian suddenly says, unplanned.

She stares with eyes wide.

“I want to write a movie...or a show ...or something like that..”

She is silent. Thinking.

“Do you think I could do it?” He inquires.

“Sure ... you can do anything you want to do.”

“”Agghhahaga..thank you nanny.” His eyes brighten up as if her opinion was an astonishing present.

Adrian cognizes at that moment, that those simple words of encouragement would really help him, and motivate him to keep going.

“What is your dream? Help…what…what kind of movie?” She asks.

“I want to write something that people will laugh at, but deeply resonate with. A dramatic comedy. Don’t you think I’m funny?”

“I don’t know...” she chuckles.

Okay. Nanny, he thinks. Thanks for that zinger. A hopeful writer always wants to hear his writing is good, especially from loved ones.

“Help. I just said help, not help me”

“That’s a little better I guess..”

“Yes it is.”

“Did Chris move out yet?” She asks.

“No, but I found my new place”

“Oh… really?”

“Yeah, and guess where it is? It’s a block away from the Martinelli house where you used to live.”

She was forced to leave there, to relocate to her current place, not by others, but because she couldn’t handle living on her own anymore. One day she lost control and hope and tried to commit suicide by swallowing dozens of her medical prescription pills. Every benzo under the sun. After that swallow, she was never to live by herself again. Never to wash her own dishes. Never to go to the bathroom by herself. Never to take responsibility of anything other than breathing.

“Oh yeah... Martinelli.. I .. I don’t really remember..”

“I do,” he shouts too loud. They had a lot of special moments in that place. He yearns for her to remember. He wants to force that memory into her like the plastic tube that would soon be forced down her esophagus to feed her her last nutrients of life.

“Help... I can’t think of anything else to say…”

Adrian begins to get agitated, not in a mean type of way, but in a sad, helpless kind of way.

“Then don’t say anything. I can’t think of anything to say either, but you don’t see me saying help me.” I immediately feel guilty for saying that. We are in very different positions.

“Oh yeah....help. It helps me to say help.”

“That’s ironic,” he returns. Adrian always likes to point out something when its ironic. His whole life is one big ironic screenplay, in his eyes. Coincidence after coincidence. He also finds it ironic that when he visits her he is always so excited for her to see himself, Adrian, but she usually mistakes him for her son, Peter, who does absolutely nothing to help her at the end of her drama. That is a sad kind of situational irony. Old Petey is currently thousands of miles away, going on rock climbing adventures and flying planes. Always a gentleman to Adrian, but he can see why he is in his mid-50’s and still doesn’t have a wife. You treat a mother how you would treat your own wife, in many ways. In this case, he is just absent.

“Yes it is…..Does ironic help me?”

She is starting to lose touch. Adrian knows he will be leaving soon.

“Help! I don’t know what’s going to be wrong with me next.”

That makes his heart sink. His heart is a shipwreck, his heart beat the fast and loud ship goers desperately wishing they could avoid their untimely fate. Except it wasn’t Adrian’s untimely fate, it was his beloved Nanny’s. He has to leave, can’t stand it anymore. She is Titanic on its fated course to a dark place far beneath the sea . The only thing they both know, for sure, is that the inevitable sinking is coming her way. An unstoppable force that will tear up even the strongest human’s immoveable will. Adrian thinks to himself, does any one deserve this?

“I’m sleepy... I gotta go get some food or something..” he says. That is his go to line to get out of any Nanny situation unscathed. She always wants him fed.

“You better go then,” she whispers in agreement.

“Yeah…”

Adrian gives her a kiss on the forehead and is sure to tell her he loves her. He promises her he will be back soon, to set up a tv so she doesn’t have to stare at the wall all day. He knows in the back of his mind that she wouldn’t, and couldn’t, watch a television show. Maybe she can listen to it, though. Its the gesture that matters. He thinks, it might “help” her situation. He trots out of the room, and with no surprise at all, hears distant “help me-s”, drifting from her death room. She is already a ghost. She is already half way out. But, Adrian knows he has to keep moving forward with his life. She would be mad at him if he didn’t.

He stumbles out into a sunny January day, and walks past two elderly folks in a wheelchair taking a fat pipe rip out of a makeshift pipe. Definitely not tobacco. He smells the pot . Pot, not weed. Theres a difference. He gives them a “yeeee!”, and a peace sign, and they stare back at him like some stoned stones. “Damn, that’s what I’m gonna be doing when I’m that age. I’m gonna get stoned as hell until time withers me away, why not?”

He wishes nanny is out there with them, but also realize that she is past the point of anything being able to ease her pain. It’s her time. He blow a kiss towards the direction of her room and puts his hands together in prayer and does a corny little bow that he immediately deem pointless. He’s not sure if this was the last conversation he would have with her, but if it is he would have no regrets. He takes one last gaze in her direction, and then hops into his Ford Fusion, escaping the tragic world of an elderly home.