A Child's Gift

“Is she holding the plastic cow again?”

“Looks like it.”

“I guess we’ll just leave her be.”

It’s not a cow. It’s a bull. Jeffrey gave it to me when he was three, fifty-eight years ago. If I hold onto it and keep my eyes closed, the nurses leave me alone. I like to be left alone with my thoughts, or alone to not think at all. Meditation is a blissful way to pass time.

I ended up here on the geriatric ward three days ago after the neighbor’s had police to do a wellness check on me. Guess they noticed the front room curtains hadn’t been opened and the plants in my flowerbeds hadn’t been watered. Good thing they did, I suppose. I’d been laying on the kitchen floor for two days when they found me. Broke my hip falling off the step ladder when I was getting a bag of cat food down from a shelf in the pantry. I couldn’t move enough to call anyone.

I’ve kept the bull in my purse all these years as a reminder of Jeffrey, his innocence, and happier times. He gave it to me when I visited him in the hospital. We had a lovely afternoon together when his parents asked me to be with him while they had meetings with several specialists about his condition. Just before I left him that day, Jeffrey pressed the bull, his favorite barn animal, in my hand and asked me to take care of it for him. I didn’t have a chance to bring the bull back for another visit.

Nothing was the same in our family after Jeffrey died. His mom, my sister, never overcame the grief of losing him. She drank herself to death twenty years later, by which time her husband and daughter were living apart from her. I’ve never seen them since her funeral.

“Ann! Oh my gosh, Ann! How are you doing?”

It’s Jenna, I’d know her soft voice anywhere.

“I stopped by your house with some baking and Mrs. Snyder said you were here. What happened?”

Jenna was heaven-sent to my life. She was once my most promising piano student and is now a beautiful friend. By the time she leaves the hospital she’s informed me – I never have to ask - that she will bring Whiskers to her place and either she or her son and daughter check in on my home daily. Essentially, everything that I was trying not to worry about while laying in this bed will be taken care of by my dear Jenna and her family.

It’s hard sometimes, never having married or had children of my own. Emily was my only sibling. Jenna means the world to me. She's the daughter I wish I'd had. I will sleep well tonight, despite the discomfort and unfamiliar hospital sounds, knowing that everything is in her capable hands now.

A bright, golden light is warming me. It feels like the sun shining through the window across from my bed. I can’t have been asleep that long, have I? I don’t want to open my eyes. I see a small figure up ahead, like a child kneeling on the ground. Is this a dream?

“Auntie Ann! Come!”

The night nurse sees that the plastic cow has slipped from Ann’s hand and is laying beside her pillow. She gently places it on the side table, relieved to see her sleeping so peacefully. She shuts off the overbed light and silently leaves the room.

The light in Ann’s dream is still bright. There is another figure now, a woman standing beside the child and waving.

“Ann, come this way.”

When the morning nurse enters the room, she immediately knows that Ann has passed. “God Bless her dear soul,” she affirms while covering her head with the blanket.

There is an envelope leaning against Ann’s purse in the chair beside the bed. “Jenna” and a phone number is neatly printed on it.

When Jenna gets a call from the hospital later that morning, she knows that the envelope contains all the details to tend to Ann’s affairs, as they had discussed some months ago. Ann was eighty-six after all and knew she would need an executor sometime in the foreseeable future. Jenna was the obvious choice, just as she is Ann's choice to inherit her home and assets, something Jenna won’t expect at all.

Jenna picks up Whiskers who is curled beside her, buries her face into his soft grey fur and cries.