The Aide Who Drove Ludie to the Ocean

I went to Lyle the next morning, and I did it right. I stood in his doorway and asked if there was any way, any form, any exception, for a hospice resident with a last request.

He listened to the whole thing, and I will give him that. He did not interrupt once.

“Four-twelve exists because of something I can’t explain to you,” he said at the end. “I’m sorry, Joelle. The answer is no. If the family wants to make arrangements, the family can come to me.”

“She doesn’t have family here.”

“Then there isn’t a way.” He tried to soften it. “I could ask the activity girl to put the ocean on the dayroom television. They have a nice program with the waves.”

I walked back to room 14 and stood at the foot of her bed, looking at her hat.

I called Gil that night from my kitchen. He was kind about it, in the way of a man who has not seen his aunt in six years.

“I wouldn’t know what to sign,” he said. “Whatever the home says, Joelle. They know better than I do.”

So I called Dee Whitlow, and she told me what a hospice nurse is allowed to tell a certified nursing assistant, which is not very much.

“I can’t send her out,” Dee said. “The home has to. But Ludie already has a portable oxygen machine on her chart for the ride to the heart doctor, and it runs four hours a battery. Medically, if she can sit up in a car, she can sit up on a boardwalk.”

“If something happens?”

“Then you turn it up to four, you sit her up straight, and you call me. I’ll keep my phone on my chest all day.” She was quiet for a second. “Joelle, I’m not telling you to do anything. I’m telling you what I tell every family. The window closes faster than the paperwork.”

Pete was awake when I finally went to bed. My husband hauls propane for a living and says maybe forty words on a good day, and most of them are about the truck.

“They’ll fire you,” he said into the dark.

“I know.”

“I make nineteen dollars an hour,” he said. “We’ll eat beans till spring if we have to.” He rolled over. “Take the Subaru. I put the good tires on it in August.”

I picked her up at a quarter to six on Saturday morning at the side door by the laundry, the one the night shift uses for cigarette breaks.

Roz Tuggle was waiting there in her scrubs with the sign-out book under her arm. Roz had been on nights for twenty-two years, and she had a voice like a gravel road and a heart she kept hidden under it.

“I’m going to write down exactly what you tell me,” she said. “Not one word more, not one word less.”

“Write that it’s a personal outing. Write that I took her.”

“Joelle.”

“Write it so nobody can say you hid it, Roz. If this goes bad, it goes bad on me.”

She wrote it. Then she did something I did not expect. She took the little hat off the shelf, set it on Ludie’s white curls, and pinned it in place with two bobby pins from her own pocket.

“There,” Roz said. “Now she looks like she’s going somewhere.”

Ludie looked up at me from the transport chair, with the blanket tucked up around her and the oxygen tube across her face, and her eyes were as bright as a girl’s.