The Wrong Tower Mandy Tedford   © Copyright 2024 by Mandy Tedford

Image by Erik Karits from Pixabay

“This is the floor.” I thought walking left remembering that it was the skybridge connecting the new building to the old. I went to the third window and looked out onto the bleak landscaping. This was where I was standing when I heard the indescribable sound of a mother’s heart breaking and where my stepmother simultaneously called out to me. Turning to the left I saw myself running then collapsing into a nurse’s arms. The pain that punctured my soul and ripped out a part of me forever came back causing me to lose my breath. Sandra waited silently. She had not been there, not even a blip on my radar, but she knew.

I walked past the room where my family had gathered. My grandmother crying softly into a napkin while we knelt at her feet. She had lost her husband of over fifty years ten months earlier and now her oldest son.

I saw my mother rushing out of the elevator, pulled from work, to find me inconsolable and needing her desperately.

Tears pooled in my eyes as I relived the chaos in the now silent tomb. I moved past the empty desk and into the blackened hall. I could make out old gurneys and IV poles lining the walls. On my left was the third room, door opened and unmade beds still waiting for patients. The antiseptic smell inside the room was the same as it had been in 2004.

I saw him lying there with a white blanket pulled up to his neck. Three day’s growth of stubble on his worn face. Hazel eyes closed forever. Not one shimmer of gray could be found hiding in his soft brown locks. After sixty-one years of gridlock with his own father, seven marriages, four children, hard drinking, chain smoking, womanizing, destitution, and bitterness, he now lay at eternal peace. His encyclopedic brain full of wit, sarcasm, vulgarity, and humor was at rest. I kissed the deep scar on his forehead that did kill him for a few minutes’ years before. Whiskey drunk with his buddy, Vonn, they missed the bridge on Main Street in Seligman, Missouri and had to be prized out of what was left of the car. Vonn’s fate would find him years later after a week at deer camp on my father’s 40 acres deep in the hills near Lost Bridge. When no one could get him on the phone my father and teenaged brother would find him nearly frozen solid alone in his bed.

My lips found his skin to be cool and moist. His musky smell still lingered, and I breathed it all the way in for the last time. Even after toiling for hours in the sweltering heat he always smelled the same, that clean, earthy scent of a man’s man. I ran my hand over the faded eagle head tattoo on his left shoulder not remembering when or where he got it. Work roughened hands that laid down carpet and linoleum in homes all over Northwest Arkansas. Calloused knees ate up with fungus from years of kicking the carpet tight.

He worked hard and played hard, enjoyed hunting and fishing even illegally at times. In his later years at the farm he would sit on the porch in his lawn chair with the radio on or a cassette playing. He could see the Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka from there and watch the full moons rise above the treetops. Finally, he had laid claim to his own mountain and little piece of heaven. In spring and summer, the spoils of his enormous garden would be strewn on the table behind his beer and ashtray. He was rarely alone as family and friends would flock to the porch at all hours to join him for a beer, a smoke, some horseshoes and always a good laugh.

He would spin his tales of encountering bigfoot in the Redwood Forest. After collecting his pay and being discharged from the Air Force in the 60’s he ended up at Haight &Ashbury sharing an apartment building with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. While stoned and drunk he launched his brand new corvette off a bridge and into the San Francisco Bay, claiming it still lay where it landed all of those years ago, riding with the Hells Angels, and courting a young Crystal Gayle in Tulsa, Ok circa 1980’s.

When he did not come home after his routine surgery the farm began to die along with him. His yellow lab, Jack went up to the neighbor’s and never came back. The old barn that had withstood years of the elements, collapsed during an ordinary spring storm. All the clusters of Hawaiian Moonflowers that grew at random among the rocks every year struggled to produce any blooms. A bleak, bare spot replaced the garden, his lawn chair sat empty and the radio gathered dust. Even the shadowy mist of ‘ol Johnny Reb stopped visiting. It was all just too much for my stepmother, so she had no choice but to sell it and move on.

The childhood demons that drove him to be wild, rough, and angry encapsulated a boy’s heart, yearning for acceptance from a father that only gave it to his other children showering them with love and pride. Underneath the rugged exterior he loved, regretted, and worried intensely.

His two older daughters did not know him, born to a man child from the first marriage. They held onto a suffocating bitterness that kept him at arm’s length always. My brother and I came along with the third wife. His alcoholism, jealousy and rage ended that union after ten hard years. His final wife took care of him, she understood him and became another mother to us.

Sandra and I exited the elevator that had been a time capsule whisking me back into the worst day of my life. Shaken we regrouped and found the correct tower that would take me to a dear friend who would be undergoing surgery the next day. I prayed for her knowing how delicate life can be. The mightiest of men with a never-ending life source had been snuffed out by a tiny blood clot lodged in his lung.

I have no idea what guided me into the wrong elevator in the wrong tower of the hospital so many years later. The same elevator that had escorted me into that nightmare. The odds of it were slim. The odds of it being abandoned and vapor sealed within a time warp were even slimmer.

My name is Mandy Tedford, I am 53 years old and I’ve lived in the northwestern corner of Arkansas my entire life. My career choices have mostly been made up of law enforcement dispatching and animal services. I have written a lot of different stories and only submitted a few but I have never been published.