Time Flying (18 page)

When I got back to Whidbey after my trip to San Francisco, a disturbing message was waiting for me. After kissing me hello when I came in the door, Amanda hugged me and then took my hand and led me into my den, picking up a note off my desk.

"Darnell Coleman called, Rich," she said, handing me the note. "Thelma's in the hospital, and it doesn't look good."

I felt myself sag. Thelma fought off cancer once, but the disease had returned. "Ah jeez," I said, a lump forming in my throat as I read the note. Amanda thought a lot of Thelma, and I could tell the news upset, her, too.

"We need to take a trip to Indy, hon," I said. 

"I already called my Mom and told her we'd be coming in for a few days," Amanda replied.

I smiled. She knew me so well.

The news was bad, but fortunately, the travel arrangements were a breeze, since I had some leave coming and managed to get the paperwork in barely ahead of the pre-cruise ban on time off. We'd be busy getting ready for deployment as soon as I got back, but I hoped to visit my parents before sailing.
Ranger
was based in San Diego, where my parents lived, and the Air Wing would usually fly to NAS Miramar, north of the city, a few days before the boat left. Three or four days after the ship sailed,we'd fly out to join them. But this time, on the eve of the first Gulf War, I didn’t know if I'd be allowed off the base once we landed at Miramar. Still, visiting Thelma was the right thing to do, and I had a couple questions I'd never asked her.

It was cold in Indianapolis when we arrived, a late-September cold snap forcing the people who lived in the middle of the Hoosier State to bring out their cold weather gear a little early. Having their parkas along for the trip, the boys hoped for snow, despite the assurances to the contrary from both Amanda and myself. Even though the ground was bare, without a trace of white when we landed, the novelty of the trip excited them.

We rented a car at the airport and drove to Amanda's parents' house on the West side, Michael and Aaron getting more and more excited the closer we got to “Gramma and Grampa’s” house. Hugs all around when we arrived, with Amanda's mother Jeanette hustling us out of the cold and into the house, the late afternoon chill setting in hard, and after a few minutes reconnecting, I got into the car and heading to the hospital.

Walking back into Wishard Memorial Hospital brought back a lot of strange feelings. I'd been brought to the Wishard ER when I fell off the roof of a house while working for my Dad's company in High School, and their rehab center I had worked hard to recover. Wishard had a lot to do with me doing so much better this time around, but I still had memories of coming to the ER to talk my way into scrips for pain meds while living those years the first time. So, being here gave me a peculiar mix of feelings.

The 60-ish well dressed lady at the Information desk, looked up Thelma Coleman's name in the patient directory, and gave me the room number, an expression mixing both sympathy and curiosity on her face. There was probably information in her patient roster listing Thelma as “terminal,” and she must have wondered why an elderly black woman was receiving a visit from a young, white military officer. I had decided to travel in uniform because I wanted Thelma to see what she had helped me accomplish. I owed everything to my family, including my wife and children, but Thelma had a lot of appreciation due her as well.

I entered room 318 as quietly as possible. It was dark, evening taking hold, the light in the room coming from a bedside lamp and a flickering television mounted on the wall. The local news played on the TV, Mike Ahern informing Hoosiers about their part of the world. When I walked in, Darnell, sitting by his sleeping mother's bedside, turned his head and toward me. It took him a couple seconds to recognize me, hair shorter than he would have remembered, my requisite naval aviator mustache relatively new. But as soon as he realized who I was, he jumped up, came around the bed and held out his hand for a soul-brother handshake (which he had taught me when I was 10 years old, to the mild annoyance of my father) which transitioned into a bear hug. I noticed his magnificent afro had been reduced in size, a business necessity, since Darnell now owned two successful fine-dining restaurants in Indianapolis, and it was, after all, 1990, not 1975.

“Hey, Ma, look what flew in!” Darnell exclaimed, turning toward Thelma, his right arm around my shoulders. She had only been only lightly sleeping and now appeared fully awake.

I now turned my attention to where Thelma lay, the head of the bed elevated, and both arms on pillows at her side. Her hair had become almost completely white, and the stocky and robust woman I knew was gone. Even though she couldn’t be called frail, Thelma was extremely thin, although her gaze had the same direct, hard one focus I remembered, growing up.

“Well, child. Come over here,' she said. 'Let me have a look at you.”

I, of course, complied, taking the three steps over to her bedside, and leaning down to gently hug her. She patted me on the back with her right hand, and with her left, Thelma held the side of my head, kissing me on the cheek.

“Haven't you got anything better to do than waste time coming all the way here to visit an old woman?” She asked.

Normally, I'd try and come up with a smartass retort for her, but a lump had appeared in my throat, seeing her like this, and hearing her words, the biting but loving sarcasm was gone. The old Thelma would have said something like Haven’t you got anything better to do that waste time coming all the way here to bother me?

Not trusting myself to speak, I shrugged.

“Where are those babies, Lieutenant Commander Ricardo?” Thelma asked. Damn, nothing gets by her, I thought. I had just been promoted a few weeks before, reaching the top of the ladder of junior officer ranks. 

“Amanda's going to bring them tomorrow,” I said, glad for the diversion away from Thelma's condition, to thinking about the boys. “It’s late, so they're about due to start turning into little beasts from being tired,” I replied.

This brought a clipped laugh from her. “And I have no experience dealing with little beasts,” she said, looking at me, then Darnell, who responded with a comical grimace. “I swear, if not for your sweet little sister, I'd think every child born after 1950 had been raised in a barn.”

Katie had flown in a few days before to visit Thelma, and had prepared me for how different the woman who had helped my parents raise her had declined. She also warned me talking to her would lead me to believe her healthier than she really was. I understood Katie’s warning now, glad for the heads up from my little sister.

“So, how they treating you here, Thelma?” I asked.

“Well, child, I've been better,” she replied her shrug limited to her head and eyebrows, her arms back down on the pillows at her side. “But they take good care of me here. Darnell won't leave the hospital, and Christopher comes down every few days.” Darnell, Thelma’s youngest son, lived here in Indy, but his older brother coached basketball at a small college in Michigan.

Darnell patted his mother's leg, covered by the blanket and said “If I did leave, Ma, you'd be on the phone calling me,” he said, shifting his voice to an impression of his mother he used to do when we were young to crack me up, “Get me this, chile, go get me that, you gonna move like that, move to the North Pole and hire yourself out as a glacier…” Darnell and I were laughing, Thelma trying not to, attempting unsuccessfully to keep her faux-pissed-off expression in place. “It's easier just to stay here!” 

An electronic ringing/beeping erupted, and Darnell picked up his cell phone, one of the huge “brick” phones Motorola made, and walked toward the door. Ringtones had yet to be invented. Before he pushed the “answer” button, he said, “It’s work. Excuse me for a couple minutes. I’ll leave you two to talk,” he said, to which I nodded my assent.

I walked around to the chair Darnell had vacated when I came into the room, and sat down.

“So. You've done a LOT better this time around, haven't you, young man?” She said.

I returned her gaze. “Yes, ma'am. You get a second chance, and you take advantage of it, right?”

Thelma smiled, and glanced up at Mike Ahern on the television. “As Christopher’s players would say, ‘I heard THAT’.” 

We both laughed.

“I can't say running around the same track a couple times is the best thing to happen to a body, but I tell you, it is far from the worst.” She looked me up and down, admiring with evident pride, the aviator wings and ribbons on my uniform. “I am so proud of you, Richard.” For the first time since I got here, Thelma smiled in a relaxed way that was unconditional and complete, not through a world of problems and struggles. It may have been the first time I ever witnessed her smiling so simply.

“Does Darnell and Christopher know about what you went through?” I said. As close as Thelma's sons and I had always been, I couldn't imagine telling them I was reliving my past, but thought it might be a good idea to know if their mother had told them about her experience.

'No,' she said, looking back at me, and abandoning Mike Ahern. “I don't know how I'd tell them I'd lived half a life without them,” she answered. “Not sure how I would do that.”

I nodded, understanding. I didn't have much time, since I didn't want to tire her out, so I jumped right into what I wanted to talk to her about. “Thelma,” I began, “I told a good friend of mine, a Navy Neurologist I went to high school with about this…You remember Walter Steinberg?”

Thelma shook her head. I couldn't remember if they'd ever met, but no matter.

“Well,” I continued, “I told him the whole story, looking for answers. He did some research and found medical evidence of other people having this same experience.”

Thelma listened closely, her eyes narrowed, in concentration or disapproval. I couldn't tell. 

“He found some commonalities, a few similarities in the stories, and I need to ask you something I've never asked you before.” I paused.

Thelma diverted her eyes for a second, aware of what my questions would be about.

“What brought you back here...To your own time?” I asked.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “What makes the difference, Richie?” She called me “Richie,” not “child” or “Ricardo.” I felt a momentary pang of regret. She's laying in a hospital bed dying and I'm asking her difficult questions. But then again, Thelma Coleman was, without doubt, the toughest woman I'd ever known, and I was confident she could handle it, even in her current state.

Thelma remained silent for a few seconds, thinking about her answer and then started talking.

“I went back to 1936 from 1954, so when ’54 rolled around again, I'd gotten pretty comfortable with what had happened to me. Once I passed the day it all started, I pretty much figured I'd wake up one morning and be back in my own time, so the further I got from 1954, the less I thought about the whole thing. Nan was still alive though, because I made her take her health and eating more seriously. Her blood pressure stayed pretty good, so I figured she wouldn’t have a stroke like last time.” Thelma paused, and pointed to a glass of water on the tray next to her bed, which I passed to her, and watched as she drank. When she finished the water, she handed the glass back to me, and waved off my offer of more.

“I wrote for the Detroit News,” she continued, “since about 1963. Covered the Civil Rights movement, mostly. Nan lived with me in Detroit. So different from Memphis, let me tell you.” Again, Thelma paused, but as I reach for the water glass to refill it, she shook her head.

“In 1967, a party for a couple soldiers coming back from Vietnam got raided by the police, and things got ugly. Then, it got uglier and bigger. A couple days later, they'd brought in the National Guard, which as you can imagine, was not the right thing to do. A couple reporters and photographers and I were out on the fringes of the trouble, talking to people who ran businesses on Clairmount Avenue, you know, getting their views on things.” Thelma's eyes were closed now, as she told me the story. I couldn’t tell if closing them helped her remember, or if telling the story put more of a strain on her than was prudent. But, her voice stayed strong as she continued.

“It was a beautiful day, in July, and I remember stepping out onto the sidewalk after talking with a man who owned a shoe repair store. I turned around to say something to one of the photographers, and saw eyes get real big. He and the others jumped back as I turned around just as the car was jumping the curb.” Her eyes remained closed, but she had wrinkled up her face at the memory.

“It felt like I got the wind knocked out of me, and I woke up in my old bed in Memphis. The wind was blowing my lace curtains and my goodness, did my head hurt!” Thelma smiled a sad smile. “Just like that, I was back in 1954 and Nan gone again.”

We both let the moment pass in silence. Without being asked, I refilled the water glass and handed it to Thelma. She drank again, but not so much this time.

After a few seconds, without fanfare, she continued. “I’m pretty sure I died,” Thelma said, nodding to herself, as if considering and accepting the story’s truth. “Dying brought me back here.”

Thelma and I didn't talk any more about time travel. Darnell came back in the room, so we talked about the boys, Whidbey, the Navy and the coming war. I told them my squadron would soon head out on a 6 month cruise on
Ranger
, but we didn't what part we would play in the drama unfolding in the Gulf.

“So, you've got those wings on your shirt, but you don't fly the airplane?” Thelma asked, as if she didn’t know everything a civilian could learn about being a Bombardier/Navigator on an A6E Intruder. The question was for Darnell’s benefit.

I laughed, saying, “No, my friend Pat flies the plane. As I tell everyone, he turns the airplane on and tell him where to go. I'm the Bombardier/Navigator. They call us ‘Beans.’” Darnell, impressed, asked several good questions and Thelma, much to my surprise, smiled and seemed just a little impressed, herself. “Really though, flying the airplane's the tough job. Well,” I corrected, “flying is the easy part. Landing on the ship can be difficult, though Pat would tell you, for him, none of it is terribly difficult for him,” I laughed.