Two Packs of Earl Grey

The road into town is lined on both sides with conifers and brown fences that divide houses’ gravel driveways. The road winds downhill with switchback corners that overlook the city which, at around 8:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in November, is often blanketed in translucent fog like fresh cold oxygen straight from a clear plastic breathing tube. There’s one particular stretch of road where great firs and pines reach their boughs to the opposite side of the street and graze their needles with the dying leaves of red and orange maples. It’s as if the pines and firs are comforting the maples as they lose their leaves, holding their hands as the cold wind slowly shakes the branches barren so the leaves fall to root beds and asphalt. Some are blown onto the road where passing logging trucks and station wagons scatter them over front lawns where they’re raked up and burned in slash piles like plagued hospital gowns. 

The smell of burning leaves and wood fireplaces wafts into my car through the heater even though my windows are closed. When I leave my house in the morning, I immediately smell it, but about halfway through my drive I can’t detect it anymore. I remember when my grade five teacher taught me something called olfactory fatigue. It’s what happens when your nose gets tired of smelling one particular smell and ignores it, allowing your brain to perceive other scents. She said those people who toss fish at Pike Place Market in Seattle don’t smell the fish by the end of the day. They just get used to it. There’s something about the odour of hospital laundry detergent and antibacterial hand soap that my brain never gets used to, though. 

It’s about twenty minutes to the hospital where I volunteer. The front entrance always greets me with a sterile hello. When I pump three squirts of alcohol based hand sanitizer into my palms and rub them together vigorously, I receive another. Then I hit the up arrow on the elevator with my elbow and wait. 8:00 a.m. is tea and cookies in the TV lounge so at 8:30 a.m., the cleaning man is usually coming down from ALC with dirty trays covered with brown napkins soaked in Lipton earl grey. Alone on the ride up the elevator, I put on my happy face because that’s my job: be happy. Most days it’s genuine, but today I really had to put it on. 

ALC stands for Alternate Level of Care, which is pretty broad and ambiguous. All you need to know is that most of these people are not going home to their families. The nurses and doctors and fellow patients are their families. I am their family. Most have been told they are waiting to be transferred to a care home or other old age facility, but a lot of them end up staying here permanently. So I visit them. After I logged my thirty hours of volunteer work, technically I had enough hours to fulfill my requirements to go to sonography school. I could have quit. But then I met Enid. 

She was an eighty eight year old woman who lived on her own until she had a fall in her condo. She wasn’t healing very well, apparently, and her condition worsened while in the hospital so she was sent to ALC. As a mere volunteer, they don’t tell me much, but from what I gathered from a few nurses and fellow visitors, she didn’t have anywhere else to go. I won’t go into too much detail, in case I’m misinformed, because I can only go off of rumours. But what I will say about Enid is that she had false teeth that gave her a smile prettier and whiter than my own. She had silver hair that reminded me of those delicate crochet dolls you get from your great grandmother on your dad’s side of the family. She had eyes like the air cells inside eggs shells, but bluer. She had a voice like a rocking chair in late summer. She was beautiful. Enid is why I stayed. Last week we got into a discussion about our favourite types of tea.

“So you like tea, huh? What’s your favourite?” I asked her last tuesday. We were both drinking earl grey from tea time a few minutes ago.

“Orange pekoe,” she said, leaning up from her bed and orchestrating her words with her long index finger. “You can’t beat the classics, that’s what I always say.”

I gave her a warm smile.

“Well, I don’t know, Enid. Have you ever tried Stash’s double bergamot earl grey? Now that’s a classic.” 

“No, I never did,” she said, looking over her glasses.

“I highly recommend it for a connoisseur of your refinement,” I said with a cheeky fake bow.

“Oh stop,” she said with a chuckle. Then with that same orchestrating finger, she gave me a gesture that implied a tsk-tsk. “Where’s a fine young man like yourself come to learn so much about tea?”

“It’s all the rage now, Enid. Yerba mate, rooibos, Japanese roasted tea. It’s all really giving coffee a run for its money.”

“Boy, if I were your age, I’d be the most popular girl in town.”

“If you were my age?” I said with a dumbfounded look, “You are the most popular girl in town! Everybody loves you!” 

After I said that, she put her warm hand on mine and gave it a little pat. We sat together in her room watching curling on the little portable TV provided and talked about who our favourite skips were. After a few ends, we both went silent and I fell asleep in my chair. It wasn’t a very comfortable chair and it was certainly not made for sleeping, but I always felt comfortable around her. When I woke up, she was looking at me with a smile, her head slightly tilted to one side. 

“Look at you, sleepy-head,” she said with her sweet rocking chair voice. “And they tell me I need my rest.”

“Oh, you caught me,” I said, stretching the kink from my neck. I looked at my watch. I’d been asleep for about twenty minutes. “They’re working me too hard.”

“You poor, poor boy,” she said with a wink. “I don’t know how you do it.”

But that was last week. Standing in the elevator today, I was genuinely happy, as I was the week before. On the second floor, the elevator opened and I smiled to Margaret at the front desk of ALC. I flashed my card in front of the scanner and the automatic doors slid open. The first person I saw was Linda whom I always have to introduce myself to. She never remembers me, so I always greet her as if it were the first time. Donald was walking the halls as usual so I gave him a nod. He was a truck driver back in the 60s and will tell you everything you need to know about gears and double clutch if you give him the chance. Today I decided to visit with Enid first, so I walked to room number two at the end of the hall where her bed was. Peaking my head into her room I noticed she was lying down. The portable TV was playing but the sound was muted. She had a mask over her face and I could hear the low hiss of gas echoing against her mouth. She was asleep. I watched her breathe in and out. Every time she exhaled, a wisp of foggy gas spilled over her cheeks and chin.The sound of footsteps behind me broke my stare. I turned to see Alan, one of the nurses, behind me. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“You should be with her today,” he said, giving me an empty smile. 

I looked past him and saw another nurse looking our way. She gave the same smile then walked away. I looked back to Alan and gave him nod. He walked away too, leaving me standing in the doorway with my stomach in a knot. I stuck my hands into the pockets of my blue volunteer vest and stepped into Enid’s room. I sunk down in the chair beside her bed and sat up straight, just looking at her pale skin. Everything was quiet except for the sound of her nebulizer. 

“Enid?” I managed to say. She didn’t respond. “Enid? Do you want to watch curling? It looks like team Canada is playing.”

Still nothing. I sat back in my chair and played with my hands. I switched back and forth between staring at the silent portable TV and watching Enid’s chest rise and fall. I looked across the room to the breakfast tray which had a full cup of black tea sitting on it. Beside that was a blue pitcher of ice water. I watched beads of liquid slide down the handle and form a ring on the white napkin beneath it. I watched a trapped fly bump against the frosty window above the radiator. Beyond the window I saw a neighbourhood lined with brilliantly coloured oak and maple trees. The cars parked by the sidewalk were all covered in fallen leaves. Every car was a smeared pallet of pastel crayons. Then I looked back to Enid. She was still breathing from her mask, her chest rising and falling. I put my hand on top of hers and turned my attention back to curling. I watched a few ends and at some point I fell asleep.

In the time I was asleep I dreamed I was standing beneath a streetlight. With me was a young girl, about seventeen years old. I was holding her hands. She had blue eyes and beautiful curly mahogany hair. Her skin was unnaturally pale under the light. She wore a black dress coat that stopped at about hip level. Beneath that she wore black leggings and black suede boots. She momentarily tightened her grip on my hands then slid them both up my sweater sleeves and used my forearms to warm the tips of her fingers. She smiled at me. 

“Look at you,” she said. “And they tell me I need my rest.”

I smiled back and then pulled her closer to my body. She winced in pain then pushed me away and looked down at her hands. They were covered in a bumpy red rash and pin pricks of blood began to form on the surface of her skin. I looked down at my hands but they were spotless. She reversed away from me and into a shadow cast by a parked car. The dark grey cement beneath her feet became hot tar. She sank in about ankle deep. I reached out a hand to pull her out but she refused to touch me. She began sinking deeper and deeper and I pleaded for her to grab my hand but she wouldn’t. Her skin was covered in rash and spots of blood. She sunk up to her neck in hot tar. At that point, just her head was showing. Her hair was matted with black sludge. She said nothing as she sank out of sight. I dove head first into the tar after her and woke with a jolt, still holding Enid’s cold hand.

I must have been out for a while because my neck and back were more sore than usual. My tongue was dry from sleeping with my mouth open. My eyelids were covered in crust and my eyes were dried out. As I blinked I looked across the room at the breakfast tray. The condensation from the blue jug of water had completely soaked the napkin under it. I looked at the TV and saw that curling had changed over to the local news. Looking out the window, I noticed that some brown and red leaves had floated onto the ledge. On the inside of the window, the fly lay dead on its back. The only sound in the room was the hiss of Enid’s nebulizer. I looked at her mask, then down to her still chest, then to her cold hand under mine. I squeezed it tighter and swallowed. Alan appeared in the doorway. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but he gave me a nod. I let go of her hand and stood up, just looking at her. I reached into my pockets and felt two packets of Stash’s double bergamot early grey.




-Daniel Greene