Who Can See Angels?

“Sophie, Sophie”. It was her mother’s voice, soft and far away, whispering to her. She must have dozed off!! Even in its softness, its unnaturalness, the voice had shocked her awake, and now Sophie lay on her bed, rigid, forcing herself to take regular, even breaths. This was it!! She had come this far and this was the one chance to carry through with her plan. If it didn't happen now, it would never happen. Sophie was sure of that; bridges had been burned and if she didn't leave now, she would be a certain prisoner here until she died. Sophie had often sat beside old Mrs. Harper as she slept in her wheel chair, and for the novelty of it, for something to do rather than stare at the idiot box as it repeated the same news again and again, she had matched the other old woman breath for breath, a softly purring, snoring sound with each exhalation. It had been a mere distraction at the time, something to help wile away a few remaining hours of her useless old age. But now she concentrated as she tried to imitate that snoring, sleepy sound with her own breathing. Sophie held her face slightly down and pulled the sheets close so the beam from a roving flashlight would not cause her eyes to twitch under their semi-transparent lids. A halo of fluffy, thin off - white hair was splayed on the institutional green pillowcase; the shiny, baby pinkness of her scalp gleamed through these sparse strands. A small, bony arm coated with paper thin, wrinkled skin and brown dotted with liver spots, poked from beneath the blanket so that knobby fingers gripped the edge of the sheet as if to pull it further over the multi-lined face. Suddenly the door, which was already open a crack, swung noiselessly inward a bit more to allow the entrance of a body. As the woman stepped in, a flashlight snapped on and slid a shaft of light across the apparently sleeping old woman. Sophie was ready for it, but the actual occurrence caused her heart rate to bump up a notch, until she thought that the sound of the pounding might be audible outside of her brittle rib cage, but it wasn’t so. The intruder stood silently and listened for the breathing of the old woman as the flashlight played around the room but night nurse found only the blinking green stand-by light of the computer whose fan hummed softly in the darkness. There was no other sound but the raspy and somewhat irregular breathing of an old woman. The beam searched across the window sill, even though the flashlight’s user knew the window was glued and screwed tight shut. She had been present herself when this action had occurred. It was late October, now, and as "The Calm Days" nursing home was climate controlled, all windows must remain tightly shut. In the late summer, when residents were not permitted outside or were taken out less and less, Sophie, longing for the outdoors, where she had spent most of her life, found she could pry the window open a crack and wedge the toe of her slipper into that crack. Even though she knew that opening a window was prohibited, she would pull her creaky old arm chair close, (she had been allowed to bring only a few of her ancient possessions here, in an effort to make her last earthly space more "homey"), and by leaning forward, could inhale the fresh, crispy, scented air emanating from the first frosts and the dead leaves. At first no one had noticed because Sophie had been careful to remove the slipper before anyone discovered her ingenuity. Then one day the slipper wouldn’t dislodge when she heard the approaching voices and, instead of staying calm and standing in front of the window until the voices had passed by, Sophie had yanked and tore on the slipper. She had been found out. At first, those in charge had simply asked her to not open the window because of the internal "climate control" and the waste of energy – the home was kept at a constant 24 degrees Celsius - as the caretaker tapped the window down tightly into place. For a while, Sophie complied, but when she could stand it no longer, she stole a knife from the lunch room and succeeded in prying the window open again. The staff, on the look-out for cool, drafty air, and being aware of Sophie’s stubbornness, soon discovered the transgression. After the second infraction, the window was secured with glue and screws. It would never again be open regardless of the season of the year. Now Sophie lived in the sharp tang of disinfectants, the musk of urine, the sour smell of the aged and the sickly odour of a myriad of medications which could keep a body alive long past the time that any human dignity remained. When her kids came to visit her, the old woman always asked them to take her outside, but as it got colder and the skiff of frost which covered the ground in the morning persisted into the afternoon, the kids fussed and worried over her. “Mom, you will catch a chill, pneumonia; fall and break a hip”. She succumbed to their will – she had no choice. Sophie smiled at their attentions and cried when they had gone. She did not cry for her life; it had been full and rich, she cried for the loss of freedom and for gulps of fresh, frosty air. This pattern may have continued until Sophie’s death if it hadn’t been for the angel.