Power Trip

Linda looked out the window behind her desk at the grey rocks dripping the last of the year’s first snowfall.  It could just as easily be the middle of spring but was instead the twenty third of December. She took a deep breath and went back to paying invoices on behalf of South Falls Collegiate and Vocational Institute.

Linda Moore has been the office manager at SFCVI for 15 years and a secretary there for more than thirty. She supervises a staff of five others and has enjoyed the sycophantic overtures from the two who are hoping to replace her. She has postponed her retirement on two previous occasions and will surely not do it a third time. She will turn sixty eight a few days before her last day of work and has no idea what she will do with herself once she finishes.

Two of her reports, Brenda Jermaine and Donna Foster entered the office. It was five minutes after one and they were both supposed to be back here working at one o'clock. Linda relished this part of the job, doling out discipline is one of the only things that make her feel alive.  She immediately rose from her desk and went out of her office located between those of the Principal and Vice Principal.

"Brenda, Donna can I have a word with you."

They finished removing their coats and walked across the room to Linda's office.

"You know they left at ten to twelve, Linda”, said Debbie Brown one of the more senior secretaries. "I thought they must be returning early, since they were leaving so early”, she said with a chuckle that trailed off like a siren winding down.

"Good to know", said Linda and closed her office door behind her.

Linda sat down at her desk and did not look up at the women awaiting their reprimand. She clicked the icon for Staff Tracker. A window opened filling her screen. Linda waited.  She felt the computer opened the program far too quickly. Instead she clicked open an email and read it before returning to the scheduling software.

“What time do you take your lunch break, Donna?” Linda said without looking up.

“Twelve Mrs. Moore,” Donna said softly

Linda began to feel alive, the vigor returned to her bones. Her skin tingled as she listened to her two submissive employees.  She knew she was power tripping but it made her feel so good and important.

"And Brenda, what time is your lunch break?” Linda said eyes still on the computer screen.

"twe-lve", Brenda said weakly, her throat uncleared.

"Oh yes that's right. And how long is your lunch break Brenda?"

"1 hour", Brenda said.

"Donna?” Linda continued to click away on her screen without looking up. Her skin was awash in goose bumps.

"An hour.” said Donna.

"Right, so that would mean that you should be back working at your station at exactly one PM, is that right?"

"Yes", they both answered.

"And, what time is it now?"

"Quarter after one", Donna answered on behalf of both of them.

Brenda, trying to explain said, "The food at Henry's took forever to arrive, we tried to hurry..."

"Serves you right, eating that garbage. I am making a note of this tardiness on both of your employment files."

"Okay. Alright", Donna and Brenda said respectively.

"And I am noting that you both left early for your break!", Linda said, quickly looking up to catch the mixture of shock and disappointment on their faces.

"Early? We didn't leave until twelve o'clock.", Donna replied gently.

"Well, that's not what I heard.” Linda said confidently.

"From who?” Brenda asked.

"A little bird. I will be making a note that you left early and returned late for your lunch today. That is fifteen minutes and we have spent another ten minutes dealing with this. You both would do well to take a half hour lunch break tomorrow.  Oh, and bring a sandwich.", Linda said her voice rising slightly.

Both agreed weakly.

"Close my door on the way out," Linda instructed them.

Her mood began to improve after the disciplinary meeting. She was feeling genuinely happy and was looking forward to her evening of curling with friends.

It was nine o’ clock at night when Linda arrived home. After parking the Corolla in the garage, she walked up the path to her door.  She hung her keys on the home made wooden key hanger and noticed that the answering machine was blinking. She hit the red triangle and continued to shed her winter wear.

After a crackling beep a man’s voice, “Hi, ah, I am not sure if this is the right number, I am looking for the family of Jay Moore and he had mentioned that he grew up in South Falls.  This is Jeremy Chase with St. Jude’s House in Toronto.  Maybe you can point me in the right direction; my number is 416-387-5487.  Talk to you soon.”

The familiar feeling of dread washed over Linda immediately.  Jason Moore was the name of her thirty five year old son.  She hadn’t spoken with him for over seven years and preferred to put him out of her mind.  The frustration and despair came flooding back.  Was this the beginning of a major emotional assault that was designed to get a few hundred dollars? 

Jason had tried a stunt similar to this when he got his former girlfriend, Jennifer to call with mock concern over Jason and his ability to afford treatment for his addictions.  After Linda paid Jennifer for three months of treatment, she didn’t hear from her son again for another year.  The receipt Jennifer mailed to her was a fake and she later found out that no such treatment facility existed.  At the time she was wary but gave the money because she could not stop thinking about having Jason, recovered and back in her life. 

Before the alcohol and drugs she was very close with Jason.  They had supported each other during the difficult times surrounding the disappearance of Gordon, her husband and Jason’s Dad.  The three of them had just moved into their dream home, a large yellow brick farmhouse on the Prospect River.  The house was at the top of a long steep hill running down to the water and they had big plans for a tiered wooden deck, a dock and boathouse.  March fourth nineteen ninety one, three days after they had moved in, Gordon disappeared.  Linda arrived home from work and Jason from school to find the house empty.  Gordon’s brand new Dynasty sat in the drive.  All that remained was a charcoal glove at the top of the hill behind the house.

Days, weeks and months passed.  Then one afternoon in late August as Linda worked in the office at SFCVI assembling handouts for the new students, Constable Jim Folds arrived to speak with her. 

Remains had been found by fishermen in the middle of Twine Lake.  She could not hear him speaking anymore, she looked at the officer’s face and there were sounds coming out of his mouth but Linda’s mind was swimming with a progression of thoughts.  She for a fleet second thought Gordon could be saved, followed by a minute of denial and doubt and finally her mind came to rest like a wobbling coin.  She had to see the remains.  She insisted and felt it was necessary to gain some closure. 

It is believed that Gordon fell into the swollen river after slipping on the icy hill.  No one would ever know for sure.

Linda and Jason immediately sold the house and moved into a one and a half story in town.  She brought along Gordon’s Dodge and parked it in one of the bays in the detached garage.  It is a reminder of Gordon.  She can fool herself into thinking he is still here when she looks at it.  It is in mint condition and creates the illusion of an earlier time.

It was during the years following this tragedy that Linda’s relationship with Jason changed.  They never really talked about the death.  They were both consumed by thought and when they did speak to one another they rarely heard.  Jason left for school and completed a degree in English 6 hours south at the University of Western.

When he graduated Jason was already working at Red Lobster and he decided to continue in this industry.  He moved to Toronto and landed a job in an upscale eatery tending bar.  She would notice the smell of lingering liquor.  At one point she had asked him whether he was drinking too much.  His response was overly defensive and emphatic.  He didn’t speak to her again for 6 months.  This was the last time she mentioned it to him.

“Who is this guy?” Linda thought.  “What is St. Jude’s house?  Does it exist, or is it made up like the treatment facility from years ago?”

She poured herself a glass of water and went up the stairs to her room.  Sleep wouldn’t come, images of her son danced in her head, she was extremely frustrated at this chain of thoughts and no matter how hard she tried to stymie them they kept coming.  Memories of laughs, love a lighter time.  Jason was such a warm, wonderful child never suffering from the terrible twos.  Linda absolutely adored her son and when he was small she would sometimes sneak into his room just to watch him sleeping in his crib.  She knew that Gordon sometimes did this too.

She spent the rest of the night hovering in the zone just below the surface of wakefulness.

The next day at work she was particularly irritable.  Joan was such a flake, Donna and Brenda brought mud in on their boots, Debbie a suck up.  Eventually she had to close her door and put her head down on her desk, the lack of sleep had caught up with her.  When she awoke ten minutes later, she was gripped by an overwhelming depressive feeling of hopelessness and a deep obsessive desire to call the man who left the message on her machine.  She knew there was a way to check the messages remotely.  After five failed attempts to retrieve the message and leaving a three minute long recording of herself breathing she grabbed her coat and left the building. 

“Oh, are we going now?” said Debbie, who had arranged to have lunch with her.  “It’s a little early”, she said in her most playful tone.

Linda didn’t answer.  Instead she ran out to her car climbed in and drove off.

When she arrived home, she got the number off of the machine and called.

“Jeremy Chase”, said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes, Mr. Chase.  This is Linda Moore from South Falls returning your call,” she said in her most formal tone.

“Oh yes, Mrs. Moore, I am looking for the family of one of our clients here.  His name is Jay Moore and he said that he grew up in South Falls.”, Jeremy explained.

“Well, I don’t know.  I have a son named Jason Moore, but he has always gone by Jason.” Linda informed him.

“Yes, Jason Moore, from South Falls.  He lives here in Toronto now.  How old would your son be?”

“Oh… thirty five”

“I am pretty sure that we are talking about the same person.  Although I am not able to discuss too many details, I thought it was important that I contact a family member of his.”

“Oh, and why is that?” Linda said, her tone harsher than she had intended.  She was beginning to suspect this was another elaborate scam to get her money.

“He is not well”

“Now you listen, I am not sending money.  I am not an idiot, I know what you are up to and I plan to contact the police after this call.”, Linda said impatiently.

“I understand Mrs. Moore.  But, I am not calling for money, I am calling because Jason is not well, it is serious.  I think he should have someone right now.”

“What do you mean exactly?” Linda said her voice softening slightly.

“I mean, you may want to come here if you wish to see him again.” Jeremy said gently, waiting for Linda’s reply.

“You mean, he is that sick?” Linda asked.

“Yes, you should come immediately.  He is at St. Joe’s”, Jeremy said.  “do you know where that is?”.

“No.”

Linda listened to Jeremy describe the hospital’s location near the shores of Lake Ontario.  She told Jeremy she wasn’t sure how serious this was and she wasn’t sure whether she would be making the three and a half hour drive. 

“I hope you do,” he said sounding genuine.

Linda arrived back at the school at ten to one, the only one there was Joan working away quietly in the back corner.  She was grateful that she didn’t have to face Debbie right now to explain why she stood her up. 

The slide show of early motherhood began to run through her mind again.  The time Jason lost the ice cream off of his cone and how she lost hers trying to help him, the laugh that the two of them shared, she chuckled slightly thinking of the memory.  Running after him with a diaper and him completely naked and giggling from his toes.  Learning to drive; running for school president.

Somewhere deep inside a light began to grow, it started in the pit of her stomach and spread upwards like a flower rising and opening at the same time.  She was going to Toronto, now!

Gathering her purse and putting her still cold coat back on, she opened her office door and walked across the floor of the office.  She hurried out to her car and roared off for the long journey south to the big city.  Driving became a kind of meditation as she went along.  She began to relax, except for a stretch where there was a heavy rain buffeting and splashing the car like a tiny ship on the sea.

She arrived at the south end of the hospital over looking an expressway and just beyond that, Lake Ontario.  She drove up Sunnyside Avenue along the east side of the hospital.  Between the road and the hospital a sprawling five story construction project was in its bare concrete stage.  It was surrounded by a high chain link fence. 

Jason was on the second floor in the isolation unit.  Linda arrived in the hallway to find two pink pinstriped nurses leaning over the desk looking at photos of a vacation one of them had taken. 

“Hello, may I help you?” The woman hovering over the computer asked, as the other clicked the window closed on the screen.

“I am here to see my son, Jason Moore”, Linda said.

“Okay, have you been in before?  Do you know how the isolation unit’s visits work?” the nurse asked.

“No”

“Alright, well, your son is in strict isolation so you can’t actually go into his room, but you can sit at the glass and speak to him on a handset,” she explained, gently.

“I can’t go into his room?” Linda asked.

“No, Jason has an illness that doctors are concerned is highly contagious.  They are still trying to properly diagnose him and until they do, they don’t want to risk exposure,” the nurse said cocking her head slightly.

“Like a cold?” Linda asked.

“Yes, a cold or flu, but atypical, that means...”

“I know what it means”, Linda said before the nurse could go into a big patronizing description.

“Okay, your son is just down this corridor, on the right side.  He is in...” she looked at a spreadsheet on a clipboard, “3105, you will find a chair and shelf along with the handset. 

Linda walked down the corridor past a man in dull green on a step ladder changing a fluorescent bulb.

She sat down on the stackable chair with her purse on her lap.  The room inside was dark except some small lights blinking red, a dim green screen showed solid black blocks of data.  She picked up the heavy handset and pressed it to her ear.  She could hear the room through the receiver, constant hissing and the occasional car splashing by somewhere outside, the sound coming in through the open French window.

“Hello?”, Linda said, tentatively.  “Jason?”.

“Hey”, the voice came from inside the room, rattling through an unclear throat.

The lights inside the room brightened steadily and there was her son.  He was lying in an upright position with an oxygen mask covering the lower half of his face.  He had a few days worth of dark beard covering his cheeks and neck.  His hair was the same as she always remembered it, messy.

“Mom! Mom!  It’s you, how did you find me?  Oh mom...”, Jason couldn’t hold back the tears, he began to sob.  “Mom, I have done it.”

Linda, managed to stop her own tears and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”.  She noticed the yellow colour of his face and arms, the thinness.

“I am so happy you’re here, I am so scared.”, He said.

“Well, I am here now and I am not going anywhere.” Linda said smiling softly.  It was all she could do to stop herself from collapsing into a blubbering mess.

Linda and Jason talked for the next three hours straight, sharing memories and telling each other what had happened since they last spoke so long ago.  Her ear grew hot and wet from being pressed against the earpiece for so long.  Jason was exhausted from laughing and talking; he had was interrupted frequently with loud rattling coughs as his lungs continued to fill with water despite all the efforts to stop the flow.

When visiting hours ended she walked down the hallway and wept.  Her son was dying, his life cut short by addiction and infection.  She knew he would not be leaving this place alive.  He had told her that he had some sort of flu that they were not familiar with and this is why he wasn’t allowed to have anyone in the same room.  Linda wanted more than anything to be in there with him during these last hours of his life.  She did not care if she got sick and died all she wanted was to comfort her dying son.

She has always been an incredibly determined woman, not willing to take no for an answer.  When Jason went in to get his tonsils out she fought and ensured that he had his teddy with him when went into the operating room. When he had tubes in his ears she ignored the hospital rules and dressed him in a pair of brand new pajamas instead of the gown they were trying to make him wear. 

The nurse told her, “no one is allowed in to his room and that it would be illegal for her to do so.  Jason is under strict exclusive isolation as ordered by the Centre for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control.”

“Well, there has to be a waiver or something I can sign”, Linda said.

“I am sorry ma’am you can not willfully endanger your own life, it is against the law”, the nurse explained.

“What if I just went in the room without asking?”

“The door is locked and sealed.  And you would risk spreading the infection to others by opening the door.  You wouldn’t just be endangering your own life Mrs. Moore.  Visiting hours are over now, you can come back tomorrow at 11 AM if you like.”

“Well, that’s that”, Linda said feeling defeated.

“Yes, I am sorry.  Have a good night,” the nurse said.

Linda went to the elevator and stood staring at the wood panel pattern on the wall.  She had gone several floors up before she realized that she hadn’t hit a button.  She hit G and waited for the elevator to take her back to the ground floor.  She walked to her car around the building and past the construction site erecting the “Our Lady of Mercy Patient Care Wing”.  She got into her car and sat there staring through the dashboard utterly consumed.  Her son was about to die, alone.

Linda backed her car into a small driveway directly opposite the entrance to the construction site to turn around and find a hotel room for the night.  The cars headlights illuminated the pavement and thick beige tracks of mud left by the comings and goings of the trucks. 

She mashed the accelerator to the floor, the car’s tires growled as they bit the concrete sidewalk and the car shot across the road, mounted the far curb and smashed into the chain link gate which flew open in feeble rattling resistance.  The car continued toward the concrete structure and splashed through large deep puddles, she stopped the car beside the unfinished structure and grabbed her flashlight from the glove box.

She passed stacks of pipe and large spools of black plastic tubing.  Just to her right she found the temporary lift, orange grate across its threshold.  After a quick study of the buttons in front of her she was on the second floor.

She walked across to the far wall and studied the windows just eight feet away from the edge of the new building.  She recognized the green exit sign that was behind her while she visited, that was his room, she was standing directly in front of the window that was exhausting his atypical flu germs.  “I guess they aren’t concerned about the carpenters”, she thought to herself.

Behind her in the centre of the room there was a tall stack of scaffolding frames.  These Metal rectangles had ladder rungs running the length of them.  She was standing there thinking about how a sixty seven year old woman would lift one of these contraptions when she spotted the pile of planks behind a concrete pillar.  Aha!  She took one of the long nine by 2 inch boards to the edge of the structure.  She managed to drop a couple of boards into the abyss below before landing one end of a plank onto the ledge beside Jason’s open window.

Resting on her stomach she slid across the board a lot faster than she had planned, and received a painful splinter in her left leg.  Pulling the door like window open further, she fell backwards inside and onto one of the large orange leather chairs under the window.  She took a second to catch her breath and for the first time felt her heart pounding in her chest.

She could hear Jason breathing great water filled breaths.  Reaching the edge of his bed, she climbed up and put her arm under his shoulders and stroked his cheek.  Jason startled awake and Linda quieted him quickly.

“Shh, just rest,”, Linda whispered in his ear and kissed him on the temple.

Jason’s breaths continued heaving loudly.  He would at times open his eyes to see his mother holding him in her arms.  He would smile in response.  Linda held him throughout the night.  The pauses between his breaths were growing longer.  He took his final water filled breath at three fifteen AM on Christmas Morning.  Linda felt strangely at peace, as though things were as they were supposed to be.

“Mother walks plank for her son,” one headline read.  She didn’t return any requests for interviews or comments.  She was hounded for over a week by numerous media representatives dangling a variety of lucrative offers. She was not tempted once. 

After a week of observation in her own isolation unit she was released.  She never found any organization called St. Jude’s House or any one named Jeremy Chase.  She had also lost her flavour for the power trip and had developed a new passion.  She found great joy from that point forward in giving.  A joy she found by risking everything for her son.