Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [58]
The three of them walked down to Elner’s room, and the young nurse opened the door, and they all stepped into the room, and quietly walked over to the side of the bed. Macky put his arm around Norma and held Linda’s hand and they stood there together looking down at Aunt Elner. The young nurse stood back from the bed as the family had their last moment with the woman before she was to be taken downstairs. Seeing her was not as frightening as Linda had thought it would be. Just as her daddy had said, Aunt Elner looked as if she had just gone to sleep. Norma leaned on Macky as tears welled up in her eyes. Elner looked so sweet and peaceful, it was hard for her to realize she was actually dead. They did not speak and the room was so quiet all they could hear was their own breathing. They were standing there in dead silence, each mentally telling her good-bye in their own way, when Elner said, “I know you’re mad at me, Norma, but I wouldn’t have fallen if those wasps hadn’t gone after me.”
Macky literally jumped back a foot from the bed. “Jesus Christ!”
Upon seeing Elner open her eyes, the young nurse at the foot of the bed let out a bloodcurdling scream and ran out of the room, shrieking at the top of her lungs. Linda screamed at the same time, threw her purse up in the air, and ran out right behind the nurse. Macky’s feet were glued to the floor and he could not get them to move or he would have gone out the door with them. But for once in her life Norma, who was far too stunned to faint, said, “Aunt Elner? What in the world do you call yourself doing, pretending you’re dead? Do you have any idea what you have put us through? We called Linda and everything!” Elner looked over and was about to answer, but before she had a chance, a woman’s hysterical voice came blaring out over the hospital intercom.
“Stat! Stat! Room 212, Stat!”
And the next moment, sounding like a herd of wild buffalo, doctors and nurses came thundering down the hall at breakneck speed and stampeded through the door, pushing machines and three or four IV stands before them, knocking Macky and Norma back against the wall. When the young doctor from the emergency room came running into the room, he turned as white as a sheet when he saw Elner sitting up on her elbows in bed and talking, and he began frantically barking orders. As the room filled up with more staff and machines, Macky and Norma were shoved outside into the hall, and it wasn’t until then that Norma realized what had just happened, and fainted again.
Back in the room, Elner was now surrounded by screaming and yelling doctors and nurses, and being hooked up to several machines all at once, and lifted out of bed, rushed down the hall on a gurney. As Elner, traveling at least forty miles an hour, sped by Linda, who was leaning against the wall still in a state of shock, she called out, “Hey, that’s my niece! Hey, Linda!” By this time the young nurse who had been the first to run out of the room had made it all the way down six flights of stairs, and she ran screaming past Nurse Boots Carroll, almost knocking her down, through the lobby, out the double glass doors, and was now past the parking lot headed down the block, still running as fast as she could. Within five minutes the entire hospital was alive and buzzing with the news. Dead woman talking! As Elner whizzed by Reverend Susie Hill standing down at the end of the hall, she called out, “Hey, Susie, what are you doing here?” “That’s my niece’s lady preacher,” she said to a nurse, who was running alongside her. After