This is not a coming-of-age story. Edna never had any poignant transitions between childhood and adulthood. What she’s had is something like a raft, always adrift between the two. This is a story of that raft finally coming ashore; and it begins at the age of 85.
The following is a typical morning for Edna: wake to sunshine that filters in through the verbena bushes; plan to spend the day gardening; find herself in a long white hallway full of strangers; retreat to her room to look for her cats.
“Gem, Gemmy! Frosty! Tiger! Kitties! Where are you?” She calls while searching through drawers, cabinets, closets, and under the bed; hands shaking, and pocked with fresh cuts and dried black blood from thrashing around while she searches. Not finding what she is looking for, she smooths her slacks with her shaking hands, then walks back out the door and slams it behind her, rattling the lighted Kinkade cottage that hangs in the long hallway.
On a morning like this, Edna might then spend the day silently interrogating the people outside her walls. On one occasion she had followed a young man down the hallway to a resident five doors away from her own room. The young man had knocked on the door and tried to ignore the elderly woman who glared at him from a distance of three feet. When the door opened, the young man gave Edna an apologetic smile and moved quickly into the room, shutting the door behind him.
Besides stalking the visitors of fellow residents, Edna sometimes lingers in the activity’s quarters. She might be found standing near the back wall, letting her eyes trail everyone who passes her. She’ll notice that the woman in the purple dress with wide hips, dangling arm fat, and swollen ankles looks suspiciously like a cat thief. And the man in the little blue suit with black hair slicked into a crescent around his head could be an accomplice. And the wheelchairs that stroll by have plenty of space to hide cats.
When Edna observes these strangers throughout the day, anger swells; expanding in her stomach like lava that rolls and gurgles at the bottom of an angry volcano. And by evening Edna will be ready to erupt. At dinner time, she will walk into the dining hall and scan the room, waiting for someone to look at her. The first person to look at Edna is often a visitor who does not know about Edna’s dining room tirades, so is apt to greet her with an innocent smile.
“You lowdown scoundrel!” Edna might scream at them. “Get your own cats!”
She often, on such occasions, raises her walking stick, and at times comes close to landing it on someone’s head, but there is always someone who intervenes. When this happens, Edna is escorted to her room, and as she is being escorted, she will protest that it isn’t fair, she’s not the cat thief.
Edna’s children live nearby and periodically dine with her to keep her mind off her cats—their cats, really; Gem, Frosty, and Tiger were their childhood pets. But when Pam visits from out of town, she stays the entire day. Pam is Edna’s granddaughter.
Pam’s earliest memory of Edna is from when she was four years old. She had run to greet Edna with a hug, expecting wet kisses and breath like sour pineapple—since this is what she was used to when she visited her Nana. She received a hesitant pat on the head, instead, and a side hug—while Edna was half standing. The embrace was awkward, but it was not devoid of affection. It just seemed unsure—almost apologetic. And Pam didn’t even know if Grandma Edna’s breath smelled bad, like her Nana’s.
I still don’t know if her breath smells bad, Pam thinks to herself on her latest visit to Sunflower Assisted Living, while she reminisces, as she often does, this earliest memory of her grandmother. She walks down the long corridor to the last room on the right and knocks on the door before opening it, and slowly walks inside. Edna is sitting in a wingback chair with her eyes on Pam. Her milky brown pupils give an accusative stair.
“Why did you let them take my cats, they were all I had…” her voice trails off in a whimper.
“Hey grandma, I hear they’re serving chicken risotto for dinner. I love chicken risotto. And it’s your favorite, right?”
“Oh but,” Edna says, trying to hold on to one thought—cat thievery—while addressing another. “These so-called cooks, they don’t know how to cook chicken. It’s always too dry, it’s like cardboard. They can’t even cook rice, honey, they always burn it.”
“Hmm,” Pam says, pressing a finger to the side of her mouth. “Let’s see what’s on today’s schedule; find out what fun things they’ve got planned for today.”
Pam walks to the wall where the activities schedule hangs.
“Oh look! There’s a storyteller; an Irish folklore storyteller. Oh, and look at that, it’s happening right now. Let’s go to this.”
Before Edna can reject the idea, Pam is helping her out of the chair. Pam used to worry about Edna’s growing unwillingness to join activities set up for residents at Sunflower, but she’s learned that Edna is malleable when others take the lead.
They arrive just when the storyteller is finishing an introduction of herself. This is a relief to Pam who is unsure how long Edna’s patience will last, listening to someone talk. The storyteller, an American woman who has never actually been to Ireland but has always been fascinated by what she envisages Irish culture to be like, fakes an Irish accent and begins her tales. She begins by detailing an enchanting green Irish meadow, and Edna is immediately irritated with the woman’s voice.
“Honey,” Edna says; not whispering. “Why is this woman telling us what Ireland looks like? I know what Ireland looks like. There something wrong with her?” Edna taps her head at the last question with a genuine look of concern for the storyteller’s mental state.
Pam stifles a laugh and puts her finger to her lips to shush Edna. This quiets Edna just as the storyteller begins to talk of fairytale creatures. In the stories that follow, fairies and leprechauns are mischievous, dragons and trolls are cruel, and unicorns are enchanting. And there is a pot of gold in every story. Pam enjoys the stories and glances at Edna with an encouraging smile. But she is startled to find that Edna is watching the storyteller intently, with eyes that are both lucid and angry.
“This is a lie,” Edna begins whispering to herself, so silently that Pam doesn’t know what she is saying, at first. Then the words get louder, “this is a lie,” and louder still, “this is a lie,” until Edna is standing, pointing at the storyteller, and yelling, “this is a lie!”
The storyteller looks at Edna and then at Pam with tired irritation. Pam’s eyes fill with tears.
“I’m so sorry,” Pam whispers to the air as she stands up and puts her hand on Edna’s soft fleshy bicep to pull Edna away from the scene. Edna resists and continues to yell and point at the storyteller, and glare at the audience. Two nurses come to Edna’s side. They place their hands on her arms and back and calmly usher her out of the room. Pam trails behind.
Edna is crying as she is led to her room. Snot and tears pool on her upper lip, and she continues to mutter that it’s all a lie. The staff at Sunflower have learned that after a fit, Edna is usually eager to go to bed; and she falls asleep quickest when tucked in, like a small child. Edna is a favorite among many of the staff because her eagerness to be tucked into bed is so endearing. It is not long after this last fit that Edna is asleep.
“Something is really wrong,” Pam tells the nurses as they fiddle with Edna’s blanket.
“This kind of stuff happens,” one of the nurses says in a reassuring tone. “The storyteller’s not offended.”
“But she was lucid,” Pam says, “I know she was. I can’t explain it, but that wasn’t the dementia, that was my grandma.”
“Edna always does well with a good sleep after an episode,” the nurse says, as though Pam had not said anything. In the nurse’s experience, visitors are more likely to be confused about their ailing loved one’s lucidity when the loved one suddenly shows hostility to something they have always disdained.
“She’ll probably be asleep for a while.” The nurse continues. “If you’d like to go somewhere, in the meantime, we can give you a call when she’s up.”
Pam looks at her grandmother. Edna’s white puff of hair is crushed against the pillow, giving her a stiff halo.
“Thanks, but I’ll stay.”
Pam sits in the chair next to Edna’s bed. She pulls one of Edna’s hands into her lap and strokes it, tracing the plump blue veins with her index finger. The scene in the activities room is familiar to Pam, somehow, though she cannot remember why. She peers past Edna, towards the flowers that gather sun outside the window. A hummingbird drops down above a verbena, hovering in the middle of an invisible flutter of wings. Then Pam remembers.
When Pam was six and her mother had just given birth to her little brother, she went to stay with Edna for a few days. One quiet afternoon as Edna rocked in her chair, knitting and looking out the window, Pam sat on the floor next to her with children’s books sprawled out in front of her. She used to ask Edna to read to her, but Edna read in monotone, a little sarcastically, and it dampened the enchantment of the stories. Pam’s favorite books were the ones about fairies. When she looked up from one of her books, she noticed, just outside the window, a hummingbird that had swooped down for a quick sip of nectar.
“Grandma?”
“Yes honey?”
“Why don’t fairies come out where we can see them?”
“What did you say, dear?”
“Well, why don’t fairies come out where we can see them? Are they scared of us? Hummingbirds aren’t scared to be seen and we don’t hurt them.”
“Honey, fairies are not real.”
“My Nanna told me all about fairies, and she don’t lie.”
“Doesn’t lie. And you’re six years old; it’s high time you learned that fairytales aren’t real. Your Nana means well, but she’s telling you a falsehood. And a falsehood of any kind is still a lie. For the life of me I don’t know why rational thinking adults go on pretending to believe in made-up creatures.”
“My Nana wouldn’t lie to me. Fairies have to be real. My Nana says so.”
“She’s lying; it’s a lie.” Edna snapped.
Pam stood up, stomped her foot, then ran outside crying. Edna left her outside to sob in the overgrown grass that blew gently, like an ocean whose waves were crashing softly and quietly against the wooden fence. Half an hour later Edna brought a platter of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to a subdued puffy eyed six-year-old.
“I’m sorry, honey.” Edna had said, and Pam had sniffled while she took a cookie.
Pam runs her palm smoothly across Edna’s after she recalls the memory. Their hands are the same size.
I have no idea what goes on inside this woman’s head, Pam thinks.
This is where the story begins.
Renee Rushing 
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