I did not answer any of the fifty three missed calls. I sat on a little plastic chair in the corridor of the pediatric ward at midnight, with a paper cup of cocoa the nurse had pressed into my hands, and I read the message of my son, and then the one from the mother of Ashley, five times each. Ashley told us you were dead. I am sixty nine years old, and I have been called many things in my life. I had never before been buried.
Gail, the mother of Ashley, had found me through the group chat. I had not even known she was in it. My son Peter had added her that summer, by accident, meaning to add the cousins. I wrote back one line. “I am very much alive, Gail. I am on the fourth floor of Mercy Pediatric, if you would care to see for yourself.” Then I put the phone face down on my knee. The nurse, a young woman named Tasha with reindeer earrings, was watching me with kind, worried eyes. “Mrs. Ellis,” she said, “do you want us to call someone?” I told her I wanted another cocoa.
To understand it, you have to know what I was before I retired. I worked in the cafeteria of that very hospital for thirty one years. I served soup to doctors and to the parents of dying children, and I learned, over the long years, which of them wanted conversation and which of them wanted to be left alone. When my husband Walter died, he left me a paid off house and a small insurance policy, and I decided what to do with it. Every December since, I had walked into that ward with a list of the children who would not be going home for Christmas, and I had bought them presents. No name on the gifts. Just “Santa.”
A cafeteria worker who secretly bought presents for sick children was declared dead by a daughter in law and found alive in a children ward.
This year, the foundation director had finally cornered me. A woman named Priscilla in a green suit, who had been trying to learn the name of Santa for eleven years, stopped me in the lobby with the cashier slip in her hand. Thirty two children, thirty two presents, eighteen hundred and forty six dollars. And behind her, in a frame on the wall, the old playroom, with its sagging couch and its sixty year old puzzle boxes. “Mrs. Ellis,” she said, “the board voted last Tuesday. We would like to build you a new playroom, and put your name on the door. Will you let us?”
I had said no, at first, politely. I did not want a plaque. But Peter had phoned that evening, between the turkey and the pie, and said, “Mom, please. Let them. You have been giving away your money for eleven years and nobody has ever said thank you.” I had cried a little. I said I would think about it. That was how I came to walk into that ward on Christmas Eve, with a car full of presents and the sound of my own front door still ringing in my ears.
I will confess that I nearly turned the car around at the corner of Third and Maple. I am not a brave woman. I had stood in my doorway an hour earlier, in my best coat, with a plate of cookies for the grandchildren, and been told that I embarrassed my own son. But then I thought of Tasha, and of the thirty two children on the fourth floor, and of a little girl named Noelle who had asked me the year before whether Santa knew her room number. I drove on.
At a quarter past midnight, the elevator opened, and out stepped a tall white haired man in a camel coat, with a woman in a velvet hat beside him, and behind them, a step back, with her head down, my daughter in law. Gail ran to me. I do not know how else to say it. She is sixty five, a polished woman, and she ran in heeled boots down a hospital corridor and fell on her knees in front of my plastic chair and took both my hands. “Margaret,” she said. “I am so sorry. I have been to your funeral in my mind for five years, and you are sitting here in a paper crown.”
Ron, the father of Ashley, stood a little apart with the letter from the foundation in his hand. He is the chairman of the hospital board. He had signed the vote himself, without knowing whose name it carried. “Mrs. Ellis,” he said, and his voice shook, “we voted to name that room for the woman who pushed a cart through these halls for thirty years. I did not know that she was the mother of my son in law.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on his scarf and put them back on. “I am honored. I am ashamed. I am both.”
Ashley said nothing for a long time. She stood at the end of the corridor with her arms wrapped round her middle, her mascara running. Then she walked to me, very slowly, and sat down on the floor, in her good coat, at my feet. “I told them you were dead,” she said, “because you worked in a cafeteria, and I was afraid they would think less of me.” She laughed, a horrible little laugh. “And all this time you were buying presents for sick children. I have been ashamed of the wrong person.” I put my hand on her hair. I told her that I had worked in that cafeteria with great pride, and that I would not hear one word against it. But I told her that I forgave her.
We spent Christmas morning on that ward, all of us, in paper crowns, handing out the presents from the pile. Ron read The Night Before Christmas in the old playroom, in a voice like a bear. Gail knitted, and Ashley held the little ones, and Peter, who had driven four hours through the snow, carried in the cocoa. The new playroom opened the following autumn, with a mural of a red kite and a bookcase of picture books, and on the wall by the door, in modest brass letters, it says, The Walter and Margaret Ellis Playroom. Beneath it, in smaller letters, someone has added, Santa lives here.