Pancake Girl

"You could have spared her Oh, but no Messiahs need people dying In their name.""Pancake" by Tori Amos

Jeff was a strange guy. He never stopped smiling, even when you said something that made other people unhappy or even mean. It got to the point that I would talk to him just to see if his smile would change, but nope it didn't. And then I started paying more attention to his eyes and that was where his true feelings were displayed. It was like one of those kids books where you mash up the animals to make them a Ti-Bear or an Ele-Horse. So Jeff was one of those. And another strange thing about Jeff is that he just didn't get it until later. And by the time he'd be knocking on my door wanting to talk about something, I'd already forgotten how the whole topic started. But even with Jeff's strangeness he was a good guy. If you ever watched the animated movie Coraline, you'd think that's where Jeff came from, except he didn't have buttons for eyes.

Jeff's little girl Tracy was just adorable. Strangely, she had the same permanent smile on her face like when you told her something funny, she just exploded into the most adorable heartfelt laugh in the world. So of course, I always liked to tell Tracy things just to see her laugh. Tracy was my daughters best friend. Probably the best friend she ever had in her life and ever will. Tracy never stole or broke my daughters toys, and was of course, always cheerful and very respectful. So Tracy spent a lot of time at our house playing Barbie's with my daughter. Tracy especially had a lot of interest when I was preparing dinner. She said that she knew how to cook all kinds of things and loved to cook for her daddy. I never asked about Tracy's mother; whether she lived at home with them and just was shy, or did Jeff have custody of Tracy and they just had a great relationship. It just never was important for me to dig deep into my daughter's friend's personal lives. Until Jeff came by one day and asked me for a little motherly advice about Tracy. His mouth was still smiling, but his eyes told a different story.

Tracy had the stomach flu and he had been giving her the usual drinks, water, popsicles, chicken noodle soup and her fever seemed to be better, but she was still vomiting and he was worried about dehydration. I then said that if this is the case, she needed to be seen by her physician. He said that he had an appointment but he had been staying home with her for the last few days and really had to get back to work before he was written up for absences. It all became obvious to me that he was a single parent and there was no mother at home. I urged him to go to the emergency room right away, and he did.

When my daughter said Tracy didn't show up at school for several days, I decided to call on Jeff and ask about Tracy. Oh she's getting better, he said. The doctor told him to keep her at home just another day. That night, Jeff called and was obviously upset. He had taken Tracy to the emergency because she had taken a turn for the worse and was looking very pale. We met him at the hospital to give him moral support. It was the first time I had seen Jeff without his perpetual smile. He now had a very pronounced frown and his eyes were very sad and scared. Jeff, whose boss had the compassion of a turnip said that he had to go to work or he'd lose his job. So confused and under pressure, he left Tracy alone and when he came home, he found her in a comatose state on the kitchen floor. Apparently, she had become hungry and was going to make herself some pancakes. The syrup bottle was out and it looked like she had sampled some of the syrup as she had syrup still in her mouth when he saw her. Immediately, he scooped up the unconscious child and rushed her to the emergency room just ten minutes away.

Then a woman who was the emergency room physician appeared and to ld us that Tracy was not doing very well. She then asked us to follow her through the doors marked DO NOT ENTER and we followed her silently, single file into an office. What made this office a little different was that it had a large paned window that looked directly into a hospital suite. In the room there was medical and monitoring equipment and lines that my eyes followed to this small bundle of a child lying still in silence. Two attending nurses quietly and carefully moved about. My daughter broke the silence when she asked if Tracy was there on the bed. The doctor said yes and asked if she was her sister. No, my daughter replied. She is my best friend. The doctor asked if I was the mother. No I said, I am just a close friend. She then asked Jeff if he wanted us to hear the disclosure of his daughter's medical condition. He said, yes. Certainly.

Tracy is a diabetic, the doctor said. She didn't have the flu, but was showing symptoms of juvenile diabetes. Luckily, she didn't have many sugary sweet drinks or candy lately, but the pancake syrup pushed her blood sugar so high that she became unconscious. Jeff was devastated. He started sobbing and apologizing for not recognizing what was going on with Tracy. The doctor said that he was not entirely to blame, because when she had first arrived in the emergency room, they had stabilized her and she was conscious…until the next shift of nurses came on. One of the nurses on the previous shift did not record that she had given insulin to Tracy, so when the next nurse cam in she gave Tracy enough insulin to put her into a coma. The doctor said that Tracy went into shock and then into a deep coma. Jeff was alarmed when the doctor said that to help the trauma they had then medically induced a deeper coma. It made no sense to any of us.

We left Jeff there at the hospital that night and told him we will visit daily. Once back at home, my daughter brought out the tape recorder and played something for me that she and Tracy had recorded. It was a song called Pancake Girl. Totally silly lyrics and more giggling than anything, the song was about a girl who loves to make pancakes for her daddy when he comes home from work. In her words, she said it was the pancake girl that made her daddy smile all the time even when he's mad, with her pancakes. And because her daddy smiled, she wanted to make more pancakes. Like I said, silly monotonous lyrics from eight year old girls having a wonderful time together.

One day when we were visiting with Tracy, the doctor said that it could help Tracy feel better if my daughter would record her classmates and playground noises at the school and then play it for her. So the next day not only did she bring the tape recorder with the class and playground sounds, but also the Pancake Girl song they had recorded. Day after day we played the recordings, sometimes adding to them, keeping it to about a fifteen minute length overall. The doctor asked if we could leave the tape at the hospital so the nurses could play it when they could. Just before Thanksgiving, Tracy's mother was contacted and the hospital made special arrangements to have Tracy flown to Iowa to a children's hospital closer to where her mother lived. Jeff contacted a lawyer who would secure a court order to stop the flight on the tarmac. Unfortunately, the judge was playing golf at the time, so the plane was permitted to leave for Iowa. Tracy's medical file mysteriously vanished from the hospital and custody was awarded to the mother who had abandoned Tracy when she was just three months old.

Jeff's smile vanished that day. I'd bet he played the Pancake Girl song until the tape wore out. And then Jeff vanished too.