A Mile in These Shoes

I.

  Lillian always put her trash out on Sunday afternoon before it got dark because the trash pickup came so early Monday morning and she was afraid of the alley in the dark. She’d found syringes there and once someone set her trash on fire. A neighbor who saw it from a second floor window, came out and put out the fire and then left a note about it under her locked gate. She always kept the gate to the alley locked. It was a tall wooden gate, part of a tall wooden fence so no one could see her in her backyard and she couldn’t see whatever was going on in the alley.

  One Sunday afternoon she forgot to put her trash out for the collection and so she had to put it out early Monday morning, while it was still dark, or it would be missed for the week. She unlocked the gate and took a deep breath and then had it startled right out of her again because, sure enough, there was a man in the alley, a very tall bearded man.

  He realized he would present a frightening sight and his first thought was to simply run away but Lillian had dropped her bag of trash and the bag broke and there was trash all over the alley. He bent to clean it up for her, speaking respectfully the whole time. “I’m sorry I scared you. I was taking a short cut to the bus to the day labor place on Colfax. Don’t touch this. I’ve got this. Let me just clean this up for you.” and so on and so forth until it was apparent to Lillian that this was a nice older man, not one of those gang kids looking to make trouble. He was not older like she was, more like her oldest daughter. It never failed to pain her that her beautiful daughter was getting old before she’d had any real joy in life. Maybe that was why she spoke so kindly to the strange man.

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Well just whatever anyone needs doing. The bosses come to this place where we wait and pick out as many men as they need.”

  “I’ve got some work. What do you make?”

  “We get minimum, and then we got to pay part of what we earn to the bosses for the transportation.”

  “Well I’ll pay you $7 an hour to do some work around here if you want. And I’ll give you breakfast.”

  She walked him around showing him the various little repairs that needed doing but insisted that he eat breakfast first and he went into the bathroom to wash up. He was in there so long she began to worry but when he emerged it was obvious what had taken so long. He had done considerable washing up on himself but had left the bathroom itself cleaner than it had been. She was impressed. Now he was clean, he offered his hand and introduced himself:

  “My name is Alexander Winfield but everyone calls me Win,” and then he chuckled a bit as if struck for the very first time by the irony of his nickname. She took his hand and said, “Lillian is what you can call me, and if you don’t mind I’d like to call you Alexander. It is such an elegant name.”

  During breakfast she talked more about her children than she should have. Their lives were still more interesting and more important to her than her own. She learned that Alexander was homeless, had been sleeping in the park but was worried about the coming winter. She learned that day that he was a hard working man and very meticulous, very neat. She paid him and invited him back to do more projects.

  It was a hot September but Colorado weather can change drastically in a wink. One morning the temperature dropped steadily from 70 degrees and by mid afternoon it was snowing. Alexander asked Lillian if he could bed down in her garage. When she said yes, he was off in a flash to go get his sleeping bag stashed in a hiding place. It was two hours before he returned and she was sorry she hadn’t thought to say fast enough that she had sleeping bags and extra blankets and even an old tent left from the days she and her second husband had gone camping on the weekends. She gathered up all those things and made a pile on a metal table in the garage for him in case he would need more than what he had.

  The snowstorm lasted three days. Tree limbs still full of leaves broke from the weight of the snow and fell onto power lines so thousands of homes lost electricity. Lillian always liked to have a fire in her fireplace when that happened as it so often did. She had an old fashioned wood fireplace and her husband had always kept a good supply of wood to burn on cold winter days. She hadn’t had a fire since his death. For one thing she couldn’t split the logs piled up in the back and they were too thick to burn. Alexander split the logs for her and she invited him in to enjoy the fire and some hot tea and they talked all day that first day.

  He shared the secrets of his life with her that day, the part about being schizophrenic, about being hospitalized and how the medications made him nauseous and tired all the time, about running away, about being homeless, about trying to maintain his hold on reality without the medications, about his fears and then he saw that look on her face, the look of sympathy mixed with apprehension, and he realized he’d said too much. He excused himself and went back to the garage where he bundled into the pile of sleeping bags and blankets and slept next to the little electric space heater for the next two days, embarrassed even to knock on the door to ask to use the bathroom and he relieved himself in the alley in the dark.

  Lillian didn’t know what to make of all this. She wanted to call her daughters but knew they would worry about her. Kind souls both, but of course it was craziness to take in this strange man right off the street. How did you get to know a person? She had trusted her second husband from the moment they first danced, two strangers there with friends, something about his eyes, she knew she could trust him. She decided to trust Alexander. He was dignified and honest and he looked like her brother who had died so young. Alexander looked young for his real age. Lillian had been surprised to learn that he was in his fifties already and figured it was innocence that kept him so young looking. She suddenly wanted to show Alexander the picture of her brother, tell him about her life and her family and how she understood about these things. How it is such a thin line between sanity and insanity.

  She waited a while to give Alexander his privacy and his space. She could see that he was hiding in the daylight and coming out at night to shovel the snow which would have been hip high but for his nightly work. Then the morning of the third and last day of the snowstorm she went out to the garage and woke Alexander by telling him breakfast was ready and he’d best come in and clean up before it got cold. She had grilled steaks on the backyard BBQ.

  They were eating in the kitchen when the lights went on and Alexander went down to check the furnace pilot light and make sure it would be working right. He would need to drain the radiators during the next warm spell but meantime Lillian had a little tool to bleed the ones that had air pockets and didn’t warm up. They began to discuss the changes they could make to the garage to make it more livable and Alexander understood he was invited to stay.

  A few days later, when Lillian went out to the garage to wake Alexander for breakfast and found him gone she didn’t think much of it, thought perhaps he had gone to retrieve more personal belongings and he’d be back in a few hours. When he didn’t return for several days she worried that something had happened to him but she was also afraid to call the police or hospitals in case she got him into some kind of trouble. She thought about going to look for him herself but realized she had no idea where to begin and that she had no hold on him or right even to worry about his welfare. She was torn between worry and hurt that he hadn’t taken up her invitation to stay, felt like she’d been used those few days of the snow storm but realized there was nothing calculating about Alexander. He had done all the work around the place that needed doing and perhaps he didn’t want to stay and feel useless. Lillian understood that. She went by the day labor place once to see if he was there but he was not and the men that were there frightened her. They had to congregate so early in the morning to be picked up for construction or cleaning jobs that it was barely even light and she felt uneasy being on Colfax at that hour.

  II.

  Lillian got on with her life and hoped that Alexander was safe, warm, reminding herself that he had mana
ged for fifty years without her help. Her daughter in New York City called to tell her the news that she’d been offered a permanent job where she’d been temping, not a dream job to be sure, but a job nonetheless, with health insurance after three months. She was fixing up her apartment, making it nicer. Lillian accepted the invitation to come out and see it. She wanted her daughter to know she was proud of her even though she had wanted so much more for her children.

  Lillian’s two weeks in the city were a nightmare. She hated the subway and she got lost on the streets when she tried to go out walking during the days and then she was too tired to do things with her daughter after work. She couldn’t get used to dining at nine thirty at night and she had a hard time keeping all her daughter’s friends straight, not just their names but their careers and boyfriends and backgrounds. She always thought the wrong girl was from West Virginia and couldn’t tell by her outfit who worked on Wall Street. Sometimes she felt that the young women were overly solicitous of her, made her feel old but she was grateful that they all approved of her having tried to help Alexander. She had thought trusting him might be perceived as naïve or even an old woman’s craziness but each and every one of the young women, most importantly her own daughter, thought it was cool what she had done and hoped he would come back. They all felt compassion for the homeless of New York and wished they could do something but they were all struggling themselves.

  Sometimes Lillian would sit in her daughter’s cramped apartment staring out at the fire-escape and cry but this she kept secret from her daughter as she also kept secret her worry that Alexander might come to the house in Denver needing to get in out of the cold, needing something to eat, and finding it empty and locked up, would go away again. She forgot that he had a key to the padlock on the side door of the detached garage.

  Lillian and her daughter got along OK until her last day and then they fought. They always fought on the last day of a visit whether it was in New York or Denver. “Separation anxiety” her daughter called it and they never got over it. Then they’d both cry and make up and be extravagantly thoughtful of one another at the airport and whoever flew would call as soon as she made it safely home and they would talk for hours.

  Her last visit to New York had been before her husband died and he had met her at the airport and driven her home to their house. Now she had to get her own way home. She had planned to arrive early enough in the day to be able to take the RTD bus and then catch a taxi closer to home because it was so expensive to take a taxi all the way but she decided she was just too tired to make the connections and decided to spend the money. She was, after all, old. The whole way home she thought about being alone and about her daughters being alone and she pretended to doze so she wouldn’t have to make conversation with the friendly taxi driver.

  Lillian went straight to bed and slept until the phone rang and woke her. She had forgotten to call her daughter who was worried. They spoke briefly and then Lillian went back to sleep, not even getting up to brush her teeth she felt so weary. She slept until the morning sun was high in the sky and she heard someone moving around in the backyard. Alexander was back.

  “Good morning. Looks like its going to be a beautiful day.” That was all he said, watching her closely to see how she would respond to his return. He didn’t say anything about where he’d been or why. He acted almost as if he were unaware of having been gone but for that look that Lillian noticed, a bit tentative, almost frightened at first, watching to see how she would react to his presence, if she would be angry at him. She decided she wouldn’t ask about where he’d been or why. Later she did go into the garage while he was gone to the grocery store with a list she had given him. She resisted the urge to tidy up because she was there strictly to snoop and didn’t want him to know she’d done so. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, bottles maybe, maybe letters, although she knew she would never dare read someone else’s private correspondence, the thought of that appalled her. She did find some meds and sighed to herself knowing how he had hated those but feeling safer knowing he was taking them.

  She made a lovely dinner that evening despite feeling tired and they talked late into the night. She finally did show him the framed photograph of her brother looking poetic in a black turtleneck sweater. He had a pensive expression and leaned his face on his hand on a table with a glass of wine in front of him. The background was the exposed brick wall of a cafe where musicians played guitars and poets read their latest work, that sort of place.

  He was nineteen in the photo that was taken shortly before he was killed on a street in San Francisco. She was ashamed that he had died a violent death and nothing had been done.

  III.

  All through the winter, Lillian talked to Alexander about her life, her brother and their childhood, but she always stopped short of her first marriage, short-lived, painful and best forgotten. Nor did she talk much about the birth of her children, except to tell him that sometimes she had dreams about her first born that turned into dreams about her brother when he was a baby and that frightened her and made her overprotective of that child. She began to mix up the memories of her children’s early years with her own childhood. Sometimes she couldn’t remember what she had just said, thought perhaps she was not making sense because of some look she thought she saw in Alexander’s eyes and then almost immediately forgot.

  By the time Lillian’s baby brother was born, her father and mother had separated. Her father slept in one of the little attic rooms that would eventually become her brother’s. Lillian slept in the other one. Lillian’s bed was built into a little alcove under the eaves overlooking the neighbor’s backyard. When she couldn’t sleep she would sit up and stare at the porch light that was left on all night until she felt her eyes droop and then she would stretch out and sleep. Her father sometimes came across the hall at the top of the stairs and read her a book before bed. She remembered the alphabet book: A for apple, B for Boy, C for Cat and so forth. She remembered it clearly because that was the book that started her out learning to read on her own. She also remembered him teaching her a prayer to say before bed that ended with the words “my soul to keep” she couldn’t remember the rest.

  “I know that one too” said Alexander, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep… but that is not the end, it is the beginning. The end goes like this: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  “You are right. I remember now” and Lillian repeated the little prayer over and over to herself fondly. The night her father taught her the prayer was the last night they lived under the same roof. That was the night he got into their car and drove straight through from Detroit to Denver. He called her a couple days later and she had a hard time finding her voice because the loneliness in his voice hurt her deeply like a blow to her chest. She didn’t think much about her own loneliness. She thought she was used to it. But when she said her little prayer she changed the words and asked the Lord to let her die before she woke. By six, she perceived life as more work than it was worth. Remembering that part of her childhood was for Lillian like watching the grief and pain of someone separate from herself and she and Alexander cried together for that strange child.

  IV

  The spring brought more snow and then suddenly it was summer. The days were so hot they didn’t go out until dusk. Then Lillian and Alexander went out walking every night after dinner. The first time he suggested they go to the park Lillian hesitated thinking it best not to be there after dark but of course she realized how silly that might sound to Alexander who had lived in the park before he moved into her garage.

  The park was beautiful at night. Not being able to see the buildings all around, Lillian felt almost as though she were up in the mountains again, in the woods. They sat by the lake and watched people walking their dogs and waited until all those people were gone before getting up. Then Alexander went over to a heavily wooded area where he found so
me of his friends who were listening to music on an old tape player someone had bought at the Salvation Army. Two people were dancing. They whirled around and around in a waltz as graceful as anything she had ever seen. Lillian watched with such longing that Alexander realized she missed dancing and asked her to dance. She was hesitant at first but figured why not and discovered that Alexander could dance quite well despite having to bend almost double to reach his arm around her waist. He whirled her around the grass until she was breathless. After the waltz came a tango and the other couple executed a tango there in the grass in the dark that inspired the rest of them to wild applause and shouts of “you go girls” and only then did Lillian realize that it was two elderly women who danced so elegantly despite their layers of ragged men’s clothing.

  They stayed out in the park all night and when Lillian got sleepy she just lay down and slept and woke again to the sound of the birds. Lillian loved the sound of the birds in the morning and when at home she would stay late in bed imagining herself in the wilderness. But she knew that the city sprinkler system would go on soon automatically and so she got right up and woke Alexander warning him to hurry before the sprinklers went on and soaked them. “Don’t worry,” he said like he always did when she worried about something. He told her his friends knew the system, what sprinklers would go on first and where and they weren’t worried. Nonetheless Lillian noticed another half dozen people emerging from beneath trees and behind bushes: no one wanted to be caught sleeping in the park and arrested. Jail was sometimes a welcome shelter in the winter but not during the summer months. Lillian felt guilty that she had a house to go home to, but at the same time was not sure she wanted all these people to know where she lived, she didn’t have rooms for everyone after all. Alexander saved her from her moral dilemma whispering to her not to go inviting anyone home. “You don’t need all the problems,” he told her and then announced loudly that he and his friend were going to go scrounge up some breakfast. No one offered to join them and they just strolled on home.

  “I feel terrible not even feeding any of them,” she said and Alexander told her the same thing her second husband used to tell her “You can’t save the world.” She almost snapped back at him that she had saved him but stopped herself because it was mean and she knew that Alexander gave as good as he got.

  Day after day the thermometer straddled 100 degrees and no humidity at all so everything dried up and died and Lillian felt like her brain was shrinking and rattling around inside, hurting her head. Every night the television reported on the forest fires that raged all over Colorado and New Mexico and the death toll mounted and in the city, people went out with masks over their faces if they suffered from asthma and ash covered the yard around the house and blew in on the window sills. The air for miles was heavy with ash.

  Lillian called her older daughter, who lived on a ranch to be sure she was OK, near as she was to large scale fires. “Fine,” she said she was fine, but it was obvious she was not fine because she was lonely and wanted to leave the man she was with but feared if she did there would be no one else and Lillian could not honestly tell her there would be. Lillian cried for her grown daughter because she understood that loneliness and anxiety and the awful feeling of looking around for something better or even just an opening somewhere in those walls that closed in on a person closer with each passing year. But there were no openings, just the walls, closing in. Lillian understood this and did not know what to say.

  When this first child had been born, Lillian had imagined she could make a better life for her daughter than the life she had lived but one night while she was rubbing her baby’s back soothing her to sleep Lillian had a premonition. It was not a vision or anything in words, just a feeling of grief that washed over her heart and it was not her own grief that she had grown used to, but a new grief and she knew somehow that it was the grief of her child, a grief that was yet to come and she was so sorry then and never forgot that feeling that came and went in a second, so strong was it. Lillian felt guilty and hopeless toward her child ever since, spoiling her but unable to help her so her daughter’s loneliness and anxiety hurt her far more than any of her own losses or disappointments.

  Alexander noticed that whenever Lillian spoke on the telephone with this older daughter she would become very quiet and depressed for days thereafter. He asked her during those times to play the piano for him. He really did find the music soothing and wanted to remind her to seek comfort where she could. Sometime the music careened off into something crazy, the two hands not playing together at all and Lillian would stop confused and soon Alexander stopped asking her to play at all.

 

  V

  A year passed, then another. Lillian marked the seasons by holidays which she remembered because her daughters always came to visit. Nothing much happened in their lives. No one got a great job or met anyone wonderful or took a fabulous trip. Nothing terrible happened either. No one lost a dull job or was heartbroken over anybody or became afflicted in any way. Lillian told her children to count their blessings and remembered her father telling her that his mother always used to tell him to count his blessings which caused Lillian to realize all of a sudden that her father had been very disappointed in his life and perhaps her grandmother had been as well. She’d sigh and tell them they should be grateful that they had the use of all their limbs and senses and they said yes they knew they should not take those things for granted but still they yearned for something more, for a great and lasting perfect love, for simple companionship that could be counted on every day, for the genius to create something that would be widely appreciated. They did not realize that such gifts still had to be paid for in some way, with some loss or grief. Lillian said that life was never as good as they hoped for or as terrible as they feared it might be. She advised them to strive for peace of mind, to take joy in the sunrise. And yet, Lillian herself still yearned for something marvelous. Alexander wanted to tell them to be glad that they had never had to be hungry, cold or humiliated but he said nothing, feeling that it was not his place.

  Alexander had vague memories of a childhood home that was comfortable, parents and a sister who were more often kind than not and only the turmoil of his own brain set him at odds with the peace of that home. He could not remember why he left home the first time but he remembered the shame when he returned and later he did not return. Sometimes he would look in the Pueblo telephone book at the library but never found his father’s name listed there and he wondered what had become of his parents. He suspected his sister had married long ago and of course he would have had no idea of her new last name. Lillian offered to buy him a bus ticket and even to go with him to look for his family but after riding the bus down to Pueblo they found the old house occupied by new people who knew nothing of his parents. They went to the courthouse and learned that both his parents had died exactly one year apart to the day, several years earlier. Alexander ached with the knowledge that his parents had died not knowing where or how he was.

  Lillian encouraged him to search for his sister. He went to the old high school but all the teachers were young and no one remembered as far back as he needed them to. The search for his sister turned up nothing. After watching Alexander gradually and timidly warm to the idea of finding his family and observing his subtle disappointment, Lillian blamed herself for getting his hopes up and she resolved to be the best family she could be to him. He was silent for several days after their little excursion, took his meds, slept a lot and cried some when he thought she was asleep and could not hear him.

  “Where does the time go?” they asked each other, both wishing someone had warned them to use it wisely then remembering that the old folks always warned the young ones about the swift passage of their lives and the young ones always ignored the old ones. Lillian showed Alexander her photo albums with the faded photos showing her young and actually quite beautiful. Looking into her old face he could see the r
esemblance as if to a cousin or child. It was alarming to see how much a few decades could change a person. Alexander looked into the bathroom mirror and tried to resurrect his own youthful face. He had no photos to help him in this endeavor and realized he’d lost himself, his own past, along with his family.

  VI

  One afternoon Lillian decided to drive to the park. She was too tired to walk and Alexander was sleeping and she just did not feel like waiting for him to get up and go with her. He didn’t have a license and she always drove but he was the navigator, reminding her where to turn, warning her to watch out for cars she might not have noticed. It was not a complicated route at all but she drifted over the middle line and an oncoming car honked long and loud at her and she became flustered. She turned right off onto a side street to get away from the noise and the traffic. She planned to go around the block and then return home, her desire to venture to the park totally squelched by the honking car. But when she got to the place where she needed to turn right again she didn’t recognize where she was, the houses there looked bigger and indeed lots of new people were moving into the neighborhood and remodeling or replacing the smaller homes on their lots with very large imposing structures. Lillian was overcome and just sat at the stop sign and cried until a jogger came by and knocked on her window, asking if she was alright. She seemed like such a sweet young woman Lillian asked her to please drive her home and the young woman did that, drove her the three blocks to her house and asked Lillian if anyone was home to help her. Lillian tried to brush off her concern and offered to pay her for her trouble but the young woman would not accept her money and still seemed worried. Lillian herself was worried about social services, taking her away to a nursing home. Thank god nothing ever came of that embarrassing incident.

  The next time Lillian got lost in the neighborhood it was the heat and her own exhaustion to blame. She had been walking in the direction of the park and for some reason became disoriented at the same intersection where she had been lost and crying in the car. She knocked on the door of one of the large new houses and asked if she could have a glass of water and the boy who answered the door brought her in, invited her to her sit down and gave her a glass of water. He asked if he could call anyone for her. She couldn’t tell him her phone number but she could dial it, her fingers falling into an old pattern. Alexander was out in the yard and the phone rang and rang and Lillian was in despair before he finally ran in and answered. The boy told Alexander the address and Alexander walked over and walked her home again. She cried like a child the whole way, feeling humiliated and very frightened. Alexander tried to comfort her but he looked frightened as well.

  That night Alexander crept quietly into Lillian’s room and looked down at her as she slept with a tiny frown turning down her lips. He understood that she fell asleep every night with a vague anxiety and woke up in a despair that the dawn only partially dispelled. He cupped his hand gently around her hair and in her sleep she nestled her head like a child into the warmth of his hand. He knelt then at the side of the bed leaving his hand on her head and took a deep breath prepared to stay as long as he needed to finish his benediction, thinking of all the things that might give her relief. He remembered once an old custodian at a hospital who told him that the touch of a madman was lucky and the man had laughed at Alexander when he appeared to believe it.

  “Are you nuts? Of course you are nuts. That’s why you’re here. Listen, all the crazies I’ve touched in here if there were any luck in it, I’d’ve been able to retire my first week. No man, there are two kinds of luck and you know. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. Maybe touching the likes of you . . . . .” and the man made a motion like he was going to touch Alexander and laughed when Alexander cringed.

  Alexander felt tears, remembering that and he wished so hard, with such palpable effort and pain that he could bring the good kind of luck to Lillian’s children. After a while he got sleepy kneeling there but didn’t want to take his hand away from her head so he lowered himself carefully onto one hip and lay his head on the bed close to hers, never moving his hand and keeping his touch as gentle as feathers. The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was that her mouth had relaxed. The last thought he had before sleeping was the hope that a moment of pure joy would overtake Lillian during this last leg of her headlong rush to oblivion.

  Time passed in fits and starts, a day could feel like a week if they managed to do very much but then a week would go by so quickly with one day blending into the next with no memories to show for it. Alexander didn’t know how soon after his efforts at prayer the letter came but it was such a wonderful piece of luck that Lillian asked him to read the letter to her because she didn’t believe it really said what it said.

  Lillian’s daughter had given her mother’s address when submitting a screenplay to a contest because she didn’t know how soon she would be moving away from her boyfriend’s ranch. For that reason the letter, informing her she had won the $4000 prize and a chance to have her screenplay produced, came first to Lillian. She read it once expecting a solicitation and her mind couldn’t quite keep up with the fact that this was good news, fantastic news, wholly unexpected and long since un-hoped for news. She called out to Alexander and asked him to read the letter to her and she screamed out loud for pure joy and said “oh we have to call her right now!”

  Lillian dialed the phone, the number in the memory of her fingertips and her daughter answered and she sounded so grownup, so old, that Lillian didn’t recognize her voice and then she could not remember who she was calling or why and she just stood there thinking she had to go pick up her children from school, worried she was late and she began to cry because her little girls would be the last ones left, waiting for their mother, wondering where she was.

  Alexander heard the voice saying “Hello? Hello?” so he took the telephone from Lillian and began to speak: first the good news, let that sink in first, and then, well then, another day he would tell this young woman about her mother. That day he lied, he told her that her mother was so overcome with joy that she couldn’t speak but that she loved her daughter so very much and that this wonderful news had made her so very happy. The woman on the line shouted “I love you” to her mom and her mom whispered “I love you too” but she did not know who she was talking to.

  VII

  Alexander had no one in the world but Lillian and various friends on the street. He hated taking medication and he often talked about his desire to end his life. There was a time Lillian periodically talked him out of suicide but then her own dementia caused her to understand it. Her own private plan would have been easier had the children not sold Lillian’s car. After they read about an elderly man who had driven his car through a building they decided it would be irresponsible to leave her car in the garage. She always said she would only drive it in an emergency and the girls said she would create an emergency by driving. They didn’t understand her reluctance to sell the car because they didn’t know and she could hardly tell them that the car in the garage was to have been her painless, self sufficient suicide: just plug up the air leaks in the garage, get in the car, turn on the engine and go to sleep. That was her dream but she had waited too long and now it was not to be.

  The girls sold the car and put the money in their mother’s bank account. Apparently they trusted her to write checks. So Lillian and Alexander had another plan involving her second husband’s gun. Alexander would figure out how to use it, shoot Lillian, call 911 and then shoot himself. Alexander went through the scenario many times in his mind knowing he had made Lillian a promise. But the reality was a source of difficulty for him. To begin with, where could he go to practice shooting to make sure that he actually understood how to use the thing? Well he would just have to keep trying until it went off. At least he didn’t have to worry about his aim. Then he would try to imagine Lillian not only dead but covered in blood and that sight was so horrific in his a
lready overactive imagination that he began having nightmares. Calling 911 would be easy enough but shooting himself? He knew he would have to swallow the bullet to make sure he didn’t simply wound himself horribly but he had a suspicion he would not be able to actually go through with this. He decided he would just give himself up but didn’t tell Lillian this. He thought with a sinking heart about returning to the hospital this time forever because he would be going in as more than insane, he would be criminally insane, or an insane criminal, he wasn’t sure what the distinction was although he thought there should be one.

  Lillian worried most about what to tell her children and had written and rewritten many letters. Alexander had saved all the various drafts because he never knew when she would no longer be able to revise and write more. After the phone call with her daughter, after that moment of pure joy, Alexander had begun to put together all the things Lillian wanted her children to find easily: the deed to the house, her will and her letters. She had promised him they would understand and respect her decision. He wished they could visit her one last time.

  Good things that cannot be explained are called miracles. Alexander wondered what to call the bad things that cannot be explained. Miraculously Lillian went through a period of lucidity long enough to enjoy a visit with her daughters who came at Alexander’s suggestion. He told them about their mother but they didn’t have to see it or feel it, that terrible cold emptiness when her mind left her stranded. They talked about the future and Alexander lied to them, let them think the future was further away than it was. He told them how much he owed to their mother and how he would care for her and be sure to let them know when they needed to come back again. He couldn’t tell them that their mother had been miraculously off in another world, had been peeing in the closet, sleeping in the yard, had attacked him several times thinking he was an intruder, not recognizing him from one minute to the next. He could not tell them that whenever she miraculously came to her senses she told him she wanted to be done, wanted him to kill her, set her free, had prepared letters for her children, had dreaded their visit, had almost not allowed it to happen.

  “You have to see your daughters one more time, you have to, I won’t do this for you if you won’t see them one last time. Your letters will not be enough, they have to be able to remember kissing and hugging you one last time or they will live with guilt their entire lives. I know you don’t want that for them. I have no one. No one will be sad that I’m dead but you have those girls, you have to do that for them.”

  And so she did and she was herself in the moment and recognized them and it was a good visit. Soon after, she awoke one morning very lucid and asked Alexander to end it for her, then and there while she was rational before she lost it again because it was more dignified. She had fasted and taken a bath and was ready. She asked him if he wanted to change his mind because it seemed to her that he was doing pretty well and she couldn’t expect him to end his own much younger life before he was ready or to ruin it by committing an act of supreme kindness that was still considered a crime. He laughed and got her laughing too about how he wouldn’t go to prison but just back to the hospital he had run from and what other alternatives did he have? She said he could remain in the house, that he would never be homeless again. In the end, they decided not to take the big step that day. They lied to each other, said that it was enough to know they had the option even though each of them knew it was no longer an option.

  VIII

  The girls did visit more often, always together now, taking care of one another, helping each other. And their mother was glad they had each other, both such good girls and probably more capable than she had ever been. Alexander took good care of her and the girls were grateful to him, told him he could remain in the house as long as he wanted.

  They were already sensing the end and it came as quietly as the last soft wet snow of the spring. She’d had enough, she needed fresh air and freedom and she wandered out, knowing enough to be quiet, not to wake the man in the room across the hall. She was thinking he was her father, who had moved to the attic bedroom after her mother filed for divorce, she was feeling sorry for him, didn’t want to wake him. He was so sweet. She missed him already. She wasn’t sure what house she was in. It felt like a house she had lived in as a child seventy years ago. She remembered coming out of her room and into the kitchen in the night and it was dark. Everyone was asleep and she had been sick with a fever. She had sensed something in the darkness, maybe it was death. She couldn’t have been more than three for her little brother had not yet been born and yet to the very end she remembered that sense she’d had of something waiting in the darkness, not frightening but sad, unutterably sad.

  She remembered a song: “To me its crystal clear, was born, gonna die, in between I’m here.” … Lillian carefully unlocked the door and walked out into the night, admiring the perfect full moon and the lovely snow that buried everything in its purity. She walked a little ways and found a large evergreen tree that spread its limbs wide like a tent and she lay down under the tent in the parkway between the deserted, snowbound lanes of the Avenue and she went to sleep.

  Alexander woke, found Lillian missing and went looking for her, but the police found her before he did. He always got nervous around the police, thinking they would pick him up and return him to the hospital but he’d been on meds for a long time now and had lived with Lillian in her home and been accepted by the family and the neighbors and that had been already several years, how many he’d lost track of, and he had nothing to fear from them.

  The daughters were called, they took over the business of planning a small funeral service and Alexander did whatever was asked of him and accepted condolences from people who had seen him care for the deceased. He was accepted for the moment but he knew that couldn’t last. He didn’t want to live in the house by himself. He didn’t want to go find his friends from the street or try to locate the sister he hadn’t seen in decades. Alexander wanted his hallucinations. He didn’t take his meds that morning or the next. He flushed them down the toilet and then he retired to the room that had become his and waited to see what would be visited upon him.

  The Rose Bush

  I.

  Abraham, Sarah and Robert Isaac