Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  They were still up at midnight when Chuck called from the centre.

  ‘The Sandwich police just called. They’ve got a man on the bridge who needs talking down, and they want us to send someone. In haste, man. Life or death. Who lives closest to the Sagamore bridge?’

  ‘Me.’ Lily looked round at Paul, who was rubbing oil into an old saddle on the back of a kitchen chair.

  ‘Looks like you, then, kid.’

  It was a black night of wind and rain. The bridge was blocked off and traffic diverted, but the policeman let Lily through, and she got out of her car in the middle of the span, among the police cars and lights. The man had climbed over the railing and crawled along a girder below the bridge, under the middle of the roadway.

  Various people were trying to shout at him over the rails on either side, but the wind shouted louder. A Coastguard boat was below, pushing against the tide, to keep a spotlight trained on the man on the girder. Would someone like to go under the bridge in another boat and try to talk to him through a megaphone?

  No one offered. ‘I’ll go,’ Lily said quickly.

  A police car took her to the Coastguard dock farther along the canal. One of the men on the boat gave her a big orange waterproof jacket, and she stood with the hood over her head by the bow rail of the small boat, staring to see the man under the bridge. When they were almost underneath the soaring span, the pilot shouted, ‘There he is – see him?’

  In the beam of light from the other boat, he was miles above them, sitting on the girder. He looked like a fly.

  ‘Go ahead.’ The other man gave Lily the megaphone.

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’

  ‘Nor would I.’

  Lily began to yell through the megaphone. What did she say? What could she say? She did not afterwards remember, but whatever it was, the whole of south-eastern Massachusetts heard it.

  ‘Please! Climb back up – you’re safe, I’ll help, don’t be afraid!’

  Something like that, something about a friend, about love. How could she compete with the magnetic pull of the dark water swirling below the tiny man to sweep him out to the peace of the sea?

  ‘I love you!’ she probably said desperately. It didn’t matter what the men in the boat thought. It didn’t matter what southeastern Massachusetts thought. Anything to get him up off that girder.

  If he responded at all, she could not see or hear. At one point, he let something fall.

  ‘A bottle,’ one of the men said. It took a long time to reach the water.

  ‘I’ll die if he jumps.’ Lily was shivering, soaked, frozen, hopeless, useless.

  He jumped. With a long trailing yell, he threw himself outwards, sprawling, clutching at the air. After an eternity, he hit the water feet first, and disappeared. The body came up, slumped over, face in the water, held up by the air in the humped jacket.

  The other boat was there. They fished him over the side and shouted, ‘He’s alive!’ and the two boats churned back to the dock.

  He was lying in a well at the stern of the other boat. When Lily knelt beside him, he raised his plastered eyelashes and looked at her. His skin was ashen, drawn back against the skull, his teeth chattering, his body shaking and rigid under the blankets.

  It was Mike.

  The ambulance men, doing the necessary things as they drove to the hospital, made feeble jokes like, ‘Thought you’d take a late swim, hey, feller?’ Lily sat in a blanket on the seat opposite, envying them for having a job to do and for being able to be jolly.

  In the hospital, they found that, amazingly, he had no injuries except heavy bruising on his chest and the soles of his feet.

  ‘The alcohol in him must have saved him,’ the doctor said.

  Lily rang Paul, and stayed to watch Mike for the rest of the night, because the nurses were busy. Asleep, he looked dead. When he woke, he half raised himself on his elbow to look at her. She tried talking to him, but he did not say anything before he fell back into sleep again, his lower teeth uncovered, like a skeleton’s jaw.

  When Lily got home, everyone was up early, wildly excited.

  ‘It was on the radio! It was on the TV early news!’

  ‘The whole story,’ Isobel said. ‘Not your name, thank God. They’d have had a fit at school. Bloody heroine, Mud.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. He jumped anyway.’

  ‘But you were brave. It said so. On TV.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Paul asked. ‘They didn’t give his name.’

  ‘One guess.’ Lily looked up at him over her coffee mug.

  ‘Mike. Oh, my God.’

  Did it go through Paul’s head that they had been almost freed from him by the dark water? Did he think those ghastly selfish things, like everybody else?

  Lily asked him.

  He only smiled. ‘Did you?’

  While Mike was in the hospital having X-rays and tests recovering from shock, which to him meant the shock of being alive, his mother came.

  She had on a new winter coat and a little pair of red boots. She did not come into the room shyly, as the visitors to the other two men did, carefully not looking at anyone who did not belong to them. She bustled in as though she were going to give everybody a bed bath, nodded at Ginger and Matt and said, ‘How are you?’ took off her coat and stood over Mike with her arms folded and said, ‘Now then.’

  ‘It’s now then, is it?’ Michael had been listening to the radio that Lily had brought in. He leaned over to turn it off, wincing at the pain in his chest.

  They didn’t say anything about broken ribs.’

  ‘Why would they? It’s called contusions.’

  ‘Show me, son.’

  He pulled open the hospital jacket. She gasped. He had not looked properly at his mother’s face since she came in. Now he looked and saw that it was soft like jelly, the determined little lower lip sucked in, the eyes sentimental behind the round glasses, roofed by furry grey brows.

  ‘Michael.’ She sat down on a chair by the bed and took his hand in her warm paws. ‘You should come home now.’

  ‘Didn’t you kick me out?’

  ‘Can you blame me? I’ve come to tell you, son. You can come home. But you didn’t jump off the bridge, remember. We’ll tell people you were leaning over the rail and you fell.’

  ‘All right.’

  But she banished him again. She let them take him off to a rehabilitation centre too far away from New Bedford for her to visit, since her eyes were too bad for her to drive now.

  In the rehab, memory slowly returned. In sleeping or waking dreams, the concrete floor of the roadway pressed over his head. He could feel the cold steel girder under his thighs. His feet hung over space. He could not see anything, because they were shining that brilliant light into his eyes. How did they expect him to jump when he could not see the water?

  He jumped, and the wind came shrieking past and carried all the breath away out of his body. He fell for ever, and came out of it gasping and clutching his throat and screaming soundlessly.

  ‘Cut it out,’ Robbie grumbled. ‘You can only die once. You don’t have to do it every night.’

  ‘Okay, Rob.’ They lit cigarettes and talked for a while in the dark, and the bridge retreated to where it belonged, humping its back over the Cape Cod canal.

  Awake, he began to remember the voices. People shouting at him faintly from above, then suddenly her voice exploding out of the heart of the dazzling light.

  In the early months at the rehab, through the boring therapy sessions, the quarrelsome groups, the gym, the workshop where they were teaching him to be a carpenter and ‘start life again’, Mike could turn on the sound of her voice, metallic, booming, larger than life. A garbled bellow of vowels that sometimes sounded like, ‘I love you!’

  If she did not come, he would find a way to sneak a chisel out of the workshop and kill himself quickly and cleanly in the third-floor broom closet.

  It was fun, having a
day out with Lil again. Now that poor Mike was safely out of her hair, Ida did feel she owed him a visit. After all, she and Shirley had let him come in and out of their house in the days when he had only his mother to fear, and was lonely for their sort of household, with the kids around.

  When Ida read in the paper about his antics at the bridge, she knew he must be crazy, but when he wrote to her from the funny farm, she could not turn him down. Shirley wouldn’t go with her, but Lily’s social conscience was nagging her to go and see Mike. Paul and her boss had said, ‘Forget it,’ so she used the excuse of taking Ida.

  ‘I could never have gone in here alone.’ Ida bit her nails as they drove through the guarded entrance gate and approached the large innocent white building along a driveway bordered by neatly kept lawns and shrubs. It was a warm spring day. Men and women sat outside on garden chairs. Three old stagers played croquet, their legs bowed out at a wider angle than the hoops. On the grass, a group sat in a circle round a demented young woman who must be staff, nodding her bushy head and gesticulating with her fingers as if they were deaf.

  ‘Why don’t they cut and run?’ Ida rolled up the car window.

  “They could. But if they’re here under a pink paper, like Mike, they could be picked up by the police and brought back.’

  ‘They look as if they don’t even want to make a run for it,’ Ida complained.

  ‘Perhaps for some of them, it’s better than where they were before.’

  Ida was glad to see Mike. She really was. He looked older. He had put on weight and his hair was short, and he had a small neat moustache and beard close round his mouth, so that you couldn’t see those stormy boyish lips. His eyes still looked at you as if they saw your soul and wouldn’t give you a nickel for it. Ida had thought he might look drugged. She had heard that they controlled the inmates by knock-out drops, but he actually looked less drugged than in the days when he was on the stuff off and on in New Bedford.

  He was in the day room upstairs, writing something at a table.

  ‘Michael,’ the orderly said. ‘Someone for you.’

  He kept his head down, annoyed to be disturbed. He went on writing, and then shut the exercise book with a sigh. When he saw Lily, his eyes lightened. Then he saw Ida and frowned.

  Hey, wait a minute, Michael Baxlee. Lily may have tried to stop you jumping off the bridge, but who was it that emptied you out of all that demarol with vodka gravy, and wore a hole in the carpet walking you up and down the whole night?

  He pushed himself up from the table. ‘Oh, hi,’ he said. ‘I thought it was my mother.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ Ida said.

  ‘No. I mean. I’m glad you came.’

  There were very few people in the big room, but he could not decide where they should sit. When Ida and Lily headed for an empty corner and sat down, he couldn’t decide whether to go and get coffee for them, or to take them into the kitchen.

  He was fumbling around so, perhaps he was thrown off by them seeing him in this place. But when he came back – coffee hot and the right colour, no spills, plate of cookies, not bad for a man whose mother had not even taught him to boil water – he talked a lot about the rehab, and what they did and how it had helped him.

  Ida had been afraid she would be nervous too, but he made her feel easy by saying candidly, ‘Maybe I’m still crazy. Chronic condition. But it’s a crazy world out there, so they think I ought to fit right back into it pretty comfortably.’

  ‘You bet,’ Ida said. ‘They got the wrong people in here, hunh?’

  He was bluffing, so she played along with the standard joke. But Lily, who had been quiet for a while, observing him with her face non-committal, leaned forward and said, ‘Mike, you’re not crazy. You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.’

  ‘Oh sure. Everyone jumps off a bridge once in a while,’ he said quite nastily. ‘Don’t give it a thought.’

  ‘That night.’ Lily moved her eyes away from his face and looked down at her hands, clasped in the lap of the faded jeans she had worn so as to look old shoe. ‘When you – when you jumped, did you want to drown?’

  ‘I was full of pills and booze,’ he said. ‘How do I know what I wanted?’

  ‘What do you want now?’ Lily plugged on as if Ida wasn’t there observing her ironically as she pursued her duty.

  ‘If they ever let me out of here’ – Mike decided to give her a break – ‘I’m going to give life one more chance, before I try the other thing again.’

  ‘That’s great.’ Lily sat back. ‘I know you’ll make it.’

  Ida changed the subject, and started to tell him about her children, and show him pictures. She knew Mike well enough to realize that somewhere inside himself, he was standing apart, seeing right through Lily’s earnest attempts to help him, and Ida was not going to have good old Lil made fun of by the devious secret soul of a weirdo like this who would never let you win.

  When it was time for them to go, Mike walked with them to the parking lot and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking boyish again, and disappointed.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. ‘It’s meant a lot. Will you come again?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ida said. ‘If I can find the way.’

  ‘I’ll see,’ Lily said. ‘You’re doing so well, you may not be in here very much longer, after all.’

  ‘Decent of us,’ Ida said as they drove away, ‘to leave the poor guy guessing.’

  ‘It’s worse to promise and then not go.’

  ‘Dear Doctor Lily.’ Ida patted her arm. ‘You haven’t lost your touch.’

  Lily’s bridge-jumper did not leave the rehabilitation hospital until the end of the summer, when Lily heard that he had got a job with a builder in Vermont.

  Too far away to call her, with any luck.

  She had worked at Crisis most of last winter, and had started going to Boston again when the summer vacation ended.

  ‘I liked it better when you were here all the time,’ Paul told her.

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘Then why. …? Don’t tell me. I know. Martha needs you and the clients need you and the new student volunteers need you to train them. And you love it.’

  ‘Do you mind? I mean, honestly, darling, if you mind –’

  When she gave him these generous openings, he always missed his chance of telling the truth. But he would never hold her back. He needed her to help with his business, but how could he compare the importance of his work with hers?

  Another winter boarder was in the stable, a fancy horse that would need a lot of care. Tony was off on a motel swimming-pool project with his father in Sandwich, and could help only on Sundays. The land Paul had bought between the back road and the railroad needed a lot more work before the winter. When Lily could be in the tack shop, Paul was out there clearing brush and levelling a place for an open shelter. He got a lot done. He was strong and fit at almost fifty. Then she would be gone to Boston the next day, and Paul had to choose between leaving the land, or closing the shop and missing customers and calls.

  In October, he had to make trips to see suppliers in New York and Florida, because if he didn’t keep up a certain amount of orders with them every year, he could not keep their dealership for special lines, and get their wholesale prices.

  Paul had to change his dates to suit the man in New York, who was his friend from the old Turnbull days. When he told this to Lily, who was going to run the shop and the stable while he was away, it turned out that she was committed to speak at a two-day conference in Rhode Island.

  ‘I told you, Paul. They booked this months ago.’

  ‘Can’t they get someone else?’ It was complicated enough already to fit in his dates and appointments. The Florida situation was still uncertain. He was worried about budgets, and a bit fussed about the trip, without this difficulty at home.

  ‘I hate to say it, but they did ask for me, because of the seminars I did last spring. This lot are social workers too. I’ll be sp
eaking on how agencies can use volunteers.’

  ‘Why can’t Martha do it?’

  ‘They did specially ask for me. Remember, you were pleased too, when I told you.’

  ‘And now I’m not. Oh, hell, don’t make me get angry. You know how I hate to get angry.’ He could hear himself sounding childish. He felt it.

  Then don’t. Have you got your tickets? Can’t you change the date again?’

  ‘No, God dammit, Lily, I can’t.’

  ‘Well, nor can I.’

  They glared at each other. It was horrible. They were outside on the terrace, everything brilliantly edged by the low, intense October sun. Mrs Dawson, coming to ride her horse, rolled down the driveway in her bloated white car, and waved to them.

  Paul turned away to go to the stable. Then he turned back and said, ‘Look, I know how important your work is to you. I hate you being in Boston so much, and I hate you being out in the traffic on that highway, but I wouldn’t try to stop you doing it. But look, I know that you’re dealing a lot of the time with quite desperate people. But right now – I have to say it – I am pretty desperate too.’

  Lily did not say anything. She looked stricken. Paul went out to help Mrs Dawson, reassembling his usual serene face in front of his thoughts. He shouldn’t have said that. Pretty underhand. Not fair to play on her so easily aroused emotions.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs D! Good to see you. Hey, are those the new breeches? They look great. Felix looks great too. He’s doing very well on those new pellets.’

  In the morning, when Paul came in from the stable where the horses, executing their daily innocent expressions of eagerness for breakfast always made him feel that his world was a well-ordered place, he was ready to tell Lily that he would make new arrangements.

  ‘That’s all right.’ She beamed at him. ‘I’ve already called Martha and asked her to wriggle me out of the conference. Of course I’ll stay here, darling. I must have been mad to think I couldn’t.’

  And being his darling unneurotic Lily, she was totally cheerful and ungrudging about it, and enjoyed going over with him everything that was likely to come up with the tack shop or the horses. So after the trip, when the hapless bastard Michael Baxlee was found sitting on the wall of the stable yard when they came back from shopping, Paul felt obliged to be more helpful than he felt.