Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  Isobel got up and drank some wine and called her mother and told her she was staying the night with Linda, and called Linda to warn her, in case Paul was in trouble and her mother needed her. She pulled out the sofa-bed and straightened the bedding and plumped up the pillows in a domesticated way, and turned on the small lamp and switched off the ceiling light. Then she took off what was left of her clothes and got into Tony’s bed, and he started to teach her some of the things she needed to know to further the progress of her sex life.

  Linda owed her something, because Isobel had helped her when she was depressed after she had to have an abortion, so she went along with being used as an alibi. Once, when Isobel was with Tony, her mother did call Linda, and Linda came over to Tony’s and beat on the door, and they shouted, ‘Get lost!’ because they thought it was one of Tony’s cousins playing tricks.

  Linda took Isobel home, very fast through the night, swerving round corners because she had a right to, in an emergency. Cathy was sick, with a fever, and Daddy was very restless and jumpy. Mum needed to go to the hospital for his pills, which she had forgotten to pick up during the day.

  He had not told her the bottle was almost empty. She should have looked. Poor Mud. She stuffed her nightgown into a pair of slacks and pulled on a sweater, and roared off without combing her hair.

  Cathy was asleep, flushed and damp, with her arms flung out and her feet kicked out of the bedclothes. Isobel covered her up and went to sit with her father.

  ‘Good girl,’ he told her. ‘I can always count on you. You’ll always be there for me, won’t you, Iz?’

  While her mother was gone, Isobel brought the backgammon board upstairs, and he played distractedly, wanting to win, but not wanting her to let him win, which was how she herself had felt, as a child.

  ‘Who taught you to play so cunningly?’ he complained when she won.

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Good for me. Good for you. Good girl.’

  Isobel did not feel strange or guilty that she had got up from Tony’s tumbled bed to come to him. She felt proud and adventurous. She was a grown-up. She could love her father even more, as an equal. She had something of her own now.

  Terry was amazed that his father and Lily were not bitter or angry against the man who had attacked him. Mike seemed irrelevant to their present situation, as if the assault were an act of God.

  Isobel and Cathy were encouraged not to feel hatred.

  ‘What good would it do?’ Lily said sadly. ‘It wouldn’t hurt Mike, and it would only poison you.’

  Terry thought he was the only one who openly hated Mike’s guts. If the man had not been locked up, he would have stalked him and shot or knifed him on a dark night. He tried to go and visit him in the county gaol, but Mike refused to see him.

  ‘If I was you,’ Terry told his father, ‘I’d think about him every day. I’d blast him with evil vibes and damn his soul to hell for what he did.’

  ‘I’ve got enough to do coping with the results of that.’ His father smiled in his old equable way that showed more teeth, now that his face was thinner.

  ‘You’ll have to give evidence at the trial. How will you like standing up there looking at him?’

  ‘I think they usually let you sit,’ his father said. ‘Especially if you’ve been ill.’

  In some ways, he was like himself. In others, the brain injury had changed him. He had never nagged at Terry before about what he was going to do with his life. He had understood when he dropped out of art college, and been glad of Terry’s ability to get jobs. Now he harped on his inability to keep them. Terry had got to have a career. He must reapply to the art college. Or go to business college. Or get in on the ground floor of some big firm.

  Terry did not want to be at the Cape Cod house all the time. He had nowhere to stay in Boston, so he went to Amy’s apartment and asked her if he could have a bed. She was cooking pasta and vegetables for herself when he turned up, but she added chicken and all kinds of other things and gave him a most marvellous meal, with subtle hints of herbs, unlike Lily, who either threw in too many, or forgot. All or nothing.

  She was touchingly glad to see him. Amy never played games to make you guess how she felt. Terry stayed for a week or two, but it was awkward for Amy, because she was involved with another man, and could not have him at the apartment while Terry was there.

  ‘If you would stay for keeps,’ she told Terry candidly, ‘I’d find some way to get rid of Bennett.’

  ‘I wish I could.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘Don’t let’s go into that again. I’m years away from committing myself, you know that.’

  ‘Since you left, I’ve had another guy like you who ducked out to save his skin. So what are women supposed to do until you all grow up?’

  ‘That’s not like you, Amy.’ She had sounded fierce.

  ‘I know, but I’m fed up. That’s why I’m tempted by Bennett. He actually wants to buy a house and marry me.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ Terry laughed. He and Amy had always laughed at people who got sucked into marriage.

  ‘I just might.’ She hung her long mole-coloured hair down and then swept it back in the way she had, which did not stop it falling forward again.

  What with that, and his father fussing at him about a career, and his mother’s lack of interest in anything he might do (which was almost as bad), Terry thought he might as well go back to the hotel in Aberdeen, as long as Dad was doing all right.

  Paul seemed sorry when Terry left, although pleased that he had not thought it necessary to wait around and watch his father die.

  ‘You can all get used to the idea,’ Paul told Lily. ‘I’m going to be all right. I’ll have the tack shop open again by the middle of summer, and maybe some other boarders besides the New Jersey people.’

  ‘Do you really think you can manage?’

  ‘No.’ He screwed up his eyes as he did when they hurt, and opened them wide to look searchingly at her. ‘But I’ll have a damn good try.’

  ‘I know you will. I knew you could beat this.’

  ‘You didn’t. You thought I was dying. I could see that. I thought so myself. I didn’t care. It’s interesting. When you’re so out of it, you’re half dead already, and it would be no trouble just to let yourself go the whole way. But when you’re alive and well, it looks as if dying would be very harsh and difficult. That’s the fear. Dying. Not being dead.’

  They had taken Arthur with Cathy’s two dogs for a walk down to Hidden Harbor, along the inlet where the mussels clung to the sticky bank, and out on to the beach, their favourite place to be.

  ‘Let’s go on the bay side.’ Lily followed the dogs, who were running on to the crescent of sand where the cormorants kept watch on the rock, gowned in their black wigs like mouldy clergy. This was Paul’s first time to be here since the attack. She did not want him to see the place where it had happened.

  ‘What? No, come on. Down here in the reeds. I thought that was why you brought me here, to exorcize the demons. I thought Donna’s self-help group had told you to do that.’

  ‘Paul – I don’t think I want to.’ He did not hear her, so she came across to him. It was all still much too clear. The blue sweater half hidden in the grey sea grass. His fair hair dark and matted into the hideous wound. The noise of his breathing, and the worse silence when it stopped. Arthur’s back legs lying in the water.

  The other two dogs had stayed on the open beach. Arthur had turned to follow them to the inlet and was nosing about in the same place where Lily had found him, trying to hook up shells with a clumsy front paw.

  ‘I’ve remembered something else.’ Paul was down there with him at the edge of the water. ‘This is where Cathy ties up her boat. The stake had pulled loose and Mike had brought the sledge-hammer down to knock it in for her.’

  ‘I thought you knew that.’

  ‘No. I thought he’d carried the hammer down here to do me in.’ Paul found the stake and pounded it in a
s well as he could with a rock.

  ‘I’ll have to bring the sledge down to get it firm enough.’

  ‘You’ll need to buy another one, then. The one which – the one that was ours is being held by the court.’

  They stayed on the beach a long time, walking slowly beside the subdued hush, hush of the small breaking waves, picking up wet pebbles and looking for a butterfly shell that had not been broken by the winter.

  ‘When we do die,’ Paul said, ‘let’s come back as something that lives here all the time. A rock, I wouldn’t mind, or a hermit crab living in one of those black snail shells. Waiting for the tide to come up and wash over me, waiting for the tide to recede and let me feel the sun.’

  ‘How do you know we’ll be together?’

  ‘I don’t know anything. No point in going through this life if you knew all the answers. But if we’ve been together before, that explains why we knew each other, at the coffee machine.’

  ‘I knew you in the plane,’ Lily said. ‘When you looked at me with those eyes that turned my stomach to water, and said, “I don’t want you to be scared.”’

  ‘Did I? I was nicer then. I’m a pain in the neck now.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘You’re supposed to say, “No, you’re not.” Oh, God!’ He put a hand to his scarred head where the hair was growing fuzzily in again. ‘Flashing lights. I shouldn’t have bent down.’

  ‘Pain?’

  ‘Threatening.’ His eyes were shut, his front teeth clamped over his bottom lip. ‘Help me up to the path, my darling. I don’t want to fall.’

  Donna had encouraged Lily to come to her women’s group, to get some support in the long ordeal of Paul’s illness. It was a group of ordinary women, most of them married, some dumb, some quick and perceptive, which had started out in the sixties days of Consciousness Raising. Now it was all right to call themselves simply a women’s group, and be more practical and less self-conscious.

  They had taken up, rather belatedly, the therapeutic vogue for ‘letting the anger out’, as a blanket solution to all ills. Lily must be angry about the gross wrong done to Paul, and what it had done to her life.

  ‘Talk about it, tell us,’ they urged, these kind, sincere, perennially tanned women, with their Cape Cod sneakers and their glasses in expensive Nantucket baskets, decorated with a scrimshaw whale. ‘Swear. Yell if you want. It will be such a release for you to let the anger out.’

  Lily shook her head. ‘I’m not angry.’

  ‘Say it. Tell it. Rage away. Say anything you want. You’re safe with us.’

  The only thing she wanted to say was, ‘It was my fault,’ but she couldn’t. To disguise the guilt, dutifully she fell on her knees and punched a cushion, feeling absurd, but glad that they were pleased with her for doing it. They were all so sympathetic and encouraging, it was enough just to be with them.

  With all the effort she had put in at Crisis, trying to find answers for other people, and plan the next step, and trying to ginger up defeated clients to lift themselves out of their mess, the most useful thing was probably just being with them. I thought I was Dear Doctor Lily, giver of counsel, but it wasn’t much I did at all.

  One day in the town, a woman stopped her outside the cleaners and said, ‘Lily?’

  ‘Yes. Do I – ?’ She did not remember having seen the woman before. She was too vague, these days.

  ‘We only met once, briefly. Margaret Spence. You got to know my husband pretty well. You helped him so much.’

  Richard Spence! My God, a name from the past which had been part of her life for weeks after the failure of his business, and his despairing intent to escape the people he had let down, by shooting himself.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s all right. After he decided to go on living, he was able to start again. We’re living here now, running a motel.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. I’m so glad I met you.’

  ‘So am I. I wanted to tell you.’ Margaret looked down, then at the traffic, then up at Lily. ‘How do you thank someone for giving you back your husband?’

  Lily went on, smiling, into the cleaner’s, feeling better. Much better than punching pillows.

  One night, Lily woke up because Paul was thrashing about in the bed.

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

  ‘God-awful headache. The pills don’t touch it.’

  He was sitting up, rubbing his neck. She turned on the light.

  ‘Turn it off. I – oh, God, Lily –’ He turned away and vomited into the pillow.

  Lily called Dr Monroe. ‘He’s really bad. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I’ll call the ambulance. Better get him to Boston, to be safe.’

  At the hospital, after a CAT scan and a spinal tap that showed blood in the spinal fluid, they told Lily that Paul had suffered another haemorrhage, undoubtedly from the original damage.

  ‘We’d like to operate, but he’s not in any shape for it.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’ Feeling like a lost child, Lily was surprised at how grown up and sensible she sounded.

  ‘He may die, he may not. An operation would almost certainly kill him.’

  Wordless and disbelieving, Lily and her daughters watched Paul slip slowly from unconsciousness into death. His agreeable face and his poor violated head, his gentle hands, his compact, agile body, from one moment to the next were no more than an abandoned, empty casing.

  Lily and Isobel and Cathy had never seen anybody die. Instinctively, they all looked towards the open window, where bright specks of dust drifted out into the sunlight.

  In the county gaol, Mike wore dark green cotton pants and a green T-shirt, because the gaol was very hot, winter and summer. The clothes had no pockets, so he carried his cigarette pack twisted up into his left sleeve, like a freak biceps.

  392

  Most of the time, there was nothing to do but smoke and gossip. When the weather improved and the ground thawed, there was some work to do outside. There were tattered paperbacks in the library, and A A meetings, which Mike attended from time to time, because there was coffee, and there was nothing else to do.

  Like the time before, in another gaol, it was degrading and noisy and raw and relentlessly boring. No one seemed to know when his trial date would be. He wanted it and dreaded it. His lawyer seemed to have no idea how it would go. Conviction could mean a few months or a few years in the House of Correction. It could mean Bridgewater again, which inmates called ‘The Ranch’. Sometimes a guy would fake being crazy, because there was a myth that life was easier there, but Mike told anyone who was not too bored with the subject to listen to him, ‘If they send me back to The Ranch, I’ll hang it up.’

  One Monday of black thoughts, he went before the gaol master and was told that his trial date would be next month. That evening before they were locked into the cells, Phil Hogan said, ‘You know that guy.’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘The guy whose head you pulverized.’

  ‘He asked for it.’

  ‘Oh, sure, you got your reasons. We all do.’

  ‘That’s why they don’t listen to us.’

  ‘That guy’s dead.’

  ‘Cut it out.’

  People like Phil plucked news out of the air, and it was all around the gaol with the speed of light, sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

  ‘He’s okay,’ Mike said. ‘That kind always are.’

  ‘Not this baby. I heard he died. You got given your trial date today, huh?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Forget it. They got to have time to change the charge. You’re in the big league now, fella.’

  Mike hated Phil Hogan, who was fat and white, with tits like a woman under his T-shirt. ‘Lay off me, will ya?’

  They’ll try you for murder now.’

  The Sheriff boasted that men did not commit suicide in his gaol, but there were many ways to hang it up, and they had all been tried. A sheet could be soaked or twisted
to make it harder to loosen. People had drunk bleach or swallowed razor blades. They had put their heads in plastic bags and their fingers into light sockets, overdosed on water, stuffed socks down their throats or banged their skulls against the floor.

  After Mike found out from one of the officers that Phil was telling the truth, he hanged himself by his bootlaces from the heating grille in his cell.

  Ten

  Where have you gone? Where are you?’

  Lily wandered from room to room of the house, and all over the land that was theirs. She walked on the haunted beach with her weeping face raised to the sky.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Long ago, she had faced the truth that he might die. All through his slow recovery, through the hopes and the anxieties, she had made herself remember the possibility of his dying, and what she would do. Now, any strength or sense that she thought she had built up was wiped out by the shock of the dizzying emptiness.

  He wasn’t there.

  She realized that when she had imagined how it would be if he died, it was with a vague notion that he would be dead and somehow still there at the same time.

  ‘Where have you gone? What are you doing? Paul! Paul!’

  The seagulls mocked her cries.

  For days that became weeks, her whole being was flooded with water. Tears poured out of her without sobs. Her eyes were sore and swollen in her drowned face. She brushed her hair without looking at herself in the mirror, and occasionally dabbed on useless make-up that would be washed off quite soon.

  Cathy slept with her. They talked and cried and were sorry for themselves, as they could not be in front of other people. When Cathy began to sigh deeply, and then fell asleep, with the smaller dog behind her bent knees, Lily lay stiffly on her back and stared through the dark ceiling, which was the nearest she could get to Paul. The hot night tears stung her tortured eyes and ran down the sides of her face into her neck.

  After Lily and Isobel and Cathy had come home from the hospital alone, and Lily’s friend Nina was getting them something to eat, a barking outside announced a rather grand truck coming down the drive. It was Paul’s famous people from New Jersey, bringing their horses and ponies for the summer.