“I’m sorry about your friends,” said Mary.
“Maybe they were the lucky ones,” said Howard.
Mary considered that and then went on, “I guess I’ve come back too, in a way.”
After the way the director had responded, she paused before explaining. But Howard won’t care, she thought, and she was right. When she told him who she was, he just crooned a long, low “Wooow,” followed by a high staccato laugh without a shred of mockery. “Neat!” he summed.
Mary looked hard at Howard. He was skinny, and his features were small, almost childlike. He looked younger than his thirty-odd years, and his face, ringed by a downy, patchy beard, had a pleasant aspect in spite of its ravages.
“How long have you been here, Howard?”
“Uhhhhh . . . almost ten years, I guess.”
Mary caught her breath and spurted, “Ten years! Why? You’re okay, you’re not confined . . . why don’t you go somewhere else? How do you stand it?” Then she was afraid she had offended him, giving away her disgust for what was, after all, his home.
But he just said, “It’s not so bad. True—nobody makes me stay, but there’s nowhere else to go. I tried the streets, and that didn’t work at all. I have my jobs and friends down on Colfax, and adequate meals and a bed here. My dad’s Social Security pays for it, and they give me enough spending cash for smokes. I can panhandle if I need more. Not a bad deal, really.”
“But, my God, it’s so depressing!” She noticed that Howard wore the same motley collection of clothes as all the rest. Anything of your own was soon stolen from the laundry. “Is it good enough for you?”
“My family used to ask me that,” he replied after a thoughtful drag, “and make suggestions.” He said that last word slowly, carefully: Sug-gest-ions. “Finally, they realized this is home for me, and they gave up. I feel safe here. And, Mary, I just don’t notice the things I saw when I first came—I look right through the others. I get along with the nurses. I read, go out, watch TV—I like my soaps.” He laughed.
Mary smiled.
“I used to want a girlfriend,” he said. “In fact, I was married once . . . I think I was, anyway.” He considered that, looked a little doubtful, and said, “But I guess the meds have shot my li-bee-do.” He laughed his singular laugh that began as a crow’s caw and ended in a starling’s wheedle. To Mary’s horrified look, he said, “You’ll get used to it too.”
“I won’t!” she nearly shouted. “I mean, I’m sorry if this is your home and it suits you, then fine. I admire you for adapting.” Mary failed to notice that her words were flowing almost as before. “But I can’t stay, and I refuse to think I might get used to it. I’m not supposed to be here!”
Howard started to speak, his voice caught on phlegm, he cleared his throat and began again. “Excuse me, Mary—so who is ‘supposed’ to be here?” He raised one thin eyebrow as in mild reproof, and his hand shook as he took a smoke, keeping his gaze on her.
Mary said she was sorry for putting it like that.
“It’s okay,” Howard said. “I’m just saying there’s worse places to be—like Fort Logan. I tried to kill myself there. In fact, I did—I jumped out of the window onto my head and died, but it just came back around again, like after the wreck. It always does . . .” He showed Mary the scars on his skinny, shaking wrists. “It always starts over again with my dream before the accident. So why go anywhere else?”
Mary began to understand: he was trapped in his own predicament as much as in this place, so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Still, the thought of his suicide attempts quickened her pulse.
The next afternoon, Mary and Howard met again, and for several days after that. He repeated himself, especially when he tried to tell her about his dream before the wreck, in mythic terms, like an epic poem. He believed the dream foretold the outcome. When Mary reminded him that he’d already told her this story—she could repeat it back to him in its precise, stylized stanzas—he cawed and said, “See? Frontal lobe! My short-term memory is shot. Hah!”
“Howard—” Mary began.
He gave her his attention and his quizzical look.
“I’m thinking of taking my life, to get out of here. Will you help me, or at least tell me how?”
“NO!” Howard spurted. “No, don’t, Mary. You’re so pretty, and you’re smart. Anyway, it doesn’t work. Don’t, don’t, don’t—please don’t!”
“But it’s the only way out I can see,” Mary said, and began to cry softly.
Howard placed his hand on her shoulder, his tremor matching its soft convulsions. “It’s no way at all. Why can’t you go somewhere else?”
Mary gathered herself. She knew the nurse would come for her soon. “I am confined here, Howard. Besides, with the pills, I can’t think . . . maybe I couldn’t anyway. I don’t know where I could go except that I’ve got to get up there someday”—she waved her hand toward Mount Evans—“that’s where they found me, that’s where I was going, I don’t know why. I thought if I could die . . . see, I’ve died before, and—”
“You too, eh? Wow. But, Mary, you can’t get to the mountains that way—except back to your wreck, and then you’d probably end up here again or, worse, in Fort Logan. It always goes back to the wreck. You know Tim, down the hall? Motorcycle. He says the same thing. And my brother says I can’t get anywhere by suicide, and I guess he’s right. Hey! If you want to go to the mountains, you oughta go with him. He’s always going up there.”
“Is he there now?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know. He lives on the West Coast, shows up here most summers. I haven’t heard from him yet this spring. At least I don’t think I have. Hah! Like I said, my memory’s not so hot.”
“Doesn’t sound as if I should hold my breath for him.”
“Yeah, well. But, Mary, if you really want to go up there”—he gestured toward the Front Range, golden through the afternoon smog—“why not just go?”
“How?” Mary implored, frustrated.
“Take a bus to Idaho Springs, the ski train to Winter Park, hitchhike—whatever.”
“But the meds . . .”
“Don’t you know how to deal with them?” Howard asked. “I thought everyone did. You just dry out your mouth on your sleeve, fake a swallow, hide them under your tongue, and spit ’em out when no one’s watching. The ones who don’t like ’em trade ’em for cigarettes with the ones who do, or sell them on the street.” This had never occurred to Mary. “On the other hand,” Howard continued, forgetting the earlier thread of the conversation, “that’s how Wendell killed himself last year: saved up a dozen double doses of Thorazine and took them all at once with a forty-ouncer of malt liquor . . .”
Mary’s sudden interest brought him back.
“Oh, Mary!” he said. “I forgot . . . I shouldn’t have told you that. Don’t do what Wendell did, will you?”
She promised him she wouldn’t, at least for now.
The scent of ozone and damp dust foretold the thunderstorm about to claim the day. Mary and Howard both felt its freshness and tried to stay outside for the skywash, but a nurse insisted that they come in and dry off for dinner. As they parted to head for their rooms, Howard said, “But I wish you’d stick around. You make this place nicer. Plus,” he added, “you’re mighty pretty.”
“That’s sweet. Thanks for getting me talking, Howard. You’re nice too. But anyway, I thought your libido was shot.” The thought of flirting in this repository made them both laugh, and almost cry. The warmth lasted, and though she clammed up again, Mary felt almost human through one meal and into sleep. But that night she dreamed of lovers in cribs with party hats on, and in the morning she felt sadder than ever, burdened with the new thought: Whatever do people who fall in love in a place like this do? Or in minds like these?
To love and not be able to do anything about it was her meditation that afternoon. But I know all about that from before, she told herself. There was no one els
e to tell. Howard hadn’t come back from town. Perhaps he’d already forgotten their talks. More likely, she thought, he was reluctant to interfere with her clear-minded time and risk helping to drive her away. Or maybe he feared getting too close, feeling just as hopeless. This thought took her back to her theme—futility—and that made up her mind.
The next morning, after an oblivious and dreamless sleep, Mary began. She faked the swallowing of her pills, spitting them out each day and night thereafter and hoarding them in her bra. After a week she had more vitality and clarity, and she enjoyed her talks with Howard all the more. But her self-awareness also picked up, making her situation even less tolerable. By the twentieth day, she still hadn’t decided which way to go, but she had stockpiled plenty of pills.
Then, on the twenty-first, ambition and anger reached a critical mass, and Mary simply walked away. One way or the other, she told herself over and over, I am leaving today. She taped a simple folded message to Howard’s door. “Thank you,” it read. “I’ll always be grateful, and I’ll watch for your brother up there. Good luck! M.” Then she walked out into her alley, turned left, right past Mount Pisgah Pentecostal, and kept on going. But she took her pills with her, in case her escape should fail.
When the nurse went to fetch Mary for dinner, she was not to be found in her old chair by the vacant lot. A search party in the neighborhood failed to find her, or anyone who had noticed her. The sheriff and the Denver police drew blanks as well. When they closed out their brief effort that night—after all, there seemed to be no family to notify—Mary was sleeping in the back of a long-haul trucker’s cab on the way up Loveland Pass. For the first few hairpins she slumbered, never minding the semi’s labored passage through the gears. Then suddenly she started to the driver’s voice. “Lady, wake up. I’m getting drowsy. I’ll have to catch a night’s sleep before heading on. Maybe you want to try for another ride.”
Mary came awake, disbelieving, to an alpine scene—even in the dusk she could tell it was much like the last sight she’d seen before the walls of Denver General. “Oh!” she cried, then “Oh” and “Oh!” again. “Where . . . mountains . . . oh, God, am I here?” Mary’s face found the space between laughing and weeping where they run together, making the driver nervous.
He was a skinny weed of a man with a goat’s beard and a ball cap on a bald top, but she had barely registered him. “It’s just Loveland Pass, ma’am. It’ll be full dark soon, and you might wanna try to get a ride down the other side before then. Anyway, I’ll need my bed. But you should take care. You’re too good-looking to be up here on your own.”
Mary gathered herself and mumbled her thanks. “Now, I’m a Christian man,” the driver went on, “and if you’re who you say you are—well, you’re okay with me and you might be just fine anyway, but I wouldn’t take it for granted. Why don’t you try that family across the road in the rest area? Where was it you were trying to get to, anyway? You never really said.”
Mary had caught the ride at a truck stop near the Mousetrap, a big concrete tangle where I-25 and I-70 mix it up in West Denver, having walked all the way there through rush-hour streets. She fell asleep so soon after stepping up into the Peterbilt, muttering in her exhaustion, that the driver had put her to bed in the back of the cab. He hadn’t learned anything about her, only that she desperately wanted a ride westward. As they rolled, she spoke in her sleep.
Now she said, “Here.”
“What?” said the driver.
“Thank you very much.” Mary opened the cab door and stepped down onto the running board, then the roadside, then into the soft turf. She stood there, sucking the alpine air in gulps, as if doing so again and again could erase all those stale and wasted days. Then she walked on down the road. The driver, thinking she was headed for the Porta-Potty in the rest area, simply shrugged and took over the berth himself. But the cabin smelled of Mary, and he slept poorly, whether from concern or desire or both.
Having no idea where she was going, insensate to the rising damp of the high-country night, and hypnotized by the very presence of the peaks and the fragrance of the flowers, Mary continued along the edge of the old asphalt. Ecstatic with the boulders, the yellow woolly sunflowers, the spongy green tundra that stretched away into the dark fir forests below, she exulted. But fear of being found invaded her brain, marred the pleasure, and sent her off the road, across the trackless tundra.
Darkness took over the alpine, along with cold. It’s all right, Mary thought. If I die here tonight, maybe I can go back, way back . . . Just to be here . . . Her mind, struggling for clarity in the limpid air, still made no sense, found no focus but the here and now. The scaling heights, the plunging glacial troughs. She trod on, her flimsy sneakers wicking the moist humors of the montane turf. This night held no terror for one released at last from a darker, colder night. Sweet breath of silky phacelia filled Mary’s freshened head, its brush of florets deepest purple in the last of the alpine night, now going black.
14
Blue hyacinths began heavenly, turned cloying, then wilted around the borders of Sterling Library as the pale violet wisteria spread its heavy scents and vines over college courtyards. The brief New England spring hit Mead with the fresh savor of new love, but too soon, as infatuation often does, hinted at a coming sultry fatigue. The onrushing summer found Noni Blue still fresh in his fancy—no ennui there, and the prospect of parting after graduation gave no joy.
The hyacinths unsettled him, too, bringing to mind his mother and her beloved beds of spring bulbs. Nothing made her sparkle like the first burst of color from the crocuses and snowdrops, daffodils and scillas she nurtured, dividing and spreading their bulbs every few falls. Especially the hyacinths, her favorites. Nothing, that is, except Molly. Once Molly was gone, the flowerbeds might as well have been weedlots, which they soon became. Bulbs are persistent. They continued to spatter color among the pigweed and bindweed that tried to take over—a dwarf tulip here, a scraggly blue bunch of muscari over there. But these survivors were neither seen nor looked after. The coddled gardens of Yale reminded Mead of what his mother had once been like and was no more. He mulched his mind instead with Noni’s rich and overriding presence, while it lasted.
Noni’s finals were finished, and she had a little time for James before the scrum of graduation week. One night, they took a volume of Carson’s field journal back to her room. Mead read it to her in bed, where they lay with tumblers of jug wine in their hands and the college cat on their laps. He wondered if it would be like this over the years, but made sure to keep the thought silent for a change. Out loud, he asked, “Isn’t this a heck of a data book? By all rights, it should be nothing but dry observations, species lists, and invoices.”
“Amazing,” Noni agreed, as engrossed in Carson’s progress as he was. “Does he make it to Estes with Ruth and Elbert? More to the point, does he make it with Ruth?”
“There’s a problem or two. Elbert tries to ditch October at Little America, but Ruth and the kids make him go back. The kids adulate Carson, who takes them behind the motel to look for horny toads. He likes them too, but in measure. He resolves never to have either kids or dogs, at least not on the road, and to stay on the road.”
“And? Get to the good bit.”
“Well, they get to Estes Park in the end, and I like to think October and Ruth share a lovely tumble in the Wheeldons’ rented log cabin while Elbert and the kids are off fishing. But he doesn’t actually kiss and tell.”
“Darn.”
“I know. I was hoping for a little soft-core, too. Anyway, he was sorry to see Ruth go, and I know how he felt. When do you have to go, and have you decided where to?”
“Well, James, it seems your Mr. Carson isn’t the only one going to Colorado.”
Mead looked up from the book and waited.
“I heard today—thanks to Professor Winchester, I’ve been accepted to work with Dr. Freulich on butterfly ecology.”
“At Stanfor
d?”
“Eventually, maybe, but starting out at his summer lab at Gothic, in the Rockies.”
Mead stared for a moment, then squeezed out a feeble “Fantastic.” A heavy beat, then, “Butterflies, yet. Maybe you’ll run into our man out there. Smile like a sunflower, and tell him hi for George and me.”
“I’ll visit my folks for a week or two, then fly to Denver. Dr. Freulich’s assistant, Dave O’Leary, will meet me and take me up to the lab. I’m excited.”
Mead smiled, more or less, and grunted.
“You sound a little less so,” Noni said.
“Well . . . I am, I guess, for you. Great opportunity, beautiful place from what George says. And a fine teacher, so I hear, for all his fame.” His eyes scraped the bedspread. “I’ll miss you, Noni.”
“Me too, you know.” In a lame effort to salvage the mood, James crooned off-key a snatch of the old song: “ ‘Will I see you, in Sep-te-em-ber, or lose you . . .’ ”
“Oh, stop! Don’t be melodramatic.”
Mead was taken aback by her quick-change act. Even as he realized he didn’t know her very well, he saw new planes and hollows in her face. Beautiful, he thought, but the new Noni only filed his feelings rawer.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just sort of short notice. I mean . . . then what?” Both were embarrassed and short with each other.
“Who knows? This has been great, James, and it may be great later. But we were never going to worry about the hereafter, remember?”
So much for the cat, Mead thought as it leaped off the bed. “I know. But will you miss me?”
“I already said I would.” Then, softer, “And long for you on cold Colorado nights, I do not doubt.”
Mead softened a little at that and squeezed her shoulder. Of course they’d both been there before—the sweet young love, the rude interruption. Noni had started at Smith, transferred to Yale when it went coed. Mead knew all the jokes: Smith women were supposed to be both chilly and horny, brainy and dense. Noni was brainy and warm and eager, horny didn’t do it justice. But she was much more besides.
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