Dear Doctor Lily (47 page)

‘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 speaking 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.

‘Hul
lo
, 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.

Mike's job had lasted three weeks. The carpentry skills he had learned at the rehab centre were not advanced enough for the needs of the builder.

‘It's rotten bad luck,' Lily said.

Mike had helped to carry in the grocery bags, and they were all three sitting round the kitchen table, discussing his future.

‘I don't know. Must have been my fault.'

Probably was, but it was bad luck too, the kind of inherent luck that dogs a loser like this, even when he tries to get his life together. He had liked the work, and seemed to have tried his best, and when his employer brought in another carpenter without warning him, Mike had gone round some local builders in Vermont, vainly trying to find at least a low-paid job where he could learn.

He had gone back to New Bedford. One man who might have given him a job remembered about the bridge, and said, ‘Whoa – wait a minute. Aren't you the guy who – ?'

Ida and Shirley were away visiting Shirley's family in New Haven. If Mike could not find work, he would have to go back to the rehab and ask for a psychiatrist's letter to get Social Security special payments.

‘I walked out of that place proud,' he told Paul and Lily. ‘A good job and a new life. “Don't come back,” they said, like a kind of joke. So it would be tough.'

‘It would be a step back,' Lily said. ‘Perhaps we can help you to find something.'

‘My record's bad.'

‘You can't have that hanging round your neck for ever.'

‘Hard to get rid of, though,' Paul said more realistically.

‘But how's he ever going to make something of his life if no one will give him a chance?'

‘That's true.' Paul's resentment against Mike's intrusions last year was forgotten. That didn't matter now. He was sorry for the man, and he wanted to show Lily that he could be part of her work, because she was part of his.

‘Let's see, maybe I have an idea that could tide you over.'

Here was a way to thank her properly for giving up so gracefully the excitement and acclaim of her conference.

Isobel knew that Tony wasn't too pleased when Ida's taxi driver turned up, one of Mud's lame dogs, who was going to clear brush and thin saplings in the new field, and finish the fences and the horse shelter: things that would have been Tony's jobs. He had no time to do them himself now, but he wasn't happy about someone else moving in.

‘You stay clear of him, Bella,' he warned.

‘Why? He's quite nice, for a nut case.'

‘That's it. He
is
a nut case.'

They knew, although no one had told them, that this Mike was the man who had jumped off the bridge that night when Mud was a heroine. Not that wanting to kill yourself was all that
far out. It was talked about a lot at school, and a few of the kids had even overdosed, or cut themselves.