Her office is furnished with a desk and chair, and a soft, salmon-colored sofa and two chairs grouped around a coffee table on which are piles of literature, the kind featuring smiling people on the front whom you suspect are smiling in spite of.
“So tell me, Cece. What brings you here?”
“Well,” I say, “I’m looking for a volunteer position.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And … this seems like it would be a good place to volunteer.”
She nods. Waits.
“Because … Well, I’ve heard you do really good work.” For some reason, although I’d intended to, I don’t want to mention Penny. Maybe I fear I will get too emotional. Or maybe I want this to be a cleaner venture than that: me doing something I want to, rather than something I’ve been directed or persuaded to do.
“I think we do do good work, thank you for saying so. First, why don’t I tell you a little about who our clients are and what our volunteers do, and then you can let me know if it seems like the right place for you.”
“That’s fine.”
I listen to her talk about the clients, people who have chosen not to continue treatments for a terminal situation, who have opted instead for palliative care, comfort measures. She tells me that sometimes patients are here for a few months or even longer, sometimes for only a couple of days. Then she tells me about the volunteers: people who come to read to clients, or to bathe them, or to watch movies with them. To take them for walks, if they’re able, or for brief car rides.
“We also have people who don’t have direct contact,” Annie says. “They do things like bake cookies for our clients and their family members. And for the staff, I’m happy to say!”
“Sounds …” I start to say, then realize I have no idea what to say next. “Nice!” I manage, and feel myself flushing at the inanity.
Will you calm down? Just listen.
“We also have volunteers who just sit with our clients. They literally just sit and don’t do much of anything. Oftentimes they don’t say anything, either.”
“That I could do,” I say, overly brightly, and we both laugh.
“Seriously,” I say. “I could do that. Is it for people who are unconscious?”
“Not always. Sometimes we’ll get a client who just doesn’t really want to talk, but who derives a kind of comfort from someone just being there.”
That would be easy enough, I think. But then, as though she’s read my mind, Annie says, “It’s not always easy.”
“I would like to try it, though.”
“When are you available to start?”
“I’m planning a short trip for the near future, but after that, I could volunteer at least twice a week, maybe more often. Also … Well, it may be helpful for you to know that I’m a motivational speaker.”
“I think you’ll find that it’s a very unique kind of learning that goes on here. It never stops, really. In any case, no matter who they are, we do have a requirement that all our volunteers go through a background check as well as two six-hour training classes, held on the last weekend of every month. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
Two days away—I can do it before I leave. I want to do it—the longer I sit here the more I feel I really want to work here.
Annie is frowning at something she’s pulled up on the computer. “Hmm. Well, this month’s class is full, but I could put you down for next month. I can send you home with an application.”
“I’ll fill it out right now, if that’s okay.”
“Of course.” She gives me the application, which I fill out while she does paperwork of her own. Then she takes me on a brief tour to show me the ten rooms they have here. Several of the doors are open, and I can see into the rooms, see the various ways they’ve been decorated, or not. All of the beds are covered with colorful bedspreads or quilts. Most rooms have pictures of loved ones, plants or flowers, and some people have knickknacks or artwork here and there. There is a huge stuffed dog at the foot of one bed where a man lies snoring. Just looking at him, you’d never suspect anything is wrong. I remember a time I was riding in Penny’s car with her when she was first diagnosed and someone cut her off. She looked over at me and smiled ruefully. Later, when she got weaker and looked bad, people gave sympathetic glances and a wide berth. “I liked it better when nobody knew,” she said.
I see butterflies hanging from strings attached to the ceiling in one room where a woman smiles at me from her bed. My heart lurches at how extremely pale she is, at the frankness of her bald head. In the corner of her room, a plug-in fountain gently burbles, and I hear the sound of birds singing, as though they are right in there with her. I look over at Annie, and she says, “CD. It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
When clients smile at me, I find it surprising and humbling, too, in a very specific sort of way. Strange to think of it like this, perhaps, but it’s as though the novitiate comes suddenly upon the master. Other clients, though, look like they are long past smiling. There’s one, a man of about thirty years old who’s heartbreakingly thin and has dark circles under his eyes so dramatic they look drawn in. He looks out at us as we walk past, and Annie says softly, “Hi, Michael.” He says nothing back; his expression is empty of any emotion. “Excuse me for a moment,” she tells me, and she goes up to Michael’s bedside and speaks quietly to him. He does not respond. She touches his shoulder, then his arm, and leaves his room, comes back to me. “Let me show you the kitchen,” she says. “And then I’ll take you out to the garden.”
Annie takes me next to a kitchen that can be used by both staff and clients. There’s a small table in there, with a lamp on it, and Annie tells me they leave it on all night.
There’s a chapel, stained-glass windows in shades of blue and red and yellow, a bench with kneelers. She shows me where the bathrooms are located on the main floor, introduces me to Florence, a smiling Hispanic woman who looks to be about my age, at the reception desk.
“So,” Annie says. “There’s your tour. Do you have any questions?”
I don’t ask about Michael. Not yet. But I want to.
“We’ll see you at the orientation, then,” Annie says, and I thank her, shake her hand. Her grip is firm.
There is a jarring kind of brightness you experience coming out of a theater in the afternoon that I experience coming out of the Arms now. It has nothing to do with light, though.
I get back in the car and the radio now feels like so much noise. I turn it off. This feeling I’m having now has to do with that, how I want back inside something I’ve just experienced: a silence that contains everything you want to hear.
WHEN I GET HOME, I find a note from Renie on the kitchen table:
There’s a letter for you. We’ll be expecting a full report. Thanks for last night. So to speak.
I rush to the front table and grab the letter. It’s a fat one! I bring it out to the front porch, sit down in one of the chairs, and open it.
It’s not a long letter, only one page. But there are photographs: that’s what accounts for the thickness. I suspect the photographs will speak more to me, and I suspect, too, that that’s what he intended.
I unfold the page, aware of a rush of joy that here his handwriting is again, in the here and now.
Cecilia,
So good to hear from you. I remember receiving letters from you before I went to Tahiti and I took that raft down the Amazon, and here would come a motorboat, sent to overtake me, and some guy would hand me a letter, and it got to be so that the three others on the raft with me would want to hear your letters, too, so I’d read them aloud. Then we’d all get quiet. Your heart’s always on your sleeve, Cecilia, I always liked that about you.
First of all, I’m not married. First and last, I suppose, so don’t think there’s any need for censoring. Say whatever you like.
It’s certainly a different life here than in Tahiti. I came back because my mom died, but also for reasons apart from that. But
it’ll take some getting used to, being back in this country: strange politics here, strange attitudes. I’m a little tired of talking about Tahiti, all those people who want to know what it was like, living there, what was it like? Everything I want to say is in my photos. Or in my actions, I suppose, the point is I’m not much of a word man. But then you know that, I’m sure.
I remember a lot, too, Cece.
As for coming to see me, I don’t know, why not, come ahead. I’ll shine my shoes, we’ll go out dancing.
Dennis
Given the circumstances, it’s a little frustrating not to be able to call him, but there is something about the pace of letter writing that’s a welcome antidote to the speed of modern life. By their very nature, letters allow for more consideration of the words and thoughts that someone is offering you, in part because they prevent interruption. Perhaps best of all is their keeping quality—there were nights after Dennis left when I slept with pages he’d sent me from South America, and I felt as though I were with him, at least to the extent that I could be.
So I’ll write back telling him I’ll leave in a week. That will give me time to get ready, and also give some time to anyone else who might want to come with me. Then I’m off.
I read his letter again. Laugh out loud. And then I turn to the photographs.
They must be of where he is living now; they are at any rate certainly not taken in Tahiti. I see a young girl doing a cartwheel on her front lawn, her ponytails hanging upside down, her friend standing beside her, arms akimbo. On the front porch steps is an older woman, the child’s grandmother, perhaps, her chin in her hands, and here is where my eye is drawn: I think I see in the grandmother’s face a joyful recollection of doing cartwheels herself.
I asked Dennis once why he made photographs. I assumed it was because of the stories pictures tell, and the idea of something ephemeral being preserved. And that certainly was part of it. But what attracted him most was that cameras could record light. He said he was and would forever be a student of light, that the two things one uses, that one must have, in order to make a photograph are light and time.
He also told me that when he was in fifth grade, his teacher gave a slide show of modern art. Dennis was a poor student, probably dyslexic, though not diagnosed as such; it was not so easily recognized then. But at that moment, sitting at his desk in a darkened classroom that smelled of chalk and paper and baloney from the sandwich stored in his lunch box, he, in his words, took a trip to the Other. He realized he could explain everything he felt in a single image. Everything he felt and was.
There are a good twenty photographs, all scenes I imagine are from in or around his neighborhood. There’s an old woman wearing a stained coat and backless slippers and carrying what must be a heavy shopping bag—she’s listing to the left. She’s shot from behind, and you can see an old-fashioned roller she must have forgotten, hanging from a piece of hair. Another photo is birds on a wire like notes on a staff, all facing forward but for the one on the end, who looks in that respect like a period at the end of a sentence. There are cirrus clouds so thin they look like bits of tissue paper glued to the sky and a shot of water braiding itself as it travels down a gutter. I’m going through the stack for the second time when my cellphone rings.
It’s Annie Sullivan at the Arms, asking if I’ve a moment to talk.
“Of course,” I say.
“I know I told you that we had no openings in the training class until next month.”
“Yes.”
“What I’m calling about is another matter, rather urgent. It has to do with a young man named Michael, whom you may recall from your visit here. He’s the one I went in and spoke to.”
“I do remember him.” You spoke to him and he acted as if you weren’t even there.
“Well, Michael has never asked for anything, but he did just now ask me for a favor and I wondered if you’d be interested in helping us accommodate him. He’s been clear from the start that he wanted no visitors. That hasn’t changed. But he’s suddenly gotten very anxious about his wish being violated. What he wants is someone to simply sit in his room from eleven to one and from five to seven every day. There’s someone who’s quite insistent on trying to see him, and she often tries to come on her lunch hour or after work. I’ve talked to her a few times, but she seems unwilling to give up. She’s actually Michael’s fiancée, or was, and she’s a very nice woman, but a bit stubborn, as it turns out. As much as I would like to let her see him, I have to honor his wishes. I have volunteers who can sit with him in the evening, but not during the day. Could you? We could do a mini-training, just to give you some basics. But you’d mostly be just sitting there in what we call open attendance—he’s never much talked to anyone. What do you think, does this seem like something you could do?”
“Well, I’ll be leaving in a week.”
“A week will be enough,” she says, and I wonder if she doesn’t expect Michael to live longer than that, or if it will just buy her enough time to find someone else. I agree to come tomorrow at ten, so that I can have the little training I’ll get, and then I’ll sit with him.
“Do you knit?” Annie asks.
“No. Why?”
“You’ll probably need something to do.”
“I’ll bring something to read.”
I hang up, then go to stand by the window and look outside. Such a young man.
One day when I was sad about something, Dennis came over, saw my face, and said, “Come with me.”
“Where?” I asked, and he said, “To where I’m taking you.”
Where he took me was down by the Mississippi River, to a wrought-iron entryway with an arched gate, LUCY WILDER MORRIS PARK inscribed in an elegant script at the top. No fence, just a gate, seemingly sticking out of nowhere. “This is a park?” I asked.
He told me that in the spring, there were wildflowers everywhere in this three-tenths-of-an-acre park, and he began naming them for me: Columbine. Wood anemone. White baneberry. Bittersweet nightshade. I remember when he said “Pipsissewa,” I laughed. And he said it was an Abnaki word that meant “flower of the woods.” That its colors were a near Day-Glo pink and purple.
I asked Dennis if later he would write the names of the flowers down for me. I knew I could find them in a field guide, but I wanted those flowers’ names written out in his hand, so that I could hear him say them again every time I looked at his list. Also I wanted to go to his house when we were finished there, I wanted to get into bed with him and put my arms around him and the smartweed and the nightshade and the wild roses and the pyrola.
In my senior year, he took that rafting trip down the Amazon. The night before he left, he came to see me, late, and asked me to cut a lock of my hair and give it to him, which I readily did, of course I did: the lateness of the hour, the fullness of the moon, the nearness of his departure, the candle burning in the Chianti bottle, our knees pressing hard together as we sat at the tiny kitchen table. He wound the long piece of my black hair into a knotted oval, then put it in a rawhide pouch that he wore around his neck. And I remember that I asked no questions that night, nothing about what else was in that pouch, or had been in there, or why he wore it, or why he wanted a lock of my hair in it. I cut off a piece my hair, I gave it to him, he nodded, and I nodded back.
After he left, days would come when I missed him so, and I’d go down to Lucy Wilder Morris Park to find him again. I’d bring along the piece of paper torn from one of his sketchbooks, on which he’d written the names of the wildflowers. Bloodroot, whose flowers lasted only a day or two. Field bindweed, which looked like tiny morning glories. Milkweed, in which the monarchs laid their eggs. He wrote down blue vervain, lady’s slippers, butter-and-eggs, four-o’clocks. When he wrote down harebells, he told me that they looked delicate, but that they could grow between rocks. He wrote down forget-me-nots, and I said, “I’ll never forget you.” And he turned his head and looked at me, and with that look said, Nor I you.
I snap
Riley’s leash on. “Hey,” I say. “Want to go for a walk?”
I’ll take him to Como Park, through the woods by the golf course where we’ll be able to catch a glimpse of the conservatory. Lucy Wilder Morris Park isn’t there anymore. The area has been cleaned up and modernized, which for me means that the charm and the wonder are gone. The wrought-iron gate, that fairy-tale entrance not only to a park but to a way of thinking, is long gone. Some things we really ought to keep.
THAT NIGHT MY ROOMMATES AND I ARE OUT ON THE PORCH HAVING a picnic dinner that I made: wrap sandwiches with hummus and raw vegetables, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, potato salad, and watermelon drizzled with aged balsamic. Afterward, Joni goes to have a drink with a man she recently met at the restaurant, telling us not to wait up for her, and Renie goes to a movie that I’ve already seen and that Lise doesn’t want to see. We linger together on the porch, I in the hammock, Lise stretched out on the swing. The days are lengthening, there’s the scent of cut grass in the air.
“It’s so nice out tonight,” I tell Lise, and she agrees, but in a distracted way.
“You okay?” I ask. I know she’s been worried about a young patient of hers who’s having kidney problems.
“If it’s still all right with you,” she says, “I do want to go on the road trip with you and Renie. I’ve got nine weeks of vacation to use up, so that’s no problem. But now I’m not sure I should visit the person I was thinking of seeing.”
“Who is it?”
“My ex.” She shrugs. “I’ve been thinking a lot about him, about us. He wasn’t the nicest guy in the world. But I wasn’t, either, is the thing. I don’t think I ever stepped up to recognizing my part in our coming undone. And I think I made a lot of mistakes with our daughter, with Sandy, having to do with him. I thought I was so very careful not to badmouth him, and I never did, not directly. But I made it clear that I didn’t think much of him, when he’s … he’s her father. And the truth is, there’s a lot to like about him. We just didn’t … I don’t know. We got married so young. And I used to blame him every time I was upset about anything. I was so critical! I think I just wore him down. I complained because he wouldn’t open up to me but then every time he did, I just … Well, I was very critical.