We had considered trying to 302 Rosie for ages. She was clearly sick. In the beginning she would just stand outside her house every night yelling, “MRI trash,” or “MRI liar.” Soon after the sun went down she yelled it on a loop at anyone who passed. Sometimes we would be hosting a party and people would come in saying, “I think your skinny neighbor across the street is calling people white trash.” We thought that’s what she was saying at first too. This little Philadelphia neighborhood where we live is one of the most inviting in the country. New York folks call it the Sixth Borough. Property values are solid, but not likely to rise much. You can go out at night and not worry about it. Even if you’re not walking a dog. People are kind to each other—and not in some forced way.
When it was just the “MRI trash” loop each night, discussion of trying to have Rosie committed was speculation. My wife is a lawyer. She knows how these things can go. Anyone can 302 anyone in the broad light of day—you just have to call the police, tell them you’re certain someone you know is severely mentally ill and poses a threat to you or themselves or both, and if the police agree they’ll institutionalize them against their will. But then you have to go to a 302 court to keep them in custody. It’s ugly business, and I won’t lie: the idea of a bunch of neighbors standing around one night watching as the cops pulled their young mentally ill neighbor out of her house, against her will, was not appealing. These were the lines we didn’t cross, norms that kept us living together in peace. Like the way you might knock on a door to borrow some cumin in the dense light at 6:00 p.m., but you wouldn’t even approach through the thin sodium light of streetlights at ten. Rosie lived in one of those narrow, tall row houses you find all over Philly and we lived across the street in a single, and at first we could ignore her, hoping it wouldn’t get worse. Hoping we could just sleep through it.
It got worse.
One of the neighbors to the left of Rosie, Isabella, stopped me as I was getting into my car one morning. It was midwinter, February, a time when being a good neighbor meant not talking to each other—make coffee, scrape frost from the windshield or clear snow, get kids in the car and off to day care. It was still so dark when we left for work each morning you might as well have called it night. A couple stars and maybe a satellite skittering across the black morning sky. But I was on my way through the murky black and Isabella came plodding across our narrow one-way street. I was clipping our youngest into her car seat.
“Rosie’s becoming bigger trouble,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
I didn’t. My two-year-old was squirming in her seat like she was trying to get away from a nightmare—in psychiatry they called it “responding to internal stimuli.” If an adult responded to internal stimuli it was a problem. But two-year-olds responded to internal stimuli all the time. They toddled through their days as if in some long waking dream. It seemed a facet of being two that there was no discernment between what was internal and what was external. No day, no night. Our sleep effaced to match it. And now we were up getting on with the day, and here she was starting to cry.
“No, like a lot louder,” Isabella said. “She was up all night, slamming some jawn against our common wall. I think she was stacking her furniture. And yelling. She just sits playing video games all night, yelling. Now she’s yelling about, ‘Gonna slit your throat.’ Maybe it’s at the TV. Maybe it’s at us. It’s scary.”
I told her we’d keep an eye out. I got the kid into her car seat and she was crying bloody murder, her little legs kicking at the air like she was trying to swim. She kicked and squirmed something fierce in my arms, trying to escape my grasp, until I finally got around and into my seat and got driving. Who knows which of our neighbors witnessed that ugliness, but they knew enough not to mention it.
Spring came early. Some mornings now it was light enough when we left for work that you could see straight across to the houses on the other side of the street. All the neighbors were outside in the lengthening evenings. We sat in our backyard eating grilled burgers and next door they did the same, only a fence crawling with privet, vine, and honeysuckle between us, and pretended we didn’t hear each other talking. Invented some dark-matter boundary to keep us separate.
Across the street, Rosie was deteriorating.
She stood out front sweeping all night. Even in the thin sodium light you could see her skin was all psoriatic. She wore an olive-green Israeli army jacket. She had black Glad bags wrapped and tied around both her elbows and her knees as if to slip undetected into our dreams. She wore a burgundy beret low over her narrow brown eyes. She was probably thirty, our age to the day maybe, but she was so wiry she seemed ageless. It was as if her life comprised only nights. Like she was living half a life, the dark half. It wasn’t that she wasn’t functional—we’d see her out on Lincoln Drive riding her bike, signaled by the flash of our headlights on her reflectors, and she could’ve been anyone. Neighbor, tourist, compos mentis or otherwise, it wouldn’t have mattered, and it didn’t. Then she’d come back to her house. We wouldn’t see her until night fell, when she would stand outside sweeping her front walk. Her front lawn was a brown muck of no grass. This was Mount Airy, where people take pride in their front yards, tiny spits of land peppered with daylilies and echinacea, mums in the fall and sedum all summer. Yards lousy with tomato plants, dogwood, and lilac. Vegetables requiring full sun. Tasteful solar-powered incandescent lawn ornaments. Decorations as much to say to the neighborhood, We care for what you’re looking at, as to make ourselves happy.
All the trimmings of what people look at during the day. Even in a city neighborhood like ours, the night belongs inside. Inside houses, inside of bars and restaurants.
All Rosie did was stand out front sweeping all night and saying, “MRI liar, gonna slit your throat” to everyone who walked past on their way from a bar or an apartment or a house. One night I was taking the trash out, remembered it just before bed, when a couple of guys came down the block near midnight, drunk from a night at McMenamin’s around the corner. I was out front stuffing mucked leaves from the previous fall into yard bags.
“The fuck you say to me?” I heard one of the guys say. He was wearing one of those all-black McNabb jerseys. It was the week after Easter. Rosie was back to her sweeping, eyes to the sidewalk, and the guys started walking down the block when again she said, “Motherfucker gonna slit your throat and yours too.” McNabb jersey walked back up the block and started to make a move toward her. The other half grabbed his shoulder but the first one kept moving toward her until I was in the middle of the street yelling, “Hey—hey, guys. She’s sick. Leave her alone.”
McNabb finally stopped in his tracks. He looked at me across the way. Probably he could only half make out what I looked like in the foreshortened lengths of dark. What do you think he was thinking? I’m not asking rhetorically. I really want to know. I had a decent idea of what our neighbors thought, recluses or affable, would-you-be-my/could-you-be-my or something-there-is-that-doesn’t-love-a-wall, from the time we’d spent living around them. You learned to talk to some people and grant others the courtesy of leaving them alone. But now standing in the middle of the street trying to call a couple of drunk sweatpanted guys away from your schizophrenic neighbor while your kids are inside trying on dreams is something else. Or is it the thing itself? Learning to live with neighbors is a big part of learning to live. You learn early on how to do it in the light of day. It’s a marathon task learning to live with them in your dream life.
McNabb sobered a bit and looked at me, then back at Rosie.
“Well, someone ought to lock her up if she’s gonna fucking yell at people like that,” he said. “If you’re gonna take care of her, fucking take care of her.”
By early June something was going to give. Every night all night Rosie stood outside sweeping, saying, “Liar gonna slit your throat motherfucker don’t.” Jim and Isabella had kids as small as ours. Every night while they were trying to sleep, she’d be standing out there on her stoop sweeping. You could call the cops but all they’d tell you is that sweeping is not disturbing the peace.
“It’s getting to be such a problem,” Isabella said when I saw her one Wednesday afternoon. We don’t see each other much in the winter when it’s so cold it feels like the two-year-old’s fingers might freeze off like little freeze pops if you don’t get her inside pronto, but in the summer, that block is like its own little pro bono summer camp after summer camp ends for the day. Feels halfway like the sun will never leave. If you need to leave your kids for an hour to run an errand, someone’s there to watch. Our next-door neighbors leave for Jerusalem for the summer and they have a little square of red-painted benches around a Japanese red maple. The kids all hop up on the benches and run around in circles, chasing each other until one falls off and skins a knee, while the adults drink a beer and wait for it to get late enough to put them to bed.
Now knowing that as soon as we all went in with the dark, Rosie would be back out with the street sweeping and gonna-slit-your-throating. Not every night. But a lot of the nights. More than not by this Wednesday in June.
“So Jim and I have decided with Michele and Nefrali that we’re gonna call the cops every time she threatens us,” Isabella said.
Mikey Jr. from a couple doors down said, “The cops will say there’s nothing they can do.” Mikey grew up on the block, so people are deferential. He’s been at it longer than any of us, and knows best how. Sometimes he’ll bring in your trash cans for you, help with landscaping. Carry in your groceries without your asking.
Isabella said she knew, she knew. “Youse can do whatever you need. But us, we’re gonna call the cops. At the least, if we decide to 302 her”—she stared at me for a second after saying it—“then we’ll have a record of having made complaints.” So what could I do? Jen was still at work. We were talking, we were neighbors, our kids were playing together, and Rosie was across the street ready to start sweeping and threatening to slit our throats.
So began a summer of red-and-blue flashing lights unnighting the night. When she got home, Jen said I should start a document on my desktop. A list of the times I’d called and the things I’d seen Rosie do and say. “A Word file will be time-stamped,” Jen said. “You’ll have a record.”
I called the cops myself for the first time the following week. I was carrying in some groceries after the kids finally went down, and Rosie was out sweeping and she said, “MRI liar motherfucker gonna slit your throat.” I stood up and walked to the edge of our sidewalk and I said, “Listen, Rosie, I don’t want to have to do it, but if you can’t stop yelling I’m gonna have to call the cops.”
She stopped sweeping and stood stone silent. I could make out her figure, but not her features, across the street in the city night dark. Her back was hunched the slightest bit. For a moment I thought she was going to speak to me normally. She said, “Motherfucking liar motherfucker gonna slit her throat.” She was looking up at my two-year-old’s window on the second floor. I think. I couldn’t tell if she’d said “her” or “your.”
Either way.
I called 911.
It took a half hour for the cops to arrive. By the time they did, Rosie had been back in her house for most of the time. I told them about what happened. Their flashing lights lit windows up and down the block.
“Did she actually threaten you?” the first cop asked. I told him that saying she was gonna slit a two-year-old’s throat seemed like a threat to me. The second cop went over and knocked on Rosie’s door. Knocking on her door this late into the dark made it feel doubly intrusive. We stood there watching him on her front porch. She didn’t open. He came back over.
“If we heard her say it ourselves, maybe we could do something. But honestly, sir, what can we do?”
“You could 302 her, right?”
“I’m sure as hell not gonna do that,” the second cop said. “Once the 302 is called in, we have to forcibly remove her from the premises,” he said. “You can’t call it off. Break down the door, hog-tie, chase her down in the streets, whatever it takes.”
I told them thank you and as my wife had advised me I asked them for their names and badge numbers and an incident report. Once their car was clear of our block I heard Rosie inside her front window say, “Motherfucker MRI liar gonna slit all your throats.”
Just as I was about to go into the house Mikey Jr. came walking up. He was almost always out at night smoking a cigarette.
“More trouble with Rosie,” he said. I told him what had been going on. “I knew her in high school,” he said. “She was a little weird, but not like this. Her brother was Crazy Joey. Same shit. Her mother lives over in Kensington. Owns the house but they don’t come by more than once every couple months. If you can catch her she’ll talk to you.” I said thanks. “I might even be able to get a phone number.”
That night I told Jen everything. She asked if I wanted to just go ahead and 302 her myself if I’d gotten so involved. She’d explained to me all that entailed and I surprised myself with my own response.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “Have her become my responsibility. Go to a 302 court. Show up every time they call. I have my own responsibilities! We have two kids. I work forty hours a week, have this house to take care of, have neighbors we actually like to invite to dinners, have the—” She told me she knew, she knew, she knew. It was what she might have said, but she didn’t. I did. I didn’t want to get any more involved.
This is probably the part of the story where you’re expecting me to say that by July Rosie had gotten so bad we had no other choice. Or worse. That we woke up in the middle of the night to find Isabella shaking uncontrollably, holding her bloodied kid and yelling like Medea, skyward to the gods, for mercy. I’m not going to trump this up or make it into anything other than the subtle confusion it was, start to end. I called the cops many times over the next month. So did Isabella, so did Jim, so did Michele. But no one was ready to be the one to 302 her.
Beyond that we had a summer. The kids went to day camp, day care. We found a way to fill their time. One Saturday afternoon we took them down to Center City. Our older daughter is eight, old enough to get a sense of history. We parked in one of the pay lots on South Second and walked to the Constitution Center, then up Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest residential block in the US. People have been neighbors to each other there, day and night, since fifty years before the Declaration was signed. We peered in windows like we were looking into a museum but people peered back—we were looking into their homes, not quite the neighborly thing to do. Jen and I looked at each other and walked the kids on.
Then we went down to Christ Church. I’m embarrassed to say that for all the times I’d passed it in the decade since we’d moved down from Brooklyn so my wife could go to law school at Penn I’d never actually set foot inside, though I knew that Kenneth at the bottom of our block worked as a docent there.
It was a revelation. Our eight-year-old sat in George Washington’s pew, Benjamin Franklin’s. Franklin was buried somewhere out in that centuries-old yard. We might have been standing over his remains at any time, in the neighborhood of Franklin’s ghost. The tour guide told us about how this was where the Episcopal Church itself was started in the early eighteenth century. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had sat in one of those pews.
I’d never really given a care about American history. I know this isn’t something to be proud of. That afternoon as my kids crawled over the pews of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, slipping over the partitions between their boxes like silverfish over the drain in our bathtub, all I could think about was Rosie. Standing in Christ Church that afternoon amid the haints of the early leaders, the wraiths of Rosie and her MRI liaring ringing in my ears, I felt out of sorts. We walked around Christ Church and I tried to put the nights of Rosie out of my mind. In the gift shop there was a display of little Declarations of Independence in little glass bottles sitting in racks. When I wasn’t looking, my eight-year-old accidentally pulled the box of miniature documents off the table. It landed on the floor, where all the fragile bottles smashed to shards. My eight-year-old was red in the face as I knelt to the floor to help clean up all the broken glass we’d left. I looked up to see that the docent at the place was our neighbor Kenneth.
“How old are you now, sweetie?” he said to my daughter. I couldn’t tell if she recognized him or not. “Well, you might not know this, but do you know that the first generation of Americans ever to exist, they all came to this church?”
She said, “Yes.”
“Well, how many generations do you think there have been in America?” he asked. He looked at me too, and I didn’t have an answer. “Twelve,” he said. “This building seems so old, I know, but it’s still young, my friends. It’s a young country. It’s a country that once had bison grazing everywhere you looked, wild turkeys gobbling about. From George Washington himself to you, only ten generations total have spent their days in this place—and he and you are the other two.”
He continued to sweep up the glass and I told him of course we’d pay for what we’d broken.
We weren’t even home, we weren’t even in the state, when the decision was made to commit Rosie. Every summer we drive our kids up to coastal Maine, where my parents have a house. We’d been up there for a couple days when I got a text late one night from Mikey Jr. He’s a serious animal lover, wanted to be a veterinarian but didn’t pass the tests, and he always watched our cats when we were out of town. He’d go in late in the evening, end of his day, to make sure even someone considering breaking in would see he was there. Perfect neighbor. Wednesday of our week up in York Beach he sent me a text: “Kitties happy and fed. Rosie’s mother phone number is xxx.xxx.xxxx. Her name is Wanda. She knows you’re calling.” I might not have even tried her if it hadn’t been for the last line. I got Jen and the kids off to the beach that morning and walked back up to the street and called.
“Who is this?” Rosie’s mom said. I told her my name, said I was Rosie’s neighbor. “Oh, got it. Michael Donatello said you’d be calling.” It took me a second to realize she meant Mikey Jr. “So Rosie’s having hard nights again.” I told her all about the MRI liaring, the way we hadn’t wanted to call the cops to begin with, but that now she was basically threatening people’s lives. Kids.
“I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before it escalates,” I said. “That’s why I wanted to call you directly.”
“I get it,” Rosie’s mom said. “Well, first you can call me Wanda, and second you can call me whenever. I mean, it’s not like we don’t go over there. You probably don’t see us because you’re at work. But we go during the days. When we can. We know how bad she’s doing. They always say she’s responding to internal stimuli. What a phrase.” I asked her if they’d ever tried 302ing her. “We don’t need to do that. We just take her in. They give her the Haldol, the Seroquel, the whatever. She gets better for a while. Then she stops taking it. She falls apart. You don’t think we’ve tried everything?”
“I’m sure you have.”
“You have kids, Mr. K? Well, you’ll see. I mean, this is bad. But at some point they just do as they do. Honestly, we’re just lucky we own that house.” The conversation was coming to a natural end, if not a conclusion. I told her I was sorry I’d had to call at all, and I was sorry for what had happened in the past, and I was sorry for whatever might happen in the future. I assured her we were good neighbors to Rosie, and weren’t just looking out for ourselves but for them too.
“Well, you all live next to her, across from her. That’s just as true at night as it is in the day. We all do what we have to to live around each other each day. You do what you have to do to live there.” From where I was standing on the sidewalk I could see my older kid being carried along with the force of the current in the water. The sun was bearing down on us. A ball popped up in the lucid blue air, then dropped. I wished I’d thought to ask her if she knew what “MRI liar” and “MRI trash” meant—had they tried to get Rosie an MRI at some point when she was previously institutionalized? Had something horrible happened at night when she was a kid, something that kept her from her bed, kept her out there all night? Was it just nonsense? But I didn’t. I was about to sign off when Wanda said, “I saw on the website that you teach at X College.” I told her I did. “My mom went there. Both my nieces too. Rosie’s cousins. Great school.” She thanked me again and we hung up.
When we got back to Philadelphia it was late, crepuscular blooming of Rosie’s time outside. The only light was grainy, streetlights. Long and late as it was, I had a new strength to talk to Isabella about Rosie and all I now knew. I hadn’t wanted to walk across the street to her house for months but now I did, having talked to Wanda. I had information finally, something to try to break the spell.
“It is awfully late to be knocking,” Isabella said. She had a look on her face I’d never seen before. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and saw it was 11:20. We’d been driving so long I didn’t realize how late it was. Or I did realize and somehow the night had become continuous with the days since all this with Rosie had started.
“We already 302ed her,” Isabella said. “Three days ago. We’ve been asleep by like nine every night since.” She said she’d talk with me tomorrow.
It was done.
I avoided Isabella for a couple days, or she me. Finally we saw each other. It was early evening. August. Philadelphia swampy humidity kept narrowing in even when the sun was down.
“The very last night was awful,” Isabella said. Her first finger was searching the hem of her T-shirt for something, worrying its way to a pocket. She had color in her cheeks. Though the sky was insulation pink with city lights you could imagine there were stars on the other side, across the street, next door. “She was slamming shit up against our common wall so hard I thought she was gonna break through. Kids were crying. Cops got here and she was still at it, they heard it. When they knocked she stopped, but they’d heard. We said we’d sign the 302. They had to forcibly remove her.” She paused on forcibly. “It was awful, but I gotta tell you—I feel better. I do. To have her done yelling at the kids, even if it’s just for a couple weeks. She needs to get better.”
I didn’t ask any more details. Even after Rosie came back from her institutionalization—and she did, she came back subdued, medicated, quiet as night—I never asked more about what happened. I’d see Isabella, or any of the rest of our neighbors who must have witnessed it, on my way home from work or the bar. Each time I couldn’t help but wonder if Rosie slid past that porous border dividing their days from their nights too, and entered that nighttime space where MRI bison graze free as thought, George Washington and kin riding astride them like kings.