The shaggy mat of yellow grass outside the nursing home, studded on warm days with forlorn people and cigarette butts, began to turn muddy green. Spring came fast to Denver, announcing itself with days that began blue, then turned brown by rush hour. Mary sat outside for as long as she was allowed, sometimes even walked to a nearby pocket park. Still she had no friends, no champion, no one who moved her to speak. The nurses had stopped trying, believing that her one lucid outburst had been an aberration.
Still the meds came each morning and night, leaving her too muddy-minded to read or to ponder. But each late afternoon, when the drugs began to wear off and the ozone air took on a mellow glow and a balmy feel, Mary came clear of mind. Then she would walk around to the vacant lot behind the squat white brick building. From there she could watch the little green things and see just a shoulder of Mount Evans between a distant shiny skyscraper and the redbrick Full Gospel Mount Pisgah Pentecostal Church. That glimpse of the Rockies sometimes made her soar, sometimes despair, always made her high, pale cheeks wet with tears of longing.
Mary felt sick every time the aide called her back in for dinner. To take food among all these unfortunates who drooled and looked through her, to face the evening ahead that would be filled with moans, shouts, and gurgled laughter against incessant radio and television babel and finally the lights-out of a forced pill and a flicked switch, it made her desperate, made her weep inside. As spring drew into summer, Mary knew that something had to happen soon or she would make it happen. Those clear times in the afternoon became her mental open space, where plans began to grow. She found whole scenarios forming themselves, but only during that hour of the day. More and more those thoughts inclined toward suicide.
The time came when the only obstacle seemed to be how to do it with as little chance of failing as possible. Mary knew nothing of killing. One day, another resident, who had been leering at Mary for weeks, rubbing himself and gesturing until the nurses had to remove him, jumped Mary in the laundry exchange. She was stronger, and help was nearby, so she escaped with bruises. The man was transferred, but the incident brought her despair to a head. By now she had reclaimed enough self-presence, yet not lost enough self-respect, to know that this existence was impossible; the injustice, intolerable. No matter the meds, acceptance would never, thank God, be hers.
So the next day when John Everson, the director, attempted to soothe and question her about the assault, she spoke.
“Are you okay, Mary?”
“Not hurt. But hardly okay. No business being here.”
“No, but how good to hear you speak! Mary, where do you have business being?”
“Don’t know. Yet. Just, not here. I’m not. Like them.”
“No one is like anyone else here, Mary . . . except that all our clients need help.”
Mary turned her face down and mumbled something.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Everson, a youngish man who’d been in VISTA before grad school and still clung to tatters of the ideals he’d gone in with.
“I said, that’s so, but doesn’t feel like help to me.”
He could see that her intelligence was intact, and he considered calling the psychiatrist to ask whether he would agree to release Mary. But where to? First he asked, “Do you know who you are yet, beyond just ‘Mary’?” And when she answered, his face clouded. “You’d better get to lunch, Mary,” he said. “We’ll talk again soon. I’m glad you weren’t hurt. That poor fellow is in Fort Logan now, and he won’t be bothering you anymore.” As he paused outside the door, Mary heard him on the phone with the doctor.
“I almost thought she was better, Mitchell. That’s right—speaking and cogent, bright, more or less logical. Well, then she blew it. She told me she was . . . yes, that’s right . . . oh, you’ve already heard that from the nurse? Yes, I know she talked a bit a while back, before her seizure up in the mountains . . . Well anyway, she seems as deluded as half the people here, staff excluded, by the way. Can you imagine how long she’d last out on the streets, believing what she does and telling people about it, pretty woman like her? No, not violent, and I don’t think schizophrenic. Still, we’d better keep a watch on her . . . right, and that was a close call. A rape or a suicide before the new facilities grant review is all we’d need. All right, goodbye, Mitchell.”
Mary crumbled. They really think I’m mad, she thought. Here is best? God, no, can’t be, can’t stay here . . . can’t! Yet she knew the director might be right about her chances on the streets were she to run off. Everything was still too hazy: she had no idea where to seek real help, no idea of family, friends, place, or purpose, only a firm but filmy sense of identity, and that she must get to the mountains. Or (her train of thought always ran this way, like a toy locomotive on a slow track that comes around and around) failing that, she must end her life. After all, she thought before the evening pill took over, she’d died before. Maybe in order to get to the mountains, she’d have to go around again.
For several days Mary skipped her outing. She just lay on her bed, concentrating on nothingness, hoping that might help her achieve it. But she was too strong, and they made her eat; she’d live forever this way. Eventually her sloth made her stiff. She realized that to kill herself, she’d have to have strength, so she lumbered outside again. Feeling one hundred years old, she faced the fading day, paced the weedy yard a few times, then crumpled into the old dinette chair that someone had carried outside and no one had bothered to bring back in. All the others sat out front where they could watch the buses, the cars, and the pimps parading into the bar down the block. No one else sat out by the vacant lot, or even went there much, so she was startled when a voice tried on a hopeful, gentle “Hi.”
Mary twirled to face the speaker and raised her hands, then dropped them. She recognized the tall, gangly young man named Howard. He was articulate, and she’d first wondered if he worked there, but the nurses’ demeanor showed that he was another resident. Howard walked downtown early most days for coffee and came back after dinner, so she seldom saw him. She’d overheard that he liked to hang out at either a bar or a strip joint where the staff looked after him and gave him small jobs to do for a dollar or two. She wondered why he was here at all. “Hello,” she returned, the first normal greeting she’d exchanged in nearly a year.
“Mind if I sit by you?” Howard asked, motioning at the alleyway beside her chair, overhung by pigweed.
“It’s okay,” she said. She noticed that his hand had a palsy, and when he sat, she saw a fearsome scar across his forehead.
“I’m Howard,” he said.
“I’m Mary.”
“I know.” His voice held a deep quaver. “Well, hello, Mary!” He closed his nice, smiling lips over stained false teeth, adjusted his glasses, and lit a cigarette. Then he offered her one, which she declined with a shake of her ratty hair. “What are you in for?” he asked.
“They say I was in a car wreck up in the mountains. Hurt my head, supposedly.”
“Oh, me too!” said Howard. “But up in Oregon. Benny fell asleep, and we hit a cattle truck head-on. Benny and Stan were killed. Well, so was I, but I came back. They call it frontal lobe damage.”
“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 else 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.