Dear Doctor Lily (46 page)

‘I've got something
she
hasn't,' he said, after Lily had used half a roll of film taking pictures of him clowning and hamming with the girls, and wearing a hallowe'en wig to support Cathy in a ballet pose.

‘She's coming over to see us.' Cathy sat on the grass, where he had let her fall. ‘She said she would.'

‘But I came first.'

He would not go to the theatre, nor make any move to see Pyge Tucker.

‘She'd love to hear about your success,' Lily urged him. ‘You could tell her about the doctor commercial, and going to Germany for the tourist advertisements. She'd be so impressed.'

‘Success isn't everything,' James said weightily. ‘Pyge, glorious Pyge, God bless her, she knew me in my halcyon days when my ego was intact. Now I am but a hollow man.'

They all told him they were sad when he left. So he sprang it on them jauntily at the airport.

‘You think I'm only going back to the pub, to see if Terry and Blanche have killed each other yet. You don't know about Pixie.'

‘Who's Pixie?' If he had made her up, wouldn't he have invented a more convincing name?

‘Aha!' Finger to large nose, more bony now, because he had lost weight with losing Nora, and Faces threatened to take the speciality ‘pot-belly' off his page in the next catalogue. ‘She shall be nameless. Soul of discretion, that's Jamspoon. Wish me luck.'

Ida's friend Mike was working again and in better shape, although he often seemed to guess when Lily was in Boston, and called her there, or came in to see her.

‘Watch out,' Martha said. ‘He has a yen for you.'

‘I don't think so. He's scared of women.'

Lily still felt she could help him. Once, when he panicked on the phone and told her that he was losing his mind and his grip on any kind of reality, she was able to reassure him and get him slowly calmed down. She did not know what was wrong with him. Nor did Martha. ‘Except he's pretty sick. If he goes on running away from help, he'll run into real trouble and get picked up and put back into Bridgewater again.'

One evening in October, Mike called Lily at home. He had been in an accident, and was in trouble with Corrigan and with the police, because of his record. He was hysterical. She had to talk to him for quite a long time. Paul was used to that. She often made calls to clients she had been to see. But when Mike called her again, when she had just put dinner on the table, Paul said, ‘Tell him not to call you here. I thought you weren't allowed to give clients your home number.'

‘I don't. But he knows it, because he was here.'

Once Mike called her in the night. She made him hang up, and got a volunteer on duty at Crisis to call him back. An hour later, he called Lily again and was angry at first, and then wept.

He knew where she lived.

One morning when she was in bed with flu, he turned up at the house in one of Corrigan's brown and white vans. From upstairs, Lily heard Paul talking to him, and Mike arguing.

‘I've told you.' Paul raised his voice. ‘You'd better go.'

Lily got up and put on jeans and a loose old sweater and banged at her hair with a brush, and went down.

‘What's the matter, Mike?' His hair was greasy and ragged.
His clothes were dirty. He had a stubble of beard. He was haggard.

‘Let me talk to you,' he said hoarsely, and coughed like a derelict.

‘What's wrong?'

‘No, Lily,' Paul ordered her. ‘You go back up.'

‘I'm all right. I feel better. Come and sit in the kitchen, Mike, while I make some coffee.'

She felt she could not turn him away without some kindness, but Paul was furious. He said, ‘For God's sake!' and banged out of the house.

‘Don't come here again,' Lily told Mike. ‘I can only help you through the centre. Don't call me here. I can't talk to you.'

Of course. That confirmed what Mike knew. She wanted to see him, but her husband wouldn't allow it. Paul Stephens. Mike knew all about him. ‘Too good to be true,' Ida had told him long ago in the New Bedford days, which had semed so lousy and hopeless, but looked like a paradise of security compared to the way he lived now.

‘I've told you.' Driving away, Mike imitated the level, snotty voice to himself. ‘You'd better go.'

Too good to be true. Too good for Mike, but Mike had the edge of him. He knew Paul wasn't good enough for Lily. Ordering her upstairs like a child. ‘Oh, for God's sake!' and banging out of the house. Well, she didn't go up, did she?

Mike had the edge on him, because Paul Stephens didn't know who Lily was. Mike's precious, his dear, his love. Lily knew, pale and pitiful in that sloppy grey sweater. One day, she would get sick of being treated so badly, and turn to Mike and ask him to be kind.

Driving over the high bridge put the Cape Cod canal between him and her. The water ran swiftly, choppy, swirling into smoothness under the middle of the bridge, as the tide dragged it
out to sea. The road ahead was a flat and empty future. Grey sky of November, hauling winter behind it like a funeral train.

Nothing good ever happened to Mike in November. With winter coming, his mother had always stirred him up, goading him, reciting everything about him she couldn't stand, before the unnerving plunge into Thanksgiving and Christmas, when he must be her spoiled baby.

It must have been November when he took the pills at Ida's house. To make it the last November. Someone should have kept Bernie out of the kitchen.

Only Lily could shatter the curse of November. And the treacherous month was not even half done.

Mike did not take the van back to Corrigan's depot. He went west on the turnpike and drove around the Worcester and Springfield area for days, sleeping in the van, drinking, buying some dope. He called Lily from different pay phones. At first she said, ‘I'm sorry. Tell me where you are, and I'll get someone to call you back.' Then she hung up on him. Then her husband answered the phone and hung up on him. Then they left the phone off the hook, so that he could not get through.

Mike was angry. He smashed up a few pay phones, because if anyone got him angry, they deserved what they got.

Corrigan would have reported the van by now. A police car spotted him and came after him. Mike pulled the van off the road, grabbed a bottle, jumped out and ran into the woods.

A wanted man. Liquor and amphetamines kept him going. The wind hunted him through the trees and across cold open fields to the lights of a small town. He took a beat-up old Volkswagen from the yard of a dark house and drove east through a storm of rain, sucking at the bottle, crying sometimes, and wiping his nose and sore eyes with bits of dirty paper towels that were on the floor of the car. The November skies wept across the streaming windshield.

Because Crisis had to be able to reach Lily, she could not go on leaving the phone off the hook at night, so Paul had changed the house phones over to the number of the shop, until they could be sure that Mike had given up.

They were still up at midnight when Chuck called from the centre.

‘The Sandwich police just called. They've got a man on the bridge who needs talking down, and they want us to send someone. In haste, man. Life or death. Who lives closest to the Sagamore bridge?'

‘Me.' Lily looked round at Paul, who was rubbing oil into an old saddle on the back of a kitchen chair.

‘Looks like you, then, kid.'

It was a black night of wind and rain. The bridge was blocked off and traffic diverted, but the policeman let Lily through, and she got out of her car in the middle of the span, among the police cars and lights. The man had climbed over the railing and crawled along a girder below the bridge, under the middle of the roadway.

Various people were trying to shout at him over the rails on either side, but the wind shouted louder. A Coastguard boat was below, pushing against the tide, to keep a spotlight trained on the man on the girder. Would someone like to go under the bridge in another boat and try to talk to him through a megaphone?

No one offered. ‘I'll go,' Lily said quickly.

A police car took her to the Coastguard dock farther along the canal. One of the men on the boat gave her a big orange waterproof jacket, and she stood with the hood over her head by the bow rail of the small boat, staring to see the man under the bridge. When they were almost underneath the soaring span, the pilot shouted, ‘There he is – see him?'

In the beam of light from the other boat, he was miles above them, sitting on the girder. He looked like a fly.

‘Go ahead.' The other man gave Lily the megaphone.

‘Don't
you
want to?'

‘I wouldn't know what to say.'

‘Nor would I.'

Lily began to yell through the megaphone. What did she say? What could she say? She did not afterwards remember, but whatever it was, the whole of south-eastern Massachusetts heard it.

‘Please! Climb back up – you're safe, I'll help, don't be afraid!'

Something like that, something about a friend, about love. How could she compete with the magnetic pull of the dark water swirling below the tiny man to sweep him out to the peace of the sea?

‘I love you!' she probably said desperately. It didn't matter what the men in the boat thought. It didn't matter what southeastern Massachusetts thought. Anything to get him up off that girder.

If he responded at all, she could not see or hear. At one point, he let something fall.

‘A bottle,' one of the men said. It took a long time to reach the water.

‘I'll die if he jumps.' Lily was shivering, soaked, frozen, hopeless, useless.

He jumped. With a long trailing yell, he threw himself outwards, sprawling, clutching at the air. After an eternity, he hit the water feet first, and disappeared. The body came up, slumped over, face in the water, held up by the air in the humped jacket.

The other boat was there. They fished him over the side and shouted, ‘He's alive!' and the two boats churned back to the dock.

He was lying in a well at the stern of the other boat. When Lily knelt beside him, he raised his plastered eyelashes and looked at her. His skin was ashen, drawn back against the skull, his teeth chattering, his body shaking and rigid under the blankets.

It was Mike.

The ambulance men, doing the necessary things as they drove to the hospital, made feeble jokes like, ‘Thought you'd take a late swim, hey, feller?' Lily sat in a blanket on the seat opposite, envying them for having a job to do and for being able to be jolly.

In the hospital, they found that, amazingly, he had no injuries except heavy bruising on his chest and the soles of his feet.

‘The alcohol in him must have saved him,' the doctor said.

Lily rang Paul, and stayed to watch Mike for the rest of the night, because the nurses were busy. Asleep, he looked dead. When he woke, he half raised himself on his elbow to look at her. She tried talking to him, but he did not say anything before he fell back into sleep again, his lower teeth uncovered, like a skeleton's jaw.

When Lily got home, everyone was up early, wildly excited.

‘It was on the radio! It was on the TV early news!'

‘The whole story,' Isobel said. ‘Not your name, thank God. They'd have had a fit at school. Bloody heroine, Mud.'

‘I didn't do anything. He jumped anyway.'

‘But you were brave. It said so. On TV.'

‘Who was it?' Paul asked. ‘They didn't give his name.'

‘One guess.' Lily looked up at him over her coffee mug.

‘Mike. Oh, my God.'

Did it go through Paul's head that they had been almost freed from him by the dark water? Did he think those ghastly selfish things, like everybody else?

Lily asked him.

He only smiled. ‘Did you?'

While Mike was in the hospital having X-rays and tests recovering from shock, which to him meant the shock of being alive, his mother came.

She had on a new winter coat and a little pair of red boots. She did not come into the room shyly, as the visitors to the other two men did, carefully not looking at anyone who did not belong to them. She bustled in as though she were going to give everybody a bed bath, nodded at Ginger and Matt and said, ‘How are
you?'
took off her coat and stood over Mike with her arms folded and said,
‘Now
then.'

‘It's now then, is it?' Michael had been listening to the radio
that Lily had brought in. He leaned over to turn it off, wincing at the pain in his chest.

They didn't say anything about broken ribs.'

‘Why would they? It's called contusions.'

‘Show me, son.'

He pulled open the hospital jacket. She gasped. He had not looked properly at his mother's face since she came in. Now he looked and saw that it was soft like jelly, the determined little lower lip sucked in, the eyes sentimental behind the round glasses, roofed by furry grey brows.

‘Michael.' She sat down on a chair by the bed and took his hand in her warm paws. ‘You should come home now.'

‘Didn't you kick me out?'

‘Can you blame me? I've come to tell you, son. You can come home. But you didn't jump off the bridge, remember. We'll tell people you were leaning over the rail and you fell.'

‘All right.'

But she banished him again. She let them take him off to a rehabilitation centre too far away from New Bedford for her to visit, since her eyes were too bad for her to drive now.

In the rehab, memory slowly returned. In sleeping or waking dreams, the concrete floor of the roadway pressed over his head. He could feel the cold steel girder under his thighs. His feet hung over space. He could not see anything, because they were shining that brilliant light into his eyes. How did they expect him to jump when he could not see the water?

He jumped, and the wind came shrieking past and carried all the breath away out of his body. He fell for ever, and came out of it gasping and clutching his throat and screaming soundlessly.