Penpal (13 page)

The woman stopped in front of me, put her hands on my shoulders, and looked steadily into my eyes. As she closed her eyes tightly and furrowed her brow, I saw beads of tears streak down her cheeks. I tried to move away, but she pulled me into her and wrapped her arms around me as tightly as she could probably manage.

“Oh, Chris. I’ve missed you so …”

I suppose I was scared by what she was doing, but I wasn’t scared of
her
. She seemed nice, and not knowing what else to do, I dropped my lunchbox, put my right arm around her, and awkwardly rested my still mending and plaster-encased left arm on her side.

“Hey!” My mom’s voice struggled against the wind as she jogged from our porch to where the woman and I stood.

My mother gently, but somewhat forcefully, wrestled me from the embrace and told me to go home. As I ran home, I could hear the woman yelling “Chris!” until I vanished into the house. Once inside, I put my backpack on the dining room table and sat down on one of its chairs.

I didn’t know what had just happened or what was happening right at that moment, but my concern laid mostly on what might happen when my mom came back in. I rested my head against my hand and saw a piece of white paint that had cracked and risen just above the surface of the table. I pinched it between my fingers and peeled it away; it was the first time I vandalized that table.

When my mother came back inside the house, I couldn’t quite understand what her expression signified, but she didn’t seem angry, so I felt relieved. I turned in the chair and faced her.

“Who was that lady, mom?”

She smiled at me as she drew closer. “Her name is Mrs. Maggie. She lives in that house you were in front of – the white one.”

“The one with all the ice?”

“That’s the one.”

“Is she weird?” I asked hesitantly.

“No. She’s … she’s just a little sick, baby.”

“She thought my name was Chris. She kept calling me that over and over again.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart. She’s a nice lady, so be nice back. But when you get off the bus, you just come straight home, okay?”

And that’s exactly what I would do. The strange events of the day I met Mrs. Maggie didn’t trouble me for long, and if I heard her calling for me by that same wrong name, I would just walk a little faster to my house.

About a month later, my cast was removed. Josh and I had talked about swimming in the lake since before the first time he came to my house, but my cast forbid it. I could have tried to protect my arm from the lake water by wearing the latex bag that I used for showers. I considered this; only briefly, though – that bag had failed me before. Once the cast was removed, we took to swimming in the lake immediately, taking advantage of what warm weather remained. I remember how strange and weak my atrophied arm felt as it pushed through the water that first time, and I remember thinking that I’d better not push too hard or it might just snap again.

Josh and I got to know Mrs. Maggie fairly well by swimming in the lake almost every weekend, taking a hiatus only when it became time for Mrs. Maggie’s yard to freeze again. When winter had passed, and Josh and I returned to the lake in the second half of kindergarten, we still wouldn’t accept Mrs. Maggie’s invitations or snacks, but one afternoon she surprised us with a different kind of offer.

We had expected her to invite us inside again, but this time when we looked toward her as she called to us, we saw her throw a small package into the water like one might throw a Frisbee. Hesitantly, but mostly curiously, we swam to it. Josh and I grabbed for it at the same time and wrestled it back and forth, ripping the plastic wrapping as we struggled, and throwing the object into the water.

“What is it?” Josh asked.

“I dunno. I think we have to unfold it …”

And so we did, but even after it was fully expanded, it was still hard to identify. We moved it around in the water – turning it in different ways – when finally Josh found an inflation tube jutting out of the grey and black mass. I heard him breathe deep and watched him pour his lungs into it. When he tired, I took over, and as we tread the water, we passed the gift back and forth until it was completely filled. I folded the stopper into the tube, and we flipped our inflated present over.

It was a float – one shaped and painted like a shark.

We splashed frantically to climb onto it, but each time one of us would make progress, the other would roll the float in an attempt to mount it. As we competed, I glanced at Mrs. Maggie and saw her laughing and clapping her hands. Eventually, we decided to take turns riding it, but the float soon doubled as a mechanical bull as the swimmer would invariably move underneath the shark and push up forcefully in an effort to unbalance the rider. Through all of this, Mrs. Maggie looked on us with a smile shining on her face.

As we paddled toward where we exited the lake, we yelled a “thank you” to Mrs. Maggie, and she said that seeing how much we liked it was thanks enough. She always treated us warmly, but there was a variance in her enthusiasm that we could never anticipate or make sense of. Mrs. Maggie was always at least pleased to see us, but there were times where she was simply overjoyed that we were there, swimming just behind her house. That day was one of those days, and as we pulled ourselves out of the water, carrying the float over our heads, she called to us as she sometimes would when she was excited to see us.

“Chris! John! You’re always welcome here!” There were times when we could still hear her yelling those same words as we walked back into my house; we heard her that day. But we were kids, and despite how truly nice Mrs. Maggie was, her quirks sometimes got the best of us.

As we carried our new gift up the steps to my house, I opened my front door for Josh.

“After you, John.”

“Oh no. Please. After you, Chris,” Josh snickered.

“Oh no. I insist. After you, John,” I rebutted.

“Be my guest, Chris. After you,” he returned with the cadence of some crude mixture of English royalty and American upper-class snobbery.

“Would you like to come in for some snacks, John?”

“Yes I would, Chris!”

We laughed as we walked through the doorway at the same time, leaving the float on the steps behind us. I saw my mother standing in the kitchen staring at us. She moved toward us and stopped in front of us. She spoke sharply and firmly.

“Don’t you
ever
make fun of her like that again. It’s not funny. Do you understand me?”

Josh and I looked at one another and then back at her and nodded. My mother smiled and went back to what she was doing, and Josh and I put it out of our minds for the remainder of the day. After Josh left with his dad, I told my mom that we weren’t trying to be mean, and we never talked like that in front of Mrs. Maggie. My mom said that didn’t matter; she said that it was rude to make fun of anyone whether they were around or not. When I told her that she was constantly calling us by the wrong names, and we just thought it was funny, my mom seemed to search for what she wanted to say.

“Well, sweetie, you remember how I told you Mrs. Maggie was sick?”

I nodded.

“She … Mrs. Maggie is sick … up here.” She gestured to her own head with her fingers.

“But you remember how, when you had that sore throat earlier this year, sometimes you’d feel okay, but then other times you’d feel really bad? That’s how it is for her too. But when Mrs. Maggie gets really sick, she gets confused. That’s why she messes up you boys’ names sometimes. She doesn’t mean to, but sometimes she just can’t remember. Do you understand?”

I nodded again. “She wants us to come in for snacks sometimes.”

“I know she does, sweetie. She lives in that big house all by herself so it’s okay if you talk to her when you swim in the lake. But when she invites you in, you should keep saying ‘no.’ Be polite, and her feelings won’t get hurt. Okay?”

“But she’ll be less lonely when Tom comes home though? How long until he comes back? It seems like he’s always gone.”

My mom seemed to struggle, and I could see that she had become very upset. Finally, she answered me.

“Honey … Tom’s not going to come home. Tom’s … he’s in heaven. He died years and years ago, but Mrs. Maggie doesn’t remember. She gets confused and forgets, but Tom’s not ever coming home; he’s gone, sweetie.”

I was only six years old when she told me that, and while I didn’t understand it completely, I was still profoundly sad for Mrs. Maggie. I knew what it was like to miss someone – how much it hurt and tore at you. But to miss someone so much while being so sure that he’d return, never knowing or remembering just how impossible that reunion truly was – I struggled to imagine what that must be like. I wouldn’t learn until very recently, however, what Mrs. Maggie’s life had really been like.

I know now that Mrs. Maggie had Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband Tom really had been a pilot. He flew a commercial jetliner all over the eastern United States, and this caused him to spend a great deal of time away from home. After he retired, he and Mrs. Maggie kept mostly to themselves, but every time my mom would run into one or both of them, the conversation would inevitably focus on the trips they wanted to take – if they could only find the time. Tom had discounts with the airline he had retired from, but as is so often the case, their plans were always for “someday,” and that day kept getting moved further down the line.

On the evening of July 4, years before I was born, Tom came to my mom’s house. He was distressed, though he tried to conceal it as he casually asked my mother if she had seen Maggie. He said that she had gone out for some chicken so that he could grill it for the holiday, but that had been almost six hours ago. My mom hadn’t seen her, but said she would contact Tom immediately if she saw her or heard anything.

The police brought Mrs. Maggie home about five hours after that. She had wandered from the grocery store and
walked to an apartment that she and Tom had shared thirty years before when Tom was just starting his job at the airline. When the police arrived at the apartment, Mrs. Maggie insisted that she lived there with her husband, but when they read aloud the address that was printed on her driver’s license, she regained her clarity and covered her embarrassment with
nervous laughter.

She wasn’t hurt when the police brought her home, but Tom was destroyed. He would tell my mom some time later that he had known for a long while that something was wrong with Maggie, but he had hoped that she would just get
better somehow.

A few days after the police brought his wife home, Tom told my mother that he was planning on taking his wife to Rome – it had been a dream of hers since she was a young girl. Maggie had a collection of books about Rome and Italy at large that were all dog-eared on the pages with the places that she wanted to see. He said that pushing it back was simply not an option anymore; the doctors had told him that the windows of her lucidity would likely grow smaller as time pressed on. Tom began to cry and stammer as he touched his own head and said that he needed to take her now, while she was still
here
. He wanted her to be there, in the place of her dreams, while she still had a chance of knowing where she was.

He wanted her to remember.

They were old now, but he thought that they might still do some hiking, and to prepare, he began to exercise by walking around the neighborhood with Maggie. Physically, Maggie was in much better shape than Tom, so he had a lot of ground to cover if he wanted to keep up with her in Rome. He kept the trip a secret from her because he wanted to surprise her, and he justified the new exercise regimen by telling her that the fresh air and exercise would be good for them. They were getting on a plane in one month.

Tom was worried that he wouldn’t be in good enough shape by the time they made it to Rome, so after Maggie went to bed, or before she woke up, he would leave the house and go on extra walks. My mom would see him almost every night when she sat outside on the porch. He would walk briskly through the cool night air, and as he passed our house, she would wave to him, and he would wave back and then bring the hand down to his lips with his index finger extended and pointing straight up, as if to say, “It’s our little secret.”

One night, about two weeks before the trip, my mom was sitting outside on the porch and saw, for the first time, Tom jogging. His posture wasn’t professional, but he was really moving. She waved to him, but he either didn’t see her or was too tired to wave back, because he kept jogging right by the house. She went back inside and went to bed for the night.

About an hour later, a knock on the front door jerked my mother out of sleep. She cracked the door enough to see through to the outside and saw a badge. It was a police officer. Behind him, the sky was filled with blue and red flashing lights that were so bright she had to shield her eyes as if the lights
were the sun itself. Her first thought was that Maggie had gone missing again, and she was about to ask if that was the case when the officer spoke and then gestured toward her lawn. She squinted and let her eyes adjust just enough to
break her heart.

Tom had collapsed and died fifty yards from his home, right in front of ours.

He had no identification, and so my mother pointed them toward Mrs. Maggie’s house and offered to go over there with them, but they declined. She explained Maggie’s condition, and they assured her that everything would be fine. My mom took one last look at Tom and went back inside.