My octogenarian neighbor floods the birdbath. Her photochromic lenses bleed dark, and she steps back into the shade, apparently blinded.
“I’ve seen doves,” she says. “I wanted them to stay.”
She smiles. Sunlight aims down its barrel at her. Water ignites between us.
And then I save her life.
Later that afternoon, I spy her 92-year-old husband wading slowly down his front walk, mouth unstrung on a pool of deep black fear. He signals me slowly as if deep underwater. As I run up to him, he is a comedian in a silent film. All he can do is gesture me inside, through the dim mahogany door and into the varnished depths of the house, where I find my elderly lady in her nightgown, sitting on the toilet, adrift in delirium and unable to tell that there is a man in her house not husband or son.
“Hang in there, Christine,” I say, unable in her loss of dignity to think of anything else.
I haven’t paid my cellular bill in months. I am just getting dry, getting my life back on a plan. I’ve got places to be. Panic heats up my chest. “Phone?” I ask the husband.
He points. Old and awkward, it hangs bladder-like on the wall—an old rotary. He could have dialed, of course, but now is not the time to ask.
The 9-1-1 operator soberly summons life savers, and I do what I can, which is mostly just standing by the front door in the light of the neighborhood as her husband hangs back, afraid to leave her again.
Then they are there—the professionals—riding in like Valkyries with flashing lights. Stone-faced, they crash across the yard with their awkward equipment and into the house; they surge into the backrooms where I hear their voices, calm and loud as they try to rouse my lady from her lost world.
Her husband slowly pads out to me.
“She’ll be alright now,” I say lamely.
“Marie,” he croaks softly. “Her name is Marie.” He’s swimming in a kind of sadness I’ve never seen before. As he sinks into his bones and looks out from the tarns of his skull, all I want to do is to go back out into the world and into my sodden pedestrian life. We are only neighbors, after all, and barely speak.
“I’m going to stay with you as long as it takes,” I say, again lamely. “I’m here.”
But the moment the police order me out of the way, I slip from the house and out into the street. They don’t need to know my name. It would be best if no one asks for my I.D. No one needs to hear my voice or recognize my face from T.V. People are waiting on me anyway, people you do not want to make wait. I pray they’ll understand. I think they’ll understand. Anyone would.
The façade of Marie’s house stands in the heat, windows tar-bright in the air. If there is a sign, it remains hidden in the trees and empty blue sky. I breathe the summer breeze, feel my living weight against the sidewalk, trust in my footsteps. My beautiful heart as it heats up in the sun. I thank God I can breathe here.
In the near future, her husband will trip down the stairs and die on the operating table, leaving his wife of generations alone in the house where she floated, almost a ghost, over biology at its most disposable.
No one seems to see the irony in this: death not so proud; the school-boy foot of God extended on the stairs.
But no matter. For now, the lady is back in her mind, a calm pond glinting in the shade. We never mention the husband or the afternoon when she awoke from her beauty to find the deluge of another world flooding in-between them, unable to tell that she was floating and yet drowning in air.
Now we stand across the shallow, mossy water from each other, shadowing the sunlit foam.
Hawks twist on updrafts miles toward the horizon.
A sparrow strikes the branch overhead, its precious breath thrumming, and then flicks away, leaving the trees trembling in its wake.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her.
“I know,” she says, “you have to go.”
Russell Brickey has collections out from Wild Leaf Press, Spuyten Duyvil Press, and Kelsay Books. He studied creative writing at the University of Oregon and Purdue University.