I looked down at this woman in the soft light filtering in through the thin curtains. She seemed so frail and so strong, at the same time. So vulnerable and so impenetrable. So needy, and yet so fiercely independent. I was moved by what she’d told me, and felt strangely protective of her. It was such a simple request, and it seemed so wrong that she should have to even fight for it. Even a Death Row prisoner gets to choose his last meal.
“I think I understand,” I said. “Thanks for telling me that.”
“Well, thank you for listening.” She looked down, then back up at me. “Thank you for everything, Barry. You know what you are? You are a true human being.”
I didn’t know exactly what she meant by that, but I figured it was a good thing.
“Thanks, Edith. See you tomorrow.”
“Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow. Tell your wife I said hello. I’d love to meet her sometime.”
And that was that. I felt, again, like we’d crossed some kind of border, into some new territory. It felt a little frightening and intriguing all at the same time, but more than that, it felt like we had become closer, part of each other’s life in a way we hadn’t been just a few minutes before.
I closed her door quietly and headed back to the construction trailer, trying to clear my mind, to focus on the tasks at hand. Feeling a little guilty for taking so much time off work that morning, but feeling pretty okay about it at the same time, for all that had occurred.
I was surprised by how self-sufficient Edith seemed in those first few months. She wasn’t, however, getting by all on her own. A friend of hers, a fellow named Charlie, was coming by pretty regularly. Charlie looked like an unmade bed. Tall and wiry with long gray hair, he was younger than Edith but older than me, probably in his early sixties. He had that leftover-hippie kind of look. I’m not sure how they got to be friends, but they seemed to have that Old Ballard connection, and it went back a long ways. He did her shopping and helped around the house, although he didn’t seem to stick around much once the chores were done. He said he was a project manager on construction sites, although when I tried to talk shop with him he’d change the subject. Still, he was helping Edith out, so I figured he was an okay guy.
Charlie’s the one who first told me about the social workers, one morning in the late summer. “They’re hovering again,” he told me. Charlie had that way about him – he’d start up in the middle of a conversation, as though you’d already been talking and knew what he was talking about. It took a minute to catch up.
“Morning, Charlie. Who’s hovering?” I asked him.
“Social workers. They’re back at it again. If they think they’re going to get her to move, they’ve got another think coming.”
It took a while to get Charlie to tell the story in some kind of order I could understand, but once I got all the pieces of it, it made sense. The state had been after Edith for some time, concerned that she was not competent to take care of herself. They couldn’t make her move – they couldn’t prove that she was a danger to herself or anything – but they were apparently putting on a pretty strong push. Charlie said they kept coming around again and again, being persistent about how much better off she’d be, how much more comfortable she’d be, how much better her life would be, if only she’d let them bring her to a facility. I remembered how she used that word – facility – when she told me about her mother, how much disdain she had in her voice. It made me wince just hearing Charlie say it.
Now it made more sense to me why Edith was so touchy when guys from my office kept offering her more money to move. She must have felt she was battling on two fronts just to stay in her house – with the Bridge Group coming at her straight on and the social workers from the flank. I’m sure that, to Edith’s ears, what they were both saying was, “You’re not able to take care of yourself anymore. Let us do it for you.”
I don’t think anybody wants to hear that they can’t take care of themselves. Certainly not a tough old bird like Edith.
Charlie took off, and I knocked on Edith’s door. I wanted to ask her about the social workers, but when she called me to come in, I found her at a rickety little desk in the corner of the living room, typing at – well, I’m not sure what you call it anymore. It looked like a cross between a late-model electric typewriter and an early PC. The thing must have been twenty-five years old. It had a tiny square computer monitor and a dark gray keyboard with white keys – not like a modern keyboard, more like a typewriter – and she was pecking away at it, slowly. I saw the word Whisperwriter on it.
“Good morning, Barry,” she said. “Excuse me for just a moment. My fingers don’t work quite as well as they used to.”
The sun was glinting off the monitor, so I couldn’t quite make out what she was writing, but when she turned around she caught me looking at it, and I felt guilty for being so nosy.
“Just a little short story,” she said, guessing at what I was trying to do. “The mind still works, but the goddamn fingers don’t want to cooperate.”
It was the first time I’d heard her curse.
“So, you’re a writer?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve done my share,” she said. “There’s one of my books, right over there.”
I looked at the counter where she was pointing, and there was a doorstop of a book, a big, bulky hardcover thing called Where Yesterday Began. The title was in red script, over the silhouettes of a man and woman looking at a sunset.
“Who’s Dominelli?” I said, looking at the author’s name.
“That’s Dom-i-li-ni,” she said, correcting me. “Domilini. That was the name I wrote under. I took it from …” But she didn’t finish the sentence. Before I could ask, she was on her feet.
“Can’t write anymore, dammit all,” she said. “I’m getting a cup of tea. Can I offer you one?”
While she was shuffling off to the kitchen, I opened the book and looked at the inside cover. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.
About The Author
E. Wilson Macefield (Domilini) was born in Oregon in 1921 and reared in Seattle and New Orleans. She served as an undercover agent during World War II. She was captured and interned at Dachau, from which she escaped, taking 13 interned Jewish children with her. She married a Yorkshire man, lived in England for thirty years, where she adopted and raised 27 children.
Following the death of her husband, she returned to the States to care for her mother. In 1984, she met and married an Old World Italian who was killed in an accident on their honeymoon. She has been writing for the greater part of her life, and has attained success in Europe.
“I cannot stop writing,” she says, “whether it is read or not. It is imbedded in the soul.” She wishes she might achieve the clarity of Maugham, and express the important truths of Locke, Lichens, and Poe.
This time, when she came back into the room, I was too intrigued to be embarrassed about my snooping. I didn’t know where to start.
“Edith, it looks like you’ve lived quite a life,” I said.
“I’ve lived quite a number of lives,” she said.
“Who are all these children it talks about here? Where are they now?”
She