This story was the runner-up in the MAYDAY 2024 Nonfiction Contest.
Life, Death, Neighbors, Houses
I’m sitting at my kitchen table talking to my friend Anne on Zoom when a cop car pulls up to the curb in front of my house. “The cops are here,” I say. “I hope I haven’t done anything wrong.” My friend and I laugh.
Nobody gets out of the police car. I keep talking to Anne. I notice there’s a guy standing on the steps of the house across from mine.
I live in a corner house and the house I’m looking at sits on the opposite corner. Its front door is directly across from my kitchen window, and I sit at my table watching that guy. He knocks on the door, types something on his cell phone, waits, knocks on the door again. It’s raining out and he’s carrying a rolled-up red umbrella under his arm; he has on a green t-shirt and cut-off jeans and a blue baseball cap. I’ve seen him through the window before, visiting the neighbor who lives in that house. Usually he drives up, parks in front of the house, and carries a small paper bag probably containing a sandwich to her door. Sometimes she lets him in, and sometimes he goes away because she doesn’t come when he rings the doorbell and knocks and waits and knocks again, the way she’s not coming now. But this time he’s not going away.
My house is blue and that house is red. It’s bigger than my house and has an attached garage and an upstairs dormer window. The roof needs to be replaced and one of the gutters has gotten detached and sometimes the yard is full of tall weeds, but otherwise it doesn’t look too bad under the circumstances. Every now and then a little group of people comes in a pick-up truck and mows the lawn and uses a weedwhacker on the overgrown weeds; they look like volunteers of some sort, maybe members of some church. I have a feeling the guy who visits with the sandwiches, the guy standing out there in the rain right now not using his umbrella, belongs to the same church.
The woman who lives in the house has been too unwell to do much of anything for years. Her name is Mary, the same as mine. We’re passing acquaintances, two women who have lived across the street from each other for a long time. Every now and then she calls me up, or used to: Did I hear that loud noise up the street last night? Have I seen the cat that’s been wandering around the neighborhood? Her voice sounded ghostly and distant, but she was friendly enough. “I need to have you over for tea sometime,” she said sometimes. “I have to get the house cleaned up first.”
“Yes,” I always said, knowing it would never happen.
I haven’t gotten one of those phone calls for a long time.
It’s startling to me to realize how long I’ve lived across the street from Mary. Some part of me feels like I bought my house and moved here a few years ago, but it’s been oh my God twenty-five years since I moved here. What have I been doing all this time? I’ve been wondering lately. And then I answer my own question: I’ve been living inside my thoughts like an animal in a burrow, not paying attention to the passing of time. But I have been evolving, growing into another version of myself like a worm in a cocoon or a cicada underground, doing it at glacial speed but definitely doing it.
I haven’t seen Mary for years, only once in a while, when someone comes to the door and helps her creep painfully down the front steps to their car in her driveway and takes her to the doctor or to the hospital. At one point she was gone for several months and my friend and repairman Bill, who went to high school with her in Iowa City, told me she was in a nursing home. I was relieved. It was terrible to think of her in that house all alone, barely able to walk, only eating the occasional sandwiches brought by her friend or the lunches delivered sporadically by Meals on Wheels.
But then she came back to the house—I saw someone drive up and help her inside—and someone told me, probably Bill again, that she didn’t want to die in a nursing home and she’d insisted on coming back. She had adult-onset muscular dystrophy, somebody else told me. And she drank. This was told to me by a cop, a young woman with blond hair, the same cop who’s sitting outside my house in a car right now, it turns out. She came to my door about a year ago while doing a safety check on Mary. Mary didn’t answer the door that day either. “She could be drunk!” the young blond cop said to me that day without batting an eyelash at broadcasting Mary’s personal information. I suddenly remembered then that Mary had a dog for a while, a golden retriever named Honey whom she adored, and I was worried the dog might still be in there. “Oh, we rehomed the dog,” the cop told me.
Now that same young woman cop knocks on my door. “Have you seen Mary Turner lately?” she asks me.
“No,” I say. “She never leaves the house.”
The young woman goes to the house and talks to the guy in the baseball hat. They stand on the step and she calls somebody on her cell phone. A few minutes later another cop car pulls up and parks behind her car and a burly male cop gets out, then more cops arrive and they all stand in a little clump in front of the door, consulting. An ambulance arrives and parks behind all the cop cars. The cops peer through the windows, pull on the door. Three of them go around the side of the house, then come back a few minutes later and join the rest of the group and they stand around some more. Nobody gets out of the ambulance. Pretty soon it drives away.
The young blond cop breaks off from the rest and heads back to her car. I go outside and she tells me there’s a screen door that’s locked from the inside with a hook and eye and they have to wait for her boss to authorize them to break in. Finally an older cop with a big belly arrives and saunters over and I watch the young woman and another young cop cut through the screen and all the cops go into the house. A black cat slides out when they go in. More waiting. Pretty soon they all come back out. I go across the street to tell them the cat has gotten out.
“The cat’s fine,” the boss cop tells me. “She’s right there beside the house and we’re about to grab her.”
“What’s happening? Is Mary alive?” I say.
I already know the answer but I still feel shocked when he says no. “She died in her bed.”
“She was very sick for a long time,” the friend with the beard tells me as I pass him, as if he’s worried I might think something bad about Mary otherwise for dying, and I say grumpily—I don’t know why I’m suddenly grumpy, why I have to act grumpy toward that poor guy: “I know! I’ve lived across the street from her for years.”
“What about the other cat?” I ask a young male cop who’s standing at the end of Mary’s driveway. I can’t stop worrying about the cats.
“It’s still in the house,” he says. “They’re pretty hungry because they haven’t eaten in a week and a half.”
I go back into my house. The afternoon passes. People come and go across the street. An ambulance arrives again and then eventually drives away. More cops come. People mill around outside the house and sometimes they go inside the house, stay in there for a while, then come out. Finally a white van with the words Medical Examiner on the side drives up and parks in Mary’s driveway, and two young women with blond hair, both of them wearing jeans, get out. One has a long blond ponytail, the other one has shoulder-length hair. They look like characters you’d see on Grey’s Anatomy. I decide that the one with the ponytail must be the medical examiner.
The two women join all the other people standing around, talking on cell phones and to each other. Eventually the blond women go in the house and stay there for a while and then come out, stand around some more, go in again. At one point they open the back doors of their white van and take out something that looks like a doctor’s table on wheels.
I sit at my kitchen table and stare intermittently out the window while all of that is going on. I’m reading a book about synchronicity, which my friend Tom from Des Moines and I are going through as part of our little two-person book club. We’re meeting tomorrow and there’s a chapter I’m supposed to read beforehand, and I keep dipping into it, reading a few sentences, then looking up to see what’s going on across the street. What I’m reading is about how the outer world and the inner world sometimes line up in mysterious ways, how sometimes the outer world will talk about the inner world down to the last detail. I’m thinking about that and about a class I’m taking called exploring your shadow side. I’ve been reading a book for that about the shadow, that part or place in the deep unconscious where according to Jung your fears and complexes can get squashed down, sometimes manifesting in the world. And I have the strangest feeling as I keep reading and thinking about synchronicity and the shadow and then looking out my window at those people going into Mary’s house and coming out of it the way I’m going in and out of the book and my thoughts, that something like that could be happening in this moment.
Mary’s not a symbol, of course, she’s a person, a neighbor, a friend. But on another level, the symbolic level which I have been reading about and which seems to mingle with this world like a pattern or a template, it seems like what’s happening to her now, what’s been happening to her, is somehow symbolically connected to what’s been happening to me. She couldn’t go anywhere or do much of anything, didn’t take in much nourishment as far I can tell, her body fading away. And in the meantime I’ve been spending all these years nourishing my inner self. It’s as if she’s the dark side and I’m the light side, as if she’s the shadowy mirror opposite of me. As if she represents my shadow and my shadow part has dwindled and died and is in a long-drawn-out process of being taken out of the metaphorical house.
Eventually, at the end of this long afternoon, they do take Mary’s body out of the house, not on the stretcher on wheels, which stays on the sidewalk at the bottom of her front steps, but in a heavy black plastic bag like an elongated garbage bag. The two young women carry it down the steps, struggling as if it’s heavy although from here it looks almost flat and shockingly small. They strap the bag onto the stretcher and lift it into the back of the van and close the van doors. They’re both wearing masks and hairnets and gloves and blue surgical gowns and booties and they strip them off and put them in a red cooler-like container which they’ve taken out of the back of the van, and I see smoke curling out of the red container as if they’re burning that stuff. The young woman with the long blond ponytail keeps stamping her feet and shaking her hands as if shaking off ickiness, but otherwise she and the other young blond woman and the cops who are starting to disperse all look and act like this is something normal you do on an ordinary weekday.
Eventually it’s just my neighbor across the street who lives next to Mary’s house and those two young women standing on the sidewalk talking. Then he wanders away and they drive off with Mary’s body in the back of their van.
The motion-sensitive light attached to Mary’s garage keeps going on and off at least once an hour all afternoon and evening. Sometimes there’s a squirrel running across the bottom of the driveway, but much of the time I can’t see anything at all that could be setting it off, and I get a strange feeling that that’s Mary, in her newly disembodied state, making her presence known, saying hello. At night, two lights inside the house, which I always assumed she had something to do with turning on, turn on. There’s one upstairs on the left side of the house and a pale round glowing one—it must be in a hanging paper lantern shade—in the living room.
When Mary was alive I found those lights comforting. They made me feel as if she was doing something in there, reading in bed, making her way from room to room, maybe going downstairs to the kitchen to scrounge up something to eat or feed the cats. Now they creep me out. I realize they must’ve been being activated by a timer all along. But as I stand in my kitchen staring at that round glowing paper lantern in Mary’s living room, pale and spectral like the moon, at the yellow light I always assumed was in her bedroom, keeping her company while she was awake—she was an insomniac like me, she told me once—I scare myself with the thought of Mary’s ghost. I can’t stop looking over at the house even though the sight of those lights, the thought of Mary’s body being carried down the front steps in a black garbage bag, and the rest of her—the thinking, feeling, alone and lonely, possibly confused consciousness part of her—still being in there, fills me with a hollow, shuddery, slightly sick feeling.
After dinner, during my nightly phone call with my friend Dave, I tell him about the motion-activated light going on and off and the fact that there are lights on in the house although I know there’s no one in there. He says maybe I should call the police, but I rule that out—whoever or whatever’s in there is no longer in physical form.
#
And now there are new people living in the house across the street, a young couple. They have a chrome-blue new-looking Honda, parked in their driveway in front of the garage. I watched them move in, on a snowy icy afternoon three days ago, the young woman standing inside the big U-Haul handing boxes to the young man and a few other people, who carted the boxes into the house.
I’m happy there’s someone living there. Today is February 26, 2022, and the house has been empty since July, 16, 2021, the day they carried the previous resident out in a black garbage bag.
I’m struck by the date the new people moved in. There’s new life in that house across the street, and there’s someone new in the house of my life. My life, which was already full, is even fuller, and it started on the very day those new people moved in there. I know because I saved the correspondence on the dating app. That day Michael sent me a message and we started talking and we kept on talking and one thing led to another and now here he is, living in my house, filling my life to the absolute brim with love and happiness.
I can’t get over the confluences and coincidences between me and the house of my life and the life of the house across the street. I feel like there’s something purposeful about life itself, as if life is standing behind the curtain, hovering in the wings, playing tricks on us and waiting for us to notice, waiting for us to realize that it’s there, performing its extended magic act for our pleasure and edification, its elaborate infinite play about life and death, love and happiness, loss and sorrow and everything else.
I still look over at the house across the street and think about Mary. I wonder if her ghost is in there, wandering around confused at night, bumping into furniture, creaking on the stairs. I wonder if that young couple senses her presence. I wonder whether I should say something to them about that, and then I decide, of course, that I better not.
MARY ALLEN is the author of a literary memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, published by Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books, and a collection of personal essays, The Deep Limitless Air: A Memoir in Pieces, published by Blue Light Press. She has received an NEA grant, has a regular blog on the Psychology Today website, and has published short work in Poets & Writers, Real Simple, Library Journal, CNN On-line, Shenandoah, Tiferet Journal, The Chaos, Beloit Fiction Review, and two anthologies, If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings and The Love Book. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival. She lives in Iowa City and is a full-time writing coach.
