Temporary Shelter

It's 3 A.M. I'm sitting in a chair next to my older sister's bed in the emergency psych ward of Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, waiting for a decision which will determine the next phase of her life. Not just tonight but the days that follow. Next to us, separated by only a thin partition, a man tied down at the ankles with leather restraints plays with his floppy penis under the sheet and shouts obscenities into the night. At the other end of the hall, an Asian woman whose face floats blankly upward into the whiteness of the ceiling, lies in coma after an overdose of barbiturates. I know these things because I've been here for several hours now, listening to the doctors jargoning back and forth, watching the repeat recording of vital signs. This is the waiting room for abandoned souls, for those temporarily dispossessed of their better judgment. You can almost feel the presence of the devil lying in wait for a chance to bid on their worst moment.

This endless waiting doesn't seem to phase my sister, whose longtime schizophrenia-untreated for the past twenty years ­has already placed her life in a kind of parentheses. Financially dependent on meager monthly Social Security checks-and with the look and lifestyle of a bag lady-she barely gets by.

At forty-nearly two and a half years older than me-with her shorn hair and boyish physique, she looks like an aged Joan of Arc. She's sitting up in bed in one of those paper-thin white johnnies decorated with faint blue stars, her thin body folded in half at the waist, barely holding on to wakefulness.

Thirty-six hours ago, when fire struck her downtown rooming house- a dingy Beacon Hill establishment tucked invisibly into the elite row of brownstones owned by Boston’s wealthiest Brahmins- she lost the small sanctuary that was all she had.  Her tiny room was neat but filthy, with its stained bed and one small window taped over with layers of newspaper. Later, I learned from one of the Red Cross workers that the fire had begun at 5 A.M. in the room next door to hers, how she was screaming for help and had to be led down three flights of stairs like a child.

After spending that first night in an emergency Red Cross shelter, the following morning she was shown rooms that were more expensive than she could afford. It was then she wandered

off and disappeared. Later that night we found her standing in front of her charred building, her thin silhouette nearly invisible in the winter dark, except for the flicker of cigarette ashes, somehow under the delusion that she could go back in.

She stayed with me and my husband and our eighteen-month old son in Cambridge that night. I made a bed for her in the study with pillows and a blanket and kissed her good night like a child. The next morning, I could see the sunken impression her body left on top of the covers where she had slept fully clothed. I invited her to stay with us through the weekend so that

we could begin to look for a new room on Monday. But after breakfast, still disoriented and confused, she insisted on going back out on the street. Despite the fact that her things were gone, destroyed by the fire, and the building boarded up, she had all intentions of going back in.

I spent most of the day stalling, trying to distract her. I knew that even if she tried to leave, she wouldn’t be able to find her way back downtown. It was early February in a season of unprecedented snowfalls, and we were expecting a major storm that night. She had been sitting in the same kitchen chair since ten o' clock that morning, one eye on the failing vertical hold of the TV screen showing Brady Bunch reruns and cartoons, and the other on the door. I had told her I would take her downtown, but was careful to keep it vague, not specify a time. Her ability to sit in one place for most of the day both comforted and disturbed me. Finally, after breakfast, lunch, and dinner had passed and it was growing dark, she stood up, went to the door, and insisted on a ride downtown, her seeming calm giving way to sudden anger. I agreed to drive her, provided she first go with me to the hospital to have someone make sure she was okay. "I want to make sure you're all right after the fire," I said. "You've been through a lot even though you don't think so." And though neither of us really believed she would willingly enter the hospital, we each needed a pretense to set things in motion, to get us out the door.

During the ride from Cambridge to Boston I was trying to think how I might talk her into actually going inside the hospital. When we pulled up in front, it was almost nine o'clock and dark. The emergency entrance was lit up brightly with orange lights, and a police cruiser sat parked next to an ambulance, its doors ajar. The air was cold and snow was just beginning to fall. My sister opened the car door and stepped out onto the curb, cupped her hands, and lit up a cigarette. She nodded to me, simply, almost sweetly. "See ya," she said, and then turned away and started crossing the street. For a few seconds I did nothing. I watched her cross the street and begin the slow climb up Beacon Hill on a wobbly diagonal, her huge clothes drowning her emaciated body in a wash of colorless gray. All along Cambridge Street cars were abandoned in the road on jagged snowbanks, and the walking space on the icy sidewalks had shrunken to a mere few inches. The snow swirled above us, and began to come down heavier, salting the sky.

In those few moments I had to ask myself who I was. Who was I to reel her into what I believed was safety, and who was I to let her go? Then I just acted. I ran to catch up with her. In all the years between us, I had always been afraid to say I love you. I thought the words might hurt if I said them aloud. No one in my family had ever said them to me. But someone needed to say it to Linda finally. Suddenly I felt if she walked away into the night I might never have another chance.

I caught up with her. "Linda," I said, and she turned around. I’m afraid I'll never see you again. I love you," I said, and I was crying. "Linda, I love you. Please come with me. You have no place to go."

She had tears in her eyes then. "You don't need to worry about me," she said. She stood still for a second, then took a drag on her cigarette. Her eyes seemed inhumanly large, the prettiest shade of blue surrounded by two floating islands of white. Her face was glazed, luminous. She turned and then quickly looked back, gave a small wave, and started walking up the hill toward the boarded-up rooming house.

HOSPITALIZING HER AGAINST her will involved bringing in the police. After she started walking away, I went into the emergency entrance and spoke to the doctor on call, who agreed, when I described the recent fire and her general disposition, that we should bring her in. I knew in some ways I was going against her privacy, her freedom. After all, how much had I successfully intervened on her behalf before? How much had I really been there for her? But it was painfully clear that she couldn't make decisions in her best interest that night.

I rode with two policemen in the back of the car and directed them up Hancock Street to where she had lived. Though fifteen minutes had already passed, she walked slowly, and from a distance I could make out the ghostly shape of her body wandering up the hill. The car pulled over and I called out to her. She turned around briefly and then continued walking. Then I ran to catch up to her. By now, the two policemen had gotten out of the car and were standing next to me, keeping a slight distance. They had a typewritten form I think they called a Section 8 that demanded she come with us. "Linda, if you don't come voluntarily, they'll make you," I said. Suddenly she seemed small, disarmed in her oversize leather jacket and wool cap, a child wanting to cooperate, to be a good girl.

Checking into the hospital and changing her clothes, she was annoyed and made me turn away. I caught a glimpse of her curved emaciated torso in the mirror, the countable ribs and vanished breasts, usually hidden under several layers of clothes.

In her teens, my sister had been beautiful. She had a kind of softness added to her extraordinary beauty that stopped people on the street. She had voluptuous curves and a sensuality. And perhaps worst of all, she believed in the power of these surfaces, she believed that her looks could bend someone's will. The result was a naive waiting game for happiness based on fairy-tale myths - marriage to someone both handsome and rich-that never came true.

While the nurse is taking my sister’s vital signs, I call my mother in California to tell her about Linda’s condition. I tell her that she will probably be hospitalized. "Don't do it," says my eighty-year-old stepfather in the background. "They'll throw away the key." But my mother understands. Nearly twenty years ago, when my sister was visiting my mother in New Jersey and shooting heroin into her veins, she got out of control and tried to attack my stepfather with a hammer. My mother had to call the police and have her hospitalized for ten days. It was a state institution and from what I gathered, pretty horrific.

Before agreeing to have the police pick her up, I spoke to the psychiatrist on call, a young woman, who assured me the hospitalization would only last until my sister had a place to stay. Besides, these days, at $1,000 a day, they don't put people like my sister in the hospital and throw away the key because the insurance companies won't pay for it. The best I can hope for is that she'll be off the street long enough for me to find her another place to live.

The doctor has come to interview my sister for several minutes. She calls her questions a test. Linda turns her back to me as if to say, this is none of your business. Then she is asked a series of detailed questions that have to do with her age, the date, who the president is, etc. "Where will you sleep tonight?" the doctor asks her again. ''I'm concerned about your welfare," she says. My sister groggily mutters back: ''I'm okay, I'm okay. It's not your concern." The doctor is kind but persistent. She asks several more factual questions, has my sister spell a word I can't hear backward, and then has her write down a random question. She thinks for a second and writes: The floor is green. My sister does surprisingly well on some things on this test, but overall, she unequivocally fails. The doctor takes me aside and tells me she is trying to get my sister into Maclean Hospital in Belmont tonight, the best mental hospital in the city. One of the goals of the hospitalization is to try to help my sister--who like so many others has slipped through the cracks--to get hooked up with mental health services again. But after two more hours and a handful of other emergencies, I am disappointed when she comes back and tells me that my sister's insurance has been turned down. Her Medicaid marks her as virtually untouchable, destitute, one of society's invisible breed. The hope for serious care that came with the possibility of her going to Maclean is gone. Instead, she'll be sent to a hospital called the Arbour in Jamaica Plain.

As the hours pass, and the paperwork is completed, all that's left to do is get her out the door. The doctor periodically comes back to try to talk my sister into willingly going into a hospital for the night, so that she won't have to force her into a straitjacket. Despite exhaustion, my sister holds her ground, refusing to fall asleep. “I’m all right," she says, “I’m all right. It's none of your affair."

FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW, we've lived in almost the same city, she in Boston, me in Cambridge, separated only by the thin blue ribbon of the Charles River. As long as she lives here, I can never think of leaving. My mother and half sister live three thousand miles away in California. When I am in my sister's company, I feel a certain braveness, a sense of doing battle on her behalf with the rest of the world, the world that takes one look at her and either laughs or turns mean. When we're apart, and my life is almost normal, running its course with all of the responsibilities of home and family, I feel in some ways that despite all this, it is still a masquerade. I will never be myself, I will never be whole, I am still walking around with some part of me invisibly broken, longing for her return.

The daily world she depends on is small, encompassing Boston's downtown neighborhood of fast-food restaurants and five-and-dimes: Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Woolworth's, the CVS. She doesn't know the time, fashions a calendar from note­book paper. Her toilet articles are always neatly laid out: comb, washcloth, soap. For years her letters have talked repeatedly about the nature of the planet and of God. Her reading materials are both impulsive and obscure, covering everything from heavy­metal music to antique dolls. She favors horror movies, laughs at the bloodiest parts when the heads are hacked off at the neck or when spikes are driven through the heart.

The tragedy of the fire was compounded by the tragedy of ignorance, of not knowing how to make her way in the tangible economic world. One of the reasons she wandered off was that the rooms Red Cross workers tried to show her at sixty and eighty dollars a week were too expensive compared to the thirty a week she had been paying for the past twelve years.

My sister is both stubborn and proud. There is no bargaining with her. Despite her illness, she almost always calls the shots. Once, several years ago when her rent had been increased by five dollars, she grew indignant, packed her few belongings in a shopping bag, and walked out into the street. Slow moving in huge clothes and oversize men's construction shoes that give her a lumbering dinosaur gait, my sister is an easy target, not just for lack of awareness but for lack of speed. As she walked the streets, searching for a new less expensive room, two teenage boys beat her up and stole all her things, then slashed her arm with a knife. The next day she returned to the old rooming house with her arm in a sling. The landlord felt sorry for her, reinstated her old rent, and never raised it again.

She literally has no one, no friends to say hello to, no one to call on the telephone. Her life is made up of a loneliness I couldn't imagine. Every once in a while my mind plays tricks on me, and I believe what I secretly want to: that she's really an actress perfecting her greatest role, a lifelong job which calls for a mixture of intelligence and absolute vacancy. Sometimes I look at her and think how we shared our mother's body, how we grew up so entirely close but separate. Now I wonder what secrets she might have left behind in her room that she wants so desperately to get back in. What could she possibly value?

Over the years we've gotten together about once every month or two months, communicating by mail. We go to Legal Seafood for lunch, where she orders wine and something grand like lobster or filet mignon, and then eats with her fingers, keeping one glove on. When I got married two years ago I felt in a sense I was leaving my sister behind. When I had my son eighteen months ago, I felt, too, that I was abandoning my sister for a second time. Being with her is a study in patience, in everything we do: in ordering from a restaurant menu, in looking in stores in which every bag of jelly beans must be handled and examined. The holidays are her friends, all of the crass Hallmark paraphernalia: the Easter Bunnies and chocolate eggs, the Christmas Santas, the Valentine hearts. They have enormous appeal, as if they are the center of what's meaningful in life.

MY SISTER'S schizophrenia probably began in the early seventies when she was in high school. We lived in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, in an industrial town about forty-five minutes south of New York City, where we were among the small handful of nonreligious. My father had his own used-car business and my mother kept house. My father was your typical father of the period, silent and moody, with a defective heart that kept us quiet and kept him on medication. My mother was striving for perfection like so many other housewives of the time. She was the kind of mother who made green Jell-O and Shake 'n Bake chicken in the afternoon, while underneath it all, prepared and ready, she was wearing leopard print underwear to please my father later at night.

Our father died when my sister and I were nine and twelve. He had been through heart surgery in Bethesda and was recovering at home when my mother went to wake him one morning and found him dead. Three years later, my brother David, born during the year between the birth of my sister and of myself, died of pneumonia at fifteen. We woke one morning to find him splayed out on the bathroom floor, pale, in rigor mortis, his lungs exploded in hemorrhage.

Within weeks after the death of my brother, my sister's usual hypochondria intensified, and she insisted on being hospitalized. She believed that she had contracted both mononucleosis and hepatitis at once. Her eyes were yellow and jaundiced, and she was extremely depressed, but the diagnostic tests all came back negative and she was sent home.

The three of us-my mother, my sister, and myself-spent the years that followed as phantoms in our own house. I don't remember ever hearing any explanations about what had happened to the men in our family. I don't remember any explanations of loss. The darkness of my thoughts was all-consuming. I remember feeling responsible, relied upon, in a sense being asked to take my mother by the hand. I was her confidante and cheer­leader; I sensed in myself endless emotional depths from which I could dig deep and administer comfort. I was my mother's fashion consultant and chef, I helped her cook dinner and pay the bills. Looking back, I feel sure I did some of these things out of concern and even need, but behind it all I realize suddenly that through all my scurrying to heal the wounds, to keep new wounds from happening, all the while that I was doing what I thought was helpful, in the back of my mind I was doing all those things in the simple hopes that I, too, would be loved.

During those early teenage years, the world suddenly went from round to flat. Because Jives came and went around us, because we were offered no absolute explanation of reality, my sister and I were free to make up our own version. I think that this life of enforced illusions, of giving and taking away without explanation, led us to believe we could do anything without consequence, led us to believe that it didn't matter if we hurt ourselves, because on many levels we lived but didn't feel.

From the time we were in fifth and seventh grades, my sister and I stopped going to school. Somehow we learned early on that we could legally be absent forty-five days a year before being held back. The truant officer came to our house while our mother was at work, but we sent our huge German shepherd dog downstairs to bark, and never answered the door. Upstairs, in the vague rooms of our family house, that to me now resembles the house of ghosts, after my mother would leave for work, my sister focused on beauty rituals and on cleaning her room. I took the bus into New York City from our northern New Jersey town and walked the streets, meeting strangers on street corners and in Central Park, going to art museums, wasting time.

My mother seemed to grow youthful overnight. She abandoned her frumpy oxford shoes for heels and dyed her hair blond. She joined a social group called Parents Without Partners, and on Wednesday nights and weekends went out on dates. She was a good dancer and had silver and gold gowns with matching metallic shoes. She was pretty and youthful with her girlish ambitions intact.

As young women, my sister and I were taught to follow our mother's example-an example which she inherited from her mother-to believe that if we were pretty enough, our respective princes would come. Only years later did I come to understand that this belief in our beauty was a belief in our powerlessness. I wish I had known then what I know now. Instead, we tragically convinced ourselves that we would be unworthy of love if we weren't saved suddenly and completely in a fairy-tale way. Even now, as I read my son the story of Snow White-which I think he loves more for the characters of Grumpy and the Wicked Queen than for anything else-I rewrite it aloud and throw the old version away. I don't tell him about jealousy or hatred, or about how beauty can sweep us away. Instead, we talk about love, how Snow White loves the animals in the woods, how the dwarfs come to love her, how when people help one another there is always a way. In the end, he still wants the Wicked Queen to give Snow White the poison apple so that she can fall asleep and he can pretend to be the prince and wake her up. But he doesn't think he is saving her. It is just a game.

I think my mother viewed my sister's early strangeness as a kind of supernatural mysticism, a superiority that extreme beauty somehow grants. Beauty like that somehow strikes us as immutable. I think my mother was afraid of looking too hard, for fear of finding something she wouldn't be able to comprehend. She had grown up close to an older sister who had tormented her from childhood into her late teens, until it became dear-after she threw money in the garbage and did an assortment of other seemingly abnormal things-that something was terribly wrong.

The devices that were supposed to be in place to help, failed. My sister's high school teachers let her slide, trying their best to push her through the system. Her therapist in college seduced her. Countless men used her. She used to say you could judge a man's character by his shoes, by the style and how he wore them in.

As a child and teenager, it was easy to overlook my sister's illness because I didn't really know it existed. When we were young children she was sharp-tongued and mean, puritanical, giving orders. She insisted I play the obedient student while she was the proper schoolmarm. It was my job to be the responsive child while she played a severe mother administering castor oil and aspirins.

As I grew older, my sister was increasingly guarded and refused to admit any disturbance to the family. When she left home for college in Boston, where she attended Boston University and then dropped out after little more than a year, she insisted on living in an apartment alone, rather than in a dormitory on campus. I visited her there once and saw that she kept a Doberman pinscher and a boa constrictor in her tiny room, sinister animals bred to protect and destroy. But as far as she was concerned, everything was fine. As the years passed, she was so abrasive and angry if we inquired after her health or finances that we stopped believing we could help or make a difference. My mother's way of demonstrating her concern was to become a faithful correspondent, writing letters and sending her extra money, and making the trip from California once a year for ten days.

I grew up with only a shadowy definition of "family." Soon after I got married and my husband began to talk about the idea of having children, I could only haltingly respond. I often wondered to myself why it was I didn't want to have children of my own, why it never really occurred to me. And then slowly after I decided to go ahead and have my son, I realized that I had already twice felt the responsibility of being a parent, first with my mother and later with my sister, whose illness, however vague and undefined, had infiltrated my soul when we were much younger children. Now that I have had a child of my own, I'm beginning to understand the enormous capacity that women keep in reserve. It takes far more than I ever realized to give birth, to mother a child, and to reinstate one's self back into life with a new, far more complex identity.

WHEN I KNEW that my sister would have to be forcibly taken to the hospital in a straitjacket, the doctor gave me the option to leave. I couldn't bear to have that memory of her being taken against her will left to replay itself in my mind. By 5 A.M. everything was in place to take her to another hospital. I felt cowardly abandoning her at her worst moment. I walked out of the hospital in a daze and watched a private ambulance pull up in front. Four huge men the size of bodyguards got out. When I realized they were there to take my sister, I cried in the cab all the way home.

She was in the hospital for fourteen days. I visited her every other day and called her on the days I couldn't come. The morning after she was hospitalized, there was a huge snowstorm in Boston, a foot high, paralyzing the roads. I felt a little relieved that I had made the right decision because in this weather out on the street alone she never would have survived.

When I went to see her the next day at the hospital, I brought her coffee and cigarettes. She was angry and determined to stay isolated. None of the staff people, except for those involved in admitting her, had even bothered to ask her her name. All she could say was that she didn't belong there and that it was a court case, meaning she thought she had grounds to sue someone. She repeatedly said: “I’m waiting for them to close my case."

"Linda," I said, "in order for them to close your case, we have to find a new place for you to live."

"It's none of your affair," she said to me, and grew silent again.

I changed the subject and asked her about her room and she said she hadn't been in it. She didn't seem to know where anything was. I spoke with one of the mental health workers at the desk and he said that she had been sitting in that same chair since she arrived and had refused to talk to anyone.

Lunch was being served: chicken chow mein with egg rolls. She was so weak she couldn't lift the tray of food off the cart. I sat with her in the dining room that doubled as a crafts and TV room while she had lunch. The huge windows overlooked the newly fallen snow. "What do you think of the snowstorm?" I said. "Oh, did it snow?" she said blankly. I introduced myself to people who worked there during that shift, the nurses and social workers, so that despite what they might have thought, I made sure they knew that someone was looking out for her. I thought that my normalcy might help buy her decent care.

As I visited with her over the next few days, two more snowstorms followed in a hush of whiteness that covered the earth. As I watched her interact with this society of people similar to herself and worse, keeping track of their moves out of the corner of her eye, steering clear of outbursts and merging with the shadows, I saw how she moved in and out of their world like a veteran. And I realized how she had, unbeknownst to me, learned to cope in this world, one that despite its odd layers of frailty involved degrees of cunning and self-protection.

The patients on one of the hospital's locked wards, were a little scary as they walked the halls licking their tongues, muttering the same word repeatedly, drawing ominously close to strangers, using foul language. Each time I visited, the same young man with long dark hair and black eyes accosted me and called me by what he believed was my name: Mary Magdalene. It was an ominous environment, understaffed, a place in which time could literally stop and it wouldn't matter. The social worker assigned to my sister's case confided that though she had taken some of the medication prescribed, there was little hope of improvement. She was, as he described it, a burned-out schizophrenic. This seemed to me a subtle means of telling me that her value to society was zero.

At first, my sister didn't want me to get involved in helping her find a new place to live. She kept saying it was none of my affair. The social worker was interested in moving her through the system and out. In order to close her case, I needed to find her another place to live. If I couldn't find a place before she was discharged, she would find herself back on the street.

Through the Red Cross, I obtained a list of rooming houses and started calling them one by one. Single rooms were not easy to come by. Unlike apartments, they're primarily taken up by the sick and transient, those without money and those without long to live. Many of the phone numbers I had gotten for rooming houses were already obsolete. Finally, I located a building on the same street where my sister had lived, a clean building with an expected vacancy in about a week. I went to look at it that afternoon and put down a deposit. The rent was higher, more than three times what she had been paying, but somehow we would work it out.

Two days later, about halfway through my sister's stay, I arrived at the hospital and my sister's hair was clean and combed for what was probably the first time in several months, and her clothes had been washed. She looked more vibrant. We had gotten a pass from her doctor to go downtown and show her the room. After several minutes of paperwork and some confusion, we were ready to go. All the patients in her locked ward had items of clothing considered personally dangerous taken away. Both my sister's shoelaces and her belt had disappeared from the locked cabinet. One of the nurses located the lost-and-found box and we got some other shoelaces. My sister used two safety pins to hoist up her pants.

The sun was shining on the snow and the sky was blue for the first time in days as we drove along the Jamaica way past the icy pond. Downtown, we parked and went across the street to take a look at the room. It was much nicer than her old place with a twin bed and a desk and chair. She agreed to take it right away. When she asked how much the rent was, I told her it was the same as the old place, thirty a week, though it was really a hundred. It was worth the extra money just to know she was in a safe place.

Our agreement with the social worker at the hospital was that she was to stay there five more days until the room was ready. Then later that day I unexpectedly got a phone call telling me they were going to release my sister to a shelter, the Pine Street Inn, the next day. I was angry and argued with the social worker, telling him that they couldn't do that, she had nowhere to go. "All the time she spent in the hospital will be a waste if you send her back out on the street now," I said. "We don't have a choice," the social worker said. "Her insurance won't cover her any longer."

I insisted on speaking with her doctor, who had never returned any of my phone calls in the past two weeks. He finally called me late that night and was both coldhearted and rude. "Why do you bother to get involved now?" he said. "The time to do something was twenty years ago. You could of course pay the thousand dollars a day yourself."

Because his opinion was that she was neither suicidal nor in danger of hurting anyone else, they had no grounds for holding her and threw her out on her ear.

Furthermore, and the thing that really bothered me, was that she had insisted that she was okay, she had insisted on going to the shelter rather than staying where she was. I called her the following morning to make sure she understood that she was being discharged to the Pine Street Inn that day. As usual she was emotionless, monosyllabic. "Make sure you call me over the next few days so I know where you'll be," I said, and she agreed.

I was devastated to see that after all this time spent trying to get her back on her feet, she was choosing to put herself right back out on the street. So a few hours later, when I got a call from the Pine Street Inn asking me to pick her up, I was surprised. Her timing was bad. I couldn't bring her back home. Her presence made my son hysterical because she refused to acknowledge he existed. Not only was my husband going through an intensely stressful period at work, but it was a very stressful time in our marriage. I agreed to pick her up and take her to an inn, a bed-and-breakfast nearby, which I had discovered early on in the process of making phone calls and looking for a room.

The Pine Street Inn, to which the hospital had discharged her in a cab, was big and overcrowded. It struck me as a holding pen for the ominous. The place was a little frightening, filled with homeless men and women with filthy clothes and surprisingly new-looking sneakers donated by the city's Good Samaritans. It struck me almost as death's halfway house, a near last stop. Situated at the end of the Mass Pike and the entrance to Route 93, it dead-ends in a gray place of intersecting ramps that looks a little like the end of the world.

Linda was waiting for me at the door, somehow poised above it all, almost as if she were Audrey Hepburn hailing a cab. We drove to Cambridge over the Charles River. The lights of the city made me feel the world was alive though I felt a little dead inside. I looked over at her and she was relaxed, breathing deeply, her freedom intact. I took her to the Irving House, an old New England inn just a few blocks away from me where she would be safe and independent for the next several days while we waited to move into her new room. It was a bed-and-breakfast, much like a youth hostel, with affordable rates and filled with students. I pointed out the stores in the neighborhood and helped her set the bedside clock. She was worried about whether the plug alone could keep it running on time.

Five days passed quickly. I visited with her every day, gradually replacing some of the things she had lost. She never left the room by herself. I think she felt safe in the small room with its white bedspread and two small prints of Paris streets. She tried my patience in various ways-for instance, by taking a good hour to try on every single belt in the men's department of DeCelle's.

The day we checked into her new room, we walked in carrying only one small bag. Later, we took a walk up the hill to the old house. It was still boarded up, now with a For Sale sign in front, proof finally that part of her past was gone.

Now we're trying to put her life back together by replacing the simple things she had lost: a belt, a new pair of shoelaces, a radio, a watch, a new pair of pants, a sheet and blanket for her bed. I offer to buy her a green plant, a living thing, but even this is too much responsibility.

Most of all I wonder how she can live with such loneliness. I close my eyes and try to imagine the workings of her mind. I imagine myself deaf, dumb, blind, perhaps with some fragmented memories of childhood. Every once in a while she'll re­member something, some small kindness or connection to the natural world. But mostly she draws a blank. What we share in common now is this: we've been through something together and we both know it. I've seen some of the danger she faces, and she's seen how I will try to help her in any way I can. Maybe that experience has created some kind of foothold for each of us, something we can look at inside ourselves and say we understand. I know that one day I will probably get another phone call with news like this or worse. But in the meantime, we've reestablished what we had perhaps too quickly forgotten: our sense of trust and family. Despite the fact that the world takes one look at her and keeps going, for a while now at least, she's found a place from which she doesn't.