Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(3)
I’ve met a few of them later, months or even years after they called me. I’ve never met any of them among the living.
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say. People who don’t care don’t choose to take the midnight shift at the Suicide Helpline. People who don’t care stay home safe in their beds, or wander the nightclubs looking for something to connect them to the world, to keep them just that little bit more anchored.
“Well . . .” She takes a shaky breath, and what I hear in that sound is more reassuring than words could possibly have been. She’s decided to live. Maybe not forever—maybe not even for long—but for tonight, she’s decided to live. I’ve done some good in this world. I’ve paid off a fraction of my debt I owe to Patty, for not hearing the things she never said to me. “Thank you, Jenna. For listening. I . . . I really appreciate you being willing to do that.”
“Any time, Vicky.”
There’s a click as the line disconnects. She doesn’t say goodbye. I glance to the display on my computer screen: we were on that call for forty-seven minutes. Forty-seven minutes to talk a living, breathing, human woman out of killing herself. At least for tonight, Vicky will remain in the world, and that’s partially because of me. I did that.
Gingerly, I remove my headset and type in the key combination that tells the system I’m done for the night. There are only a few people on the graveyard shift. Two are on calls of their own. The third is working one of the chat rooms we maintain for people who can’t talk on the phone about what they’re feeling, even to a stranger. His fingers dance across the keys, and I pause to admire the speed and grace with which he responds to four different conversations. I never ask to work the chats. How would I measure the time? It’s too abstract. People type at different speeds; they pause and backtrack and lie so much more easily than they can when they’re actually speaking to me. I’d start crediting myself with more than I deserved, and it would all be downhill from there.
Forty-seven minutes. That’s what I’ve earned tonight. Vicky wasn’t my only call, but she’s the one that counts, the one where I spoke long enough, said enough of the right things, that I can legitimately say I made a difference. I hold that number as I get my coat from the closet, shrug it on, and make my way out the door, down the narrow stair to the old precode fire door that always sticks and groans when we force it open. Some of my coworkers joke about how we work in a haunted house because of that door. I always laugh with them. It’s not like they’re somehow on to me; Melissa McCarthy and the rest of the Ghostbusters won’t be barging in with their proton packs and witty one-liners any time soon.
Which is almost a pity. The nights can get long, and we could use the entertainment.
The air outside is warm and humid, smelling of boiled hot dogs, cooling pavement, and the close-packed bodies of a million people, each with their own hidden secrets and stories to tell. There are people who don’t like the smell of New York in the summer, but I find it soothing. I could stand in front of the door with my nose turned to the wind for a hundred years, and I still wouldn’t breathe in everything the city has to offer. That’s good. There should be some things too complex to experience, in or outside of a lifetime.
It takes me a moment to orient myself, to determine where I am in relation to Mill Hollow. The pull of it is always there, a fishhook in my heart, but sometimes it gets tangled up in the tall buildings and unfamiliar skyline, becoming twisted and strange. I follow it patiently back to the creek and the old oak by the ravine, until I know my exact position in the world again. I can read a street sign as well as anybody, but I’m always lost if I don’t know where the Hollow is. That’s where I’m from. That’s where I died. That’s what anchors me to this world. Without it, I might as well be a sheet on the wind, blowing senseless, no more mindful than a bit of old laundry.
Everything settles into its proper place. The world makes sense again, and I start walking.
The office of the hotline where I volunteer is tucked into the back of a privately owned building in the East Village, one of those old-money havens where buying an apartment begins in the millions and climbs rapidly upward from there. The last time the top floor was sold, I think it went for five million dollars, and that was eight years ago. Most of the building is owned by a gray-haired, steel-spined old woman whose eldest son took his own life after he came home from Vietnam. She’s the one who gives us our office space, free of charge, because she doesn’t want what happened to her Johnny to happen to anyone else.
“He just got lost, and he couldn’t see that he was already home” was what she’d said the first time we met, in the late seventies, when her hair was still shot through with black, and her eyes were still sharp without the aid of corrective lenses. She looked at me like she knew me, and when I reached for her hand to shake it, she moved politely away from me. It’s been forty years. She’s in her late eighties now, and she’s never allowed me to touch her.
I don’t think she knows why, exactly. Some people just get a feeling when they’re around me, like they shouldn’t chance it. I don’t push. Most of them heard something from their gran, who heard it from her gran before them, and I don’t believe it’s right to go crossing someone else’s gran. Especially when she’s right. Especially when I am a danger, or could be, if I wanted to.