One Weird Day

See Me Not - Part 1

"Want some more?" Sheila bends over me and checks my plate. "Oh, you've eaten nothing yet! Come on, get started. How do you expect to have any energy if you don't eat?"

Cornflakes float in the milk, and they taste even worse than they look. I have no appetite in the mornings, but it's all irrelevant to Sheila with her mother-hen instincts. Each day she's busy feeding me, taking care of me and, in her words, fixing me up. She lets go a little bit only when the grandchildren—hers or mine—come to visit. Then she gets busy fixing them up, and I'm allowed to breathe for a while.

It's funny how we switched roles. I was ten years old when she was born, and as long as I can remember I enjoyed the responsibilities of being the older sister—watching her, making sure she was fed, dressed properly, not hurt by other children. From the moment she came into my life, I've always felt older than my age. And now we live together again, this time as two widows, and she is seventy already—while I'm still ten years older, no escape from that—and now she's the one who takes care of me. She claims that doing so makes her feel younger, which is fine with me—if only she could fulfill her duties in a less fanatical manner.

"I'm not hungry," I say. "I'd better go for a walk, work up an appetite."

"No-no-no," she says. "You are not going anywhere on an empty stomach."

I give here a look of exasperation, but she's washing dishes with her back to me and doesn't notice anything. Maybe I should get her a dog or a cat just to distract her a little. I'm not young, of course, and sometimes I do need assistance, but still, it doesn't give her a right to treat me like a baby.

Apart from that, I do need to take a walk. While the sun hasn't risen yet and the streets are empty, something needs to be done, and the earlier is the better.

"I'll be back in an hour," I say. "Do we have some bread left?"

Sheila turns around, wiping her hands on her apron, her lips pressed together, but this time she doesn't object. This scene repeats itself almost every morning, and sometimes I play along and eat the breakfast, while on other occasions I take a stand and go for a walk. It's just a daily ritual, and she knows it well enough. She reaches for the bread bin, retrieves a few dry slices and puts them into a plastic bag. My morning route lies across the small river that flows through the city park, and sometimes I stop on the bridge to feed the fish or the birds.

I carefully put the bread into my bag, next to another object inside of it. The object is wrapped in several plastic bags, thick and non-transparent, but I know what it is, and it makes me feel uneasy.

I walk slowly along the road. There's no lights in the windows and the streets are empty. I'm out earlier than usual today, and everyone I'm used to meeting in the mornings are still asleep or just preparing to go out. These early walks unite us into some kind of a sect, make us feel like we are allowed into a secret, granted a right to witness the wonder of a new day being born before the city begins its restless fuss.

I walk along the alley by the riverside when the first man runs past me. He's young, probably in his thirties, and I see him here from time to time, but he never speaks to me. Young people ignore me, they just run their daily route listening to the music in their headphones, lost in their thoughts.

In fact, from a certain age I started to feel like I'm invisible. When you are twenty, people notice you. I remember running in the park then, how men smiled at me or said 'Good morning' or threw a joke or a compliment. But when you are eighty, they just ignore you—even though I'm not expecting compliments or smiles or anything, just a nod would do. They act as if one look at me can spoil their mood by reminding that one day they will be eighty too, so they'd just rather look somewhere else.

Morning and evening walks and reading are the only hobbies that I've got, and Sheila is always nagging how I need to find more ways to occupy myself. She plays bridge a couple of times a week, goes to a swimming pool and to a knitting class—all this in the time free from fixing me up, of course. But I don't feel like doing anything like that.

Not after what happened to Mathew.

I stop at the bridge, retrieve the plastic bag and begin to crumble the bread into the water. The surface is seething immediately as a bunch of fish pounces at the treat, their gray shiny backs flickering in the cold morning light. My hand feels for the object at the bottom of the bag and I take it out, looking around as I do. The paths on both sides of the river are empty. I open my hand over the water and the object falls down, forcing the fish to scatter. It sinks, leaving but a few rings on the water, and I go on throwing breadcrumbs about, feeling relief.

Mathew was my favorite grandson. It may have been wrong to prefer him over the others, and I loved his brothers too—I still do—but he was always special. He used to hug me and ask me how I was doing and treated me as a loved person and not just a source of presents and pocket money. I wasn't a ghost to him, he actually saw me, and heard, and loved. And that means a lot, especially when the rest of the world looks right through you.

That day, he was going to spend the evening with us. He was eight and he came by himself, riding his bike. Sheila made an apple pie. I got him a new book.

He was late.

I came out of the house when I saw the police lights.

A part of the street was cordoned off with a yellow tape, and a policeman was trying to scatter the onlookers, but I came closer, taking an advantage of my invisible person status, and saw an empty sneaker on the roadside and a bent bicycle frame, and some people gathering around, covering their mouths with their hands.

"Please, stay away," the policeman kept saying tiredly. "Nothing to look at."

I don't know if there's life after death. But there's no life after an empty sneaker on the roadside, that much I know for sure. At least my life as I knew it had ended at that moment.

He'd been hit by a drunk driver, for whom it was his twenty-eighth violation—and the first lethal one. On the news and in the newspapers they boiled over how he still had his license after so many transgressions, bringing up other similar cases over the past few years. A schoolgirl bound to a wheelchair, a mother of four hit by a drunk driver and left to die on the roadside, a biker found in a water table by the road. A string of irresponsible drivers, violating the rules again and again until their ignorance took somebody's life—and even then they often avoided proper punishment, thanks to the loop-holes in laws, good lawyers, kind jurors.

I watched the news and I read the articles.

"That's life," Sheila used to say. "We can't change it."

But I had to try.

TO BE CONTINUED...