Silence

A man shot himself in my cul de sac this month. I did not know him, but I should have. He lived on the hill and from my house you can see the goings on at his front door, but I have not noticed much about his house or him. I seldom drive that way and when I do I am usually frantically calling for my dog or mindlessly driving his way because of a detour.

My neighbor told me today that he had grey hair and a grey beard though he wasn't old enough to die of natural causes.  He might have plowed my driveway one or twice but in the cold winter when I was without a husband, I may or may not have seen who actually plowed. It happened when I was out or asleep.

The night it happened, I knew there was a "situation" because I was stopped at the entrance to my neighborhood by paramedics. Lots of them. They asked, "where are you going?" And because my circle with a pretty bird name was the place of the situation I wasn't allowed to go further. A conversation with the paramedics on a hot August night, past midnight, in a quiet place where traffic seldom comes was not frantic or alarming. I "should find another place to stay the night that night," I didn't want to because it was inconvenient.

I did not turn around and go to my mother's or my daughter's place, but parked, and waited two backyards away as the hummingbird flies, from where he did it. Or was threatening to do it. A man was drunk and threatened to off himself, but the uniformed squad was waiting it out until he passed out so they could disarm him and tell the family he was sleeping it off in a jail cell. 

The summer was threatening a storm itself, so I reclined, opened the roof and watched nothing happen for a couple hours. The paramedics chatted, wandered, waiting, "in case they need us." I remember that one tired of the chat group at the ambulance so he sat on the curb in front of the house where the man with cancer lives. The paramedic rocked forward and back for a minute with his hands stretched out stiff holding his knees and eventually laid back on the grass, probably watching the night sky. It was a beautiful night. A nice night to die I suppose.

I talked to my dog, who was asleep in the back of the car. I didn't expect that he would rouse. But would he if there was really something monumental about to happen? Traffic on the nearest busy street had slowed to near nothing and I remember hearing the night sigh at one point. Perhaps that was the grey-haired man's agonal breath.

I know that word, agonal, because in a similar odd moment, my friend who hung upside-down inches from my wretched body turned grey from the lack of air and let out his last breath of agony. I know that gasp, then half-sigh as well as I know my child's voice, and as I sat in my car this August, an echo rolled through the trees and I wondered if that was what I had heard again. I have made a habit of second guessing myself, so I said to myself, "No, that was the night saying, be still."

And where is my son, I wondered? Is he there, a driveway away from whatever was not happening, with the blinds rolled down and texting his friends? I called. He was not near, but he offered to go the back way from the neighbor's back lot to get what I needed for the night. "No. Stay and play and we will wait." Relief, such relief that the house was empty.

Empty though, is evident late at night, when you look at my house from the corner, the house and what goes on behind the shutdown shades recedes into darkness. It feels like nothingness. The driveway is invisible until you get right up on it. And the house pauses in the background, like me, when I want to be alone. Pause, barely breathing; a half sigh. Had I left the lights on that night, would it have given the man a different perspective? Would the courtyard have reminded him that his agony is temporary? I wonder if I should keep the lights on for the next man?

He had told his family he was desperate. At least that's what my neighbor told me today. I know desperation and I know it can fit on a hummingbird's wing, or seep deep into the soil then tilled under so the stained pool of blackened blood is captured forever in tall June grass; never washed off with summer rains.

So we sat, my dog and I, and watched the green lights inside the police car across the street from us blink in a straight row as police calls spit on his radio that hot, still night. I remember wondering if my friend knew that there was a SWAT team outside her window. She lives next to the man with cancer. She had cancer too. I wonder what kind of cancer I will get.

Years ago, my friend's dog was shot by the farmer that lived behind my back yard. We heard the gunshot and woke on a night just like the night this August. I asked my husband if he thought that was the man two doors down ending his life. "Maybe." He was dying a slow, skinny, yellow death and no one would have blamed him one tiny bit. He ended up dying in the arms of an ex-lover; a death we all should get.

No one could verify that the dog was dead, but he had probably been raiding the farmer's chicken coop and when the dog went missing, the eggs flourished. My friend knows the farmer did it but it doesn't matter now because the farmer is dead too. So is the back lot that once flourished in green rows of vegetables. It is now covered over with road base minus the black tar tack and tall gold weeds that could combust at any moment.

So there we sat, still waiting for the man that lives in the house on the hill with the red door to pass out or fall asleep in my cul de sac. I sat and waited and eventually, a neighbor dittoed my approach into the neighborhood and was stopped by the paramedics killing time. Then she stopped by my rolled down window and we speculated who it was that sat in the middle of our little out-of-the-way circle of houses. "Don't know. Wouldn't tell us." She thought she'd wait it out too. So we sat in separate cars, eerily apart, not taking the opportunity the man on the hill was giving us to get to know each other

I rescued her dog once and she lives in the house that the skinny, yellow man that died in the arms of an ex-lover lived. That's what we knew of each other. That's all. Except that one night two summers ago when I woke to the voice of her Gothic-esk, skinny-jeaned, barely-teen son behind my backyard telling his friends, "There, that's where I buried the cat, and I'll do it to the next one that I see." Or something equally menacing. I've lost the exact words. It bothered me so much that I made my husband walk around the block and lift me onto the porch of the neighbor who now has a dead cat buried in his back lot to ask if his cat was where he could see it. "Um, yes." [you freaking, weird lady], he is sitting right here on the back of the couch." He lives in the same house that dog-killing, chicken raising, vegetable growing farmer lived.

Ok then. Husband was embarrassed and neighbor was freaked out by crazy weird lady. Anyway, I was fine with sitting in my own car as the mother of cat-killer (Oh God, I hope the cat was dead before it was buried), sat in her car. She did mention that her son was safe and sound away from home. Hmm.

It would have been a perfect night to screw up a suicide because there was a full SWAT team kicking rocks within in a glance away and the paramedics with an ambulance and a fire engine just lined up "in case they need us" waiting for something, just anything more than what was happening, to happen.

And there we sat, one hour, then two, waiting for grey beard to fall asleep. I considered getting out of the car and pacing around the neighborhood. Somehow that seemed ok to do. Can't drive in, but perhaps a silent walk through the neighborhood would have been fine. And just as I decided to share my incredibly uneventful after-midnight night with my daughter, a policeman hollered at the paramedics, "Hey, they need you you guys up there."

"I'll be right there," she said. And they said the same as they filled the ambulance and drove toward my house. "No, no, it's more amusing than anything..." She headed my way. And I sat and watched the leaves in the tree above the police car that was parked in front of the house of the man with cancer turn silver, then dark as the August breath twisted them as agony passed above his house.

I remember thinking how I would be able to hear the end of some one's life with the sound of one bullet. I would surely recognize it, like the bullet that got the chicken-killing dog had woke me from summer sleep. But the bullet sound never came. I waited. Thank God he fell asleep, and by default his life would be spared because he had drank too much whiskey. Or vodka. Either way, the drink would be his salvation.

How is it that I am so ignorant to the color of my neighbor's doors? I can sit in my driveway and see the front doors of eight neighbors and I can't tell you the color of six of them. Does the color of my door say something about what is going on inside it? Perhaps. My door is the color of blood as it rises through the veins of June grass.

Today my neighbor told me that by the time I had driven into the neighborhood that night, the man that lived in the house with the red door had already been dead for two hours in the middle of my street. He told his family he was going to kill himself and they said something like any of us might have said to a persistent drunk.

Whatever. Get some sleep. Go ahead. Or even something like, No sweetheart, not tonight because it is too beautiful to die tonight. Then he does. And not one person hears his breath escape his agony.