Originally published in The Evening Street Review, Number 6, Spring 2012

            It’s dark by the time I finally park my car on Melissa’s street, where maple trees drip red leaves onto the curb. Her apartment, on the top floor of a three-story clapboard house in Portland, Maine, overlooks the Cumberland Farms gas station across the street. The front door is unlocked, as she told me it would be, and inside I’m met with the stale, musty scent of piled-up shoes and of flowers, long dried out, in a vase by the door. I sidle past a red kayak leaned against the walls and then make my way up one dim, narrow staircase, then another, and finally I can see the pour of yellow light in Melissa’s open doorway, and her own pile of shoes before the threshold. Strains of music filter out—a woman’s voice and a rippling guitar—and then Melissa’s head pops into sight and there’s that same wild mop of dirty-blonde hair I’ve always known, and those same grinning, ruddy cheeks.

            Melissa’s mother Liza is there too, with her dogs Daisy and Flo, and so the two-room apartment is full and noisy with the hugs and quick exchanges—How was the drive? Did you see the lightening? We did—and the dogs’ anxious weaving around our legs. I’ve known Melissa and Liza since they’d moved into the house next door to mine when Melissa and I were both just six, and so I was there the day Melissa and Liza both wept while George, Melissa’s dad, buried their old collie Lucy in a hole in the little field behind their house on the day she died on the kitchen floor. There was the morning Melissa rolled her ankle racing me down the rocky hill behind my house, and the day I fell off my bike and spilled blood all over the road. There was the string of guys we’d dated, the parties we’d illicitly attended at the dead-ends of dark, curving roads, and then there was the night Melissa showed me the lines she’d dug into her arm with a pocket knife when we were seventeen. Sometimes, I just want to feel something, she’d whispered as I’d touched the raw, jagged marks lightly with my fingers. Seeing Melissa and Liza now is like seeing my whole life, so closely do I assimilate their faces with my past.

            One year ago Melissa’s dad left the family for another woman, another teacher at the school he works at, and so Liza stays with Melissa now most weekends. He left behind the house he and Liza designed and built at the end of a winding road that grows empty of other houses as you drive through the forest. The neighbors helped them to build that beautiful house over one Adirondack summer, each day marked by the number of boards Melissa’s parents hauled, the nails they drilled and hammered. Now that house is just too big and too empty, Liza says, but I knew it’s really too full of ghosts, and too heavy with the minutes and memories that make up a past.

            Tonight the three of us walk to a restaurant in the Old Port for bowls of meaty paella. We guzzle wine and speak about the present only, tiptoeing around any mention of a life with George in it, while the diners around us eat their own dinners and drink their own wine, have their own conversations, so that it’s as if we’re all in our own little rooms, even as we sit just inches apart. Once, a man pushes his chair back a little too far and bumps Liza. Sorry, so sorry, he apologizes quickly, yanking his chair back in towards his table without ever turning to look at us. Back at Melissa’s apartment, the three of us sit on the couch with the dogs while Melissa strums her guitar to the Natalie Merchant on the stereo. Liza climbs onto Melissa’s bed beside the window and looks down at the Cumberland Farms.  I love spying on Cumbies, she tells us, and is still awake, watching drivers pull up to the pumps, or run in and out of the store, or smoke cigarettes against the building, when Melissa and I fall asleep on the air mattress beside the couch. We wake the next morning, sunlight in the windows, to the sound of her shower.

             After a breakfast of flaky croissants and tall paper cups of coffee laced with half-and-half from the café down the street, Liza and I hug Melissa, preparing to leave. The dogs mill around Liza’s car, unwilling to jump inside, while their tails swat away flies. Liza finally drives off, Melissa goes inside, and then I drive away, to an apartment that I, too, inhabit alone.

*

            Two years before, I’d found myself in a packed ten-seater van that chattered over the washboard road in Northern Laos, that country pressed between Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, with China to the north. Through the window, I watched the fields that stretched long over the earth, washed golden by the Laos sun, but in my seat I was crushed between two French Canadian women, their necks draped in local, colorful scarves, their eyes concealed by oblong sunglasses. They lifted tiny digital cameras to snap photos of a woman with bales on her back, or a swampy lake scooped into triangular mountains, or gaunt cows in fields. Two pale-eyed Brazilians in the back seat chatted with me after the French Canadians plugged headphones into their ears while the van wound up the frequent hills, jolting through potholes. They were from Rio, the Brazilians told me, where the traffic is so thick that the government distributes coded license plates, so that you must determine by the number issued to you which days of the week you may drive in morning traffic.

            The driver sat hunched behind the wheel, a bottle of water jiggling in the cup-holder beside him, a worn green cap on his head to shade his face from the brilliant sunshine that poured, humid and buzzing, over the road. It’s a teetering route from Luang Prabang, a city dense with monks, to Vang Vieng where, I had heard, the river flows wide, lazy, stunning, and slow.

            The van finally slowed at the crest of a high-up rocky ridge and suddenly we could see for miles: the mountains were at once curved and jagged, the trees steamed in the hot hazy sun, and in the valleys I could see clouds reflected in lakes. The van pulled into a stony lot, where young children immediately surrounded us.  Because the windows were rolled up, sealing the conditioned air in, we couldn’t hear their voices, but we could see their mouths moving, their hands waving or outstretched in cups. The driver swiveled around: Ten minutes, he announced. We pulled the doors open and spilled out, one by awkward one, into the crush of children and heat and the smell of orange peels drying in the sun.

             Pen? The children were crying, their voices high and surprising after the hours in the van’s cool quiet. Pen? Pen? The French Canadians rifled through their hand-woven bags, producing Bic pens that they held out like prizes, letting the spiky-haired children banter and fight for them. The row of outhouses at the edge of the lot contained the squat toilets I had grown used to, slabs of porcelain curving into squarish bowls with wide holes at the bases. I had figured out how not to need toilet paper, had learned what the bucket filled with water and a ladle beside every toilet was for. The outhouse door didn’t close all the way, so I had to hold the handle shut, listening through the holes in the boards for the wind that rolled up over the ridge. When I came back out, the smell of orange peels baking and the murmurs of the pink-cheeked vendors, young women turning corn on grills, swept over me again.

            The jewelry those vendors wore glinted silver and gold in their ears and at their wrists. Some had babies on their backs, wound against their bodies in scarves. Their sarongs fell in clean lines, knotted at their hips, and they tucked their straight hair behind their ears. They are beautiful, I thought, and was suddenly ashamed of my freckles, my height, and the way my boxy skirt hit above my knees. The kids still swarmed, wearing t-shirts too large for their wiry limbs, or else traditional Laos clothing: brilliant sarongs with bands around their waists and headdresses fastened to their hair. They shook bells and posed for the Brazilians, who took turns standing beside them for pictures. Afterwards, the children opened their palms as the Brazilians dug in their bags for tattered notes of kip, then turned and ran to their mothers, shrieking and jumping.

            One little girl, maybe two, maybe younger, came over, close to wear I stood. She wore only a t-shirt and stared at me with big black crusted-over eyes. I felt the simultaneous urges to turn from the flies that swarmed her and clean her dirty eyelids with my shirt, but I did neither, just stood and watched as she squatted and peed on the ground, never taking her eyes from me. My stomach knotted; my throat tightened, but no one noticed or reproached. She finished, stood, and tottered to the line of vendors, but I stood frozen by the outhouses and the puddle on the ground.

*

You know you’re leaving Maine when you stop seeing pines along the roadside and sand blown over the pavement. The road simmers on my drive home from Melissa’s; housing developments appear, marked by rows of identical balconies and parking lots with thick painted lines. And then I am home, using three keys to open three doors, and here is the cat, crying and winding around my legs and begging to be fed.

            Because my Cambridge apartment looks out over a busy street, I have become voyeuristic, the way you might imagine an old, cantankerous woman to be, a woman with too much time on her hands, her curtains faded enough so that she can see through them without anyone ever seeing her. A woman who glares down at the rowdy Spanish kids on the stoop as they toss one boy’s shoe back and forth, or eyes the noisy trucks as they barrel down her street, which years ago was quieter.  I feed the cat and take the seat by the window to look down.

            I can hear the distant pitch of sirens, a sound we’ve grown used to; my cat’s ears no longer twitch when she hears them. And yet, as she jumps to join me on the windowsill, I notice that the sound of the sirens isn’t fading. The noise screams outside and fills my apartment, and then there’s the swirling flash of red lights. A fire truck pulls up and parks and then two ambulances come. Men leap from their vehicles and are running to my building toward the front door right below my window. They pour inside, there’s the thud of the first door and the pound of the second, and I can hear their footsteps, boots striking fast and heavy up the marble stairs.

            I open my front door a crack, lean out, and hear a woman’s cries from upstairs. She’s saying things in a language I can’t understand, but desperation is universal. My heart starts beating faster. Beefy Boston guys in uniforms with shaved heads are jogging past my apartment, towards the crying.

            “Keep this hallway clear,” one of the medics pants as he passes. The woman’s screams pour onto us. A mechanical beeping begins in the apartment above, the sound of hospital machinery hooked up to a person. Just like that, the building goes silent, save for that beeping. Blood roars in my ears. I have no idea what’s happening above me, can only hear the even, rapid tone that pitches through the breathless silence.

*

            When we drove away from that Laos hill station, the vendors waved. The children chased the van. I watched them until we dipped back down into forest, my eyes on those women’s beautiful faces, the barefoot children, the corn still turning.  That smell of the orange peels baking.  I felt guilty, sitting in the air conditioned van, with shoes on my feet and lenses in my eyes to give me perfect vision. After all, the flies buzzing around! Those hardworking women, so young and gorgeous, left nevertheless to vend charred corn and packets of nuts, all the while watching their children who run like they are free but who really have no escape. One day they will be vendors, too.

            But there was something else, something true about that place. On that wind-swept ridge, with jungle all around and below those shimmering lakes, you didn’t hear the shriek of mechanical alarms or sirens; the only clocks were the measured rise and fall of the sun, the stars’ movement across the sky, the cries of the birds, and the cycle of sleeping and waking. I knew that behind every face there are tears, and that those women dressed their children up to beg because they had to.  But as we plunged again into the thick press of trees that darkened the van’s interior, I wondered whether poverty gives you something wealth cannot.

*

            Standing at my door, my eye pressed to the peephole, I listen to the pulse of that machine. The door next to mine opens a crack and then slams shut. I still haven’t met that neighbor. My view is a distorted orb of the hallway and stairs. My cat sits behind me with her ears pricked back. A man comes flying up the stairs, a small Indian man I recognize as the one who drives the red Ford pickup and wears dress shirts untucked. He takes the stairs two at a time, and I feel a spy’s guilt.

            “Can’t go in there, sir,” I can hear the medic tell him. There’s a pause, and then the Indian man says something I can’t discern.

            “You the father?” comes the medic’s loud voice, and then I can hear the woman again, the woman who was crying. Her voice is steady now.

            I hear their door shut, the beeping continues, and I realize I’m holding my breath. The cat weaves between my legs, her tail high, her face tilted up towards me, her pupils fully dilated so her eyes look black. “I don’t know,” I tell her in a whisper. “Nothing’s happening.” And just then the floor above me bursts into noise again, the men talking fast and urgent. I can’t make out their words. I don’t dare open the door. I keep my eye to the peephole.

            It took hours to navigate back down the mountain after we left the hill station. We passed lines of walkers on the winding road who raised their arms as drove by. Once, we passed a wide stream by the side of the road, where children splashed in the water while their mothers washed clothing. They, too, waved, the children shrieking and running behind us. The driver inched the van down the steep, steep road, while motorbikes tore perilously close in the other direction. One helmeted driver carried a girl behind him, who sat side-saddle, her arms around his waist, her crimson skirt flapping. Little trails broke off from the road: herd paths.

            I closed my eyes and dreamed lucid snapshots: an image of boards being carried to a half-finished house; and our own herd path, worn from the road to the front door, before there was a driveway. A kitchen full of people; handmade pottery on the table; and a guitar in my best friends hands, her arms tanned and still unmarked. In my dream, I am still a little girl, and so we haven’t yet felt loneliness, the aching loneliness that comes when you live alone. We don’t understand rules at restaurants, or the way that marriages can split and crumble, or the way it feels to know that someone is dying.  In the dream I could smell flowers and dried orange peels, and then the potholed road woke me and my dream skittered off. The last drop of it, that scent of dried flowers, slid away.

            The road had grown straight, flat, dusty and red. Little shacks and skinny dogs gave way to restaurants with low tin roofs, plastic chairs and white signs with bright block-lettering. A group of boys played soccer in a field, most of them barefoot, all of them sprinting. Elderly men and women sat in plastic chairs beneath the awnings of houses and shops, their skin deeply tanned and cut with wrinkles. Little kids, barefoot and gleeful, darted past cows to jump alongside the van. We looked out the windows and waved and waved; the kids waved back but were eventually lost in the dusty red clouds the van made.

            From the window of the van I saw a dog. For a moment I wondered whether he’d lost his legs, and then I realized, no, they’d been flattened. He pulled himself along by his front legs, his useless back half dragging behind.  I wondered whether anyone else in the van saw. I felt a sick pit twist in my gut but I couldn’t keep my eyes from the dog. I could almost see the wheel marks where the truck ran him over. None of the passerby―the energetic children, the plodding adults, the old folks looking on―noticed the dog. No one tried to lift it from the ground, no one wept, no one ran screaming. No one said a word and neither did I. What was there to say? Look at that terrible thing, for it won’t ever be erased from our minds.

*

            I can hear the medics lumbering down the stairs now. With my eye on the peephole I see first their feet, then their legs in their white cotton scrubs. They pass by me, just one foot from me, the barrier the door and this peephole. Then come men with a stretcher. The figure bundled onto it is tiny, surely a baby or a toddler at most. I look for a face but can’t see one. The peephole makes everything distorted. There are tubes; one man carries a bag on a stand, hooked up to the little body.  The beeping continues. They all pass by, intent on their task, and I watch unnoticed and helpless from behind my closed door. I wonder whether death has passed me by. The front door opens and closes below me, the men are outside now, and I hear a woman’s high keen coming from the rooms above. Death did pass, I suddenly know, certain the screaming above me marks this.

            I go to the window and watch the ambulances pull away, all sirens blaring, the fire truck last. It seems sadly excessive; all those vehicles for one little kid. The cries have turned to sobbing upstairs and I can hear footsteps racing back and forth above my living room ceiling. Then the sirens fade and the street is quiet again. The people on the sidewalks resume their conversations and the postman pulls up to my building and hops out of his truck with the mail.

            Ambulances pass us all the time, their lights signaling that we must make way, and we do, ignoring for a moment the traffic lights and the bad drivers in front of us. The sirens flail past, and we resume our driving, our lives, forget just as quickly as they came that those ambulances hold the most tenuous life, a reality we don’t have to face. Stowed away, concealed in that white and sterile box, we are thus akin to none of it.

            Once, when I worked in a deli in my hometown, I delivered a sandwich to a woman who lived on a crumbling street and sat with no lights on before the TV, too heavy to stand and come to the door to pay me, the smell of stale urine and rotten food permeating her house. Those snippets of people’s whole lives make me feel the way those dog’s legs did, or the girl with the crusted eyes. Every time you see something like that you’re faced with life’s ugliness, people’s pain. But that day in Laos, as we drove on past the dying dog, I thought of a girl who dug words into her arm with a knife because she just wanted someone to notice, wanted to feel something. Liza, with her now-empty house and her great stretching lawn, must go through the motions of living, trying not to notice the maple floorboards in her home because of the memory of his hammer against the nails. She must slink to bed by herself every night and wake there alone every morning, her pain trapped inside.

            I saw the rest station high in the mountains, scented of orange peels, the women chatting with each other, the children running gleefully over the dust. Surely that woman alone in her house, immobile before the TV, feels a misery greater than waking each day to red floors swept with wind. Maybe the Laos people see a dog dragging its flattened hind legs and aren’t sickened, because every day they see suffering. Maybe seeing that strengthens them when they’re feeling sad, heartbroken, or hurt, because they’re sure that they’re never alone.

            Another ambulance pulls up to the curb and this time just two men get out and walk slowly and calmly to the front door of my building. The woman upstairs has stopped her crying but continues to whimper. I hear the men slowly climb the stairs but this time I don’t go to the peephole. Instead, as they enter the apartment above mine and then descend the stairs once more, I think of the crowd on that ridge, and remember the way the wind whipped through our clothing and hair.

            I can see through my window that the medics have carried out full trash bags, which they place in the back of their ambulance. They slam their doors and drive away. The implications of those bags, of what’s inside, of what’s become of the child on the stretcher, of what will become of the woman upstairs who is moaning now, a guttural and terrifying sound; all are far crueler than any suffering laid bare. Here, we live in a world of closed doors, of solitary rooms, of walls guarding our hearts. Here, we’re taught to keep our pain as secret as the contents of an ambulance that you notice and pull aside for, then continue down the busy street to work.