McFadyen-Ketchum, Andrew

English

The Open Repository @Binghamton (The ORB)

SUICIDE WATCH IANDREWMCFADYEN-KETCHUM1.I kicked at pebbles on the shoulder of the highway,tested the wind’s direction with a finger. The windsthat came spoke of hoarfrost and fields, commercerumbling by on 1-40, the streetlamps burningtheir fishhook of light before the red-brick Victorian-its locked double doors, its hundred shuttered eyes.Not a family member, not a lover, no guests welcomepast visiting hours, I watched the night watchman dozein his A-frame of spit cups and Hustlers, I observedthe roosting of birds, the library of stars adrift againstthe trees that lined the county road where I draftedmy path over the high outer wall and through the just-mown grass, the method by which l’d scale the sanitarium,tap a finger on her window, whisper, Mary, let me in.ii.I still don’t know why I've put her in this housefor the somewhat-less-than-sane where they kept hera mere 24 hours, a two-hour’s drive from her bedroomwhere she hid herself the year before she died.McFadyen-Ketchum 361McFadyen-Ketchum: Suicide Watch IPublished by The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB), 2015That December home from college, I’d parkacross the street from her house, warm my handsby the heat of my Sentra’s 4-cylinders and wait to catcha glimpse of Mary in her window. More than a decadeI’ve been writing these verses. Still I have no answer.She spent just a year in college. She climbedthe mountains of Nepal, helped raise schools for the poor.In the one picture l’ve kept, she smiles at the camera.Sometimes a fly lands on the glass of the frame.Sometimes it looks as if she’s blinking.iii.And what would you do differently? she asks, sights trainedthrough the passenger window on that glowing squareof light that could be the window of the imagined sanitarium,could be the window of her bedroom on Willis Ave. She'sblue-eyed here. The breeze is honeysuckle and sex And eventhough she knows [’ve no answers, knows when I say nothingI say everything, she places a finger to my lips to freeze mein that game of What 13 l’ve been playing since collegethen departs to follow that brick path back to herselffrom the mailbox to the stoop, up the sanitarium wallsand through her house’s archway into that whitehospital room while l’m stuck here, eyeing that figurelighting the window. is that a chest x-ray or the moon?is that the girl I once loved, the girl we thought we knew?372Harpur Palate: a Literary Journal, Vol. 15, Iss. 1 [2015], Art. 15https://orb.binghamton.edu/harpurpalate/vol15/iss1/15

Suicide Watch I

https://orb.binghamton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2132&context=harpurpalate

Suicide Watch I

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