When I was ten years old my Dad got a job in an old town just out of Chicago. It felt strange to move from the city into the quiet streets. There weren’t any alley cats anymore, just ladies with blonde hair and Dad’s who mowed their lawns a lot. Mom said it would be good for me; I’d get to go to a really nice school and make friends and even play out on the street. I couldn’t do that in the city, we lived in a High-rise on the top floor. Dad worked a lot. He was a detective in the homicide division. His buddies couldn’t understand why he would give all that up but I think it was because he and Mom fought a lot and she would cry nearly every night. So we moved.
Dad was the local officer in town, Mom worked at the bank and we had a house on the corner. I remember it was this old weatherboard house. Painted white except for the timber frames around the windows and the dark tiled roof. I’d left all my friends in the city so Mom said I could pick whatever room I wanted. At the time I didn’t really realise picking that room would change my life. It was small inside, the roof was slanted and the walls were chipped, even the light flickered if I left it on too long. But the window had a ledge; it extended far enough to the other side, almost adjoining our house with the neighbour’s house. My window looked directly into our neighbour’s window. I remember drawing back the curtains and noticing that they’d left their window open. It had rained earlier that day and they’d left little saucepans out to catch the rain. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t just closed the window, and it wasn’t until years later that I found out why.
I met Mary on that ledge.
She was sixty years old, and she became my best friend.
I didn’t like school so much in the suburbs. The kids hated me from the moment I walked in. They’d taunt me about my Dad being a big city cop. Said he’d been demoted or he was a pussy and couldn’t handle the city anymore. I was pretty sad about it. I was ten; I couldn’t understand why no one wanted to play video games with me. That’s all I’d done with my friends in the city. But all these kids wanted to do was play sports. Not just any sports either, they wanted to play team sports, only problem was that I was never picked for the team; any of the teams. I spent a lot of time in my room, mostly lying around and thinking about how I was going to get back to my old life. I hated it here, I just wanted things to go back to the way they were. I guess my Dad felt pretty bad about it, he would always come into my room and offer to do things with me, said he wasn’t as busy out here as he was in the city and it meant we could spend more time together. I wasn’t really interested in that though. After the sixth week of my Dad trying to coax me out onto the front lawn to play Frisbee I think he gave up, because he told me that he was tired of trying and left the Frisbee in my room. I was a stubborn little shit, I think it just took him years to realise I got that stubbornness from him.
It had been a Saturday afternoon, and my friends from the city weren’t online to play video games, so I was bored. I started throwing the Frisbee around in my room. I laughed as it bounced off the walls and flew back towards my face and I had to duck out of its way. I got a little excited with one of my throws and it ricocheted off my lampshade and out my open window. I wanted my Frisbee back and I didn’t want to tell my Mom I’d been playing with it in the house, so I crawled out onto the ledge. It was my first time, of many more times.
The window to the neighbour’s house was open again. I had gotten a good look inside from time to time over the last few weeks. It was some kind of library or study room. It had a giant bookcase that took up most of the back wall and it was full of books. There were two armchairs, a lamp, a weird patterned rug and a desk in the corner. There was also an ancient looking mirror and some weird objects on the shelves. I think a lady lived there. I had seen her once or twice in the garden, but she looked pretty ancient herself and I highly doubt she had any grandchildren I could play with. She seemed pretty alone. I remember the sun that afternoon; it had been in my eyes as I’d reached for the Frisbee.
“What are you doing?” I’d heard and I’d nearly toppled forwards.
“Getting my Frisbee,” I replied, “What’s it to you?”
“Because I’m enjoying the sun and this knucklehead is blocking it out,”
“I’m no knucklehead lady,” I grinned because I could see that it was my neighbour, she must have dozed off in the armchair, “I’m a pirate,” I added.
“
Pirates are meant for the sea, not for dangerous and peculiar ledges, you need to get down,” she responded.
“Says who, you’re not the boss of me?”
“Well I’m sure your Mom and Dad won’t be very pleased you were swashbuckling your way up there to an untimely death,”
“I’m invincible,” I said, and I had pretended to walk a tightrope, which as it so happened, was actually the very edge of the two ledges. I was a skinny kid, one wrong step and I would have slipped right through and probably broken all my bones.
My neighbour obviously knew this, because she had risen from her slumber and was at the window, peering up at me, “What’s your name, young man?”
“Jimmy,” I replied, still trying to show off, by balancing on the two edges.
“What’s your name?” I asked back.
“I’m Mary,” she replied, “like Marry but with one R”
“You want to see me cartwheel Mary?” I grinned.
“No, I most definitely do not,” she cried, “You need to get down,”
I, of course, did not do as I was told and when trying to step into the position of a cartwheel, I did slip. I came down hard, but as it seemed Mary really wasn’t a frail old lady, she caught me, clean and square. She almost jumped right out of her open window and scooped me upwards.
I was breathless for a while after that, mostly out of shock, but I remember asking her not to tell my parents. Mary instead had reached out and retrieved my Frisbee from the ledge and made me sit down.
“Do you want tea Jimmy?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, “I’ve never had tea before,”
Mary had looked at me that day, with a glint in her eye and a small smile, and from that moment, tea with Mary on Saturdays, even as my life became busier and busier, was something I never missed, not once, from that day forward.
Things got a little easier for me eventually. The kids at school weren’t so mean after I told them I had ancient witch who could create any potion from raindrops using her magical saucepans as my best friend. Of course, Mary wasn’t really a witch, but she was magical. I showed her all kinds of things in that first year. I showed her my comic book collection and explained how Spiderman was the king of the universe. On nice nights I would sit out on the ledge and read the comics to her and explain what was going on in the pictures, until the sun was setting and Mom was calling for me to brush my teeth. Mary said it was important to look after my teeth and every time I protested she would take her fake ones out and I was so grossed out by it I would brush for extra long.
A year suddenly turned into another year, and another year after that, and I was growing up and she was a little worried I was getting so big and muscly that the ledge wouldn’t be able to hold my weight. I told her I could be the size of an elephant and I would still come out to meet her, the ledge was my favourite place in the whole world. One day I asked her if she could help me write a poem and even though I tried to convince her it was for homework, I knew, she knew that I was trying to give it to someone. I can’t even really remember who I wrote that poem for, all I remember is during writing it, Mary told me the story of how she met her husband. It was during the war. She told me about all the protests and the marches she had been in and how she had met him in the middle of a shootout. She told me after he died, it was almost like a piece of her had gone too, because from the moment she met him, he had always carried her with him and when he left, she left with him too. Mary told me to never settle for anyone that couldn’t carry my heart across oceans.
I was fifteen when I broke into Dad’s liquor cabinet to get back at him for not turning up to my chess final. I got so drunk I barely made it back up the stairs to my room. I woke Mary up at 2am in the morning, crying because I didn’t think my Dad loved me enough. I wasn’t strong or built like some of the other neighbour hood boys my age and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t good enough. She was seventy-five years old and yet she stayed up until 5am convincing me that I was good enough. Sometimes the weather was real bad. It would rain and in winter it would snow, and I was almost always late home from school because of chess practise, so the ledge was really the only place I got to spend time with Mary. Bad weather always meant we had to spend time differently. I tried to teach her how to use a smartphone so we could text but she never really got the hang of it. Instead we’d tape giant notes on the windows or draw silly pictures and try to understand what the other was saying. I made sure mine were extra big so she didn’t have to admit her eyesight was getting worse as the years went on. Even so she always kept one side of the window open to catch the rainwater. It wasn’t until I was eighteen that Mary told me why she did that. I was leaving for college and it was the same day I had my first cigar. She told me she had been saving her husbands old ones from the war, but it was a special occasion because her boy was now a man and she even cracked open her bottle of whiskey. Mary told me as a girl she used to live by the sea, and her father had told her that rain comes from the sea. When they moved away and into the suburbs, he told her she could always find the sea in the rain. She couldn’t move around a lot, her hips were real bad and she needed a walking stick most days, so whenever it rained she would catch it in the saucepans and the sea would be right on her windowsill.
I went away to college then. I studied business and economics and in my spare time I liked poetry. I came back every break, and I spent every day on the ledge. Every time I came back, it was like Mary had aged another ten years. I’ll never forget the day I brought someone home. I’d never brought anyone else to that ledge; no one had ever been good enough to introduce to Mary, not even my own parents. But I introduced Adam. She studied him for quite a while, he was already nervous enough sitting high up on a roof ledge, let alone having an old wiry haired women scrutinise him from behind big rimmed glasses.
“I like him, Jimmy,” she announced, before peering at him again, “But only just,”
Mary never judged me for my choices in my life. In fact she had always stood as one of my biggest supporters. It was hard for my Dad to come to terms with the fact I was gay, but having Mary on my side felt like I was still that invincible kid showing off on the ledge again. She would catch me if I fell, and I would do that same for her, I didn’t know anything else.
The day I came to the ledge calling her name but she didn’t respond, hit home for me. I called and I called and I still got no response. It wasn’t until I crawled right to the edge and stepped inside her window that I saw her lying on the floor. She’d cut her head open and she wasn’t moving. I don’t think I’ve ever felt panic like that before. My best friend, my Mary, lying there motionless, I tried desperately to find the spark in her eye but they were closed. I held her hand all the way in the ambulance and stayed for the three days it took for her to open them again. The doctors said she’d had a stroke; she was never really the same after that. Even so, my Mary was still in there somewhere, I’d bring her back, and I didn’t care how long that took. I was stubborn, I had always been stubborn, and I’d forgotten that people get old and that these things happen. I didn’t want to admit that this was happening to her, that her body was getting older. Mary came back every now and then; in fact the longest time she ever came back was right around the time Adam and I got married. She told me it was one of the happiest days of her life and I told her that having her there made it one of the happiest of mine.
She went into an aged care facility not long after that. I tried to make her as comfortable as possible in the ways that I knew. I brought her my old comics, I read to her, I put her saucepans on the window and let the rain catch even though the nurses would get mad at me. Until one day I got a call, it was the kind of call that I needed to leave work for, the kind of call that I needed my husband to leave work for as well and meet me at the hospital.
"Jimmy,” Mary said as I entered the room, “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,”
“Nobody calls me Jimmy anymore, Mary,” I grinned.
“I’m not nobody,” she laughed, and her breath was raspy and she coughed for a while after.
I kissed her forehead, “How you doing?”
“Bells and whistles,” she grinned, “Did you bring me what I asked for?”
“Of course,” I dug into my pockets and retrieved a small bottle of whiskey, “You sure you can have this?”
“I can have whatever I want,” she smiled, “Don’t you forget it,”
She barely even took a sip, her arms wouldn’t work and she couldn’t lift the tiny bottle so I had to help her. It made her cough even harder.
The tears came then, I almost started sobbing next to her, “What am I supposed to do without my best friend?” I asked.
“I’m not sure!” she replied and she looked back at me with the glint in her eyes she’d had all these years, “Considering you won’t ever really be without me,”
“I do,” she said, “But I know that you carry the ones you love, wherever you go, just like the rain carries the sea,”
I’d never thought about saying goodbye. She had been there nearly my whole life and I couldn’t picture it without her.
“You think of me when it rains Jimmy,” she murmured, “I’ll be waiting in the rain for you,”
“You’re my best friend,” I said softly, and I took her hand, “You’ll always be my best friend,”
“And you’ll always be mine Jimmy, captain of the ledge, the finest ship in all the lands!” she smiled.
We laughed a moment, before silence enveloped us and we sat for a really long time after that, and then it was just me sitting, Mary went to join the rain.
My husband was waiting for me in the corridors, he stood up when he saw me, “You okay?”
“Not really,” I replied, closing my eyes as he kissed me and I took his scent in, something familiar and comforting, “But I will be,”
“I love you,” he whispered.
“Who’s this!” a nurse asked crouching down in front of the chairs to where our daughter sat, transfixed in the book she had been reading all week.
I smiled at my husband and then looked to our daughter.
“I’m Mary,” she smiled and held out her hand, “like marry but with one R,”
- Thanks to the person who looked at this picture and came up with such a great idea! I felt really compelled to hash out a bit of a story! Courtney x
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