By Elissa Greenwald

Eight years after Jeanette Gustavson left her native Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, she returned to the familiar streets lined with three story brick buildings. Jeanette had planned never to return. Yet here she was, outside the second-floor clinic on North Seventh Street on a windy winter evening, hand shaking as she vaped. She stood under the streetlamp on the deserted street, waiting in the midst of a pandemic for her appointment with a drug rehabilitation counselor.  

From where she stood, she could see the old courthouse on the town’s central square, illuminated by spotlights. The house where she grew up was only ten minutes’ walk away.  

Her high school boyfriend, Tommy, was letting her crash in his basement apartment on the town’s lower edge, near the dam that choked McMichael Creek. He was stuck indefinitely in Colorado, where he had gone to work on a construction project when all travel stopped. 

 “You’ll look after the place for me, won’t you, Jeanie?” His husky voice reminded her of the smoky bars where they used to hang out. “It’s kind of you, Tommy,” she breathed at last, overwhelmed by his gesture. If it weren’t for him, she would be homeless in the city where she was born, where her family had lived for five generations.

Tommy’s apartment was on the outskirts of the historic downtown. In that southern end of the city, a transient population flocked to wooden structures with cheap rent. Every window in the apartment was covered with black paper. Green light from two lava lamps cast ghoulish patterns on the paper. Jeanette dispelled the smell of mold, accumulated after a flood two years earlier, by burning lavender incense. She had learned to dispel other smells that way–vomit, rotting food. She shook off memories of that time a year ago.

She slept for most of every day, emerging only in the evening. That way, she wouldn’t encounter many people she knew.

People still recognized her from the Café Duet where she used to work, called her the smartest girl in her high school class, wondered aloud why she was back. There were people whose cappuccino orders she remembered but whose names she had forgotten. She took to crossing the street when she spotted someone she knew, raising the hood of her sweatshirt to hide her blond hair.

She felt in her pocket for the dark blue geode she had appropriated from Tommy’s apartment. The theft seemed justified. After all, she was the one who gave him the good luck charm, one of the first things she had bought with her own money on a family trip to Wyoming. She presented Tommy with the mysterious blue stone when she left for college. He was stuck in Stroudsburg; she figured he needed it more than she did.  

Now she wrapped her freezing fingers around it as if for warmth. She sought its magic more than ever to help her get through drug rehab, then out of Stroudsburg forever.  

A car drove by, screeched to a halt, then wheeled in the opposite direction, flashing red and blue lights which reflected on the brick walls of the downtown buildings. She withdrew into the clinic’s doorway, putting up her hood. After she was arrested for possession, she had vowed never to repeat that experience. Though she had been clean for eight months, she could still feel the cold clasp of metal around her wrists.  She chafed her cold wrists, remembering.

* * *

The car’s flashing lights reminded her of the disco lights inside the low-ceilinged club where she first met Mark. Alone on a Saturday night in New York City, six months after moving there, she was voracious for company, any company.

Her fantasy of a glamorous life in New York had given way to an apartment tinier than any space she could imagine living in and a banking job which, though well-paid, consumed her waking hours.  

“I shouldn’t be here,” she confided in Mark, the bartender, as she nursed a Cosmo. Its neon pink echoed the color of the disco lights.  

“Bit retro,” he said, gesturing towards the Cosmo. He tilted his head to peruse her. “You look a little like Carrie Bradshaw.”

 “I’m no Carrie Bradshaw, believe me. I’ve got a big work project due Monday.”  

“Working girl, eh?” He had curly dark hair and a charming grin, though it was hard to make out his features in the flashing light. He disappeared before she could think of a retort.

By 3 AM, the bar was nearly empty. The disco ball stopped turning. Fluorescent lights flickered on, bleaching the room to a ghastly pallor. She saw Mark watching her as he dried and stored glasses. He reached under the bar and handed her a small plastic packet. 

 “Here. This will help with your deadline. Don’t take them with liquor.”  

She quickly secreted the packet in her handbag. When she looked up to thank him, he was wiping the other end of the bar.

The two tablets worked like a charm. She finished her work project on a surge of energy, though she couldn’t sleep for three days afterwards. On the third day, more tired than she had ever been, she returned to the bar. Mark was nowhere to be seen. The bartender on duty told her Mark only worked Saturdays.

When she returned the next Saturday and made her request, Mark inclined his head without a trace of his former grin.  

“That’s a C-note.”  

She flinched.

“You said you work for First Bank, right? Shouldn’t be a problem for a hot-shot MBA like you.” She cringed, but he was right: she had the cash.

* * *

Six months later, she tried to keep up with her job while driving two hours to Stroudsburg every weekend to care for her ailing father. Bennies seemed a rational solution to the problem of insufficient time. They circulated easily among the first-year bankers. 

The demands of caregiving and work were more than she could handle. When she asked her older brother Brian to help her with their father, Brian told her he was moving to California to work in the music industry. 

 “Gotta follow my dream,” he said the day he left, avoiding her eyes. “Sorry to leave you with–all this.” He looked around the living room of the dark Victorian house where they had grown up.  She knew it had been a strain for her brother to stay there with their parents, unable to leave because he didn’t earn enough playing guitar at local bars to live on his own.

“You’ll be OK, Jeanie. You’re good with Mom and Dad–better than me.” He looked at her with liquid brown eyes.  

“Sure.” She could never say no to him. 

“Thanks. I know you’ll handle it. You’re always on top of things. The old man respects you.  Me, not so much.” Brian lit a cigarette. He had battled with their father for a decade about his decision to pursue music and, before that, his marijuana smoking. He tried to help their mother care for their father, weakened by a heart ailment, but as their mother pointed out with a twisted smile, “His heart wasn’t in it.”  

Brian grinned while he described the places he planned to visit on his cross-country drive. 

 “I might drop in on Tommy in Colorado. He still holds a torch for you, Jeanie.”  

Jeanette found it hard to listen to her brother while she contemplated caring for their father single handedly. Her mother had abandoned the task, worn out after two years.

It was difficult for Brian and Jeanette to think of their father as needing care. Judge Gustavson had been a prominent figure in Stroudsburg for decades. He greeted everyone he passed on his daily ten-block walk to the courthouse. When Jeanette was growing up, he dispensed judgments at home as if he were still on the bench. She sought his approval by becoming the perfect student. Brian did the opposite, but Judge Gustavson indulged his son until the day he smelled marijuana on his clothes. Then the judge took to lecturing his son about the embarrassment it would bring him as a public figure, the very embodiment of the law, if Brian got caught smoking the illegal substance. 

The lesson Brian took away was to smoke marijuana only outside the house and change his shirt when he got home. His refusal to stop smoking the drug drove a permanent wedge between him and his father.

Now heart failure stooped their father’s tall figure, grayed his cheeks. It was hard for him to ask for his daughter’s help. Once he began, though, he never stopped. 

For an excruciating month, the judge gasped for every breath. Jeanette drove two hours from Stroudsburg to New York for work every day, returning to Stroudsburg every evening to tend to him as best she could, changing the cannula on his oxygen tank and cooking him salt-free meals.  She couldn’t tell if the medications he took were helping or not.  

Jeanette didn’t hear from her brother for months. She took her three allotted personal days off from work to stay with her father in late June. By then, he no longer left his bed. She tried to turn him over without injuring his fragile body and mostly succeeded, though once he cried out in pain during the procedure. She stayed in Stroudsburg another week without leave from First Bank, unable to summon the energy to call her workplace to explain.

At the end, it was just her and him.  

“I can’t take it any more. Wake me when it’s over,” said her mother, retreating to her bedroom after bidding her husband a tearful good-bye at 7 PM on a Friday.

All night, Jeanette alternately sang to her father and watched over him while he slept. His breath grew more and more labored. At 2 AM, exhaustion overtook her. When morning light awakened her, she asked him how he was before opening her eyes. When she opened hers, she realized his would never open again.

* * *

After her father’s death, her life fell apart. She was fired from her job at the bank for taking too much time off. Within two months, her mother sold the house where Jeanette grew up, the house that had been in her father’s family for four generations, and moved to Florida. When Jeanette asked about two vases her grandparents had left for her in the house which once was theirs, her mother said, “I had the junk dealers haul everything away. I saved the mittens grandma knitted you. I’ll put them in the mail when I find them. First I need to settle in here. My condo is brand new.  You’ll have to come visit!  The weather’s beautiful! I couldn’t stand another Stroudsburg winter, another day in that rickety old house. How’s New York?”

Jeanette returned to her apartment in New York City. When the package with the pink mittens arrived without a note, she threw away the wrapping bearing the return address. Her efforts to get a new job went nowhere, for there was a whisper network among bank hiring programs.

She sold her business suits and cashmere coat to thrift stores, trading her fancy work clothes for hoodies and jeans. She was running out of money for rent. Her main budget item, ahead of food, was drugs. She had given up the rush of energy that benzedrine gave her for the sweet oblivion of heroin, which was cheaper. Sometimes she longed to join her father. The waking sleep of heroin felt like the next best thing to dying.

One day, her oldest friend from high school showed up at her doorstep with a fruit basket.  “I saw your dad’s obituary in the Pocono Record,” Debbie said, bustling in and placing the basket carefully on a kitchen counter piled high with dirty dishes. “Been trying to reach you for a month. Why don’t you answer your phone?” 

Jeanette was mute. “How’s the baby?” she asked eventually. She recalled that Debbie had given birth a year ago, but she had never even seen a picture of the baby, since she had let her friendships slide while balancing work and caregiving. She found Debbie’s husband, a tall, saturnine entertainment lawyer, hard to talk to, though Debbie assured her that he was more fun than he seemed.

“Oh, Jeanie, she’s amazing. She’s walking now. She babbles in her own language . . .  like she just arrived from another planet. Wait, I’ll show you her first steps . . . .”  

Debbie scrolled through pictures on her phone. After looking around for a place to sit and not finding one, she put the phone back in her pocket.  

She cleared dishes with food on them from the side of Jeanie’s unmade bed, put them in the sink, and found soap under the sink to wash them. As she stood at the sink drying dishes, she looked back at Jeanie where she sat on the bed, hair falling over her eyes. 

Debbie dried her hands and sat down on the bed next to Jeanie.  

“Jeanie, I’m your friend so I need to say something to you. Look at me, please.”  

Jeanie parted her unwashed hair with her fingers. 

“It takes one to know one. Remember I told you Grant wouldn’t marry me unless I kicked cocaine?”

Jeanie nodded.

“He’d seen too many Hollywood stars crash and burn from cocaine.  I cut my hours at the law firm when the baby was born. That helped me stay clean. But no one can recover without help.”

She took Jeanie’s hands in hers. “I know what you did for your father. Would he want to see you like this?”

Jeanie shook her head.

 “If you don’t get straight, you won’t survive.”  

A week later, Debbie drove Jeanette, carrying only a small suitcase, to Sunny Acres Rehabilitation Center in the tiny town of Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. In six months there, Jeanette had ample time to reflect on the irony that, after all her travel and education, she had landed just five miles from where she started out.

* * *

Snow slid from the sky in Stroudsburg already gray, stained by soot on the ancient brick houses. When the alarm woke Kelly Brainerd in the dark one freezing February morning, she shivered in the uneven heat of her small house, cursing the weather, the house, and Carl. She even cursed the soldiers for whom the street, Patriots Lane, was named. No wonder they nearly deserted George Washington at Valley Forge. With all the snow, she was tempted to give up too. She hadn’t realized when she rented the house on the mountain that each hundred feet higher up meant another inch of snow. She came to despise snow–its weight, its wetness.

It had snowed like this when Carl moved out without notice, taking most of their furniture, on a weekend when she was visiting her parents in New Jersey. She had to abandon their new duplex in Stroudsburg and move up the mountain to Mount Pocono, where she found a cheap rental, a two-bedroom bungalow. That turned out to be a lucky move. Soon afterwards, the county cut her hours as a drug rehabilitation counselor to part-time, which meant she lost  her health benefits.

In the small house, silence became her constant companion. It wasn’t Carl she missed so much as the sound of someone else’s breath, the feel of a hairy chest against her back while she slept, the weight of an arm reaching for her in the middle of the night.  

She dressed in the dark, shivering.

She hadn’t felt so heavy since the brief time–just two months–when she was pregnant.  She knew something had changed in the first week, even before she missed her period. At 43, she thought she was entering menopause. When they married a year earlier, Carl, five years younger, told her how sad he felt at losing the chance to have children. His disappointed desire shadowed their marriage until she told him she was pregnant. Then he grew ecstatic, regaling her with plans to decorate their second bedroom as a nursery.  

A month later, the doctor could not detect a heartbeat and told Kelly she would probably miscarry in a week. The doctor, a young woman who had seemed as excited as Kelly about this late-life pregnancy, advised her to have a D & C in a hospital as soon as possible. Kelly waited a few days, during which she heard friends’ gruesome stories of bloody, painful miscarriages, including one that happened in a car, flooding floor mats with blood.

When the pain started, she couldn’t put off the procedure any longer. Her drug rehab patients and the anti-abortion demonstrators outside Lehigh Valley Hospital didn’t need to know her business. So her doctor made arrangements for her to have it done in a hospital across the border in New Jersey.  

The operation was painless. A nurse insisted Kelly sit in a wheelchair while she took her outside to where Carl was waiting. He sobbed as he drove home.  

“We could have had a child, Kelly. That was our child.”

Kelly felt a stab of pain between her legs and crossed them tightly.

That evening, she was preparing dinner when her legs wobbled. She steadied herself against the counter. When she lit the stove, she realized that the heat that had warmed her from within for the last month had dissipated, as if the pilot light within her had gone out.

Carl sat at the kitchen table watching her. 

“The other young women coming out in wheelchairs held babies,” he said. When she turned around and saw him wiping his eyes, she resisted the urge to throw the pot of soup she was heating at his head.  

After a few weeks, the hormonal storm of pregnancy cooled and calcified into sadness.  That was a year ago.

Loss. How strange that the same word applied to the death of someone you loved and the misplacement of eyeglasses. In a miscarriage, a woman “lost” a child, but how could she lose what she never had? She hadn’t even had enough time to envision the pregnancy as a child. No one talked to her about it. Few knew she had been pregnant.  

Loss was something her patients–she forced herself to think of them as “clients”–knew about. Many had lost parents young and so lost their childhoods. Some had lost brothers or sisters to drugs or to suicide. Loss bred loss: the clients lost jobs, houses, and, most heartbreaking, custody of children. Kelly became an unrelenting advocate for her patients, trying to restore lost children to their parents.

A yowl interrupted her thoughts. She left a saucer of milk outside and watched one of the feral cats that prowled her yard approach, stepping tentatively with white paws on the snow-covered ground like an aristocratic lady holding up her skirts to walk in high heels. She slammed the screen door so the cat wouldn’t get inside the house.  

* * *

She buttoned up a blue blouse and slipped her arms into the sleeves of the brown tweed, professional-looking jacket, though yellow snow boots spoiled the effect.  She fastened around her neck the turquoise and silver pendant Carl had bought her on their honeymoon in Yosemite.

As she eased the car down the icy driveway, pink streaks pierced the gray sky. She thought about one of her clients, Jeanette. The young woman had shown up for the first time three weeks ago. In group therapy, she would sit, brown hoodie hiding her face, playing with the tassels on her pink mittens like a child. She always wore pink sneakers. She must not be from around here; no one in her right mind would wear pink sneakers through a wet Stroudsburg winter.

Kelly paused at a stoplight in slow-moving morning traffic. A slight young woman was walking down the snow-covered sidewalk. Her blond head stood out against the gray snow.  Who walked through a snowstorm with her head uncovered? Then she saw the pink mittens.

She lowered the window.  

“Jeanette!” she called, but the line of cars started moving just as the girl turned her head.  There were rules against that kind of thing anyway, Kelly reminded herself as she drove on: no mingling with clients outside the office. She pulled her car into the ice-covered parking space next to the building on North Seventh Street, dumped her keys in her bag, and gingerly stepped onto the ice.

She walked down a flight of stairs, along a corridor with a linoleum floor, to the big room where group therapy sessions were held. The room spoke of neglect, from its battered filing cabinets to the stained folding chairs to the ancient computer on one desk and the broken one under an aluminum table on which a dingy stuffed snowman perched.

The people who filed in and sat in a circle in the chairs also emanated an air of neglect. Most had unwashed hair, bad teeth, torn and dirty clothes. It was important to watch these markers of self-respect. If therapy worked, one of the first signs of recovery was that a client would clean herself up as she tried to get clean of drugs. 

Jeanette was the last to enter, shaking snow from her hair. 

“Let’s begin, shall we? There’s hot coffee in the kitchen for anyone who doesn’t have it yet.” Kelly looked at Jeanette, who stared at her damp sneakers, now more gray than pink.  

She wished Jeanette would participate. When all the dozen people in the circle gave themselves to the process, group therapy could be magical. If the dynamic of the group was right and Kelly was attentive enough, she could save lives in this room.  

Drowning people, she had heard, sometimes brought would-be rescuers down with them.  In this room, though, the drowning struggled to keep each other’s heads above water. Patients with no idea how to look after themselves listened alertly to other people’s problems. It seemed easier to help others than to help themselves. They didn’t hesitate to call out someone else’s lies.  With Kelly’s and each other’s aid, they learned to distinguish the lies they had been told and the lies they told themselves from that rare commodity: the truth.  

This was the part of her job she loved. If she could separate these people from the illusions they clung to, illusions that surfaced like bits of wood bobbing on a sea of difficulties, they could swim for themselves. It was terrifying to let go of addiction’s gauzy dreams and scrape the hard rocks of reality and sobriety.

“Embracing the truth means laying ghosts to rest,” she told the group, warming to her subject. The steam from hot coffee stopped rising from the styrofoam cups her listeners stared into. She was glad they could meet in person again.  Meeting over Zoom for a year had set many of them back. She looked around the circle and called on Zeke, one of her old reliables who could always be counted on to participate. He had finished his coffee and was staring at her.  

“Zeke, how are you today?” 

 Zeke would pace down the street scowling but he bloomed like a flower at the slightest attention. “I’m great, Kelly,” he said, gazing around the circle. He took out a packet of cigarettes and shook the last one out of it. “This is my last pack. Haven’t had any cancer sticks for two weeks!”  

“Hooray, Zeke!” Kelly said. 

“Go, Zeke!” several people responded.

“I  saved the last one to stab in the eye of the haters who said I’d die an early death.”  He raked his fingers through his salt and pepper beard, went over to the trash can, and tore the cigarette in two.

“Easy for you,” someone said.

“What’s that?” Zeke replied.

“Who’s ever helped me?” a gray-haired woman said.

“You are . . .” Kelly said.

“Doris! I’m Doris! Can’t you remember my name?” 

“Sorry . . . .”

“I don’t smoke in here because it’s against the rules.  But I’ll damned sure do what I like outside of here.”

Zeke crossed his arms and cleared his throat.  “But . . . .”

“You don’t know anything about me or why I’m here. Did you have a mother who died of the drink? Did you have a stepfather who raped you? I should have killed the bastard when I was old enough to hurt him.”

Doris started to cry, rocking back and forth as she hugged herself. Zeke stood up, then looked at Kelly, who nodded. He walked over to Doris and stretched out his arms. 

“May I?” She nodded, and Zeke hugged her as she sobbed. Everyone else looked away.

Zeke returned to his seat and silence fell.

“I understand that many of you would like to hurt those who hurt you,” Kelly said. “It’s not right to treat other people as if they don’t matter.” She thought of how Carl stopped smoking when she told him she was pregnant. But he was smoking when he came to pick her up after the D and C.

A collective sigh escaped the room. 

“But using drugs only hurts yourself. It keeps you powerless.” Zeke nodded and Doris looked up.

“Many of you may have experienced abuse in the past–verbal, physical, sexual,” Kelly continued softly. Several young people scrunched down in their seats while several older people looked away. Jeanette turned towards the back door as if preparing to run out of the room. But the grayish-pink sneakers stayed flat on the floor.

“You may wish to share your experience with the group, just with me, or not at all.  Whatever your experience has been, you are not alone.”

Kelly looked around the circle expectantly, waiting for someone else to share. The silence seemed endless. She fingered her necklace and waited. Revelations often came after a long silence.

A string of curses erupted from the right side of the room, where another recent patient, Gabriel, sat. He was dressed in a green army jacket. Golden curls streamed over the collar. His styrofoam coffee cup lay turned over at his feet. Coffee seeped a brown stream over the tan, green, and orange rug, purchased because it didn’t show stains.

While Kelly searched for something to say, he stared at her. What was that look? Guilt? Reproach? Despair? His eyes were the hard blue of turquoise. Amethyst circles showed darkly on the skin around them.

By the time she unlocked her gaze from his, someone had fetched paper towels from the adjacent kitchen and was blotting up the coffee. It was Jeanette. Her blond hair blended with Gabriel’s as she bent over him, saying something Kelly couldn’t catch. Only then did Gabriel stop staring at Kelly and turn to Jeanette, who whispered something in his ear. He buried his head in his hands.

They went around the circle to discuss weekly triumphs.  Some of the participants found triumph in a successful supermarket visit, others in avoiding a favorite bar.  Jeanette and Gabriel, when their turns came, shook their heads.

As streaks of sun warmed the basement room, Kelly’s watch alarm sounded. “I’m sorry, I have to bring this session to an end.” She did not conclude with her usual “We’ve made good progress today.” 

She said good-bye to everyone as they filed out the back door, watching them navigate deep puddles between the heaps of dark-stained snow. 

She returned to the kitchen to unplug the coffee pot. In the therapy room, Jeanette and Gabriel sat next to each other, whispering.  

“Time to go!” Kelly said brightly as she turned off the lights. In near-darkness, she saw Jeanette put her arm around Gabriel’s shoulders. “Have a good day!” Kelly exhorted as they squeezed past her down the narrow hallway. Jeanette flashed a thin-lipped smile, hand on Gabriel’s back.

---

After teaching English for thirty years, Elissa Greenwald received her MFA in 2024 at 70; this is her first long work of fiction to be published. Her first chapbook of poetry, The Church of This World, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2027. She is completing a novel, The Blessed House, a family saga set on Cape Cod.