By Elissa Greenwald

Jeanette hadn’t been to group therapy for four months, Kelly realized when she did her quarterly review of patients’ records. The young woman was so quiet in their sessions that Kelly hadn’t realized how many Jeanette missed. Kelly had worried about her ever since Jeanette called to tell her she was in the hospital with a rattlesnake bite. She felt guilty since, against regulations, she had driven Jeanette to the trailhead. She offered to visit her in the hospital but Jeanette said no.  

The rattlesnake bite had set Jeanette back, causing her to lose her job as a cashier at the Dollar Store. She was overqualified for such a job in any case. So Kelly had found her a job with a lawyer, but Jeanette lost that job too. Jeanette, with her MBA, could go after a better job–maybe at East Stroudsburg State University or at the hospital. 

Kelly emailed the social worker assigned to Jeanette’s case asking her to visit Jeanette’s home; only social workers could make home visits. A week later, the social worker reported that Jeanette was no longer at the address she had originally given, nor was anyone else. None of the neighbors knew where she had gone; several were unaware she had ever lived there.

In October, Jeanette reappeared in group therapy as mysteriously as she had vanished, uncommunicative as ever. At least she was there. Other patients, like Gabriel, just disappeared.

* * *

After Kelly and Reenie hiked up Mt. Minsi in May, they resolved to make their hikes a regular event on the first Saturday of every month. Kelly was cheered by Reenie’s bubbly presence.

One warm day in early November, they walked up the fire road to the top of Mt. Minsi. Kelly enjoyed following her own advice to her patients to go out into Nature, which spread luxuriantly around Stroudsburg in the mountains, forests, and the wide, sluggish Delaware River flowing through the Delaware Water Gap, the canyon the river had cut thousands of years before.

She and Reenie panted slightly when they reached the top of the mountain after a two-hour climb. The view was endless, of mountains painted in rich reds and oranges. They sat on the flat rocks at the top, gazing across the river at the slanting rock face of Mt. Tammany. Kelly saw Reenie glance behind her and turned around to see what she was looking at.

Perched on a rock above them appeared the pale face and green-clad shoulders of Gabriel. In bright sunlight, his purple eyelids made him look like a vampire. He stared at Kelly.

She turned away, alarmed. Where had he come from? Was he following her? Patients had been known to do that, which was why counselors kept their phone numbers private. She felt vulnerable on the narrow mountaintop, looking down into infinite space.

When she looked again, he was gone. “That was Gabriel. My . . . client,” she said to Reenie. She asked Reenie if she had seen him leave, but Reenie shook her head.

 “I was taking in the view. Should we call the police?”

“Oh, no.  I . . . I’m sure he was just enjoying the view, like us.” Kelly’s hand shook as she grasped the rock on which they perched.

There was another way to the top, a rocky section of the Appalachian Trail which clung to the mountainside above the abyss of the Gap. Staring down at the precipitous path, Kelly stopped worrying about herself and began to worry about her former client. 

What would become of Gabriel, she wondered, as she and Reenie started down the fire road. He looked even thinner and paler. She had never seen him outdoors; she hadn’t seen him at all for six months. 

“I wonder where he went.”

“Maybe he forgot his trumpet.” Reenie grinned.

When Kelly looked at her blankly, she continued, “Like Gabriel in the Bible. In pictures, he always has blond curls and carries a golden trumpet.”

Kelly remembered the image of an angel in the red and blue stained glass window of the Presbyterian Church in Stroudsburg, the old stone building where she and Carl attended services when they were first married. “He was the one who announced her pregnancy to Mary. You remember.”

Kelly nodded. Irritation overwhelmed her as Reenie related another story about the angel Gabriel announcing a pregnancy to a woman who thought she was infertile, the mother of John the Baptist. Kelly had never disclosed her miscarriage to Reenie but was still offended.  How insensitive some people could be.

She remembered why she stopped confiding in Reenie. When they worked together, Reenie related everything to religion. “It’s God’s will,” she said of two clients who died of overdoses shortly after Kelly started working at the clinic. “Did you pray over it?” she asked Kelly when she saw her one day in tears exiting their supervisor’s office. Kelly wasn’t sure what Reenie was referring to; she had just informed Sue Ellen that she would have to miss two days to have a D and C for a miscarriage. The tissues Sue Ellen offered were more helpful than Reenie’s words. Not knowing how Reenie would react, since the procedure for a miscarriage was identical to that for an abortion, Kelly never confided in Reenie about her miscarriage.  

Many people considered addicts criminals, evil. In Reenie’s view, they were in need of salvation.  

Salvation wasn’t something Kelly believed in or had ever witnessed. No sudden annunciation would change an addict, only the hard work necessary to tread the path of sobriety. It was a lonely path that required communal support. She often asked recovered addicts to talk to her groups to show that a sober life was happier than the fleeting pleasures of drugs.

Religion helped Reenie deal with the suffering and untimely deaths they confronted daily, but Kelly stopped believing in God when she lost her first and only child, which she refused to think of as just a “pregnancy.”  

She refused to believe, as Reenie did, that they were engaged in “God’s work.” If He was all-powerful, why didn’t He do His own damned work? Why did he allow child abuse and incest to ruin the lives of her clients, who found the degradation of drugs less severe than the degradation they used drugs to escape? After the group therapy session when Gabriel broke down after she mentioned sexual abuse, he had confided to her in individual therapy that he had been molested by a priest when he was seven.  He told his parents only after the abuse continued for years, when he was twelve and started to realize it was wrong. His parents immediately left the church and filed a complaint with the bishop, which resulted in the priest’s removal from their church. But Gabriel told Kelly he’d heard that the priest had been transferred to another diocese in western Pennsylvania. 

She thought back to when Gabriel first appeared to her. Had he not appeared soon after she lost a child, like an Annunciation in reverse? Had he seen her as a replacement for his lost mother? He could be considered a child of hers. She longed to help him, if he would let her, but she had to find him first.

As she gazed out over the mountainside, streams of light pierced the clouds, illuminating the fall foliage as if it were on fire. 

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked Reenie.

“God’s country,” Reenie replied.

Kelly turned to see if Gabriel had reappeared behind them, but there was no one but themselves. Clouds streamed over the sun. Their day on the mountain ended prematurely as they rushed down the fire road to beat the rain, which soaked them by the time they reached the parking lot. “See you next month, Kelly,” Reenie shouted, heading to her car. Kelly did not respond.

* * *

Views of the broad Delaware River and the mountains surrounding it unfolded all the way down as the Appalachian Trail snaked along the mountainside. Gabriel paused several times to lean out, holding onto a branch, and watch hawks soar over the Gap. Towards the east, low ranges of mountains marched for miles into New Jersey. To the west, sunlight paved a track far into the flat lands of Pennsylvania.  

The golden light reminded him of Jeanie. “I dream of Jeanie with the light blond hair,” he sang to her when he left home that morning, as she wrapped the blue scarf she had knitted for him–”to match your eyes”–around his neck. Since she moved into the fifth bedroom of the house on North Seventh Street he shared with other employees of the Sarah Street Grill, she had brought light in many ways. After deciding the house was too dark, she found two brass lamps at the Goodwill store. “To pay you back for letting me stay for free, Gabriel,” she said. When the bright lamps showed grime on the old wooden floors, she cleaned and varnished the floors until they shined.

He sidestepped a boulder, grabbing a pine branch to steady himself. The smell of pine sap reminded him of his younger sister, Tammy, who was as much at home in the woods as the deer and bears. He gathered pine needles in his pocket as he used to for her. She would laugh at the fact that the “needles” were not sharp but smooth, green and sweet-smelling. He kept a book that once belonged to her, Anne of Green Gables, with faded needles pressed into its pages.  

It wasn’t the force of the wind, which picked up with a threat of winter behind it, that made his cheek wet. He hadn’t seen his sisters for five years, since the state separated his family when he could no longer provide for them.

He found himself on the edge of a precipice as he thought about the addiction that had nearly sunk him. Heroin was like jumping off a cliff, like flying. Remembering the pain of withdrawal, he drew back from the edge of the cliff as he had from the addiction.

He scratched under his thin sleeves. The injection sites itched sometimes, but his itch for the drug was gone. He hadn’t realized what a difference it would make to have friends, a regular job, a place and time to sleep. 

He dug in his toes, feeling the solid earth under his feet, the air flowing in and out of his lungs. He knew Mt. Minsi’s rocks and trees as well as he knew his own body.  

He had thought of himself as a sad case for so long he had forgotten that he liked to help others. The day Jeanie came into the supermarket to find him, at first he didn’t recognize the kind girl from group therapy. Her blond hair was sticking up on top of her head; her clothes were disheveled, eyes unfocused. Then he remembered how she comforted him in group therapy against the invasive questions of Kelly the counselor.  

“Lucky you found me,” he said. “Next week I’m starting a new job, at the Sarah Street Grill.”

“I love that place,” Jeanie replied, eyes brightening. “My brother’s band plays there sometimes.”

The line of customers behind her was growing.

“Look, come by the house sometime? 220 North Seventh Street. Our boss rents it to people who work at the Grill. I play guitar. Could I play for you sometime?”

She nodded and stepped out of the line. Gabriel gazed after her until the next customer said, “Are you working or are you dreaming?”

* * *

After Jeanie became a regular visitor to the house, Gabe and his roommates agreed to let her stay rent-free in the small bedroom on the first floor that no one else wanted. “Until you get back on your feet,” he told her, smiling. Jeanie made the small space into a little nest with vivid pillows and a colorful quilt her grandmother had made.  

When she got a job with an accounting firm, she insisted on paying back rent for the room and her share of the groceries. She overhauled her wardrobe for the Stroudsburg winter with a pair of boots and two skirts she found at Goodwill. She discarded the pink sneakers, now gray, and put aside the brown hoodie. “I’ll use it for hiking,” she told Gabriel.  “I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hoodie,” he crooned as she giggled. He didn’t tell her that he dreamed of her often now, as he slept in the bedroom above hers.

Though he longed to kiss her, he refrained after she told him the story of her relationship with Jack. When she broke down and asked for a hug, he held her lightly and kissed the top of her head. A few weeks later, they were walking down Seventh Street when Jeanie pulled Gabriel into a doorway. A tall man passed them, limping and cursing. “That’s Jack,” Jeanie whispered. “I heard he was run over last month.”  

When Gabriel told Jeanie how his family had been broken up, she asked for his sisters’ names. Two days afterwards, she came back after staying late at work. With an air of triumph, she handed him a printout bearing a name and address. “Tammy Perkins,” it read. “55 Army Hill Drive, Tobyhanna.”

 “Whoever adopted her must have given her their last name. That doesn’t mean you can’t get her back, Gabriel.”

Gabriel stared at the piece of paper. “How did you get this, Jeannie?”

“I have my ways. That company has access to a bunch of databases.”

 “But there are a million people named Tammy. What makes you think this one is my sister?”

She put her arm around his shoulder and pointed out the middle name–his last name, Macmillan. Gabriel burst into tears. Had his sister been just ten miles away for the five years they had been apart?

Jeanie drew him into a hug. “It’s OK, Gabriel. You can get in touch with her.”

He kissed Jeanie’s smiling face. 

Now he touched the place over his heart where he had buttoned the piece of paper into a pocket of his army jacket. He wondered for a moment if his reappearance in his sister’s life would cause her more harm than good. Then he remembered their days together, the way she lit up when he came home from work when it was just the three of them.  His hope soared that he would reach her, that perhaps she knew where their sister Peggy was and his family could reunite.

It started to rain. He ran down the rest of the trail. He needed to grab his bike off the rack to cycle to work for his evening shift. Brian was back in town and had promised to let Gabriel audition for his band at midnight, after their performance at Sarah Street Grill’s Saturday jam. Gabriel paused when he reached Lake Lenape near the bottom.  He closed his eyes and let raindrops dance on his tongue.  Then he opened his eyes and stretched his arms wide, twirling around.

* * *

As fall lowered into winter, Kelly took on more work, as if to punish herself for losing Gabriel. If a co-worker had to miss a shift, she volunteered to take it. Jeanette remained elusive, missing more sessions than she attended, divulging little.

Kelly’s failures haunted her. She kept seeing Gabriel, scrawny in his army jacket, as he appeared to her on the mountain. Had he gone back to using? Was he alive?

She visited the supermarket where he worked, first with a shopping list, then without one. She asked the man behind the meat counter if he knew of a Gabriel, but the man shook his head and asked her what she wanted to order. When she came up blank, he walked away.

One Friday at 6 PM, her supervisor ordered her to go home. “Did I do something wrong?”  Kelly stood, clutching her winter jacket closed, before kindly, brown-haired, hugely overweight Sue Ellen.

Sue Ellen leaned back in her swivel chair. “Kelly, counselors also need to tend to themselves.” She offered Kelly a sweet roll; Sue Ellen always kept treats at her desk. “You’ve already put in 60 hours this week. Time to let others take up the burden.”

“It isn’t a burden . . . . ”

“You can’t let work consume you. I don’t mean to pry, but it seems like you’ve lost weight lately.”

Sue Ellen was right. Kelly stifled a laugh at the “intervention” by her plump supervisor, who was devouring a sweet roll.

“Tight budgets force us all to work longer hours, but if we don’t take care of ourselves, we’ll burn out.”

“You’re right. I’m leaving now.”

“Here,” Sue Ellen said, holding out a card edged in pink. “Someone gave me this voucher for a spa treatment at Helly’s downtown. I go once a month. It helps, believe me. Enjoy your weekend.” She looked down at her paperwork.

Kelly tucked the voucher into her jacket pocket. “Thanks, Sue Ellen,” she said softly.

Kelly wandered up and down Main Street peering into empty storefronts, wondering where Gabriel was. She passed the darkened Helly’s without looking in, as light snow started to fall. Recognizing the pain in her stomach as hunger, she got in her car and drove to the Sarah Street Grill.

 No tables were available on a Friday night, the 20-something receptionist with spiky green hair and numerous face piercings told her. “You can sit at the bar and order from our bar menu.”  Kelly took a seat at the crowded bar and ordered nachos, but after a few bites the pile of cheese, fries, and peppers made her queasy. She ordered a ginger ale, turning to listen to the jazz trumpeter playing in one corner of the room.

A man with a scraggly gray beard took the empty stool next to her.

“Hey, pretty lady. No appetite?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’ll give you something to chew on.”

Kelly stared at the puddle of yellow and green ooze before her, chips poking out like dinosaur bones. She could smell the man’s beer-laden breath and the onion-y scent wafting from his clothes. When she looked up, he was standing, talking to someone she could not see. Then the old man disappeared from her line of vision.

At her elbow was Gabriel. She looked into his bright eyes and golden hair. “He’s an angel come to save me,” she thought. He touched her wrist and said something she could not hear amidst the din at the bar, then walked out before she could thank him.

She plunked down ten dollars for her bill and ran out the back door to the protests of the bartender and the bearded man. She saw Gabriel’s back as he headed out through the parking lot. “Gabriel! Wait!” she shouted, but he didn’t turn around.

She jumped into her Chevy as he disappeared from view. Not watching where she was going in the crowded parking lot, she banged into another car, setting off its alarm.  

She did not pause. She had to find Gabriel. The one-way streets would only let her go in the opposite direction from where he had set off, so she sped around the block as fast as she could, sweeping across the yellow line to blaring horns to evade a car backing out of a space on Main Street.

A block later, she caught up to him. She followed slowly behind him, while someone in the car behind her honked relentlessly, until he turned up Seventh Street, where he walked up a long driveway into a house.

She accelerated, tires screeching, to the top of the driveway and jumped out. She ran to embrace him. He would save her as she had saved him. He was her angel. 

Why was he backing away from her? She held out her arms. “Come to me, Gabriel. I’ll help you.”  

From the side of the house a figure streaked towards them. It was a young woman, blond hair flying. She put her arm around Gabriel and led him into the house. She cast a glance back at Kelly, who recognized Jeanette.  

The dark house was suddenly illuminated. Flashing red and blue lights danced off the white wooden shutters and iron railing. Kelly ran towards the house, then slipped in the snow, scraping her elbow. She heard a familiar voice and felt strong arms raise her.  

“That’s OK, Kelly, that’s OK.” She recognized Officer Reilly, whom she often dealt with when one of her patients broke the law or was in crisis.  

“It’s OK, officer. There’s no crisis here.”  

Reilly kept her arm in his grasp. 

“But it’s Gabriel,” she explained to the police officer, clutching the stiff serge sleeve of his uniform. “My patient. My . . . child.”  

As Officer Reilly led her away, she looked back at the house, on which red and blue lights reflected as if in a pane of stained glass.

---

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.