Josie Tolin

 

 

Every week that summer the old woman hobbled into my office with a huge bag and a new ailment. Her concerns were understandable at first. When she complained her heartbeat felt irregular, I held a stethoscope to her chest to check for palpitations. “It’s cold,” she said as I listened, so I breathed on the little metal circle and tried again.

“All normal,” I said. She blinked, picked up her bag, and left.

Late June she griped about the discoloration behind her ear. I shined my tiny white light on the problem area. A brownish lump stared back at me. “That’s a mole,” I said. I flicked off my flashlight and slid it into my pocket. “We’ll keep an eye on it to see if it changes shape.”

“I’ll see you next week then?” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder and darting out the door before I could tell her that wouldn’t be necessary.

She started to visit more frequently for even less pressing matters. “The weather is humid,” she’d say as she barged into my office. I’d ask her about her health, and she’d tell me everything was fine, except for her hair, which stuck up like a cockatoo’s in the damp heat. Her hair, she explained, was thick and wiry like her mother’s: that’s why she wasn’t balding like everyone else her age. I sighed and told her not to come in unless she had an illness and she stormed out and came back the next day with red pox Sharpied onto her arm.

 

 

“She won’t quit,” I told my wife over breakfast-for-dinner. I shoved a French toast stick into my mouth and chewed.

“Tell the secretary not to let her in.” My wife shrugged. “It’s a simple solution, really.” She chased a piece of scrambled egg around the plate with her fork, stabbing it, swallowing.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No,” I repeated. “I mean, what if something goes terribly wrong and I shoo her away and she dies because no one’s listening?”

My wife sat there, massaging the bridge of her nose.

 

 

“What’s in the bag?” I finally asked the old woman during her next visit. That morning, she’d forced me to sniff her toes three times before I convinced her there was nothing to worry about: feet just smell worse in the summer.

She pulled a sweater box from her tote as if she’d been waiting for me to ask. “A sweater box?” I said, crossing my arms, swiveling unimpressed in my doctor chair. She lifted the lid without answering. Inside was a dead cat with an open mouth, its fur caked and gnarled like the threads of an old bathmat. I turned to face the wall, taking the five deep breaths my therapist had recommended. When I swung back around she’d already stowed the box in her enormous bag. She’d looked docile then, cross-legged on the examining table with her hands folded in her lap.

“What the fuck?” I said. “Sorry, I mean, what the hell? Sorry, I mean — ”

The old lady didn’t flinch. “Like Schrödinger’s Cat, you know?”

I snorted. “You’re carrying around a dead animal, not a quantum physics theorem.”

“But in this moment you don’t know if it’s alive or dead.”

“I saw it. It’s dead. I know what dead things look like. It’s dead dead dead.”

“You don’t know that. The box is closed. The cat is out of your sight.”

“Show it to me again.”

“That won’t help my point.” The old woman stood to leave.

 

 

“You won’t believe what she did yesterday,” I said to my wife over dinner-for-breakfast. I twirled spaghetti around my fork, slurping the coil from its prongs.

“What?” my wife asked between milkshake gulps.

“She showed me her dead cat. She keeps it with her, boxed in her bag.”

My wife shrugged again. Those days, nothing surprised her. “She’s insane.”

“Yeah,” I parroted. “Really insane.”

My wife tapped her fingernails on the counter, waiting for me to say something else. I grabbed my car keys from their hook and left without making eye contact.

 

 

“The mole is changing shape,” the old woman said.

“Let’s see.” I grabbed my mini flashlight and shined it behind her ear. She was right — it’d grown from dime- to quarter-sized in a matter of months. I shivered.

 

 

August ended the day the melanoma biopsy read malignant. I walked her out to the exit sign. “Thanks,” I said, “for keeping me company this summer.” The words felt stupid even then, but I meant them, I think. The old woman looked down at her shoes and nodded.

 

 

She killed herself with the radio on in her bedroom that night, or so I was told by my secretary, whose cousin was friends with the neighbor who’d found her dangling from the ceiling fan. Small town news travels in a strange way.

It’s like she needed a doctor’s permission to die, I thought as I read the obituary in bed by lamplight. I placed the newspaper on my nightstand and told my wife what’d happened. She was grateful but wouldn’t say it. “Sometime soon,” she said, “we’ll go a night without talking about the bag woman. The bag woman was — the bag woman is — not so good for our sex life.” She slid in earplugs, rolled over, and pretended to sleep. I stared at the ceiling and thought about how every moment in my entire life had led to that one.

 

 

The old woman still wouldn’t leave me alone. I saw her in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth before bed and on the train to Chicago for a medical conference. One moment she was in the waiting room reading People magazine with her legs crossed. The next, she wasn’t. She was everywhere and nowhere. She was alive and dead.

 

 

 

 

JOSIE TOLIN is a flash fiction enthusiast and Indiana native. She holds a B.A. in English and Spanish from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.