Home

We sit on the porch by the wild overgrown garden to watch night fall in pink shadows between the houses across the street, a view we've dubbed "Sunset Alley." I've got my white wine, with lots of ice that chinks cheerfully in a ceramic coffee mug, Eileen has her bottle of fancy beer. Just about every night we sit here, after a walk around the neighborhood.

Tonight, she found an abandoned dresser left out on the sidewalk. In this neighborhood so close to the schools, all summer kids are moving in and moving out, leaving behind unwanted things: office chairs, desks, old TVs and 45 records from the '70's, lightbulbs, lamps without shades, shades without lamps, framed posters in varieties of subject matter, china dishes, board games, an iron, everything she hauls in up the back staircase, with a proud smile on her face like a cat back from a mouse hunt.

When we came across the dresser on Linden Street, she stopped in her tracks before the bulky, heavy looking thing. I've learned during our long friendship to stand by as she makes her appraisals: "Real wood. Mahogany maybe." She rubbed her hand along the slightly warped surface. "Some water damage on the top, I think I can sand that out." Her eyes widened. "Dovetailed drawers, look." Dutifully, I looked, though I never know what I'm looking at, still I nod approvingly.  "I could paint it pink," she said. Again, I nod.

Soon, we are lugging the hulking piece down the quiet side streets, and up the two flights of stairs, banging and huffing until finally into the living room it goes, where it sits with the other foundlings in this orphanage of oddities.  This is the third bureau she’s rescued so far during my brief tenure of two months. With her hand on her chin, she thinks out loud, "I could put it in the garden, put plants in the drawers, something trailing, like those wave petunias, could you see that?"  The garden is a circus of birdbaths and trellises where climbing sweet peas flower all summer, tall sunflowers top heavy and drooping, grass as high as your waist, tomatoes bursting red on tangled vines, cucumbers nestled under broad green leaves, statues of nymphs and fairies, wicker chairs with busted seats, a Victorian croquet set hidden in the weeds, a family of rabbits. "Sure," I say.

I get our drinks, grab the cigarettes. When I meet her on the porch, she has already smoked half a joint and her eyes are closed, the evening sun makes her hair gleam silver. She passes me the sizeable roach, this one is the kickass skunky stuff that makes me stupid after one hit, and I always cough. We sit a while, drowsily, just sit. A few neighbors walk by, Nancy with her asthmatic pug Julius, who stops long enough to sniff among the cosmos, and the Martins with their two tots Ava and Rosa in an aerodynamic Swedish designed stroller. Everyone says hello. A few joggers go by, someone is cooking on the grill, there's the sound of kids laughing down the street and cicadas singing riotously. In the weeks since I've been staying here, I've come to enjoy the neighborhood noise and rhythms of the old three decker houses, so different from my place, just a mile away in Harvard square.

My tiny condo is undergoing a long-awaited renovation, and Eileen has offered me her back bedroom for the duration. In her usual generous, brusque manner she insisted, "You'll stay here." On my street, lined with condos and massive brick apartment blocks, the residents, mostly grad students at the law school and summer kids working on their PhDs, don't say hello, there aren't any young children with their happy play sounds, no one grills, and the cicadas have nowhere to sing. The contrast between our spheres is striking, given the short distance, and I am happy to be here for a taste of living in a real neighborhood. And so, I am another displaced refugee taking residence on Ashland Avenue in Somerville.

The small bedroom is cute, quiet, with green painted walls and a hula girl lamp on a random night table, the huge mattress is up on milk crates. A scarred chest of drawers, a find from the street, houses all my stuff. There's a crazy quilt and a floral bed spread, feather pillows and striped sheets that are soft and smell like lavender dryer sheets. I've settled in.  My books, ones I've read so far this summer, and ones I'm going to read, and books I know I won't read but feel bad about not reading so I keep them, and books ready to be leant out or given away, are piled here and there. It's home, for now.

The room is also where Eileen's brother Tommy shot the fatal dose of heroin laced with fentanyl  that would kill him. That was last October.  She found him on the kitchen floor, half in and half out the room, lying across the threshold, his face distorted and blue. The paramedics worked on him even though he was past saving, you can still see the dents on the wood floor where their equipment was thrown down, the defibrillator and the tool box of drugs, you can see the trace of his prized Frye boots when he was dragged to the middle of the kitchen, where they hooked him up and did futile chest compressions.

"I've always been the saver of lost souls," she says, with her last swig of beer. It's true. There have been a series of stray dogs, feral cats, friends down on their luck, the temporarily destitute, the bereft. When tommy was released from prison this last time, where'd he'd spent 7 years and change for a botched armed robbery, it was no surprise when he showed up on the doorstep, no surprise when she let him in, again. "He was my brother, " she says simply.

I helped her go through shoe boxes full of old photographs a few days after her brother died. They were adorable kids, PJ with his missing front teeth, Eileen with her mop of hair, and shy Tommy who never looked at the camera, or the person holding the camera. Still, there the three sibs are dutifully lined up in Easter outfits, around the Christmas tree, in bathing suits running through the sprinkler on the front lawn. They seemed to be the normal family, circa 1960, pastel curtains and floral wallpaper. The smiles hide the whole story.

Eileen says she watched because she didn't know what else to do, she stood there and watched them pound and shock poor Tommy, but he was dead and she knew it. Still she watched, because just maybe-- until a kind detective got her to go downstairs, got her to sit and lit her cigarette and listened as she told him how she found him, how she'd just gone to the service station to get her car inspected a month late and she'd run into the store for milk and scratch tickets, the tickets were still in the pocket of her work shirt. She bought the 2% because he likes it in his morning coffee, she was bringing it into the kitchen to put in the fridge and then she saw him, his face, it didn't even look like him, but still she knew, she doesn't even remember calling 911, or crying into the phone. It's ok said the kind detective, who watched as she wiped her eyes with the tissues he kept on hand for these calls.

In spite of their early years, probably because of them, Eileen has been trying to recreate home and family ever since. "Tommy never stood a chance," she has said many times since that awful day last autumn. Beaten at home from the time he could walk, molested by the parish priest, he ran away, got in trouble, dropped out of school in the 10th grade, then drifted, skidded. By the time he died at the age of 57, he'd spent a third of his life behind bars. The last 11 months of his life he spent here, in the home his sister had made, the home they never had as kids.

"There was a sweetness to him he didn't show very many people," she says, "he was embarrassed by kindness, it was not easy for him to open up." But there's a card still tacked up in the little back room, the only thing he brought to the space that you might call decorative. It's a crappy Hallmark knock-off card, a view of a cottage snow covered under glittery white, lit up windows give the scene a wintry cozy feel. Inside it’s dated Christmas 1991 in the round cursive letters of a young woman, who signed the card "with all my love, Sandy." Who was she? Sandy? Eileen says she never knew, he never brought his girlfriends around. This one thing he saved, through all the wreckage of his adulthood. What little else he owned, the few things he brought, are mostly gone now, the army jacket, his clothes, the boots he always wore, the boots he would die in… the paraphernalia of his habit, dirty cotton balls and bent burnt spoons and tiny empty bags with crystalline residue, needles, and glass pipes, all that was removed by the detectives. The mattress is new, the bedding too. But still Tommy lingers, in the one shirt that still hangs in the closet because she just can’t part with it, in the few photos of him as an adult. “He always had a shit eating grin,” she says. He is squinting in the sunlight, still too shy to look into the camera. And sometimes, when I'm drowsing with one of the books from one of the piles, before I drift off, when I shut off the hula girl lamp and the room is dimly illuminated by outside light that glints on the glitter snow of the card, I wonder if he was happy here, even if just for a little while.

On the porch, I sit next to her. She never says that she is lonely, that it’s hard for her to be the only one of them remaining; PJ died of AIDS 20 years ago, Tommy has been gone nearly a year, and now it’s just her of the Nolan kids, from the house on Green Street where they played at happy family. I begin to understand her need to save the discarded and the displaced.

And so we sit quietly, listening to the neighborhood sounds at night.  

But I should know better to think she might sit still long.

“Where are you going?” I ask, when she is up and off the stoop.

“I’m thinking I need those chairs we saw on Elm, the ladder backs with the cane seats.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now—come on before somebody else snatches them."

And soon she is off, to claim another foundling, to find something else that needs a home.