He Kindly Stopped for Me

Death did not come for Dolores Vandegrift on a pale horse. Death did not come heralded by thunder or trumpet, nor was it flanked by four beasts and followed by Hell itself. Rather, Death came for Dolores Vandegrift in the form of Suzanne Miller, a gap-toothed, pig-tailed ten year old. And so as Dolores busied herself in her flower garden, Death wandered up to her as ten year old children do and tugged on her pantleg.

Dolores rubbed dirt onto her overalls, turning away from a blooming sea of sunflowers and snapdragons to smile up at the little girl. “Well hello there. How can I-” But when she met the child’s eyes, she went rigid as if struck, trowel falling from her hand. She immediately dug into her front pocket, withdrawing a pair of glasses, large clunky things that they were. She looked almost like an owl, eyes magnified to almost comical proportions in her small, wrinkled face. Vision clear, she gaped at the girl. “This cannot be, this…”

“Do you know who I am?” asked the child in a voice flat and cold, not belonging of her body.

“You’re Suzie Miller. How could I forget?”

She was eight years old again, dressed in her checkered green dress with the white collar.

“Come on, Dolly! Don’t be such a stick in the mud!”

Suzanne Miller was halfway up the metal fence, silk ribbon loose and hair spilling every which way out of her braid. There was dirt on her knees, dirt on her face, which had since gone pink with exertion. As she shimmied upward, the fabric of her dress caught and snagged on stray chain link and Dolly caught a glimpse of her polka-dotted underthings beneath. A voice in her head sounding rather like her grandmother shrilled: “Unladylike, unladylike, unladylike!”

“We aren’t allowed to go past the fence, Suzie,” said Dolly, staring down intently at her oxfords, if only to avoid staring at that polka-dotted underwear. “It’s dangerous.”

“Says who?” the other girl snapped. “What do you know about anything, Dolly? You’re only eight. I’m ten. You should feel lucky that I even spend my time with a stupid, scared little baby like you in the first place.”

A retort rose in Dolly’s throat that eight was only two less than ten and two wasn’t really much at all. She had learned so in arithmetic. But she swallowed it down. Suzie was tough. Suzie was clever. And when you were around Suzie, she had a way of making you feel the exact opposite.

So Dolly took hold of the fence and began to climb.

“They had been trying to fix the aquifer there,” Dolores said quietly. “That’s why the fence was up. We were by the river. One wrong step and the ground just gave way beneath you.” Dolores forced herself to look up from her gardening gloves to meet the girl’s steely gray eyes. “I never forgot the way you screamed when you fell. I tried to get you out. I really did. But there was just so much dirt. A person can only go without air for two minutes, Suzie. That isn’t very much time at all.”

“It isn’t,” the girl replied.   

“And good Lord, your poor parents. They weren’t the same afterwards. You were their only child. Their pride and joy. They had moved here so that you could go to the private school. You were such a clever girl, you would have done so well. But when you were gone… They just packed up and left. Oregon, I think my mother said. I do hope they found some sort of peace there.”

“Nevermind that, Dolores,” said the girl. “It is time for you to leave.”

“I don’t quite get what you mean.”

“Look,” the girl said, pointing.

Dolores followed the girl’s finger and her breath all but left her body. There, facedown in the dirt, fledging flowers squashed beneath her and beginning to attract flies, was Dolores.

“I don’t understand, how-”

“It’s a hot day, Dolores,” said the girl, for the first time a trace of pity in her voice. “A woman of your age and condition shouldn’t be out working so hard in this. Sometimes the body just… Gives out. That’s just the nature of things. So we have to go now. It’s time.”

Dolores did not move, her gaze unwavering from her own corpse. Dread settled like a stone, cold and heavy in her stomach.

One did not live to eighty three without musing over the reality of death. For most of her life, it seemed like a far off, distant thing, talked only in abstracts. She’d sigh and sympathize with others but paid it little mind in the workings of her own life. But then her joints began to ache and pop. Her spine curled and shrank. Looking in the mirror, she watched as her skin sagged, her hair faded to the color of freshly fallen snow. One day she realized she was attending more funerals than weddings and losing more friends than she was making them.

So when she looked up to regard the girl, she spoke measured and sure.

“I… I understand that everyone has to go sooner or later. But please. I just need a little more time. Just until my garden blooms. If I don’t take care of it, no one else will. Please… Just let an old woman have her last bit of happiness.”

The girl tilted her head. “That’s… That’s it? You just want to see some plants grow?”

Dolores reached out to run one of the flower’s petals between her fingers with a tenderness reserved for injured animals and infants.

“That’s it.”

"I… I think that can be arranged. Know your time is limited, Dolores Vandegrift. Live it well.”

And so Death left as quickly as it had appeared. Picking up her discarded trow, Dolores set off to work once more.

***

When Death came for Dolores Vandegrift a second time, the flowers outside her home stood tall and proud, swaying to a silent song carried on the warm winds of summer. This time, Death came in the form of a pretty, if a touch plain, young woman with long raven hair and skin like alabaster.

Dolores sat in her living room in the rocking chair her mother gave her, feeling every bit the archetypal old lady she was, half-made blanket taking shape in her lap and knitting needles clicking. Far more conscious of the heat now, the air conditioner rumbled and rattled, an undercurrent to the warbling Oldie’s station on the radio and the grandfather clock tick, tick, ticking away in the corner.

When the young woman appeared, examining the photographs on the wall with the casualness of someone browsing a museum exhibit, Dolores did not startle. She placed her needles down in her lap, mid stitch, and said, “Hello. Please excuse me for the dust. Don’t have much reason to clean these days.”

“Hello,” said the young woman. “Do you know who I am?”

Dolores studied the woman’s face, whose features were set in careful neutrality. There was no sudden jolt of recognition that came like when Suzanne Miller was before her. She could have stood in line behind the dark haired woman at the grocery store, passed her on street, and been none the wiser.

“I’m sorry but I don’t.”

The woman opened her mouth and began to sing, her voice sweet and sad. “See the pyramids along the Nile, watch the sunrise from a tropic isle, just remember darling all the while, you belong to me.”

Realization sunk its teeth into Dolores and it was only then that she remembered.

She was twenty two again, coming out of an uneasy sleep in a room that was all white walls, stainless steel, and the stink of antiseptic. Her body felt like it was just put through war, a dreadful ache deep in her stomach, between her legs. But beyond that, she was seized by the panic that came only when you were missing something that was within in your grasp moments before. She struggled to sit up, a flash of dull pain shooting through her in protest, as her eyes tore across the room.

The door opened and from it hurried in a mousy looking woman, dressed in a white apron and cap. “Oh careful, Mrs. Vandegrift! You shouldn’t be moving so much after delivery.”

Something in her brain clicked. She remembered then what she was missing.

“My baby,” she gasped, reaching out to seize the nurse’s wrist, stopping her as she puttered about the room, making notes on her clipboard and checking the monitors. “Where is my baby? I need to see her.”

The nurse’s face fell.

“They didn’t tell you… Oh, Mrs. Vandegrift. I am so sorry.”

When Dolores spoke her voice was no more than a whisper, feeling the sting of a sixty year scar torn open. “The baby… You, I suppose, had a heart condition the doctors were unaware of. You only lasted two minutes before your heart gave out and they rushed you to emergency surgery. You… didn’t make it. They let me hold you though… You were so tiny, so frail. I rocked you and sang that song… And when they took you away… Well, I didn’t sing for a long time after that.” Dolores reached out, as if to stroke a strand of hair from the young woman’s face, but thought better of it. “I wondered for years if you’d favor your father or me. What type of woman you’d grow up to be… You’re… So beautiful.”

“Thank you,” the young woman said. “But Dolores, I’m afraid it’s time for you to go. Your garden has grown. That was the arrangement.”

Dolores’ eyes flickered beside the rocking chair. Sure enough, there was her corpse beside a tangled mess of yarn and discarded knitted needles. “What was it this time?” she asked.

“Heart attack.”

Dolores sighed and shook her head, irony not lost on her. “You know, I never had anymore children after you. I was scared. But I taught Sunday School at church and I run a donation drive for the local women’s shelter. Their babies need clothes and blankets. I may not have children of my own but that doesn’t mean I still can’t help someone else’s. I just need a little more time to finish these blankets. Please. This isn’t about me anymore.”

“And how long will that take?”

Looking at her hands, gnarled and wrinkled, she shrugged.

“The arthritis makes me work slower than I used to. But I’ll try to be prompt. I promise.”

“Very well, Dolores. We will be back for you soon.”

And away went the daughter she never knew.

***

The final time Death came for Dolores Vandegrift, she was in her bedroom. She had just cleaned up from dinner, the process thoroughly tiring her out. Though she had sat alone, the table was set as if for a feast- an entire chicken, homemade mash potatoes, green beans, flowers from her garden arranged in a centerpiece, and candles all on top of an ornate maroon tablecloth. Across from her sat an empty place setting and a glass of water, no ice. No one had shared her table for a very long time. But fifty year habits proved to be tough to break.

Now, she sat on the edge of her bed, studying the reflection in the mirror as she worked a brush through her soft, white curls. It was funny, all your life you were expecting there would be a point where things would make sense, where you would feel the age that was thrust upon you. But besides the aching in her bones, there were times, even at eighty three, she felt every bit the shy, soft spoken little girl she was at eight. Other times she felt like the uncertain, terrified person she was at twenty two, not quite a girl, but not yet a woman, hurled into the murky depths of adulthood and told to swim. But regardless of how she felt, that worn face, that sagging body in the mirror did not feel her own. She might as well have been wearing the suit of a stranger.

“Oh don’t be like that,” a voice sounded from behind her. “I think you look lovely.” A man stepped into the reflection behind her, looking just as he did the day she met him at eighteen- hands in the pockets of his letterman jacket, dark hair slicked back, and blue eyes enough to charm the devil himself. He had hidden his class ring in the pocket of that letterman jacket to give to her the night of the big game- he told her it would do until he could buy a wedding band.

Tears pricked at her eyes, clouding her vision. Her throat felt tight but she smiled anyway. “You always were a flatterer, Jack.”

She was sixty five again, sitting at the dining room table. She fluttered and fretted to and from the kitchen, summoned by the cry of the microwave. Dinner was to be simple- left overs from her retirement party. Jack, as patient as every, sat waiting until she dumped some half-heated baked ziti and a glass of water- no ice- in front of him. “Thank you, beautiful,” Jack said, smiling at her like she hung the stars. Dolores rolled her eyes, though even after all this time, the man had a way of making her heart stutter.

Sitting down at her own end of the table, she immediately dove into the mass of papers cluttering it- pamphlets, magazines, articles printed from the Internet. “Scotland is gorgeous,” she said, flipping through pictures of cobblestone streets and rolling green hills. “But the weather there is a bit of an issue.”

“Hon, I-”

“Greece is warm. Economy is terrible right now.”

“Dolores-”

“What about Paris? Oh Lord, I always wanted to go to Paris as a girl.”

“Dolores, I have something to tell you.”

“Cancer,” Dolores said, spitting the word like poison. “You work and you work your whole damn life with this dim hope that someday it will be worth it. And finally when you get the chance to live life as you please… Cancer. God, Jack. I missed you.”

The laughter left the man’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“It just… It just wasn’t fair.”

“Is anything?”

“We deserve more.”

“I know.”

There was a brief silence. Dolores shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “Are you going to ask me to leave now?”

“That depends. Are you going to keep making excuses?”

Letting out a bitter laugh, Dolores shook her head. “So snarky. It’s almost like you’re really him.” Stealing a glance at her bed, there she was, tucked in bed, covers drawn to her chin. All tension on her face was gone, a slip of a smile toying on slightly upturned lips. If not for her ghastly white coloring, it might have been as if she was only sleeping. “I never did get to see Paris, Jack.”

“Neither did I.”

"I never got to do a lot of things.”

“Maybe so. But you did more than some. That has to count for something.”

“I just feel like I need a little longer. This just isn’t a convenient time.”

“Is it ever?”

“I haven’t learned to play violin. The ending of my favorite book series comes out next month. I haven’t been to Paris.”

“I can’t take you to Paris. But I can take you somewhere else.”

Toying with her wedding ring, Dolores looked up into the face of her beloved. For a fragment of a second, behind his handsome countenance, there was a glimpse of a writhing body of shadow and smoke, offset by piercing red eyes.

“Can you guarantee me eternal paradise? Can you guarantee that Jack and I will be together again?”

“I’m not inclined to say. But wouldn’t that be worth the risk?”

Wordlessly, Dolores pulled aside the covers of her bed and slipped inside. Clasping her hands together, just beneath her heart, she thought of sunflowers, of a voice crooning about flying the ocean in a silver plane and seeing the jungle when it’s wet with rain. She thought that she may have left the oven on downstairs and that she told her neighbor she would pick up their mail while they were away. Nevertheless, Dolores Vandegrift met the gaze of the creature who wore her husband’s face and closed her eyes.

About the Author

Jess Derr is a sophomore English major from Willow Grove, PA. She's a Because Arcadia blogger, consultant at the Writing Center, freelance photographer, and member of the women's lacrosse team. Beyond writing and photography, her passions include dogs, sweatpants, and period dramas.