Mail from the Asylum

People assume I spend all my time talking to killers.

They're only half right.

Some days I'm interviewing a man who buried seventeen bodies beneath a church. Other days I'm drinking Earl Grey with an eighty-something-year-old woman who knits blankets for the medical ward and worries whether there's enough butter in the kitchen.

If you've already met Eleanor, then you know exactly who I'm talking about. If you haven't... well, you're behind. Go fix that.

One of the things you'll learn about Eleanor is that she measures time differently than the rest of us. She doesn't think in years, she thinks in seasons. Spring means planting, summer means preserving, winter means stew.

Fall... fall means pumpkin bread.

I asked her once why she only made it when the leaves started changing. She looked at me like I'd asked why people breathe. "Because that's when Matthew comes home."

"Every year?"

She shrugs. "Most years."

She leaned back in her chair and wrapped both hands around the mug of tea I'd brought her.

"It was October," she said. "The maples had already turned. The mornings were cold enough that the windows fogged while I was making breakfast."

She smiled to herself. "I woke up wanting pumpkin bread."

"Just because?"

"No." She looked over the rim of her glasses. "Because Matthew was coming home."

She told me she'd baked two loaves that morning. One went onto the cooling rack beside the window, the other she wrapped in a clean tea towel and left on the counter. Then she started a pot of beef stew.

"You made all of that because you had a feeling?"

"I made it because my children always came home hungry."

There's something unsettling about the way Eleanor talks about her children. Not because of what she says, more because of what she doesn't say. She never talks about why they left, or what they did when they were gone. To hear Eleanor tell it, they simply wandered out into the world for a while before finding their way back to her kitchen.

It wasn't until much later that I discovered the evening news had a very different version of those same stories.

She told me she'd already set the table before lunch. Seven bowls, seven spoons, seven mugs.

"You expected seven people?"

"I hoped."

"And if only one showed up?"

"Then there'd be leftovers."

I laughed, but she didn't.

The stew simmered all afternoon, the pumpkin bread cooled by the window, and the house smelled of cinnamon, cloves and onions.

Around sunset, there was a knock at the back door.

"I knew it was him."

"You didn't look first?"

She frowned. "Why would I?"

She walked to the door and opened it.

Matthew stood on the porch. He looked older than the last time she'd seen him, thinner too. Rain had soaked through his jacket and his left sleeve had been cut open, with a bloodstained bandage wrapped his forearm from wrist to elbow. One eye was beginning to swell shut. His boots left muddy footprints across the porch.

"You've lost weight," Eleanor told him.

"I've been busy."

"So I see."

She stepped aside. "Come in before you catch cold."

He stood there for another second. "You aren't going to ask?"

"Ask what?"

"What happened."

She shook her head. "If you wanted me to know, you'd have told me already."

He stared at her for a moment before letting out the sort of laugh that only comes after someone realizes they're finally safe.

She handed him a thick slice of pumpkin bread before he even took his coat off. He stood at the kitchen counter eating while she stirred the stew. Not another word passed between them for several minutes. By the time he'd finished the second slice, the shaking in his hands had stopped.

"He looked tired," Eleanor said quietly. "Sometimes people need feeding before they need questions."

I sat there watching her. "You really never asked where the blood came from?"

She smiled into her tea. "No."

"Not even later?"

She shook her head. "Jack... he came home."

Like that explained everything. And maybe to Eleanor it did.

I've met enough killers to know that everyone wants something when they walk through a door. Money, forgiveness, a place to hide.

Matthew wanted pumpkin bread and Eleanor wanted him fed.

I asked Eleanor once if she ever wondered what happened after her children walked back out that front door.

She smiled the way only Eleanor can.

"No, Jack."

"Why not?"

"Because they always knew where home was."

She took another sip of her tea.

"That was enough for me."