April. The short weeks between the last of the Vermont snow and the return of the blood sucking mosquitoes. The forsythia dares to bloom and Huey begs for longer walks. We walked downtown on Tuesday and his plumed Golden Retriever tail spun into turbo drive when he saw my son at an intersection. Winter had whittled Seth down a few more pounds, his awkward smile revealed another missing tooth, yet to me, he looked like a million dollars.

Seth offered Huey a Milk Bone treat and then hugged me hard. “The weather is finally nice,” he said. “Come over Friday night.”

I lingered in his arms. “I’d love to,” I said as we moved apart. “What can I bring?”

“Huey. And maybe lobster mac and cheese?

“Of course! How many am I serving?”

“Six or eight. Just make sure no one follows you.”

Our conversations run like electric fences strung with high voltage words. I can’t say to my thirty-year-old son, get over this being followed thing! Have you seen your psychiatrist? Have you filled your prescriptions?  Seth never asks might Dad join us?

Al, my husband, refuses to accept his only son’s lifestyle. Once Seth was called homeless, but now he’s a person experiencing homelessness. “For God’s sake,” Al says. “Make him take his damn meds! You know he won’t listen to me.” Al avoids the woods that Seth calls home. I can’t. Our arguments about this lack closure but at least I sleep at night. Not Al.

During the winter I left hot casseroles at the encampment. Also down comforters, outerwear, and Darn Tough Socks but never money, though others, not Seth, asked for just ten or fifteen. On the worst nights, when the weather forecasters warned not to leave dogs outside, I’d drive anyone willing to the shelter in town. Faced with freezing—or going without drugs or alcohol in order to stay the night—some wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t convince them but Seth always did.

Finally it had turned warmer. Safer. We could resume our Friday night dinners.

***

A few days after seeing Seth downtown I grated cheddar and gruyere, cooked pasta, steamed lobsters, and made an arugula salad. While the food was baking, I showered and then dressed in faded jeans and the nubby fisherman’s knit sweater Seth had given me years earlier for Christmas. Al called from his office. “You’re enabling him!” he said with bitterness. “Won’t you ever learn?”

Ten minutes later I parked in the supermarket lot and lugged my box of food down the wooded hillside. Several tents and a few dwellings made from plywood and sheets of black plastic were scattered around the sun-speckled ground. Broken bottles glinted in the light filtering through the bare trees.

Mirabelle greeted me first, her lopsided braid draped over her shoulder. Hard times had carved deep wells beneath her high cheekbones and crack had pocked her pale skin. She clung to me and her dark hair smelled like coconut oil and cigarettes.

“Would you please convince Seth that you’re alone?” she whispered. “He’s being ridiculous today. He thinks ICE is coming after him. I told him no one is deporting crazy Americans yet. Who would take us?”

Mirabelle, formerly Christina and an Army medic, is Seth’s partner. She shares his tent, his blankets, his food and clothing. Seth protects Mirabelle and easily agitated, he’d defend her against anyone. Once Seth had been the captain of his high school hockey team; now he’s the captain of the woods. While Mirabelle set paper plates and plastic cups on tree stumps, John, Andy, Grace, Bo, Kathy, and Glen greeted me. John didn’t smile, the others did.

Seth remained in his tent.

I found him inside, propped against his backpack, a library copy of Lincoln in the Bardo in his hands. He looked up, raised his dark eyebrows, and invited me into his literary world, a haven for his beleaguered mind.

“I’ve never read anything like this before,” Seth said. “I live with people like these characters.” His voice turned suspicious. “Now are you sure, absolutely sure you didn’t see anyone from ICE?

“Yes. And I parked way behind the supermarket. No one saw me.”

“You can’t be too certain.”

“I know. But it’s okay.”

Huey bounded to Seth and memory blindsided me. Seth’s birthday party five years earlier, a time when he took his meds and taught high school history. “You’ll love this little guy,” Al had said as he handed him a fluff of puppy as a gift. Memory is quicksand if you linger in places incomparably better than the present so I moved on. “Let’s eat,” I said. “I don’t want dinner getting cold.”

My coaxing drew Seth from the tent. We sat on a tattered plaid rug by a small campfire. In homeless camps no one wants judgment, advice, or pity. But food, especially the kind you’d serve in your own dining room, is appreciated. My lobster mac and cheese is a family standard, a culinary scrapbook of better times. Food must have been scarce that day because eating overtook conversation.

“Sure do like this,” Glen finally said with his jack-o-lantern grin. “It’s stuff I can eat.”

Mirabelle had wedged herself next to Seth and with her nearby, a look passing for contentment settled across his guarded face. For the moment, he’d forgotten deportations. “This is great,” Seth said and shot me a rare smile. “And you’re the best.”

No. The best could make him accept treatment or at least convince him to live in the apartment above our garage. Al had laid hardwood floors, installed a small kitchen, built cedar bookcases, even put in a surround music system for Seth. Seth said no thanks, he preferred living free and on his own.

Squinty-eyed Andy passed a fifth of Old Granddad around the ragged circle. I drank my share from a cracked plastic cup.  John, rattlesnake fast and just as friendly, scowled but said nothing. And then he exploded. “That’s my bottle!” he yelled. “Don’t anyone go thanking Andy. He stole it from me!”

John is unpredictable, has few allies, and I’ve never trusted him. I flinched as he picked up a rock and lunged into Andy. Seth fell upon John in seconds, twisted him away, and knocked him to the ground.

“You kill someone,” Seth warned, “We turn you in, you rot in prison.  If you stay here, you fucking well behave. Got it?”

Dazed, John nodded.

Mirabelle retrieved her first aid kit from the tent. She squatted next to Andy and inspected his forehead. Wearing plastic gloves, she sopped up the blood with gauze, and washed the wound from a water bottle. “I’ll rub in some Neosporin, tape up a bandage, and you’ll be fine,” she said. “In the future, keep your hands to yourself!”

After dumping the gloves into the trash barrel, Mirabelle pulled a pack of Marlboros from her back pocket. Her fingers trembled as she lit one with her Hello Kitty lighter. The violence, like the subzero nights, is the norm. Seth has adapted to it. She can’t. Neither can I.

“Sorry about this,” Seth mumbled. “You know we aren’t always kumbaya around the campfire. I hope it didn’t ruin anyone’s evening.”

“Not at all,” I said. “We’re fine.” But I wasn’t. How I worried that John, or someone like him, might knife Seth in his sleep. Seth had other worries. Would the cops find out about Andy’s attack?

“No, of course not,” I reassured him.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Kathy said. All agreed.

Relieved, Seth turned bon vivant. “Hey folks, ready for dessert?” he asked. “Miss Mirabelle stood by the interstate this morning and some dude in a bakery truck handed her a couple apple crumb pies. Such luck!”

Luck? What a subjective word. As we await improbable miracles we make choices. I’ve made mine. I choose the luck of an apple crumb pie day and dinner with my son and his people.

Al won’t. He contends that if he can take meds for his own illness, if he can practice law, maintain relationships, and be close enough to sane, Seth can too. But Seth argues that the meds flattened him out. Instead of feeling high or low, he’d been more robotic than human. “Why can’t you accept who I am?” he’d bellowed at his father a year ago. “I’m not like you!”

“Yes, you are,” Al cried back. Another bitter winter turned into spring. A year without a father and son seeing each other even though they lived a mere three miles apart.

Now, in cloud-veiled moonlight, Seth and I finished our dessert in peace and I said good night.

Mirabelle offered to carry my box to the car while Seth tidied up the campsite.

“That son of yours is a real pain in the ass about treatment,” she confided as we picked our way uphill over tangled tree roots. “But every day I nudge him more. I think he’s almost there. I know he can get better.”

“I’ve always thought so. It’s just a matter of the right meds. The right dosages.”

“But, what if he does get well? He might leave me behind!”

Love, as well as  need, filled her voice. “He wouldn’t do that to you, Mirabelle,” I reassured her. “He isn’t that kind of guy.”

I described the garage apartment, room enough for two, a kitchen with granite counters and a lake view. As we trudged along the trail, her raspy words grew hopeful. She asked if she could plant an herb garden. Maybe some flowers. She laughed about baking her own pies. And of course, she promised, she’d get clean for good. We hugged, her cigarette-and-coconut scented braid brushing my cheek. I longed to trust her eggshell recovery.

“I’ll be back next week,” I said. “See you then.”

Drugs didn’t prevent Mirabelle from reading people. “Don’t worry so much,” she said with a kindness I depended on.   “I’m keeping your boy safe. We’re okay.”

I needed to believe this and drove away. Alone in the car I spoke out loud to Huey. I told him that next time, we’d bring beef stew and good French bread. Maybe it would be the luck of an apple crumb day and I’d convince Al to join us, to be a family around a fire with friends and good food. I imagined that evening, imperfect through perfect, our words drifting like woodsmoke and settling upon our weary souls.

Nancy Levine, a former pediatric neurology nurse, received a MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Vermont Magazine, The Sun Magazine, and The Journal of General Internal Medicine. Nancy and her daughter, Rachel Levine-Spates, co-authored LIGHT: A Mother and Daughter Memoir of Anorexia.