A Sigh In The Morning
by Isabella Madruga
Johns Hopkins University
Isabella Madruga is an undergraduate studying Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University under the Writing Seminars Program and is set to graduate in 2024. Her short stories have won first place in the Young Adult category in Palo Alto Weekly and first place in The Baltimore Science Fiction Society Amateur Writing Contest.
Juniper Avenue was a loud street, smack dab in the middle of a university crawling with aloof students and the rest of the city, with its construction workers, businessmen, and vagrants. Otto was an anomaly, an unknown variable in the equation that was the city around him. He wore sixty-five years like an oversized sweater, the years nebulous to him as he still felt middle-aged. He’d walk among the college students and wonder why his stride didn’t match theirs. But then he’d pass by a shop window and see his reflection, take in the reality of his wispy gray hair and sagging skin, and his shoulders would slump more than they were before with the weight of realization. He’d had too many years taken away from him to fully feel comfortable in his old age.
Otto wasn’t uncomfortable in his loneliness. Rather, he had grown to tolerate it, just as he tolerated when his favorite coffee shop moved to the suburbs when his pants size went down as his muscles wasted away, and when he lost in a game of chess against a pigeon in the park. But when somebody anonymously signed him up for a “letters to the elderly” program—he suspected it was his favorite barista at the old coffee shop—he tolerated that, too. Although he loathed the term ‘elderly,’ he knew the reality of his condition. He aged like a 1936 bottle of Port—while delicious, it was dreadfully considered vintage.
It was about a week of walking up and down Juniper Street for Otto to come home to a letter in his mailbox. It was from a girl named Bea—pronounced Bee!, she emphasized—whose handwriting switched between tight cursive to print font in a sloppy but ample introductory dance.
My favorite artist is Taylor Swift, which is what made me want to talk to you. What’s your favorite album? If you say, Lover, we’re going to have to fix that. Mine is evermore, for obvious reasons. Hmmm, my favorite food is my mamá’s tostadas that she only makes on Christmas Eve for no! Good! Reason! I could eat them every day if I could.
She went on to describe her life plan, which was to live in a penthouse apartment in Seattle with two dogs. She was a pre-med student, hoping to fund that penthouse with a gynecologist’s salary. She ended on the note, P.S. I hate that Rover’s got moved too! Now it’s just some regular Peet’s.
Otto replied to her letter after watching the evening news so that he’d have something interesting to tell her. He wrote about the wildfires caused by people’s gender reveals, how the quality of hot dogs had decreased over the years, and that Lover is definitely not his favorite album. He ended his letter with, P.S. I have had Peet’s coffee. It is not good. :(
He laughed at his frowny face and hoped it made her laugh, too. He put the letter in the mail, expecting it to be the last. When he checked his mailbox every day for the next week, he slipped into quiet acceptance that he was alone again. Not lonely—simply alone. He told himself it didn’t bother him, but as he checked the mailbox with less frequency, he found that a crucial part of his day had been taken away from him.
After almost two weeks, Otto checked the mailbox for bills and instead found a letter in Bea’s characteristically unpredictable scrawl. He giggled to himself, something uncharacteristic of him, noted by the mother and her son giving him a side-eye as they exited the apartment building. He rushed upstairs and tore open the letter, not even using his letter opener from sheer excitement. Once he reached the end of the letter, he set an alarm on his phone to wake up early on Thursday. He was going to Peet’s.
Bea expected the conversation between her and Otto to fizzle out and for both of them to be left in silence, staring at their bland cups of coffee until the steam ran out and one of them mustered up the courage to excuse themselves. Instead, she rescheduled a meeting and was late to class to continue their conversation about the newest season of The Unsolved Files.
“It’s always the boyfriend!” Bea exclaimed, throwing her hands up in the air. “Men are evil, I tell you.”
Otto nodded sagely, sipping at his tea absentmindedly. “Very much agreed. But I thought the security camera footage was quite peculiar…”
Bea’s eyebrows dropped, and she sighed. It was light as if she was exhaling glitter, accompanied by the whisper of a chuckle. “You’re going to say it’s aliens, aren’t you?”
It was Otto’s turn to throw his hands up. “You are accusing me of something I did not do. Much like Theo in episode six.”
Their bantered continued until Otto caught sight of the clock behind the bar and returned his attention to his companion.
“Don’t you have any classes, Busy Bea?” Otto had asked as he chuckled into his croissant.
“No,” she had lied, and while she didn’t like lying to people when she first met them—if at all—she figured a little white lie didn’t hurt. Not when she was buzzing all day from such a pleasant interaction and remembering Otto’s stupid jokes when she was doing her organic chemistry homework.
Their meet-ups proceeded from once a week, to twice, to three times, with Otto changing his schedule from going home directly after his walk to beelining to Peet’s. He didn’t like giving money to such a bad establishment, but it was comfortable and warm.
When Otto finally decided to ask her why she decided to spend time with an old man like him, she sighed that princess sigh of hers he had grown to love and replied, “That’s the thing. It doesn’t feel like I’m talking to an old guy. No offense.”
No offense was taken on Otto’s behalf. Bea was fascinated by Otto’s accent and often asked him to say things in Hebrew. She asked him about Bremen, about his late wife and buried children, but avoided the war. Her eyes would wander to the tattoo on his wrist, the skin taut around the numbers as if the skin was stuck in time, a preserved relic of the years he lost. She’d look back up at Otto, and nothing more between them would need to be said.
Bea’s friend saw the two of them together one day when they were standing in line for coffee. They were giving her the eyes that women give each other to save them from creepy men, the unmistakably female quirk of the brows, and the widening of the eyes. Bea waved them away, and when she caught up with them after bidding Otto adieu (as he liked to say), they crowded around her and peppered her with enough questions to make her feel faint.
The one that stuck out was, “Is he your sugar daddy?”
Her other friend echoed the sentiment with a deep nod of the head and an affirmative harrumph. “I knew you were short on money, but I didn’t know it was this drastic. You should let us help you, girl.”
“Gross, no!” The mere thought of seeing Otto that way made her want to empty her stomach of the bitter coffee Otto bought her. “He’s this guy I met when I had to get up my community service hours. Talking to the elderly seemed a lot better than planting a bunch of trees.” She cringed at the word elderly just as Otto did and wondered just about how much time one had to spend with somebody to react in the same way they did to things. “He’s like my grandpa.”
Again, cringe. Their friendship, in the weeks they had spent together, had progressed into something more undefinable, more amorphous than that categorization. It felt like an insult, really, and she hoped Otto hadn’t felt her betrayal.
“Why are you still talking to the geezer, then?” another asked her hands on her hips.
Bea didn’t think she’d had to label or quantify their friendship just yet. All she knew was that the time she spent with Otto was akin to the time she spent with the friends surrounding her, and at times, was better. She decided against voicing this for the sake of sounding sane and settled on, “No offense, Rebecca, but I think talking to somebody who’s actually had a successful relationship would be a lot more helpful than talking to somebody who went back to their cheating ex three separate times.”
Her friends—except Rebecca—laughed and went on their way, making Bea promise to call them in case Otto tried anything to hurt her. She knew men of all ages could be cruel, but Otto was the exception. She wouldn’t say he wouldn’t hurt a fly—he had on many occasions with swiftness when they landed on the table or flew by his ear—but he would never hurt anybody around him. Humanity had already done that for him.
A year or two passed—Otto didn’t remember, years were all the same to him, but Bea knew it was one when she claimed senior status —and December rolled by. Bea brought him a gift. She wanted to get him a gift each day of Hannukah, but she could only do so much on a meager college student’s salary after most of it went to her family back in Guatemala. By the stupefied look on Otto’s face when she presented the box to him, however, this gift was more than enough.
It was covered in snow, but inside the box was a watch.
“I found it in a thrift store. It’s from 1943,” she said. “I thought it was cool.” A sheepish shrug.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said. “It is cool. Very cool.” A sincere smile.
The next day, he showed up at Peet’s with the watch on his wrist. When Otto showed Bea faded pictures of his family, she noticed that his father wore the same model of a watch as the one she bought him. Now when she looked at Otto, he looked like a child playing grown-up with his father’s watch, just like she had when she put on her mother’s white coat as a nine-year-old.
When the snow on the leaves melted, leaving behind wet heat, Otto attended Bea’s graduation. Bea laughed at the way Otto said summa cum laude, but he didn’t care about the pronunciation—besides, he bragged about Bea so much to the people in Peet’s that he perfected the pronunciation in no time.
Bea had a ticket to Spain the next day for her gap year, and they sent letters back and forth until she returned to the city, this time across the pond, for medical school. He’d check his mailbox every day just as he had when they first met, even when he’d just sent a letter the previous day. His mailbox had been so barren for so long, it felt like even spam letters forgot he existed. When he got a letter, he’d pour himself some Lagavulin 16 an American soldier gifted him, put on an Édith Piaf record from his sabbatical in Paris, and puff on a fat Cuban cigar he stole from a lover from so many years ago. He’d melt into his letters, and Bea found that she could hear his laughter from the cursive on the thick bond paper. She thought she’d enjoy calling him better, hearing his gruff laughter and phlegmy coughs that reminded her of her grandfather, but she found she much preferred hearing his voice echo in her head and imagining how he’d say Valladolid in his thick accent.
Other times, however, she used those letters—the only connection she had back to a home—as a way to soak up her tears. When she came home from the women’s clinic after a much-needed, much-lamented abortion and was hunched over the toilet the rest of the day from cramps painful enough she dissociated, the only thing that took her mind off the pain was thinking about what she would write to Otto. She’d write him a letter in intervals, switching between her office chair and the toilet. She debated whether she should tell him about her drunken night and the consequences that came after. Instead, she wrote to him about the Barcelona Botanical Garden and the different flowers she saw. She dropped Polaroids of his favorite flowers—lilies, and carnations—and sealed the envelope with a quivering lip. Some secrets are meant to keep tethered to the heart. However, Otto could tell something was wrong from the tear stains on the thin paper. She thought they’d dry, naïvely so. Otto had written and received enough tear-stained letters to know tears tattoo themselves on everything they come into contact with. He decided not to pry. Some things are better left as unanswered thoughts.
Bea came back just in time for New Year’s. Otto greeted her at the airport with a kiss on each cheek and asked her to speak Spanish, this time in a Spanish accent.
“Barthelona fue exthepthional,” she replied, emphasizing the lisp enough that Otto doubled over in laughter.
“Now I understand what you mean when you say they sound stupid, my dear.”
Bea leaned her head out of Otto’s old Cadillac DeVille, admiring the milky color and the tiny side view mirrors. She wondered if he’d launch into the story about how he got the car for the fourth time. “A good friend of mine got married,” he’d say, “and his wife hated the car. He needed to get rid of it but loved it so much, he didn’t want just anybody to get it.” Then he’d wink at her and click his tongue while gesturing to the car with his thumb. “I got this Schönheit for $1,000 even though he bought it for $6,500. Stupid guy.” And she’d always laugh, not from pity, but because she’d forget how his voice would go up when he spoke German, and she’d crack up as if it was the first time she’d heard it. She’d then sing out into the world at the top of her lungs, and she’d ignore how brightly Otto was grinning at her and focus on the rolling golden hills, the giant windmills, on the wind carrying her voice far, far away.
They took the two weeks Bea had left before school started to visit fairs and amusement parks in the suburbs. They visited Rover’s, which had since closed down, and took pictures in front of the shuttered entrance. Bea would run to the food stands to look at the menu and turn to comment on the absurd prices, only to find her side barren and for Otto to be several paces behind her, still catching his breath. Right, she’d think, and feel ashamed. But Otto’s willingness to pay the prices, while still complaining, was enough to remind her that he didn’t take it too personally. He still went on the kiddie rides with her, and the Ferris wheel, but reserved the right to deny rides named the likes of “Soulsucker 3000” or “The Skullcrusher.” He found enough joy in taking videos on the camcorder Bea bought him of her screaming or her vomiting the fair food up in the bin after getting off.
After their weeks together were over, she still found time to visit him, even as she rolled into her residency. His busy, busy Bea. Their meet-ups never lasted more than thirty minutes, an hour at most before she got another call. But it was enough for Bea to cry about her failed engagement, for the towers to fall, and for Otto to tell her he has lung cancer.
“We’ll beat it,” she said, emphasizing the plurality of the tragedy. It didn’t just affect Otto. Now that he had a friend—family, as he saw it—his diagnosis wasn’t just his alone to cope with. He still held the mindset that his world was barren, devoid of life, but then Bea reminded him that there was life growing in front of him, inside him.
We’ll beat it, busy Bea. he thought. We will.
It took him three years to beat it, and one miscarriage from Bea, but he attributed this victory to home-cooked dinners at Bea’s parent’s house and to listening to somebody complain about problems other than his own. Bea found watching her mother interact with Otto fascinating. Ever since her maternal grandfather passed away from a battle with throat cancer five years ago, she hesitated to bring Otto home in case her mother suffered unwelcome flashbacks from seeing his skin dotted with needle pinpricks and bald head dotted with liver spots. She watched as her mother hesitated to touch him in fear of leaving bruises from the lightest of pats, but as his diagnosis went from grim to hopeful to assured, hugs and kisses made their way back into her mother’s acts of love. Bea, on the other hand, never stopped in her affection. When she was at her lowest, Otto never hesitated in holding her hand or pulling her to his side, offering his shoulder as a pillow or a tissue.
Rodrick, Bea’s boyfriend, made infrequent appearances in their story. Bea first introduced Otto to her future beau using his dating profile, to which Otto critiqued his wrong use of your/you’re. He could tell by the glint in his smile and the cocky way he tilted his head that he was bad news. He’d seen his fair share of bad men, but he wasn’t one to tell Bea what to do with her life. He knew that she knew his thoughts on the matter, and they kept it at that. Rodrick was respectful enough when he was around Otto, anyhow. He’d ask if the food was too hard to chew or if he needed a wheelchair when they went to the grocery store together before dinner, and Otto and Bea would share a knowing look. Yet again, another person sees Otto as he was on the outside: an elderly man.
“He can walk, babe,” she’d say with that sigh of hers, resting a hand on the small of Otto’s hunched back. “He’s not geriatric.”
Otto could tell Rodrick didn’t know what that word meant, and Bea knew that, too, but she didn’t want to acknowledge the man she chose to experience something as traumatic as a miscarriage with was stupid.
Rodrick voiced his concerns about Bea and Otto’s relationship in the early stages, feeling as if he was intruding on his own girlfriend whenever the mismatched pair spent time together. The shared glances, the plentiful inside jokes, the obscure references to 1950s films, it all went over Rodrick’s head.
“I mean, how am I supposed to connect with you? You’re like my grandma,” he complained. Bea tried to retort, but there was nothing she could defend herself with. She decided to cut down on her time with Otto and spend time with Rodrick as if she was replacing sugar with Splenda, and it made her feel hideous. But soon enough, compliments, bouquets, and good sex distracted Bea enough to leave Otto walking past the Peet’s because Bea canceled their meeting last minute. He wanted to be selfish, to monopolize her time to distract from his loneliness, which he had grown to hate. But selfishness had gotten him nowhere in life, and it wouldn’t get him anywhere now. He watched as Bea cut their meetings short, not just because of a residency call, but because Rodrick was calling to ask where the flour was because he planned to make her a birthday cake and, oops, he spoiled the surprise.
“He’s an idiot, Bea!” Otto wanted to shout. “You can find a thousand good men out there, a million! And you choose this sonavabitch?”
Instead, he said, “Well, he can do a better surprise next year,” before surprising her with the Kate Spade bag he noticed she had been eyeing for almost six months. Bea gave him so much and asked for so little, he could afford to could give her—and Rodrick, by default—the benefit of the doubt.
When Bea passed her gynecology board exam, she opened up her practice to only one man. Otto went to her for his growing ails, and, at age seventy-seven, there were many. After she got off work, he’d visit her two children, Otto and Frederick, named after Otto’s perished brother. He was at their births, sitting in the waiting room for hours each time, balancing a handmade teddy bear on his knee. He was there at Frederick’s birth when Rodrick could not since he was overseas on a business trip, and as he cradled Frederick in his arms while Bea slept, he saw his late son in those puffy newborn eyes. After nearly sixty years, he prayed to God again.
He spent more nights at Bea’s than at his own home, waving rattles in the children’s faces and watching them spit up their applesauce with delight. When Otto Jr. asked him in first grade if he was his grandfather, Otto had to hug the child very close to his chest so he wouldn’t see the old man cry.
“I’m your friend,” he’d say because he wanted to respect Bea’s parents. “I’m your mother’s friend, too. She’s quite the Schönheit. Say Schönheit. Very good.”
It took every fiber in his body to reject the title. He ignored that fact and focused instead on Otto Jr.’s tooth gap and Frederick’s dimples that sat high on his cheeks and pictured his own nonexistent grandchildren having such features. It was bittersweet. Sweet: a daydream. Bitter: it would stay a daydream.
He coached Bea through the divorce, a messy one, as most divorces based on infidelity are. He didn’t dare bring up the fact that he knew Rodrick was evil the second he saw him and let her stain his sweater with tears and mucus. She asked what she did wrong, if she had let herself go after having children, and all he could do was shake his head and kiss her cheeks until they were rosy. He knew nothing he said would carry any weight when she could barely hear his words over the pounding of her own heart.
He watched as she fell in love with alcohol instead. A beer here, an old-fashioned there. A bottle here, two bottles there, to the point that the underneath of her couch looked like a graveyard of booze. She hated his pitiful looks as she vomited into the sink, whacking his hand away from her hair, and holding it up herself. She had gotten this far by herself, and she didn’t see any use in having him around to stare at her when she was too ashamed to even look at herself in the dusty mirror.
“What do you know about what I’m going through?” she yelled one night. When Otto asked her to speak quieter to not wake the children, and only screamed louder, “What do you know? Your whole family’s dead!”
She crumpled at that, her knees losing their strength and collapsing underneath their own weight. She was riddled with a vomit-soaked puddle on the bathroom tile, her tears dissolving into the grout. She repeated her apologies in hiccups and sniffles, and Otto held her unconditionally.
After that outburst, she cleaned up her act. She went to church, dropped her kids off at school and picked them up without shoving the responsibility on Otto, and cooked again. She would make roast chicken for Otto one night and make him disappointed the next. She knew what she was doing was wrong. She hated how she felt drunk. The dizziness, the nausea—all reminded her of her miscarriage and entire marriage to Rodrick. But the heat that would light up her chest and the fuzziness of her thoughts were enough to quiet her down for an evening, and that was enough for her. She went to AA meetings drunk and confessed to Otto sober, trusting him more than the servant of God in the confessional booth.
When he tried to host an intervention—alone, since she had sabotaged every other relationship in her life—he was kicked out into the street at ten at night. She had driven him there, and he had nowhere to go. He turned and looked up at the windows and watched as every light in the window went out, leaving the house and the street in darkness. He didn’t listen to any of the words she said that night. He just focused on the blood-stained rug that he gifted her for a medical award she won, on the glass shards strewn throughout the kitchen, on her matted hair and chewed-down fingernails. He watched the children’s doors, just in case, but they didn’t come out, just as he had instructed them to.
When he turned back to look at Bea, he didn’t recognize her. He wondered if she recognized him, and he concluded that nothing about them or this situation was recognizable. And that was the scariest thing.
She stopped showing up at Peet’s, leaving Otto just another old man sitting in the corner of a café alone. He waited for a few hours each day, nursing a black coffee that went cold in the first fifteen minutes. The baristas offered to refill his coffee for free, but he shook his head. He drank one cup of black coffee each day and left as alone as he went in. He walked by her house when he could since he knew he wasn’t welcome inside, and he watched as the hedges got more unkempt and the weeds took over the dry spots on the lawn. There was never a light on when he passed by. Soon enough, he saw a For Sale sign on the front lawn, and he knew that it was done.
He went to the court dates for Otto and Frederick and expected to see Bea there, but the chair she should have been sitting in was occupied by their father. When he inquired to the court officer where she was, he said that she never replied to the summons and was suspected of having abandoned her children. He nodded solemnly and took his seat in the empty courtroom, where he watched as their dog of a father got full custody. After all, Rodrick wasn’t a bad father—Otto was grateful for that. Just a scumbag of a human being. Otto let him know his true thoughts in the parking lot, the first time he’d gotten red in the face from anger since he discovered his lover in bed with another thirty or so years ago. The man nodded at him, waved the old man off, and climbed into his car. He had been rendered yet again as an elderly nobody, a geriatric who knew no better than to throw tantrums. Without Bea, he was not independent. He was a person who needed to be guided, and who warranted pity. He missed her, but he missed his selfhood just as much.
Otto woke up later and later in his morning. There was nothing to wake up for. After so many lone mornings at Peet’s, Otto forgot the color of Bea’s eyes.
Otto celebrated his ninetieth birthday alone, just as he had the past twelve. He didn’t know where Bea lived now. She could be one of the homeless people on the street, or dead. But when he became bedridden after his last bout of pneumonia, he put an ad in the paper. Nobody read the paper anymore, but he needed to try. Bea, it said. I am dying.
He’d almost accepted his own fate and that Bea would never come by. It had been a month, until one day, he felt a foreign presence in the room. He was blind by that point, but he recognized that sigh, as youthful as when he first heard it. A sigh was as crisp as their finite mornings together. He had already gone over all the mornings they could have spent together had disease not corroded Bea’s brain. But the what-ifs were starting to corrode his, so instead, he focused on her hand slipping into his, pressing into his elevated plump veins, caressing his knobby cracked knuckles. Here and now, she was here. Here and now. And that made up for a million missing mornings together.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he rasped. “I know.”
“You know everything.”
“Of course I do,” he retorted, and his chapped lips pulled apart into a silent smile as he listened to her smoker’s laugh. That was new, but he figured everything about her was new. He’d never know to what extent, and he was content with that.
“I missed you,” she said, her voice wet.
“Oh, Schönheit,” he said, squeezing her hand as tightly as he could. “Don’t cry. Please don’t. Sing for me. Sing, Busy Bea.”
He felt her squeeze back and the tip of her nose brush against the back of his hand. A fat tear plopped itself in the deep valley between his knuckles, followed by more and more until there was a stream running down his wrist. Bea sang her apologies, and Otto exhaled in relief that Bea was okay. Her hand felt plump, and although he could feel some scars, she wasn’t skin and bone. Her voice was rough, but that happened with age. She still had long hair, which brushed against him as she rocked back and forth. She was alright. She was going to be okay.
Bea had done enough for him. So may my passing be enough for you, my dear.