Inside Pocket
I bought the coat at a consignment shop on Lake Street in November, for forty dollars. Gray wool, long, double-breasted, heavy as a blanket, with a black satin lining that had gone soft with age. No label. The woman at the register said it had come in with a box of men’s things from an estate in Edina and she’d been surprised nobody had taken it. I’m five foot four and it was too big in the shoulders and I didn’t care. Minneapolis winters will make you forgive a lot.
The first slip of paper was in the inside breast pocket the next morning.
I found it at the bus stop, reaching in for my phone. A strip torn from a page of a small notebook, ruled, the edge ragged. Written on it in pencil, in neat, old-fashioned handwriting: 2217 Garfield Ave S. Upstairs.
I assumed it had been in the coat when I bought it, though I’d gone through the pockets in the shop, the way you do. I put it back in the pocket and forgot about it.
The next morning there was a second one. 1840 Marshall St NE. Back door.
I’m a dental hygienist. I’m not a person things happen to. I’m telling you that because I want you to know that my first reaction was not ghost, it was someone’s messing with me. I live alone in a duplex in Longfellow, and I started locking the coat in my bedroom closet at night. I checked the pockets before bed. Empty. In the morning, there’d be another one. Always an address. Always in pencil, the same hand. Sometimes a little extra. Upstairs. Back door. Side gate. Ask for Ray.
By the end of the first week I had seven. I laid them out on my kitchen table and looked them up. They were all real addresses in Minneapolis and St. Paul, all residential. Nothing connected them that I could see.
I’d like to say I threw them out. I put them in an envelope and put the envelope in a drawer.
I went to the first one on a Saturday in December, because I couldn’t stand it anymore. 2217 Garfield, upstairs. It was an old brick fourplex in Whittier. I wore the coat. I don’t know why I wore the coat.
I rang the upstairs buzzer and an old man answered. He was maybe eighty-five, in a cardigan, with a walker. He opened the door and looked at me, and then he looked at the coat, and his face did something that I’ve thought about every day since. It sort of opened. Like a little kid’s when a parent walks into the room.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, you came.”
I said I was sorry, I thought I had the wrong place.
“No, no,” he said. “Come in. Please. I knew someone would.”
I went in. I want to be clear: nothing happened. His apartment was clean and overheated and smelled of coffee. He made me a cup. He didn’t ask my name. He sat across from me at his little table and told me about his wife, who’d died in 2009, and his son in Arizona who didn’t call, and the Twins, and the war. He talked for two hours. When I got up to leave, he held the sleeve of the coat for a moment, gently, between his finger and thumb, and said, “Thank you for coming. I’d been waiting.”
I said I’d come back. He said, “No, you don’t need to. That’s all right. I’m ready now.”
I found his obituary online four days later.
I’ve been to six now.
The second was a woman in Northeast, at the back door, who was sitting alone in her kitchen in the dark when I knocked, and who looked at the coat and cried, and held my hand, and asked me to stay while she fell asleep in her chair. I did. The third was a man named Ray in a rooming house who didn’t want to talk at all, just wanted someone to sit on the other side of the room while he listened to a baseball game from 1987 on a cassette. The fourth was a woman in a big house on Summit Avenue with a nurse who let me in without a word, as though I’d been expected.
They all look at the coat first. Then at me. And every single one of them is glad.
They’ve all died within the week.
I went back to the consignment shop. I asked about the estate in Edina. The woman remembered, eventually, and dug out a receipt book. The coat had belonged to a man named Leonard Voss, ninety-one, retired. I looked him up.
His obituary was long. He’d been a hospice volunteer for thirty-four years, after he retired from a career selling insurance. The obituary said he’d sat with more than a thousand people at the end of their lives. It said he was known for “always turning up, often without being asked, when someone was alone.” It had a photo. He’s standing on a porch in winter, a tall old man with a thin face, smiling, wearing a long gray wool coat, double-breasted.
There was a quote from his daughter at the end. She said, “Dad always said the hardest part wasn’t sitting with people. It was knowing where to go. He used to say the coat told him.”
I didn’t wear it for two weeks after that. I hung it in the hall closet and didn’t touch it.
Every morning I opened the closet and checked the pocket anyway, and there was an address. I didn’t go. I tore them up. Every one, I wrote down the address first and then tore it up and threw it out, and then three or four days later I’d look up the address, and find an obituary, or a news item, or nothing at all, and I’d sit with that.
On the fifteenth day, I went to the closet and the slip was already lying on the floor beneath the coat, as though it had been pushed out. It said: Please.
Just that. No address. Please, in pencil, in the same neat hand, pressed in so hard it had almost torn the paper.
I put the coat on.
I’ve kept going. I don’t know what else to tell you. I do it on weekends, mostly, and sometimes on weeknights after work. I don’t do anything special when I get there. I just sit with them. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they hold my sleeve. I think it’s the coat they’re glad to see, really, more than me. I think they recognize it from somewhere I haven’t been.
I’m writing this down because of this morning’s slip.
It’s an address in Longfellow. It’s a duplex on a street I know very well. It says, Lower unit. Front door. No hurry.
I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for an hour holding it. I’m thirty-six. I’m not sick. I don’t feel sick. I went for a run yesterday.
But I think about all those people opening their doors and looking at the coat, and how glad they were, how their faces opened, and how not one of them was afraid. And I think the worst part, the part Leonard Voss must have understood, isn’t the dying. It’s being alone when somebody should be there.
The coat is hanging on the hook by my front door. It’s the first time I’ve taken it off since December.
I keep looking at it. I keep waiting for someone to knock.