From the window of our house we could sometimes see Winn Handler—the Winn Handler—sitting alone in his kitchen, lit by a Tiffany chandelier, head bowed forward, long hair glowing a warm yellow-white. We’d giggle idiotically, thinking how lucky we were to live next to such a beloved celebrity. He was a lot older now, must have been close to eighty, but he still had that tanned skin, those canny blue eyes, and wore his pants low slung on his hips with a silver beaded belt and a clump of turkey feathers tied to the fringe on his jacket.
At first Peg and I didn’t dare wave at him, even though we lived only thirty feet away. We worried every night that our daughter, Ella, only three, would annoy him with her bath-time shrieking. But all that evaporated when Miles was born.
It was one of those clear, warm October days when we brought our new son home from Mt. Auburn. Ella trotted ahead, tossing handfuls of Hershey’s Kisses wrappers like confetti in our path. Winn was sitting on a big rock staring up at the oak in his side yard, and when he saw us walking up our driveway carrying the baby bucket, he pulled off his headphones and smiled.
“A new baby!” he exclaimed. “How wonderful.”
“Yes,” Peg said, without hesitation. “We think so.”
“We’re naming him Miles,” Ella announced, prancing in circles like a pony.
“Nice name,” Winn said. He walked closer to us and paused. “May I?”
“Of course.” Peg unbuckled the strap around Miles’s fragile shoulders and lifted him up for Winn Handler to see. Winn held out his enormous, be-turquoised hands and Peg handed the baby over without a second thought. He settled Miles in the crook of his elbow and stuck a pinky in the baby’s mouth. Miles’s head seemed to light up like a fuzzy melon in the glow from Winn’s beatific face. When Winn looked back at us there were tears in his eyes.
Peg took the baby from him and invited him for coffee the next morning. Since then it’s been an easy relationship between us; he’s become hands-down the best neighbor we’ve ever had. We don’t mention “the mind cure” to him—I’m sure he’s sick of being asked about it—and we don’t mention him to anyone else, to protect his privacy.
I don’t want to come off as a sycophant fan-boy, but Bruce Dern went to him for years.
The change happened so slowly Peg and I didn’t really see it until the night I brought the whole family—Peg, Ella, now seven, and Miles, just three—to his house for dinner. Winn and I had agreed on the date and time that afternoon. I’d picked up take-out barbecue, and Peg, the kids, and I crossed through the bushes and knocked on Winn’s kitchen door. We saw him sitting at the kitchen table, his dinner already in front of him: a veal patty, some peas, a glass of Pino Grigio. We filled the kitchen with the cold from outside, the bulk of our coats, the loudness and confusion of our talking. He looked at us, unshaven, eyes wide and colorless behind thick glasses, working his mind like crazy trying to make sense of why we’d come. I put the neatly stapled bag of ribs and sweet potato fries on his counter.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Winn confessed, in a ragged voice that no one who’d known him before would recognize. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
Peg and I exchanged looks. Peg had a good instinct when it came to Winn; he was exhausted, she said. People are born with a certain amount of life force—Peg was quoting Winn here—and if you constantly give it away like Winn had, you don’t have enough to sustain yourself.
Me, I thought something more mundane. Alzheimer’s.
We tried not to stare at his veal patty, at him, at his faded denim shirt, at his eyes. A truck idling out on the street rattled the fork on his plate. Winn reached out a graceful white forefinger and silenced the tines. He cupped his hands in his lap and avoided our eyes.
“I never wanted it to come to this,” he said. “I never thought it would. I always thought I could take care of myself. But I can’t remember where I put my coffee grinder. Or how I pay my taxes.”
“We’ll help if you want us to,” Peg said. “What can we do?”
“What day is it?”
“Monday.”
“I can’t seem to remember much anymore.”
“Worry and fear are corruptive,” I said gently, quoting from his most famous TV special. “Right?”
Winn looked at me with pity.
“He’s shutting down,” Peg told me that night, after the kids were asleep. “He either doesn’t remember what he’s supposed to be doing or he doesn’t care. He’s going to leave us soon.”
“You think he’s dying?”
“No, I don’t think he’s dying. I think he’s sick of us all. I mean, not us, specifically, but people. Asking him things, begging for help, needing something from him.”
The next afternoon Peg was in our kitchen trying to pick the price tag from a new wine glass, but really she was tracking Winn. It was easy to tell where he was by watching for the glow that spilled out of each window he passed by, lighting one lamp, shutting it off, lighting another in the next room. Most of the time now, he was in the TV room.
“He’s been pacing for hours,” she said. “Where’s Miles’s Batman cup?” She bent to look under the kitchen table.
“Here,” I said, and retrieved the pale-yellow cup from the fridge. “How long’s he been down?”
“It’s been worse since Christmas, as far as I can tell,” Peg answered absentmindedly.
“Not Winn. Miles.”
Peg looked stunned. “Miles! Oh crap. We’ve got that doctor’s appointment at Children’s. I forgot. I mean I knew about it, but I lost track of the time. Get him up from his nap, would you? I’ll pack the bag.”
Because Ella screamed the first six months of her life and needed constant distracting, we were all spent by the time Miles came. Peg and I let a lot slide. We didn’t think much about how uncoordinated he was—I was a klutz as a kid, too—or how Miles got tired when you didn’t think a three-year-old should. But three weeks ago he started having trouble chewing. Anything, really— bananas, the strawberry gummies he loved. We had a dentist look at his teeth but she didn’t see anything wrong. Then Miles’s words started melting. The boy who could say really or radish without lapsing into baby talk could not find the ends of his words. Book, swing, cookie became bo, swn, caa. His cheek drooped. His pediatrician made an appointment for him with a colleague, Dr. Keiran, at Children’s Hospital for some tests.
“Sure you don’t want me to come with you?” I asked Peg.
“No, it’s fine. Stay with Ella and do your calls. They’ll probably just do tests, ask a lot of questions, right?”
I booted my laptop. I sell ergonomic chairs that cost $700 to $3500, mostly to corporate headquarters. You wouldn’t believe how many people are unhappy with their chairs. I got in when the business was new—no one cared much about ergonomics until a decade ago—and I’ve done really well. I went to school for jazz trumpet, but that was not going to happen, so I’m glad the chairs did. And I can work from home. Which is why I was there when the first woman showed up.
She was in her 50s, wearing a down jacket and black sweatpants with “Princess” written in pink sequins across the seat. She plunked a yellow-webbed lawn chair outside Winn’s kitchen window, opened a paper bag, pulled out a sandwich, sat down, and took a bite. She was carrying a brown office-type envelope under her arm. Winn came outside to dump a few tomato soup cans into the recycle bin and she sprang up out of her chair and ran full force at him.
“I need to talk to you! You need to help me with this. It’s not fair!”
Winn stared at her, working his jaw. There was a feral look to him, like a city dog that jumped his fence and didn’t know which way to run. He dropped the cans and closed himself inside the house.
“Hey!” the woman yelled. “You’re supposed to listen to us!”
I opened my side door a crack. “He’s not feeling well,” I offered. “Maybe you could come back later?”
“My daughter’s about to lose custody of her kids, and I’m sitting here until he comes out and tells me what to do. No matter how long it takes. I know who he is.” The woman sat down in her lawn chair and opened a thermos. I could see steam rising from it when she unscrewed the lid. She bit into her sandwich again. “And I’ve got a sleeping bag in the car,” she said, without turning her head toward me.
Sure enough, she was still there when Peg got home.
“DIPG?” I whispered. The kids were in the den lying on top of each other having a staring contest.
Peg was leaning against the stove with tears running down her face. She nodded and took a big, wavery breath. “They gave me the name of a someone, a doctor at Dana Farber in Boston—”
She had to stop talking, she had no air, she was squeezed flat. I wrapped my arms around her and willed my own heart to keep beating.
“Tell me again what the doctor said,” I said. “Tell me exactly.”
Ella appeared in the doorway, afraid to come closer. “What’s wrong?” she asked in an anxious voice. “Is something wrong with Miles?”
Peg pushed away from me and opened the refrigerator door to hide her face. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “Miles is fine. Are you hungry?”
There were printed sheets from the doctor: “DIPG: Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (dih- FYOOS in-TRIN-sik PON-teen glee-OH-muh). A highly aggressive and difficult to treat tumor found in an area of brainstem called pons, which controls many of the body’s most vital functions, such as breathing.”
The facts of this disease were so foreign to Peg and me that we wouldn’t say the terrifying, alien words to each other. I grew furious with the websites that explained them. I was livid that no doctor had diagnosed Miles earlier, and demanded new tests, new specialists, new opinions, a different disease. Errors happen all the time, I insisted to a woman in the insurance call center.
“Why is this happening to us?” Peg whispered to me, one night when we were both lying in bed. “What did we do?”
“It’s not our fault, Peg.”
“It’s not yours, anyway,” she said.
“What does that mean?” I was frayed, too tired.
“I carried him; he was inside my body. I must have done something. I did this. I corrupted the energy somehow, it was something I did in those nine months. Maybe I was too angry, or read too much, or cried. I caused this.”
Winn’s theories again. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t have enough in me to comfort Peg, or reassure her, or whatever it was that she was asking for. I didn’t have enough thought state to manifest in the physical world.
The second page was a kick in the gut: “Conventional limited-field radiation produces responses in more than 90 percent of children with DIPGs. These responses are short-lived, however, lasting about six to nine months on average. Several trials to increase the dose of radiation therapy have been performed and none have improved survival. The survival rate among children aged 3-9 is 3%.”
I knew I shouldn’t think the worst but I did. I imagined how it could happen, the death, what he would look like, what it would feel like to touch him. I was terrified by the heart-stopping precariousness of children. When I look at Miles’s preschool class photo now, I see depression sneaking into the little blonde girl in the Minnie Mouse shirt, or addiction already eroding one of the twins. I vowed to do anything to keep Miles for another day, month, until Christmas, until he’s seven, please dear God, save this little boy’s life.
Winn. I had to talk to him. He’d brought that little girl in Minnesota back from a coma in the 70s. Jamie Manaheim. I remember reading about it in Time. He could fix this. If I could get to him.
The woman in the driveway was one thing, but now dozens of people squatted outside Winn’s house: on the sidewalks, on the front lawn, even in the woods that abutted our back yards. Once people found out he was in town there was no stopping the crowds. They came begging for Winn to help them: an extra paycheck, a pregnancy, a promotion, a lost dog. Winn was the miracle man – he’d fixed Cher after the 90s! – and now regular people needed their own miracles. There were counter protestors too. A group of twelve men sat side-by-side, their ears Xed-over with black tape like a quilt stitched together with surgical thread. Peg read that they were mocking Winn’s well-known “regardful listening.”
I didn’t care about any of those people. All I cared about was Miles, strapped in his car seat behind Peg and me, on his way to Dana Farber to recline like a tiny king and offer up his head to the stream of nurses who forayed in and out of the radiation room. Afterwards we’d sit next to him as he slept, Peg stroking the thin skin stretched over his temples, so delicate and dangerous. Me, cradling his hand and watching dreams play across Miles’s translucent lids. Sometimes his leg would twitch, and I’d be desperate to know where he was running to. “Where are you, Miles? Where are you going? Are we with you there?”
I knew I shouldn’t ask Winn for a favor at this moment, but I didn’t have a choice. My son could die.
One morning, early, as quietly as I could, I tapped on the aluminum screen door to Winn’s back porch. To my surprise, he opened it himself. He was wearing a bathrobe and only one slipper sock.
“You okay?” I asked, squinting at him.
“I’ve been better,” Winn said, removing his glasses and peeking past me to the yard. “Come in, John.”
He led me to the den, favoring his bare foot. He sat in his leather chair and rested the foot on a hassock.
“What happened?”
“Tripped on a fold in the bedroom rug. Arma took it up after. She says throw rugs are dangerous.”
“Who’s Arma?”
As if on cue, a brick of a woman appeared in the room. She had straight, dyed-dark hair with a brilliant stripe of white where it had grown out. Arma wore a simple brown dress with a huge, but real, gardenia pinned to the collar. She held a sweater.
“Put this on,” she ordered.
Her voice was one of the sweetest I’d ever heard. I reached out my hand to her. “John,” I said. “From next door.”
She smiled tightly and lifted each of Winn’s arms, gently placing his hands into the sleeves of the sweater.
“He’s so thin now,” she said to me, not unkindly.
“She’s an angel,” Winn said.
I could hear a handful of protestors chanting in the back yard: “Fear is contemptible. The solution is visual. Work it, see it. Work it. Be it.”
Winn closed his eyes and slumped back in his chair.
“This isn’t a good time,” Arma told me. “You go away now.”
“I’ll ask him again,” I promised Peg when I got back home. “I’ll go tomorrow morning.”
She was nervously rotating the handle of a carpet sweeper at the door to my office. “Ella’s in the club house and she won’t come out,” she said. “She’s got Miles up there.”
We’d turned our attic into a “no adults allowed” playroom for the kids when Miles was big enough to climb up the few steps from our second-floor landing.
“You think I should intervene?”
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s see if they’ll come out for you.”
I climbed the steps to the attic and pressed my ear to the door; nothing. “Ella? Miles?”
Silence.
“Hey guys. It’s lunch time.”
I heard the snap of duct tape coming off a roll. “What are you doing, Ella?”
Silence.
“You need to open up now.” Another rip of the duct tape.
“If you don’t come out, we’ll come in,” Peg warned.
“You can’t. It’s private.”
Peg dug around in the hall desk and handed me a screwdriver. I started to remove the door from its frame.
“NO, Daddy, NO!! Don’t!!!”
I kept unscrewing—first the top hinge, then the bottom. I lifted the door and carried it down the steps to the hallway. Peg ran up and froze at the top step. She gave me a nervous look and climbed into the attic. I followed her.
“It’s Ok, sweetheart. You’re not in trouble,” Peg crooned. “I just need to see Miles.” […]
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Lesley Bannatyne received the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award first place for fiction and won the 2018 Bosque Literary Journal fiction prize. Her work has been published in the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, and Zone 3, Pangyrus, Craft, and other literary magazines. As a freelance journalist, she’s covered stories ranging from druids in Massachusetts to relief workers in Bolivia. Bannatyne also writes extensively on popular culture, and her most recent non-fiction book, Halloween Nation, was short-listed for a Bram Stoker Award. Her debut short story collection, Unaccustomed to Grace, was published by Kallisto Gaia Press in 2022.
“OMG Winn Handler Moved Next Door” originally appeared with Kallisto Gaia Press.