Snowbleed

"Good morning, Princess Elizabeth," I'd say as we passed on the steps of the shabby apartment house where we both lived in 1971. Princess Elizabeth was my neighbor in Albany, NY, a cold Northeast city blanketed in snow from November into March. I was about 19 years old, a student/cocktail waitress. 

Until the shots crackled and the blood droplets appeared on the snow, I didn't think much about Princess Elizabeth . 

No one did.

Princess Elizabeth may have been placed in the basement apartment by social services. I only recall our landlord’s request - that she was a nice woman who’d   been discharged from a hospital and needed a place where she would feel welcome. In the culture of the times, I agreed. I knew little about  deinstitutionalization 

She introduced herself as Princess Elizabeth. She was frumpy, pudgy-faced and ever-cheerful. Unless she was screaming in the common back stairwell. 

Middle-aged, her skin was more blotchy than lined. Her comfort seemed unfettered by reality. Three coats in August. No coat in winter. She didn't seem to have a job, walking from dusk to dawn and in between, circling the several blocks that connected us to the rest of the city, only a few blocks from the capitol. She explained that she was a Princess on multiple occasions, as if we were meeting for the first time.

There was no doubt that Princess Elizabeth, ever alone, never accompanied on her walks nor visited by anyone, was not royalty. But she was insistent about her ancestry. Like many in a post-hippie era, I accepted her by any name. 

And no one else cared enough to challenge her claims. 

Daily, her footfalls pounded hard on the steps when she came into the building - she was always hurrying, looking for someone or getting away from something.

Toward the end of her stay, I'd sometimes hear her in the common back hall, a faceless voice three stories down, wailing in the stairwell. More than once I called down, asking if she was okay. I don’t think she knew her cries could be heard. Princess Elizabeth told me to go away in a sinister tone, and I did. 

That morning in late November, it was bone-cold when I heard the sound. About a foot of snow buried the streets the night before. I heard a loud BOOM, could it be a car backfiring? Barely awake, I was still rummaging around the kitchen in search of a coffee cup in the midst of mayhem. 

Though the window, I looked down to the sidewalk and saw blotches of red spots in the snow  - an alarming crimson red. Icicles glued the windows shut and I couldn't hear from what going on. Sirens screamed in the background, and unfamiliar voices shouted, "DON'T DO IT!"

What happened? I waited until I saw an ambulance, then saw her escorted from the building. Cautiously, I went downstairs, then outside to learn more about  Princess Elizabeth. I learned that she was among discharged from her home, a psychiatric hospital a couple of years back, set free to find a life alone without family, friends, or a job. A government check kept her royal name intact but her medical visits were few and far between. Maybe never.

That morning, the psychiatrist showed up to take her back to the mental hospital. She, Princess Elizabeth , clung to the confusing world she could could barely navigate. 

She had stopped taking her medication. 

So she shot the police office accompanying the ambulance, and wounded others. Blood in the snow.

She would return to a psychiatric hospital