up wearing mascara altogether for that year, and the one that followed, when the slightest thing could trigger a memory of Molly or one of the others. And when Molly banished me that fall—which is what it felt like, banishment, no two ways about it—it broke my heart.
Molly texted me Thanksgiving week and asked if I could come by Tuesday night after work. The pool house door was opened by a pleasant-looking Filipina caregiver wearing floral-patterned scrubs, a new and alarming addition. Molly introduced us, then shooed the woman up to her parents’ house and promised to call when we were finished.
I was shocked at how much her appearance had deteriorated. She slumped in a wheelchair in baggy sweats. The expensive blond wig which had been styled before her treatment began, to perfectly match her sophisticated hairstyle, now looked absurdly out of place atop her pallid, steroid-swollen face.
“I’m sorry I’ve been rude,” she began, and I tried to cut her off but she waved a hand to stop me. It was something she’d been working up, I realized, and I let her go on. It was a wonderful summation, a sad reminder that a world full of crummy lawyers was about to lose a really first-rate one. When she finished the apology she asked if I would do her a favor.
“Anything,” I said, and meant it.
“I knew I could count on you. It’s just too weird to tell my parents. And my brother is on Planet Frank, pretending that I’ve got a bad cold.” Her parents had always been fairly cool, as reactionary billionaires went. Her brother Frank was megaintelligent but socially inept, a physicist up at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.
“Let me guess. You want me to have your love child.” She laughed. “No? Okay, then. You must want to revive the Instant Karma project.”
Her smile was weak as she shook her head. “Too late for me on that, though I suppose it’s never too late for justice. No, Tina, this is a lot simpler.” She explained that when she was first diagnosed, after a grand mal seizure in the shoe department of Nordstrom at the Grove, she worried endlessly about loss of control. Once her diagnosis was firm and irrevocable, she decided that she wanted power over when and how she would die.
“But I’m a coward. And I didn’t want to do anything that would make a horrible memory for my parents, or whoever found me. So much for guns and knives. I kind of liked the idea of jumping off a skyscraper, or out of a plane, but I figured by the time I was ready, that wouldn’t be practical.” She waved a hand at the wheelchair. “As it isn’t. Anyway, one night I had an incredibly vivid dream.
“I was in some kind of medieval court, like one of those period movies where everybody’s dressed in forty yards of satin. Mine was deep blue. We were speaking a language I’d never heard that sounded like chipmunks. Then, suddenly, huge doors swung open and warriors swarmed in, wearing ragged animal furs and carrying swords and shields. Everybody was screaming and slashing swords, but in the midst of it all I was totally calm. I looked into my lap and saw my hand, wearing an ornate ring with a huge ruby. Just as one of the warriors was about to pounce on me, I raised my hand to my mouth, unclasped the ruby, and swallowed a golden liquid.”
Quite a dream, that. Mine tend to be about getting lost in parking lots, or being unable to find the right color pen on my way to the final exam for the course I didn’t know I was taking.
“I woke up then,” she continued, “and went on eBay and found a poison ring. They’re big in Goth culture, in case you didn’t know, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I actually bought a couple, so I could pick the one I liked best once I had them all.”
“The opal!”
Molly never wore jewelry when she was younger, was one of the few women my age I’ve ever known without a single piercing. I remembered noticing the ring as we sat around the fire ring outside her pool house after Halloween group session, and how she laughed it off as something she’d had forever. I looked at her hands now and her fingers were bare again.
She nodded. “The opal. And I got myself some potassium cyanide and I made my own poison pills, just like those guys in the spy movies who always have a fake tooth in their mouth in case they’re captured. It was almost comic, actually. I mean the stuff
Only Molly could think of the creation of poison pills in those terms.
“How many billable hours did it take?” I asked.
She chuckled. “You got me, Tina. Always could. Altogether, counting the online shopping and death pill construction, about four and a half, but that’s cause I was taking my time. Perfectionism is a burden.”
This from the Torrey Pines valedictorian, the Stanford National Merit Scholar, the Boalt Hall law review editor.
“So this is really the last loose end,” she said. “I’ve signed all the powers of attorney and health care directives and financial papers, and my affairs, as they say, are in order. Donating organs, I’m sorry to say, isn’t an option. My parents have sworn that they won’t haul me to a hospital and that I can die right here, in hospice, with all the painkillers I want. I’m past pride about pretty much everything, and it will be easier for my parents that way. Between you and me, I’m ready to cry uncle and go into hospice. My head hurts and the drugs will be better.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her simply. “However I can help …”
She smiled and there was a spark of the old Molly again, looking up triumphantly after racing through the AP Physics exam. “You can take care of the damned poison rings. I don’t want my parents to find that stuff after I’m dead or for anybody to accidentally get into the cyanide. What I had in mind, if you’re willing, is for you to make it all disappear. Take it away and dispose of it for me, please.”
I hesitated for a moment and she misunderstood.
“Listen, if this is too much—”
“Not at all,” I said. “But you need to promise me something. You won’t cut me off again. This is awful, Molly, but it tore me apart when you made me go away.”
We both cried a bit then, and a few tissues later she told me where she’d hidden the rings and the poison, in a pretty little oval cloisonne box in her swimsuit drawer. I retrieved the innocuouslooking pink-and-gold box and found the opal and three other rather bulky rings nestled inside on black velvet, each holding a lethal gelcap. A miniature version of the cloisonne box beside them held a dozen more capsules.
