Part III. Heather Laurent
CHAPTER TWELVE
The cosmology of angels is neither problematic nor puzzling. Nor is it sectarian. Virtually all religions have spiritual messengers or escorts. Someone to take our hands when we need their grasp most, someone to pull us hard and fast from the fire. Someone to yank us off the pavement as that oncoming pickup truck whizzes past while we are strolling at dusk, so that the vehicle may transform our windbreakers into sails but we continue on unscathed. Or, just maybe, someone to yank from our fingers that orange vial of pills because it has become too painful to live. My father’s brother and an older cousin of mine had both spent time in McLean, and so depression had never been a taboo subject at the breakfast table in my home growing up.
In my case it was indeed going to be a prescription drug that I was contemplating for my last act. My roommate my first year at college had a prescription for sleeping pills, and between Thanksgiving and Christmas I fell into a funk deeper than any I had known since my parents had died. (And those initial months after their deaths had been a fog; I was so buffered by large dollops of shock and small ones of relief-yes, relief-that the first year had been considerably easier than the ones that immediately followed.) I had been deteriorating all semester, but it had begun to accelerate as the days grew precariously short. I had gone to my aunt and uncle’s home in Fairfield for Thanksgiving, and the four days there had been more dispiriting than usual, and already I could see the changes in Amanda-how caustic her humor had become, how dark. How she was intent, it seemed, on starving herself to death. So many of the things I cared for most or associated with moments of comfort in my childhood-dolls, a couch, my childhood bed, a teakettle my mother had cherished-were scattered to the attics of relatives and friends or had been sold in the estate sale. There was just no more debris from the sinking ship that had once been my life that I could cling to. And I was miserable at college. I was lonely, I was doing poorly in class, and I was grappling with the reality that I was enrolled in a university rather than a conservatory. Unfortunately, I was five-ten-at least two inches too tall for even the more statuesque dancers-and I had never completely recovered from a series of ankle and toe injuries that had dogged me as a junior and senior in high school. It had been clear for a couple of years that I was never going to be a ballerina. And though I was in the dance program at the school, I had begun to realize that my voice was going to be my undoing when I began to audition for Broadway shows. It was adequate at best, and that was after four years of work with vocal coaches and voice teachers. What did that leave? The Rockettes. And no one, in truth, makes a living as a Rockette. Perhaps I could be a choreographer. Or a dance teacher. But I was never going to be a performer.
My depression, of course, was being fueled by far more than a fear that my professional dreams were starting to evaporate. I was eighteen, and the sad fact was that I was essentially alone in the world. I had been an orphan since high school, and my sister was falling apart even faster than I was. I simply didn’t see anything that gave me hope or confidence that tomorrow just might be better than today.
Now, the separation between depression and suicide is more crevasse than chasm. For months I had been working my way gingerly over the rocks along the ledge on the near side but studying how easy it would be to throw some ropes across the fissure and cross over. That whole autumn I was eating less and less, not consciously trying to starve myself the way Amanda was but simply incapable of making the effort most meals to pull myself together and go to the dining hall. I can recall lunches and dinners when I would just cry in my bed with the sheets pulled over my face. I wasn’t sleeping, but I wasn’t getting up, either. I would often just lie there, and my mind would drift to very dark places. On one occasion my roommate found me shivering in my parka on the floor by my bed at about three in the afternoon, naked other than that down jacket, and murmuring that I just couldn’t do this- though I wasn’t forthcoming about what “this” was, because even I wasn’t sure whether I meant getting dressed or breathing with purpose. I couldn’t explain to her quite what had happened, and I imagine if she had been more self-aware (and less self-absorbed), she would have reported me to the school’s health services. But she attributed my funk (her word) either to boys or to the fact that I was the kid at college whose parents had died in that murder-suicide. I think she expected me always to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That autumn I would lose twenty-five pounds. There were classes where I would sit in the back row of the lecture hall and look around, oblivious to anything the professor was saying, and suddenly my eyes would be bleary and tears would bounce off the yellow pad on which I was supposed to be taking notes. (Invariably the page would be blank.) I would look at myself in the dorm’s bathroom mirror, and even I could see that I was terrified and despairing and utterly lost. Some days I would sit at a library carrel and in my mind walk myself carefully through my aunt and uncle’s home or across the university campus and try to imagine precisely the tools or the manner in which I might kill myself. There was that beam running across the steep twelve-by-twelve-pitch roof in my relatives’ attic, a perfect spot to loop a rope if I decided to follow my father’s lead and hang myself. There was their car and their garage. Or the antique bathtub with the lion-paw feet in the guest bathroom, where I could lie in soothing warm water with a paring or carving knife beside me and watch the clouds of my blood turn the bathwater pink. At the college there were tall buildings with glass windows, most locked but all easy to smash with those heavy wooden chairs, and I gazed out from the highest floors all the time. There was the bell tower in the chapel, and one day I went so far as to walk to the hardware store in the village beside the campus and finger the meticulously bundled lengths of clothesline. There was the train that passed along the edge of the college near the physical plant, just far enough away that only when our windows had been wide open in September had we heard its occasional whistle. One afternoon I clawed my way through the wild tangle of bushes and shrubs beside those tracks and crouched for long moments, awaiting the train and envisioning in my head the passage from
I would contemplate who might find my body, and at first I would worry how it would affect them, but soon I was beyond caring. When you are as far down that path toward self-destruction as I was, you grow oblivious: not selfish, precisely, but insensible. Still, I decided finally that the best thing I could do was to choose a method that would make it likely that I was found by someone who did not know me well (if at all) and that my body would not be left in a condition that might leave that person with memories it would be hard to expunge. Consequently, I never seriously contemplated using a gun.
And so the night before the first day of exams, while everyone was hunkering down in dorm rooms or the various libraries scattered across the campus, I dropped the small bottle of my roommate’s sleeping pills into the dance bag that doubled as my book bag and slipped unnoticed into the basement of our dorm. I also packed a water bottle and some antihistamine tablets I had gotten from the infirmary to ensure that I wouldn’t vomit back up the great handfuls of sleeping pills I was planning to ingest. I had caught a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror on my way out the door, and I was struck by how drawn my face seemed, even by the standards of that miserable autumn, and how my hair looked a bit like a crazy woman’s: I hadn’t washed it in four or five days-hygiene falls by the wayside when you’re depressed-and it was hanging in strands that were long and oily and flat.
The dormitory was a Georgian monolith from the turn of the century, and the basement was a maze of thin corridors created by the rows of empty trunks and stacked cardboard boxes that belonged to the eighty of us who lived on the four floors above. There was a corner with our bicycles and a few pieces of decrepit furniture that not even a college student would use. I wanted no one to know I was in the basement, and so I navigated the stairs and the labyrinthine chaos on the cement floor by flashlight. I had pulled the door shut behind me. What I found most interesting as I searched for my own trunk was how the basement, which previously had been a source of terror-the abode of spiders and mice and demented men who lurked in the shadows-seemed now to be merely a cold room jam-packed with the detritus of young adults. It wasn’t frightening at all.
And, soon enough, I found my trunk. It was wedged vertically between another first-year student’s chest and
