She heard her phone buzz again under the covers, but Emily seemed not to notice as she loped from the room. “I want jelly on mine, Dad!” she called, exiting and shutting the door behind her. Brown started barking again.
Guilt, the river that runs through motherhood, threatened to rise over its banks. The day and all the misery it promised loomed like a thunderhead. She smelled the scent of coffee and figured there was no way out but through.
THE DAY MY father killed himself dawned blue and cold. I heard the hard wind rattling the windows and saw the bright sky and high cirrus clouds from my window as I woke. I looked across the room and saw my sister lying on the bed across from me. She stared up at the ceiling, her arms folded behind her head.
“I had a bad dream,” she said, knowing somehow that I was awake. She looked pale, small in her bed like the child she was.
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Something terrible.”
“Dreams can’t hurt you,” I said, only because that’s what she always told me. And she only told me that because that’s what Mom told her. She was fifteen. I was ten. But there had been no dream, I’d learn later. She’d seen him. Linda had been the one to find my father as he lay slumped in the toolshed far behind our house, the wall sprayed with his blood, the gun lying on the floor. Somehow she was the only one to hear the blast.
It woke her from a deep sleep and she drifted out the back door to find him. He was always out there building things with wood-birdhouses, dollhouses, and tiny pieces of furniture, picture frames, curio cabinets. Everyone loved my father’s work. He was always making gifts for friends and neighbors, never accepting money. My mother complained about how he wasted his time with building trinkets when the lawn needed tending and the fence repair, that his hands were splintered and calloused, rough to the touch.
Linda pushed open the door and saw him there. A cigarette still burned in the ashtray. She was surprised, had never seen him smoke. She said it was as if the rest of the scene just didn’t register. All she could think about was that cigarette and how she just couldn’t imagine him putting it to his lips, drawing the smoke into his lungs. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there.
I often imagine her in the doorway, one hand resting on the frame, the other on the doorknob. The bright full moon making her white nightgown translucent, the slim form of her body visible beneath it. She might have shivered in the cold, wrapped her arms around herself.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?”
I know he never meant for Linda or me to find him that way. We were forbidden from bothering him when he was in there. He would have expected our mother to come out raging in the morning about how he’d stayed out there all night again, and didn’t he remember he had a wife?
A fog fell over our lives. And it never lifted, not really. The contrast between our life before that day and after was so stark that it seemed like two different lives. Suicide marks you in a way that no other tragedy does- especially the suicide of a parent. And maybe the worst part about the suffering that follows is that no one ever discusses it. People feel angry when they think about suicide, the coward’s way out. As if all there is to life is the bravery to soldier on. There’s blame for the deceased who chose to throw away something to which other people desperately cling, and even for the family he left behind.
People step away from the topic, avert their eyes from you. I don’t remember being taunted at school. The other children just seemed repelled by me, kept distance between us. As a child, this has the effect of adding shame to the powerful brew of grief, rage, and sadness. There are no platitudes to offer those grieving a suicide. No one says, “He’s in a better place now” or “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” He wasn’t taken by accident or illness. He didn’t allow himself to be part of God’s plan. In the ultimate act of rebellion or surrender or just irreverence, he left.
I remembered a particular feeling I had in the year after my father’s death. It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.
I had that feeling again standing in the apartment I shared with my husband. The doorman had tried to stop me, to warn me that something was terribly amiss. A uniformed police officer held me up at the elevator for a few minutes, arguing, blocking my passage with his body. And then Detective Crowe came to the door of my apartment. It was odd to see him there,
“You don’t want to be here, Mrs. Raine,” he said gently as I approached, the uniformed officer at my heels. “Not right now.”
“I
Something passed between us, a tacit understanding, and he moved away from the door frame, allowed me to enter the shambles of my life with a sweep of his hand.
8
He awoke with a start, breathing hard. The room was dark. But he could see by the sliver of light shining in between the edge of the blinds and the window frame that it was daylight. How long had he slept? Too long.
She shifted beside him.
“Relax,” she said. “It’s over. By tonight you’ll be gone.”
He didn’t answer her. It wasn’t over. The money had been transferred, the evidence destroyed, arrangements for his departure had been made. But it wasn’t close to being over. In the comfortable life he’d made, he’d forgotten what it was like to be afraid.
He looked over at Sara’s long, lean form, feeling the powerful arousal the sight of her body always awakened in him. But he didn’t reach for her. Instead he moved away, took his phone from the pocket of his pants, which lay in a heap on the floor, and moved quietly into the bathroom.
Her apartment was a hovel, filthy. She lived like a man, without a thought toward design or cleanliness. It was just a place she came to sleep, nothing but a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, all featuring a grime and neglect particular to their functions.
He opened the keyboard on his phone, started tapping with his thumbs:
I DON’T WANT YOU TO THINK I DIDN’T LOVE YOU BECAUSE I DID. REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU HAPPY FOR A WHILE, THAT WE WERE GREAT FRIENDS AND EXCELLENT LOVERS. AND THEN FORGET ME. MOURN ME LIKE I’M DEAD. DON’T TRY TO FIND ME OR TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS YOU’LL HAVE. I CAN’T PROTECT YOU-OR YOUR FAMILY-IF YOU DO.
It was a foolish thing to do, close to suicidal, and he was surprised at himself for even considering it. It would be far better for her to suspect that he was dead. But he knew her, knew the lengths she would go to prove herself right or to prove him wrong. The things she would risk, just to answer the most inane question. She’d walk the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, just to authenticate her writing. She’d go alone, just to feel the fear, to find the words to describe it. He realized that she wouldn’t be able to live with the ambiguity of his disappearance. And if she couldn’t, he couldn’t help her, wouldn’t be able to save her from herself.
“Do you ever lose control, Marcus? Have you ever just blown your stack?” Isabel wanted to know during a recent argument. “Don’t you want to know what it would be like to just let it rip?”
“No,” he told her with a smile. “It’s not fuel-efficient. An engine runs best warm, not hot.”
“And too cold, it seizes. It cracks.”
But he wasn’t as cold as she thought. It was just that her engine ran so white hot that everything else seemed frigid. Her temper, her passion, the heat of her desires, opinions, drives, that’s what drew him to her. She thawed him. His time with her had changed him in ways he hadn’t anticipated. He’d stayed with her far longer than he
