“You and Callie really can’t handle this woman by yourselves?”
“Tara might have soldiers of her own,” I said.
Chapter 38
The odds of finding Tara my first night in Boston were less than zero, so I decided to let her find me.
The Life after Suicide Therapy class (LAST) meets weekly at Boston’s Norton Community Center on Franklin Street, near Devonshire. I purposely walked in a few minutes late hoping to catch Tara by surprise, but she wasn’t there. It had been nearly two years since I’d been to one of these sessions, and I didn’t recognize any of the attendees. The instructor was the same, and he remembered me well enough to frown. I nodded at him and took a seat and he continued his lecture.
“More people commit suicide in New York City than are murdered,” he said. “And it’s the same here in Boston and most major cities in America. Suicide has become the third leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults between ages fifteen and twenty-four.” He paused to let his words sink in.
Then he said, “What’s going on, here, people?”
Then he proceeded to tell us.
I listened as long as I could, which was about twenty minutes, before making an early exit to avoid becoming thoroughly depressed. His words, as always, brought back the memories.
Tara and I had hooked up during my dark days, when Janet and I were first separated. We were brooding, depressed people with several things in common: we were both freshly abandoned by our significant others, both worked for Darwin as assassins, both orphaned at a young age, and both of us were the offspring of suicidal parents. Tara’s parents committed suicide together. They tried to take Tara with them, but at the last minute, for reasons unknown, failed to follow through. Both my parents attempted suicide several times, but only my mother succeeded, and that didn’t happen until my father died from a heart attack. Tara and I had gone to these sessions for a while, as well as the annual convention held at the Park Plaza Hotel.
Those who have been affected by a suicide in the family—five million of us in America—are called survivors. As a group we have a tendency to dwell on death, and because only twenty percent of suicides leave notes to explain their behavior, most of us spend an inordinate amount of our adult lives trying to divine some sort of meaning from our devastating losses.
Suicide affects the surviving family members in a unique way. Sure, it saddens, confuses and angers us. But more than anything else, it worries us, because we know our chances of cocking that trigger or stepping onto that ledge are much greater than it is for the general population.
Women are three times more likely than men to attempt suicide, but men are four times more likely to succeed. Women like Tara Siegel often go through life with an internal suicide bomb set to explode at any moment, and when some external factor comes along to light the fuse—they’re sitting ducks. What I came to realize over time is that Tara had a death wish. But while the two of us and the rest of Darwin’s monkeys were mentally unstable, Tara was hyper suicidal as well, and her self-destructive behavior manifested itself whenever things appeared to be going smoothly in her life.
Like when we were at our best.
That night I left the Norton Community Center building and walked to a nearby diner for a cup of coffee. Then I caught a cab to my hotel and spent an hour sipping whiskey in the hotel bar, watching people come and go.
No Tara.
I paid my bill and loitered in the lobby a few minutes, and caught the elevator to the sixth floor. I stood in front of the door to my room, slipped in the key, and took a deep breath before pushing the door open and ducking to the side.
No gunshots fired by Tara.
I entered the room, checked the phone for messages, checked the room for booby traps, and finally undressed, turned out the lights and climbed into bed.
An hour later I awoke to the sound of a gun being cocked four inches from my face.
Tara said, “100 billion people have died since the dawn of the human race.”
Morbid as it sounds, Tara and I always started our conversations by quoting trivia death facts to each other.
I said, “In Madagascar, families dig up the bones of dead relatives and parade them around the village, along with the shroud their loved ones were buried in. Then they bury the bones with a new shroud.”
“What do they do with the original shroud?” she asked.
“They give it to a young, childless couple.”
“Why?”
