I'd Give Anything(26)

“Agnes? It’s okay. Maybe Lomy is with her.”

“She said that you were spending the night, that you’d be there within fifteen minutes. I didn’t want to leave before you got there, but she insisted. You know how she insists.”

“Hold on just a second,” I said.

I sat down on the curb and dropped my head between my knees. I could feel Dobbsey and Walt butting their noses against the top of my head.

“Ginny—”

“Maybe she just wanted to be alone?” I said. “That would be like her, to want a night alone.”

“Maybe. I’m standing on your mom’s front porch,” said Agnes. “You’d better come.”



She’d left an envelope taped to her front door. On the envelope, she’d written: Agnes, Give this Envelope to Virginia Before You Open this Door. Call Her Right Now. I Mean It. Inside was a note to me.

Dear Virginia,

I request that you not enter my house. Call 911 and have them send an ambulance, although you can tell the dispatcher that there is no need for sirens and lights or for exceeding the speed limit. Insist upon this. We don’t need a circus.

I would prefer that you not see me in what will be my current state at the time you read this (although I assure you that I am well turned out and perfectly presentable), but I anticipate that you will be tempted to not honor that preference because of some misguided and ridiculous goal of achieving “closure.” Trust me: I am dead.

I chose this. I made a plan and executed it, the way I always do. I was entirely sane and clearheaded at every stage of the process. No one helped. My death was not the result of foul play, although I know that if it had been, there would be a long list of viable suspects, a fact I view as evidence of a well-lived life.

Do not be foolish enough to assume that I did this because I was despondent. I have never in my life been despondent. And for God’s sake, don’t blame yourself or anyone else. That would be arrogant and presumptuous. No one but I had anything to do with this.

My attorney Henry Hill has all of my instructions. I will be cremated. No funeral.

I died the way I lived, on my own terms. You might try living that way, as well, Virginia.

Your mother,

Adela Sartin Beale





Shoulder to shoulder, Agnes and I sat together on my mother’s front steps as I read this. Around and above us was full-blown morning. Clear blue, cantaloupe orange. A comma of moon, vanishing. From somewhere inside the house, I could hear singing, two women’s voices, silver and gold, rippling into and out of each other like tributaries. When I finished the letter, I handed it to Agnes to read and tugged my jacket sleeves over my hands to warm them.

When Agnes finished reading, very soon, I would call 911. The ambulance would come, a tumult of violent red and whirling lights but no siren, a police car, too. There would be chatter and people, neighbors materializing silently on the front walk. I would see my mother’s face, sunken above the carefully buttoned collar of her gray silk blouse, her skin like paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out, her eyes shut.

Soon, I would have to perform an accounting of my feelings, to measure the dimensions of the new Adela-shaped hole in my life.

But for now, for these seconds, there was peace: a shining sky, sleeping flower beds, voices like water.

“Delibes,” I said, remembering. “The ‘Flower Duet.’”

Agnes folded the letter, slid it back into the envelope, and pressed it into my hand.

“Your mother was too weak to stand,” said Agnes, very quietly.

“I know,” I said.

“When I left, she was upstairs, in bed.”

“Yes, I thought she probably was.”

“This letter was on the front door.”

“I know.”

“She couldn’t have done that.”

I closed my eyes and imagined Goddy, shutting the front door behind him, taping the letter to it. I think he must have done that. Maybe he did more before then, back in the house: turned on music, administered drugs, kept watch. Maybe he hadn’t. But I knew that whatever he’d done he’d done because of a friendship so long-standing it had not mattered when one of the two people in it had ceased, a long time ago, to be a friend.

I put the letter into my pocket and took Agnes’s two hands in mine. Her blue eyes were gentle. I looked into them steadily and told her this: “I say she could have. She has always been capable of much more than anyone would ever guess.”

For a moment, we sat there, eyes and hands locked. Then, Agnes nodded.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

I took out my phone and dialed 9-1-1.



When I got home, chilled and dizzy with exhaustion and with so many phone calls to make, a sky-blackening swarm of phone calls hanging directly over my head, I made myself coffee in the French press I’m usually too lazy or impatient to use. And there was a holiness in it. I don’t mean in the coffee itself, but in the unhurried act of making it. Pouring hot water into the carafe to warm it, opening the bag of oily, deep brown, clicking beans, breathing in their nutty fragrance, grinding them to a coarse grit. The water tumbling into the kettle made a solemn music. In the intervals of waiting—for the water to boil, for the coffee to brew—I let my mind rest empty as the white coffee bowl Avery had given me last Mother’s Day because she knew I liked to warm my hands on my cup. And then the slow downwardness of the plunger, the coffee arcing from the spout. I even frothed milk, and it floated in my bowl like snow. I am not religious, but there is something prayer-like about tasks that you cannot rush through, the steady work of hands, every step imbued with patience.