The Best of Me(89)
Because everyone was coming for Thanksgiving, the house was going to be full. The family was arriving in dribs and drabs, so for the first night it was just the three of us. On the second day, late in the afternoon, Lisa pulled up. I helped her unload her car, and then we took a walk on the beach. It was cold enough to see our breath, and a strong wind was blowing. “Did I tell you I got Tiffany’s toxicology report?” she asked a while after we’d left the house. “They also sent me her death certificate, and apparently—”
At that moment a Labrador retriever bounded up, tail wagging, a middle-aged woman in a baseball cap trotting behind it. “Brandy, no,” she scolded, adding as she unfurled her leash, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Lisa gathered the dog’s head in her hands. “You’re beautiful, aren’t you?” she trilled in the melodic voice she uses for things with tails. “Yes, you are, and you know it.” She turned to the owner. “How old is she?”
“Two years this February,” the woman said.
“I have one that age,” Lisa told her. “And she’s a real handful.”
I have no patience for this kind of talk and turned to face the ocean, waiting for the conversation to end. Hopefully then I could learn what our sister had used to kill herself with. We figured she had taken pills—Klonopin, most likely—and though it technically didn’t matter if she’d mixed it with other things, we still wanted to know.
Behind me, Lisa was telling the strange woman that the Newfoundland water dog she had before the one she has now died after swallowing all her husband Bob’s high blood pressure medication.
“My God,” the woman said. “That must have been awful!”
“Oh, it was,” Lisa told her. “We just felt so guilty.”
The woman with the Labrador wished us a happy Thanksgiving, and as she headed down the beach, Lisa continued her story. “So they sent me the death certificate, and the cause isn’t listed as a drug overdose but as asphyxiation.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
She sniffed her hands for dog and then stuffed them into her coat pockets. “After taking the Klonopin, Tiffany put a plastic bag over her head.” Lisa paused a moment to let that sink in. “I wrote to the state trooper who found her body and sent him a picture of her in her twenties, the pretty one we ran with her obituary. I just wanted him to know she was more than what he walked in on.”
I’ve always liked to think that before killing myself I’d take the time to really mess with people. By this I mean that I’d leave them things, and write letters, nice ones, apologizing for my actions and reassuring them that there was nothing they could have said or done to change my mind. In the fantasy I’d leave money to those who’d have never expected it. Who’s he? they’d wonder after opening the envelope. It might be a Polish lifeguard at the pool I used to go to in London, or a cashier I was quietly fond of. Only lately do I realize how ridiculous this is. When you’re in the state that my sister was in, and that most people are in when they take their own lives, you’re not thinking of anything beyond your own pain. Thus the plastic bag—the maximizer, as it were—the thing a person reaches for after their first attempt at an overdose fails and they wake up sick a day later thinking, I can’t even kill myself right.
It’s hard to find a bag without writing on it—the name of a store, most often. LOWE’S, it might read. SAFEWAY. TRUE VALUE. Does a person go through a number of them before making a selection, or, as I suspect, will any bag do, regardless of the ironic statement it might make? This is what was going through my mind when Lisa stopped walking and turned to me, asking, “Will you do me a favor?”
“Anything,” I said, just so grateful to have her alive and beside me.
She held out her foot. “Will you tie my shoe?”
“Well…sure,” I said. “But can you tell me why?”
She sighed. “My pants are tight and I don’t feel like bending over.”
I knelt down into the damp sand and did as she’d asked. It was almost dark, and as I stood back up, I looked at the long line of houses stretching to the pier. One of them belonged to us, but I couldn’t have begun to guess which one it was. Judging by distance was no help either, as I had no idea how long we’d been walking. Lisa hadn’t spent any more time at the Sea Section than I had, so she wasn’t much help. “Does our place have one deck or two?” she asked.
“Two?” I said. “Unless it has only one?”
The houses before us were far from identical. They were painted every color you could think of, yet in the weak light, reduced to basic shapes, their resemblance was striking. All were wooden, with prominent picture windows. All had staircases leading to the beach, and all had the air of a second home, one devoted to leisure rather than struggle. They likely didn’t contain many file cabinets, but if you were after puzzles or golf clubs or board games, you’d come to the right place. The people in the houses looked similar as well. We could see them in their kitchens and family rooms, watching TV or standing before open refrigerators. They were white, for the most part, and conservative, the sort of people we’d grown up with at the country club, the kind who’d have sat in the front of the plane and laughed when the man across the aisle compared his broken overhead bin to Obamacare. That said, we could have knocked on any of these doors, explained our situation, and received help. “These folks have a house but don’t know which one it is!” I could imagine a homeowner shouting over his shoulder into the next room. “Remember when that happened to us?”