The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(144)

After her death.

She turned the blade so that the edge pressed against her wrist. At the instant that she was about to cut deeply lengthwise—as she had learned was necessary for a successful suicide one time when she’d investigated it on the Web—there was a rap at the bathroom door. She startled, and as her hand jerked, the blade sliced shallowly into her flesh. A few drops of blood ran down her arm into the water.

“Who’s there?” she asked, with a voice that sounded surprised it had the chance to speak again.

“You’re not the only one who needs to use the bath, you know,” called out a woman.

“Just a moment,” Paula said.

She looked into the water as her red blood dissipated into pink and then was gone, almost as if the thoughts of suicide were a dream. But they weren’t, and never would be again. She tried to identify exactly whose voice had called out to her, to remember which of the women with whom she had shared a bustling breakfast it could have possibly been—Lillian, who squeezed her hand briefly after passing the marmalade, Jennifer, who found it hard to meet her eyes, or perhaps one of the others—and though she could not put a face to the voice, she remembered them all as friendly, and sympathetic once they realized the purpose of her journey. And so she thought…no, not here. Don’t do it here. Paula didn’t want to make friends, however new, clean up the mess she’d leave behind. Whatever she was going to do, it had to be done in front of people whom she had never looked in the eye, who would not then be forced to mourn their own failures to save her. The women she’d just met here, even though just passing acquaintances, deserved better. Her mother had raised her that way.

Her mother…

Paula slipped slowly into the water until her head submerged beneath its surface and her knees popped up to cool in the chill air of the room. She held her breath, embracing the silence, and wished that she could just keep holding that breath until all breath was gone, taking with it this room, this city, everything. She held the air in her lungs for as long as she could, but then the air exploded from between her lips and she sat up quickly, shivering in a strange room in a strange country.

She dressed quickly and rushed back to her cramped room, which was all that she could afford, and only barely afford at that. She grabbed her backpack, stuffed it with her possessions, told no one she was checking out—almost laughing, but not quite, at the double meaning of that phrase—and fled the hostel.

If she was going to die that day, she was going to do it in front of strangers.





Paula gulped down a mouthful of coffee the moment the waitress brought it over, burning her tongue, which reminded her yet again that life meant pain. At least for her it did. She blew on what liquid remained in the cup, cursing her impatience. She had no idea how others managed to maintain pleasant lives, but hers was one filled with impatience, and blossoming with pain.

She had hoped that the despair which had settled over her, initially back home and now deepening here, would do her a favor for once and demonstrate its own patience, so that she could stave off her suicide long enough to return to die in her home country. But her latest worries made that unlikely. The intricacies of getting her family’s remains released, negotiating with a local funeral home for proper caskets, dealing with the airlines to transport the bodies (or what remained of them)…it was all too much for her, and those details buzzed in her head, blotting out both sleep and reason. She found it hard to contemplate the enormity of suddenly being the responsible one in the family. No one could have ever mistaken her for the one in that role before, and now…

Identifying her father’s body had been difficult enough. She just didn’t have the energy to do all of the other things that remained.

And she didn’t have the energy to remain alive either.

She had walked all morning through the streets of a country she had never before thought to visit, stumbled on until her aching feet insisted that she drop into a chair at a corner cafe. She’d sat in the sunshine for hours, unable to summon up the energy to move, shamed by the determination of the passersby rushing on with their lives. Picking at the remains of her plate of squidgy lemon pudding, an odd dessert with an odd name, she wondered why her father had always wanted to visit this odd country.

He had always talked about it, studying maps, poring over guidebooks, and had finally done it, and look what good chasing his dreams had done him. She never understood his dreams anyway. That had always been part of their problem, she figured; she should have been able to understand him better. But then, he never seemed to spend much energy understanding her, either. Still, he had reached out to both Paula and her sister Jane, neither of whom had ever married, offering to pay their ways to London to experience it with him. Perhaps she should have taken her father up on it as her sister had. If she’d done so, she would have been on that bus with the three of them, and all of her worrying and despair would now be over.

Instead, she had to sit in an unfamiliar place and contemplate how and when she would…do it. If she’d been home, she would have known exactly what to do. She had been thinking about it long enough, planning for its inevitability. It would have been easy. There was that lake, and the sunset that came with it, and those pills that since Mark had left she had been spending far too many long nights studying, even before every living relative of hers had been erased. She cursed her decision to remain home instead of taking her dad up on his invitation. The matter could have been taken out of her hands. She could have died with them, without thought, instead of just sitting there thinking about dying.