The Other Mrs.(70)
“Fibromyalgia,” I tell her. “It’s a terribly frustrating thing. I wish I would have known your mother. I might’ve been able to help.”
“Bullshit,” she says. “Nobody could help.”
“I would have tried. I would have done anything I could to help.”
Her laugh is a cackle. “You’re not as smart as you want everyone to think. You and me have a little something in common,” she says, changing tack.
“Oh yeah?” I ask, disbelieving. “What’s that?”
I can’t think of one thing Imogen and I would ever have in common.
She comes closer. “You and me,” she says, pointing between us, “we’re both fucked up.”
I swallow against a lump in my throat. She takes a step closer, points her finger at me, stabs me in the chest with it. The bark of the tree presses against my back and I can’t move. Her voice is loud now, losing control.
“You think you can come in here and take her place. Sleep in her bed. Wear her fucking clothes. You are not her. You will never be her!” she screams.
“Imogen,” I whisper. “I never...” I start to say as her head drops into her hands. Imogen begins to sob, her entire body surging like ocean waves. “I would never try to take your mother’s place,” I say in a muted tone.
The air around us is bitter and bleak. I brace myself as a gust of wind comes rushing past and through me. I watch as Imogen’s dyed black hair swirls around her, her skin raw and red instead of its usual pale white.
I go to reach a hand out to her, to pat her arm, to console her. She draws swiftly away from the touch.
She drops her arms. She raises her eyes. She screams at me then, the suddenness of her statement, the emptiness of her eyes startling me. I pull back.
“She couldn’t do it. She wanted to. But she just couldn’t get herself to do it. She froze up. She looked at me. She was crying. She begged me. Help me, Imogen,” she seethes, saliva coming from her mouth, building in the corners of her lips. She leaves it there.
I shake my head, confused. What is she saying? “She wanted you to help with her pain?” I ask. “She wanted you to make the pain go away?”
She shakes her head; she laughs. “You’re an idiot,” she says.
She composes herself then. She wipes at the spit, stands upright. Looks at me defiantly, more like the Imogen I know now, no longer in pieces.
“No.” She continues undaunted. “She didn’t want me to help her live. She wanted me to help her die.”
My breath leaves me. I think of the step stool, out of reach of Alice’s feet.
“What did you do, Imogen?” I force out.
“You have no idea,” she says, her tone chilling. “You have no fucking clue what it was like to hear her cry in the middle of the night. Pain so bad at times that she couldn’t help but scream. She’d get all excited about some new doctor, some new treatment, only for it to fucking fail again, her hopes dashed. It was hopeless. She wasn’t getting any better. She was never going to get any better. No one should have to live like that.”
Imogen, with tears dripping from her eyes, starts at the beginning and goes through it again. The day began like any other day. She woke up; she went to school. Most days Alice would be waiting in the foyer when she came home. But that day Alice wasn’t there. Imogen called out to her. There was no reply. She started searching the house when a light in the attic lured her to the third floor. There she found her mother standing on the step stool, the noose around her neck. She’d been that way for hours. Alice’s knees were shaking in fear, in exhaustion, as she tried in vain to will herself from the stool. She’d left a note. It was lying on the floor. Imogen has it memorized. You know as well as I do how hard this is for me, the note read. It’s nothing you did. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. But I can’t keep living this double life. Not a Dear John note but Alice’s suicide note, which Imogen picked up and slipped into the pocket of her sweatshirt that day. Imogen at first tried to talk her down from the stool. To convince her to stay and live. But Alice was decided. She just couldn’t take the plunge. Help me, Imogen, she begged.
Imogen looks straight at me, says, “I yanked that fucking stool from beneath her feet. It wasn’t easy. But I closed my eyes and I yanked for dear life. And I ran. I ran faster than I have in my life. I ran to my bedroom. I hid beneath the fucking pillow. And I screamed my head off so I didn’t have to hear her die.”
I catch my breath. It was not suicide, not exactly, but also not as malevolent as I once believed. It was assisted dying, like those doctors who slip a lethal dose of sleeping pills to a terminal patient to let them die of their own accord.
I’ve never been that kind of doctor.
My job is to help patients live, not to help them die.
I stare at Imogen openmouthed, thinking: What kind of person could do that? What kind of person could grab ahold of the step stool and pull, knowing full well what the outcome would be?
It would take a certain kind of person to do what Imogen has done. To act on impulse and not think of what comes next. She just as easily could have called for help in that moment that she pulled. She just as easily could have cut down her mother’s noose.
Before me she cries; she convulses. I can’t stand to think what she’s been through, what she’s seen. No sixteen-year-old should ever be put in such a position.