The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  But it keeps feeling the same, everywhere. It feels like nothing.

  Now she’s sitting on the floor of her mother-in-law’s guest room, leaning her back against the bed, wondering how she’ll feel when her husband, who is lying in bed struggling valiantly to stay awake to keep her company, finally loses the struggle and falls asleep. Then I’ll be alone, she thinks. Maybe I’ll feel it when I’m alone.

  The TV is on: Marcus Welby. The actor who played him tried to kill himself last month. Something had gone wrong (or right—the attempt failed, anyway), they’d found him and gotten him to the hospital in time. She remembers reading an article in a magazine, earlier this week. Reading it and thinking, if she thought anything at all: Poor man, his poor family.

  Marcus Welby looks paternal, rock-solid. (Although those things don’t really fit together anymore, do they?) He is taking care of a troubled teenager. Marcus Welby talks to the boy’s parents, his teachers, his sister. No one can figure out why the boy is sick; no one understands why he is miserable. Then suddenly, on the screen: a gun. The boy has it. Black and stubby.

  She reaches out to shut off the TV, but she’s not quite fast enough. The shot has been fired, with a shattering crack. The gun’s tiny dark mouth is pointing at her, and then it vanishes, sucked into a blue dot in the center of the now-black screen. The dot hangs there for several seconds. Then it fades and disappears.

  She turns around to look at her husband, to see whether he found the image disturbing. He’s asleep. Deep oblivious breathing. She’s alone, for the first time since her father’s death.

  Now, she thinks.

  Now nothing.

  Suicide: day after

  brother’s appearance

  THE DAY AFTER MY FATHER DIED, MY MOTHER’S HOUSE FILLED up with people. Neighbors bringing turkeys. Cousins nobody remembered, who’d driven up from New Jersey. My husband’s father spotted my husband’s mother across the living room, and went over to say hello to her. They’d been divorced for twenty-five years. She saw him coming and turned her head away, refusing to speak to or even look at him. My mother, standing near me, seeing all this, muttered, “She can’t even be nice to him in my house? Today of all days? I should have to worry about smoothing this shit over?”

  “Leave them alone, they’re grownups,” I said, but she was already moving across the room, smiling stiffly at my husband’s father, her arm stretched out in compensatory welcome. The doorbell rang again, and I went to answer it.

  At first I thought it was my father standing there. My mouth began to relax, to grin: I imagined the stunning relief of saying, “You won’t believe it when I tell you what we’re all doing here.”

  Then I realized it was his brother, Kurt.

  He put his arms around me, and I buried my face in him. He was tall and warm and solid. He resembled my father—not exactly, but more closely than anyone else on earth. The same mouth, the pale blue eyes—Russian eyes—under thick wiry brows, the big bony nose. He had that unmistakable brother-look of having hatched from the same egg. His physical presence was so powerful that the minor differences between them—he was a little shorter, he had more hair left—didn’t matter. Oh, God, I thought, so that’s what my father looked like. I had already forgotten; and the forgetting was only going to get worse with time.

  My father had not been close to Kurt, and I barely knew him. But I just stayed there, folded against him. He held me and said my name over and over, in my father’s voice.

  Finally we let each other go. He ran a hand through his long, thin white hair. He was wearing an old black corduroy jacket; the pile was thinning at the elbows, and some of the cuff buttons were missing. He and his wife had come once to visit for a weekend, when I was a child. They were supposed to arrive by lunchtime but they hadn’t shown up until late afternoon, and they’d slept until noon the next day. “Actors’ hours,” my parents had sniffed. They hadn’t made their beds, or offered to strip the sheets; their wet towels littered the bathroom floor.

  I had another memory of Kurt coming to visit, when I was even younger. He was playing Ariel in a production of The Tempest in Hartford. We went to the matinee, and he came to our house for an early supper before the evening performance. I hadn’t understood the play, but it had been exciting to see my uncle, simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable, leaping around the stage in white tights, his blond hair goldened and standing up in peaks like sun rays all over his head. He kept his makeup on when he came to our house—there wouldn’t have been time to remove and reapply it. His face was painted white, with black and gold lines around the eyes. He was glamorous, an uncle and not an uncle, a spirit and not a spirit, gilded, but wearing an ordinary blue button-down shirt and gray slacks, talking to my parents about the recent blackout and the New York transit strike.

  When I’d seen him last, ten years ago at my grandmother’s memorial service, he had still been blond. It was only the startling sight of his white hair now that made me realize how long ago that had been.

  The living room had gotten very crowded. “My mother’s here somewhere,” I murmured. Kurt put his hand to his forehead and worked his fingers back and forth; apparently he was no more eager to see my mother than she was to see him. “Could I get a cup of tea, do you think?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  I led him toward the kitchen. I wanted to stay close to him, to take care of him. And I was ashamed of my reluctance to talk to him on the phone the day before. I’d been afraid that he might be too emotional. But what could “too emotional” possibly mean, in a situation like this?

  In the kitchen, Kurt dropped into a chair at the table, pushing aside a bakery box someone had brought from New York. “I never thought he’d do it,” he said, as if doing it had been a possible choice all along, a plainly visible brush in the paint box that the artist had never yet had occasion to use.

  Maybe he knew my father better than I’d realized. Maybe he was going to explain why this had happened.

  I went over and shook the teakettle. It was nearly empty; I took it over to the sink and filled it. Kurt was talking. He was saying that he’d always known my father was damaged, but that he had never realized how deep the damage had gone. He said that my father had put up a strong front. His willpower had been incredible, Kurt said. “He thought that if he willed everything to be all right, then it would be. He thought if he could make it all look a certain way—solid and healthy—then it actually would be solid and healthy. He thought he could change deep feelings, erase old injuries, just by deciding: Enough already.”

  I sat down at the table with him. He was speaking in my father’s voice—those eerily familiar deep tones, the slight hint of nasality, the slow, carefully assembled diction hinting that English hadn’t been their original language—but he was saying things my father never would have said. It was illicitly fascinating and morally queasy. I was torn between wanting to listen and wanting to preserve my father’s privacy. He would have disapproved of this conversation. “Psychobabble,” he would have said.

  The teakettle began to whimper and then to shriek. I got up and put a tea bag into a mug. “Do you take milk or sugar?” I asked Kurt.

  “Do you have any honey?”

  Heavy footsteps were coming into the kitchen: my mother. “Are you making tea?” she asked me. Then she caught sight of Kurt.

  Kurt stood up and went over to her, and kissed her cheek. “This is a terrible thing,” he said.

  “Yes, Kurt, it is,” my mother said, as if she’d figured this out long before and was peeved at him for only now arriving at the realization.

  I got down a second mug from the cupboard, and reached for another tea bag.

  My mother and Kurt stood just inside the kitchen doorway, facing each other. “So this happened yesterday morning?” he asked her.

  “Very early,” she said. “I wasn’t even up yet.”

  Kurt sighed. “You know, Lee, I wish someone had thought to call me earlier. I don’t really understa
nd why it took until three o’clock for me to hear about this.”

  “We were busy, Kurt,” my mother said, loudly. “We had a lot on our minds.”

  “I know,” Kurt said then, and he touched her shoulder. “I know you did, Lee.”

  “Do we have any honey?” I asked.

  My mother looked surprised. “No. Why?”

  “For Kurt’s tea.”

  My mother tightened her lips. “Everyone else is having sugar or Sweet ’N Low.”

  Other people came into the kitchen, and my mother and Kurt were happy enough to be separated. He and I had been interrupted, but I didn’t mind. If there were sides to be taken here—open discussion of feelings versus a stoic resolution to keep one’s own counsel—then I was going to side with my father. Much as I wanted information and explanations, I was going to abide by his preference for silence.

  I don’t think I understood yet that what he had done was final. I think I believed that if I proved I was a good enough daughter—loyal enough, discreet enough—I could get him back.

  I made a big pot of tea, put it on a tray with some cups, and carried it out to the living room. In the course of the afternoon, I passed near Kurt several times. He was moving around, talking to different people, asking them what time yesterday they had been notified of my father’s death.

  Suicide: day after

  concern that he will be viewed differently now

  ANOTHER MOMENT, FROM THAT SAME AFTERNOON. PEOPLE were saying things to me like “My God, your poor father. The pain he must have been in.” And I was saying things like “Yes, I know. So listen—how’s grad school going?” I was in loony high-hostess mode. I had my aunt Irene backed into a corner, and I was asking about her vacation plans. She was going to Italy in a couple of months. Where? I wanted to know.

  She looked troubled, and embarrassed. “Florence. And Venice, and Ravenna. We’re not going to make it to Rome this time.”

  I smiled and nodded. I wanted to show her that, yes, my father had killed himself, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t still have a normal conversation. I said, “My father always said that Venice is a much better city than Rome.”

  Irene’s shoulders tensed in her little dressmaker suit. “Yes, well, that’s what we’ve decided. For this trip at least.” Her voice was gentle, but I knew that there was distaste there. Maybe it was for the strangeness of me and my chirpy small talk. But more, I thought, for my father. Irene had loved him. But I could see, in that moment, that he’d been permanently shifted from one category to another. From the world of people whose opinions about various Italian cities were worth listening to, to the world of crazy people.

  What difference did it make that he’d liked Venice better than Rome? He killed himself—what did he know?

  Suicide: day after

  “little room” discussion with his business partner

  MY FATHER’S BUSINESS PARTNER AND HIS WIFE WERE PUTTING their coats on, getting ready to leave. I went over to them and thanked them for coming. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you, Gil.”

  Gil shook his head. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too. Or your mother. I wanted to tell someone about what happened Wednesday.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It just wasn’t like him. We were out on the turnpike together. Your dad was driving. It was rush hour, snowing a little, getting dark. Your dad went to change lanes, he pulled out, and there was this big truck bearing down. It almost hit us, the guy sounded his horn—and Jesus, was Paul upset. I never saw him so upset. He pulled over into the breakdown lane, he stopped the car, and he just sat there. I said, ‘Paul, you almost got us killed.’ And he wouldn’t answer me. He just sat there behind the wheel, just kind of staring at nothing. It was like he was in a trance. And then he wouldn’t drive anymore. He made me get behind the wheel.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Not that I think that caused his death, or anything. But sometimes there is a straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or at least it might be a clue to his state of mind this past week.”

  “Right,” I said. “Thanks for telling me, Gil.” I was beginning to see that there was never going to be a straightforward sentence: He did it because . . . It was all going to be fragments, a snarl. All these bits would keep coming, and that’s all they would ever be, bits. Nobody knew the whole of it. It was as if one person was saying, “Well, I knew he had matches, but I didn’t think he’d ever light them,” and someone else was saying, “I knew he lived in a house made of paper, but I didn’t know he had matches.”

  Gil was still talking. “I kept asking him, after that, ‘Hey, Paul, what’s the matter, are you okay?’ But he wouldn’t answer me. It’s not like I didn’t try to find out what was bugging him.”

  “No, no, I’m sure you tried,” I murmured. I felt sorry for Gil. The business was such a mess, and now he’d have to try to clean it up alone. I put a hand on his coat sleeve. “But listen, how are you? Are you doing okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Yeah, I suppose. I’ll be all right.” Then he laughed. “Too bad I can’t just walk away, isn’t it?”

  “Gil,” said his wife.

  “You think I haven’t thought about it, too? You think I haven’t wanted to do what your dad did, just go into that little room and close the door and take myself out of it? Your dad doesn’t have to worry anymore. He’s out of it all right. All right for him. But what about the rest of us? We can’t just go into the little room, can we?”

  “Stop it,” his wife said. She opened the door, threw me a quick embarrassed look, and got him outside.

  The door closed behind them. I stood there looking at it. I had assumed that all the people closest to him would still love him—would maybe even love him more, because now we were all beginning to understand how secretly fragile he had been all along, or had become at the end.

  The little room. As if it were a cozy, tidy place.

  Or a yearned-for destination.

  Shit, Gil, you make it sound like he packed a suitcase and jetted off to Bermuda.

  Suicide: day after

  search warrant

  MORE FOOD SHOWED UP: A FRUIT BASKET, A PIE. THERE WAS NO room left for them on the kitchen countertops, so I went into the laundry room and set the basket down on top of the dryer. As I turned to leave, I saw a piece of paper lying on the washing machine.

  SEARCH WARRANT, it was headed.

  I didn’t read it carefully. My eyes jumped around and found the word MURDER, under the heading REASON FOR SEARCH.

  I was leaning over it, scanning the rest of the document trying to make it make sense, when my mother came in.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Why a search warrant?” I asked.

  “It’s a formality,” she said. “That’s what the detective told me.”

  “But what were they searching for?”

  “Nothing. I think they needed it in order to take things out of the house.”

  She put her hand on the orange cellophane covering the fruit basket and then bent down to sniff the outside of the pie box. When she straightened up she said, without looking at me, “There was a word on that paper that really upset me. I’m sure you know which word I mean.”

  “Do they think Daddy was murdered?”

  “No. No. The detective told me ‘no.’ No, they know he wasn’t murdered. I mean, what, do they think I did it? ‘Is that what you think?’ I asked him. But he said no, no, of course not. That’s just the word they use when something like this happens. They have to investigate it as if it’s a murder, even though they know he killed himself.”

  “They shouldn’t throw around a word like that.”

  My mother put a hand over her mouth and said behind it, “Can you imagine what it was like for me, seeing that word?”

  I nodded, and followed her back into the kitchen.

  Suicide: day after

  speculation relating to bulge

  AT DINNER THAT NIGHT MY MOTHER
SAID SUDDENLY, “THERE was a bulge on his head.”

  We all looked at her. “What?” I said.

  “A bulge. This funny . . . bulge.” She touched a spot on the top of her head. “Right here. I noticed it when I found him.”

  There was a silence. The cousins and friends had gone home. We were sitting around her kitchen table—my mother, Ted, my sister, my husband and me—eating a turkey one of the neighbors had brought. There were sweet potatoes, too, which no one in our family had ever liked. They were mounded up, glowing, sprinkled with herbs, in a little blue pottery bowl. I had been thinking about the solemn, lavish trouble someone had gone to, cooking and mashing the potatoes for us with some careful seasoning that no one would ever taste. I felt sorry for those unwanted potatoes, and for the hands that had prepared them. I hoped someone in our house knew whom to return the bowl to.

  I had been thinking about all this when my mother spoke up about the bulge; and the residual melancholy about the blue bowl of glowing potatoes stayed with me for just a moment, fondly: such a foolish simple thing to feel sad about.

  I cleared my throat. “Maybe,” I said, “he was sick.”

  My mother, seemingly carefree now that she had made her announcement, speared a piece of broccoli with jaunty energy and ate it.

  The rest of us were all looking at one another.

  Ted said, “Was it possible that he had a brain tumor?”

  My mother frowned, as if Ted had said something incredibly vulgar. She shook her head and ate another big hunk of broccoli.

  “Had he seen his doctor recently?” I pressed. I had become sure, already, in these few moments, that here was the explanation for my father’s death. The missing puzzle piece that would make the whole picture clear. He had gone to the doctor, been told he had unbeatable brain cancer, and decided on a fast, private death. He hadn’t told us about the diagnosis because he knew we would try to talk him into treatments he didn’t want. Also, I thought, he’d been unable to bear the prospect of seeing us react to the news: the sorrow, the fear, all the big emotions heaving messily within the family. If his situation was really hopeless, then what was the point of going through all that? Better to duck out through a side door, and to trust that once we discovered the reason for his swift exit, we would understand and forgive him.