Drafts of a Suicide Note

by Wong, Mandy-Suzanne

  I gave it one more night. Sunday, I staked out Mount Olive. The Furberts’ Honda never showed. I pounded on the door at their condo on Harbour Road till a neighbor stuck his head out and said he’d seen the Honda heading for Hamilton. Bull’s Head Shreds was locked and empty so, homing in on a conniption, I drove to BRMS.

  Long shot? Not for Team Furbert. Gavin was in the driveway, sucking on a cigarette. Stressful moment while I fought the urge to rush him.

  “Zapnin, bye?”

  “Martin here?”

  “Yeah, inside. What’s—”

  I barged through the door. I remembered Nabi saying BRMS had the sixth and seventh levels, flashed back to a Christmas party where Martin bragged about his “top-floor” situation, and rode up to the seventh.

  Big room with a bunch of desks. Each housed two computer screens and a teamster who watched in bewilderment as a stranger strode into their midst and assaulted the door to the private office at the back.

  “Come in and make it happen!”

  Some eye-rolling and I let myself in. “I need to talk to Nabi.”

  A moment before I understood what I was looking at.

  Not just team leader in full swing, suit jacket and stiff Bermuda shorts, tie knotted impeccably, rising to hand me some papers like it was a busy Monday instead of a listless weekend afternoon, but also someone who’d received a nasty shock. Not “how dare you soil my sacred chamber,” that kind of shock. Worse than that. And after what he said, I had to lean against the door.

  He said, “I thought she was with you.”

  We couldn’t talk there. I wouldn’t. We went to my car, which I’d left behind a food truck across the street.

  Martin hadn’t spoken to his wife since Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon was the Arboretum debacle.

  “Thought you’d run off to Greece. Course I checked your credit cards. Figured you were using cash.”

  “Nabi told you about Greece?”

  He looked away. “Talks about you all the time. Shenanigans the two of you got up to as kids.”

  Yearning for the past and a fantastic future, both dead and impossible. My head dropped against the window.

  “So you had a tiff,” said Martin. I couldn’t answer. “Probably gone to sulk at some spa in Martha’s Vineyard.”

  “Which one? Can you check?”

  “That was just a guess.”

  “Check anyway. Or tell me where to check.”

  “Clearly she’s not interested in talking to you.”

  I punched the steering wheel. Martin looked at me like I’d grown an extra head. I shouted, “I just need to know she’s safe. That all right with you?”

  “Well, if she’s on some kind of spree, it’s your fault anyway. Look, this whole thing is just to make us beg. She wants us to panic, exactly like you’re doing now, and beg her to come back.”

  I forbore to mention I’d already tried that. “That’s not her, man, come on. Where else might she go?”

  “And if she thinks she’s gonna make me boo-hoo over her? After what she did? She’s got another think coming. You and I both know I am not going to let that woman take me for a fool.”

  “What about Clocktower?” I said.

  “What about it? Some of us have lives to lead, you know.”

  He said it smoothly, too smoothly. Even managed to smooth out his frown.

  “Martin, if you know something…”

  The timbre of my voice shocked him a little. The frown returned. He turned and looked out the window.

  The shades were drawn on the food truck. A nearby car wore a parking boot. Martin said, “I got an email.”

  “From Nabi?”

  He shook his head. “Colleague. Next-door office. Clocktower wants to hire us.”

  It was just as I’d described. Song and dance about outsourcing the disposal of Clocktower’s sensitive documents. The due-diligence investigation is a routine preliminary to any sensitive hire, Martin explained, standard risk-management practice especially in “questionable circumstances.” Like this one.

  “Ms. Richards,” he said (of course), “claimed she’d heard some kind of rumor that all isn’t aboveboard at Bull’s Head Shreds.”

  “There’s no such rumor.”

  He just shrugged. “We won’t take the contract. If my company investigated Bull’s Head Shreds, anyone could scream conflict of interest and call everything we did into question. My colleague only sent me Ms. Richards’ email because he thought I should know what people have to say about my wife.”

  “So what’re you going to do? We can’t stand by and let Char leak this shit to everybody. She came to you because BRMS could make these rumors look like they’ve got substance. You could also turn the tables on her, Martin. We have to find Nabi and stop this.”

  “She’ll turn up.”

  Well, when that man looked at his watch, I grabbed him by the tie.

  “What do you expect?” he snarled. “She dumps this in my lap, runs off to hide, leaves me to deal with colleagues muttering behind my back, and you want me not just to grin and bear it but to fix it for her?”

  It murdered me to say it, but I was out of options. “It’s too big for her, Martin, and these people won’t give up. Look, this shit played out just like I said it would, didn’t it? The rest of it’s true too about the suicide notes. Come on, bye, tell me you’ve at least thought about it.”

  Hesitation: part of him never stopped thinking about it.

  But he said, “I knew, you know. Not like you idgits could fool me. I had you figured out. But she tricked me. I changed my mind.”

  “Nabi don’t play tricks.” (Unless you count defrauding how many people out of their insurance money, which I didn’t at the time, being for the moment in a “No she wasn’t” mood.) “Why’d you change your mind? I mean about us.”

  This came out timidly. My insecurity was at its peak, and Martin gobbled it.

  “The midnight calls,” he said primly.

  “I never called Nabi at midnight. We wouldn’t have—”

  “I know you didn’t. One night when she was in the bath, I answered.”

  “You answered her phone?”

  “I am her husband. It was one in the morning. Anyway, the person with whom I spoke wasn’t you.”

  This insipid punchline appeared to give him a bit of a boost. I lacked the wherewithal to do anything except appear exactly as I felt (crushed) and gratify him by sniveling, “But who was it?”

  He shrugged like he’d had his fun and was now back to being better than me. “That girl Pauline.”

  “Pauline who?”

  “Pauline from your school days. She said she and Nabilah were reconnecting.”

  “I don’t know no Pauline. There weren’t no Pauline in our class. Nabi never said nothing about no Pauline.”

  For a snippet of a second, Martin looked like he’d stepped off a staircase into nothing. Unlike me, he recovered.

  “Well, if you don’t know, I certainly don’t know.”

  I thought, Pauline. My powers of recall have known much better days. Pauline?

  “The point is (A) now we know where she went. And (B) she never trusted you either.” He said it like that. With the A and B.

  “Course Nabi trusts me. We tell each other everything.”

  He made a noise, the kind that goes with sneers, and I took a dive off that staircase.

  “Find this person, Martin.”

  “How? If she’s with a friend, she’s safe.”

  “No. No, see, you don’t know that. Neither of us knows who this person is—”

  “And I imagine that’s the point. Wake up, you idiot. She betrayed us both.”

  I drove my fist into the dashboard as Martin walked away.

  I called all the spas in New England. None had
a Furbert or a Simmons. I tried Char again (nothing); and all the time Pauline, who the fuck is Pauline? Rhymes with Doreen? I exhausted every avenue I could think of and found not a trace of the one Nabi had chosen. Some black alley might’ve sucked her years ago into its gullet, and she never told me. Perhaps my own terminal darkness had infected her, perhaps I’d turned her into the woman who’d drowned herself in her own fathoms.

  Or not, and nikkou wasn’t a pseudo-suicidal pro-forger but had some other secret. Something she kept from me and Martin as she gave up on us both. Either way, she lied because she resented me; she built a door between us. The books are black because they can’t be read.

  It’s not true, I thought. I thought: what will Char do if it’s true? It’s true or not depending on whether I’m stoned or hysterical (always one or the other). I said nothing to Martin; if she is, I must protect her; if she isn’t, he doesn’t need to know. It makes all the evidence make sense, even the lack of evidence—the computer was at Harbour Road, her passport was in her other name—and it makes all the evidence perfectly ridiculous. She said so: that should be evidence enough; the Nabi I know is incapable of lying. But Aetna is all lies, all shadow and deceit except when she is death. Whoever Martin spoke to was a liar too; there was no Pauline at Warwick. Evidence is just a reason to believe.

  Trying to think my way into her shadow-world. Back to the Ten, seeking a sign, a tone, a word, a glimmer of sunshine in Aetna’s endless night. And when I found it, I thought I’d have a stroke.

  The letter P.

  There: AS7. But on the back, in the cage. Box E: AETNA P SIMMONS.

  P for what?

  HSBC said: SIMMONS AETNA P. The only record I could find.

  P for Providence?

  It’s not true. Nabi’d never heard of Aetna until she disappeared and I began my work. But if it is true, P for Pauline, then Nabi’s not Aetna Simmons but something else altogether. Something I can’t see. The text in caps in AS7—did she write that for me?

  As Hardy says, despairing minds feed on compulsions. With each passing hour I fell into deeper misery. I was up all night on Sunday. Writing. Writing this, in fact. To her, sort of. That is, to you. Because I don’t know who you are, you need to understand.

  Monday morning, Wayneesha called. “Dr. Caines, where is Mrs. Furbert?”

  She was close to tears. Nabi had promised to be there, day or night, when Wayneesha was ready to talk (I didn’t know what this meant, I’d find out all too soon). But Nabi hadn’t been to work and wasn’t answering her phone. Clients were calling, employees had issues, decisions needed making, someone had to get in there and make them. Someone besides a nineteen-year-old receptionist. “Please come, Dr. Caines.”

  Why this child was the one in Nabi’s office giving orders while the grownups ignored everything except their regular tasks, well, it’s beyond me. Bryan and those lot could afford to be indifferent only because Nabi had rigorously streamlined their procedures, leaving little room for error. But even well-oiled machines need attention now and then.

  I’m a businessman, yes? I thought, How hard can it be?

  I stood in the doorway staring at Nabi’s empty office.

  “You all right, Dr. Caines?” said Wayneesha.

  I wasn’t, but I couldn’t say so. To her other, plaintive question—posed in a lonely voice as if Nabi were a gentle and beloved parent—I could only reply that she’d be back any day.

  Wayneesha showed me how she’d sorted Nabi’s inbox. She logged onto Nabi’s computer, showed me a dozen reminders that had popped up on the screen over the past few days. She gave me a mountain of phone messages, made me check the company’s email address, and it was full of bills and invoices and question marks.

  “It looks like a lot, but it’s not really,” she said. She asked when was the last time Nabi did such-and-such with some work-order forms.

  I said, “Which ones are the work-order forms?”

  Very long pause.

  Then Wayneesha started talking. Work orders, barcode labels, CoC records, CoDs, invoices, transactions, billing cycles. She was very patient, enviably knowledgeable. And shit, I tried, but I was overwhelmed. When she’d been talking forever—not a word sank in, I was a step away from screaming—in swaggered the guy who drives one of the trucks. For an awful moment I feared the truck was missing, I’d forgotten all about it. But Nabi had returned it on Wednesday afternoon. Possibly the last thing she’d done before vanishing. I wanted to ask him about the timing, but the guy hadn’t seen Nabi, only the truck. He had to hit the road but first he needed a battery for his handheld scanner-thingy and some receipt paper for his little printer gadget. I said, “Receipt paper?”

  Wayneesha whipped a roll out of a drawer. When the phone rang, she and I looked at each other till she said it was okay for me to answer it, and the guy on the other end—I had no idea what he was on about, didn’t know how to put the call on hold, I just looked at Wayneesha and she told me what to say, guided me to the relevant invoice on Nabi’s computer. Someone barged in to complain about the toilet in the break room (this while I’m on the phone again, trying to reschedule someone’s pickup and learn how to use the scheduling software at the same time), and Wayneesha whipped a plumber’s card out of Nabi’s Rolodex. She’d learned everything she knew, she said, from observing Nabi closely and asking detailed questions. I thought I’d done that too, over the years. Clearly I hadn’t done it right. So the kid had to walk me through each one of Nabi’s messages. When all I wanted was to hurl the phone across the room, I groaned, “Thank god you’re here, Wayneesha,” and that good-for-nothing child said she might have to quit.

  “Are you crazy? You can’t quit!”

  Then the phone rang. The Gazette. Rumors, said the reporter, because of which Bull’s Head Shreds could lose a huge overseas contract. I insisted on precision and learned that the contract in question was with Clocktower Insurance.

  “What’s your input on this?” he said. “Is Bermuda about to lose yet more international business because of local corruption?”

  “The only corruption I smell around here is coming straight from you, bye.” I had a splitting headache, a cold soda pressed to the back of my neck.

  “Well, we’re all in this together,” said the imbecile.

  “Then what’re you trying to do, getting up in my face about nothing? First of all, I’ve never heard any unflattering rumors about Bull’s Head Shreds anywhere in Bermuda or anywhere else. Second, we have no contract with Clocktower. We’ve never had one. Nobody’s even proposed one. You want to bet what’s going on here? Your sources on this matter are trying to make jackasses out of both of us. I suggest you find yourself some new ones.”

  I hung up on the guy. I put my head on Nabi’s desk. And at the end of the day, when the sound of Nabi’s telephone had stir-fried all my nerves, when I’d snapped at several employees and the colorful bars in the scheduling program began to swim together like rotten Neapolitan ice cream, Wayneesha informed me that she’s pregnant.

  I came this close to begging her to tell me she was kidding.

  I got the whole story, all of it: morning sickness, deadbeat boyfriend, clueless grandparents-to-be; shrink who refuses to approve Wayneesha for an abortion; night classes at Bermuda College, where Wayneesha’s trying to learn to be just like Mrs. Furbert, who’d taken the child into her confidence about diversifying into mobile hard drive shredding (no, Wayneesha didn’t know any Pauline), which meant Bull’s Head Shreds was on the cutting edge (ha ha awesome) of the tech and high-finance industries’ most important support effort; and Wayneesha wanted to be there to be a part of it, a driving force in it, in fact, at Mrs. Furbert’s side; therefore, like Mrs. Furbert, Wayneesha had no time for a leaky, foul-smelling, noisy, and expensive brat. The kid’s made up her mind that Mrs. Furbert will be the one to see her through this; no problem is too daunting for Mrs. Furbert, Mrs. Furbert
understands, she doesn’t judge, she cares and she is wise, but now she’s gone, and that leaves, well—somebody’s teenager wailing into my shirt. I considered returning the favor, I was so burnt-out. Nabi would’ve bestowed a hug, but I was concerned that hugging or even being cried on might qualify as molestation or something else Char could use to cudgel us. I said lamely, “She’ll be back soon.”

  However, I should mention that I made at least a dozen SOS calls that day. Some included invoice numbers. Nabi saw fit to answer none of them.

  I can’t promise Wayneesha anything, not without Nabi. But when eight o’clock rolled around and I’d texted the kid at least five times, I lost it and said she’d be officially in charge until Nabi returned. Yes, the sexually compromised barely-not-a-minor.

  I was still in Nabi’s office trying to make sense of her paperwork and getting nowhere. I’d had it, and that made me angry and ashamed and distraught. I’d built the place too, you know, with my savings and my risk, yet I felt so disoriented there, a ghost that can’t get the knack of haunting. I’d lost track of the amount of Zo I’d taken just to keep my sanity, I hadn’t slept or eaten in two days, and worst of all, the Zo didn’t seem to be working: it made me sick instead of calm, and that made me panic. When I gave up on the paperwork and searched Nabi’s computer for Aetna’s traces (none), I felt like my heart was drilling through my chest; I couldn’t browse the files in an orderly manner; I kept forgetting what I’d seen and reading things over.

  Soon I slumped in Nabi’s chair. The overhead lights were like javelins to the head. I turned them off. Closed my eyes in the dark in the place that’s uniquely Nabi’s.

  I wonder if she found inspiration there. Make documents or tear them up, either way you change history. Whenever I try to make Nabi and Aetna bleed together, for some reason I imagine her there in that office. It’s dark in those images. The only light is from that same, reticent computer glowing like a scrying pool. Perhaps it’s end-of-month, and she has lied to both husband and lover, pretended she must stay late to balance the books. Perhaps it’s really daytime, everyone’s at lunch, and she’s turned out all the lights in the windowless warehouse so she’ll attract the shadows; and behind the scheduling program hides a word-processing document spattered with self-destructive sentiments.