The Last Chance

by Rona Jaffe

  She saw just what she wanted in the showcase. Little silver mice. They were more than she had planned to spend, more than she really could afford right now. But they were so sweet. She’d write on the cards: “From the country mouse to the city mouse.” Then they would all laugh and tell her she wasn’t a country mouse any more, she was one of them.

  Nikki finally got a salesperson and bought three silver mice, had them gift-wrapped, and charged them. She wrote the three cards and sealed them in their tiny white envelopes. All of it went into a tiny paper shopping bag. She stuffed that into her tote bag. No reason to entice any other muggers with her expensive loot. She whistled a Christmas carol while she waited for the elevator, glad she’d spent the extra money to get something really nice for her friends. The clock above the elevator said twelve twenty-five and she knew she’d be late—but, so what?

  Rachel got out of her taxi on Fifth Avenue and walked west to Rockefeller Center. The huge tree was up, overlooking the ice skaters below. Tourists were gawking at it, dragging their children; tourists were everywhere. The flags of all the different nations set around the skating rink snapped in the wind. She leaned over the wide wall for a moment, watching the skaters, listening to the music they were moving to. Little kids you’d think were too young to skate so well, old people you wouldn’t think had the energy. Every year she always thought briefly that she should take up ice skating, and every year she found reasons to avoid it. This winter she had a good excuse; she had to go to classes and study. There were so many things she wanted to do, and she was going to do them too! There was no reason why she couldn’t. One at a time, and she would have them all.

  She left the enticing view of the skaters and walked across the street to Rockefeller Center. It was exactly twelve thirty. She looked around to see if Nikki or Ellen or Margot might be coming along, but she didn’t see them. The street was full of people. Offices were letting out for lunch. Men and women, singly or in groups, hurrying to get somewhere or chatting casually about where they should go. She didn’t notice the woman with the shopping bag coming toward her because she was so ordinary-looking.

  When the woman was right in front of her Rachel moved away, to get to the building, still paying no attention to any detail of this wan, bland-looking stranger, neat and plain, one of a million anonymous faces on the streets of New York. She felt a pressure on her arm through her sleeve, not a pain but a pushing. She looked down. There was blood on her coat sleeve and it was coming from her arm. She looked at the woman then in disbelief, searching the face she had never seen before, looking for the first time at the shining knife the woman had taken from the shopping bag and was holding in her hand.

  The madwoman looked back at her, and for one fatal moment they were both madwomen, the tall, beautiful one filled with a confusing primordial guilt she could not understand, and the smaller, plain one lost in feelings one can only begin to comprehend.

  “Do you know me?” Rachel asked. “Do you know me?”

  And then the woman stabbed her through her open coat, the knife blade going into her heart, and Rachel was dead.

  Epilogue: December 1975

  Margot, Ellen, and Nikki sat together at Rachel’s funeral. The coffin was closed. Lawrence’s best friend, a man who had known Rachel for over ten years, made a lovely speech. Margot thought in passing that she had never been to a funeral where a woman delivered the eulogy, and she wondered why not. No one had even asked Nikki, who had been Rachel’s best friend, even though Margot knew Nikki wouldn’t have been up to the pain of it. Still, had Lawrence thought Nikki would have collapsed, or had he simply thought she hadn’t known Rachel long enough? What was long enough in friendship? Margot knew that Rachel had been one of her own only friends in the world. How ironic that she, who had tried to die, had lived, and that Rachel, who had loved life so much, was dead. She looked at the coffin, trying not to imagine Rachel inside it, and realized for the first time that death was forever. When she had taken all those pills she had not thought of it that way, she had simply thought of ending what she could not bear. There was a difference.

  The night of the day that Rachel was murdered, when no one could get Margot on the phone and she had not appeared at the studio for work, Nikki had come to her apartment and leaned on the bell until Margot had dragged herself out of bed to see who it was. Nikki’s way of coping with grief was the opposite of Margot’s; she became hyperactive. She took one look at Margot, the empty pill bottles, the filthy apartment, and she knew. She called the studio and made up a lie about Margot having pneumonia. Then she told Margot about Rachel. It was not a brutal thing to do, it was Nikki’s way of jolting Margot out of her self-absorbed isolation, and it worked.

  It was Nikki who had found Rachel’s body, surrounded by people, police cars, an ambulance. She had phoned Lawrence’s office to find him; she had discovered from calling Jill that Ellen was in the hospital. She had rescued Margot. From the time she found Margot until almost now Nikki had not left her alone, even to sleep. She had sent her cleaning woman to clean Margot’s apartment, paying her herself, and had made Margot sleep on the couch in her apartment. She had prepared simple, soft foods, the kind Margot remembered as security foods from her childhood whenever she had been sick, and she had almost fed her. Nikki’s two daughters had appeared. Lynn had her boyfriend in tow and all the new magazines for the convalescent, and Dorothy, who was studying to be a psychiatric social worker, had supplied Nikki with the names of several good psychiatrists. Nikki had given Margot the list.

  “The rest is up to you,” Nikki said. “But I think this is better than pills. Do you know how lucky you are that doctor gave you Dalmane? It’s so safe, I’ve heard of someone who took a hundred and lived. That doctor must have suspected you were up to no good. I just wish you’d confided in me before it got that far.”

  At first Margot was not sure if she was Nikki’s project, her therapy for her grief over Rachel, or if Nikki really cared. But then she realized that Nikki did care. “People can’t help you if you hide from them,” Nikki said. It was true. You had to reach out. But reaching out was one thing Margot was lousy at, she knew that. It wasn’t something she could change by herself.

  She carried the list of psychiatrists in her handbag and had it with her even now. She knew Rachel would have told her the same thing. Rachel had tried to help her, had called, had kept inviting her to come over, and Margot had finally hidden from her and lied. No one could help her if no one knew.…

  Why had it been Rachel instead of her? But it wasn’t an “instead of” proposition. That had always been one of her problems, Margot realized, that she had been so overwhelmed by mysterious guilt that she had thought everything was either-or. If she had died that night it wouldn’t have saved Rachel. None of the things she had chosen to do in her life had automatically blocked out the other choices. It was just that she had believed they did.

  How terrible for Lawrence, who had loved Rachel so. Margot wondered if any man would ever love her that much. Rachel was the only one of them who had truly been loved by a man.… Margot saw him in the first row, with Kerry beside him and some people she thought were his relatives or Rachel’s. He had not wanted anyone to come to see him during the past few days except the immediate family. Lawrence, who had always been so sociable, so surrounded by friends and business acquaintances, had been suddenly overwhelmed by the knowledge that Rachel was his best friend and it was all meaningless without her. Margot knew that eventually he would go back to his social life, because it was his habit, but she knew how little it would help.

  She looked at Kerry as if he was a stranger. Had it been only a little less than a year ago when she thought of him as her last chance? What an odd idea. She knew that her real last chance was a good psychiatrist. Life, since Rachel’s death, had been revealed to Margot as what it was, a moment-to-moment thing, fragile, valuable. It was not an endless sentence, as she had thought. It was a gift. She had the right to throw it away if she wished, but
why should she do such a stupid thing? Perhaps she had years left, perhaps only hours. She would never really be sure again. But at least she should try to do the best with what she had.

  Ellen, with Margot on her left and Hank sitting stolidly on her right, was crying. She was wearing a dark veil so no one could see the bandage on her cheek and wonder, and people thought she was in deep mourning. She was crying as much for herself as for Rachel. She had almost died. If Jill had been stronger, if her aim had been better … Ellen had never realized Jill had a temper. Such a sweet girl, a little withdrawn and secretive, but never tears, never tantrums. Too sweet, perhaps. Jill’s burst of temper had been an accident. The woman who had killed Rachel had chosen her accidentally too, and had been taken away to Bellevue to await whatever the law did to insane murderers. She had lived somewhere in Queens, and the neighbors had said she seemed like such a nice, quiet woman. Who knew what kind of insanity went on in this city? Not that Jill was by any stretch of the imagination crazy, but she had problems: she was obviously terrified of boys and of sex, and she was anorexic. For some reason, ever since the accident when she had lashed out at Ellen, Jill had been eating almost normally. But she wasn’t a happy girl, Ellen realized that now, and it was more than she herself could handle. That was why she had asked Martin Wilson for the name of a good psychiatrist.

  Dr. Martin Wilson … Ellen stopped crying. He had taken such good care of her in the hospital that she had told him, kidding, that he had the same initials as Marcus Welby. She knew right away that he was interested in her. She had seen the signs too many times not to know. And she was interested in him too. Of course he had a wife and children. He had married a girl who had helped put him through medical school twenty years ago and hadn’t kept up with him since; Ellen knew the signs. He had spent an inordinate amount of time at Ellen’s bedside, worrying about her. Jill even seemed to like him and hadn’t noticed that his interest in her mother was more than professional. Jill had liked the psychiatrist too, a nice young man whom Martin had brought to the hospital to meet her. Jill had agreed to go into group therapy with some other young kids the doctor treated. Ellen wasn’t sure she liked the idea of group therapy; suppose the first boy Jill got a crush on was some maladjusted kid from the group? But Martin assured her it would be good for Jill and would cost less than individual therapy. Group therapy was the new thing for kids. Who was she, Ellen-approaching-menopause-Rennie, to make judgments on new methods of psychotherapy? She had enough problems of her own just coping with being forty and trying to realize that while it wasn’t the bloom of twenty it wasn’t sixty-five either.

  Poor Rachel, so young, so beautiful, so happy. Such an insane, meaningless accident. Why was life so full of accidents? There was nothing sure you could believe in. Ellen glanced at Hank sitting by her side, silent, somber, staring straight ahead. Well, she thought, it’s nice that I have good old Hank.

  Nikki had been unable to cry ever since she had found Rachel’s body, and she couldn’t cry now either. Her heart felt crushed in a vise, and sometimes when she was alone she threw up until she felt she had been turned inside out, but the tears waited. She was numb. All the frantic activity, the organizing, the holding together of those weaker than she was, had been automatic. It was her nature to be both a mother and an executive. She hardly listened to the sermon. The minister hadn’t even known Rachel; he’d asked Lawrence what were the best things about her. Perhaps it was better to let a professional take care of such things as eulogies, Nikki thought. She didn’t expect Lawrence to ask her. The things that she felt were most extraordinary and beautiful about Rachel were not things she wanted to share with a mob like this. And what a mob! The world had turned out, as if Rachel’s funeral were the Academy Awards. She was sure some of them had appeared so they would be seen. They were from Rachel’s old life. And hiding in the back row, almost timidly, was Andy, Rachel’s little school friend, wearing a tie for the first time in respect for the dead. Rachel, Nikki thought, would have told him to take it off and be comfortable.

  Nikki thought how much both she and Rachel had changed during the year just past. She thought of herself … the decisions she had made that had seemed so scary were not really scary at all because they were things she could control. But the mindless, pointless, wasteful violence that came from outside was the really frightening thing. The final decision in Rachel’s life had come from a stranger.

  We have no control, Nikki thought. What can I control, with all my struggles and determination? I can control the things inside my life. Enjoy my life, my work, my family, my friends, my loves, my pleasures, my moments, and try not to think about the other.

  But how can I not?

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1976 by Rona Jaffe

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-0837-2

  Distributed by Open Road Distribution

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  New York, NY 10014

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