“Don’t you want to see her?” I ask.
“It’s my thing. Call it a weakness. Just tell her—tell her hi for me.”
“That’s it? Just ‘hi’?”
“Jesus. Then say—say I couldn’t help her, but I know someone who can. No, don’t say that, I don’t like that. Tell her—nah, nothing. It doesn’t matter anyway. She won’t know the difference.”
Jill shrugs his big, sad shoulders.
PART XI: THE SUICIDE
I am still talking to you about truth and love. There is no other way than this way. So that’s the way I go, into the elevator with the guard. He thinks he’s dangerous, but there is no way I can’t find her. There is nothing between us now except one bright thread. No Hasidim here. It’s as if there never were.
“I could get in a lot of trouble for this,” the guard whispers at me. “No funny business.”
“Like what?”
He huffs in response as we climb floors. The tube is under my arm. The glowing button hovers for floor nine. This is the part where I don’t know what happens next. What would happen if I ignored the thread? Last time I was in an elevator, Jill was with me. “Have you read about the disappearing bees?” I ask the guard.
“No.”
The metal mouth opens again, onto a sign that says ALZHEIMER’S RESEARCH CENTER. The center is closed and dim as if it’s always night here.
“Shit or get off the pot,” the guard says. Then, apologetically, “It’s a good ward.” He really thinks I’m her son. “One of the best in the country.”
Jill didn’t mention anything about Alzheimer’s.
There’s less security than in the main hospital; it’s its own wing and entity. I step out of the elevator. We pass the empty nurse’s station framed with Plexiglas so loaded with patients’ fingerprints it could topple over. The fingerprints reach for me but can’t peel themselves off. The guard unlocks the first door and holds it open. Past the blood lab, through double swinging doors, down another hallway haunted by light.
“Is it her birthday?” the guard asks about the wrapped painting.
“Yes,” I say.
The corridors surprise me. They don’t exist until I step into them. I feel like a rat building a maze. Doors open and close as I pass them, swashed by the wind of my walk. There are one hundred and three beds in the research center. I can feel every one of them, all stacked on my nose for a circus trick. It hurts my back. A night nurse doing paperwork at a counter glances up at us tiredly. The guard flashes his badge and she doesn’t say a word.
“Here we are,” the guard says. “Room 919.”
He makes as if to follow me in.
“That wasn’t part of the deal,” I say. “You wait here. Thank you for your help.”
“Fifteen minutes,” the big oaf says.
“Twenty.”
“Ten.”
“Okay, fifteen.”
I knock softly as I enter, shut the door behind me. And my heart nearly falls onto the clean hospital sheets. The bed is empty and freshly made, and the privacy curtain is half open on its ceiling track. Did I miss her? I edge around the first curtain, and find another slightly parted.
“Hello?” I say. The window lets in a sepia tone. The sun has set but is still throwing in light. Under a beige blanket are the shapes of feet. I step through the parted curtain.
She is lying on her back, a bouquet of gray hair splayed out on the pillow. Asleep, but not restful, frowning at her dream. I unwrap the tube then pull the painting out and unroll it. I peer at the faces of the women on the canvas, then up again at the woman in bed. Her face is the face in the painting. It is her exactly, all the women falling. There is Claire Bishop.
Her eyes flutter open. I think she smiles at me.
“It’s you,” she says hoarsely. “I thought you’d come.”
How does she know me? I’ve never been recognized like this.
“You know who I am?” I ask.
Did Nicolette somehow pull everyone together in the past? Perhaps this will all make sense. But for now, no matter the reason, I like being recognized.
“Of course I know her.” She hesitates. “Isn’t your mother Mary?”
The strange certainty of her voice coming from the uncertainty of her body. A body nearly entwined with the cotton of the hospital sheets. IV bags hang from metal hooks, caught fish.
I move closer to her so she can hear me. “My mother’s name is Beth.”
“Mary.” She says this so matter-of-factly that for a moment I believe her. But she doesn’t know me after all. I shouldn’t be disappointed. Why should she know me?
I hold the painting out to her.
And there she is, twice. Lying on the bed and lying in my arms.
She looks at it, unsurprised, her face unchanging. “Do you like it?” she asks.
“Yes, very much.”
“Then you keep it. I don’t need it anymore.”
“But—” That’s very rude, I want to say. I drape the painting over the chair beside the bed and sit down on the edge of the mattress. “May I ask you a question?” I use my politest voice.
“I must look awful like this,” she says.
“Not really, considering.”
“I must get ready for the sitting. But who wants a portrait of a bad woman?”
“A portrait?”
“She’s coming to paint me. I have to make the sandwiches and change into something nice. Lay down a sheet for the easel, will you? The blue cloth we don’t care about.”
I don’t know what else to do so I say, “Okay.” I wonder if I should pretend to lay a sheet.
She tries to sit up. “My hair is a mess. Can she change it in the painting? I will ask her to change my hair.” She looks around, bewildered. “I hope they can swim.”
“Who? Who’s painting your hair?”
She doesn’t answer. She looks at me with sad, wet eyes.
“I think they can swim,” I say. “I need to ask you.”
“That nurse is sleeping with Freddie. She doesn’t know I know. She’s a dumb cunt.”
She coughs for a while and I hold up a small waxy cup of water that she waves off. A thread of pain slithers down her throat and falls in her stomach, nowhere else to go, the spool winding and winding in on itself. I can see it shimmer, like she can.
“So Jill sent you in his place?” she finally asks. “Because he’s too chicken to do it himself. But you’ll help me.”
“I need to ask you. What is the name of the artist who painted this? Is her name Nicolette? I know it is, but I need you to tell me. What did she look like? How old is she? Have you seen her lately?”
“Nicolette,” she says. “Nicolette.” She lifts a gaunt finger. “I can’t seem to die. I’d like to,” she says nonchalantly, as if she needs help crossing the street, “but it won’t let me.”
“It was Nicolette. I knew it was. And the painting won’t let you die, that’s it exactly. You do understand. Nicolette didn’t want you to die.” As if on cue, distant footsteps echo in the hall, recognizable and many. The Hasidim. I lower my voice. “Now you’re ready to go and you can’t.” Her soft moan pushes me to touch the canvas and my fingers feel burnt. There’s only one way. “I have to destroy it.”
“No.” She tries to sit up again but doesn’t get far. “This damn body won’t let me. Besides,” she strains her voice so I can hear, “I want to see the painting there. It took me decades to see it.” She puts her hand on mine. “Did Jill leave you anything else to give to me?”
He said she’d want the pills at the bottom of the envelope.
I shake my head. I have to make her understand. “But the painting won’t let you do that. The suicide belongs to it. It’s keeping you alive.” The footsteps are louder now. The guard must have given me away.
She coughs in response. I bunch her pillow so she can raise her head.
“I’ll get better soon,” she says.
“When did you last see Nicolette? Please tell me,�
�� I whisper. “Don’t you hear them coming?”
She squeezes my shoulder as much as she can. “I don’t want to get better.”
I see her face coming apart and the bed around her, and there’s you telling me to do her in. I will not listen to your selfish voice, your need for drama. I will focus only on Claire.
“Are you afraid to talk about Nicolette? Is that it?” If the painting is preventing Claire’s suicide, then Nicolette did time travel. Which means I can give her the pills and no one will die. Everything holds. It’s an act of verification. No one dies. This is the risk Nicolette’s been preparing me for.
She nods in answer to my thoughts, and moans softly. “They’ll be here soon. Be quick about it,” she says. She knows, too—the Hasidim.
No one dies. I pace around her bed, then back the other way. The walls are beginning to crack and the bees want to come back, but I won’t let them. I’ll make it right. “Let’s think about this here. Let’s take it slow. This is a big thing what you’re asking me. Even though it won’t work. I just met you, and maybe I don’t want to do it. What if I get in trouble? I probably definitely would get in trouble. Wouldn’t I?”
She reaches out a wobbly hand and I stop pacing. “There’s no one else,” she says.
In my hand, her fingers are brittle twigs. I could crush them if I squeezed any tighter.
The windows are giant microphones listening in. The windows are not listening in.
“I’m telling you it won’t work.” It can’t work. I’m not wrong. I’m not wrong after all.
I peek out the curtain to hear the footsteps better, but they’re still just as far. How many minutes since I left the guard? If I’m so certain I needn’t hesitate any longer. Simply an act of verification to prove Premise 1 is true. The heart monitor and alarm is only a simple star network topology—I disable it easily. I unhook the oxygen vine from her nose, unwind it from around her ears. From the envelope, I shake out the three pills Jill put in there, and two from the bottle of Xanax in my bag. This is me giving her medicine for her pain because it can’t kill her because it can’t.
The cup of water at her lips is a cup from another dimension where small people live and live. The footsteps are kicking in my eardrums. She takes the pills. She swallows them.
I sit on the edge of her bed and take her hand again. It feels good in mine. Her skin is alive and wired, a dried-up and rotting apple. She smiles at me. She’s not dying at all, see?
She talks about the spiders and flies she sees in the corners of her eyes. Black shapes on the edge of things. Another set of eyes comes to life behind her own. Real eyes. True eyes. She says, “I know I’m seeing things that aren’t there. How strange. I can say: the things I’m seeing are not there, but that doesn’t make them go away.”
I begin quietly, “Jill says—”
“My bees flew off again when the Towers fell. Twice they ran away.”
I tell her that’s sad, because it is.
“Things disappear all the time. It’s not a mystery.” She falls deeper into her pillow. “I’m not going yet. Why not?”
“I told you,” I say. “The painting.”
“Unplug the damn thing to make sure.” She’s not plugged into anything. There’s the mechanical bed and a desk lamp. I pull both from their sockets to appease her.
“Jill wanted me to tell you—” I say.
“That’s it. The boy left me chocolates on my windowsill. And drool down his chin. Tell Mary that boy drooled all over me.”
She says, “Chicken. Chickens in the field.”
She says, “I never lost anything. Was that cheating? It feels like cheating.” Her breath is low, barely filling her lungs. She sighs. And her hospital gown, and her old lady skin, and her aches and pains, they seem to sigh off her, too.
I’m sitting beside her. I say, “He’s sorry.”
“Don’t you worry,” she whispers. “I’ve been making this decision every day of my life.”
Her hand tightens around mine. It stays tight, until it’s not.
That can’t be right. How can her hand not be tight? Her eyes are closed.
Her eyes are too closed. I hover over. I shake her tiny shoulders. I call out her name. Claire. I call out for Nicolette. She is not dying. This dying woman is not dying. I can’t be wrong. If I’m wrong—“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Where is Nicolette? She has to jump out from the shadows now.
I check under the bed. I check out the window. The window is black and cracking. Where is she? Has she ever been here? I am sitting on my heart. I’ve killed myself.
The walls are pulsing. On the verge of breaking. You chatter away, how wrong I am, how stupid and inconsequential. How no one was hurting Jules but me. No one.
No. I didn’t mean to. But she wanted. Have I killed her? I can’t help it, I’m crying—for the loss of it? Because I’ll miss this woman I’ve only just met? This good woman. As if she feels it too, I can see her last breath inside her, a torch lighting up everything. Time leaving her.
Premise 1 is false.
I open my mouth and a ticking sound escapes. A bomb I planted in myself, when I was away from myself. This is what it is to not trust your own brain. A foreign roar rings up the building and through my legs. The walls will crumble. The ocean is coming.
Three Nicolettes.
One left me long ago.
One I let fall.
The other led me here, to help her old friend.
When she painted me, when we laid together stomach to stomach, my Nicolette asked what it was like to be me. But how can you tell someone something like that, especially the person you love? Wouldn’t the truth drive them away? “I just want to be part of you,” she said. “Your arm, maybe. Preferably your heart. But,” she admitted, “not your brain.”
There are not only three Nicolettes. There is a fourth—inside me.
It’s her I’ve been looking for.
A truth has come unlocked. I am a million contradictions being juggled in real time.
Closer now. The sky will soon be all around us; the hospital will fall back to the sea. All the sad things in me are lit-up spheres. I have hardly begun.
Holding her hand, I start humming. Just so she knows. So she knows someone is here to sound out her life.
There are no more footsteps. No band of Hasidim. Just West and Claire. A woman who is dying. And the painting, just a painting. Not any painting—ours.
PREMISE 1: I AM MY TRUE SELF.
EPILOGUE
First the water sloshes down the corridors of the hospital. Roaring past the blood lab and the nurse’s station and the Alzheimer’s Research Center and the staff lounge where a med student tries to take the bra off another med student, and you feel it rip through the cancer ward and the hospital cafeteria. You hear it beat and rush like a heart, around the corner and down the tile hall, and you hear the door strike open as it pounds into the room. The doctors and nurses are carried off in a rush. The walls fall and float away. You are on the bed and rolling with the waves.
You are flooding the hospital, you are flooding up the street. You see the flower-heads of strangers bobbing down the current, off to work, off to drop their noses in a tonic, off to indulge or trade or slack, to city-live, completely unaware they are underwater, strewn like kelp. The sudden spray of ocean on your skin. You’re riding toward it, into it low and hard. You leave them all behind. This is all you need: the cloud shadows cast on water. Weird light falling on your eyes. Light dripping and bouncing, as if the sun had nothing better to do than show you beauty. Beside you, the painting is bobbing like a life raft. You see the clouds span the new gulf and seagulls mouth off at the wind and the underbelly of bridges.
Above is a bridge: it is your whole life. You could, if you felt like it, with just a short leap from your floating bed, climb on at any point. You could jump onto the bridge when your father is alive and smell the collar of his flannel coat, the one that is later eaten through by mo
ths because you steal the mothballs to play with as a child. You can live before the diagnosis, before you pulled your sister’s hair, before you hurt her again. You can fling yourself to where your mother is healthy, or when you carry that slap in your hand, or when Mary is near, or the day you first met Nicolette. Moments shift and shimmer like flecks of light on water.
You are alone now, under the bridge, in the middle of nothing and the water’s warm. You are in the water and you are the water. And the hospital bed bobs up and down on the waves, catching and tossing fingers of light. What a thrill, what a thrill to be suspended in time like this. What a way to finally see the ocean, the terrible, indifferent, beautiful ocean you were once so afraid of. You stand up, body acting as it did before it was sick. But it is the memory of a body, standing on the edge of the memory of a bed, toes tucked around the lip, feeling the starchy sheet fold under them. As the wave swells, you grab hold of the underside of the bridge. You climb onto it.
There is someone waiting, always waiting for you. A woman with cropped dark hair and welling eyes. She is waving you onward.
Here, the sky is forever in front of you. Away and away it goes, the dim firmament splashed with gulls, and crows like paint splotches on the horizon. Here you are so alive. You are alive, you are alive, you are ready.
Dive in.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 34
