by Toni Graham
She now knows that most often it is men who shoot themselves. Statistics indicate that women rarely choose a gunshot to the head as their mode of suicide. There is conjecture that most women find the idea of mutilating their faces the most undesirable way to go. Women usually swallow pills, or sometimes sit in their cars and breathe in carbon monoxide. Holly had always imagined, though, that one tiny gunshot to the temple would not be all that bad and certainly would be quicker than taking pills and having to lie down and wait to die. She had imagined a tiny, bullet-sized indentation in the temple, bleeding slightly at the entrance site, and envisioned perhaps a slightly larger exit wound somewhere else in the head. Neat, practical, effective. It was not as if one needed to ram a shotgun into her mouth and blow off her face. No, what Nancy Reagan had once termed “a tiny little gun” placed strategically at one temple did not seem too grotesque.
But when she entered the bedroom, though it took several moments for what she was seeing to actually seem real, all she could think of in her dumb horror was photos she had seen of Jackie Kennedy in a pink suit splattered gruesomely with crimson-brown blood. Reed lay on the floor, his face obscured by gore, an evil scarlet halo on the carpet beneath his head. The amount of blood on the walls and ceiling shocked Holly to the core.
She wishes she could say that she had run to Reed, stooped to take his pulse or to perform CPR, or even knelt to pray. But the fact is, she did exactly what that sixties comedian Lenny Bruce claimed Mrs. Kennedy did when her husband was shot: “hauled ass.”
To be accurate, Holly crawled ass. She sank to her knees as if she were a plastic blow-up doll with a slow leak, a slow descent to the formerly eggshell carpet. She scooted along on her belly down the hall to the phone, crawling like a blindworm with Joyce creeping along with her, whimpering.
The crime-scene-restoration company had done wonders with the bedroom. After they were finished, Holly could find no trace of the blood that had punctuated the room. The workers asked her permission to discard the black-and-white movie posters that dressed up the walls. Fred and Ginger and Clark and Claudette were blood spattered, which morbidly called to mind the old riddle from elementary school: What’s black and white and red all over? She did not even see the gun until after the police arrived—a 12-gauge shotgun. The fact that Reed owned a shotgun came as a total surprise to her. She cannot imagine where he must have been hiding the thing.
What used to be the bedroom is now the guest room and vice versa. Though the former guest room is smaller than Holly and Reed’s bedroom, it does not feel as spooked. But of course Reed is still dead, and she is now a bombed-out hull and thus a member of the Suicide Club. As with the crime-scene-fixing company, she found Dr. Jane’s grief support group in the Yellow Pages, in this case online.
Her laptop sits on the kitchen table where she left it this morning. She logs on to e-Luv. A man has e-mailed her: “Damn your cute Sandy.” She immediately zaps him, then clicks on the profile of a decent-looking bearded man named Larry. As she reads his profile, nothing about him strikes her one way or the other; he seems fairly generic. But as Holly reads over Larry’s responses to the list of e-Luv-provided questions, she is stopped short by one of these. The question is “Name four things you cannot live without.” When perusing some of the past male responses, she has noticed that the answers seem to run the gamut from “my boat” to “my kids” to “good wine” to “excitement” to inappropriate statements about sex. But poor Larry has answered “air, water, food, sleep.” She looks back to the top of the page and sees that he has listed his occupation as civil engineer.
But her late fiancé, Reed, had plenty of imagination, along with good looks, bedroom skills, intelligence, and wit. Only fly in that VapoRub was that he also shot himself in their bedroom; probably Larry would not do such a thing.
She snaps shut the computer’s lid, opens the bottle of Cabernet, and pours herself a glass. When Joyce nuzzles her, begging, she dips her finger into the glass and lets the dog lick off the wine. Holly lowers her face to Joyce’s furry head, breathes in the familiar musky smell. That was the worst thing in the days following Reed’s death: she could smell his hair everywhere she went, as if the scent clung to the inside of her nose like a fragrant mist. Her hands, too, had tingled, nearly vibrated, with the phantom pain of feeling Reed’s curly hair. She sits at the kitchen table, staring at nothing. Her hips, seeming heavy as a sandbag, moor her to the chair. The dead-mouse smell creeps up through the floorboards, eradicating any yearnings for dinner. She should get up and light some candles and incense. Maybe she ought to call back the restoration company and see if they can find the bodies and haul them out. I’m not here now, I’m not here.
“I’m alive in the moment, present here and now,” Holly recites, then repeats the affirmation several times. She is sitting in a chair across from Dr. Jane in the psychologist’s office on the university campus. Holly has scheduled a private session, having begun to feel mildly alienated by the group meetings. Her usual mantra is deemed by Jane a “dissociative reaction” and something of which she should divest herself. Jane herself has suggested the replacement mantra “I’m alive in the moment, present here and now.” Holly feels like a talking computer, as she does not for a moment feel alive in the moment, present here and now. If she wanted to sabotage the session, all she would need to do is voice for Dr. Jane the as yet unspoken mantra, the one that comes closest to the truth: I’m dead every moment, world without end, amen.
Instead Holly says, “Reed might still be alive if it weren’t for me. It’s all my fault.” She cannot forget what he left as a suicide note: Goodbye, cruel world! He even remembered the comma between “goodbye” and “cruel.” She did not know then, nor does she now, whether the message demonstrated mordant humor or whether Reed actually meant Goodbye, cruel Holly.
She conjectures again that Reed’s gambling might not have escalated so ferociously if they had stayed in L.A. The combination of being cut off from his friends and family and spending too much time online had driven Reed deep into Internet poker and then Indian gambling casinos—“gaming” casinos as they are euphemistically phrased. He had slid right off the edge and gone down quickly. She does not need to tell Dr. Jane about the quarrel the night before Reed died.
“What about the money he stole from you, though?” Jane says.
“He took it, more than stole it,” Holly says.
Jane says, “Where’s your rage? Are you intent on making a saint out of him just because he’s dead?”
I don’t have any rage, Holly thinks but says nothing. Poor Reed—how can she rage against someone desperate enough to take his own life?
It has begun suddenly to rain. Holly is still not accustomed to the summer storms in Oklahoma, which come quickly out of nowhere and rumble overhead like the Heartland Flyer train. The rainwater pounds the windows and skylight in Dr. Jane’s office, and Holly mercifully cannot hear what Jane is saying. She sits inert, watching Jane’s lips move like an actor’s on TV when the sound is turned off. In the weeks before Reed’s death, he often sat in front of the TV smoking Camels and staring at the screen with the sound muted. When Holly entered the room, he would turn to her with the look of dull glass in his eyes. The rain escalates as Dr. Jane’s lips offer subaudible counsel.
As Holly walks across campus from Dr. Jane’s office to the lot where she parked her car, the sun bearing down on the back of her neck makes her feel like a burger under a broiler. She has left Cadon in charge of the shop, so when she spots an on-campus café called Kampus Koffee she decides to stop for an iced tea. She pulls open the glass door and immediately spots Dave from the suicide survivors group. Her impulse is to push the door closed and go elsewhere.
But Dave has seen her. She gives him a small wave, and he stands and makes a “sit here” gesture, pointing to the chair across from him. Holly complies as Dave nudges aside the spiral notebook he was writing in.
Once Holly has ordered and she and Dave exchange a few pleasan
tries, silence sets in and she feels as if she should get the conversational ball in the air. She knows he is a professor of architecture at the university, so she says the first thing that comes to mind, “Sketching out a building?” and points to the notebook near his cup. She instantly regrets the moronic inquiry, but heck, is she expected to begin a dialogue about Buck-minster Fuller or something?
Dave comes as close to looking flustered as she has ever seen him. His hand moves to shield what he has written, and color rises in his face. “It’s just a list,” he tells her. “Sometimes when I’m idle I make lists—it’s nothing, really.”
“Let me see,” she says.
Just as Holly complied when he indicated she sit with him, Dave passively hands over the notebook. “Things That Look Like Other Things” is the scrawled heading. She reads the list:
1: Men named Buck or Rowdy who look like accountants
2: Women named Joy who might better have been named Dolores, or even Oleander
3: Zucchini, which look like cucumbers
4: Penguins
My gosh, what a strange little man he is, Holly thinks. Before she looks up from the list, she attempts to keep her face deadpan. “I don’t understand about the penguins,” she says.
Dave says, “Did you see that movie about the marching penguins?”
When Holly nods, Dave continues, still appearing a bit embarrassed. “The film depressed the hell out of me,” he says. “The damn birds do nothing but suffer from birth to death. Even the act of conception seems grim.”
Not knowing what to say, Holly only shrugs.
“I’m a Jew, you know,” Dave says, “but in school I studied Eastern religions, and something from the Tibetan Book of the Dead always stuck with me.”
Holly nods again, waiting.
“I’m not saying I believe this,” Dave says, “but the Book of the Dead says that if you wreck your karma, you get stuck on the karmic wheel and are likely to be reincarnated—transmigrated they call it—as an animal. I don’t want to be a fuckin’ penguin.”
Holly is nonplussed. Dave has heretofore seemed like a fairly pragmatic guy. “And you feel as if you’ve damaged your karma?” she says.
The volume of Dave’s voice decreases to just above a whisper. “I wasn’t there for my dad.”
She reminds Dave that Dr. Jane says all suicide survivors feel guilty. “Maybe so, but Poppy had cancer and I was so self-involved I didn’t even know it. Truth be told, I hadn’t even called him in half a year.” Dave looks so aggrieved that Holly feels compelled to share her own guilt.
“I can top that,” she says. “The night before Reed shot himself, he said to me in a really quiet voice, ‘I’m no good.’ You know what I said to him?”
Dave shakes his head.
“I said, ‘Darling, I’ve been telling you that for months!’”
They hold each other’s gaze, words unnecessary. Only a suicide survivor really knows another; that much Holly has learned. Dave reaches across the small round table and places his hand paternally over hers, patting her as if she were an infant. Dave’s face across the table is mournful and kind. From the crown of her head, Holly feels an inchoate glow of warm radiance, luminance. The feeling disperses through her body, as if she were being filled like a balloon and might rise up from the wrought-iron chair and hover at the ceiling like the floating Little Mermaid in the Macy’s parade.
Dave offers to walk Holly to her car, but she declines and trudges back to the lot where she parked the Mustang. She has not told anyone other than Dave, not even Dr. Jane, about the terrible thing she said to Reed the night before he committed suicide. She cannot fathom what made her cough it up to Dave. Maybe she saw evidence in his stricken countenance that he too carried a corpse on his back. His transgression seems to Holly so much less malignant then her own. He hadn’t phoned his father in months—in her view, no huge malfeasance. She, however, had answered Reed as if she were Nora Charles tossing off a sassy line of dialogue in a 1930s Thin Man movie.
But she was no Myrna Loy, no glamour-girl comedic leading lady. She was the person who hauled ass, leaving her beloved face up in a pool of congealing blood. Dave’s point about karma has hit home with her, and she knows she would be getting off easy if she came back as a penguin.
Teddy telephones just after Holly finishes dinner. He and his father went to the beach today, Teddy says, and he is still giddy with the thrill of sand, breaking waves, and Sno-Cones. Theo took Teddy to Santa Monica Pier, and Teddy is effusive about riding the bumper cars. She asks to speak to Daddy, ready to ask Theo if she can have Teddy back a couple of weeks early.
In response to her query, Theo says, “What the hell would he do there—go to Jesus camp?”
“There are other activities,” she says, knowing that Theo is correct: summer for children in Hope Springs consists of Vacation Bible Camp, and even the woods are beset by deer flies and chiggers. Holly caves more easily than she would normally, not wishing to be overly selfish. She cannot deprive Teddy of California beaches and subject him to a parched summer in a landlocked state so backward it does not even have a major league baseball team. “We’ll stick to what we planned,” she says, then speaks briefly again to Teddy before she hangs up.
She is still somewhat unsettled by her session with Dr. Jane, and by the odd interlude with Dave in the café. She roots in a kitchen drawer for matches so she can spark up some calming candles and incense, but as she lights a white lotus candle, she realizes that the mouse cadaver smell has notably abated. Maybe the downpour of rain somehow purged the odor from the basement and purified the air. Or maybe the smell at last simply dissipated. By the time Teddy comes home, the house will probably smell fine.
She has brought home from the shop a copy of the Tao Te Ching, recommended by Dave, which she sets down on the table and will begin reading while she eats dinner. Dave claims the book helps him deal with the loss of his father. But before Holly starts dinner, she checks e-Luv. The matches she has been sent today are all either ugly as gargoyles or Pentecostal or Republican. She dispenses with the “matches” and scrolls through photos of non-matches, looking for someone appealing. When she gets to page 10, like a “Yes!” floating up in the fluid in a Magic 8-Ball, a photo of a man closely resembling Reed becomes visible. For one exquisite, awful moment, she thinks the man actually is Reed—that the promise has been magically fulfilled, like it never happened.
Waiting4U is the man’s screen name, allowing Holly to continue to think of him as Reed. The most unlikely thing is that the man’s hair is the same shade as Reed’s: dark red, not the carrot-top red one most often sees, but a rare deep burnt carmine. Like Reed, the man has black eyebrows and slightly swarthy skin. What is even more improbable is the sole dimple on one side of his mouth, exactly like Reed’s. She indulges in a momentary fantasy, the sort of unlikely scenario one encounters in soap operas: Reed has a twin they never knew about, and she has now found him. She knows such things can actually happen. Only a few months ago she read in the Tulsa World that in Ecuador a chance meeting had reunited twin sisters who never knew of the other’s existence.
Holly sees that Waiting states the last “good book” he read was (but of course!) The Purpose Driven Life. She thinks of Dave’s list from earlier today—things that look like other things—and is reminded of Lauren Ba-call. The actress once married Jason Robards, and the consensus was that she did so only because the actor resembled Humphrey Bogart. Bogie had been the love of Bacall’s life; evidently, when she saw Robards, she felt that through some sort of necromancy she could again be made love to by Bogart. The marriage had not worked out.
Now Holly sees that Waiting is not a divorced man but a widower. She scrutinizes the rest of his profile, scrolling doggedly up and down, looking for signs of Reed-kinship. Waiting was born in Texas, where he still resides, whereas Reed was born in Colorado. That does not mean they might not still be twins, though—if Waiting was adopted out, his actual place of birth might have been �
��revised.” But he claims to be thirty-five and a Taurus, whereas Reed was thirty-eight and a Pisces.
Under “Favorite Things to Do” Waiting has written: “Watch sports on my widescreen, ride my Harley, watch movies (favorite: all James Bond), dance at C&W clubs, and especially—cheer on the Cowboys. But none of those since my wife passed away. I don’t really have any favorite things to do, anymore. Maybe I signed up for e-Luv too soon, sorry.”
Holly’s guts whirlpool, and she feels sweat bead on her upper lip. Grief trumps country-and-western bars, even trumps that awful book. She sits staring at the pulsing cursor on the screen, her hands motionless on the keyboard, but Joyce begins to whine to go outside. She writes: “Dear Waiting4U, I lost someone, too.” She sits a few moments more, then impulsively reaches across the table for the Tao Te Ching. She has always believed that a book can help just about anything. She opens randomly to a page and chooses what she will send to Waiting4U:
A man is supple and weak when living, but petrified and immutable when dead.
Grass and trees are fragile and pliant when living, but dried and shriveled when dead.
Thus, the steely and the strong are the comrades of death;
The supple and the weak are the comrades of life.
She types the verses carefully, then adds “(from Lao Tzu)” and “If you feel like e-mailing me, my real name is Holly.”
Before she can change her mind, she clicks Send. Something surges inside her. Who ever knows what might happen, anyway? With a roll of the dice, the universe can transmute. Faster than a speeding bullet.
She flings open the kitchen’s French doors to let the dog outside and Joyce vaults out to the yard. Inhaling deeply, Holly smells the rain-washed air. The Oklahoma red-clay soil seems to glow in the dusk like smoldering coals. In the distance stands a water tower, the painted-on words visible from her yard: Hope Springs. She stands motionless at the threshold, thinking she hears something. Can it be someone whispering, something slithering? She sees nothing out of the ordinary, so she listens intently. There is a barely perceptible buzzing sibilance, and Holly senses an invisible presence. Beyond her is the known world, the mountainless vastness of the plains.