The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  He said, very quietly, without looking at me, “How did he do it?”

  I would have liked not to tell him. But I thought of the psychiatrist, and Kate, and Liz, and their unanimous aversion to secrets, and of my own growing aversion to secrets, and I said, “He had a gun.”

  I waited. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

  He shook his head.

  “Because if there is, you can always ask me.”

  He didn’t say anything else.

  After a little while, I said, “Dinner should be ready any minute,” and he nodded.

  I asked him what he was building. “It looks like a maze. Is it a maze?”

  He did look at me then, swiftly, a glance that was private and proud, and shaded, I thought, with a sadness at my failure to recognize this thing he’d been making. “It’s a museum,” he said.

  Suicide: possible ways to talk to a child about

  weapons god

  IN FOURTH GRADE, IN MY SON’S SCHOOL, THEY STUDIED ANCIENT Greece. In the spring they got an assignment to create a god.

  My son had always been private and self-reliant about his homework. He didn’t want any help; he didn’t want anyone looking over his shoulder; he didn’t even tell me what the assignments were or when they were due. I heard about the god project from Liz. She laughed about it over the phone. Her son was passionate about music, and he was ordering her to drive him around to various arts-and-crafts stores, gathering materials for his poster. “He’s got this three-dimensional guy with an acoustic guitar on top of Mount Olympus,” she said. “And the clouds have to be cotton, he says. And of course they can’t be cotton balls, which we happen to already have in our bathroom; they have to be cotton batting from the fabric store so he can tear them into wisps. That’s what he said: he doesn’t want cumulus clouds, they have to be cirrus. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’m ready to kill him.”

  I had to go into the classroom one morning, to deliver my son’s lunchbox, which he’d forgotten at home. The kids weren’t there when I came—they must have been at gym, or at music—so I took a few minutes to look around at the god posters that were hanging all over the classroom walls. There were gods and goddesses of rainbows, and pets, and flowers, and sports. Some of the sports gods seemed to reign over athletics in general, but others patronized individual games: soccer, baseball. There was a god of laughter, with scraps of Sunday comics pasted around his head in concentric circles, like a giant halo. There was Liz’s son’s music god, astride his mountaintop in sunglasses, with sixteenth and eighth notes raining out of the wispy silver-tinged clouds.

  And there was my son’s name on a poster. He had drawn a large figure with many arms and hands, and each hand was holding a gun: handguns and rifles and machine guns and others I didn’t recognize, complex big ones used in warfare, all drawn with careful attention to detail. Across the top of the poster, my son had printed in large capital letters, black ink shadowed with red, THE GOD OF WEAPONS.

  After looking at this for a minute or two, I continued my tour of the room. A couple of other boys, I saw, had done gods of war: one dropping bombs out of a plane, and one sticking up out of a tank and holding a machine gun.

  This is what they do at this age, I thought. This is what fascinates them.

  But all through the day—while I was working, while I picked up my younger son at nursery school, while we were in the supermarket—I kept thinking about that poster, and how secretive he’d been about it, and how explicit and stark his drawings of the various guns were.

  When he got home from school, he sat at the kitchen counter drinking milk and eating a piece of banana bread. I said, “I saw your poster today, when I came in to drop off your lunch.”

  He gave me a look that was—what? Furtive and annoyed? I wasn’t sure. I was rarely sure, these days, what he was thinking.

  I said, “I’m curious. What made you think of doing a weapons god?”

  He shrugged, and started to slip down off his stool.

  “No, wait,” I said. “I really want to know.”

  “I just wanted to,” he said, frozen half on and half off his seat, with his feet on the rungs of the stool.

  “Was it because you’re interested in military history?” I asked, and he shrugged again.

  “Because you know, don’t you, that guns hurt people,” I said. “They kill people.”

  A sly, exasperated smile crossed his face. He looked at me and said, coldly, “Well, I think they’re interesting.”

  I took a breath, and felt words rising and ripping out of me. “What do you mean, interesting? Don’t you get it? Don’t you get what guns do? They blow people apart, that’s what. Your grandfather picked up a gun and blew a hole in his brain. That’s what guns do.”

  My son’s face was stiff, terrified. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  I was looking at his face, and knowing that I’d always remember it. “No, no—I’m sorry. I should never have said that. It’s okay, it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.” I was moving toward him with my arms out. “I am so sorry.” He let me hug him, his stiff little body.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered again, in the same tone as before, as if my apologies hadn’t made any difference, which of course they hadn’t.

  I let him go up the stairs, his backpack sagging off one thin shoulder. I stood in the kitchen looking out the window.

  After a while I went up and knocked on his door. “Come in,” he said.

  He was lying on his back, in bed, on top of the quilt I’d made for him years before.

  “Listen,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I want to take a nap,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I just wanted to tell you again that I’m sorry. You know that sometimes people do or say things they don’t mean. Parents. You know that, don’t you?” He didn’t say anything. Then I said, “Would you like your door shut?” and at the same instant, so that I couldn’t tell which question he was answering, he said, softly, “Yes.”

  Suicide: psychiatry as an indirect means of addressing

  I’VE TOLD YOUR FATHER THAT I LOVE HIM.

  I’ve cried in front of him.

  I could describe his shirts and ties to you.

  I wonder if you gave him some of the ties.

  Your son has been coming to this day camp. So has mine. Today is parents’ day. I knew you might be here; I saw your name on the phone list that was mailed to us before camp started.

  I’ve never met you, but when I scan the crowd I recognize you instantly. You look like your father.

  I watch you sitting on a folding chair, in the hot July afternoon. The children’s skits are interminable, and inaudible. You sit patiently through all of them, and clap when each is over. You’re a woman who looks strong and thoughtful, someone who could be my friend. This is the kind of thought I tend to have about your father, and then feel ashamed of having. What a waste, that he’s my psychiatrist. I’d rather have him for a friend, a lover, a husband. This thinking feels both clichéd and deranged (though he keeps telling me I’m okay). It would creep you out, if you knew I was watching you.

  I don’t know what happened to your mother. Did she marry again? I imagine her still living around here, your two parents circling each other over the grandchildren, on holidays. They are cordial, but not quite friendly. You can have them to Thanksgiving together, with her husband and your father’s partner, but you’d rather not. It’s too determinedly civilized; it exhausts you.

  Your mother forgave him a long time ago, but the only way she could do it was to sort of dismiss him. She doesn’t think of what he did as betrayal anymore. It’s been distilled down to disappointment. He was a good man who used her to try to prove something to himself. He used her in an experiment that failed.

  In some ways, it doesn’t matter anymore. They’ve both long since been happy with other people. She understands the sociology of what he did; a lot of men in his situation did th
e same thing in those years. He wouldn’t be capable of doing such a damaging thing now. But he was once, and they both remember that she was the one he did it to.

  This is all conjecture. He never mentions your mother.

  He does talk about you, though. He told me you hated the intense little private school they sent you to in ninth grade. He told me this because I sent my older son to the same school, and my son was miserable, too. Your father said you got less miserable as it went along, and by twelfth grade you actually liked it. My son never liked it. He had days when he couldn’t get out of bed, and other days when he’d come home at ten in the morning because he couldn’t figure out how to make himself walk in through the school’s front door. Your father helped me find a psychiatrist for my son. He used you to try to normalize this for me, telling me he’d pushed you to see someone when you were a teenager, and you’d finally agreed to go.

  (I don’t think you were depressed when you went to see that shrink. My guess is that you were angry—at your parents for splitting up, and especially at him for coming out.)

  (I don’t know when your father came out; that’s another thing he never talks about. I’m just guessing.)

  I didn’t like my son’s psychiatrist; he seemed chilly and arrogant. He was hard to talk to—for my husband and me, that is. Our son liked him. “When they were together in the doctor’s office, behind the closed door, and my husband and I were in the waiting room, it sounded like a party in there. Murmur, murmur, laugh, laugh, laugh. We raised our eyebrows hopefully at each other after every laugh. Maybe, we whispered, he’s starting to be okay? The doctor walked our son back to the waiting room after each appointment; they seemed borne on a wave of goodwill together, which crested and fizzled out when they saw us. They never said a word to each other in front of us. Our son would duck his head and start down the stairs, and the doctor would stretch his arms over his head and nod at us and say, “Well, good-bye.”

  I was furious with this doctor, for being so opaque. “Serious depression” was pretty much all he told us. After our son had been on an antidepressant for a few months, we asked the doctor, “Do you think it’s working?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Fuck him,” I said to your father. “He’s like a cartoon version of a psychiatrist.”

  “Do you think the antidepressant is working?” your father asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  I talked to your father a lot about how scared I was. He kept reminding me that depression and suicide are two separate things. He knew that this was the hole I was falling into. Was my son having suicidal thoughts? I said I didn’t know.

  “Have you asked him?”

  “I’m afraid to ask him.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid of putting ideas into his head.”

  “It’s not a bad thing to let him know how concerned you are.”

  So one rainy afternoon when my son came home from school, we sat in the living room and I asked him if he ever thought about hurting himself. He said no. I said it was really important to tell people if he ever did have those thoughts. The doctor. Us. He said he would. I said that to stay alone with those thoughts was the worst and most dangerous kind of loneliness possible.

  Your father has told me the names and ages of your kids, that the older one has been having night terrors and that the younger had hearing problems as a baby and you all still worry about her. He’s told me the name and profession of the man he lives with; he talks about what play or movie they saw over the weekend and what restaurant they went to and what they ate there. He says “we” and “us” sometimes, and I always feel lonely when he says it.

  Sometimes my curiosity about him feels normal, the sort of curiosity I might have about anyone I liked and wished to know better. But sometimes it feels ravenous, driven. He turns back questions; a door shuts in my face. Once I asked if he had brothers and sisters. He said, “If I begin to answer questions like that, it will change things in here. You may end up with information that makes you less free with me; you’ll start worrying about my feelings too much.” We talked about the delicacy of this for the next forty minutes.

  At the end of the session, he said, “So, do you still want to know if I have brothers and sisters?”

  “Not today,” I said. I felt that this was what I was required to say. Then there was a silence, and when I spoke again I said, “I don’t know what it is, but sometimes I’m tormented with curiosity about you.”

  “Tormented? That’s a strong word,” he said, and I cursed (also a strong word) myself for having said it.

  I want to know more, but at the same time I worry that I know too much. When your father tells me personal stuff, I feel like he’s going off the rails. I’m afraid I’m making him do his job wrong.

  When I tell him this, he says he can take care of himself. “What makes you think I can’t?” he asks.

  He and I both know why I think he can’t.

  Once I brought in some earrings to show your father. A pair of gold half-hoop earrings. My mother had given them to me for Christmas the year after my father died. When I started to thank her, she interrupted me: “It’s Daddy’s wedding ring.” She had taken it to a jeweler and had it chopped in half to make earrings for me, and she’d had her own wedding ring chopped in half to make earrings for my sister. She was smiling and tilting her head at me, with tears in her eyes, so I told her that I found the gesture touching and the earrings beautiful. I shoved the box in my bottom drawer and managed to forget about it, pretty much. But sometimes, rummaging for stockings or a scarf, I would see the square red leather jeweler’s box and feel sick.

  One day—and this was years afterward; I’d been seeing your father for quite a while by then and I didn’t start with him until nine years after my father’s death—I put the box into my purse and brought the earrings in to your father’s office. I said, “Is this as awful as I think it is?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  I told him I wouldn’t have minded so much if she’d just given me the ring. But she’d hacked it in half and had it made into accessories and expected me to wear them.

  “You could get it made back into a ring again,” your father said. “There’s a jeweler right around the corner.”

  When I left his office that day, I walked around the corner and stood outside the jewelry store. I opened the red leather box and looked at the gold half-circles lying there, and I remembered what the ring used to look like on my father’s finger. I actually had the ring for a little while; the police gave it back to me after my father died, and when I asked my mother if she wanted it she’d said, “Not yet. I don’t think I could bear it yet.” Then a few months later she asked me for it, I guess because she’d gotten the idea of making the earrings. I stood outside the jewelry store that day after seeing your father, and even though I knew he was right—I could have the earrings made back into my father’s ring—I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t the kind of erasure that would comfort me.

  Sometime after that I was doing one of my restless Internet searches—old boyfriends, old enemies, Googling my father (I’d never found any results for him, but I kept hoping and fearing that he’d suddenly appear)—and I started following your trail. I learned something about your husband: he works in the jewelry store around the corner from your father’s office.

  I told your father recently that I’d decided to hang on to the earrings. I also told him I’d since figured out that your husband worked in the store. There was a silence. Then your father said, “Did you think I was trying to draw you into my family?”

  Once he said it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Maybe he was making some kind of covert declaration of feeling; maybe that was why he’d volunteered it as a possibility.

  Still, it felt awfully convenient—embarrassingly, suspiciously convenient—to imagine that he might have wishes of his own that would so exactly mirror mine.

  My husband and I took our son out of the fanc
y little private school and let him go to the public high school. His medication was changed, and he started to get better. Your father said he felt bad because he’d encouraged me to send my son to the little private school in the first place. He asked if I was angry at him.

  “You didn’t encourage me,” I said. “All you did was to tell me what your daughter’s experience there was like, fifteen years ago.”

  He nodded. I didn’t know if he was giving me permission to be angry, or if he needed to be reassured that I wasn’t.

  Your father is always asking, “Why do you think you have to take care of me?”

  In trying to picture your life, your father’s life, I’m hampered by the limits of imagination. My father used to drop clues like bread crumbs, and then would turn evasive when I tried to follow the trail. So does yours. I need to make a story, on inadequate evidence.

  There’s a wall of impenetrable privacy. Things go on behind it. I stand on the other side and assemble clues, furnish houses.

  I know from something your father says what book is on his bedside table. I know from what you’re wearing today, from your sons Popsicle-smeared T-shirt, which things will be tossed into your laundry hamper tonight. Of your family I think: “They’re just like us.” And equally, or perhaps more, intensely, “They’re nothing like us.” I imagine you have found that mess can be survivable. I imagine you all safe, loved, understanding, understood. The grass on your side is verdantly, screamingly, blindingly green.

  You are thirty-one now, maybe thirty-two. When I was your age, my father was still alive. I thought he was okay. Nobody in my family had ever seen a psychiatrist.

  If I were to put it that way to your father, I’d probably frame it as self-pity. I’d say, “I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, remembering a time when I had no idea that my father was going to commit suicide.”