The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  Your father would say, “Sorry for yourself? Do you mean you’re feeling sad?”

  I would leave out the fact that I’m comparing myself to you, or even thinking of you at all.

  If I did tell him that, if I did mention you, he’d shrug and tell me it was okay.

  I’d say, “I was afraid you’d find it disturbing.”

  “What, that you feel wistful when you think about my daughter?” He’d lift his eyebrows, and look puzzled and curious, and ask me to talk about my feelings about you.

  I wouldn’t want to do it, but I would do it. I wouldn’t tell him all about it, but I’d tell him part. I’d watch his eyes, which would try to hold steady behind his glasses, but they would move a little. And I would try, and fail, to figure out what that little movement meant.

  Suicide: psychological impact of

  “‘Psychologically impacted’ means the effect of certain circumstances surrounding real estate which includes . . . 1) The fact that an occupant of real property is, or was at any time suspected to be, infected or has been infected with the human immunodeficiency syndrome . . ., or (2) the fact that the property was at any time suspected to have been the site of a homicide, other felony or a suicide.”

  FROM A CONNECTICUT STATUTE ENACTED IN 1990,

  AND REPEALED IN 2004

  1. He Haunts the House

  “It really doesn’t bother me,” my mother said of the room where my father had shot himself. “I go in there all the time, to fold the laundry, or to get something out of the filing cabinet. It’s just another room in my house.”

  Then she lowered her voice: “But once in a while the cleaning people shut the door of that room when they’ve finished, and that does bother me. Walking up the stairs, and seeing that closed door.”

  2. He Makes a Museum

  The bulging black trash bag, from when my husband had sorted through my father’s papers the week after he died, still sat on the floor of the study. Every time we visited for the weekend, we noticed that the bag was still there. We asked my mother if we could throw it out. She flapped her hand at us, irritated. “Leave me alone. I’ll deal with it.”

  She had bought a little paper shredder, which sat in its box on the floor next to the trash bag.

  “Mom,” I said. “You don’t have to shred his papers. There’s nothing all that personal. Nobody cares.”

  “People go through those bags at the dump,” she said. “I don’t want anybody finding things. It’s nobody’s business.”

  “Then how about if I take the bag to Kinko’s,” I said. “They have giant shredders. They could do the whole bag in about five minutes.”

  “Someone working there might open the bag, and get interested in what’s inside.”

  “I’ll stand there. I’ll stand and watch while they do the shredding.”

  My mother gave me a look of combined annoyance and exhaustion. “I don’t want the shreds in Kinko’s garbage,” she said.

  I asked my husband if he remembered what he’d put into the bag. “Cancelled checks from twenty years ago,” he said. “File folders full of newsletters your father subscribed to, about successful investing.”

  The book my father had been reading was still in the room, on top of the filing cabinet. It was a fat history of oil and the oil business. I’d given him the book for Christmas, six weeks before he died. He’d filled up some of the silences in our last few phone calls by telling me how much he was enjoying it.

  The film he’d shot at Christmas was still in the camera.

  The last batch of spaghetti sauce he’d made was in the freezer, in neatly stacked square plastic containers.

  The last CDs he’d listened to were piled up on top of one of the living-room stereo speakers.

  The wood he’d carried into the house a couple of weeks before he died was still stacked next to the fireplace. The thick suede work gloves he’d worn lay nearby on the hearth, palms and fingers still curved in the shapes of his hands.

  All this stuff stayed there, petrified. An eerie accidental museum of him.

  3. He Haunts the Boat

  The man who bought his little sailboat, who of course had no idea how my father had died, asked my mother if it was okay if he kept the boat’s name. He said he could feel my father’s presence on the boat, a benign spirit wishing him well. He said, “Your husband was happy sailing. And he was a nice person. I can tell.”

  My mother said that of course he could keep the name, and she gave him my father’s insulated picnic cooler.

  4. My Mother Converses with His Picture

  On her desk, my mother had a photograph of my father. One night she and I sat up late talking, and there was a silence. We were both tired, but we didn’t want to go to bed. My mother picked up the photograph and held it in both hands.

  “What,” she said to it, “what? Didn’t you know how much I loved you? Didn’t I tell you often enough? Didn’t I tell you how much I loved our life together, this house, our daughters?” She shook the picture.

  “Mom,” I said.

  She was still addressing the photograph. “Did I make you feel like you were worthless? Was that it? Was it all my fault?”

  “Ma,” I said sharply. “Cut it out.”

  She put down the photograph and covered her face with her hands. I put my arm around her shoulders. “Come on,” I said. I walked her down the hallway to her bedroom and stayed there while she changed into her nightgown and brushed her teeth and got into bed. I kissed her good night.

  Back in the room where I was staying—my mother’s study—I picked up my father’s photograph from the desk. He was sitting on the living room sofa, with his chin resting on his hand. His face was aloof, elaborately blank—not an absent expression, but like he was trying hard to look absent, to appear to be thinking of nothing. It was a look he would get sometimes, especially toward the end: a blankness that seemed assumed in order to conceal something, though I never knew what. If he’d been alive, and I’d walked into the room and found him sitting on the sofa, looking like that, his expression would have segued instantly into something else: happiness to see me, an alert realization that he needed to pull himself together. He and I might have smiled and rolled our eyes at each other, about some over-the-top emotional thing my mother had said.

  But in the photograph he just sat there, closed and mysterious. When he was alive, he’d met my mother’s hysterical questions with silence, and it was the same now.

  Maybe my mother had questioned the photograph in front of me in order to make a point, to enlist me as an ally. “You see?” she seemed to be asking me. “See how he never answers me?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said to the picture of my father sitting on the sofa. “Who wrote this script?”

  5. He Appears in the Cheese Shop

  I was in the little fancy-food store in my neighborhood, buying cheese.

  My father and I used to shop here together when he was visiting me. He liked the store because it sold the smoky meats he’d had as a little boy in Germany: wursts and Westphalian ham, blood sausage, Lachsschinken. There were expensive tins of English tea, smartly packaged foreign crackers, jams and chocolates, glistening fresh strawberry tarts. My father would point into the display cases, his eyebrows raised in sneaky, childish pleasure. “What do you think?” he would ask me. “Shall we, just this once?” Amassing a pile of white-wrapped parcels and buttery-smelling baker’s boxes tied with string. Standing in the checkout line smiling down at me, never letting me pay.

  And that’s where I saw him, on a cool October afternoon when he was eight months dead. He was standing two places ahead of me in line, waiting to pay.

  His height. His posture. The back of his head, tall and domed, speckled with years of sunburn, the fringe of gray hair—the whole of it giving off an air of careful grooming and unwitting vulnerability. All the details that I’d forgotten and could not have conjured up, but which, suddenly appearing in the cheese shop, were so piercingly familiar, so right. />
  The sight of him was shocking. But it also had a kind of inevitability. I realized that I’d been imagining he might reappear in just this way: arriving in my neighborhood to surprise me, stopping first at this store to buy a few treats to bring to my house. It was as if some lost object had taken longer to turn up than expected, but then had suddenly, quietly, appeared, in a place where I thought I’d already looked.

  There were two women standing between me and my father in the line. They were chatting and shifting their weight, so my father was visible and then invisible. I pushed myself forward to get closer to him, and one of the women turned around in annoyance.

  “Sorry,” I said loudly. I was testing. “Would the sound of my voice make him turn around?

  He was at the register now, pulling out his money. I strained to see his hands: his long palms and fingers. He did not turn to look at me. And his hand, when it flashed out sideways holding the money, was wrong. Small and white. The big brown wallet that he’d pulled out of his pocket was wrong, too, though the way he lifted his suede shoulder and stood very straight, with his head tilted, was right enough to hold me, mesmerized and confused.

  But then he turned enough so that I could see the full soft mouth, wrong; and the small pink fleshy nose, wrong; and I saw him lift his forefinger to his lips and quickly lick it and then bring it down to peel some bills from the stack he was holding in his other hand, wrong wrong wrong.

  Yet when this man walked by me, holding his shopping bag, and I saw that he in fact looked nothing like my father, I still said the word “Dad?” aloud.

  I didn’t look at him when I said it; I was looking straight ahead. I said it quietly, but he was only inches away from me when I spoke. He kept walking. The two women in the line ahead of me turned and looked at me.

  6. Another House Is Haunted

  People were always asking my mother if she planned to move out of the house. She would shrug and say, “I like it here.”

  To me she said, “I don’t even know if this house would sell, because of psychological impact.”

  “The impact it would have on you, you mean?”

  “No,” she said, impatiently. “Psychological impact. It’s a thing. An actual thing, in real estate. If the buyers ask whether or not a house has psychological impact, you have to tell them.”

  “I still don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Like if someone in the house has had AIDS, or if a murder or suicide has happened there—”

  “That’s ridiculous. And the AIDS thing is probably illegal.”

  My mother, who was a real estate agent, shook her head. “Under Connecticut law, the buyer has the right to ask the question.”

  “What, you’re saying that Daddy’s death is supposed to have some kind of psychological impact on the house itself? That oooh, now it’s a suicide house?”

  “There are houses like that, where bad things keep happening,” my mother said. “I had a listing that I couldn’t sell. That beautiful old brick house over on Pickwilder Road. Some man murdered his wife there, back in the ’twenties. And then maybe fifteen years ago a girl, a teenager, killed herself. It’s a gorgeous house, I should have been able to sell it in five minutes. But there’s something about it. You bring customers there and they don’t even want to go inside. Even when they don’t know, they know.”

  I was furious. “So the law puts the buyer’s right to be superstitious and ignorant above the seller’s right to privacy?”

  My mother, confused by the question, suddenly swerved. “That’s why Daddy did it in the house, instead of driving off and doing it in the woods somewhere,” she said. “He knew. He knew it would have psychological impact.”

  I clicked my tongue against my teeth.

  “No,” she said, “really. He knew. I told him. He knew what a tough time I had with that Pickwilder Road listing. I remember specifically telling him: this is what happens when there’s a murder or suicide.”

  “Why would he think it out to that extent?” I said. “Why would he say, ‘Aha, I think I’ll turn this into a haunted house that will be difficult for her to sell’?”

  She shrugged. “He was very angry with me,” she said.

  7. A Friend Who Should Know Better Insists on the Supernatural

  “Can you believe it?” I asked my friend Jill over the phone. This psychological impact thing was making me wild. “Why limit it to AIDS, murder, and suicide? Why not just let the buyer quiz you about your marriage? Did you and your husband fight in the house? How often? How bad were the fights? How was the sex? Maybe you should set up a hidden camera when you move in, and then when you’re ready to sell, just hand the buyer the footage.”

  “Mmm,” Jill said. The kind of murmur that let me know she thought I was ranting.

  “No, but really,” I said. “What the hell difference could it possibly make to anyone else that my father killed himself in the house? He was a nice man. But now just because he did this one thing, he’s—”

  “I know,” Jill said.

  “Not only is he beyond the pale, but he puts our whole house beyond the pale. He’s tainted. I mean, what—is he buried outside the city gates with a stake through his heart?”

  “I know.”

  “And what about the houses where other kinds of terrible things have happened?” I went on. “Rapes, or incest. Or husbands beating wives. Or parents beating children. Why should they be exempt from psychological impact laws?”

  Jill was silent for a moment. Then she said, “There is a house like that, down the road from where I live. Nobody knew what was happening to the kids in that house. It was a nightmare. Social services finally got a tip from someone, and came in and took the kids away.”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “But what I’m thinking of,” Jill said, “is that the people who bought the house after that just always had this weird creepy feeling there. Like there was this aura. They finally hired someone to do some kind of ceremony. Like a blessing, or maybe it was an exorcism—”

  “Well,” I said.

  8. His Museum Exerts Its Power

  My mother had thrown out the spaghetti sauce. But the garbage bag was still there. So were the CDs, and the firewood, and the gloves curved in the supplicating shapes of his hands.

  He’d been dead for two years, three years, five.

  “Mom,” I said, my hand on the trash bag.

  “What,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  9. My Mother Confesses to Murder

  At the beginning, right after his death, my mother spoke about my father in big, sweeping statements. “I have nothing but compassion for him,” she would announce.

  Or: “I have such anger. Such anger. How could he have abandoned me like this?”

  After he’d been dead awhile—three years, five—she started to tell me stories, rather than just headlines. She was still trying to enlist my sympathy, but she also seemed to be puzzling something out.

  “Did I ever tell you what happened with Troilus?” she asked me one day. We had each driven an hour and a half to meet for lunch at a deli halfway between our houses.

  “Troilus the cat?”

  “Did I tell you about his death?”

  “I knew he died,” I said, spreading cream cheese on my bagel.

  “He kept getting sick. Every day there’d be this little mess of cat vomit somewhere, that I’d have to clean up. I kept telling Daddy, ‘Something’s wrong, we’ve got to take Troilus to the vet.’ But Daddy would just give me this angry look. He’d get that look and you couldn’t talk to him. So finally I just took Troilus to the vet by myself, and they found a tumor. They said he’d be dead within a couple of months. So I had him put to sleep.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “But the point is, Daddy never asked what happened to him. The cat was there, and then suddenly the cat wasn’t there. And Daddy never asked.”

  I stopped laying smoked salmon on top of the cream cheese. “Why didn’t you jus
t tell him?”

  “I kept waiting for him to ask. It was his cat. Wouldn’t you think he would have asked me, ‘Hey, where’s Troilus?’ Then I would have told him.”

  I drank some coffee and tried to keep my face neutral.

  My mother said into the silence: “You are so hard on me, you know that? You’re always judging me.”

  “I am not,” I lied.

  “I feel guilty, all right? I go over it in my head. Why didn’t I tell him that Troilus was dead? I don’t understand it myself anymore. I have to keep reminding myself what it was really like to live with a man like that, who wouldn’t talk. A man who wouldn’t just say, ‘What have you done with my cat?’”

  I nodded, and drank more coffee. Part of me wanted to laugh. But also I was imagining the silences at my parents’ dinner table, my father determined not to ask and my mother not to tell.

  10. He Haunts Someone Else’s House

  I was visiting my cousin Sarah in Ohio, and she said, “Did I ever tell you about the time your father came to see me?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  It was late at night. We were sitting at Sarah’s kitchen table, drinking wine. Rain was slapping against the windows, and we could hear the tree branches heaving around in sudden gusts of wind.

  “It was the week we moved in here,” Sarah said. “We moved, and I hated it. This little dark ugly house. I couldn’t stop crying. Your father came to town on business. I opened the door, and the first thing he said was, ‘You have some beautiful old lilacs here.’

  “I just looked at him. ‘Really?’ It was winter, I didn’t know what the hell a lilac looked like. He took me out into the garden, and he just kept pointing stuff out to me. These were hydrangeas, these were wild roses, this was a dogwood. He pointed to a brown glob on a twig and told me it was a praying mantis egg case, and how good they’d be for the garden. Then we went inside, and he did the same thing with the house. Look at this great south-facing window. Did I know how lucky I was to have fir floorboards? What a wonderful deep bathtub.