The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  It’s emphatic.

  If you want to say “fuck you,” there’s no louder way.

  It’ll be swift. It’ll be clean (well, not for whoever finds you—your wife, you assume).

  But for you it’ll be fast and clean: you won’t have to watch the gory draining away of your own life.

  All you have to do is flex your knuckles, and move your finger a total distance of an inch and a half. Maybe less.

  Suicide: where I am now

  bed

  I am in bed with my husband. Maybe we are reading. Or maybe we have turned out the light and are lying side by side in the dark. Somehow we find ourselves talking about my father.

  This isn’t one specific night; it could be any night. We’ve been talking about something else, or we’ve been silent.

  We don’t talk about him too much anymore.

  We sort of try to figure it out, but not really, not anymore. The subject is like a fish that’s probably dead, but every now and then thrashes briefly, startlingly, convulsively on the dock.

  Maybe we’ve been talking about my husband’s law partner, who is in his early sixties and who, after several years of widowhood, is about to make a passionately happy second marriage.

  “He can’t mention her without grinning,” I say. “Have you noticed that?”

  My husband says, “He stands in the door of my office and tells me what she’s doing that day. She’s going grocery shopping, then she has a dentist’s appointment, then she’s meeting her sister for lunch. I think he just likes saying her name.”

  There’s a silence.

  “My father seemed so old,” I say, “didn’t he? But sixty-one isn’t old.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “Did we think he was old because we were so young?”

  “No,” my husband says, “we thought it because he thought it.”

  Or maybe it’s one of those nights when I’ve begun again, obsessively, to list the reasons for my father’s death. The failing business. The expensive lifestyle that my parents couldn’t afford. The anger in their marriage. His bad health. His horrific childhood. Clinical depression. I know that it wasn’t any single thing, that it was all those things and something more—some way in which the combination or the relentlessness or the loneliness of all those things became unbearable.

  My husband listens to me, and then he says, “There’s something that happens in the ocean, called a double high tide.” He tells me it’s a phenomenon that occurs occasionally, during a bad storm. The winds and currents are so fierce that the tide comes in and never gets the chance to recede. It’s trapped near the shore for hours and then the next high tide comes in on top of it. That’s when catastrophes happen: boats, houses, and people swept out to sea.

  “That’s what killed your father,” he says, “a double high tide.”

  Or it might be a night when I announce, out of nowhere, “My father was a selfish jerk.”

  “Yes,” my husband says coolly.

  We lie there for a while. Then I say, “But he wasn’t.”

  My husband says, “I know.”

  Or maybe my husband has fallen asleep. I’m reading a novel, and suddenly I realize that one of the characters is going to commit suicide. There are ominous foreshadowings, hints that something violently beyond the pale is going to happen, oblique references to a note and a gun.

  I’ve been enjoying this book, admiring and envying the writing, but now I shut it quickly and bury it under the other books on my nightstand. I don’t want to read someone else’s take on suicide.

  I’m afraid the other writer will get it wrong. Make it too pat, or too melodramatic, or make it the backdrop for some other showy foreground plot—a love affair, a road trip across America, some redemptive literary conceit that purports to change the characters’ lives and ultimately to heal them.

  I am convinced that in real life suicide can’t be the backdrop, dwarfed by something else. It is the foreground: itself inevitably the thing that changes people’s lives. There is no other plot, and no resolution. And while some healing does happen, it isn’t a healing of redemption or epiphany. It’s more like the slow absorption of a bruise.

  Another night. My husband is awake, and I am thinking of all the things he did after my father’s death: wiping away the blood, arranging the funeral, getting papers to the lawyer, cleaning my father’s study.

  “You were great,” I tell my husband, belatedly, years after the disaster.

  And he, belatedly, squirms and says what I at first take to be the equivalent of Aw shucks. “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Yes you were. You were amazing.” I move closer and wrap an arm around him, put my head down on his chest. He lies there rigidly on his back. When he speaks after a moment his voice is sick with shame.

  “I wanted you to think I was amazing. I liked the idea of being wonderful.”

  I don’t find this confession of vanity disturbing; if anything, I am touched by it. “It doesn’t matter. There were things that needed to be done, and you did them.”

  I can feel him, in the darkness, shaking his head. “It was just busywork.” Then he says, “I couldn’t really help you.”

  “You did,” I say instantly, reflexively.

  I think of a time, soon after my father’s death, when my husband held me, murmuring over and over, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” and how I finally drew back and said, “What the fuck do you mean, it’s okay?”

  And how he’s never said it to me since.

  And how I would have hated it if he had.

  “You’ve been there,” I say, and now his arms go around me.

  We are quiet for a while.

  “Listen,” I say, “can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  It feels like a moment of perfect trust. I can ask, and finally, finally, he will tell me. I draw in my breath. “When you went to the house that night, was his body still there? Did you see him?”

  He hesitates, and his arms loosen some, though he continues to hold me. Maybe he’s deciding whether or not to keep lying, or maybe he’s been telling the truth all along but is simply surprised, and sad, that so many years later I am still asking the same questions.

  “No,” he says, as he always has. “By the time I got there, he was gone.”

  graveyard

  I am driving in Connecticut. I have spent the day with my mother. I took her and Doug out to lunch at a steak house. The steak set them off on an irritated, amused tirade about how the assisted living place was always running out of filet mignon because of the woman who ordered two steaks every night: one to eat, and one to take upstairs for later.

  “Our theory is that she feeds it to her dog,” Doug said.

  They beamed at each other, and my mother said fiercely, “We’re planning to form a grievance committee.”

  The route back to the highway takes me through the town where my parents used to live, past the town library. I grin, driving by, remembering how every September my mother would give several boxes of books to the annual library book sale, and my father would come home excitedly with a stack he’d bought. “Look what I found!” he would say, and my mother would look at the books in dismay: “Paul, I donated these.”

  See? I can smile now when I think of him, I tell myself.

  At the same time, I’m aware that I can’t smile about him without finding the smile noticeable, remarkable.

  At the stop sign after the library, my eye registers a turnoff labeled DIAMOND ROCK ROAD. Familiar, I think.

  Then I remember: sitting with my mother and sister in Ted Tyson’s chic kitchen the day my father died, arguing about whether to bury his ashes in the graveyard my mother knew about, on Diamond Rock Road. The memory is vivid and leaden—not quite as vivid as if we’re still sitting there, but almost. It’s also sorry, wistful, laced with some compassion for those three sad shocked women of fifteen years ago.

  I remember my sister saying, “There needs to be a place, so we can visit
it.”

  My sister did visit it with her two children, my mother has told me; they went and put cherry tomatoes on my father’s grave.

  I remembered how my father loved cherry tomatoes, and how he always scattered his tomato plants among the flower beds, because he believed that proximity to the flowers made the tomatoes sweeter.

  My mother asked me then, hesitantly, if I had ever visited the grave.

  “No,” I said, with more vehemence than I’d intended.

  But today, for some reason—a benign, green, lush summer day, so many years after his death—I flick on my blinker and turn left on Diamond Rock Road.

  Hills, curving and dipping. Stone walls, day lilies, barns converted to houses, houses nestled in real-estate-brochure acres and acres of emerald lawn. Big old trees. New trees laid out in geometric patterns, carefully mulched. Money.

  The road is longer than I expect. But then, just when I think that perhaps I’ve remembered wrong, there it is: a green slope, flanked by woods, dotted with gravestones. I am glad and sorry to find it. I pull the car over into the dirt road at the edge of the graveyard and get out and start walking up the hill, reading the names on the stones.

  The only other time I was here was the day we buried his ashes. It was springtime, a few months after he’d died. There was a small deep hole in the ground. The ashes were in a gray metal box, like the box we kept the cash in at my son’s nursery school fair. We stood around in the graveyard, and my mother read the Twenty-third Psalm aloud. She was wearing shoes with high heels, and they kept sinking into the soft ground and she kept trying to pull them out, lurching each time, and all the while she kept on reading this psalm. Her voice was intense, emphatic, holy, and, when her shoe would unexpectedly sink again and throw her off balance, angry. It was the first time I’d ever heard anything remotely religious coming out of either of my parents’ mouths. Both of them were atheists. I was calm, numb, looking at the sky, trying not to laugh. Weren’t there families somewhere who could handle this sort of thing more straightforwardly? What were we doing here with my mother lurching all over the place reading from the Bible?

  What I can see today, climbing slowly up the grave-studded hill, is that we were reeling. Suicide isn’t just a death, it’s an accusation. It’s a violent, public declaration of loneliness. It’s a repudiation of connection. It says, “You weren’t enough to keep me here.” It sets up unresolvable dilemmas of culpability and fault: were we to blame for being insufficient, or was he to blame for finding us so? Someone had been weighed and found wanting, but who?

  No wonder none of us could figure out how we felt.

  Today, wandering around this small green space, I can’t find him. The graveyard is tiny but disorganized. Eroded stones from the nineteenth century jostle up against crisply engraved ones from a year or two ago. My memory from that long-ago spring day is reliable, but useless. I remember trees and a steep slope; the whole place is treed and sloping.

  I do find him, eventually. His stone, pale granite, engraved on the left-hand side with his name and his dates, the right side left blank for my mother.

  (Which, I can’t help thinking, were the sides of the bed they slept in throughout their marriage. And I am reminded of an Etruscan tomb sculpture I saw once, in a museum in Italy: a couple, reclining, staring at each other in frank horror, as if to say, Oh my god, it was bad enough to go through life with you—are you telling me we’re stuck together for eternity?)

  There is his name, on a gravestone. He’s really dead.

  But I knew that already.

  I cry for a while. I leave.

  Italy

  I am standing in a medieval church in a small town in Italy.

  My husband is outside, sketching the facade. Our sons are nearby, in the main square. When they were younger, they made up a game on one of our Italy trips where they would draw imaginary swords, yell “ching!” (the sound of the sword coming out of its scabbard), and then chase each other around waving their arms, lunging, and arguing about who had stabbed whom first. Now, at eighteen and twelve, they’re too old for public exuberance. They slouch around looking bored, but sometimes, when there are no other people around, I’ll see them darting and scuffling in a brief silent version of their old game.

  The church is empty; I’m alone. I move slowly up the aisle. It is neither dark nor light. A pale pearly dimness, like the receding shadowed interior of a seashell. The church smells of damp chalk: the smell of Europe.

  Sometimes, when I was a child and my father and I were outside together, he would look up and say, “A European sky.” I never knew what he meant. It always looked like regular sky to me; there seemed nothing particular or unusual about it. And I thought, though I wasn’t sure, that he said it about different kinds of skies.

  “What makes it European?” I asked. “What does a European sky look like?”

  He shrugged, and looked at the sky for a long moment. “Oh . . .” He would shrug again, and laugh, and never explain. I don’t think he quite knew what he meant.

  The air in the church is cold, and the draught is like someone breathing, cool quick breaths on my cheek.

  I pass the altar and turn to go up the other aisle. Near the end of it, I stop. Candles burn on a spiky wrought-iron stand before a picture. It’s a panel painting, fourteenth century I think, of the Madonna and child. Mary’s head is bent, her cheek resting against her child’s hair as she gazes sadly out at the viewer. The child is looking up at her, one hand wrapped around her neck, imploring her not to be sad, trying vainly to comfort her. Either he knows less than she does of what lies ahead for them, or far more.

  I put some coins into the box and reach for a candle. It’s an impulse: I’m not sure why I’m doing it. Touching the wick to a nearby flame, I set it burning on one of the few empty iron spikes in front of the Virgin. I close my eyes, and think of my father.

  When I open my eyes, the flames dance and blur, each in its own pulsing halo of light. I’m not sure anymore which candle is his. All the flames flicker and bow in unison; there is nothing to distinguish the one I just lit from all the rest.

  In this moment—dim, blurred by candlelight—I can stand and watch the white flames, the multitude, and think that I see him somewhere in their midst, restored to his place among the tall shining souls.

  psychiatrist’s office

  I am sitting with my doctor, telling him about the church in Italy, about how I lit a candle there for my father. My eyes water a little as I describe it to him. “I think that’s going to be the ending of my book,” I say, “that candle, burning there with all the other candles.”

  He is shaking his head. His face is filled with—what? Pity, affection, knowing me very well. “That’s not where you are,” he says.

  We sit for a while. I’m annoyed: what does he mean, that’s not where I am?

  But he’s right. It isn’t. It’s where I wish I were. It’s what I think is supposed to happen.

  We sit together, looking at each other, silently acknowledging my fierce desire for a resting place, an ending, and the fact that we both know there isn’t one.

  “It’s partly where I am,” I say. “It’s not untrue.”

  where I didn’t go

  I am driving in Connecticut again, after spending a couple of days with my mother.

  Again I am passing through the town where my parents used to live. Again I’m at a stop sign—but a different one this time. This time, I notice a small blue sign that I’ve never seen before. An arrow and the words POLICE STATION.

  There is no one behind me. I sit in my car for several moments, deciding whether or not to turn.

  In that police station, I know, is a file on my father’s death. A file of papers, from the days before everything was computerized. It would be in deep storage by now: in a basement, or an attic, or an outbuilding—which, in a small rural town like this, could be an old barn, with swallows nesting in the eaves above rows and rows of rusty file cabinets.

&nb
sp; But somewhere, that file exists.

  In it are ail the things I’ve seen. Copies of the death certificate, the autopsy report, the list of items the police removed from the house on the day of his death. A photocopy of the spreadsheet he left for my mother—that long, pathetically dwindled list of his assets.

  That folder, I know, also contains something I’ve never seen. Pictures. Photographs of him dead in the armchair. Of his face, of his eyes open or closed. Of the clothes he was wearing, of the bib-shaped dark stain on his chest. Of his head, fallen back or slumping forward. Of his ankles, crossed on the footstool. Of the gun, wedged down between the cushion and the arm of the chair, or fallen underneath the chair itself (hidden somewhere, I know, since my mother said she never saw it when she was in the room with him). Of the blood on the woodwork, before my husband wiped it away.

  Still no one behind me at the intersection.

  Why this impulse, to turn my car to the right and drive to the police station and ask to see his folder?

  Masochism?

  An attempt to shatter the last persistent vestiges of numbness, to force myself once and for all to look, to see, to get it, to feel it?

  A kind of preemptive bravado? A desire to bring all the possible other shoes raining down on my head at once, so that I’ll never have to dread another one falling?

  Sheer curiosity? A salutary desire for omniscience? A journalistic urge to have followed all the leads, uncovered all the mysteries, learned everything that is learnable, shied away from nothing?

  A lurid instinct that this might be a sensational ending to the book: this poignant, dreadful tableau of me and the pictures?