The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  “I don’t have bedbugs. The neighbors do,” I say. “It’s preventative. Just a couple days.”

  They look at each other and pretend to communicate with their eyes but I know they’re speaking different languages.

  Jules and Dan have already eaten but they sit at the kitchen table and watch me scarf down some bland veggie pasta. “Why didn’t you join us at the protest?” Jules says.

  “You went?”

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Dan says. “Jews are born protestors.”

  “It’s in our nature to take issue with an indifferent leader,” Jules says. “We get mad at God if He’s unjust. Even though maybe He’s always unjust. Maybe humans are more moral than God. But he set the standard, and we have to let him know if He’s not living up to it.”

  “Easier to let Bush know,” Dan says.

  “But what good did it do?” I say.

  “We’ll see,” Dan says. “But even if it looks like nothing, it’s not. Protesting is survival.”

  I pour hot sauce over my pasta and take too big of a bite.

  “Slow down,” Jules says to me. “You’ll choke.”

  “Don’t tell him how to eat, he’s a grown animal.” Dan winks at me.

  It’s true I feel hungrier than I’ve ever been and I can’t slow down. I am hungry! I could eat my own arm, I could eat the moon. This pasta will do nothing for me.

  “We could watch a movie,” Jules says.

  “We could watch the game,” Dan says.

  “It’s my night to choose,” Jules says.

  “Let’s let West choose. Why are you so quiet, West? You should take a cue from Jules and speak up more. Jews know how to talk. It’s why we’re so smart, isn’t it?” he sort of asks Jules. “It’s how we learn. You can’t form ideas with only you in your head.”

  Is he insinuating he knows something about my mind? I want to tell him that it’s just as hard when it’s not just you in your head.

  “Do you have any meat?” I ask.

  “Yes!” Dan says, as if he’s won an argument.

  And then I realize what I’ve been throwing down my gullet. His food, in his kitchen. Would Dan hurt me? How can I take the chance? I spit out the bite I just took into my napkin.

  “What’s the matter?” Jules asks. “It’s good.”

  I think I’m going to be sick.

  “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  After cleaning the dishes, I’m about to close my eyes on the couch when Jules comes out of the bedroom cradling a big book. She sits on the arm. Dan’s out of focus, reading the sports section at the table, eavesdropping.

  She speaks quietly, looking at the coffee table. “I called your doctor. We think—Dan and I think—that you should go back to the hospital. Before things get worse.”

  I sit up. “How’d you know I wasn’t sleeping? You might have woken me up just now.”

  “And, West? Dan and I, we’re taking a…” She looks at Dan, who is no longer pretending to read. “A vacation.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She drums her fingers on her knees, stalling. “Well, nowhere. What I mean is, we need some time. From everything. We’re under a lot of stress. Dan thinks maybe—”

  “We think,” Dan says.

  “We think that you, your illness, might be causing me too much stress. And right now I don’t feel good and need to try resting. West. For me. Do you understand?”

  “Because of the baby?” I ask. Jules just stares at me.

  What if the baby ends up like me? That’s what they’re thinking.

  “You told him?” Dan asks.

  “No,” Jules says, still staring. “He just knows.” She looks at me the way she does. “Tomorrow—hospital. I’ll go with you. It’ll be better this time, shorter. To get you back on track.”

  This is all Dan’s doing. He wants me out of the picture. I shake my head. “Tomorrow’s no good. Big project at work.”

  “Is there?” Dan says, coming toward the couch.

  “Why do you care?” I ask.

  “West, please.” Jules touches her stomach lightly, looking down like she’s calling it West. “I’m sorri I upset you. But you can’t act like this. You’re lying to me again.”

  “You’re the real liar,” I say, “keeping your big secret.”

  “Do you hear yourself? You sound like a child. You sound like yourself. That’s how he always used to talk to me,” she says to Dan.

  She’s right—but how can I help that my old child-self possesses me like a ghost?

  “How did you know I was pregnant?” Jules asks. “You better not have told Mom yet.”

  “I’m glad he knows,” Dan says. He grabs a blanket off an armchair and drapes it over Jules’s shoulders and says, “Now he and I can celebrate with some wine, and you can watch.” He throws me a grin, to throw me off. His teeth are too big.

  Jules shoos Dan away, but her shoulders relax. “I want to show West something.” She opens the book she’s brought, pointing at a glossy group photo with both of us tucked in the middle. It’s a high school yearbook. “Key club, or whatever, remember? Mom made us join.”

  “You look dumb,” I say and try to smile.

  “You look dumb,” she says.

  “Why do you have this out?”

  “One of my old classmates just died. We weren’t really friends, but—”

  The book on my lap, I flip to my class photos—it’s from my senior year and Jules’s freshman. All the kids look like jerks in their photos, even Miles and Ralph. Nicolette’s picture is the only one that doesn’t make her look jerky, she just looks like her—Nicolette.

  Nicolette.

  “What’s she doing in my yearbook?” There, right in the B’s, on the same page as me, is Nicolette’s face in a half smile, not quite prepared for the release of the shutter.

  “Oh, that was so sad,” Jules says, looking over my shoulder at the picture. Dan’s looking too, and I try to shield her face from him.

  “How did she get in there?” I ask again. Slowly so they understand.

  “I thought she was gone by then, too, actually. They must have used an old photo.”

  “You know her?” I ask. My words feel like they are coming from a memory. Not here and now.

  “How could I forget? West saw the most horrible thing. Did I ever tell you about that, Dan? The girl on the cliff?”

  Dan’s looking hard at Nicolette’s face. I slam the book shut.

  “Huh.” Dan straightens himself up, suddenly uneasy. “Enough reminiscing. You’re supposed to go to bed early,” he says to Jules. “Did you take your medicine?”

  Jules groans. “No. Of course I forgot to pick it up.”

  “Something’s wrong.” I try to tamp down my smile. Something is beautifully wrong. How did she get into my yearbook? My past? Is that where she’s been hiding all this time?

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Jules says. “Just some pain.”

  “I’ll run down to the pharmacy,” Dan says.

  “No, I will. I can do that.” I stand quickly and give them my politest smile. “Least I can do, showing up uninvited.” Nicolette found her way into my past. But why would Jules remember her while I don’t? Some sort of time-traveling ethos? I can’t even begin to think about all the implications while I’m trapped in here.

  “Thanks?” Jules says, a little surprised. “I’m going to take it that this new attitude also means you’re okay with the hospital tomorrow?”

  “If it will make you happy.” Obviously, there’s no time for hospitals.

  “I’ll call the pharmacy and tell them you’re allowed to pick it up.”

  Dan glares at me and Jules smiles. I grab the painting and open the door.

  “You can leave that,” Jules says. “West? Leave it.”

  “It’s a present, you’ll peek,” I say, ducking into the hallway before they can stop me.

  Down in the lobby, there’s a camera pivoting toward me like a duck’s head, filming me as I sli
p out the front doors and cross the street. If I could piece together the footage of my personal surveillance, from all the storefronts and ATMs and museums I’ve ever walked by, I could make a film of my true self.

  I couldn’t think in there, with their threats of hospitals and Dan’s razor smiles, but out here, on the night street, Nicolette is everywhere.

  Nicolette is in my past. Do you see how brilliant it is? But why? All I can think is she’s trying to send me a message. What better way to contact me than traveling back and inserting herself in my timeline, my very own high school? Artfully, through a story I told her, about the girl on the cliff. That must be where she’s been since she disappeared last year: fourteen years in the past, dropping breadcrumbs for me to find throughout time. But she wouldn’t have jumped. Would she? It must be another clue.

  The tube swings at my side as I walk west. Maybe Nicolette is trying to tell me something about the painting—how to get it to her, where to go in order to do so.

  But something is off with Jules and it cannot be a coincidence it’s happening now. Is it about her baby? Could they be after it? I have to find a way to once and for all convince Jules she’s keeping dangerous company. But I can’t protect anyone from inside a psych ward.

  I shield my face as I pass the pharmacy with Jules’s medicine. There’s a homeless man wearing a plastic halo from a bachelorette party.

  The homeless man is right about one thing—Jules is an angel. She’s too good. She can’t see what’s going on in her very own home. The nerve to go through my sister to get to me!

  There’s a red no-walk sign and I can’t go any further, the universe slowing me down.

  The Jews know suffering—they know it in their blood and in their bones. Every generation, Jews have been forced to deny their identity, or sleep on ashes. Jews were considered the mad ones—they chose ashes over un-knowing themselves; that’s the story, over and over again—except for our great-grandmother. My heritage is pretending to be sane with the rest of society. And Jules, the martyr, believes that’s an offense she must repent for. Anyone stuck between two worlds like her is bound to be impressionable. Dan’s been feeding on that guilt.

  P7: DAN ABDUCTED JULES INTO HASIDISM BY PLAYING ON THE VERY COMPASSION AND GUILT THAT LETS HER LOVE ME.

  But I don’t care if it would save a whole people from vanishing. I don’t even care if Jules would choose to sacrifice herself to keep them from disappearing. I can’t lose Jules. And Dan knows that! He thinks I would do anything for her, even give up Nicolette. But he’s wrong—I’ll save them both from the cliff edge, and Dan doesn’t know that.

  C6 (FROM C5, A3, & P7): JULES IS A PAWN; SHE IS BEING HELD AS RANSOM TO PERSUADE ME TO HELP THE HASIDIM USE NICOLETTE TO STOP THEIR DISAPPEARING.

  Dan nearly found out where Nicolette is hiding, looking at the yearbook. If I don’t get Jules out, she’ll get hurt, and the baby, too. People will drop like anchors.

  I won’t let that happen. I loop counter-clockwise back around the block, past the homeless man with the halo, past the pharmacy, back to Jules’s building.

  And there they are. The same two cops, on cue, materialize on the opposite corner of First Avenue, walking straight toward her apartment.

  Kennedy airport is a carnival of pissed-off people. Not a minute has passed in my mind and here I am, at a counter facing a woman with a double chin and mean eyes, booking the next red-eye west with my nearly maxed-out credit line.

  This is the only way. And Jules knows it, too. It was like she was handing me a clue on a silver platter and I almost missed it. The yearbook was obvious, but did you catch that bit about me being my child-self? On a silver platter over a bed of lettuce with some gefilte fish. I’m supposed to start thinking like a time traveler.

  The past: it’s the only place to escape the Hasidim and their agents, A.K.A. “the cops.” They know where I am, always, in the present, and I can’t fight them from here. Jules will be disappointed in me for not getting her medicine. She’ll never know I’m saving her life, and they might take advantage of her with me gone. But if this works, I’ll stop it before it even began.

  And that is where I’ll find Nicolette. In my past, I’ll give her the painting, and she’ll remember how good I am. She’ll know me again.

  But Watson, what of the physics? You’re thinking that only a pro time traveler can move through time and space, that a newbie like me would be lucky to travel a millisecond in the same geophysical position. But maybe, you’re thinking, just maybe, if I find the right nexus point in my past, I can stay in the same place but emerge at Nicolette’s exact time coordinates.

  That’s what I’m thinking, too.

  In order to paint and therefore time travel, Nicolette had to get at that point of original pain. She had to return to the origin—the nexus—of her subject.

  Which is why I’m going to my place of origin—that moment when my true self diverged from my imperfect self. That’s the portal, and it just so happens to be in the dragon’s lair. Straight into the arms of a woman who has herself run from the law. She’ll help me hide the painting, she’ll understand. To get there, I must travel three hours into the past, EST to PST. There, the physics will become clear.

  You, dedicated listeners, will never leave me. If you are in the trunk of my brain, it is by your own volition. Even when I’m an embarrassment, even when I break the law or run away into the past, you are with me every step of the way.

  The airline clerk taps her screen and clucks at me. “Well? There’s a middle seat.”

  I smile and say to the mountain-faced woman, “I’m going home.”

  PART VII: THE THAW OVID, NEW YORK, 1982

  1.

  She moved up there in winter so she never saw the ground. Covered in snow, December to May—the house she grew up in, and yet she couldn’t remember the land it stood on. There was a garden that must have been beautiful once, a low fence around it for the deer and pie tins tied there with twine, clacking in the wind. The woods behind and tracks from animals she never saw. Footprints, every morning a new pair circling the house and never once a glimpse of the thing they belonged to.

  And above it all was a low, constant rumble, like something was always hungry. Snow slow-grinding into itself.

  Her mother’s breasts seemed to have vanished. This was the first difference Claire noticed, a strange-looking man propped behind her mother in the doorway, his hand on her shoulder. She’d had such a nice body; Claire remembered being jealous of it once.

  “Come inside, please,” the man said in a low voice. “You must be freezing.” He had a thin, graying beard that made Claire think of how snow looks dirty when it thaws.

  Claire fingered her luggage on the porch a moment longer, finishing the count of her inhale, tricking herself into breathing—something she’d learned from her meditation teacher in the city. An icicle hung so low she had to crouch around it to get in. In the musty entranceway, she hugged her mother delicately. The old woman stayed stiff, not raising her arms in return.

  “Come in,” her mother repeated in her slight German accent, though Claire was already in. The man nodded approvingly. “You look different.”

  “I’m happy to see you too,” said Claire.

  The nurse’s name was Michael. He could have been handsome if he weren’t so worn. There was no ring on his finger. If her mother was in her right mind—or her original mind, anyhow, it was never quite right—she might have tried to fix them up.

  “Leave those where they are for now,” he said, gesturing to her luggage beside the door. “We have to stay on schedule.” It was evident he was annoyed that she’d arrived late, though it was still early evening. He’d made chicken stew and said he would stay for dinner and talk her through everything.

  The eat-in kitchen was, of course, still down the hall, but Claire walked gingerly, as if the rooms might have shifted in her ten-year absence. She’d been up to Ovid for her father’s funeral the month prior but hadn’t come by the hou
se; she couldn’t brave it then.

  Once they’d begun to eat, Claire excused herself to search through the fridge, where she found a bottle of hot sauce, the cap dried on. Michael watched, waiting for her to sit before saying, “Elsa can’t have spicy food,” as if Claire planned to splash it in all their bowls.

  Claire smiled into her stew. “I don’t see any butter beans. They’re her favorite.”

  She felt her mother’s eyes on her and expected some comment about her recently dug wrinkles or the roots showing in her dyed-blond hair, which Claire couldn’t decide whether to keep a natural gray or not. Elsa was eyeing Claire like she was a child sitting at the adult’s table. She’d done something wrong already, it seemed.

  “Am I wrong? Butter beans aren’t your favorite anymore?” Claire asked.

  “Try to ask one question at a time,” said Michael.

  Elsa cleared her throat. “Is it your birthday today?”

  “No?” Claire said. “Why?”

  “How old are you now?”

  “That’s quite a question to ask in front of a stranger,” Claire said.

  “Always answer her questions directly,” Michael said, “or you’ll confuse her.”

  Claire thought he must be enjoying this. “Fifty-seven.”

  “I’ll have to get you a blanket,” Elsa said, as if this followed logically. Her voice was scratchy with irritation, like an old recording. It still had that bite Claire remembered.

  “A blanket? I’m not cold. Are you cold? Is she cold?”

  “One question at a time,” Michael repeated. The nurse smiled at Elsa condescendingly and said to Claire, “She means napkin. Elsa, where are the napkins?”

  Elsa glared at him, then turned to Claire.

  “How long are you visiting?”

  Claire ate a large spoonful of the bland stew. She didn’t know how long she’d be there, if this was temporary or permanent. Or at least as permanent as Elsa herself.

  The nurse said, “This will be a very big change for her, you being here. She’s going to be on edge. I hope she eats.” He paused and looked at Elsa. “Eat your food.” He lifted his spoon dramatically to his lips. “Chew and swallow.”