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Most drug addicts …
I let the magazine slide to the floor. The pain I have been holding at bay for months, years, roars to life, sucks me into the bleakest, loneliest place I’ve ever been. I will never be able to crawl out of it.
I stumble out of the living room and leave my condo, grabbing my car keys as I go. I don’t know where I’m going. Just out. Away.
I can’t live like this anymore. I have tried to go on alone; God knows I’ve tried. But the world is so big and I feel so incredibly small, not myself at all. I am like a charcoal drawing of the woman I once was, just black lines and white space, a silhouette. My heart can’t hold this loss. I can’t … look away anymore. Now all I see is the emptiness around me, beside me. Inside of me.
A strong wind would blow me away, that’s how weak I am, and it’s okay. I don’t want to be strong anymore. I want to be … gone.
In the elevator I push the down button. As I careen through the underground parking lot, I fish the Xanax out of my evening bag and swallow two, gagging at the bitter taste.
I get into my car, rev the engine, and drive away. I turn onto First Street without even looking to my left. Tears and rain blur my view, turn my familiar city into a landscape I’ve never seen before, a jagged, misshapen blur of silvery skyscrapers and distorted neon signs and lamplight burned into impossible, watery shapes. My despair is spilling over, obliterating everything else. I swerve to the right to miss something—a pedestrian, a bicyclist, a figment of my imagination—and there it is: a hulking concrete stanchion that supports the aging, dangerous viaduct, looming in front of me.
I see that huge black post and I think: End it.
End it.
The simplicity of it takes my breath away. Has the thought been there all along? Have I been circling it in the obscurity of my subconscious, watching it? I don’t know. All I know is it’s there now, as seductive as a kiss in the dark.
I don’t have to be in pain anymore. All it takes is a turn of the wheel.
Twenty-five
“Oh, my God. ” I turn to Kate. “I tried to turn at the last second to avoid hitting the stanchion. ”
I know.
“I had one split second where I thought, Who would care? and I kept my foot on the gas, but then I turned. Only … it was too late. ”
Look.
The moment she says the word, I see that we are in the hospital room again. It is bright and white and there are people around my bed.
I’m hovering above it all, looking down on them.
I see Johnny with his arms crossed tightly, moving back and forth. His mouth is drawn into a frown, and Margie is crying quietly, a handkerchief held to her mouth, and my mother looks devastated. The twins are there, standing close together. What I see are the tears in Lucas’s eyes and the defiant, angry jutting out of Wills’s small chin. They look insubstantial somehow, boys who have been partially erased.
They have spent too much time in hospitals already, these boys. It breaks my heart that I have brought them back here again.
My boys, Kate says, and the softness in her voice takes me aside. Will they remember me? This she says so quietly I think I may have imagined it. Or maybe I am reading her mind like best friends do.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
My boys, growing up without me? No. She shakes her head; silvery blond hair shivers at the movement. What is there to say?
In the silence that falls between us, I hear strains of a song, coming from the iPod on the bedside table; the volume is so low I can barely hear it. Hello darkness my old friend …
And then I hear voices.
“… it’s time … not hopeful…”
“… temperature normal … remove ventilator. ”
“… we’ve removed the shunt, but…”
“… drained…”
“… on her own, we’ll see…”
