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“How did Jamie die?” I stirred the sugar cube into my tea as the sentence left my lips. The voice which sounded like a foreign imitation of mine crawled up through the back of my throat, tickled the soft pallet in my mouth, and escaped into the air.
“Like I told you yesterday. Suicide.” Mom tripped over the word suicide.
She faced away from me, standing on the other side of the island in my kitchen. Her nose pointed into the cabinet as she inspected for dirt, manicured nails resting against the wood. Prada glasses slid down to the bridge of her nose, as hers were apt to do, though she didn’t seem to notice.
“Suicide is a broad classification, Ma.” I cupped a hand around the paper cup of steaming liquid and cautiously stepped toward four boxes stacked in the center of the kitchen which were flipped upside down and currently served as my dining room set. Also known as my seating arrangement post-divorce. Four boxes stacked together to support my weight. Plopping down on my glorious chair, I pressed the makeshift mug to my lips.
Outside, rain beat against the glass sliding door.
Rain.When four days ago, we’d had a snowstorm.
Gotta love Portland.
Mom eyed me from where she stood, her perfectly curled hair framing her narrow face. “For Christ’s sake, Jemma. When are you going to go out and get a proper table and set of chairs? And pots, pans. Food, for that matter.”
“Oh, I don’t know. What’s wrong with the setup now? Suits me just fine.” I swung one leg across the other, marveling at a hole in the knee of my sweatpants and continued sipping my tea.Proud homeowner post-divorce. Nowthatneeded to be a hashtag. Maybe after this, I’d get online and start tweeting it myself.
“Did he off himself like Dad?” I asked hesitantly, wanting to get an answer out of Mom. I figured mentioning Dad was the easiest way to talk suicide.
“No.” Mom pulled out the can of tomato soup she’d been searching for and shut the cabinet door. “Jamie hanged himself.”
Mom proceeded to the back wall lined with lilac wallpaper. She then pressed the soup up to the can opener on the wall—another fixture Dave hadn’t bothered to take—and a buzzing noise filled the room.
And my mind.
Hanging. I imagined Jamie with his soft blond hair—the seventeen-year-old boy who tugged on my arm that day in the art museum—and I saw him walking into a hardware store. Purchasing a rope. And driving back to his home. Wherever he lived. Wherever hehadlived. Deciding that, this was it, he’d had enough. I envisioned the method with no troubles of understanding the feeling.
No, no, no. The hardest part of imagining Jamie doing this… was my inability to picture Jamie in my mind. I hadn’t seen him since I left Stony Point Academy. After my own suicide stint at Stony Point Park.
I sighed, a heaviness settling around my heart at both the memory of Stony Point Park and the vision of Jamie’s hanging.
“His oldest brother, Doug, found him,” Mom said as she placed the contents of the can into another paper cup. I suddenly realized I’d just been sitting there in front of her, staring off into space, numb from the news.
She sat the soup inside the microwave, turned it on, and faced me with her arms crossed. “Just be happy you stopped dating that boy when you did.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I shrugged as I took another sip of tea. Of course, Mom would say that, though. After all, for some peculiar reason, she couldn’t quite understand why her daughter would have tried tooffherself back in the day. In her mind, suicide should have been the last thing to ever cross mine after what happened to Dad. So, she’d chosen the easiest target to blame.
Jamie. She’d chosen Jamie. It couldn’t have simply been that I wanted to die. Not the way my mother’s brain functioned. There had to be another reason. A boy. Yes. Of course. How convenient. A boy. It wasalwaysa boy.
Except in my case. With or without Jamie, I would’ve tried to kill myself that night.
“His mother called me with the news,” Mom continued, her voice soft.
“His mother called?” I questioned drily.
Not that I was surprised about his mother calling mine. It was just that their connection served as a reminder that—as with everything else in my life—Mom craved control. As soon as she got wind of my involvement with Jamie all those years ago, she’d somehow roped herself into the lives of his parents, too. Fifteen years later, and they still talked periodically. Not only because of this news but because Mom continually felt the need to keep in touch with his family.
Every time I got wind of this communication, an icky irritation clung to the walls of my intestines like some kind of parasite had taken over my body and marked it for dead. I wished it had. But, like I said, death always seemed to miss me.
“His mother said he’d been suffering from depression for a long time. What a damn shame. She should’ve put him on meds or something.” Mom glanced around the room, inspecting. She tilted her chin down and brushed a hand across her ruffled blouse and black dress pants like an insufferable amount of dust hit her. “Jemma. This place is filthy.”
She reached for a towel, wiped off the counter, and grabbed the empty pill bottle in the back corner.
“Speaking of meds. That reminds me.” She dumped two pills into the palm of her hand and held them out to me. “Don’t you go missing any of yours.”
I peered down at the pink, oval pills. Without thinking about it too hard, I swiped a hand across her palm and threw the meds down my throat. Ten years of taking Paxil, and I didn’t notice the effects of the pills on my brain anymore, anyway.
“The funeral’s on Monday,” she said right as the microwave beeped. Within moments, Mom traded me my cup of tea for the cup of tomato soup. I stared down at the creamy, red globs as my stomach churned with pangs of nausea.
