She sat up on her bed with the pillows piled up behind her and read the book with a yellow transparent marking pen, just as if she were back in college and studying for her finals. She was methodical. It was very important to her to do this right, to learn what was needed to help Grandma and prove herself to her mother and, most importantly, to herself. It mattered a lot that she not fuck up. Her new image of herself as the competent therapist went with the careful note taking, the figuring of the exact amounts of whatever drugs she could buy that were necessary for a sure lethal dose.
After the restaurant closed Friday night, she went out to the late-hours bar with the gang and took a seat next to Robby, watching for a good opportunity to talk when no one else was listening. Robby mostly dealt cocaine, crack, heroin, and marijuana, but he boasted he could provide anything. Finally her chance came. “Robby, I need some stuff.”
“I’m listening.”
She did not dare ask him to get it all at once. It would be too weird. She would ask for part of it and then in a week or so, request more. “I’d love to have some Nembutals or Amytals or…” She went down her list. “And maybe some Darvon or Demerol or codeine?”
“Either/or, or both.”
“Like I’d want both, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“It’s going to cost you.” What he never would ask was why she wanted it. Presumably to get high, to get low, to get out of it.
“If you want to fly, you got to pay. When can you have it?”
“Next Friday.”
“Give me a ballpark figure and I’ll have the bills.”
When Elena reported back to her mother, she was pleased to tell her not only that she had figured out what to use—drugs and dosage—but that she had lined up the first delivery for the next night. What she needed was cash in fifties. Robby liked fifties. “Neither too big nor too small,” he had said in his deep liquid voice. “Just right.”
Friday night she gave Robby the money and she got the pills in two vitamin bottles. “The vitamin C is the Nembutal. The B complex is the codeine.”
Instead of putting them in her purse, she put them in the pocket of her black silk pants. The bulge would not show under her mandarin-collared tunic of deep red and gold. It felt safer to keep them with her than to leave them in her purse in Natalie’s office. Every time she felt them bump against her, she felt proud of herself. Grandma’s deliverance. How happy she would be. It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.
She waited till she was at Sean’s, to count them in the bathroom. She needed thirty Nembutal. Robby had sold her ten. He’d been more generous with the codeine.
Her mother was waiting for her Saturday morning. “Beverly’s asleep. Did you get it?”
Elena produced first one bottle with a flourish and then the other. She felt like a magician. “It’s part of what she needs.”
Her mother looked at the bottles but did not touch them. “That’s it?”
“What did you expect, a guillotine?”
Suzanne ran her fingers through her short thick hair. “I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“It’s not like you to be so indecisive.”
“I never murdered my mother before.”
“Come on, don’t be melodramatic. Don’t you believe she has a right to decide when to give up her life? When to die with dignity, while she still can?”
“I believe it—in the abstract.”
“Well, I’m exhausted. We’ll talk it over with Grandma tomorrow in the morning when she’s got it together. Now I’m going to bed.” Elena was a little miffed that her mother did not appreciate what she had done, but Grandma would.
“Can you get the rest?” Suzanne asked, wringing her hands. “This much won’t do it, if I understand you correctly.”
“Next week I’ll get more. And the week after I’ll get the last installment. I can’t ask for it all at once. The guy I’m dealing with would be too suspicious.”
When it came to the third time she asked, he was leery. “You’ve been doing a lot of those. Got a habit? Or are you dealing them?”
“I’m doing them with two friends who are in town for a while. I’m not addicted. We’ve just been into it lately. I don’t do it when I have to work. Have I seemed off to you?”
“Guess not.” But she noticed him watching her, and she was extra careful with everyone that night and the rest of the week. The price went up. He was testing her. Well, after this batch, she would tell him her friends had left and she was no longer interested. She’d buy some weed just to fool him.
On Saturday he finally sold her the last of what they needed. She did not spend that night at Sean’s. She just told him she was feeling a little queasy, something she’d eaten. Sean hadn’t seen the transactions in the cloakroom. Robby never talked about his customers. She drove home cautiously, not even running a yellow. When she had actually shut the front door behind her and entered the house with the pills still in her pants pocket, she felt an immense relief. It was all there, everything Grandma needed. She had done it.
47
Beverly
Beverly wanted to keep the two bottles on top of her chest of drawers, where she could gaze on them, eyes no matter how blurry fixed on her deliverance. Suzanne objected. “The aides can see them there. It’s important that they not be aware you have the pills. Elena could get into trouble.”
Beverly had a project. She was an actress playing her last role. She was persuading the caretakers that she was weaker than she was. She faked apparent sleep even oftener than she lapsed into that druggy stupefaction that overwhelmed her frequently. She saw no reason to perform exercises that were unpleasant and pretended she could no longer do them. Two of the aides told Suzanne Beverly was getting worse and should see her doctor. Suzanne made an appointment for the last week in February. They would do tests to determine if she had undergone another small stroke or if she were suffering from some other complication. Beverly was determined not to endure more tests. That was the deadline, three weeks away.
She felt weirdly expectant and cheerful. Knowing that it would all end soon made everything more bearable, like the pain in her leg that had no feeling. It was impossible the leg should hurt, but it did. The doctor called it phantom pain. Well, he should feel it, then he’d know what a phantom it wasn’t. The pain in her head that came and went and came back again. The pain in her back from lying in bed too much, from sitting up in bed, from lying in awkward positions because half her body was dead wood. The pain in her bowels from the severe constipation she supposed came from lack of exercise. The pain in her kidneys from the medications they had her on. The pain when she did attempt mild exercise. The fearful effort of doing anything whatsoever, from putting on a Velcro-fastened sweater to going to the bathroom. The shock when she saw herself, that scrawny twisted-face hag in the mirror. The heroic effort it took to speak a coherent fragment. The total boredom of getting through each empty day and long night. The humiliation when she could not get to the toilet in time, as happened increasingly. The smell of her own body, the smell of the bed she was condemned to. All about to finish.
She felt young inside, knowing that her exit was under her own control. This was the first power she had enjoyed after months of being helpless and at the complete mercy of others. She would not wait too long. She did not want more tests, more invasion, more time in the hospital. She hated the doctors who treated her like an idiot. She would escape them all. She saw herself as the woman she had been, slender yes but shapely, with her red hair and green eyes, with her laugh and her wit and her husky voice, with her ability not only to speak like a human being but to move rooms and crowds. She saw that woman rising up from this ruined body and escaping. It did not matter that she did not believe in an afterlife. She believed that at the moment of death she would be restored to her full ability. She would die as herself.
She would do it all correctly. She would not waver. She wanted silence, she wanted peace, she wanted out. Each time Elena brought an
installment of the pills, she kissed her granddaughter’s hands. Every day when she wakened in the morning, instead of despair and a return of pain, she opened her eyes to hope. It would not hurt, what she read promised her. She would pass away quietly. There would be no more awakenings to a burnt-down life. She would slide into a sleep of real peace and never waken again.
Every day she asked herself if it should be today. It had to be the weekend, when the aides were gone. She could not take the chance of one of them finding her in a coma, her secret fear. She had seen a woman who had tried to kill herself but had not taken enough pills. She was brain damaged, kept alive on machines—as punishment, Beverly supposed. She would do it right. She had been bold and efficient all her life, and she would seize the opportunity the pills gave her and make an exit under her own control.
Elena came in to sit with her. It was morning. “What day?”
“Monday, Grandma.”
She felt a stab of panic. Somehow the weekend had slipped past. With her new confidence in the pills, she was letting the days slide by under her. Nothing seemed as terrible now that she knew she could call a halt. But next week was the doctor’s appointment. She would have to go into the hospital for tests. She had pretended deterioration too convincingly, and now she must act.
She made a simple chart on her pad of paper. 11111. She would cross out each, starting with the first one for Monday, so she did not forget again what day it was. She must do it Friday night or Saturday night. “El….”
“Yes, Grandma. Do you need something?”
“Fri…Sat…Time.”
She thought Elena could not possibly understand what she meant. To make it clearer, she jerked her head toward the shelf where the pills were hidden inside a nightgown. “This coming Friday or Saturday night?” Elena asked. “Or just some Friday or Saturday night?”
“Coming.”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll have to go to work anyhow, Grandma. It would look too suspicious if I didn’t.”
“Suzanne…be here.”
“We’ll have to make sure with Mother that she will be.”
She would rather have Elena on hand. Maybe she could do it before Elena left for work or wait till she came home. So many practical arrangements to be made. “Give…book.”
Elena of course knew exactly which book she was talking about. “Oh, you want the Bible.”
Beverly did not think that was funny. “Not religious.”
Elena grinned, handing her Let Me Die Before I Wake. Beverly loved to read about those peaceful deaths. They kept the book hidden with the pills. Now she waved Elena away so she could read her favorite account again. Everything had to be done right. She had made Suzanne and Elena both read several chapters. This was her final piece of work as an organizer, organizing her own death—with dignity. Under her own power.
“Grandma, I’ll miss you so much. And so will Mother. I love you, Grandma.”
“Miss…both.” Of course she wouldn’t. Silence and peace. The great comforting nothing. She would allow them to be a little sentimental, as long as they didn’t try to stop her and as long as they didn’t insist too much that she go along with the mushiness. She had always been hard-headed and wasn’t about to change at the end. She had heard of deathbed conversions, but she had contempt for them. The values someone lived by should be sufficient to sustain them in dying. She had the same contempt for rational people who suddenly called for a priest or a rabbi as she did for those old fellow travelers or party members who went leaping to the other side and became as fanatical right-wingers as they had been fanatical on the left. Nobody seemed to undergo a conversion to tolerance and the understanding they didn’t have every last penny of truth in their particular piggy bank. Religion had never interested her, and it didn’t now. Politics and the economy as they impacted on ordinary people, justice and equality, those had been her passions, but she was past being able to have an effect. Time to let go, of everything.
“Grandma…are you asleep?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
“What believe? You.”
Elena was puzzled for a minute. “Do you mean you believe in me? Or are you asking what I believe in?”
“Both.” She had actually meant the second possibility, but she did have faith in Elena.
Elena scrunched up her face. “You ask hard questions, don’t you? Not much. I guess there’s some power behind everything, but I can’t imagine getting into a personal relationship with whatever it is. Sort of like thinking whether electricity likes you or not.”
Beverly nodded, pleased.
“I guess I believe in trying to be good—a recent thing for me.” Elena laughed self-consciously. “I mean, I haven’t got much of a track record, do I?”
“Good to me.”
“Well, maybe you’ve had an influence on me. I mean, I think it’s cool how you were trying to help people all your life.” Elena rose and paced. Beverly thought she looked as beautiful and swift as a panther. “You were cool and you had a good time anyhow. I want to do something right. I guess I really have to, to like myself. I’ve done so much damage. I’ve broken a lot of people’s dishes.”
Beverly motioned Elena near and squeezed her hand. She stared into her face. That face was one of the few things she would miss, her beautiful bold granddaughter. “Don’t…lose…bold…. Dare.” Glossy black hair worn unstylishly long. Long large eyes almost as dark as her hair. Full sensuous mouth and cheekbones like her own. A face that could be a tragic mask or a seductress, except it was too animated, too alive from within.
“Grandma, I don’t think that’s my problem. It’s not thinking things through. Not being clear what I’m doing. Not guessing consequences but just driving over the cliff to see what happens.”
She wanted so much to tell Elena how precious she was, and how she must value herself. How even if she made messes and even the occasional catastrophe, she was vital and glorious. She must not be tamed. She must not give up and become mediocre and gray. Beverly had never in her life loved anyone more than she loved Elena. “Love you…as…you are.”
“I know, Grandma,” Elena said, her voice breaking, “but I don’t.”
In that moment, Beverly decided: it would be Saturday night. It would be more convenient for Elena if she did it then. A last little gift of timing for her beloved, not to cause her any more trouble than she had to. Then, then, she would finish. She would have her own death and be done.
48
Suzanne
“Getting divorced is such a lot of work. I don’t wonder I never went into that kind of law.” Marta lay on her couch, her belly rising majestically above her.
“Everybody’s wrong and nobody’s right. But can’t this stop while you have your baby? Can’t you call a time-out?”
“Three weeks. She says it’ll have to be a C-section.”
“They do a lot more of those now. Did you get a second opinion?”
Marta sighed heavily. “Could you give me a back rub if I lie on my side? If I can still lie on my side.”
“Sure. Where’s the oil you like?”
“In the bedroom, on the dresser.”
The green gym bag was no longer there. The room looked different with Jim’s things gone. Marta had Adam move the bed against one wall, to make more room for the baby’s crib and bassinet until she could make over Jim’s office into the baby’s room. Marta wanted to make the house over completely, but the divorce was impoverishing her, as Beverly’s illness was doing to Suzanne. Neither of them had money to waste on new curtains or rugs. Suzanne found the almond massage oil and brought it back to the couch.
“Now that it’s coming close to time, do you miss Jim?”
Marta shook her head. “Honestly, no. I realize how much time I spent stepping carefully around his ego. I want this baby. It may be self-indulgence, it may be middle-age folly, it may be the fastest way to total exhaustion kn
own to woman, but I want her.”
Jake’s lawyer called at eight that evening. “The jury’s back.”
“What were their findings?”
“Guilty on all counts.”
“No!” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
“I told you, with the judge’s instructons, there was no other possible outcome.” He sounded irritated.
“Can Jake call me?”
“I think he’s disappointed in you. He hoped you would come out.”
“My mother’s in terrible condition. I can’t leave her now. She’s been deteriorating rapidly since her second stroke. My daughter and I are doing most of the caretaking, and I can’t get away. I just can’t! Try to make him understand. I don’t know how much longer she can hang on.” In one sense, she was telling the truth. In another, she was lying. She was gradually sinking in a mud hole of guilt, sinking like the creatures whose remains she had seen in the museum by the La Brea tar pits in LA. She had no idea why she should think of that—a place she had visited with Sam when Rachel was just four and Elena, nine. She felt guilty she was not in California for Jake; she felt guilty about her mother in all aspects, in all scenarios, at all times.
“I’ll tell him, but you know, he’s facing prison. They got him on all the misdemeanor charges, then on conspiracy to disrupt commerce. That’s the big one. The lumber companies are the big employers up here and the big contributors and they get most of what they want—and they wanted Jake’s hide.”
“I understand. I’ll be available for the appeal, I promise. That’s what I do best.”
“He’s still going to be serving time, even if you start the appeal tomorrow—which I understand you can’t do.”
“Just get me the transcripts as soon as they’re available….”
Suzanne had all the instructions in front of her. The two types of pills were to be ground up together and put into a small amount of liquid. Beverly requested fresh orange juice. Elena did the grinding before she left for work, but it would be up to Suzanne to prepare the “cocktail” just before Beverly consumed it. “Saturday! Saturday!” Beverly had been saying all week: beaming as if she were looking forward to a date or a party. Suzanne kept going into her own room and weeping. Her stomach was lead. How could she really go through with it? It seemed to Suzanne that her mother and she had finally been communicating at least semi-well for the first time in decades. Why couldn’t they continue? She had always wanted her mother’s respect, and lately, she seemed to be getting at least a little of it. She felt the finality of death as a sentence on her as well as Beverly.