“What?”
“Live longer.”
He looked as if he might cry.
“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling bad for him. Her humor was normally softer; incipient death had given her an edge. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not anybody’s fault,” he said, shaking his head and pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.
Nobody’s fault? She wasn’t so sure about that.
What about the pollution she breathed, the chemicals she drank? And what about stress? Couldn’t that kill you? Well, yes, it looked as if it could, though she probably couldn’t prove that to her stressful employer, her stressful parents, her stressful sister, her stressful boyfriend, the stressful parents at DayGlow DayCare with their screaming stressed-out children, the stressful woman with the stressful dog in the next apartment, the stressful man at the food cart with her favorite hot dogs, not to mention all the pedestrians who bumped into her on streets and taxis that honked at her in intersections.
And doctors who told her she was going to die.
He said, “If drugs aren’t going to help you, or surgery, or radiation… what do you want to do with the time you have left, Priscilla?”
“I’m only twenty-six,” she whispered, all her laughter used up now.
“I know.” His eyes filled again, but he forced an encouraging smile. “So your list ought to be a lot more fun than the one my hundred-year-old patient just drew up-”
“A hundred years old?” she said wistfully. “I wish.”
“It’s not so great. Her big moment was drinking cranberry juice in spite of being allergic to it. Go for it, Priss. Go for more than cranberry juice. Don’t hold back. Who knows? Maybe happiness will cure you.”
He didn’t believe that.
She didn’t, either.
But as a way to kill time for the next couple weeks, before time killed her, it did beat shooting herself. She said as much to Sam, which made him grimace.
“May I use your pen?”
He handed one to her and then watched her write three words at the top of the pad. She printed them with force, going over each letter multiple times, so that even from across his desk he could see the thick black letters.
She held them up for him to read:
TELL THE TRUTH
His eyebrows shot up. “I was expecting something more along the lines of, ‘Ride a roller coaster’ or ‘Fly to Paris.’ ” He gestured toward the pad. “That could cause some damage.”
“It could do some good,” she countered.
As she left his office, he asked her to check in every day.
“For pain control? Or to know when I ought to go into hospice?”
“Yes,” he said, and then he hugged her.
She clung to his white jacket for a moment. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” she whispered, and then she bravely walked away.
She called him on each of the next three days.
On the fourth morning, Dr. Samuel Waterhouse’s tearful receptionist brought in a newspaper that explained why they wouldn’t get a call that day.
The night before, Priscilla Windsor had been stabbed to death as she walked-running was no longer possible-in the late cool twilight along Riverside Drive. The redbud trees would blossom into mauve by the next morning, but she wouldn’t see them. She had hoped to live long enough to see spring, but she had also been afraid of seeing it, fearing that it would fill her with unbearable longing for more life. On the night she died, the buds were still wrapped tight as tiny boxers’ fists, as if they didn’t want to pound her with the bittersweet pain of seeing them open their petals.
Witnesses saw her stumble near the dog park, saw a person in sweats and a hoodie stoop to lift her up, saw them huddle for a moment, saw him set her upright, saw him prop her against a tree, saw him pat her shoulder, saw him continue on his own run. They thought, Aw, nice guy. They smiled toward his unidentifiable back as he ran faster than before. When he turned a corner, they remembered to look back at the woman he’d so kindly helped.
They saw her sway, and then slide down the tree, and not get up again.
“Oh, my God,” a woman said, pulling her dog closer on its chain.
Other people hurried to check on the fallen woman; there was shock when they saw blood, horror at the knife, then confusion as they figured out who among them should call 911. The Upper West Side of New York City was a neighborhood, and even if they didn’t personally know this young woman, they knew they wanted to help her.
“Are you sure it was a man?” one of them asked as they compared notes on what they’d witnessed. “I really thought it was a woman.”
“But we’re all agreed he was white, right? Or she was?”
But they weren’t agreed on that, either. Nor on tall or medium height, or stocky or thin build, or even whether the perpetrator had come up to the woman after she stumbled or had in fact caused the stumble. The hoodie was black, gray, red, or navy. There were fifteen eyewitnesses, and the cops joked later that you’d have thought they were all looking in different directions at fifteen different women being killed by fifteen different perps. One eyewitness swore there might have been two people who stopped to “help.”
It had the earmarks of a random killing by a random crazy person, people said. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the very randomness of it-in a public place, in front of lots of people, on a lovely evening-that made it so frightening. The truth was, they would have felt safer if the killer had specifically, and with malice, set out to kill this particular woman, instead of just stumbling onto the easiest person to stab.
Sam Waterford rarely attended the funerals of his patients, and he felt nervous about going to this one. At one such ceremony, years ago, he’d been screamed at by a family, and he didn’t want that to happen again. The family filed a malpractice suit the next day. They lost because he hadn’t done anything wrong. But ever since, he hadn’t wanted to remind other grieving families of his failures, or what they perceived as such.
The church on West End Avenue was packed, reflecting the social status of Priscilla’s parents, who were the head of a famous brokerage firm (her father) and the head of an even more famous charitable foundation (her mother). He paused at the back of the sanctuary for a moment and then walked down the center aisle so that he could slide between two couples in a pew near the front. When he glanced to his right, he didn’t recognize the stylish couple who had made room for him. But when he faced left, he found a very tanned older woman already grinning at him.
“Dr. Waterford,” she said, “do you recognize me with my clothes on?”
“Mrs. Darnell,” he said, smiling as if he hadn’t heard that joke a million times before. Her first name was Bunny, but he didn’t use it to address her. “How are you?”
“I suppose you’ll find out at my next appointment.”
He smiled again. She was as rich as chocolate torte and as thin as someone who never ate it, which was how she fit into her black Chanel ensemble, a perfect funeral suit.
“Poor thing,” she murmured, meaning, he supposed, the deceased and not him.
Then the organ music swelled, and the service began.
He spent it staring at the family and feeling anxious.
He could see them clearly in profile from where he sat. It was easy to pick out the elegant mother, the portly middle-aged father, the older sister who looked like a harder version of Priscilla.
They are remarkable, he thought.
In a packed sanctuary filled with the sounds of soft weeping, the air thick with the awareness of tragedy, they sat rigid and dry-eyed. Mr. Windsor did not put his arm around Mrs. Windsor. The mother never looked at her daughter. None of them wiped away a tear. It was hard to imagine anyone disliking Priss, but it appeared that either her own family was holding in torrents of emotion, or else they loathed the daughter and sister they had lost. He had seen this posture before-in hospitals, on the deaths of patients whose families did not love them.