“Yeah,” he said. “Do you think he and Bethany are having sex right now?”
“Probably,” Lexy said. “Probably everyone’s having sex with somebody except us.”
“Yup.” He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. “Everyone except the bald girl and the homo.”
“What would you do if Michael were here right now?” Lexy asked.
“Probably nothing. I’d probably clam up and be afraid to talk to him, as usual.”
“How drunk are you?” she asked.
“Pretty drunk.”
“Let’s pretend I’m Michael.”
He kept his eyes closed. “I don’t think it’s possible to get that drunk.”
She swallowed the rest of her drink. “Sure it is,” she said. “Come on. I’ll turn out the light.”
She lay down next to him on the bed and nuzzled his neck.
“Lexy,” he said.
“Quiet,” she said. She bit his earlobe lightly. “Think about Michael.”
As she touched him, she whispered to him all the things that Michael might do. “He’s wanted to do this to you all year,” she murmured. “He’s finally here with you. Just think about Michael doing this to you. Shhh,” she said as she felt Brian’s body respond to her touch. “Just pretend I’m Michael.”
Afterward, Brian reached out in the dark and squeezed her shoulder.
“Thanks, Lexy,” he said. “That was cool.”
She waited a few minutes until she was sure he was asleep. Then she went into the bathroom and closed the door and put her head in her hands and cried. She paced back and forth in the tiny bathroom, her sobs growing louder and more convulsive until finally she sat down on the edge of the tub and buried her face in a towel so Brian wouldn’t hear her. And it was as she was perched there on the narrow ledge of porcelain with her face pressed to the rough fabric that the thought came to her that she could kill herself, and she was filled with a sudden calm. I could just do it, she thought, and the idea had a kind of beautiful simplicity to it.
She stood up and began pacing the room again, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She was filled with a clarity of purpose that exhilarated her. I’m just going to do it, she thought, and then it will all be done. But how? She looked around the bathroom for inspiration. Brian had left a small bag of toiletries by the sink, and she considered breaking apart his safety razor, but the blade looked too small and dull to do the job. There was little else in the room that seemed promising—this was a hotel room, after all, and there were no bottles of prescription pills in the medicine chest, no kitchen nearby with a butcher block full of knives to choose from, none of the deadly everyday objects people fill their homes with.
Then she saw the water glasses sitting on the counter, each one topped with a white paper cap attesting to its cleanliness. She picked up one of the glasses and threw it onto the hard tile floor. It shattered with a loud crash, and she was afraid for a moment that Brian would wake up, but when a minute passed without any sound from the other room, she bent down and picked up a large pointed shard. She stood over the sink and looked into the mirror for a moment, seeing herself in the strange, harsh bathroom light, a bald girl with swollen eyes and mascara smeared on her cheeks. And she didn’t hesitate. She pushed the jagged point into her wrist.
She didn’t get very far; as soon as the first drops of blood hit the basin of the sink, she grew terrified and pulled the piece of glass away. She ran her wrist under water and pressed a washcloth to the wound until the bleeding stopped. Then she cleaned up the broken glass from the floor as well as she could and opened the door to the bedroom. Brian was snoring lightly on top of the bedclothes, his pants still unzipped. Lexy climbed into bed next to him, cradling her hurt arm beneath her, and cried to think what she had done.
No one ever knew. The cut on her wrist turned out to be fairly inconspicuous in the light of day; she was surprised to see how little damage there was. Two days after the prom, she went out by herself into the city and found a tattoo parlor. She presented her scalp to the man who owned the place—he was a big man, and his name was Goldie—and she asked him to cover her head with snakes. She wore long sleeves until the wound on her wrist had healed completely, and her parents thought that a snaky-haired daughter was the worst they had to fear. Within a few months, Lexy went off to college, and by and by, the heaviness that had inhabited her body for so long began to lift. But that night in the bathroom became part of her. Every breath she drew was colored by what she had learned that night.
Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people who love you and the sun is shining and there’s a movie coming out this weekend that you’ve been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself: Is this it? You start thinking that you’ve known this was coming all along, but you don’t know if today’s going to be the day. And if you think about it too much, it’s probably not. But you dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below—what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you’re going to make them see? And the moment’s over. You think about how sad it would’ve been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would’ve taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.
This is what we know, those of us who can speak to tell a story: Lexy didn’t jump. The wounds she suffered in her fall, the break of her bones and the wreck of her organs, the haphazard spill of her blood in the dirt, have told us this much. But perhaps, and this is where my breath catches in my throat, perhaps she let herself fall. The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.
FOURTEEN
I think it was fairly early in our courtship that Lexy told me the story of how Lorelei came to be her dog. Lorelei was maybe five months old when she first entered Lexy’s life. She showed up on Lexy’s doorstep one day during a sudden summer storm, a big bleeding puppy under a dark and shrunken sky. Lexy was walking around the house, closing windows, when she heard a low whine from outside, followed by a short, insistent bark. She opened the door to find a puppy with big ears and a ridge down her back and a gash in her throat that matted her fur with blood. “Hi,” Lexy said. “Who are you?” She bent down to check for a collar and tags, but there were none. “Wait here,” she said, and she ran to get a towel. She brought the dog inside and washed the cut with a warm soapy cloth. Lorelei flinched as Lexy touched the cloth to the wound, but she didn’t make a sound and she didn’t snap at Lexy. The gash wasn’t big, but it looked deep. Lexy took the phone book down from the top of the refrigerator, and she looked up veterinarians. When she brought her back home from the vet, Lorelei had four stitches in her throat. The doctor wasn’t sure what had caused the injury. There were no bite marks, so he didn’t think it had resulted from a fight with another dog. He thought that perhaps Lorelei had gotten tangled in some low brambles or had somehow torn her flesh on a piece of rough metal, although the edges of the cut were fairly smooth. He allowed that the wound could have been inflicted by a human being, although he couldn’t imagine what the purpose might have been.