13 Views of the Suicide Woods Read online

  “Why do you want that so bad?” Allison asked.

  Leslie hobbled over and held up the prize. “It’s a magician’s ring. It has a handcuff lock pick.” Poking a finger inside the steel circle she pushed out the thin, inch long wand of metal curled inside. She began trying to jimmy Allison’s padlock. She had no idea what she was doing, however. It wasn’t working. She’d imagined the bolt popping open and them walking out, holding each other around the shoulders and the waist, emboldened by their escape to stand up to the judgmental eyes of the world outside. They’d walk off, arm in arm, unafraid of what they left behind.

  Except, the lock held.

  She dropped the ring.

  Allison sobbed and said, “No. Keep trying.”

  “I can go get help.”

  “You can’t leave me. I’ll scream.

  “He’ll come and kill us both if you do.”

  “Don’t leave me here. I’ll do it.”

  “You’d rather we both die than I get help?”

  “You won’t come back. If you go without me,” Allison looked her in the eye and said, “I’ll scream.”

  Leslie sat back, astonished at Allison’s declaration. She couldn’t think of anything to say in response. It was so amazingly short-sighted and selfish. I can bring help. I can bring the police and an ambulance and maybe they can save Reginald and you both. What the fuck is wrong with you?

  “How did you get to be like this?” she asked instead.

  “What do you mean?”

  She stood and backed away from the princess, daring her to raise her voice. Leslie grabbed her boot, wincing as she slipped it carefully over her torn foot. “I’ll send help.”

  “Don’t go. Please, don’t leave me here.” Tears streamed down the princess’s face. Leslie tried to imagine herself tomorrow or the day after saying “hi” to Allison in the halls. Calling her “Alli” like her friends did. Alli smiling back and introducing Leslie to all the other popular girls, explaining that she had saved everyone from creepy Mr. Brendan and his torture basement. Thanking her and apologizing for all the mean things they’d ever done to her, one of them—Blair—invited Leslie to a party, saying she could bring anyone she wanted. Any friend of Leslie’s was a friend of theirs, she assured her. Leslie imagined herself standing in the living room of a big house on the hill with a picture window looking out over the city. Gazing at the view of the night as grand as standing on a mesa cliff with only sky for a ceiling: starlight above, city lights below. Freddie holding her hand and telling her how happy he was she hadn’t abandoned them. How much it meant to him that she’d risked everything to get help.

  Behind her, Reginald wheezed feebly. And then he was silent.

  She dreamed.

  “I’ll send help.”

  Allison’s face fell. “Don’t forget about me.”

  Leslie staggered to the table and picked up Reginald’s backpack. She began stuffing books inside, trying to give it enough weight to use as a weapon. A weird flap on the side caught her eye and she folded it over, exposing the hidden zipper. Pulling it open, she found the snub-nosed revolver Brendan had missed. Was this for the dweeb’s protection? Or something else?

  It didn’t matter.

  She cocked the hammer. Turning back to the princess, she said, “Go ahead and do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Scream.”

  “I don’t—”

  Leslie pointed the gun at the princess. “Scream.”

  Allie did.

  The footsteps above them were heavy and hurried. Brendan sounded ready to stomp another one of them to death. Leslie hobbled away, almost tripping over the iron ring as she passed it on her way toward the darkness beneath the stairs. The locks above her clacked and the door slammed open. The guidance counselor’s footfalls on the stairs boomed and echoed through the basement like the thunderclaps of an angry god.

  “What the hell is going on in here?” he shouted, staring dumbly at Allison, processing the scene.

  Leslie leveled the gun at the back of his head. She hesitated, glancing around him at Allison. The princess’s eyes were as wide as an owl’s and were trained on her instead of Brendan. He turned, swinging an arm.

  “You mess with the bu—”

  She pulled the trigger.

  He didn’t dream.

  Neither did he sleep.

  IN THE BONES

  Carol was stable, but still unconscious. She had tubes going into her arms and mouth, bandages around her head covering the portion they’d shaved in order to operate, and a large contraption that looked like an inquisitor’s device holding together what was left of her leg. Large metal circles with wires leading to screws and pins invaded pink and red inflamed flesh, torn and cut and loosely stapled back together. All for the sake of holding together a single bone which had been made several.

  Although it wasn’t permitted, the night staff bent the rules and moved one of the fold-out chairs from Maternity into Carol’s room for her husband, Paul Goddard, to sleep on. It was uncomfortable, but after two nights in the hard visitor’s chair leaning over to rest with his head propped at the end of the bed, it felt like a feather mattress. The doctor who came in the following morning to check on Carol seemed to tut-tut softly when he saw what they’d done, but had nothing else to say about it. Paul doubted that the doctor kept quiet purely out of sympathy for his plight. It was likely just a matter below his pay grade. Come in. Check the patient’s condition. Move on to the next one.

  He looked at his wife’s butchered thigh and thought about the things coating the floors and floating through the air in any hospital that might take up residence in her. Tiny invisible things cast off from one person, infecting another, passed from mouth to hand to wound. Everyone directly caring for Carol washed their hands compulsively. For the other staff and lighter-contact visits, there were alcohol hand-sanitizer dispensers hanging on the walls in every single doorway and hallway in the place. Hospital protocols bred obsession. A dose on the way in and a dose on the way out. The drip leading into Carol’s arm fed her an antibiotic to keep infection at bay.

  Still. You had to be vigilant.

  Paul had read about MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphy-lococcus aureus. It was natural selection at work—a strain of bacteria resistant to antibiotics that, while not any more virulent than normal staph, was much more difficult to treat once infection set in, thus making it deadly in certain cases. Cases like hers.

  Paul sat up in the chair to look out the window at the Charles River. The water sparkled under the light of the rising sun. On the surface of the calm water, a young man pulled on long thin oars, his narrow boat lacing delicately across the surface leaving a pattern like the water-skippers he used to stare at as a child when his parents took him to the woods.

  Beyond the river, the city skyline rose up like distant, jagged spires stabbing at the white and blue sky. The Hancock Tower, 111 Huntington, the Pru. The city was once a peninsula connected to the mainland by only a slender isthmus until they built up the Back Bay and other parts of the city using landfill. They displaced the bay with the shattered fragments of earth and forest, old docks and tons and tons of gravel transported there by truck, arriving every forty-five minutes, day and night, for fifty years. It was all buried to build a bigger city, a stronger city. But it was never strong enough. The fill is weak. The gleaming towers that rise above the Back Bay are built with supports that pierce down through it, right down to the bedrock. Man’s reach for the sky rooted to the bones of the earth.

  He looked at the windows of the tall buildings that had been checkerboard lit and dark in the night. Now, in the light of the morning, they were all uniform squares of reflective anonymity. People moved behind them invisibly, carrying on as if nothing had changed in the world, always looking forward in time as though they would see no end of it.

  Somewhere in the glittering skyline was a single window that looked into his Back Bay apartment. Their apartment. He thought of the bare wall
s beyond the window. Carol had taken the art, leaving behind blank white squares where the time hadn’t been allowed to dim the walls’ luster. They were a faint reminder of the purity of the first time they’d stepped foot into their home. She’d taken the paintings down and placed them, along with her half of the closet and the clothes in the drawers, along with her books and CDs, and everything of hers that could be packed into boxes, by the door. There they sat waiting for the men to take them. Strangers who take lives away to other places.

  He’d asked her to stay. Asked her to remember all the wonderful times they’d had. He reminded her of their days together in college, of their wedding in Vermont, their tenth anniversary spent in Capestrano, and a dozen other memories immortalized in digital photographs never printed out. Ephemeral images that only existed in ones and zeros. He tried to move her not to leave. “Don’t you remember how good it used to be?” he’d asked.

  She reminded him of the hard times—of law school and endless billable hours as an associate at the firm, the miscarriage, the second miscarriage, not making partner, the fights and broken dishes, all the moments that had left her feeling alone in a house full of things while he was gone. All the things that made her feel like a thing. “I remember our life,” she said. “That’s why I’m leaving.”

  And he understood.

  Sitting in a bare living room, he stared for hours at a television broadcasting one program after another empty of meaning or relevance. He listened to her music, digitized on his iPod—more ones and zeros—hearing the sounds that had moved her but never him. He read the same paragraph in a forgotten book a dozen times never seeing the words, instead seeing her reading it on the sofa, in the bathtub, in bed. And he understood. There was a profound emptiness in the house. His life was outside of it. And he’d left her there in the middle of all the nothing he’d amassed, desperately looking for something to make the days stand out from one another.

  And so she had.

  Thinking of the empty squares on the wall reminded him of her face every time she brought home a new painting. Some scrawl of chiaroscuro paint more texture and passion than technique. A half-illuminated face of smears and drips that had stared back at him from above the television. She’d thought it was funny to have the portrait above the set, watching them watch it. The joke wasn’t all that amusing to him, but he got it. He stared at that face, not seeing it, for years. Pale shoulders beside breasts that emerged like bare islands from a dark sea. A long neck stretched above them in the gloom beneath a shrouded face, darkened and sad. The model’s eyes were lost in twin pools of gloom, framed by gaunt cheeks that hinted at the figure’s skull hidden just beneath the skin.

  That painted woman had watched him, grimly anonymous and unrelenting in her gaze. He’d never realized it was a portrait of his wife; not until she took that face from the wall.

  He turned away from the city view to look at Carol lying in her hospital bed. Her face now was a mottled mess of bruises and cuts and smashed and reconstructed bone and swollen flesh. Maroon deposits of dried blood inhabited the cracks of taped-together incisions, lacerations, and scrapes. Her eyes darted left and right under trembling, thin eyelids. Her chest rose and fell softly to the hiss of the machine beside the bed.

  “It’ll work out. She’ll wake up,” the doctor had said. “She will open her eyes. And you’ll be the first thing she sees.” He’d smiled while he said it, expecting that the promise she would behold him before all other things would bring Paul a measure of comfort and satisfaction. The surgeon assumed that Paul was the loving center of Carol’s world. Their relationship the bedrock upon which they built their lives.

  The ambulance had brought them to the hospital to-gether: her lying on a gurney, him sitting beside her on the bench, trying not to topple over as the driver snaked through traffic. It had been late, but there was always traffic in Cambridge. There was always someone sitting in a car, annoyed at the siren that broke through the bubble, forcing him to detour off to the side of the road while another life was carried forward. Given priority. In all the years he’d driven in the city, Paul had never thought about the fate of any occupant of an ambulance passing him. It was always a nuisance. A distraction from real life as he tried to get from point A to point B with a minimum of delay. At the sound of the keening wail, he would begrudgingly pull over to make way and then immediately dart back out into the emergency vehicle’s wake, trying to take advantage of the swath they cut through traffic, indifferent to the sick and dying leading the way.

  Then he rode in one and it all came into focus. These men and women drove through the city, siren screaming, trying to keep people together, keep death at bay, save lives, save families. The wailing was the sound of people hurtling toward the team waiting to pull souls back from oblivion—hurtling toward people dedicated to keeping a mother, father, son . . . or your wife from leaving before you were ready.

  And who was ever ready?

  Staring at her lying in the bed, he thought back to before the ride. He recalled standing in the dim light spilling out onto the third-floor deck, speaking to Carol in hushed tones, both of them trying not to make more of a spectacle of themselves at the party than they already were. She was on her fourth glass of wine. For a change, she wasn’t driving. When the party wound down, and the last guests left, she’d remain. With Glenn. The artist.

  Paul hadn’t been invited to the party. But he’d heard about it from a friend who had been asked to attend. One of their friends. He found Glenn’s name and address on an old receipt for a different painting—the one Carol had bought him for his office at the firm—stuffed in a file cabinet back in his study. The piece still hung above his office chair. He faced it every day when he entered, but never saw it again as he always kept his back turned to it. The painting had cost her two thousand dollars, and since he hung it up at work he wrote it off their taxes as a business expense. A double gift.

  Her face as she first opened the door to Glenn’s apartment studio was astounding to him. She stood shaded, lit from above and slightly behind, the living embodiment of the painting she’d taken from above the television. The mole on her collarbone stood out, casting a small shadow and he wondered how he’d ever missed it in the portrait. For years he’d asked her to have the blemish removed. She reacted as if that imperfection made her unique and asking her to slice it off was like asking her to become a faceless Stepford wife.

  In the doorway, she didn’t ask what he was doing there. Neither did she ask him to leave, however. She simply said, “Paul?” As if that single syllable communicated everything else that needed to be said. This is not where you are meant to be. This is not our life. It’s mine.

  She wore a lightweight, peasanty-looking dress that hung loosely over her pronounced bones. It looked vaguely Indian and reminded him of the outfits that the waitresses at their favorite restaurant wore. Somehow, though, it also looked right on her. With her kinky hair up in a bun, errant strands poking out here and there, she looked loose and relaxed, like when he’d first seen her in college. She certainly looked nothing like the woman in the form-fitting Little Black Dress he took to the various firm functions when they were together.

  “Carol,” he said. She stood in the doorway staring at him sadly, waiting for Paul to say something else. When he didn’t speak, she filled the empty space.

  “I’m surprised to see you.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, bending at the waist, keeping as much space between their bodies as she could while still making contact. Tenderness at a distant remove. Her warm lips brushed against his smooth-shaven cheek. He smelled wine on her breath. She inquired of him how he’d come to know about the party, but he didn’t sell out their friend. Paul figured she’d put it together eventually. Pamela was the only one who’d refused to take sides. Their last living connection.

  “I was hoping to see you,” he said. “I just wanted to . . . see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m good. I’m happy.”

  “Are you
?” he asked. She stepped back from the door into the light and changed from the sad woman in the painting to a fresh new Carol. Not the Carol he’d married. An older, experienced Carol. One who smiled.

  She raised her eyebrows in that way she did before saying something she expected might upset him and said, “If I invite you in, will I regret it?”

  He grinned. “Of course not. We’re adults, right? No reason we can’t be friends.” Although he knew she disagreed with that last statement, she gestured for him to come inside anyway. A crash and a tinkle of glass sounded from deep in the room behind her. She excused herself and hurried off. Paul closed the door behind him.

  The space was a built-out studio on the third floor of a triple-decker near Harvard Square. Low tables struggled under the weight of books. On top of them rested glasses half-filled with white or red wine. More books were stacked on the floor in front of shelves covered in seemingly endless and dusty bric-a-brac and objets d’art. When they’d been together, she insisted on hiring a cleaning service to come once a week to dust and polish the empty surfaces of their condo. He wondered how she lived with such clutter in this apartment.

  The walls were covered with paintings similar to the ones she’d been buying all those years. Although they maintained a thematic style, they showed a progression—growth as an artist. Half of them were portraits. Many of those were recognizably of the same model.

  Carol.

  His estranged wife.

  Someone else’s muse.

  As guests drifted around the space looking at the art on display, he shuffled off to a black and brushed aluminum IKEA kitchen island that had been moved into the living room to serve as a bar. He set about fixing himself a gin and tonic while he waited for Carol to come back. Taking a sip, he turned to face the room, scanning for anyone he recognized. Although their friends had divided themselves after the split, he saw none of the ones who’d taken up with Carol’s camp. This is Glenn’s show, after all.