Every night, Mrs. Newman summons her dead son to her bedside.
She would beckon at a nurse with an arthritis ridden finger and pronounce in halting speech, “Bring Charlie to me.”
An orderly would bring a clay urn resting at the foot of her bed to her. She would fit it under the crook of her elbow, her gummy lips peeled back in a contented smile, and close her eyes. The urn contained her son’s ashes, a living reminder of what she had lost. That’s how she would go to sleep every night. An old lady with the shadow of death hanging over her, closing her eyes and clasping tightly to a stone jar. It would creep out every orderly that worked this floor, but I think it’s sweet in an I’ll-see-you-in-the-afterlife kind of way.
Edie Newman is thin with bones the size of pencils and loose skin hanging in flaps off her body, most likely because she never quite recovered from her experience in concentration camps. She’s a Holocaust survivor. She was taken from her home when she was a teenager and released just after her forty fifth birthday. Suffering from flashbacks and the occasional schizophrenia, she voluntarily admitted herself into St. Elizabeth’s and has been staying here ever since.
St. Elizabeth’s is a sanctuary. At least, that’s how the brochures put it. It’s really a place where people can disappear, the place where rich people stash away their crazy, f---ed up branches of their family tree. They accept everyone from teenagers who think they’re the Second Coming to middle aged conspiracy theorists who think the government is tracking them through sugar packets. Most of the patients here are perfectly harmless. They hold doors for imaginary people. Drink beers with long lost presidents. Edie, by comparison, is practically normal.
I should know. I live right across the hall from her.
“Edie,” I kiss her on her papery cheek. “You’re looking younger by the day, you know that?”
She chuckles wryly. “You know it’s a sin to lie to the elderly, dearie.”
The old woman glances at me over her glasses, her wise-owl eyes blinking rapidly. I know she notices how my cheekbones are too sharp for my face, how my collar bones jut out, how there are purple circles brushed underneath my eyes. “You look peaky, sweetheart.”
“Too many things on my mind.” I say, sitting down on her bed and feeling Edie’s toothpick legs poking out underneath the thin blue blankets. The infamous urn sits oh-so-innocently near the foot of her bed.
“I hear you’ve been skipping the group sessions again.”
“I’m fine, Edie.”
“You can’t lie to save your life.” Edie observes.
“Stop it. You’re making me blush.” I say, cynical as ever.
There. I see it. Sitting on her bedside table.
“Go to the sessions, dear.” She says sternly. “You’re here so you could get better.”
“Really? I thought this was just a really extended vacation.” My fingers itch to grab it. Not yet. Soon.
Edie laughs dryly, a papery sound as soft as a whisper. “Don’t get smart on me now.”
“Too late.”
Edie crashes a few minutes after that, just as I’d predicted, so I slip out, my fingers wrapped tightly around what I had really come into Edie’s room for.
Pills. A whole bottle of them.
Edie has the good kinds, the ones that will knock you out in minutes flat, not the pathetic, half-assed ones the doctors give me.
How many do you have to take before you never wake up again? Five? Ten? Maybe I’ll just tip back the whole damn bottle just to be safe.
I’ll say this right now: this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it.
But this is the first time I’m planning on going through with it.
The pills are the size of my thumbnail and bone white. Encased in plastic. Glossy. I stare at them, their blinding white color, and I imagine a clean slate, a blank ledger wiped clean of any red.
Almost unconsciously, my finger skims over the smooth globe of my bald head. The surgeons had to shave all my hair off – I can still see my red curls crumbled on the ground, a writhing mass of coils that reminded me of Medusa’s snakes – to repair the damage left by the bullet wound.
The scar stretches from the base of my skull to the back of my left ear. Roughly six inches in length, it forms a ropy scar across my head, a bumpy mountain ridge to go along with the geography of the injuries I suffered that day – a red canyon across my forehead, a fault line along my lip.
I call it my souvenir. After all, other kids got away with tears and the occasional nightmare but me? I was one of the lucky few who got a bullet – silver lining and all that.
My eyes are wet.
The mayor made a speech that day. So did the principal. They handed out their condolences like they were hot commodities – cheap, common, and undeniably worthless. Our hearts go out to the victims of this school shooting. May they eventually find closure in their lives.
My hands are shaking.
Do it. Just do it.
But my body can’t seem to follow orders because I can’t seem to open my hand. I have to physically peel back each finger until I can see the white capsules nestled in my sweaty palm.
There’s so many of them. Rattling. Shaking. Like dry bones rustling around in a crypt.
I stare at them for what seems like an eternity. Then, hiccupping in a breath, I square my shoulders. Inhale. Exhale.
It’s time.
Hands trembling, I shake out five pills. Then I add one more. For good luck.
Here we go. One last step.
I swallow them all in one gulp.
There. I’m done. I did it.
Closing my eyes, I fall back on my bed, a smile playing on the edges of my lips. My eyes seal shut and I’m drifting, floating on the edge of consciousness, a deep bliss accompanying my dream.
Then it changes. A weight drops and it squeezes and shifts and contorts everything in me.
Everything churns and there’s a deep wrenching in the pit of my stomach. Like I’m getting sucker punched from the inside out. It’s burning. Everything’s on fire. White-hot, scorching fire.
The pills are working.
My lungs are screaming. I can’t see. I can’t hear. I can’t breathe because I’m burning. Retching. Draining myself of everything in me.
I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead, dead, dead.
I’m tumbling and plummeting and there’s red everywhere – a brilliant, hot red that cakes my fingernails and sticks to my clothes.
Make it stop. Please, make it stop.
Pounding in my chest and head and shoulders and legs. Brutal and fast and punishing.
Then, suddenly everything opens up and there’s light and air. I’m gasping for breath, ragged pants shaking my entire body and why are my cheeks wet?
Then the red fades until it’s replaced by white – a blinding, antiseptic white that I recognize as the walls of St. Elizabeth’s.
The bed dips down and something drops beside me. A man. A doctor.
He’s trying to untwist the blankets from my sweat-soaked body while barking out orders to a legion of nurses behind him. They’re holding me down, struggling to still my frantic muscles and suddenly, all the fight goes out of me, through that plastic tube they've inserted in me. They’re pumping my stomach.
“Don’t move,” the doctor says. “An orderly found you. A Mrs. Newman sent him to collect you for your group session and found you lying on your bed. Practically comatose.”
I can’t speak. My throat feels rusted over.
“You’re very lucky, you know. A few more hours and you wouldn't be here right now.”
Words float around. Words like teenager and pills and accident.
And I’m drawing in small, bloody breaths into my broken lungs. My stomach is bruised and I won’t be able to eat solid foods for a while. The pain is receding bit by bit, until my limbs are no longer trembling like brittle leaves and breathing isn't a chore.
That’s when I start to laugh. It’s a cracked, hollow sound but I’m laughing because it’s funny. The whole situation is funny. This thing sounds like a very bad joke.
A survivor of a school shooting walks into a bar and tries to kill herself. But through some sick cosmic joke, she fails in the one thing she thought she was good at.
And I’m laughing and the doctor is staring at me because son of a b****, isn't that the best joke you've ever heard?