Aftermath of a Suicide

Sallie Reynolds

Word Count 1223

Remember how George would stop at the door, gather himself, stride in, and take over the room? It really impressed me when I was 18. He’d throw his head back, haloed with that dandelion fuzz, square his jimber-jaw. Bingo! We were his.

We were in school together, and afterward, he got his first job teaching psychology in a fancy college where rich kids went. He interviewed once and wowed the dean. But I guess the kids played him hell, all their little sorrows. Not that he talked about them. And I was busy with our boy, who wasn’t even two yet. Things snuck up on us.

George went quiet for months around his orals, and that silence lingered. They say your brain doesn’t gel till you’re about 30, and we were both a long way from 30. It was my birthday – my 22nd, he was 25 – and as he left the house to teach a class, I called out to him to stop at the A&P on his way home, bring us back a steak. Something special that he’d like, that the baby would like, too. The baby already liked meat.

He didn't respond. He left, and never came back.

Our baby kept going to the window overlooking the walkway. He always did that, Daddy’s coming home. Well, it didn’t sound like that. It sounded like addyaddyom. Like I said, he wasn’t quite two.

One, two, three hours. And then, I don’t know, a light went on. George was dead. My husband was dead. Car wreck? Heart attack? You know, some people have weak hearts from the minute they’re born.

Sixty years later – still searching for the flash, the mini-microsecond where I could have changed everything – I’ve written it over and over, trying to find it. But it’s just flat.

An hour went by, two. not a thing you do can make your breath come right. I wasn’t about to say “dead.” Nobody in his right mind would come to you if you said you knew your husband was dead somewhere.

That’s because stuff like the paragraph above is boring. Hope you didn't read it. Could be anybody, anything. It's just me, like a million others, trying to find an escape hole.

Steve came. Steve was George’s friend. Very sweet man, really. Kept saying, We’ll find him.

We left my little boy with a neighbor, and I directed us to this cabin out of town, George and I rented it sometimes for a weekend. He’d gone hunting there with some guys not long before, and one of them accidentally shot our dog.

At the road leading in, there was our car. Door wide open, seat flung forward, like you do when you’re in a hurry to get something out of the back.

Steve said You stay here. But I followed him, we went up a little hill.

He was lying stretched out on his back. He had on his good suit coat, for teaching, and his old WC Russell boots. Crazy, to remember that 60 years later, right?

I couldn’t see any blood or brains. Steve said, Oh god. Hauled me back to his car and drove. And I got sick. Steve turned into some stranger’s driveway and took me to the door, said something like, This lady’s husband had an accident up the road. She’s taken ill.

The woman took me into the bathroom. I hope she left then. I just remember my body gathering itself in, tight and hard as a bag of rocks – and then spewing everything out, all over the place. I mean everything. Stuff came out of me where I didn’t even know I had holes.

George’s daddy died when George was 3. I’m leaving this in because I want us to think for a minute about suicide as a family decision. Somebody said to me, years later, suicide wouldn’t happen in his family, it just wasn’t an option. George’s family had the options.

George said his mother told him his daddy’s death was his fault, he’d hit his daddy in the leg with a baseball exactly where the cancer came. Can’t you just see that? A little boy throwing a ball, the way they do – hauling back their little arm and flinging the ball all over the place?

But I never believed his mother said that. I think she told him about the hitting and the cancer and he put those things together himself.

When he was older, he killed a kitten in his grandmother’s barnyard. It wouldn’t stop crying, he threw it, it hung up on a barbed-wire fence and died. Little gray dead thing, hanging by the wire. It was the weakest, he said, the one he should have taken special care of.

Now think of the cases where the perpetrator spent his childhood torturing animals, lighting their tails on fire. That wasn't George. But he didn’t like little weak things. Didn’t really like holding our baby. When he did, he held him the way you’d hold a thin, flat piece of glass that has a crack in it.

I remember lying in bed with my arms around my little boy, he slept so warm, a little damp, his hair had that sweet baby-chicken smell.

When you’re alive, you eat. Some nice woman made me eat something she’d cooked just for me. She told me one day I’d “find myself.” Her food is what divided me from death, a custard thing. White, smooth, milky, sweet coconut. If anything besides mother’s milk could taste like mother’s milk, that custard was it. Today it would gag me. But then it was good, so so good.

Why didn’t I just curl up and die? Look at all the reasons I had. This-is-the-thing-we've-all-been-waiting-to-happen—but my body got rid of them. Every bad thought, every evil, killing flash. Down the toilet in that bathroom. Replaced by sweet coconut and milk. Yeah.

The years it took me to “find” myself were really the years it took me to reinvent myself. You have to start from scratch. You have to make it all up. I had 20-30-40-some years to turn over, until there was enough of me to make a whole.

George’s inventions, most – not all – were bad. Like how he’d killed his father. And the cat. Who equates a dying man and a cat? George was from those Scotch-Irish mountain folks, who either tear up the pea patch or turn to stone. Be careful you don’t invent something like that.

So I took my boy and we went off and invented things. Mostly good, hard stories. Like what he’d do, precisely and in what order, if he found me dead in the bed. Or how to cook an egg. Practical stuff. And I’m alive, my boy’s alive. Sometimes at night I find myself, 60 years on, talking to George. Sometimes – not always – growling: You bastard, you started it. Then Daddy took a gun, then your mother took pills, and somebody finally told us your grandfather on your mother’s side drank laudanum.

I get in the middle of the list, but then something far away, a little wind, says shhhh. A little wave on the beach. Shhhh-shhh.

Shhh. That voice is also in the blood, a counter-melody in my veins. And my boy’s. Living blood dancing along. And so far, winning

Sallie is 85, lives back of beyond in Northern California with her painter-writer-mechanic husband, a grand dog, and two hawks (she’s a licensed falconer.) She had to live this long in order to become a decent human being. Her stories are here and there, her two novels are on Amazon.