“Your mom?”
“She’s bipolar. I don’t know if Meg was. I never saw her manic, but I saw her depressed. Trust me, I know what that looks like.”
I’m about to tell Tree about the mono, how tired Meg had sometimes gotten since then, how if she slept enough for five people, it was because she expended the energy of ten people. She needs a little time to rejuvenate, Sue would sometimes say, closing the door, sending me away.
Then Tree says, “Plus, healthy people don’t talk that way about suicide.”
The hair on the back of my neck rises. “What?”
“We had a feminist lit class together, and one night me and her and a few other girls were in a café, studying at a table, and Meg starts quizzing everyone about how they’d off themselves. We were reading Virginia Woolf, and at first I thought it was because of that. Everyone had their half-baked answers. Guns or pills or jumping off a bridge, but not Meg. She was very specific: ‘I’d take poison and I’d do it in a hotel room and I’d leave the maid a big tip.’”
Neither of us says anything. Because of course, that’s exactly what Meg did do.
“At which point I told her that she should stop moping and get to the campus health center for some Prozac already.”
A friend told me to go to the campus health center to get some meds.
“It was you,” I whisper into the phone.
I can hear her surprise crackle through the phone. “Me?”
“She said a friend talked her into going to the campus health center, and I’ve talked to dozens of people, and no one ever mentioned a thing, no one thought to suggest it. Except you.”
“We weren’t friends.”
“Well, we were. We were best friends and not only did I not suggest this, I didn’t think to.”
“Then we both failed her,” Tree says. And there’s such anger in her voice. And it’s then I get it. The animosity. It’s Meg. It’s the tentacles of her suicide, reaching out, burning people who barely knew her.
“Sorry,” Tree mutters under her breath.
“She listened to you. She went to the campus health center and got some meds.”
“So what happened?” Tree asks. “Didn’t they work?”
“It’s my understanding that you have to take them for them to work.”
“She didn’t take them?”
“Someone talked her out of it.”
“Why would they do that? Those drugs saved my mom’s life.”
I think of all the stuff on the boards, about the drugs numbing your soul. But that wasn’t it. It was because someone convinced Meg that her life wasn’t worth saving. That death was a better option. It was because, at the very end, when it should’ve been me whispering in her ear, telling her how amazing she was, how amazing her life was and would be again, it was All_BS doing the whispering.
Tree is right about failing Meg. But it wasn’t her that did. It was me. I failed her in life. But I won’t fail her in death.
28
I’m vacuuming at Mrs. Driggs’s the next day when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out and recognize the 206 area code, but the call has already gone to voice mail. A few seconds later it chimes to let me know there’s a message waiting.
I stare at my phone in my palm, the vacuum motor whining. Why did he call back? Does he even know it was me who called him? Who knows if he even saved my number, and my outgoing voice mail message is now generic in case All_BS calls.
Whatever he has to say—who is this? or something else—I don’t want to hear it. I go to delete the voice mail, but I hesitate, and in that moment the phone rings again and I’m relieved and ashamed in equal measures.
“Hey,” I say, my heart pounding.
There’s a slight pause on the line. “Repeat?” says the voice. The vacuum cleaner is still on, and it takes me a minute to understand that it’s not Ben. I flip the phone over to check the caller ID. It’s not the 206 number this time. It’s blocked. “Repeat,” the voice says again, and then I understand I’m not being asked to repeat anything.
“Yes.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“I know.”
“What’s that noise?”
“Oh. I’m at work.”
He chuckles. “As am I.”
His voice is not what I expected. It’s jovial, almost comforting. It’s like we already know each other.
The vacuum is still droning. I turn it off. “There. Is that better?”
“Yes.” He chuckles again. “If only I could turn off the noise at my work so easily. But I’ve found a quiet corner. Forgive the delay.”
I listen then; in the background, there’s an electric clang of something. Cash registers?
“One must choose the risks one takes and mitigate them.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Speaking of risks and choices, you have chosen?”
“Yes,” I say.
“That’s very brave,” he says.
“I’m scared.” It flies out. This absolute truth. All_BS seems to pull it from me. Which is an irony, of sorts.
He continues: “You know what George Patton said? ‘All intelligent men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.’ That holds true for women, too, I’d say.”
I don’t say anything.
“Have you decided on a method?” he asks.
“Yes, I’m going to—”
“Don’t,” he cuts me off. “That’s a personal decision.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I’m not just disappointed. I’m devastated. I want to tell him so badly.
“Are all your affairs in order?”
Affairs in order. That’s the language one of the sites he referred me to used. It had all the instructions about writing the note, creating a legally binding will.
“Yes,” I answer. I feel dazed.
“Remember, the opposite of bravery is not cowardice, but conformity. You are bucking conformity, choosing your own path.”
Somewhere it registers that Meg would’ve loved this sentiment, if he used it on her. She was all about bucking conformity, right up to the very end.
“Now, like all things, it’s a matter of following through. Screw your courage—”
“To the sticking place,” I finish the sentence without thinking.
There’s a pause on the line. Something is being weighed. I’ve made a mistake.