thirty-five

Veronica and I hadn’t been in touch since we parted at Astor Place. I called her a few times but she was never home and any message I left went unreturned. More disturbing was the fact that she hadn’t returned to school. I went down to her building on several occasions and waited across the street for a few hours but never saw her come or go. I didn’t have the courage to ring the bell which made me question if I really wanted to see her at all. But why else would I have been standing outside her house?

The truth was I missed her terribly. I felt so close to her, closer than I’ve ever felt to anyone, and at the same time I felt so far away. I wanted to see her every day for the rest of my life and I wanted to never see her again as long as I lived.

But mostly I wanted to see her. Be near her. Next to her. That’s all. That would have been enough. I’d have been happy not saying any words at all.

The last day I stood watch, her building seemed different to me. I was suddenly struck by its extreme rectangularity. Looking up toward the roof from my post across the street, it loomed before me, long, black, and suffocating. It was only a five-story structure but the two buildings that flanked it were less than half its size. The two skinny trees in front were equidistant from the doorway, which was dead center, giving the whole picture a cold and formal frame. Something about the symmetry disturbed me. It was as if the building was alive and breathing and staring right at me. It made me feel like it didn’t want me there.

That same day I saw Sanoo come out of a taxi and go into the building carrying a big bag of groceries. I only watched her for thirty seconds or so but the difference between her and her sister was blatant and clear. Veronica’s face was both open and mysterious and her smiles came unexpected, like a warm afternoon sun in February. At twenty-one, Sanoo’s face had already set into a hardness that expected the worst in people, with a readiness to attack at the slightest provocation. She frightened me. There was no approaching her at all.

* * *

After three weeks of radio silence, I asked our history teacher Mr. Gorman if Veronica had switched schools. I liked Mr. Gorman and he liked Veronica. He called her “Countess,” with the accent on the second syllable. I think the nickname pleased her.

It was right after the 3:10 dismissal bell and Mr. Gorman was rushing out the front entrance. My question took him off guard but he didn’t break stride or even look me in the eye. He seemed very uncomfortable with what I asked him.

“I’m sorry, Matthew . . . ummmm . . . I don’t . . . I don’t have anything to tell you.” He patted my shoulder and darted into the street like he couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

A little orange car was double parked at the corner. Mr. Gorman’s wife got out of the driver’s seat and walked around to the passenger side as Mr. Gorman replaced her behind the wheel. He looked at me through the window and after a strange wave, he drove off.

This did not bode well.

* * *

I never figured out how my mother knew before I did. I assumed it was through the school but I am not 100 percent certain. She broke the news to me very gently, with a lot of compassion. I can’t say I went into immediate sorrow or grief or horror or shock.

The first feeling I remember was revulsion: a sickness . . . disgust. There was something obscene, something profane about the act itself. I felt it would have been better left a secret or an ambiguous “natural causes,” even if it was a lie and there was nothing at all natural about a seventeen-year-old girl being dead.

Then I realized that the disgust I felt was toward my mother. Her knowledge of what Veronica chose to do to herself was an invasion of privacy. Both Veronica’s and mine. I didn’t want to share that space with anyone, least of all my mother. It was mine, and mine alone, because she was dead and the dead have no right to privacy. The dead have nothing. They are nothing. They’re gone.

My mother of course did not go into any detail about the actual method my love had chosen. Knowing Veronica the way I did, I narrowed it down to three possibilities:

1) Slit wrists in the bathtub. The two of us once spoke about the ancient Roman way, which was said to be peaceful and painless, although the slashing part couldn’t possibly be painless and the peace would only come after enduring the violence of the slicing. We also discussed how this method was not very peaceful to the person finding the bloody mess of a corpse submerged in all the sickly pink water and the tiles and shower curtains splattered in garish red. Suicide is always an act between two people, isn’t it? The one committing it and the one who discovers it. I wondered how much she had considered that before doing what she did.

2) Pill overdose. A more likely choice for Veronica. Far more peaceful and painless than wrist-slitting but a long waiting period between the ingestion of the agents and the onset of the incapacitating effects needed to shut down one’s life-sustaining systems. The gap of time was a stumbling block for me because it required a high degree of patience, a virtue I would not under normal circumstances attribute to Veronica. So unless she was in some inspired state of beatific grace, I find it hard to imagine she’d summon enough forbearance to sit tight until the drugs were digested and assimilated into her veins and organs. Yet in blatant disregard of the above argument, I have made the choice to acknowledge this mode of self-destruction as her final act of will. I have convinced myself this is how it happened because I do not want to accept the abominable reality of what she most likely did to herself. Which not coincidently leads us to:

3) Hanging by the neck until she’s dead, dead, dead. Veronica once commented that the second-floor fire escape behind her building would make an excellent and effective gallows.

The day after I received the news I went down to her building, rang all the bells (except for hers), and was buzzed in. I walked past the trash bins, through the rear door, and into the backyard. There was no evidence of a crime scene. (It was technically a crime, wasn’t it?) I sat down on a rotted old picnic table and started to write her a letter. I didn’t look up.