FOR MANY YEARS suicide was known as the victimless crime. But whether the act of an impulsive teenager, a depressed businessman, or a terminally ill cancer patient, each suicide leaves behind a great many victims—wife, husband, parents, children, friends—for whom the pain is just beginning. “There are always two parties to a death; the person who dies and the survivors who are bereaved,” wrote historian Arnold Toynbee. “. . . There are two parties to the suffering that death inflicts; and, in the apportionment of this suffering, the survivor takes the brunt.” The suffering of survivors is acute after any death, but the grief inflicted by suicide may be the hardest to bear. In addition to shock, denial, anger, and sorrow, the suicide survivor often faces an added burden of guilt and shame. Although the pain is over for the one who died, and his problems, in their way, answered, the survivor is invariably left with questions. “Suicide is the cruelest death of all for those who remain,” says a bereavement counselor. “Each day the survivors face the gut-wrenching struggle of asking themselves, ‘Why, why, why?’” What makes a suicide so difficult to resolve is that there may be no answers. “I’ll never know why,” says a man whose seventeen-year-old son hanged himself. “There’s only one person who can tell me, and he’s dead.” After her husband, Carl, killed himself at the age of thirty-three, Merryl Maleska’s life was ripped open just when she’d believed it was most secure. It was the beginning of a long, excruciating journey in which she was forced to reexamine every moment of her life since she had first seen Carl sixteen years before.
On a September evening not long after she had arrived for her freshman year at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, Merryl Maleska lay on a bed in her dorm room, flipping through the “pigbook,” a thin yellow volume containing pictures of everyone in her class. It was her third night of school and there were hundreds of faces to scrutinize, but when Merryl got to the seventh photograph, she stopped. Something in the boy’s eyes—a faraway, intense look—drew her in. She studied his picture. His name was Carl, and he was from a small town in Pennsylvania. She looked at the picture next to his: that boy was a standard-issue matinee idol, but she had passed right over him. Carl was handsome, too; even in a photo not much larger than a postage stamp, she was drawn to his smooth face and his thick brown hair, neatly parted on one side and a little windswept on the other in a way that reminded her of the Kennedys. But it was those eyes, looking straight at her yet keeping their distance, that stayed with Merryl. She called to her roommate, pointed at Carl, and said, “I’m going to marry him.” They laughed, and then they laughed again because her roommate realized Merryl wasn’t kidding.
In the following weeks Merryl often saw Carl walking across campus in a green high school football jacket with cream-colored sleeves. She was thrilled to discover they took the same biology class (he was a premedical student), and she sneaked peeks at him during lectures. In the cafeteria his name came up often. By the end of his sophomore year Carl had accrued four years’ worth of honors—president of the Sword and Shield Honor Society, president of the Biology Club, the biology prize, highest GPA in his class. At the most prominent frat on campus, Carl was known as the Golden Tongue because, although he was quiet, almost timid, he was a riveting speaker. To Merryl he seemed everything his picture promised. When friends teased her about having a crush on a man she had never met, Merryl laughed. But she kept her eyes peeled for that green jacket, and when she saw it coming across campus, her stomach knotted. Before she went to sleep she often found herself pulling out the pigbook and turning to the seventh photograph. It seemed inevitable that someday she and Carl would meet.
They did, sort of, during sophomore year when Merryl’s lab partner invited her to the annual Sword and Shield dance. Merryl accepted, half because she knew Carl would be there. When they arrived, Carl, as club president, was greeting guests at the door. Next day Merryl swore to her roommate that when Carl shook her hand, he had given her a meaningful smile. Her roommate, reminding Merryl that she had always needed glasses, kidded that her perception had been blurred by myopia, not romance. But all evening as she danced with her lab partner, Merryl was aware of Carl and of his date, who Merryl felt wasn’t nearly good-looking enough for him. For the evening’s last dance the disc jockey put on “Light My Fire” by the Doors—and while they danced, people mouthed the words. As the song went on, Merryl found that she and her date were dancing in a corner next to Carl and his date, on the fringe of the vibrating crowd. As Merryl danced, sometimes it seemed to her that she was dancing with Carl and then sometimes with her date and then again with Carl, and she was exhilarated, and sometimes she knew Carl was watching her and it seemed he knew she knew he was watching, and yet he kept watching, and though the song lasted only six minutes and fifty seconds, to Merryl it seemed to go on forever.
Merryl spent her junior year in London, studying English literature. Carl studied political science in Sweden. When Merryl returned to Tufts, she decided to write an article for the school newspaper about students who had lived abroad. One day in the cafeteria, with five of her girlfriends watching and praying, Merryl walked over to Carl and asked him for an interview. They agreed to meet Friday evening. Friday afternoon in front of her mirror, Merryl tried on every outfit she owned, finally settling on a gray wool dress that was prim yet flatteringly tight. That night they went to dinner and talked for hours. Carl was everything Merryl had imagined: intense, strong, and sensitive, with a gentle voice that inspired confidence. Merryl didn’t bother taking notes—she never even wrote the article—they just talked and talked. Afterward, she asked Carl back to her dorm. When they arrived, she made him wait on the stairs. She ran to her room, spent fifteen minutes stuffing everything under the bed—she had never expected him to come back and had left the place a mess—then ran back downstairs and invited him up. They spent the night together, and the following morning they took a bus down to her family’s summer house on Cape Cod, broke in through the bathroom window, and spent the weekend huddled in her parents’ double bed. Merryl told Carl about her crush. He was surprised. He didn’t remember her from the Sword and Shield dance, and he was sure he hadn’t given her a meaningful smile. But now he did, and the next day, on the bus back to Boston, he asked her to move in with him.
Merryl threw herself into the relationship and was happily overwhelmed. Although Carl was shy and retiring by nature, his intellectual curiosity was fierce, and he cared passionately about certain things; he had dropped his premed program, in fact, to devote more attention to political activism. Merryl, warm and gregarious, had always felt a little frivolous, and Carl’s intensity lent her a focus she had not yet found. Carl was the teacher and Merryl was his willing student. This imbalance kept their relationship somewhat tilted, and Merryl was often fearful that Carl would leave her. A year after their graduation, at Carl’s insistence, they did break up and were apart for two years. But they got back together at the age of twenty-five, and two years later they were married at Merryl’s parents’ house on Cape Cod. The bride and groom recited vows they had written in secret. Standing in a gazebo built for the wedding, Merryl expressed her belief that “our lives together will be infinitely richer than our lives apart.” Carl’s voice broke as he promised, “I will be as open and honest with my emotions as I can possibly be.”
They set up married life in a cozy carriage house in Evanston, Illinois, a short commute to the University of Chicago, where Carl was a graduate student in developmental psychology. Merryl embarked on a seven-month job search that landed her an entry-level editorial position at Rand McNally. Carl was immersed in his studies but managed to read widely, tend an indoor garden, and bake bread. It was a happy time. Merryl felt secure in Carl’s love, and Carl, who had entered therapy, seemed at peace with himself. One Christmas he surprised her with a pillow he had stitched with a favorite scene: Merryl sitting at a picnic table in their backyard, looking up from her writing in delight as Carl serves her iced tea from a tray. Carl had labored over the pillow for months when Merryl was at work, carefully noting where the markers were on the sewing machine, stitching for hours, then restoring the markers to their original position before she came home.
Gradually, however, Carl’s frustration with his work began to show. The University of Chicago had not been his first choice. It didn’t offer clinical psychology, only developmental psychology, which led to an academic career. But because the academic market was so tight, the only route assuring an eventual job in psychology was the clinical one. Carl felt cornered. Furthermore, the Chicago program emphasized adult and geriatric psychology; the sole faculty member who specialized in child psychology was two years younger than Carl, and he didn’t feel she was the mentor he needed. In any case Carl was a perfectionist who hated to ask for help, and rather than admit uncertainty, he preferred to wait until a piece of work was flawless before turning it in. Carl was especially demanding about his dissertation, an analysis of toddlers’ cognitive responses. Carl loved children, and he spent five hours a day on his hands and knees performing puppet shows for two-year-olds, taping their reactions, then recording the results in the dozens of spiral notebooks that lined his study. He made the puppets himself from dolls, proudly showing Merryl each painstaking creation: an elephant, a pilot, a truck. But the project seemed to take forever; there was always another paper to read, another reaction to research, another departmental requirement to fulfill. Friends began to joke about whether he would ever finish. At night Merryl would watch him work at his desk. Though Carl was doggedly trying to live up to his marriage vow and be more open with his feelings, Merryl could sense the tension building inside him, and when she probed, it would often turn out that something had been irking him for days.
Meanwhile, after six years of graduate school, Carl was anxious to start earning money. But the résumés he sent out drew no response. He felt inadequate when he compared his stalled career to the smooth successes of the people around him. His brother had landed a job in a psychology lab at Harvard; his sister was winning awards at Harvard Medical School; Merryl was being given increasing responsibility at Rand McNally. Nevertheless, Merryl was prepared to move when Carl found work; she had given him a list of twenty-five states she’d live in. She preferred New England but would live almost anywhere east of the Mississippi. Texas and the Far West were out. Carl applied to schools in those twenty-five states, but he received no offers. As his dissertation dragged on, he typed and retyped his résumé, changing only the date he expected his Ph.D. to be completed. The time was postponed so often that eventually he just used Wite-Out to change the date.
Eventually, they moved back to Boston. Merryl had found work as an editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Carl had been promised a job at a think tank. But Carl’s position didn’t come through, and though he seemed to make the best of it, the next two years held a series of progressively more galling disappointments. The job search became numbing. Carl followed up every lead, every newspaper ad, every cocktail party conversation, but the only positions available, it seemed, were at junior colleges for sums so low that people apologized as they offered them. Merryl, who was delighted with her work, watched Carl grow ever more depressed. But she still had faith in him. She knew he would get a job, she told him, and someday he would teach in a university. So what if it happened at forty instead of thirty? For Carl’s thirty-second birthday Merryl had his portrait painted. Important people had their portraits painted, she reasoned, and she wanted to let Carl know that he was an important person. Carl was pleased with the idea of the gift but was anxious about having an artist capture a time of his life when he felt so fragile. In the portrait, Carl, in his green suit, looks young and terribly handsome. Whenever Merryl passed through the living room where it hung, she found herself looking up at him and marveling at how well the artist had captured that faraway look in his eyes.
Merryl’s faith in Carl was so absolute that she was stunned when one January morning she was on her way out the door to work and Carl, lying in bed, said, “If I have to go through another job search like this, I’ll kill myself.” Unnerved, Merryl said, “Well, I don’t want to come in this house and find you hanging.” Carl’s statement was so out of character that she put it from her mind. In any case, a month later Carl got a job. Merryl baked him a cake in celebration.
Carl was the junior member of a three-person team studying the effect of a new drug on learning disabilities in children. He did the paperwork and ferried the youngsters to and from the hospital where a clinical psychologist ran the experiments. But it was a job, and though it paid poorly, Carl drew a salary for the first time in years. His confidence was renewed. At night he worked on his dissertation; his proposal, two years in the writing, had been accepted, and the finish line was in sight. Meanwhile, he and Merryl talked about having children of their own. They filled their bedroom shelves with books on pregnancy and parenting and discussed buying a house. Although they tried for six months, Merryl did not get pregnant.
One night in late October, Merryl and Carl were filling each other in on their workdays. Merryl had chaired an important meeting and was feeling proud. Carl had always helped celebrate her triumphs, but Merryl sensed her success was making Carl’s own dreams seem further from him. Later, when they were preparing for bed, Carl suddenly went into a tense, agitated tirade; he was worthless, he said. He hated his job and he hated himself. It disgusted him to be ferrying vials for someone whose job he would have had if only he’d stayed premed in college. As Merryl watched, horrified, he repeatedly punched himself in the temple with his fist. When Carl calmed down, Merryl tried to persuade him to get help from a therapist. Carl refused, saying he didn’t want anyone to see him like this.
Although there were no more violent outbursts, things got steadily worse. Carl’s job was due to end in June, and he had to start looking all over again. He had several promising interviews, only to be told later that he was overqualified or that the position had been eliminated. In the middle of May, Carl’s brother called to say that he had just accepted a good position in the research department of a large corporation. Carl congratulated him but within half an hour of hanging up he was in a panic of self-loathing, muttering, “I’m worthless, I’m worthless,” over and over. His face was drained of color, and his skin looked drawn and taut. Merryl was terrified; she hardly recognized him. This time when she insisted he get help, Carl agreed. Next day, Carl met with a psychiatrist, who said he couldn’t take on new patients until the end of the summer, but if Carl was ever in crisis, he would fit him in.
Merryl never knew what kind of mood to expect when she came home from work. Night after night she and Carl lingered at the table, dishes undone, trying to unravel what was happening. Carl ruthlessly criticized decisions he had made over the years. Merryl had had no idea how deeply Carl’s self-hatred ran. She told him that she still felt he was the greatest. As far as this job search was concerned, she said, he was a square peg where there were only round holes. But someday there would be a square hole. Carl seemed to take heart. One evening he got a call from Temple University. He had been recommended for a good job. “It’s finally working,” said Carl, hugging Merryl. “It’s all going to pay off.” On Merryl’s thirty-third birthday, Carl flew to Philadelphia for his interview at Temple. He left a card for Merryl on the dining room table. To Merryl the printed words seemed absolutely perfect:
Everyone needs someone
to understand and care
Someone to depend on
and count on to be there . . .
Everyone needs someone
to make a dream come true
And I’m so glad my someone
is someone special—you!
Underneath the ornately scripted “Happy Birthday,” Carl had written, “Dearest Merryl, You’ve been so supportive and so tender to me. I’ll always love you for it. Happy Birthday! I’ll hurry home to help celebrate it. Love, Your Carl.”
And Carl seemed buoyed. He had an interview at Manhattanville College the following week, there was a possible job at a Boston VA hospital, and he was one of the top two candidates for the position at Temple. The chances of his getting the kind of position he wanted seemed better than they’d ever been.
Then one day in early June, Carl announced that a problem in his dissertation was more serious than he had thought. He believed he had asked the children a question in which the pronouns had not been clarified. If this was true, he said, the research was contaminated. Merryl assured him it didn’t sound as drastic as he thought, and Carl seemed soothed. But over the following week his doubts escalated, and on June 10 he told her he was certain his dissertation was ruined. Merryl reasoned with him: even if one question was flawed, he could still salvage most of the project. She persuaded him to call his dissertation adviser in Chicago, who told him it didn’t sound like a major problem. But Carl spent every spare moment in his study, chair pulled tight against the desk, flipping through his vast files.
On Sunday, June 13, Merryl woke to find Carl in a white-faced panic. “My life is over,” he kept saying in a thin voice, staring straight ahead. “My life is over.” Merryl reached for him, but he shrugged her off, saying, “Don’t touch me—the pain is too great.” All day Merryl sat with him, coaxing, cajoling, reasoning. She reminded him of his triumphs at Tufts: the biology prize, Sword and Shield, the highest GPA. Carl snorted; he wasn’t smart, he said—if he’d been smart, he would have stayed premed, but he hadn’t because he was a loser, he was worthless. Merryl reminded him of all the people who’d looked up to him, but Carl dismissed her. He’d always been the manager, not the player, always the odd man out, the second-class citizen, the chump ferrying vials for the people he should be. No matter how she tried, Merryl couldn’t reach him—it was like attempting to penetrate a plastic shield—and even if she made some headway, he’d soon fade further into his own world. “How do people do it?” he said at one point. “How do they kill themselves?” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s a good sign that I’m talking about it. Isn’t it true that when people talk about suicide, they don’t do it?” Merryl told him she didn’t think that was true.
On Monday night when Carl was no better, Merryl pleaded with him to let her call the psychiatrist. Carl said no, and Merryl couldn’t bear the thought of going against his will, of treating him like a child. At 11 p.m. she finally coaxed Carl into letting her call. The therapist wasn’t home; Merryl left her name with his answering service. By the time the psychiatrist called back the next day, Carl seemed stronger. Merryl, who had stayed home from work to be with him, heard him tell the doctor that he was okay, and they made an appointment for Thursday. But Merryl couldn’t get the previous day out of her mind. For a moment she wanted to grab the phone and tell the psychiatrist he didn’t understand how serious this was. But she didn’t; it wasn’t right, she thought, and Carl did sound better. That afternoon he took a long nap. Merryl looked in on him from time to time and was relieved to see him sleeping peacefully. It was going to be okay. The worst had passed.
But Carl was up and down all week. One moment he’d be in his white-faced panic, calling himself “worthless.” He wasn’t eating right; he would push away his plate halfway through the meal. Sometimes he would get up suddenly and go for long walks. Merryl, worried, would ask to go along, but he always said no. One night she asked him whether he was going to come back, and a look flickered over his face as if she’d recognized his deepest fear, but then it disappeared and he said of course he was coming back. Carl spoke often of death. Once, he came in from a walk and said he’d seen a hearse going by and imagined he was in it. Another time, when Merryl killed an ant, he grimaced and said he felt that life was squashing him, like that ant. Merryl told him that if he ever killed himself, he’d be killing her, too. Once, in desperation, she suggested they simply walk off into the woods together. “Do you really mean it?” Carl said. Then he reflected on her suggestion and seemed disappointed. “People can live for forty days in the woods without food.” Merryl talked to him about hospitalization, and he said no, it would gall him that the people taking care of him would be the doctors he should have been. At times Carl seemed like a stranger to Merryl—he had night sweats and even smelled different to her. At other times she’d walk into the house and the Carl she knew was cooking dinner, commenting on some event in the outside world. Merryl fought to keep in touch with that Carl, but he always ebbed. Merryl began to have a recurring dream: She was standing on a dock while a vast steamship was pulling away in a dense fog, leaving her alone. It seemed as if Carl was on the ship. The night was too hazy for her to be certain. But in the dream and after she woke, Merryl felt utterly abandoned.
On Thursday, Merryl picked up her parents for dinner. Merryl’s mother, who had cancer, had just learned that it had spread. As Merryl drove, the whole world seemed on edge; the traffic loomed dangerously, and shapes that seemed to be people were shadows. She nearly hit a bicyclist, and the rest of the way home she squeezed the wheel tightly. When they walked into the house, Carl was in the kitchen making salad. He looked up, and Merryl could see he was in that white state, but it was concealed by a polite mask because her parents were there. When Merryl and Carl had a moment alone, she asked him if he was all right. As he stirred the salad dressing, he looked up at her slowly and, in that thin voice that chilled her to the bone, said, “No.” Her mother came into the room, and Carl went back to his stirring.
After dinner Carl said he was going for a walk. Merryl hurried into the kitchen after him and asked if he was sure he was okay. He was sure, he said. He just had to get out. After he left, Merryl’s parents asked her what was wrong, and she told them Carl had been under a lot of strain lately. She didn’t go into details—she felt it was her and Carl’s business. They talked about her mother’s illness, and Merryl felt pinned between the two problems. She felt guilty she hadn’t had time to comfort her mother; at the same time she was anxious to find out what had happened at Carl’s appointment with his therapist that day. Merryl herself had spoken with her gynecologist that morning about her difficulties getting pregnant, and with her own therapist that afternoon all she had talked about was Carl’s depression. Yet life spun crazily through these tragedies—her mother, ever practical, pruning the philodendron that Carl, the gardener in the house, had neglected for months; her father noticing that the rug had been cleaned. When Carl came back after half an hour, he went straight into his study and shut the door.
After her parents left, Merryl asked Carl about his appointment with the therapist. Had he talked to the therapist about suicide? Yes, said Carl, he had. But he had said he didn’t have the courage to do it, and the doctor had replied that he wasn’t worried. Merryl felt a breeze of relief. But it was short-lived. That night Carl talked wildly. He spoke of giving up the dissertation; he was sure it would be exposed as a failure. He had to finish it, he said, but he couldn’t. “If I give up the dissertation, I’m giving up my life.” His life was much more than the dissertation, Merryl assured him. Carl looked up from his work and said, “What would happen if I didn’t finish it? What would you do?” Merryl told him she would still love him, that she would never leave him. Carl managed a tight smile and for a moment seemed calmed, but then he was back inside himself, going back and forth about whether he could finish it. “This is the living out of my worst nightmare,” he said. “I always knew I’d be a failure, and now I am.” Eight or ten times he got up from his chair to pace, then sat back down, pulling his chair right up to the desk, his face scouring the quilt of papers; then he would push his chair back abruptly, wood screeching on wood, and pace once more. Once he stared at Merryl and said, “You know, today I looked at that portrait of me that you say has such sensitive eyes.” Merryl broke in and said, “They are, Carl.” Carl leaped up, went into the living room, came back, and said, “They’re not the eyes of a sensitive person, they’re the eyes of a weak person.” He stared at her. “I’m frightened of life.”
When Merryl woke on Friday morning, Carl was already at his desk poring over his dissertation. Merryl went off to work carrying a pamphlet on infertility. At noon Carl called to say that he had been offered the VA job. Merryl was flooded with relief. He and Merryl talked about his sudden change of luck, and Carl said that he would pick her up at work at six. When they said good-bye, Merryl’s last word was “Congratulations!”
That afternoon Merryl felt as if she and Carl had been pulled back from a precipice. She was able to free her mind from worry for the first time in weeks. She could also devote some thought to the upcoming weekend. Carl’s brother’s son had been born the week before. The baby had been named Carl, and the christening was to be that Sunday. Afterward Merryl and Carl were going to host a small party. Merryl knew Carl wasn’t looking forward to it, but maybe now that he had a job offer, he would be less edgy. A woman at work had baked a cake in the shape of baby blocks, with the name Carl written across the top. The cake sat on Merryl’s desk that evening as she waited for Carl to arrive.
At six o’clock there was no sign of Carl. At six-fifteen Merryl called home. No answer. Maybe he was on his way. She waited ten minutes and called again. No answer. She called their landlord, who said his son had seen Carl leave at six. Carl had seemed agitated. By seven Merryl was frantic. At seven-twenty she left a note on her desk: “Where are you, Carl? What happened?” With the cake melting in her arms she went outside and hailed a cab.
When she got home, she left the cake on the porch and ran inside. The first thing she noticed was a clothes hanger on their bed. She ran to the closet. One of Carl’s suits was missing. For a moment she hoped maybe Carl was going to surprise her with a dress-up dinner out because he’d gotten the job. But then she saw that a second suit was missing, and her stomach went sour. She ran into the bathroom; his toothbrush was gone. She ran to the front closet; the suitcases were gone. Carl was gone; something had gone bad. Merryl fell sobbing to the floor.
She called her parents. They called her brother, who hurried over. She called Carl’s therapist, and when Merryl told him Carl had packed suitcases, he said that didn’t sound like a man who was going to kill himself. Merryl and her brother explored every possibility. Maybe he was in a hotel in Boston mulling things over, said Merryl. Maybe he was in his car, parked somewhere in confusion, said her brother; maybe he was even on some nearby street. Merryl half-hoped he’d gone to Atlanta or to the sun belt, places he’d talked about where there might be jobs. She and her brother got out maps and traced possible routes to possible destinations. She waited for the phone to ring, and she imagined Carl’s familiar voice saying he was in Atlanta, he’d been looking for work, but he was on his way home. Or maybe she’d get a letter with a Texas postmark telling her he’d gotten a job in Dallas. That night while her brother slept on a mattress in Carl’s study, Merryl sat up on her bed with the light on. Every five or ten minutes she’d hear a scratch or a whirr and run to the back door, thinking it might be Carl. But it was always a branch creaking or the wind blowing or a car driving down another street. She pressed herself against the door so hard that months later marks from her forehead and fingers lingered on the glass.
When the sun came up, the fullness of the fact hit her: It was Saturday morning and Carl wasn’t there. Merryl ran to the mirror and screamed, “Where are you? Where are you?”
At noon Merryl called the police to report that Carl was missing. When a patrolman arrived, he told her that everything was going to be okay, that it happened all the time, that her husband was probably sitting in the car somewhere, just thinking things through. But as he stood in her living room filling out a missing persons report, and she told him Carl’s height, weight, and date of birth, Merryl realized that the world she had tried to contain was yawning wide.
On Saturday night Carl’s parents arrived from New Hampshire. They had been packing to drive down for their grandson Carl’s christening when Merryl had called. They drove to Merryl and Carl’s apartment instead. Saturday night became Sunday, and still no word. Merryl and her in-laws scoured the house for notes but found no hints. Carl had left everything neat. He’d taken out the garbage. He’d opened the windows to let in the breeze.
At nine on Sunday night there was a knock on the door. Merryl sprang up to open it. A policeman wearing sunglasses handed her a slip of paper with a number on it and said, “Somebody’s been trying to reach you all day.” Merryl’s mother-in-law told him they’d been in the house all day. “I don’t know,” said the policeman. “All I know is just call this number.” He turned and left.
Merryl went into the kitchen and dialed the number, which had a New York area code. It rang once. A deep, heavy voice answered, “Medical.” In the back of her mind Merryl knew from some TV show that this meant “medical examiner,” but still hoping she said, “Is this a hospital?” There was a pause and the voice said, “Lady, this is the morgue.”
Merryl dropped the phone and screamed. She ran through the kitchen, out of the house, and leaped off the back porch to the gravel driveway, a six-foot drop. She hurled herself repeatedly onto the space in the driveway where Carl’s car should have been. Then she crawled under her landlord’s car and lay there screaming, wedged between the carburetor and the gravel.
Merryl could see her mother-in-law’s face trying to tell her something as she knelt by the car. She could see legs and feet multiplying. She could hear her name occasionally surface from the blur of voices. And still she screamed. Her head felt as if it were on fire. Her face, her arms, and her legs were scratched and bloody. Her shirt was torn. She’d lost her glasses. She felt she couldn’t be in a normal space; the world suddenly seemed so unnatural and misshapen and wrong and dangerous that the only place she could be comfortable was between the car and the gravel. If she had had her way, she would have stayed there forever, screaming.