2003, South Carolina

By Elizabeth McKennedy

After the door clicked shut behind me, I moved closer and jabbed at his arm with one finger.

“Wake up,” I said. He didn’t stir. “This much hasn’t changed, I guess.”

For seven years, whenever things had seemed too complicated, Jason would lie still with his eyes closed until he fell asleep or I walked away - whatever happened first.

During the first few years, he always fell asleep before I walked away, but the longer we stayed together, the more time he spent making himself invisible. I learned to walk away, because staying and hoping gradually felt more and more like drowning.

“This is why I left,” I said. If not for the incision down his chest and stomach, I thought. If not for the steel table, this might be more what it looks like than what it is.

“Wake up, goddamn you.” I raised my fist and pounded his chest. “Don’t do this,” I said, and pounded his chest again, then again. If not for that empty thud.

I lay my head on his chest and cried for the first time in two days. “Your heart isn’t beating,” I said.

“You did this,” he had said. He’d blamed me for everything else; why not this?

“Don’t let them see,” he’d said with a gun in his hand, two nights ago when I thought the police would come in time.

“Don’t leave me,” he’d said after he punched me, after I lost my grip on the baby, after I shoved him away and asked, “Who are you?”

“Don’t leave me,” he’d said, and then, “Don’t let them see,” and then, “You did this.”

I stood up to wipe my face. “This is not my fault,” I said, wishing the tears would come back, wishing that I could believe that this was actually happening so I could feel something other than cold dead nothing. “I don’t care what you say; I’m not taking responsibility for this.”

“Don’t leave me.”

I had asked the same thing: “Please, I’ll be different.” But he always left. He left because he had to, because it wasn’t right. It had never been right, and it would never be right, and we both knew it. He left, and I waited, because he always came back. He would come back with flowers, and we would cry and promise, and start the whole mess up again.

“I stayed,” I said. “You asked me not to leave, and I stayed.”

I hadn’t made any promises, and he knew that I wouldn’t stay forever, but when he asked me to stay, I followed him to the closet.

“You never stayed. Not once. And I stayed because I know how it feels, and look what I got.”

“You did this,” he’d said, then raised the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger before I knew what was happening.

I saw the blood and ran, slammed the door behind me, screamed into the phone at the operator.

I didn’t see him fall. I wondered, waiting in the hallway for the police, if I’d imagined the whole thing.

“Dead on a table with a hole in your head, and I’m standing here talking to you, as if you fucking care.”

The police had come in the backdoor without knocking or ringing the bell, three of them with guns drawn and aimed toward the back hallway where I stood with the baby.

I pointed toward the bedroom door. “He’s in there.”

They opened the bedroom door and led with their guns, shouting, “Drop your weapon,” and I felt sure that I must have imagined the blood, until the shouting stopped.

The three of them stood outside the closet door, guns lowered.

“OK, partner,” the oldest officer said, his voice softer now, as if he were speaking to a child who had finally given up a tantrum. “Put down your weapon for me.”

He slid his gun back into its holster and leaned into the closet, down toward the floor.

“There we go,” he said, and stepped back with Jason’s gun pinched between two fingers like someone else’s dirty underwear. “We need crime scene and EMS,” he said, then nodded toward me. “And let’s get her outside.”

Standing in the hallway, I asked, “Is he alive?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Half an hour later, waiting in the backseat of the cruiser, I asked again, a different officer this time: “Is he alive?”

“I believe so.”

Leaning against the back of the cruiser now, signing a search warrant on the trunk, I asked the first officer again: “Is he alive?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know.”

Two hours after the gunshot, smoking a cigarette, I gave my statement a fifth time, this time to the detective.

“Is he going to be OK?” I asked. “No one seems to know.”

“No ma’am,” the detective said. “He’s dead.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

I looked down the driveway, across the street, down at my feet, back up at the detective. I wanted to throw up, or cry, or feel something, but I had nothing.

“We were together for seven years,” I said. The detective took this down in his pad, as if it mattered now. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Who in the hell is widowed at 24?” I asked Jason, who offered no explanation.

I noticed how clean his hands were for the first time in as many years as I’d known him. He worked on machines all day, and no matter how hard he scrubbed, or what he scrubbed with – he’d once scrubbed his hands with a wire brush — the grease had worked its way into his skin and wouldn’t come off.

I wondered how long it had taken to scrub his hands clean and who had washed the blood out of his hair.

I wondered why they’d tucked a cotton ball into the entry wound. He’d already been embalmed; the wound wouldn’t continue to bleed. If I pulled out the cotton, I wondered, could I see through to the wall?

“You know what? Be a fucking man,” I said. “Wake up and tell me why you did this to me.” I traced the stitches over his scalp, from ear to ear across the top of his head. “And while you’re at it, tell me how in the hell to explain this shit to a 3-year-old.”

I’d imagined a goldfish or a hamster, buried in a shoebox. I wouldn’t have to mention ashes, or dust, or guns, or police, or why his father had said, “He’s not my kid anymore. He’s just yours now.”

But he’d been there; he’d seen the gun and heard the argument. He’d heard the gunshot, and he’d heard me telling the operator, “He shot himself.”

I couldn’t lie or make it pretty. I couldn’t gloss over it or tell him this had all been an accident. I couldn’t see telling him death is a part of life, something that just happens to all of us, because what had happened wasn’t a part of life, and it didn’t just happen; it was a choice his father had made, and it couldn’t be forced into a smooth round capsule and swallowed.

The only explanation that came to mind was, “Sometimes people are stupid,” but that seemed applicable only as a part of the bigger picture, for another time when he was old enough to really understand, not as an explanation in itself.

I said nothing, and he’d gone to visit my grandparents, where he wouldn’t have to wonder why his father wasn’t there, where my grandparents had taped a sign to the front door, a scrap of paper and red block letters to alert visitors as they rang the bell: HE DOESN’T KNOW YET.

“He deserves better than you,” I said. “This is probably the best thing that could have happened for him. No kid should have to grow up with a father like you, and I think this proves it.” I slammed the door behind me and ran out the front door without stopping to speak to the funeral director.

I had nowhere to go, I realized as I started the car, and no one to run to. Jason was gone, and I was free - as free as I’d wished to be all those nights he called, drunk, begging for one last chance I couldn’t afford to give – but even as I drove back to my apartment, to sit alone in the dark and try to think of anything other than this, I knew I’d go back.

I’d go back again today, and again tomorrow before the wake, and again on Friday before the funeral.

Every time we’d said good-bye, I’d wished good-bye would last forever, and now that forever had come, I didn’t know how to let go.

Elizabeth McKennedy lives in North Carolina with her husband, their son, and a cat. She is currently unemployed and working on a collection of irreverent essays about her first husband’s suicide, several of which can be found, expletive-laced and unedited, at Secondhand Suicide.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 | Email This Post

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