Three Women (32 page)

Suzanne and Beverly

Suzanne thought Rachel, in trying to act cheerful, sounded so miserable, she ended up urging her to get back together with Michael. She could tell that rejecting that suggestion made Rachel feel better. Rachel had made a Mizrachi friend, Nava, a young woman with Moroccan parents. She was invited to the older sister’s henna party. Suzanne worried that the wedding preparations would upset Rachel. Perhaps it was too exotic to make her jealous. The henna party was all women, with hours of eating and giggling and dancing. Rachel wrote that she was sending photos. If Rachel was depressed by the wedding, her E-mail did not reflect it. Karla kept insisting they would get back together, but Suzanne was doubtful. If Rachel felt that Michael was in essential disagreement with her about something as important as her religion and her role as a rabbi, they would not reconcile. The rift had hurt Rachel and shaken her confidence.

Suzanne understood how the quarrel could cause Rachel to doubt her ability to command love. She had been down that betrayal road herself. She had been slow to suspect Sam, because even Victor, whom everyone
had expected to be constantly running around, had seemed satisfied with her until she got pregnant. She had begun to suspect Sam when stories and schedules did not jibe. She had been shocked at the deceit as much as at the infidelity. She had been told a hundred times that she just didn’t understand temptation. It was her nature to fall in love rarely, to put her practice and her daughters before any man, and to have too much trouble trusting the love of one man ever to consider another on the side. She had no time for complications. She could still find buried in the bottom of her brain a hot core of anger, a seed she had never let grow but had never rooted out. It was there, radioactive but unacted upon—that old painful sense of betrayal she called upon in defending many of her women clients.

Sam had phoned her the week before, wanting to discuss Marta’s divorce and the situation with Elena. She had referred him to Miles, who surely could handle Sam and deal with his curiosity. Marta and Sam had never gotten along. She wasn’t about to say one word to him that might come back to haunt Marta or give him satisfaction. Sometimes she was fond of Sam, but she did not entirely trust him where Marta was concerned. They had old grudges they hadn’t aired or relinquished. Years ago, she had resolved never to be caught between them.

Suzanne had to muster all her patience, never considerable, to have a real conversation with Beverly. Beverly was sitting up in bed, while Suzanne sat in a desk chair dragged up beside the bed.

Beverly wrote, BETTER GAVE YOU KARLA FULL TIME.

Instead of denying the suggestion to avoid a fight, Suzanne pondered what Beverly had written. “Maybe so,” she said. “It was hard going back and forth. You had such different ideas about everything. With Karla, I went to shul. With Karla, I was supposed to be interested in food and to like to learn to cook. Eating was good. With you, any mention of religion set you off. You didn’t want to observe Jewish holidays, so if I didn’t spend them with Karla, I didn’t get any holidays. You were bored with food. Grab some takeout. Have a snack. You never ate much and you hated to cook.”

Beverly shook back her hair, struggling to speak. “Karla…fat.”

“I didn’t think that was so bad. Her house smelled like cinnamon and
garlic and onions and rendering chicken fat. Her chairs were easy to sit in. She spoiled me, you said, and certainly she made me feel like something precious. But I couldn’t want to be her. She was a third grade teacher. I already knew that wasn’t enough to be.”

Beverly carefully printed, I MADE YOU SNOB?

“Let’s just say you had higher ambitions for me. Security wasn’t your goal, and you didn’t want it to be mine.”

“So not…all bad.”

“Of course not. But you two sure were a contrast. You were glamorous. You were a flirt—”

Beverly laughed, waving her hand as if to bat at a fly.

“You were always coming and going. You had boyfriends. If you entered a room, everyone knew it. You had politics. You took chances. But Karla was kinder. Gentler. And she was more…affectionate.”

SHOULD NOT HAD KID.

Suzanne knew she should disagree politely, but she could not, for she had often thought the same thing. When she was little, how often she had wished that Karla were her mother and Beverly her aunt. She had felt guilty for that wish, but she had not been able to keep herself from confiding it to Karla—who had been very, very pleased. She would have said that the two sisters were at war over her, except that her mother seemed rather satisfied to leave her to Karla at least half the time. “Well, I suppose I had two mothers. That must be twice as good as one. Basically, you know, you were flat out, the way I live now. I barely have time for anybody, and you were the same way. We’re alike in that. You gave first place to your work, because it was important to you—”

“Im…portant…others.”

“Likewise for me. Besides, she let me down too. When I came back from college, I’d been replaced. She was crazy about Suwanda—she’d just adopted her—and suddenly I was no longer the golden girl. But you and I are more alike than you realize in how we deal with things. You had Karla take care of me, and I get Elena to help and the agency.”

Beverly nodded. She let her head loll back on the pillow. “Tired.”

Suzanne started to rise. “I’ll let you rest then.”

Beverly stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Must talk.”

Suzanne took her seat again. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”

“You know. Want die.”

“Yeah. You want to die.” She looked hard at her mother. “You’re asking me to commit murder, you understand that, Mother.”

Beverly shrugged. “Do…careful.”

“I teach the law. I am an officer of the court. We’ve already had one notorious case touching this family.”

Tears rolled out of Beverly’s eyes. “No…go on. No.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Suzanne asked out loud.

“Pills.”

“What kind of pills?”

Beverly gestured toward the bookcase she had been using as a dresser. “Top…shelf.”

Suzanne went to the bookcase. She saw only socks and stockings and mittens. A jar of oversize safety pins. “What am I looking for?”

“Print…out.”

She found a sheaf of papers under the socks, downloaded from the Internet, from last July before Beverly’s second stroke. It consisted of descriptions of various ways for terminally ill people to end their lives. “But you’re not terminally ill.”

Beverly had been writing on her pad. NO END. WORSE THAN TERMINAL. On a second sheet she continued printing, LITTLE ME LEFT. ALL I VALUE GONE. BURDEN. THIS NOT LIFE!

Beverly felt exhausted and frustrated. To say something simple, almost simpleminded, took all her strength. Why couldn’t she make Suzanne understand? There had to be a way to get through to her. Her thoughts raced in her head, although sometimes a word or a phrase eluded her and she had to make do with some equivalent, but what came out of her mouth was crude and jerky. It was not what she wanted to say, but a brief headline version. Everything became a summary, a synopsis, a piece torn from her meaning. It wasn’t enough to sustain her interest just to eat, shit, and sleep. She was trapped in this broken mind and partly paralyzed body. She was tired of it, tired to death. If only she could make them feel what she felt. But how? “Why you…make…me stay?”

“Is it that bad here?”

Beverly nodded fervently. She longed to tell Suzanne it wasn’t any
thing wrong she was doing. This was not Beverly’s life, rather Suzanne’s she was squatting in the middle of, out of place, unable to communicate, unable to act.

“Would you be happier in some kind of facility?”

“No! No!” That was living death: to be stored with the other dysfunctional to be minimally tended by underpaid staff who had no idea who she had been and did not care. “On steps…disappointed.”

Suzanne pondered for a moment. “Are you talking about this summer?”

Beverly nodded. “Bad day.”

“It sure was.”

“Marta free. Elena okay.” She hated to hear herself talk. It was humiliating to sound like a two-year-old or someone who had only begun to learn English. Every time she opened her mouth, she cringed. She printed, NOW TIME HELP ME!

“We’re trying to help you. Elena and I and the aides who come in make sure you walk every day. We try to give you what you need, Mother, even if you don’t think we succeed.”

She glared. How could Suzanne so stubbornly refuse to understand? She felt taken advantage of. Because she could barely argue her case, Suzanne could pretend she did not know what Beverly wanted. “Help…die. Only help…want.”

Suzanne was silent for a long time. Beverly waited her out, staring. Did her daughter really think she would forget what she wanted so passionately, that she would change her mind, that she would drop the subject? Fat chance. She would not let Suzanne forget what had to be done. She would hound her daughter until she got her way. She had to communicate her desperation, even though she felt like a toddler in a high chair banging a spoon. “Only…thing…want.” She hit her good hand against her chest. God, she was skinny and flabby. Her own body disgusted her. It was not the body she had nourished and cared for, the vehicle of her will and her pleasure. “Die!”

Suzanne began to weep. Beverly wished she could hit her. How dare her daughter sit and weep because of what she wanted and desperately needed? As if the whole family wouldn’t be much better off with her out of the house. How dare Suzanne assume she was not aware how much her illness was costing—she’d asked the aides what they were paid
and multiplied that by two—and for what? Boredom and pain and disgust. She glared at her daughter, who looked up, saw her, and began to cry harder. This is a big help, Beverly thought, a great big help, as if crying made anything different. She was never a weeper. Karla was. Since they’d been little girls, she had wept at anything: you only had to tell her a dog had been run over or a bird had hit a window, and she was off. In the movies, she was always blubbering. Sometimes Beverly had refused to sit with her. In fact, Suzanne had been the same way, but Beverly had shamed it out of her, making her more stoical, stronger. It was undignified to be constantly spouting tears. Women who relied on crying to get their way should be ashamed. Never had she used tears as a weapon, and she was immune to them. Suzanne could blubber all night, but Beverly would not alter one jot of her intent.

Suzanne felt despair like a cold rock in her abdomen. Beverly was not going to relent. She was not going to stop sitting there like a furious owl glaring and repeating in that low cracked voice that she wanted to die. She could just see explaining to Beverly’s doctors that her mother was bent on suicide, except that Beverly was far too helpless to commit suicide. Suzanne would be responsible for killing her.

Suzanne had fought legal battles for twenty-five years, but never had she killed anything larger than an earwig. She had lived her life non-violently. She could not even imagine helping her mother die. She still had in her lap the sheaf of papers Beverly had insisted she take from the shelf. Obviously Beverly had been contemplating suicide even before her second stroke. Obviously she was not about to change her mind, no matter what Suzanne argued. She felt trapped. Whatever she did would bring an avalanche of guilt down on her. She would be buried in guilt whether she refused to help her mother die, or whether she was coerced into killing her. How could she live with either choice?

She waved the papers. “I’ll read this and get back to you.” How ridiculous that sounded, as if it were a brief on which she was offering an opinion.

“Help…me.”

“I’ll do what I can, Mother. I’ll do what I can.”

Beverly reached out with her good hand and grasped Suzanne’s wrist, hard. Suzanne was surprised how much strength Beverly could muster.
Her mother’s gaze never wavered from hers. She seemed determined not to blink. “Must, Suze, must.”

Suze: what her mother had called her when she was a little girl, and Beverly was actually pleased with her. She was not so much touched as briefly amused. “You’re a crafty old manipulator, Beverly. You won’t give up, will you?”

“No.”

“I’ll read the material and consider very seriously what I can do. Now, let go of my arm, Mother.” She then bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

Beverly held on for another minute and then let go. “Tomorrow.”

“Yes, tomorrow we’ll talk again. That’s a promise.”

Suzanne turned out the lights and went into her office. What her mother had given her did not exactly seem like bedroom reading. She sat down at her desk to read the directions for ending her mother’s life. She wished that she drank whisky, but the strongest thing she ever consumed was sherry, at the dean’s socials. She didn’t even have any of that handy. There were times it was a real pity she was not a drinking woman.

As she was reading, she got a call from a California lawyer who owed her a favor. She had talked him into helping on Jake’s case. “It’s bad. The judge has just given instructions to the jury that practically preclude anything but a guilty verdict including the conspiracy charge, which is the real killer. I think there’re plenty of grounds for appeal, but since I came in late, I won’t know till I see the complete court transcripts.”

“There’s really a chance Jake could go to prison?”

“I’d say the odds are on it.”

Elena

Elena listened to her mother going on about this case in Florida where the guy got a suspended sentence for helping his wife die and this case where a guy got fifteen years house arrest. Then there was a case in North Carolina where a son was convicted of first-degree murder, in spite of the fact that his father was dying and begging him to end his suffering. Now she was talking about something called Cruzan.

“It’s a crap game,” Suzanne said, putting down her notes. “There is no state in which the law recognizes the right of a family member to help someone die, even when they have begged for it and are in terrible pain.” Suzanne rose and began pacing, not frantically but almost to Elena’s eyes with a mechanical precision, turning each time on her heel. “For exactly the same act, juries have repeatedly let the defendant go free while other juries have sent people to prison for life. The standard defense is the kind of temporary insanity plea. Everybody knows it’s patently untrue, but the juries will often seize on it to justify what happened. And in
Washington v. Glucksberg
, the Supreme Court opinion, written by Rehnquist, made a strong distinction between withholding medical treatment and affirmatively giving someone medication that could kill, thus overturning the decisions maintaining the right to die from the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts.”

“So a lot of these guys took a gun and snuffed the one they loved. But we’re talking about pills,” Elena said. “If we do it right, there’s no murder investigation. Come on, Mother, we should be able to help her.”

Suzanne sat down again to the pages of notes she had brought with her to this little meeting in her home office with the door shut. “You’re convinced we should do this?”

“Mother, she’s been begging me for two months before she ever asked you. I can’t refuse her, just to protect my own neck. I love Grandma.”

“I love her too—”

“But you have a lot of history. She was always there for me. She never judged me. I owe her this.”

“The fact that I have history with her makes it even more complicated. How do we know we haven’t made her feel guilty for being dependent on us?”

“She does feel guilty for being dependent. Wouldn’t you?”

“Then we’re failing. How do we know we’re not subtly encouraging this for our own convenience?”

“I suppose because, according to you, we could both go to prison for life.”

“But don’t you sometimes feel imprisoned now? Don’t you wish you didn’t have to rush back here to sit with her? To help her to the bathroom. To change bedpans or sheets when she doesn’t make it to the bathroom in time. To help her bathe. To help her eat. To take her to the doctors and the therapists. Doesn’t that get to you?”

“Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes not. I have more patience than you do.”

“The cats have more patience than I do. But don’t you see, Elena, we have motive. How can we be sure it’s not our own convenience we’re acting on?”

“Because she’s been asking and asking again. She’s in despair. She hates her life now, Mother. Can’t you understand that, can’t you try to see this from her point of view, just this once?”

Suzanne sighed. “I hate suicide. I can’t help it. When I think you almost killed yourself when you were fifteen—”

“Come on, Mother, that’s ancient. It was never my idea. It’s one thing Marta was right about. Chad wanted to die, he was so bullshit at his father. He was just ripped. He didn’t want the life his father was making him live. He felt he’d rather die than go to military school. I was just fucking bored.”

“I know you don’t like my starting with the legal aspects, but that’s how I come at it. I can divide our research into several parts—”

“Research?” Elena heard her voice rise in a spiral.

Suzanne looked at her in surprise. “Yes, research. First, the law. Second, available methods, pros and cons, and of those methods, determine
which are actually practical for Beverly and for us. Then, once we have chosen a method, if we both decide it is advisable to proceed, how to do it.”

Elena laughed dryly. “Here we are, working together, Mother. For perhaps the first time.”

“Is it really? I guess it is.” Suzanne lay back in her desk chair and closed her eyes for a moment. “I wish it was less grim.”

“Why should it be grim? We’re working to release her. It’s the best present we could give her. We have to do it for her, Mother. We both promised.”

“Yes, we did, Elena, we must be out of our minds.” Suzanne raised her hand wearily to forestall a reaction. “One of the thorniest points is that she is not dying, she is not in unbearable pain. She simply feels helpless and hopeless and she wants to be done with a struggle she’s losing. Okay. Now the practical.” Her mother brought out the sheaf of papers Elena recognized as Grandma’s printout.

Elena stood. “I’ll take over this part. I’ll do the…research.”

Her mother looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Are you sure you want to? It’s rather dull library stuff.”

“You think I can’t do it because it’s too intellectual for me?”

“Never. Of course you can. I’m a little surprised you’re volunteering.”

She knew very well her mother did not believe in her ability to dig up information on suicide methods but could not say so. She smiled. Mother was sometimes ridiculously easy to manipulate. Elena wanted to figure it out. She was pretty good at scouting out drugs, and she had connections for getting them without leaving a paper trail. “It’s a job I’m more than willing to take on.” She trusted herself more than Suzanne’s scruples in the situation.

Suddenly Suzanne crumpled. She sat at her desk with her head in her hands, weeping. Sobs wracked her. Elena was terrified for a moment. Suzanne never cried. She moved slowly toward her mother, hoping it would end as spontaneously as it had begun. Then awkwardly, tentatively, she put her arm around Suzanne and patted her back, feeling somewhat like a person afraid of horses attempting to quiet one.

Suzanne got herself back under control. When she could speak, she said softly, “It’s hard to explain. But all this means giving up. Giving up the fantasy that someday she and I would understand each other, would
…have a better way of being together…. Don’t be upset, Elena, it’s just an old daydream of mine.”

“At least the two of us are doing better, Mother, don’t you think? That’s something neither of us expected, right? At least we have that.”

There were lots of nice ways of saying what they were talking about, ways people had invented to discuss a person offing themselves with words like tongs. One of Elena’s favorites was “self-deliverance,” which sounded like having a baby on your own. If she was amused by the language that went around death on tiptoe, she was matter-of-fact about gathering information. Chad had been sloppy in planning his own death. He had taken Evan with him, without Evan’s desire, simply because Chad had been out of control. If he had truly wanted to kill himself and only himself, the solution would have been to take the gun, lock himself in his room at home and use it, or walk into the desert alone and put the gun to his head. But he had not wanted to die alone. He had wanted company in his dying, for them to be with him and for them to die with him. For so many years, she had felt guilty that she had not shot herself or been shot. She had not been able to protect Evan. She had failed him. But she did not feel guilty toward Chad. Finally after all these years, she found in the core of herself a certain amount of anger and a certain amount of pity. Sometimes anger dominated and sometimes pity, but the guilt for not dying with them was utterly wiped. Evan had died because of Chad’s gun, not because of her.

She went off to the public library and began to look for books on suicide, which proved irrelevant—endless statistics and stupid generalizations. Psychological profiles. Pontificating. Then she tried poison. That was more useful, although most ways sounded too painful.

In a big bookstore, she found a couple of books that were actually about helping people to die, or people offing themselves. She stood by the shelf reading them for a while before she decided the one to buy. She bought a couple of random books so that the bookstore employee would be less likely to remember her: an Italian cookbook and a book about all the various current psychological therapies. That she might actually read. The clerk was maybe twenty-two and paid no attention. She gave him cash.

She carried home her three books and sat down to read case histories
of suicides,
Let Me Die Before I Wake
. Most of the people seemed to have cancer, but Grandma had the same right to decide she didn’t want to live. Grandma wanted to do it neatly. She hadn’t asked about Mother’s gun, which was a blessing. Elena could still see Chad with his head blasted open and the brains and blood spilling out. Shooting a person turned them into garbage.

She sat up on her bed with the pillows piled up behind her and read the book with a yellow transparent marking pen, just as if she were back in college and studying for her finals. She was methodical. It was very important to her to do this right, to learn what was needed to help Grandma and prove herself to her mother and, most importantly, to herself. It mattered a lot that she not fuck up. Her new image of herself as the competent therapist went with the careful note taking, the figuring of the exact amounts of whatever drugs she could buy that were necessary for a sure lethal dose.

After the restaurant closed Friday night, she went out to the late-hours bar with the gang and took a seat next to Robby, watching for a good opportunity to talk when no one else was listening. Robby mostly dealt cocaine, crack, heroin, and marijuana, but he boasted he could provide anything. Finally her chance came. “Robby, I need some stuff.”

“I’m listening.”

She did not dare ask him to get it all at once. It would be too weird. She would ask for part of it and then in a week or so, request more. “I’d love to have some Nembutals or Amytals or…” She went down her list. “And maybe some Darvon or Demerol or codeine?”

“Either/or, or both.”

“Like I’d want both, but I’ll take what I can get.”

“It’s going to cost you.” What he never would ask was why she wanted it. Presumably to get high, to get low, to get out of it.

“If you want to fly, you got to pay. When can you have it?”

“Next Friday.”

“Give me a ballpark figure and I’ll have the bills.”

When Elena reported back to her mother, she was pleased to tell her not only that she had figured out what to use—drugs and dosage—but that she had lined up the first delivery for the next night. What she
needed was cash in fifties. Robby liked fifties. “Neither too big nor too small,” he had said in his deep liquid voice. “Just right.”

Friday night she gave Robby the money and she got the pills in two vitamin bottles. “The vitamin C is the Nembutal. The B complex is the codeine.”

Instead of putting them in her purse, she put them in the pocket of her black silk pants. The bulge would not show under her mandarin-collared tunic of deep red and gold. It felt safer to keep them with her than to leave them in her purse in Natalie’s office. Every time she felt them bump against her, she felt proud of herself. Grandma’s deliverance. How happy she would be. It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

She waited till she was at Sean’s, to count them in the bathroom. She needed thirty Nembutal. Robby had sold her ten. He’d been more generous with the codeine.

Her mother was waiting for her Saturday morning. “Beverly’s asleep. Did you get it?”

Elena produced first one bottle with a flourish and then the other. She felt like a magician. “It’s part of what she needs.”

Her mother looked at the bottles but did not touch them. “That’s it?”

“What did you expect, a guillotine?”

Suzanne ran her fingers through her short thick hair. “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“It’s not like you to be so indecisive.”

“I never murdered my mother before.”

“Come on, don’t be melodramatic. Don’t you believe she has a right to decide when to give up her life? When to die with dignity, while she still can?”

“I believe it—in the abstract.”

“Well, I’m exhausted. We’ll talk it over with Grandma tomorrow in the morning when she’s got it together. Now I’m going to bed.” Elena was a little miffed that her mother did not appreciate what she had done, but Grandma would.

“Can you get the rest?” Suzanne asked, wringing her hands. “This much won’t do it, if I understand you correctly.”

“Next week I’ll get more. And the week after I’ll get the last install
ment. I can’t ask for it all at once. The guy I’m dealing with would be too suspicious.”

When it came to the third time she asked, he was leery. “You’ve been doing a lot of those. Got a habit? Or are you dealing them?”

“I’m doing them with two friends who are in town for a while. I’m not addicted. We’ve just been into it lately. I don’t do it when I have to work. Have I seemed off to you?”

“Guess not.” But she noticed him watching her, and she was extra careful with everyone that night and the rest of the week. The price went up. He was testing her. Well, after this batch, she would tell him her friends had left and she was no longer interested. She’d buy some weed just to fool him.

On Saturday he finally sold her the last of what they needed. She did not spend that night at Sean’s. She just told him she was feeling a little queasy, something she’d eaten. Sean hadn’t seen the transactions in the cloakroom. Robby never talked about his customers. She drove home cautiously, not even running a yellow. When she had actually shut the front door behind her and entered the house with the pills still in her pants pocket, she felt an immense relief. It was all there, everything Grandma needed. She had done it.