What Comes Next (2 page)

He had always thought of himself as a decisive sort of person, and he welcomed the harsh insistence of suicide. He tried to come up with arguments for delay but none jumped to mind.

Maybe,
he told himself,
just stay right here. It’s a nice spot.
One of his favorites. A good enough place to die. He wondered whether the temperature would drop enough over the course of the night to freeze him to death. He doubted it. He imagined that he would just spend an unpleasant night shivering and coughing and live to see the sun come up, and that this would be embarrassing, even if he was the only person in the world who’d have seen sunrise as failure.

Adrian shook his head.

Look around,
he told himself.
Remember what’s worth remembering. Ignore the rest.

He looked down at his shoes. They were caked with mud and soaked through, and he wondered why he couldn’t feel the damp against his toes.

No more delays,
he insisted. Adrian stood up, brushing some of the shale dust from his trousers. He could see shadows seeping through the brush and trees, the path down the mountain darkening with each passing second.

He looked back at the valley.
That was where I taught. Over there is where we lived.
He wished he could see all the way to the loft in New York City where he’d met his wife and fallen in love for the first time, but he could not. He wished he could see his childhood haunts and places he remembered from all sorts of moments growing up. He wished he could see the rue Madeleine in Paris and the corner bistro where he and his wife had taken their coffee every morning while on sabbaticals or the Hotel Savoy in Berlin, where they’d stayed in the Marlene Dietrich suite when he had been called upon to give a speech to the Institut fur Psychologie and conceived their only child. He strained, looking east toward the house on the Cape, where he’d spent summers since his youth, and the beaches where he’d learned to throw a fly to cruising striped bass or any of the local trout steams where he’d waded amid ancient boulders and water that had seemed to be alive with energy.

Lots to miss,
he said to himself.

Can’t be helped.

He turned away from what he could and what he couldn’t see and started down the path. It was slow going.

He was only half a block from his house, cutting through the rows of modest middle-class, white clapboard homes that were filled with the eclectic selection of other college faculty and local insurance men, dentists, freelance business writers, yoga instructors, and life coaches that made up his neighborhood, when he spotted the girl walking down the side of the road.

Ordinarily, he would not have paid much attention, but there was something in the determined way the girl was pacing forward that struck him. She seemed filled with purpose. She had dusty blond hair that was tucked up under a bright pink Boston Red Sox cap, and he saw that her dark parka was ripped in a couple of places, as were her jeans. What grabbed his attention was her backpack, which seemed stuffed nearly to overflowing with clothes. At first he thought she was just walking home after being dropped off by the late bus from the high school, the bus that distributed the kids who had been kept after school for disciplinary reasons. But he noticed fastened to her backpack a large stuffed teddy bear and he could not imagine why someone would take a childhood toy to high school. It would instantly have made her the object of ridicule.

He glanced at her face as he rolled past her.

She was young, barely more than a child, but beautiful in the way that all children on the verge of change are, or at least that was what Adrian thought, although it had been many years since he’d actually tried to get to know someone so young other than in a classroom setting.

She was staring ahead, fiercely.

He did not think she even noticed his car.

Adrian pulled into his driveway but did not get out from behind the wheel. He thought the girl—was she fifteen? sixteen?; he could no longer accurately judge the ages of children—seemed to wear a single-mindedness that spoke of something else. This look fascinated him, jolted his curiosity.

He watched her in his rearview mirror as she walked briskly to the corner.

Then he saw something else, which seemed just slightly out of place in his quiet, determinedly normal neighborhood.

A white panel van, like a small delivery truck but wearing no insignia on the outside advertising an electrician or a painting service, cruised slowly down his street. He glanced inside and saw that a woman was driving and a man was in the passenger seat. This surprised him. It should have been the other way around, he thought, but then he considered he was merely being sexist and clichéd.
Of course a woman can drive a truck,
he told himself. And even though it was getting late and the evening darkness was dropping rapidly through the trees, there was no reason to think that this truck was anything other than ordinary.

But as he watched he saw the van slow down and seem to shadow the marching girl. From his spot inside his car, he saw the van stop across from her. Suddenly, he could not see the girl—the van had blocked his view.

A moment passed, and then the van accelerated sharply around the corner and disappeared into the few twilight moments remaining before night.

He looked again. The girl was gone.

But left behind on the street was the pink baseball cap.

2

As soon as the door opened she knew she was dead. The only questions she had were:
How long do I have? How bad will it be?

It would be some time before she got those answers. Instead, the first minutes were filled with a fierce terror and uncontrollable panic that obscured everything else.

Jennifer Riggins had not immediately turned as the panel truck crept up next to her. She was totally focused on quickly getting to the bus stop slightly more than a half mile away on the nearest main road. In the careful way she had designed the scheme of her escape, the local bus would carry her to the center of town, where she could connect with another bus that would take her to a larger terminal in Springfield, some twenty miles away. And, once there, she imagined she could go anywhere. In her jeans pocket she had more than $300 that she had stolen slowly but surely—five here, ten there—from her mother’s purse or her mother’s boyfriend’s wallet. She had taken her time, collecting the money over the past month, hoarding it in a box inside a drawer beneath her underwear. She had never taken so much at one time that they would notice it, just small amounts that were immediately forgotten. When she’d hit her target number, she had known that it was enough to get to New York or Nashville or maybe even Miami or LA, and so, on her last theft early that morning, she had only taken a twenty-dollar bill and three ones, but she’d added to her stash her mother’s Visa card. She wasn’t sure yet where she was going. Someplace warm, she hoped. But anywhere far away and far different was going to be all right with her. That was what she had been thinking about when the truck pulled to a stop next to her.
I can go anywhere I want…

The man in the passenger seat had said, “Hey, miss, could you help me out for a second with some directions?”

This question had made her pause. She had stopped walking and faced the man in the truck. Her first impressions were that he hadn’t shaved in the morning and that his voice seemed oddly high and filled with more excitement than his ordinary question required. And she was a little annoyed, because she didn’t want to be delayed; she wanted to get away from her home and from her smug neighborhood and from her small boring college town and from her mother and her mother’s boyfriend and the way he looked at her and some of the things he’d done when they were alone and from her awful school and from all the kids she knew and hated and who taunted her every single day of the week. She wanted to get away before it got too dark, but it was still just dark enough so that no one would notice her leaving. She wanted to be on a bus heading
somewhere
that night because she knew that by nine or ten her mother would have finished calling all the numbers she could think of, and then she might actually call the police, because that was what she had done before. Jennifer knew that the police would be
all over
the bus terminal in Springfield, so she had to have made her move by the time all that was set in motion. All these jumbled thoughts flooded into her head as she considered the man’s question.

“What are you looking for?” Jennifer responded.

She saw the man smile.

That’s wrong,
she thought.
He shouldn’t be smiling.

Her initial guess was the man was going to make some vaguely obscene, sexist remark, something insulting or belittling, a
Hi, good-lookin’, you wanna have some fun
lip-smacking nastiness. She was ready for this and ready to tell him to go screw himself and turn her back and keep walking but she was a little confused, because she looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a woman in the driver’s seat. The woman had a knit watchman’s cap pulled down over her hair, and even though she was young there was something harsh in her eyes, something very granite-hard that Jennifer had never seen before and which instantly scared her.

In the woman’s hand was a small HD video camera. It was pointed in Jennifer’s direction. This confused her.

Jennifer heard the man’s answer to her question and it confused her further. She had expected he was asking for a neighborhood address or a direct way to Route 9, but that was not what came out.

“You,” he said.

This made no sense.
Why were they looking for her? No one knew about her plan. It was still too early for her mother to have found the false note she’d left stuck with a magnet to the kitchen refrigerator…

And so she’d hesitated at the very second in time when she should have run furiously hard or screamed loudly for help.

The truck door opened abruptly. The man vaulted out of the passenger seat. He was moving much faster than Jennifer had ever imagined someone
could
move.

“Hey!” Jennifer said. At least, later, she thought she had said
hey
but she was uncertain. Maybe she had just frozen. The only idea that went through her head was
This can’t be happening
and that was followed by a dark, icy sense of dread because she
knew
in that second, as she saw something coming at her, what it truly meant.

The man had clubbed her across the face, staggering her. The blow had exploded in her eyes, sending a sheet of red hurt right through her core, and she had felt dizzy, almost as if the world around her had spun on its axis. She could feel herself losing consciousness, reeling back, and crumpling when he grabbed her around the shoulders, holding her from falling to the ground. Her knees felt weak, her shoulders and back rubbery. If she’d had any strength anywhere it vanished instantly.

She was only vaguely aware of the panel truck door opening and of the man bodily rushing her into the back. She could hear the noise of the door slamming shut. The sensation of the truck accelerating around the corner drove her into the steel bed. She could feel the weight of the man crushing her, holding her down. She could barely breathe and her throat was nearly closed with terror. She did not know if she was struggling or fighting, she couldn’t tell if she was screaming or crying, she was no longer alert enough to tell what she was doing. She gasped as a sudden great blackness came over her, and at first she thought she was already dead, then she thought she was unconscious before she realized that the man had pulled a black pillowcase over her head, shutting out the tiny world of the truck. She could taste blood on her lips, and her head was still spinning and whatever was happening to her she knew it was far worse than anything she had ever known before.

Odor penetrated the pillowcase: a thick oily smell from the floor of the truck; a sweaty, sweet smell from the man pinning her down.

Somewhere within her, she knew she was in great pain, but she could not tell precisely where.

She tried to move her arms and legs, pawing at nothingness like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, but she heard the man grunt, “No, I don’t think so…”

And then there was another explosion on her head, behind her eyes. The last thing she was aware of was the woman’s voice, saying, “Don’t kill her, for Christ’s sake.”

With those words echoing within her, Jennifer slid out of control, tumbling swiftly into a deep, dark fake death of unconsciousness.

3

He held the pink hat gently, as if it were alive, turning it over carefully in his hands.

On the inner part of the brim he saw the name
Jennifer
scrawled in ink, followed by a funny drawing of a smiling ducklike cartoon bird and the words
is cool
as if they were the answer to a question. No last name, no phone number, no address.

Adrian sat on the edge of his bed. Resting starkly beside him on the hand-crafted, multihued coverlet his wife had purchased at a quilt fair shortly before her accident was his 9mm Ruger. He had gathered a large collection of photographs of his wife and family and spread them throughout the bedroom where he could look at them as he prepared himself. To make his intentions absolutely clear, Adrian had taken the time to go to his small home office, where once he had labored over lectures and lesson plans, click on his computer, and find a Wikipedia entry for
Lewy body dementia.
He had printed this out and then stapled it to a copy of the receipt for his bill from the neurologist’s office.

All that remained, he told himself, was to write a proper suicide note, something heartfelt and poetic. He had always loved poetry and dabbled in writing his own verse. He had filled bookcase shelves with collections, from the modern to the ancient, from Paul Muldoon and James Tate, ranging back in time to Ovid and Catullus. A few years back, he had privately published a small volume of his own poems,
Love Songs and Madness
—not that he thought they were any good. But he loved writing, either free form or in rhyme, and he believed it might help him express the hopelessness he felt and the reluctance he had to try to face down his disease.
Poetry instead of bravery,
he thought. For a moment, he was distracted. He wondered where he’d placed a copy of his book. He thought it belonged on the bed, beside the pictures and the gun. Things would then be totally clear to whoever arrived at the scene of his self-murder.