Julia knew what he was thinking: “This is really all her fault. Nobody else knows about it. She’s torturing herself and me over nothing.”
Julia knew that once Scott realized how illogical her actions were he would no longer feel any pity for the downcast creature that sat across from him, but rather despise her for having subjected him to that painful moment of empathy, that split second in which he might have felt all the pain and loss that she was experiencing. She wanted him to believe that the storm of emotions that was raging inside of her was justified, but she didn’t hold out hope.
His face seemed to say: “How dare she? Sitting there like that to try to make the world feel sorry for her when there’s nothing to feel sorry about.” Then, as if he’d pushed aside his indignation and resolved to say what had brought him to that bench in the first place, he broke the silence.
“Julia.”
She looked up at him again with empty eyes that wanted to say, “I have no interest in anything you might tell me, but I’ve resigned to hear you out because I don’t have the will to leave either.”
Scott turned away from those eyes and continued, “I was thinking that after we graduate, and I go to college, you should come with me, and we could move in together. My parents would, of course, pay the rent and while I take classes you’ll be free to pursue acting like you’ve always talked about.”
“You want to get married?”
There was no excitement or hope in Julia’s voice, only incredulity that he was capable of such a noble offer.
“No, not get married.” Scott was quick to interject. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing, it’s really just a legal entanglement. I mean we would just live together. We’ll still have each other, but without giving up our freedom.”
“No.” Her voice was still dead and completely devoid of any emotion. Had there been any passion of any kind in her response Scott would probably have been indignant, but such a flat refusal caught him off guard.
“I was only trying to do the right thing, but if that’s how you feel I guess it’s over,” he said and got up and walked away without saying another word.
Julia put her head down and returned to her former state completely withdrawing into her own thoughts, her eyes fixed on the brown grass at her feet and then at the half eaten bagel in her hands. How different he seemed from the boy who had asked her to homecoming just a few weeks ago. Then he’d talked about dying without her, and now he seemed completely indifferent. Were all those emotions and hours spent together sincere? Of course they had been. Even if they hadn’t she refused to let herself think otherwise. What a change an operation can make. Where was her prince charming, the one who would go through everything with her and for whom she had given up so much? And in that moment, somewhere past her resigned self-pity, she began to hate him.
She sat on the same bench for another half hour, and hoped that the lowest, most depraved person imaginable would pass by and make her the same offer. She would agree immediately and pack all of her bags at once; she would be anyone else’s mistress just to show Scott that he was the only person in the world who she considered beneath her.
But as she turned her hatred back on herself she couldn’t imagine anyone so depraved as to be willing to take her in. It was during this time that she remembered her dreams of acting, and marriage, and happily ever after. She remembered how she would talk about them with Jason and how he never said anything to discourage her. She felt relieved that there was a part of her that could feel enough to hurt, and at the same moment she felt ashamed for that part of her that was still alive enough to be able to feel sorry for herself.
* * *
When Julia got home she was alone. In her desperate state of mind, the fact that she was still alive proved beyond a reasonable doubt to her that there was no justice in the universe. She knew that it was out of despair, not a sense of justice, that she’d locked herself in the bathroom with sleeping pills, but she’d convinced herself that everything she intended to do in that room was for the sake of justice. As she waited she found the determination to go through with what she’d decided to do slowly welling up inside of her. It came from a persistent nagging voice that, in so many ways, resembled her conscience, that constant reminder that hadn’t allowed her a moment’s peace since the operation.
“I do deserve to die,” she thought, “and not just because of the operation. The operation doesn’t have anything to do with this—it might be the least wrong thing I’ve ever done because I did it without thinking and without malice. I deserve to die because of everything else I’ve done, and because of everything I do every day, and because of everything I don’t do,” she thought. Julia began to understand the remorse that had never really left her since that day. And, knowing that no court could convict her, the legal system being concerned more with loopholes and logistics rather than with justice, she determined to take justice into her own hands, and she stared intently at the white pills that she now held. She had made sure to get enough to do the job. She had heard of people making attempts that failed and had even scoffed at those who hadn’t even been able to succeed in killing themselves.
She wanted everything to be over, to take the pills and to sleep. “Yes,” said the nagging voice. “Take them and end all this misery, all your suffering. You deserve it.” This new thought was such a departure from everything that had been swirling through her head that it startled her, and she dropped the pills and watched them scatter across the tile floor.
“I don’t deserve to die,” she said in a barely audible voice. “I deserve to live and to suffer. That is justice!” Julia Manchell felt a small pang of excitement. She walked out into the hallway, determined to pay her debt to justice through a lifetime of suffering, abstaining from every form of happiness. She left the pills on the floor not caring if her parents found them. “Let them find them,” she thought when she looked back at the pills. “Let them ask me why they’re scattered all over the floor, and I’ll tell them everything, absolutely everything, and they’ll be furious or sad or indifferent but I won’t care, and then they’ll probably punish me because they think they have to, and that will be good too.”
She hurried to her room to decide what course her new life of suffering and penance would take. She had to resolve everything immediately, while the conviction was still scalding inside her. Julia sat in her room and determined to give herself completely over to charity. She sat down and made a list of everything she despised most in the world:
Cleaning the bathroom
Dirty homeless people on the street
The clingy people at the nursing home
Family dinners
Driving Lewis around town
Scott Beckerson
Julia hesitated before writing this last item on her list, knowing that he fit the category of things she despised, but unsure of whether he would fall under her original idea of charity. But somewhere past the hatred she could still find pity for him, if only because she knew that doing anything for him would be the worst possible punishment she could ever think of for herself.
She read over the list several times, and then said to no one in particular, “I will dedicate my life to these things and these things only.”
She wasn’t sure to whom she had made it, but felt that such a resolution should be voiced out loud, as if the force of the spoken word would bind her to it. With all the impatience and zeal of a new convert, she left the house immediately to begin work on her new life. She got in her car, turned off the music in order to maintain a somber mood, and in silence, pulled out of the driveway. She didn’t do any of the things that she thought she’d intended to do when she had left the house. Instead she drove aimlessly. She’d left with a vague idea of what she would do, but nothing definite. On the way back home she stopped at Wal-Mart and worked her way through the congestion of bodies to the school supply section where she purchased a diary, much like the journal that she had bought for Thomas a few mont
hs earlier, before he’d left for college.
Standing in line was torment, as always. Julia tapped her foot impatiently trying to figure out why even the express checkout counters took so long, not knowing why she was in such a hurry, especially since she had been ready to put an end to her life less than an hour ago. When her turn came she was obviously exasperated and placed her item on the counter.
The woman at the counter who scanned the diary was in her mid-twenties and looked like she had less enthusiasm for life than Julia. They exchanged meaningless pleasantries and Julia handed the woman a ten dollar bill. The woman entered $10.00 into the cash register and gave Julia the amount of change that appeared on the screen before turning to greet the next customer in line.
Julia hurried out to her car, found a pen in the glove box, and opened the diary to the first page. She started to write the date at the top of the page but hesitated.
“Nothing happened today that I want to remember,” she thought, “at least nothing that I want to write about. Tomorrow will be a new day and I’ll make sure only to do things that I want to remember.” This made sense to Julia so she wrote the next day’s date at the top: Tuesday, November 26th. She drove outside the city limits and sat in her car for hours looking at her list. By the time she got home Monday, November 25th would be all but over; it was already too late to try and make Monday worthy of remembrance.
When she got home she collapsed on her bed. She could count the hours of sleep she’d gotten over the past two days without going into double digits. She didn’t have anymore tears or emotions or resolutions. So she went to bed early, empty, and exhausted, and, for the first time since the day she’d had the operation, she didn’t toss and turn for hours before drifting into sleep.
Neither Peter nor Hannah found the pills Julia had left on the bathroom floor. Lewis had gone into the bathroom first and, discovering the mess his sister had made, he did something that up to that point would have been completely out of character. He collected the pills and put them back in the bottle that had also been left open on the counter and never mentioned the mess to anyone, not knowing the significance of his actions beyond the simple understanding that his big sister had been upset, and he was doing something nice for her.
Chapter 8
“The day of death is better than the day of birth. It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.”
-King Solomon
Peter and Hannah had agreed to take the day off to work out the details of their upcoming separation. So instead of being in their respective offices on Tuesday morning, they sat at the breakfast table trying to talk through some of the arrangements, and settle as much as they could out of court.
“I don’t really care about the house, or any of this stuff for that matter. I just want my life back.” Hannah said.
“I feel the same way you do,” Peter answered. He matched her tone, even though he didn’t feel the same way she did about anything they had discussed.
“So what are we going to do with it?” Hannah asked.
“With what?”
“The house.”
“Let’s sell it and split everything down the middle. Let’s sell everything except the cars, you’ll take yours and I’ll take mine. We’ll divide up the personal stuff and sell everything of value. We can make this really simple,” Peter said.
The phone rang and Hannah got up to answer it. He could hear her talking for about three or four minutes before she hung up and walked back into the living room.
“Who was that?” Peter asked when his wife sat down on the sofa. He still thought of her as his wife and she would be for at least a few more months. “When did I lose her?” he wondered as Hannah took her seat.
“It was Abigail.”
“What did she want?” Peter asked. He tried not to show too much interest.
“It looks like she’s going to get a position in Chicago. She’ll probably be moving at the end of the year.”
“I didn’t know she was looking for something else,” Peter said casually.
“Neither did I,” Hannah said as she put on her jacket. “But apparently she’s ready for a change of scenery.”
“Where are you going?” Peter asked.
Hannah told him that she was going to the coffee shop and let him assume that she was meeting her friend there.
When she got to the coffee shop she ordered and sat down at a table in the corner by herself. “I need to get used to this,” she told herself. “Now that Abigail’s leaving this is going to be my life. Alone with nobody is still better than alone with him.”
She thought about her coworkers, about how everyone at the office liked her but nobody knew her. She felt like a stranger in there with all those people who she’d worked alongside every day for so many years. She wondered if anyone else felt the same way, if they ever got tired of superficial conversations as they passed by each other’s office doors, or if she was the only one. She let the loneliness eat at her, and the gnawing emptiness felt so good. She’d felt so dead inside that any sensation seemed refreshing.
“Is there something wrong with doing this to myself?” she wondered. “Is there something wrong with letting all the hurt and bitterness that’s been knocking at the door in? Is it wrong to enjoy the pain and loneliness? Do I need counseling?”
As she sipped on the steaming drink that the young girl, about Julia’s age, brought out to her, she reasoned that basking in the hurt was the only thing that kept her sane, if in fact she was still sane.
“Peter’s probably having a drink about now too,” she told herself. “And his will have more than caffeine in it.”
As she drank in the warmth she found it easier to judge her husband rather than herself. He was a coward for burying everything that had happened between them underneath the alcohol. She took another sip, both envying and pitying the young couple flirting at the table across from her.
“Maybe it will work out for them like they think it will,” she conceded, but her last two decades of experience made it hard for her to believe that they had a chance of keeping love alive.
“Everyone suffers, that’s what life here boils down to: suffering, with brief interludes that we call happiness,” she thought, but she immediately reproached herself for being so cynical. “No, there has to be something more. If there isn’t then why am I getting out of this marriage? I was truly happy once. It was so long ago I can barely remember it, like a dream, but it was real. It had to have been real because if it wasn’t then all of this is pointless. It had to be real so I can hope that I might have that again.”
* * *
Julia passed through the halls of the high school unnoticed on Tuesday. She sat quietly through her classes taking notes but never drew any attention to herself; she was the model student. When the bell rang at the end of the day Julia walked out of the building with her head held high. She found her car and pulled out her list. Julia decided to start with the most familiar item on it, but when she entered Grace Assisted Living Center, the realization swept over her that she didn’t know what she had planned on doing when she got there. She didn’t have much time to think of anything before an elderly woman immediately accosted her.
The woman looked like everyone else in that place, brittle grey hair, a sallow face, and a thin frame with skin sagging off of her bones as her muscles shrank from atrophy. The walker served as a partial barrier between Julia and the mass of flesh that she could hardly bring herself to think of as a person. The woman looked like a holocaust victim, tucked away and left to slowly rot, while the rest of the world forgot about her existence or pretended not to notice. The woman introduced herself, though Julia couldn’t understand what she had said, and offered Julia her hand. I
t was cold and clammy. Julia hesitated before offering her own hand and said, in her father’s patronizing voice, that it was a pleasure to meet the old woman. The woman didn’t seem to hear, or want to let go of Julia’s hand. She clung to Julia like a drowning man clings to a life preserver. Julia noticed Susan sitting behind her desk. She was watching the predicament with obvious amusement, trying to laugh as discretely as possible.
After some time of shaking the woman’s hand one of the workers who was coming down the hallway noticed what was happening and forcefully freed Julia’s hand from the woman’s grip, and with feigned politeness, escorted the woman to her room.
“So what are you doing here this time?” Susan asked when Julia walked back into the reception room.
Julia thought about her list. It seemed so silly to her now that she was out of the house and away from the pills. She didn’t even know what she had hoped to accomplish by surrounding herself by the things she hated.
“I came to visit my grandfather again,” she said after a moment of silence.
“You were walking down the wrong hallway so I was just wondering. You didn’t forget where his room is did you?” Susan asked.
Julia pretended that she’d forgotten the way and let the receptionist guide her to Abraham’s door. When she walked in Abraham was lying in bed writing on a clipboard.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“My last thoughts on life,” he said.
He looked up from his clipboard and neither of them said anything right away.
“Why don’t you come in an’ sit down,” he motioned to the chair. “You can proof read it an’ tell me what you think. I’m done.”
“Of course,” Julia said.
She pulled the chair up close to the bed and sat down. Taking the manuscript from the old gnarled hands she began to read out loud:
I received my death sentence on January 4th 1928 and was christened Abraham Thomas Manchell. I was born almost a month premature, had jaundice, and a really bad cough, and the doctors told my father that I would probably die. They were right of course but their timing was a little off.