however, that they don't tell you about suicide:
1 If you hear your husband's final words, and they come after he has made up his mind to end his life, you will forever be able to replay them in your head in Dolby surround sound. This is because there is an audible click that happens when a living man begins to speak as a dead man, and a dead man's voice is terrifying.
2 The police officer working the case will mean well, but he still has to ask you if you want to take home the gun your husband shot himself with. If the officer is also new to the force, he may wonder aloud, with a mixture of awe and revulsion, how a person could choose a muzzle-loading rifle to do the deed. Finally, if he is both new to the force and young, he may hand you your husband's glasses without noticing that they have tiny fragments of gray and red matter on them.
3 The phlebotomist taking your blood may not consider what brought you into her lab or guess that after six agonizing weeks, you've finally decided to remove your wedding ring. She will only see a pregnant, single woman getting an HIV test, and you will disgust her.
4 Trying to get a handle on grief without answers is like trying to snap a photograph of the whole world while you're standing on it.
# # #
Three months after Jay shot himself, I was heading to the basement to do laundry. I stepped off the bottom step into a puddle of dog pee, slipped, and landed on my back without any mediating flailing, just smack, ridiculously pregnant lady flat on the linoleum-covered cement, soaking up cold urine and staring at the ceiling. Maybe my head hit first because I couldn't decide what to do next. In fact, I remember feeling profoundly relaxed, removed from everything, just right, oh, yes, I could stay here forever.
Zoë skipped out of her playroom. Using a beautiful logic unique to three-year-olds (Mommy is playing lay down!), she was delighted rather than alarmed to find me sprawled out. She plopped down cross-legged near my head and wiggled her body underneath me. Now the dog pee was dripping from my hair onto her lap.
“We'll be okay, Mommy.”
I'm not sure to this day what she meant by that. Probably she was only repeating what I said to her daily as a sort of prophylactic wish. She began to pet my head like I did for her when she was sick. As she stroked my pee hair, she hummed a song, equal parts “Happy Birthday” and “Frère Jacques.” The dog padded downstairs and curled next to me.
The three of us stayed like that until I remembered how to move.
We'll be okay, Mommy.
# # #
I'd read twenty mysteries before I finally decided to write one. My belly was swollen. I could go an hour at a time without thinking of him. My brain and heart were starved. I lived at the end of a lonely country road that the plows visited last, and I saw how people were looking at me.
Pregnant. Husband killed himself. Out there alone with a three-year-old, forty miles from the nearest hospital.
People wanted to help. They worried about me. I still carry that with me, all their worry, all the pain they tried to haul for me so I wouldn't have to heft it alone. Not just my friends and family, but strangers reached out to hold me up, and they didn't stop even after the funeral. Grief is selfish, though, and so I could only watch and keep turning inward.
Writing a novel saved me.
# # #
Here's how May Day, the first mystery I wrote, begins:
I tried not to dwell on the fact that the only decent man in town had stood me up. Actually, he may have been the only literate, single man in a seventy-mile radius who was attracted to me and attractive. The warm buzz that was still between my legs tried to convince the dull murmur in my head that it was just a misunderstanding. To distract myself from thoughts of Jeff's laugh, mouth, and hands, I downed a couple aspirin for my potato chip hangover and began the one job I truly enjoyed at the library: putting away the books.
I glanced at the spines of the hardcovers in my hands and strolled over to the Pl-Sca aisle, thinking the only thing I really didn't like about the job was picking magazine inserts off the floor. Certainly the reader saw them fall, but without fail, gravity was too intense to allow retrieval except by a trained library staff member. I bet I found three a day. But as I teetered down the carpeted aisle in my flowered heels, I discovered a new thing not to like: there was a guy lying on the tight-weave Berber with his legs lockstep straight, his arms crossed over his chest, and a reference book opened on his face. He was wearing a familiar blue-checked shirt, and if he was who I thought he was, I knew him intimately. A sour citrus taste rose at the back of my throat. Alone, the library aisle wasn't strange; alone, the man wasn't strange. Together, they made my heart slam through my knees. I prodded his crossed legs with my foot and felt no warmth and no give.
My eyes scoured the library in a calm panic, and I was aware of my neck creaking on its hinges. I could smell only books and stillness, tinged with a faint coppery odor. Everything was in order except the dead man laid out neatly on the carpeting, wearing the same flannel I had seen him in two days earlier. I wondered chaotically if dead people could lie, if they still got to use verbs after they were gone, and if maybe this was the best excuse ever for missing a date. Then I had a full-body ice wash, five years all over again, a nightmare pinning me to my bed as I silently mouthed the word “mom.”
Had proximity to me killed him?
# # #
Six months after Jay's suicide, I called my mom and asked if she'd stay overnight at my house. She had driven the two hours one way to sleep over every Monday since his death, but this was a Thursday. My dad visited when I asked, was over regularly to repaint walls and fix leaks, but he preferred his own bed and had never slept in my house. He asked if he could come with mom that day, though. I said sure, I needed him to help carry some wood for the woodstove.
My water broke that night, with my parents sleeping upstairs in the spare bedroom and my daughter tucked safely in her room. I wasn't yet having contractions, but I rang the hospital to let them know that I'd be arriving soon. I'd called the hospital at least three times before to make advance arrangements for my daughter's birth and then my son's. Each time, different people, always female, answered the same impersonal way: “Douglas County Hospital, how may I direct your call?”
This time, the person on the other end of the line was a man. “This is Jay. How can I help you?”
Jay. My husband's name. I gripped the phone.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
“I'm having a baby.” It came out a whisper.
“Fantastic!” He sounded so excited that I surprised myself by smiling. “Has your water broken?”
“Just now.”
“First baby?”
“Second.”
“Why don't you come in now? We'll take care of you.”
My dad stayed with my daughter so she could sleep through the night. My mom drove me to Alexandria, steering her Ford Taurus between a moonscape of snowdrifts and the kind of cold that freezes the wet of your eyes. When we arrived, Jay took care of everything, just as he'd promised. My son,
