Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“And her suicide made sense?”

“In what way?”

“She’d been melancholy over the boyfriend’s accident, et cetera?”

“One assumes.”

“And that would be enough?”

“Oh, I see what you’re getting at.” She nodded, then shook her head. “Look, suicides? They rarely make sense. Tell you something else, most people who do it don’t leave a note. Maybe ten percent. The rest, they just off themselves, leave everyone wondering.”

“There must be a common thread or two.”

“Between victims?” Another sip of tea, another shake of the head. “All of them, obviously, are depressed. But who isn’t? Do you wake up every day thinking, Wow, it certainly is just super to be alive?”

I chuckled and shook my head.

“Didn’t think so. Neither do I. How about your past?”

“Huh?”

“Your past.” She waved a spoon in my direction, then stirred her tea. “You completely settled with everything that’s ever happened to you in your past, or are there some things-things you don’t talk about-that bug you, make you wince when you think about them twenty years later?”

I considered the question. Once, when I was very young-six or seven-and I’d just taken several swats of my father’s belt, I walked into the bedroom I shared with my sister, saw her kneeling by her dolls, and punched her in the back of the head as hard as I could. The look on her face-shock, fear, but also a sudden weary resignation-was a look that drove itself into my brain like a nail. Even now, more than twenty-five years later, her nine-year-old face jumped out at me in a Back Bay coffee shop and I felt a wave of shame so total it threatened to crumple me in its clenched fist.

And that was just one memory. The list was long, accrued over a lifetime of mistakes and bad judgment and impulse.

“I can see it in your face,” Joella Thomas said. “You got pieces of your past you’ll never be reconciled with.”

“You?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned back in her chair, looked up at the ceiling fan above us, exhaled loudly. “Oh, yeah,” she said again. “The thing is, we all do. We all carry our past and we all mess up our present and we all have days we don’t see much point struggling on toward our future. Suicides are just people who commit. They say, ‘More of this? The hell with that. Time to get off the bus.’ And most times you never even know what straw it was that broke their back. I’ve seen some that, I mean, seemed to make no sense. A young mother in Brighton last year? All accounts, loved her husband, her kids, her dog. Had a great job. Great relationship with her parents. No money worries. So, all right, she’s the bridesmaid in her best friend’s wedding. After the wedding, she goes home, hangs herself in the bathroom, still wearing that ugly chiffon dress. Now, was it something about the wedding that got to her? Was she secretly in love with the groom? Or maybe the bride? Or did she remember her own wedding and all the hopes she’d had, and while watching her friends exchange vows, she was forced to face how cold and unlike her fantasy her own marriage was? Or did she suddenly just get tired of living this long-ass life?” Joella gave me a slow roll of her shoulders. “I don’t know. No one does. I can tell you that not one person who knew her-not one-saw it coming.”

My coffee had cooled, but I took a sip anyway.

“Mr. Kenzie,” Joella Thomas said, “Karen Nichols killed herself. That’s not debatable. You waste your time looking for why-what good’s that going to do?”

“You never knew her,” I said. “This wasn’t normal.”

“Nothing’s normal,” Joella Thomas said.

“You find out where she lived her last two months?”

She shook her head. “Some landlord will call it in when he needs to rent the apartment.”

“Until then?”

“Until then, she’s dead. She don’t mind the delay.”

I rolled my eyes.

She rolled hers back at me. She leaned forward in her chair and studied me with those ghostly irises.

“Let me ask you something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“With all due respect, because you seem like a good guy.”

“Shoot.”

“You met Karen Nichols, what, once?”

“Once, yeah.”

“And you believe me when I say she killed herself, all alone, no help?”

“I do.”

“So, Mr. Kenzie, why in the hell do you care what happened to her before she offed herself?”

I sat back in my chair. “You ever feel like you screwed up and want to make things right?”

“Sure.”

“Karen Nichols,” I said, “left a message on my answering machine four months ago. She asked me to call her back. I didn’t.”

“So?”

“So the reason I didn’t wasn’t good enough.”

She slipped on her sunglasses, then allowed them to slide down the bridge of her nose. She peered over the tops of the rims at me. “And you think you’re so cool-do I got this?-that if you’d just returned her call, she’d be alive today?”

“No. I think I owe her a little for blowing her off for a bad reason.”

She stared at me, her mouth slightly open.

“You think I’m nuts.”

“I think you’re nuts. She was a grown woman. She-”

“Her fiancé gets hit by a car. Was that an accident?”

She nodded. “I checked. There were forty-six people around him when he tripped and they all say that’s what happened-he tripped. A patrol car was parked a block away on Atlantic and Congress. It moved on the sound of impact, reached the scene roughly twelve seconds after the accident. The guy whose car hit Wetterau was a tourist, name of Steven Kearns. He was so devastated, he still sends flowers to Wetterau’s hospital bed every day.”

“Okay,” I said. “Why’d Karen Nichols fall completely apart-lose her job, her apartment?”

“Hallmarks of depression,” Joella Thomas said. “You get so locked into your own funk, you forget your responsibilities to the real world.”

A pair of middle-aged women with matching Versace sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads paused near our table, trays in hand, and looked around for an open seat. One of them glanced at my near-empty cup of coffee and Joella’s crumbs and sighed loudly.

“Nice sigh,” Joella said. “Come from practice?”

The woman seemed not to have heard her. She looked at her friend. Her friend sighed.

“It’s catching,” I said.

One woman said to the other, “I find certain behaviors inappropriate, don’t you?”

Joella gave me a big smile. “‘Inappropriate,’” she said. “They want to call me a coon, so they say ‘inappropriate’ instead. Fits their self-image.” She turned her head up at the women, who looked everywhere but at us. “Don’t it?”

The women sighed some more.

“Mmm,” Joella said as if they’d confirmed something. “Shall we go?” She stood.

I looked at her crumbs and teacup, my coffee cup.

“Leave it,” she said. “The sisters here will get it.” She caught the eye of the first sigher. “Ain’t that right, honey?”

The woman looked back toward the counter.

“Yeah,” Joella Thomas said with a broad smile, “that’s right. Girl power, Mr. Kenzie, it’s a beautiful thing.”

When we reached the street, the women were still standing by the table, holding their trays, waiting for valet service apparently, practicing their sighs.

We walked a bit, the morning breeze smelling of jasmine, the street beginning to fill with people juggling armloads of Sunday newspaper with white bags of coffee and muffins, cups of juice.

“Why’d she hire you in the first place?” Joella said.

“She was being stalked.”

“You dealt with the stalker?”