Ashes, Ashes

25 - An Explanation (tw: suicide)

I hadn't been trying to learn Laurel's secret. Hell, I had barely been in contact with her for a long time. Just the usual passing chatter -- a Facebook comment or a one-off text every so often. I'd hear about something going on in her life, a book release or the start or end of a relationship, and I'd offer advice or enthusiasm or whatever seemed appropriate and then we'd be back to our separate lives.

It wasn't that I'd ever stopped caring about Laurel. Just that she belonged to a part of my past, a relic of an earlier era -- something that belonged more to fond memories than the present. We were friendly. We had both grown up and moved on. That was my assumption.

But we lived in the same town, and that meant running into each other occasionally, lives intersecting at places maybe neither of us wanted them to.

Like the hospital.

I was filling a prescription when I happened to glance at the name and frowned. Laurel Williams. Not an uncommon name for sure, but enough to give me pause, and I was uneasy because the drug being prescribed was something only ever really given to late-stage cancer patients. I hadn't been close with Laurel for a while, but I was certain she would have said something about cancer.

I was working the back, so it's not like I saw her come get her pills. It was probably a nurse who handed them off, anyway.

But I couldn't get it out of my mind, knowing. I caught myself trying to read more into Laurel's social media posts, looking for hidden messages or clues to what was going on in her life behind the scenes. But everything seemed so normal that I was starting to think I had imagined it, that there was some rational explanation I was missing.

So I reached out. I sent her a message: "Really random, lol, but how are you doing? For real?"

And then, when there was no response for a little while, I followed up: "I know about the cancer."

She responded to that one right away, and the immediacy of it was enough to confirm my suspicions, enough to send a swoop of dread through my stomach. I didn't have to read the text message to know, but I read it anyway. Laurel said: "Don't tell anyone."

I asked her if we could talk, and she agreed, and we arranged to meet at a coffee shop on a side of town neither of us tended to frequent, a place nobody would recognize us. It felt like we were going to have a drug deal.

We drank coffee and she confessed what I already knew: She had cancer. It had spread. There was an inoperable tumor in her brain. She was going to die.

I sipped at my latte and tried to keep it together because it felt wrong to cry, it felt wrong to break down when she was the one who was dying. But she didn't seem sad or worried; classic Laurel, she seemed pissed.

"I'm not going to die of cancer," she said, matter-of-factly, and I looked up in surprise because that didn't seem to match with what she'd just said about the tumor in her brain. "Not like my mom. No way. I'm not going through all of that shit."

Her true meaning bumped uneasily against me, and I didn't want to believe what she seemed to be saying.

"Lots of places have euthanasia. They have right-to-die laws." Her lips had twisted into a wry smile. "This isn't one of them. But it's okay. I've always been a bit of a rebel, right?"

She reached for my hand, then, and gave it a squeeze, and she looked at me with so much intensity that I knew, somehow, she had orchestrated all of this. Everything that had happened up to this moment had been part of a plan leading to this, and I felt suddenly stupid and ashamed for not realizing it sooner.

"You'll help me, right?"

I didn't agree right away. I don't know if anyone will believe that, and I don't know if it even matters any more, but I just want it to be said: I didn't agree then. I told her no way. I said it wasn't my place, and it wasn't hers either. I told her she still had a life to enjoy. I mentioned hospice and death with dignity and all those other things you're supposed to say.

But she wasn't listening. Laurel had always been good at cutting through bullshit.

I walked away from the meeting feeling unsettled and dirty, but I didn't agree. Not until later. Not until she started messaging me at all hours, sending me increasingly disturbing and detailed plans.

"Did you know in Japan they sell carbon monoxide poisoning kits for your car? They come with a warning sign for the EMS and everything. Isn't that thoughtful?"

"So I've been reading about hanging. Strangulation sounds awful, but if you do it right, you can cut off the carotid artery and pass out right away."

"Do you realize how easy it is to buy a gun?"

A part of me wanted to ask her why she hadn't just done it, then. Why drag me into it? But you can't ask that. You can't call somebody's bluff that way. So I tried to talk her down each time, and every time she'd turn that signature scathing Laurel rage back on me.

Until finally one night: "If you don't help me, I'll do it myself. And if I suffer, that's on you."

I knew she meant it.

What else could I do? She was determined to die. And the ticking bomb in her brain meant she was dying already. Was I supposed to keep stalling her until her brain was chewed through like termites in a foundation? Was I supposed to do nothing and know that I was the reason she's spend her last minutes or hours frightened and in pain and alone?

Didn't I have a responsibility to help? I had powerful drugs at my fingertips. It would be so easy to slip some into my pocket and help her drift off to sleep. Like an old pet. That's what I told myself.

We did it at her house. She asked me how long the drugs would take to work, and I told her. I told her how it would feel. She gave me a timeline: when to call 911 to make it look like I'd tried to help without risking screwing it all up. She told me she'd arranged for me to be the one to handle the funeral, too. My hands were shaking, but it was too late now, there was no backing out of this.

"Logan, promise me when I'm gone, you'll get the group together like we always said we would. Scatter my ashes to the wind and have a real party about it. You can do that for me, right?"

I nodded, and I was crying and shaking and I thought I'd throw up, but I didn't. Instead I gave her the pills and held her hand and she started to get sleepy, and she drifted in and out like she was just nodding off to sleep.

I thought: this wouldn't be such a bad way to die.

I thought: she's so out of it, she won't notice if I call the cops. I'll call and they'll save her and it'll all be okay.

I was starting to stand up when her eyes shot open. She reached out her hand, grasping me hard around the wrist. Her face contorted with fear and pain.

"Logan. Logan, I'm dying." She sounded awed, like it was an amazing and awesome and horrible thing, and I guess it truly was. "Logan, I'm scared."

Her hand squeezed convulsively around my wrist, nails digging hard into my wrist, and I couldn't pull away. Her muscles started to seize. She shook and trembled and I saw her eyes roll back and a light froth of saliva at the corner of her lips. She gasped, and I managed to jerk back them, stumbled, fumbled for my phone.

However much we had planned, whatever we had thought it would be like, nothing could have prepared me for the reality of it.

I called 911. I said the right things, I think. All of it is a blur. I tried to do CPR. I screamed and cried and, somewhere along the line, everything inside went cold and empty and nothing could hurt anymore because I could feel nothing.

Laurel was dead, just how she'd wanted it. Or had she changed her mind at the last minute? Was her final thought one of regret?

I couldn't let myself think that way. I physically could not sustain the thought. In the hours after her death, my brain started to rewrite history. It tried to tell me I had done the right thing. The only thing. I started to think that my role was inevitable, and then that I had done nothing at all. 

But I did. Right or wrong, I was there. I did it. I killed Laurel Williams. 

And by keeping her secret, I've killed our friends as well.