{"id":164483,"date":"2023-06-08T11:05:54","date_gmt":"2023-06-08T15:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164483"},"modified":"2023-06-12T13:07:25","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T17:07:25","slug":"molly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/06\/08\/molly\/","title":{"rendered":"Molly"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

If you are contemplating self-destruction, please tell someone you trust. Immediate counseling is available 24-7 by dialing 1-800-SUICIDE or 988.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Sunday afternoon in early spring. We\u2019d spent the morning quiet, in separate rooms\u2014me in my office, writing; Molly on the bed in the guest room, working too, so I believed. I\u2019d pass by and see her using her laptop or reading from the books piled on the bed where she lay prone, or sometimes staring off out through the window to the yard. It was warm for March already, full of the kind of color through which you can begin to see the blooming world emerge. Molly didn\u2019t want to talk really, clearly feeling extremely down again, and still I tried to hug her, leaning over the bed to wrap my arms around her shoulders as best I could. She brushed me off a bit, letting me hold her but not really responding. I let her be\u2014it\u2019d been a long winter, coming off what felt like the hardest year in both our lives, to the point we\u2019d both begun to wonder if, not when, the struggle would ever slow. I wished there could be something I might say to lift her spirits for a minute, but I also knew how much she loathed most any stroke of optimism or blind hope, each more offensive than the woe alone. Later, though, while passing in the hallway in the dark, she slipped her arms around me at the waist and drew me close. She told me that she loved me, almost a whisper, tender, small in my arms. I told her I loved her too, and we held each other standing still, a clutch of limbs. I put my head in her hair and looked beyond on through the bathroom where half-muted light pressed at the window as through a tarp. When we let go, she slipped out neatly, no further words, and back to bed. The house was still, very little sound besides our motion. After another while spent working, I came back and asked if she\u2019d come out with me to the yard to see the chickens, one of our favorite ways to pass the time. Outside, it was sodden, lots of rain lately, and the birds were restless, eager to rush out of their run and hunt for bugs. Molly said no, she didn\u2019t want to go, asked if I\u2019d bring one to the bedroom window so she could see\u2014something I often did so many days, an easy way to make her smile. I scooped up Woosh, our Polish hen, my favorite, and brought her over to the glass where Molly sat. This time, though, when I approached the window, Molly didn\u2019t move toward us, open the window, as she would usually. Even as I smiled and waved, holding Woosh up close against the glass, speaking for her in the hen-voice that I\u2019d made up, Molly\u2019s mouth held clamped, her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room. Woosh began to wriggle, wanting down. The other birds were ranging freely, unattended\u2014which always made me nervous now, as in recent months a hawk had taken favor to our area, often reappearing in lurking circles overhead, waiting for the right time to swoop down and make a meal out of our pets. So I didn\u2019t linger for too long at the window, antsy anyway to get on and go for my daily run around the neighborhood, one of the few reasons I still had for getting out of the house. I gripped Woosh by her leg and made it wave, a little goodbye, then hurried on, leaving Molly staring blankly at the space where I\u2019d just been: a view of a fence obscured only by the lone sapling she\u2019d planted last spring in yearning for the day she wouldn\u2019t have to see the neighbors.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I corralled the chickens to their coop, came back inside. In Molly\u2019s office, where I had a closet, I sat across from her while changing clothes in preparation for my daily run. Molly spoke calmly, said she\u2019d just finished reading the galley of my next novel and that she liked the way it ended: with the book\u2019s protagonist suspended in a stasis of her memories, forever stuck. I felt surprised to hear she\u2019d finished, given her low spirit and how she\u2019d said she found the novel difficult to read, because it hurt for her to have to see the pain behind my language, how much I\u2019d been carrying around all this time. I told her I was grateful she\u2019d made it through, that I wanted to hear more of what she thought after my run, already anxious to get on with it, in go-mode. My reaction seemed to vex her, causing a little back and forth where we both kept misunderstanding what the other had just said, each at different ends of a conversation. She remained flat on the bed as I kissed her forehead, squeezed her hand, then proceeded through the house, out the front door. Coming down the driveway, I took my phone out to put on music I could run to and saw I\u2019d received an email, sent from Molly, according to the timestamp, just after I had left her in the room. <\/span>(no subject)<\/span><\/i>, read the subject, and in the body, just: <\/span>I love you<\/span><\/i>, nothing else, besides a Word document she\u2019d attached, titled <\/span>Folk Physics<\/span><\/i>, which I knew to be the title of the manuscript of poems she\u2019d been working on the last few months. I stopped short in my tracks, surprised to see she\u2019d sent it to me just like that, then and there. Something felt off, too out of nowhere\u2014not like Molly, or perhaps too much like Molly. I turned around at once and went inside.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

During my brief absence, she\u2019d already risen from the bed, up and about for one of only a few times that day. I found her in the kitchen with the lights off, standing as if dazed by my appearance, arms at her sides. She seemed to clench up as I came near, letting me put my arms around her but staying taut, hand on my chest. She hesitated when I asked if she\u2019d finished her manuscript, wondering why she hadn\u2019t mentioned it. Yes, she said quietly, she guessed it was finished, a draft at least but no big deal. I told her I was excited to get to read it either way, that I was proud of her, and squeezed her tightly one more time, then let her go. She seemed to hover there in front of me a moment, waiting mute for what I\u2019d do next. I asked if after my run we could go to Whole Foods, pick up something to make for dinner together, and maybe watch a movie, have a nice night here at home. She said yes, that sounded good, and I said good, I\u2019d see her soon, then one last hug before I left her standing in the kitchen in the dark.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On my run, I followed my usual route around our neighborhood without much thought. I\u2019d always liked the way the world went narrow in this manner during exercise, as if there could be nothing else to do but the task at hand, one foot in front of the other, counting down without a number. I don\u2019t remember seeing any other people, then or later, though I must have; in retrospect, the smaller details would fade to gray around the corridor of time sent rushing forward in the wake of what awaited just ahead. Near the end of the run, I decided to extend my route, turning around to double back the way I\u2019d just come, adding on an extra half-mile on a path that took me past the entrance to the gardens where Molly and I would often walk in summers. The sidewalks in this part of the neighborhood were cracked and bumpy, requiring specific care not to trip. I pulled my phone out to see how far I\u2019d gone and saw a ping from Twitter telling me that Molly had made a post, just minutes past\u2014a link to a YouTube video of \u201cThe Old Revolution\u201d by Leonard Cohen, including her transcription of the song\u2019s opening line: \u201cI finally broke into the prison.\u201d I liked the tweet and thumbed the link immediately, opening the song to let it play, happy to imagine her selecting the closing soundtrack for my run home, just a couple blocks away now. \u201cInto this furnace I ask you now to venture,\u201d Cohen sang, backed by a doomy twang. \u201cYou whom I cannot betray.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The song was still there with me in my head as I arrived back at our driveway, where looking up from halfway along the path toward the stairs to our front porch, I saw a shape against the door, covering the spy hole\u2014a plain white envelope, affixed with tape. My body seized. From early on in our relationship I\u2019d had visions of Molly picking up and leaving just like that, deciding on a whim and without warning that she preferred to be alone. Running up the steps, already flush with adrenaline, a pounding pulse, I saw my first name, <\/span>Blake<\/span><\/i>, handwritten in the center of the envelope\u2019s face in Molly\u2019s script. Immediately, I wailed, devoid of language, too much too fast, real and unreal. Inside the envelope, a two-page letter, printed out. I stopped cold on the first lines:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Blake,\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

I have decided to leave this world<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Then there was nothing but those words\u2014words to which I have no corollary, no distinct definition in that moment, as simple as they seem. Every sentence that I\u2019ve tried to put here to frame the moment feels like a doormat laid on blood, an unstoppable force colliding with an intolerable object in slow motion, beyond the need of being named. Before and after. <\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Out of something akin to instinct, I forced my sight along the rest of the letter, not really reading it so much as scanning for a more direct form of information, anything she\u2019d written that might tell me where she was\u2014which, near the end of the second page, I found: <\/span>I left my body in the nature area where we used to go walking so I could see the sky and trees and hear the birds one last time. <\/span><\/i>Then: <\/span>I shot myself so it would be over instantly with certainty and no suffering whatsoever. <\/span><\/i>This time when I screamed it was the only word that I could think of: <\/span>No<\/span><\/i>. I must have sounded like a child jabbed in his guts, squealing. I knew exactly where she meant\u2014I\u2019d run right by it, just minutes before, perhaps a couple hundred yards away. I might have even crossed her path while on the way there had times aligned right, had I known. A sudden frenzy of possible options of what to do next swarmed my brain, none of them quite right, devised in terror.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

At the edge of the sidewalk, I stopped and tried to think if I should go inside and get my keys and drive to where she might be, or if I should run there fast as I could, still in my running clothes, already half-exhausted and slick with sweat. Each instant that I didn\u2019t do exactly the right thing felt like the last chance, a window closing. Finally, I took off running at full speed along the sidewalk, shouting her name loud as I could, begging her or me or God or whoever else might be able to hear me: <\/span>No<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>please<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Molly<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Not like this. <\/span><\/i>No matter what I said, there was no answer; no one on the street around me, zero cars. Ahead, the sidewalk seemed to stretch so far beyond me, no matter how fast or hard I ran, as if growing longer with every step; all the houses shaped the same as they were always, full of other people in the midst of their own lives. As I ran, I tried to scan her letter, held out before me with both hands, already wadded up in frantic grip, scanning through fragments of despondent logic that felt impossible to connect with any actual moment in the present as it passed. \u201cEveryone\u2019s life ends, and mine is over now,\u201d she\u2019d written in present tense about the future, which was apparently in the midst of happening right now\u2014or had it already happened? Was there still time? I felt embarrassed, sick to my stomach, to feel my body\u2019s power giving out no matter how hard I tried to maintain the sprint, forced instead at several points to slow down against the burning in my muscles, sucking for air with everything I thought I knew now on the line.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t find her in the fields. The grass was high and muddy, and my running shoes kept getting stuck, sucking half off me, as I worked my way along the path between the unkempt plots of wild grass left overgrown through the winter and the vacant patches where in the spring ahead flowers would bloom. Everything felt blurred, moving much faster all around me than I could parse. I was still screaming her name, begging her to answer, to be okay, but my voice just disappeared into the strangling silence. I searched the spots where last summer we\u2019d returned daily to watch a mother duck care for her newborn flock; the bank of reeds where hundreds of frogs would often sing till you got too near; the grown-together pair of trees Molly said she thought would resemble us in our old age someday. I kept calling her number, listening to it ring and ring until the default voicemail recording came back on, asking in an android woman\u2019s voice for me to leave a message. Maybe in the memory on Molly\u2019s phone now there\u2019s a recording of me huffing and howling, just before I really understood that there was no way to go back, that nothing I could say or want or do could reverse what had taken place. <\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The longer she failed to turn up, the more I felt a desperate possibility that it wasn\u2019t already too late\u2014that she was out here somewhere, and I could save her, and yet no matter where I turned or how I shouted, nothing changed. I realized I should call 911, holding the phone up to my face while rushing through the mud into the far end of the gardens, clogged with the trees. After what seemed endless ringing, an operator\u2019s voice came on the line, firm and professional, and asked for my emergency. I heard the words come out of my mouth before I thought them: <\/span>My wife left me a suicide note and I can\u2019t find her<\/span><\/i>. The operator asked me where I was, how they could reach me, and I kept trying to explain, uncertain how to be specific with the location of the gardens, of no immediate address. <\/span>I can\u2019t find her, I need help<\/span><\/i>, I kept repeating in frustration when I couldn\u2019t seem to get it right, <\/span>please come and help me<\/span><\/i>. The operator reassured me the police were already on their way, someone would be there very soon. In the meantime, she stayed with me on the line as I hurried through the trees to where the gardens reached their end amid a sort of bog, studded with thickets and obscured patches, brambles, shrubs, so many possible places to end up. Every time I called her name, it felt a little less like her; as if what those syllables had meant to me for so long no longer bore resemblance to itself, and in its place, a widening hole, larger than all else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Reaching the end of the bog area, I turned around and started back toward the street. Close to the entrance, along a patch of land where some local group had planted food, I saw two women coming down the slope toward me, one near my age, the other probably her mother. I could see at once they looked concerned, had come down to the area for a reason. \u201cDid you hear a gunshot?\u201d I begged of them in a pinched voice, desperate to hear a different answer than what I thought. <\/span>Yes<\/span><\/i>, they said, they had\u2014and I felt something deep within me break\u2014ambient anguish so overwhelming I should have fallen to my knees but could no longer remember how. Like having the skin ripped off your head and being asked to run a marathon on live TV where the finish line ends in a lake of burning bile. It\u2019s not that time stands still in such a moment\u2014it\u2019s that there\u2019s nothing you can do to make it stop, and every second lasts forever even as it\u2019s over, as if what you\u2019d once thought must be impossible has become the organizing principle of who you are. With someone else speaking for me now, I asked how long ago they\u2019d heard the gunshot. They said ten minutes. I asked in which direction, and they pointed back the way I\u2019d come. \u201cAre you missing your dog?\u201d the younger woman asked, as I turned to hurry where she\u2019d pointed. \u201cMy wife,\u201d I said, over my shoulder, and heard her groan, say, <\/span>Oh my God<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I was completely frantic now, even more incensed with the task of finding as the world surrounding bent to blur; all possible locations interlacing in my periphery like abstract glyphs, beneath one of which, somewhere, was Molly\u2019s body. Between my clearer memories of this transition in time\u2019s fabric, huge, wide blank patches, a jagged space in how I\u2019d been that simply <\/span>no longer exists<\/span><\/i>. I remember moving away from where those women were as through a vortex, past cracks widening within my vision, the sound of my inhale like a black hole. As I hurried back along the gardens\u2019 path again, expecting at any second to come stumbling onto blood, I noticed another form there with me parallel, a man hurrying along the massive drainage pipe that laced the property, trying to help. Back near the far end of the trees, he shouted at me for her phone number so he could call, too, as if she\u2019d answer him instead of me. The only numbers I knew by heart were mine and my mother\u2019s, I realized, stopping to stand there scrolling through my contacts till I found hers, then shouting it across the thickets for anyone to have. Right then, standing in the middle of a forest with my phone out, I felt as far as I have ever felt from salvation; like all the minutiae life is made of was nothing more than illness and detritus, empty gestures, worthless hope. What if I never found her, I imagined, already able to imagine countless variations of the desolation just ahead; what would life be, in this hole, where space-time seemed stretched far beyond the point of breaking, no longer even scrolling forward, but just flapping, tearing skin off, empty space? I could already imagine it just like that\u2014the nature of reality, comprised in violence made so innate you don\u2019t even need to find your loved one\u2019s body to realize, with every passing moment, that you can\u2019t go back, and that what\u2019s ahead is little more than an endless and excruciating blur. I could barely think to lift my feet, but I was moving, through somewhere so far beyond adrenaline it felt like the world had finally actually gone flat, my blood replaced with poison, choking on it, being dragged. Somewhere above me, though, if something was watching, it would have appeared like I was strolling by now, taking care to admire the minor aspects of the terrain, laying my wide eyes on anywhere the weeds and branches might obscure the truth from being found, a secret place that so far only Molly knew the shape of.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Then I saw. There in the wild grass, just off the path obscured by saplings. Her body on her back facing the sky. Eyes closed. Completely motionless. A handgun clenched between her hands against her chest. Hair pulled up in a bun. Her favorite green coat. Her face blank of\u00a0<\/span>expression, already paling. A tiny, darkened wound punched in her chin, near to her throat. A single fly already circling the hole, lurking to feed. I knew at once that she was gone. Something else about me in my brain replaced the rest then, taking me over in that instant, clobbered blank. As if the atmosphere had been ripped off and all the air sucked out around us. Like the world was just a set that\u2019d been abandoned long ago, and I was the only one still down here wandering around. I heard me tell the operator that I\u2019d found her, that she wasn\u2019t breathing. My voice was steady, somehow, already cleaving onto <\/span>facts<\/span><\/i>. I heard me say that I was not allowed to touch her, right, because this was a crime scene. Because she was without a question dead. My wife was dead. Molly was dead. The operator told me yes. She told me they were having trouble placing my location, but someone would be there soon, so just hang on. I took a step back from Molly\u2019s body, standing over it for just a moment before putting my hands over my face, turning away. I didn\u2019t need to look any longer to see the way it was, now and forever\u2014her image scraped into my brain, drained of all light. I tried to take a knee and instead fell on all fours, no longer screaming but just wailing, for her, for Mom, for God, but choking on it, out of breath, as meanwhile the white-hot silent sun above us burned, an open all-unseeing eye.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I have no idea how long I lay alone there in the dirt\u2014forever, it would have felt like, but also as if no time at all, as time meant nothing now that there was nothing left to fear. Nothing left, either, to hide me from the blank above, all one long clear pale blue, the surrounding land flat and sandwiched in around me, as in a hole cut through a map. <\/span>This can\u2019t be real<\/span><\/i>, I kept insisting aloud to no one, simultaneously devastated and enraged, moaning for help and for erasure, anything that could intercede. I felt a sudden buzzing near my right eye, then, the hum of wings and then a landing, and a pinch. I slapped back at the place where I\u2019d been stung, on my right eyelid, inadvertently hitting my own face in place of the bee, already moving on now, having delivered its weird joke. I\u2019d never been stung before but as a child, too young to recall but by my mother\u2019s story of the memory\u2014how I\u2019d stepped on a dead yellow jacket and lost my mind, more scared than hurt. I think I howled then, almost like laughing, pawing at the expectation of a swelling while looking back at Molly\u2019s corpse, as if this was some strange punchline we might share\u2014<\/span>something just stung me, what the fuck<\/span><\/i>\u2014not yet having felt it sunken in yet that she could no longer respond. \u201cA bee sticks the young king\u2019s hand for the first time,\u201d I\u2019d realize later she\u2019d once written in a poem, as if already having known. \u201cAlone on a slope where apples are rotting \/ under boughs in a sweet acid smell \/\/ and he\u2019d like insects to cover him \/ for the effect it had on the other children. In rain \/ minnows feel the pond grow.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When the cops arrived, they found me on my stomach, talking to myself. There were two of them, a medic and an officer, and at first they maintained a distance, testing me out, as if I were a criminal or wild animal. Without needing to be asked, I aimed my arm at where Molly\u2019s body was and the officer went to it, the other staying with me, not kneeling down but standing over, asking questions I can\u2019t remember to repeat. Something else was speaking for me now, a part of me that didn\u2019t need the real me to keep going; as if I wasn\u2019t really there, but in a maw. I heard myself call out after the officer to verify what I felt certain I had seen: That she was dead, right? Were they sure? Calmly, clearly, he said yes, simple as that, a legal fact. Was she pregnant? the medic asked, nodding just so when I said no. I could tell they could tell I wasn\u2019t in my right mind when I asked if they could tell where she got the gun from, and if so, would they please be sure to let me know, please? As if there were anything that I could do about it now, or as if at any second someone might come up and tap me on the shoulder, apologize for the confusion, and lead me back to my real life. Instead, by now, other police had begun arriving, masses of them, so it seemed, coming as if out of nowhere to take part in the production, right on cue. Someone put up the yellow CRIME SCENE<\/small> tape around her body. Still, I couldn\u2019t bring myself to turn my head, to have to remember her there with all the cops huddled above her with their tools. Everybody else around me was all business, working around my open moaning, bawling, barking, with eyes averted, as if at once trying to give me space and do their job. I felt so helpless there in my detainment, never officially told to stay in one place but also knowing that I must, sitting on my ass in the dirt weeping through hubbub, no certain guide but by the law. <\/span>These people are just at work<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>I remember thinking, <\/span>They must feel so thankful they\u2019re not me<\/span><\/i>. What else was there to say? I knew they knew, as best they could, how no consolation could change the fact, and that therefore there was no reason to try to touch me, offer warmth. We were just here to take part today in what the day had produced all on its own\u2014a kind of programmatic existential framework I imagined Molly finding sick satisfaction in, another brutal lesson from the void.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t sure who I could call\u2014for years, my go-to would have been Molly or Mom. The absence of both options doubly underlined the absence of any place to call my own, right then and there. It felt insane, pathetic even, to call our therapist, and so that\u2019s exactly what\u00a0<\/span>I did, unable to imagine any other person who\u2019d be the one to force out of my mouth for the first time the awful truth. Against my ear, my phone felt like a wormhole, sucking my air out as it attached me to the world beyond my reach. Maybe if nobody heard the news, it would undo itself, go back to how it\u2019d been just hours earlier. But our therapist picked up\u2014only <\/span>my <\/span><\/i>therapist now, no longer <\/span>ours<\/span><\/i>, I understood, trapped in the midst of the ways words sometimes alter their intentions, right in stride with all the other shifting details of your life\u2014and I heard the words I didn\u2019t want to have to say come flooding out: <\/span>Hello, it\u2019s me, Blake; I\u2019m very sorry, but I didn\u2019t know who else to call; Molly shot herself today; Molly is dead. <\/span><\/i>I don\u2019t remember what she said, quite; only the texture of the saying, the sound of the voice there on the line held far away, someone who knew us both and understood the impact of those words more than the other people all around me. I could see my body moving and hear the sounds that left my mouth, left with nothing else to do but play the role of my new self. I should call my sister, we concluded, after talking it through, like jumping forward through the hoops of future time arriving, point by point, like any day, though once I\u2019d done that, sharing the news with someone hundreds of miles away, I feared it would become realer somehow, a final terrible seal forced popped. People would know soon, then it\u2019d become gossip, old news, word of mouth. There\u2019d no longer remain any way, then, that I could hold off reality from taking course, filling in around me where I was not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t allowed to leave the scene. Instead, I was asked to tell and retell my story of what happened over and over, first to one detective, then another, then another, like hellish Matryoshka dolls with badges and guns. I could feel their eyes searching my eyes, reading me as I told the story as best I could. They asked if I\u2019d had any sense that this could happen, which made me feel embarrassed to say yes, trying to explain in so many feeble words Molly\u2019s persona, her personal history, her cryptic poetry. \u201cI like poetry too,\u201d one detective interrupted with a grin, somewhere between considerate and dense, like we weren\u2019t really talking about what we were talking about. I had to hand over Molly\u2019s letter, which I\u2019d been clutching this whole time, messy with mud and crumpled up, now considered <\/span>evidence<\/span><\/i>. This letter was my last link to her mind, I felt, therefore to any frame that might be found to explicate her reasoning, and now I had to hand it over, following procedure like some suspect on TV. I begged them to be sure to return to me, to not let it end up missing, aware at the same time in my periphery of the handling of the body of my wife, the hunt for facts, none of which could ever change what had just happened, much less whatever might come next.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I was busy reiterating my story for another detective when across the mud I noticed Matt, one of my oldest friends, running toward me. The look on his face, the sound of his voice, the way he hugged me to him: now there was no mistaking what had occurred, no way to keep it separate from the whole rest of my life. I felt my limbs go limp to be embraced, as all of what had kept me upright no longer needed to hold on. At the same time, still in shock, I felt my body holding back there on the cusp, not letting me implode yet, as somehow the world continued on. I could touch my face and feel it there, part of my body, but who was I, and why, and how? Had what just happened actually happened, or was I living in a hell world, an exact model of how it\u2019d once been with just this one major detail brought to change? Like any second everybody would start laughing, including Molly, who\u2019d get up and come to take me in her arms, without a need for explanation besides to say that she wasn\u2019t really gone. Then they\u2019d roll the sky back, too, and show me everything else I hadn\u2019t known yet about my life, about existence. Instead, I listened in as Matt spoke up on my behalf, asserting that I should be allowed to leave as soon as possible and go home. Hearing him say <\/span>home<\/span><\/i>, however, reminded me that the word already clearly no longer meant the same as it last had, and in a way, that felt more frightening than standing out here in broad daylight at a crime scene, where at least there was a formal process underway. What choice did I have, though, but to keep going, unless I was ready, willing, and able to die too? Yes, that made sense. Molly was my wife, my love\u2014shouldn\u2019t I go with her, having failed her? Why should I be allowed to survive beyond this day? Already, in thinking back, I felt an undeniable desire that instead of doing the right thing calling the cops, I\u2019d instead taken the gun from Molly\u2019s hands, laid down beside her, and, as if somehow in her honor, doubled down. At my most dire, any other option outside of that, now and for some time, would bear the tint of a pitiful formality, tempered only by conditioning, as if all we really are is just the shadow of what we\u2019re not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to get mud all over the inside of Matt\u2019s car. I remained formal and polite even in zombie-mode, relieved at least to have something else to do. Back at our address, I trudged up the same set of concrete steps where I\u2019d only just been standing when I discovered her suicide note taped to the door, a hanging haze there like the fumes after explosion. The front face of our house looked like a facsimile, designed to trick me into believing I existed\u2014a secret feeling shared between me and it alone, as to most anybody else, outside my mind, it was just another piece of property. I imagine that\u2019s how haunting works\u2014only those who know can parse the signal linking the residue of history to how we are, what we\u2019re becoming amid our slow transition, step by step. I sat on the stoop with my head in my hands, trying to remember how to think, or not to think. I was focused, mostly, on her letter, getting it back, so I could read it in full, over and over; as if, like Molly, only work could save me now. Matt volunteered to go back down and ask for information, if I\u2019d be okay on my own, and I told him that was fine, that it might be good for me to have some time alone now, so I could feel the way I felt beyond the reach of other eyes. I was well-accustomed to this aloneness, this want for independence, having already accepted as natural law that no one could ever reach me but myself, the bells and whistles of attention that made most others seem to feel better were for me more a nuisance than a balm. As he drove off, I went inside and closed myself inside the bathroom, walking right past my reflection without looking, not wanting yet to have to see, and past the mostly pastel-colored painting Molly had made in college and hung here, as if for forever, having planned this ending to our story all this time. I stripped my muddy running clothes off and turned the shower on hot and lay face down on the tile beneath the spray. I can\u2019t remember what words I made, only the texture of my voice, mumbling in monotone under my breath as if to anyone who still might hear me from Beyond, the same way that I had once, as a child, tried to comfort myself mimicking Mom\u2019s lullabies. <\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

When Matt got back, he handed me a brown paper bag containing Molly\u2019s letter and her phone, along with the business card of the investigator for the medical examiner\u2019s center and a second note by Molly found on her body, scrawled on the back side of a small envelope:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

VOLUNTARY EXIT<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am an organ donor<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My husband Blake Butler\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

(my phone number)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I took Molly\u2019s letter into my office, closed the glass doors. I knelt on the floor and read it from beginning to end once and then immediately again, trying to find some kernel of her voice there, something alive. These were Molly\u2019s final words, I realized, believing in them as some form of access to her brain\u2014despite how out of sync they seemed, like a lost child trying to figure out how to explain her situation to herself while standing front and center in harm\u2019s way. Here was what she had left for me to hear. A widening terror within me renewed itself with every breathless word and hard return, underlined by an undeniable form of failure, hers and mine. If only I had one more chance to hold her, I imagined, to tell her everything she meant to me no matter what. If only I could tear this paper up, as if it alone had been the cause and not the receipt. Any chance to contradict her logic, though, to reach beyond it, had been not only lopped off at the hilt, but imminently infected by the violent silence of the world\u2014including the matted, jagged sunlight pouring in now through the windows, getting all over everything we\u2019d ever had, nowhere to turn but toward the absence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From\u00a0<\/em>Molly<\/a>,\u00a0to be published by Archway Editions in November 2023.<\/em><\/p>\n

Blake Butler is the author of nine book-length works, including <\/em>Alice Knott, <\/em>300,000,000, <\/em>Sky Saw, <\/em>There is No Year,<\/em>\u00a0and <\/em>Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. In 2021, he was long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He is a founding editor of <\/em>HTMLGIANT<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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