Chapter 19 Freak Accident #2
It wasn’t true, of course, but I knew what he meant—and that he had meant it as a compliment.
Sometimes when people survive a suicide attempt, they simply try again. Moreover, I was—I am—clearly an addictive personality, and recidivism is a character trait shared by addicts, criminals, and the clinically depressed. I was, to some degree, all of those things. Every single one.
So, why is it that I never tried again?
After Ethan left later that afternoon to return to Amherst, I took Harvey for a walk around the village.
Usually, I wrapped the loop of the nylon handle around my wrist, but since I had returned to Tallmadge from the hospital, I’d been afraid I might tear the stitches and reopen one of the wounds, and so I’d been holding it with only my fingers.
I was wearing one of my golf windbreakers against the autumn chill and decided now the fabric would protect the skin there, and held on to the leash the way I always had.
Wrapped it around my right wrist. I viewed this small return to normalcy as a sign of emotional healing. Emotional good health, even.
As I watched my pup sniff for the presence of squirrels and chipmunks and cats (and other dogs), I felt content, an emotion I seldom experienced.
Oh, I had been happy often enough in my life, but it had always been a manic sort of happiness, the kind of euphoria that comes from coke and good weed and, alas, desperation.
Even postcoital, even when the sex with Theo or Dennis had been particularly good, a part of me was still more frenzied than satisfied.
Which, perhaps, is another indication of why I was constitutionally unlikely ever to be an LPGA champ.
Think about it: when golfers win a tournament, they don’t run around like crazed children the way other sorts of professional athletes do when they succeed.
Recall the classic photos and videos you’ve seen of baseball players tearing off their shirts after hitting a game-winning home run or football players somersaulting into the end zone or spiking the football after a game-winning touchdown.
In golf, the most iconic images of victory involve a fist pump after sinking a long, high-pressure putt, or putting on a green jacket—a crested blazer, for God’s sake—after winning in Augusta.
We are so mannered that polite, muted applause is referred to as a “golf clap,” and there are plenty of parodies of the way TV golf announcers breathlessly whisper the play-by-play on each hole.
Compare a golf commentator’s careful murmurs with the way a baseball announcer will become blissfully hysterical on a home run call.
After I’d win a tournament, and I won often, I’d want to hurl a club into the air or wave one like a saber.
I’d want to bellow and roar. But golfers aren’t supposed to be swashbucklers, that’s not the etiquette, and it especially wasn’t the case in the Mesozoic era of the mid- to late 1970s.
So, I’d sink a putt on eighteen, clinching my win, and I’d nod and bow to the galleries. It was all as contrived as a curtsy.
But that wasn’t how I’d feel inside. Back then, my core was volcanic; serenity—contentment—was as foreign to me as a language I couldn’t speak.
Now, after almost killing myself, I had changed. I am not suggesting that suicide is a solid path to overcoming addictive behavior, criminality, and depression, or a path to enlightenment. It’s not. Trust me, it’s not, and you do not want to go there. I was lucky.
What changed—what changed me—was the discovery that despite all the damage I had inflicted upon the soul of my world (not the soul of the world, I was not that arrogant), there were still people who cared for me and wanted me around.
I could never bring back Kenny Foster, and I could never heal the pain I had inflicted upon the Catton family.
But, just maybe, it really was, as Ethan had said, a freak accident. Maybe the gospel of Mira Land was madness, after all, and I did not have Kenny Foster’s blood on my hands because I had slept with Theo Catton. The connection was only in my head.
Maybe I really wouldn’t even go to jail. Maybe my parents wouldn’t go broke paying my damages in a civil settlement. Or, maybe, my wages wouldn’t be garnished forever after I lost and I insisted on paying them myself.
Since I’d been home, I’d smoked no weed and snorted no coke.
And I could have. I’m sure, at the very least, I could have found the kid brother or kid sister of any of my friends from high school, some now juniors or seniors themselves, who would have given or sold me marijuana.
I could have gone into the city and met with the editorial assistant from the travel magazine who doled out disco biscuits like peanuts.
But I didn’t. One afternoon, I considered watering down my parents’ Johnnie Walker the way I had when I had lived at home before college, but I didn’t do that, either.
We were still far from a dry house, but I could see they were drinking less.
When your kid tries to kill herself, you tend to reassess a lot of your behavior, it seems.