Lorelei's Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst Page B

little damage there was. Two days after the prom, she went out by herself into the city and found a tattoo parlor. She presented her scalp to the man who owned the place - he was a big man, and his name was Goldie - and she asked him to cover her head with snakes. She wore long sleeves until the wound on her wrist had healed completely, and her parents thought that a snaky-haired daughter was the worst they had to fear. Within a few months, Lexy went off to college, and by and by, the heaviness that had inhabited her body for so long began to lift. But that night in the bathroom became part of her. Every breath she drew was colored by what she had learned that night.
    Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people who love you and the sun is shining and there’s a movie coming out this weekend that you’ve been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself: Is this it? You start thinking that you’ve known this was coming all along, but you don’t know if today’s going to be the day.
    And if you think about it too much, it’s probably not. But you dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you’re going to make them see? And the moment’s over. You think about how sad it would’ve been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would’ve taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.
    This is what we know, those of us who can speak to
    tell a story: Lexy didn’t jump. The wounds she suffered in her fall, the break of her bones and the wreck of her organs, the haphazard spill of her blood in the dirt, have told us this much. But perhaps, and this is where my breath catches in my throat, perhaps she let herself fall. The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop .moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

14
    I think it was fairly early in our courtship that Lexy told me the story of how Lorelei came to be her dog. Lorelei was maybe five months old when she first entered Lexy’s life.
    She showed up on Lexy’s doorstep one day during a sudden summer storm, a big bleeding puppy under a dark and
    shrunken sky. Lexy was walking around the house, closing windows, when she heard a low whine from outside,
    followed by a short, insistent bark. She opened the door to find a puppy with big ears and a ridge down her back and a gash in her throat that matted her fur with blood.
    ‘Hi,’ Lexy said. ‘Who are you?’ She bent down to check for a collar and tags, but there were none. ‘Wait here,’ she said, and she ran to get a towel. She brought the dog inside and washed the cut with a warm soapy cloth. Lorelei flinched as Lexy touched the cloth to the wound, but she didn’t make a sound and she didn’t snap at Lexy. The gash wasn’t big, but it looked deep. Lexy took the phone book down from the top of the refrigerator, and she looked up veterinarians.
    When she brought her back