Driving With the Top Down (13 page)

Even though that part is obviously true.

Anyway.

I wasn’t sure it was such a great idea either, but I can’t afford to sift through the quality of ideas right now. I was thinking Florida might be a good place to go down and rent a boat, drive out into the ocean, and just … disappear. Leave ’em wondering forever. That wasn’t the original plan, obviously, you know that already. I’m not into uncertainty and I’m sure not into pain, so I think the gun idea was the best. (They say women don’t shoot themselves, because they’re too vain, but at least there are no variables.)

Now I need to rethink. I said I was going to Florida because I wanted to think of someplace far enough away that they wouldn’t volunteer to just drop me off, but when they said they were going to Florida, well, it seemed like a good omen. I was watching
Nancy Grace
sometime ago when this woman had disappeared and they said she could be reduced to nothing but bone out in the Florida elements in just a matter of days. Under a week. I find that to be a plus. I don’t know you, so I don’t know if you’re squeamish about that kind of thing, but at least you’ll know now that I’m not. I like the whole “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing much more than, you know, traditional burial.

The only thing I’m not so sure of is how I can spend the days necessary with Colleen and her niece, acting like everything’s normal, socializing, taking part in life, when I have already mentally checked out. This is a toughie.

Right now, I’m sitting in this old rattletrap of a convertible of hers, complete with an embarrassing old trailer attached, with the heat blasting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the carbon monoxide got me. That’s not my plan, but, hey, if it happens, it happens and it means the car wasn’t safe for those two so, actually, my last act will be altruistic. Unfortunately, I feel fine. Everything around me is completely and utterly normal. I’m in the parking lot of CVS, watching a sprinkler spit at some little tomato plants in a house just a few yards away right now.

I feel kind of bad because I asked Colleen if I could borrow her car to go to the drugstore, and now I’ve been gone—I don’t know—an hour or so. Maybe more. She’s probably wondering where I am, and if I’m the same Bitty she knew. Thinking she can’t trust me. She’s right, I guess. And the answer is no, I’m not the same Bitty she knew. I’m not the Bitty anyone knew, not even myself.

I guess I’m no one now.

Of course, you already know that. You’re holding the proof in your hand, this suicide letter written to Dear Stranger. How pathetic is that? If I heard this story on the news, I’d think it was one of the saddest things I’d ever heard. Maybe a letter like this floated up on some shore in a bottle or something, and some kid dropped his beach ball and opened it up hoping it was a treasure map and found, instead, that it was a middle-aged woman’s angsty ramblings. Maybe even attached to a name. “Authorities suspect the letter might have been written by Wilhelmina Camalier, the woman missing since June of last year, but the water damage is too great to definitively identify her writing.…”

Or what she’s saying.

I guess I won’t send this off to sea in a bottle, now that I think about it.

Anyway, before the car debacle, I pigged out at Henley’s, and, let me tell you, that felt good! Best I’ve felt in ages, honestly. Let them know I died happy, will you? Okay, not happy, obviously, but I went on my own terms. Had peace of mind. Then I started writing to you and felt a real sense of purpose. Is that crazy? Well, of course, you’d have to say anything I said right now was crazy, wouldn’t you? I mean, facts being what they are. Or will be. But being there, alone, in that place where I’d spent so many good times before my marriage … it reminded me, somewhat, of who I am. Was. I can’t ever be her again, I’m too far down the rabbit hole to climb back up and have a normal life, but for a few random moments here and there, I could feel myself twisting deep inside, like a toddler beginning to wake from a nap.

So when Colleen walked in—jeez! I just didn’t know what to make of it. At first she seemed like an echo or a memory, but memories don’t age. Not that she looks old or anything; she actually looks great. She has the face of a woman who hasn’t seen too many sleepless nights. No Botox, no fillers, a few lines, but the unmistakable mask of a woman who has seen mostly contentment, if not much excitement.

Or maybe it’s just the bloom of the Well Fed. She’s as curvy as ever, with one of those old-fashioned hourglass bodies that would be criminal to call fat, and doesn’t seem to care what she eats as long as it tastes good. Same old Colleen.

The girl was always there to pull me out from my slump, so leave it to her to magically arrive the night I decided to kill myself.

Apparently, she’s going to antique auctions down the coast, picking up old furniture for a business she has. Made sense. Whenever I pictured Colleen, which I didn’t do often—it kind of hurt too much to think about “the old days”—I always imagined her covered in paint. In her baggy, torn-up jeans covered in sawdust and acrylic paints, the tips of her fingers stained from the alizarin crimson she painted with—the color that always looked bloodlike.

So it made sense to me that she would still be doing something like that. Still working late into the night, hair in a ponytail, accidentally getting a pretty swipe of paint across her eyebrow.

I wonder if she still paints. She “fixes things up” for some sort of antique store she has, she says, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s doing oils or sculpting anymore. That’s the kind of thing that, all too often, depends on the support of a spouse. I wonder what her marriage is like. I was invited to the wedding. I probably should have gone, but I didn’t.

I was too caught up in my life. My life was supposed to have been new. Not just a new chapter in my life, but a new book entirely.
Bitty’s Life, Volume 2: Wilhelmina.
Back to my ridiculous given name, which most people cannot even take in when they look at it.

Wilhelmina Camalier.

But alas, my marriage, just like my death, didn’t go as I expected.

Oh my God, an old man just knocked on the car window. Hang on, I’ll be back.

I’m back.

And that was unpleasant.

First off, it wasn’t an old man, it was a wizened old woman who looked like a man. In fact, to be perfectly accurate, she looked exactly like the Mayor of Munchkinland—and that’s who she seemed to think she was, because she was trying to pull her stupid RV into the parking lot and said my camper was in the way. She had, like, twenty feet on either side of her, which she should have known because her ridiculous pink flamingo string lights lit the entire parking lot like the UFO landing gear in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
but, nooo, she needed me to move.

I would have argued, I swear I would have gone all Towanda on her, like Kathy Bates in
Fried Green Tomatoes,
but I don’t really know how good Colleen’s insurance is, or if it’s different coverage that doesn’t allow someone else to use your vehicle, or whatever.

So I got out of the car, to point out how much room she had, and how little room I had to maneuver, and, honestly, the woman was like three foot nothing. I towered over her.

But despite that, she started yelling at me! I mean profanities, flailing arms, the whole nine yards. I tried to speak quietly, because in normal situations, people respond faster and listen better if you are quieter, but in this case, she just bulldozed me. So I raised my voice—just to be heard, you understand—and then she raised hers (when you wouldn’t have thought that was possible), and all of a sudden, people filling their gas tanks at the station thirty yards away were looking over, and people were coming out of the food mart into the gas lanes to see what the commotion was.

When I told her to please stop yelling, she screamed, “Don’t threaten me!” as if I’d pulled a gun on her.

(Which I could have, if it weren’t for my car being stolen! More bad luck! I mean, what would I have had to lose? And what a satisfying moment that would have been!)

Anyway, as you might imagine, the scene everyone thought they were witnessing was five-foot-seven-inch me towering over this tiny person, threatening her, frightening her. I don’t know, maybe some even called Child Protective Services. It was humiliating!

So, just to end the nightmare, the little bitch got her way and I moved the car and trailer, only to hear this horrible screeching sound. So I got out and looked, and the bumper had gotten caught on the broken base of what must have been a parking lot light once and it was pulling off. So I lifted it up and over the damn cement base and pulled the trailer around, then pushed—well, sort of shoved—the bumper back into place.

It seems to be okay now.

Nevertheless, I’m going to run into the pharmacy and get some Krazy Glue in addition to sleeping pills.

I’m back again. So I glued the bumper in place, and if those old commercials with a guy hanging midair from his hard hat, held in place only by Krazy Glue, are any indication, the bumper should stay in place now.

I have less confidence in the sleeping pills. I’m sorry, the NoSomnias, which I think is a pretty poor pun on “insomnia” and kind of sounds like it too, indicates “no sleep” but it was two bucks cheaper than the Tylenol PM, and I have to watch my dollars in case this doesn’t work. No telling how long that $222 (now) is going to have to last me.

It’s tempting to take them all now, but the car is getting low on gas, and I can’t leave Colleen with a corpse and an empty tank. Talk about tacky.

And I can’t do that to the kid either. Did I mention Colleen had this kid with her—this sullen girl—who is apparently her niece, her husband’s brother’s child, so no relation to apple-cheeked blond Colleen. She has dull, charcoal hair—dyed, of course—and skin so pale, it’s almost green. This time of year! When I was her age, I would have been out trying to get a Bain de Soliel tan but instead she’s on this road trip with a woman twice her age. She must be bored out of her skull.

Too bad I’ll never know more of her story.

Still, tempting as it is, I can’t do myself in in this car, right where they have to get back in and drive another thousand miles and back. The kid would freak out. I remember being her age. Weird thought: I’m alive now and maybe strike her as weird but not frightening. Not creepy. But the minute my life leaves me, I’m something else entirely.

Better that I don’t do it in a space they have to keep regardless.

So, what am I on now? Plan C? Got to keep thinking.

Meanwhile, I guess I should put at least a few bucks’ worth of gas in the tank, considering the fact that I must have used up quite a bit sitting here writing with the engine running.

I may be planning “the ultimate selfish act,” but I don’t want to be inconsiderate.

CHAPTER TEN

Colleen

Farm auctions were Colleen’s favorites. You never knew what you were going to get. Where traditional antique auctioneers brought up one fussy item at a time and there was absolute clarity on what you were getting—though you could still get a great deal—farm auctioneers always seemed grizzled and a little bored, and inevitably, about three hours in, they’d start selling multiple boxes of unidentified, uninspected items. Sometimes they’d even sell an entire tableful just to end the thing and, presumably, get on home to pop a beer and watch some tractor pulling.

For Colleen, these auctions were just like Christmas mornings of old, when she’d excitedly run downstairs to dump her stocking onto the floor in front of the fireplace, eager to see what Santa had left, even though it was 80 percent gumdrops and a good half of the foot was taken up just by the orange no one ever ate but that her parents always included anyway.

That’s exactly how farm auction lots were.

Once, for just two dollars, Colleen had gotten a lot that included, among other things, an orange outdoor extension cord, a plastic hard hat that she wasn’t sure was real or a toy, a small wooden box of rusted chains, a bingo ticket cage like a hamster wheel for mixing up the tickets, a fourteen-pound bowling ball in a bag, and a heavily tarnished Tiffany sterling silver trumpet vase, which someone threw in there because they were too lazy to walk an extra five feet to the recycle bin.

All she’d wanted was the bowling ball bag. She thought she could make it into a cool purse. That it had a ball in it surprised her. She made that into a candle holder, wondering if anyone would seriously want it even though she thought it was awesome, and it had been the first thing to sell the morning she put it out. The Tiffany vase was the last thing to go that day, but it went for twelve hundred dollars. That was the sort of profit that kept Kevin encouraging her to keep on doing what she was doing, but it was the bowling ball candleholder that actually kept her interested in what she was doing.

So everyone won.

Except today, when Bitty and Tamara both looked so miserable that instead of enjoying the down-home atmosphere, strong coffee, and over-fried cinnamon doughnuts, Colleen was self-conscious that she wasn’t showing them a good enough time.

Which wasn’t fair, because she wasn’t here to show them a good time; she was here to collect inventory for her business and somehow—through very little fault of her own—she’d ended up with these two sullen strays.

“See anything of interest?” Colleen asked Tamara after she’d wandered alongside a table of items, peering into the boxes like she was looking into exhumed coffins.

“There was an old Easter basket filled with pink plastic grass and three dead wolf spiders.”

Colleen was not rising to the bait. “Do you plan to bid on it?”

“Do you think the spiders come with it?”

“I think you could negotiate a deal with the auctioneer.” She glanced toward a very tall man with a very large gut barely covered by a
PIGS R US BBQ
T-shirt, who was wearing a Peterbilt hat over what Colleen just knew was a sparsely covered scalp.

Normally she loved this kind of sight.

Tamara looked in his direction and literally turned up her nose, though she probably didn’t realize she did it. “No, thanks.”