Losing Clementine (37 page)

I looked over her left shoulder, hoping a way out would materialize there. She shook my arm.

“You're going to take me with you, right? You're not going to leave me?”

I looked at her. She was ready to crumple. She was made of nothing more substantial than tissue paper. She could blow away in the wind right then or dissolve in the rain.

I felt responsibility throw a saddle over my back. It cinched around my stomach.

“You can't rely on me,” I told her. “I'm the worst possible person to rely on.”

“I know.”

A car rolled by on the street, slowing as it passed us and then picking up speed again. It stopped at the end of the block with its blinker on, waited too long with no traffic coming, and then turned.

“You really don't.” I tried to put enough weight into my words so that they could sink through the protective coating that was forming over her brain, keeping out all other pain. “Let's go,” I said, putting my hand on her arm and pushing her toward the open door. She resisted, her lower body staying planted while my shove turned her top half. She looked like a swivel-waisted Barbie doll.

“I want to go home with you,” she said. “I want to stay at your place tonight. Let me stay tonight.”

My place. My place with my papers all laid out and my corpse in the bathtub by morning. I remembered I needed to turn the AC up.

“Will your mother come out here?” I asked.

“What?”

“To take care of you,” I said. “I've heard the drugs they give you—I've heard you might need someone to check on you.”

“I'm not going to call her. Why would I call her? I want to go home with you.”

“I can't take care of you,” I said.

“I know. I'm not asking you to.”

“You are.”

“I'm not.”

I took hold of her chin with my free hand and tilted it up, forcing her to look into my face.

“I gave away Chuckles today. I gave away my cat. I am the sort of person who would give away her cat.”

“We can get him back,” she said, blowing past my point without a sideways glance.

“I can't take care of him anymore. I can't even take care of my cat.”

“I know.”

“You have to stop saying that.”

“I know you stopped taking your medicines,” she said, “and I know you don't have cancer.”

I let go of her chin. I felt a flash of anger at her and shame over my lies, and I swallowed the part where I called her a sneak and a spy because I could do that much if not a lot else. She didn't need my shit on top of her own.

“I think you should start taking the pills again,” she said.

Such a lovely, naive thought from a lovely, naive head that had not and would not turn on its owner like a sick animal.

“I am not going to get better,” I said.

“You don't know that.”

“I do know that.”

Two doors down a woman walked out her front door. She had a teenage boy with her. She stopped to lock the door behind her while he continued on down the walk toward the street. His gate had an exaggerated lope, a self-conscious affectation meant to convey relaxed casualness. The woman caught up and then passed him, her steps quick and purposeful, making him drop the stroll to keep up. I heard the police helicopter make another pass, farther away than before. The normality was distracting.

“I want to go home with you,” Jenny said, “and I think you need me to go with you, too.”

“I don't.”

“You're a bad liar. You should stop doing it so much.”

“Jenny.”

“You don't have to pay me,” she said. “I'll be your assistant for free.”

“This isn't about money.”

“Would you take Ramona in?”

“You don't get to go there,” I said. There are places in a person's past that are off-limits even to emotional pirates and plunderers.

“Why not? She was my sister, too, wasn't she?”

Jenny had let go of my hand, and I couldn't remember when exactly that had happened. Somewhere we'd moved from pleading conversation to argument, and she'd decided to fight with bare knuckles, which was more than unfair.

“It's not the same,” I said.

“It is the same. It's exactly the same. I'm your sister, and you're mine, and she was, and we're all in this together, so let me go home with you.”

I shut the car door and pressed the button on the key chain. A faint click came from inside as the plunger dropped into the lock.

I didn't want to have this argument. I didn't want to be here. Not on this street. Not in this city. Not on this plane of existence.

“Clementine.”

I ignored her.

My plan was so good. So neat and clean. I had taken care of everything. No one needed me. No one was supposed to need me.

“Clementine.”

She reached for the door handle and pulled up uselessly.

I had bought my own casket, for Christ's sake. I got points for that. The universe owed me. I did my part. I did more than anyone in my shoes could possibly have been expected to do.

“Clementine.”

I had been responsible. Other people walked out in front of trains. I didn't do that.

“Clementine, open the damn door!” Jenny banged her fist on the passenger window. “You have to!”

I looked down at the car keys in my hand. I could just open my door. One click of the button. I didn't have to open hers. That was two clicks of the button. I could open mine and climb in and drive away with her screaming in the rearview mirror and things would almost be exactly the way they were three hours ago. Let her find her own way to the clinic. Let her find her own way home. Let her find her own way period.

“You'd do it for Ramona,” she was yelling at me. “You'd do anything for her, and I've done a lot for you. I have. You know I have.”

One click? Two clicks?

“We can take care of each other. We can.”

I looked past her into the street.

“What are you going to do?” she demanded.

I really had no idea.

“I really have no idea.”

“Decide tomorrow,” she said.

“What?”

“You could do that. We could just get in the car for now, and you could decide tomorrow what you want to do. Or the day after,” she added because why not buy a little time if you could?

“We can't go back to my place,” I said.

“Mine then. Come home with me after the clinic. For tonight.”

I tried to think of a logical, reasonable thing I could say to explain why I could not wait for tomorrow.

“Your apartment is a dump,” I said.

“Yeah, my employer paid like shit. That means you should spring for the pizza.”

“I didn't agree to this.”

“Yes, you did, and it's only until tomorrow.” She took a deep breath and started to cry again. It must've taken a lot for her to hold it in that long. She'd really been trying when no one could've expected her to. “Now take me to the doctor.”

I clicked the button. Then I did it again.

At its heart,
Losing Clementine
explores the breaking and re-forming of relationships within the storm of mental illness. It's about families—the kind you're born with and the kind you make. It's about love and sex and marriage and food—and it's really about art and the creative process.
Losing Clementine
is about a lot of things. Here are some questions for discussion:

by Ashley Ream

The first line of
Losing Clementine
was written in a coffee shop in Santa Monica, California, where I was briefly a regular. Followers of the Spiritualism movement would've called those first pages “automatic writing,” a state in which the author is a sort of secretary taking dictation from an otherworldly source. Writers just call it “the muse” or, as I prefer, “flow.” Whatever you call it, I hadn't sat down to write about Clementine, had never before made her acquaintance, and, in fact, was working on another novel entirely (which was going rather poorly). But the moment she barged onto the page, threw open the window, and started chucking crockery out onto the street below, I knew two things: Clementine was an artist and she was suicidal.

Several reputable newspapers, including the
New York Times,
have written articles about the suicide tourism phenomenon. Proponents of right-to-die laws are providing travel information to patients with painful and debilitating illnesses who are planning their own deaths. Although tightly controlled in the patients' home countries, a particular barbiturate used to euthanize animals can be had easily in Mexican border towns.

I wanted to find out just how easily, so I booked my own trip to Tijuana's medical dark side. Despite easy access to specific information elsewhere, I chose not to name the drug. I also chose to inaccurately describe the recommended method of taking it. Those looking for a how-to guide will not be well served by this book.

In 2010, the year of my trip, a number of Mexican border towns were experiencing more than their fair share of drug-related violence. In 2008, a war had broken out between rival factions of a drug cartel in Tijuana. There were 844 homicides in the city that year. By 2009, it was believed the factions had reached a truce, and the crime rate fell. However, in the first eleven days of 2010, four youths were shot, four people were decapitated, and at least ten more were killed in drive-by attacks. In addition, there had been five kidnappings—all in just more than a week, according to the
Los Angeles Times
. It was putting a serious dent in recreational travel south of the border.

By the fall, most of what would become
Losing Clementine
was written. A research trip couldn't be postponed any longer, and while no one thought it was a particularly good idea for me to go traipsing around alone inquiring about barbiturates, a line wasn't forming to accompany me, either. So I called Eric Stone.

Eric, another recovering journalist turned author, replied, “I know a good place for
carnitas
down there.”

We loaded our bags into his aging Lexus and drove the 130 miles from Los Angeles to the Mexican border along Interstate 5. It's easier and faster to cross on foot, and the last mile of American soil is filled with nothing but long-term parking lots and Mexican car insurance purveyors. We abandoned the car, piled our bags on our backs, and walked the last quarter-mile.