Voices in the Night (9 page)

She walks down the steps and feels the grass cool and sharp-soft against her bare feet. She strides past the row of spruces that separate her yard from the husband and wife next door, asleep in their bed, past the pinewood fence in back, past the side of the garage. The thief must have stood somewhere in the dark yard, studying the house, planning his way in. A safe world of yards and fences, of people asleep in the night, behind locked doors, under the tipped-back moon. The thief must be somewhere. Where is somewhere? Somewhere is nowhere. She throws herself onto one of the reclining lawn chairs and leans back with her legs on the stretched-out part, her ankles crossed, her slithery robe open at her knees. A warm night of summer, dim glow of streetlights over the roofs, a good night for prowling. He must have climbed the back steps, tried the door, surprise! She hears something in the trees. A cat? Raccoon? If the thief is hiding under the trees, he’ll come out, he’s got to, after a while. He’s only waiting for her to go back upstairs, if he’s there, so that he can complete the work she interrupted.

She glances suddenly at the lawn chair next to her. He is not there. She looks behind her. He is not there. He is not there, and he is not there, and he is not there, and he is not there. He has gone away, her thief in the night, he doesn’t want to rob them anymore. She turns to
look at the house. In the warm-cool air, under the tipped-back moon, she is waiting, she is watching, she is restless, she is ready. She bends and unbends her toes, squeezes the chair arms, flings back a twist of hair from her face. Something is rising in her, a tide of night sorrow, at any moment she will burst into loud tears, she will cry out with bitter laughter. Lights will go on, people will stare out of windows, the moon will tip back in its chair and fall out of the sky. Her soles itch. She’s got to jump up, jolt herself loose. There’s only so much waiting you can hold inside.

As she climbs the porch steps, the wife looks quickly over her shoulder. She enters the kitchen and locks the door that her husband locked before going to bed. From a box under the sink she removes a large plastic bag with tie handles. She opens a second bag and lines the first with it. She pauses, listens, then opens the cellar door. From a hook on the back of the door she removes a baseball cap and pulls the peak low on her face. She closes the door and moves through the kitchen. In the dark living room she takes the windup clock with the four glass sides and places it in the bag. From the top of the lamp table she removes the painted glass tray from Italy and the ivory statuette of a girl with a parasol and places them in the bag. She moves swiftly and surely about the room, taking the porcelain vase with the ostrich feathers, the silver dove on the mantel, the photo album of the trip to California, the spiral lightbulbs in the bottom drawer of the corner cabinet, the two TV remotes, the dictionary, the framed photograph of herself in a straw hat standing by a stream, the small painting that shows a woman reading by a haystack, letters from drawers, the wooden owl. From the dining room she takes the cut-glass bowl and a set of blue wineglasses, from the kitchen the silver napkin holder, the coffeemaker, the clock. With the aid of a flashlight she drags the heavy bag down the cellar steps and carries it past the furnace and the water heater to the pile of boxes and broken furniture in the corner. The boxes contain old dishes, folders of outdated medical records,
discarded gloves and hats. She thrusts the bag of stolen goods into a space between boxes. Over the space she places an upside-down table with three legs.

At the top of the stairs she hangs the cap on its hook. She closes the cellar door. In the kitchen she returns the flashlight to the drawer. She moves through the living room, climbs the stairs, opens the bedroom door. Her husband is lying asleep on his back. He has the nose of a little boy. She removes her robe and slips under the covers. She can feel a dark peacefulness flowing in her like the water of a pebbled brook. She closes her eyes and sleeps like the dead.

W
e have completed our preliminary investigation and hereby submit our report to the Committee.

For nearly six months our town has suffered events that threaten its very existence. Entire families have moved away, in the hope of finding relief in other towns, only to discover that they cannot escape what some have called a curse, others a fatality; we ourselves prefer less colorful forms of speech. Those of us who remain have attempted to go about our business as if nothing has changed, while knowing that everything has changed. The very expressions on our faces have altered. Even the smiles of our children are no longer the old smiles, but betray an air of exaggeration, of willed cheerfulness. On block after block we see the empty houses, the untended lawns. Cats scratch at screen doors that never open. Large groups of townsfolk gather in vacant lots at dusk, as if for a purpose, only to drift away. Under such conditions, who can speak? We who dare to hope, we who are in the thick of things but try to stand apart, in order to grasp the ungraspable—we have taken it upon ourselves to trace the history of these aberrations and to discover their secret cause.

For as long as anyone can remember, our town has been a pleasant place to live in. Situated at the far end of the commuter line, we enjoy the sense of a vital connection to the larger world, as well as a satisfying sense of self-exclusion from that world, of communal separation for the sake of our own way of life. Here, we preserve touches of an older, more rural America. The north woods, the stream with its railed wooden bridge, the Indian burial ground—such retreats coexist peacefully with our train station, our six-lane thruway, and our new microchip plant. Here, the streets are shady, the houses in good repair, the backyards bright with swing sets, lawn chairs, and round cedar tables under broad umbrellas. In Sterling Park, our children play baseball on a diamond with real bases, a pitcher’s mound with a pitcher’s rubber, and a chain-link backstop, while our dogs lie down, beside slatted benches, in stripes of sun and shade. Of course, like other towns, we have our share of troubles, we’re only human. But on the whole we are happy to be here, where the sky has always seemed a little bluer, the leaves a little greener, than in other towns we know.

Was there a turn, a change in the atmosphere? To single out a particular moment is to distort the record, for it suggests a clear history of cause and effect that can only betray our sense of what really happened. We can nevertheless agree that something began to reveal itself in March of this year, about six months ago. At that time three incidents occurred, apparently unrelated, which made a strong impression on the town without seeming to point in a direction. The first was the death by suicide of Richard and Suzanne Lowry, of 451 Greenwood Road. The Lowrys were in their early fifties, rich, healthy, happily married, with a wide circle of friends. They left no note. The police investigation uncovered no secret, no mistress or lover, no illness, no problem of any kind, and it was above all the absence of a motive that disturbed and finally angered a good many of us, who blamed the Lowrys not simply for throwing their lives away but for leaving us with an impenetrable mystery. There was some unpleasant
talk among us that they did it in order to spite us, to show us that they needed no one and nothing. Although this explanation struck most of us as petty and malicious, we took it as a sign of the dissatisfaction we all felt, a testament to our irritable unforgiveness.

Two weeks later came the news of Carl Schneider, a seventy-four-year-old retired high-school geometry teacher who had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver. His death, by his own hand, attracted less attention than the Lowry deaths, though we were all aware of it and felt secretly thankful to Mr. Schneider for providing us with a reasonable suicide, some would say an admirable suicide, one that we could readily understand. In this sense the two incidents, which had nothing to do with each other, were connected in our minds. We also noted that in an interview in the
Town Ledger
, Schneider’s forty-six-year-old daughter said that her father had read about the Lowrys and had mentioned them during a visit. In a small town, someone remarked at the time, it’s difficult to kill yourself without word getting around.

Four days after the death of Carl Schneider, two high school juniors, Ryan Whittaker and Diane Grabowski, were discovered in the basement playroom of the Whittaker house, lying side by side on the daybed near the Ping-Pong table. The cause of death was bullet wounds to the head from two handguns, both owned by the boy’s father. A note was found, pinned to the young man’s polo shirt, written in his hand but signed by both teenagers and addressed to both sets of parents. In it they apologized for any distress their action might cause and stated that they died willingly by their own hand as a way of affirming their love and celebrating it forever in death. The note had a self-conscious, literary tone that we found exasperating and touching in equal measure, but what stuck in our throats was the fact that our town had experienced five suicides in less than a month.

It might have been left at that—a dark month, a run of bad luck—if it hadn’t been for an incident that took place in early April. George
Sabol, a high school sophomore, and Nancy Martins, a ninth-grader, were found by police on a blanket in the woods behind the Sabol house. This time there was a single gun—a .38 Smith & Wesson semiautomatic—but the suicide note revealed that the plan was for Nancy Martins to fire the first shot, into her left temple, after which George Sabol would fire a shot into his own left temple. The note, printed from Sabol’s computer and signed in ink by both students, spoke of their undying love and the eternal bond of death. The written statement and the weapon made it evident that Sabol and Martins had patterned their deaths after the double suicide of Whittaker and Grabowski, and it was this unmistakable connection that first sent a ripple of alarm through our town. Fathers began to lock their guns away, mothers followed their sons and daughters anxiously from room to room; the high school expanded its counseling program and urged people to come forward with any information concerning unusual behavior. In the night we began to wake suddenly, our hands tense against the sheets.

Scarcely had we had a chance to absorb the deaths of George Sabol and Nancy Martins when we were confronted with another incident, more troubling still. The morning paper reported that three groups of high school students—two, two, and three—had been found dead, in three different homes; all three groups left suicide notes modeled on the ones we knew. It was also reported that five of the seven students belonged to the Black Rose, a secret association devoted to the cause of Meaningful Death. A stapled handbook, printed on purple Xerox paper, was discovered in the bedroom of one dead boy; from it we learned that members of the Black Rose were encouraged to give meaning to their lives by choosing their own death. Suicide was praised as a celebratory act, which transformed the drift and emptiness of ordinary life into the certainty of choice: to choose death was to impose a design on randomness. What disturbed us wasn’t so much the danger or incoherence of such ideas as their very existence. The
next day two more deaths were reported, in different neighborhoods; a page torn from a handbook of the Black Rose was found in the pocketbook of one victim. It was now that we began to take the car keys away, to impose strict curfews, to keep our cell phones on at all times. In the houses of our town, unease drifted like smoke.

At this period we felt that if only we could put an end to the Black Rose, we could also put an end to the sickly fashion for death that had seized our sons and daughters. In this sense, though we hated and feared the Black Rose, we also clung to it, in a way were grateful to it, since it provided us with the hidden reason we desperately sought. Our teenagers were in the grip of a morbid philosophy—a decadent dogma—which had inspired a fatal game. We would fight a battle to win back the minds of our children, we would hurl ourselves against the forces of darkness with weapons of the sun. It was true that not every death could be traced to the Black Rose; there was even some evidence that membership was confined to a small circle of fanatics. But just as we felt we were getting to the heart of things, a new turn unsettled us—for it seemed that the Black Rose had already been left behind, while new seductions emerged with disquieting ease.

A passion for spectacular suicide now seized our sons and daughters. It was as if they had begun to vie with one another for the most memorable death. One group of six high school students, visiting a nearby amusement park, rode the roller coaster and were found dead at the end of the ride; all six had injected themselves on the way up the track with a solution of potassium chloride. None of the six was in any way connected with the Black Rose. Joanne Garavaglia, a popular girl with a passion for home video, went up to her attic one night and filmed herself as she raised a bone-handled hunting knife and plunged it into her throat. Lorraine Keating hanged herself at dusk from the branch of a hickory tree in front of a group of admiring friends. The fad for suicide notes had already been replaced by a taste for terse, obscure messages, such as “Never Enough” and
“Evermore,” while the act of dying became an increasingly elaborate art, discussed and evaluated in high school hallways and behind the locked doors of bedrooms bathed in afternoon sunlight.

Young teenage girls were especially susceptible to the new trend for eye-catching death. It was seen as a way of drawing the right kind of attention to yourself, of making yourself stand out from the crowd. A popular girl, by means of a well-staged death, could become more popular still; an unpopular girl could break free from her isolation and loneliness in the short space of a single magnificent gesture. Jane Franklin was a quiet girl who walked the halls alone. On the night of the spring dance, she pulled on a pair of black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, climbed to the top of the water tower behind the chemical plant, and set herself on fire. Two days later Christine Jacobson, a blond cheerleader and co-captain of the girls’ swim team, walked to the front of her English class, raised a dark object slowly with both hands, and shot herself in the center of the forehead.

Even as the epidemic of suicide raged through our high school, we noticed that its effects were being felt in two opposite directions: upward, in the colleges where our older sons and daughters were finishing their spring semester, and downward, in the William Barnes Middle School and our six elementary schools. A college junior who had graduated from our high school fastened a pair of satin-covered foam angel wings to his shoulders and leaped to his death from the top of the astronomy building; a college sophomore painted the word “luminosity” in neon-green letters on the side of her car, drove through a guardrail on the outskirts of her rural campus, and sailed into the air above a much-photographed ravine. Four seventh-graders were found in a stand of spruce between two backyards after they had swallowed rat poison dissolved in cherry Kool-Aid. Howard Dietz, a fourth-grader, pried open his father’s gun cabinet one day after school and, sitting on the edge of his bed, opened his mouth, placed the barrel of a twenty-gauge shotgun between his teeth, which had
recently been fitted with braces decorated with metallic-blue brackets, and pulled the trigger. One group of sixth-grade girls initiated a brief vogue: wearing jean shorts, bathing-suit tops, and bright red lipstick, they dragged a barbecue grill into a backyard toolshed, shut the door, and inhaled the fatal fumes of charcoal briquettes. We held town meetings, consulted with crisis counselors and family therapists, engaged in lengthy discussions with our children. We dreaded opening the morning paper.

What haunted us, apart from the deaths themselves, was the spirit in which the perpetrators appeared to seek their own destruction. For it was difficult to deny that a majority of deaths were chosen in a mood of adventure, of high daring, even of exhilaration. Here and there, to be sure, an adolescent boy rejected by his girlfriend swallowed a fistful of barbiturates, a depressed girl who felt unloved slipped into a tub of warm water and slit her wrists. These deaths were in some sense comforting, almost pleasing, for we could imagine ourselves, under similar circumstances, arriving at the same decision. But what were we to make of the atmosphere of excitement evident among the others, their sense of embracing the unknown with something like fervor? Death as a spirited game, death as a challenge, as an intriguing art form, an expression of originality—this death was something we knew nothing about, we who understood what it meant to wake in the night with dread in our hearts.

Excitements falter. Fads fade away. Although we were dazed with exhaustion and anxiety, we remained stubbornly hopeful, for we knew that crises of adolescence do not last. And in fact the school suicides began to diminish, without actually coming to an end. At the same time we were unable to ignore new signs of trouble. It happened here and there—a marriage suicide, the suicide of a young mother. We understood, with a kind of rage, that the same parents who listened to their sons’ rock bands and imitated their daughters’ styles in hip-hugger jeans and spaghetti-strap tank tops were not immune to
the latest craze. As the deaths spread among the adults of our town, we began to hear talk of the Blue Iris, an association all too clearly inspired by the Black Rose but with a crucial difference. Whereas the Black Rose promoted suicide as a method of imposing a design on the randomness of life, the Blue Iris spoke of death as the culminating moment of existence—the climactic event to which every life aspired. Precisely for this reason, death should be chosen at a moment of fulfillment. We began to hear of sexual suicides, ingeniously enacted at the height of lovemaking. Couples began to look to death as an erotic stimulus, a mechanism for ultimate release, as though they were seeking, in the act of self-murder, a cosmic orgasm. Others chose different moments of heightened feeling: a wedding ceremony, a longed-for promotion, a sudden eruption of irrational happiness. We took note of these suicides with a certain disdain, for they seemed too closely modeled on a fading teenage fashion, while at the same time they made our blood tremble. The new suicides were our neighbors; they were ourselves.