God,” she said. “You hate him, too, don’t you.”
“You’ll never know how much.”
“Do you want to get a pen and paper?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
In the hallway the front door opened, then shut again, and now Donald’s footsteps were coming in their direction. She told her mother the combination to the safe.
* * *
—
THAT SAME NIGHT she awoke in the darkness of her childhood bedroom to the knowledge that she’d decided something in her sleep: she would end her life. The decision felt both momentous and oddly anticlimactic. Her mother’s medicine cabinet was full of sleeping pills, and she couldn’t think of any reason not to take them. That evening she’d watched the news and seen the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia burst into flame, and she knew boys her age were being incinerated there. Against all reason Mickey would be heading toward that conflagration in a matter of weeks, and by next year Lincoln might well follow. They would both die there; she was certain of it. Death was everywhere, universal, a joke in bad taste. If you could die drinking a glass of water, as her father had, what was the point of living? In fact, Jacy thought sleepily, there was no reason to not do the deed right now. Nothing to prevent her from just climbing out of bed, walking across the hall and grabbing a bottle of pills. Easy. Fill a large glass with water and just start swallowing, the very thing her father hadn’t been able to do, and thereby achieve the identical, symmetrical result. There’d be both beauty and justice in that, wouldn’t there? Her poor father. Brokenhearted, he’d given her the gift of his absence. Now that he was gone and beyond further injury, she would absent herself. That was her last thought before drifting into a heavy, black sleep.
The next thing she knew it was morning, the sun streaming in her window, the phone on her bedside table jangling. Since there was no one she wanted to talk to, she waited for Viv to pick up down in the kitchen, answering only when the ringing continued. Groggy, she didn’t immediately recognize Teddy’s voice. It seemed so long ago that they’d all been friends. If she understood him correctly, he was suggesting they all spend one last weekend together before going their separate ways. He and Lincoln had already talked Mickey into joining them on Martha’s Vineyard, he said, so how about it? All for one? One for all?
Only after hearing herself agree to join them and hanging up did she remember her dark-of-the-night resolution to end her life. How could she have forgotten something so profound? The clock on her bedside table said it was nearly ten-thirty. Was that possible? After deciding to commit suicide, she’d fucking slept in? And then agreed to celebrate the beginning of summer with friends on the Vineyard, as if nothing of significance had changed since graduation? Was this any way to repay poor Andres Demopoulos, who in order to ensure his daughter a normal life had exiled himself from it and died alone? No. Fuck no. Living would mean that Don and Viv had won, that the whole shit-eating world, with its innumerable falsehoods and treacheries, had won. So, no. This simply wouldn’t stand. Don and Viv were apparently off somewhere. She had the house to herself. The time was now.
Still muzzy from too much sleep, she went into her mother’s bathroom and found, as expected, an unopened bottle of sleeping pills. Not wanting to die in Viv’s bathroom, she returned with the pills and a large glass of cold water to her own room. The bottle had one of those newfangled caps, so she set the glass down on top of Andres Demopoulos’s obituary so she could line up the tiny arrows and push up on the cap with both thumbs. When it finally popped off, she poured a handful of pills into her palm and sat down on the edge of the bed. It felt lumpy. Feeling between the box spring and mattress, she found the stacks of bills she’d stashed there earlier. What had she meant to do with the money? She couldn’t imagine. For money to be of use you had to want something money could buy, and she didn’t. Not anymore. She had a single need: to not exist. When she put the whole handful of pills in her mouth at once, her gag reflex kicked in, but she got