Legend of a Suicide Read Free

Not having taken off to any heights, we had nowhere to fall. We drank clear bouillon soup with a few peas in it after my uncle called and told us the news, and in the evening, as the light in the sky faded to blue and then black, we sat in our living room, in the fluorescent glow of the fish tank, watching. The iridescent shark had learned to find his way around by now and bumped less frequently into the glass. The empty sockets, their rawness originally laced with thin tracks ofblood, had been soothed and covered over by an opaque white film. The tiger-striped archer fish, who was half jaw, half tail, who swam always at a forty-five-degree angle to the surface of the water, and who could spit sizable water pellets, was skimming his strong lower lip along the surface, waiting, and at some point—I have no idea when, since time stands still after a death, with no sensation of passing—I rose to bring him the jar of flies. I let one into the air space between hood and water, covered the hole again with tape, and sat down beside my mother to watch this ritual of the familiar, a relic from what our lives had been, but I knew that I had lost interest. The archer fish tensed up, danced in a fluttering circle with his hooked lip at the surface the fulcrum, followed the mad flight of the fly with quiet deliberation, and spat his pellet of water with such celerity and yet so little movement that it seemed not to have happened at all, and yet there was the fly, mired in the water, sending off his million tiny ripples of panic.

RHODA
    WHEN I FIRST saw my stepmother, I thought she was winking at me. I winked back. But she only frowned, and her right eyelid never lifted. She was wearing a yellow wedding dress, with no veil or train, and had turned to see me just as I was passing the front row of pews, carrying the wedding rings on a small velvet pillow. I don’t believe I so much as glanced at my father. I saw only this new woman whom my father had hidden away until now from everyone, who had dark, dark hair, pale skin, and a dropped eyelid that, on closer view, made her terribly beautiful.
    My new stepmother, Rhoda, untied the ring for my father with thin white fingers. I looked up again at that blank eye, drawn to it—it was open slightly—and realized too late that she was watching me. Her other eye was brown and shiny. She laughed out loud, right there in the middle of the service in front of everyone, at the same moment that she was slipping my father’s ring onto his finger. Her laughter startled all of us,but especially my father, who looked around as though it had come from somewhere else in the church. His mouth opened slightly as he looked up, and for the first time in my life, I saw him frightened.
    At the reception, Rhoda ate carefully, cutting her food into tiny squares. She knew she was being watched. Our tables were set on my father’s lawn, along the edge of which ran a small walnut orchard with a creek and two mountainsides of brush in the background; there was plenty to view, but everyone looked only at Rhoda. And the moment she excused herself and walked into the house—to use the bathroom, we assumed—my grandmother opened fire.
    “It’s too bad your mother can’t be here today,” she said to me, wedged as I was between her and my father, with no hope of escape. Though Rhoda’s parents hadn’t come to the reception or even the wedding, her older sister was sitting directly across from us. “I don’t know why he couldn’t have stayed with your mother,” my grandmother went on. “Did you know this Rhoda’s only twenty-four years old?”
    “Margaret, this is not the place,” my grandfather broke in.
    “Oh, I’m not saying anything. It’s just that we’ve always liked his mother so.”
    “Margaret?” His voice rose on this, and he put his hand over hers on the table.
    “Can I get you more of anything, Mom?” my father asked. He wasn’t looking at Rhoda’s sister.
    “She’s essentially