As she sat in the bathtub, stroking her forearm with the flat of a knife she had lifted from the hostel’s communal dining area, that fine a distinction no longer mattered to her. Whether she was racing toward her death, or racing away from her life, all that mattered now was the speed with which that race could be consummated.
The reflection of her face in the still water, water turned lukewarm so long had she been sitting in it, was unfamiliar to her. Her years on this earth had been full of unfortunate life lessons, and thanks to this added insult from the universe, there seemed little point in going on. Before the call that startled her in the middle of another sleepless night, before her sudden trip to London, she saw herself as a person able to at least keep up a pretense of happiness, even though happiness itself was beyond her. But this day, she no longer had the energy for false smiles, and her expression was far grimmer than she had ever known it.
Grimmer, and almost lifeless already.
As she switched the knife from her right hand to her left, her slight movement gently rippled the water, and as her reflection distorted, she could almost see her sister’s face. And when the ripples were at their greatest, even her mother’s. She slapped the water angrily, so that the faces went away. She just couldn’t bear it. Her mother’s face, her sister’s face… they were both gone. The explosion that had taken the two of them had been so great that there had been no faces remaining after death, no body parts that the officials at the morgue felt it necessary for her to identify.
While the terrorist attack had left her father’s body bloodied but intact, if she was ever going to see the rest of her family again, it would have to be after death.
After her death.
She turned the blade so that the edge pressed against her wrist. At the instant that she was about to cut deeply lengthwise—as she had learned was necessary for a successful suicide one time when she’d investigated it on the Web—there was a rap at the bathroom door. She startled, and as her hand jerked, the blade sliced shallowly into her flesh. A few drops of blood ran down her arm into the water.
“Who’s there?” she asked, with a voice that sounded surprised it had the chance to speak again.
“You’re not the only one who needs to use the bath, you know,” called out a woman.
“Just a moment,” Paula said.
She looked into the water as her red blood dissipated into pink and then was gone, almost as if the thoughts of suicide were a dream. But they weren’t, and never would be again. She tried to identify exactly whose voice had called out to her, to remember which of the women with whom she had shared a bustling breakfast it could have possibly been—Lillian, who squeezed her hand briefly after passing the marmalade, Jennifer, who found it hard to meet her eyes, or perhaps one of the others—and though she could not put a face to the voice, she remembered them all as friendly, and sympathetic once they realized the purpose of her journey. And so she thought…no, not here. Don’t do it here. Paula didn’t want to make friends, however new, clean up the mess she’d leave behind. Whatever she was going to do, it had to be done in front of people whom she had never looked in the eye, who would not then be forced to mourn their own failures to save her. The women she’d just met here, even though just passing acquaintances, deserved better. Her mother had raised her that way.
Her mother…
Paula slipped slowly into the water until her head submerged beneath its surface and her knees popped up to cool in the chill air of the room. She held her breath, embracing the silence, and wished that she could just keep holding that breath until all breath was gone, taking with it this room, this city, everything. She held the air in her lungs for as long as she could, but then the air exploded from between her lips and she sat up quickly, shivering in a strange room in a strange country.
She dressed quickly and rushed back to her cramped room, which was all that she could afford, and only barely afford at that. She grabbed her backpack, stuffed it with her possessions, told no one she was checking out—almost laughing, but not quite, at the double meaning of that phrase—and fled the hostel.
If she was going to die that day, she was going to do it in front of strangers.