She didn’t, either.
But as a way to kill time for the next couple weeks, before time killed her, it did beat shooting herself. She said as much to Sam, which made him grimace.
“May I use your pen?”
He handed one to her and then watched her write three words at the top of the pad. She printed them with force, going over each letter multiple times, so that even from across his desk he could see the thick black letters.
She held them up for him to read:
TELL THE TRUTH
His eyebrows shot up. “I was expecting something more along the lines of, ‘Ride a roller coaster’ or ‘Fly to Paris.’ ” He gestured toward the pad. “That could cause some damage.”
“It could do some good,” she countered.
As she left his office, he asked her to check in every day.
“For pain control? Or to know when I ought to go into hospice?”
“Yes,” he said, and then he hugged her.
She clung to his white jacket for a moment. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” she whispered, and then she bravely walked away.
She called him on each of the next three days.
On the fourth morning, Dr. Samuel Waterhouse’s tearful receptionist brought in a newspaper that explained why they wouldn’t get a call that day.
The night before, Priscilla Windsor had been stabbed to death as she walked—running was no longer possible—in the late cool twilight along Riverside Drive. The redbud trees would blossom into mauve by the next morning, but she wouldn’t see them. She had hoped to live long enough to see spring, but she had also been afraid of seeing it, fearing that it would fill her with unbearable longing for more life. On the night she died, the buds were still wrapped tight as tiny boxers’ fists, as if they didn’t want to pound her with the bittersweet pain of seeing them open their petals.
Witnesses saw her stumble near the dog park, saw a person in sweats and a hoodie stoop to lift her up, saw them huddle for a moment, saw him set her upright, saw him prop her against a tree, saw him pat her shoulder, saw him continue on his own run. They thought, Aw, nice guy. They smiled toward his unidentifiable back as he ran faster than before. When he turned a corner, they remembered to look back at the woman he’d so kindly helped.
They saw her sway, and then slide down the tree, and not get up again.
“Oh, my God,” a woman said, pulling her dog closer on its chain.
Other people hurried to check on the fallen woman; there was shock when they saw blood, horror at the knife, then confusion as they figured out who among them should call 911. The Upper West Side of New York City was a neighborhood, and even if they didn’t personally know this young woman, they knew they wanted to help her.
“Are you sure it was a man?” one of them asked as they compared notes on what they’d witnessed. “I really thought it was a woman.”
“But we’re all agreed he was white, right? Or she was?”
But they weren’t agreed on that, either. Nor on tall or medium height, or stocky or thin build, or even whether the perpetrator had come up to the woman after she stumbled or had in fact caused the stumble. The hoodie was black, gray, red, or navy. There were fifteen eyewitnesses, and the cops joked later that you’d have thought they were all looking in different directions at fifteen different women being killed by fifteen different perps. One eyewitness swore there might have been two people who stopped to “help.”
It had the earmarks of a random killing by a random crazy person, people said. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the very randomness of it—in a public place, in front of lots of people, on a lovely evening—that made it so frightening. The truth was, they would have felt safer if the killer had specifically, and with malice, set out to kill this particular woman, instead of just stumbling onto the easiest person to stab.
Sam Waterford rarely attended the funerals of his patients, and he felt nervous about going to this one. At one such ceremony, years ago, he’d been screamed at by a family, and he didn’t want that to happen again. The family filed a malpractice suit the next day. They lost because he hadn’t done anything wrong. But ever since, he hadn’t wanted to remind other grieving families of his failures, or what they perceived as such.
The church on West End Avenue was packed, reflecting the social status of Priscilla’s parents, who were the head of a famous brokerage firm (her father) and the head of an even more famous charitable foundation (her mother). He paused at the back of the sanctuary for a moment and then walked down the center aisle so that he could slide between two couples in a pew near the front. When he glanced to his right, he didn’t recognize the stylish couple who had made room for him. But when he faced left, he found a very tanned older woman already grinning at him.