How to End a Love Story(42)
They stop in front of a dark marble headstone.
Michelle Zhang
May 24, 1992–June 7, 2008
Beloved daughter, sister, friend.
Helen watches as Grant crouches down and places the supermarket flowers across the bottom of the headstone. The flowers are wrapped in festive cellophane and it feels almost as if he’s saying Merry Xmas, Merry Xmas, Merry Xmas to her dead sister. She sits down on the grass in front of the headstone, and he sits beside her.
“Why did you come to the church that day?” she asks.
He hesitates and she becomes aware that they’re holding hands still. He studies their gloved hands as he contemplates an answer.
“I felt like I should,” he says. “I didn’t really want to. I just felt like . . . I owed it to her, or something. It was stupid, in retrospect. I was thinking about me and not how it’d make your family feel. My dad tried to talk me out of it, to be fair.”
“It must have been hard for you,” she says. He laughs mirthlessly.
“Hard for me,” he murmurs. “You lost your sister.”
Helen turns back to look at the headstone as he gives her hand a slight squeeze.
“My parents asked for my input on the inscription. I gave them the blandest, most generic one on purpose.” She studies the headstone for what feels like a long time before she looks at him. “You know if someone in your family dies by suicide, your chances of being suicidal increase?”
Grant turns to look at her sharply. Helen exhales.
“One of the school counselors told me that. I spent the rest of that summer paranoid every time I picked up a knife or scissors. Which was stupid, honestly. Because after all this time . . . I still don’t understand how she could do it.”
They stare out at the same view, as if an answer might materialize before them.
“After she died, I became so, so angry at suicide prevention organizations. I know that sounds strange,” Helen says. “Everywhere I looked, it seemed like there were messages to reach out if you were worried about someone, to tell them you loved them, to tell them they weren’t a burden, to help them find help. It infuriated me. The idea that they all seemed to believe there was something I could have done to keep Michelle from killing herself.”
Helen picks at the grass with her free hand, then presses her palm into the dirt.
“It’s the life-and-death stakes. Everyone wants to believe they could save someone else’s life, if they saw the right signs, had the right tools. Like maybe, if I say the right words, in the right combination this time, she’ll choose life. But that’s not how it happens.” She laughs, a short brittle one. “What happens is your sister withdraws and becomes distant, but not all the time, and you think, she’s just being a teenager, and then you find out she’s doing things you’d never dream of doing—she had a boyfriend and a drug dealer before I even had my first kiss—but you want to be cool about it, you don’t want to seem like you’re overreacting, and you don’t want to get her into trouble, and she’s a fucking asshole to you back, and you start checking in and checking in and she pushes you away and pushes you away and finally you’re like, Fine! And fuck you too! And then suddenly she’s dead.”
The letters on the headstone are still sharp and easy to read, and Helen has to look away.
“I refused to feel guilty, after she died,” she says to the ground. “And no one knew how to talk to me. Everyone knows how to say, ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ But if you say, ‘I know it wasn’t my fault, it was hers,’ people get uncomfortable. And maybe they’re right. Maybe—maybe it wasn’t Michelle at the steering wheel of her own body, that night. She died without ever having gone to a therapist, so I have no idea what disorders might have been driving her. She was probably an addict—she didn’t look like one, like how I pictured addicts before: desperate, homeless strangers on the street. She lived in our house. She was smart, and she had people who loved her, and it still wasn’t enough . . .”
Helen swipes away a frustrated tear. “I called a suicide hotline, the Monday after she died. I didn’t want to kill myself,” she says. “I just wanted to talk to someone who was used to talking to people who did. I remember asking him—‘Do you think if everyone on earth went through the training you did, learned how to talk about suicide without all the—the stigma and the self-consciousness, do you think then we’d live in a world where no one would ever kill themselves again?’ I wanted to see if there was a way to cure it, like cancer. And I’ll never forget—the man on the other end of the line said, ‘No. I can almost guarantee you, some of them still would.’ And I hung up after that.”
Helen draws a shaky breath.
“I took her suicide really personally,” she laughs, and it comes out a stifled, wet sound. “It felt like she took all the love I had to give and said, no, it’s not good enough. Which is probably not the healthiest way of looking at it. But—I am so sick of always being the healthy one.”
Her breath comes out in shaky spurts now, and Helen becomes aware of the warmth of Grant’s body, his left side pressing against her right as she commands herself do not cry. Grant shifts his arm slightly—not enough that it’s wrapped around her, but enough that she feels the support of it against her back.