Suicide Med (32 page)

I hate visiting my mother these days.

It takes me about an hour and a half to make the drive from Southside
, Connecticut, to Brooklyn—an hour and a half I can’t really spare—but I still go. I do it more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. I know Dad would want me to check up on her, see how she’s doing. She’s not so young anymore, after all. So that’s why I do it.

But I’ll never stop being angry at her for the way that Dad died.

Fine, he was on life support.
Yes, he had a chronic, degenerative disease. But I still can’t help but feel his life got cut short. If she’d just waited a little longer, he might have pulled through. She didn’t even
ask
me if I was okay with it. She just decided to take him off the ventilator and that was it. I know Dad wouldn’t have wanted to die.

As far as I’m concerned, she killed him.

When I visit my mother about a month into the semester, I notice the apartment hasn’t changed much since my father died. Mom preserved it in roughly the state it’s been in since I was in high school. The furniture is scuffed and secondhand, and just hanging together by a thread. The walls are desperately in need of a paint job, but we can’t afford it and I don’t have time to do it myself. The refrigerator is still making that loud whirring noise.

I immediately s
tart cleaning the tiny apartment. Ever since Dad died, Mom has let housekeeping fall to the wayside, and my sisters are too busy with their own families to help her out. I do three loads of laundry in the basement, wash the dishes by hand (we’ve never been able to afford a dishwasher), and vacuum the carpet.

“You don’t have to do all this, Virginia,”
Mom says, as she watches me fold her clothes.

She speaks to me in Russian, even though my parents were pretty strict about speaking English around the house when I was growing up. It
’s like since Dad died, she just gave up on everything, even English.

“It’s fine,” I mumble.

She watches me for another minute in silence. My mother and I have never had much to say to one another. I was always more of a “daddy’s girl.”

“Are there any
nice boys in your class?” Mom finally asks, as I sort through the socks.

“No,” I
say curtly.

Why am I not
surprised this is my mother’s first question? I’m twenty-six years old and practically an old maid in her eyes. She came to this country from Russia when she was just a girl, and back there, I gather they get married pretty young.

“None?”
Mom raises an eyebrow. “Now how could that be, Virginia? Isn’t the class mostly boys?”

I
don’t bother to point out that these days, medical school classes are at least half female. My mother would never believe it.

Finally,
my mother says what she’s been waiting to say since the moment I walked in: “Ginny, why don’t you come back home?”

“Daddy wouldn’t want
me to quit,” I say through my teeth.

“Daddy didn’t know everything,” Mom says quietly.
“I think… you’d be happier at home. Maybe that nice family will hire you back to watch their kids until you find a husband.”

I look down at the sock ball in my hand.
I want to hurl it at my mother.

“I don’t want to have
this conversation again, Mom,” I say. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to use the bathroom…”

I don’t need the bathroom.
Really, I just need to get away from my mother. Instead of going to the bathroom, I brush past the small bedroom I used to share with my two sisters and end up in my parents’ bedroom. Just like the rest of the house, it hasn’t changed a bit since my father’s death… but there’s something comforting about this fact. I open the closet and see rows of my father’s shirts, all neatly pressed. I can still vaguely smell his aftershave.

“I’m trying my best,
Papa,” I whisper, as I run my hand along the sleeve of my father’s old blue shirt.

Then I really do go to the bathroom, which
has also remained untouched since my father’s death. I see his razor and shaving lotion still on the sink counter, and a large lump forms in my throat that makes it difficult to swallow. I guess my mother misses him too. Maybe it comforts her to see Dad’s stuff still around the bathroom and in the closets.

I
open the medicine cabinet and see the pill bottles that contain all my father’s medications. Before his death, he was taking several kinds of pills that attempted to increase the amount of dopamine in his brain and decrease the symptoms of the disease. The medications decreased his symptoms somewhat, but the dopamine had an undesired side effect: hallucinations.

I
remember how my father was haunted by voices he started hearing in his own head and visions of things that weren’t there. It tortured him to the point where he chose to live with the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease rather than continue the medications. He preferred shaking hands, poor balance, and shuffling feet to the voices in his head.

I
pick up a large bottle of a medication called Sinemet. This medication is essentially pure dopamine, the substance implicated in many patients diagnosed with schizophrenia—it caused the worst of my father’s hallucinations. I shake the bottle and discover that it’s still almost full.

There’s only a seedling of an idea in my head as
I shove the bottle into my pocket.

_____

I
definitely hate Mason, but I actually sort of like having him around in the library on the late nights. Sometimes it’s just the two of us, and it’s comforting to look up and see him sitting there. Sometimes I look up from my own books and just watch him working—his brow furrowed in deep concentration as he stares at the diagrams of muscles and bones. When he catches me looking at him, he always smiles at me.

A few days after
my visit to my mother’s apartment, I approach Mason late in the evening while he’s studying.

“I’m going to get some coffee,” I
say. My voice cracks strangely on the words and I clear my throat. “You want a cup?”

Mason blinks
in surprise. “Uh… yeah, sure. Thanks, Ginny.”

“Black?”
I ask.

“Sounds perfect.”
He smiles at me and I get a little lost in those hazel eyes. Sheesh, he is
really
good looking. But I have no interest in a guy like that. Not a chance. He’s a jerk and a phony and absolutely not my type.

I
go to the coffee machine down in the med student lounge and fill up two cups of black coffee. It’s close to midnight and the floor is deserted, but I still cautiously glance over my shoulder to make sure I don’t have company. When I feel certain I’m alone, I pull my father’s bottle of pills out of my pocket.

I
open the bottle and remove a single capsule. I break it open and let the contents dissolve into one of the cups of coffee. I wait until the powder is completely invisible before I start back toward the library.

It’s almost a little surreal, in a way.
I mean, I’m
poisoning
him. I’m poisoning my classmate.

It isn’t really
poison though. Calling it poison is really melodramatic—it’s a medication. And it’s not really going to hurt him—maybe just distract him enough that he won’t be able to spend every waking hour studying. Or more likely, it won’t affect him at all.

I
hand Mason the cup of coffee, careful to give him the cup with the Sinemet mixed in.

“Wow, thanks,
Ginny,” he says. “I really appreciate it.”

I
smile. “My pleasure.”

Mason and I are dissecting the large intestines and he’s pretty focused, but I notice that every once in a while, he looks up and stares at Rachel’s breasts. It’s incredibly irritating. No matter how good a student Mason is, men only have one thing on their minds.

I
’ve been slipping Mason the Sinemet nearly every day for a couple of weeks now. As far as I can tell, it isn’t affecting him at all. In some ways, I’m glad—I’m sort of scared of something terrible happening to him. I know what I’m doing could get me kicked out of med school in the blink of an eye.

Dr. Conlon limps over to ou
r table, “How are things going?

I
have a few questions, but Mason quickly replies, “Very smoothly.”

“Good to hear it,” Dr. Conlon says.
He leans over our cadaver and glances inside at the dissection we’ve been working on. “Very nice job, Dr. Howard.”

Of c
ourse, Mason gets all the credit.

I
watch Dr. Conlon’s blue eyes flit up for a second to where Rachel is standing. Oh my God, is Dr. Conlon staring at Rachel’s breasts too? Are you kidding me? I’m so angry, I nearly threw the scalpel to the ground and storm off in a tantrum. Rachel loves to go on and on about how men are all sexist pigs, but the least she could do is wear a bra so that her nipples aren’t poking out through the fabric of her shirt. Rachel is a hypocritical phony, just like everyone else.

As I
continue my dissection, I notice that Mason is looking at the cadaver’s upper arm. There’s a tattoo on the arm that reads, “To serve and protect.” He had probably been a cop. I wonder if he died in the line of duty, although I guess that if he had, there probably would have been an autopsy. More likely he had a coronary from stress or too much fast food.

“Hey,
Ginny.” Mason nudges me. “What do you think this tattoo means?”

What are you, an idiot?

“It means he was probably a cop,
” I say.

Mason’s eyes widen
and he looks really impressed. He talks about it all through the rest of the lab, how cool it is we’re dissecting the body of such an important person. He’s talking faster and louder than I’ve ever heard him speak before, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s a side effect of the medication.

Nah, probably not.

_____

It’s a Friday night and everyone is beginning to feel the crunch from our upcoming anatomy exam. I’m in the library as usual, as is Mason Howard. I brought him a cup of coffee laced with the usual hallucinogenic that seems to have no effect whatsoever. I’m beginning to wonder why I even bother.

“Do you mind if I join you?” he asks, nodding toward m
y table as I hand him the cup of coffee.

“Uh… sure,” I
agree. I feel a flash of fear as I wonder if he discovered what I’ve been doing. Why else would he want to talk to me?

He shakes
his head at me, “Don’t you ever go home?”

Wow, what a freaking hypocrite.

“Do you?” I
ask belligerently.

Mason blinks
a few times, taken aback by my response, and that’s when I realize it: holy crap, he’s flirting with me.

Mason Howard
is flirting with me.

It seems so impossible.
I mean, I’m not ugly or anything, but Mason is… well, Mason. He’s sort of in a different league. Well, at least the girls who throw themselves at him on a regular basis seem to be in a different league. Those girls are gorgeous. Why would he pay any attention to
me
when he could have
them
?

“So tell me,
Ginny,” he says, “why do you want to be a doctor?”

For a second, I’m
completely taken in by his hazel eyes. Even though I officially hate him, I find myself blurting out the whole sad story about my father and how much it changed me. And he actually looks like he cares. Maybe he’s faking it though.

“I’m so sorry,
Ginny,” he says, as he places his hand on mine.

And that’s when I recognize that he wants to kiss me.
And even though I hate myself for it, I want to kiss him back. I shouldn’t though. It would be a mistake. I really have to stay completely focused on—

Oh hell,
now he’s kissing me.

And i
t’s a very nice kiss too. Very passionate and lustful. Much more so than with too-short Alex. I love the way his tongue gently moves against mine as his fingers lace into my short brown hair, pulling me closer to him. We kiss in the empty library for several minutes.

W
hen he pulls away, Mason whispers in my ear, “You want to get out of here?”

God, I really do.

We end up in the med student locker room. It’s not a super comfortable place to have sex—we’re basically stuck doing it on the floor. But we both want each other so bad, it doesn’t really matter. Mason’s fingers are shaking so much as he unbuttons my shirt that he accidentally dislodges a button—he nearly rips my blouse open. I guess it’s been a while for him. Me too.

When it’s over,
we both collapse against the cold locker room floor, still half-naked. This is going to sound dumb, but I sort of feel like I want a cigarette. I look over at Mason—he’s still breathing hard and I see a line of sweat along his hairline.

He grins
at me, “That was really great.”

After a
moment of hesitation, he kisses me on the cheek.

It
was
really great. But he’s already got an inflated ego, so I just say, “It’s a nice study break.”

He doesn’t seem disturbed that I
haven’t showered him with praise.

“Maybe we could take another study br
eak in the future,” he suggests, looking at me in a way that makes me think he’d like to take another study break
right now
. I can’t imagine why he desires me so much, but it’s clear he does.

I
’ve never been with a guy like Mason before. Every man I ever dated has been humble, meek, and plain—the diametric opposite of Mason. He’s not my type at all. But I can’t deny that I am incredibly attracted to him.

Even though I still hate him, of course.