Blood and Perfume

Sometimes, but not often, I decide to write about my deeper truths.

My family doesn’t know this story. My friends don’t know this story. Her family knows this story, but only because I had to explain it to them after I explained it to the police. I’d never met her mother and father before, even though she told me about them. I did my best, but there was no way I could make that a pleasant meeting. I might change some details so nobody can tell who I’m talking about. It’s been a while, and a lady deserves her privacy.

I called her because I thought she was pretty. That’s usually how that starts. I wasn’t expecting much. I’d been involved in something horrible, and I wanted something that was a lot more fun and a lot less trouble. I learned fairly early in life that some women like to talk on the phone for a really long time. I’m able to listen for a really long time, so I figured that was my special talent. I wasn’t going to woo them with my hair, although the size of my arms sometimes made an impression.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out she mainly kept me around because I would listen. I didn’t mind that. Listening don’t cost nothin’, at least the way I do it.

There are seven different types of depression. I have Persistent Depressive Disorder or Dysthymia. It’s only supposed to last for a few years. Mine lasted longer than the Beatles, but not as long as the Stones. There are several below that, including Post Partum Depression, which happens because hormones can make you crazy.

There’s one above Dysthymia, known as Unipolar Depression, clinical depression, or Major Depressive Disorder. This one mostly exists as a steady state, but it can have peaks lasting up to a month before sinking back down to the steady state.

You wouldn’t think this woman was depressed. She maintained a job as an associate with a smaller law firm in town. Her boss often let her work at home as long as she got her work done, which she did. I’ve never been an associate lawyer. I’ve talked to people who say that it alone can make you pretty damn depressed. She seemed to like it. She told me she didn’t want to be around long enough to make partner. I assumed she meant at the firm. We talked about the days in the future when she would have no responsibilities, no tasks, and no one expecting anything from her. I assumed she meant retirement.

Women attempt suicide as often as men. Statistically, they are more likely to use less violent means to do it, so they are statistically more likely to survive it. I probably sound like a horrible person for describing it that way, but I think it’s pretty accurate. There’s been a great deal of study done on how to tell when a person goes from depressed to suicidal, but it’s not an exact science.

By the time I began to tell there was something terribly wrong with this woman, I had moved on from any thought that she might be some sort of girlfriend or even romantic partner. I’d just gotten away from somebody who was terribly disturbed, and doing that made me terribly disturbed, so I was content to just listen and maybe have a few dinners. She was pretty, remarkably smart, and much better read than I. I like girls who are smarter or at least more well-read than me. She saw a psychologist in the same group as my psychologist.

I could tell she was depressed, but it didn’t seem horrible. She talked openly about her psychologist, who worked in the same office as my own psychologist. She had somebody in her life that she talked to regularly who knew an awful lot more about these things than me, so I was satisfied.

Unipolar depression doesn’t have the valleys that come with bipolar depression, but it does have peaks. One day, she called to say she was taking a few weeks off from work. I asked if she had plans for vacation. She said she had none. I asked if she wanted to go to New York. She said she’d rather stay home with her cat. She told me once that her mother agreed to take care of her cat if anything ever happened to her. I didn’t read any special sort of meaning into that. Her mother, from the way she described her, seemed nice.

I called from work to ask, “Do you want to eat?” That meant Scrooges or Amerigo. Even though she was staying home with her cat, she still had to eat. “You go. We’ll open a can of something, " she said. When I got home, I called again. She liked to lay on the sofa and talk into my ear for hours, but not then.

After a few times at this, I didn’t ask. I picked up food I knew she liked from Old Tyme. She was a non-practicing Jew; her grandfather was a merchant in New Orleans.

In Belhaven, I knocked on her door. Then knocked again. I could see her car, but she wouldn’t answer the door. I left the bag on her doorstep and called from my carphone. When this story took place, cellular phones were tied to cars. They had little pigtail antennas on the back window.

“Thanks, but you didn’t have to do that.” She said.

“I can’t let you in. I look terrible, and my clothes are dirty. Thank you though, that was sweet.”

This went on for about a week. I don’t know if she was eating the food, and it had been several weeks since we last spent all night talking.

It was a Thursday night. I dropped off a bag of Golden Dragon Chinese food. For some reason, I thought cats liked Chinese food. Through the window, I could see her sitting on her living room floor, wrapped in a blanket. Her mahogany hair was pinned into a complicated lump on top of her head. I knocked. She didn’t look up but rocked back and forth gently.

Her front door was locked, and she didn’t respond, even though she had to know I could see her. Something told me to try the back door. Some of the houses on the South side of Belhaven are really just bungalows. Hers had two bedrooms, a sitting room, a dining area with a kitchen, and one bath. Her backdoor was open.

“Hey! I brought food.” She didn’t move.

Sitting on her sofa, the cat found the bag. I was waiting for my friend to acknowledge me. She didn’t.

I sat on the floor with her. When you're with animals or children, it’s often a good idea to move your head to the same level as theirs to make them more comfortable. She was cocooned in a sort of quilt that she got at a store, not the kind your grandma makes. I couldn’t see her arms or legs.

I knew a woman who made two suicide attempts with pills. It crossed my mind that this might be what was happening since my friend wouldn’t respond. Suicidal women usually use less violent means to make their suicide attempts than men. That’s why they’re more likely to survive.

She never said a thing. All of this would have been easier to remember if she had just said something. Anything.

I heard a sound. I’ve shot lots of guns. I know what they sound like. When you hear them in situations where you don’t expect them, they sound different. The blanket around her sort of poofed out from the report. A red spot grew on the blanket where her back was.

She began to fall towards me, and the blanket fell off her shoulders. I grabbed her and held her, pulling her into my lap. She was so tiny—limp and now wet, she was even smaller. Like a lot of older homes in Belhaven, she had wooden floors. One of the first things she did when she moved in there was refinish them. She took a lot of pride in her little bungalow.

Girls have a smell you recognize once you’ve kissed them. Gunpowder has a smell too, and blood.

I felt her neck for any signs of a pulse. I became aware of a red circle around where I sat on the floor. It was growing. The circle was bright red close to me, and the further out toward the edges, the more it turned vermillion. I had put one hand over the wound on her back and one hand over the wound on her chest. This wasn’t a conscious action. I had a first aid merit badge from years ago. I suppose that’s where it came from.

The blood on the floor was dripping off my elbows from where I held her wounds. That which was part of her body was now covering my body and covering more and more of her floor. My subconscious and conscious mind, at some point, came to an agreement, and I stopped acting on instinct. More blood was coming, but not much.

I lay her down, closed her eyes, and used her phone to call the police.

There were fleeting moments when I worried that the police might think I did this, but they never questioned it. I answered their questions. Met her family. Waited for the man to come for the body.

I’ve long been in the practice of keeping a change of clothes in the trunk of my car, wadded up in a black trash bag, in case anything ever happened to what I was wearing. You’d be surprised how often things happened to what I was wearing. Not this, though. I changed clothes in her little bathroom and put my red-stained Oxford shirt and khaki pants into the bag. When I finally left, I put my bag of wet clothes that smelled of my friend’s blood and perfume in a garbage can somebody left out on the street not far from where Eudora Welty lived. I wasn’t of a mind to try and wash it.

We don’t know why some people decide they can’t go on another day and others don’t. We don’t even know why women usually choose less violent ways to make this decision. They usually do, but not this time.

“Hey Pop, would it be ok if I took a few days off?”

“Sure, Buddy. Are you going somewhere?”

“Not really; I just need some time to myself.”

“Are you ok?”

“Oh, absolutely. I think I have a bug or something.”

I never liked lying to my father, but I did it more than I'd like.

My father had talked about how I was seriously and chronically depressed. We talked about ways to resolve it. He knew I’d been around suicide before—really, a lot more than you’d expect for someone my age. I didn’t want him to know what happened because I didn’t want him to worry about me. I wasn’t suicidal, but I was very, very tired.

My dad had friends in the police force who kept him informed when I was in trouble. I had friends in the sheriff’s office that helped me keep that sort of information from him. It was a sort of detente. My father never knew what girls I was going around with until it became time to bring them home, which I avoided.

My friend was an only child. Her parents grew old and moved away from Jackson. Some other young associate lawyer bought her bungalow. Life went on. There were other girls. By now, I’m a little embarrassed to say how many.

Life and death are a sort of pulsating mystery. You’d assume that nobody alive would ever choose death, but for some people, in some moments, choosing death over life is the only logical thing to do.

I never meant to watch someone die. I never meant to hold someone as the warmth in their body spread out in a circle on the hardwood floor. I never meant to be the person who was present at the moment of decision. Sometimes, you don’t get a choice about these things.

This is not the house from the story, but it’s a similar size and age