Later that afternoon, all of Amanda’s friends went over to Kathy McCormack’s house. Kathy was a friend of Amanda’s from childhood. Her family lived in a beautiful house on a wooded lot on Morning Sun Avenue in Mill Valley. Wells and I walked in together. The whole place was decked out in white Christmas lights. Everyone was drinking. Bottles and cans everywhere. Kathy greeted us, introduced herself, offered us beers. I took one, thanked her, opened it, and walked outside for another cigarette. I hadn’t stopped smoking since I left the church.
The people on the back porch appeared to be intoxicated. There was a joint going around. Laughter and coughing. It almost seemed like a party.
“Mandy would want it to be a celebration,” I heard someone say. “She wouldn’t want everyone to stand around moping. She wouldn’t want it to be sad.”
It was nearly 5:00 p.m., and already the sun was down. It was December 23. The days are short that time of year. Amanda had killed herself the day before the winter solstice. Somehow that made sense. I finished my beer, smoked two more cigarettes, and made some sporadic small talk on the deck with a guy I didn’t know, some neo-hippie from Petaluma with a mangy beard. He was wearing a fur-lined hat with earflaps.
“It’s a strange day,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Strange energy,” he said.
“Really strange,” I agreed.
“At least we got decent weather,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Amanda brought us good weather,” he said.
A few seconds later, I stuffed my cigarette butt inside an empty beer can and walked back inside.
People were starting to get outwardly drunk in the living room. The talking was getting louder and less coherent. The room was filling up with false confidence. I stood around in silence for a minute or two, feeling terribly awkward, and then I decided to leave. I had determined that it was safe to leave. I’d been biding my time, and now it was safe to leave. I could claim a long day and an early flight in the morning. I could walk out without having to lie. I’d done my duty. I’d done the right things, said the right things, gone to the right places. All things considered, everything had turned out fine.
I caught Wells in the kitchen and told him I was on my way out. I asked him if he needed a ride back to the East Bay. He told me no thanks, he was going to stick around and catch a ride later. We shook hands by the stove and shared another man-hug. He programmed my contact information into his cell phone and told me he’d call me. I wished him well and went off looking for M.J. and Nancy.
I found them upstairs in Kathy’s room. I knocked twice, lightly, and stuck my head in the door. The two of them were sitting on the bed, locked in heavy conversation. There was a bottle of red wine on the nightstand. Their eyes were red from crying, and their teeth were blue from the wine.
“Hey,” I said. “I just wanted to say good-bye.”
“Fencer,” Nancy said, slurring a little and patting the mattress. “Come sit down.”
I walked over and sat down on the end of the bed, and Nancy told me the story: how Amanda had missed her period in June, the summer that we were apart, the summer before I broke up with her. How she had debated about what to do. How she had decided to have the abortion. How she had decided not to tell me. How she’d freaked out, afraid it would scare me away. How she’d had the operation in the city, at a clinic near the Embarcadero. How Nancy had driven her there, was with her the entire time. How there were protesters lining the sidewalks as they went inside, picketers screaming at them, telling them that they were baby killers, murderers, how they would rot in hell for eternity on account of their sins. How it wasn’t something I should feel responsible for. How I couldn’t have known. How Amanda didn’t want me to have to deal with it, how she just wanted it to be over and done with, how she swore Nancy to absolute secrecy.
The news hit me strangely. My reaction was decidedly minimal. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. There was a barely detectable feeling in my belly—a weakness, a twinge. But not much more.
“But with everything that’s happened,” said Nancy, “I feel like it’s important to come clean.”
“It helps things make a little more sense,” said M.J., “but it doesn’t solve anything. Not by any means.”
“Absolutely,” said Nancy. “I’m not trying to say that this is the reason she killed herself. Not at all.”
“Oh, no,” I said. The words fell out of my mouth weakly.
Nancy crawled across the bed and gave me a hug. I didn’t hug her back.
“Do her parents know?” I said.
“No,” said M.J. “I don’t think so.”
“We were just talking about whether we should tell them,” Nancy said. “I don’t know if it would be worth it. They’ve already been through so much.”
“But if it helps them find some kind of closure,” said M.J., “maybe it would be a good thing.”
“I think I’d wait on that,” I said, running a hand through my hair.
“I would obviously tell them that you had no idea,” Nancy said.
“I think we should wait on that.”
“It’s not anything we would do anytime soon,” said M.J.
Nancy sniffled, reached for her glass, took a sip of her wine.
I rose to my feet and told M.J. and Nancy that I’d really appreciate it if they didn’t say anything. I told them I needed time to think, that I’d like to be the one to make the decision about whether or not to say something, that it was my responsibility. I asked them to keep this information in confidence. They told me they would.
I took a step backward toward the door, not knowing what else to say. There was nothing else to say, really. I didn’t want to say anything more, didn’t want to debate. I didn’t want to coerce, and I didn’t want to empathize or discuss.
I just wanted to get the fuck out of there.
Moments later, I walked out of the house, climbed into my rental car, and drove south out of Marin and across the Golden Gate Bridge, back toward Horvak’s place, completely numb. Night had settled in, and the lights of the city were shining in the distance. I rolled my window down and lit up another cigarette, turned on talk radio, and looked out across the bay. The city was alive, glowing like fire beneath the clouds.
The fog was rolling in again.
The Golden Gate Bridge first opened to vehicular traffic at high noon on May 28, 1937. It is approximately 1.7 miles long, and its two towers are 746 feet tall. Channel clearance is approximately 220 feet, and the cables that support the suspended roadway are 36.5 inches in diameter. More people have jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge to their deaths than any other bridge in the world. It is a magnet for the desperate, arguably the number-one suicide destination on the planet. Depressed people with dramatic flair like to go there on their last legs, ready to cross over into the next dimension.
In 1975, at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, a psychiatrist named David Rosen conducted a study of people who jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge