Caribou Island

And then she had to step outside again. The smells too much, the pain in her head. She didn’t know if she could go through with this. It was too much, really. Leading herself to slaughter like an animal. She didn’t know how her mother had done it. And so much less trapped. Hadn’t committed murder. For Irene, there was no choice, but for her mother, there had still been a choice. How had she done that?

Irene walked into the trees. Close cover a comfort now, hidden. Walked aimlessly among the trunks, followed patches of moss poking out through snow, the snow thin and light, in some places no more than a dusting, blocked by branches above. She lay down in a large patch of moss, curled on her side. Up close, like a tiny forest, each finger of moss as large and grand as any spruce and more perfectly formed. Not bent or misshapen, but symmetrical, with layers of branches exactly like a tree, and a defiance of gravity at this smaller scale, the ends of the branches unbowed. Hundreds of miniature trees reaching upward. She reached out and touched one of them, pushed it to the side and it sprang back. She snapped it off at its base, snapped off its neighbors, felled a forest.

Rose again and walked farther into the trees but didn’t know where she was going or what she was doing. Circled back toward the cabin, and when she broke from the trees, stopped and looked at the tents and the cabin, the stove set up between. Their camp. Her husband dead. A murderer. That’s how she would be known forever. Daughter, preschool teacher, wife, mother, murderer, suicide. The earlier ones would be forgotten. Only the last two remembered. She walked to the cabin door, stepped inside, and held her breath. Walked over to the stool and noose, placed her neck in the noose and pulled down with her chin, pointed a toe at the floor, checking to see whether she’d hit. There had to be air underneath still. It was no good if she hit.

She reached up with both hands to hold the rope, hung down on it and pointed her toes and still didn’t touch. Swung in the open air and had trouble getting back on the stool, panicked for a moment she would be stuck like this, not properly hanged. But she caught the stool, freed her neck, then placed the pieces of two-by-eight on the top step, three layers, enough to create a good fall.

Holding the noose, she stepped carefully onto the two-by-eights. Stood there balancing, placed the noose around her neck. Afraid she’d use her hands, though. How do you not grab the rope with your hands, even during the fall? Impossible to stop that instinct.

So Irene removed the noose again, stepped carefully down, and walked outside to Gary’s tent with the tools, found a folding knife. Returned to the cabin and stood over Gary, found the loose end after the tie around his chest, cut off a few feet, dropped the knife and tied one end around her wrist.

It shouldn’t be this difficult. No dignity in life, ever. Even one’s own death interrupted by crass things, small concerns. It wasn’t right. And the pain had not left. It had promised to go but had not. You’d think enough had happened to clear it away. Irene was angry now as she stepped onto the stool, put the noose around her neck again, climbed onto the loose blocks of wood, precarious and about to fall, and she very carefully led the line from her wrist between her legs and tied it to the other wrist. Hard to make much of a knot, but she tried to make it tight.

No way out now. Hands tied, balancing on the blocks, noose around her neck. Breathing fast and hard, panicked, her heart clenching. Blood and fear. Not the calm she had imagined. No sense of peace. She didn’t want to do this. Every part of her said this was wrong. But she kicked out then, launched herself into air, yelled from deep in her lungs, a yell of defiance, and then the noose caught and at first it didn’t feel so hard but then it caught with a terrible weight, all her muscles pulled, a sharp pain, her breath gone, her throat crushed, and she swung in that cold, empty place. Her hands struggling upward, held back, and she would never forgive herself.

Rhoda would be the one to walk in the door and find this. Irene knew that now. She didn’t know why she hadn’t seen this before. She felt tricked. She was doing to Rhoda exactly what had been done to her. A cold day, overcast, just like this, her mother hanging from a rafter, wearing her Sunday best, beige and cream with lace, a dress come all the way from Vancouver, Irene remembered it now, white stockings, brown shoes. But her mother’s face, the lines in her face, the sadness, her neck grotesquely stretched. All that could never be said. Irene knew now that it would not have been quick, that her mother would have known what she had done. Enough time to know what she had done to her daughter.