San Diego Noir

At least until a group discussion of execution methods devolved to a detailed description of the Torture Museum up at Medieval Times in Orange County, a place that so creeped me out in seventh grade I couldn’t sleep for a week. Torture unto death was what Molly referred to with her question about boundaries.

“You mean you’re not gonna let us kill all these people, counselor?” Kenny asked.

“Afraid not,” she answered.

Adam grinned. “Then can we just mess them up a bit?”

Three days later, Katherine had a bad reaction to a new drug and died.

Her funeral was every bit as horrible as you’d expect, with sobbing third-graders whose parents should have known better and shocked cronies of her parents and her grandmother who kept wailing, “It should have been me,” until pretty much everyone agreed.

Molly went into a funk and stopped even going to the support group for a couple of weeks. She didn’t want me to take her anywhere, thank you very much, and said that she didn’t need anything and would be in touch if she did, as if I were some annoying telemarketer.

I pretended not to be terribly hurt and went about my business, working long hours and trying to remember the old Molly I knew in high school, the one whose bikini was always the sexiest, whose laugh the most infectious, whose mind the keenest. The brilliant girl whose vibrant energy made it clear that she was going to live forever.

Big. Fat. Lie.

I don’t want you to think that I was unfeeling back then, that what’s happening to me now is my own karmic payback for being too blasé or smart-ass around four people whose lives were slipping away by the minute. I gave up wearing mascara altogether for that year, and the one that followed, when the slightest thing could trigger a memory of Molly or one of the others. And when Molly banished me that fall—which is what it felt like, banishment, no two ways about it—it broke my heart.

Molly texted me Thanksgiving week and asked if I could come by Tuesday night after work. The pool house door was opened by a pleasant-looking Filipina caregiver wearing floral-patterned scrubs, a new and alarming addition. Molly introduced us, then shooed the woman up to her parents’ house and promised to call when we were finished.

I was shocked at how much her appearance had deteriorated. She slumped in a wheelchair in baggy sweats. The expensive blond wig which had been styled before her treatment began, to perfectly match her sophisticated hairstyle, now looked absurdly out of place atop her pallid, steroid-swollen face.

“I’m sorry I’ve been rude,” she began, and I tried to cut her off but she waved a hand to stop me. It was something she’d been working up, I realized, and I let her go on. It was a wonderful summation, a sad reminder that a world full of crummy lawyers was about to lose a really first-rate one. When she finished the apology she asked if I would do her a favor.

“Anything,” I said, and meant it.

“I knew I could count on you. It’s just too weird to tell my parents. And my brother is on Planet Frank, pretending that I’ve got a bad cold.” Her parents had always been fairly cool, as reactionary billionaires went. Her brother Frank was megaintelligent but socially inept, a physicist up at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

“Let me guess. You want me to have your love child.” She laughed. “No? Okay, then. You must want to revive the Instant Karma project.”

Her smile was weak as she shook her head. “Too late for me on that, though I suppose it’s never too late for justice. No, Tina, this is a lot simpler.” She explained that when she was first diagnosed, after a grand mal seizure in the shoe department of Nordstrom at the Grove, she worried endlessly about loss of control. Once her diagnosis was firm and irrevocable, she decided that she wanted power over when and how she would die.

“But I’m a coward. And I didn’t want to do anything that would make a horrible memory for my parents, or whoever found me. So much for guns and knives. I kind of liked the idea of jumping off a skyscraper, or out of a plane, but I figured by the time I was ready, that wouldn’t be practical.” She waved a hand at the wheelchair. “As it isn’t. Anyway, one night I had an incredibly vivid dream.

“I was in some kind of medieval court, like one of those period movies where everybody’s dressed in forty yards of satin. Mine was deep blue. We were speaking a language I’d never heard that sounded like chipmunks. Then, suddenly, huge doors swung open and warriors swarmed in, wearing ragged animal furs and carrying swords and shields. Everybody was screaming and slashing swords, but in the midst of it all I was totally calm. I looked into my lap and saw my hand, wearing an ornate ring with a huge ruby. Just as one of the warriors was about to pounce on me, I raised my hand to my mouth, unclasped the ruby, and swallowed a golden liquid.”