San Diego Noir

Quite a dream, that. Mine tend to be about getting lost in parking lots, or being unable to find the right color pen on my way to the final exam for the course I didn’t know I was taking.

“I woke up then,” she continued, “and went on eBay and found a poison ring. They’re big in Goth culture, in case you didn’t know, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I actually bought a couple, so I could pick the one I liked best once I had them all.”

“The opal!”

Molly never wore jewelry when she was younger, was one of the few women my age I’ve ever known without a single piercing. I remembered noticing the ring as we sat around the fire ring outside her pool house after Halloween group session, and how she laughed it off as something she’d had forever. I looked at her hands now and her fingers were bare again.

She nodded. “The opal. And I got myself some potassium cyanide and I made my own poison pills, just like those guys in the spy movies who always have a fake tooth in their mouth in case they’re captured. It was almost comic, actually. I mean the stuff is poison, and it’s designed to kill as quickly as possible. So I had to keep from spilling anything or getting it on my skin while I was working. All I could think was that if I screwed this up, I’d be dead even sooner, and my final act on earth would be a failure.”

Only Molly could think of the creation of poison pills in those terms.

“How many billable hours did it take?” I asked.

She chuckled. “You got me, Tina. Always could. Altogether, counting the online shopping and death pill construction, about four and a half, but that’s cause I was taking my time. Perfectionism is a burden.”

This from the Torrey Pines valedictorian, the Stanford National Merit Scholar, the Boalt Hall law review editor.

“So this is really the last loose end,” she said. “I’ve signed all the powers of attorney and health care directives and financial papers, and my affairs, as they say, are in order. Donating organs, I’m sorry to say, isn’t an option. My parents have sworn that they won’t haul me to a hospital and that I can die right here, in hospice, with all the painkillers I want. I’m past pride about pretty much everything, and it will be easier for my parents that way. Between you and me, I’m ready to cry uncle and go into hospice. My head hurts and the drugs will be better.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her simply. “However I can help …”

She smiled and there was a spark of the old Molly again, looking up triumphantly after racing through the AP Physics exam. “You can take care of the damned poison rings. I don’t want my parents to find that stuff after I’m dead or for anybody to accidentally get into the cyanide. What I had in mind, if you’re willing, is for you to make it all disappear. Take it away and dispose of it for me, please.”

I hesitated for a moment and she misunderstood.

“Listen, if this is too much—”

“Not at all,” I said. “But you need to promise me something. You won’t cut me off again. This is awful, Molly, but it tore me apart when you made me go away.”

We both cried a bit then, and a few tissues later she told me where she’d hidden the rings and the poison, in a pretty little oval cloisonné box in her swimsuit drawer. I retrieved the innocuouslooking pink-and-gold box and found the opal and three other rather bulky rings nestled inside on black velvet, each holding a lethal gelcap. A miniature version of the cloisonné box beside them held a dozen more capsules.

“I used up what I had,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not something you can just toss into the stew with the leftover vegetables.”

We never talked about it again, and the whole episode was so crazy that I just took the box home and pushed it to the back of the top shelf in my bedroom closet. I worked really hard and stopped by Molly’s every couple of days and at Christmas I brought her new music by her favorite artists. By then she was in bed all the time and heavily medicated, and I wasn’t always sure she knew I was there.

Every now and then I’d think about her poison rings, and once or twice I even got down the cloisonné box. But I never opened it.

Molly died on the last day of January. That was two years ago, and now it’s coming into spring again, in a year where I won’t reach Christmas. Maybe not even the Fourth of July.

So here we are.

I’m inches away from being reunited with Molly and Katherine and Kenny and my parents, if there’s an afterlife, and inches away from oblivion if there isn’t. I’ve gradually lost energy, as the doctors said I would, on medication that sufficiently masks my symptoms so that I sometimes forget for a few minutes just what’s happening inside my body. I stopped working a few weeks ago, but I’m an information junkie and still spend a lot of my waking time online, just like I always did.