Living Among the Dead*

On the Saturday before Easter several years ago, Shawn’s sister Diane and her husband Pete had plans to spend the evening coloring Easter eggs with their baby son, Jeffrey. But Pete had spent all afternoon drinking. So when the time came to color eggs, he was only about half there.

“I don’t want to color no Easter Eggs.” This was not new behavior for Pete. It had been a rocky, abusive marriage. He usually hit her someplace that didn’t show, but one night he punched her just above the right eye and opened up her brow. He couldn’t stop the bleeding. She went to the neighbors and then to the hospital. Shawn had asked her: “Are you going to wait until he kills you?”

Diane didn’t wait. That Saturday, Diane had had enough. She put Jeffrey in the car and headed east. She didn’t really know where she was going, just out of Iowa and away from Pete. She picked up the four-lane and went through Clear Lake, Mason City, Charles City, Waverly, Cedar Falls, Waterloo, and Cedar Rapids. From there she went straight east and picked up highway 64. She crossed the Mississippi at Sabula, “The Island City”. It is an island in the middle of the river. You end up driving on some causeways, and then it connects to Illinois by an aging all-steel bridge. The guard rails are low enough that it wouldn’t take much for a car to veer into them and go right over. Diane thought about doing just that.

When she got to the crossroads on the other side of the bridge, she turned right into Savannah, Illinois. I’ve never been to Savannah before. She thought. She went to a gas station to get some cash at an ATM. Then she checked into the Sunrise Motel. It was like any other place: about $35 bucks on a weeknight -$45 on a weekend — cable TV, telephone, two full-size beds with multi-colored floral bedspreads, a “starving artist” print on the wall over the bed, and a round Formica-topped table and two captain’ chairs under a swag light by the window. The light shade was a kind of woven basket and the cord for the light was strung up through some plastic chain links, which looped over a couple hooks and trailed down the wall to an outlet. The walls were wood paneling, painted white.

Diane tried to call home, but no one answered. She pictured the phone torn off of the wall by a drunken Pete that was out of control. So she wrote a note to him instead:

I would like Jeffrey and me to be buried together. Please dress us both in white, with roses everywhere.

Diane’s plan for the rest of her life was to find comfort in death. Her plan was a nice funeral, flowers and a graveyard. She was longing for rest and peace. In her room at the Motel Sunrise, Diane reached in her purse and got out the prescription drugs that she had bought that morning. They were for depression. She took some out; and using a razor blade, chopped them into powder. She put the powder in Jeffrey’s baby bottle, filled it with water, screwed the nipple on and shook it. Then she gave the stuff to the baby, who was lying on the bed.

She went to the bathroom sink. There was a tray with a sort of paper doily on it. It held an ice bucket and a couple of glasses wrapped in shrink wrap. She unwrapped one, filled it with water from the sink; then she poured a handful of pills out, tossed them down, and washed them down with water. She hugged and kissed Jeffry goodbye. Then she took the razor blade and slashed the insides of both her wrists. As her blood oozed on the carpet, she felt very peaceful. Now we are finally on our way. We are going to be happy. I did the right thing. We are going to heaven, a better place.

I have always tried to make sense out of that notion: “Going to a better place.” If that is the way it works, I’m ready to cash in and checkout of here myself. But I’m not sure about that. I feel kind of attached to my body and my body feels kind of attached to the earth — not to mention to family and friends. I am not sure that I want to be some kind of disembodied soul wandering around the cosmos looking for that better place. I have a feeling that Diane was missing a step in there somewhere.

Early in the morning on Easter Day, the night manager of the motel was sipping coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, trying to keep awake. They kept a pot of it going all the time in the lobby as a kind of amenity for the guests. The phone rang. It was the guest in room 10.

“The baby in the next room has been screaming for about and hour now. Will you do something about that?”

“OK. I will check it out.”

The manager got the extra key. It was attached to an oval piece of plastic with the number 11 on it. In small print, it said that if you put the key in any mailbox, it will be returned to the motel. People had a way of driving off and not turning in their key.

The manager walked through the parking lot. The sun was just coming up; it was a pink and purple sunrise, Easter colors. He knocked on the door to room 11. He could hear the baby crying. Nothing happened. He knocked again and waited. Then he took the key and opened the door a crack.

“Sorry to disturb you. I am the motel manager.”

Nobody answered. He slowly pushed the door open. What little sunlight there was fell across the bed. Any other light was coming from the TV screen. The screen was gray with static. There was a baby sitting there on the bed crying. There was a body on the floor lying in a large pool of blood. The manager called the police. When the police arrived, the body was cold, so instead of an ambulance they called Dick Perlmutter, the county coroner.

The coroner couldn’t feel a pulse in the cold corpse on the floor. He was about to pronounce her dead, when she groaned. They rushed Diane to the hospital. The doctors were amazed that she lived.

Back in Iowa, Diane was convicted of the attempted murder of her son, Jeffrey. While awaiting appeal, she divorced and remarried and had another child. Once, when Shawn asked her about the whole thing she said: “I guess you just have to go on with your life…”

*Excerpt from Finding the Ruby Ring; Tales from the Heartland by Clark Kilgard