“You log incoming calls, don’t you?”
“We jot down whatever name the callers choose to give us and a few notes about them in case they hang up and then call back later. As for 911, we can’t do that at all. If word got out that suicide-prevention hotlines were turning over information to the police, no one would ever call again.”
“Do you record the conversations?”
She gave me a wary smile. “Without the caller’s permission that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”
I smiled right back at her. “But you do it anyway.”
She picked up her cigarettes again. “Just to protect ourselves in case of a lawsuit, to prove that while maybe our volunteer didn’t do any good, at least he didn’t do any harm.”
“So if I wanted to listen to the tape?”
This time her smile was playful and flirtatious and made her seem at least ten years younger. “You’d have to ask nicely.”
I waited in a narrow, mildewed cubicle in the back of the building and flipped through a coffee-stained spiral notebook that served as the Better Way Foundation’s phone log while Sandy went to search for the tape. Lea had called at nine-thirty on the evening of her death and used her real name, maybe because she’d wanted to be stopped or maybe because she was past caring. Sandy shrugged apologetically when she set the kind of full-sized portable cassette recorder in front of me that I hadn’t seen since 1985 and then bent to plug in a clunky AC adapter.
“We survive on donations and since antidepressants hit the market, nobody donates money to a suicide hotline anymore. They just assume that everyone can pop a pill and be all right,” she said. “We buy most of our equipment from yard sales or scavenge it from garbage dumps.”
I tapped the log. “It says Freddy took the call, but then there’s a slash and an S.”
She nodded and lit a fresh Virginia Slim. “Most of the people who volunteer here aren’t professionals. They mean well and their hearts are in the right place but they’re a long way from being experts. Freddy’s a retired car salesman who started working here after his granddaughter overdosed. Sometimes when a caller seems serious, and the volunteer is inexperienced, I take over.”
“You talked to Lea?”
“For nearly an hour.”
“How did she sound?”
“Sad,” she said, gesturing towards the tape recorder. “But you can hear for yourself.”
Lea’s voice was a surprise. It was husky, whiskey-rough, sexy but with an undertone of defeat and exhaustion. She was tired, she said, tired of pretending to be something she wasn’t, tired of hurting people, tired of promising herself that she could change and then doing the same things she’d been doing since she was fourteen, tired of letting the world and herself down. Sandy tried to reassure her, listened patiently to Lea’s litany of complaints, and gently pointed out other options, steps Lea could take to make herself and her life better. Then, thirty or forty minutes into the tape, there was a pop and Lea’s voice was replaced by tape hiss.
“Oh hell,” Sandy said. “Let me see the log.” She rifled through the notebook and then squinted in the dim fluorescent light. “That was the night the power went out. MLGW claimed it was our problem not theirs, and refused to come out unless we paid a hundred-and-fifty-dollar service call.”
“You don’t have a backup generator?”
She pitched the notebook on the table. “Are you kidding? We can’t even afford batteries for the damn tape recorders. I’m sorry.”
“It probably wouldn’t have helped much anyway.”
“So what now?”
“Good question.”
She gave me a smile that was almost girlish. “I’ve got an idea. Let me buy you a drink.”
One drink became two and two became four. I’d never been fond of chain restaurants or lounges, but I’d also never been one to argue with convenience or a free drink so I sat in a leather booth at an Applebee’s and drank oversized mugs of draft beer without complaining. Sandy ordered martinis and drank them like she knew what she was doing. After a little while I gave up on pumping her for information about Lea. She’d told me all she could and nothing she said contradicted the fact that Lea had been home alone, despondent, drunk, and had decided to jump.
“I lost her, Charlie,” Sandy said. “I tried, God knows I did, but I can’t hold on to them all.”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say about Lea Washburn’s suicide so we moved on to the typical chatter of almost-strangers sharing a drink. She asked about my work and whether I liked it. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. She asked about my marriages.
She picked up her martini, swirled the last of her drink around the glass. “Let me guess. Your ex-wives didn’t like being married to a cop.”
“They didn’t like being married to me,” I said. “The cop thing I’m not so sure about.”
When she ran out of questions, it was my turn. She’d been married once. Her husband had died in a car wreck. She’d had boyfriends since but didn’t believe she’d ever marry again. She lived in a small apartment in Midtown with a Siamese cat named King Edward. Her work took up most of her time even if it didn’t pay all of her bills.
“Doesn’t it get depressing?” I asked, my own tongue loosened a little from the beer. “Talking to all of those sad, hopeless people day after day, I mean.”
She drained her martini and motioned to a perky young waitress for another round. “Only when I lose them,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that so I didn’t say anything, just hurried to finish my beer before a fresh one came, and waited for Sandy to go on. She didn’t, at least not until after the waitress had taken our empties and then brought back our drinks. Then Sandy swirled her martini, took a quick sip, picked up a toothpick loaded with olives, and dropped it back into her glass.
“You know how cancer runs in families? In mine, it’s suicide. My mother, my brother, my daughter. It’s a mental illness, you know? I’m not sure what the psychiatrists say these days, but it is.” She downed a hefty swallow of her martini and then licked the moisture from her lips. “Suicidal people are manipulative and controlling. They can’t help themselves, but that doesn’t change what they are. Maybe I’ve been doing this for too long. I mean, you’re not supposed to judge the people you’re trying to save.” She lifted her martini glass. “So there’s my half-drunk confession for the evening. I sometimes resent the people I’ve dedicated my life to helping.” She smiled around the rim of her glass. “What about you?”
“I resent a lot of people,” I said.
She laughed and shook her head. “No, no. Let’s hear a confession from you. Fair’s fair, after all.”
I looked around at the ferns, the Eating Good in the Neighborhood signs, the Happy Hour crowd of car salesmen and young lawyers. “I really, really hate this bar.”
She touched the back of my hand with her fingertips. “Well then, let’s get out of here.”
I drove her to work the next morning. We’d locked her car and left it in the Applebee’s parking lot when she’d stumbled on her way out of the bar. Then we’d stopped at a Discount Liquors for a bottle of gin and a six-pack of tonic. We made it halfway through the bottle before we made it to her bed. I’d awoken at four in the morning, naked, shivering, hung over, sneezing from the cat hair under my nose. I thought about slipping away, maybe leaving a note to say goodbye. I didn’t, not because I’m Prince Charming but because I figured the least I could do was stick around to give her a ride back to her car. But she’d wanted to go to work instead and assured me that she’d walk over at lunchtime to pick up her car and maybe drown her hangover with a Bloody Mary. I parked in front of the Better Way Foundation and wondered if I should offer to walk her in or kiss her goodbye or do something foolish like send her flowers when I got back to my office.