MAGGIE WOKE UP AND LOOKED OVER AT THE CLOCK. SIX A.M. Good. She might as well get an early start, and there would be less traffic on the way down to the river at this hour. After she was dressed in her fishing shirt and jeans and men’s boots, she emptied out the refrigerator, took out the garbage, placed the ant traps under the sink, and took out the “To Whom It May Concern” letter and laid it on the kitchen counter. When she left, she locked the front door behind her and put the key under the mat. The taxi was right on time, waiting, and to her surprise, the driver looked exactly like Omar Sharif from Doctor Zhivago. The bad news was, he could barely speak English, and she had a hard time explaining how to get to the river. But the good news: he was from Siberia, so he had no idea she was a former Miss Alabama or that she was not Mrs. Tab Hunter.
She tried to be pleasant and asked him how long he had been in America. When he told her eleven years, she asked, “Do you ever miss Siberia?”
He looked up at her in the mirror and said sadly, “Oh, yes, I can’t wait to get back.”
She couldn’t imagine how anyone would long for Siberia, but she guessed everybody loved their home, no matter where it was. As they drove, Maggie sat and thought about how life was so full of surprises, even up to the very end. She was sure a lot of other people must have considered ending it all at one time or another but had chickened out at the last minute. She’d bet that a lot of people would be surprised that she, of all people, had actually gone through with it. But then, they say it’s always the quiet ones you never suspect. She was even surprised at herself and was amazed at how calm and serene she felt. She knew intellectually that this should be a big dramatic moment, but she didn’t feel it. She had been more nervous just going to the dentist than she was now. But real life was never the same as they showed it in the movies. And then, too, she had made this same trip so many times that now it all seemed anticlimactic.
When they reached the river road, she had the driver let her out a few minutes from the old Raiford Fishing Camp. She gave him a nice tip, and when he was out of sight, she walked the rest of the way to the spot where her things were waiting. When she reached the clearing, she went down the path, snakebite kit in hand, but luckily she didn’t see one snake. Near the water, she was glad to see that everything was still there, exactly as she’d left it. Maggie inflated the raft with the pump that came with it and placed all four weights in the boat. She then climbed in and pushed herself off with the paddle and started rowing out to the middle of the river.
It took her about fifteen minutes to get there and, just as she expected, there was not a single person or a boat in sight. She picked up the two ten-pound ankle weights and applied a generous amount of the sticky, white, As Seen on TV “miracle glue” onto the Velcro and wrapped them around her ankles; she did the same thing with the two wrist weights. Now all she had to do was wait the twenty minutes for the glue to dry and she’d be good to go. She set the egg timer on the seat and realized that she had worn her expensive watch. She should have left it in the envelope at home for Lupe. That was so stupid. Oh well, one small detail missed. Everything else had been taken care of. As she sat there waiting for the glue to dry, she found out that twenty minutes is a long time, especially if you have nothing to read. She should have brought a magazine.
As she sat there, an old song ran through her head, and she began to sing, “Oh, Mr. Sandman… bring me a dream, make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen…”
After singing the entire song all the way through, twice, she looked down at the rooster egg timer again… Good Lord, eleven more minutes to kill. So she started another song that had always been one of her mother’s favorites: “Blue champagne, purple shadows and blue champagne.”
It was a strange sight, a woman alone, sitting in the middle of the river, singing all the “oldies but goodies” she could remember. Finally, after another ten long minutes, the timer’s bell went off. She put one leg over the side of the boat, then the other, and slowly lowered herself into the cold water. She held on to the side of the boat with one arm for just a moment, then let go.
The second she let go, she immediately began sinking straight down to the bottom at a surprisingly rapid speed, and her last thought was “Well, I did it.” As the cold water rushed past her ears with a loud roar, she sank deeper and deeper, and the water became darker and darker. But just at the very moment she was expecting to black out, a brand-new thought suddenly hit her.
“Wait a minute, this is a mistake!”
In that one second, she had completely changed her mind and now wanted to go back up to the surface. Maggie began to flail around in a panic, kicking and struggling with the weights around her wrists, desperately trying to pull them apart, and as she continued to sink, she jerked and pulled at them with all her might, but to her horror, she could not get free. As advertised, the “guaranteed-or-your-money-back magic glue” was holding tight. Sinking deeper, she could hear herself screaming and yelling underwater, “Wait! Stop!” And then came the terrible moment, the horrible realization that she could not save herself. It was too late.
As she gasped for what she knew was her last breath and felt the heavy ice-cold water rushing down her throat and into her lungs, just as she was on the very verge of losing consciousness forever, she suddenly shot straight up in bed with her heart pounding in her chest, covered in sweat, still screaming at the top of her lungs, “Wait! Stop!” She sat in the pitch dark struggling for breath, still in a blind panic, not knowing if she was dead or alive. Had the river been a dream or was this a dream? She could still hear the sound of the water rushing past her ears. Was she dead? She reached over to the nightstand and grabbed the remote and, with shaking hands, clicked on the television set, and when the gray light came into focus, there sat Rick and Janice on the set of the Good Morning Alabama show, and Maggie had never been so happy to see any two people in her life.
Still, her heart continued to race out of control. It was pounding so hard that she wondered if she was having a heart attack and if she should get up and take an aspirin. Ironic that someone who was planning to drown herself was now terrified about having a heart attack and dying, but she was. She jumped up out of bed and ran into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, but it was empty. She had thrown everything away last night. So she just stood at the sink and did some deep breathing until, finally, her heart slowed down a little. She was still slightly disoriented, but now that she thought more about it, she realized that of course it had all been just a terrible nightmare, a bad dream. She should have realized it sooner. What had she been thinking? Omar Sharif was from Egypt, not Siberia!
She made her way into the kitchen and fixed a cup of herbal tea. Still sweaty and shaky, she then went outside and sat on her patio in the fresh air, just as the sun was starting to come up over the mountain. She sat there, still in a state of shock. She had had nightmares before, but never one that vivid or real and certainly never that terrifying. Up until a few minutes ago, she’d had no idea she wanted to live, but clearly, she did. She had fought with all of her might. Even though it had just been a dream, she still felt exhausted from the struggle. What a total surprise! She had assumed she was perfectly ready to go, but she had been wrong. Just yesterday, she couldn’t think of a thing to live for, but right now, a hundred reasons flooded her mind. For one, it felt so good just to be able to breathe; why hadn’t she noticed that before?