The Rooms of Heaven by Mary Allen

Author:Mary Allen [Allen, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76678-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

16

I’ve wondered many times what happened to him that day.

When I talked to him on the phone, after we’d made up and he’d established that we weren’t going to break up, he said, “Well, that’s done,” as if he were checking something off a list of things he needed to accomplish. He was in an accomplishing mood that day, and I don’t think it was necessarily that he was trying to tie things up, get rid of loose ends before he killed himself, the way they say people do, that usually right before they kill themselves their mood lifts and they do the things that need to be done, say good-bye and so forth. I don’t think he was necessarily doing that, because he also called his friend John Gray and asked for the phone number of the health club John belonged to, which Jim had been talking about joining for months. The brochure for the health club was on his bedside table as if he’d been looking at it, on that last day, weighing his options, considering how to solve his problems; we found it there when we went to his house to collect his things. And there are other indications he intended to get back on track that day. On the phone he’d said, “Maybe I’ll go out to the Hoover library and start setting up.” And he started another work project he’d been putting off and avoiding: writing a memo to the sheriff of Downey, who’d approached him about restoring an old barn. Above his suicide note, on the same piece of paper, it says in his handwriting, “Our recommendations consist of two major points. The first point is that the pavilion in its present condition is unsafe.”

So what happened? Maybe his will simply flagged, maybe depression set in, his dopamine receptors started flapping in the wind, maybe the residual effects of the previous days simply reared their heads and he couldn’t get past them. Or maybe he fell prey to some sudden temptation. Maybe someone called him and said, “I’ve got some cocaine, could you come over here and take it off my hands, could you do an errand for me?” Something like that. Peggy said he looked very disheveled and that he went somewhere for a while. I’ve always wondered where he went. Did he go out to buy wine? Or to do an “errand,” to pick up some cocaine?

A “pillbottle w/ white powder,” is item H, quantity 1, on the Iowa City Police Department Evidence Control Inventory, a copy of which I somehow ended up with; I keep it in a file along with the suicide note. I can’t remember how I got the evidence report. Maybe I asked for it and they gave it to me at the police department when I picked up my copy of the note, or maybe Jim’s sister Pat sent it to me in the mail. Item I is “five syringes,” item K is “one spoon—bedroom.” Item A is “one note found in bedroom,” Item D is “two .

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