Laughing in the Dark by Susan Swartz

Author:Susan Swartz [Swartz, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948598187
Publisher: Open Books
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“HAVE TO PEE,” SAID Jude, after they finished lunch. She headed down the hall, pausing to look, as she always did, at the family photo lineup on the way to the bathroom. Rick’s and Anna’s wedding photo. With her dark eyes and straight hair, she looked like an Indian queen. A picture of Robby as a roly-poly kid in Cat in the Hat pajamas. Then the three of them, howling and collapsing into each other. Franny, head thrown back, snorted like she was gulping air. Jude exploded into her full-bodied roar. And Anna, the dainty laugher who made little puppy yelps, burrowed in Franny’s shoulder. Happy people, innocent times.

She closed the door and started humming. There was nothing in Anna’s fancy bathroom as simple as a medicine chest with a mirror on the front. Instead there were three antique mirrors arranged around a glass cabinet displaying pretty jars and artful stacks of little soaps, likely some Restoration Hardware version of a medicine chest. Very handsome but where do they keep the Band-Aids and all their pills?

Jude opened the small drawers in a side table. Nothing there but travel tubes of shampoo and a bag of throat lozenges. Of course, now that she thought about it, any serious drugs would be upstairs in Anna’s and Rick’s bathroom. Next time Jude would figure out a way to get up there. When Robby was still living at home there were no meds allowed anywhere in the house. But Robby was long out of the house, and by Anna’s account, clean and sober. Hmm. Maybe Rick’s mother had arrived with her own stash.

Jude had pretty much concluded that her way out was pills. Everything else was so grisly. She was too afraid of guns, didn’t own one, wouldn’t know how to fire one. She had to look away when she got a blood test, so slicing her wrists and sinking into a hot bath was out of the question. Hanging would be too awful. When Jude was little a friend of her parents from church hanged herself. The woman’s daughters had found her in the attic. The kids were Jude’s age, in grade school. Jude overheard her mother talking on the phone about “that poor woman” and “those poor girls” but she refused to answer any of Jude’s questions so Jude conjured up her own horror scene. The girls probably came home from school, expecting their normal snack of crackers and peanut butter, and started calling for Mommy. Which one thought to look in the attic? Jude imagined their mother probably had worn a dress and heels. All the mothers wore dresses and heels back then. Would her shoes have dropped off as she hung there? What did she look like dead? For the rest of their lives did those girls still see their mother hanging there? Jude could never do that to Katy or Charlie.

Robin Williams hanged himself although it was more typical for celebrities to die from an overdose, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

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