Greetings from the Vodka Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

think by then the Mexican ambassador was singing to her in Spanish, something vaguely familiar, like a lullaby, although the words and melody didn’t register. Yes. That’s it. “London Bridge.” In Spanish. I’ve always wondered if you heard it too. I did not hear the splash as your sister dove into the water, and I don’t recall anything before the ambassador called her name. By then, you were calling too. I followed the trail of clothes to the water’s edge and saw you waist deep in the water, calling, calling, calling your sister’s name. The ambassador, who once worked as a pearl diver and had tremendous breath control, scoured the bottom of the lake, while we did the best we could from the cumbersome rowboat. It was almost dawn when the police divers arrived with their scuba tanks and sonar equipment. You stayed on the water in the rowboat the rest of the day and into the following night. It’s not so strange that we never recovered her; the police captain, the one with the twitch and the stammer, said that the lake was cluttered with sunken stumps; a four-foot layer of mud and silt covered its bed. Finding her would have taken a miracle. The search continued for a week, but all we came up with was her waterlogged hairpiece, which had drifted to shore on its own. I’ve always wanted to ask you, how come you never cried? Not when she went missing, that’s understandable, there was work to do. But not even later, when the police called off the search, or when we found your mother in a heap on the floor of her living room with her dress wet with tears and a photograph of your sister in her hands, which she held so tightly that it tore when we tried to take it away from her. I’d thought you’d cry then. But you seemed indifferent, cynical at best. You laughed at the funeral and ridiculed us for spending two thousand dollars to bury a thirty-dollar hairpiece. Afterwards, you laughed when your stepfather tried to put things into perspective. “At least this tragedy has brought us all closer together,” he said. And later as I drove you home from the cemetery I confessed to you that I had never felt more alive than I had during the search, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the police, all of us focused, and that I had never felt closer to anyone than I felt to you right then in that car. That’s when you said it. “Men need the company of strangers. Men only come to life when they’re surrounded and involved with people they don’t know.”
    The coroner says most people wait until the spring to kill themselves. Death in general is more abundant in the spring; hospitals and old folks’ homes routinely report the highest number of deaths in March and April. The coroner sees this in a positive light, and I agree: people hold on to life for as long as they can. Surviving one more winter is, if not a small victory over death, at least a slap in death’s face. I’ve come to think of you as this kind of person, the kind who plans to make it through one more winter. I think you’d like the coroner. In a lot of ways, he’s similar to you. Stoic, that’s the word. Stoic, but in the good sense. Not like an institution, but stoic like a well-fed farm animal.
    I wanted to tell how I came to collect suicide notes, but it’s not a very interesting story. A fluke, more or less. I chanced upon a note. I must confess that I was very apprehensive about telling you anything at all, especially at this time. But in a relationship like ours, we should be able to tell each other our deepest secrets as easily as we say “I love you.”
    I wanted very much for this to be about someone else, but it’s about you.
    I’ve read your note. I was going to put it in my collection, but the coroner’s offered me a handsome sum for it, and, at this point in our relationship, I think I should accept his generous offer.

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