Mary Anne sits in her beat-up Honda Accord with a vial containing a cyanide pill residing atop the dash board. The vial is set against the gray backdrop of a June morning as the subtle breezes of the weather sways the leaves of trees outside in just a little way. They seemed like an audience waiting in anticipation. A scenery framed inside her car's front window.
She's not even looking at the little bottle. Her face is downcast.
She has been known as a crier all of her life, a reputation that has followed her even to adulthood. But at this moment, when most would probably be bawling, she couldn't. Her emotional state has moved her beyond tears.
A bottle of 16-ounce Heineken sits by her foot. A small nudge can send it rolling around for a small while. It's a cause and effect that's predictable.
She bought the beer even though she has never consumed alcohol in her life. Yet she bought it to wash down her pill with. She went into Jugtown to buy a bottle of water but on a whim decided on the beer. Hey, why not try everything at least once . . . even if it's just one time, she thought.
Jugtown. That's the store of the parking lot she's in.
People passing and going around her, and imperious about their own business as she quietly exits the room of the world out of the back door. She tightened her lips with determination with that thought.
She thinks about her baby girl. About holding her. How holding her must have been a mirror visual of how her own mother must've held her when she was at that age. How oblivious she was while swathed in more than a blanket but in a lot of love and warmth too which is how she held her own baby girl. She imagines the many different places where she's cradled her in and herself had probably been cradled in in the past - in a nursery, in the kitchen, in a store. Too many settings. And each so precious.
She imagines autumn leaves cascading down to the ground outside of her car's front window replacing the reality of the drab weather outside. Autumn leaves mimicking the shedding of perfect tears - the slow descent, the sadly beautiful collective look of individual cogs operating in unison for the larger production.
Then amidst those falling leaves, an out of place object speeds down barreling through the crowd on a manic solo race to reach the bottom - a baby.
Her baby.
It happened so suddenly (a fleeing robber careening at full sprint into her while she waited outside on the corner of a store for her friend, Kristy, to pick them up) and was an event which was such an outlandish freak-accident that her mind couldn't comprehend fast enough to catch the bundle.
But that's just an excuse; I can't accept that reason, she thought.