Page 115 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

“Did you ever read it?” Kevin asked.

Read it? I had no idea he even wrote it.

“Of course I didn’t read it,” I said. “Unlike your sister, I respect boundaries.” My voice was calm, but inside I was seething.

“I don’t get it,” Kevin said. “You waited a long time after Dad was... after he was departed... before you wrote his eulogy. Why would he write one for you while you were still alive?”

Because that was typical Alex. So cocksure of himself that he wrote his acceptance speech before he even shot the movie.

But my son didn’t need to hear the bitter truth. He needed something that would reinforce the image of the perfect father, the committed doctor who pledged to “first do no harm.”

“You never met my mother,” I said, spinning the yarn as I spoke.

“Grandma Kate,” he said.

I smiled. “She’d have loved hearing you call her that. She was only forty-one when she died. The disease that took her is very rare, but it’s hereditary. Which means Aunt Lizzie and I are at greater risk than most people. Even though your dad dealt with life and death every day, one night he confessed to me that he was afraid that if I died young—emphasis on theif, Kevin—he’d be too devastated to gather his thoughts and write a proper eulogy. So I jokingly said, ‘Write it now while you still worship the ground I walk on.’”

“Good one,” Kevin said, always happy to let me know when my mom humor meets with his approval.

“Anyway, he took me up on it. But I would never think of reading it in advance. I told him I wanted to be surprised at my funeral.”

I reached out and gave him a fleeting suitable-for-self-conscious-teenagers hug. “Speaking of funerals, we should get out there and join the circus. Go get Aunt Lizzie and Katie and save me a seat in the limo.”

He left, and I gathered up the pages of my eulogy from the table.

The words that had once been true were now hollow.

How do you go from loving a man with all your heart to feeling relieved by his death, I wondered.

How do you decide that your children will be safer, live longer, if their father is gone forever?

How do you think the unthinkable? Do the undoable?

I did what I’ve been doing all my life. I gathered the facts, weighed all the options until I was down to one, then I braced myself for the consequences.

I didn’t kill Alex. But that afternoon at the rock quarry when Johnny said those four words—do you trust me—I could have stopped it from happening.

And I had made a calculated decision not to.

SEVENTY-ONE

three weeks before the funeral

Johnny never told me the plan. Despite his Chinese fortune-cookie philosophy that the more you know, the better off you are, he decided that the less I knew, the less likely I was to tip off Alex.

So his call came out of the blue that Monday evening after the kids and I had dinner. “Hey, Maggie. It’s Johnny. I think I may have left my bandanna in your car,” he said.

Johnny had set down a rule back in our high school days. Never call, text, or page him with a message that said I needed help. “Just say you left your bandanna in my car. When I ask what color, you can say green, yellow, or red, and I’ll know how fast you need me to get there and bail you out.”

We hadn’t used that code to communicate for more than twenty-five years, but when he called that night, I didn’t hesitate. “Your bandanna? What color was it?”

“Red.”

“I’ll look for it,” I said.

“Thanks. I’m working the night shift.”

Red. I jumped in the car and raced toward the hospital.

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