And she had hanged herself? Had hidden whatever despair it was, had planned it, maybe even consciously gone out and bought a rope, had sent her children away, made sure she had plenty of time before she would be discovered, had gathered up the rope, walked down the stairs into her basement, found a chair and a suitable beam, knotted the rope, flung it over the beam, stood on the chair, placed the rope around her neck and kicked away the chair? Selma Finnerty had done all that, and it was impossible to know why, even her husband and her children did not know why, so how could I, who hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even thought of her, for almost fifteen years? Maybe even she didn’t know; maybe it just seemed like the thing she had to do at that particular time.

I tried to tell Stephen about her, but I couldn’t explain why I was thinking about it, why it was so important. Yes, he said, it was a terrible thing, but what more could he say, what was it I expected him to say? How could he know what to explain, however was he to know? She kept coming back; I even, one day, went into the garage and found a rope and carried it slowly into the basement. Yes, there was an old chair down there, it would do, and over on the other side a solid-looking beam, and I would just need to drag the chair across the room, stand on it and do it.

I didn’t, of course, I had no reason to, no desire to; all I wanted to know was how Selma might have felt, but I couldn’t because I knew that what I was doing wasn’t real, and she must have known that what she was doing was very real. Still, there was something frightening about it, and I hurried upstairs to put the rope back in the garage. I tried not to think about it after that, but sometimes in that half-here half-there moment before falling asleep I would see her, not dead, not yet, but in the process of becoming dead, climbing onto her chair, placing the loop around her neck and suddenly pushing with her feet and the chair falling. In my semi-dreams I always watched the chair falling; I never saw her face.