Excerpt: Those Inside

Overnight, the garage had become a tomb.

There was little way for anyone to have known what Carla was going to do before she went ahead and did it. Not unless there was a mind reader at the party the night before. Not unless Jack could have used the powers granted to him by the crushed can of Coors Lite to divine not that she was not having fun at the gathering but that life had failed to incite in her any considerable ability to continue on her chosen part. Not unless Niall could have looked her in the eye during a game of Quarters and decided that what she chiefly needed was to be brought out onto the front porch and given a cigarette and asked about her job, about her feelings, about her plan. Not unless Georgia could have gauged by the most fleeting of glances exchanged while passing each other by in the narrow upstairs hallway, Carla en route to the bathroom and Georgia on her way to meet Kerry in the increasingly disheveled bedroom, that anything other than the weather and the state of the union was amiss.

It could be argued that any one of those people taking up temporary residence in the two-story Victorian, with the attached garage and the tended-to flower beds and the neighbors who didn’t mind the enraptured shrieking and the juvenile chanting and the merciless laughter streaming out of the windows open to let out the heat of a dozen breathing, speaking bodies packed into a living room, could have made some sort of sense of the dampened signals that the young woman was giving off. What signals there were would have made sense to an outsider—the way she kept to herself, the way she slouched, the way she seemed almost opposed to opening her mouth to speak or ask for anything—but would not have seemed entirely unusual to a group of people who had seen the young woman without failure nearly every month since they had been thrust into the unforgiving land of Adulthood and Responsibility.

There were other concerns that night, other drains on and calls for the congregation’s attention and action. There were individuals there who had had to be separated from fighting multiple times in the past and were just now back on terms that allowed for them to exist in the same area code without immediately moving toward each other like magnetized atoms and attempting to connect fists to face with as much force and accuracy as one could hope to attain during a bout of beer-and-tequila-fueled intoxication. There were individuals there who were attempting to consummate years’ worth of tension and longing, who were attempting to do so without alerting any of the bloodhounds present to the fact that they were not sneaking away to share a joint or discuss the states and futures of their chosen occupations but to go to the upstairs bedroom and lock the door and bare flesh and souls with tabletop lamps dimmed by discarded sweaters. There were individuals there who were mourning the passing of those who had been at once an integral part of the group and a steady source of companionship and assistance in the past, who were attempting to disengage from the pain they were carrying around in the weeks since her passing and were achieving a rather beautiful numbness with the assistance of double shot glasses and carefully-chased alcohol.

There were those there who were simply there because they had been invited, because there was absolutely nothing better to do in Hoboken on a Saturday night than watch vague acquaintances drown their sorrows and fulfill their fantasies and disappear in a sea of faces at once friendly and distant.

Not a one of those individuals could be blamed for what happened to Carla Cortez that night. Not a one of those individuals handed her the keys to Gino Palermo’s Corvette and told her that the attempt would be granted a greater chance to become a completed act if she cracked the back driver-side window and not the front driver-side window. Not a one of those individuals had told her that the thoughts and feelings she was carrying around without alerting any one of them to her intent or desire were wholly substantiated and that not only her world but the world in general would be exponentially improved by her removing herself from it. Not a one of those individuals had told her that her having been made an acquaintance was the worst day of the hypothetical individual’s young life and that not one redeeming quality could be found in either the relationship or in her, herself, period.

Yet despite all of the evidence that could be pointed at to support the claim that there is not an individual who was present at [address] the night of [date] who could be marked as one who ought to take personal responsibility for Carla Cortez’s death, that does very little to change what happened what happened not to Carla but to the eleven individuals, from absolute stranger to proclaimed best friend, who were present in that house the morning that Patrick Landry opened the door between the kitchen and the garage not to figure out where Carla was but to figure out why the house smelled like exhaust. Whether or not she was known, whether or not she was important or valued or even loved, Carla Cortez had a painful impact on each person who accepted a beer or a weak hug from her last night, on each person who asked her how her sister was doing or how her Master’s was going or whether she was going to be at the softball game on Sunday.

It is one thing to be told that none of the individuals present at the party, or even any of the individuals who were a part of the woman’s life outside of where and with whom she socialized, had nothing to do with what happened, and an entirely different thing to witness the actions leading up to the young woman’s escaping into an unventilated, uninsulated garage, rolling down the back driver-side window, and turning on the engine while the people she had considered her friends slept upstairs.

This is what happened the week Carla committed suicide.