I never got the chance.
The morning my mother and I were scheduled to fly to Chicago, I awoke to find myself standing in her recently remodeled kitchen. The place had been completely trashed—broken plates covering the floor, orange juice dripping from the open refrigerator, countertops a wasteland of eggshells, flour clumps, and oil slicks of vanilla extract. Seated on the floor amid the debris was my mother, weeping for the daughter who was still with her yet irrevocably lost.
Why, Quincy? she moaned. Why would you do this?
Of course I had been the one to ransack the kitchen like a careless burglar. I knew it as soon as I saw the mess. There was a logic to the destruction. It was so utterly me. Yet I had no memory of ever doing it. Those unknown minutes spent trashing the place were as blank to me as that hour at Pine Cottage.
I didn’t mean it, I said. I swear, I didn’t mean it.
My mother pretended to believe me. She stood, wiped her cheeks, gingerly fixed her hair. Yet a dark twitchiness in her eyes betrayed her true emotions. She was, I realized, frightened of me.
While I cleaned the kitchen, my mother called Oprah’s people and cancelled. Since it was all of us or nothing, that decision scuttled the whole thing. There would be no televised meeting of the Final Girls.
Later that day, my mother took me to a doctor who gave me a lifetime prescription for Xanax. So eager was my mother to have me medicated that I was forced to swallow one in the pharmacy parking lot, washing it down with the only liquid in the car—a bottle of lukewarm grape soda.
We’re done, she announced. No more blackouts. No more rages. No more being a victim. You take these pills and be normal, Quincy. That’s how it has to be.
I agreed. I didn’t want a troop of reporters at my graduation. I didn’t want to write a book or do another interview or admit my scars still prickled whenever a thunderstorm rolled in. I didn’t want to be one of those girls tethered to tragedy, forever associated with the absolute worst moment of my life.
Still buzzing from that inaugural Xanax, I called Lisa and told her I wasn’t going to do anymore interviews. I was done being a perpetual victim.
I’m not a Final Girl, I told her.
Lisa’s tone was unfailingly patient, which infuriated me. Then what are you, Quincy?
Normal.
For girls like you and me and Samantha, there’s no such thing as normal, she said. But I understand why you want to try.
Lisa wished me well. She told me she’d be there if I ever needed her. We never spoke again.
Now I stare at the face gazing from the cover of her book. It’s a nice picture of Lisa. Clearly touched up, but not in a tacky way. Friendly eyes. Small nose. Chin maybe a bit too large and forehead a touch too high. Not a classic beauty, but pretty.
She’s not smiling in the picture. This isn’t the kind of book that warrants a smile. Her lips are pressed together in just the right way. Not too cheerful. Not too severe. The perfect balance of gravity and self-satisfaction. I imagine Lisa practicing the expression in a mirror. The thought makes me sad.
I then think of her huddled in her tub, knife in hand. An even worse thought.
The knife.
That’s the thing I don’t understand, more than the act of suicide itself. Shit happens. Life sucks. Sometimes people can’t deal and choose to opt out. Sad as it may be, it happens all the time. Even to people like Lisa.
But she used a knife. Not a bottle of pills washed down with vodka. (My first preference, if it ever comes to that.) Not the soft, fatal embrace of carbon monoxide. (Choice No. 2.) Lisa chose to end her life with the very thing that almost stabbed it out of her decades earlier. She purposely slid that blade across her wrists, taking care to dig in deep, to finish the job Stephen Leibman had started.
I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if Lisa and I had stayed in touch. Maybe we would have eventually met in person. Maybe we could have become friends.
Maybe I could have saved her.
I make my way back to the kitchen and open the laptop that’s mostly used for blog business. After a quick Google search of Lisa Milner, I see that news of her death has yet to hit the internet. That it will soon is inevitable. The big unknown is how much its impact will reverberate into my own life.
A few clicks later, I’m on Facebook, that insipid swamp of likes and links and atrocious grammar. Personally, I don’t do social media. No Twitter. No Instagram. I had a personal Facebook page years ago but shut it down after too many pity follows and friend requests from strangers with Final Girl fetishes. Yet one still exists for my website. A necessary evil. Through that, I can easily access Lisa’s own Facebook page. She was, after all, a follower of Quincy’s Sweets.
Lisa’s page has become a virtual memorial wall, filled with condolence messages she’ll never read. I scroll past dozens of them, most of them generic but heartfelt.
Well miss you, Lisa Pisa! XOXO
I’ll never forget your beautiful smile and your amazing soul.
Rest in peace, Lisa.
The most touching comes from a doe-eyed, brown-haired girl named Jade.
Because you overcame the worst moment of your life, it inspired me to overcome the worst moment of mine. I’m forever inspired by you, Lisa. Now that you’re among the angels in Heaven, keep watch over those of us still down below.
I find a picture of Jade in the many, many photos Lisa posted to her wall over the years. It’s from three months ago, and it shows the two of them posing cheek to cheek at what appears to be an amusement park. Criss-crossed in the background are the support beams of a wooden roller coaster. An enormous teddy bear fills Lisa’s arms.
There’s no question that their smiles are genuine. You can’t fake that kind of joy. God knows, I’ve tried. Yet there’s an aura of loss around both of them. I see it in their eyes. That same subliminal sadness always creeps into pictures of me. Last Christmas, when Jeff and I went to Pennsylvania to visit my mother, we all posed for a picture in front of the tree, acting like we were a real, functioning family. Later, while looking at the photos on her computer, my mother mistook my rigid grin for a grimace and said, Would it have killed you to smile, Quincy?
I spend a half-hour poking around Lisa’s photos, getting glimpses of an existence far different than mine. Although she had never married, settled down and had kids, her life seemed to be a fulfilling one. Lisa had surrounded herself with people—family and friends and girls like Jade who just needed a kind presence. I could have been one of them, had I allowed it.
Instead, I did the opposite. Keeping people at a safe distance. Pushing them away if necessary. Closeness was a luxury I couldn’t afford to lose again.
Scanning Lisa’s photos, I mentally insert myself into each one. There I am, posing with her at the edge of the Grand Canyon. There we are, wiping mist from our faces in front of Niagara Falls. That’s me tucked into a group of women kicking up our two-toned shoes at a bowling alley. Bowling Buddies!! reads the caption.
I pause at a picture Lisa had posted three weeks ago. It’s a selfie, taken from a stretched, slightly overhead angle. In it, Lisa is raising a bottle of wine in what appears to be a wood-paneled dining room. For a caption, she had written, Wine time! LOL!
There’s a girl behind her, mostly cut out of the tilted frame. She reminds me of those alleged pictures of Big Foot I sometimes see on cheesy paranormal shows. A blur of black hair turning away from the camera.
I feel a kinship with that unnamed girl, even if I can’t see her face. I, too, turned away from Lisa, retreating into the background, alone.
I became a blur—a smudge of darkness missing all my details.
Pine Cottage, 3:37 p.m.
At first, the idea of the cabin made Quincy think of a fairy tale, mostly because of its whimsical name.