Ty Oliver, father: “Claire, you understand we have rules in this house for a reason, yes? It’s not just whim.”
Claire Oliver, daughter: (sigh) “I understand that the family unit is a body politic, like any social collective. And that within its infrastructure, there is a power base—i.e., you—whose sole ambition is both to retain your power at any cost and to legitimize said power in the minds of those who must adhere to it. To wit, you pressuring me to acknowledge your right to rule over me.”
“Claire, dammit—”
Her father said these two words so often that Claire’s younger brother, Simon, upon learning to speak, believed this was her name—Claire Dammit—and addressed her as such for months, much to the horror of his parents. Claire, however, was delighted and insisted well into his teenage years that Simon address her this way.
“Claire, dammit,” her father continued, “can you just have the same conversation I’m having—for once? Which is that you, as my daughter and a seventeen-year-old sleeping under my roof, that when I say Be home by midnight, you say, Yes, sir.”
A kind of delight spread across Claire’s face. Her sigh this time was more one of pleasure at having been proven right.
(sigh) “Sir, is it?”
“Claire—”
(sigh) “No, I get it. Alarmed by the tenuousness of your authority, you’ve increased your strongman tactics to try to intimidate me into falling in line. FYI, Daddio—that’s not how a democracy works.”
“A family is not a democracy.”
(sigh) “My point exactly.”
Her relationship with her mother was less Clarence Darrow versus William Jennings Bryan, and more Road Runner versus Wile E. Coyote, in that her mother was always trying to recapture Claire, to domesticate her into being her little girl once more, often physically—thus reenforcing her own delusion that Claire had once upon a time been naive and trusting, when what she had been from the moment she could crawl was independent, suspicious, aloof.
In the Oliver household, this was what passed for love.
“Trust me, kiddo,” Claire would tell Simon whenever he would come into her room and lie on her bull’s-eye rug reading his comic books, “you’re better off taking the blue pill and staying in the Matrix. The minute you see through this whole mommy-daddy bullshit, your life is officially fucked. Pardon my French.”
Later, when the truth began to come out about their parents, about what her father did for a living, not just a CEO, but a pusher, when details emerged about the internal emails he’d sent, the way he’d instructed the advertising and marketing division of Rise Pharmaceutical to encourage doctors to prescribe more pain pills at higher doses, even after the proven risk of addiction was clearly understood—that is to say before the stories appeared in newspapers, but while the journalists were digging around, asking questions—when their father started drinking earlier in the evening, coming home in a clear gin sweat, agitated, looking for a fight, that is, when their mother upped her dosage of Prozac and fell prey to fits of nervous knitting—Claire would sit outside her father’s study and eavesdrop on his panicked phone calls.
“Old Ty is shitting the proverbial brick, maintenant,” she’d tell Simon, then fourteen. And yet, though she herself knew the truth about the family business, she remained tight-lipped in front of Simon, aware perhaps that naivete was the most precious gift she could give him, the ability to complete his childhood with the belief intact that his parents were good and trustworthy people.
It’s possible a similar motive was at play in the formation of her final words, a desire to protect Simon from the spectrum of what she understood to be her family’s, and her own, terminal pathology. And yet the act itself—as tragic and permanent as it was—was still rich with irony. This too, her friends would later say, was classic Claire. For the way Claire chose to take her own life—a suicide that predated the global surge of adolescent self-murder by nine months—was to surreptitiously collect hundreds of oxycodone sample packs from her father’s office over a period of weeks and then off herself in her parents’ palatial, second-story bathroom. It was the first weekend of summer. Ty and Patty Oliver were in the Hamptons with young Simon. Horse shows and white parties, the Ogilveys and the Dunkirks, and the Nichols helicoptering in from the Cape. Claire begged off going, stating she had a hot date with the “starting lineup of the New York Knicks” and didn’t think she’d be able to walk properly “for some time afterward.” She watched them load their weekend valises into the town car for the drive to the heliport, given a hearty wave as they drove off. The last thing Simon saw, as he turned to wave back, was her wink.
You and me, kiddo.
He still sees the wink every time he closes his eyes.
*
Photographs of the scene, taken three days later, after her mother’s frantic 911 call, showed the following: