He was not there, but this is how it happened.
After a last look around, Mary turned out all the lights except for the one in the bathroom. She checked the water in the bathtub again. Almost right. Another five minutes. The steam was all but vanished from the mirror. Mary sat down on the edge of the bathtub and lit her last cigarette. All was ready. She took a long drag and exhaled slowly, trying to still the melodramatic fluttering in her heart.
When she had smoked the cigarette down to the last fringe of paper and embers she dropped it into the toilet and put the seat down.
She lit a candle, placed it carefully beside the soap dish and switched off the light. She stood in front of the sink, staring at herself in the mirror, half of her face illumined by the candlelight, the other half shadowed to uniform darkness briefed only by the reflection of her iris, unruptured by tears or tiny arteries to milkwhite. She was wearing only a thin blouse, a pair of underpants and her lilac socks. She smiled to herself: whoever said that death has no inhibitions? She numbered the objects on the sink, doubled in the glass: bottle, razor, towels.
She rolled the sleeves of her blouse up tight around her upper arms and turned on the cold tap. She held her right wrist and hand under the faucet and began to add warm water. When she could see the slight line of a vein she laid the edge of the razor along it, lightly, gently. She made the first incision quickly and then another, longer one, parallel to the first. She held the razor under the faucet to wash off the blood and made a fist. There was noticeable throbbing but so far very little pain. The blood from the slit veins was pulsing into a thick band. She sliced across it horizontally and let the razor drop into the sink, across the drain.
She looked at her wrist. It reminded her of a careless Chinese ideogram. She wanted to look into the mirror but didn’t. She wrapped the pale yellow towel around her wrist, careful not to make it too tight. Taking a swig from the bottle of vodka she regretted having smoked her last cigarette. But there was hardly time for that now.
She leaned over and set the bottle on the edge of the bathtub. The throbbing in her right arm had diminished and she was beginning to lose sensation in her fingers. She did a bad job on the left wrist, hurting herself several times when the razor jagged sharply in her clumsy fingers. She lifted her wounded wrist and held it against the outer folds of the yellow towel, shutting off the tap with a shove of her elbow.
She stepped into the tub and sat down, letting the towel loose from around her wrist. It soughed softly against her hip, moving slowly with the warm current. She closed her eyes, leaned her head against the humid tile and murmured:
-Done.
Mary lay back, feeling the chill of porcelain against the back of her head. She slid lower in the water and opened her eyes. In the candlelight the water looked black, tinged with even darker shadows where her blood clouded it.
The vodka bottle slipped from the tub and fell to the floor. Mary smiled, listening to its volume glugging out sadly upon the floor.
After a bit she closed her eyes. One of her eyelids was twitching and she had an itch below her left breast but she could not reach it. The water was very warm.
For a moment she thought of Cecilia. What if he was at the door, crying to be let in? She couldn’t remember whether she had filled his food dish. It suddenly mattered very much.
-Oh, Mary, she whispered, what have you done? Something rather stupid, I’m afraid.