Chapter 1: Bridge

I planned my death the way I design a room: heavy objects first to anchor the narrative, bones for all the crucial details—creases and corners where the devil hides—to rest upon. There can be no gaping voids of negative space where the mind lingers unattended. Just quiet pauses between elements. A story you don’t know is being told as your eye is drawn from cornice to carpet. Organic but not random, harmonious but not predictable.
     A well-designed room feels accidental, but never hapless.
     A well-designed death is no different.
     I squeeze the berries in my pockets, letting their juices seep into the fine lines of my knuckles and fill the soft, white crescents of my nails. The walk is silver before me in the predawn gloom, a bright paragon of architecture over the Cooper River, running headlong into the future. It dazzles, this bridge, like something from a spaceship, ready to launch me into the next place.
     The first time I ate deadly pokeweed, I was five. I found those dangling clusters of glossy black berries and wine-pink stems irresistible, popping one after another into my mouth. I’d never been so hungry before. I can still feel the high August sun bearing down on my scalp, drying the juice and staining my hands burgundy. And I can still hear my mother’s scream when she found me—a sound without shape, the bellow of a gutted animal. His body was a log at my feet, fallen. She slapped the berries from my palms until they stung and rushed me to the hospital, leaving the dead man behind.
     I don’t remember feeling ill. I don’t recall the stomach cramps or the seizure she said I had. “You stopped breathing,” she would tell me. “You almost died.” I don’t recall the man giving me the berries. “He was sick,” my mother claimed. I do recall the briny flavor of his skin, the give of flesh beneath my teeth, the hot pulse of blood like iodine. I recall resting against hospital pillows when the nurse brought me ice cream, and my mother crying softly, the policemen looming columns of black.
     I didn’t eat pokeweed again. Until I was nine.
     Death by deadly ingestion isn’t common, but it has a certain drama my husband, Henry, will immediately ascribe to me, an unnecessariness. He always found my reactions exaggerated, even comical. As if I were in an old cartoon—helicopter arms and tweeting birds flying around my head. Stars blinking in and out. It’s hard not to flail when someone is cutting off your oxygen.
     The police, I suspect, will look at my past—popular interior designer who withdraws from polite society, whispered about at the odd dinner party. And there is the family history, of course. They’ll find it fitting, at first. A sloppy suicide—crucial to keep Henry from coming after me. But the peculiarities will pile up, hinting that something is off. They’ll start looking into the husband because that’s what they always do.
     I’m counting on it.
     I blink against the fog, my shoelaces slapping the walk, rain jacket zipped to my chin. Soon, the sun will freewheel across the sky, lighting Charleston up, setting it aglow. It’s a glorious day to die, an ironically tranquil morning.
     I love Charleston. I love its quaint, cobblestoned history and watercolor ambiance, the unpretentious gentility of the people. I came here looking for something—charisma, hospitality, belonging. I was only twenty-three, fresh from community college with nothing but an unimpressive degree, youthful optimism, and a relentless work ethic. In seven years, I built a life to be proud of—a brilliant career, a circle of specious friends, a client list longer than this bridge. In two, Henry took it all away.
     On days like this, Charleston looks like a painting, too romantic to be real, like some old debonair destination in Europe—Paris or Venice or Copenhagen. It’s what made me believe over the last two years. In him. In us. If the light slanted just right and the breeze smelled of gardenias and palm and I didn’t overcook the shrimp, we would be okay. The good days dot my memory like sand dollars on the beach. Prizes to collect, dead as they are.
     I don’t believe anymore.
     Whatever happens when I hit that water, I will never see Charleston again, never ride in one of its horse-drawn carriages through the French Quarter or sip planter’s punch under a sherbet-colored sky. This city was all I had—the father I never knew and the mother I always craved. Charleston was the place where I left behind a troubled past clouded with questions and drew myself in clear, crisp lines. But this bridge is where my love affair with Charleston and Henry ends.
     I glance over my shoulder and quicken my pace. Behind me, the man in the black hoodie trudges with his head down. He could pass for Henry. Same height. Same build. I’ve been watching him for months on mornings just like this one. Henry leaves exceptionally early for work, wanting to fit in a workout at the gym and still beat his associates to the office. I would leave my phone on the kitchen island and climb out the bathroom window, so the front door camera wouldn’t alert him to my coming or going, and drive to the nearby waterfront park. I’d come here and contemplate the only way out I could see. It’s how I noticed him. He was here every week around dawn, in a jacket, hood hanging around his face, head down, and hands balled inside his pockets. He never noticed me. He never noticed anything. I wondered if he was thinking of jumping, too.
     I put everything into place. Switched from driving in to taking two buses, knowing the next time I saw him, I had to be ready to go at a moment’s notice if I wanted Henry to pay.
     Then he stopped coming.
     I spent a restless couple of weeks standing at the mouth of the bridge, my secret bus fare dwindling, knowing I may not get another opportunity to follow through.
     This morning, my luck turned.
     I see a dark speck at the seam of my pocket and remember the dully sweet flavor of pokeweed berries when I was nine. We’d moved to a house bordering a national forest, and come summer, the flowers dappled the edge of the wood like constellations. I would lie in my bed and watch them swaying gently in the dark. They turned from spectral white to chartreuse, to pink, and eventually a violet so deep it vanished in the night. When they began to drop, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I waited till the moon was over the trees before going to them, unable to explain my craving. Then I grabbed a fistful and shoved it, stems and all, into my mouth. The juices flooded my gums, blander than I’d expected. I’d thought I was being discreet as I ate my way around our yard. But in the morning, my mother saw the stains along my lips and fingers, splattered across the front of my gown.
     Later, the doctor would call it pica, an eating disorder characterized by the desire to consume substances with no nutritional value. I was given supplements and cognitive behavioral therapy and out came the little pills that made my heart race. They monitored me so closely I could scarcely take a piss without an audience. But eventually, my mom began to relax. Her new husband, Gerald, disliked the attention I was taking away from him. He coaxed her into leaving me alone for increasing periods of time. It didn’t take long for me to find my way back to where the pokeweed bushes waved at me with big, frilly leaves.
   Maybe I built up a tolerance after that first incident, like people who are snakebit so many times they no longer react to the venom. I never got sick, never went back to the hospital, never encountered another strange man in my forays or sank my teeth into his arm, standing sentinel over his prone form until someone found me. “He fed you. He grabbed you, and that’s why you bit him,” she’d recited over and over. It was easy to remember when the police came.
     But it was harder to forget. The hunger—like claws raking across my stomach lining. The taste—bitter and forbidden in a way I longed for. The man—a hard face like chiseled stone, a harder fall, the rightness of it, the certainty. And the memory, a flash that didn’t belong to me—hands around a slender throat, full blue lips, eyes that stopped blinking. I still don’t know who she was. Or him, for that matter.
     Eventually, we moved to a neighborhood with wide streets and arching oaks, and a new doctor put me on a medication that blunted sensation and emotion. My cravings dulled to a docile purr. I didn’t even see pokeweed again until I was in my twenties and old enough to resist. But sometimes I would pull my car over just to watch them dance across a field, the mere sight a comfort. I never told anyone else about them, or the pica diagnosis, the man at my feet or my trip to the hospital, or why I took the medications I did. Not even Henry. Not even when the pokeweed started coming up in the yard, brazen and leggy along the back fence.
     The Cooper River is a haze of green beneath me. I keep glancing over my shoulder as my pace accelerates, the center of the bridge coming into view. At its maximum height, the road deck of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. bridge stands at nearly two hundred feet. Maybe one in ten survive the fall. I’ve done my research. It’s a calculated risk, but a risk all the same. Though it hardly matters; I’m dead either way. Henry will kill me. In a week. In a year. He’s been working up to it. I see it glinting behind the dark centers of his eyes when he fucks me, one hand always at my throat. It is his greatest turn-on. If Henry had a dating profile it would read: Enjoys antipasti and Beaujolais, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14, and fantasizing about dead women. Sometimes when he touches me, I see their faces—the women he wants to bury, the ones who will come after. They spark across my mind like saltpeter, ashen and gasping for breath. Something in me burns to save them, has to try. I hope it is enough, this plan. At least if I die today, it is by my own hand. At least they’ll be safe.
     The center of the bridge in sight, I pull my fists from my pockets and crush the berries into my mouth, chewing carefully, letting the liquid roll around my tongue. It’s mid-August. A brutal summer has brought the berries out early, but they’re most potent closer to fall. I ate extra just in case. Henry is always so particular about measurements. As an engineer, he doesn’t leave anything to chance. Therefore, I can’t either.
     I swallow the mash and look across the water. My heart begins to pound. Ducking my head as I walk, I double over and shove a finger down my throat. It only takes half a second for most of the berries to come back up, splatting the pristine walkway in maroon pulp. I cup my hands beneath my mouth, covering my fingers in a slimy, purple mess. I grip the railing with them, letting the pokeweed smear across it. The sun will bake this to a rich, oxblood patina.
     Glancing up, I see the black reflective eye of the camera overhead.
     Now.
     I spin around and back up, bumping awkwardly into the rail, raising my hands and shaking them. The man in the hoodie, an oblivious player in my little drama, draws closer, and I slow down, act scared, clutch my chest. My mouth opens in a silent scream as I climb the railing. My tears are real, even if the reason isn’t. I must be fast now. No second thoughts or time for doubt, for the man in the black hoodie to intervene. I have both feet over when our eyes meet.
     His steps slow. He stares at me, silent and wary. I can see the sense of obligation warring with his desire to stay unattached playing across his face. I want to tell him he’s too late. There’s nothing left of me to save. I want to tell him about my and Henry’s first date at the Peninsula Grill. How he introduced himself to me by all four names—Henry Excelsior Walden Davenport. How he pronounced foie gras like he’d been saying it since birth. How he made me read that whole menu aloud a year later while he stood masturbating over me  a foot against my neck. I want to describe all the ingenious ways he found to torture me, sometimes in plain view of others. The ways I became invisible. The people who looked away.
     But there’s no time.
     The man’s eyes widen with alarm. Mine narrow. If I could stop and explain without ruining the effect I’ve so carefully orchestrated, I would. Instead, I straighten my spine as I count to three, throw my hands out in mock self-defense, and leap backward off the edge, dropping like an arrow. Legs straight. Arms tucked.
     I squeeze my eyes tight as everything falls away and I resist the urge to flail. Henry trained me well.
     When I break the water, the force ricochets up my bones. I splinter with pain—icy and needle-sharp—in a thousand places at once. But I don’t pass out.
     Instead, I swim.