Authors: Bill Rowe
Pagan’s little body was cremated, and after a funeral service in the
undertaker’s chapel the next morning, we went to the cemetery with her ashes. I
had assumed that Rosie would be driving there with Rothesay and Nina, but when
Brent and I arrived with Mom in her car, Rosie and Suzy were already there, and
Rothesay came a few minutes later. Nina hadn’t felt
up to
attending the “inurnment” and the girls had come in a taxi. And so, in the
presence of just Rosie, Rothesay, Suzy, Brent, Mom, and me, and the female
clergyperson, the pot of Pagan’s ashes was lowered into a hole in the graveyard
plot originally reserved for Nina next to the headstone identifying Joyce
O’Dell, “beloved husband of…”
Rosie and Suzy rode back with us in my mother’s car. On the way to Rosie’s
house, Mom tried to probe: “I guess Heathcliff had to rush back to his office to
tend on a patient, did he, Rosie?”
“He’s very busy these days, Auntie Gladys, what with his practice and the board
and Pagan and Mother and everything.”
When we arrived, Mom gave me a look of surprise when she saw Rothesay’s Land
Rover in the driveway, but she didn’t say anything. Rosie asked me if I would
come in with her and Suzy because she needed my help with something. She didn’t
elaborate. Mom drove away to drop Brent off, a perplexed expression on her
face.
Walking to the front door, Rosie told me she was going to answer her mother’s
constant question right now about how Pagan had killed herself. I had told her
that Rothesay wanted to keep delaying it, with the excuse that the police were
still investigating. “Telling Nina at this stage might put her over the edge,”
he’d said. Rosie replied sarcastically that her mother had always thrived so
well under his care as a doctor she was sure he could help her handle her
reaction to the truth. The funeral was over; now was the time.
Knowing what Nina would hear, I asked Rosie if she was sure that Rothesay
didn’t have a point. But Rosie said her mother was supposed to be a responsible
adult and she couldn’t have essential facts of her daughter’s death kept from
her, especially since the police would soon be asking her questions. “Besides,”
Rosie muttered, “from now on I’m not letting anything about this stay hidden
from anyone.”
On our way in, Rothesay was on his way out. He’d been glad to see us coming, he
said, because he had to attend to a patient urgently. He exited with, “Please
don’t say anything to upset Nina. She is exceedingly fragile.”
Rosie led us into the living room where Nina was lying on the sofa. “Mother, do
you still want to know what caused Pagan’s death?”
“Yes, my sweet, I have to know.”
“It was your sleeping pills. The autopsy showed that she had swallowed a full
bottle of your sleeping pills and that she died from the combined effects of
that and drowning in her own vomit.”
Nina sat up. “That’s not true,” she barked. “How do they know
it was mine? That’s too foolish to talk about.”
“They know exactly what was in her system and how much, and they found the
empty bottle under her body on the bed. The label on it identified the
barbiturate sleeping pills prescribed to you in your name by Dr. Heathcliff
Rothesay last August.” When Nina slumped back, dazed, Rosie said, “You must have
mislaid them when you flew up with Pagan, or maybe she took them from your
purse. Didn’t you notice them missing at the time? A full bottle?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t remember now. I always have a part bottle and
a full bottle with me when I travel, just in case. I think I did mention
something to Heathcliff when I came back, and he said not to worry, he wouldn’t
see me short. I’m not sure.” She closed her eyes and put the palm of a hand over
each eye and commenced to keen: “Oh my Jesus, it’s all my fault. Oh my sweet
Jesus, everything is my fault.”
I caught Suzy’s eye, and we registered our agreement with Nina and our disgust.
Rosie answered her quietly, “Mother, it is not
all
your fault. Not
everything
is your fault.”
“But why? Why did she do it? My little girl. Why? Why? Why?” She began to wail
and continued non-stop, like a mortally wounded animal. Rosie and Suzy helped
Nina up over the stairs to her room, where she lay down on the bed and faced the
wall in fetal position, continuing her moaning and wailing without let-up. I
asked if we shouldn’t call Dr. Rothesay.
“I’m not calling him,” said Rosie. “Do you think maybe your mother could come
over and have a look at her?”
I called Mom, described what had happened, told her Rothesay was gone, and
asked what she thought we should do. While Mom paused for a moment, I said,
“Maybe we shouldn’t have told her about Pagan taking her sleeping pills.”
She didn’t answer that. She’d be right over, she said.
Coming into the house, Mom said to Rosie, “Sweetheart, you did the right thing.
Don’t blame yourself. She had to be told what happened.”
“Thank you, Auntie Gladys,” said Rosie. Tears flowed out of her eyes, and she
put her head down and pressed her tissues to them. Mom put her arms around her
and stayed there for several minutes, as Rosie’s body shuddered and went still,
shuddered and went still. Then Rosie straightened and said, “You should have a
look at poor Mother.”
“If you’re okay,” said Mom.
“I’m okay,” said Rosie. Suzy and I went and stood on either
side of her.
Upstairs, Mom walked into the bedroom alone. Nina’s ruckus increased in volume.
But it contained a note of hope now, as she repeated, “Oh Gladys, oh Gladys,”
over and over. When Mom came out she said, “I think she’s suffering from acute
depression and anxiety—what people call a nervous breakdown, which she’ll come
out of—but I’m going to call an ambulance and go with her to St. Clare’s for
some tests. What medications is she on, do you happen to know, Rosie, besides
the sleeping pills? We wouldn’t want to inadvertently make her go cold turkey in
this state while we’re waiting for the results to come back. It’s hard to pull
someone off the ceiling when their fingernails and toenails are really dug
in.”
I was half embarrassed by Mom’s tough nurse’s humour in these circumstances.
But Rosie smiled and took her hand in both of hers. “I think Valium, for one—she
probably carries it all around in her purse, if you want to look. But he would
know for sure.”
“I’ll call him after we get her to the hospital.”
THE HOSPITAL ADMITTED NINA
to the psychiatric
ward for observation and testing. She stayed there for five days. The test
results and medical report confirmed that the patient was already receiving a
regimen of prescribed medications for her conditions of depression, anxiety, and
insomnia from her family physician and her physician husband, and cautioned that
there may have been in the past, and may continue into the future, a risk of
accidental overdoses of medications and improper combinations of medicines at
wrong times. Therefore, the patient herself and her family and caregivers should
be very vigilant in monitoring dosage amounts and their accurate diurnal
timing.
“
Accidental
overdoses,” said Rosie to Suzy and me in her kitchen,
shaking her head. “Improper combinations. What a surprise.” She had stayed in
her own home, with Suzy moving in as company, rather than going to Suzy’s house
during her mother’s absence. She wanted to be there, she told me, to answer all
telephone calls from Toronto.
Her conversations with Pagan’s school and the Toronto and St. John’s police
provided Rosie with some facts of the case. Pagan had never spent a night away
from her residence unless she was going out for a weekend with her mother and
stepfather. Then they always stayed in a suite at the Park Plaza. To Rosie’s
specific question, it was ascertained that Pagan had never spent a night at the
Victoria and Elizabeth Arms, although she had
sometimes met her
stepfather there by taxi during the day, or had dropped in there with him after
he’d picked her up at school. Sometimes she would go up to his room with him for
a short time if they were getting ready to go out somewhere. Both the doctor and
the stepdaughter had been very open and chatty with staff about all that. Once
or twice Pagan had made a reservation by phone from her school residence at the
request of her stepfather, the doctor, who would be arriving later. On those
occasions, if she arrived earlier than him, she would, by prior general
arrangement with the hotel, get a key and wait for him in the room. That’s
exactly what the hotel desk thought she was doing this time. Phone records
obtained by the police over past months showed that each time the doctor had
been there, phone calls had been made from his room to Nina’s home phone number
in St. John’s. The doctor said he encouraged Pagan to use the room phone to call
home and say hello to her mother, who, of course, knew about and very much
encouraged such visits by Pagan with her stepfather. Her mother had never stayed
at the hotel.
The only communication from Pagan before her death had been the note found in
her residence. No note was found in the room with Pagan’s body. Rosie asked the
police if there was any evidence of anything having been moved or removed from
the room. No, said the police, for example, the empty pill bottle was on the bed
in plain view. Then Rosie asked if there was any indentation on any hotel
notebook or letter paper that might indicate the writing of something—a note,
perhaps—that was no longer in the room. Knowing her sister, it would be highly
unlike her not to leave a final note, in addition to the earlier one in her
residence. The police responded that there was no writing paper in the room,
either on the desk or in the drawers, which was not surprising in that the
hotel, while homey and comfortable, was by no means high end. Did the hotel
confirm that they did not normally keep a supply of writing paper in the rooms?
Rosie asked. And, for instance, was there a pen there, and if so, could they
check for Pagan’s fingerprints which might indicate if she had used it or
not?
The police got a little irritated and queried whether she had some reason for
asking these questions. The death had been ruled a suicide—did she suspect foul
play? If so, that would send the file in a whole other direction. She was not
denying the suicide, she said, but she was curious because her stepfather had
found the body, having come all the way from Toronto in secret. The police said
that that had originally struck them as unusual too, but the doctor had
explained his action as based on a pure gut-feeling without enough foundation in
fact to share it with anyone.
Didn’t it strike them as strange, she asked, that the doctor
hadn’t acted on his gut-feeling by calling the hotel from Ottawa to inquire if
Pagan happened to be there? The police stated that not everyone, even trained
professionals, acted entirely logically in such anxiety-producing situations,
and if she persisted in this line of vague, unsubstantiated suspicions, they’d
have no choice but to advise the doctor so that he might have a fair opportunity
to answer them for the police. There was absolutely no evidence of any
communication having taken place between the doctor and Pagan, by, for example,
telephone calls between Toronto and Ottawa. Everything pointed to the fact that
she didn’t even know he was in Ottawa, in that the only use of the phone by
Pagan was a half-dozen apparently frantic attempts from her hotel room to reach
the doctor at his private line at home in St. John’s on the night she ingested
the sleeping pills.
The disclosure of this last fact knocked the wind out of Rosie, she told me.
She did manage to ask the police if it struck them as strange that Pagan had
been fixated on the doctor’s private phone but did not once call the regular
line to talk to her mother or her sister, to which the police replied that it
did not seem one bit strange—the young girl was having second thoughts and was
panicking and was trying to reach her stepfather, the doctor, for help.
Rosie did not persevere in her questions to the police. That might have been
because I kept asking her why she was pushing the Rothesay angle so hard. I got
a little mad when she would only reply that there seemed to be some holes. She
told me also, with an anguished look on her face, that if she had only answered
the phone that night as I had been urging her to, she might have been able to
save Pagan’s life. She said three or four times that she felt responsible for
Pagan’s death. Each time I tried to persuade her otherwise, but I knew I was not
succeeding.
FOR A MONTH AFTER
Pagan’s death, Rosie and I were together
almost constantly, in school during the day or at our homes during the evenings,
and although we said I love you to each other all the time, we did not contrive
to make love. Neither of us pushed beyond some tender kissing and embracing.
Then one day in school, Rosie came up behind me at my locker and said, “Suzy’s
mother is working four to midnight and I’d love to lie in your arms in my bed
there tonight.” Trying to keep my arms from going around her right there in the
school corridor was my biggest challenge.
That night Suzy went to the supermarket and Rosie and I lay quietly on
our sides in a naked embrace kissing gently for half an hour.
Then I put my condom on and pulled her upon me, where she lay stretched out as
if she were lying on a mattress. We made quiet love with minimal movements. “I
love this, just lying on top of you like this,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong.”
She hoisted her head and smiled down at me. “I love it all—but I love this best
for right now.” And that’s the way our lovemaking was for weeks, slow and gentle
and infrequent compared to the early days. Sometimes she would just stretch out
on top of me and we wouldn’t make love at all as she lay there, sometimes even
falling asleep for twenty minutes. Rosie seemed to have a lot on her mind, which
was stealing away energy and motivation from everything else. Then she got a
telephone call that altered everything in our lives forever.