Dear Betty: It's a wheelchair, I realize. A fancy one, not like the kind that they pushed you around in in the hospice. Motorized, computerized. My eyes focus.

"10 years," said the man. "In case you're wondering."

"Excuse me?" my voice sounded dusty and remote.

"I've been in the chair for 10 years, since I tried to do what you tried to do."

"How do you know what I tried to do?"

The Man in the Wheelchair smiled.

"We have something in common, Kate. We planned and plotted, and failed."

"You're disappointed," the man says. "You wanted to be somewhere else, and you worked very hard to get there."

Dear Betty:

By now, I thought I'd be with you--well, not with you, because, of course, I would have gone to hell, but on the same side of death as you, but, no. I'm a failure at this, too.

"I wouldn't exactly call it a failure," said the man I couldn't quite see. I didn't have my glasses--I didn't think I'd need them after I was dead. He moved toward me, but he didn't get up, and I could hear a purring sound. Even close up, his features were indistinct--just bright grey green eyes in mahogany skin. Wheelchair, I finally thought. African American man, the second thought marched through my brain. Am I dressed?

"We hope you don't mind the nightgown," the man said, now positioned at the side of my bed.

"No, it's very nice," I said, as if some strange person fished me from the river, spirited me away, and popped me into a Martha Stewart fantasy every day.

"We like to make our clients comfortable, but we didn't really have the kind of time we wanted to prepare for you," the man chuckled. "You're a little more unpredicable than we guessed."

"Sorry," I said, and then cursed inside. I had wanted to be dead, and in some ways, though I was having a more interesting time than I'd had since--well, since Charlie had disappeared--I still did. But it didn't take much for my hostess manners to come right back to me, as if I were helping Roy lure a new client into a crummy deal.

Kate thought how much her husband---her ex-husband, she corrected herself--would have hated this room. He liked things with clean edges, uncluttered. Surgical, Kate thought, and then she thought about Betty, and how much she had failed her.

Well, she'd--she thought of the bad word her husband would have used, and could not bring herself to say it, even in her mind--she'd, yes, she could say this, screwed this up too. Suicide. She couldn't even commit a mortal sin correctly.

She imagined confessing the sin to Father. "Bless me father, for I have sinned, it has been two weeks since my last confession...and if I'd been successful at what I was trying to do, I'd be burning in hell."

And he'd understand, because he was one of those New Gentle Priests who saw everything in relative terms.

Kate heard a sound, halfway between a moan and croak.

She was laughing.

Death smelled like...peppermint?

Kate opened her eyes. They ached.

Everything ached.

Death had old-fashioned taste: the room teemed with things covered in chintz.

What would she wear on the Oprah show? Kate's mind stopped for a second. If I am still thinking about what to wear on a ridiculous talk show, maybe I don't want to die. And she laughed. The pills, were they making her giddy? She wasn't sure. Betty, tough Betty had just willed herself to sleep.

She was wearing one of her old lady dresses, one of the dresses she'd bought when it was clear that she was never going to slenderize and slim as she once had, baggy, partly polyester--it made Kate's skin creep--with plenty of pockets. Kate reached into her shopping cart and loaded the pockets with stones.

They would find the note, eventually. They would notice that she had stopped all connections to the outside world, eventually. Someone else would live in that little house, and her ex-husband would use the money he used to send to her for...what? Paper napkins? If there had been any hope that her son wanted to see her again, if there had been any hope that she could find her son, she'd keep going, like one of those ridiculous Beckett characters she never knew how to play.

But it was all done, all gone. Blink would probably put her picture up on the wall, and that would be nice, or she wouldn't, because it would make her sad. Kate walked to land's end. The water was low tonight, and she would make some noise jumping into the water, but not enough to raise any kind of alarm. She would go quietly.

And she did.

From her pocket, she pulls the two amber bottles of pills. She thinks of Betty and her pain, Betty who wanted to die beautifully, and didn't. She takes a bottle of Evian out of her basket, the first bottle water she's bought since the divorce. She felt giddy buying the water, because for once she could afford to be reckless with money.

The pills take a long time to go down. She knows that; she's done enough research to know that some suicides are unsuccessful because halfway through, the very process gets...boring. Kate knows she has to swallow them fast enough so she'll still be lucid enough to slip into the river, so she's set her watch to go off in 10 minutes if, God forbid, she isn't done. Or, God forbid, she's fallen asleep.

When she was in the library doing the research, Kate realized that she had learned enough to teach a class. She imagined herself going on that Oprah show, or giving Martha Stewart tips on an aesthetically pleasing end. She wished she had somone to share the joke with, but Betty was gone, and Blink would try to stop her.