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thirty seconds, then handed the sheet to me. “It’s OK. I think you can handle it.”
    I looked.
    The man on the slab looked like nobody I had ever known. I couldn’t find the slightest hint of similarity between him and the scarecrow-gaunt young man with the mop of blond hair and the glittering, often fanatical eyes who had once been my father. This man was obese, well on his way to three hundred pounds, and mostly bald. One eye was closed, the other partially open and rolled up into his head. His mouth hung open, teeth crowded and fleeing in all different directions, like scared goldfish; black bloodspatters swallowed most of his face. Offhandedly, I wondered why they didn’t wipe down his face or something before taking the picture. The room suddenly smelled like death, whereas moments before, it had simply been a regular office with a conference table.
    â€œThank you,” I whispered, handing back the photo and feeling queasier than I expected.
    For several nights, unable to sleep, my thoughts would revert back to that face on the mortuary drawer, and I would try to imagine what was going through his mind when he pulled the trigger. Was it planned? Spur of the moment? Was he drunk? High? Did he, at any point, feel the cold gun barrel against the inside of his mouth, and think, “I can still back out of this, I don’t have to do it…” before deciding “…yes, yes I do,” and pulling the trigger?
    Once, at fourteen years old, I was left behind at the house while my mother took Molly on a trip to Palm Springs. She had instructed me not to read any books—books were my lifeline to sanity, my passion and my escape, so as punishment, she liked to deprive me of them as often as possible. She drove the hour back from Palm Springs that night and peeked through my bedroom window, to make sure that I hadn’t disobeyed her edict. She discovered me deep in study, preparing for my NMSQT, an optional scholarship test being administered at Troy High School the following week. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not approve of pursuing higher education, the reasoning being that college is a waste of time—after all, the apocalypse is coming any day now. It’s not as if God will understand that you were just too busy getting a degree to convert the poor sinners before it’s too late. Besides, the Governing Body of the Watchtower, Bible and Tract Society likes to point out,going to college turns people into atheists. Mind control of this sort, keeping members in darkness and ignorance, never sat very well with me. I did well in school and part of me wanted to go on to college, even though I knew it was a very heathenish, pagan desire, this frivolously airy-fairy “pursuit of knowledge” that the Witnesses scoffed at.
    I was jolted from my studies by my mother screaming through the window. I was in for it now.
    Fifteen minutes of beating later, she spat on me and stalked out of my room, with the parting shot, “And just think, I was coming back to pick you up and bring you with us to Palm Springs. You don’t deserve it, you little whore.” I lay on the floor in fetal position, keening, the pain and outrage too much to tamp down. I could not be callous and detached that night. I waited for her headlights to dim as she sped off, and I bolted to the downstairs bathroom. I couldn’t explain what came over me. I was just done . I was a fourteen-year-old kid who had been writing bad, angst-ridden poetry for five years just to cope and something had finally snapped. My mother’s medicines were all locked up in her room—otherwise, I would have had my pick of Vicodin, Valium and any number of other prescription sleep aids, which she often unwisely mixed with her cheap boxed wine from Long’s Drugstore. I flung open the medicine cabinet and rummaged. A jumbo bottle of Tylenol. That was it. Bawling like a wounded hippo, I poured out handful after