Witnessing His Wife's Suicide
My love died that day, and I watched it happen.
On my way home from work that day, I bought a Polaroid camera. It was meant to be our anniversary gift.
When I got home, I changed my shoes at the entryway.
I called out: Honey, I'm home.
The apartment was silent. She was probably in the bathroom, I thought. Then I noticed our cat sitting on the coffee table, its gaze fixed on the sunset pouring through the balcony doors.
I aimed the camera at it, found an angle from the entryway, focused on its hindquarters, the balcony blurring softly in the background.
Something felt wrong. I refocused on the balcony.
This time I saw it clearly. My hands began to tremble. The camera clicked, and a photo slowly slid out.
---
My wife stood barefoot on the balcony railing.
The wind caught her long dress, making it sway.
She noticed me, turned her head, and smiled.
I dropped the camera and sprinted toward her.
The balcony's sliding door was locked shut. The key lay at her feet. I shoved the door, hammered the glass, screaming for her to come down.
She said: Ian Ashford, what is one hundred sixty to the sixth power?
I said: Serena, please come down. Be good.
She said: Tell me the answer.
I said: Around three million...
She said: You're wrong.
She kept watching me, her left foot sliding backward one step.
I threw myself at the glass. In the instant it shattered, a shard buried itself in my left eye. I thrust my arm through, desperately trying to grab her, but I only saw the hem of her dress flash past the railing.
A dull thud from below.
I squinted through one eye as blood trickled down my face.
I stared at her crumpled body on the concrete below. The sharp pain in my foot reminded me this was not a hallucination. Only when the police arrived did I realize that what had pierced my sole was a thumbtack.
The balcony was scattered with thumbtacks.
---
The police ruled it suicide.
They reviewed the surveillance footage. That day, no one else had entered or left the apartment besides the two of us.
In her diary, she had written:
Tomorrow, I'll go out for groceries. When Ian gets off work, I'll make him braised pork ribs.
The entire diary was filled with the mundane details of daily life. Nothing suggested any suicidal tendency. In all the years we'd been together, whenever something troubled her, she told me right away.
The police offered their condolences and asked if I could contact her family.
I sat at home, bandages wrapped around my forehead, covering my injured left eye.
I lowered my head and said: She was an orphan.
I looked up and said: I think someone did this to her.
The police looked exasperated. They told me they had checked the thumbtacks on the balcony—only her fingerprints were on them. As for the math problem she posed before she fell, they found nothing suspicious about it.
And my own testimony made me the perfect witness for a suicide ruling.
But I couldn't understand. Why would she take her own life?
I insisted her death was likely the work of another person.
The police were noncommittal. In their eyes, I was just a grieving man spouting nonsense.
---
On the day of Serena's burial, I watched the casket lowered into the earth and tried to light a cigarette. The flame caught, then sputtered out, again and again.
I must have looked pathetic.
A black umbrella shielded me from the falling rain.
Someone held a cigarette out to me from behind. It was Detective Lauren Vance.
She said: I'm sorry.
I said: There's nothing to be sorry for.
She said: I went through the case files. Before Serena, three women jumped to their deaths. One every week.
I said: Just like Serena?
She said: The circumstances are nearly identical. None of the victims showed suicidal tendencies. All of them fell in the evening. Each one left behind the same math problem—what is one hundred sixty to the sixth power. But only your wife scattered thumbtacks on the balcony. That's why I wanted to ask you.
I said: She grew up in an orphanage.
She said: I know that.
I said: She told me that at the orphanage, she was bullied. When she was scared, she'd scatter thumbtacks around herself.
I paused, then said: That evening, she was terrified.
---
There was one thing I didn't tell Lauren Vance. I figured she wouldn't believe me anyway.
Sometime after Serena died, I was sorting through her belongings in the apartment. My chest felt tight, so I lit a cigarette and slowly smoked it.
Then I saw our cat walking toward me, a Polaroid camera dangling from its mouth.
When I pulled the photo from the camera and saw Serena on it, cigarette smoke drifted into my left eye.
My left eye went black for an instant.
By then, my bandages had already come off. The doctor had told me there was no serious damage, though the glass shard that had pierced my eye was never found. The doctor said it might have fallen out on its own, or perhaps I had imagined it. Either way, he'd said, don't worry about it, Mr. Ashford.
I closed my eyes, took slow, deep breaths. After a long while, my vision gradually returned.
When I opened my eyes again, the photo of Serena was surrounded by five shadow figures.
I rubbed my eyes again and again. The shadow figures remained, hovering around her.
Each of those five shadow figures had two white lines extending from their bodies, connecting to two other figures, forming a perfect five-pointed star. At the center of the star was Serena, enclosed by the shadows. Her back to the sky, her dress swaying in the wind.
The cat leaned against me.
I said: Can you see them? These people.
The cat reached out a paw and pressed on one of the shadow figures.
It was Fats—our mutual friend, my colleague, who had visited our apartment before and held the cat.
The five shadow figures were all people I knew, or people who knew Serena.
I recalled carefully. They weren't ghosts. Every one of them was very much alive.
I confirmed it repeatedly with my cat. We looked at many other photos together. The cat only reacted to that one photo, and I could only see the five shadow figures around Serena.
So it probably wasn't a hallucination.
Or, even if it was a hallucination, it was one that only appeared in a specific context. I believed that the shadow figures I saw must be hiding something—perhaps even the truth behind Serena's fall.
I rubbed the cat's head and asked it: What do you think she was so afraid of that day?
The cat only stared straight at those five shadow figures.
Was Serena afraid of them?
---
I met Serena seven winters ago.
That year, a heavy snow fell. I left the office, still jabbering with a client on the phone. I wandered into a nearby park and sat on a bench in a pavilion.
Finally I hung up, exhaled warm air onto my hands, and pulled out the rice ball I'd planned for dinner.
Only then did I notice a girl sitting in the same pavilion. Quiet, wordless, silently watching the swirling snowfall beyond the eaves.
I said: Have you eaten?
Truth be told, I had no idea why I chose that way to greet her. If I'd been more poetic, I might have asked if she'd care for a drink. If I'd been bolder, I'd at least have asked if she was cold. Instead, I asked if she'd eaten—and all I had to offer was half a cold rice ball.
She stared into the snow, lost in thought, then murmured: Would you marry me?
The question caught me completely off guard. I stood there, stunned, and finally said: Isn't this moving a bit fast?
She smiled without answering, stood, walked out of the pavilion, and vanished into the snow.
That was the first time I met Serena.
Five shadow figures. Three men, two women.
My colleague; her male supervisor; her fitness coach; her best friend; the vegetable vendor downstairs.
I tried my best to remember. First was Fats—always trying to lose weight, never succeeding. On the day of Serena's accident, I had left work early. He was still at his desk eating instant noodles.
The other four, I asked Detective Lauren Vance to look into. On the day of the incident, all of them were at work. None were near the scene at the time. The closest was the vegetable vendor, but she had only been setting up her stall at the neighborhood entrance—she hadn't even entered the residential complex.
In other words, all five had alibis.
I carefully traced the lines on the photograph and drew the five-pointed star they formed onto paper.
I couldn't explain why I could see these shadow figures, let alone what caused the phenomenon. I could only give myself a temporary explanation:
I could see the cause of Serena's death through my left eye.
These five people were in all likelihood the cause of her death.
I knew my behavior was bordering on irrational.
But the girl who taught me how to grow up was no longer here.
Pursuing this was the only way I could still feel alive.
---
On Sunday morning, I went to see those five people.
I spoke with her best friend, her supervisor, her fitness coach, and the vegetable vendor.
On the day of Serena's accident, each of them had said something to her.
When I pieced those words together, I found my hypothesis was essentially correct.
But my heart sank deeper with every revelation.
The last one was my colleague Fats. I knocked on his door with a dark expression. He opened it with a look of panic and tried to shut it, but I wedged my arm into the gap. He pushed several times, but when he saw me watching him through the crack, he reluctantly opened the door.
He said: I'm really sorry about your wife.
I found a glass in his living room, spotted a kettle of freshly boiled water, and poured myself a cup.
He stood behind me, dodging my gaze, and said: Are you holding up okay?
I said: Fats, something weighing on you?
He said: No, nothing.
I said: You'll feel better if you say it.
He hesitated, opening and closing his mouth.
I smiled and gestured for him to sit.
I held out the cup of water to him. He let out a scream like a stuck pig and knocked it from my hand.
It was a ceramic cup. After holding boiling water, its surface could reach eighty degrees Celsius.
I seized his hand and slammed it flat onto the table.
I grabbed the kettle and tilted the spout slightly, aiming it at the back of his hand.
I said: Trust me. You'll feel better if you say it.
He finally couldn't hold back. Tears streamed down his fleshy cheeks as he stammered: That day—your wife called me. She said she couldn't reach your phone and asked where you'd gone. I saw you heading out with her best friend, holding your car keys, so I told her you two had driven off. She asked where you were going. I like to joke around, so I ran my mouth—I told her she'd better check your hotel records.
She hung up right after. I—I thought I'd explain it the next day, but then I heard she'd killed herself.
I remembered that before Serena's accident, I had indeed left work with her best friend.
Her friend had come to borrow my car. I walked her to the parking garage, then headed home on foot. On the way, I passed a shop selling Polaroid cameras and stopped to browse. Serena couldn't reach me probably because I'd been in the elevator and the parking structure—both dead zones for cell signal.
Fats was a mess of tears and snot, apologizing to me over and over.
In truth, Fats had no need to shoulder all the blame.
Because on the day Serena jumped, all four of the others had also said things that wounded her.
That morning, Serena went to work. Her supervisor increased her performance targets—if she couldn't meet them, she'd face termination.
After work, she went to the gym. Her coach accused her of touching other people's belongings. He claimed she was misusing things, but the subtext was calling her a thief. Only afterward did he realize it was all a misunderstanding.
When she returned to the neighborhood, the vegetable vendor chatted with her warmly. The vendor had once worked at Serena's orphanage. She mentioned there had been thefts in the area lately and told Serena to be careful.
She contacted Fats and got hit with his reckless joke.
She called her best friend, who was driving. When Serena asked where she was, the friend casually said, "On the road." Then realizing how that sounded, she quickly added, "Ian isn't with me." But even she couldn't understand why she'd phrased it so clumsily—it only made things worse.
So my hypothesis was right. The shadow figures I saw truly were the cause of Serena's death.
But this also meant the police were right. Serena had heard their careless words, been driven to despair, and chosen to end her life.
I slowly lowered the kettle.
I said: Impossible.
I raised the kettle again and seized his jaw with one hand, pressing the spout against his mouth.
I said: I don't believe it. Someone forced you to say those things. Who was it?!
He flailed his arms, stammering: I don't know, I honestly didn't think it would end up like this—
A voice came from the doorway: Ian Ashford, put the kettle down.
It was Lauren Vance.
Several times I wanted to pour the boiling water.
In the end, I set the kettle down.
Lauren Vance stood there in casual clothes—a hoodie and jeans, a blue hair clip holding back her hair. She looked more lively than she did in uniform.