Page 71 of Chosen Path
“Hi, Officer,” he said, both eyes reluctantly now open.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Absolutely.” He pushed away from the door with alacrity. The last thing this village needed was a rumor that the head of the council was sick or weak. “Just taking a moment to remember Nik.”
“Were you?”
“Ah-yup.” He pasted on a smile and gestured toward the public side of the building. “Shall we?”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-FOUR
Bodhi surveyed the materials spread out on the floor around him. He’d brought Hope’s timeline up from the library, along with Molly’s records of the eight most recent deaths and the files of deceased patients that Hope had located. With Rolf Larson’s personal medical records and Rupert Collins’ files from his brief, but eventful, stint as the village doctor, Bodhi began to assemble a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of the history of death in Scandia Bluff.
He arranged the records along the timeline and took a sheet of paper from the pad Hope had been using. He recorded the date and manner of death for each patient whose files made up the timeline, then he rocked back on his heels, and studied his handwork. After a moment, he placed the list on the floor beside him, lowered himself into a cross-legged position, and softened his gaze.
He breathed. Focused on the in breath and the out breath for three cycles, just long enough to clear his mind. Then returned his attention to the timeline and he centered his concentration on the spaces between the three doctors’ tenures. The turning points. He marked them off on his list, and then he knew. He knew for sure.
He stood and brushed off the seat of his pants. Then he pulled out his phone and texted a single word to Molly:senicide.
For as long as Scandia Bluff had existed, the village had been killing its residents before they could “become a burden,” in the words of its slogan. And the Ättestupa Council called the shots. The timeline told the story, at least the modern story.
His phone buzzed with an incoming text. He responded, then asked Molly to have Jenny Booth call him. This was, after all, her jurisdiction, not his. He took a final look at the story he’d created on the floor and went downstairs to make himself a cup of tea.
As he sipped his steaming drink, he stood at Molly’s kitchen window and stared out at the weedy jungle of her backyard. A blue bird hopped along the top of the fence. Bodhi peered at it. It was a blue jay. He wondered if it was the same bold jay from Corrine’s yard. Before he could dig a handful of peanuts from his backpack’s pocket, the bird had flapped his wings and moved on. Gone.
That was the way of life, after all. Impermanent, ever-changing. Nobody was promised anything other than the present moment—not a bird, not a newborn baby, and not a ninety-year-old doctor. Bodhi believed that. He also believed that death was not something to be feared or shirked from. But was it something to be hastened?
And regardless of what he believed, was it his place to rip asunder the fabric of this remote village? Isolated from the world, the people of Scandia Bluff had decided long ago how to organize their lives. Who was he to upend their traditions?
But even as the thought floated through his head, he knew that he would act. He had to. Because the people of Scandia Bluff hadn’t decided anything. A select subset—unelected, unappointed, unrestrained—decided for them.
* * *
Molly perched on Hope’s porch swing, swaying gently back and forth, back and forth, and frowned down at her phone and the one-word text it displayed.
Senicide?
She knew the word. Not from her medical training, but from Uncle Al’s occasional monologues. Ordinarily cheerful and mild-mannered, he would become impassioned to the point of being inflamed when the topic of how society treated people of advanced age arose.
“Senicide,” he’d say, sometimes pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand for emphasis. “It’s senicide, or geronticide—take your pick. We, as a society, discard people as they near the end of life.”
And once Molly had begun to practice medicine herself, she’d try to poke gentle holes in his argument, to let the air out. “We don’t kill senior citizens in this country, Uncle Al.”
“Don’t we, Molly? I’d say we do. At a minimum, we abandon them, leaving them to die.”
She shook her head and fired back a text to Bodhi, her fingers flying over the letters on her screen:
Corrine, 59. Laura, 64. Nik, 75. Not elderly.
Three bubbles appeared on the screen as he crafted a response. Hope’s door swung open and she stepped out onto the porch, her hair pulled back in a bun, still shower-damp.
“Are you ready?” she asked Molly.
“One minute.” She watched the bubbles blink. Then the message appeared:
Agreed. Council went off
the rails when Doc died.
