Cause of Death

by Laura Dembowski

  She says she can meet for lunch. I tell her I’ll be at the café just around the corner from her house in an hour. That gives me thirty minutes to get ready and thirty to get there. I’ll be rushed, but that’s okay with me, because Lana may change her mind at any moment, and that’s a risk I’m not willing to take.

  The thought of being at the café is appealing to me; I used to love it there. And I also enjoy the drive—the alone time without Lana or Dave or TV, or even music—just me and the sounds of the road.

  Andrea, still beautiful, even though we’ve both passed middle age, arrives twenty minutes late. Ironic, since she literally could have walked to the place, but I say nothing, because beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, sitting outdoors—the birds singing, the flowers blooming, the sun shining while I waited for her with a glass of sangria—was rather blissful.

  “Hey!” she says, enveloping me in a hug. We walk inside to our table and she drops her Chanel bag on the floor. I’ll never understand how someone can treat such an expensive bag with such disregard. Even my Coach bag is stowed safely behind me, on my chair. There’s only one person who can have Chanel bags in my house, and I’ll give you one guess who that is.

  Somehow Andrea still looks like a supermodel. Her maxi dress and wedge sandals appear effortless, as do the beachy waves in her red hair. I swear she’s not even wearing any makeup. Suddenly I’m self-conscious of my black sleeveless dress and blonde hair that didn’t do what I wanted today. I need to invest in a hat.

  “It’s good to see you,” I say, after Andrea orders a drink. It is good to see her, even if I’m a bit jealous of her beauty and afraid I look like I’ve run a marathon before heading to lunch.

  “It’s always good to see you, Mags,” she says. “It seems like you’re never available, so when you called I was, like, it’s now or never I guess.”

  “Yeah, sorry, it’s just since Lana’s been home.”

  “You spoil her. Make her get a job. Kick her out of the house.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I say, a mixture of embarrassed that she’s calling me out on my decidedly lackluster parenting skills and angry that she’s offering such harsh advice, since she’s only been a mother to a few dogs, none of which have ever seemed to live very long.

  “Sure it is. And stop buying her all that stuff. I mean, come on, the new Balenciaga bag.”

  “How’d you know that?” I ask, genuinely puzzled.

  “I follow Lana on Instagram.”

  I laugh. “Really? I don’t even follow her on Instagram. I don’t have an Instagram.”

  “It’s a nice feed. She’s smart and talented and pretty. Seems like she’s got everything going for her.”

  “All things I’ve told her,” I interrupt.

  “So she should be able to go make a life for herself and leave you and Dave alone.”

  That sounds so menacing. Me and Dave. Alone.

  It was different when Lana was gone before. She still needed us all the time. Called. Texted. E-mailed. At all hours of the day or night. We never had the chance to miss her. But if she moved away and had a family of her own, a life of her own—if she didn’t need us, what would we do? Would we make it? Would we even love each other anymore? Dave and I haven’t been together without Lana as a part of our daily lives in nearly three decades. Maybe I should be thankful she’s always intruding.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say, Andrea.”

  Ugh. Now I sound like Lana because I don’t know what I want. Sure, Lana can be a pain in the ass, but God knows how Dave would be if she left us to each other. That’s when old married couples turn on each other and suffer through, or get divorced.

  “Make her change.”

  “Clearly you’ve never had kids. I mean, she’s not perfect, and we haven’t done a perfect job, but she’s not on drugs or a homicidal maniac, so I guess we’re doing okay.”

  Andrea stares at me for a while, silently judging me, figuring out what to say next.

  “I have to go,” she says simply, grabbing her bag.

  I watch as she departs the restaurant. I should be mad. I wasn’t in the wrong during our conversation, and now my day out has been ruined. Instead, I’m fine, numb, maybe, which is possibly how I’ve been since the day Lana was born.

  I sit and enjoy my lunch and more solitude. I drag things out as long as possible, not really wanting to return home to laundry, cooking, dishes, and Lana, the only things I seem to have left in life.

  The one word that keeps ringing in my head not just through the rest of lunch but through the rest of the day and into the evening is alone. Alone. Alone.

  I walk in the door. You might think that since Lana relies on me so much, she’d run to the door like the lost puppy dog she is the moment I walk in, but this does not happen. It never happens. She sits nonchalantly on the sofa, typing away on her computer.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Did you have a good lunch?” she asks through a sob—or at least with a tone that indicates something is clearly wrong. What is wrong is the burning question, though.

  “It was . . . interesting. What’s going on here?”

  “I’ve been doing that stupid online dating and no one writes me or likes me or anything. Well, that’s not true; the ugly, fat, unemployed guys who say they’re still in school but have three kids and have already been divorced do, but I’m not really interested in them.”

  “I wouldn’t be, either, but I’m sure the good guys will write soon.”

  “It’s like they can sense I’m stuck living at home with my parents. They know they won’t like me even though I set up, like, the perfect profile. Things won’t be like this forever; why can’t they see that?”

  “I didn’t meet your dad right away,” I say. “I’m sure I’ve told you before.” About a hundred times, but she never listens. “I was living at home, afraid nothing good would ever happen to me, and then I got a new job and met your dad and fell in love and had you.”

  “I bet that was the worst day of your life. Do you wish you never had me? I would.”

  My eyes bulge. As many times as I’ve been angry with Lana, which is many, many times, I’ve never once wished I hadn’t had her. Okay, maybe a couple times. I always wanted kids. She is what I got, and though I imagined motherhood differently, I suppose I’m lucky I got to have a child at all.

  “Of course not.” I run over to her and sit next to her on the sofa, my arm around her.

  “Things are never gonna work out for me. I’m not like you. You had friends and went out and were normal. I’m not. I’ve never had friends. People don’t like me. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “It will get better,” I say, sounding like a broken record. It’s what I always say to her, and I think it’s true, but as time passes, maybe she has a point. Maybe things are never going to change. They’re never going to get better. We’re going to be stuck here forever.

  I don’t tell Lana any of this. It’s not going to help her situation, so it won’t help mine either. I comfort her for another half an hour or so until she calms down, and we start talking about something else. I can tell by the look on her face she’s only thinking about her future, no matter what words are coming out of her mouth.

  “Has Lana ruined our life?” I ask Dave, lying next to him in bed later that night.

  “No. No. Of course not. How could you even ask that—even think it?”

  “She brought it up earlier, but it got me wondering if it’s true.”

  “I don’t think it’s true. Do you?”

  “No. I just wanted to ask.”

  And I don’t think it’s true. Really. Our lives would be different without her, but better? No way. She’s our daughter. Our angel. Our sunshine. She’s not like this all the time. She has fun and laughs. She has the best laugh. But when someone says s
omething like that, it gets you thinking, you know? You wonder, dream about the possibilities. What might have been. It’s intriguing.

  Dave doesn’t wonder, even when I pose this question. He loves Lana unconditionally, more than he loves me, I’m pretty sure. That’s another hard pill to swallow. We came first, Dave and me, and now I play second fiddle to my own daughter everywhere but the bedroom, except lately she’s been in control of our love life, too. Dave and Lana deserve each other, perhaps, but what about me? I’m the innocent victim, even though no one seems to see it that way.

  “Have I ruined everything?” I ask a minute later.

  Dave pauses. “No.” Then he rolls over and goes to sleep.

  I have my answer. Everyone blames me.

  Chapter 4

  Lana

  “I should just kill you, or myself!” my mother screams. I’m afraid the neighbors will hear and call the police. That’s the last thing we need. This whole threatening homicide and suicide is a new development, and I can’t tolerate it.

  It all began when Mommy Dearest found out that I had met Zack for dinner the other night instead of going to the annual homeowners’ meeting for our subdivision. Did she seriously think I was going to go to that meeting? In the twenty years we’ve lived here, neither she nor my dad has ever gone to the damn thing.

  It was really my fault. I had stupidly paid the bill, literally tearing it out of Zack’s hands, with a credit card. This shouldn’t have been a big deal, since I normally pay the bills, but for whatever reason, she just had to check the statement.

  “Where were you last night?” she asked, in this menacing tone. I try not to read too much into her tones, since there are so many of them, and they have far too many meanings for me to keep straight.

  “The meeting. I told you. It was boring.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “I don’t know. That lady from down the street and that old couple from the court down there,” I said, pointing vaguely in the direction of a house.

  “You’re lying to me. You were at Medium Rare.”

  “I was not,” I said. Maybe I should have told the truth, but in the moment, sticking with the lie seemed like the right course to take. “I was at the meeting.”

  “Lana, don’t lie to me. That is one thing we don’t do in this house. We don’t lie.”

  She’s lied. She lies all the time. I wanted to call her on it, but this conversation was already snowballing down a mountain with no sign of stopping.

  “Fine; I was at Medium Rare.”

  “With whom? I hope not one of those online dates. Women who meet men from the Internet end up as stories on the five o’clock news, not madly in love.”

  I thought about telling her that I’d met Dad there, and he probably would have backed me up, but for some reason I chose not to. Maybe I didn’t want to lie anymore. Maybe I wanted to piss her off, blow the doors off the underground bunker I feel like I am trapped in. I still don’t really know.

  “I met a friend. He’s actually kind of my boyfriend, and he got me a job interview.”

  She sat down on the sofa, one hand covering part of her face as though she had just been told I had cancer rather than that I’d gone on a date.

  “I . . . how could you do this to me?” she said. “I thought we had a good thing here.”

  “We do, and I’m not running away from you; I just want to branch out a little. Don’t you want me to branch out? Wouldn’t you like to have a grandchild one day?”

  “No. I don’t want you to leave me. I should just kill myself. Or you. Probably both of us.”

  A similar statement had gotten me to quit my job in New York, a job I’d loved, to leave my friends and move back home. But this time, I wasn’t going to let it stop me. It’s not her right to say that to me. Plus, I’m not really going to leave her; she’s just being overdramatic as usual.

  Now here we stand in the kitchen, her, drinking her grape juice. She’s gone through almost a whole bottle today. She becomes more upset when I tell her the interview has gone well and that I’ve looked at nearby apartments so I can have a place of my own.

  I knew she would be upset, but this screeching, really, is enough to burst an eardrum. I know she won’t really kill me or herself. She doesn’t have it in her. She talks a big game, but not much else. In fact, she’s probably more upset at the thought of losing the game than losing me. She didn’t get her way. That’s scaring her more than me moving ten minutes away from her.

  “Don’t say that, Mom,” I say calmly, but firmly.

  “I mean it. What do either of us have to live for if you leave?”

  My eyes nearly bulge out of my head. She could take trips and volunteer, she could even get a job if she really wanted to force herself to meet new people and not be alone. Me? I can get a job, grow as a person, start a family.

  “Are you kidding?” I ask. “We have so much to live for. This isn’t funny, Mom, not at all. You’re scaring me.”

  “I want to scare you into staying.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t want to scare anyone you love into doing anything.”

  “You don’t know what I want.”

  “What the fuck do you want, Mom?”

  “I want you and your father here with me, and if I can’t have that, I don’t want to live at all.”

  “I’ll come over for dinner every night to start. We can go shopping every weekend. It will be fine.”

  She makes a disapproving snorting noise.

  She’s not going to scare me. I know for certain that I have to leave now. I go up to my room and call Zack.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he says.

  “I have to get out of here. Can I come stay with you for a while until I can find my own place and figure out my life?”

  “Yes, of course. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just—how did things turn out like this? What did I do?”

  “Nothing; it’s fine. This is just a blip on the radar. Everything will be fine.”

  “Thanks. That’s what I needed to hear.”

  I hang up and start packing up my room. I put headphones on and just groove to the music while I fill my suitcases and duffel bags with as much of the past twenty-seven years as I can fit. I will come back for the rest another time. For now, I have enough to get started on the next phase of my life.

  All of my clothes and shoes and handbags are expensive designer goods I could really do without. It’s beyond me why a handbag should cost four thousand dollars. Or a pair of shoes, one thousand. What are these things made of? Gold? But my parents buy them for me all the time—Dad, out of guilt, Mom, as a way to bribe me. They’re what I have and they are well made, so I wear them. And okay, maybe I’m starting to like some of them, but I will never pay that kind of money for a pair of shoes when it’s my dime on the line.

  I drag my Louis Vuitton suitcases down the stairs one at a time. They are heavy, too heavy for me to lift, but I can’t wait for Dad to come home and help me. I am determined to leave now. As I finish making the last trip, Mom approaches.

  “I’m sorry about what I said before. You know I didn’t mean it.”

  “I know, but you scared me, and I don’t want to be frightened of my own mother.”

  “I don’t blame you. It’s time for you to leave; I know that. Just stay one or two more nights while we figure all of this out.”

  “No,” I say, stomping my foot, determined to hold my ground.

  “Come on; I’m your mom. What’s a couple more days going to change? I need you. Please. You can’t leave with our relationship like this.”

  I soften my stance. One more night won’t be so bad, but that’s it. I’ll just call Zack and tell him. He’ll understand. We can start our lives together soon enough.

  “Fine,” I say. I leave my bags behind and go
make dinner with Mom, hoping for an uneventful night.

  Chapter 5

  Margaret

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper. Lana isn’t up yet even though it’s nearly ten. I must admit, it’s rather nice to sit here in peace. I almost forget about her being in the house at all until I hear Dave yell.

  The sound is bloodcurdling. I’ve never heard anything like it before, certainly not out of my husband.

  I run up the stairs and call his name.

  “Margaret,” he says breathlessly.

  I run into Lana’s room and see the source of his dismay.

  Lana is hanging from the ceiling fan by a scarf. Hermès. How appropriate.

  Dave tries to get her down, but it is not a one-person job. I hurry over to help him and together we manage to lay her lifeless body on the floor. Both of us fight through sobs as I check for a pulse and Dave throws off his jacket to do CPR. There is no pulse, but he begins chest compressions anyway.

  “Call nine-one-one,” he roars at me.

  I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself, but I run back downstairs, thundering through the house to retrieve my cell phone. I dial 911.

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” the female voice answers.

  “My daughter. She hanged herself,” I say frantically.

  “Okay, ma’am. I’m sending emergency technicians right now, but can you tell me, is your daughter breathing?”

  I run back upstairs. “Is she breathing?” I ask Dave.

  He stops compressions and checks her pulse, then puts his ear close to her nose and mouth to listen. He shakes his head. “No, she’s not breathing.”