Cause of Death

by Laura Dembowski

  Dave shakes his head. He is unconvinced.

  “You’re wrong, Maggie. This whole thing—none of it makes sense.”

  He’s right. Lana would undoubtedly have left a note. Lana loved to write, and for her not to take one last chance to put her words out into the world is insane.

  That doesn’t mean I think someone killed her, however,

  “Maybe we didn’t look hard enough,” I say.

  “People don’t usually hide suicide notes,” Dave says.

  “Lana wasn’t very ‘usual,’ now, was she?”

  “She wasn’t unusual.”

  “Whatever you say,” I murmur, rolling my eyes. “Maybe she hid it somewhere, so later, maybe even years later, we’d find it.”

  Dave ponders my words. “You really think she would have put that much effort into this?”

  “She killed herself,” I’m saying, as Dave puts on a pair of shorts and a button-down shirt. He looks rather beach chic, actually. “She put a lot of thought into the whole thing.”

  “I’m not convinced. That’s not my Lana.”

  His Lana. Ugh.

  “I don’t know. The cops don’t even know. When I get home, I’m going to tear her room apart, looking for a note,” I say, hoping Dave drops the subject, yet knowing neither of us will stop thinking about Lana and what caused her death.

  “I’ll help,” he says. “And if we’re going to search her room, we might as well box up her things while we’re at it. Keep a few things, give some away, maybe sell some.”

  Where the hell did this come from? Dave went from being a drunk, bumbling mess to wanting to sort through Lana’s things in less than twenty-four hours. I’m impressed, if not a bit suspicious.

  Dave’s up to something. Now I just have to figure out what.

  I fumble with the keys as I unlock the door. I don’t usually have a problem unlocking it—I’ve done it thousands of times—but with Dave standing behind me, tapping his toe on the brick pavers, impatiently waiting for entrance into the house, I can’t focus. I turn around and glare at him.

  “Sorry,” he says, and stops tapping.

  I finally manage to open the door and he rushes past me as I turn off the alarm. When he’s in the bathroom, I know where he’ll be headed next: Lana’s room.

  Dave managed to enjoy the rest of the trip, although I have no idea how, since he mentioned Lana’s missing suicide note every day, often more than once a day, including making a list of possible places where he might find it when we got home. On the plane ride home, it was literally all he could talk about. Knowing he wouldn’t fall asleep, having worked himself up, I popped an Ambien and drifted off into a deep sleep, void of any thoughts of my husband, daughter, and death in general.

  Now that we are home, there is no avoiding the issue. I must face it head-on. I could let Dave tear up her room all on his own, but I’d prefer to take this opportunity to help him clean it out and get rid of her stuff, despite Dave’s continuing protests that he wants to do it all alone.

  I beat him to Lana’s room and start going through things, so focused on the task at hand that it doesn’t hit me for a couple minutes how strange it is to be in here. We haven’t entered the room since her death. I look around, take a deep breath, and concentrate.

  I decide to start with her closet, which is jam-packed. She was never keen on letting me into her room, even cleaning it herself, so I was unaware of the crowded nature of her closet. I really shouldn’t be surprised, considering Dave and I have bought her all of these things; nonetheless, seeing all the clothes hanging from racks, the shoe boxes stacked haphazardly, about to tumble, and the purses in their dust bags, placed wherever they will fit—it’s all rather staggering.

  There must be over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stuff here. Maybe two hundred. Thinking about all of that money wasted makes me sicker than thinking about Lana’s death. I could have a beach house or a Maserati instead of all this stuff. Won’t the Salvation Army be thrilled with all of this?

  I haven’t found her jewelry box yet. I’m not sure I want to. Dave and I created a monster. Yet, even with all this stuff, she was so unhappy, so desperate for a way out, that she killed herself. I am so baffled by my daughter’s actions, I am shaking with anger. I did everything she asked of me, and more. I did everything I could. And she didn’t care. What the fuck was wrong with that ungrateful bitch?

  Just exhaustion and jet lag talking, I’m sure.

  The more I look around, I realize I need to save as much of this stuff as possible, for myself. Sure, some of the clothes are too young-looking or won’t fit me, but all of these purses are going in my closet. Most of the shoes, too. She was a half size smaller than me, but feet are meant to be crammed into small spaces. Everyone will wonder where I got the new wardrobe straight from the pages of In Style. What will I tell them? I can’t very well say I raided my dead daughter’s closet.

  I’ll deal with the clothes on an item-by-item basis. I’m rubbing my fingers on the silk of an electric blue Jason Wu dress that I hope I can sell. I won’t be able to live with myself if I donate it.

  Then Dave walks in and rushes over to me. More accurately, he rushes over to the dress.

  “Oh, that was her favorite dress.” He looks down at the floor. I know he’s crying without even looking at him. “Maybe we should have buried her in it.”

  “She would have loved the dress you bought for the funeral. Plus, she’d already worn this one. You know she would have wanted to have a nice, new dress,” I say, and I mean it. I want to make some snide remark about the price of the one he bought, but refrain.

  “You’re right,” he says, before worming his way into the closet.

  I grab him by both shoulders and walk him over to the other side of the room.

  “I’ll take care of the closet,” I say. “Why don’t you go through her books?”

  “Yeah, right, good idea,” he says, as he grabs a stack and sits on the floor. I actually think the note, if one exists, could be in one of the books. It’s the perfect hiding place. Flipping through all of them will keep Dave busy for hours.

  “She seemed happy as a kid. Do you think she was happy?” Dave asks me.

  He’s finished searching the books, with no luck. He even boxed them all up.

  The more we go through the contents of the room, the less Dave believes we can keep all this stuff. We both can’t stop marveling at the fact that Lana managed to get so much in here. It’s not like it’s a small room. I wasn’t about to give up our master suite, even though she’d wanted it. She made that very clear, asking for it at least once a year, usually on her Christmas list, but that was one thing I wasn’t going to give up.

  We offered to have a second “master suite” built for her in the basement, but she declined that offer, making a face that told us exactly what she thought of the dark, damp basement. Even after assuring her that it would be different once it was prepared to be a living space and not simply a storage space, she held firm to her rejection and stayed in her room.

  I don’t really blame her; I wouldn’t have wanted to live in the basement either. I actually think she grew to like her room as much as she complained about it. It was her little cocoon, her slice of the world that was completely and totally under her control. We all want a space like that sometimes.

  “I think she was happy,” I say, leaning back against the wall. I’d found her jewelry box, hidden behind all of her clothes, and it was next to me on the floor.

  I think about all the moments of her childhood where she looked happy and when I felt like we were all happy. Disney World. Her first dance recital. That lame play they put on in second grade. When her one and only friend slept over. Her first formal dance.

  “I thought she was.”

  Then I realize something: I can’t think of any similar moments once I start remembering h
er high school years. Maybe it’s because she, like every other teenager on the face of the Earth, started to pull away from us. But I think it’s more because that’s when she stopped being happy. She put too much pressure on herself to make good grades and be on the tennis team. To be valedictorian and prom queen. To get into the best college and make the dean’s list. To have a job to walk right into the moment she’d graduated—to be the best at whatever she did.

  When she’d failed to do all those things—not because she wasn’t beautiful and brilliant, but because she had set the bar too high—it destroyed her, piece by piece, until she couldn’t take it anymore.

  “We did all we could, right? I guess that’s really what I want to know,” he says.

  I notice some photos in his hand. I crawl over to him so I can see them. They are all the happy memories I thought of, and more.

  “I think we did, but maybe she saw it differently.”

  “Maybe she did.”

  “She was so different. She was weird, Dave; our daughter was weird, and I didn’t even know how to make her normal.”

  He sets the pictures down and stares straight ahead. His eyes look empty. He had succeeded as a member of society in all ways except fatherhood, perhaps the most important role.

  “I don’t think she wanted to be happy,” he says. He picks the photos back up and looks at them before holding them to his heart, as though he can reconnect with the little girl in the pictures. The little girl, I realize, who is the only Lana I miss.

  “Then she thought of the world as her oyster, because we always taught her it could be.” He paused, and I could see him starting to drink the Kool-Aid I was forcing down his throat. “After a while, though, she stopped trying. Who stops trying to be happy?”

  I tread lightly. I know it was difficult for him to say these things. This is the most honest he’s ever been about Lana. We’ve spent so much time in denial and submission to our own child; we didn’t know any other way to go about things. It would have been easy to make her do things. Kick her out of the house. Force her to stay in New York. The people who say those things don’t understand that maybe she would have killed herself sooner had we done that. At least we had that time with Lana, even if it wasn’t perfect.

  I want to say everything on my mind, throw Lana under the bus, reassure Dave, and even myself, that we weren’t the world’s worst parents, but Dave’s funny, especially when it comes to Lana. You’d think since I’m his wife I could say anything to him, but when Lana’s the topic, that tends not to be the case. Just because Dave has shared all of these harsh opinions of Lana, that doesn’t mean he wants to hear other people’s harsh opinions of her, even if they’re mine.

  I can’t keep quiet though. I just can’t.

  “I wondered if she’d stopped trying, too. I wondered why she didn’t have any friends. To me, it was like people could tell she was this toxic person who hated the world. That’s why she didn’t have friends, why she wasn’t married, why people who did spend time with her did it for all the wrong reasons.”

  “You think our daughter was toxic?” Dave asks.

  I realize I’ve taken things a step too far, but I decide I’m okay with that.

  “Yeah. Don’t you walk into work in the morning and know instantly who’s having a bad day and who’s on top of the world?”

  Dave shakes his head yes. I’m thinking about Lana while I stare at her now-organized closet, the few things that I don’t take and we don’t want to give away filling the space.

  “I think through all the unhappiness,” I’m saying, “and there was plenty of it—”

  “It must take something powerful to make someone kill themselves,” Dave interrupts.

  “Right, but through it all, she always believed she would be happy one day. She kept believing she would find happiness. That life would work out, and all her dreams would come true.”

  “So why’d she kill herself?” Dave asks.

  Good question.

  “Because she got tired of hoping,” I say, as I get up and walk back over to the jewelry box. I open the bottom compartment. It’s full of all the jewelry that wasn’t fancy or nice enough for her to wear anymore, but she just couldn’t bear to part with. Corny Christmas-themed pins. A giant faux diamond ring she was once obsessed with. A ticket stub from a concert.

  As I pull these things out, I notice a piece of paper in the bottom of the compartment. I figure it is just a note from her grandmother, or perhaps even Dave or me. Something she read on bad days for proof that she was loved.

  I unfold it. It’s not a note of that kind.

  “I found it,” I say. I don’t even think before the words come out of my mouth. I should have taken it in the other room and read it before announcing its presence to Dave. I don’t know what it says. If it blames me for her death, which will make Dave hate me. Or if it blames Dave for her death, which will make him hate himself more than he already does in this moment.

  Too late now.

  “What?” Dave asks.

  Has he forgotten why we are sitting in this room? Why we ran in here the moment we got home instead of unpacking, cleaning, doing laundry, getting a bite to eat, or nursing our jet lag?

  “The suicide note.”

  He walks over to me without saying anything, towering over me like a building over a sidewalk. He has his hand extended, but I can’t tell if he wants the letter or not. He’s not holding it close enough for me to place the note in it without struggling. He doesn’t bend or inch forward so I can reach him.

  If we’ve just spent all this time in this room full of memories that remind us of Lana, for better or worse, just so we could find the letter and then not read it, I’m gonna kill him. I mean, I won’t really kill him. I’ll just want to kill him. I don’t have the capacity for murder.

  He’d better take the letter. I wave it back and forth, signaling my displeasure at his indecision. That, and my arm is getting tired. He snatches the letter from my hand, maintaining eye contact with me the whole time. We say so much to each other without saying a word. After so many years together, coming up on thirty, we have our own unspoken language. We know so much about each other. We have this deep connection, I swear, it’s like sometimes we know exactly what the other is thinking even when we’re miles apart. I’m hoping that’s not the case right now.

  I know instantly he doesn’t want to read it, but he will. Does anyone really want to read a suicide note? On the one hand, you want to know what it says, see if there’s any reasoning behind the death. However, believing that person’s words is questionable at best, because if they were disturbed enough to kill themselves, they certainly can’t be trusted to write an honest or reasonable note.

  Dave walks back over to his side. I don’t know why I’m suddenly thinking of it as “his side.” It just feels like we’ve taken equal, divided ownership of this room.

  He turns his back to me. I can tell he is reading. I watch him intently, searching for clues as to how he’s feeling and what the note says. I don’t find any. He remains completely still. So still, in fact, that I think he’s leaning on the wall, supporting himself so he doesn’t waver or simply fall down, leaving shards of his person on the gray carpet as the only sign he was ever there.

  I hear a noise. At first I think it is a sob, but then I decide there’s a distinct possibility it could be laughter. I wonder immediately what the note could say that could possibly make Dave laugh. And I want to read it—now. But I can’t grab it from him. I can’t rush him. I don’t really want to. Well, maybe part of me wants to, but truthfully, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that Lana could have written a suicide note. This was all Dave’s idea, so he has earned the right to read the note in full first.

  Usually I’d be jealous that he got to do something before me, but I feel this is like sending someone into a dark room first. Anything could be lurking—sp
iders, rats, a serial killer—so you send someone else in first, someone expendable, just in case.

  I’m not saying Dave’s expendable; it’s no secret I need Dave in my life, and no one’s going to die from reading a suicide note. It’s simply nice to have an idea of what I’m getting into when I lay my eyes on it, should I choose to do so.

  Dave turns around and faces me, holding the note to his heart. Tears are falling from his eyes, but he is smiling. He holds it out to me. I grab it, knowing I have to read it. Before I can say anything, he’s gone. I see him just as he is closing the door behind him.

  I am alone in Lana’s room. Trapped in a prison, it feels like, with the door shut. Maybe that’s how Lana felt. Suddenly I can’t breathe. I’m hyperventilating, huffing air in and out, yet feeling like nothing is getting in. I move to her bed and flop down. It’s comfortable, and I debate sleeping in the room tonight, or maybe, for a few nights, just to feel closer to Lana. I feel relaxed on her bed with her stuffed bears staring me down. I grab one and nestle my face into it. It smells like her. I start crying, and I feel like I will never stop. I can’t believe what I’ve done. What we’ve done. What she did.

  I calm myself enough to read the letter through blurry vision. Some of my tears fall on the paper, sullying it. Her handwriting is beautiful. I always loved her handwriting.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I kept telling you I was going to kill myself, hoping you’d do something to change our lives, but you never did. I got tired of waiting. Waiting to fall in love. Waiting to be happy. Waiting for someone to give a shit about me and see me for the special person I am. So I changed my fate, in hopes I’m in a better place now.

  This isn’t really your fault. I was too different, and you didn’t know what to do with me. I understand, and I am sorry I was such a handful, and sorry I have done this to you now.

  Please live your lives as though I never existed. Because except for you two, I didn’t.