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
