Chapter Four Barb
Chapter Four
Barb
My instincts were right. Something has happened to my daughter.
Through the peephole, I spot Isaac standing on my porch, eyes bloodshot.
I try to convince myself that it’s minor, a benign lump in her breast or a ruptured spleen, a car accident that gave her a concussion, possibly a broken leg, knowing that none of these small tragedies would bring my ex-husband to my front door.
Any momentary disbelief is sucked from my body as Isaac reports what happened.
He keeps his distance across my porch, detailing the impossible story to my slippered feet.
I lean against my house, certain I can feel the world spinning.
How is the world still spinning when Regina is dead?
Why did the police call Isaac instead of me, her mother?
“What do you mean, she drowned?” I cut Isaac off. In high school, Regina was on the swim team. She lifeguarded in the summers. She knew CPR. How could she have drowned?
“The officer said it will take weeks for the toxicology report to come back. They think she must have been pretty out of it.”
“Out of it?”
Isaac’s expression implores me not to make him elaborate.
I’m genuinely confused. During our stay at Shutters, Regina opened up to me about her journey to sobriety.
She told me about twelfth grade, when she would bring a water bottle of vodka to class.
College, when she took a semester off for her first try at rehab, then another failed attempt when she was twenty-five.
And the last time at twenty-eight, a final chance that would either save or kill her.
She chose life. It wasn’t easy, but over the last seven years, abstaining from alcohol had become second nature.
Her sobriety was her identity. I know, as much as I know anything, that she would never have endangered that.
I start pacing, collecting my thoughts. “We spoke yesterday. She seemed fine. Busy, but fine. She was headed to a meeting. There’s no way Regina would—” I can’t give the thought the weight of spoken words. I can’t make this a possibility. “They must have made a mistake, overlooked something.”
“Barb, I know this is hard—”
“You said the LAPD called?” I cut him off again. “Why would the LAPD call if she died in Venice? Isn’t it its own city?”
I’m determined to disprove her death with a loophole, a technicality. If I can find the fault lines in his story, I can crack it apart, fracture his account until it can’t be put whole again.
“Anna asked the same thing.” Isaac pronounces her name like she was born in Hungary instead of New Jersey, like she’s worldly instead of regional. Anna. She knew about my daughter before I did. “It’s part of LA, at least as far as police jurisdictions are concerned.”
“Who called the police? Who found her?”
“Barb,” he pleads. I can’t remember the last time he’s engaged me like this, wanting so much from me—only his need is the most devastating kind.
“We’ll know for certain after the toxicology report, but she’s gone.
Our Regina—” His voice cracks and then he starts to sob.
I’ve seen Isaac mean. I’ve seen him angry, disappointed, frustrated, road raging.
I’ve never seen him broken before. He puts his face in his hands, his shoulders and upper back convulsing.
I envelop his body in mine. His grief is physical.
It enters me, suffocating my confusion and denial until I surrender to it, until I am as distraught as he is.
We stand on the porch, holding each other until we run out of tears.
I still can’t fathom what’s happened. I know Regina is gone.
A mother can always feel her child. At least I could always feel Regina.
Even when she wasn’t speaking to me, I always sensed she was okay.
Four years ago, before she emailed to make sure I was wearing a mask and staying home, I felt a buzzing through me.
This morning, when I woke in a panic, my entire being was empty.
My stomach grumbles. I don’t want to be hungry when Regina can never eat again. Isaac hears it rumble and pulls away.
“Do you want to come stay with us? You don’t have to go through this alone.”
He assumes because I don’t have an Anna, I’m alone.
“I’ll be fine.”
He nods, relieved that I didn’t take him up on this offer. “We’ll see you for the shiva?”
The shiva? That’s what he’s thinking about right now?
Once, when Regina lamented the bleak dating prospects in LA, I suggested she join a singles group at a synagogue.
Linda’s daughter and Susanna’s son both met their future spouses through Shabbat meetups.
I don’t think I’ll meet the kind of person I want to be with at temple, she teased.
I took this to be less about the kind of person she was attracted to and more about her thoughts on religion.
Regina wouldn’t have wanted us to sit shiva for her.
This shiva isn’t for her, though. It’s for Isaac.
“There was no fighting them on the autopsy,” Isaac adds.
My surprise morphs into disbelief. He would risk not finding out what happened to our daughter for the sake of tradition, of keeping her body sacred?
I stop myself. It’s not Isaac I’m mad at.
“The officer seems like a good guy, though. He’s doing everything he can to get her back to us quickly. ”
“Do you have the police officer’s number?” I ask.
“Barb.” It’s too much, hearing him say my name like this again. I lean against my house, trying to steady my breath, to cocoon myself from my ex-husband, who’s studying me, deciding whether to oblige my request.
“Please. I need to talk to him myself.”
We stare at each other, near strangers who have shared so much of this life even after we were done with each other, who can finally have the full separation we craved decades ago, now that our Regina is gone.
Isaac reaches into his back pocket for his phone.
He finds the number for Steve Gonzales at the Pacific Community station.
I’ll call this Steve Gonzales. I’ll make him realize he’s wrong.
Regina’s death was not a drunken accident.
Isaac hugs me again. “I’ll call you the minute I hear anything.”
I have the officer’s name and number. I don’t need to wait for Isaac to tell me anything.
He waves as he pulls out of my driveway, and I’m alone again. Only it isn’t the same. It will never be the same, because Regina is dead.
Somehow, everyone knows. I’m in the kitchen, googling Regina’s death, when my doorbell rings. My book club is waiting on the porch with casseroles, coffee cake, and deli.
“What can we do?”
“What do you need from us?”
“Is there anyone you want us to call?”
They usher me into the kitchen and make me a plate of food. Linda spots an article about Regina open on my laptop and shuts the lid. “You don’t need to be seeing that.”
“Don’t.” I lunge toward it. They all jump back, and I lift the computer off the table, hugging it to my chest.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just don’t want all that getting in your head.” She’s already read the articles. She knows more about Regina’s death than I do.
“Regina was sober,” I tell them. “She was a strong swimmer. This makes no sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t make sense,” Delia stupidly replies.
“It’s senseless,” Susanna agrees. Because it is. It leaves me senseless, numb.
My book club takes a seat around my living room, and we start our own impromptu shiva, one that isn’t for Isaac and Anna but for me.
They stay until sunset, knitting, completing crosswords and sudoku, Wordle.
We hardly speak, taking the act of mourning seriously.
We’re all too old not to have experienced grief.
The death of a child is not like other losses.
As I begin to feel that none of them can relate to what I’m going through, I remember that Gloria had a stillbirth.
Delia’s daughter has Huntington’s disease, and Linda’s granddaughter was hit by a drunk driver.
They’ve all been through something unimaginable.
We’re as united in our loss as we are in our friendship.
When my friends pack up and promise they’ll be by again tomorrow, Linda offers to spend the night.
“I’m fine,” I insist. I want to be alone. I want to return to my computer and search for answers that will never satisfy me. I want to call that police officer, Gonzales, and make him tell me, her mother, that my only daughter is dead.
Before she leaves, Linda says, “Any hour. Call and I’m here.”
Along my cul-de-sac, four car engines turn over.
Their taillights fade as they drive into the distance.
Once they’re gone, it’s dark outside except for my neighbors’ porch lights.
When Regina was young, I called the neighbors friends.
We all had children around the same age.
But I’m the only one from the old guard who hasn’t sold my house to live in a fifty-five-plus community or an in-law suite.
I have no need for a house as large as mine.
I wasn’t saving it for grandchildren, but as long as I remained in her childhood home, I knew Regina would come back to me.
Now, not even her body is returning to me.
Her mourning will take residence at her father’s house.
In the kitchen, I open my laptop to the article I was reading.
It offers no new insights. Given how they found her, the police assume she wandered into the canals and fell.
I keep rereading that word, accident, which I realize is meant as a counterpoint to suicide.
I storm away from my computer, do circles around my kitchen island.
How could anyone suggest that about my daughter?
I can’t read the article anymore, or the others that deliver the same news.
Instead of searching for Regina’s death, I search for her life.
She wasn’t on Facebook. Her Instagram account is private, her X account inactive for months.
It’s all retweeted articles about films or contentious political topics I’d advised the employees at my firm to avoid publicly commenting on, even if, like Regina, they were on the side of those mistreated and disenfranchised.
I find a few bylines, articles about film premieres and real estate development.
I keep searching until I locate an essay she wrote five years ago called “My Mother’s Daughter.
” Five years ago, we weren’t in touch. Whatever’s in this article, it’s not our relationship now but a past, worse version.
Still I click on it, wanting to be hurt by all the ways I failed her.
When I read it, I discover that it isn’t angry.
It’s regretful. She’d just started a new job.
Tutoring, I assume. It forced her to reconsider motherhood—something she didn’t want for herself—and all the things mothers do that their children never appreciate, all the things I did that she took for granted and resented.
She understood her role in our estrangement, that it wasn’t my fault alone.
Too much swirls in my head: everything we didn’t say to each other, everything we still needed to say, everything we could have said if we’d had more time.
These regrets orbit around one certainty.
Regina didn’t get intoxicated and drown.
That’s not who she was. That’s not how her life ends.
Before I can second-guess myself, I open a travel website and purchase a ticket on the earliest flight out of Newark for tomorrow morning.
My therapist would recommend more rational first steps—speaking to Officer Gonzales, contacting Regina’s friends, if I knew who they were.
Contacting my therapist, even. Intellectually, I recognize what reasonable behavior looks like.
But these options are passive, and right now, I need to act.
I can’t sit back in Tenafly, New Jersey, and wait for an autopsy, for my daughter’s body to be delivered to her father.
I need to go to Los Angeles and make the police realize that there’s more to the story.
I owe my daughter this much. I owe it to the relationship we were building to find out what happened to her.