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9
MARK
The traffic toget from the morgue to the apartment complex was congested beyond belief. What should’ve been a five-minute car ride took us almost half an hour, and my mood wasn’t improved by the fact that the victim's mother wasn’t at home. Or the fact that my own mother had called while we were at the morgue, leaving a very cryptic voicemail message, saying only that her plans hadalteredand I should call her back. It probably means she’s not coming after all, and that’s no big surprise, if I’m honest, so calling her back can wait.
“We could try her at work,” Sojer suggested. “She’s a manager at the main branch of the NLB bank in the city center.”
The last thing I wanted was to get back in the car and make another slow, frustrating ride across the city, but that’s what we did. This time I left the car in the garage at the office though, because looking for a parking spot in the city center always requires more patience than I ever possessed.
What kind of mother goes to work the day after her daughter is found murdered?
But that’s where we found her. Sitting behind a large dark wood with metal accents desk in one of the glass-walled office that encircles the cavernous, marble-tiled main room of the city’s largest bank.
Her hands are shaking, her face is whiter than the sheet covering her daughter’s dead body, but her voice is firm and clipped as she asks why we’re here.
“We have some more questions regarding your daughter,” I tell her.
“Sit,” she says and points at the two black chairs facing her desk. She locks the door before sitting back down behind her desk.
“Ask,” she says when neither of us starts speaking right away.
“Do you think your daughter might have been contemplating suicide on the night she died?” I ask.
Normally, I ease into questions like these, but everything about this woman—from her big, permanently curled, dyed blonde hair, to the way she’s pursing her bright red lips while sitting at the edge of her chair like there’s a board attached to her back—is rubbing me the wrong way.
She sucks on her teeth, not loudly, but loud enough to be heard. “Ana was a sad and depressed girl all her life. And all her life she wanted to die. Do you know what that does to a mother? I tried to help her, no one can say that I didn’t. But she didn’t want to be helped.”
“She had cancer,” I interject. “And she was battling it. That doesn’t sound like a person who just wanted to die.”
She leans back, making her chair creak. A waft of her cloyingly sweet perfume hits me as she crosses her arms over her chest. “She fought because I would drag her to the hospital and wouldn’t let her give up. All her life, I was the one who made sure she fought. She’d be dead long ago if I hadn’t done that.”
She’s shaking worse and worse despite keeping her arms tightly locked around her body.
“Did your daughter ever use drugs?” Sojer asks, clearly opting for the direct, no-nonsense approach for which I laid the groundwork for with my question.
The woman looks visibly shocked for a moment, but shakes it off. “No, Ana wasn’t like that. She wasn’t a druggie. She might have smoked the occasional joint, but nothing more than that. She was on enough prescribed medications all her life and she didn’t even want to take those most of the time.”
“Was your daughter in therapy while undergoing the cancer treatment?” Sojer asks.
She nods. “I made sure she was. Had to practically drag her there too and in the end all they gave her was a bunch of pills, because she wouldn’t talk. She fell apart after they removed her womb, said she wasn’t even a woman anymore now. But what does that matter? There’s more to being a woman than having children. Isn’t there?”
The look in her eyes is fierce and combative as she glares at each of us in turn. She seems to be looking for a fight. We should stop giving her one. Grief hits people in different ways. I need to lean into knowing that.
“Did she often go walking by the river at night?” I ask. “It doesn’t seem like a very safe place for a young woman.”
“And yet she went,” her mother says exasperatedly. “Every time she couldn’t sleep, which was most of the time. Just another manifestation of her death wish, I always thought.”
“Was she meeting anyone there?” I ask, startling her again.
She shrugs. “I doubt it. She never mentioned anyone. And who would she meet down there? Some homeless vagrant?”
“So she didn’t have a boyfriend?” Sojer asks.
“She only ever had one boyfriend, and that was back in high school,” she says and shakes again. “They made a pact to kill themselves together. She survived, he didn’t.”
Man, all this death, depression and tragedy is seriously starting to fray my nerves and triggering me something awful. Sojer asks for the name of the boyfriend, but I don’t really hear it.
At least I now finally know the true source of my sour attitude towards this woman that just won’t abate. It’s my PTSD acting up. I went through a couple of dark spells like what she’s describing Ana suffering from and they never truly go away, no matter how hard you try. Hearing that you should just snap out of it doesn’t do the trick either. Working too much helped me but caused other problems.
