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 tosuicide. 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.
Chapter Five
Tessa
When Gabe returns downstairs after putting Jasper to bed, I’m pacing the living room, hand on my lower back, breathing to calm my racing heart. Each step sends a sharp twinge through my pelvis, reminding me I’ll soon have another person to keep safe, that I’m doing a terrible job of protecting the child I already have if he’s identifying women later found dead outside our house. Regina. Gigi. It’s the kind of truncating and reframing Jasper does with names. We saw her yesterday, and today she drowned in front of our home? That can’t be a coincidence.
“T.?” Gabe races over, catching me in the middle of the room. “You okay?”
I’m about to sayOf course I’m not okay. Our son knew the woman who drowned in our canal.He’s rubbing my stomach. He means the baby. He thinks, from the way I pace and breathe, I’ve gone into premature labor.
“I’m fine,” I tell him, then point to the TV. “Gigi?” He’s confused. “The woman in the canal? Jasper called her Gigi.”
I haven’t given him enough information to follow, but I expect him to intrinsically grasp that our child might be in danger. A father’s instinct isn’t the same as a mother’s, though. It doesn’t course through fathers like blood, doesn’t keep them up at night with its gentle humming.
“The woman they found in the canal.” I show Gabe the article on Regina Geller with a picture of her on the beach, kicking up one bare foot, laughing. As Gabe reads about her death, the crease between his eyebrows deepens. “Jasp and I saw her yesterday. He knew who she was.”
Gabe startles, the fear settling into him too.
“Yesterday, we stopped at Café Collage.” I hesitate, guilt ridden over that latte, even though Gabe’s fine with the occasional coffee, a few sips of wine. I’m the one who judges, the one who forgoes sushi and processed sugar, even though Gabe tells me if I want a piece of cake, I should have a piece of cake. It was so hard to get pregnant with Jasper. Six months of trying without even a miscarriage, then three failed IUIs, then at last, IVF. It took almost a year. This time was so unbelievably easy. We weren’t even trying. I still don’t trust it, this close to the end. I’ve been waiting for something to go wrong, and each week it doesn’t, it seems more inevitable that she’ll never be ours.
Gabe says nothing, only nods, encouraging me to continue.
“The woman, Regina, who they found—” I point toward our patio doors, expecting the paths to be empty. Outside, someone is lurking. It startles me until I realize it’s Judy.
