“But the hallucinations stopped eventually, right?” I ask.
“They’d come and go all through high school,” she says. “At one point she was convinced she was possessed by the devil, hence the Goth phase and all the pentagrams.”
“Was her deep depression the result of her illness?” I ask.
She nods. “No medication worked for that either. But then she found God and the black man finally stopped haunting her dreams, or her waking life. Or so she claimed. But she would still wake up in the middle of the night screaming. She just couldn’t remember the nightmares anymore.”
I’m fairly certain she’s drunk, so I’m not sure how much of what she’s telling me I should take as fact. But then again, they say there’s truth in wine.
“My daughter was a troubled, sick girl, in body and mind,” she says. “I’ve had to make my peace with that. And I think in the end, she did too.”
She hiccups and wipes her eyes again.
“Did she keep a journal?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No, not after I found one once and showed it to her doctor. She never forgave me for that.”
She walks to the bookshelves and points at a large, black mortar and pestle. “Whatever she wrote down she would burn in there right away. Over the years it became something of a cleansing ritual for her. She even tried to burn all her medical papers in there, but I stopped her.”
“She was found with chemotherapy instructions in her pocket,” I say and she nods.
“Maybe she was looking to set them ablaze,” she says. “Or throw them into the river. She did that too, after I forbade her from burning things in the house.”
Mark walks back into the room, carrying a large red filing box in both hands, which I presume is filled with the medical records he was going through in the kitchen all this time.
“Do you mind if we take these?” he asks her.
She turns to him and waves her hand through the air dismissively. “Take what you want. What use is any of it to me now?”
I glance back at the stack of journals on the writing desk, then walk there to pick them up. “May I take these as well?”
“Suit yourself,” the mother says. “Ana has no use for them anymore. She found what she was always searching for. Death.”
I don’t think she’s right about that. I think Ana was searching for life. That’s what has been screaming at me from between the lines of everything her mother told me tonight. But it would be cruel to tell her that, so I won’t.
I point at the church steeple visible in the distance beyond where Ana’s body was found. It’s awash in a yellow light, standing tall in a sea of darkness around it. “Is that the church she went to?”
Her mother grimaces and nods. “Yes. And the youth center is right next to it. But you won’t learn anything from them. I tried to get the priests to help me help her, or to speak to her about trusting her doctors and accepting treatment. But you know what they told me? The Lord works in mysterious ways. What a crock of bullshit. Then they also said they’re always there for me if I ever need them. What a bunch of hypocrites.”
She pauses to catch her breath after saying all that in a single gush of indignation.
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” I tell her, as I should have done before now. This woman is suffering. She tries to hide it behind anger, but it’s plain as day. “Do you have someone who can stay with you?”
She makes a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Don’t worry about me. My daughter is at peace. I have that to get me through.”
She strides past Mark and leaves the room, saying not to bother after I tell her that we’ll bring back whatever we take.
I place the journals in the box Mark is holding, then tell him I’m ready to leave if he is. Ana’s mother is holding a brimming full glass of red wine in her hands as she sees us out.
“We’ll find whoever killed your daughter,” I tell her as she holds the door open for us and she scoffs, but her eyes are soft, watery and sad. She needed to hear it, I’m sure, even if she’s pretending she didn’t.
“She’s a cold one,” Mark mutters as we enter the elevator.
“On the outside, sure,” I say and leave it at that.
I may not be fully a mother yet, but I already know it would be unbearable to lose my child.
* * *