The Deaths

Image by Daphne Walsh

For a month after her mother died in June, Lonnie didn’t water the plants on the back porch. She instead allowed them to wither gracefully, closing their leaves like hands in prayer, ducking their heads to kneel, before dramatically collapsing. It was cruel, she knew, particularly because it wasn’t that she was too distraught to notice. Rather, she figured: everything dies, why not those too? It gave her a sense of satisfaction when they were gone.

It was an unbearably hot summer that year, and the fact that her mother could die in such weather was unsettling. Somewhere along the way, Lonnie figured she’d absorbed the idea that winter was the time for passing. It made sense, all that tucking-in one had to do in the colder months; it would be possible to go inside and not come out again when spring arrived, and somehow that felt all right, well-ordered. The summer, with its wide and open jaws, its tawdry dancing of blooms, seemed like an impossible time to leave.

“But then again,” she noted to Brooke one day at lunch, “my mother was never one to follow the rules.” Susan had bent them instead, wearing white throughout the winter rather than waiting for Memorial Day; sticking with sugar after everyone around her started using a pink or blue packet of sweetener in their coffee.

Brooke, who’d known Lonnie’s family practically as long as she’d known her own, nodded as she reached for a napkin, her feet curled under her as they always were when she was relaxed. “That’s true,” she said, as she dabbed tzatziki from the corner of her mouth. “There’s something admirable in that, though. I’ve always liked that about your mom.”

The death was recent enough that the women still spoke in the present tense, as if Lonnie could go home at any moment, get Susan on the phone, and tell her about the mix-up at work with the accounting department or the fact that Sarah, Lonnie’s youngest, had recently changed her major yet again, this time to something called Studies of Yesterday. Lonnie vaguely wondered when it would sink in that she couldn’t, in fact, call her mother anytime to inform her of the most mundane things.

The summer was ending, and still, she was shocked at how painful it was, every time, to remember anew that her mother was gone.

“How are you sleeping?” Brooke asked, as Lonnie watched her polished fingernails reaching for the pita again. Brooke had always been a stunner, Lonnie’s mom used to say, and Lonnie knew it was true: her oldest friend was also her prettiest, petite and dark-haired, her skin tone straddling a color that existed west of olive and east of rose. As they’d gotten older, Lonnie and Brooke had settled into middle age with similar symptoms – greying temples, softer midsections – but it had deepened Brooke’s beauty in a way that had escaped Lonnie.

“Oh, not so well,” Lonnie admitted. “But that’s not much different than it’s ever been.” Insomnia was a well-worn habit; not a friend, but not really an enemy, either.

“Dr. Todd gave you Ambien?” Brooke paused, looking up at Lonnie. Every friend they had, it seemed, was on Ambien. Sometimes Lonnie wondered what was wrong with the world, when no woman in it could sleep.

“He did. I haven’t taken them.” Dr. Todd had been something of a find several years earlier, when he was first out of med school, sandy-haired and fit. The women had flirted with him, giggling over appointments they’d deconstruct later, over wine; it had made them both feel young, to be so drawn to him. Susan had tried to get Lonnie to ask him out, which she never had done. She wasn’t sure that sort of thing was allowed. Now, Dr. Todd was a trusted advisor, but no longer as exciting to visit, what with his thinning hair and rounded paunch. It happened to everyone, Lonnie supposed.

“They aren’t a bad idea, really,” Brooke opined, before launching into a monologue about how much the prescription had helped her. Lonnie tuned her out softly, much like lowering the volume on an old-fashioned radio, the kind housed in a dark wooden box like her grandparents had once owned. She’d heard this particular story before; Brooke tended to repeat herself, which was something Lonnie enjoyed. It meant that sometimes she could lean back into their friendship and let go of the responsibility of paying attention, the responsibility of being present, as her yoga instructor often encouraged.

Lonnie reached across the old oak table for another piece of lamb. She was a reformed vegetarian who had flirted very briefly with veganism before realizing how much she depended on butter for her joy in life. The vegetarianism was a byproduct of her marriage – she liked to think of it as her first, though there had yet to be another – and had been abandoned alongside the relics of that relationship she no longer had use for: the gold band that languished in the bottom of a jewelry chest she rarely opened, the too-close pictures of faces on vacations taken when they were in love.

She took great pleasure in meat now, savoring the tender chunks of an animal that had once breathed the same air that she depended upon. Six years after the decline of her marriage, Lonnie’s omnivorous lifestyle still amused her, and she often pictured the horror that would engulf Nathan’s entire body if he was standing in front of her. He might convulse if he saw her now, if he knew that roasted lamb smelled, to Lonnie, like heaven.  

Lonnie turned the volume back up on her friend’s voice as she chewed, a wave of affection washing over her. Brooke talked with her hands, always had, even when they were little girls. One summer – sometime during the early 80s; they’d been in junior high, but weren’t yet drinking diet sodas – she’d thrown an entire can of Grape Shasta over her shoulder by accident, so propelled was she by the content of the story she was telling. It plopped in the swimming pool with a satisfying sound, the soda leaking out like an oil spill near a woman corralling two small children. Susan picked them up early after they called from the red phone in the lifeguard’s office at the entrance, laughing so hard she had to pull over when they admitted why they’d been kicked out of the pool.

That was a lifetime ago, junior high; nearly 40 years had passed. They could track their classmates through Facebook, learn about the illnesses and retirements. Lonnie, in fact, had just contributed to a GoFundMe account created by a woman she hadn’t seen since she was a girl, who she suspected she wouldn’t remember at all if it weren’t for social media. As it was, Lonnie knew her life story: the two divorces, the jailed second son and the artist daughter, the breast-cancer diagnosis and ensuing mastectomy. It was a weird world, Lonnie thought, when you could donate to a near-stranger so that she could cover the deductible for her 3-D nipple tattoos.

“Anyway,” she heard Brooke say, apparently in summation. “It’ll be good to see if it makes the flight easier; I’m sure I’ll have a glass of wine or two anyway.” Lonnie realized Brooke was talking about her upcoming trip to Rome. Lonnie had visited once, years ago when she and Nathan traveled there on a Hail Mary for their marriage, though they’d pretended it was a romantic getaway. They had both gotten food poisoning and had spent a night in their tiny hotel bathroom, pushing each other out of the way for precious porcelain space.

“You leave Friday?” Lonnie knew this was true, but wanted to continue the conversation.

Brooke nodded, then paused. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? We could still make it happen.”

Lonnie shook her head. It felt miserable to even think about, the last vestiges of summer clawing their way towards September, heat still suffocating tourists in crowded squares, the cacophony of languages fighting for air alongside their humans. “Thanks, though.”

“What are you going to do instead?” Lonnie knew Brooke thought she should get out more, and she felt an old conflict between appreciation and annoyance rise up. She was doing the best she could; Brooke still had both her parents, didn’t know what this was like. There had been times in their friendship when Brooke had known everything, but she had no experience on this front, Lonnie thought to herself.

“I need to work on my mom’s house,” she answered, though it wasn’t at all what she felt like doing. Susan had been stylish in an old-fashioned way, matching her purse to her shoes and her lipstick to her coat, all the way up to the last doctor’s visits, when everything hung off her emaciated frame anyway. Lonnie had teased Susan about how much stuff she had; it had seemed like a novelty, before it was her responsibility to clean out her mom’s house. Now, it was overwhelming, the task of going through her things painfully slow. All of it belonged to Lonnie now, as did the house itself, and the car sitting in the garage, and the trees in the backyard and the neglected and overgrown garden. Tomatoes gone haywire, rotting on the vine. Perhaps she’d let them die, as she’d let the plants at her own home perish. But no: these were her mom’s.

Brooke nodded, wiped at her mouth again; even at home, she could be meticulous. “Ok,” she replied, resolute. “Call if you need anything, though. I have that plan where my phone should work in Europe; I’ll leave it on for you.”

“I’ll be fine.” Lonnie heard the clip in her words, and let it stand.

“I know,” Brooke replied. “But just in case.” She looked at Lonnie with such compassion that Lonnie had to stand up and turn towards other things. She was not in the mood to cry; she was so sick of tears.

She busied herself with the tasks of cleaning up, wrapping the leftovers in paper bags, walking towards the kitchen where Brooke hardly ever cooked, placing the glasses in the deep farmhouse sink. Lonnie hadn’t traveled in years, not since before her mom got sick, and in some ways, she occasionally forgot there was a world outside of Philadelphia. Sure, she caught the train to New York sometimes and had gone down for a protest in Washington a couple of years ago, but those were just day trips. Flying somewhere felt like something that belonged to other people, to those who were younger, to those who didn’t have a mom to look after. And yet: though she’d hated watching Susan journey into pain and hospice – all those stale-sour smells that came with dying, all that equipment crowding up the living room – Lonnie hated the idea of belonging in the untethered population, belonging with those who could do anything.    

Brooke joined her as she came out of the kitchen, walked alongside her to the mirror in the front hallway. They made eye contact as Lonnie leaned close to her reflection, though Brooke looked away quickly. In these months, Lonnie thought to herself as the two friends walked out to her car, she’d gotten used to the pain her grief inflicted on others.    

“You know I’m here, right?” she said. “Even when I’m not.” Lonnie nodded, dodging Brooke’s eye and the lump rising up in her own throat. They hugged, then kissed each other’s cheeks, a ritual that emerged somewhere around their late 30s. Where it came from, Lonnie didn’t know, but all her friends did it. Most of them were from these streets exactly, from the humid summers and the punishing winters, from the gravy they put on their spaghetti and the water ice they devoured when it was too hot to eat actual food. Still, somehow, they had become the type of women who bid farewell with kisses.

In the car, Lonnie pulled out her phone and plugged it in. No messages from the girls; she’d reached out to each one of them earlier, hoping for a call back. She’d tried to sound breezy on their voicemail, but wasn’t sure it had worked. Maybe she’d try them again in the morning, give them the night off from her. She didn’t want to be a burden.

In the wake of Susan’s death, Lonnie sometimes felt she’d lost her own way as a parent all over again, like she did when Sarah came home drunk for the first time or when Beth told her, out of nowhere and when she was just 14, that she wanted to go on birth control. It wasn’t even that Lonnie always called her mom when those sorts of things appeared; she felt no desire to consult on her teenagers’ most worrisome times. It was just nice to think she had some sort of back-up, some sort of emergency grown-up on call if things got really out of hand. Now she floundered with her daughters, searching for the right words, the right tone. She didn’t know what was more painful: to think that grief had changed her or that maybe her children had just outgrown her, like a forgotten stuffed animal that was once beloved.

Lonnie set the music to shuffle, skipping over most songs, realizing how urgently she needed to cull her music selections. She punched the forward button once, twice, three times, before landing on a Stevie Wonder song her mom used to sing to her. For a moment, she was back in the house where she’d grown up, dancing on shag carpeting as her mom, in wide-legged pants and with a scarf tied over her hair, belted out the words. Susan’s voice had been high, perpetually flat, enthusiastic when she was speaking or singing or yelling, all the way until her last six months, when her tone had become all wrong: too spacious, breathy, hollow. Lonnie shook her head as she remembered, leaving the past behind, and pressed the skip button again. 

Her mind wandered as she drove; that had always been the case. More than once, she’d gotten lost on the way home, even when she was coming from someplace she often visited. Nathan used to tease her about it, advising her not to get lost on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, before it became something about her he couldn’t stand. There was a whole list, by the time they separated: the lists she left around on scrap paper, the way she sorted the recyclables. “It’s single-stream!” he yelled at her once during their final days, and she didn’t have a thing to say to that.

Today, though, Lonnie drove along the river straight to the rowhouse she’d bought after their breakup. It had a tiny basement where she stored her wine, even the inexpensive bottles. Her mother had insisted she keep the crepe myrtle but Lonnie had taken out everything else in the small front yard when she moved in. She wanted something clean, low-maintenance, and installed a rock garden instead. Sarah and Beth had been in high school, and between field hockey games and late-night homework and arguments that stormed into their lives over nothing, tending a yard had seemed like too much work. She and Susan had fought about it – “You’ll regret it!” Susan had warned, her eyes bright and passionate – but Lonnie had dug in her heels. She wasn’t sure, then or now, that it was the right choice.

Lonnie unlocked the bolt, walked in the house, and threw her keys on the small table by the door. Since her mother’s death, she’d been going through something of a purge, and her house looked foreign to her. There were pictures of the kids here and there, marking the rooms as her own, but for the first time in her life, she had so few things that there actually was a place for everything. Books stood color-coded on shelves, the remotes were lined up in parallel rows on the otherwise-bare coffee table. She used coasters now; the throw pillows were angled just so. It looked lonely, her house, as if it too was missing someone.

Lonnie kicked off her shoes as she passed the couch, walked to the center of the living room, and stood completely still. She heard the ticking of the clock, sitting stoically on the mantle, and the sound of the dryer, turning itself back on for another wrinkle-free cycle.

When she was a girl, her family had adopted a dog. Clarence. He was the son of a Boxer mom who’d met someone shaggy and wild along the way. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box, her mom used to say, but he was sweet, eternally hopeful. Lonnie had loved him in a way that she’d never loved anyone else: unabashedly, without limit or apology or self-consciousness. She’d been 16 when he died, and was so distraught she’d had to drop out of the school play. She still thought of him often, maybe every few days, and sometimes had an urge to stop people on the street so that she could talk about him – just even say the name Clarence out loud – as if she could make strangers understand how perfect he’d been.   

At 23, she lost her father in a car accident; he’d hit a patch of ice three days after New Year’s and skidded into a tree. His death was more than shocking; it had reordered Lonnie’s world. He’d been a quiet man, and when Lonnie thought about him now – dead longer in her life than he was alive – she remembered small things: ice cream every day, even in the winter; the habit she inherited of putting one sock and shoe on before starting the other side, dressing one foot entirely at a time; an ever-growing stack of thoroughly-read New Yorkers by the side of his heavy, ancient desk. Lonnie could still hear him if she tried, but only in snippets: the way he called up the stair for her mother, sounding exasperated and charmed, the second syllable dragging out until she acknowledged him; the deepening of his tone when he was angry; a sigh, as ethereal as steam, but still his, all the same. The scent of Old Spice – his scent – still made Lonnie catch her breath.

She was 36 when she learned that her first love, a man named Mitchell who’d wooed Lonnie with poetry and travel, had overdosed in the ground-floor bathroom of his office building after two sober years. His death frustrated her, angered her, though she knew, had done the reading to understand, that addiction was a disease just as cancer and diabetes were, capable of striking anyone at any time. It had been more than a decade since she’d seen Mitchell and he was frozen in time for Lonnie: a wide smile across the deep satisfaction of tangled sheets; his brown hand extending a mussel, Lonnie’s first, on a tiny fork in Amsterdam; a wink, meant just for her, under thick brows and above a glowing cigarette, on a near-dark porch filled with partygoers.

And seemingly right on schedule, at 40, the first cancer diagnosis hit her circle: a woman Lonnie had known for years, since their girls were little, brought down in a matter of months by a tumor in her lungs. She hadn’t even smoked, everyone said. She didn’t even drink. Jenn’s diagnosis and death had made Lonnie feel reckless, the clinging fibers of youth suddenly panicked, paramount. At the reception after the funeral, Lonnie had found herself alone in the basement with Jenn’s brother-in-law. It reminded her of her teenage days, when basements had held secrets and promise, and Lonnie suddenly felt moved to offer the man a blowjob, partially in an act of charity, wanting to distract him from his grief, but mainly just to know that she still could. She wanted to know she still had a wild side; she needed to know she, at least, was still alive, though even the thought of that made her feel sick to her stomach.  

Standing in her living room, listening to the soundtrack of her life – for it was the dryer turning on and off that had outlined her most significant moments more than it was a curated list of songs that put Lonnie in any particular mood – it struck Lonnie that the deaths would be speeding up now, coming more often and becoming less surprising each time. That was terrifying, as scary as anything she’d understood before, and yet she felt a deep acceptance of the fact: there was no other way.

She walked to the sliding glass doors, to the view of her square backyard that Susan had declared was the size of a postage stamp, and looked at the row of houses behind it that were nearly identical to her own. Most of Lonnie’s neighbors were strangers, though there were a few she might call friends, despite the fact they’d never been in her home, nor she in theirs. They met by chance at the mailbox or when out for a walk, sidling up against one another in the midst of their routines.

She wondered what their homes were like; what their lives contained. Sometimes she wandered through the neighborhood as dusk settled in, pausing before houses where the interior lights had been turned on but where the curtains were not yet shut. Lonnie would stand on the sidewalk, watching strangers move about as though they were actors in a play, deftly dodging furniture that was familiar to them, walking right past family pictures that Lonnie would never see up close. She’d stand there, and watch, and eventually, move on.

Lonnie slid the door open and walked outside, standing on the back porch where the massacre of greenery had occurred earlier in the summer. There was one resilient plant left, a tenacious succulent that had been tucked under the shadow of the roof, forgotten and alone. She walked over, fingered the waxy, firm leaves.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said aloud, embarrassed as soon as the words left her mouth that she was talking to a plant. But it was such a lovely, lonely thing, she thought to herself. She looked around at the other back decks surrounding hers and saw no one at all. The rumbling of a thunderstorm growled in the distance.

She breathed in the August humidity, wiggled her feet out of her sandals so that she could feel the wooden planks under her soles. It was heartbreaking, to be an orphan; Lonnie didn’t know if she could survive it. She closed her eyes, and waited for the first drops to fall.

about the author

Originally from the East Coast, Anna Levy now lives in Northern California. She spends her days listening to young people, loving on her family, and dreaming of a life abroad. Her writing has appeared in The First Line, Word of Mouth, and Fieldfare; she can be found online at https://wanderingintrovert.com.

About the artist

Daphne Walsh is a photographer working in Chicago. After abandoning a career as a studio photographer to pursue her interest in street photography, she explores the environment of the city — its inhabitants, architecture, movement and light.