The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Danielle and her mother in 1996, when Danielle was eleven years old

  She found countless quirky ways to do that. After Danielle’s nightly baths, Kris wouldn’t just give her a snack. She’d give her four different kinds of fruit on skewer sticks. Kris wanted Danielle to always know that she was the priority, and if that meant the house wasn’t always neat or the dinner dishes weren’t done right away, that was OK. Stuff like that was secondary. She understood that there was a messy essence to childhood, and she indulged it. She’d tell Cynda, “If Danielle cooks and makes a mess, too bad, that’s how you learn. If she’s painting and it gets all over, too bad. Paint is supposed to get all over the place. We’ll clean it up later.”

  Kris had warm memories of going with her own father every Saturday morning to a doughnut shop. It was their little getaway ritual. “Danielle doesn’t have a father to take her for doughnuts,” Kris told Cynda. “But I’ll always be there to take her everywhere.”

  When Danielle was five years old, Kris, Cynda, and Cynda’s mother rented a motor home and mapped out a four-generation road trip to Disney World. They stayed in motels along the way, and all three of the older women—a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother—doted on little Danielle. As an only child, Danielle spent a lot of her life with adults, and that gave her a kind of maturity, and an appreciation of adult conversations. She fit right in with her older traveling companions.

  Kris and Danielle often drove up to northern Michigan together for the weekend, and Kris had activities planned from the moment Danielle’s eyes opened. Kris loved to fish. It was her calming refuge, and she was happiest when Danielle came along, even if they were just sitting silently, waiting, waiting, for their fishing rods to jiggle.

  In 1993, when Danielle was eight, Kris met a divorced man named Ted and fell in love. Ted was a garage-door installer with two kids, and he became the first positive father figure in Danielle’s life; he was reliable, loving, and playful, with an easy nature.

  The first time Danielle visited Ted at his house, she noticed that the big tile floor in his kitchen looked like a checkerboard, with large black and white squares. “I have these giant checkerboard pieces,” she told him. “We should play checkers.” She went home and got them—her checkerboard pieces were the size of dinner plates—and from then on, she and Ted loved to sit on his kitchen floor, playing checkers.

  Even though Danielle was thrilled to have Ted in her life, he saw how much she also wanted to maintain a relationship with her natural father, and how he disappointed her. It was hard for Ted, and for others who loved Danielle, to shake their image of Danielle as a sad little girl in her winter coat, her suitcase packed, as she waited in vain for her father to take her for the weekend as promised.

  Ted tried to be the substitute dad in any way he could. Once he and Kris began dating, they’d spend most weekends at a cottage up north. Ted would drive there in his truck with his two dogs along for company, and Kris would drive her car alongside of him, with Danielle in the passenger seat. Kris and Danielle always brought along their favorite cassette tapes—Dwight Yoakam, Prince, Alanis Morissette—and every time Ted looked over at them, they’d be bopping up and down to their music, laughing all the way, their heads almost hitting the roof as they sang. Ted knew he was seeing something special; not every mother and daughter enjoyed each other’s company that much.

  Ted had fallen in love with Kris, and he quickly loved Danielle, too. “She’s just so mature,” he’d tell people. “It’s almost like she isn’t a child.” Kris and Ted talked about marriage, but didn’t see an immediate need. They kept putting it off.

  Kris could be a disciplinarian, with her preschoolers and with Danielle, but she also had an intuitive sense about when to be firm and when to be lenient. She demanded good grades because she wasn’t always a conscientious student when she was young. Kris had been the kind of teenager who didn’t think about studying hard or going to a top college; she was more interested in plotting a night out with her friends at the next Journey or Foreigner concert.

  Once she was a mother, however, she had different priorities. “She didn’t want Danielle to party her way through high school, like we did,” says her cousin Holly. “She knew education mattered.” Danielle had to grow up and be able to support herself. Kris was vehement about that. Kris had learned from her own life: You can’t put yourself in a position where you’re fully dependent on a man.

  Kris also became a stickler for facing responsibility. She told Danielle: “If you start something, you need to finish it. You want to join the band? Great. But once we buy the instrument, you need to play it. In the band.”

  Kris insisted on respect, too. Sometimes Danielle would march into her bedroom, angry about something, and she’d slam the door. That wouldn’t fly with Kris, and Danielle knew it. So minutes later, Danielle would open the door a crack, call out “sorry,” and then close the door more gently. She has memories of seeing her mom out on the couch, trying to hold back a smile, as the apology was issued. It’s as if Kris was thinking, “I know Danielle’s a good kid. I love her.”

  As Danielle entered her teen years, she and Kris didn’t always get along. Sometimes things could get heated, but looking back, it was all pretty normal. (Every two and a half days, the average mother and her teenaged daughter have an argument that lasts fifteen minutes, according to researchers at Cambridge University. Adolescent boys are less argumentative. They have tiffs with their moms in six-minute bursts every four days.) In any case, Kris believed in never going to bed angry, and she didn’t like to part with Danielle unless a disagreement was straightened out.

  One morning when Danielle was in ninth grade, she missed the bus for the third day that week. Kris was unhappy about it; she’d have to drive Danielle to school yet again, and that would make her late for work. She and Danielle had a fight about this, and on the drive to school, Kris was lecturing. “You’re fourteen years old now,” she said. “You need to be more responsible. I can’t be late to work every day because you’re not getting up in time to make the bus. It’s not fair to me. And it’s irresponsible of you.”

  Danielle listened quietly, ready for the ride to end, but as usual, as they pulled into the school parking lot, Kris softened. “I’m sorry to come down hard on you,” she said, “but you have to get up on time. That’s the bottom line. Anyway, you know I love you.”

  Danielle got out of the car, and before she closed the door, her mother called out to her, “I’ll pick you up after swim practice.” And again: “I love you.”

  Danielle closed the car door, gave her mom a slight wave and sheepishly thanked her for the ride. “I love you, too,” she mumbled, then turned to head into the school.

  That was the last time she ever saw her mother.

  Kris went to work at the preschool that day—December 9, 1999—and at lunchtime, stepped outside and collapsed. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She was thirty-three years old, and had been a healthy, active young woman who exercised and watched her diet. Cynda thinks her daughter died of a heart issue—Kris had mentioned what she thought was heartburn the previous week—but an autopsy was unable to determine a cause of death.

  When Cynda got the call that her daughter was dead, she sped to the preschool, where staffers were frantic and emotional. Some even said they’d heard gunshots. (That turned out not to be true.) The staffers quickly tried to shield the children from seeing what was going on in front of the school. The kids were kept inside, and paper was put over the windows. Calls were put out to parents to come pick up their children, and they were directed to take them out the back door.

  Cynda stayed at the school for a half hour or so, in a horrible daze, and then found she had an agonizing decision to make: Should she remain with Kris’s body, or get Danielle out of school and let her know what happened? “I decided that my daughter would have wanted me with Danielle,” she says.

  Danielle was inconsolable after Cynda broke the news. There’s no
other way to describe the sadness of a fourteen-year-old girl who had just learned of her mother’s unexpected death. But even in those first terrible hours, Danielle was able to recognize that her life would now be divided into “before” and “after.” To deal with her changed world, to cope with all that awaited her, Danielle knew that she’d need to find a great maturity within her.

  For three days before her mother’s memorial service, there was visitation at the funeral home, and Danielle observed the adult ritual of mourning from a front-row seat. Most of it was not comforting to her.

  Cynda had always bought Kris a poinsettia every Christmas. She had resolved to do that shortly after Kris got divorced: “She doesn’t have a husband to buy her a poinsettia, so I’m going to do it.” More than a few people who knew Kris knew about this, and the funeral home was filled with poinsettias they’d sent.

  But these were the sort of touches that adults would find meaningful. It was tougher for Danielle.

  She sat at the funeral home, eight hours a day for three days, watching the same scene unfold again and again, as hundreds of visitors came through: They all signed their names in the guest book. Then they walked over to Cynda to offer their regrets. Then they stopped by the casket to pay their respects to Kris. And then they’d see Danielle, and they’d just lose it. They’d approach her, many of them tearfully, and say, “Honey, we’re so, so sorry.” Of course, they were sorry. Danielle knew that. But it was hard for her to endure hour after hour of their long faces, their urges to take her hands, the way they hovered over her, and then whispered to each other as they left her, “Oh God, what will happen to Danielle?”

  “It’s getting on my nerves,” Danielle said at one point to Ted’s son Kris.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I’m taking you to McDonald’s.”

  When they got to McDonald’s, Ted’s son tried to amuse Danielle by dipping his french fries in his milk shake and waving them around. After days of crying, Danielle found a reason to laugh. All these years later, she remains grateful for his impromptu McDonald’s performance, helping her smile at a terrible time.

  The funeral was on a Sunday, and when Danielle woke up that morning, her first thought was “I can’t go to Mom’s funeral without a haircut.” It’s odd, the things that come into your head at the worst moments of your life.

  “Are you really sure you need a haircut?” Cynda asked, a bit incredulously. “I mean, there’s so much to do today . . .”

  But Danielle insisted. Kris had been very particular about Danielle’s hair, always making sure that she looked presentable. Maybe that’s what was motivating Danielle to demand that she get a haircut.

  Cynda had a friend who cut hair, and so Danielle went to her that morning. The adults seemed to understand. Danielle was focusing on little things to distract herself.

  Danielle had asked to speak at Kris’s funeral, and on that cold December day, people were awed by the poise of this fourteen-year-old girl. She stood at the front of the chapel, speaking directly to Kris in the present tense.

  “Mom, you are still so young,” she began, reading from a sheet of paper. “I wish I could just hold you for a moment, touch your hair, smell your perfume, feel your heartbeat in my ear. I will miss you so much. A day will not go by that I won’t think of you . . .” The place was still. Though it was heartbreaking to watch, the other mourners knew they were witnessing an act of bravery.

  “It’s going to be hard, Mom,” Danielle continued. “I know in my heart you will give me the strength. You’ll be there to pick me up and push me forward. I will be OK. I have many people who care about me, Mom. They will take great care of me, just like you have done.”

  She took a breath, fought back tears, and looked up at all the adults at the service. There were those who loved her, those who would make great efforts to be there for her, but all of them combined could not equal her mother.

  Danielle looked back down at her notes. “I will make many rivers when I think about you, Mom. All the good times we had; the secrets we shared. The short thirty-three years you were with us, you were so giving. That was you, always helping others.” Her voice cracked as she continued. “I’ll take care of everything I can, Mom. I will try to make you proud of me. I will miss you and I love you with all my heart.”

  After Kris’s death, everything felt surreal. Kris had just sent out forty Christmas cards, and most of her friends and loved ones received them the day she died. She had also ordered a Christmas present for Danielle, a $50 light-blue coat with fur trim that Danielle had been eyeing. It had arrived in the mail a few days earlier.

  “I’m so excited. The coat came in,” Kris told her mother in a phone call. “Should I give it to Danielle now or wait for Christmas?”

  “Might as well give it now,” Cynda told her. “It’s cold and she could use it.”

  And so a couple nights before she died, Kris had given the coat to Danielle, with a big hug, as an early Christmas present. Danielle just loved the coat, but couldn’t bring herself to wear it to the funeral. (The coat remains at Cynda’s house today, on a sturdy hanger, wrapped in plastic.)

  The weeks after the funeral were devastating on several fronts.

  Danielle moved in with Cynda, but her father quickly went to court to win custody of her, and that exacerbated Danielle’s grief. She didn’t want to live with him. She said that plainly. She felt it deeply. But he wouldn’t back down and because she was a year too young to contest it the decision would have to come from the courts.

  Danielle resented her father, and not just because he had so often disappointed her. She also couldn’t shake her memories of how he had treated her mother. He had been verbally abusive to Kris during and after their marriage, and when he drank, things got even worse. Danielle knew that her father loved her in his own inept way, but she couldn’t bring herself to live with him now that her mother was dead.

  Cynda feared Danielle’s father might show up unannounced and take Danielle away, and so they plotted for that possibility. Danielle slept with her cell phone and promised her grandmother that if her father came and took her with him, she’d run away from his house by climbing out a back window. Then she’d call Cynda to come get her.

  In court, Danielle’s father made defamatory accusations about Cynda: that she was an alcoholic, that she had put Danielle on the pill. The charges were horrifying and untrue, and it was hard to shield Danielle from what was going on. But then, after eight months of court battles—including testimony from Danielle that she desperately wanted to stay with her grandmother—her father suddenly agreed to give up his right to custody. Cynda’s lawyer said his strategy was to wear down Danielle’s father, and in the end, it worked. When Cynda got over her anger, she came to respect him for surrendering, and for accepting what was obviously best for Danielle.

  “I’ve forgiven him for what he did to my mom,” Danielle would tell people, “And I’ve forgiven him for not being there for me for all those years.” But she no longer wanted him to be part of her life—and she would hold to that decision into adulthood.

  Danielle and Cynda—having lost a mother and a daughter—were emotionally fragile for a long time, yet both resisted showing their sadness because they didn’t want to bring each other down. They now know that it wasn’t healthy, but that’s how they handled things. “She cried alone,” Cynda says, “and I cried alone.”

  Danielle has the same recollection, with slightly different wording: “She was sad and I was sad. I’d go to my room and Grandma would go to her room. That’s how it has always been.”

  Like other teenage girls whose mothers died suddenly, Danielle found herself replaying her last day with her mother—missing the school bus, being reprimanded by Kris in the car, the final “I love you.” The preteen and teen years are when girls start pushing their mothers away, and mothers struggle to deal with their girls’ sense of autonomy, their surly teen tantrums, even their sharpest declarations: “Leave me alone!” or “I hat
e you!”

  Danielle and Kris didn’t have major issues, but they had their moments. It’s natural for teenage girls whose mothers have died to feel as if they weren’t as loving as they should have been, or that they let their mothers down. There’s a layer of guilt which can exacerbate the grief. Danielle had to deal with this, too.

  Cynda found reasons every day to be proud of Danielle. She had been an A and B student, but after Kris died, her ability to concentrate suffered, as did her grades. She got C’s for a while, but eventually rebounded and found welcome diversions in extracurricular activities.

  There was a saying etched in large letters on the family-room wall of Cynda’s house: “Home is where love resides, memories are created, friends always belong, and laughter never ends.” It was a sweet sentiment, of course, but it also reminded Cynda and Danielle of a love now absent, of memories too sad to indulge, of friends who looked at them both with pity, and of days when there was no laughter.

  Cynda sold the day-care center as soon as she could, and focused on parenting Danielle. She felt a responsibility to chronicle every moment of Danielle’s life because she thought Kris would have wanted that. And so Cynda diligently kept scrapbooks with everything she could find to boost Danielle’s self-esteem: report cards, honor-roll certificates, newspaper clippings about Danielle’s swimming successes and her selection to be in a Junior Miss pageant and on her school’s homecoming court.

  Cynda gathered all the photos Kris had taken of Danielle over fourteen years and put them in scrapbooks too, then added photos of her own, taken when Danielle was fifteen and beyond. The scrapbooks were a nice record of Danielle’s life, but they too became an obvious reminder that Kris was gone. In the early scrapbooks, Kris is in photo after photo with Danielle. And then, abruptly, Kris was gone from the photos.

  Some relatives thought Cynda was too indulgent with Danielle. She didn’t force her to do chores or to clean her room. Her impulse was to let things pass, to resist making demands. After all, look at what this girl had been through. “Cynda coddled her,” says Kris’s cousin Holly. “It was hard for her to say to Danielle, ‘You have to do this because I said so.’ I worried that Danielle might turn into a big baby—or that she’d become a party girl. But that’s not how it went. Danielle kept herself on the straight and narrow.”