I drifted off thinking about Amelia, how she watched me from behind her hair, how she always seemed to know what I was going to do before I did.
Maybe we were the same kind of animal, the kind that waits in the ditch and watches the world go by and only bites when it has to.
Maybe I could be her friend, in secret, and she could fill this hole in my heart.
32
AMELIA
Through the window,I watched Caiden’s car disappear, leaving me alone in the ghostly midst of my childhood home.
The silence felt feral, prowling at the baseboards. Soot-black walls, the same as always, but shabbier, streaked with the graffiti of a life that had ended badly.
Mom’s absence was an organ, throbbing, still alive in this house. The television was off, but the imprint of her body remained, gnawing at the room like an afterimage.
The silence inside was a thickness, a slow rot that climbed the back of my throat as I stood just inside the door, waiting for the ghosts to finish their circuit.
I’d rehearsed this moment a thousand times since Mom died, mapping out the choreography: the precise steps I’d take to collect what was left, the brisk efficiency of boxing up a life.
But my body wouldn’t move. It was as though the house itself was holding me in place, forcing me to breathe in the staleness it had incubated all these years.
My stomach turned at the realization that every surface was probably still thick with her fingerprints. The paint on the banister, the light switch, the knob on the fridge. Each was asignature for the countless times she’d steadied herself between one high and the next.
I set my bag at the threshold and tried for the first room. The old kitchen. My mother’s memory hit hardest here: not the tidy, sitcom version of mother-daughter breakfasts, but the chaos of midnight searching for another fix, the clatter of drawers as she scavenged for cash.
I remembered how she’d sometimes cry, silent and shaking in front of the open fridge, staring at nothing while the cold bled into her bones.
I’d learned then to step lightly, to orbit her sadness like a moon does a dying planet. Close enough to witness, too far to pull free.
I didn’t know where to start, so I stood with my hands tight in my sleeves, counting heartbeats and small refusals. If I moved, it made everything real.
The refrigerator was mostly empty, save for a crusted bottle of ketchup and a single slice of American cheese, hard at the corners. I closed it quickly, as if the light would draw more ghosts.
I turned to the magnet-crusted freezer, not ready but not wanting to look weak, and saw the note I’d left here long ago, and it surprised me to know she had kept it.
‘Don’t forget to eat something, Mom.’
The corners were curled, but I recognized my handwriting: childish even though it had been written in my late teens, desperate to believe a Post-It could save her from starvation, or from the thing that ate her from the inside out.
I slipped the note off the freezer and folded it into a square. For a second, I pressed it to my lips.
The kitchen went blurry at the edges, like I’d fallen underwater, and all the noise in my head came to the surface. The fight I’d had with her the night before I left, the click ofbottles rolling under the sink, the static of years compressed to a single point behind my eyes.
I took inventory. The keep box, half-empty. The trash bag, gaping. There was a list on my phone, made days ago in the dead of night when I’d convinced myself I could control how any of this would feel.
I checked it now, scrolling past lines. Birth certificate, jewelry box, her wedding ring if it still existed, and photo albums. I’d written “anything that smells like her” but deleted it, then retyped it, then deleted again.
Drawers next. She’d always hidden things in the drawers.
On autopilot, I moved from one to the next: mail addressed to MISS JUDY LANGSTON, bills unpaid, a prescription for Ativan with the label half-gone.
I didn’t find any bottles of alcohol stashed; instead, they were in the open.
When I lived here, Mom felt the need to hide her substances like a rat. Just when I thought she would be sobering up, I would find stashed bottles of pills or alcohol, and my heart would sink.
Typical addict behavior.
Hope became a tragic and dead thing.
