Chapter 8
Savannah
My childhood home settles differently at night. It’s not quieter. It’s heavier. It feels like it is aware of what is about to come and it is holding its breath along with me.
I lock the front door out of habit, even though there’s no one coming, then lean my forehead against the wood for a moment longer than necessary. My coat stays on. I don’t bother turning on all the lights. The glow from the kitchen is enough to keep the dark from feeling too final.
Boxes line the walls, stacked neatly and unapologetically, as if they know exactly what they’re holding and are waiting for me to be brave enough to remember it too.
Aunt Carol has been thorough. The practical things are already gone, furniture wrapped, drawers emptied, and closets thinned to hangers and dust.
What’s left is intentional. It’s left for me.
I move toward the dining room first, drawn to the smaller pile set off to the side. I kneel on the floor and lift the lid of the top box.
Paper. So much paper.
Cards, folded and refolded until the creases are soft. Programs from events I don’t even remember attending. Notes written in my mother’s looping handwriting with everything from reminders, to recipes, to lists of things she meant to do and probably never did.
I pick one up at random.
Savy,
Don’t forget to call the electrician.
Love you.
She always signed everything like that. As if love needed to be named out loud or it might slip away.
I set the note aside and reach deeper into the box. A stack of notebooks comes next. Her notebooks. The covers are worn, the corners are worn away completely. I know better than to open them yet. Some things feel too much like trespassing, even now.
The second box is heavier, packed to the brim with photo albums. The old kind, with thick plastic pages that crackle when you turn them and get caught on the middle rings. I sit back on my heels and open the first one.
There I am at six, missing two front teeth, holding a doll I don’t remember asking for. There’s my mom behind the camera, reflected faintly in the glass of a window, smiling like she already knows how fast this goes.
I flip the page.
The day I left this town with my car packed too full, and my mom standing in the driveway with her arms crossed like she was bracing herself against something invisible.
I close the album.
The ache spreads slow and deep, the kind that doesn’t knock you over but never really lets you stand straight again.
The kitchen is worse.
Her mug is still by the sink, where I left it earlier, where Aunt Carol must have been using it to hydrate through all of her own sense of loss after losing her sister.
The sight of it hits me again like grief is learning new angles against my defences.
I pick it up this time, turning it in my hands. The chip catches my thumb.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I don’t know what for. Everything, maybe. Anything.
I move through the house room by room, touching things lightly, like the back of a chair, the edge of the counter, the doorframe where my height is still penciled in from years ago.
Each mark feels like proof of life. Each one feels like a goodbye.
In the hallway, I stop outside my childhood bedroom. I tell myself I don’t have to go in but I know I must. Shadows can only stay in the dark for so long until they come into the light. I open the door.
The room is stripped down to its bones. The bed gone. The posters peeled off the walls. What’s left is the faint outline of who I used to be in this house with nail holes, and a pale square where a bulletin board once hung.
On the floor sits many boxes but one stands out.
Sav.
Just my name.
My hands shake as I lift the lid.
Inside are things I recognize instantly and things I forgot ever existed like concert tickets, old journals, and a scarf I thought I lost years ago. On top of it all is a folded piece of paper with my handwriting.
Things I’ll come back for.
I sink down onto the floor, the motion clumsy and ungraceful, like my body gives up before my pride does.
I never did. I never came back.
The truth lands slowly, cruel in its patience. I didn’t come back for the holidays or the things that mattered. I left, and I kept leaving, convincing myself that distance was the same as survival.
The house creaks around me, familiar and foreign all at once, like it’s clearing its throat. I press my palm to the floor, the wood cool beneath my skin, and breathe until the room stops tilting.
Tomorrow, this place won’t be mine. Tomorrow the boxes will be gone, and the rooms emptied of proof that we ever lived here the way we did.
Tonight the house still knows me. So I sit there, right in the middle of everything I avoided. The half-packed boxes. The memories stacked too close together. The grief I kept telling myself I’d deal with later. I let it all spill in at once, messy and wildly unfair.
It hurts but it also feels important and honest.
I stop trying to outrun the breaking and let myself feel it with a knowing some things don’t shatter you all at once. They wear you down quietly, over years.
I’ve been breaking for a long time.
Tonight, I finally stop pretending otherwise.
I don’t hear the car pull up.
I only realize I’m not alone anymore when the front door opens and closes softly, the sound careful in the way only one person in my life ever is.
“I brought soup,” Aunt Carol calls from the kitchen. “It’s your favorite too. Chicken noodle with leeks, just like you taught me. You don’t have to eat it, but it exists. Oh and so do I, in case you forgot.”
She’s trying to be funny but it just doesn’t land right now. Even though I usually love it, I have no capacity for her humor.
I’m sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom, back against the wall, surrounded by open boxes and half-sorted versions of my life. My eyes burn. My chest feels hollowed out, scooped clean and left that way.
“You didn’t have to come,” I declare, because saying thank you feels too vulnerable.
She appears in the doorway a moment later, a sweater too big for her already on, her hair in a messy bun on top of her head. Her gaze sweeps the room, taking in the bare walls, the boxes, the way I’ve slid all the way down to the floor and have been frozen since.
She doesn’t comment. She just lowers herself beside me, slow and deliberate, close enough that our shoulders touch. For a long moment, we don’t speak. The house fills the silence for us, settling and creaking like it’s speaking for us.
“She hated this room empty,” Carol nods toward the walls. “It was hard for her when you went to college. She was happy to see you go but…”
A small, broken sound escapes me. “She hated quiet.”
“She sure did,” Carol agrees. “More than anything. She needed people. Noise. Something to do with her hands.”
I swallow. “Was she lonely?”
Carol doesn’t hesitate. “No.”
I turn toward her.
“She missed you,” she corrects gently. “That’s different.”
The truth lands where it always does, right in my heart. “I was doing the best I could.”
“You were,” she answers immediately. “And she knew that too.”
Silence settles again, heavier now.
I need something, anything to keep my hands busy, and to distract me from the booming in my head. I reach for another box. This one is heavier than the rest.
Inside are photographs.
Nothing in albums or stacked or labelled. There are just stacks of loose prints, edges softened from being handled, from being loved.
All are loose save for one in a frame, but a photo I’ve never seen before.
My mother is kneeling, coat open, hair tucked behind one ear, her face gentle in a way I recognize instantly.
She must have been early thirties here. In front of her stands a little boy, maybe six or seven, clutching a bright red toy truck to his chest like it’s something precious and fragile.
It’s hard to make out his features with the oversized Santa hat draping over half of his face, but that smile says it all.
It’s is wide with the kind of joy that doesn’t know yet how rare it is.
“What’s this?” I ask Aunt Carol, hoping for some guidance and some clarity.
She smiles fondly at the photo, her gaze lingering on it like she’s back in that moment in time. She exhales slow, a sweet smile curling on her lips. “Keep digging, that’s why you’re here.”
I reach deeper into the box and pull another photo at random, and this one feels different in my hands. The paper is newer, the images more crisp.
The first one makes my stomach drop.
It’s the community center again, only my mother is seated now, not standing or directing, just present.
She’s wrapped in a thick sweater despite the crowd, hands folded in her lap, a knitted blanket tucked over her knees, while Mrs. Kincaid crouches beside her, clipboard abandoned, smiling like she’s been let in on something precious.
Mom’s smile is still there but it’s smaller, like it’s conserving energy.
I flip to the next.
She’s leaning against a folding table now, one hand braced for balance, the other resting on a stack of wrapped gifts.
Mrs. Levin stands in front of her, tiny and fierce, handing her a drink of some sort in a styrofoam cup.
The look on my mother’s face, gratitude mixed with fatigue, lands right next to grief in my body.
Another photo.
The room is fuller. The lights brighter and my mother is seated again only this time in a wheelchair. I hadn’t known she used one. I gasp at the sight, my hand shooting up to my mouth, trying to quell the sound of guilt escaping.
“I didn’t know, Auntie. I didn’t know.”
“I know, dear. She didn’t want you to.”
Her hair is thinner, her cheeks more hollow but she’s laughing with her head tipped back, eyes closed. A group of kids crowd around her, holding toys like trophies. One of them is helping place a Santa hat on her head, delicately.
I press my fingers to the edge of the photo, grounding myself.
Another.
The scene changes.
This one isn’t in the community center.
It’s a hospital room. The room is all white walls and harsh light, softened only by Christmas decorations taped crookedly to the window.
A tree no taller than a nightstand twinkles beside the bed, where my mother sits propped up by pillows, the IV line visible against her wrist. She looks small, so small and frail, but she isn’t alone.
Mrs. Kincaid stands at the foot of the bed, alongside Mrs. Donnelly, while Mrs. Levin sits in a chair pulled close, her cardigan buttoned wrong as she holds my mother’s hand.
I can read the fear in her eyes just from the photo.
There are wrapped gifts spilling over every available surface all over chairs, windowsills, even the floor.
My mother is smiling. The real smile. The kind she saved for people she loved. It’s not the smile she forced herself to make near the end, for everyone else, when she was uncertain of what would come next but tried to remain brave.
“Everyone kept showing up for her, but I wasn’t there.” I hold the photo tightly, grief and guilt swallowing me whole.
Carol wraps her arms around me tightly. “I meant it when I said she wasn’t lonely. And don’t think for a second you weren’t there. We didn’t know how fast the end was going to come. We all thought we had more time.”
“Carol,” I whisper. “Who took all of these photos? I’m so grateful for them. That I can see the moments I missed, that I didn’t even know existed.”
She goes still beside me.“That’s all Erik.”
I look at her. “Erik?”
She nods. “He started taking them years ago.”
My pulse stutters. “Why?”
Carol’s gaze drifts to the photos in my lap. “He said someone should remember it properly. That it would matter someday.”
She pauses. “To you.”
Tears stream steadily down my face.
“He was there every year,” Carol continues.
“Every year he took photos of whatever he could. Every available moment, he was right in there with his camera. He printed them himself. Labeled the dates. Never made a fuss about it. He wanted you to see your mother through the years. He wanted her to see what was unfolding in her absence. He always made sure she was apart of it.”
I look down again, seeing what I missed before, the consistency. The same careful eye. The way my mother is always caught in moments of giving, of listening, of joy.
“For how long?” I ask. “How many years has he been doing this?”
Carol exhales. “Every year since you left.”
My chest aches.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper.
“You weren’t meant to,” she says gently. “Your mom didn’t want this to feel like something you owed. She didn’t want you to feel like you needed to come back. She wanted you to be free. It’s all she ever wanted for you.”
“And Erik?”
She smiles, placing her hand tenderly on my knee. “That’s a question only he can answer for you.”
I place the photos back into the box, my hands shaking now. They feel heavier than paper. Heavier than memory. Erik didn’t just show up this year like I did. He’s been here, all along.
Carol squeezes my hand. “You don’t have to do all of this tonight.”
“I do,” my voice waivers. “Tomorrow there won’t be time.”
She nods, understanding this isn’t really about boxes.
“I’ll stay,” she assures me. “We’ll sort what we can. Together.”
I lean into her shoulder without thinking, exhaustion finally catching up to me.
Outside, the house creaks softly, settling around us, like it can finally let go and somewhere beneath the grief, beneath the anger and the endings swirling inside of me, something else stirs.