Chapter 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 a signature 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 of bottles 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.
The hallway was dark, the lightbulb gone in the fixture overhead. My shoes made no sound on the runner, worn flat by years of haunted pacing.
The door to my old bedroom was closed, as if the room itself had shut down in my absence. For a moment, I stood with my hand on the knob, picturing what might wait inside: relics of girlhood, perfectly preserved, or maybe just dust and the outline of my vanished presence.
I opened the door and was caught off guard by the air. How crisp and untainted it felt compared to the rest of the house, as if the room had been sealed off from her chaos.
It was almost a kindness. The bed was made, and the sheets were the same ones I’d left behind, pink with a faded print. I sat on the edge with my palms pressed to my thighs and waited for a memory to surface.
It did, but not the one I expected. Instead of a happy one, I remembered the afternoon I’d locked myself in here while my mom raged and sobbed on the other side, alternately begging me to come out and threatening to break the door down.
The begging was worse. Something about her voice—clogged with desperation, the slur of her words—had made me want to disappear inside the walls. I’d folded myself up so small on the floor of the closet, knees to chin, that I nearly believed I could make it permanent.
I moved on to her bedroom, expecting the worst and getting it. The floorboards were gritty with ash, and the bed was unmade, a permanent indentation on one side.
I saw my mother’s glasses, bent at the bridge, resting next to a paperback mystery with a water-warped spine. For a moment, I hovered, fingers grazing the pillow, and I could almost conjure the sound of her sigh.
I checked the closet, afraid of what I might find, and was relieved to see nothing but hangers and old receipts. There was a faint whiff of her perfume, something floral and synthetic, that made my eyes water. I grabbed a cardigan from the floor and pressed it to my face.
I let the wool scratch my cheek, then peeled it away, the sleeve damp from my tears. I pressed the cardigan to my chest and willed myself to stand up straight, to be an archivist, not a daughter.
By the time I finished, the box was full. A collage of her, minus the parts I couldn’t bear to keep or couldn’t bear to lose.
I left the other things, the haunted relics. Let someone else sort the evidence of what she’d become.
When I’d packed everything worth packing, I circled the rooms again, looking for anything the eye might have missed.
Just when I thought I was done, preparing to text Caiden to tell him to come rescue me from this hellhole, I remembered the attic.
I hadn’t found anything too personal, and I realized it was all in the attic, packed away, collecting dust, like she wanted to forget who she was and what could have been.
Pulling down the string, the stairs folded downwards. I climbed up the creaky steps. Once in the attic, I flipped the light switch on and observed the atmosphere.
The roofline angled low, forcing me to hunch, and the floorboards creaked under my feet.
Bins and boxes lined the walls, stacked with a kind of logic only Mom could have engineered: Easter baskets in December, hideous Christmas sweaters next to a case of off-brand soda, a plastic bag brimming with souvenir shot glasses from places she’d never visited.
I knelt near the window, dragging out a box labeled ‘AMELIA’S SCHOOL STUFF.
’ Inside, time had stratified: first-grade valentines, a faded spelling bee ribbon, my high school cap crushed beneath an avalanche of yearbooks.
My handwriting changed from fat, childish bubbles to the pinched script of someone who’d learned caution early.
I flipped through the pages, skimming for some sign of a before. The version of me that predated Mom’s collapse. But each photo, each inscription, was a fossil of the same slow-motion disaster.
Next to it was a smaller box, unmarked. I opened it expecting the usual—tax returns, unpaid bills—but instead found the photo albums.
I let the photos spill out, shuffling through decades in seconds. There was Lillian, front teeth missing, grinning in a way I could never manage.
There was Mom, younger and less brittle, holding me on her lap at the county fair. There was one of the three of us sitting on the porch swing. Our smiles were so wide, and I wished I could remember that day.
There was another photograph, faded and worn, of our whole family, and I sat there staring at it helplessly as my eyes moved over the shape of my father.
I almost forgot what he had looked like. He left when I was around four or five years old.
The photograph was so old it looked like it had been finished in tea. Mom’s auburn hair was still thick and shiny, a color that insisted on itself; Dad’s expression even then was already half-turned, already leaving.
His arms were around both of us with the practiced tightness of someone who thought holding a pose could pass for holding a family together.
I wanted to hate him, but all I could do was squint, trying to find any resemblance in the geometry of his face that might answer a question I was no longer sure I needed solved.
I set the photo on the floor, letting it curl back on itself, and reached for the next layer down.
At the bottom, shoved between the cardboard and the insulation, were a set of battered notebooks. The cover was limp, leached of color; a strip of duct tape held it together at the spine. I knew immediately it was one of Mom’s journals.
The kind she started and abandoned, full of vows to quit smoking, or find God, or write a memoir that would finally explain herself to her own daughters.
My hands went clammy, but I opened it anyway.
Her pen bled blue across every page, a frantic cursive that varied from certainty to despair and back again. Most of the entries were short, half-thoughts, confessions hastily scratched before she lost her nerve.
I read them anyway, my eyes stinging from the dust and the knowledge that Mom had never really intended for anyone to see this part of her.