I don’t even know where she got half of this shit from.
As I paw through my mother’s belongings, my sister holds up a piece of paper from the 90s. We share a collective groan. I sit back on the floor, wiping my hair away from my face with the back of my hand to avoid the dust on my fingertips.
“I don’t even know where she got half of this shit from,” I tell my sister. “Why does she have a Burger King receipt from 2005?” This makes my sister laugh and grab it from my hands to hold it to the light in an attempt to read it.
“God, could you imagine paying two dollars for a burger?”
“The thought of what would be in that to make it two bucks makes me want to ralph,” I say, mimicking a gag. My sister laughs and stands up next to me, brushing the debris and dust off of her pants. She announces she’s taking a break, and I nod her away. I resume my task, undeterred. The room fills with silence except for shuffles and rustles. For some reason, it feels sacrilegious to play music during this task, my mother’s office turning into a pew. Or a tomb. Papers in the trash, except for handwritten notes, which I squirrel away into a pile for myself. This already declutters much of the space. I pull another box towards me. The gentle tinkling and rustling inside tells me what it is before I open it.
As expected, neat stacks of Christmas ornaments and lights lay inside. I can’t see them, but I know there are handmade ones from my siblings and I from when we were in single digits, our little fingerprints forever memorialized in red and green paint and popsicle sticks. I see a jumble of pompoms and popsicle sticks with glued on sequins, my clumsy childhood handwriting spelling out some semblance of “I love you mommy”. I sigh heavily, and reach for a wipe to clean my hands.
Something prickles at the back of my neck.
“I know you’re here,” I murmur into the quiet of the room. I lift my eyes and can’t help the jolt of my heart when I see her dart out of my peripheral vision.
I started seeing her a few months before my mom died. I remember the first time quite vividly; in a moment where I don’t know if it was a dream or reality, I woke up to see a little girl ducking just out of sight. Whether I had been awake or dreaming, I remember my heart thudding in my chest, grabbing for my wife next to me.
I didn’t see her for a while, and then as I was composing myself in the bathroom after an afternoon of caretaking, she stood right behind me in the mirror. A startled gasp and surge of fear shocked through me and I whirled around, only to see there was nothing there. I remember feeling distinctly terrified to turn back to the mirror, but when I did, she was nowhere to be seen.
I avoided that bathroom for several days after that.
It still unnerves me to look at her fully, and so I mostly stick to glances out of the corner of my eye; even still, every attempt I’ve made to look straight at her has only left me feeling stupid for thinking it was real. I’m only able to catch silent glimpses or the flash of a sheet of hair before she escapes me again. For the first month, seeing her filled me with a sense of dread that I’ve never experienced before. It’s a mix of sadness and a strange duty that I feel now, no longer dreading her because of fear, but because it was just a fucking bummer. I don’t have anything left in me today to feel terrified of her; going through my mother’s belongings had taken a lot from me already. I try to calm my hammering heart.
I flip through the pages of a photo album, pausing to take in the red-tinted photos of my mom as a young child. One of her sledding with her brothers, jackets zipped to their throats as they all laugh exuberantly. There’s another of her and her parents, her dad standing tall and straight and serious. Her mother stands on the other side of her, sharing the same cheeks and smile as my mom (and my sister, and me). They both have their arms around my mom, her hair cut in a chic little bob and lacy socks. They’re standing at the scenic overlook at some cliffside, undoubtedly much different in the 70s than today. Her school photos, face unchanging. As I flip towards the end of the book, already looking for the next album to flip through, something catches my eye.
I paw through the last few pages again, and sure enough, a few of the very back ones have pictures. Photos of two girls—one undoubtedly my mother, and the other with a sheet of hair that makes my blood run cold, slightly older than my mom. As I stare closely at the pictures, the uneasy feeling returns and I hear my heart thudding in my ears.
There are photos of them together over years and years. In one, the older girl is holding a baby in her clumsy, small arms. I recognize the baby from old photos of my mom. Over the years in various embraces, the girls grew more and more similar as they aged together. I can’t stop poring over them, leaning in closely to take in as much as possible. A polaroid of my mom at sixteen or seventeen, grinning into the camera with smeared makeup around her face in some semblance of clown makeup, sits next to one of the girl with similar (but distinctly different) makeup of her own. There’s a carefree quality to my mother’s grin in each of the photos that I hadn’t seen in a long time.
The pictures are more sparse on the next page, the girl looking more and more frail as time passes. Suddenly, the pictures are in hospital rooms, tubes and wires stringing from the girl’s body as her skin sticks closer to the bones. The carefree glow begins to fade from my mom’s face. There’s one final one: the young girl, shrouded in a sturdy wool cloak, fuzzy earmuffs over a warm hat pulled low over her face. My mom stands behind her, hands on the back of her wheelchair. They’re squinting and grinning (or grimacing) into the camera, sun clearly in their eyes. The girl looks scarily small, barely visible in the mass of fabric. They’re at what looks like a farmer’s market with stalls in the background, people moving in blurs around them. Something familiar pulls at me as I look at it, but I’m unable to place it; maybe it’s just the familiar feeling of dread and slight terror.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been seeing a similar face recently.
I pull my eyes away from the photo at last with a small inhale of breath. My pulse thunders in my ears and the back of my neck prickles again. I flip to the next page of the book. It’s mostly empty except for a small clipping of hair, fine and lightly blonde. There’s a polaroid next to it, the only other item on the page.
It’s taken on what seems to be the crest of a hill, overlooking a small clearing in a forest. There’s what looks like a small park or benches just barely in frame. It’s evening time, the light dwindling. Something eerie settles into my bones looking at the photo.
Impulsively, I carefully peel away the thin sheet of plastic. Every protesting squeak it gives makes me wince, but I extract the polaroid and quickly smooth the plastic back down. I set the photo album to the side and stare at the polaroid before putting it into the front pocket of my overalls. With my heart in my ears, I stand up, brushing my pants off as I do. I suddenly want out of this room, desperately. All I can think about is that girl. A sister? It would explain the resemblance, but it wouldn’t explain that I never knew about an aunt. My mother only had brothers, both of which I hadn’t spoken to since I was in my teenage years. One was deeply hated by my mom, and the other was barely tolerated; what happened in the years between the photos of them sledding and ripping into Christmas presents and the icy silence, I don’t know. A friend? No, that was stupid. What kind of friend would be there for when my mom was a baby? A family friend? Maybe a cousin?
Still, I rack my brain for any mention of errant women in my mom’s life, past and present(ish). I vaguely grasp at the memory of a close friend of hers that had been the victim of a serial killer in the 70s, but realize the timelines didn’t match up. I imagine the polaroid burning its way through the fabric of my overalls and my shirt, settling into the thin skin of my chest.
I find my sister in the kitchen, and the relief of her presence is immediate. It makes me realize how activated I had been in the office.
“This is going to be a weird question.”
She looks up at me questioningly, mouth full of BLT.
“Did mom ever have a sister?”
She gulps her food down and laughs. “What? No. Just brothers.”
“Yeah, right? I don’t know why I asked,” I laugh a little, rubbing the back of my neck.
“It’s alright. Grief does weird stuff. Why? Did you find something in there?”
“No,” I lie impulsively. I don’t know why, but I feel compelled to keep my discovery a secret. “Just some pictures, but it was just a friend I think.” My words ring false in my ears, but I hope she can’t hear it. I surreptitiously slide the polaroid from my front pocket to my purse when my sister has her back turned.
She doesn’t seem to notice, and we resume working efficiently through the evening. I avoid the office. No further clues surface through all of our digging, and we return to the hotel room that evening. We agreed that the townhouse she died in was not where we wanted to sleep. In our silence, I go back to the girl over and over again. There’s something familiar about the girl in the picture. She does share an unsettling resemblance to the women in our family, but what kind of secret can be kept between that many people for that long? In the last few moments of my mother’s life, through a fog of morphine and steroids and brain cancer, surely something would have slipped. Even my sister, who spent a lot of her childhood with our grandma, didn’t know. An unsettling thought fills my brain: did my mother kill someone?
I shake it out immediately. No. She was clearly ill. From the pictures in the hospital, it can be assumed that she spent a lot of time there. From what I knew about my mother and grandmother, they both detested going to the hospital. My mom immediately refused to be in hospice there, instead opting for the comfort of home instead. My grandma died in a nursing home a few years back, comfortable in her room. Maybe the aversion started in those photos. Maybe it was a beloved cousin. I rack my brain for conversations that could fit into the puzzle with retrospect. I fall into a restless sleep with the questions swirling in my brain.
***
Our loved ones don’t ever go anywhere, you know. They’re still with you.
This was echoed by nearly everyone I shared my loss with. One thing that I was unprepared for—-other than my mom’s death—-was the visceral discomfort other people feel. I always loved the idea of being spoken to from the Great Beyond. Death and ghosts have fascinated me since I was a little girl, but the permanence of dying began to terrify me somewhere along the line. My family was deeply agnostic, so ghosts were the only logical conclusion my brain could come to about the afterlife.
Shortly before she died, I asked her to send me a sign when she got where she was going. As my sister and I traipsed down the stairs after the coroner wheeled her out, breath fogging in front of us as I was zipped into a coat my mother wouldn’t need anymore, I looked up at the stars. The sky was beautifully clear and crisp. The air had begun to chill a few days before. As I squinted at them, silently wishing her a good night, I got the distinct impression her response was “Out to lunch - be back soon.”
So I waited.
The first time I dreamt of her was a few days after her death. I was in her townhouse, eerily familiar but not at all the same. The walls wound and wound around me, unfamiliar corners and staircases, as I was taunted endlessly by scrapes and bumps. Just when I felt close, what sounded like a cabinet would slam close somewhere across the house. There was a distinct feeling of terror and helpless guilt as I desperately tore around the home. I couldn’t be sure if the noises were her—-what if I missed her calling for me from the afterlife? A larger question hung over me, however: what if it’s something that knows about my mother?
So I waited more.
The confidence I had in visits fell. And fell. And fell. Days, then weeks, then months. I kept my options open—-open to opportunities, but I wanted (want) a bonafide sign. I wanted her favorite song on a radio that won’t turn off, or a whiff of her laundry detergent in a still room, or a gentle phantasmal weight to hug me as I fell asleep. I want to sit with her buried in the sand of the beach by my childhood home and hear her bright laugh again. I want to watch the shows we never got to see together. I want to update her on the ones that she’s missing. I felt—feel—hot jealousy when others shared their own spectral visits, wishing I had the ones with beautiful conversations or reassurances of being at peace. It sits inside me, burning and heavy and sharp, and prickles at my eyes. I find myself staring into the mirror, desperately searching my features for signs of her. I notice I have smile lines by my eyes one day and crumple on the floor when it occurs to me my mother will never see me with them, the perfect mirror of her own.
Now, I feel like a fucking idiot for ever thinking I would get anything different than this. God has never kept me company, nor have I ever sought out his. I’ve never lit candles or recited elegies. I’ve only turned to God with my most desperate pleas in my most desperate moments; it wasn’t as if he’d ever listened before. If I wanted in, I should’ve laid the groundwork long ago. My mom never believed in any sort of life-after-death. She didn’t even have a funeral, just her children and husband at her deathbed. It feels less comforting and more cruel to continue to fool myself into seeing little ways she’s still here. What good would chasing her ghost around and around do?