Emily Vance Brown

Beyond the curve in the road, past the old post office with the barred-up windows and the dead shrubs slumped by the graffiti-covered mailbox, there was a house. It had not been a home in some time. A man lived there, alone, dying, while the ghost of his son sat in his car with the engine running in the front driveway.

Jean had been sitting in the car for some time now.

She turned the engine off, once, about thirty minutes ago, and put her hand on the handle for a moment. She couldn’t make herself open the door. So she turned the engine back on, queued a few songs on Spotify, and waited until she felt like someone else again.

Some time later—years, maybe, or perhaps five minutes; once she had been reborn—she locked the door behind her. She left her purse in the front seat—she wouldn’t be here long. It was 105 degrees Fahrenheit, humidity not considered, and the back of her legs were sticky from the cracked leather seats.

She stretched her arms above her head and bent to touch her toes. She let herself hang there for a moment, folded over in the driveway of her childhood home. Both her parents’ cars were in the driveway, her mother’s squeaky-clean with a temporary paper license plate and her father’s covered in a thick yellow layer of pollen dust that would have infuriated him had he still had the stamina to go outside and see it.

Jean’s mother, Kim, opened the door. Her jaw dropped open when she saw Jean, and hung there. Jean paused for a moment, but she didn’t break the silence. She knew it would make her mother mad, but seeing her standing there so perfectly still, mouth open in a cartoonish “O” of surprise, she couldn’t help it—she laughed.

“I tried to warn you,” she said.

Her mother’s surprise transformed into a tight-lipped grimace. She nodded and gestured Jean inside.

“How is he today?” Jean asked.

“Still the same. He’s asleep now, but he was awake for a while this morning. We’ll have to wake him up for his afternoon meds.”

Kim guided her through the hallway with her tour-guide voice on, like she would a stranger, as if Jean hadn’t spent the first twenty-two years of her life in this house. Other than the new medical-caregiver mess, it was the same as she remembered. Her mother had kept the same artwork on the walls, dusty Monet reprints in shining gold frames and wooden crosses adorned with New Mexican turquoise ovals and silver beads. Jean’s childhood photos were where she left them, too: a second-grade school picture day portrait in which she smiled so aggressively it looked like she was squeezing her eyes shut, and a professional Disney photographer photo of the three of them at Disney World posing with the eerily human-sized kittens from The Aristocats.

From the kitchen, Jean could barely see over the raised granite bartop separating the kitchen from the living room her mother had transformed into a makeshift hospice bedroom.

The kitchen counter was littered with orange pill bottles of all sizes, yellow post-it notes detailing new symptoms, and printed graphs charting which meds to give, and when. Jean tried not to look too closely at any of it.

“When do we do that?” Jean asked.

“Hmm?”

“The afternoon meds.”

“Oh, yeah, well…” Kim shuffled through the piles of papers on the kitchen counter. “About an hour,” she said.

They stood in an uncomfortable silence.

Jean broke first. “So… how have you been doing?”

Her mother scoffed. “How do you think I’ve been doing?

Jean didn’t have anything to say to that.

“Do you want coffee?” Kim asked.

The fridge was more coffee creamer than food. Mocha, caramel, sweet cream, vanilla, Almond Joy. 2% milk, skim milk, a suspiciously unlabeled gallon of milk that Jean assumed was one of her mother’s black-market unpasteurized finds. There was a wilted bag of premade salad mix in a produce drawer, a jar of pickles, three cans of Dr. Pepper in the side shelf, a few Tupperwares of pureed soups and juices.

“Is there anything you’d want to know about my life?” Jean asked while the coffee was brewing.

Kim shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.

They drank the coffee in silence, each scrolling their phone until the alarm went off for medications.

“Let me wake him up and talk to him first,” Kim said.

He was disoriented when he woke up, eyes out of focus and slightly glazed over. Kim whispered to him behind her raised hand. Jean watched from the kitchen, unsure if she wanted to know what Kim was saying to him. It was hard to look at the withering body in the bed. He was sunken into the mattress, sores barely visible on the back of his arms. The blanket had slipped off one of his feet, revealing the garish gray sole of his foot.

“I have someone here to see you,” Kim said to him. He looked at Jean, scanning her face. There was no recognition in his eyes.

“We need to turn him to help with the sores,” Kim said.

Together, they shift him onto his other side. Her mother moved the chairs to the other side.

“You can sit with him for a while, if you want.”

Jean took his hand.

“Hey, Dad, it’s Jean. I don’t know if you remember me.” He stared past her face with a blank expression. She felt like she should be crying, but no tears came. She leaned in closer. “It’s Jake,” she said. “Do you remember Jake?” His eyes slid over to her face. He didn’t look confused or angry, the way he did the last time they spoke. “It’s me, Dad,” Jean said.

He had nothing to say, or maybe, no words to say it with, and she had already said everything there was to say a long time ago.

Her mother showed her out.

“Do you want me to call you when it happens?” Kim asked.

“You can just text if you want,” Jean said. “But yeah, I’d like to know.”

Her mother nodded. They did not hug. They did not touch. They both stood in the doorway for a moment, assessing each other, then Jean gave a short nod and started off across the driveway.

“Jean?” her mother called, her hand resting on the doorknob.

“Yeah?”

“Are you happy?” she asked.

Jean froze for a moment, feeling like she hadn’t understood the question. “Most of the time,” she said.

“That’s good,” her mother said. “Don’t be a stranger.”

She closed the door without looking back.