You get a phone call, driving home from work. It’s your brother. You haven’t spoken to him since his birthday, three months ago. He’s a mess, his sniffles carry through your car speakers. On an average Tuesday, he tells you that your mom is dying and he thinks that you should witness it.

He begs you to come home, but all you can hear is, “Return to your grave.”

You hang up on him without an answer and sit in traffic for the next thirty minutes in silence.

◈

When you get home, you collapse in your wife’s arms. When you tell her about your brother’s call, she asks what you want to do.

You take forever to respond because you don’t know what you want to do. Your brother said mom had been sick for a while, but she wanted to hold off on telling you. Derek is the one who wants you to come home, not her. You’re not sure you can even go for her, see her again. Like the failed daughter you are.

You start packing with a franticness that aches your muscles. Your wife cycles between attempting to read her book and watching you grab whatever clean clothes you can get your hands on to shove in your only suitcase.

She does, however, say, “You don’t have to go.”

You pause your packing. Her blue sweater is caught in your hands. Maybe you don’t have to go, but you respond, “She’s my mother.”

“Moms die every day.”

“Yeah, but not my mother.” You drop the sweater into your suitcase. A little piece of home away from home. “I have to be there. I don’t know why but I do.”

◈

You marathoned the final three hundred miles, chain smoking a pack of cigarettes you bought at a truck stop halfway between home and hell. This will be your little secret—if your mother found out, she’d sooner chastise your apparent disregard for safety before ever realizing what dropping everything just to see her actually means.

When you pull onto the street you grew up on, you’re nervous to see who will welcome you back into the house. You trashed your key when you were twenty-two and moved out for the final time, otherwise you wouldn’t be worried about this. Your parents never answered the door when they were in good health. Maybe it’ll be Derek, maybe it’ll be Derek’s wife Annie. Or maybe no one will answer and you will have driven almost eleven hours with a single bathroom stop for nothing.

Maybe yet, the ghost hiding in your old bedroom closet will open the door.

It takes you a minute to hear its whispers after you park in the street behind your brother’s minivan. You’ve been away for so long, you almost forgot what they sound like. Beyond the rustle of tree leaves in the breeze, between the bursts of static from the quiet radio. They sit just below the sounds of life, waiting for you to lock yourself away someplace where you can be alone.

You wish the whispers weren’t so pointed. They have such a way of getting under your skin, begging for you to wear their truths like a mask, making you feel like a monster again. Sometimes you miss the ease the whispers sing about. And then you remember you were only a child and everything is easier as a child.

Derek lets you in after you text him that you’re here. He pulls you into a hug that lasts several seconds too long for you to feel comfortable, then takes your suitcase and leads you upstairs. He tells you that your old room still has a bed in it, so you won’t have to pay for a hotel. You get to stay in the thick of it—his words. You bite back the want to correct him.

Forced. You’re forced to stay in the thick of it.

He leaves you to settle in after he makes you promise to eat dinner with everyone, minus mom because she’s in the hospital. Your room is different now, every little contour of personality you carved in there—posters, bed sheets, the old paint color—had been wiped clean to a fresh white. There are still hidden reminders of you though, hiding behind the dresser and the closet doors. Places where you carved too deep that the scars came out ridged.

You drop your suitcase on the bed and run your fingers over a patch of raised drywall, unable to escape the feeling that despite all the little marks and memories, you no longer belong here.

You kick off your shoes and believe that you can at least pretend.

◈

Dinner is painful to sit through.

You meet Annie for the first time since the wedding, and all you can say is she’s still nice. Your father is as pleasant as you remember him as, which is to say not pleasant at all. He at least has the sense (or maybe the lack of a spine) not to bring up the number of years since you last saw him or your missing wife.

After you finish cleaning the dishes, you and your brother stand at the island waiting for dad to go to sleep. Your brother asks you to drink with him. You finish a glass of wine each and he apologizes for asking you to come.

“She’s my mother,” you tell him.

“Yeah, but she—“ You pretend you don’t hear the rest of his sentence. Instead, you pour yourself another drink and hope that your body still handles alcohol like it did when you were in your twenties.

“She’s still my mother,” you say. You don’t know why you’re trying so hard to convince yourself of this fact.

◈

You aren’t sure what you’re supposed to do or say. Your mother is in the hospital, a fifteen minute drive from your childhood home. Your brother guilted you into being here, even though you both stayed up until three in the morning, buzzing and talking about everything and nothing.

Your brother is hungover. You think you might still be a little bit drunk. The two of you finished off three bottles of wine together before realizing what you were doing. He called it quits (the coward) and you broke into the liquor cabinet in the garage and drank half your father’s expensive whiskey.

Derek found you pacing around the backyard, sun half risen, and told you to shower and get some coffee before dad woke up. Derek is the reason you even bothered to get in the back of the minivan, the reason you’re sprawled in a massively uncomfortable chair in the corner of your mother’s private hospital room, clutching onto a thermos full of coffee like your life depends on it. He gave you the face you could never say no to, even when you were kids.

She’s a stick. Your mother is dying and she’s a stick. That’s the nicest thing you can think after she demanded to know who let you in her room. Like you aren’t her child. Like you aren’t the ghost who haunts her closet.

After several minutes of hushed conversation you aren’t allowed to join, your father leaves to get coffee. Derek asks if you want anything as a formality before he leaves too. You know he only left because he thinks you might repair things with mom. Like it’s all your fault things are this way.

You push yourself up in the chair to see her better. She still looks like she’s dying. “You know,” you say, “Derek is the one who told me about this. Blame him. But I’m not surprised you didn’t want me to see you like this.”

She takes a terribly rattling breath. She keeps her eyes glued to her thin blanket when she says, “See me like what?”

“So fucking weak.” You really are still a little drunk, because those words tumble out of your mouth so quietly, so lacking of all the edge you wanted. They should’ve hurt, but she manages to shape you into someone you don’t want to be, even now. You hope she’s proud of the way she still affects you.

You slump back in the chair and clutch tighter to your thermos. This way, you can close your eyes and pretend the warmth is your wife hugging you, surrounding you in her soft blue sweater.

◈

You and Annie are in the house alone. Derek called you an Uber when he came back to the hospital room. He could always sense a brewing fight. You sit on opposite ends of the couch. She looks like she wants to ask you something and you feel like throwing up.

But you keep your ass on the couch because you don’t trust yourself completely to be alone.

You stare into the backyard from the couch. You can see the wood patio and the grill and the stone fire pit your mother begged for and the holes from the old swing set and garden beds of weeds and the one bare patch of dirt in the middle of the yard.

Annie asks if you need anything, and because alcohol makes you more honest that you like to be, you leave the living room without answering.

◈

You sit with your back against the foot of the bed in your childhood bedroom and wonder who a life of hiding was made for. Someone stronger than you? Someone weaker than you? Someone neither stronger or weaker than you, but just different? You pick at the skin around your thumbs for the first time in almost two decades as you decide that kind of life wasn’t made for anyone.

That’s the reason you killed your younger self, cut the body into several pieces and buried it in the backyard. That’s why you built your current body from scratch, into something untouchable. Unbreakable.

Maybe that’s the ghost in your closet. The you that didn’t get to grow up.

You think, you should have killed it quicker, before it gained a consciousness and got memories. You can feel its eyes on you, too curious for its own good, stuck in its own juvenile ignorance. There’s also a sadness, a longing, a pain that never left you even after you made a new body.

But you don’t feel bad. You don’t think you could feel bad, because you know where that sadness comes from, and it didn’t come from anything you did.

You pull your knees into your chest and hold on to your ankles. Being back in this house, you feel like a child again. Scared of being found out and you don’t know why. You are all wrong, born with your joints in the wrong places, a left hand on your right wrist and a finger where your big toe should be. You were born a monster, with fangs too big to hide and claws and fur on your knuckles. You were born too big for your old body, the real you begging to rip its way out of your skin.

When you were a child, you didn’t know what these feelings meant. As an adult, you know it just means the people who were supposed to love you, didn’t.

You decide you’re going to do something about it and then your phone buzzes. A text from your brother.

Mom’s dead.

◈

You skip the funeral. You can already see the whole thing in your mind: how all of your distant relatives who found out about you through gossip and vague Facebook posts would look at you; how you’d be expected to eulogize on your special relationship with your mother that only a daughter could have and how you wouldn’t even be able to stand up to do that; how people would expect you to cry over how wonderful and loving of a mother she was.

Because you skip the funeral, your father avoids you when the funeral attendees gather at the house and your brother gives you that same guilting look. Instead of sitting your ass in the living room and quietly stewing for the next several hours and drinking far too much, you sneak out to the backyard. You stand in the one bare patch of dirt, under which you buried yourself.

You drop to your knees, dig your fingers into the dirt still a little damp from the rain last night. You dig and dig and dig, pulling dirt into your lap and to your sides to blanket your only pair of dress pants, until your fingers touch cardboard. An old shoe box.

You pull the box out. The red paint is peeling off now, leaving patches of brown cardboard. The words you markered on the lid are mostly untouched, still legible. A plea.

Come back better.

You don’t bother ripping the tape off the edges and checking the contents of the shoe box. You can tell by the weight that everything that matters is still there. You carry it to the grill, where you take a handful of newspaper scraps and a lighter, then to the fire pit. Even after all that begging from your mother, you only ever used the fire pit twice.

Well, three times if you count what you’re doing now.

You know that all of the guests are watching you from inside the house as you drop the shoe box and the newspaper scraps on top of the half-burned wood and ashes. The door slides open when you flick the lighter on and drop it in, too. The scraps catch quickly, then what’s left of the wood. The flames swallow the shoe box whole.

You can feel the heat inside your body, licking at your organs and your bones. This is the you your mother was desperate for you to build and rebuild. This is the you that you’ll never have to be again.