a plant and then lit them. And put it into our fireplace, which has never worked, and called it our fire in the fireplace over and over again.
I stand still until my eyes adjust. I look for the outline of my mother on the couch. Horrible visions come to me of her ghost, and what it would look like—I imagine that if I wanted to see it, I could. I don’t want to see you, I tell her. I don’t want to see you yet.
I think of her body, her empty body inside of a drawer in the hospital. Filed away like information. Cold.
From the streetlights, from the fading light outside, I can faintly make out the contents of the room. I walk toward the kitchen with my arms outstretched. And there is the flashlight, plugged into the wall. It makes one bright spot on the walls and the floor and I swing it around and around looking for things I can’t name.
I open the refrigerator. There is no cold inside. The smell of rotting things comes toward me and I shut it tight. In the pantry there are chips and things, my mother’s junk—the stuff I bought for her and brought to her and which helped to kill her. I open one of the bags and stuff something roughly in my mouth. I chew without tasting.
I try adjusting the thermostat on the wall but there is no rush of noise from the basement, no click that tells me the heat’s gone on.
Blankets.
I walk upstairs, still holding the bag of chips. At the top of them I know what I will see and I don’t shine the flashlight on it. I feel around for it with my hands—the note that my mother taped to her bedroom door. It’s burned into my brain. Do not come in. Call police.
She said: Love, Mom. That’s what she wrote.
I tear the note off the door. I crumple it into a ball and throw it down the stairs.
I don’t go into her bedroom. I can’t yet. I pull her door shut.
When I go into my room I shine the flashlight around it and it’s just as I left it, and I feel that it should have changed somehow, from a boy’s room into a man’s. The best memories I have of her are in here: when she would rescue me from whatever I’d imagined, when she’d come running for me in the night when I cried out. I woke up in this room once, six years old, running a fever, seeing or hallucinating frightening things in the dark. She came running for me in her red plaid robe, saying What is it, what is it, Kelly?
It was nuns. Black and diamond-shaped nuns, who floated by me one after another, faster and faster until they became a blur that I could not separate from the general dark of the room. I couldn’t speak from fear. When my mother came in she was my hero and she sat on my bed. I feared for her ankles. I tried to tell her about the anklebiter that lived under the bed and I couldn’t.
Be careful, I finally whispered, and she said, Of what?
Down below.
She looked under the bed, she got down on her knees and peered into the empty space under the bed, and she told me that there was nothing there.
Still—she crawled into the bed beside me and curled her arm beneath my head. I was six years old. Back then it did not matter to me about her bathrobe or her terrible old-fashioned hairstyle or her physical closeness to me. What mattered was that she was protecting us both from harm. And that she did not have friends—this too I didn’t mind, this too seemed right and fine to me. She was my mother.
She cooked for me when I was small.
She made cookies. Chocolate chip cookies and sometimes, many times, spaghetti for dinner. It was my favorite thing to eat. It was only when I started buying groceries for us that I realized the lifesaving cheapness of spaghetti and tomato sauce for dinner.
I’m starving suddenly. I stuff some more potato chips in my mouth. They’re stale—too flexible. No chomp to them. I drop the bag on the floor.
I take two blankets off my bed and wrap them tightly around myself.
Then—I don’t know what compels me, but I get down onto the floor and I pull myself slowly under the bed. I used to do this when I