My flight was almost empty, and they gave us pretzels, and my dad was dead.
The Uber driver’s car smelled like lavender incense to cover up the weed, and my dad was dead.
I had already been standing in front of the steps to the Days Gone Funeral Home for ten minutes, watching the figures inside the glowing windows walk in and out of the parlors less and less, because the reading of the will had already started, and Dad was dead.
The funeral home was a renovated Victorian mansion, repainted white every summer so it looked fresh and ghostly for whatever happy haunts decided to arrive. The shingles were a deep obsidian that, when the sun hit the roof just right, sparkled like black sand. The patterns in the foundation’s brickwork were faded reds and oranges, and the wrought iron railings curved sweet deathly designs across the upper windows and dormers. On Valentine’s it was festooned in paper-cutout hearts and pink and red balloons, on the Fourth of July we set off purple fireworks, and at Christmas it was outlined in lights of red and green, like the grumpy old grandfather who didn’t want to admit he was enjoying the holidays but very much was.
It looked just as it had the day I last left for college a decade ago. I still remembered the way Mom kissed my forehead and left a bloodred stain in the shape of her lips, and the way Dad hugged me so tightly, like he didn’t want to say goodbye.
I couldn’t wait for him to hug me again—and then I remembered, like a stone dropping into my stomach—that he wouldn’t. Ever again.
It knocked the breath out of me.
I should’ve come back sooner. I should’ve taken weekend trips like Carver suggested. I should’ve gone fishing with Alice in the summer, I should’ve helped Dad re-stain the front porch, and I should’ve gone with Mom to those ballroom dancing classes.
I should’ve, should’ve, should’ve . . .
But I never did.
The funeral home looked the same as when I last saw it, the stained glass windows and the dormers and the turrets, but there was something inherently wrong as I stood there on the porch, mustering up the courage to step inside.
Dad was gone, and there were crows sitting in the branches of the dead tree beside the house, crowing, prodding me to go inside. I didn’t think much about the crows.
Maybe I should have.
It’s just—the world felt all wrong. Dad should’ve been answering the door. He should’ve been outstretching his arms and bringing me into a rib-crushing hug and telling me what a treat it was to have me back home.
But instead when I rang the doorbell, a large and long gong that reverberated through the house’s old bones, my little sister answered the door. She’d cut her black hair short since the last time I’d seen her, and her gauges were a little larger than last time, though she didn’t have on her dark gothic eyeliner. But that might’ve been because she’d cried it all off.
“Oh, it’s you,” Alice greeted, opening the door wider for me to come in with my suitcase, and retreated into the foyer.
“Hello to you, too.” I stepped inside. I took off my coat—I didn’t need it in Mairmont at all, it turned out—and hung it on the coatrack. There were about ten other coats hanging there—so I could only guess who was waiting in the parlor. People I didn’t want to see.
Which was, like, everyone.
Alice waited in the foyer for me to hang up my coat and made a hurry up motion with her hand. She was dressed in black, from the oversized sweater she pulled over her hands to her black jeans to her black Doc Martens, and for a moment I could trick myself into thinking this was just another day, another family meeting, because Alice always wore black. She had the most Dad in her. Alice wearing black was like a blue sky—it was just right.
I hated the color. For a multitude of reasons. Turns out when you were known for being like that kid in The Sixth Sense, everyone expected you to dress in all black and quote Edgar Allan Poe.