Mom crossed one leg over the other, and took out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “Fuck him,” she quipped.
“Mom!”
“No, truly,” Mom repeated, lighting her cigarette. “Fuck that son of a bitch for twisting every good memory you told him into some deranged Twilight Zone. We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story.”
I . . . never thought of myself, my story, my life, as anything more than a boring book shelved in a boring library in a boring town. But the more I thought about my family, about the summers I and my siblings ran around in the sprinklers, and played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, and the Halloweens Mom dressed as Elvira and Dad hid in a coffin and popped out to scare every poor kid who came trick-or-treating, and the years Alice and I played dress-up with the vintage clothes we found in the attic, and the summers collecting animal bones, and lighting candles for midnight waltzes through the parlors, and sitting so quietly in the kitchen with Dad to listen to the wind sing—
There was nothing but love in those memories.
We might’ve been a family in black, but our lives were filled with light and hope and joy. And that was something that Lee Marlow never understood, never wrote in his cold, technical prose.
It was a kind of magic, a kind of love story, I didn’t think he’d ever understand.
From the oak tree in our yard, a crow cawed in the branches, and a few of his friends echoed. My chest tightened.
Ben.
“And someday,” Mom added surely, as certain as sunrises and spring thunderstorms and wind through creaky old funeral homes, “I know you’ll write our story the way it was meant to be told.”
“I—I don’t think I could—”
“Of course you can,” she replied. “It might not be in one book. It might be in five or ten. It might be little bits of all of us scattered throughout your stories. But I know you’ll write us, however messy we are, and it’ll be good.”
“You have a lot more faith in me than I have in myself.”
Mom tapped me gently on the nose and smiled. “That’s how I know I’m a good mother. Now, these old bones need some rest,” she sighed, and stood. She kissed me on the forehead. In the porch light, she looked older than she ever had. Weighed down by sadness—but held together, still, by hope. “I’ll see you at the Waffle House in the morning. Sweet dreams, dearest.”
Then she went into the house, and closed the door behind her.
I sat there for a while longer as the wind began to howl through the trees as the storm grew closer. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky.
In my memories, I could see Dad sitting on the steps of the house, smoking a stinking cigar as he watched the storm roll in, a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, Mom leaning her head against his shoulder, a glass of merlot in her hand, her eyes closed as she listened to the rumble of thunder.
“There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.”
Another streak of lightning crawled across the sky, and I finally stepped out into the night.
The air was heavy and human. Alice said she couldn’t smell the rain, but I never understood how she couldn’t. It was so distinct, so full, so alive, like I wasn’t only breathing air, but the movement of electrons sparking together, igniting the sky.
As I started back toward the inn, thunder rolled across the town in a booming, house-shaking rattle that left my ears ringing. I hoped that when they eased Dad into the ground, the dirt would part for the thunder. I hoped the sound would rattle his bones still, make them dance, like they did mine. I hoped that, when the wind was high, blown from some far-off shore, I could hear him singing in the storm, as loud and high and alive as all the dead I’d ever heard singing.