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On the trip out west, and then again on the way up the coast from San Francisco to Seattle, there’d been times when they’d switched off the radio, letting whoever wasn’t driving have a chance to sleep. Other times, they’d driven for long stretches without talking, simply watching the road disappear beneath the car. But those had been comfortable silences, punctuated by stray thoughts and occasional laughter, easily set aside with the clearing of a throat.
This, however, was different. It was a brittle quiet, sharp around the edges, and the stiffness of it had settled into every corner of the tiny car, making Owen shift uncomfortably in his seat. Back at the rental place, he’d offered to drive. He knew Dad hadn’t slept on the plane—a crowded red-eye from Seattle to Philadelphia—and he was slumped against the counter, rubbing at his bleary eyes. But he’d shaken his head.
“It’s fine,” he said, his voice gruff. “I’ve got it.”
As they drove out of the airport, Owen was thinking about the oddness of this trip. It was meant to be a good thing. When they’d learned that the house had finally sold, they’d toasted with mugs of apple juice. Afterward, in the backyard of their new home in Seattle, they’d circled the yard together, making plans and pointing out all the things they’d do to the place once they had money again.
But there’s no such thing as a completely fresh start. Everything new arrives on the heels of something old, and every begi
And Owen wasn’t so sure they were ready for that.
“We should stop on the way,” Dad had a
“Stop where?” Owen asked, but as soon as he said it, he knew. “Oh. Right. Yeah.”
They’d last visited his mother’s grave on their way out of New York, the two of them standing with bent heads and folded hands and blank eyes. There hadn’t been any tears. They were saving those, each of them, for the moments when it felt like she was truly with them, which wasn’t there on the windswept hill, on a chilly September day, where there was only the rough headstone and the clipped grass and the vast emptiness of a sprawling cemetery.
But today they would go back. It was supposed to be their first and only stop on the way to the house, but when a gas station loomed up ahead, hugging the highway on the right, Dad wrenched the wheel in its direction without explanation. Owen craned his neck to check the gauge, which of course showed that the tank was completely full; they couldn’t have been twelve miles out of the airport. Instead of pulling up to one of the pumps, Dad parked the car in front of the mini-mart, then stepped out without a word.
Owen sat up a bit straighter in his seat, watching his father disappear inside, and a few minutes later, Dad emerged with a bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane. He set them carefully in the backseat, the car door dinging, and then climbed back in and started the engine. Neither of them said a word as they eased back out onto the highway.
As they drew closer, the sights becoming familiar again, the car was still filled with a palpable dread, but it had at least started to feel as if they were in this together, which of course they were. At a stoplight, Dad even gave him a grim smile. It was part apology and part acknowledgment; it was all he had to offer at the moment, and Owen could tell it cost him a lot.
They turned in at the gated entrance to the cemetery, which stretched across a series of gentle hills, all of them dashed with gray headstones like an elaborate message in Morse code. It was 10:24 AM on a Wednesday, and the place was mostly empty. Owen was grateful for that. The first time they’d come, it had been for the funeral, and they’d both been raw with grief. The second time, just two months later, there was a numbness to the visit. Now there were months and months and miles and miles behind them, and Owen wasn’t sure how to feel. After parking the car, they followed a narrow path through some of the older gravestones, and while his mouth was dry and his hands were damp, his careful heart did nothing but beat in time with his careful footsteps.
When they arrived, they both stopped a few feet short of her headstone, which was simple, her name written in block letters across the top. Owen looked at it for a long time, waiting for his lump of a heart to do some sort of trick, something appropriate to the moment: He waited for it to leap or bound or skip or sink; he waited for it to be extraordinarily heavy or unexpectedly light; he waited for it to seize up or slow down. But it just kept ticking the way it always did, the way it was meant to, as well-behaved and predictable as its owner.
Dad was standing a few feet away, still gripping the bouquet. “Do you think she’d be okay with it?” he asked after some time had passed, and Owen looked over sharply. It had been nearly an hour since either of them had spoken. “We could have stayed, you know. We could have just gotten over ourselves and lived in the house. I’d have found a job eventually, I’m sure. But taking off like that…” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I think she wouldn’t have minded the New York part, if that had worked, but I’m not sure about the rest of it.”
“She’d have been fine with it,” Owen said quietly. “She loved the years you were on the road.”
Dad’s frown deepened. “Yeah, but we were adults.”
“Barely.”
“We were having an adventure.”
“So are we,” Owen said with a little smile.
“I’ve had you in four different schools this year. She would’ve hated that. She would’ve wanted you to have a normal senior year.”
“None of this is normal,” Owen said, his eyes on the grave. “Or maybe all of it is. It’s kind of hard to tell anymore.”
They stood there for a long time. A couple of squirrels darted past, using the gravestones in their game of hide-and-seek, and when the wind picked up, rustling the cellophane on the bouquet, Dad glanced down, surprised to find it still in his arms. He took a step forward and laid it on the stone, then backpedaled until he was at Owen’s side.
“Let’s go,” he said, and though his voice was soft, Owen could still hear the unspoken word at the end of it: home.
It was a short drive, not nearly long enough to recover from their last stop and prepare themselves for the next. When they pulled onto their old street, Owen could see Dad’s fingers tense on the wheel, and as the house came into sight, he was overcome by a wave of sadness more powerful than anything he’d felt at the cemetery. Even from here, he could already tell: It was the same house; it just wasn’t their home anymore.
Maybe it had started the moment she died, or maybe it was when they left. But now, as they parked out front and Owen stepped out of the car, he could see that the transition was complete. This house that they’d all loved, the house his parents had always dreamed of—with its green siding and white trim and wraparound porch—had been left empty for too long. One of their neighbors had been checking in on it from time to time, and there had been a few scattered showings with the real estate agent, but for the most part, it had simply sat here through seven months without them, through a Halloween without trick-or-treaters, a Thanksgiving without the smell of turkey, a Christmas without the uneven lights Dad always put up around the windows.
When they opened the door, they were suddenly like strangers, like neighbors, like visitors. The house was cold, the air gone out of the place, and as they moved through it, Owen realized that in spite of all the stuff—the furniture and the utensils and the curtains, the picture frames and the bedding and the books—the real measures of their lives here were now well and truly gone.