Hallowed

She pressed her lips together, and I had the strangest feeling that only her short hair had aged since the days I’d stumbled beside her, hand in hand, some twenty years ago. Now, I was tall enough that my back ached as I hunched forward, the damn tendon in my upper back tugged at my shoulder blade. Yet, I didn’t notice the numbness in my hand as I shuffled out of the room. For now, I held my jaw in an honest effort to keep it from dropping.

My earliest memory of her, or of anything really, was when I sat in the middle seat, and both my mother and her, stepped out of the car, and I was left to myself, and would watch the world. As I have later found a certain depth in. Seeing the things that others are too busy to appreciate—life, as some call it.

When they returned, the car coughed into gear and sputtered off—we had a campervan for our summer weekends.

She had probably been old for thirty years by now. When I visited home, I half-expected to be met with a wall of thin smoke seeping from her room, the burnt scent of pork punching me in the face, and the wailing fire alarm sending the waving woman out into the hall to open anything that resembled a window. The warmth that used to fill the kitchen while she baked cream puffs for me and my siblings, was now replaced by a literal warmth as the meat charred in solitude.

Sometimes, she stayed in her temporary spot at the nursing home for the week, and I would catch myself giving the empty shoe rack a half-crooked smile, recalling her cooking attempts in the deafening silence.

When she was there however, she would look at me like a flipbook when I strode through the door. Her eyes flickered as she decided what age I was, whether I was me or my brother, and what to ask about which job I might have worked. I could see the gears turning, searching for the right words that trailed past her—a shame. Instead, she would give up and grip my wrist a little too tight, pull me in a little too close, and laugh a little too loud in my ear—her way of letting me know that the fine print didn’t matter, and I would lean in and feel like a kid again.

After skipping up the cold steps in the hall and flinging myself onto the couch, I would catch a whiff of the freshly baked buns that filled the air. In that moment, my jaw would drop in surprise, and my mother would already be smiling at me. Then, I’d bounce up and trail into the kitchen.

When I least expected it, my mother would slip a folder of old pictures in front of me while I was mesmerized by the coffee machine and the newly baked buns that stung in my joints. As I flipped through the images, I recognized the ’90s red Mazda sedan that had no right to conquer the snow-mounded hill road up to the house with such ease.

It was parked in front of a surprisingly new white house. Not the flaky one I know, where the cement in the foundation begged the sand and rebar adieu, leaving after seventy-some years. She was still herself though. Even when the car changed to a gray Beetle, she remained unmistakably the same, in her dark blue tracksuit and a cigarette hanging from her lips. And the younger she looked, the more she resembled my dear mother.

My grandmother’s vision had gone bad by now, and it would only get worse. But there was an entire world living in those dark eyes of hers—perhaps even another world snagged on her retina, and why shouldn’t it fall to her, seeing as long as she had lived?

What she told me next was so surreal that I had to believe it, even though at the time, I didn’t believe in “tomorrows” or “what comes next.”

“Not yet,” her voice rasped, in the scene painted in her mind and here, warming my face. Her eyes bore into the panel seams behind me as if she could see right through to the insulation. The handiwork of my grandfather.

I hadn’t thought much about it. Before the renovation, the room had been small. Tiny, even, at least for a young boy bouncing off the walls, jumping into the faux leather chair, flipping the leg rest up and down like a crow’s wing. He was all spent, lying in the hospital bed at home—the one my grandmother had begged the nurses, through tears, to strap him into so he wouldn’t hurt himself. They shook their heads. “Not allowed,” they’d said. And I get it. But still.

I never felt a speck of irritation seep out of him, he was like that, and tolerant wouldn’t cut it, not by far. Patient would put the man to shame. Let’s just say he was something else, and that I was proud to be of carpenter’s blood.

“You saw him,” slipped out of me before I knew it. Any other time, I’d laugh if a “medium” came on TV, or if some electrician swore he’d heard strange noises in an attic after pulling a 12-hour shift. But now, she had caught me off guard and hooked me.

She didn’t respond, just nodded slowly, her mind already drifting back to that night. Another conversation seemed to play out between us, one where her memories filled in the silence. By then, she must have seen him clearly, my grandfather. Sometimes, when I struggle to remember his face, I wish I could replay memories of him as easily. But I was all out.

Before I could ask, What happened next?, a gentle smile wrapped around her face, and her eyes met mine, and the haze cleared for a moment. I knew then, with an ache in my heart, that she must have seen him.

“And then he left.”