There are few situations as universally fraught as the cleaning out of a departed loved one’s home. It’s a grief-filled situation laced with an almost archeological possibility of discovery. What treasures will we find? What secrets of the past will be revealed? Yasmin Adele Majeed subverts this pattern by situating the emotional core of her story entirely within the concerns of the living: three generations of Filipina American women, and a voluble cockatoo, who clean out the family beach house following the patriarch’s passing. This is a coming-of-ages story, a story about how different generations face the impending changes in their lives. Above all, it is a story about the messy, frustrating, contradictory, and joyous business of being part of a family.
Narrative has played a pivotal role in fostering the early careers of so many of my favorite writers. I couldn’t be more delighted to see Yasmin Adele Majeed join their ranks.
The Clean-Out
I had been dreading my mother’s arrival all week, and now here she was, her own mother in tow. I watched their car wind up the long dirt road that led to the beach house, a cloud of dust following in their wake. Tall grass separated the house from the beach, and out of instinct I crouched in the field, out of sight. After a few days alone at the house, it was my new routine to take these evening walks along the beach, following its crest until the sand receded into the redwood forest in the distance. The forest marked the end of my walks. I was always too scared to enter the woods alone.
I held this last moment of solitude close—the sea behind me, the road in front—before the slam of the car door punctured the evening’s quiet. “Teo,” my mother called out. “Where is she?”
I watched her circle the car and help her mother, my Lola, out from the passenger seat. Lola looked tired. Four weeks ago, Walter—her late husband, and my mother’s stepfather—had died unexpectedly. Complications from chemo, my mother had told me on the phone.
Lola said something to my mother, who did not reply. “Teo, come help,” she said, sharply. For a moment I imagined myself as a petulant daughter, running away into the forest, where no one could find me. But I had never been that girl, and I felt too old to be any other kind than the one I was.
I stood up. The grass tickled my ankles. “I’m here,” I said. “Right here.”
Their faces turned to me in surprise. Lola’s broke into a smile when she saw me, but my mother’s was troubled. She didn’t expect me from that direction.
The last time I saw Lola was during our annual visit to Vacaville last fall. She looked the same to me now, her cherubic face brown and lined by years spent in too-sunny places: the Philippines, Guam, California. She had worked as a seamstress for most of her life. When I visited her, she sat me down in her garage to take my measurements for dresses that, when we got home, my mother tucked into her closet, with the promise that I could wear them for “special occasions” that never arrived. Lola’s garage walls were lined with shelves of pastel Beanie Babies and wispy-haired troll dolls, and I always associated her with their treacly cuteness. As she aged, she looked more and more like them—a small, overripened child.
As I helped her into the beach house, I was surprised by how strong her grip was. She had just turned eighty last year. She retired from work ten years before that and had taken to wearing elaborately decorated acrylic nails. These ones were a deep crimson with sequined bows glued to the pinkies and forefingers. I found her nails glamorous, evoking her short, youthful career as a lounge singer on the Manila club scene. But my mother, my practical mother, found Lola’s nails tacky.
“Are you excited for college, Teodora?” Lola asked. Her voice was shaky, quieter than I remembered. “When do you leave?”
“At the end of August,” I said. I was going to Williams in the fall. It would be my first time leaving California, and my first time leaving home. I had been counting down the days all summer.
“You’re going so soon, baby,” she murmured.
I didn’t reply. I was too focused on my mother, who was quietly—and suspiciously, I felt—messing with their bags in the trunk. So much so that I didn’t notice Lola digging her nails into my arm until I settled her on the couch.
“Oh!” she said. “Sorry, baby. That’s my fault.”
I examined the damage, a line of pink crescents on the inside of my wrist. “No harm, no foul, Lola,” I said to reassure her.
When I looked back up she was staring at the floor blankly, as if someone had come and switched her off without my noticing.
“I’ll go check on Mom,” I said, touching her shoulder with the tips of my fingers. Lola did not reply.
We were at the house on a simple mission: to clean it up. I had been at my father’s house in Sacramento when my mom called to dispatch me to the beach house.
“I don’t know what shape it’s in,” she said. “But I don’t want to see any of his stuff.”
She was referring to Walter.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine, Teo,” she said cheerfully. I could tell she was upset. “Everything’s perfectly fine.”
She always hated him.
When I’d gotten to the house, there was not much evidence of Walter. He had purchased the summer house with his pension. It was a drafty shotgun, built too close to the beach, and the ocean crept closer each year. We never used it for vacation getaways the way he imagined. My Tiyo Francis lived there with his wife when he was released from Folsom, my cousin Bea stayed for a semester when she got kicked out of CSU Fullerton for dealing bunk ecstasy to freshmen, and my favorite cousin Carlina had stayed with her girlfriend when her dad finally kicked her out last year. When I was eight, I spent a blissful summer here with my mother, because, as I found out on Labor Day, she had been quietly getting divorced from my father.
Tiya Eilene had initiated a redecoration five years ago that cleared the house of memorabilia. I had gathered the remaining trinkets—the photos from Walter’s Naval Academy graduation and family reunions that my mother didn’t want to go to, tchotchkes from various island cruises, including a handful of tinsel leis and pressed pennies engraved with the national flora of American states, a Bush-Quayle ’93 hat, and a lavender marbled urn carrying the ashes of a “Penelope ‘Peggy’ Williams, beloved daughter, sister, aunt, and friend to many,” a collection of mac ’n’ cheese boxes that expired thirteen years earlier, in 2005—and placed them in the closet of Lola’s room. But in Lola’s bedroom, I left the framed picture of her and Walter sitting in front of this house, their faces ruddy and happy from spending the day in the sun.
I remembered Walter as a quiet, red-faced man who always seemed both bewildered and infuriated by his strange lot in life as the ineffectual white patriarch of a large Filipino family. At the rare family gatherings my mother took me to, he usually sat in what Carlina called “his throne,” a cracked leather recliner stained with his usual drink of choice, cranberry juice, a vice picked up after his turn to a late-in-life sobriety.
The chair would soon be sold, or donated, or trashed, along with the rest of his and Lola’s earthly things, in this house and the other. His was a legacy of credit card debt and online poker losses, and while the rest of the siblings were back in Vacaville, my mother was tasked with watching over Lola for the duration of the clean-out, the euphemism they used for this unexpected end of Walter’s life, the life that Lola came to America for.
Where Lola would go when the beach house and the Vacaville house were sold was still unclear and subject to stealthy, passive-aggressive negotiations among her children. Ever the master of high-stakes emotional poker, my mother refused to show me her cards. My bet was on Tiya Eilene, who was unmarried and the only one of the siblings who was Walter’s biological child. She lived in Vegas, where she worked as a phlebotomist and played bingo on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Surely, she would be the obvious choice.
As I approached the front door, I heard the faint, ugly sound of a jungle bird. My mother met me at the doorstep with a regretful look and a wire cage in her left hand. An enfeebled, feathered creature peered up at me. Its eyes were circled with a familiar layer of beige crust.
They had brought the bird.
“Sweetie, I hear you,” Lola crooned from the living room.
The cockatoo spat back one of the jingles she picked up from daytime TV, which Lola left on all day to keep the bird company. A running joke was that Sweetie was the best voice in the family—the joke was that listening to the bird squawk out the melody of “Mack the Knife” was an experience one could only wish on their worst enemies. Which, for our family, was often one another. My main gripe? The bird never shut up. As a child, Sweetie had terrorized me, swatting her wings in my face and nearly biting my finger off on more than one visit. I had assumed they would leave her at the house.
“Belen, bring her here,” Lola directed my mother, who caught the disgusted expression on my face.
“Don’t say anything,” my mother said to me. “She refused to leave it behind. Besides, you didn’t have to spend hours in the car with it.”
Sweetie whistled another song in response, which I vaguely recognized as “The Girl from Ipanema.”
“Fine,” I said. “But if it bites me I’m finally killing it.”
“That’s not funny,” she said. “Don’t joke about death in front of her.”
“Sorry,” I said. “How is she?”
My mother placed the cage down in the kitchen. Sweetie chirped hoarsely. “What do you think?” she said. “Her whole life has been upended. Her husband died.”
She never referred to Walter as her father, or her stepfather. She rarely spoke about him at all.
Lola entered the room and made her way toward us. Her short hair was buoyed by the humidity, and I was reminded of a photo she had shown me from her showgirl days, her hair done up in a careful bouffant, her face unbroken and sweet, still so recognizably her own. To me, she looked the same as when I last saw her. But what did I know about her, this woman whom I saw a few times a year—if that—for less than a week at a time? I could read little from her face, which was turned adoringly to Sweetie.
Sweetie had a strange diet. Lola liked to feed the bird Eggo waffles and wet lettuce that she stuck to the cage with clothespins. She ate a specially made mix of birdseed, which was collected in pink and blue plastic cups clipped along the interior of the cage. I rarely saw the bird eat, but Lola diligently changed her food every morning. On that first day, she walked my mother and me through the process: warming the waffle just so, washing the lettuce with lukewarm—not cold—water, and pouring out three tablespoons of birdseed, making sure to scrape off the extra seed with the flat edge of a kitchen knife. The waffles, she told us, were doled out every evening at exactly 7 p.m. for dessert.
“How old is Sweetie?” I asked Lola.
“Oh, she’s old,” Lola said. She handed the food cups to me so I could tip the seed in. “She’s Filipino too, you know.”
I laughed, thinking it was a joke, but Lola was serious. “I got her in Manila,” she said. “When was it . . . 1979. In the summer. Right before I went to the US. She was an engagement present from my older brother.”
I nearly spilled the bag of seed, but my mother caught my arm. The bird was more than forty years old. “How is that even possible?” I asked.
Sweetie was hunched in her cage, violently flipping her head toward us every time we said her name.
“They live a long time, these birds,” Lola said. “Fifty, sixty years. She even speaks Waray, huh? Better than Belen.” She whispered a phrase to the bird, who chirped back a sound that plausibly sounded like what Lola had said. Lola beamed at us, and I clapped, more for her than for Sweetie, but I could sense that my mother was annoyed.
“My Waray is fine, Mom,” she said.
Lola shrugged. “Well, your Tagalog isn’t good. You should practice more.”
My mother snapped the food containers into the cage bars. “I’m busy.”
“With what?”
“With work. With raising a daughter.” I noticed that Lola was looking at my mother, but my mother would not meet her eyes. She was staring at the ground. As the daughter being invoked, I wondered if I should say something to keep the conversation from escalating further. I regretted asking about the bird’s age in the first place and stared at Sweetie accusingly. This is your fault, I thought, illogically, and I realized that I did not know whose fault it was that every conversation we had devolved into the airing of the same wounds: that Lola had left my mother and her siblings with my great-grandfather so that she could marry a stranger, that my mother did not want to leave the Philippines but was forced to when she was sixteen, that when my mother turned eighteen she did not speak to Lola for eight years, until one day she called to say, “I’m pregnant, Mom. I’m having a daughter.”
But if Lola was offended, she didn’t show it. She flicked her eyes coolly between us. “Well, she’s grown,” she said. “Now what will you do with your time?”
The next morning, my mother went into town and returned with a car full of boxes and packing tape and bubble wrap. We began the slow work of packing up the house and filling the car for trips to Goodwill or the unattended backlot dumpster of the Safeway in town. The days passed this way, consolidating each room into as few boxes as possible. Lola spent too much time in her bedroom, I thought, and often, when I knocked on her door, she would call out to say she was taking a nap. Eventually, she stopped replying, and I stopped knocking. There were times, after the glow of dinner, Lola humming some old show tune with Sweetie, my mother and I washing the dishes together, the sound of the ocean outside, where I felt that this maternal oblivion could be the rest of my life. But then, just as quickly, I would remember that I was leaving soon and my body would itch with the desperate need to leave the house, to go to college, where I would not be a granddaughter, or a daughter, but just another girl.
I still took my walks alone. From the beach, I liked to watch my mother and Lola, mother and daughter, sitting together in the warm light of the house. At that distance, I could see only their shadows in the light, changing shape with each movement of their bodies. I wondered what they would see if they were to look out the window. Would they recognize me from this far away?
At night, after Lola hugged me goodnight, checked with my mother that Sweetie had gotten her waffle, covered the bird’s cage with a sheet, and shuffled into her room, my mother and I watched “Christmas in July” on Lifetime, an endless marathon of movies about white women and, what seemed to me, petty familial problems that always resolved themselves neatly in time to celebrate the holidays together. I knew that these women existed only to placate the rest of us from unhappy families in varying degrees of dysfunction. I knew my mother knew this too. Neither of us acknowledged this—it remained the only TV we watched together.
“What if she lived with us?” I asked one night, during a commercial break.
My mother muted the TV. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“No, I’m serious. Why not?”
“You mean she’d live with me. You’re leaving.” Somehow this sounded like an accusation, although no one had been more excited about my getting into college than my mother, who had cried so intensely when I got the acceptance letter that I was afraid she was confused about which school I had gotten into.
“I’ll be back, like, all the time,” I said.
My mother sighed. She reached over and squeezed my arm. “I’ll think about it, Teo.”
I knew this was her way of saying no.
One afternoon, while Lola was napping, my mother asked me if I wanted to go for a walk in the forest. It was a mild summer day, the sun peeking through the canopy above us, lighting our way through the trees. My only pair of shoes, Vans so old that the canvas was ripping at the seams, were impractical for a hike. I kept tripping on risen roots and rotted fruit scattered along the path. My mother, however, was a woman prepared for all seasons. She had brought a waterproof hat and cargo pants whose bottoms she unzipped into knee-length shorts, and she wore her usual thick-soled boots. She loved to hike, to be in nature, and could have easily sped along intrepidly ahead. But she walked patiently beside me.
“This place reminds me of the Philippines,” said my mother. “This morning I woke up, and for a moment I felt like a little girl. Something about being by the water.”
I had never been to the Philippines. And since she left as a girl, neither had my mother. She claimed she had no time to travel, that it would be too expensive, but I suspected that the real cost, the one she could not bear, would be the bridging of the gap between her memory of home and the reality of it now.
“We had a forest right behind our house,” my mother said. “My Lolo would never let us go in there alone.”
“Why?”
“He told us different stories to keep us out. Usually ghost stories. The spirits of dead wives who would sit in the trees waiting for children to walk by so they could steal them. A curse on the forest that could turn any child walking through it into an adult who would never be allowed to return home because their parents wouldn’t recognize them anymore.”
A blackbird flew overhead, cackling furiously, startling us both for a moment. Then my mother continued, “Once he told us, and I think this is true, or at least based on something that happened in a forest in the province, that once they found a Japanese soldier in the woods. He had been there alone, thinking he was hiding out from American soldiers without realizing that the war had ended twenty years earlier. I don’t know how he could have survived like that. Lolo says at first he was in denial, he thought it was a trick to capture him. Luckily all his ammunition had been used up by then, and he was a skeleton from living off mangoes and the occasional slaughtered cow for years, so he wasn’t a threat. Even once they convinced him that the war was over, he couldn’t bring himself to surrender. I think they made him, but my Lolo always said that it must have just been a formality.”
“I can’t imagine believing in anything enough to hold out that long,” I said.
“I think he was just crazy,” my mother said.
“Right.”
“Lolo built me a shed to play in, since I couldn’t go into the forest,” my mother continued. “We would go and tell ghost stories at night. It’s still there, next to the old house.”
“Did Lola ever tell you stories?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “She was never there.”
I did not know what to say. She had told me versions of this story many times before. There was an insistence in her voice, as if she assumed that I did not believe her. I did: but I felt burdened by her confessions, which came more and more the older I got. Selfishly, I preferred it when my mother did not talk about her daughterhood. It put too much of a mirror on me, and at that age I was too much of a coward to look up and see myself clearly. Even now, I am that way.
“She wasn’t a good mother, Teo,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “You told me that already.”
Lola dug up a cardboard box stuffed with photo albums. She spread them on the dining table, and I sat with her as she flipped through the yellowed plastic sleeves. “This is your great-grandmother,” she said, tapping at a photo of an old woman with horn-rimmed glasses sitting at a kitchen table. Beside her was a lanky boy leaning against the doorway. He was wearing plastic sandals, his skinny feet lifting at the heels. “And that’s my older brother,” Lola said. “Francisco. He was my parents’ favorite.”
“He’s handsome,” I said.
“He was,” said Lola. “They could afford to send only one of us to school, and they sent him. I was so mad. I didn’t talk to them for weeks. But then he ran away and got married without telling anyone. Some girl he met in the city.”
Stories about our family in Leyte often followed this same narrative arc. The introduction of a family member I had never heard of, an opportunity they were given to pull themselves out of poverty, and the manifest ways they squandered what they nearly had in their grasp.
She showed me another photo, this one of her as a young woman in a secretary blouse and bouncy, curly hair. In the corner, she had signed her full name in dramatic, silver cursive letters: Reyna Cristina Atienza Camino. “After that they sent me. But I didn’t finish.”
“Why not?”
“It wasn’t for me.” She shrugged. “I’m not like you, baby. Smart, huh?”
I shrugged too. “I guess, Lola.”
“Here, look,” she said, pulling another photo out of its sleeve. “It’s your mother.”
My mother as a girl—shy, black-haired, with a half-formed smile, the expression caught on film before she could complete it. Illogically, I thought she looked like me, as if I were the progenitor of our face and not the other way around. Beside her, with his arm around her shoulders, was an old man in a pale-blue barong. This was my grandfather, my namesake, Teodoro. “So dark, those two,” Lola said, as if this were a personal failing they shared. “She always looked just like him. That’s why they got along so well.”
There were endless photos. Of the house, the land, christenings, birthdays, spare candids. Lola visited Leyte every year to see our extended family of second and third cousins and uncles and aunts who I had never met. She knew them all because she was responsible for all of them, because she had squandered everything and had everything. She had dropped out of school, had three children by a man who left one morning without a word, and a year later, at a Manila nightclub, met Walter, a young naval officer who married her and whisked her away to the US base in Apra Harbor.
The truth was that when my mother told me Walter had died, I felt relief. Things would be simpler now he was gone. But somehow, even in death, he was a pain in the ass. It was with his money that Lola helped pay for the family’s schooling, weddings, and debts. Who would do that now?
The next evening, we ate a dinner composed of freezer leftovers on the terrace. Frozen pizza, steamed broccoli, hash browns. We had only a few more days left in the house. At the end of the week, we would drive back to Vacaville, where Tiyo Jose was waiting for us. I had placed my money on the wrong sibling. It had been decided that Lola would live with him and his family in Anaheim. “There are lots of Filipinos there,” my mother said. “You’ll never be lonely.” This did not seem to move Lola, who was more interested in talking about her annual trip to the Philippines in the fall, a trip that seemed impractical given how different her life was going to be soon. On her phone, she showed me photographs from her last visit.
“This is the south side,” she said. “We’re thinking of building a house there for my cousin Alina’s daughter. She’s getting married in the fall. Isn’t she beautiful?” She passed the phone to me, but my mother intercepted it. She stared at the photo of a young woman posing beachside beside the old house, the house my mother and Lola grew up in.
“Where’s the small house?” my mother asked.
“What do you mean?” Lola said.
“The shed Lolo built,” my mother replied, and in her voice I caught an unfamiliar note, the sound of a child whining. “The one he made me.”
“What do you care about that?” Lola said. “You’re not going back there. What does it mean to you?”
“What happened to it?”
“It was damaged in the typhoon. You knew that.”
“You were going to do repairs.”
“It cost too much. It was easier to just tear it down.”
My mother tapped the phone, as if she could conjure the small house back into being. “It was my house.”
Lola spoke in a tone I was familiar with, the tone my mother spoke to me in when she thought I was acting like a child. “This was my house too, Belen.”
My mother’s face twisted and she stood up for a moment, as if formulating a reply, but instead she swallowed it down and rushed back inside, slamming the screen door so hard that it slapped back open.
Lola lapsed into the same blank expression that she wore all the time now. Although I was still sorry for her, I did not feel the urge to comfort her, or to explain myself when I followed my mother inside the house. I found her by Sweetie’s cage, the door cracked open, placing a waffle inside. When I walked up to her, I realized that she was crying. I turned to her, and she held me the way she did when I was younger, an embrace that I refused more and more because I was afraid of how much she needed me. But for that one moment, I let her hold me. When we separated, I saw Lola in the doorway, looking shocked as she turned her head away from the house. At first I thought she felt betrayed because I had gone to my mother and not to her, but when I followed her gaze I saw Sweetie, let loose, flying into the forest.
It had rained earlier that day, and the forest floor was black and wet. The trees were full of native birds: orange-breasted robins and bluebirds that traveled in pairs and black crows the size of small children and even a low-flying hawk who turned a yellow eye at us, as if to ask our odd crew of women, why are you here, so far from home? Who are you looking for?
Lola moved slowly, and I held her hand as she navigated her way through the trees. My mother walked ahead of us, moving too quickly, I thought, aggressively looking around in search of the bird. Lola played a video of Sweetie singing on her phone, hoping the bird would reply. I suspected that Sweetie wouldn’t be easy to find. In her cage, the cockatoo looked frail, always on the verge of teetering over into the pile of droppings and loose feathers that formed a rank carpet along the bottom of the cage. But as she dived into the forest, disappearing from sight, Sweetie flew elegantly, assuredly, as if this whole time, traveling from one country to another, she had been waiting for the right moment to slip free.
An hour passed, and then another, and Sweetie’s recording began to grate on all of us. Lola turned the volume down, and we rested on a knocked-over redwood, the bark still gummy from the rain. Through the canopy, the sun ran orange, glinting against the red of Lola’s acrylic nails. My mother stood up and did a last scan of the forest. “It’s getting dark,” she said. “We should go back.”
“Where are you going?” Lola asked.
“Back to the house, Mom,” my mother said. “We can’t stay out here all night.”
“Why are you giving up, huh? How can you leave now?” Lola’s shoulders tensed.
“I’m tired. We can look again in the morning.”
Lola wouldn’t stop. “How can you be tired? It’s your fault she’s gone.”
“It was an accident, Mom.”
“I distracted her, Lola,” I said. “It’s my fault too.” But neither my mother or Lola acted like they heard me.
“You just wanted to hurt me,” said Lola. “So you let her out.”
“I did not, Mom.”
“Yes, you did.”
My mother pressed her hands to her temples. “You are so fucking stubborn.”
“Ha!” The sound echoed around us. Lola’s face was wild, her eyebrows raised in unexpected fury. “I’m stubborn?”
“Yes.”
“You’re stubborn. You couldn’t even come to Walter’s funeral.”
My mother whispered, “You know I couldn’t go.” I wondered, then, if she had let the bird out on purpose. Or merely let neglect shape her actions, making the accident inevitable. But before I could ask the question, she was already walking away, leaving me and Lola alone in the darkening forest.
I took Lola’s arm. “Come on,” I said. “We can look more tomorrow.” She hesitated, but my mother had already disappeared into the trees. She was right, it would soon be too dark to find our way home. Lola held my hand as I guided us back, pointing out the roots and dips in the dirt so she wouldn’t trip. When we returned, my mother and Lola went into their separate bedrooms. Neither one could bring herself to say sorry.
At dawn I woke to a strange whining noise that I thought was the wind, but then I remembered: Sweetie. I walked through the house, following the ebb and flow of the sound, peeking in the corners behind the sofa and the fridge in case the bird had somehow found her way back in. But there was nothing there, just boxes and things soon to be placed in boxes. I was checking behind the TV when I realized that the whine was emerging from Lola’s bedroom. It was the sound of her crying, a sound I had never heard before.
I wished then that a different grandchild was here in the house with her instead of me. Carlina or Bea or Ricardo or Alonso or Gigi. Any one of them would have heard that sorry sound and opened the door that separated them from the woman in the room alone. They would have bothered to ask Lola how she was feeling. They would have realized that this was the last time they would spend time with her like this, before the rest of their life began.
Years later, on one of my occasional visits back to California, I confessed to Carlina how I had felt. It was my last trip home for a long time—I was three weeks into my first pregnancy, and I had not yet told my mother. But I told Carlina, and somehow our conversation led to Lola, who was gone by then, and Carlina had taken my hand and answered the question I did not ask. My real question. “You’ll be a good mom, Teo,” she said. “I know you will.”
Still, I did not believe her.
Lola’s crying softened; soon the house was quiet. Through the living room windows, I could see the sun rising quickly over the forest. It was bright enough to start looking again.
The forest was louder than last night, and when I played Sweetie’s song off my phone I could barely hear her over the birds cackling and crying and singing above me. I walked with my eyes trained on the trees, hoping to spot a flash of pink against the green. But even once the sun had risen completely, there were no signs of the bird.
Eventually, my foot settled on something soft. When I looked down, there she was, lying on her back in the brush. Her body convulsed with quick, shallow breaths. She must have hit a tree, or a telephone wire. Her left wing hung crooked behind her back, and twitched with each breath. I scooped her into my hands and held her in my lap. She was very heavy. That was how I knew Sweetie was dying—how heavy she was. There was no recognition in her eyes, no sense of my holding her. Just those quick breaths and the wings shaking the body into silence.
When I returned to the house, I realized that almost everything was finally in boxes, some set aside for storage, the rest marked for donation. The clean-out did not make the house feel new or more spacious but instead much smaller than before. It was unbelievable that everything could have fit in there in the first place. My mother and Lola were awake, waiting for me. Among what remained, they stood there united in their questions for me: Where did you go? What did you see?
I told them as much of the truth as I could. The rest, I kept for myself.