I lay on top of the covers and smiled up at the ceiling. One unmarked evening a few weeks ago she fell asleep like any other night and just never woke up. She would have been furious to know that her death wasn’t some dramatic crescendo that it had no flair. I stood over my mother’s bed, which was still covered with her garden of pillows that were only there for decoration. But the apartment lease was up and I only had her room left to refresh. I didn’t want to stay in the house until it was finished. Every day I’d painted until I was too drained to carry on, and then left to pass out on an air mattress in the apartment I was leaving. I left my old room, newly pink from yesterday’s efforts, to enter the room I’d put off until the end.
I couldn’t resist the illusion that I could transform it and make it mine, but so far I felt naive for thinking repainting would be enough. She’d left me the house in her will, and with its mortgage paid off, it was a bigger and better place than I could ever hope to afford on my own. The final trill always led to a fearful silence. It wasn’t the sound I’d hated, but the dread that each note might be her last. My memories of nighttime, even ones that didn’t involve the house or my mother, always carried a sharp echo of that instrument. I looked at the walk-in closet and could almost feel the clothes brushing the top of my head from all the times I hid in there with a flashlight and book on nights when I wanted to muffle the sound of my mother’s clarinet floating up through the house.
It wasn’t like going back in time, exactly, but like finding embarrassing photos of yourself. It was strange to stand in my childhood bedroom as a woman who was starting to find her first gray hairs when the light hit her head just so in the bathroom. I chose gaudy colors that would have sat like a bad taste on my mother’s tongue anytime she thought of it, were she alive. Mint living room, yellow bathroom, pink bedroom.
The week I moved into my old family home, the brick one that sat like a triple-layered cake at the end of the street, I spent each day and into the night repainting every wall. Content note(click for details) Content note: abuse
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