Home

Beside me, my husband Joe snores lightly. I nudge his shoulder. 

Downstairs, I hear my youngest son looking for a snack in the kitchen.

I am restless tonight, not quite ready for sleep. Careful not to disturb Joe, I reach for my laptop. The screen glows softly in the dark.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be anywhere other than where I was. At school, I’d gaze out the window and wondered what would happen if I simply walked out the door.

When I was at my father’s house, I wished I was at my mother’s house. When I was at my mother’s house, I wished I was at my friend Ruth’s house. Ruth was an only child, and her mother was the local librarian. Her father was very quiet. I never saw him so much as light a match, never mind burn a hole in the sofa with a cigarette.

Everywhere I go, I see different versions of her.

My mother. 

A woman tugging a small child through the store, her patience run thin.

The bank teller with striking green eyes and curly hair. 

The sunbather at the beach, gloriously soaking up the sun.

It’s been six months. Yet still, there are days when I forget she is gone. It’s not like I pick up the phone to call her. It was never like that.

She wasn’t my emergency contact. She wasn’t the person I called when I got a promotion or had a bad day. We didn’t visit each other.

Home. I never knew quite how to find it. I never knew what it meant. I fled every chance I got. 

I see the same tendencies in my middle son Charlie. Some days, it’s as though he hates to be here. Watching him come and go like a kite in the wind, I feel a quiet panic.

What we chase doesn’t necessarily set us free. He doesn’t know this yet. I don’t know how to tell him.

When my heart beats a little faster, I remind myself.

I have built something different.

I have built something new. 

Have I?

How do you define a home?

There are walls and roof. Windows. Lamps to ward off the evening dusk. Perhaps a song on the radio to ease the silence.

But inside the walls there is a secret language. Only the occupants speak it.

She wanted me to choose. Her, or the man I married.

The man who points out the glow of the Big Dipper as if he arranged the stars in the sky just for me. Who announces, “That’s where your Aunt Elaine used to live!” to the kids every time we pass exit 67 on the highway.

I guess you could say I wasn’t always good with choices. 

People write to me now. They ask about the word estrangement. They wonder how to change it in their own lives. 

Find something, I write back. Anything. Find a tender thread to bind you, despite the fissures, the fractures. 

For my mother and I, it was books and movies. We sent them to each other a few times a year. Mad Men, Schitt’s Creek. The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. Family Pictures by Sue Miller. These were our favorites.

Her house just sold. With any luck, it will go under contract soon. 

We went back to see it a month after she died. In every room, I felt her presence. I heard her voice. I remembered the way she stood over the stove, boiling water for the instant coffee she loved.

Can you miss someone you haven’t spoken to in nearly a decade?

Whose number wasn’t stored in your phone?

I assumed she’d be there forever.

Tucked away inside her house, surrounded by her books and movies.

I miss her.

I miss who she might have been.

Who we might have been.

My gravity is gone.

Her house.

We roller-skated up and down the sidewalk in the summer. 

The cracks haven’t changed, even after all these years.

I glance over at Joe. His eyes are sweetly closed. 

He is my home. This man. The companion of my heart. 

We have built something new. 

We have built something different. 

I want to be here. At last, I want to be somewhere.

May the stars shine.

May the music play.