Even the doormat is gone. Your girlfriend, June, hefts your backpack over one shoulder and says, “Well, that’s it.” You stand in the doorway, staring. The one-story brick house that contained your childhood, your adolescence, and most recently, a good chunk of your early twenties, echoes with June’s voice. Only you see beyond the absence. 

The mounted coat hooks are grasping and bare. You hook a finger around one, the brass cool to touch, and just hold on. Meanwhile, June scans the surroundings for anything left behind, and you know what she sees—the blank white walls, the empty terrain of linoleum. But your eyes, they know the topography of this place, the sections where the damp made the flooring pock and rise into rivers and valleys. Your childhood home exists to you as a sort of living organism, somewhere stuck between body and landscape. 

And yet, you’ve gutted it. Shucked it like an oyster from its shell. You packed away what you could, and you donated the rest: the canary-yellow rocking chairs on the porch, the colony of ceramic bunnies your mother collected, and the black metal vanity she bought you for your thirteenth birthday. These items appear to you as phantoms, after-images slotting into the places where they once belonged. Right there was the settee—and there was the record stand. You couldn’t bear to bring the kitchen clock with you in the move, the kitschy thing your grandmother had passed on to your mother where birds replaced the time. A cardinal at six o’clock, a blue jay at the strike of twelve. Blue jays were your mom’s favorite. 

You sanded away the lilac paint on the kitchen cabinets. Repainted the walls in white for whoever lived there next. June, at least, was kind enough to return the rented hospital bed, the mess of poles and wires that dwarfed your mother, in the end. 

But kindness is just June’s way. You had spent most of your sophomore year of undergrad relieved there was even space for you in her life, and after graduation, you were thrown again when she stuck around, the both of you crammed with two other roommates in a two-bedroom, stuck in your college town as you scrimped and saved for a place near the city. June wants good things for you, the best things. She often says that you, like everyone else on this Earth, are made for pleasure. She tells you this curled up in bed, her fingers skimming your curves, your roundness, her tongue tasting your skin. 

Especially you and me, she says. We’re made for plenty. 

You always figured you were made for mediocrity, if anything. For the haze of your hometown. And yet, you believed her—at least, until your mom got sick. Then, it seemed like you’d never feel a good thing again, and worse, that you’d drag everyone else down with you. 

June set aside her dreams of a shared place a breath away from a-dime-a-dozen thrift stores and low-light clubs, drag queens and god-awful slam poetry and bookstore-coffee shops with overpriced lavender matcha lattes. Late-morning brunches, mimosas and French toast, sweet-wet strawberries dripping full-fat whipped cream. Instead, she moved in here, with you, to this dead-end town with your dying mother. You felt bad when you’d been a little bit relieved. June’s dream had sounded so…big. Loud. Still, city life is what you’re meant to want as a sad queer kid in a sad West Virginia town, where being yourself came with a caution sign. You want to want it, but you don’t know how. 

Your world has always been this place and your mother, and now, she’s gone. 

June claps her hands, and the sound bounces through empty rooms, down the single hallway. “Ready to say goodbye?” she asks. 

You nod, feet glued to the entryway, June a warm presence against your back. Out the window, fog drapes itself over the Blue Ridge Mountains. It grows thicker and thicker, until the only home you’ve ever known appears conjured from smoke.

All you can say is, “Um.” You’re scrounging for words, but they’re tucked away somewhere you can’t find them. June nudges your shoulder.  “Well, goodbye, house.”

 It’s a pitiful farewell. The very back of your throat itches, and your nose tingles with the promise of emotion. It’s part grief, part humiliation. It’s just a fucking house. Just a house where your mom died, and who in their right mind would want to live there?

“See you,” you say to the house. This, of course, is a lie. The house says nothing at all. 

You love this house. Or, maybe, you loved it, once, when you were younger. You were never the kid to go outside much, to sleep over at a friend’s house or to go to overnight camp. Not when everything you needed was right where you put it, at home. My little homebody, your mom used to say. When you left for college, she drew you into her arms. Her hair was still dark, her cheeks pink and round—it was before the sickness made her forget your name. Before it left her bedbound. Before your childhood home was the only place she felt safe. 

My little homebody, I’m surprised the house isn’t up and following you. 

For weeks after you moved into the college dorms, your mother would call you with strange complaints—missing keys, tools. One of her heirloom pearl earrings wandered off. The tomatoes molded, enveloped in fuzz days after picking, and the cheddar grew spores. Your mom spoke of waking up for a midnight snack and finding a figure illuminated by the light of the fridge, scrounging for food. But she shrugged it off as a dream. It’s just nerves, Birdie, she said. You’ve never been gone so long, so far. I worry you’re hungry all on your own. 

Meanwhile, you were disturbed by the new sounds of the dorm room. You spent nights anticipating the groan of your house’s pipes. You could almost hear it. 

I miss home, you’d say. 

I think home misses you back. 

*   *   *

June’s the sort of girl that blossoms during car rides. While you already feel cramped and irritated, rubbed the wrong way by the seat belt riding high against your neck, June’s like a coming-of-age film: heart-shaped sunglasses sheening cobalt blue, strawberry blonde hair fluttering out the open window. She’s tapping the wheel and humming some bubblegum-pop hit so loud the air’s saturated with the sweet silliness of it, and you love her, you do. 

But the humming stops when the thumping begins. “You hear that?” June asks, and as if in reply, the whole car begins shaking with it, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump. It bounces both of you and all your belongings like a toddler on their mother’s knee. 

“Whoa,” you and June both say, throats vibrating. 

“Pull over,” you say. “Maybe something’s stuck in the wheel.”

Taking the back roads means there are very few fellow cars. You know this road well—your mom taught you how to drive here. You know the cross bolted into a tree, made up of fake dollar-store flowers and pink ribbon—and a teddy bear, pinned open like a butterfly. You know, if you thought back far enough, you’d remember the name of the little girl that teddy bear belonged to.

“Wait here,” you tell June, and she faux swoons, mouthing my hero. 

You’ve never been good with cars. Nowadays, you barely drive at all, working from home as you do, tapping away at your laptop on yet another movie review. All you know is from frantic troubleshooting and condescending chat room logs, but the noise must be coming from a tire. For a minute, you just stand there, hands on your hips, and wait for—Well, you’re not sure what you’re waiting on. Maybe for the problem to fix itself, so you can get back in the car to an impressed girlfriend. When that doesn’t happen, you get on your knees by the side of the road and look for nails, for broken glass, for a toothy beer bottle cap, anything that might explain the sound. 

Your eyes catch a strange glimmer. At first, you think you’ve imagined it, an anxiety-induced mirage, but sure enough, a pearl earring is poked through your right back tire.  It’s not very big, the pearl smaller than the pad of your thumb. It should’ve been crushed beneath your tires, but it’s whole. It’s not even dirty, the gloss of it catching like an oil slick in the morning light. You pluck it from where it’s punctured through the rubber, and the post slides out easily. It’s not bent. Such a small thing shouldn’t have made such a noise. It shouldn’t have jarred the car until you bounced. You feel a wave of vertigo.

It looks exactly like the pearl earring your mother had lost, all those years ago. You’d know the set anywhere—they were meant to be yours, after all. An heirloom from your great-great-grandmother. You’d loved those earrings, the oddity of them, the way the baroque pearls dipped and curved like organs, like little unbeating hearts—an aorta-like protrusion here, the curve of a pulmonary artery there. Even after Mom had lost the one, she still wore the other in her ear. You’d buried her with it. 

You stand up and dust off your knees, chest tight. Somehow, you are certain this is the same, lost earring. It shouldn’t be—but it’s here, in your palm. You can touch it, feel it. The skin of your arms, the back of your neck, they prickle with a strange new awareness. The rows and rows of trees along the road stretch, elongate, until you cannot find the end of them. Holding the pearl, you feel watched. You wonder what is trying to stop you, holding you here so close to home.

Afraid of ghosts, Birdie? your mother might say. It’s what she said when you went to your first funeral at nine years old, where your grandmother laid painted and still, dressed in orchid blue. 

Don’t be, your mom would say. People don’t haunt—places do. Things. 

And your mind conjured up images of ghostly fine china holding tea parties, dishwashers spitting up silverware, your great-grandfather’s Navy uniform looming over your bed. Now, of course, you realize what your mother meant. People are what they leave behind. What they lose.

“Okay out there?” June asks, ducking her head out the car window.

“The tires are fine,” you call back, sliding the pearl into your pocket before getting back into the car. “Must’ve been a whole lot of potholes.” 

June smiles at you, and you smile back. You let her kiss you. And it’s unfair, the way you think: this isn’t for her. You’re sharing a life with this woman, a house, but this pearl—it’s family, it’s home. It’s all yours, for better and for worse.  

*   *   *

An hour into your drive, you’re not as far from home as you should be. June, still behind the wheel, doesn’t seem to notice. She runs her hand through the wind outside the car window like she’s stroking an animal. Completely at peace. But with the pearl in your pocket and memories weaving through your thoughts, you’re hyperaware of your surroundings; you catch the veins on every leaf, you hear the radio static hum of beating beetle wings. The sounds of the forest awaken something primal, something prey-like, within you. Branches crack; the underbrush crunches; the birds flee from the trees. You clench the center console, hoping it will ground you. Three times, you ask June if she can hear it. It, the low, low groan of pipes, the creak of wood and dull thump of plaster: the sounds of an old house at night. 

But it’s sunny outside and nearing afternoon, not evening, and June just gives you an odd smile and turns up the radio louder. It’s an old car: no Bluetooth hookup, so no Spotify, and all your CDs are at the new house, lost among boxes. The radio’s audio is so fuzzy, it sounds like an old record, though it’s still set to the local station. 

June chatters on about your new house’s features, and though you were there for the viewing, the signing of the lease, and the slow crawl of moving in, you let her remind you of real brass fixtures and clawfoot bathtubs, a kitchen sink that doesn’t leak. “It’s the original pine floors, Birdie,” June says, and your mom’s nickname on her tongue stings at you, half-pleasure half-pain. But June loved it, the well-worn love audible when your mother spoke it, and June loved it even more when she got her own similarly-flavored endearment—Bug. 

Can you grab that for me, Bug? You’re one of ours now, Bug. Love you, Bug, sleep tight. 

Birdie looks like she loves you enough to eat you right up. 

“It’ll be gorgeous,” June says, words picking up that much faster, “with all the natural light and the green couch we thrifted.” You let yourself imagine a life in this new place, which often feels disconnected from the world you knew, a world made up of brick and sage shutters, the chorus of your mother’s life-preserving machinery. 

In this new house, there will be a spice rack for June, and it will be organized by color—red pepper flakes with paprika and cayenne and saffron, pink peppercorns next to Himalayan salt. Because it’s a rental, you can’t paint the kitchen cabinets, but you bought a roll of wall decals that portray big bursts of florals, bombshells of petals and color. The sink faucet curls like a long silver ribbon. In the living room, there will be the green couch, the bright light, the squishy brown rug you can dig your toes into on the cool hardwood floor, which won’t pock and bend and buckle beneath you. The house grows bigger and bigger. It creates new rooms in your mind, new doors, until you are thinking about the bay windows of your shared bedroom, the queen bed without a frame, the heaps and heaps of blankets and pillows spilling into nests on the floor. You will remake yourself here, a body built for simple pleasures. A body built for June.

You think beyond those rooms, those doors, to the backyard with the bobbing heads of black-eyed Susans. “We can get a cat,” you say, a hint of excitement fizzing your blood. “The backyard’s fenced in. They wouldn’t have to be cooped up.”

June grins. “A cat,” she drawls out, considering. “We can name it… Leo. No, Willow. Maybe Milo?”

“Vesta,” you say.

“Vesta,” June agrees. One hand still on the wheel, she reaches across the console and rubs at your knuckles. “She can sleep at the hearth and eat treats from our palms. She’ll terrorize the birds—” There is a great, heavy thud. June cuts off with a yelp. 

A body slams into the windshield, a violent smack of violet-blue against the glass. A blue jay. It’s a kamikaze made up of feathers and bone, and it’s so sudden your brain doesn’t think to scream. June shrieks again, the sound punching out of her, and slams into the brakes. Your skull knocks back into the car seat headrest. It happens so fast. The road is empty behind you, in front of you, and the two of you sit there in your seats, almost panting.

“Holy fuck,” June says.

 The bird didn’t bounce off the windshield. It remains, spread out against the glass, visible eye staring. June tries knocking the bird off with the windshield wipers, and while the body goes flying, hitting the gravel in a plume of dust, a feather snags the wiper blade. It plucks straight from skin and muscle, leaving dark blood smeared in its wake. The wipers are ancient; practically worthless. There’s no way they can handle the mess left in the bird’s wake. 

“There’s a gas station—” you try. 

 “I know where it is,” June snaps, fear bleeding into anger. Just as quick, her face crumples. “God. I’m sorry. I don’t—”

“Hey, you’re all right,” you say. “I understand.” 

How could you not? You and June offer each other clumsy smiles, but you can’t take your eyes off the radio’s clock, which reads twelve on the dot. 

At the nearest gas station, you designate yourself squeegee duty as you wait for the gas to fill, if only to get June away from the blood. She goes in for snacks. At first, you were hopeful you could wash away the evidence of vehicular slaughter, but the blood keeps spreading and spreading. “No, no, no,” you say, but it’s no use. The blood spreads. Panic spikes through you, your fingers tingling with numbing cold. When you toss the squeegee back in the bucket, it splashes soapy water all down the front of your shirt. 

“Fuck,” you curse, but it doesn’t sound angry like you want it to. It sounds fragile.

A little later, with the car parked in front of the gas station, you and June stare at the windshield, snacks unopened in your laps. It bears a terracotta glaze of death, like your life’s a shitty Western filter. “Jesus,” June mutters, but she tears open her pack of mini doughnuts in a puff of powdered sugar. She brings one of the pastries up to your lips. 

“Here,” she says. “You look a little sick.” 

“Thanks,” you say, taking the treat into your mouth. You lick some of the sugar from June’s thumb just to hear her laugh. And she does laugh, hand shaking with the force of it as she presses that thumb to your bottom lip, holding it there, as intimate as a kiss. The moment unspools between you, thick and sweet, golden like spun honey. You almost forget about the pearl in your pocket, about the crime scene that is your windshield. But in the distance, past the gas station and near lost amid a thicket of trees, you catch something pastel and out-of-place: your childhood home’s sage green shutters, peeking out between the pines.

*   *   *

When you offered to take over the rest of the drive, June seemed relieved, and so were you. You hoped driving would soothe you; you could enter autopilot, clear your mind of everything beyond the road. 

You think you’re being followed. 

You see things you shouldn’t, like the shutters bearing their chipped paint or a sliver of red brick among all the green. Light refracts off windows, but when you turn your head, there’s nothing there. You don’t ask June if she can see it, the little glimpses of your childhood home within the woods. It’s crazy. 

It’s crazy, but you can’t remedy how your normal driving-induced tunnel vision has been disrupted, like a needle snagging on scratched vinyl. Your eyes discover familiar haunts—like a window ledge wide enough to sit on, like the wooden plank you’d used as replacement for a cracked front porch step. Even the rustle of the underbrush is drowned out by creaks and groans, like the sound of old pipes, and the swish and thwack as saplings snap and fall, their young, whip-thin bodies whistling through the air. June, at least, can hear these sounds, but she only says, “I wonder what kind of construction’s going on,” as she taps on her phone. And you try and let yourself rationalize the noise away; you tell yourself that, yes, it’s construction. Just construction.

Then, you see them, clusters of red popping amongst green. The geraniums, you realize, and your stomach swoops. It’s the geraniums, with blooms fatter than your fist and petals bright as arterial blood—the geraniums your mom planted and tended to every summer, the geraniums you’d left behind, unwatered, in their window boxes. You forgot them. You left them. 

“I gotta go back,” you say, though you can’t feel your mouth move. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you see June’s head snap towards you, the phone in her hand dipping into her lap. Her fingers stop tapping. “No,” she says, and she doesn’t sound shocked. She sounds tired. “Birdie, please.”

The red is following you just beyond the trees, mocking you, and you can’t believe you left them behind. “I need to turn around,” you say. “I left them, June. I left the geraniums.” There is no reason beyond the dread that overtakes you, seizing your lungs and tensing your shoulders—your body like ice cracking in warm water. You don’t wonder at the logic of your desire; you don’t ask your compulsion why you have to turn back if the house is right here, following you. You are on the precipice of the unreal. 

“The flowers?” June’s free hand falls onto your shoulder. 

“Yes,” you say, “the flowers.”

“It’s okay. We can—”

“It’s not okay,” you say, too loud now, voice breaking, and June’s fingers cringe away from you. “Nothing’s okay. Mom loved those flowers, and I left them, June—I left them alone.”

“Sweetheart,” June says, low and slow, “is this really about the flowers?”

It’s one o’clock, and your phone alarm starts blaring. It cuts through the air. You always fed your mom lunch after her early afternoon nap: broth chock-full of greens. At the end, she couldn’t stomach meat. Too rich. Often, there were saltines or buttered bread or a clementine you’d peeled, piece by piece, until no connective membrane remained—your fingers smelled perpetually of citrus in those final months. And there was always a little cup of primary-colored pills that always brought to mind poison dart frogs and coral snakes. 

June says, “This isn’t healthy.” She’s digging around in your purse for your phone, but all you can think about is the geraniums, unwatered, and your mother, unfed. You worry she’s hungry, though you know that’s impossible. The alarm seems to grow louder. “I know you’re sad, but you can’t keep—Jesus, this fucking alarm.” June fumbles within your bag. 

The alarm stops. You squint. Far off, there’s something in the road. White and indistinct. 

“What?” June asks. She only has eyes for you. “What’s that face?”

As your car approaches, it becomes clear. Roadkill. You suck in a breath between your teeth. It’s rabbits, you realize, great big pillars of white rabbits heaped on top of one another, fur smooth and gleaming and so much like the ceramic bunnies your mother loved—if not for all the blood wetting the road. If not for the patches where their coats have been torn away, revealing the ripe pink bodies beneath, their open bellies. It’s all so fresh. Their organs, red-black and brilliant as pomegranate seeds, steam in the spring air. 

The piles of bunnies are arranged neatly in a line, a barricade of carcasses across the entire width of the road. You’re not sure how you will get through them without a great big mess, but you don’t stop driving, too shocked to lift your foot off the gas. You only watch the rabbits grow closer and closer. The fat glistens on the meat, like an offering. Like a cat dropping presents on their owner’s doormat. The rabbits’ glossy black eyes stare at you, pleading. Don’t go, they say. You’ll never go hungry here.

Your stomach growls, and that’s when you snap out of it. 

Again, you don’t scream, you can’t, but your ears ring and your vision turns spotty, and your mouth goes dry and then wet. There is no time to process. Slamming to a stop, you fling out a hand in front of June, protective—the same way your mom used to when you first started riding in the front seat, twelve years old and so sure you were grown.

Your car sits in the middle of the road for the second time today. June grips your forearm, like she wants to tether you back down to Earth. “Babe?” she asks, a little wobbly. 

You blink, hard, and when you look again, your eyes find only a few bunnies, not even a litter’s worth, abandoned on the road. If not for their cotton ball tails, you wouldn’t even be able to tell that’s what they were. They’re nearly flat from getting run over, more like pelts than the living creatures they once were. Their coats are ashy from dirt, brown with old blood. The roadway is otherwise clear.

“I—did you see that?” you ask. 

There’s a rusty stain soaked into the concrete, unremarkable on any backroad.

June asks, “The rabbits?” Her eyes are wide, overwhelmed by their whites. “Pull over.”

You pull over to the side of the road. Distantly, you notice your hands are shaking, nails clicking against the plastic of the wheel. Rolling down the window, you gulp in air so thick with humidity it coats your tongue. “Maybe it doesn’t want us to leave,” you say. 

“It?” 

You wince. “Oh, I don’t know,” you say, “it,” and gesture one sweeping palm towards the landscape just past your car window, towards whatever looms beyond it. Your eyes keep finding the rabbits. Silence permeates the car for one long moment, and you fidget in your seat. Then, there’s the click of June’s seat belt coming undone, and the whisper of her sweatpants against the leather seat as she shifts her body towards you. 

“Look at me,” June says. 

Fingers graze the side of your face, and you give into the touch, into her. Across from you, June’s still golden-haired, still broad-shouldered but sweet-faced, her bottom lip caught pale between her teeth. You ground yourself in the familiarity of her; you press your cheek against her broad palm and feel her animal-heat. “Birdie,” she says.

 “I don’t know,” you say in a small, small voice. “I don’t know. I think—I think we made a mistake.” You think you might be haunted.

June’s face crumples like tissue. “What are you saying?” Her voice cracks into an open wound. Even without saying it, you hear her, Are you breaking up with me? 

“No, no, no,” you say. “I’m sorry. No. It’s just, I wanna go home.”

There’s a heavy pause. “Birdie, you hated that place.”

Your shoulders rear back. “That’s not true, I—”

“No, just listen,” June says. “You complained about the pipes, the lack of hot water, the—the broken front step. You even hated how it smelled—you said the air was stale, sick. You’re the one who brought up moving, remember?” You shake your head, but June only cups your jaw. “Yes! Yes. You were miserable.”

And your mind, it latches onto your doubt and manifests it into something almost solid—the memories a weight on your tongue. You remember an afternoon spent on your knees, scrubbing at your mom’s shag carpet, the scent of ammonia stinging the air. One night of many in the dark with June, one hand between her legs and another clamped between her teeth. Your bedroom doorframe was swollen from years of muggy summers; the door would never shut. You two had to be so quiet; you almost feared touching her, even after your mom died. It felt like anything—anything good, too good, was a violation in that house, a mockery of the pain that lived there. June reopens dozens of small moments of discontent, some insignificant and some not: your flowers getting beheaded by deer, your neighbors giving you dirty looks. Your mother, dying in increments.

But I loved it, you think. I loved her, I swear.

“Birdie,” June says, “Robin, please. We’re almost there. We’re almost home.”

You ask, “Can you say that again?”

“Robin, we’re almost home.”

*   *   *

The house you and June are renting is a two story the color of buttercream, with neat little hedges dotting their way up the drive. It’s about twenty minutes out from the city, just like June wanted. None of the front steps are rotted through. There are no rocking chairs, but there is a porch swing. When you go inside, the rooms swell with sunlight; the air dances with dust. You breathe in the dry air, and there are no phantoms here, just empty space to fill. 

June plops her suitcase on the ground and collapses face down onto the couch—the only thing unboxed—and lets out a low sigh of pure relief. Meanwhile, you keep wandering, fingers grazing the blank beige walls, the rough brick of the fireplace with its blackened mouth. Wandering into the kitchen, you toe off your sandals and feel the cool hardwood floors beneath your feet. They’re smooth, unscarred, and you are half-afraid of slipping. Padding over to the garden window, the glass is so clean your reflection distorts from the shine. 

You turn on the sink until the water steams, the curve of the faucet hot to the touch, and it’s perfect. You should be happy, but you just feel cored out. 

Still, you try and think about happy things, promised things—nests of pillows, coffee with cardamom, breakfast in bed. June’s favorite: brioche toast, ricotta schmear, fresh peaches drizzled in honey. You want to taste the juice from June’s tongue. You want to fuck June with every door in the house blown open. You try and make all that enough. You wait for the wanting to change you. Make you the person you’re meant to be. 

But maybe happiness will always be unfamiliar to you. Maybe taking care of your mom gave you a taste for misery, and that is all you will ever know how to seek out—like tonguing at a broken tooth, pressing on a bruise. Maybe that is why you reach into your pocket, fingers seeking out your pearl earring. 

Your fingers are halfway into your pocket when you feel June come up behind you. She notches her bony chin into your shoulder, her hands knotting over your stomach, and you go still. Her lips find the soft spot beneath your jaw, and you go limp against her. 

“Welcome home, Robin,” she says. 

That is when you hear it—a creaking groan, the rumble of displaced dirt and rock. It’s faint, like a ringing in your ears. You know that sound, even though you’ve never heard it before. It’s the sound of a body, settling deep into the earth. 

You look up—part out of fear, part out of obligation. First, your eyes focus only on your warped reflection, ghost-like within the glass. You’ve always looked so much like your mother. Then, past your image, past the garden window above your new sink, past the black-eyed Susans withering in the heat, you see the old house. 

It’s only visible because you know where to look, well-camouflaged from its place among the trees, its sage green shutters caked in dirt from the journey. The window boxes overbrim with geraniums, limp like corpses. Inside, past the windows smeared with generations of fingerprints, the curtains are parted a handsbreadth. They reveal an amorphous figure, featureless but familiar. She tilts her face upward, basking in the steady trickle of sun. The gesture is so sweet that your throat closes, like corset strings pulled tight. You would know her anywhere. 

Your mother sways to a tune you are not privy to. A pearlescent shimmer flashes in her ear—the earring you buried her with—and you’re almost home. It’s as if you never left. It’s as if you will never go home again. You want your mom, but she is right here.

 You curl your fingers around the pearl in your pocket, and it’s warm. 

“Help me put this on?” you ask June. You hold up the earring to the sunlight. 

A sharp intake of breath rustles your hair. June says, “You buried her with it.” 

“No, it’s the one she lost.” You wince. “I found it—earlier. I should’ve told you.”

June shakes her head, chin dragging across your scalp. She extends her cupped hand, and you drop the pearl onto her palm. You don’t feel lighter for its absence. This grief is a part of you, and apart from you. Your body is both the haunting and the house.

“I miss her,” June says, her words like an open door.

“I know, Bug,” you say. “Me, too.”