Chapter 13

Janice's homeis eclectic in ways that Oma's never was—pictures and artwork lining every available wall, painted murals of flowers dancing along the door trim, the formal dining table covered in half-finished canvas instead of placemats. It should feel claustrophobic, the amount of knick-knacks is borderline hoarding, but somehow there's an order to the chaos that makes it feel full without being suffocating.

Bifocals perched on the bridge of her nose, the attached beaded lanyard glinting in the morning light, Janice spreads documents over the surface of the kitchen table as she explains each one. Sara listens numbly, hearing the words but struggling to register them, until Janice gets to the bank statement. "The savings account was pretty much cleared out a few months ago, but the house—"

Sara interrupts, shaking her head. "Wait, what?"

That can't be right. Oma never spoke about her finances, but she regularly gave Sara advice. Having a healthy savings was one of the topics she exhausted the most.

A rainy day fund is no good in a flood.

Janice looks down at the statement, nodding. "Her savings is empty. It looks like she withdrew the balance a few months ago. There's still money in the checking, though."

A few months ago.

Right before classes started.

The apartment.

Sara's vision swims. Janice says something else, but everything is muted. Echoed. It dawns on her then, what she should have probably suspected from the start. "She knew." Sara pins her grandmother's oldest friend with a look, the horror in her heart growing with every trembling second. "She knew she was dying."

Janice pauses, expressions changing so rapidly it's like she's on a skip reel: surprise, regret, hesitance, and, finally, resignation. "Yes."

Sara didn't think there was anything that could make it hurt more, but the sharp pain in her chest proves otherwise. "Why," she wheezes, throat tight. "Why didn't she tell me?"

How much time had she wasted? She would have come to visit more, would have taken her time to enjoy every remaining moment. Why—

"Gertie didn't want you to worry," Janice soothes, taking her hand. "She was adamant that you be able to enjoy your last year without this hanging over your head. She didn't know it would be so quick. No one did. The doctors thought she would have another two years."

Sara knows the words are meant to bring comfort, but they only sharpen the pain. All those months they could have had together, gone. So what if it would have pushed her graduation back? What's a half a year in the face of just a few more months making memories in Oma's kitchen, laughing when the flour smudged their cheeks?

Janice's aged fingers slip away from her own to rifle through the remaining papers. "The house is to be sold, the profits to go to you on your twenty-third birthday."

A little less than a year; just after she's due to graduate. She's not entirely sure how she feels about that—Oma's house has always felt like home. "Does it have to be?"

"Sold?" When Sara nods, Janice sighs. "Yes, dear. Gertie was very clear. She had big dreams for you, honey, and she knew you wouldn't find them in the likes of this place."

There is no funeral,not in the traditional sense, but Janice does organize a Celebration of Life.

They set up tables in the garden, drape fairy lights between the house and the gnarled oak. It's smaller than Oma deserves, but the people who come are the people she cherished, and Sara thinks that's just how she'd want it. A handful of people, laughing and toasting a life well-lived under a late summer sky.

Jen hugs her when they arrive, the embrace so tight it's borderline painful. It feels good—grounding. "I'm so sorry." Her voice hitches, cracks. She grew up having play days and sleepovers under Oma's roof—shares many of the same fond memories that Sara holds dear. The grief she wears is as real as her own. "Oma was an amazing lady."

Sara tries very, very hard to resist the instinct to flinch at her use of past tense. She nods, throat tight. Over Jen's shoulder, Miles greets her with a sad, empathetic smile, and Sara is reminded that it was just last year that she joined him on the grass for his brother's funeral—the ritualistic rifle fire loud and the folded flag heavy in his mother's arms. She remembers the bitterness Miles spat later, fueled by whiskey and grief, that the army had some nerve to take his brother after taking his leg.

Then, Sara couldn"t find the right words to help him. Now, she understands that there are none. The truth is that none of it is fair.

It's not fair that Miles lost his leg in a war he had only agreed to serve in as a medic, only to lose his only brother six years later to the front lines.

It isn't fair that she lost the love of her life to a freak accident and a miracle turned sour, only to lose her grandmother to death just when the tear in her heart was beginning to heal.

That night,Sara sleeps in the spare bedroom Oma always called hers. Her dollhouse, built by her grandfather's careful hands when she was born, sits in the corner. Tomorrow she'll have to sort through Oma's life, treasure by treasure, and decide what she can keep and what she'll have to let go.

The digital clock on the nightstand illuminates the room, the numbers changing faster than she can find sleep. She stares at the dollhouse, admiring the tiny shingles and hand painted shutters, and knows there's no space for it in her tiny apartment.

(It doesn't stop her from wanting it anyway.)

She takes as muchas she can, unwilling to part with all of it. The bed frame from her old room, the mustard velvet couch from the living room—but it's not the large items she finds herself in danger of taking too much of, but the seemingly infinite amount of odds and ends she has a memory attached to. She combs through the house with a diligence that borders on frenzy, her pile of treasures growing faster than she can box.

Here is Oma's favorite pie plate she would use almost exclusively despite having three others; there is the embroidered artwork that hung in the bathroom for as long as Sara's been alive. She takes the bundt cake pan, the faded coffee tin full of tea bags. Sara's never crocheted in her life and has no use for her grandmother's hooks, but she takes those too—the wooden handles shiny from use. It takes her at least five minutes to talk herself out of taking the yarn as well.

She packs up every single one of the photos; strips them from the frames and presses them neatly between the pages of Oma's albums for safekeeping. All in all, the pictures take up two moving boxes. Sara knows they will likely take up a cringeworthy amount of space under her bed, but she can't bring herself to regret it. Photos and yarn were the only things Oma hoarded. Sara can't rationalize the second, but she can justify the first.

Miles' hand rests on her shoulder, startling her. She's not sure when she stopped moving or how long she's been staring through Oma's decorative set of wedding china, but the worry lining his forehead gives her a pretty good idea.

"You good?"

A question with ‘yes' or ‘no' answer. Miles has always been good about offering an easy way out of difficult conversations. If he were anyone else, Sara might have lied as easily as breathing, but she knows Miles. Trusts him to know when to push and when to let the conversation die. "No," she says, her smile as weak as her heart, "but I'll live."

Miles nods. Behind the frames of his thick-rimmed glasses, his eyes soften with sympathy. He gives her shoulder a soft, reassuring squeeze before dropping his hand. "Yeah, you will." Miles nods toward the china she had been staring at. "This coming, too?"

Biting her lip, Sara stares longingly at the displayed plates—eyes tracing over the sweeping floral pattern and wondering if she even likes it (or if it's just her love for Oma bleeding into everything she owned). "I have nowhere to put it," she murmurs, regret tightening her chest. She tries to tell herself she won't miss it, will probably never think of it again. It's just that the pressure of knowing what to take and what to leave feels like a game of dodgeball she'll never win. No matter what, she's sure to return home with bruises.

She still hasn't been able to make a decision on the dollhouse.

Wordlessly, Miles opens up the display case, pulling out a plate and wrapping it in newspaper.

Sara watches in painful silence until she realizes he's putting it in one of the boxes labeled as ‘keep'. "Miles—"

"Keep it," he says, eyes warm and expression soft. "Keep all of it, if you want. If you don't have space at your place, there'll be space in ours."

Sara shakes her head. "It's not fair to ask you to store all this just because I can't make up my mind."

"So go through it in a month, or a few months. Or a year. Life's too short for regrets, and if you force yourself to leave this behind now, you're going to regret it." He gestures towards the plates, eyebrows raised. "Take it. We already have a spare room full of stuff. What's a few more boxes?"

Her throat tightens and her eyes burn; gratitude as poignant as the loss. Stiffly, she nods. Miles ruffles her hair, the way he knows she equally hates and loves, before reaching for another plate.

The house is bare,nothing but skin for walls and windows for eyes. A corpse.

Everything that made it home is packed up in boxes; some of it for donation (Oma's clothes, some of the furniture, the majority of the kitchen supplies). A lot of it isn't. As she watches Miles load up the dollhouse into the truck, she feels another pang of guilt over how much she's keeping. There's no way she'll be able to fit everything in her tiny apartment.

Jen links their arms, leaning her dark head on Sara's shoulder. "It doesn't feel the same, does it?" Somehow, she always knows exactly what's going through Sara's mind.

"No. It feels…" she trails off. Hollow? Lifeless? Both words fit in ways that make her heart ache, but neither encompass the full scope of it. It's like someone developed the film wrong and everywhere she looks, it's nothing but shadows and static. Sara doesn't have a word for that, though, so she leaves the sentence hanging and unfinished.

Jen doesn't push for more. "Do you want a moment to say goodbye?" she asks, voice soft.

It should sound silly, saying goodbye to a house, but Sara knows it's exactly what she needs. In so many ways, this place was the one she called home. Her measurements are notched in the doorway of her old bedroom—the walls still lavender from when she was ten and begged Oma to let her paint it. In the garden, hundreds of daffodils lay dormant, set there years ago by her and Oma's hands and waiting to bloom come Spring.

Her childhood is cradled in these walls, in the soil… so much of who she was, who she is, planted around the property like painted eggs on Easter morning. Sara knows she won't have time to find all of them, but—maybe—she can gather enough.

"Yeah," she croaks. The word feels like sandpaper, all scratch and grit.

Jen gives her a gentle squeeze before unfolding herself from the crook of her arm. "We'll be outside finishing up, but Sara? Take however much time you need, ok?"

She's tempted to ask if forever would be too long, but her throat is still so tight she doesn't want to risk the words cracking, so Sara nods instead. Jen gives her a final pat on the shoulder—her touch lingering—before she pulls away. Behind her, Sara hears the front door softly shut.

The house is so still, so empty, she feels like a phantom drifting from room to room. It's only the occasional creaking of the floorboards under her feet, the feel of the wallpaper sliding under her touch that ground her. She goes through every room, every closet, with a diligence she's never had. There's a fear prodding her heart, a whispered command to commit as much as she can to memory before she forgets.

She saves the kitchen for last, her fingers tracing the grout lines over the counter. The ceramic feels cool against her palms. Most of her memories were made in this kitchen—Saturday morning banana bread steaming, fresh and soft out of the oven. The sink overflowing with dishes and flour streaking their hair when Sara would help bake and assemble plates of Christmas cookies.

How does she say goodbye to a lifetime in the meager span of a few minutes?

Silently, she shakes her head because she knows the answer is she can't.

Her eyes drift to the kitchen window. Sara's always admired how it looked over the garden—a living picture framed by wooden trim. She steps closer, for a better look, and her heart plummets.

Surrounded by the vibrant colors of Oma's garden, bathed in the golden light of dusk, a charcoal shadow is wedged between the color. He reaches for one of the wine colored roses as if to skim the petals, to feel the velvet texture slide beneath his fingertips. When his hand drops, there's a softness around his eyes and a tension highlighting the sharp line of his jaw. On him, the expression is foreign to her, but she recognizes the emotion behind it.

Longing.

She doesn't know why he's there, why he would risk her fury to come, but in that moment Sara knows it wasn't with the intention of being seen. He has always been the picture of composure around her (spine straight, shoulders back) but she sees none of these things now. The line of his body is soft, shoulders bowed in a way that looks more tired than relaxed—vulnerable.

She waits for him to look up, for their eyes to meet, but he never once faces the house. Instead, he turns away—his back to her and the fields of dried corn stalks stretched out before him in a shifting sea of gold. With his hands hiding in his pockets, he is a splash of ink, a colorless silhouette in a warm, vibrant landscape.

Framed by the kitchen window, Sara can't remember standing witness to a more lonely picture.