In the living room I stood in the spot my father had pulled the trigger. A chill ran up my spine. Then I stood in the very place my mother’s life had ended. The carpet had been shampooed, the walls scrubbed. All the blood and the brains were gone. I ran my hands up the wall, then down it. I dropped to my knees. Where the baseboard met the carpet a spot of blood had been overlooked. It was dry, almost black. It didn’t look like blood, but I knew that it was. I scraped it away with my thumb and some of it got stuck beneath my nail. I left it there, the very last thing of my mother.

I stood and studied the softball-size hole in the wall and could see the markings the police had made digging out the bullet. They needed it for evidence, though I figured it was superfluous since the evidence was already weighted enough in their favor. I ran my thumb along the hole’s sharp edges, then stuck my finger into it. The bullet had lodged itself into a wooden stud. The perimeter had splintered, but the stud had held. For some reason I wished the cops had left it behind. And I wonder, as I sit writing these words this many years later, where that bullet is now, because the mad truth is that the bullet still exists somewhere.

The silence changed with each room. In the living room, I had encountered the heavy silence of pain and anguish that still lingered. But in the bedroom, the silence was an altogether different one, that of nostalgia, which had a voice of its own. I closed my eyes and could hear the thud of my fists against the heavy bag, the sound of my neighbor’s radio that always blared when she lay by the pool and I lustily watched from my window, the smack of my lips against Emily Cole’s—Emily, in sixth grade, the first girl I ever frenched. I would have never had the courage to kiss her myself, but luckily one of my friends had been there to urge us on, and even then I was scared shitless to do it. I had grown up in that room, and the essence of those events had persisted even though the door itself had been slammed shut on that particular childhood, and I knew that I was forever changed.

The windows were closed and the room was stifling. Otherwise it had remained untouched, the fans still aimed at my bed, the covers exactly as I had thrown them aside when I heard my mother’s scream. The heavy bag still hung from the ceiling. I punched it a few times. It felt hard against my knuckles.