wednesday, january 10

I’m hit with a powerful blast of nostalgia as soon as we open the door. Inside, the Berkeley house smells just as it always has—like home—but I don’t think I realized before how home smells like Mom’s cedar trunk we used as a coffee table, and Dad’s Danish cigarettes—apparently he snuck them more than I knew. A sunbeam bursting in through the living room window captures a few tiny stars of dust, spinning. I have a woman come and clean the house once a month, but even though things look tidy, the place still feels abandoned.

It sends a guilty ache spearing through my middle.

Elliot comes up behind me, peeking over my shoulder and into the living room. “Do you think we’ll make it inside today?”

He softens his joke with a kiss to my shoulder, and I can’t exactly blame him for the gentle jab: we’ve driven by the house twice now, late at night after my shifts at the hospital. I’ve been too mentally drained to feel up to rejoining my childhood home. But I don’t work until tonight, and today I woke up feeling . . . ready.

Our plan for now is to sell the Healdsburg house and clean out the Berkeley place to make it ready for visiting Cal faculty who want a furnished rental. But cleaning it out for this means taking all the important memories with me—photo albums, artwork, letters, tiny mementos sprinkled everywhere.

I take a step in, and then another. The wood floor creaks where it always did. Elliot follows me in, looking around. “This house smells like Duncan.”

“Doesn’t it?”

He hums, passing me to walk over to the mantel, where there are photos of the three of us, of Kennet and Britt, of Mom’s parents, who died when she was young.

“You know, I’ve only ever seen one photo of her. The one Duncan had next to his bed.”

Her. My mother. Laís, to everyone else. Mãe, to me.

Elliot trails his fingers over a few frames and then picks one up, studying it, before looking over at me.

I know which one he’s holding. It’s a picture Dad took of me and Mom at the beach. The wind is blowing her long black hair across her neck, and I’m leaning against her, sitting between her legs, with her arms wrapped around my chest. Her smile was so wide and bright; in it, you can see without having to be told that she was an absolute force of nature.

He blinks down to it again. “You look so much like her, it’s uncanny.”

“I know.” I am so grateful for the passing of time, that I can see her face and be glad that I inherited it from her, rather than terrified that looking in the mirror would be a greater torture every day as I aged and began to look more like how I remembered her.

I kneel down by the cedar trunk, where all our photos, letters, and keepsakes live.