She’s here, though, I realize. This is her childhood home. She slept under this roof until she fled at eighteen to Southern California for college. It gets me thinking.

I poke my head out, listen on the landing. Maura’s snoring rumbles in the distance like an idling car. A slow, moaning creak joins the chorus. The old house and the old woman settling in the night.

I creep down the narrow attic stairs to the third floor to find a sea of doors. Maura has so many rooms, so much space, and all closed doors. What’s hiding behind them?

To my right, a bathroom, vintage with a pull-chain toilet and a charming claw-foot tub. Directly across from the stairwell, I find a hobby room, cluttered with boxes, an ancient sewing machine, shelves overflowing with scrapbooking supplies. I can’t imagine Maura scrapbooking, and apparently neither can she—the first three albums I open are half-empty. And down the hall to my left, I flip on the light and find my mother.

Her room is frozen in midnineties glory, muted by the fine layer of dust covering everything, as though Maura shut it when Mom left for college and hasn’t been inside since. Her desk is dominated by a boulder of a computer, flanked by built-in CD shelving filled with bubble-gum pop, boy bands, and feminist folk. Posters on the wall offer a snapshot of the teen girl my mom once was: Romeo + Juliet, Jagged Little Pill, Titanic. So she liked Leo DiCaprio and was…angry?

I do a turn of the room, drink in the details, expecting, hoping, to feel a connection. A sensation that she’s watching over me, that she’s here. Everyone always says that, that you feel your loved ones with you. But I don’t. I feel suffocated. By this place that might as well be a mausoleum, by the gaping chasm of my own grief. These are only things, but they were hers. And they’re falling away to dust, like she did.

I’ve held it together in the weeks since my mom took her final breath. I didn’t even cry at the funeral.

But now, in my mom’s old room, in my creepy new house, I fling myself onto her mothball-scented, dusty bedspread, desperately hoping to catch one last whiff of her. And I cry all the tears I’ve refused to shed when I realize she isn’t there.

I wake with a start, disoriented, sweaty, and still in my street clothes. For a moment, the anachronistic setting confuses me, until it all floods back. I’m in my mom’s childhood bedroom. The nightmare is real.