The Whole Family’s Regret After I Died Chapter 09
Grandpa carried me home, step by step, deep into the forest.
I drifted at his side, watching his profile.
The sun was nearly down, and the light caught every line in his face. His lips were pressed closed, the muscles in his jaw tight. His arms were locked around the soul crystal, holding it like he was afraid that if he let go it would shatter.
He didn’t walk fast, but he never stopped.
By the time he got home, the sky was fully dark.
Grandpa’s courtyard was small: a low wall built from stone, a wooden gate that creaked on its hinges when he pushed it open. Inside, no light. He felt around for a matchbox and went through three strikes before one caught his hands shaking too badly.
A candle. Half a white one left on the kitchen windowsill, the wick already burned down once, the flame thin and not strong enough to fill the room. Just enough to light a small patch of the big oak table in the center.
Grandpa set the soul crystal in the middle of the table, then opened the kitchen cupboard and found a chipped clay bowl, poured half a bowl of water, and set it in front of the crystal. From the bottom of the wardrobe he brought out a photograph of Grandma and propped it next to it.
“We’re home.”
He said it to the table. Whether it was meant for me or for Grandma, I wasn’t sure.
Then he turned. Not toward the door, not toward the bed, but toward where I was floating.
His eyes found mine.
Every part of me went still in the air.
“Grandpa…?”
He nodded once.
“I can’t hear you clearly.” His voice was low and rough. “But I can see you. Since you stopped breathing, I could see you. Right there in the cellar.”
The tears didn’t ask permission. I had no body to cry with, but they fell anyway.
Someone had seen me.
From the cellar to the living room to the grave to this dark little house, all along, someone had seen me. He hadn’t said so. He’d held it in for a whole day and night without saying so.
“When your grandmother went,” Grandpa’s voice fell lower, “I could see her too. She sat up in her bed for three days before she left. Before she went, she said two things to me. First, the shoes were finished, keep them for her. Second, love Emma for her. Make sure she gets enough.”
He reached into his inside coat pocket and brought out the vine-woven shoes. Silver vine-flowers embroidered across the toe in fine thread, stitches so small and close they almost looked like they’d grown there. He set them in front of the soul crystal.
“Brought the shoes home.” He looked at them. “You know your grandmother’s work. They won’t rub.”
I reached for him and passed straight through. My arms went through his chest, my body through his body. Nothing to hold onto.
I crouched in the air behind him, bent over, both transparent hands pressed against my face, shaking.
Grandpa seemed to sense something. He slowly opened both arms toward where I was floating. “Come here.”
I drifted back and stopped inside the circle of his arms.
I knew he couldn’t hold me. When his arms closed, they went through my back with no sensation for either of us./ But he didn’t put them down.
He stayed there holding a piece of air, his chin resting at the height where my head should have been, eyes closed, and the tears came down one at a time.
“Go ahead and cry,” he said. “Cry as long as you need. You’re at Grandpa’s now. Nobody’s going to shoo you away, nobody’s going to lock you up.’
I don’t know how long I cried.
Grandpa loosened his arms and scrubbed his face hard with his sleeve, then went into the kitchen. He rummaged through the cupboards for a while and came out carrying a bowl of oat porridge, made that morning and gone cold. It was all that was left in the pot, not quite a full bowl.
He set it on the table in front of the crystal, then went to a cabinet behind the stove and felt around until he found three honey-berry shortbreads. My favorite.
“Not much in the pantry,” he said, sounding almost sheepish. “The porridge is from this morning, leftover. The shortbreads are from the neighbor. She baked a batch yesterday and brought these over.”
He arranged the three pieces beside the bowl.
“When you were little and you’d come stay here, every morning you’d ask your grandmother for honey-berry shortbread. She’d bake you one. You said it wasn’t enough. She’d bake another one. You said still not enough, so she’d break off her own piece and stuff it in your mouth.”
He paused. “Three. She always baked you three. Your mother called her spoiling you rotten. She paid no attention. Next day, still three.”
I crouched in front of the bowl.
The shortbreads had cooled, the edges gone a little hard, flecks of sugar crystals still clinging to the tops. I couldn’t smell them. I couldn’t touch them.
But I remembered: fresh from the oven, the outside crisp, inside soft and giving, the sweetness of berries threaded through with honey, steam still rising when you broke one in half, a little cream on the side, and the first bite filling your whole mouth with warmth.
Grandma always handed them over with the same line: “Take your time. No one’s going to steal them.”
At her house, she was right. Nobody else wanted them. All three were mine.
Grandpa sat down across the oak table like he was keeping me company at a meal. He didn’t eat. He just sat there, looking at the bowl and the shortbreads, talking in the scattered easy way of someone with nowhere to be.
He talked about things from when I was small.
About the time I came to visit at age two, still unsteady on my feet, and tripped over the threshold in the
courtyard. I didn’t cry. I got up, turned around, and kicked the threshold. Grandma laughed until she cried.
About a summer when I was four, when I went to the stream with Grandpa to wash laundry and a dragonfly landed on the back of my hand. I was so scared to move that my face went red, and when it finally flew away I burst into tears. Not from fright. Because I didn’t want it to go.
About one winter holiday when I set off a small fireworks spell in the courtyard and sent Grandma’s drying herbs flying in every direction. Grandpa chased me around the yard for three laps before he ran out of breath first and ended up crouching there laughing.
“Your grandmother was still here then.” He stopped for a moment. “She was in the doorway, laughing at you. Said you took after me. A little troublemaker.”
The candle flame flickered twice, in and out.
Grandpa went quiet. He looked at me for a long time.
“Are you almost gone?”
I didn’t move. But he seemed to read something in my face.
“Getting lighter, aren’t you,” he said. “Lighter and lighter. Starting to fade.”
I looked down at my hand. He was right. The edges of my fingers had already gone soft, like a painting left in the rain, the colors bleeding outward.
I nodded.
Grandpa closed his eyes. When he opened them, he stood up.
He walked to me and raised one hand, holding it where my shoulder should have been.
“Your grandmother told me to love you for her.”
He said it, and his voice held, though he was fighting to keep it from breaking.
“I didn’t do enough. You came to the forest too seldom, and every time I wanted to keep you a little longer, your mother would come to take you back. Every time I walked you to the road, I wanted to say ‘stay, live here with Grandpa,’ but I couldn’t get the words out. I was afraid of making trouble with your mother.”
He breathed in.
“I’m sorry.”
His shoulders finally gave way and his voice broke apart with them. “While you were alive, I couldn’t get you out of that house. Now that you’re gone, all I could do was bring your soul crystal home.”
“Too late. Everything is too late.”
I shook my head, over and over. My mouth was moving not too late. Not too late. You came. That means it
wasn’t.
He couldn’t read my lips. But somehow he understood, because he smiled.
A hard-won smile. Tears came down through it, twisting along the creases in his face.
“Go on then.”
He opened both arms wide.
“If there’s a next life, find parents who love you from the start.”
His voice was getting quieter.
“If they don’t love you, run. Run all the way to Grandpa. Grandpa will bake you shortbreads.”
“Three. Guaranteed.”
I threw myself into his arms.
Everything passed through. There was nothing to hold onto.
But I pressed my face into the place where his chest should have been and closed my eyes and tried to memorize the shape of this hug.
This was the most complete embrace I had ever been given. Living and dead combined, it was the only whole one.
Morning came.
Light crept in through the broken east window, touching the soul crystal on the oak table first, then the bowl and the shortbreads, then Grandpa’s face. Then mine.
My hand was almost invisible. Light passed clean through my fingers and threw no shadow on the wall.
Grandpa watched me fade. His lips shook badly. His hands gripped his pant seams, knuckles bone-white.
But he didn’t cry.
He bit down and pushed out one last smile.
“Go.”
I looked at him one more time. Looked at the small dark room, at the soul crystal on the table and the three sugar- dusted honey-berry shortbreads, at the photograph of Grandma on the windowsill.
And at the one person in the world who had always been able to see me.
Then I turned and went toward the light.
Lighter with every step. Further and further.
Grandpa grew small. The old house grew small. The courtyard grew
small.
Then everything was gone. Only a clean, warm white.
1
I closed my eyes inside that white.
And this time, I wasn’t afraid.
In the next life, I want to be a child who is loved from the very beginning.
Not a lot.
Just a bowl of warm oat porridge, three honey-berry shortbreads, and one hug that holds.
That’s all.
