Page 192 of Haunt Me

‘The silence screamed of quiet school mornings

All of our ghosts sitting down to breakfast.’

Suddenly, Faith rises so abruptly her chair’s legs screech against the tiles. She bolts for the door, a hand over her mouth. Everyone’s eyes snap to her. Eden is already on her feet, rushing after her sister before she’s even out of the room, sending me a quick glance. I follow them.

Faith is halfway up the stairs, trying to stifle her sobs with both hands pressed over her face.

“Fee?” Eden calls, overtaking her. “What’s wrong?”

“Memories,” Faith gasps, crying so much she can barely breathe. “In the smells. They… they bring everything back.”

I get it. I suck in a breath as if I’ve been hit in the gut. Faith is right. Memories live in the smells, I can attest to that. Smells can catch you unawares, betray your emotions, bring up stuff you thought you’d buried deep. When you smell something from your childhood or from the past, everything comes back clearly, even things you have forgotten or repressed on purpose.

It's happening again all over for you, right now, no matter how much time has passed. Smells do that.

“The smell of autumn,” I say, looking up at Faith. “Of breakfast in winter. Of new books.”

“The smell of rotten leaves in the woods,” Eden adds, and we both turn to look at her. Faith slides down to sit on the top step, and Eden and I crouch down on either side of her. “Of rain on freshly-cut grass.”

Faith is nodding.

“Every year, I can barely face the Christmas lights without thinking about it,” she says. “But we’ve never… We’ve never been such a big family before, you know?”

I look away. No, I don’t know. It’s been so long since I was part of a big family, I can barely remember it. Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Grandma, James and me around a table… It’s nothing but the echo of a dream I have long since woken from.

“I just think… at every big moment like this…” Faith wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “How much she would have loved it.”

“Who would have loved it, Fee?” Eden asks.

“Mom. Our mom,” Faith says.

“Oh,” Eden looks at me helplessly. “I’m sorry. The pain… it never goes away, does it?”

Faith shakes her head. “I wish you had known her.”

“I wish I had,” Eden agrees softly.

And it hits me all over again, how Eden lost her father too. Well, she lost the man shethoughtwas her father, but her heart doesn’t know that it wasn’t real, does it? Her heart feels the same grief, the same pain over losing a parent as Faith’s does. As mine does.

Eden hugs Faith and they stay like that until Faith stops crying. I try to stand up to give them some privacy, but Faith grabs my hand to stop me.

“Stay until the pain dulls,” she tells me, and I nod.

I have never thought about it like that. ‘Until the pain dulls’. It’s never going to stop, I know that, but if someone hugs you tightly enough, it might dull a little. Enough for you to smile. So we both stay until Faith can breathe again.

When she is better and we’re about to follow her back to the kitchen, a sudden sixth feeling makes me touch Eden’s shoulder.

“You ok?” I ask her. Faith is already down the stairs; we are alone.

She shrugs.

“Tell me what’s hurting,” I beg.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. To me, you can.”

“It’s… what Faith said about my mom missing this.” Eden waves her hand. “You feel like that, don’t you, when you lose someone? You constantly think of them, thinking that they might have liked this, hated that… You think of a year in the past, and you wonder—what year was this? Was it before high school? What grade was I in? Was my little nephew born yet?”

---