Cleaner
The porch light was on.
I stood on the bottom step of my son’s house in Boulder, Colorado, and looked at that light for a long time. It was a brass lantern, the kind you buy at a fancy hardware store for three hundred dollars. Two years ago, there had been a cheap white fixture there, with a dead moth inside it.
Things had changed for my son since I died.
It was a Thursday night in May. The air smelled like cut grass and pine. Somewhere down the street, a dog was barking. Through the big front window, I could see the glow of a television and the shape of a woman moving around a kitchen island with a wine glass in her hand.
Emily.
She’d cut her hair short. She looked good. Rested. Like a woman with nothing heavy on her mind.
In the pocket of my coat, I had a folded piece of paper. A drawing in green crayon. Two stick figures holding hands beside a big brown mountain. One tall, with gray scribbles for hair. One small, with a cast on his arm.
Across the top, in a six-year-old’s wobbly letters: ME AND GRAMMA. WE DIDNT DIE.
Behind me, at the curb, there were two unmarked cars with their lights off. A man in a gray jacket stood beside one of them with his hands in his pockets. He nodded at me once.
I climbed the three steps to the porch.
I lifted my hand to knock.
And for a second, I stood there with my knuckles an inch from the wood, and I thought about how I’d gotten here.
About a ravine full of pine needles.
About lying perfectly still.
About my son’s voice, above me, saying the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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