Kristine Salcedo

Kristine Chung Salcedo is an emerging writer who has lived in Philadelphia, New York, Madison (Wisconsin), and Chicago. Her short stories have been published in Project As[I]Am and Pif Magazine. She currently lives in New Jersey, with her husband, daughter, and son.

Coming Home

I asked my mother to tell me about the day my father died. It was 16 years ago and I thought it was safe to ask. A wound that old, even one as deep as hers, should have healed by now. 

      She did not question why I was asking; she simply began to answer. The words poured out of her as if she were reciting an oft-visited memory. The familiar death narrative began to form, her words filling in the holes in my memory. 

      It was a Sunday afternoon, and she and my brother were waiting for my father to come home from the gym. An hour and then two had gone by without a call from his cell phone. She was past worrying now, her mind already filled with dread.

      A loud pounding on the front door startled her. She opened it and saw a man dressed in plain clothes. “Hello,” he said, “are you Mrs. Joseph Chung?”

      “Yes, I am,” she replied. “What is it?”

      “Your husband is at the hospital. You need to go there now.”

      “How is he?”

      He paused and said in an even voice, “I don’t know.”

      She could sense the lie in his eyes. Before she could say anything further, the man continued, “Let me give you directions and instructions on what to do when you get there.”

When my mother and brother arrived at the hospital, she approached the front desk and mentioned my father’s name to the staff. A nurse looked up his name and then ushered them to a small waiting room and closed the door behind her. My brother paced the room in silence while my mother sat in a chair and waited, not understanding why they were in a private room and wondering what was brimming in the eyes of the man who knocked on her front door minutes ago. 

      Eventually, a white-coated man and a woman entered the room. The man identified himself as the doctor and began to talk about my father. How something happened at the gym. How he was rushed to the hospital. How his heart wasn’t beating. How they tried to revive him. “We did everything we could,” the doctor said, “but he died.”

      The woman who accompanied the doctor, they later learned, was the hospital chaplain. She held my mother after she had crumpled to the floor and uttered prayers of consolation. My mother was a woman of God too, but in that moment nothing could reach her. The chaplain’s prayers streamed over and around my mother, pooling somewhere else and disintegrating. 

      A thin veil, an infinitesimal juncture, separated the moment my mother believed my father was alive and the moment she realized he was dead. I had witnessed her grief back then, grief that was impossible and cavernous, grief that had cut into her irrevocably. This part of the narrative was familiar to me.

      What I had never known, what my mother had never told me, was what she felt in the house after he died.

She left the hospital with my brother, her face and body heavy with sorrow. To go back home without my father and sleep in their bed was unfathomable to my mother. As they pulled onto their street that night, my mother at first did not recognize their house at the end of the cul-de-sac. It loomed from behind the evergreens on their front lawn, a shadowy apparition of the home they had left earlier that day. The windows, black and lidless, gazed onto the street as they pulled into the driveway.

      She had not thought to turn on the porchlight before they rushed to the hospital that afternoon. Now that the sun had set, the stone porch was shrouded in darkness. The ritual of opening the front door with her keys, once so familiar to her hands, felt unnatural as she twisted her wrist to unlock the deadbolt. She turned on the ceiling lights inside, ventured into the living room, and peered upstairs. The hallway and the bedroom doors were obscured by the night. 

      Something tugged at the corner of her mind. “There is something in this house,” it said to her.

“Years ago, we had a customer at the pharmacy who lost her husband,” my mother told me. “She told me she was so scared of the house after he died, she had to move. She had to get rid of the house right away. I didn’t understand what she was so afraid of. Then when Daddy died, I thought of that woman. And then I understood what she meant. I was afraid of our house. Because Daddy was gone.”

      “Really?” I asked in disbelief. I imagined my childhood home, the dimpled wallpaper from the 90s, the gleaming hardwood floors, and the kitchen that faced the grassy backyard. In my mind, our house was a repository of dissonant memories - late night fights with my brother, handwritten love letters I wrote and never sent, Neil Diamond songs playing on the record player, and other banalities. 

      “It wasn’t the kind of fear you feel when you are lost in the woods at night,” she continued. “It was so much more than that. It felt supernatural.”

      “Supernatural,” I echoed, “like ghosts?”

      “Something like that,” she replied uncertainly.

      “Something demonic?” I offered.

      “Something like that.”

My mother had meandered through the hallway on the second floor and into each room, taking in the absence of my father. The floors creaked in their usual spots. The bedrooms were vacuumed and the beds were made. Nothing in the house had been altered. Yet she felt something lingering in the spaces between the furniture and fixtures, just within the walls, and in the air already thick with grief.

      Every day the sun rose over the backyard and set over the front lawn, sending soft beams of light through varying curtained windows throughout the day. In the daylight, my mother could always glimpse the outside depending on which room she was in: the evergreens in the front, the daffodils and rose bushes that bordered the porch, the prairie-like backyard, the paved street, or the asphalt driveway. At night, these same windows, yellow and bright during the day, shifted seamlessly into ominous specters of their former selves.

      My mother avoided looking at the windows after nightfall. She was convinced that something awaited her in the black, glass panes. Even with every light on, she could see in her peripheral vision the dark openings in the walls, each one beckoning her to look their way. She never looked. She was certain that if she did, she would see an apparition that, once seen, could never be unseen.

      I thought of my father and his indomitable energy. The man who bought a dilapidated storefront and turned it into a bustling pharmacy. The man who went to work the morning after an armed robbery. He almost seemed invincible to us. Now that he was gone, I imagined that something, once kept at bay and now emboldened by his absence, had crept over the lawn, crawled atop the bushes, and entered the house through its crevices. Something invisible and inhuman now dwelled in their home.

My brother lived in the same house, yet even his presence was not enough to drive out whatever it was that haunted my mother. He seemed oblivious to it and, after taking a week off, he resumed his daily routine of going to work, watching Netflix DVDs at home, and posting on his travel blog. My mother surmised that whatever haunted their house seemed fixated on her.

      “I was so afraid,” she told me. “I prayed to God to protect me. I read the Psalms in the Bible so many times, I memorized them. Especially Psalm 121. Especially verse 8.”

      Psalm 121: 8

      the Lord will watch over your coming and going

      both now and forevermore.

      I imagined my mother, shut inside her bedroom with the lights on, praying and reciting the psalms, while something roamed in the house at night with impunity.

Eventually, my mother consulted the pastor at her church. A recent death can sometimes stir and invite evil spirits, the pastor told her. In many cultures, people pay a visit to the bereaved person’s home and spend the night there, in part to comfort, and in part to ward off those spirits. I was skeptical of the pastor’s theory but could offer no other explanation for the peculiar presence my mother felt in the house. The only thing they could do was pray.

      As spring gave way to summer, the days grew longer and milder. Whatever it was that dwelled in the house grew weary of my mother’s perpetual prayers and psalmic recitations, and took its leave. The rooms and hallway were restored to their natural, unremarkable state. The closets had been cleared of my father’s belongings and his affairs had been settled. One day, my mother opened the windows to air out the house and breathed freely for the first time that year. The house, now lighter and wearied by loss, became Home again.

Several years later, my mother sold the house to another family of four. A young couple and two little boys dwell there now. I am sure they stripped off our old wallpaper, scratched up the hardwood floors, and relandscaped the yard. The bones of the house remain the same though, and I imagine all of them making memories of their own within those walls and enlivening the rooms once lived in by me, my brother, my mother, and my father.