She was cold. How long had she been in the bathroom? Her body felt like it belonged to someone else; she had no control over her limbs, her fingers, her neck. Her head floated.  It took a moment of gazing, unfocused, into the toilet bowl before the image of him heaving her thin body against the shower door flickered in her head. 

I tapped back through the previous days’ photos. They were blank until the morning of her death three days before. Then, one by one, day by day, the small square photos went back through time, the last photo taken exactly one year prior to her death.

Scrolling through them, I recognized nothing. Some photos had trees not seen around here. One was from such height it made my skin crawl. I could feel my face grow clammy as I downloaded the phone’s photos onto her computer. Some were fuzzy, several were macro shots of details, others half obscured by over exposure or shadows. Checking the metadata on each photo, I sorted them by place. Some were local, taken around our Tennessee landscape. But when I was through, 366 photos were literally all over the U.S. map. 

... it’s a divine calling we must answer. To spread the word to the furthest reaches of the universe. Wherever light quells darkness, men in white button-up shirts and black ties will continue ringing doorbells. 

“Miss, uh,” stammered Dr. Haan, looking into May’s eyes. “Can you translate what I said?” He pointed with his eyes toward her mother, sitting with her back straight as an arrow, arms crossed defiantly at her chest. She stared at May with a soured face. “What did he say?” she asked twice, raising her volume with urgency.

May leaned in to the doctor’s desk, listening with great intensity this time. “Your mother has cancer. Gastric cancer.” He said it, accentuating each individual word, as if each weighed heavily on his tongue to say it again. She gave the slightest nod, showing she understood every word.

Kayla had always loved rainbows for the colors, but Kelsey loved the mystery in them. The challenge to try to discover what really happened at the end. 

“Very important, resting the meat. Keeps it juicy. By the way, saying juicy reminds me of that dive Juicy Lucy’s down the coast—had the best crab cakes, ever. Remember? Have you been back since the last time we were there? Got a little ugly, as I recall, but I apologized for that. Anyway, the cocktail sauce was to die for. Lucy made her own horseradish, you know. 

“Next, the soufflé. I’m sure you’ll recall the chef at Noveau!, who compared soufflés to poems, suggesting one should discard the first one thousand of both. Not that your soufflé won’t be perfect, or that your poetry sucks. I never said that. Never. But, just in case, maybe you should have a Plan B. How about shrimp on the barbie?

“Ok, that was mean but, seriously, maybe you guys should just go to Outback." 

Mom talks about the camps in this flat, distant monotone.  She keeps going until I start to cry. Then she stops, looks around as if remembering where she is, and says, “Enough Gitteleh. Hitler ruined my life and now he should hurt you, too? Enough with the stories.”

And then I feel that by crying like a weakling who didn’t even go through these things.  I have completely failed her and worse, THE SIX MILLION. 

The tiny pack animal has yet to acknowledge me. It prefers to skip across the desk, sniffing and feeling bits of crumpled paper and broken pencil leads. It did not pause at my half-eaten sandwich. I think to myself, “I thought elephants are supposed to like peanuts." 

Staring at the black void of the revolver barrel, he wished she was here now, saying that same thing to him again. She wouldn’t have seen the gun, not yet, and when she asked him where his mind was, he’d say "Everywhere!" as he lifted the revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

Except, she hadn’t asked a question. She had made a statement, and in that context his response wouldn’t make sense.