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you’re walking through a mausoleum. I’d given up trying to throw open the curtains and open up the windows a while ago now.
     
    There were a lot of things that I’d given up on a long time ago, and having anything resembling a normal life was one of them.
     
    My mom hadn’t left the house since my father had died. She hadn’t even gone to the funeral. We had thought that she was in shock—that’s what the doctors had said anyway. That she was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
     
    I remember asking the kindly but ultimately useless doctor if that wasn’t just something that soldiers got when they came home from places like Afghanistan. I remember that Doctor Moyes had been impressed at my knowledge. He had explained that sometimes the shock of something is so great it sends us somewhere else, and sometimes it can take a long time for us to find our way back. He told me that’s what had happened to my mother—that she was somewhere else, trying to find her way home to me.
     
    I had clung to that hope the way a drowning man clings to a life-preserver for days—days that had turned into weeks, weeks that had turned into months, and months that had eventually turned into years that passed with no discernible change in my mother.
     
    It was only recently that I’d finally begun to realize that Doctor Moyes had left out a vital piece of information when he’d explained the diagnosis to me. He hadn’t told me that the patient has to want to come back in order to find their way, and I don’t think that my mother has any inclination to rejoin the real world.
     
    The world where her husband is dead and she’s living in a nightmarish town that seems like something out of Mad Max . I don’t blame her for wanting to check out of this place. If I were her I would probably figure that there wasn’t much of anything to come back for.
     
    Except for me, I guess. Except for her daughter.
     
    “Mom, I’m home,” I shout as I drop my keys onto the table by the door.
     
    Silence is my only reply. This is no great surprise, I don’t even feel disappointed anymore, or at least I try not to. After all, it really is just a waste of time. I had only recently noticed that I stopped holding my breath as I walk into the house, hopeful that I would find my mother in the kitchen making up a batch of her famous cookies and that she would ask me about my day.
     
    But that never happened, and there came a point when you had to stop expecting a miracle. It just made you feel like an idiot when it never came to pass.
     
    I find her in the armchair where she’d pretty much taken up residence since dad had gone. She slept down in the lounge, presumably because she couldn’t bear to sleep in the bedroom that she had once shared with the love of her life.
     
    Her once lush, thick, beautiful red hair that made her look like a force of nature is now thin, dirty, and flecked with grey. She had always been slim, but the slightness of her frame has turned into boniness.
     
    She is a shadow of her former self, but when I think about her I still manage to remember the person that she used to be even if it’s getting harder and harder. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, so full of life and love. She loved our family. She and my dad had been together since they were kids, and they used to say that they were soul mates and I had completed their family.
     
    That’s what made it so hard when everything changed after dad died. It was like a piece of my mother died that day as well—the piece that made her who she was. All the neighbors and friends had pitched in to help when it became clear that my mother wasn’t able to cope.
     
    They would bring food for dinner, make me hot chocolate, make sure that I did my homework, and that I had medicine when I was sick. All while my mother shrank further and further away from real life.
     
    After a while, the well-meaning members of Painted Rock had slowly drifted