No One Came Chapter 14
And my grave sat on the hillside, washed by the rain, day after day.
Later, Mom moved back into the house alone.
She cleaned my room until it was spotless.
She changed the sheets.
She wiped down the desk.
She even opened the curtains, letting the sunlight pour in.
I used to keep my curtains drawn all the time.
Not because I liked the dark.
I just couldn’t stand to see the family across the street, sitting around their dining table together.
Now the curtains were open.
But I was gone.
Every day, Mom would come and sit in my room for a while.
Sometimes she sat on the edge of the bed. Sometimes she sat at my desk.
She’d flip through my old textbooks, looking at the little doodles in the margins, the notes I’d written, the key passages I’d marked with a highlighter.
She read my diary, too, page by page.
When she read, “Nico picked on me again today,” she cried.
When she read, “Mom smiled at me today. I’m so happy,” she cried then, too.
My diary held almost no blame for her.
Most of it was just:
I made Mom unhappy again today. I’m sorry.
I’ll do better tomorrow.
I hope Mom will look at me a little more.
She cried over every single page.
She cried until her voice was gone and her eyes were swollen shut.
A neighbor knocked on the door once to ask if she was alright.
She opened the door, said she was fine, then closed it and went back to crying.
One day, she found a piece of paper I had hidden in the very back of a drawer.