by Tracie Adams
Mother’s grief unfurled slowly, like paint blistering and peeling from the shed out back. For months after the sirens, she locked herself inside with our photo albums. She taped pink-stickered pages of ultrasounds and baby-shower smiles to the walls until daylight thinned and mosquitoes came out.
“Give Mother some space,” Father said when we worried out loud about how her grief was taking on a new animal shape. We heard a low purr behind the woodpile. We didn’t have a cat. Father is allergic.
As the oldest, I could still remember the first time mother’s grief burrowed like a guinea pig under my sweatshirt, letting me run my fingers through her hair. That grief seemed smaller somehow. I didn’t mind it until one day at the park I slipped out of her sight for too long. Wiki-wiki-wiki echoed across sandboxes, slides, swings.
This time the change began the day the tears dried up. My youngest brother grabbed my arm after Mother ambushed him in the hallway.
“Have you seen her eyes?” he whispered.
The space between them was wider somehow, like something had pulled her apart from the inside. In the lamplight, her pupils thinned to dark slits. She moved differently—shoulders lifted, steps soundless. At the sink one night, suds slipping down our wrists, the four of us watched her pace. She arched her back and dragged her nails down the side of Father’s favorite recliner, shredding the fabric.
Mother’s grief curled itself under beds in closets, while we split the evening chores—laundry, packing lunches, checking homework. On the walk to the school bus, we wondered what it would be like if Mother’s grief had been a dog instead. Not the yapping, ankle-biting kind. Maybe a big, slow hound who would lay its heavy head in our laps and let us cry into its ears. Something we could leash. Something that would come when called.
Father’s worry lines deepened when Mother got the zoomies. Every night, at the exact same hour, she came alive, racing down the hallway, batting at the sliding glass door, circling as if she could outrun something only she could see. We could have set a clock by it. It was the hour of sirens. The hour the neighbors knocked. The hour Mother’s pants bloomed red with the blood that would have been our sister. The hour Mother began to stray, leaving muddy prints by the door.
We’ve grown used to the way she kneads the baby quilt in her lap, her long nails pressing in and out, as if trying to coax breath into cotton. When strangers ask how many children she has, she says five. If we say four, her hand snaps out, leaving five bloody trails that sting for days.
Father tells us, “Grief has stages. Some just last longer.”
Maybe it would have been easier if Mother’s grief had been a retriever that would drop the hurt at our feet and let us throw it far into a field. Something with a deep steady gaze and a high tolerance for pain. Two velvet towers for ears tuned to the frequencies of four kids. A wall of muscle and fur to absorb the chaos and stand between us and the world.
Tracie Adams, author of Our Lives in Pieces (IAN Book of the Year Finalist) and Not Finished Yet (2025 BookLife Prize Finalist), writes memoir and fiction in rural Virginia. Her work, widely published in literary journals, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. Find her at tracieadamswrites.com.
