He gave her a glimpse of the person she could have been.

Beneath the porch overhang, she watched him drive away. The night was over. The hospice volunteer’s car was gone. She was fifteen minutes late getting home. The lights along the front of the house were off, which meant her mother was either in the den watching TV or sitting in the bedroom over her father’s deathbed. Or maybe she’d already gone to sleep.

Bree unlocked the front door, and, once inside, quietly slid the deadbolt home. Locking Luke out, and locking herself in with her parents, with her past, with her fears.

She stopped a moment, hugging tonight’s memory close. It had been so perfect, so unexpected. He hadn’t fought when she wouldn’t let him touch her. There was nothing to feel guilty about later. She’d been a good girl. Then he’d melted her very soul with his kiss.

No one just kissed her. The men she’d been with used it as punishment, or a reward, like a pat on the head. No one had kissed her just to kiss her. As if her taste were special. She couldn’t have known how much she craved it until the moment Luke gave it to her. Just as she could never have imagined that bowling would be her dream date.

She almost laughed. Her mom would freak that it was pizza in a bowling alley instead of a five-course meal at an elegant restaurant.

Bree stood in the empty hallway, the sound of the rain running along the gutters and down the drain spouts. Except for that, the house was silent as a tomb. What an apt expression. It was a tomb. Her father was dying in this place, and she felt as if her mother’s spirit might be dying with him.

Or maybe it only meant that soon her mother would be free.

She padded quietly down the hall that was the leg of the house’s T. The den was empty. Her parents’ room at the end was dark, too. She had the urge to simply walk into her own room and shut the door.

Instead, she pushed on to the end of the hall and her parents’ doorway. It seemed to gape eerily. She forced herself to step over the threshold. Her father’s hospital bed was silhouetted against the rainy sky. And against that silhouette stood her mother. One small lamp was on behind the head of the bed, shining on her father’s face.

Bree could swear she heard voices, as if her father had come out of the semi-coma he’d been drifting in for the last thirty-six hours.

But no, as she moved closer, her feet silent on the carpet, it was only her mother’s voice. Soft words, almost nonexistent, but there nonetheless.

Bree strained to hear them. As if they held the meaning of life, the meaning of death.

Until finally they coalesced beneath the rain’s chatter. “Die, you old fuck, die.”

She had never heard her mother use that word, not once in her entire life.

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear for a moment over the roar of blood in her ears as if it were a great waterfall. Yet the next thing she knew, she was by her mother’s side, her father’s emaciated, inert body in the bed before them. He didn’t move, nothing but the incessant twitch of his eyes back and forth beneath his half-open lids.

Is that what her mother had been doing the past few days, sitting beside his bed willing him to die?

“If you felt that way, why didn’t you ever leave him?”

Her mother didn’t startle, didn’t turn. “I was afraid,” she said.

“So was I, Mom,” Bree finally whispered into a quiet broken only by the rain and her father’s torturous breaths.

Until her mother spoke again. “I thought whatever was out there was worse than staying with him.”

“It wasn’t worse,” Bree said so softly she thought her mother wouldn’t hear.

Yet she heard. “I did my best, Brianna.”

Bree wanted to say she understood. But she didn’t. She probably never would. They stood beside his bed, the man that been the most important thing in their lives for so long that neither of them knew how life would continue without him. He was all they’d ever known. Would you even recognize freedom if you’d never known it?

Finally, Bree took her mother’s hand, laced their fingers. “Let’s watch him die together.”

Her mother squeezed. And hands clasped, they waited.

When finally she couldn’t stand on her feet anymore, she’d slept fully clothed on her mother’s bed with only a blanket pulled over her. Her mom had taken her father’s side of the bed, still touching Bree in the darkness deep in the middle of that endless night.

Upon waking, she’d gone to her bathroom to brush away the taste of a long night, but returned to her parents’ room without changing or showering.

The doorbell broke through the gurgle of her father’s breathing. He sounded like he was choking.

Please don’t make me do this. No one listened.

“Get the door, Brianna,” her mother said, once again ensconced on the stool by his bedside.

After the things her mom had said last night, Bree almost believed she sat there simply to make sure he was really dead when it finally happened.

The two aides she hadn’t met before, one man, one woman, followed her back to the bedroom. Despite the fact that the sun was out after the rain, she felt as if she were leading them to a dungeon where she and her mother held her father captive, chained to a wall and spread out on a dirty straw mattress.

“This is Meredith and Geoffrey, Mom.” They’d each given her a card when she let them in.

“How’s Dad doing today?” Geoffrey said as he passed behind Bree’s mom, trailing his hand across her back in comfort. Her mother still wore yesterday’s housecoat.

How she’d changed; a few short weeks ago, she wouldn’t have been caught dead in a housecoat, not even by a delivery boy.

Her mom murmured something in reply that Bree didn’t catch, and Geoffrey smiled. Tall with fair skin and a bald head, he was big, not fat but muscled. Though the aides were well-trained in how to move patients with the least amount of physical exertion, rolling them to one side, then the other to change the sheets beneath them, wash them, put on new pajamas, et cetera, a big man made the procedure run more smoothly. Meredith was a slight blonde with curly hair she’d tamed back into a bun. Having Geoffrey as her partner surely made things easier.

Leaning over the head of the bed, Geoffrey adjusted the oxygen tubes in her father’s nostrils, then stroked his cheek in the gentlest of gestures. Meredith moved to the other side of the mattress, next to the window. Behind her, the sun shone on the roof of the dollhouse, glittering in the raindrops as it dried them. The miniature house looked so pretty with its scallops and flowers painted along the sides. So inviting, so innocent.

Bree suddenly hugged herself and looked at Geoffrey.

As he caressed her father’s face, Meredith trailed a hand down his emaciated arm. They gave him a series of touches and caresses that were both a comfort and a test of his condition. Bree wondered idly if they’d have been so tender and caring if they’d known him before he was comatose. He didn’t twitch, didn’t move, didn’t respond, not even a flutter of his eyelids that still hovered at half-mast.

“Ladies,” Geoffrey said, his voice soft and gentle for such a big man. “You can see the mottled black and blue coloring along his bottom half. Dad has increased lividity. This means his circulatory system is shutting down.”

Once again, her mother murmured a sound. Maybe she was saying nothing at all, just acknowledging Geoffrey’s comments.

“If we move Dad,” he went on, “we stand the chance of losing him. He’s very close, and we could push him over by so much as turning him to wash him. How do you feel about that?”

Her mom’s back to her, Bree couldn’t see her expression. But she said nothing, didn’t even touch him. In the ensuing silence, Meredith pulled some prepackaged single-use cloths from her pocket and ripped one open. She soothed his brow, wiping gently, then his cheeks, his cracked lips.

“What would you like us to do, ladies? Meredith and I will wash him gently to prepare him, if you’d like to discuss it between you.”

Bree couldn’t find any voice with which to agree or even talk to her mother. Her heart beat in a staccato rhythm, and she heard her mother’s words from last night.

She wanted it, Jesus, she wanted it. Just let it be done, let it be over, let him be gone.

“Turn him,” her mother said, her voice a crack in the gentle, soothing atmosphere Geoffrey created with Meredith.

Wasn’t that killing him, wasn’t it murder? Or was it more mercy than he deserved?

Geoffrey closed his eyes and dipped his head in the briefest nod of agreement, then smiled. For him, it was an act of mercy. He must do it all the time, must know when the end is close, so close that a simple push could release the soul.

For a moment, Bree wished she was capable of that kind of delicate, caring emotion.

“Come close,” Geoffrey whispered to her when she hung back. “You’ll want to see. I believe it helps keep the loved ones in our hearts forever.”

No, she didn’t want to see, didn’t want to remember or know. Her father hadn’t been in her heart for years. He’d been in her head, telling her what to do, how to do it, and how miserable her attempts at life were. But the hypnotic quality of Geoffrey’s deep yet so very tender voice drew her near.

Geoffrey’s voice compelled her.

Closer, closer, she could now see the dark bruising along the underside of her father’s arms and shoulders where the blood had settled.

How could a man die so quickly? Four days ago she’d fed him whiskey and morphine to shut him up. Now he was silent, still, even the twitching of his eyeballs back and forth had ceased. The bottom half of his irises—the only thing she could see other than the whites of his eyes—were milky. Like the corpses you see on TV.

By her side, she felt her mother’s body pressed to hers. Don’t touch me. Bree wanted to scream, to shout, to run.

When he was gone, who would she blame for the way she was?

“Meredith.” That was all Geoffrey said as he lightly massaged her father’s shoulders, then his neck, his fingers blunt and thick.

Meredith pulled the sheet aside. Her father’s legs were nothing more than sticks protruding from the bottom of his hospital-style gown. His backside rested on a towel laid across the mattress. Meredith grasped one edge of the towel, pulling up, slowly turning his body.

“Watch his face with me, Bree.” Geoffrey’s words were little more than a voice in her head, and yet, as if he were a magician, she obeyed.

Her father’s mouth hung grotesquely open, and his head seemed to move on its own, as if it were disconnected from his body, lolling backward on his neck. If her mother hadn’t been holding fast to her sweaty hand, Bree might have touched him. Poked the waxen skin. Screamed at him.

Then Geoffrey cupped the back of his neck and held his head up, paper-thin flesh covering a skull.

There was a sound like a breath, with none of the gurgle that had rattled constantly with every rise and fall of his chest. Then a gentle whoosh of air like the wings of a butterfly right next to her cheek.

“There he goes,” Geoffrey whispered.

Her heart contracted. A shimmering stream of breath slipped from her father’s lips and rose gently, lightly, airily to the ceiling. He had never been a light and airy man. He had never been gentle. Yet his essence, if that’s what it was, was all of those things.

“I see him,” her mother murmured with the softness of awe. They watched the ceiling as if . . . well, as if they were really watching her father’s soul rise to heaven or the hereafter or whatever.

Later he would fall back down to hell where he belonged.