CW: death, child loss, alcoholism.

My mother sits at the kitchen table in the moonlight, gazing at her folded hands. “Has your father returned with Lilah?”

“You know he hasn’t.”

The tremor she had before she died is gone. A tube runs from the oxygen unit, through her laced fingers, and up into her nostrils. An oxygen concentrator drones on the floor beside her—but she isn’t breathing.

“He should have found her by now,” she says. “Brought her home.”

I’m standing in the open door to the backyard, the night garden at my back. Behind me, the Earth’s shadow slips across the edge of the moon. The penumbral phase of the eclipse is a barely discernable diminishing of light.

Her gaze shifts around me, and I know she’s looking toward the old willow at the edge of the property. “On a night like this,” she says, “they might come again. They might come for you.”

“They don’t take grown men.”

“I worry they may have taken your father,” she says. “He should have been back by now with Lilah.”

I grew up waiting for them to return. A father and sister I never really knew.

“You’re dead,” I say to her. I expect this cold reminder to break the spell and for her ghost to wane from existence. But she doesn’t fade. Instead, she turns her gaze from the garden and scans the kitchen wall.

“You’ve painted.”

Her words rob my voice of weight. “Mother,” I whisper.

Perhaps I should succumb to dread and run back through the kitchen door and out into the garden. Perhaps I should run down the moon-glazed street until I’m far away from the drone of her oxygen tank and her hunched shoulders and those knotted fingers. But there’s another urge buried deeper within my history, the urge to move closer, to be at her side. I step into the kitchen and take the seat across from her at the table.

Mother and I once ate our suppers at this table. She would ask me about my day at school, while constantly glancing toward the unlocked door that led into the garden. In the evenings we would read in the front room or play hands of gin rummy, which my mother loved and taught me to play at a young age. We would use two decks and remove the ace of spades from each. She refused to play with the death cards but insisted that they remain present. Mother would place them face down on the edge of the coffee table. Unseen but always there. And always, she watched the unlocked door. One eye on this world and one eye on the other. She was never completely present in my life after the day that Lilah went missing.

The penumbral moon slides further into its eclipse, and its light recedes from the room’s darkest corners.

“The first time I saw the lights,” she says, “I was pregnant with your sister. They were weaving and dancing around the willow tree. Do you remember?”

I’ve asked myself that question through the long unfolding of years. What do I remember?

I was just shy of three years old, and perhaps those soft fairy lights triggered my neurons to form the hard circuits of memory—or perhaps I only remember her words, her story. She’s told it to me so many times, and I’ve always been a central character in the tale.

The memory goes something like this: I woke in the middle of the night to find the garden door open, and my mother standing in the garden beside the willow. I stepped outside to stand beside her. Together, we watched the lights weave through the willow’s drooping leaves. The air was crisp, and she kneeled down and pulled me closer to keep us warm.

“They want Lilah,” I told her.

Each time she retells the story, I whisper a warning into her ear. They want Lilah. In some versions, I take a step forward, mother’s hand still at my back. I reach out toward the floating lights, grasping for contact, and one of them drifts down and touches my outstretched fingers. That image is one of my strongest memories from childhood.

“I should have listened to you,” she says. Even after death, there’s regret in her voice.

“You were a good mother.” I’m the only one left to say it, and I feel it’s necessary that I do. This is the ghost of my mother at the end of her life, hobbled by fear and remorse. She needed me so badly, but I rarely returned home. It wasn’t until she died and left me the house that I moved back into these rooms. And yes, I have painted over the memories as best I could.

Behind the wall, spectral sobs push above the hum of her oxygen delivery system, and another ghost pulls together: the crying comes from the den. Leaving the kitchen, I place my ear on the hardwood door, listening to my mother’s soft tears. I should walk into the room and place an arm around her; I should offer comfort; I should speak words to ease the pain. But I can’t. Not then and not now.

In the living room behind me, there’s a rustling, more like a shifting of air along the picture window. I don’t turn on the room’s lights for fear that I might disturb the ripple of moonlight affecting this moment. Moving through the soft darkness, I enter the room to see Mother. A different mother. Or rather the same mother from a different time. This apparition stares through the window glass, her face hidden. She’s young, maybe twenty-five years old. Her skin is taut and pale in the moonlight, her hair pulled tightly into a ponytail. She wears the gingham house dress I remember from the black-and-white photograph.

In that photo, I’m probably five years old, standing on the porch with Mother, leaning into her, wrapped in a pale arm. Lilah, of course, is not in this image, nor in any of the other half-dozen photographs that document our past. Within those fading photographs, the sadness in my mother’s eyes lends the only proof of my sister’s existence.

Now, her eyes are turned toward the partial eclipse. “Have you seen Lilah?” She doesn’t turn to look at me, so I step to the side. She turns away, refusing to show her face.

“Lilah never returned,” I say, and Mother’s delicate shoulders visibly sag. “Father never came back, either.”

“They’re probably trapped beneath the hill.”

There are no hills around our home, but I’ve come to understand that my mother used the hill as a metaphor for that other realm—the land of the fairies that stole Lilah all those years ago. I carry two mental images of my little sister. In the first, she’s packed tightly within the earth, unable to move her arms and legs through the weight of the soil, unable to scream through the dark loam that clogs her throat. In the second, she’s in a large hall beneath the ground seated at a table littered with marshmallows and chocolate and bottles of orange soda. I’ve always clung to that second image, but the first is the one I fear is true.

“That night we lost her,” says Mother, “I was asleep next to your father. You and Lilah were in the other bedroom—you lay tucked into your own bed, and your sister lay in the crib beside you. Your father slept like the dead, and nothing could wake him, but I’ve always drifted in and out of sleep easily. That night, lights flashed at the back of my eyelids, and I woke to a glow crossing the bedroom door and moving down the hallway. I could hear my heart beating. I got up to check on you, and the hallway was like the lonely corridor of a hospital at night—a world caught between the living and the dead.

“I pushed open the door to your room, and you were standing on your bed watching the light in your sister’s crib. Do you remember? Do you remember how the light shone so brightly, filling the corners of the room?”

The moon shines through the window silhouetting my mother’s figure. The eclipse nears totality. Earth’s shadow nudges across the lunar surface to block the moon’s light, which is really the transformed light of the hidden sun. A reflection. A parody. An apparition of the truth.

And still, behind the den’s heavy wooden door, the sobbing continues with punctuations of sadness like a beacon into the night. Come in, it says. Come in and comfort your mother.

A clank clamors from the back room. It’s my mother’s old bedroom where I now store memories of my childhood: old clothing, uncomfortable heirloom furniture, a set of china too special for us to have ever eaten from. The china is neatly packed in boxes, useless to me, but like so many things, I can’t bring myself to give it away. The floral pattern on the cups and plates supports small, winged creatures—dragonflies and bees—but I’ve always suspected that they are actually paintings of the fairies that ruined our lives. Perhaps this is the real reason we never ate off them.

I enter my mother’s old room to find her lying on the bed. The clank I’d heard was a toppled bottle of gin. What little alcohol she’d left in the bottom now seeps across the side table and drips onto the hardwood floor. My mother’s ghost within this room has the face I remember from the year I made friends with Joey Hurtado.

We met in the sixth grade and swapped comic books. I offered back issues of Monster Island, and he traded from his stack of War Dog. One day, he followed me home to look at my collection. When we got to the front gate, my mother was framed in the picture window, dancing in her underwear. Behind me, I heard Joey laugh, but then he caught himself and stifled his reaction—an unusually mature act of mercy. When I turned, he was blushing and stammering an excuse for having to get home. He was already half a block away before I felt the first tears spill out of me.

Mother was drunk, of course, and didn’t remember any of it by the next morning, and I never mentioned it to her. Joey never said anything to me either, but our trades and our conversations soon stopped, and I caught enough stares at school to know that other people had heard about his experience at my house. The shadow of that afternoon slid across my life, leaving me cold and distant and hidden.

My mother’s ghost lies spilled across the bed, her eyes glazed as if she’s peering back into the world she just came from.

“You’re a good boy,” she says. “Stronger than your father.” Her ghost rolls into a fetal position and looks at me. But it’s more like she’s studying me—measuring and weighing me.

“I’m not . . .” My voice fades and dies; my words are stillborn before I can express them. I want to tell her it wasn’t fair. It was never fair that I should carry the weight of a sister I didn’t know, that I should be made to share this profound sense of loss that seeped in from the night garden and dusted every aspect of our lives with its unshakable light.

Mother’s words are slurred and delivered in a hypodermic stream. “To come home without her to never really know and all their apologies and condolences all so very fucking sterile like everything else in their world.” She writhes across the bed. “I don’t want condolences. I want my daughter.”

“It’s okay, Mom. I’m here.”

“Your father will come back with her. He will, and we’ll be a family again.”

“I know. I’ve left the doors unlocked. I’m sure it won’t be long now.”

“Be careful. You’re my ray of sunshine, and I couldn’t bear to lose you too.”

Any sunshine on me has only ever been a weaker reflection of something elusive and missing. A life I was supposed to live but never could, a life blocked by the specter of Lilah.

My mother reaches for the phantom bottle, and I turn and slip from the room.

The crying from the den is louder. I skirt past the closed door and walk into the kitchen where the ghost of my mother still clings to the forced oxygen.

“When you were a small boy,” she says, “I sometimes heard you talking to someone in the next room. When I came to check on you, of course, there was no one there. You were alone where I’d left you. But I knew.” Her eyes look up at me, searching, pleading. “You’d been talking to them, hadn’t you? The ones who stole your sister? The fairies who took my little girl?”

I move back to the garden door and gaze at the sliver of light that hangs above the tangled branches. Earth’s shadow has nearly consumed the light, and the eclipse nears totality.

“What did they say to you? I hope she’s safe. When we see her again, will she still be a child?”

This has always been our life together: so many questions without answers, and I’ve never known what to say to her.

“I should have listened to you that night you warned me. Do you remember? They want Lilah, you whispered, and that night, the night they took her, I walked into your room and the lights swirled and clustered above her crib, and you stood there watching them, trapped by their spell, and their light was not warm and welcoming but cold like the moon—the light of thieves. They took so much from us. So much! And Lilah whimpered in her crib, but still I watched, unable to move, anesthetized by their glow and shimmer. When I was finally able to shake off their enchantment, I tried to save her. I ran to her crib, but she was gone. I turned to grab you, to protect you, and you were fast asleep in your own bed. Enchanted. You remember, don’t you?”

“Yes. I remember.”

During my entire childhood, the images from her story grew like seedlings in the half-lit corners of my memory until they blossomed like evening primrose and filled me with their unshakable truth.

“Your father will find her. We’ll be a family again.”

She goes silent, and the sobbing from the den fills the house until there is nothing else.

I walk to the den and pause, listening to the mother I never saw because I never opened that door. Behind me, the lunar eclipse inches toward totality, and the house grows darker, and the voices of all my mother’s ghosts begin to whisper at the same time. The cacophony spills through the rooms until their whispers begin to meld, slipping into a unity that says the same thing, over and over: “What we tried so hard to hide away . . .”

I turn the handle on the heavy door and push it open. The darkness in the room struggles against the glow from a single table lamp casting a queasy yellow light. At the edge of that light, sitting in a winged-back chair, Mother slouches, knees to chest, her features distorted and her eyes hollowed by shadow. Her shoulders convulse through tears.

This is the ghost of my mother when I was fourteen years old, my mother on the other side of the door, waiting for me to enter the room and sit beside her, waiting for a son who would place an arm around her and tell her everything was going to be all right; my mother, who I never really knew, trapped in the light of that other world. The mother I’d never seen, locked behind a door I would not and could not open.

The moon is fully covered now. The eclipse is in totality. The temperature drops with the final loss of light.

I don’t belong here. At some point, I stopped believing, and I have not been able to find my way back to her world. Even then, as an awkward boy of fourteen, I knew we were different—her need to pull me closer and my need to push her away. I often feel like this woman’s real son was taken on the same night that Lilah was taken. Perhaps I was left here as a comfort, as a consolation, a cheap imitation of her real child.

She looks at me and stops crying, expectation in her eyes. I’m so close to the person she needs, the person I wish to be: a few small steps to cross the room, an easing of resistance to kneel beside her, a lean into her waiting arms, and the delivery of a quiet whisper (such a small but profound offering)—I love you.

The words hang between us, unspoken. I can’t move; I can’t speak. My limbs feel as if they’re packed in soil, my voice trapped behind a clog of earthy loam.

A sliver of light, like the band of a silver ring, highlights the edge of the Earth’s shadow. The moon’s light is returning. Mother’s eyes catch its soft glow, and the corners of her mouth pull into a thin smile as if to tell me that all is forgiven, and then she says, “I love you, too.”

I hear the call of the garden atop the hill. I turn and slip from the room, shutting the door behind me.

These ghosts are all that’s left of a mother that has faded with time, but tonight, she has returned to offer me absolution, to remind me that there was always a part of me that belonged to her world.

Before the shadow passes completely over the moon, guided by the light of the great hall, I will enter the garden and find the hill beneath the willow. Lilah is waiting at a table, and our parents are there too. We’ll sit together, our mouths stuffed with marshmallows and chocolate, and our past will be washed away and a new one rewritten. Mother will reach across the table and take my hand. Do you remember, she’ll ask. Do you remember when we sat at the kitchen table together? And we only ever had each other, and that was enough.