“Who’s living there now?”

I pose this question to Mom as we sit on her back porch, rocking in the two Cracker Barrel chairs we plucked from a yard sale last spring. The small ranch-style homes in this subdivision were built in the 1950s, on equally tiny rectangles of land. Our view is of naked tree branches—save a few stubborn autumn leaves, flickering like lit candles—and the back of the house that Leena never got to grow up in.

“The same couple with their three kids,” Mom says. “A little over two years now.”

Mom doesn’t say aloud what she’s thinking. She doesn’t have to. Never has a subsequent owner of the Morgans’ house made it past two. This is the longest anybody’s stayed in 35 years.

It has to be a ghost that has driven owners out. I don’t believe in that stuff, but what else could it be? Is it Leena’s? Even in fourth grade, she was starting to develop a dark sense of humor.

I don’t broach the subject of poltergeists with Mom on my quarterly visits home from Chicago, a six-hour drive from our small town. Also, we never talk directly about the murders: Leena, her three-year-old brother, and their parents.

We do sometimes reminisce about how Leena and I were best friends from the first day the Morgans moved in, when we were both four. Mom and I have talked occasionally about how Leena and I loved to run barefoot on hot asphalt or climb trees to the tippy top. We’ve recalled how Leena and I stuck up our noses at most food, (too mushy, too smelly, too green), and absolutely refused to eat anything that touched something else.

But Mom and I never talk about that morning when I was nine, when she woke me up by sitting on my bed instead of yelling up the steps. When she explained that Leena would not be joining me at school, that day or ever again. When she pulled me onto a rocking chair much like the ones we are sitting on now. When she told me Leena’s whole family was gone, even Jeremy, who’d been a toddler, who couldn’t tell the difference between his Glo Worm and a molded glob of Play-Doh, and wouldn’t have been able to identify anyone. Mom rocked me like a newborn baby and let me cry and cry, cradling my head against her chest, long after my school bus had come and gone.

Mom was the only family I’d ever known, but Leena’s mom had always invited me into their home, just as my mom welcomed Leena. Leena’s mom and dad had become my second parents; Jeremy, my brother; Leena, my best friend and sister.

Mom and I celebrated her 73^rd birthday the last time I was home. Now she’s dozed off. Her head doesn’t droop, her mouth doesn’t gape open, but her eyes are closed, and I can hear air being caught by her nostrils. Her hands rest on her tummy, and there’s a crookedness in a few finger joints. The elastic at the top of a sock that peaks out from below her jeans makes a dent in the skin at her ankle.

Mom has never napped when I’ve visited, and perhaps that’s why I do what I’ve never done before: I pull out my iPhone and Google the Morgan family murders.

The first word I enter for my search is “unsolved.” Whereas there isn’t a single clue as to what person—or more likely persons—did this, the “facts” of what the police discovered when Leena’s dad didn’t show up for work at his bakery have burgeoned with each passing year. My eyes zero in on the phrases “bloodstain spatter” and “stab wound trajectory.” Website sleuths decide that the perpetrators hung out in the house afterward, eating Halloween candy.

If you feel cheated by my omission of additional horrific details, feel free to Google it yourself. But let me warn you that repulsion and fury will simultaneously punch you in your gut, even as you can’t stop yourself from clicking on yet another link.

Although it’s late October, it was an unseasonable 76 degrees when Mom and I ventured outside earlier today. Now, dark gray clouds quickly gobble up the cotton-candy white ones, and the gentle breeze is replaced by an ill-tempered wind. This has nothing to do with my decision to Google the murders. Of course it doesn’t. Yet, the correlation seems exact to me, a message from Leena: Do Not Disturb.

I wake Mom up, and we go inside. The back porch door opens into Mom’s bedroom. I have to push with all my weight behind my shoulder to snap it closed. I latch the deadbolt. For added security, I keep leaning against the door.

The local weather person is talking on the TV I forgot to turn off. He has interrupted the regularly scheduled program to expertly tell us all about the storm that is happening, although he hadn’t forecasted it.

Mom plops onto her bed, next to her two-drawer nightstand, still waking up. She pulls open the top drawer.

This is the one that had always been locked when I did my prowling around, on afternoons when I got home from middle- or high school earlier than Mom got home from work. This is the drawer I found open when I hitched a ride home unexpectedly one weekend from college. Inside was a 38 Special.

I wonder at what point in the last twenty-something years she’s felt safe, enough to get rid of the pistol. Or has she, like me, always felt afraid of something she can’t define?

Certainly she bought that gun to protect me—afterward.

From the drawer, she removes a folded fabric, holds it up.

“My new craft, Jenny,” she says.

Since she’s retired, she has a new hobby every time I come home—origami, pencil sketching, collage note cards. The last time I visited, there were butterflies flitting around in her study.

I sit down beside her and open the material on the bed. Two unfolds and it’s unveiled. A lap quilt. The colors are rusts and browns and grays, and you wouldn’t think they’d look good together, but they do. There are small tinctures of blue throughout. I bend over and pull off my glasses to study all the teeny-tiny hand-sewn stitches.

Then I see minuscule human figures, charcoal gray—almost black—two adults holding the hands of two children between them. I realize this is not simply an alluring palette of colors, but a landscape quilt.

Mom has retreated to the door. She watches me as I admire her work.

Rippled sand. Windblown shrubs. A setting desert sun that the family is walking toward.

I’m a little prejudiced, I know, but I’ve never seen anything quite so beautiful.

“Mom,” I say, and I choke on the word. It’s quite a while before I can add, “You’re an artist.”

She smiles. “It’s good, isn’t it? I can’t believe it myself.”

I ended up much taller than Mom, so when I walk to the door and hug her, it’s her head against my shoulder.

I feel thirty-five years of anger, revulsion, sadness, fear, and now something else—healing?—meld into this moment.

“This new hobby of yours,” I say, “it’s a keeper.”

#

The next morning I get an early start. Mom is at the front door waving, like always. She’s never asked me why, when I get to the stop sign at the corner, I turn left instead of right.

I turn left again and park a few houses down from Leena’s.

Every visit home, every time I leave, this is what I do: I turn off the motor and sit here. Sometimes I remember Leena and me playing together, giggling. Sometimes I imagine what she would have been like in high school. Today, she’s barefooted, carrying her shoes, kicking up sand in a desert.

Would we have kept in touch? Would we still be friends?

For the first time I let it occur to me that there is going to come a time when my mother is not going to be living in this neighborhood, won’t be living, period. There will be no reason for me to come back here. Will I?

This is what I’m wondering when a blue Chevrolet Malibu pulls into Leena’s driveway.

A man in a wrinkled suit gets out, picks up the downed branches from yesterday’s gale, and tosses them behind some bushes. Then he opens his trunk, pulls out a wooden post, and hammers it into the ground.

I turn my key in the ignition. No need to stick around to read the sign he’s sure to attach.

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Jan Allen’s short stories have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Flash Fiction Magazine, Fiction on the Web and Apple in the Dark.