He Has Dad Now

Author’s Note: This story is based on true events and contains references to suicide and the loss of loved ones. 

Mom climbed up the basement stairs without my little brother’s urn. I stared at her hands—one on the banister, the other dangling at her side.

I frowned. “Where’s Christopher?”

Her eyes lifted briefly to mine before dropping back to the stairs.

“He has Dad now. I think it’s okay to leave him here this time.” 

She flipped the switch, blanketing the stairwell behind her in darkness. Her hand brushed my shoulder as she passed into the kitchen.

I stared down the green carpet runner that led into the concrete abyss. 

“I’m gonna say goodbye before we go,” I said. 

With a flick of the switch, the stairwell brightened again, and I hurried downstairs.

“Okay,” Mom called after me. “I’ll be outside, Sabrina.” 

Another switch bathed the renovated half of the basement in fluorescent light. Against the wall, a twin mattress lay beneath an oversized floral bedspread. Two pillows rested at its head. Silver and mahogany peeked from beneath the folded edge of the duvet. Two urns, tucked in bed.

I pulled back the covers. Christopher’s silver urn gleamed beneath the fluorescent light; beside it, gold lettering across dark mahogany spelled out my father’s name.

I lifted up Dad first. Stout and rectangular. My gaze caught on the two n’s in his name and held there, as if they might look back.

“Bye, Dad. Mom will be back in a week or so. I told her I could fly back home, but you know how she is.” I breathed a dry laugh. “Rather drive nineteen hours to spend more time with me.” 

Once he was back on his pillow, my hand lingered atop the smooth box. “Love you and miss you, Dad.”

Christopher was next. His urn was more, well, urn-shaped. The metal was cold beneath my hands as I cupped its curved sides below the neck. His ashes were heavier than Dad’s. Dad had been an organ donor. Christopher couldn't be.

“Hey Chris, sorry you’re not coming with us this time.” My gaze fell to the pendantless gold chain around his urn. “You might actually prefer that—getting to stay home.”

Christopher returned to his place beside Dad. I straightened his chain, then pulled the covers a third of the way over them. Their lids peeked out.

“Take care of Chris, Dad.”

Then I left them in the dark.

Mom hopped from foot to foot on the porch—a puffy fur-lined coat swallowing her small frame. 

“Why are you waiting out here? I thought you’d be in the car!” I said. 

She stepped between me and the door, yanked it shut, and shoved the key into the lock.

“I can use—use the fresh air. Been inside so much.” With a strained turn of her hand, the lock clicked. “I wanted to be the one to lock up.”

She gave the door one final yank, then hurried to the car. I followed, checking the trunk one last time before pulling open the passenger door. 

I paused. A camo blanket lay folded on the passenger seat—the one usually wrapped around Chris's urn before Mom buckled him in.

Sliding into the passenger seat, I gathered up Christopher’s blanket and tossed it behind me.

Mom glanced over at me. “Just in case you get cold on the drive,” she said, starting the car.

Cold air blasted from the vents.

My chin dipped as I twisted my grandmother’s wedding bands hard enough to unscrew my finger. They had been mine for two years—since the day I married my husband and my little brother took his own life.

My gaze lifted. Mom wasn't looking at my wedding bands, but at the copper ring beside them.

The corners of her mouth lifted into something almost like a smile. 

“I’m wearing mine too.”

She unfolded one arm from her chest and held out her left hand. On her ring finger sat a brass ring with Chris’s initials, C.Y., identical to mine. Chris had made mine first, practicing with cheaper metal. Beneath it was Dad’s thick gold band, capped off with the small brass band as if to hold it on. 

I nodded, my mouth tight.

“I had a dream last night,” Mom started. “He went to your wedding…. I regret not making him go.”

My jaw clenched as I forced a smile. “Are you ready to get on the road?”

Mom backed slowly out of the driveway, turning right instead of left.

“Wait,” I said.

The car jerked to a stop.

“Can we take Independence instead of Pahaquarry Street?”

Her lips curved into a smile that never reached her eyes. “Sure.”

She pulled back into the driveway, then backed out in the opposite direction.

Morning light filtered through the trees as we turned off our street. I watched the strip of grass beside the sidewalk, searching for the spot.

Only weeks had passed, yet the grass looked ordinary. I almost missed the spot, but Mom slowed without a word.

Dad died on the street. At least Chris died at home, in the comfort of his basement. 

I stared at the curb where Dad had last sat. Mom drove on without a word.

By Pennsylvania, Mom was on her fourth true-crime podcast of the day. We'd agreed: solved cases, nothing too horrific, and absolutely no suicide. Even so, all the talk of death was…a lot.

I leaned back in my seat, the camo blanket settling over me in gentle folds. I extended a lazy arm out for the radio.

Mom playfully smacked my hand away.

I recoiled. “Ow! What was that for?”

She shook her head. “This did not hurt.”

I pulled both arms from beneath the blanket and cradled the hand she'd smacked. “Ow,” I breathed. “Ow.”

The corners of her mouth lifted. “I was listening to that,” she said.

I dropped the act and pulled both arms back under. “Fair.”

She leaned into the steering wheel, her chin just clearing the top. I'd raised her seat for her many times before, but she preferred this exact height. Her eyes stayed on the road, her attention on the speakers.

“Can we turn it down a little?” I asked.

This time she obliged. 

“Hey…can we make a few stops on the way?” I said.

Her brow knit briefly but relaxed. “Oh, okay, where?”

My husband's year-long deployment still had a month to go. Arkansas meant returning to an empty house, and I wasn't ready for that yet.

I shrugged. “Anywhere. I just…am not in a rush to get back to Arkansas yet.”

Her face softened. “No problem. I’ll look out for something.”

We had just crossed the border into Virginia when Mom pointed to a roadside sign. 

“How about we stop there?” she said.

I followed her finger to a large sign flanked by cartoon soldiers, one in gray and one in blue.

“You want to stop at a battlefield?”

She shrugged. “Well, Dad would have.”

We pulled off where the sign instructed, looping through a jug-handle-shaped turn into a gravel parking lot. At the top of the lot stood an old brick building, its weathered face seeming to belong more to the century we'd come to see than the one we'd left outside. 

A rush of heated air swept past us as I held open the door for Mom.

Mom surprised me by wanting to stop at a historical site, then promptly grounded me in reality by choosing the quickest self-guided tour.

The rooms were arranged chronologically from the pre-war politics to the battle itself. Mom reached the battle room while I was still somewhere in 1861 with Lincoln and doubled back to retrieve me. The final exhibit opened into a vast circular room lined with artifacts.

I stayed with her this time. 

“Dad would have liked this,” I said, trailing Mom like a duckling.

She nodded, hands folded before her, drifting from case to case without lingering. “He really would. Would have taken him three hours to look through it all, though,” she said with a laugh. 

I slowed at a case of assembled uniforms and rifles. 

Each uniform was tied to a specific person, with a paired rifle hung low on the wall beside it.

A uniform draped around a faceless mannequin—blue fabric torn at the chest. The edges were frayed, dark blotches pooled around the tear like spilled ink. My nose nearly touched the glass to read the plaque on the wall by the shoulder. 

Harrison Montgomery

Killed by a bayonet wound through the heart.

I straightened. What a brutal way to go. Worse than how my father’s heart attacked itself. 

My knees bent deeper to read the placard beneath the rifle. Huh, there was no bayonet fixed to it. From my angle, I could see almost straight down the barrel. Metal wire held a bullet to the wall beneath the trigger. 

Did Chris use a gun like this? I never asked. I didn’t want to know. 

Mom had given me as few details as possible about how she'd found him.

Twenty minutes later, we were back in the car. Mom drove us through the rest of the day—food stops, shops, a flea-market mall—before we settled in Tennessee for the night.

The trip needed to slow down. More detours. More stops. Anything to prolong the inevitable.

“Do you want to stop in Nashville?” Mom asked. “It’s coming up soon.”

I nodded, eager to take any detour no matter what lay there. 

Traffic stalled us almost as soon as we entered Nashville. From the passenger seat, I spotted a roadside billboard: a cartoon kangaroo holding the word ZOO. 

“Can we stop at the zoo?” I asked. “For Christopher?”

For a tall, brooding twenty-four-year-old, he melted over anything furry.

“Of course,” she said.

The zoo was nearly empty on a weekday during the school year. Chris loved animals, but for the life of me I couldn't remember his favorite.

We walked past the tiger exhibit. “What animals do you think Chris would have wanted to see?”

Mom considered it longer than I expected. My gaze settled at her throat. Chris’s cross pendant gleamed in the sun.

“Hmm, well, are there kangaroos here?”

Something in my chest loosened. I smiled. “There has to be; I saw one on the sign.” I stepped closer to her, then hooked my arm through hers. “Let’s go find them!”

Her face warmed, a closed-lip smile nearly reaching her eyes.

Eventually we found the kangaroo enclosure. Unlike the others, it had no glass separating us from the animals—only a double-door entrance and an attendant.

Mom’s hazel eyes brightened, seeming to lighten by a shade. “Can we go inside?”

I stepped up to the employee at the front and echoed the same question.

They nodded, and a hand gestured toward the door. “Yes, you can! Please stay on the path and let the kangaroos approach you. If they come up to you, you can pet them.”

Mom beamed as we stepped inside. A path wound uphill toward the exit, kangaroos scattered across the grass, lying in the sun or grazing like the dairy cows back in New Jersey.

I hadn’t seen Mom smile like this in weeks. 

We followed the path slowly, cooing and calling but careful not to approach them. Halfway through, none had come near us. Mom's smile began to fade. With no one around but an attendant near the exit, we slowed even more.

“Oh!” Mom exclaimed. 

I spun to see a small kangaroo sniffing the back of Mom’s leg. 

Slowly, she turned to face it.

“Oh, hi there, baby,” she cooed. 

She extended the back of her hand for it to sniff, as she would a dog. The kangaroo pressed its nose to her skin, then rose from its crouch. Its little hands met hers.

The kangaroo took my mother's hand in both of its own.

Mom gasped. 

I stared.

The kangaroo turned Mom's hand palm-up and sniffed again. Then it simply looked at her hand, its little fingers curled around either side of her palm.

Mom eased into a crouch, her hand never wavering. The kangaroo held on a few moments longer, then released her. It turned toward the others, glancing back once before wandering out of reach.

“Whoa, that was cool.” 

Mom stood, staring at her hand for a moment. “That—I don’t know how to explain that.”

I blinked. 

She cradled her hand with her other like the kangaroo’s touch had made it sacred. 

“It was like Chris held my hand… was telling me he’s okay now.”

I blinked again. This time, my vision blurred.

“Yeah, maybe it was,” I said. 

She looked up, her eyes wide and rimmed with mist.

“I miss him. I miss Chris and Kenny so much.”

I nodded and stepped to her side. I looped my arm through hers and guided her along. A family had entered behind us and was quickly making its way up the path. 

“I do too. I do too,” I said. “Let’s get going. We can talk about it while we walk.”

We meandered down the exit lane, still attached at the arm.

“I've never seen a kangaroo do that.” I huffed a laugh. “Well, I've never been that close to one either, but I doubt they normally walk up and hold your hand.”

Mom nodded, smiling softly. “I don’t think so. I think… I really think it was, Chris. Maybe letting me know he’s with Dad and he’s okay?”

I cleared my throat and turned away, wiping my eyes with my sleeve.

“You think he’s okay now, right, Sabrina?”

I nodded, holding her gaze.

“I've thought he's okay for a while now. Probably since I finally forgave him.”

A crease formed between her brows. “Forgave him?”

“I was angry at first. Not because it was my wedding night. He didn't ruin my wedding. I was angry because of what he did to you and Dad—”

“It's okay to be angry,” Mom interrupted. “I miss him so much too.”

“I do too.” I swallowed. “But Chris...you knew him. I knew him. He didn't have a malicious bone in his body. He didn't do it to hurt us.”

She looked down and nodded slowly.

“No, no, he was the sweetest, most sensitive boy. Soft and gentle like that kangaroo.”

The rest of Nashville blurred past—what we ate, what we listened to, even the hotel where we slept.

Dread greeted me before I was fully awake—the kind that comes when an ending has a known time and place. The drive into Arkansas, then down to the tiny town where my husband and I had settled two years earlier, passed too quickly.

Soon, we were parked in my driveway. Mom shut off the car, but neither of us moved. After a moment, she popped the trunk and climbed out.

Mom was already wrestling my bags from the trunk by the time I caught up.

“Give me that!” I said. “I can do it myself; don’t strain yourself.”

She huffed. “I’m no old lady. I can carry those myself—with one hand.”

A fond eye roll was all the answer she got. I dug the keys from my purse and unlocked the front door. The bags landed in a heap by the door as I turned to Mom.

Mom came in empty-handed.

I frowned. 

“Where are your things?” I said.

She shrugged. “I thought I’d head back on the road before nightfall. Maybe make my way home.”

My mouth twisted. “Your work said you can have a few more weeks?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that.”

“Do you have an appointment I don’t know about?”

She shook her head again. “I thought I’d—I’d give you your space.”

I huffed a dry laugh. “Space?” I gestured to the empty living room behind me. “I have too much space. I want you.” I took a step closer. “Can you stay just a few days? Can we maybe do something together or just watch movies? I just want to be with you.”

Her face opened into a gentle smile, and for a moment, grief seemed to loosen its hold.

“Okay,” she said.

I opened my arms. “Come here.”

I gathered her into my arms. Hers worked free between us and wrapped around me in return. In the quiet of my empty house, we held on to what we still had.