you can never go home

I dreamed she was coming back from the dead, coming to a room she’d lived in, a room I hadn’t known about. When I opened the door, I found a bed, not the one she’d slept in with my father for just short of 60 years, but a small bed, covers drawn up over the pillow. I heard giggling and realized my grandsons were under the blankets, hiding. They had been playing in the room and their lego, books, bows and arrows, and little trucks were strewn everywhere. You have to help me tidy up, I told them, as I looked around at the unfamiliar clothing, a painting on the wall, a bag of epsom salts, the plastic shredded with age. A threadbare dressing gown hung from a hook on the door. She was coming back from the dead and I wanted her room to be as she’d left it. Would I tell her what I’d found out about her parents, I wondered. She died in 2010, not knowing. She’d lived from infancy with a woman she called her foster mother. She had her biological father’s surname. After her death, much later, I sent off a DNA sample and waited, waited, for a couple of years as little pieces of her family puzzle fell into place. First her father, then her mother, details revealed in a letter found in a tin box two years ago by the woman who would have been her sister-in-law. Would I tell her? You can never go home, you are never the same person, you are older, you have gone out into the world, you can never go home, but can you come home? She was coming home, back from the dead. You have to help me tidy up, I told my grandsons. Get out from under the covers.