Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

Years later, after her mother had passed away too, Deena thought about that: about grief, and differing responses. She took the loss of her mother more easily — perhaps loss was something you got better at with practice, or maybe she’d always been that way, and it was just the confusion around her father’s death — with a flash, she remembered the patch of blood on her mother’s damp blouse, the scratchy 911 recording — that had made it so difficult to bear. Cassell had been right, she could finally admit that. In the end, it had been better to know for sure.

She’d inherited the house but didn’t want it. Maybe it was superstitious of her, but she couldn’t think of using the master bedroom where her mother had died in her sleep, or the master bathroom where her father had slipped; the house didn’t feel cursed or haunted, but it felt full of death, with no room for her. She’d list it and clear out, let the real-estate agent handle everything. She would even sell it furnished, she decided, after she picked through the valuables and sentimental childhood remnants: her mother’s jewelry, her father’s collection of hunting lures, their shared library of everything from poetry to pulp science-fiction novels.

The house had stored the history of them like stripes of rock and geologic eras: here a drawer full of hand-knitted tea cozies, there a box of old Christmas ornaments that had only looked good on their white aluminum tree from when she was ten. Her old school projects, even a little self-sculpture of herself made out of painted clay. She actually laughed — personal nostalgia was poignant, cultural nostalgia was funny — when she came across the spare closet off the laundry room that held a neatly boxed Super Nintendo and cassette player. But her parents had been slow adapters: Her father had painstakingly taped whole seasons of British comedies off PBS over the course of several years and had refused to give them up to DVD, instead labeling the tapes with masking tape and Sharpie by season and episode. The VCR was still hooked up in their bedroom, bulky and anachronistic.

Deena found the boxes of tapes next to the Nintendo and ran her finger down a peeling Fawlty Towers label. Nothing to be done with them, really, but she didn’t want to get rid of them, either. She hoisted the box and the contents shifted and for the second time that day, all thoughts of death left her. Underneath the sitcoms were their old home movies, taped diligently, first by her mother and then by her father (who claimed he’d “developed an eye”) over the first ten years, at least, of her life; a handful of them even before that. She wouldn’t dig too deeply into those old ones — her parents had been remarkably uninhibited, and it wasn’t impossible that she might see more than she wanted to see.