Nothing but Ghosts, An Excerpt

My mother’s things are in there—her clothes, her jewelry, her boxes of shoes, her collection of tinted glass bottles. She had lined the bottles up on every inch of windowsill, so that the room would never repeat itself—would be the color of whatever bottles the sun had struck, whatever ways the reflections mixed on the walls and on the ceiling. “It’s like being inside a giant kaleidoscope,” she said. And the thought of that made her happy.

In the end, after the doctors said that there was nothing they could do, after my father had begged for a better answer, after I hated every living thing for living past my mother, the kaleidoscope was all my mother did—she watched the room change as the sun moved toward and then beyond her. There would be spots of lilac and tangerine and moss green on the ceiling up above. There would be shades of ruby in the creases of her pillow.

“You’re so beautiful, Claire,” my dad would tell her. But mostly he would sit, saying nothing. The chair where he sat is still there, empty. The colors collide, but no one’s watching.