The hardest drive I ever had to make lasted 15 minutes. It was from my father’s house on a hilly farm in Winfield, West Virginia, to St. Albans, the small town I grew up outside, on the day of my mother’s funeral.
I’d just flown in from Denver, and I hadn’t slept in days. My brother was in the hospital, and he was refusing visitors. My aunt, who’d driven in from North Carolina for the funeral, and I had tried to find the cause of what we assumed was another overdose for my brother.
With him stabilized in the hospital, we looked through his hundreds of keys, his boxes of glasses and knives he’d collected, to find the one to his biggest safe, where we assumed we’d discover one of my mom’s hydrocodone bottles squirreled away. His safe had some photos, a watch, some cologne. We thought maybe he’d attempted suicide, which was honestly unlike him, but grief does wild things.
Maybe, we decided, he’d gotten the drugs from a girlfriend who’d pawned my mother’s remaining jewelry for the goods. It wouldn’t be the first time. My aunt and I called his cell phone, left at home when the ambulance took him.
We searched the house in frenzied precision, looking for an explanation to one narrowly avoided death to distract from the real one, my mother’s. We heard it buzz from the basement. We searched the insulation between exposed rafters, hoisted up on step ladders and a beat-up futon.
It wasn’t there. We heard the buzz through the wood. It was upstairs.
We ran ba.