One

How had I come to be here

Like them, and overhear

A cry of pain that could have got

loud and worse but hadn’t?

-Elizabeth Bishop

The doorknob felt cold and shimmied almost indiscernibly as the front door lock clicked. A definitive sound. Final. An ending. Natalie placed her right palm against the door and closed her eyes. Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe. Each sip of air required work. Thought. And though air meant life, breathing had become the hardest thing she’d ever done.

She slid the key under the doormat for the realtor who’d arrive after sunrise to put a lock box on the door. When she came home again, this house would no longer be hers. She’d return instead to her townhouse on the beach in Wilmington. This house, her family home, overlooked the Falls Dam, one of the prettiest spots in Wake County. She’d been approached to sell many times, but she’d always refused. She could afford a larger house and modern amenities like a gourmet kitchen or a screening room, but this old farmhouse was home. She knew every creaking floorboard to avoid when she wanted to sneak into the house unnoticed, and how to set the window in the corner bedroom just right so it would stay open to capture the river breeze on a late summer’s night.

Years ago, when her ex-husband, Parker, and she had first seen the house, its view made buying it a no-brainer. It had been the right decision then, but now the house and everything around it appeared different. Her footsteps echoed when she came home late at night. The barn owls the kids loved to imitate had become an irritating noise that kept her from sleeping, and every shifting beam of light made the most mundane items appear sinister. Instead of being a balm for her soul, the view and the house itself only brought up all the memories of the years she spent here with her boys—and Parker. Even the happy memories were unwelcome now.

“You have everything, Miss?” The taxi driver who’d been silently waiting in the driveway startled her. His voice roused a pair of mourning doves nesting in the eaves above where the cabbie stood. They whirred into the sky.

No, I don’t have everything, Natalie wanted to say. I have nothing. But she nodded silently instead.

As the driver maneuvered down the long, winding driveway, Natalie pressed her face against the window and forced herself to count the pine trees lining the road. In an hour or so, the road would be lined with media anxious to ask her how she felt now that a year had passed. She had chosen this early morning flight specifically to ignore such inane questions. Even in the dark quiet of this taxi, she didn’t want to think about how she felt. If she concentrated hard enough, she could stop the scenes that played inside her eyelids like the twitching movements of a silent film. She couldn’t drive when those moments arrived and stole her attention. In fact, it was after one of those blinding memories that she’d finally admitted she needed help.

She’d shared her deepest feelings about life and death with only one person in the past year: Sally Littlefield, her psychiatrist. She’d been too scared to share with anyone else the chilling thoughts she had late at night. The crushing fear that she might be losing her mind, and the realization that maybe being completely insane would be less painful than trying to pretend she could move on, made her lose her perspective. She’d told Dr. Littlefield during the first session that maybe it would be better if she had a complete breakdown. Then maybe she wouldn’t know the guilt of living.

Dr. Littlefield attributed Natalie’s roller-coaster emotions to post-traumatic stress, and she promised the drastic mood swings would eventually subside. Natalie wasn’t so sure.

“It’ll be most difficult for the first year,” Dr. Littlefield had said. “Don’t make any big decisions until you get past that first anniversary. And take care of yourself. Eat. Sleep. Nonstop work isn’t going to make things go away. You have to feel your grief. Embrace it. Cry into your pillow until you have nothing left. Don’t hold back.”

Maman made sure Natalie ate. Too much. Sometimes she discovered two casseroles waiting for her in the refrigerator when she got home from work. Sometimes there was a cheesecake on the front porch. And she always insisted Natalie come over for Sunday dinner. Natalie ate in fits and starts, but she never got into the habit of three square meals a day.

She had listened, but the year was up now, and talking to Dr. Littlefield was no longer enough. Though the doctor didn’t push, she made it clear that the only way to move forward was to put one foot in front of the other. “How?” Natalie would scream. “How the hell do you move on when both of your kids are gone, and you’re still here? Who hates me enough to punish me like this?”

Dr. Littlefield said all the right things after that question. “You’re not being punished. You might never have the answers to everything, but know this: nothing you could’ve said or done would have altered that day. Nothing. Be kind to yourself, Natalie.”

It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Nothing stopped the pain.

Every time Natalie stepped back into the house, the memories flew at her from every corner of every room like thousands of hummingbirds, moving too quickly to catch, and poking their long beaks into her body, stinging her with images of her kids: Danny hanging off the side of the couch laughing, one tooth missing, upper right side, and beside him, Stephen, eyes crossed, wearing astronaut pajamas. She saw them doing their homework, watching television, baking brownies, making faces when she suggested the garbage needed to be taken out. She heard their voices and laughter so clearly that her heart quickened, and she nearly convinced herself the sound was real. But it wasn’t, and in her heart of hearts, she knew it, so she’d push herself up the stairs past the memory of Danny, barely a year old, learning to walk, and she’d closet herself in her bedroom, door closed against the image of Stephen at seven, dancing down the hallway in his stocking feet. Only in her bedroom were the images stilled, so that’s where she stayed, finally giving in and installing a microwave and coffee maker so she wouldn’t have to go downstairs. She slept and ate there, wishing she found comfort in the house that had been home for so many years, but there was no longer any peace there.

Last night, she’d given in completely to the house and let it swallow her. She stayed awake all night to wallow in the past, opening each door of her heart as she opened every door and drawer in the house. Though her family and staff members at her equine surgery clinic would have helped, packing the memories was something she needed to do alone. She gently stored school photographs, report cards, and Halloween costumes in the last Rubbermaid crate at three in the morning, an hour before the taxi was scheduled to arrive.

During that last hour, in the quietest part of the morning, she curled into the couch on her back porch and listened to the night sounds as she stared into the blackness around her. She didn’t need to physically see the pine trees to know they were there, or to trace the ebb and flow of the Neuse River that created her northern property line. She breathed in the scent of their existence, determined to capture the essence of the place where she’d spent the last fifteen years. The longer she sat on the porch, the more she remembered other sounds: the roar of a summer boat filled with teenagers screaming and laughing; the voices of children exploring their way down a woodsy path to the riverbank. An adult’s warning: Be careful. Don’t go too far. The child’s response: Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m right here.

She had seen the taxi’s lights snake down the drive toward the house. Now she watched as the house receded in the rearview mirror. Its rooms would be empty soon. The boxes of items she couldn’t bear to give away or destroy would wait for her at Easy Storage on Route 1 until she returned a year from now. In her suitcases, she had everything she’d need until then.

“So, where are you going?” The driver, a twenty-something, rangy kid wearing a Duke Baseball cap backwards, watched her in the rearview. His green eyes were friendly.

“I’m going to Thailand,” she told him.

“Wow, Thailand. That’s cool. That’s where all those temples are, right?”

She smiled and met the cabbie’s eyes in the mirror again. “Yes, that’s the place. Some of them are even decorated with real rubies and emeralds.” She didn’t know why she chose to tell him that.

His eyes widened. “Maybe someday I’ll get there.”

They drove down I-40 and took the exit to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport without another word. It wasn’t until he’d removed her third suitcase and closed the trunk that he finally asked. “Don’t I know you? You look really familiar.”

Her suitcases stood on the curb in front of the Delta terminal. Through the windows, the terminal was already busy with travelers though the night sky had barely begun to brighten. Her heartbeat quickened as the cabbie stared her down, curious.

“I don’t think we know each other,” she said, grabbing her receipt from his hand and replacing it with a hundred-dollar bill. Too much, she knew, but she would have paid ten times more to get out of the state of North Carolina without being...