For a brief moment, my head was completely empty of thoughts, but I knew all too well what that meant.

It was this moment when the water dragged back from the shoreline, much farther into itself than it ever did for added theatrics.

"Stupid necklace," Mom whispered in between sniffles as she wiped the tears away.

I stared at her, unable to make any move to comfort her or cheer her up. I had expected tears to burn my eyes too by now, but they didn't come. I couldn't remember the last time they did.

Mom ran a hand through her hair, surprised to find it a mess. The current updo was a poor imitation of the bun she always kept it confined in.

She seemed to have realized the same thing and chuckled humorlessly as she leaned against the headboard for support that she didn't seem to find there.

"I'm so sorry for bringing it up. I know we've been doing this thing where we never talk about it. But you scream about Grace every night. I haven't slept in days."

Since she pointed it out, exhaustion was all I could see on her face. I didn't know how I had missed the dark bags forming under her eyes, nearly blending onto her cheekbones. Her current state was a remastered version of Mom I barely recognized.

"Mom—" I knew I had to stop her before we reached that point where there would be no going back. If she didn't stop, I would remember too much to ever forget again.

Our family had sidestepped the textbooks' mourning guidelines and constructed this new, safe stage of coping with grief. It operated as the perfect balance between denial and acceptance, never quite falling into either category.

The key was to act like it never happened. And we had outperformed each other at it.

It was effective enough to send us into manic productivity to make up for the block of untouchable information that we kept locked in the special compartment for what we refused to deal with.

I bought into the formula when my parents cleaned up Grace's things, erasing any sign in the house that she had ever been there, and from our minds in the same process.

There was no proof that she had ever lived there, other than the unreliable memories of her laughter and her huge blue eyes when she wanted something from me.

There was nothing left of her in that house besides her carousel nightlight that currently sat on the nightstand.

Bits and pieces of memories danced along with the moon and stars of the starry night image the carousel projected.

"Could you clean your room, Kelly?" Mom had asked, her voice resonating in my ear now as loudly as if she had been speaking now.

She had just packed up all of Grace's clothes and had taken down the bunk bed we shared. The room had looked as empty and messy as it would have if it had been robbed.

So I cleaned. My tiny fingers kept slipping out from the scrubbing brush, but I couldn't stop. Not when it was sorting through my brain and filtering out memories I had no use for. Not when chunks of the dirt we had covered her small coffin with still lingered under my fingernails.

More soap. More water. More... anything.

When Mom came to my room to get me for dinner much later, she had found a slippery room with large puddles of water.

Without saying a word, she had pried the brush from my tight grip to store it away despite my protests that it wasn't clean yet.

Later that day, Mom had tucked me into bed, which she hadn't done in years. She brushed back my hair in repetitive and comforting movements.

"I cleaned and double-checked. It's all gone," Mom had whispered, and it was the only thing that could have given me the peace to fall asleep.

Gone from our memories, too, though we never added that part.

Now, as Mom and I sat on the bed, I didn't dare move even when I could feel tiny cramps tingling in my feet and toes.

"I know," she said, her hand reaching up to brush and rub my shoulder. "I know you don't want to think about it. But you're not okay." The words were ironic, considering that her eyes were the tear-stained ones. "I thought—I wanted to think that you were doing better. I guess that's why I never visited and took all the words you wrote in your emails for truth, regardless of how generic they all sounded."

I still made no movement or said anything as I listened to her, though the words barely reached my ears.

"I wasn't completely honest. I was concerned about you, but I didn't come here because you weren't answering my calls. I came to run away from your dad. He kept bringing her up," she said, making a small vague gesture with the necklace she had picked up from my open palm. "I didn't want to hear it. Then I came here, and you wouldn't stop talking about her in your sleep."

"So, Marge..."

She nodded. "She heard you a few nights, and she was worried. That's what she and I have been talking about. She's been walking me through a few things that have really helped me approach all of it from a better perspective."

I glanced at the faint line of tears that still marred her cheeks, but I was too tired to be skeptical.

"Let's not go there," I finally said, my voice trembling as much as I expected it to.

But it was a futile sentiment at this point because we were already there. And the path that had led us there was too far out of sight. I couldn't go back even if I wanted to.

"You might not see it," Mom said and continued to pound against the shield I was holding up. It was my last attempt at maintaining any sort of authority over myself. "But it's affecting everything else in your life, Kelly. It's there in your personality, in your relationships, and in your writing. Nothing will change until you realize that. The longer you take, the more painful it will become."

My parents had never quite acted at home like the therapists they were. They always opted not to read into my words and behaviors as they would have with a patient.

I never understood why they did that, but now that Mom was, I wished I had never complained about it because I couldn't see how this psychoanalysis trick was ever going to help me.

I stood up from the bed without a word, letting go of the hand that had held mine. I walked to the bathroom and closed the door.

Dragged back as far away from the shore as possible, the waves would hold for what seemed like a longer moment than it was. Suspended in the air, they would celebrate apparent victory in the fight against gravity.

My arms pushed against the closed door as though that would hold back every single memory that tried to make it past the imaginary shield.

It worked for a while. For a moment, I thought of nothing besides the sink in front of me even though I couldn't see it well and the comforting cleaning tools I knew were hiding in the cabinet under it.

My eyes adjusted to the light from the bedroom that seeped under the bathroom door. It revealed the other items around me that I could focus on to deny passage to everything else that tried to enter my mind, whether it chose to cooperate or not.

But, though I still had a shaky grasp over my mind, there was nothing I could do about my mom as she continued to speak, not intimidated by the sturdy door.

"Your dad was right," she said, and I heard her voice vibrate against the door as though she was leaning against it. "We can't keep ignoring it—it happened. We can't deal with this until we admit that."

I had done just fine for ten years. I didn't have the strength or the desire to change how my mind worked. It was too late for that.

We were behind on the grieving journey, and I didn't know the first thing about getting back onto the path. I didn't want to get back onto the path.

"Those business trips, the unnecessary work meetings, and the working non-stop were tricks I used to run away from you so that you could never bring it up." She sighed. "I'm done now. I'm not going anywhere right now, I promise. Please talk to me."

Her voice sounded hollow to me like my brain was morphing the audio frequency into a disfigured version that concealed the meaning of the words.

My head leaned back against the door as I slipped down to the floor, unable to shoulder the heaviness in my chest without assistance.

I was still an emotionless automaton as I struggled to block the stream of thoughts and memories trying to flood in and wash away every single neuron. I had the feeling that if my nails stopped digging into my palms, I wouldn't be able to hold back the waves any longer.

"It wasn't your fault," she said—the trigger words that would prompt the domino effect that unraveled every healthy thought pattern in my head and coaxed them into lies that made more sense than the truth of her words.

These simple words jumpstarted my brain from the daze I had willingly slid into, and everything I had been brushing away came running back. Not just Grace. She also brought Thomas and all the others before him along with her. The good and the bad memories I had taken such care at keeping at bay.

Everything I had neatly arranged away united and burst out, reducing that compartment to a pile of rubbles.

Whatever illusion of control I had struggled to maintain these past few years--between keeping people away and tuning out dangerous thoughts--slipped right through my shaky fingers. The waves charged with all their might back towards the shoreline and continued way past it, rallying against any sign of life.

I didn't see that storm coming until it was too close to dodge and knocked every breath of air right out of my lungs.