when grief calls

Your mother answers the phone. 

She recognizes the number and picks up before the impossibility of a Lazarus rises. The room forgets to breathe. Your grandmother watches, with a half-eaten cookie in her hand. And you wait. 

Everyone waits.

Your mother says that she only answered because it was from his old room. Someone else must be there now, sleeping in his bed and using his phone. Someone else must be trying to reach the outside world, to break out of the memory care home with hallways that led nowhere and doors that required a whispered password. Your grandfather never asked you for the password, only for his car keys. 

Someone else must have pressed a speed dial button, one silent and weary and lonely and when grief calls, your mother takes an extra moment to hang up the phone.

Telephone lines that dangle against the wall like veins pressed against fragile skin, always a moment away from tearing free. Obituaries that never mention the voicemails we swore to keep. You start the dishwasher and wish that you had taken the phone and said to whoever was on the other end, 

         “I hear you and I’m here.”