From Here To There

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When I was fifteen, my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer.

It all started when she slipped in the shower. Miraculously, she didn’t break her hip, but while she was at the hospital, the doctors insisted on giving her a full physical. That’s when they found the cancer. It was already advanced. They gave her six months.

My family lived in Seattle. My dad worked long hours at Boeing—sometimes sixteen a day—so my mom packed up my seven-year-old sister, Anne, and me, and we moved to Lakeside, California to help take care of her.

I didn’t want to go.

I had friends. A life. A summer that was supposed to be mine.

Instead, I found myself in a house where no one said what was happening out loud.

The only real conversations happened late at night, in the kitchen. I would lie awake and listen.

There was no crying. No tenderness. No fear.

Just voices, flat and businesslike, as if they were discussing something routine.

“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Same.”

That was the tone of it. As if death were just another task to get through before the day ended.

But it wasn’t just the conversations.

I hated that house.

At first, I thought it was because my grandmother was dying in it. That would have been enough.

But it was more than that.

The lights were always low, even during the day. Sunlight came in through the shades, but it didn’t feel like sunlight. It filtered in weakly, like something that had already passed through too much before reaching you.

The shades were the color of desert dust—faded, worn out. Maybe they had once been white, but if they had, that was long gone. Now they just seemed to keep something out.

Or keep something in.

There were bowls of hard candy that had been there longer than anyone could remember. If you tried to take one, it stuck to the others, pulling away in a clump. The wallpaper was faded. The furniture didn’t make sense. The whole place felt like it had settled into itself and stopped changing.

But the worst part was the paintings.

They were everywhere.

Large portraits of people I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know if they were family, or strangers, or something else entirely. None of them looked happy. None of them looked at ease.

And their eyes—

I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching me.

Not just following me across the room.

Watching.

Fifteen was too old to be afraid of paintings.

But those eyes were wrong...