His stomach was bleeding, and the blood was rising up his esophagus and down into his lungs. The doctors were eager to get him in for surgery as quickly as possible, but not before making him sign a series of papers that essentially swore he would not knowingly sabotage the progress of his treatment moving forward.

The operating room had a poster on one wall of a tropical beach dappled in sunlight. A single palm tree listed happily to the side. Out at sea, a dolphin was suspended mid-leap, beads of sparkling water spiraling from its gray skin.

“Count backward from six for me,” the anesthesiologist said, placing a mask over Benno’s mouth and nose.

“Six…” Benno remembered suddenly he needed to call Nick back. “Can I call my son?” he asked, the mask stifling his voice.

“Soon.” The anesthesiologist turned a knob on a machine.

“It’s import…” Benno’s vision tapered into darkness.

SOON… said a monotonous Voice.

Benno looked down at the pared, swollen eyes in the dark.

I just had this dream, he thought.

There was the candle, and the beige hand holding the small heart, which bled into the flame. The unwashed stench. Recipient lurking along the floor.

I just had this dream.

Benno studied the tumescent eyes. The whites were so swollen that the pupils within were no more than specks. They were so strange, so wrong looking. And yet familiar.

Who are you? Benno tried to ask. Why do I keep dreaming about you?

The eyes watched him from the dark, betraying nothing.

Benno searched the dark space. There were walls just outside the ring of candlelight. Flindering wooden walls, and a dusty wooden ceiling. The floor, Benno could just barely discern, was dirt.

I’m in a shed.

And there was something else. In Benno’s arms—which he could not move no matter how hard he strained—something heavy. He cradled it like a child. There was hair, and fabric, and papery skin. If he looked down far enough, just over the rim of his eyelids, he could see shapes on it: An eyeball, a cross, a smattering of cursive…

I’m ready to wake up. Benno had no voice. I’m ready to get out of here.

SOON…

“I’m ready to wake up…”

“Benno?”

Benno opened his eyes. Brooke looked down at him. There were crow’s feet starting to form around her eyes. Benno had never noticed them before.

“Benno? Are you awake?”

“Yeah…” Benno’s breath was rancid in his mouth. “Is it over?”

“It’s over. You did good. How do you feel?”

Benno’s legs were stiff, and his throat was sore. But there was no pain. He touched around his abdomen, searching for the suture, then remembered they’d merely stuck a tube down his throat to reach his stomach. It was better that way. It was supposed to be better. No new hole. Just the repurposing of an old one…

“…to see you,” Brooke was saying.

“What?”

“I’ll go get him.” She got up and left.

Benno blinked up at the ceiling. There were little pockmarks in the paneling, almost like a distant desert topography. It was likely a product of the anesthesia wearing off, but he was overcome by the sense that he was dreaming, that none of this—the surgery, the cancer, his conversation with Edie, even Brooke and Kay and Nick and everything—was real.

“He’s here.” Brooke’s voice drew Benno’s eyes to the door.

She stood just behind Nick, holding his shoulder softly, guiding him forward. Benno squinted, disbelieving. It hadn’t been that long since he’d seen his son—maybe two weeks, three?—and yet he looked so much older. Taller. Thinner. With even a dusting of stubble on his upper lip. When had he stopped being a boy? When had this happened?

“Hey,” Benno said, merely a whisper. “Hey, kiddo.”

“Hey.” Nick’s voice was deep.

“Come in. Come sit.” Benno patted the narrow ledge of bed just to his right.

“Sit in the chair.” Brooke guided Nick to it, and sat him down. “I’m just going to speak to the doctor. I’ll be right back, okay?”

“That’s fine,” Benno said before realizing she was addressing Nick.

Nick nodded at her as she left, then looked at the floor. He placed his large hands on his knees. For a long time he didn’t move.

“I’m okay,” Benno said.

Nick was so still—his face angled so far forward—he might as well have been asleep.

“How’ve you been?” Benno urged to reach out and touch his son, but his hand was lodged beneath the sheets, and leaden.

Nick shrugged.

“How’s your mom?”

Nick shrugged again.

Benno looked toward the door.

“Are you on pain killers?” Nick asked then.

“What?”

Nick looked up from dark, heavy eyes.

“Why?” Benno asked.

Nick looked back down at the floor, and again he shrugged.

“Listen.” Benno managed to tug his hand free from the sheets, and rested his fingertips on his son’s wrist. “I know it must be scary, watching me going through all this. I’m sorry that it’s happening. My dad was sick too, for a long time. I don’t know if you knew that. But I want you to know I’m gonna get through it. I’m gonna get better. The cancer isn’t even that bad, as far as cancer goes. If I had to bet I’d say by this time next year—”

“I don’t care,” Nick said.

“…What?”

Nick looked up. “I don’t care if you get better or not. I don’t give a shit.”

Benno’s stomach churned.

“I’m only here because Brooke asked me to be. You know she’s way too good for you.”

“Nick…”

“When I showed up at your apartment on Wednesday and you weren’t there and the door was locked, I called you like five times. Then when it started to rain I had to call mom. She canceled plans to come pick me up. And then on the way back to her house she cried. You guys have been divorced for four years and you’re still fucking up her life.” Nick stood, the backs of his legs striking the chair and sending it wobbling. “So get better or don’t get better. I don’t give a shit. And I’m not sure you do either.” Then he turned, and was gone.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Benno blinked up at the pockmarks on the ceiling. When Nick was three years old, he and Benno had started playing a game in the evenings—after dinner and before bubblebath—where Benno would stay stock-still, his arms outspread, and Nick would climb up him, gripping his shirt, digging his little bare feet up Benno’s legs, until he reached the top, where he would wrap his arms around Benno’s neck and bury his face into Benno’s hair and giggle. I climbed the Daddy tree! I climbed it! A silly game. Benno would rather have been sitting on the couch after a day of teaching, having a drink. But he played it with Nick because he knew it was important—the time, the bonding—even if it didn’t feel important. They’d played that game for many, many years. Now, he wondered if Nick had known. If he’d known then that his abject joy at such a simply activity was not shared, and if that monstrous betrayal had caused irreparable harm.

Brooke returned, her brow creased. “What happened?” she asked.

Benno wrung at the tight sheets. “Help me up.”

“The doctor’s on her way. Benno what happened with Nick?”

Benno glowered at the pockmarked ceiling. “Please. Help me up.”

#

Benno found out his cancer was in remission only two weeks before Brooke was due to give birth. It was the day after his fortieth birthday.

It was an unlikely outcome, the doctors said, to a dire situation he’d done little to improve. “You’re lucky,” said the nurse as she doled out his pills. “That’s all they’re talking about out there. Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

A week later, Benno was discharged. As was protocol, he was made to sit in a wheelchair until he was outside the hospital’s entrance, when an orderly wheeled it back inside. From there he walked, arm-in-arm with Brooke, through the parking lot.

“I set up the couch in the den for you,” she said, starting the car. “There’s that step at the end of the hallway to the bedroom that you should avoid for a few weeks.”

Benno shook his head. “We need to go to Middle Forest.”

“Where?”

“Middle Forest.”

Brooke frowned. “Do you mean Middleton?”

Benno started to shake his head, then paused. “Yeah. Middleton. Sorry.”

“Why? What’s up there?”

“A museum.” Benno looked at the hospital in the sideview mirror—gray angles and points of sunlight—as the car pulled out onto the road.

“Benno you need to rest.”

The car followed the road around a bend, and Benno lost sight of the hospital in the sideview. In its place, a wash of trees.

“Benno.”

Benno straightened up in his seat. “We need to go to the museum.”

#

Middleton was a sleepy town of red brick buildings and quaint storefronts. As he and Brooke drove slowly down Main Street toward the museum—a large white building at the end of the street that looked more like a town hall or a library—Benno imagined the town must be pretty in the winter, carpeted beneath a layer of snow. He imagined smoke rising lazily from the chimneys of the red brick buildings. He imagined the cars parked along the street, yet to be dug out. He imagined the townspeople gathered together, scared. He imagined a blast of light and heat, and a scalding wind, and smoke rising off a lake of ash…

“I didn’t know this place was here,” Brooke said, pulling into the museum’s nearly empty parking lot. A sign forty feet from the building’s entrance read: MIDDLETON MUSEUM OF ART AND ARTIFACT followed by: ALL ARE WELCOME HERE. Benno experienced a bout of deja vu—it had been happening so much lately—which passed as soon as it appeared.

Brooke and Benno helped each other make short walk from the car and up the museum’s front steps, both holding their respective abdomens. Benno’s pain was minimal, but he was weak: His legs felt hollow, and as they entered the museum’s lobby he found he was winded.

The lobby was no more than a hallway lined with posters depicting various ongoing or upcoming exhibits: The Real Pirates of the Caribbean; Egypt Unearthed; Land of the Lenape; Revisiting the Work of Nellie George Stearns; etc… At the ticket window immediately inside, a young man leaned, scrolling through his phone. He nearly startled when Brooke and Benno entered, and smoothed his blue hair aside from his face.

“Good morning,” he said, then glanced at his phone. “Afternoon. Just you two?”

Brooke glanced at Benno.

“Actually, we’re looking for someone,” Benno said, trying to conceal his breathlessness, which made it worse. “Someone who used to work here. I think in research or curation or something like that. Probably Egyptian stuff. Maybe she still does.”

The ticket taker continued to smooth his hair. “Who?”

“Her name is Rose,” Benno said. “I don’t know if she’s going by Rose Haim or Rose Gallant or something else. But I do know she was here.”

“Well I don’t know her,” the ticket taker said. “But I’ve only been here a few months. And I haven’t even met everyone in the back yet. I guess I can go get Teresa for you.”

“Thanks.”

The ticket taker nodded slowly, visibly regretting his offer, then disappeared from the window, emerged a moment later from a door a little further down the hall, and walked off around a corner.

Benno eyed Brooke, who looked off at the posters on the walls.

“Nothing to say?” he asked.

“What’s there to say?” Brooke did not make eye contact with Benno. “If your mother is here, or if someone here can help you find her… That’s really important.”

Something squeaked off in the bowels of the museum.

“You’re not looking at me,” Benno said.

The back of Brooke’s head turned minutely, but not enough to reveal her face. “No?”

The ticket taker reappeared from around the corner. With him was a small woman—Teresa, Benno assumed—with short gray hair and heavy silver jewelry around her neck, wrists and fingers. She frowned at Benno as she approached.

“Hello.” Benno stepped forward to meet her. “Thanks for—”

“You know Rose?” Teresa asked, slowing to a stop.

Now Brooke looked at Benno.

“Yes.” Benno’s heart kicked up in his chest.

“How do you know her?” Teresa asked.

Benno opened his mouth to answer—She’s my mother—but of course if Teresa didn’t know what Edie had known, then that wouldn’t make sense to her. He could tell her she was his daughter—as he had with the woman in the back of the bar—but then what would Brooke think? Benno had given Brooke an abridged and palatable version of events: He’d seen a woman in a bar who looked like his mother; he’d tried to speak to her but she’d disappeared before he could; he’d spoken to the bartender, who said she might attend an AA meeting nearby; there he’d met her old sponsor, who told him she worked at the Middleton Museum of Art and Artifact; then Benno had ended up hospitalized for nearly six months; and now they were here. He made no mention that his mother was the same twenty-something Brooke had caught him talking to outside the bar two years ago, and of course omitted all of what Edie had told him—about Egypt, about the tomb, about the gardens inside of it deep underground, about the thing that lived there, about what happened to his mother when she spoke to it. It was all too much. Brooke wouldn’t have believed it. Benno wouldn’t have either if he hadn’t seen his mother with his own eyes. Younger than him. Reborn twenty-five years ago by a terrible slip of the tongue…

“She’s a relative,” Benno said after too long, which warranted another look from Brooke.

Teresa raised a silver-leaden hand to her throat. “I’ve been trying to find someone,” she said. “A family member, a friend—anyone. I’ve been looking for two years.”

The ticket taker lingered by the door to the ticket window, his blue hair flat on his head.

“Where is she?” Benno asked, taking another step toward Teresa. “Is she here?”

Teresa looked at Brooke for a moment, then down at the floor. When she looked back up at Benno, his heart fell, and his stomach churned as if the cancer had returned anew.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Rose is dead.”

#

There was an oil painting hanging on the wall in Teresa’s office depicting an impressionistic scene of a flower garden, and sculptures on pedestals in the room’s corners, torsos of men and women and intricate hand-carvings of animals—both familiar and alien—posed in shameless displays of bluster. A floor-to-ceiling shelf filled with books was built directly into the wall.

“She killed herself.” Teresa sat behind her large messy desk. She was small in the high-ceilinged room. “Here, in the museum.”

Benno and Brooke sat in matching chairs across from her. Brooke’s arms extended the distance between the chairs, her soft hand holding Benno’s.

“We didn’t know until afterward that she’d faked all her paperwork. The police couldn’t find a next of kin—couldn’t find anyone. I tried myself, but after awhile I didn’t know where to look. She spoke seldom about herself. She was the most knowledgable Archaeolinguist I’ve ever met. Brilliant. And at such a young age…”

Brooke glanced and Benno, who pretended not to notice.

“Why she would choose to work here of all places,” Teresa continued. “After the time she spent in Giza, in the field, her contributions… She could have worked for the Met, or any university. I figured she just liked the peace and quiet. I didn’t know she was so disturbed. In retrospect there were signs. I may have ignored them for selfish reasons…”

As she spoke, Benno looked off at the painting on the wall behind her. From his medium distance, it was barely more than a concatenation of vibrant brush strokes. In fact, there was nothing about it that confirmed its depiction of a garden at all. It could have been anything. And yet Benno knew it was a garden. He knew it was a garden the way he knew the sky was up; not because it was objectively up—objectively a garden—but because it was up from his vantage. A garden from Benno’s vantage. Because it had been put in that context the last time he’d seen it. The last time he’d seen this painting…

“Are you okay?”

Benno looked over at Teresa and Brooke, both of whom looked back at him with matching expressions of concern.

He nodded, then shook his head, then looked back off at the painting. “I think I’m asleep,” he said, not meaning to say it aloud. “I think I’m dreaming.”

Brooke leaned over to him, her other hand joining the first hand on his. “You’re pale,” she said quietly, as if there was a low enough volume to keep Teresa from overhearing her in their close proximity. “I think we should get you home.”

“There’s no such thing…” Benno murmured.

“Her remains are at the Everson Family Funeral Home,” Teresa said, jotting on a pad. “They were kind enough to cremate her, but without burial costs or a family contact, they were not able to bury her…” She tore the page from the pad and handed it to Brooke. “If you decide to have a memorial, please let me know. I will plan to attend.”

“Thank you.” Brooke took the page and folded it into her pocket, then returned her attention to Benno. “I think you need to rest. This has been a lot. We can call the funeral home on our way back and speak to them about your mother. Does that sound alright?”

Teresa’s brow creased. “Mother?” she asked, looking from Brooke to Benno. “No, I think there’s been some kind of a mistake.”

The painting on the wall behind her blurred in Benno’s vision. They were flowers. It was a garden. And there was something standing among it, a shape, looking out from the tangle of stems and petals. Benno recognized it, recognized the wide, grinning face. He had known it his whole life, or longer. Or much, much longer…

“Come on,” Brooke stood and tugged gently on Benno’s arm.

“There’s been some kind of a mistake,” Teresa repeated.

The face grinned from the gut of the gardens.

“There’s no such thing,” Benno whispered, rising with the tide of Brooke’s pull, finding himself light-headed, dizzy, wobbling, and then collapsing into blackness.