I sit in the loud silence of the morning and watch the sunrise over the trees and brush, broken concrete and rotten wood. I feel myself crying again, but I make no sound, just letting the tears fall as the animals and insects wake up all around me.

Eventually I get up. I collect the necklace from the ground and I carry myself back inside. I make it as far as the couch in what used to be his office. Collapsing from exhaustion both physical and emotional I drop the necklace on the coffee table and sob myself to sleep.

I wake up what must’ve been a few hours later and remain there on the couch. Still crying, but back to a silent fall of tears. The lump in my throat is so swollen and heavy it feels like I could choke on it. My hair is tangled and oily against my face, and my face is a damp mess of sweat and tears. The hood of my jacket is bunched up uncomfortably against my neck, and the teeth of the zipper are cold where they dig into my skin. One of my arms has fallen asleep under me, and my legs are screaming to be stretched. Even so, I continue to lay there, unmoving, until I fall asleep again.

The second time I wake up I cannot stand to stay there in such discomfort. I groan with the effort it takes me to sit up, then to stand, and I drag myself up the stairs, down the hall into the bathroom. I turn on the hot water for a shower and let the room steam up around me. When I finally step into the water it feels like heaven, my muscles relax, the sticky layer of sweat rinses away, the oily feeling of my hair removed from my skin. I still feel like I can barely manage to stand, so I sit under the water to wash and condition my hair. If this place still had a bath tub I would take a soak, but this was the best I could do. I sit under the water until it finally starts to cool down, then turn it off and wrap myself in a towel to preserve the warmth as I sit on the bathmat with my knees under my arms and my back resting against the shower door.

My mind wanders back to the final pearl, waiting for me downstairs. Was this even worth it? It seems that visiting the past like this is only leaving me miserable when I have to lose these places again. What would I even use the last pearl for? I’ve already visited the rink and the pool once each, what did that leave? The steam has all but dissipated and I’m getting cold, so I grab another towel for my hair and go to the guest room to hurriedly dry off and find something to wear.

Sweatpants and a t-shirt yanked on to my still slightly damp skin, I head into the kitchen in search of breakfast. I feel like I could eat an entire continental breakfast buffet. I settle for microwaved waffles with lots of butter and syrup. I sit with my plate in the breakfast nook for much longer than it takes me to finish my food. As I delay getting up to wash my plate I stare out over the pool just as I did yesterday morning. I find my mind wandering back again to the necklace, the pearls. So many questions that I’m sure will never be answered. Questions I wouldn’t even be able to ask anyone without being diagnosed with something. I suppose it’s still possible that all of this is some sort of mental break, it does seem more plausible than magic. Maybe returning here, to live in the graveyard of my childhood, wasn't the soundest of decisions. I let out a concerned humm for my sanity, then went to rinse my plate in the sink.

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Instead of being productive, I spend the afternoon digging through all the photo albums I can find. The pictures span back several lifetimes, the oldest ones showing my grandmother's parents, back when my grandmother was a small child sitting in her fathers lap. The most recent ones are of my generation, pictures of my teenage years and my brother's bootcamp graduation. Around that time my grandmother found a digital method of sorting and storing photos that she liked, so the decade and change between then and now isn’t represented in these dusty old books. I trace through the pictures of my fathers childhood, speed skating, football, a mullet AND a perm. It doesn’t take long before I reach my brother's childhood. Not a lot of baby pictures, but from the age of five or six onwards there are tons. Birthdays, sports, family photos, and then I show up. The first picture I find of myself is my brother holding me, then my aunt, then the old family portrait that's framed somewhere around here. It takes a couple of pages for baby me to lose the black curly hair I was born with and for the blonde to grow in. My first time on roller skates, my dad holding my brother and I on his shoulders in the pool, so many birthday parties, I sneeze as the dust from the attic finally accumulates in my nostrils. With that I relocate to the dining room table.

I resume flipping through the pictures of my childhood, my blonde hair darkens to brown, I start kindergarten, my family visits my great aunt in California. My grandfather looks so healthy in all of these, until I reach somewhere around my seventh or eighth birthday. The difference is subtle at first, he loses weight, he was already a very lean man so the loss is a bit startling. Then the oxygen tanks start appearing, he isn’t always hooked up to them at first, they’re just waiting there in the background, and soon he’s attached to one in every picture, never standing anymore, becoming paler, at this point there are no more pictures of him downstairs, he stopped being able to get down them.

I reach the pictures of his eighty-ninth birthday. All of us are there, all smiling, with a cake, and he’s smiling but he looks so tired. I know this is the last picture we have of him. All of us huddled up around his chair laughing as my dad tries to stick frosting in my grandfathers mouth. I stay there for a while, on that page, not ready to move on to his funeral. This was the very last time I saw him alive. I didn’t make it in time, the night that he passed. I had been at the theater, we finished up our evening performance and we got the call as dad was driving me home. We stopped to pick up my mother. She took such a long time finding her purse, I wanted to yell at her, ‘you don’t need your purse, why would you need your purse’, but I couldn’t say anything, and I couldn’t find her purse. We pulled up in the driveway and I was out of the car before it had fully stopped, yanking open the old stubborn door and sprinting up the stairs, throwing open the door to see my grandmother leaving their bedroom in tears. A near miss.

I lean back in my chair to keep the tears off the pages. There’s plastic to protect the pictures but no reason to risk it. I don’t think this place is good for me. I think about the necklace downstairs. One pearl left, I guess I figured out how to use it. I stand to go fetch it from the coffee table downstairs, opting to leave the photo albums out mostly because I don’t feel like putting them away. Back down the stairs, grabbing the necklace and slipping it in my pocket and my phone begins to ring up on the dining room table. Shit. I rush back up the stairs and manage to just miss the call. It was my grandmother's number; I wait to see if she calls again but instead, I get a text a few seconds later. A picture of the two of them in the Bahamas, along with a sweet and simple message about missing me and remembering when they took me there after graduation. I send a heart in reply, not really knowing what else to say, then put my phone in the pocket opposite the necklace and make my way towards my bed, it’s time for my final visit.