When I find an old photo of Mom on the phone, it all comes back: my throbbing thumb, my aunt, Mom’s sobs.

Dad was tasked with picking me up from elementary school and I’d slammed the car door on my thumb because he didn’t fully stop as I ran to get in.

It throbbed and turned red, then purple, then black as he yelled at me like he always did, ‘You’re so careless!’ and ‘We don’t have time for this!’ and ‘Another problem to deal with!’

I couldn’t come up for air through the crushing pain and panic as I cradled my hand and he sped to the hospital when we should have been going home. The doctor drilled into my nail with a monstrous machine until it fell off. I vomited at the awful-looking thing where my nail just was, all pink and red and gooey and angry, but the worst of it was when we arrived home.

Mom was kneeling in the kitchen, coiled phone cord stretched tight, strangling her hand as Dad turned with a growl and thundered up the stairs, leaving me there, paralyzed as I watched her rock back and forth. She was sobbing and screaming, crushed by the news that Aunt Anne had been found after eighteen months. Her twin sister’s decaying body was wedged in the woods under an old oak tree, empty pill bottle in her skeletal hand.

The naive child in me still wonders like I did back then how things could have turned out if Mom never answered the phone that day. Maybe if the bad news wasn’t delivered, Aunt Anne wouldn’t be dead, just wandering those woods with the deer she loved so much, but that’s not how closure works; it’s a call that must be answered.