“Don’t come looking for me. Let me rest.”

I am 11 but tall for my age, for a girl, as we walk home from Friday night dinner. My mother and I are in lock step and my forehead clears her shoulders. She’s pensive, quiet. It’s windy tonight in London and her mane of tinted hair is whipped back off her face.

“When I die, let me rest.” She says it again, gentler this time, a request that sounds like a command — her specialty. I nod earnestly, sensing the seriousness in her stride as we trace our steps back home from Shabbos dinner at Gubbah’s house.

Gubbah had ladled chicken soup into bone china bowls and regaled us with the story of her father. How he hid all his money before he died, how they searched for days after the funeral and found nothing, how her sister found a psychic, how the psychic told them to look “under the glass.” They found his money hidden behind a mirror. 

“Let me rest,” says Mum, still shaken by the story. I am 11, but already I know there are so many promises I will not be able to keep for her: the promise to stay her daughter, the promise to marry a nice Jewish man. I nod yes, yes this I will do for you; when you die, I will let you rest.

I am 16 but fat for my age, for a girl, and time grows dull and edgeless in my mother’s hospital room. I wait for doctors to tell us what happens next, what happens now. The bullet is out, the coma is over but still she’s not back, not herself. Her expression is fixed, her eyes trained on an empty middle distance, she grimaces and bawls like a baby but nothing more. “She can feel pain,” they tell us. She seizes, she strains, but inside there is nothing, at most a shadow. She’s all but gone. When I go to leave, I whisper into her hairline, begging her to stay.

I am 23 and I will be 24 in two days, but my mother will be dead by then. Her breathing is raspy, her body wrecked, eight years as a vegetable and six months of cancer have done their worst. We watch her go together, all of us eager for this to finally be over. Outside there is thunder without rain — London at the end of March and unseasonably sunny. We’ve drawn the curtains. I take her hand and tell her to go under my breath. Rest. Go rest.

I am 24 at her funeral and not a daughter anymore, but a son — with tits still, so family friends sometimes stare. I pretend not to notice; I don’t have to pretend not to care. We carry her coffin to the electric cart that takes her to the grave, the cart lowers her coffin down, and finally we cover her with earth. Shovel after shovel, the sound of clods against wood and then nothing, heavy breathing, a burst of sobs. I drink whiskey at her shiva. It’s my birthday.

I am bored of condolences, I am sick of pity. I ask people for stories instead. They tell me of her bravery, how she knocked a man down at a pub, how she tackled a horse with her shoulders. How kind she could be, how warm, how tough. “How do you make God laugh? Tell him your future plans!” Her favorite joke now riddled with irony, but it still carries. I listen and laugh. I keep my stories to myself. I carry all of her shadows. I only want to think of her sun.

I am 27 and a long way from London, a man now, no tits, and a beard. On the phone, my younger sister explains slowly: “Look, I know it sounds weird, but it’s true. It’s real.” I click my teeth in doubt, but her voice isn’t wavering. “It’s her. I don’t know how, but it is,” she says. I remind my sister of the promise to let her rest. That we wouldn’t go looking. That we swore.

Keith came to her, she says. Came with a message, the message that our brother’s music wasn’t commercial enough, that it might not sell. 

“Sounds like her.” I try to hold back laughter. 

“Yes, we swore,” says my sister. But do I remember what else she said that night?

What else?

“If she had something to say, she would come and find us.”

***

The psychic’s name is Keith, which throws me off. I half expect someone cartoonishly villainous, but Keith is heavyset and straggly-bearded with a thick Yorkshire accent and disarmingly cherubic cheeks. I will myself to be suspicious of him. He is possibly a conman, I tell myself, as Keith explains cheerfully how this will work. We will Skype and he will dial up some spirits. “Anyone could come through,” says Keith. “It might be your mother, but it might be your Great Aunt Gladys.” He can’t guarantee results, do I see? I say yes, and we book a session. 

When the day comes, I crack open my laptop and fire up my camera and cloak myself in cynicism. Keith begins speaking and, at first, I am embarrassed for him. He calls names into nowhere and I hear the silence of his living room in my headphones. And then I am shuddering, I am cold. I gasp a little at the cool against the small of my back. “They’re here,” says Keith. “They’re all here.”

I don’t have an Aunt Gladys — at least she didn’t show up. But according to Keith, my grandfather and his brothers, my nana and her mother, cousins I had never met or heard of all fill the room, all want to speak or be seen. “They like you — more than the others,” says Keith. He means my siblings; more spirits have come for me than for them. Cheap flattery, but it works. They have questions for me, about me, says Keith. “You’re not who you used to be!” Indeed, I’m not, Keith. Indeed, I’m not.

Where is she? I am getting impatient. I was summoned. I kept my promise, I did not go looking. Where is she? What does she have to say now? All these years and a new name and a shifted body lie between the man I am and the girl she remembers. What could we possibly have to talk about now? 

“Where is she?” I ask Keith who looks around his empty living room searching, searching, and then—

Ice, cold across my whole body. “That could only be Jill,” I say, that could only be my mother. “She’s here now, isn’t she?” I mutter. 

Keith nods, it’s her. She’s here.

Keith has been casual until now, talkative, telling the spirits to give him a minute as he relays their words. Now he is focused, speaking only to Jill, speaking only like Jill. His voice raises, his face moves differently, he calls me darling.

“You kept your promises, darling, you kept them in the end,” says Keith, says Jill.

I didn’t come looking for you. No Ouija boards, no tarot cards, I never asked for you in dreams. “What did you want to tell me?” I ask, bracing to be told some eternal truth.

“I’m not worried about you, darling.

“You’re the only one of my children

“Who married a nice Jewish girl.”

William Horn is a writer living in Brooklyn with two dachshunds. He’s working on a book and trying to avoid being a cliche.