Cleaner
The porch light was on.
I stood on the bottom step of my son’s house in Boulder, Colorado, and looked at that light for a long time. It was a brass lantern, the kind you buy at a fancy hardware store for three hundred dollars. Two years ago, there had been a cheap white fixture there, with a dead moth inside it.
Things had changed for my son since I died.
It was a Thursday night in May. The air smelled like cut grass and pine. Somewhere down the street, a dog was barking. Through the big front window, I could see the glow of a television and the shape of a woman moving around a kitchen island with a wine glass in her hand.
Emily.
She’d cut her hair short. She looked good. Rested. Like a woman with nothing heavy on her mind.
In the pocket of my coat, I had a folded piece of paper. A drawing in green crayon. Two stick figures holding hands beside a big brown mountain. One tall, with gray scribbles for hair. One small, with a cast on his arm.
Across the top, in a six-year-old’s wobbly letters: ME AND GRAMMA. WE DIDNT DIE.
Behind me, at the curb, there were two unmarked cars with their lights off. A man in a gray jacket stood beside one of them with his hands in his pockets. He nodded at me once.
I climbed the three steps to the porch.
I lifted my hand to knock.
And for a second, I stood there with my knuckles an inch from the wood, and I thought about how I’d gotten here.
About a ravine full of pine needles.
About lying perfectly still.
About my son’s voice, above me, saying the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard.
My name is Carol Hartwell. I’m sixty-eight years old now. When this story started, I was sixty-six.
I was married to Richard Hartwell for forty-one years. He was a civil engineer for the city of Omaha. He designed bridges and drainage systems and spent his weekends building birdhouses in the garage. He was quiet and careful and kind, and he never once raised his voice at me.
He died in March, two years and two months before I stood on that porch. A heart attack, in his recliner, during a Creighton basketball game. He was sixty-nine.
We had one son. Michael.
Michael was a beautiful little boy. Curly hair, big gray eyes. He used to fall asleep on Richard’s chest on the couch. He used to bring me dandelions from the backyard and say, “These are for you because you’re my favorite.”
Somewhere along the way, that boy disappeared.
I don’t know exactly when. Maybe when he went to college in Boulder and stopped calling home. Maybe when his first wife, Hannah, died in a car accident on I-25 when their son, Aiden, was only a year old. Maybe when he married Emily eighteen months after the funeral, at a winery in Napa, and invited us with three weeks’ notice.
Or maybe it was the money.
It’s usually the money.
Richard was a careful man. That’s what everyone said at his funeral. Richard was so careful.
He’d set everything up years before. A will. A trust. A life insurance policy. He’d done it all with our attorney, Thomas Reinholt, in a brick office building on Dodge Street, and he’d walked me through every page at our kitchen table.
“Just so you know where everything is, Carol,” he said. “In case.”
The Richard and Carol Hartwell Family Trust held almost everything we had. Our retirement savings. His pension rollover. The brokerage account he’d been adding to for thirty years. When he died, it was worth about two million four hundred thousand dollars.
I was the lifetime beneficiary. Everything was for me, for as long as I lived. When I died, the rest would go into a separate trust for our grandson, Aiden, until he turned twenty-five.
Only if Aiden died before me would any of it go to Michael.
“Michael has a good job,” Richard told me, when I asked about it. “He’s a grown man. He doesn’t need it. Aiden lost his mother. Aiden needs it.”
I didn’t argue. I thought it was fair.
There was also my life insurance. A policy with Great Plains Mutual that Richard had bought for me in 1998, when he decided a homemaker’s work was worth insuring too. Four hundred thousand dollars. The beneficiary was Michael.
“So he’s taken care of,” Richard said. “In his own way.”
Michael was named as the successor trustee. If I couldn’t manage the trust anymore, he would take over.
At the time, it all seemed so sensible.
After Richard died, I fell apart.
I’m not ashamed to say it. Forty-one years. You don’t just wake up the next morning and know how to live without someone.
Michael flew in from Colorado for the funeral. He stayed for ten days. He was wonderful those ten days. He made phone calls. He dealt with the funeral home. He sat with me at the kitchen table at night while I cried.
On the eighth day, he brought me a stack of papers.
“Mom, Mr. Reinholt’s office drew these up. It’s a power of attorney. Just so I can help with the bank stuff while you’re grieving. Insurance claims. Bills. You shouldn’t have to deal with all that right now.”
I signed it. A notary from Mr. Reinholt’s office came to the house and watched me sign. I barely read it. I could barely see through my tears.
It was a durable power of attorney. Financial. It gave Michael the authority to act for me on my accounts, as my agent.
I didn’t think about it again for over a year.
The phone call came on a Tuesday evening in May. The night I arrived in Boulder.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed in Michael and Emily’s guest room. I’d just flown in from Omaha that afternoon. It was the first time I’d visited since they bought the new house, a big gray modern place on a hill with a view of the Flatirons. It had a three-car garage and a wine refrigerator built into the kitchen wall.
My phone rang. It was Gene Albright, the trust officer at First National Bank of Omaha. He’d handled Richard’s accounts for fifteen years.
“Carol, I’m sorry to bother you on your trip. But I’ve been going through the trust’s quarterly statements, and I need to ask you about something.”
“Of course, Gene.”
“There have been several transfers from your personal savings account, and two from the trust’s brokerage account, over the last five months. To an account at Flatirons Community Bank in Boulder. In Michael’s name. Made under his power of attorney.”
My stomach went cold.
“How much?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“One hundred and eighty-one thousand, four hundred dollars,” he said. “Total. The memo lines say things like ‘reimbursement’ and ‘household expenses for C. Hartwell.’”
“I haven’t asked Michael to pay any of my expenses.”
“I didn’t think so,” Gene said gently. “That’s why I’m calling.”
I sat there on the bed with the phone against my ear.
“Carol,” Gene said. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “While I’m here. In person. I’ll get it straightened out.”
“Please call me when you do.”
I hung up.
When I looked up, the guest room door was open a few inches.
Emily was standing in the hallway with a stack of fresh towels in her arms.
I don’t know how long she’d been there.
She smiled at me. A small, polite smile.
“I brought you towels,” she said. “The blue ones are softer.”
“Thank you, Emily.”
She set them on the dresser and left.
She didn’t close the door all the way.
The next morning, Michael announced we were going hiking.
“Come on, Mom,” he said, with a big smile, as he buckled his four-year-old son into a child carrier on Emily’s back. “Fresh air, good views. It’ll be fun.”
I’m sixty-six. My knees aren’t what they used to be. I hadn’t been on a real hiking trail in thirty years.
“Michael, I don’t know if I’m up to a mountain.”
“It’s not a mountain. It’s an easy trail. Up Fourmile Canyon. Emily does it every week. Right, Em?”
“It’s easy,” said Emily.
She was strangely quiet that morning. She’d always been polite with me. Careful. Like a waitress with a customer she isn’t sure about. In three years, I’d never managed to get past that. Some invisible wall between us that I’d never understood.
She didn’t look at me once while she adjusted the straps of the carrier.
Aiden was singing. Some song from a cartoon about trucks. Off-key and loud.
“Gramma! Gramma, are you coming? We’re going to see a moose!”
“Maybe,” said Michael, laughing. “If we’re lucky.”
I looked at my grandson. His curly hair, just like Michael’s at that age. His mother’s brown eyes. His sneakers that lit up when he stomped.
And I put on my walking shoes.
The trail was narrow and twisted along the side of a ridge. Rough rock and dirt rose on one side. On the other, a steep wooded ravine dropped away toward Fourmile Creek, which was loud and white with spring snowmelt.
I followed behind Emily, watching Aiden bounce in the carrier on her back, listening to him sing.
Michael walked ahead. He didn’t look back much.
About a mile in, we stopped at an overlook. A little clearing at the edge of the ridge, with a split-rail fence that had mostly fallen down. You could see all the way down the canyon.
Emily took off the carrier and set Aiden on the ground.
“Stretch your legs, buddy,” she said.
Aiden ran straight to me and grabbed my hand.
“Gramma, look! Look how far down! Can you see the creek?”
“I see it, sweetheart.”
He pulled me toward the edge. Not too close. A few feet back, where the old fence used to be. The dirt there was soft and dark. Wet from the snowmelt.
Emily was standing behind us. Michael was a little farther back, looking at his phone.
I remember Aiden’s hand, small and warm and sticky with granola bar.
I remember the creek, far below, white and loud.
Then everything changed.
The ground made a sound I’ll never forget. A low crack, like a tree branch, but deeper. Underneath my feet.
Then the earth simply wasn’t there anymore.
I screamed. The whole edge of the overlook was sliding. Dirt and rocks and roots and me and Aiden, all of it, falling away. The world tilted.
I remember the sky disappearing above me.
I remember a flash of Emily turning around. Her red jacket. Her face. Her mouth open.
I remember Aiden’s hand ripping out of mine.
I remember him screaming, somewhere close by, a high, terrified sound.
Then everything went dark.
When I woke up, I was lying face-down in a ditch.
There were pine needles in my mouth. Jagged rocks under my chest. My left arm was bent under me in a way that sent white-hot pain shooting up to my shoulder every time I breathed. Blood was running from somewhere on my scalp, warm and slow, into my right eye. I could taste metal. My ears were ringing so loud I couldn’t think.
I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know how long I’d been there.
Then I heard something above me that made every instinct in my body freeze.
Footsteps.
Moving slowly across the ground. Deliberate. Careful. Coming down the slope.
I didn’t move.
At first, I thought it was Michael and Emily, coming to find us. I almost called out. I almost said Michael, help me, I’m here.
Then I heard Emily’s voice.
And the coldness in it stopped me before I could open my mouth.
“Are you sure she’s dead?”
