On the way home that day, I stare out the bus window. Evan has been dropped off already, and I am alone in my seat as the bus wends its way slowly toward my bus stop. I catch sight of a large truck—a moving van, I realize—parked in the driveway of a house that has been on the market for so many months that I assumed it would never sell. Two dark-skinned men—one in a dress shirt and a tie fluttering in the breeze, one in blue coveralls—argue, gesturing angrily at each other, at the house, at the van. On the porch, a slender figure in black watches, and I think I notice something, but then we’re farther down the road and whatever I thought I noticed is gone.

Mom is still at work when I get home, so I go to what had been my sister’s room, the nursery. I only go in when Mom isn’t home.

In movies and on TV, when someone’s child dies, they almost always show the room preserved, frozen in time. In English class, I learned that this sort of thing is supposed to be symbolic, that the room’s unchanging appearance reflects the inability of the parents to move on, the rigid, frozen horror and pain that cannot thaw.

This is why I’ve come to the conclusion that symbolism is bullshit. Because my sister’s room is not preserved, but no one has moved on. We’re all still stuck in place.

The room serves now as storage. There are boxes and bags of things here, most of them belonging to my father, things my mother won’t throw out. Not out of sentiment—out of spite. “I won’t do his dirty work for him,” she said once. “His things will rot in there before I lift a finger to get rid of them.”

It made no sense to me then and makes no sense to me now, but I try to avoid asking my mother to explain herself.

For a time, I thought the boxes and the bags might contain mementos of my sister—photos, old toys, old clothes. But, no. There are books and magazines, old drawings, bits and pieces of model airplanes and HO scale trains. I have a vague, flickering memory of a Christmas tree scraping the ceiling and a model train platform that took up half the living room floor, the chug and click of the train cars in unison with sparks that delighted me. One engine almost politely burped puffs of smoke. The smell of pine, the stab-crunch of needles underfoot through winter-thick socks. A giggle-laugh that must have been mine.

A broken chunk of old memory, adrift in a pool of blood.

I don’t want to remember it. Memories go into the memory hole. That’s where they belong. Dr. Kennedy thought that if I could remember the shooting, I could move on from it. I told him I didn’t want that in my head, just like I don’t want my father’s trains and the smell of pine.

Our Christmas tree for the past few years has been a four-foot-tall plastic and aluminum facsimile of a fir that Mom has me haul out of the attic shortly after each Thanksgiving. It looks as fresh each year as the year before. My sister’s room is not frozen in time, but the Christmas tree is. It’s still not symbolic, though—it’s just crappy Chinese plastic. It’s chemistry class, not English.

There may be symbols and symbolism in books and movies—sometimes it’s even fun to find them—but in real life, we only have boxes and bags, old sagging shelves, and attics with fake Christmas trees. And none of it means anything. It’s all just the detritus of life, our own jetsam, heaved overboard, then washed back to us by the waves and the tides.

Coming around and around again. And the water disgorges the same sights, same house, same me, same Mom.