A photograph of our mother’s headstone, printed on ordinary paper, with the 9 p.m. thumbs-up emoji drawn on it in black marker. That’s all. No note, no name. I called out for my sister from the porch and she came up the hall from the kitchen with a knife in her hand and both of us stood there in the doorway shaking, and then we called the police, and then we waited fifty minutes for a county car.
It was the kid from the store. Twenty-three years old, worked the counter in Springfield in March, and he’d taken her old phone off the trade-in pile and never wiped it. He’d read four years of two women texting each other one symbol a night — no words, nothing to steal, nothing to sell — and something about it had gotten into him. He told the detective he’d wanted to know why they did it. He’d found the obituary and the plot online. He’d been to the cemetery twice.
My sister said the worst part wasn’t fear, it was the sense of having been read. Those messages meant something enormous and they said nothing at all, and a stranger had sat in an apartment somewhere and worked out exactly how much they meant, which is a thing not even our own husbands had managed in four years.
He got probation and a stalking order and he moved out of state in the fall. My sister changed her number twice. We still send it at nine — hers, then mine, and if either one is late by more than five minutes the other one calls. Last week she added a second message underneath for the first time since Monday in June. It said: still me.
