Home to Ohio by Chelsie Bryant

Grandma Roberts has a secret. She tells me this as I’m lugging a jug of brown well water across the old cemetery while trying not to knock my shins against the stones. It is the summer of 2015, five years before she dies. She points out a grave marked “Miller.”

“Add some water here,” she says, pointing toward the flowerpot in front of it. When I heft the jug to pour some in, she mutters, “Terrible, how they died.”

“Who?” I ask. I know there are Millers in our family even though no one I know has that surname. Grandma Roberts knows a lot of people. She can rattle off distant relations like she’s reciting her favorite recipe, but I have never heard her say the names marking this grave Coda E’s and Frank W’s.

“It’s a secret,” Grandma Roberts says, blotting her nose with a Kleenex. She’s squinty, unsteady on her feet with one arm broken and in a sling, as she leans back to shield her eyes from the sun. “He killed her then himself.”

“What?”

I wipe sweat off my chest, as I follow Grandma Roberts to her parents’ grave a few rows back and over. The flowers here are more robust, the planter bigger. She pulls the dead head off a geranium. She says, “There was something about a salesman, the salesmen that found them.” She dabs her nose again. “We weren’t supposed to talk about it.”

***

He shot her just above the heart. That’s what the blurry newspaper article Grandma Roberts shows me says. 

SALESMAN FINDS WIFE’S BODY IN CHAIR ON PORCH, it reads.

We are sitting on Grandma Roberts’s white bed in her powder blue wallpapered bedroom. The bedroom, like her house, hasn’t changed in the 26 years I’ve been alive. She pulls the article, printed on a laminated white sheet of paper, from her nightstand drawer.

Grandma Roberts points to the title and then to the subtitles. There are three. They read: “Marital Difficulties Seen as Cause of Tragedy Early Thursday Morning;” “MARRIED FOR 36 YEARS;” and “Double Funeral to Be Held at North Baltimore Funeral Home Saturday.”

“We weren’t supposed to talk about it,” Grandma Roberts says again, patting her nose with the used Kleenex she has in her fist.

I ask her if anyone else in the family knows this “secret,” as I skim the article. The murder-suicide scene is described in such gripping imagery that I forget I’ve sat on my leg and my foot falls asleep. She tells me Leland found the article online and printed it for her, but no one else knows. Leland is her brother, who is older by one year. He is both short and short-tempered.

They were her mother’s parents, she says about Coda and Frank.

“Why couldn’t you talk about it?” I ask her. I don’t know the exact date Frank murdered Coda—the article doesn’t say—and I can’t find it on Google, but I know it was in 1936 because that is how their shared tombstone is engraved. That means Grandma was either six or seven, depending on if they died before late August.

“We weren’t supposed to talk about these sorts of things.” Grandma Roberts is slouched on the bed next to me, her drawstring pants the exact shade of neon green as her t-shirt. Her skin is red from the heat at the cemetery. She says they didn’t know what happened, not really, until Leland found this article a few years ago.

“But why can’t you talk about it now?” I ask.

She pauses, clenching the Kleenex in her fist. She is missing one of her thumbs because it was torn off when she was bailing hay at five years old. Another thing she was told not to do; it was dangerous.

“We mustn’t talk about such things,” she says, as if that is explanation enough.

I don’t ask her again why not, and I don’t ask her why me.

***

When Grandma Roberts dies suddenly, I happen to be in Ohio because Grandma Bryant is dying of Alzheimer’s.

It’s March 2020 when Grandma Bryant falls on a Sunday. The next day, I whirl into my boss’s office at work, words flying from my mouth, ponytail askew. I have to leave for Ohio, and I don’t know when I’ll be back, I say. It could be two weeks or six months; that’s the amount of time they’ve given her to live. My boss tells me to go.

Later that day, like many other businesses across the country, the office closes for the two-week lockdown because of COVID. We won’t know we will be remote for two years. We won’t know the company won’t exist in three.

I am in a rush when I leave, my suitcase a mix of black clothes, all the toilet paper and canned food items I have, boxes of dry noodles, and rolls of paper towels. The cat and I leave Maine in the early afternoon. We are in Hartford before I realize I accidentally selected the Pennsylvania route to Ohio and not the New York one. The difference is slight—Pennsylvania is 15 minutes shorter but 15 miles longer—yet I know New York’s roads. I do not expect to drive through mountains in Pennsylvania or for every rest stop to be closed because of the pandemic.

I am exhausted and emotionally drained when I decide I can’t make the 12-hour journey in one go, so my parents spend an hour or so finding a hotel along my route that will take a cat. I won’t remember what town it is in, just that my cat howls all night long, as if he, too, is anxious to get there.

The next morning, I am moving slowly from exhaustion when my mom calls to tell me that Grandma Roberts fell at the hospital. She had been admitted two days before for malnutrition and a broken pelvis. “They are moving her to the hospice ward because she can have visitors there,” Mom says.

“Is she dying, too?” I ask, voice wavering, wondering how I can finish this drive on little sleep and on an even thinner emotional rope. Everything around me feels suspended. Everything feels surreal.

“No,” Mom says.

But she doesn’t know that almost at that exact moment Grandma Roberts will lose consciousness and never regain it. That she will die hours later, just nine days before Grandma Bryant. That this terrible month in our lives will dwarf our perspective of this terrible moment worldwide. I had never lived during a pandemic, and I had never lived without my grandmas. 

***

When the grandmas die, they are buried in the new cemetery down the road from the old. Like Coda, they share tombstones with their husbands. Aunts and uncles say that now they can be with them in heaven. Grandpa Bryant died 30 years to the day before Grandma Bryant. Grandpa Roberts died 21 years and some months before Grandma Roberts. Now that the grandmas are dead, my family says, they don’t have to be alone. 

***

Even five years later, I can recount in minute detail how Grandma Roberts died. How I was afraid to see her when we were called to the hospital because her prognosis was graver than my mother thought. How slack her jaw was and black her teeth were from chewing iron pills when I did. How someone had ordered her a tray of beautiful fresh fruit, chocolate pudding, turkey, and dressing. How it sat in the corner of the room, never touched.    

At some point, my cousin and twin sister leave to go home to their families and my uncle goes to the cafeteria, and it’s just me and Grandma again. I read to her from a story I am writing about a grandma, telling her I’ll print it out for her to read when she wakes up. I’m not far into the scene when a nurse interrupts us.

I ask the nurse something about “when she wakes up,” as she checks Grandma’s pulse. The nurse’s ice blue eyes meet my hazel ones when she tells me she won’t wake up. “If she does, you don’t want her to. I’ve seen people like this who wake up, and they’re always in a lot of pain and then they die anyway.”

When another cousin comes in with my uncle, I tell them what the nurse said word for word.

I don’t know why I can’t remember exactly what I asked about when I asked when Grandma would wake up, so I don’t entirely understand why I remember the nurse’s response. I think that’s the thing about trauma, sometimes feeling overtakes memory and all that’s left is the frantic acid in your gut, as you try to understand the reality you’re trying to reject.        

***

Anger is not an emotion I often let myself feel. Anger is my father looming over me, tomato-faced and wringing his fists, spit flinging from his mouth as he yells; it’s my mother telling me I have no personality, and no one likes me. 

I am not supposed to tell you that. I’m supposed to pretend that it never happened and to wait until enough time has passed that we all forget. Because if there are no witnesses besides me, well, maybe I didn’t hear what I heard. Maybe I didn’t see what I saw.

Anger is shame, and I am not allowed to be angry. 

Because, if I am, what kind of trauma could I cause?

***

Though I do not know exactly what happened between Coda and Frank, I know more details from the laminated news article Grandma Roberts kept in her nightstand drawer than I might have known had the murder-suicide occurred in recent years.

Coda was 53 when she was murdered by her husband. She was found by a salesman on a Thursday around 11 AM, slumped on a chair on the porch. Per the article, “He addressed her and, when she did not answer, he observed a pool of blood on the floor and a shotgun wound above her heart.”

The article speculates the scene “from appearances” as follows:

Miller apparently had fired the choke barrel of his double-barrelled [SIC] shotgun into his wife’s body at a range of four or five feet in the living room of the house. There was a pool of blood where she apparently had fallen down in trying to flee. Then the trail of blood led through the kitchen and onto the porch, where she sank onto the chair, her right hand clutching the wound to her chest… Miller then went into the kitchen and, holding the muzzle of the gun to his forehead, pulled the trigger. The entire top of his head was torn away.   

The rest of the article tells how neighbors said the couple had “quarrelled [SIC] for many weeks” and provides double funeral service details, but what stands out most is an item tucked away in the second half about a partly packed suitcase filled with some of Coda’s clothing.

***

I take a photo of my cat sitting in my partially packed luggage a few days before I leave Ohio in 2016. I am only supposed to be gone for a year before I pursue my PhD. I don’t know that I will turn those offers down to stay in Maine or that I’ll continuously flee back to Ohio when I crave familiarity. 

I move to Maine, where I change sides of the sidewalk to be in the sun in winter and the shade in summer. I go to Maine, where I live next to the ocean that I am afraid of because I can’t see the bottom and don’t know what’s there. I stay in Maine because it is not Ohio, although every root of myself feels buried in the place from which I came. 

***

As Grandma Roberts is dying, I start begging her not to go. I tell her I’ll bake her pie. Her caretaker, Josie, arrives and we start listing different kinds of pies I can bake over Grandma’s body. If she would just wake up.

Josie says her favorite is mincemeat. Mine is peanut butter.

I know the nurse told me Grandma would not wake up, that we didn’t want her to wake up, but I start promising different kinds of cookies, too. If she would just come back. Stay.

The pamphlet on the bedside table provides information on what happens during death; it says the last sense to go is hearing, so I get irritated when someone starts talking about Grandma dying in front of Grandma.

“She can hear you,” I tell them. “This says so.”

At some point, I start looking at the room. Outside of the tray of food, there is the pamphlet and several folding chairs occupied by various relatives and Josie. The room is eggshell beige, mint chip green, and coffee creamer white. Aside from the fruit in the corner, the only bright thing is a laser yellow tarp with a black zipper under the mattress Grandma is prone on.

I crinkle it and ask what it’s for. My oldest cousin looks where I’m looking and suggests I do not ask questions for which I do not want answers.    

***

My parents think there is something wrong with me, that I am content to be alone.

This is why you don’t have any friends, they’ve both said to me, separately and at different times in my life, whipping their words when I’ve stepped out of line by disagreeing with them politically, by running late when we’re trying to leave the house, by arguing with my sister.

“No wonder you don’t have any friends,” they say.

“No wonder no one likes you,” they mean.

Years of therapy have told me this is not true. My friends tell me my parents are wrong. I don’t even know if my parents truly believe it when they say it, but I hear the implied, “This is what is wrong with you.”

I perform compulsions, which for me mostly means ruminating and seeking reassurance. In the middle of the night, waking up and wondering if maybe they are right and no one likes me. In the middle of the day, wondering if everyone is just faking it. In the evening, calling friends for comfort.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is nicknamed the Doubt Disorder. It feels like a human brick strapped to my shoulders, just out of sight, immovable and all-consuming at the breath of a trigger. Constantly making me question everything. Constantly whispering in my ear: Did I hit someone with my car and not notice? Did I turn off the oven? The hair straightener? The lamp? What if I cause a fire? Did I lock the door? Am I asking too many questions? Did I really say that? Are you mad at me? 

Do you think I’m a bad person?

Maybe I’m a bad person. Maybe I did something bad and don’t remember. I should check. Did I look close enough? If I touch this mug, something bad might happen. Did I brush it with my knuckle? If I think this thought, something bad will happen. Did I just think it?   

***

Nothing about the handling of Coda’s death rings right to me. The double funeral. The fact that she is buried beside her murderer. How the town’s paper blamed “Marital Difficulties” instead of Frank. The description of Coda’s body or how it’s implied that she was having an affair with the salesman. How she is referred to as “WIFE” in the title and “Mrs. Miller” in the body.

My brain constructs elaborate stories to answer complicated questions.

The question: How close was Coda to escaping when Frank found her packing her bag in the bedroom? The story: He followed her into the living room where she told him she was leaving for good, and he pulled out the gun. She’d dreamed of her own home, where she would spend time with her grandchildren. She would take up painting or gardening. Maybe she could move on with someone new, or maybe she’d be happy on her own.       

Was there a moment of clarity, I wonder, after Frank shot Coda, where she realized her hopes had been snatched away? As she sat on that porch, hand over her bleeding chest, her heart rate slowing, did she hear Frank’s gun blowing off the entire top of his head and smile? Did she taste relief at the finality of things and accept it may not have ended how she wanted, but that it was done?

What does it mean to love someone despite their cruel actions or words? If trauma begets trauma and man hands on misery to man, when will we be left standing with nothing but quivering, silent palms?

In Coda’s last moments, the scene in my mind is one of sun and shadows. Her body slumped in a rocking chair, looking out at the tilled cornfields in front of her. All that empty space I find suffocating when love tugs me home to Ohio, but maybe she looked at it and saw opportunity. Surely, someone would find her there, out in the open, exposed.

Chelsie Bryant is an Ohio native living in Portland, Maine. Her writing has been featured in Michigan Quarterly Review, Passages North, The Carolina Quarterly, and in several other places. She is the recipient of the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, the Willow Springs Fiction Prize, and other prizes. 

10 July 2025