There are five of us in the chat: me, my two brothers, and my parents. It's called FAMILY (no drama) and it is entirely drama. Casserole recipes, my brother's fantasy football grievances, my mother forwarding weather alerts like they're gospel.
Dad died in February. Heart, in his sleep, sixty-one. We didn't remove him from the chat. Nobody could bring themselves to be the one to do it, so his little gray circle just stayed, silent, at the bottom of the group, a small tombstone we all kept scrolling past.
In June he started typing.
Not messages. Just the three dots. That pulsing gray ellipsis that means someone is composing. It would appear under his name — Dad is typing — and hover for ten, fifteen seconds, and then vanish. Nothing sent. My brother Cole screenshotted it and posted it and the chat went dead quiet for the first time in its history.
Mom said it was a glitch. Old account, server somewhere confused. Reboot your phones, she said, in the voice she uses to make things not-true. But it kept happening. Always late. Always when the five of us were on — you could tell because our read receipts would all light up at once, drawn to it like moths.
Cole, who is an engineer and does not believe in anything, called the carrier. They confirmed what we already dreaded: Dad's line had been disconnected in March. The number recycled to a stranger in Savannah. That account could not be typing. That account did not exist.
Last night at 2 a.m. it finally sent something. One message, to all of us, the first words from my father in five months. We were all awake. We all saw it land.
it read: which one of you was in the room with me
And then, before any of us could breathe, before I could even understand what it was asking, the dots appeared again — but not under Dad's name this time. Under mine. Someone was typing as me. And I was holding my phone in both hands, and my thumbs were not moving.