What the House Remembers

I was unable to sleep and kept rolling on my bed trying to figure out what the problem was. I mean I know what was keeping me from sleeping, it was sitting about 6 feet away from me but there was also this nagging feeling at the back of my mind.

It was like the calm before a storm. Like I knew something was going to be wrong but at the same thing, what could go wrong? I have this habit of being overly optimistic even when I know something is really wrong somewhere.

The grandfather clock downstairs struck nine-thirty. I know this because I counted the way I always did, half out of habit and half because counting felt like doing something, and doing something felt marginally better than sitting very still and thinking about the fact that my mother had said she would back by nine and I haven’t heard a peep from her. I checked my phone to see if I missed her message but there was nothing. And if mom said she would be back by 9, she is never late.

"They’re fine," I told the book, which did not answer, because it was obviously a book and also because I was clearly losing it.

"They stopped for gas. Or pie. People stop for pie." Pie is a very good excuse and mom is a sucker for pies.

The book sat there being unhelpfully mysterious, the way it had been all evening. I'd tried reading it twice more since dinner and both times the words had done that same infuriating thing where they almost resolved into language and then didn't. It was like trying to read a road sign through fog at sixty miles an hour.

I thought about walking across the street and knocking on Cillian's door and just saying it. All of it. The book, the cold leather, the vision of fire I still hadn't found a non-insane way to describe to another human being. I only got as far as standing up before changing my mind.

 I thought about how that conversation would actually go. “Hi, sorry to bother you. I think an antique got from the store today might be haunted and also possibly haunting me back” and I sat back down. It was bad enough that I couldn’t get him out of my thoughts, I should preserve whatever self-worth I had left and keep my mouth shut.

I called mom’s cell instead. It rang four times and went to voicemail  Her voice bright and unbothered, telling me to leave a message. It was as if the version of her that recorded that greeting had no idea what a Tuesday in October could turn into.

"Hey. It’s me. You’re later than you said you’d be, which, historically, is not a huge deal, except tonight I’m apparently the kind of person who narrates her own anxiety out loud to a book. Call me back.  I love you."

I hung up and sat there feeling faintly ridiculous but relieved. Ridiculous I could work with, it probably meant everything that has been happening is in my head. Ridiculous had a shelf life.

The house made its usual sounds around me, the radiator ticking as it cooled, the particular creak of the second stair that had been there since before I was born, the wind doing something halfhearted against the window. Ordinary house sounds. I'd grown up inside this specific chorus of noises and could have picked it out of a lineup blindfolded.

I thought about the year I was twelve and convinced the creaky stair was haunted, and Dad spent an entire Saturday afternoon underneath it with a flashlight and a mouthful of nails, muttering the whole time about ungrateful daughters and structurally sound houses, and how he refused to fix it properly because I'd once told him the ghost and I had come to an understanding.

Mom had laughed so hard at that she'd had to sit down on the actual stair, ghost or no ghost. I remembered thinking then that I had the two best and most ridiculous parents in the entire state, possibly the country.

 I still thought that, at twenty-five, sitting on my bed with a cursed book in my room. The thought did not make the waiting any easier. If anything, it made the silence downstairs feel louder.

Which was exactly how I knew, at some point between the clock striking nine-thirty and it striking ten, that something in the chorus had changed.

I couldn't put my hand on what it was but something was very wrong. There was totl stillness and absence of warmth in the house. The wind was still moving, the radiator still ticking, but underneath all of it, a stillness that didn't belong in a house that two people were supposed to be coming home to.

I told myself it was nothing. I have a rich and detailed history of telling myself things were nothing right up until they were something. Usually something bigger than whatever scenario I might have conjured in my head.

Ten o'clock came and went without the sound of the front door, without my mother's keys hitting the bowl in the hall the way they had every single night of my entire life, a sound so constant I'd stopped consciously hearing it years ago and only now understood how loud its absence actually was.

"Okay," I said out loud to the empty room, to the book, to absolutely no one. "Okay, this is fine. This is a normal amount of late." I could feel myself slipping into a calm panic mode, if that’s a thing.

I was still telling myself that when the crash came from downstairs. It sounded like a glass, something heavy, the unmistakable sound of a door that had not been opened so much violently thrown to the inside of a wall.

           With the crash came down every reasonable explanation I had been trying to give myself since I got home that evening.