THE HOUSE REMEMBERS

Sometimes, a ghost is just the house remembering. The tears of some long-gone soul drip out of our faucets. The floorboards that miss the weight of footsteps bend and creak on their own accord. The shape of a person far too small to be mine or my husband’s haunts the mattress of the guest bedroom upstairs.

I lie awake—as I often do every night—and listen for the old creaks that the house makes. They normally sound like the footsteps of children running up and down the hall. Sometimes there is laughter, often followed by a sharp shushing behind barely contained giggles. Sometimes I can hear people in the kitchen sharing a hushed conversation. I can never make out what words are being said. The house will silence the conversation if I get too close.

Tonight, however, it is quiet. There are no other sounds to accompany the soft snoring of my husband. I can’t even hear the singing of the cicadas outside, nor the chirping of the crickets and the croaking of the frogs that I know are lurking in the garden. It is deathly silent.

It is the silence that forbids me from falling asleep. And it is the silence that allows me to hear the soft thudding coming from downstairs. It is so faint that I barely notice it, but the sound is as constant as a frantic heartbeat.

My husband begins to stir as I sit up in bed and pull myself towards the bedroom door. He groans. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a noise,” I tell him. It is a noise I’ve never heard before.

He rolls over so that his back is to me. “It’s just the house remembering,” he slurs, his voice stained with sleep.

Within seconds his soft snoring once again fills the room. I creak open the door and stalk into the hall.

The floorboards echo my descent down the stairs, the panicked thudding growing louder and louder as I draw nearer to the source. I pass through the living room. A blanket is draped over the couch as if someone is sleeping there. The faucet in the kitchen is leaking.

I turn to face the dark hall that leads to the storage closet. Shadows dance around the door to conceal it in thick darkness. The thudding is nearly deafening. I haven’t opened that closet in months, but the desperate pounding is enough to make the door pulse from its frame. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.

A shriek: “NO!”

The noise jumpstarts my heart and I rush to the door. The pounding mirrors the throb in my head. The handle does not turn. Silence pours into the house like a flood.

I try to turn the doorknob again but it is locked, refusing to turn all the way. “Hello?” I call out to whoever is on the other side of the door. I am greeted with a hollow quiet that freezes my heart. My hands are shaking. My legs feel weak. I press a palm to the locked door, as if it will comfort the house. “What an awful memory,” I murmur to it, turning to go back upstairs.

My husband sleeps soundly, still. He is blissfully unaware of the events that just unraveled downstairs. My pillow is cool. As my eyes finally grow heavy, there is a buzzing on my husband’s nightstand. His phone lights up, casting the dark bedroom in a bluish hue. The dark returns. I close my eyes.

Bzzzt.

I grab his phone—only with the intention to turn it off—but the notification of a text catches my eye. Whoever is texting him past midnight is saved in his contacts as “E.S.”

Michael, E.S wrote, I miss you.

My heart feels like it’s being crushed. My throat is thick. I delete the message and put his phone back on the nightstand.

I can only imagine what his reaction would be if I were to confront him. My mind races back to the few times I’ve seen him lose his temper. Plates thrown against the wall and shattered in a jealous rage; tables flipped over on their sides when things don’t go his way. I shudder at the thought.

...

Morning comes much too quickly. My husband sits with his legs crossed at the table, sipping his coffee as I wash the dishes from breakfast. He is reading an old newspaper, the pages yellow and weathered with time. The headline reads: ‘Husband Still Awaiting Word on Missing Wife’s Whereabouts.’

I unplug the drain in the sink and begin to dry the dishes with an old towel. “Do you remember last night?” I ask him.

He offers a humorless chuckle. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“When I woke you up because of the noise.”

“Ah.” He leans back in his chair and lowers the newspaper. “Did you find out what it was?”

The faucet begins to leak. Salty tears drip into the draining dish water.

“I think there was someone locked in the downstairs closet.”

I don’t turn around to face my husband, but I can imagine the perplexed expression on his face. I hear him take a sip of his coffee before responding. “What makes you think that?”

I explain the frantic thudding and how the house was so silent. I tell him about the voice that sounded so desperate and so afraid. How all the sounds stopped at once so that the house felt like an empty chasm.

I do not tell him about the text.

We fall into silence after that. He is unsure of what to say. I’m not certain whether I appreciate his lack of an answer or not. He works on the crossword puzzle in the back of the newspaper while I put the dishes back into the cabinets. “A five-letter word,” my husband mutters. “A fool’s first mistake.”

I mull it over while sorting the forks, knives, and spoons into their respective spots in the drawer. “Trust.”

I hear the scratching of pencil on paper. A dry, forced laugh. “Kind of depressing, isn’t it?”

“Do you know where the key to the storage closet is?”

I turn around to face him. My backside is pressed against the counter as I chew at the inside of my cheek. Hands fiddle with the dirty dish towel as I wait for a response. My husband blinks at my change in topic but quickly puts his attention back to the crossword. “I don’t know,” he responds. “It shouldn’t be locked.”

“It was last night.”

“That’s just the house,” he assures me. “It’s probably not locked anymore.”

I find myself walking over to the closet. It’s more mundane in the daytime. The anxiety in the pit of my stomach is unwelcome and as I reach for the handle it only heightens.

The doorknob turns. The wooden door creaks open. The closet is dark. There’s a single lightbulb displayed loosely on the tall ceiling, and I pull the string that dangles high over my head. Light blinks into the small space, illuminating the various boxes that litter the shelves and floor. I hear my husband’s soft voice from the kitchen: “I told you so.”

The worries I felt dissipate and I close the door. I hear the latch click into place before I rejoin my husband in the kitchen. “Are you satisfied with what you found?” he asks.

I shrug. “I didn’t find anything.”

“I didn’t think you were going to.”

My lips press into a thin line. The creaking of the floorboards upstairs distracts me from making some kind of retort. My gaze drifts to the ceiling as the footsteps creak down the hallway. We hear a door open, then slam closed, and the house is quiet again. My husband takes a long sip of his coffee.

I climb the stairs and they squeak beneath my weight. The banister is weathered down from decades of hands running along the wooden surface and my palm fits perfectly in the mold. The long, narrow rug that stretches down the length of the hallway is askew, as if someone has been running and they kicked up the rug. I step on the bumps to flatten them and straighten the rug with my foot as I make my way to our bedroom. The shower is already running. Hot steam pours from the cracks of the closed bathroom door. There is a woman’s voice singing words to a song that I cannot understand. I wonder if it is because the house does not remember the lyrics.

I open the door. The shower, the steam, the woman, and the song disappear as if they were never there. The water takes a moment to heat up, and I rub tiredly at the bags under my eyes as I wait. My reflection stares back at me, and we numbly look at one another until the steam fogs the mirror.

While I’m showering, I hear footsteps in the bedroom. “Evelyn…” my husband’s voice calls, a playfulness in his tone that I haven’t heard since our honeymoon four years ago.

I freeze.

That isn’t my name.

A giggle echoes through the bathroom, bouncing off the white walls. A woman’s voice that I don’t recognize. I stick my head out of the shower, holding the shower curtain close to my chest. The door opens, allowing the steam to escape into the bedroom. Cold air rushes in. No one enters the bathroom. No one that I can see, at least. My husband’s voice: “You sly fox…”

I don’t notice how fast my heart is beating until I turn off the shower water and can hear it pounding in my ears.

A ghost is just the house remembering, I remind myself. There is a pit in my stomach.

I throw on my clothes and rush downstairs.

My husband has already left for work. His coffee, now cold, is still on the kitchen table. The newspaper is still turned to the crossword, his pencil on the floor.

I put his mug in the sink to be washed.

...

Sleep is as lacking as it was the night before. I stare up at the ceiling, tracing the tiled pattern with my eyes as my husband snores soundly to my right. There are voices in the kitchen tonight, sharing the same conversation that they’ve shared for the past few months. The topic is still unknown to me, and I doubt that tonight will be any different.

My husband’s phone still rests on the nightstand. His steady breath indicates he’s asleep and I can’t help myself from reaching over and grabbing it. The passcode has always been our wedding anniversary—061209—but tonight, it does not work.

I do not know what compels me to try this next sequence of numbers. A hunch, a gut-feeling, maybe. I pray with every fiber in my being that it’s wrong. My breath is caught in my throat as I try the code 383596.

E-V-E-L-Y-N

When his phone unlocks, I feel like I’m going to throw up. I throw myself out of bed, not bothering to be quiet about it, and I storm down the hall.

My palm presses into the mold of the banister. The stairs do not protest as I descend. The conversation in the kitchen becomes louder as I draw nearer. There is a single light on in the kitchen. The chairs at the table are pushed out as if two people are sitting in them. The conversation is not clear. It’s almost as if they are speaking gibberish. There’s a baritone lilt that seems so familiar, and I’m so worked up that I do not doubt it to be my husband. The house remembers a conversation that I was not present for. A few words break through the language barrier, but it’s not enough for me to understand the context of what they’re saying.

“…go upstairs…”

“…won’t have to worry…”

“…I love…”

“…the best thing…”

The door to the storage closet slams closed: a cymbal crash that silences the house. The light in the kitchen goes out, the voices stop mid-conversation. That awful, desperate thudding resumes, just as frantic as it was last night. I try the door, eager to free whoever is trapped inside despite knowing that it’s a memory, the past can’t be changed, and all is fruitless. The door is locked.

I pound against the other side of the door, throwing both fists against the wood. “Hello?” I yell, “What can I do to help you!?”

“NO!” That shriek, tearful voice responds. “PLEASE, COME BACK!”

I dash to the kitchen, throwing open drawers and rummaging through the various trinkets in hopes of finding a key. The thudding continues as I search, crying and screaming filling the house with a despair I’ve never felt before. It settles deep within my chest, as if my lungs are filled with water. How my husband does not wake, I do not know. Before I know it, tears are running down my cheeks as I slam open drawer after drawer.

“PLEASE!” the voice continues to wail, “OPEN THE DOOR!”

But I can’t.

I sob against the door. The cries of the anguished voice mix with mine as we release the fear and doubt and betrayal that has been building in our chests. It is finally when I feel like I have no tears left to cry that the floorboard next to me creaks. It is so soft that I barely hear it, but footsteps make their way to the kitchen and slam closed one of the drawers that I left open.

With the little hope I have left, I pull myself to my feet and open the drawer.

An antique key tarnished by rust rests undisturbed among the random items in the drawer. I grab it with shaky hands and throw it into the lock of the storage closet door. It slams open, and the house goes silent.

The light in the kitchen flicks back on.

“Let’s go upstairs,” the voice of my husband echoes, a giddiness that is so unfamiliar ever present in his words.

A woman’s voice, who I can only assume is Evelyn responds, “And what will your wife say?”

“We won’t have to worry about her for much longer.”

There’s a long pause of silence, followed by the creaking of the floorboards. “I love you the most,” my husband says. “You’re the best thing that has happened to me in a long time.”

...

I sleep on the couch that night. I awake the next morning to my husband in the kitchen. He is reading another old newspaper, his foot tapping impatiently on the floor. “Good morning,” he says as I pass by the room to head upstairs. “It’s about time you woke up.”

I do not speak.

“Can you make me some coffee?” he asks, not looking up from the paper. “You know I get cranky without it.”

I want to demand why he can’t make it himself, but I already know the excuse he will use: it tastes better when you do it.

“I’m going to shower,” I tell him instead, climbing the stairs.

His phone is still on the nightstand, and it buzzes with a message as I enter the room. E.S.

When are you going to do it?

My husband’s voice sounds from the hallway. “What’s going on with you?”

He rounds the corner and he freezes when he sees his phone in my hand.

“Who is E.S?” I ask him.

Many emotions flash across his face—shock, guilt, worry—but it ends on anger and his voice turns into a growl. “Why are you going through my phone?”

I say nothing.

“It’s just a guy from work,” my husband tells me. “Just a stupid nickname. Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong.”

“Evelyn?”

Her name feels wrong in my mouth. My husband’s frown deepens. “Are you accusing me of something?” he demands. “Give me the phone, right now.”

“You’re cheating on me,” I say, hoping the vigor in my voice matches the anger and betrayal that I feel.

“Don’t be stupid,” my husband tells me with a scoff. “What makes you even think I would do that?”

He’s walking towards me now, a deep-rooted rage boiling just behind his eyes. I refuse to falter as he regards me as nothing more than an irritation. As if this conversation is but an annoyance.

“The house,” I evenly say. “The house remembers.”

I wonder if the house will ever make ghosts out of this moment.

Michael rushes at me. I scramble to the door and run down the hall. The long, narrow rug trips me up and I kick it askew as I try to get to my feet. Michael is upon me in an instant, grabbing my ankles and yanking me backwards towards him. I kick him hard, my heel connecting with his nose. It cracks, his head thrown backwards at the impact.

By the time he recovers enough to get back on his feet, I’m halfway down the stairs. My hand runs along the mold of the railing, but in my haste, I stumble on the last step and trip. I hit the hard floor with a loud thud, giving Michael the opportunity he needs to catch up with me.

I race to the front door, but Michael grabs the back of my shirt and slings me away from my only exit. I turn, sprinting to the kitchen and grabbing a knife from the wooden holder.

Blindly, I swing, fearing nothing but my own safety. Michael wrestles it out of my hand in a matter of seconds, and before I know what is happening, I am shoved into the storage closet.

I hear the lock click into place and darkness envelops me. “NO!” I scream, realizing what he has done. I pound against the door with everything I have.

“You didn’t stand a chance,” Michael huffs, “and you’ll stay in there until I decide to let you out.”

I hear his retreating footsteps. “PLEASE,” I wail. “COME BACK!”

I scream and kick and pound against the door, but I am met with silence. I hear him slam the key into the drawer in the kitchen and stomp upstairs. His footsteps creak down the hallway. A door crashes shut.