A Haunting of Words

by Brian Paone et al.

  We had argued that night, which cuts me up more than anything else. Silvery tears tracked down her cheeks as I climbed into the car beside her and fastened my seatbelt. I had been unreasonable— spiteful even—but I couldn’t bring myself to apologise while the rage still boiled in my veins. The argument was stupid, not worth getting so riled up over, but sometimes my anger just gets the better of me.

  She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand as she turned the key in the ignition. The roads were wet, and the night was cold. Vapour fogged the windscreen, and she flicked on the heaters to dispel it.

  A knot of guilt formed in my stomach, and I chewed on a fingernail, the dark purple polish flaking off and spreading across my tongue. I stole a look at Jenna. The watery redness of her eyes did little to spoil the image of her perfect profile captured in cameo by the streetlamps.

  I wondered if I should apologise. I had spoiled what should have been a wonderful evening.

  The other vehicle seemed to come out of nowhere. There was a flash of light, a squeal of brakes, the shriek of metal giving way, and the crunch of glass scattered across my lap.

  My head pounded and my mouth suddenly felt dry. I looked across at Jenna and watched an impossibly bright trickle of blood course its way from her temple. A brick of despair settled itself deep inside my stomach, and a physical pain tore through me, as though I were made of tissue paper.

  Nothing would ever be the same.

  The flashes have been getting less frequent, like she’s fading away and there’s nothing I can do to stop her. I cling to her memory like I’m drowning. I try to recall the sensation of sliding my fingers through her hair, of touching my lips to hers, of wrapping my arms around her.

  And then she’s there, clearer than she’s been in a long time, standing by the front door. I sweep across the room, like this fleeting image can slake my unquenchable thirst for her.

  The figure is translucent and rippling, pulsing in and out of clarity, but it’s her. I recognise the curve of her cheek and the soft slant of her brow like I know my own reflection. Her hair is scooped into a messy bun, not loose and wild like it was the night of the crash. She’s wearing a pale green cashmere cardigan that I don’t remember.

  Her lips are moving, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. A sibilant buzz tickles my ears, but the words are indecipherable. I concentrate on her mouth, focusing everything I have on the indistinct sounds she is producing. What is she trying to tell me?

  I sense the other presence before I see it. Another figure, vaguer even than her, stands just on the other side of the front door—I hadn’t noticed it was open. It’s another woman, with dark hair cropped short and swept low across her forehead. She flickers in and out of my vision, and I concentrate harder, trying to decipher what is happening. I focus all my energy—blocking out everything else around me—and the words they are speaking start to make sense. Their conversation sounds muffled, like voices underwater.

  “Come on, Jen,” the figure at the door says. “You’ve never even let me see inside.”

  Who is she?

  The shape of Jenna floats in the doorway, hands hanging on either side of the doorframe. “I don’t know, Diane. It’s weird.”

  “What’s weird is you never letting another person in here. No one. Cassie said she’s not been in here since the accident. Neither has anyone else.”

  Jenna shakes her head.

  The other woman, Diane, takes her hand. There is tenderness in her voice. “You need to let go, Jenna. This place’ll be on the market by tomorrow morning. You need to stop treating it like a shrine.”

  My stomach cramps and lurches. I can taste bile. This can’t be happening. My face prickles and a thudding feeling reverberates through my whole body. I explode in a cold sweat.

  Shimmery tears trickle down Jenna’s translucent cheeks. She picks up the photograph of the two of us that sits on the shelf by the door and hugs it to her chest so that it looks as indistinct as she does. Jenna steps aside and lets the other woman cross the threshold of the flat we had shared for three years.

  “You’ll feel better once this place is packed up and you’re settled in at mine,” Diane says.

  Jealousy surges through me like a steam train. I reach out and slam the door shut. They both jump and Diane exhales a pathetic whimper of surprise.

  Jenna turns and extends her hand toward where I stand. “Nicky?” she murmurs, her voice full of hope.

  I reach for her hand, but mine passes through it like smoke.

  She shudders.

  “Don’t do this to yourself,” Diane mutters in Jenna’s ear. “Let go.”

  Jenna collapses in silent sobs. She catches her breath and speaks in a hallowed whisper. “I don’t know if I can, Di. It feels like she’s still here. Sometimes I think I sense her watching me, looking after me. I don’t want to leave her.”

  “I know, darling, but she’s gone. It’s been eighteen months now. I love you. I know I’m not her, but I love you, and I’m still here.”

  A flash of light, a squeal of brakes, the shriek of metal giving way, and the crunch of glass scattered across my lap.

  I look at Jenna and watch an impossibly bright trickle of blood course its way from her temple. A brick of despair settles itself deep inside my stomach, and a physical pain tears through me, as though I were made of tissue paper.

  My lungs constrict and the air I gasp is thin and dry. My heart thuds in my chest, each palpitation shaking my whole body but slowing, slowing … and then darkness and an incredible feeling of lightness.

  I watch them pack her belongings, their shadowy forms pulsating in and out of existence. Jenna stops to weep from time to time; Diane makes tea and provides tissues. In a matter of hours, our home’s heart is excised like a cancer at the mercy of the surgeon’s knife.

  The mug I used to make her coffee in every morning is packed in a box. The painting we chose on a whim in Brighton is rolled in bubble wrap. The photo of us in Thailand has been removed from its frame and tucked in the bottom of her bag, the frame reclaimed to display future memories.

  The flat is lifeless, a show-home shell of its former self. There is nothing left of us here. The furniture is staying—for now at least— but every personal touch, every trinket and knickknack, is removed and boxed up.

  Jenna’s figure flickers in the foyer, a shimmering box propped on her hip. Her nose and eyes are red from crying, but her angelic beauty still enthralls me.

  She lingers by the door. I don’t know where Diane has gone. Jenna’s eyes drift across the hallway, looking through me as if I weren’t here at all.

  I watch her swallow another sob.

  “Bye, Nicky,” she says and presses her fingers to her lips to blow me a final kiss before closing the door behind her.

  With leaden feet, I walk back toward the couch and sink into the cushions. I look around the empty flat and feel a balloon of anguish growing inside me, expanding until I am sure it will explode and rip me apart. There is nothing left of the home Jenna and I had created together.

  Maybe tomorrow she will return. I know she still loves me. I know she won’t leave me.

  I sit with my head in my hands and wait.

  “I’m taking Joe to the park today,” I tell Rufus, my trusty, silky-eared black and tan mutt.

  His good ear pricks up at the word park, and he chuffs at me, his head slanting comically to one side, a hint of excitement in his eyes.

  “Yes, you can come too. Fetch your leash, then.”

  Rufus’s paws scrabble on the hardwood floor of the hallway, his nails clicking as he slides his way enthusiastically past the stairs, past the closed door to the lounge, and along to the kitchen door, where his blue leather lead hangs from a white hook attached roughly four feet from the floor so that he can reach it. I watch in amusement as he stands on his hind legs and places his front paws onto the grooves his claws have gouged into the wood over the years. He curls them slightly to allow him to take a grip, n
udges aside the coats that hang from the higher hooks, and slips the leash from his own by taking it carefully in his mouth and jerking his head upwards and inwards. Pleased with himself, he returns along the hallway to drop it at my feet, his tail spinning like a dervish. I clip it to his collar, tell him to sit, then I run upstairs to make sure my son has his shoes and coat on, straightening the photos that line the wall as I climb.

  I stop to look at the fifth one along. It was taken on a gloriously sunny day, much like this one: Joe is wearing his little blue shorts and a white vest top. I say he is wearing blue and white, but the truth is that anyone looking at the picture would say he is wearing brown; he is sitting, splay-legged, in the middle of the one and only puddle that remained from the previous day’s rain, covered in mud, his head thrown back in one enormous guffaw of laughter. A brilliant stream of sunlight illuminates his wet hair—blonde curls that cascade around his head like an angel’s aura. Rufus is just behind him, one ear cocked, one ear flopped, head down and rear end in the air in his classic play-with-me position. He, too, is a muddy mess. I can still hear Joe’s laughter and can almost taste the smell of mud, dog, and boy. I smile to myself, stroke the picture with one tender finger, straighten it up, then make a move to Joe’s room.

  “Ready, son?” I ask, watching as my little boy, all wrapped up in his new red jacket, gives a final tug on his red wellingtons and looks at me hopefully. “Yes, you can wear them!” I say with mock severity, knowing how much he adores his red boots.

  He smiles up at me, relief written on his dear little face.

  “Well done for getting them on all by yourself. Come on then.” I hold out my hand to his and welcome the warmth of his tiny fingers in mine.

  It’s a bit of a kerfuffle, exiting the house with an excitable dog and happy five-year-old boy in tow. I tie the leash around one wrist to keep Rufus under control and grab a tight hold of Joe’s sleeve using that same hand. I use the other hand to firmly lock the front door and put the keys into my pocket, then I transfer the leash to that hand and we set off, me tugging on Rufus’s leash to hold him back so that Joe’s little legs can keep up with us, Joe practically running to stay abreast.

  The road is busy. Always busy. Cars roar past, reckless drivers hurtling along the tarmac at a speed that exceeds the limits by a large margin. The sidewalk is narrow, and I tighten my grip on both dog and boy, loosening it only slightly when Joe turns his face up to mine and yells with indignation, “Too tight, Mommy!”

  “Sorry, sweetie.” I grin down at him. “Just making sure you’re safe.”

  “I’m not still four!” Joe’s voice is scornful as he scowls up at me. “I know to keep away from the cars!”

  “Ah, but they don’t know to keep away from you, do they?”

  I stoop to draw him closer so that I can give him a kiss. He obligingly turns his face and allows me to plant one on his chubby little cheek, then tries hard not to giggle as I turn the kiss into a raspberry.

  “Yuck, Mommy!” He wipes at his wet cheek with Pudge, the teddy he has had from birth that has to come everywhere with us. Pudge is being carried in the hand I am not holding.

  A tug on the leash, a heavy sigh, and a meaty thud tells me that Rufus has given up on our walk and sat down on the pavement.

  I grin at Joe and wave the hand that holds the leash. “I think he’s trying to tell us something. Shall we go?”

  Joe nods and indicates our joined hands by squeezing mine. “But not so tight please.”

  “As tight as I need to, okay?”

  Joe rolls his eyes.

  There is no safe place to cross the road to gain access to the park unless we trudge all the way into town and use the elaborate system, which involves crossing the main road twice: once where the cars split to turn left into town and becomes a one-way system, and again where it turns right onto Beach Road, which has traffic that passes both ways. Both crossings involve the kindness of drivers actually stopping, and it can take some minutes until someone decent takes pity on those trying to get to the other side and stops.

  About a quarter of a mile before the split is our local police station. All the locals are aware that sometimes one of the cops, probably bored from the lack of action in our little town, sits with a speed gun ready to catch one of the lunatics that use the road as a racetrack. There is usually a much more sedate flow of traffic at this point and, as the station sits directly opposite the entrance to the park, often a big enough gap to use to cross.

  Today—after Joe has been lifted up so that he can walk along the two-foot-high brick wall that passes for the border of the police station’s tiny car park, holding tight to my hand as he carefully balances and waves to the friendly sergeant on duty in one of the offices—there is such a gap. Once I have lifted Joe back down onto the sidewalk, we take advantage of it without having to stop walking.

  “You didn’t stop, look, and listen!” Joe scolds me as I hurry both him and Rufus over and through the ornate, but rusting, swing gates.

  “I did,” I tell him. “Okay, no, we didn’t stop, but I had been looking and listening, and that’s how I knew it was safe to go when we did.”

  “But you said we should always stop, look, and listen so that none of the assholes hit us!”

  I stop in my tracks as Joe’s little cheeks flame red.

  “Sorry,” he says sheepishly. “But you do say that!”

  I acknowledge the truth with a nod. He’s right—it is something I say, I can’t deny it. “Well, it’s something mommies say that little boys don’t. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah—I said I was sorry. Can I go and play on the swings, please?”

  I cast a glance toward the enclosed play area to make sure that none of the bigger kids are lording it over the younger ones. There is only one other child there—a girl of around the same age as Joe, whose mother is lolling against the fence outside the play area, evidently too busy texting to actually watch her daughter, who is attempting to climb the high slide.

  I wince. Some mothers should not be allowed to have children.

  “Come on then,” I tell Joe, who whoops with happiness, releases my hand, and runs as fast as his sturdy legs will allow him toward his favourite part of the park.

  Rufus tugs on the leash and whines at me, rolling his eyes. If he could speak, he would be saying, Let me go and guard him, then! I unclip the leash, and he hares across the grass and is soon at Joe’s heels. I hear my son’s peal of laughter as our wonderfully clever dog slows and trots beside him, and I experience a moment of utterly pure happiness.

  This. This is what life is about.

  There are very few people in the park, other than the woman still ignoring her daughter; an elderly couple, who hold hands as they follow the pathway, are exercising their tiny Bichon Frise; and an overweight man of around my own age, who wears baggy yellow shorts and a grubby, off-white tee-shirt that is slightly too small for him as it is bunching up above a flabby paunch, jogs in through the gates and begins to run toward me. He puffs loudly with each step. He sees me watching him and tries to smile.

  “Lovely morning for a run,” I tell him.

  He grunts in acknowledgement, speeds up slightly, detours back to the pathway, and overtakes the elderly couple. Their dog yaps in annoyance at the interruption to its walk and chases after the jogger. It can’t possibly catch him, and it soon gives up the chase.

  From the corner of my eye, I see Rufus’s good ear prick up, and I have a moment’s anxiety that he will loop off to chase the much smaller creature. Being the good dog that he is, he stays with Joe. The jogging man is soon rounding the trees that are to the left of me and is therefore out of my line of sight. I smile as the echo of his footsteps slows to a walking pace, then chide myself—at least he is making the effort to get fit.

  Far in the distance, I hear a car backfire—an unusual sound in this day and age. It reminds me of the time my old neighbor, Jack Kazinsky, got drunk and tried to shoot his nagging wife, June. He misse
d but he spent a fair amount of time in the pen for the attempt. Prior to the shot going off, I hadn’t been alone in praying for something to shut her up; our walls are thin and her voice loud. She’d been upset by his drinking and vociferously told him so, and I, and several other neighbors, were forced to listen to the entire one-sided ensuing argument. We all also heard the shot when he finally snapped, and had been required to testify at his court appearance. There wasn’t a person among us that didn’t secretly wonder why he hadn’t done it a long time before, and for a man on trial, Jack Kazinsky looked happier in that courtroom than I’d ever seen him look outside of it. June divorced him during his time away, met someone else in a short space of time, and is now happily nagging him to death in that same house.

  Dislodging the memory, I turn back to my son and pick up my own pace when I see that he has almost reached the little security gates that border the fenced-off play equipment. They, and the fencing, are there for two reasons: to stop little children from escaping the confines of the area and to keep dogs out.

  Joe figured out how to open the gates at age two and nearly frightened me to death the first time he did it. We had to have a long chat about what he was allowed to do and what he wasn’t. I think I frightened him a bit, which hadn’t been my intention, but that busy road is only a short distance away and easily accessible to a small child through the gaps in the hedges. He still opens the gates, but only when I am with him and tell him he can.

  He turns to look for me, and as his eyes lock onto mine, I hear his piping voice call, “Can I go in? Please?”

  “Go on then. Be careful though, until I get there,” I call back.

  The woman texting sends me an uncalled-for dirty glare.

  “My boy,” I explain.

  She glances toward Joe, who is sliding the bar across the gates to access the play area, then she nods her head toward the elderly couple. “That should be on a leash. Dogs on the loose are dangerous, don’t you think?”