The house was haunted.
I had my suspicions when I moved in. In the middle of the night, the lights flickered, the phone chimed when nobody called, and most disturbing, I witnessed tears sliding down the rough, misshapen stone fireplace. Maybe it was because my father-in-law’s ashes were kept in a German beer stein on the mantel. Or because one day my husband’s grandmother put her head down on the dining room table as though she were about to take a nap and died instead.
The child inside my belly would be the fourth generation to live here. Unfortunately, it had also been four generations since anyone had slapped a coat of paint on the walls or updated the furniture. But I loved the place, an old dairy farm my husband, Chris, had inherited, and we planned to spend the rest of our lives fixing it up and making it our own.
I surveyed the room, the dusty old Victrola that played by itself, the pastel vertical blinds that rattled when there was no breeze. I was going to start crying just like my fireplace if I had to look at all this for one more day. Perhaps a little sprucing up would act as a peace offering to the spirits for invading their space. I needed to stay occupied, otherwise I would succumb to a loop of anxiety. I was twenty weeks pregnant and had been on bed rest for fourteen days, getting up only to pee and to take a quick shower. That meant I had twenty weeks to go in my sentence of near-solitary confinement . . . if I was lucky enough to make it to my due date. My only crime: an ailing cervix.
Two weeks earlier I had been spread-eagle on the examination table in a bright yellow room looking up at a poster of an imitation Georgia O’Keeffe flower taped to the ceiling while my doctor put her hands in places that generally required a lot more foreplay and at least a little bit of booze. Fashionably decked out in one of those fabulous pink paper robes, which had ripped as I slipped it on, I looked like I was sporting some cheap off-the-shoulder evening wear. It was the first time my husband had seen me in stirrups. So much for maintaining that air of mystery, but his eyes twinkled when he looked at me, and I was reassured.
I propped myself up on my elbows to get a better look at the doctor, who was mumbling something between my legs, but all I could see were the dark roots on her bleached-blond head. I lay back down and gave Chris a smile and a wink. He was doing well, sitting off to my right in the unofficial husband’s chair. We had planned to go to that little Mexican place down on the waterfront for dinner, and I began thinking about the menu options.
Then the doctor made her pronouncement, and my life changed.
“Wait, what?” I heard Chris say.
In an instant, my eyes had fixed on my husband’s darkened demeanor. In place of the reassurance I had seen moments earlier, there was fear. No, no, I thought, shaking my head. The doctor’s shiny red lips moved, but I absorbed just bits: “. . . cervix . . . situation . . . dangerous.”
Now here I was in bed, a commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl stuck in a haunted farmhouse for the next five months with my husband gone most of the day, and no one around to hear me scream. So that’s what I did. I threw my head back on the pillow and let out a bloodcurdling howl of rage and fear and sadness that reverberated down to the deepest part of my core and filled the room, bouncing off the old windowpanes. The house shook. I looked around as if challenging even the spirits to answer me but was met only with deafening silence. Then I rolled onto my side and fixed my gaze at the sun setting over the horizon, turning the sky a brilliant orange, streaked with reds, golds, and the softest pinks. I stayed like that until dark, a thick round tear sliding across the bridge of my nose, splashing onto the comforter.
There was only one person who could get me through this. But he wasn’t here. And I needed him now more than ever.