A HAUNTING
JOHN CONNOLLY
THE WORLD HAD grown passing strange.
Even the hotel felt different, as though all of the furniture had been shifted slightly in his absence, the reception desk moved a foot away from its previous position, the lights adjusted so they were either too low or too bright. It was wrong. It was not as it had once been. All had changed.
Yet how could it be otherwise when she was no longer with him? He had never stayed here alone before. She had always been by his side, standing at his left hand as he checked them both in, watching in silent approval as he signed the register, her fingers instinctively tightening on his arm as he wrote the words “Mr. & Mrs.,” just as he had done on that first night when they had come here on their honeymoon. She had repeated that small, impossibly intimate gesture on every similar occasion thereafter, telling him in her silent way that she would not take for granted this coupling, the yoking together of their two diverse personalities under a single name. She was his as he was hers, and she had never regretted that fact, and would never grow weary of it.
But now there was no “Mrs.,” only “Mr.” He looked up at the young woman behind the desk. He had not seen her before, and he assumed that she was new. There were always new people here, but in the past enough of the old had remained to give them a sense of comforting familiarity when they had stayed here. Now, as his electronic key was prepared and his credit card swiped, he took time to take in the faces of the staff and saw none that he recognized. Even the concierge was no longer the same. Everything had been altered, it seemed, by her departure from this life. Her death had tilted the globe on its axis, displacing furniture, light fixtures, even people. They had left with her, and all of them had been quietly replaced without a single objection.
But he had not replaced her with another, and he never would.
He bent down to pick up his bag, and the pain shot through him again, the sensation so sharp and brutal that he lost his breath and had to lean back against the reception desk. The young woman asked him if he was all right, and, after a time, he lied and told her that he was. A bellhop came and offered to bring his bag to his room for him, leaving him with a vague sense of shame that he could not accomplish even this simple task alone: to carry a small leather bag from reception to elevator, from elevator to room. He knew that nobody was looking, that nobody cared, that this was the bellhop’s purpose, but it was the fact that the element of choice had been taken from him that troubled him so. He could not have carried the bag, not at that moment, even had he wanted to do so. His body ached, and every movement spoke of weakness and decay. He envisaged it sometimes as a honeycomb, riddled with spaces where cells had collapsed and decayed, a fragile construction that would disintegrate under pressure. He was coming to the end of his life, and his body was in terminal decline.
He caressed the key card in the ascending elevator, noting the room number on the little paper wallet. He had been in that same room many times before, but, again, always with her, and once more he was reminded of how alone he was without her. Yet he had not wanted to spend this, the first wedding anniversary since her death, in the house they had once shared. He wanted to do as they had always done, to commemorate her in this way, and so he had made the call and booked a room. And in a kind of fitting symmetry, he had been given a junior suite that was familiar to him.
After a brief struggle with the electronic lock—what was so wrong with metal keys, he wondered, that they had to be replaced by unappealing pieces of plastic?—he entered the room and closed the door behind him. All was clean and neat, anonymous without being alienating. He had always liked hotel rooms, appreciating the fact that he could impose elements of his own personality upon them through the simple act of placing a book on a nightstand or leaving his shoes at the foot of the bed.
There was an easy chair in a corner beside the window, and he sank into it and closed his eyes. The bed had tempted him, but he was afraid that if he lay down he might not be able to rise again. The journey had exhausted him. It was the first time he had traveled by plane since her death, and he had forgotten what a chore it had become. He was old enough to remember a time when it had not always been so, when there was still an element of glamor and excitement to air travel. On the flight down he had dined off paper, and everything he ate and drank had tasted faintly of cardboard and plastic. He lived in a world composed of disposable things: cups, plates, marriages, people.
* * *
He thought he must have slept for a time, for when he opened his eyes, the texture of the light had changed and there was a sour taste in his mouth. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that an hour had passed. There was also, he noticed, a bag in his room, perhaps brought by the bellhop while he slept. It was not his.
Silently, he cursed the young man. How difficult could it be to bring up the correct piece of luggage? The lobby hadn’t even been very busy when he checked in. He got to his feet and approached the offending item. It was an unopened red suitcase, and it lay on a baggage stand beside the closet. It struck him that perhaps he might have missed it when he entered the room, wearied by his trip, and it had been there all along. He examined it. It was locked, and there was a green scarf tied around the handle, presumably to help to distinguish it from similar baggage at airports. There was no name upon it, although the handle was slightly tacky to the touch where the airline label had been removed. He glanced into the trash can beside it, but it was empty, so he could not even find a name to identify its owner.
The telephone in the bathroom was closer than the phone beside the bed, so he decided to use it to call reception. He was about to do so when he paused and looked again at the bag. He experienced a brief surge of fear: this was a big hotel in a large American city, and was it not possible that someone might deliberately have left this item of baggage in one of its rooms? He wondered if he might suddenly find himself at the epicenter of a massive terrorist explosion, and saw himself not disintegrate or vaporize, but instead shatter into pieces, like a china statue dropped onto a stone floor, fragments of his being littering the remains of the room: a section of cheek here, an eye, still blinking, there. He had been rendered fundamentally flawed by grief; there were cracks in his being.
Did bombs still tick? He could not say. He supposed that some—the old-fashioned kind—probably did. Just as he had relied upon his windup alarm clock to wake him for his flight that morning (he lived in fear of power cuts on such occasions), then perhaps there were times when only a straightforward, tick-tock timepiece with a little keyhole in the back would do the trick when failure was not an option.
Carefully, he walked over to the bag, then leaned in close to it and listened, holding his breath so that any telltale sounds would not be masked by his labored wheezing. He heard nothing and instantly felt silly for even trying. It was a forgotten case, nothing more. He would call reception and have it taken away.
He stepped into the bathroom, hit the light switch, and stopped, his hand poised over the telephone. An array of toiletries and cosmetics had been carefully lined up beside the sink, along with a hairbrush, a comb, and a small vanity case. There were moisturizers and lipsticks, and in the shower stall, a bottle of green apple shampoo alongside a container of jojoba conditioner. There were blond hairs caught in the hairbrush. He could see them clearly from where he stood.
They had given him an occupied room, a room that was temporarily home to a woman. He felt anger, on both her behalf and his own. How would she have reacted had she returned to find an elderly man snoozing in the armchair by her bed? Would she have screamed? He thought the shock of a woman screaming at him in her bedroom might have been enough to hasten his mortality, and he was momentarily grateful that it had not come to that.
He was already composing a tirade in his head when he heard the hotel door open and a woman stepped into the room. She was wearing a red hat and a tan mac, both of which she discarded on the bed along with two shopping bags from a pair of chichi clothing stores whose names were known to him. Her back was to him, and her blond hair was tied up loosely at the back of her head, held in place by a leather clip. Now that the coat was gone, he saw her lemon sweater and white skirt, her bare legs and the tan sandals on her feet.
Then she turned and stared straight at him. He did not move. He felt his lips form a word, and he spoke her name, but she did not hear him.
No, he thought, this is not possible. This cannot be.
It was her, yet not her.
He was looking not at the face of a woman who had died barely a year before, her features heavily lined by old age and the depredations of the disease that had taken her, her hair thinning and gray—her body small, almost childlike, where she had shrunken into herself during those final months—but at the face of another who had lived by that name in the past. This was his wife as she once was, as she had been before their children were born. This was his wife as a young woman—thirty, perhaps, but no more than that. As he watched her, he was taken aback by her beauty. He had always loved her and had always thought her beautiful, even at the end, but the photographs and memories could not do justice to the girl who had first entranced him, and about whom he had felt as he had never felt before about a woman.
She walked toward him. He spoke her name again, but there was no response. As she reached the bathroom he stepped out of her way, performing a neat little dance that left him outside the room and her inside. Then the door closed in his face, and he could hear the sounds of clothing being removed and, despite his astonishment, he found himself walking away to give her a little privacy, humming a tune in his head to cover any stray sounds that might emerge but also to distract himself from his own confusion. In the short time he had been asleep, the world appeared to have changed once again, but this time he had no understanding of his place in it.
After a minute or two, he heard the toilet flush, and then she emerged again, also humming the same tune, an old sixties thing they had both loved. She cannot see me, he thought. She cannot see me, but can she somehow hear me? She had not responded when he called her name, and yet now here she was, sharing a song with him. It might have been coincidence and nothing more. After all, it was one of their favorite pieces, and perhaps it was hardly surprising that, when she was alone and content, she would hum it softly to herself. He had, by definition, never seen her alone. True, there were times when she had been unaware of his presence and he had been allowed to watch as she moved unselfconsciously through the rhythms and routines of her day, but such occasions were always brief, the spell broken either by her recognition of his presence or his realization that there were important matters to which to attend. But how important had they truly been? After she died, he would have given up a dozen of them—no, a hundred, a thousand—for another minute with her. Such was hindsight, he supposed. It made every man wise, but wise too late.
He shook his head. None of this was relevant. What mattered was that he was looking at his wife as she had once been, a woman who could not now be but somehow was. He went through all of the possibilities: a waking dream, a sleeping dream, a hallucination brought on by tiredness and travel. But he had smelled her as she passed by him at the bathroom door, and he could hear her now as she sang, and the weight of her footsteps left impressions on the thick carpet that remained visible for a moment before the strands sprang back into place.
I want to touch you. I want to feel your skin against mine once again.
She had unlocked her suitcase and had begun to unpack her clothes, hanging blouses and dresses in the closet and using two of the dresser drawers on the left for her underwear, just as she did at home. He was so close to her now that he could hear her breathing. He spoke her name again, his breath upon her neck, and it seemed to him that, for an instant, she lost her place in the song, stumbling slightly on a verse. He whispered again, and she stopped entirely. She looked over her shoulder, her expression uncertain, and her gaze went straight through him.
He reached out a hand and brushed his fingers gently against the skin of her face. It felt warm to the touch. She was a living, breathing presence in the room. She shivered and brushed the spot with her fingertips, as though troubled by the presence of a strand of gossamer.
A number of thoughts struck him almost simultaneously.
The first was: I will not speak again. Neither will I touch her. I do not want to see that look upon her face. I want to see her as I so rarely saw her in life. I want to be at once a part of and apart from, her life. I do not understand what is happening, but I do not want it to end.
The second thought was: If she is so real, then what am I? I have become insubstantial. When I first saw her, I believed her to be a ghost, but now it seems that it is I who have become less than I once was—and yet I can feel my heart beating, I can hear the sound my spittle makes in my mouth, and I am aware of my own pain.
The third thought was: Why is she alone?
They had always arrived together to stay in this hotel to celebrate their anniversary. It was their place, and they would always ask for this room because it was the room in which they had stayed that first night. It did not matter that the decor had changed over the years or that it was, in truth, identical to almost every other room in the hotel. No, what mattered was the number on the door, and the memories that number evoked. It was the thrill of returning to—how had she once put it?—the “scene of the crime,” laughing in that low way of hers, the way that always made him want to take her to bed. When the room was not available, they would feel a sense of disappointment that cast the faintest of shadows over their pleasure.
He was seeing her in their room, but without him. Should he not also be here? Should he not be witnessing himself with her, watching as he and she moved around each other, one dressing while the other showered, one reading while the other dressed, one (and, in truth, it was always he) tapping a foot impatiently while the other made some last-minute adjustment to hair or clothing? He experienced a sensation of dizziness, and his own identity began to crumble like decaying brickwork beneath the mason’s hammer. The possibility came to him that he had somehow dreamed an entire existence, that he had created a life that had no basis in reality. He would awake and find that he was back in his parents’ house, sleeping in his narrow single bed, and there would be school to go to, with ball practice afterward, and homework to be done as the evening light faded.
No. She is real and I am real. I am an old man, and I am dying, but I will not let my memories of her be taken from me without a fight.
Alone. She had come here alone. Alone, for now. Was there another coming, a lover, a man known or unknown to him? Had she betrayed him in this room, in their room? The possibility was more devastating to him than if she had never existed. He retreated, and the pain inside him grew. He wanted to grasp her, to demand an explanation. Not now, he thought, not at the very end, when all I have been waiting for is to be reunited with her at last—or, if there is nothing beyond this place, to lose myself in a void where there is no pain, and where her absence can no longer be felt, merely absorbed into the greater absence beyond.
He sat down heavily in the chair. He raised his hand to his brow and tried to remember what was real. The telephone rang, but whether in his world or hers, he did not know. They were layered, one on top of the other, like twin pieces of film, just as in old movies an actor could play two parts in the same scene by being filmed against an earlier image of himself. His wife, her shoes now discarded, skipped across the floor to the bed and picked up the receiver.
“Hello? Hi, honey. Yes, everything’s fine. I got here okay, and they gave us our room.” She listened. “Oh no, that’s too bad. When do they think they’ll be able to fly you out? Well, at least you won’t miss the entire weekend.” Silence again. He could hear the tinny voice on the other end of the line, and it was his own. “Well, it makes sense to stay at an airport motel, then, just in case. It won’t be as nice as here, though.” Then she laughed, sensual and throaty, and he knew what had been said, knew because he had said it, could almost remember the exact words, could recall nearly every minute of that weekend because now it was coming back to him, and he felt a flurry of conflicting responses to the dawning knowledge. There was relief, but there was also shame. He had doubted her. Right at the end, after all of their years together, he had thought of her in a way that was unworthy of himself, and of her. He wanted to find a way to apologize to her, but he could not.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and to acknowledge his fault aloud gave him some relief.
He went through his memories of that weekend. Snow had hit the airport, delaying all flights. He had been cutting it pretty tight that day, for there were meetings to attend and people to see. His was the last flight out, and he had watched the board as it read “delayed,” then “delayed” again, and, finally, “canceled.” He had spent a dull evening at an airport motel so he would be close enough to catch the first flight out the next morning, if the weather lifted. It had, and they had spent the next night together, but it was the only occasion upon which they had found themselves apart in such a way on their anniversary, she in their room and he in an anonymous other, eating pizza from a box and watching a hockey game on TV. Recalling it now, it had not been such a bad night, almost an indulgence of sorts, but he would rather have spent it with her. There were few nights over the entire forty-eight-year history of their marriage that he would not rather have spent with her.
There was something else about that night, something that he could not quite remember. It nagged at him, like an itch in his mind demanding to be scratched. What was it? He cursed his failing memory, even as another emotion overcame him.
He was conscious of a sense of jealousy, of envy toward his younger self. He was so brash then, so caught up in his own importance. He looked at other women sometimes (although he never went further than looking), and he sometimes thought of his ex-girlfriend, Karen, the one who might have been his wife, the one who went to a little college in the Midwest with the expectation that he would follow, when instead he had gone elsewhere, choosing to stay closer to home. They had tried to make it work, but it had not, and there were moments in the early years of his marriage when he had thought about what it might have been like to have married her, of how their children might have looked and how it might have been to sleep each night next to her, to wake her in the dark with a kiss and to feel her respond, her hands upon his back, their legs slowly intertwining. In time, those thoughts had faded, and he had dwelt in the present of his choosing, grateful for all that it—and she—had brought him. But that young man, carefree and careless, would arrive the next morning, and he would take his beautiful wife to bed, and he would not yet understand how fortunate he was to have her.
She hung up the phone and sat on the bed for a time, running her fingers across the stone of her engagement ring and then tracing circles around the gold band that sat above it. When she was done, she stood, finished unpacking, and then, as he remained in his chair, aware now of flurries of snow falling outside, she drew the curtains, turned on the bedside lamps so that the room was lapped by warm light, and began to undress.
And it was given to him to be with her that night, both distantly yet intimately. He sat on the bathroom floor as she bathed, his cheek against the side of the tub. Her head rested on a towel and her eyes closed as the radio in the room played an hour of Stan Getz. He was beside her as she sat on the bed in a hotel robe, a towel wrapped around her head, painting her toenails and laughing at some terrible comedy show that she would never have watched had he been with her, and he found himself laughing along with her as much as at it. He followed the words on the page as she read a book he had given her, one he had just finished and thought she might like. Now he read along with her; the contents of the book he had long forgotten, so they both discovered it anew together.
At last, she removed the towel and shook out her hair, then took off the robe and put on a nightdress. She got into bed, turned out the light, and rested her head upon the pillow. He was alone with her; her face was almost luminescent in the dark, pale and indistinct. He felt sleep approach, but he was afraid to close his eyes, for he knew in his heart that she would be gone when he awoke, and he wanted this night to last. He did not want to be separated from her again.
But the itch was still there, the sense that there was an important, salient matter that he could not quite recall, something linked to a long-forgotten conversation that had occurred when he had finally found his way to this room and they had made love. It was coming back to him: slowly, admittedly, but he was finding pieces of that weekend in the cluttered, dusty attic of his memory. There had been lovemaking, yes, and afterward she had been very quiet. When at last he had looked down at her, he saw that she was crying silently.
“What is it?” he had asked.
“Nothing.”
“It can’t be nothing. You’re crying.”
“You’ll think I’m being silly.”
“Tell me.”
“I had a dream about you,” she had replied.
Then it was gone again. He tried to remember what that dream had been. It was relevant, somehow. Everything about that night was now relevant. Beside him, his young wife’s breathing altered as she descended into sleep. He bit his lip in frustration. What was it? What couldn’t he remember?
His left arm felt numb. He supposed that it was the position in which he rested. He tried to move it, and numbness became pain. It extended quickly through his system, like acid injected into his bloodstream. He opened his mouth and a rush of air and spittle emerged. He groaned. There was a tightness in his chest, as though something were now sitting astride him, coiling around him, constricting his breathing, compressing his heart so that he saw it as a red mass grasped in a fist, the blood slowly being squeezed from it.
“I dreamt that you were beside me, but you were in distress, and I couldn’t reach you. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get to you.”
He heard her voice from afar, recalling now the words, remembering how he had held her and stroked her back, touched by the strength of her feelings yet knowing in his heart that he thought her foolish for responding to a dream in this way.
She moved in her sleep, and now he was crying, the pain forcing tears from the corners of his eyes.
“I dreamt that you were dying, and there was nothing I could do to save you.”
I am dying, he thought to himself. At last, it has come.
“Hush,” said his wife. He looked at her, and although her eyes were still closed, her lips moved, and she whispered to him: “Hush, hush. I am here, and you are here.”
She shifted in the bed, and her arms reached out and enfolded him in their embrace, and his face was buried in her hair, and he smelled her and touched her as the agony grew, his heart exploding deep within him, all things coming to an end in a failure of blood and vein, of artery and muscle. She clasped him tightly to herself as the last words he would ever utter emerged in a senseless tangle, and then the darkness took him, and all was stillness and silence for a time.
“Hush,” she said, as he died. “I am here….”
And now you are here.
Hush. Hush.
And he opened his eyes.