On a Quiet Street

Raglan happens like a blink. The houses and shops break the wilderness for just a moment before the sea beckons you, and it is easy to miss the town completely. My thoughts are elsewhere but I still drink in the tranquility as the buildings bathe in the final hour of sunlight. It helps a little to lighten the weight pressing on my chest. Navigating what little traffic there is, I slip out of the veins of the town and toward the houses that stand guard along the waterfront. There is no rhythm to the homes, no family resemblance as the simple bach and the new, towering home stand next to each other. The road is narrow, parking at a premium, but I spot a space along the kerb, between an aging Australian beast and a new, sleek German import. The latter felt like the herald of some new future for the coastal town. It was a whisper of intimidation, letting the poets and the painters know that even here they would not be safe from the creatures of the cities.

Plucking my backpack and suitcase from the passenger seat, I step out onto my old haunting grounds. The June wind nips at my ears. My shoes kick through the graveyard of autumn, auburn leaves strewn across the pavement. The house waits patiently for my return. Its solitary companion, a planted kowhai tree has a single leaf hanging on the tallest branch, a final brave soldier trying to hold off winter. The house looks well-lived, and if I’m not a semantic, then I guess it is. The gate shrieks as a year’s worth of rust attempts to resist my hand pressing against the metal.

As soon as I step across the threshold of the home, I feel it. What any squatter would feel if they attempt to enter the house. Not a cold, it never could be, but instead a deep warmth sinks inside my bones. It’s like I’ve downed a pint or two without noticing. Muscle memory takes my coat from my shoulders and hangs it upon a peg. Ignoring the dying rooms of the ground floor, I head upstairs, every creak echoing loudly through the nearly empty home. I check my watch as I walk. There’s about an hour left to prepare. My step quickens as I walk past a bathroom, a study and a spare bedroom. The latter is still waiting for its new arrival and its real purpose. I don’t look; I never do. I’m not sure I can handle looking into that bedroom, to see the half-blue walls, the work forever stalled. Just thinking about it makes it harder to breathe. Instead, I take the next flight of stairs two at a time and enter the master bedroom at the top of the house.

It’s a simple room. Most of the furniture had been stripped to make the property less attractive to looters. It remains the only useful advice someone gave me in the aftermath. The remaining words, friendly platitudes and ignorant suggestions, were useless to me. There is a bed, which hasn’t been slept in for a decade, and that’s it. The room is bare. The walls, though, are covered in sheets of paper. From skirting board to ceiling, to one side of the room to another, thousands of words stare back at me. The room is a manifesto. I can’t remember what it says anymore, and I don’t loiter to read the words as I drop my backpack and open my suitcase. There are hundreds of pages and an industrial strength stapler inside it.

Rolling up my sleeves, I get to work. I start in the same corner I always start, pinning the first page over the start of the last narrative. It’s hard work. In no times, my arms are aching and my palm is tender from pressing down on the stapler. I don’t slow, though. With each passing minute, the pile of pages in the suitcase shrinks. The labour feels good. It keeps me distracted, my mind focussed on the wall and not on my watch. I almost forget why I’m here. The hole in my heart nearly closes for just the shortest passage of time, an eclipse of pain. It’s only when I’m done, when every page is embedded in the wall, do I remember why I’ve returned.

“Are you here?” I say out loud, keeping my eyes locked on the wall in front of me.

There’s a moment of silence, my heart skipping a beat. I might just be too early. It doesn’t mean that whatever magic holds sway is breaking. My fingernails dig into my palm and then I hear her voice, her beautiful, calm voice. “I’m always here, hun. It’s just now you can actually hear me.”

I turn, and now I move quickly, my soul dry and aching to drink in the sight of her. She waits for me in the middle of the room. I can see the wall behind her; see the pages staring back at me through her translucent body. Her black hair frames the face I see in every photograph I hold dear. I can’t help but grin, seeing that button nose I adore and those thick eyebrows she always despised. Like every time since we first met at college, her smile disarms me. It’s a dazzling array of emotions crammed into one frozen moment of beauty: happy and sad, amused and distant. I forget that she’s dead. I forget that I can barely touch her. I take a step forward, ready to throw my arms around her, to feel whatever is left of her against my body.

“Not yet,” she says, floating a step back. “The night’s only just started; you’ll go right through me.”

I nod. It breaks my heart to watch her hover there, not the confident woman I married but a scared girl, unsure what to do with her arms. I just want to hold her. “So,” I offer to the room, trying to distract myself. “Did I miss anything?”

It’s always the first thing I ask her. We cling to the little inside jokes and that question was what stumbled out of my mouth when I first saw her staring back at me after the accident. It makes her laugh and everything is a little better in the world. The greyness that smothers me weakens for just a moment. I pick the backpack from the floor and take a seat on the bed, but she doesn’t. She can’t yet. Instead, she floats toward the walls, toward my handiwork.

“Oh, you missed out on a thrilling year. A couple of boys broke in at Halloween; they must have been on a dare. I was so wicked, hun. I wanted to push over a chair or something. Could you imagine their faces if I did?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” I reach into the bag and pull out a bottle of water, taking a sip. “It’s already hard enough keeping this house without drawing attention to it.”

She doesn’t say anything, choosing to peer at the wall. Fire threatens to flow down my veins. She does this every time. We have a single night, one fleeting moment in the year, and she wastes time staring at the wall. If we wanted to make a reservation on time, I’d always have to hide all the books left waiting on the coffee table. The whole reason I take time to redecorate the walls is so she has something to read throughout the year, but she was always the type of person who would devour their Christmas books by New Years.

“I’d rather you wouldn’t do this,” she said, jolting me from my sulk and now I feel hurt, a dagger plunged between my shoulder blades. “Oh, don’t be silly. I love them. I read them over and over again. I just wish you didn’t feel the need to do this for me. It must take so much time.”

I shrug, being drawn into the walls now too, staring at the words typed neatly across the pages. There’s a little of everything: poems, short stories, my thoughts about the news. I once offered to bring newspapers to keep her up to date with the world, and she laughed and called me stupid. She never wanted the news to follow current events. She wants to trace me through the world, to see my opinions shift and twist, to watch which interests of mine wane and which of them grow. The walls are a manifesto of me.

“How long does it take?” she says, now looking at me. She floats closer to the bed and my eyes watch the carpet to see if she leaves some imprint on its surface, some memory of her presence.

I shrug again, feeling naked under her stare. My dignity is being stripped. “The stories are just my stories.”

“But the poems and the news?”

“It’s nothing.” I look away. “If I take some time out each day, it’s easy to stay on track.”

She sighs as I talk and comes to sit next to me on the bed. “Every day? How is that moving on with your life? You promised; you promised me that you’d move on with your life, that you wouldn’t mope around.”

“I’m not moping around,” I say. I’m nothing but an angry, misunderstood teenager, but she laughs and I’m diffused. I look at her, that special smile on her face again, and I wonder where the time has gone. We used to be the same age. Now she is still some thirty-something goddess and I’m easing myself beyond the reaches of middle age. “And if I am, I’m not the only one that’s moping.” I let the thought hang in the air, but she says nothing. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Oh dear.” She giggles.

“We have this conversation every year. ‘You need to let go, you need to move on, why do you come back, why don’t you sell the house and be done with me?’ But, y’know, what about the other way around. Why are you still here? Why haven’t you moved on? That’s why I haven’t. That’s why I can’t stop myself from coming back here. So, fair’s fair, and if you want me to move on, why haven’t you?”

She turns away from me now, like she did the first time I asked that question, the year after her death. She stayed silent and eventually turned the conversation to a different topic, like a river being redirected. I can’t believe it has taken so many years to repeat the question, and yet now I wish I never had. If we were younger, if we didn’t know every weakness and every flaw of each other, I’d panic, terrified she might drift away and never come back. With time, though, I know she would never do that to me. Now, I just worry that I’ve made her sad, that I’ve inflicted some unneeded pain on her.

“There is a door out back,” she says, gesturing with her head to the garden. “Down by the beach. I’ve opened it once or twice. There’s a dark tunnel and then there’s a light, and I think I’m meant to go down there.”

“Why don’t you?”

She laughs but she doesn’t mean it. “Because what if I can’t come back, hun? What if I go through the tunnel and that’s it? And now you’re gone and we can’t talk anymore?”

“I see,” and I do, I really do, and I know why she has never told me about the tunnel before. I even know why I have never asked. The thought strikes me hard across the cheek. “You’re waiting for me? You’re waiting for us to go down the tunnel together?”

“Don’t you dare.” A noble anger sits on every word.

“I wouldn’t,” I say, the words forceful and swift. I need to let her know I’d never put her in that position, that I would never inflict such guilt upon her. Instead, I must live. “I wouldn’t. I promise.”

We sit there together for several minutes, time trickling by as we just enjoy being a couple again, even one that is bickering. Then she turns to me, her hand moving to pat my knee, inching toward me until she stops herself and returns her hand to her side. “Well, I’m glad we had this talk. We shouldn’t keep these things penned up inside, it’s not healthy.”

I snort. “None of this is healthy; you’re dead!” She joins me, and together we find the thing so hilarious that the old house is filled with laughter.

Our conversation turns away from heavier topics. For a while, it becomes a quiz. She asks me everything she can think of, trying to pry every bit of gossip from my life in the last year. There is little fuel to burn, though. Instead we return to memories and old debates, laughing and sniping, engaging in the verbal duels we both still adore. We sit like any normal couple. It kills me slowly, yes. Buried in the back of my mind, I know this night is already trickling away between my fingers, and soon I’ll lose her again. But I never think about leaving or not returning next year. I need this. I need these precious few hours to fortify my soul for the year ahead. A partner should never make life worth living, worth should be internal, but she makes life easier. She colours it with bright, light hues. I need her voice, even for a day, to help make the year ahead a little friendlier.

“I think you can hold me now,” she says, her voice faltering over the simple words.

I pull her against me in seconds, wrapping my arms around her. After all these years, it still feels right. We sit there in silence. Her body is against mine. Her skin is cold, her chest doesn’t rise and fall, there is no gentle beat to feel, and I don’t care. I hold her. I hold her so tight, it’s like I’m trying to give her some of my life, some little spark to wake her from death. It never works. For a long time, we cry. She sobs and her tears stain my shirt. My whole-body shakes, heaving as a year’s emotion is bundled out of my soul. Eventually, the tears dry up. We have nothing else to give. We start to talk again, of nothing and of everything, and one eye is always on the time, watching it drift away.

“We should dance,” she says, morning nearly upon us. I roll my eyes at the suggestion. “It’s tradition!”

It is not. It is a story, an art form. The Danse Macabre. But she loves it and I have no other explanation for this miracle, for this portal, for this one day a year. I take her by the hand and pull her from the bed.

We dance to silence at first, smiling as we sway around the empty room. My hand squeezes hers and I still have to concentrate to avoid her feet. Then she is humming something, plucking some tune from the depths of her memory, and I follow her lead. Soon words slip free. We sing, harmonising as best we can as we dance around my two left feet. Fast songs, slow songs, we work through the backlog of the soundtrack of our life. With each passing melody, though, the weight of her hand against mine lessens. She slips away from me, no matter how hard I press her body against mine. As the sun breaks through the horizon and begins its ascent, her form drifts away, a shadow dancing in time with me.

Whispering, I finish the song we were singing, my voice alone now. The room is empty. Her shadow is gone; I still sway on the spot.