Ghosts and Mice
I live my life in stories.
Willow had almost fallen asleep when she heard someone on the stairs. She sat up before she was fully awake, listening for the next step, expecting the bedroom door to open and someone she loved to come in and lie down beside her. For a second, she was already moving over.
Then she remembered. It was the house creaking in the wind. There would be no next step, no door opening, no familiar weight settling into the mattress. She lay back down in a bed that somehow still seemed surprised to contain only her.
Six months, and apparently nobody had informed her reflexes. During the day, she understood her life perfectly well. At night, one floorboard could have her making room for someone who wasn’t coming.
The next creak sent her thoughts in an entirely different direction. What if somebody really was in the house? She lived alone, and she could not properly secure the place. People knew where she lived. Her address was public record. She defended people accused of murder for a living, which supplied her imagination with considerably more material than it needed at bedtime.
She listened. Was that a footstep? Would she hear somebody before they reached her room? She told herself to stop, that it was the wind, that old houses made noises. All reasonable observations. None especially helpful when the house chose that moment to make another noise.
The night went on like that: a sound, a moment of longing, a moment of fear, followed by an exhausted woman telling herself to please get a grip. By morning, she had investigated several possible intruders without leaving her bed and welcomed home someone who had never arrived. She had accomplished very little sleeping.
But there was fall in the air. The first little bit of it, cool and moving through the trees, with leaves beginning to scatter across the ground. She loved the leaves. Every year they collected in the backyard, and that morning she went to the dining room windows to see whether they had started gathering.
They had. She began to smile, looking out across the yard. Then she saw the basketball lying in the grass.
There should have been a little boy out there with it. She could almost supply the movement herself: the running, the bouncing, the ball getting away from him. Instead, it stayed exactly where it was, and she stood at the window looking at something she could neither fix nor bear to keep looking at.
She knew where her children were. She knew a quiet yard was not a verdict on her motherhood. Unfortunately, knowing things had never prevented her from finding a way to blame herself for them. Within minutes, her mind had opened every file it kept on her failures as a wife, a mother, a lawyer, a person. Mother was the thickest file. It always got reviewed first.
There was someone else she missed, too. An employee who had mattered to her far beyond the work, whose absence she still didn’t quite understand. The day after the other disputes, Willow had still been angry and hurt. There were mistakes to address, but she knew she had addressed them sharply. Whatever needed correcting, her frustration had come through in a snappy, criticizing way. She could admit that. She wished she had taken a breath before she spoke.
The employee had said something about going to lunch and then heading home. Willow remembered saying she didn’t need to worry about coming back, but she remembered meaning that day. Now she wasn’t sure what the other woman had heard. Had Willow fired her without meaning to? Had she quit? Had they each walked away believing the other had closed a door? There were emails she could go back and read, details she might be able to straighten out. She hadn’t made herself look yet. This one hurt before she even opened the messages.
This was someone whose love she had felt sure of, even when she was difficult. Willow kept thinking about that. Somewhere in the middle of being angry with other people, she might have spoken carelessly to someone she wanted to keep. She didn’t know whether there was a conversation still to be had, or what either of them would say. She knew she missed her.
Eventually, she took herself onto the porch. She sat looking at the lake, smoking a cigarette she knew she shouldn’t be smoking. She was aware of the irony of worrying all night about being murdered and then voluntarily lighting something with a warning label. She did not currently have the energy to become a more consistent person.
Tears kept rolling down her face. She wasn’t working herself up or scrolling through something painful. She was just sitting there, and they kept coming. Every so often, she wiped her cheeks, as though that might settle the matter. She cried for the people she missed, including the woman she wasn’t sure she had meant to let go.
The strange thing was that she felt better. Her medication had been adjusted, and after about a week, she had finally noticed it beginning to help. Yesterday, she had felt a difference she was grateful for. She still felt it that morning. She was simply feeling better in a house where she missed people.
She looked at the lake and thought about leaving. There were too many memories waiting in ordinary places. She couldn’t even check on the damn leaves without stumbling into another one. She wanted a morning when she could look out a window and see what was there without first having to survive what wasn’t.
Then her phone lit up with a message from one of her best friends. They hadn’t talked in a couple of weeks. She knew he was busy, and she hadn’t wanted to bother him. Lately, answering “How are you?” seemed to require background information, supporting documents, and a reasonable estimate of how much time the other person had available.
He said he didn’t know why, but he had woken up thinking about her. He wanted to check in. How was she? Could they do lunch or coffee that week?
She answered immediately. She was so glad to hear from him. As they spoke, she wrote, she was sitting on her front porch looking at the lake crying. She hadn’t wanted to bother him with everything going on, but she would love to catch up.
“The lake’s crying?” he replied. Then he sent another message: he was kidding. He just wanted to make her smile.
She did. Sitting there with wet cheeks and a cigarette she ought to put out, she smiled down at her phone. He had reached her at exactly the right moment and then elected to address her sentence structure. She had missed him.
Later, she worked on the list for the office move. There were practical things to think about, things she could write down and check off. Computers, monitors, keyboards. Then she went to write “mouses” and stopped.
That sounded wrong. Mice. She wrote “mice,” looked at it, and became immediately suspicious. Were computer mice actually called mice? Surely there was some distinction between office equipment and something you called an exterminator about.
She stared at the word until it lost all credibility. She could stand in court and construct an argument. She could run a law firm, raise children, and explain complicated things to people who had no interest in having complicated things explained. But apparently she could not make a moving list without getting hung up on whether she was packing rodents.
Then she started laughing. She tried saying it aloud, which made it worse. Mice. They needed to remember the mice. The monitors, the keyboards, and the mice. Someone would ask where to put them in the new office, and she would have to answer like a professional woman who had meant to bring them.
She laughed until she had to wipe her eyes again. This time, she didn’t mind.
Nothing had been resolved. She was still tired. The basketball was still in the yard, and she would probably listen too closely when the house creaked that night. But her friend wanted to see her, and she wanted to see him. There was an office waiting to be put together. She had things to do, including determining how many mice a small law firm reasonably required.
She left the word on the list. Later, when she looked down and saw it again, she smiled. She had spent so much of the morning being caught off guard by what hurt. It was good to discover she could still be caught off guard by something funny.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney At Law
Hampton Law Firm
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