“Jessie, isn’t it?” she asks, and though it takes a minute to find my voice, I say that it is. She says that it’s nice to meet me. She steps toward me, slipping her hand into mine. My hand shakes as it did this afternoon, a quiver that won’t quit.
“I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I say. Though I’ve done far worse than interrupt. “I rang the doorbell. I knocked. The front door was open,” I explain, voice as doddery as my hands, just barely managing to scrape the memories together and remember why I’m here. “You left your front door open,” I say again, for lack of anything better to say.
“Oh,” she says, chastising the door latch. How it’s old. How it doesn’t work properly. How she needs to get it fixed, as she needs to get many things in this old home fixed.
“How is everything with the carriage home?” she asks instead, and I tell her fine. I say how much I like it. I compliment the hardwood floors because I can think of nothing else to say. I say that they are pretty. I thank her for letting me stay there. She says it’s no bother.
It’s awkward and uncomfortable, all the conversation forced. I think then that I should leave. I’ve overstayed my welcome because I was never welcome in the first place.
But just as I’m about to say my goodbyes and go, a noise comes from somewhere upstairs. From the third floor of the home. What it sounds like to me is the thud of a textbook falling. Something heavy and dense. I glance upward, finding a hatch there, a pulldown ladder that when folded up and stowed away becomes one with the ceiling, as it is now.
“What’s that?” I ask, but Ms. Geissler’s face goes suddenly blank, and she shakes her head, asking, “What’s what?”
“The noise,” I say. “Is someone there?” as I point up toward the ceiling.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she replies.
I hold my breath and listen in vain for more noises coming from up above. But they don’t come. The house is silent, and I know then: I made it up.
My eyes burn. I rub at them, making them more red than they were before, still aware of my shaking hands.
“I must be mistaken,” I say, holding my hands out before me so that I can see the way they tremble. They’re cold. But that’s not the reason for the trembling. It’s something far worse than that, I think. Something neurological. I have my brain to thank for this. Because after all these nights without sleep, my brain functions are out of whack.
I try and convince myself that the shaky hands aren’t degenerative. That they aren’t getting worse. And yet there’s no denying the fact.
My hands are shaking far more than they were this afternoon.
It’s as if she can read my mind.
“You’ve been having trouble sleeping,” she says, more of a statement than a question. She’s not asking me because she knows. Behind the glasses, her eyes are a soft gray, staring at me in pity. I wonder how it is she knows I haven’t been sleeping. Does it have something to do with the dark circles under my eyes, the bags, the red pools of blood that flood my sclera?
“I saw your light on late last night,” she says by means of explanation, and I think of myself last night. Hearing the strange pinging sound through the floor register, the voices, and turning the light on to investigate. It was nothing, of course, though still I spent the rest of the night lying in bed unable to sleep, forever indebted to the sun when it finally decided to rise and I headed off in search of caffeine, my magical potion, which becomes far less potent with each passing day that I don’t sleep.
What makes not sleeping even worse than the crippling fatigue is the boredom that infiltrates those nighttime hours. The misery. The morbid thoughts that keep me company all night long. Last night I found myself thinking about ashes and bone fragments. That’s what remains after a body has been incinerated. When Mom came back to me from the crematorium, I expected something soft, like the ashes left behind in Mom’s and my fireplace. On cold nights, she and I used to toss in a few logs, sit on the floor beneath the same blanket, trying to stay warm. When the fire burned out, the ashes that remained were soft. Delicate. I didn’t know that Mom’s ashes would be coarse like sand, like cat litter, and not soft like ashes. Or that there would be bone fragments.
After Mom’s 130 pounds were reduced to just 4, I didn’t have the wherewithal to bring the urn to the crematorium with me so that they could place her inside. And so instead she came to me in a little baggie in a sturdy box. I was tasked with making the transfer to the rhubarb urn, this straight, canister-like contraption that’s anything but the round body, narrow neck of your classic urn. You wouldn’t even know it was an urn except for Mom’s name impressed in the clay along with the years of her birth and death. Her stint on earth. Forty-nine years.
I made the transfer at the kitchen table, the day after I brought her remains home from the crematorium. The same table where we used to eat. I used a funnel. Same funnel we used to use when transferring sugar cookie icing to the piping bags. When I was done, a fine mist of Mom covered the tabletop. I wiped her away with the palm of a hand. Then Mom was stuck to me, and it wasn’t like I could just wash her off with soap and water. Because it was Mom. I couldn’t just wash Mom down the kitchen sink.
These are the things you don’t think about when someone has died. You don’t want to think about them.
And yet these are the thoughts that keep me up all night. A fine mist of Mom on the palm of my hand.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I say, leaving it at that, pretending it was a one-time thing, not letting on to the fact that I haven’t slept in all these nights.
“Try a glass of warm milk,” she offers. “It always helps me sleep like a baby,” she says, and I tell her I will. But I won’t. I’ve tried that already and besides, I hate the taste of warm milk.
But then it comes again. The noise, one I’m certain I didn’t imagine this time. Another dull thud.
And it’s unintentional when my shaky hand lifts up to tug down the ladder and see for myself what’s inside.
“You don’t want to do that,” Ms. Geissler snaps, her words brusque.
I freeze in place, insisting, “There’s something there,” and only then does she reconsider.
“I didn’t want to scare you,” she explains, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I didn’t imagine the noise. It was there.
“It’s squirrels,” she tells me. “They’ve taken over the place,” she laments. “I haven’t stepped foot up there for a while.” She says that she’s been working with a pest control service to have them removed, but she’s quite sure the service is more adept at bringing squirrels into her home then getting them out. The space is uninhabitable for now, until the problem gets sorted out. She can’t bring herself to go up there, not until the squirrels are gone and her contractor repairs the damage.
“The squirrels,” she complains, “have chewed holes in the walls. They’ve gnawed their way through electrical wires. They’ve ruined a perfectly good lamp. I’ve switched services, mind you. But getting rid of squirrels is no easy task. I need a roofer to come and replace the tiles and block the squirrels’ way in, but the roofer won’t come until all the squirrels are out. The darn things have it in for me,” she says, sighing exasperatedly, and it doesn’t once occur to me not to believe her.
I say to her, “Sounds like a mess.”
Out the window, I see that the sun has finished setting. Darkness has arrived, anchoring itself to the earth for the night. Ending another day.
“It’s getting late,” I say, excusing myself, saying my goodbyes, and leaving.