“My Dear, Someone Screams Inside Your House Every Day, Claire. And if You Refuse to Call the Police, I’m Going to Call Them Myself.”
Mrs. Parker said those words to me on a Thursday afternoon while standing outside my front gate, her apron still streaked with tomato sauce and a broom clenched between her hands as though she intended to use it as a weapon.
I had just arrived home from work, carrying my handbag, my keys, and the kind of exhaustion that sinks all the way into your bones after working from eight in the morning until six in the evening, only to return to a house with no one waiting inside.
“Mrs. Parker, I’m not even here during the day,” I said, forcing a small smile. “I live by myself.”
Her face remained completely serious.
“Well, someone is inside that house. And what I’m hearing isn’t the plumbing. It’s a woman screaming.”
My stomach twisted into a knot.
Ever since Ethan died two years earlier, my home in a quiet gated neighborhood in Westchester County had become unbearably still.
Not peacefully still.
Cruelly still.
I had learned to eat dinner with the television playing in the background, to leave the hallway light on throughout the night, and to keep my eyes from lingering too long on my husband’s photograph in the living room.
Ethan had died in a crash on Interstate 87.
At least, that was what everyone told me.
His SUV had caught fire.
His brother Ryan identified the body because, according to him, the family wanted to spare me from “that kind of trauma.”
I accepted every explanation I was given because when someone places an urn in your hands, there is rarely enough breath left inside your body to ask questions.
But Mrs. Parker refused to dismiss what she had heard.
“It begins like someone crying,” she said, lowering her voice. “Then a woman starts begging for help. Sometimes she says, ‘Don’t leave me here.’”
My entire body went cold.
Those were my words.
I had said them to Ethan years earlier after an argument that began when he disappeared for three days and returned home smelling like expensive perfume, insisting the entire thing had been caused by stress at work.
I had sobbed into a voice message.
I had begged him not to leave me.
And afterward, I hated myself for begging.
I barely slept that night.
I checked every door, every window, and every closet.
There was nothing.
The following morning, I did something I had never imagined myself doing.
I dressed for work, drove out through the neighborhood entrance, waved to the security guard, and continued down the road for three blocks.
Then I parked the car, walked back through a rear access street, entered through the service door, and crawled underneath my bed.
Two hours went by.
Dust tickled the inside of my nose.
My arms began to ache.
I was seconds away from convincing myself that Mrs. Parker had misunderstood what she had heard when the sound reached me.
A key slipping into the lock.
No one kicked in the door.
No window shattered.
Someone simply unlocked my house as though entering a place that belonged to them.
Footsteps moved across the living room.
They stopped for a moment in front of Ethan’s photograph.
Then they continued down the hallway.
