Someone has died. Of this, I am certain. I know it because I always know it.

As I
lie here alone in this big, empty bed and listen to the rain, I remember it as it
returns to me, this feeling, this dread, skittering up and down my throat with a
thousand little legs. It settles in my stomach like a great stone, a solid,
sickening weight. It is rancid in its heaviness and unmistakable in its
familiarity. Someone has died. I do not know who.

I sit up, and I take a long breath, pulling my legs out from beneath the covers so
that they can dangle above the hardwood—cold where I press my feet. The remains of
chipped red polish color my toes. I had intended to paint them this week, but I
could not choose a color. I have been told that I am bad at making decisions, too
nervous to choose the wrong one. But I do not think that is true. Someone else has
simply always been there to make them on my behalf. But I will make one now.

I will call my daughter, I think. I move for the end table to retrieve my glasses.
They sit crooked on my nose, and I push them back into place as I look at my
cellphone, plugged into the wall there. I wait for it to ring. I stare. I expect
it. But it does not.

I had told my husband, at one time, that we should keep the landlines, one in the
kitchen and one in the bedroom, for hurricanes or when the power goes out. But
there was no point, he had decided, no point when we had a family plan, which was
expensive. But sitting here now, maybe there was a point, I think, and maybe I had
not insisted hard enough.

A person cannot silence landline phones, after all, not really, not the way they do
mobile phones at night. Maybe someone has called me already, someone with the most
awful news, and I did not hear.

Connie does not have a landline either; she may not even answer now. Or worse, she
may no longer be able to. I shudder, picking up the device. No missed calls. I turn
on the sound and begin to flip through my contacts, squinting in the dark.

Connie will answer, I think. And she will be upset that I woke her for nothing. She
will say that the children are asleep, and that she just checked on them. Howard is
out cold beside her, and yes, she is positive, sure, one-hundred-percent certain
that she can see the rhythm of his chest, up and down, up and down.

He is breathing. He is breathing, and he has work in the morning. And so, I really
should not bother them so early. There is nothing to worry about, and she will
visit me soon. And we will get our toes done together, the pair of us. It must be
the storm, she will say, the storm riling me up.

Connie has always thought I worry too much, though. And maybe I do. I place the
phone back down.

I will not call her, I think. I have nothing to fret over. The phone has not rung.
No one has called. And they always do it so tactfully, in hushed voices, as if the
most terrible part of the announcement is the waking, the oh, so sorry for
disturbing you, ma’am.

I stare at the phone again. I wait. It does not ring. I hover a hand over it. But I
do not pick it up to make the call. I should not disturb her. But someone has died.
Of this, I am certain.

My father died when I was six-years-old. I first felt this peculiar nauseous
feeling, the sensation of knowing, as I lay in a bed much smaller than this one—
with a delicate white metal headboard, wrought into the shape of flowers. I awoke
and stared at the ceiling, taking a long, labored breath and pulling the heavy
comforter up to my chin, just as I always did to fight off the wind that could fill
that room in the winter months. It rattled the windows, and it rattled me, shaking
my very bones as I rolled over to look at the little toy chest across the room.

It had been gifted to me by some distant cousin when I was very, very young, too
young to recall the party, but it had sat there for as long as I could remember, as
if it had always existed right there alongside me. It now sat properly shut for the
night.

But that was when the sensation came for the first time, this indisputable,
terrible stone in my gullet. Softly, as not to disturb my parents, I pulled myself
upward to sit atop the mattress, and crawling to the floor, I crept inch by inch,
across the room, my hair dangling over my face. I pause above the toybox, and I
stared down at it. And for reasons I even now cannot dare say, I opened the lid.

I do not know how my father got inside. But I saw his bulging, bloodshot eye,
staring up at me in the dark, the rest of his swollen features obscured and buried
by the clutter—a baby doll whose own hinged eyes have broken, forever open; a
spinning top; a velveteen teddy bear; an assemblage of blocks. My father’s eye
looked up at me from beneath them all. It blinked.

And at last, he said my name, his voice hoarse, a hollow, splintered noise, uttered
through unseen lips from the very depths of his ravaged throat: the worst noise I
ever heard.

“Cassie.”

I ran. And from the upper railing, my face placed flush between the wooden rods, I
found my mother standing in the front hallway, clad in her checkered nightgown. She
wore her hair in curlers then, and pressed up against a dark, wallpapered wall, she
stared at the telephone in the alcove by the door. She stared, and I stared at her
staring. And I know now that she knew like I know.

But most people can tell, I think, even if they do not realize it. They pick it up
in the chilliness of the air, in the lateness of the hour, in an unnatural flicker
of a piece of fabric, these tiny signs that something is amiss, that the universe
has shifted.

They create in a person, a person with enough sense to see, a terrible, sinking,
heavy feeling. And finally, the phone rang.

Sometime later, my mother found me huddled by the doorway to my bedroom. I did not
dare go back in, but I had retreated there to cower after a few minutes of
listening. She smoked a cigarette as she told me, a nervous habit people still did
around their kids then.

But I already knew, of course. I knew that my father had died. I learned later, not
from my mother, that a towering, industrial shelf in his warehouse had collapsed,
and he had been buried by its contents. And I had found him just like that,
entombed in my toybox, some grotesque phantom vision caught, like a crude, blurry
snapshot of the moment of his death.

But he was not there when my mother closed the chest again that night. And he did
not return. The feeling, however, had been there, this terrible sensation of
knowing, the awareness of a death. I had felt it, then, and I feel it now.

I really should call Connie, I think. I pick up the phone, and as I look down at
it, my finger hovers over the lock. But I do not press down. I should not bother
her. Instead, I tuck the device back in place, and I rise from the bed. I rise, and
as if compelled, I move for the closet, the mighty wooden armoire perched right
beside the window, where the rain still patters. I stare at it, and I reach out a
hand. But I hesitate.

I hesitate because I think that if I open it, I might find someone staring back—a
rotted specter come to visit, because perhaps it did not know where else to go. I
do not deign to know the motives of decaying ghosts.

And I still, even now, do not know why I saw my father that night, only that, at
his funeral, I cried because they had once again put him in a box. And maybe that
was it, after all, the soul’s search for a box in which to be put, now that its
fleshy container had loosed it.

With a bracing breath, I grab the golden knobs. I should go back to bed. I should
not open it. I should not open it because if I do, I may regret it. But if I do not
open it, I will have to sit here and wait and stare at the phone until it begins to
ring, which I, of course, know it will.

And so, closing my eyes and rearing back my head, so that I might not have to look,
I grasp the handles, and I tug. I tug, and the armoire opens, and I dare not peek.
I count to three in my head. And in the very back of my mind, I can see Connie now,
think of her as a child, in a red dress we had bought her for Christmas. I should
like to remember her that way, I think, not how I remember my father—not as a
faceless, blackened eye in a box.

I turn back my head. I take another breath. And I open my eyes. I see clothing, and
only clothing, a closet full of patterned blouses and dresses I have so few
opportunities to wear. But I will have to pick something now, in black, for the
services, I think, for whichever one I will have to attend.

Not that one, though. But maybe this one, I decide, reaching out to run my fingers
along the edges of a dark, collared dress, with silver buttons down its back. No,
maybe not. Reaching into the armoire again, I pull out a dress with a low waist, a
black rose stitched on the hip. I could wear it with the long silver chain my
husband bought me, I think, the one with the silver charms. But maybe that would be
too garish, too bold for a such a grim occasion.

No, I think I could wear it with my mother’s pearls; they are more understated.

I had known it when she died too. But she had not gone suddenly, no, not like a
lamp abruptly turned out before the dark. Her own end had come gradually, like the
waning glow of sunset, bit by bit, until night could be the only natural, expected
conclusion. The phone rang in the middle of the afternoon that day, when I had been
folding laundry, the weight of knowing in my stomach.

The hospital had told us to go home and to rest that morning and that they would
call if anything changed. But something had indeed changed before they decided to
tell us. I wandered into the kitchen that day to find Connie already with the
telephone’s cord jumbled around her elbow. And I knew for certain.

I should call Connie now, I think. I should have her check on Howard and the
children. No, no, it would wake them. They would be upset. And really, it is just
as likely to be a co-worker or someone from the church. These thoughts bring no
comfort.

But still, wrapped in them, like a terrible, frayed quilt, I reach into to the
closet once more, shifting through the row of heavy clothing, in search of the
long-sleeved dress with the belt. I will wear that one to the funeral, I think. It
might be the proper choice because I had worn it to my husband’s funeral.
I was alone in bed on the night Richard died. He had been working late, as he so
often did. And I had fallen asleep early, with the television on, lulled by the
lullaby of commercials and rain. I awoke, as if from a nightmare, to find an
infomercial about a countertop grill just starting to loop.

The feeling once again took hold as I rolled over to check the alarm clock,
blinking red. And I lay there for a good long while, watching my phone, curled up
in a ball beneath the covers, as some sports star extolled the virtues of sleek
design, grease traps, and easy cleaning.

The phone rang at 2:27 in the morning, and it was on the third chime that I felt a
sudden shift in the bed beside me. A ragged, heavy breath ghosted my ear, hot and
garbled, the way a person chokes, and the familiar weight of an arm stretched over
to wrap 'round my shoulder.

The exhaling came, then, again and again, a steady, labored noise, rattling in some
phantom throat. But I did not dare turn around. I wish, now, that I had, but I did
not. I stared forward. I did not blink. And I picked up my cellphone, plugged into
the wall there.

“Hello?”

“There’s water in the car, Cas. Oh God, there’s so much water in the car.”

I let out a long breath at Richard’s voice, distorted by static, and all at once,
the bed was empty again, and only silence was ringing in my ear.

A police officer told me a few days later that his little silver Ford had been
caught in the sudden storm and that he had swerved too hard around a bend in the
road. He had died from the collision when the vehicle hit the water, they had said.
And the drop was too high for any other possibility, of course. So, at least, he
did not drown, something said to me as if it were a genuine comfort.

And he had not been conscious to see the water filling his car. They did not find
his phone.

Oh, God, I should call Connie. I cannot take this anymore. Turning from the
armoire, I move once more for the bed, for my telephone still plugged into the
wall, perched there on the end table. I stare, and it rings. And I scream.

I can recall, even from where I am now, that it was a full, horrible noise, hurled
from the very depths of my stomach, as if I were finally letting that terrible
great stone out, the one that had been sitting there within it. It echoes from the
very core of me. But I do not answer the phone.

My neighbor, in the apartment next-door, is a nice young man. He has shaggy hair
and an earring, and he checks in on me from time to time. I stir him from sleep
with my wailing, and he will, a few moments from now, come to knock on my door. I
do not answer because I am picking up the telephone to see that I have missed a
call from Connie. And shaking there in my dark bedroom as he knocks, I decide to
dial her again.

My neighbor will call the police. He will tell them that he heard me scream a
little bit after 3 in the morning. And he will tell that same story still, for
many, many years to come, whispered around darkened tables and across the
occasional campfire.