(version 22/10/2013)
A sound woke me up. I open my eyes and wait for them to get used to the dark. I don’t like the dark, there is too much I can’t see. There are stars hanging from my ceiling, it is called a mobile, I don’t know why. The stars look dark grey, almost black, now, because it is night, but I know that in daylight they are gold. The sound returns. Something rolling over the wooden floor. You wouldn’t notice it during the day, but at night the house is so quiet that you could hear even a needle falling to the floor, if you dropped one. At least that is what mama says. But mama hasn’t said much for a while now. She has gone very pale. I think she tries very hard not to cry. The rolling is still going on. I want to go and look but I want to stay in bed and hide my face under the covers and pretend it’s not there. I wish mama was here in my room, no I wish I was in her and papa’s room. For the first few nights after Jesse was gone, they let me sleep in their bed. But I wriggle too much, papa said. I need to find out what the rolling is or I’ll never sleep.
The floor is cold and creaky, but I have trained myself to tip-toe through the house without being seen or heard by anyone. Sometimes I would sneak into Jesse’s room because I was afraid of sleeping alone. He would pretend to get annoyed, saying ‘Go away’, but if I didn’t go away he would just let me stay there. I’ve always been the best at Hide and Seek, too. Jesse is a boy and boys make more noise. I mean, Jesse was a boy. Now he is in Heaven, and I can’t sleep next to him anymore. I can’t play Hide and Seek with him anymore. Too bad, I know all the best places to hide in the house, like the cupboard beneath the bathroom sink, or the dark space behind the washing machine in the scullery.
I was heading for mama and papa’s room, but I’ve stopped walking now. The sound is coming from Jesse’s room. This is impossible because Jesse is not here. Maybe a family of rats has taken over his room. Maybe they are playing with his toys. They are still there, the toys, waiting to be played with again.
I open his door. The room is lighter than mine, because mama doesn’t close his curtains at night anymore. I see a boy in a school uniform sitting on his knees on the floor. He is even wearing his black shoes that are part of the uniform, even though it is night. It looks like Jesse, but it can’t be. He is rolling marbles back and forth across the wood. He looks up at me. It is Jesse. I want to cry, but I think my body is frozen. ‘Will you play with me?’ Jesse asks. His voice is normal, the way it always was. It shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be able to talk. He shouldn’t be here. He should be in Heaven. The cough sent him up to Heaven. He holds up a marble for me. Maybe he came back to play with me. Maybe he came back so I wouldn’t have to be alone. That is nice of him. Maybe I don’t have to be afraid of him. I take the marble from his hand, his cold fingers shock me. I try not to let him see that I am shocked. I roll the marble across the floor and he giggles before rolling it back to me.
I wake up and the room is bright. ‘Sarah, what are you doing in here? Were you in here all night?’ I don’t know if mama is angry, she should be but she just sounds sad, like she has been for many days now. ‘I was playing with Jesse, mama, he woke me up.’ A strange sound comes from somewhere in her chest, she throws her hands to her face and then she runs out of the room. Now I think she is talking to papa. ‘No you deal with it!’ I think she is saying, a little angry now. Papa comes into the room and says I better not visit this room anymore, because it upsets mama. He says I can have any of the toys here if I want, I can take them to my own room and play there. He says I shouldn’t walk around at night, I should sleep at night. I am afraid to say Jesse’s name again, because they haven’t said it for many days.
It is night again. I made myself stay awake, waiting to hear the rolling marbles again, but when I finally hear a sound, it is not from a marble. It is the ka-ching! Sound of a supermarket till. I jump up from my bed and quietly make my way to Jesse’s room. He is wearing a paper hat, the one that I made for him on his eighth birthday, and he is sitting on the floor again. In front of him stands the fake till, with its fake money, that mama and papa gave us as a joined Christmas gift last year. It is blue and red, it doesn’t really look like the tills I’ve seen in the shops, but mama says that tills used to look like this when she was a child. ‘Buy something,’ Jesse says, without looking up. I skip, skip, skip to the toy box beneath the window, and pick out my favourite pieces of fake fruit: the lemon and the banana. I like yellow things, they are bright as daylight. I offer them to Jesse. He pushes the buttons on the fake till. Ka-ching!
The next night, I wait until my parents go quiet in their bedroom, and tip-toe to Jesse’s room. I wait outside his door, for him to make a sound, to invite me in. My head is heavy and my eyes are trying to fall shut. I am almost asleep, when I hear the sound of the piano keys. I forgot they moved the piano to his room. It wasn’t there when he was still alive during the day. I go into his room. There is only one seat in front of the piano, the one that Jesse is sitting on. I sit next to him on my knees. We learned to play a song, not so long ago, for our grandpa’s birthday. Jesse on the lower keys, myself on the higher ones. I still know how to play it. We play it together again. We are giggling both. But then the door is thrown open behind me, making a noise. ‘What are you doing?’ their voices are loud, angry. We have stopped playing. I look at Jesse, but Jesse has disappeared. Papa grabs my shoulder, it hurts. I start crying.
Papa locked the door to Jesse’s room. At night I hear sounds again. I sit in the hallway on the cold floor and I press my ear to the door. I don’t know what that sound is, but it stops suddenly. Then I hear him move closer to the door. ‘Sarah?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you not coming to play with me?’ ‘I can’t. It’s locked. I’m sorry.’ It is quiet for a moment, but then I hear loud banging against the door. ‘I want you to play with me!’ ‘Sssh sssh!’ I try to make him stop. ‘Okay, okay, wait here,’ I say. I run to my bedroom. I pick the book on the top of my pile of books. I run back to his door. ‘Listen Jesse, I think you’ll like this story.’
‘Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”’
It has gone very quiet behind the door. ‘Jesse? Are you there?’ I ask. ‘Read me more,’ he answers.
I read until I fall asleep.
Six Years Later
I arrive at my old house for the first time in a very long time. I am returning from boarding school. It isn’t as exciting as it sounds. Girls with braces, girls calling each other nasty names, girls smoking underneath the bathroom window and ratting each other out to the teacher. But at least it took my mind off things. It saved me from depression, that black monster that took a hold of my mother, all those years ago. It gripped her tight, immobilized her. She no longer lives here. She couldn’t take the silence anymore. She might come back one day. I wonder if I will recognize her then, if she will recognize me. I have grown a lot taller. I have started my period. I don’t need braces, because I brush well, says my dentist. My dad still lives here. It must be depressing to live here alone. But he travels a lot for work, so I guess he doesn’t have to be here much. Still, the nights alone must be terrible.
I stop in front of the door that Dad calls “the Study” now. it is a ridiculous name for a room that nobody ever enters, let alone studies in. Do I dare go inside? All day we have been pretending it doesn’t exist, while we moved all my possessions back into my old room. My room still looked more or less the same as it did. I still have stars on my ceiling. Maybe I should take them off, I am no longer a child. I don’t want to think about how I am older now than Jesse will ever be. He stopped aging at nine. Does that make me the older sibling now? Or can I no longer say I have a sibling, I am a sibling? I don’t want to think about it because it makes me feel cold from my cheeks to my spine.
I turn the knob. The door is no longer locked. That would be stupid, to put all these books in this room and call it a Study and then make it impossible for anyone to actually go in and study. I look around, trying to find something familiar. Dad put these books here after my mum left. They were hers, she studied Arts at university, or something like that. Dad only reads newspapers. The room looks very different now, it looks like a library more than a boy’s room, but his bed is still there. Woah it is tiny, I think. The piano is also still here.
I sit down on the little stool and carefully lay my palms on the keys, making sure not to press them, letting my fingers slide over the cool black and white keys, like trying to decide how to lay pieces in a game of Dominoes. I breathe in slowly, breathe out. I thought I forgot the song, but my hands remember it. It sounds weird with only the high notes, it is only half of a song, like a sandwich without anything inbetween, just two slices of bread on top of each other. I am about to stop playing, embarrassed, but then the low keys start to make a sound. I look beside me, and there he is. Not a little boy anymore. Fifteen years old. A kind face, a long nose. He notices me staring and he looks at me, and smiles. I smile back and try to ignore the stinging of my eyes. We are playing the song together, the way it should be. ‘Thanks for coming back,’ he whispers.
‘I’m sorry I ever left,’ I say. ‘I won’t do it again.’
