When the room went dark, she heard her name.

It wasn’t a sound, not truly, but a pressure in the air, a settling of the old house’s bones that formed itself into the two syllables of her. The heat of the Piedmont, Alabama day, a thick, sodden blanket, had finally suffocated the faltering generator. The electric hum she had long since ceased to hear was gone, and in its absence was a silence so profound it seemed to ring. Regina sat in her father’s worn wingback chair, the horsehair stuffing clawing at her back through the thin cotton of her dress, and did not move.

The name came again. Regina. From the hallway, this time. Or perhaps from the parlor, where the dust motes would now be frozen in their eternal, sunlit dance. It was his voice. It was always his voice, the ghost of it, a rasp of whiskey and regret woven into the very plaster. Benjamin. Twenty years layin’ in the red dirt of the family plot, but never gone from the rooms. He was in the warped floorboard that groaned by the bookshelf, in the faint scent of pipe tobacco that clung to the velvet drapes, a prisoner of the air itself.

She could see it without seeing: the slant of the late afternoon sun through the tall, grimy windows would be gone, replaced by a greenish gloom from the encroaching oaks. The portraits of her dead father, mother, brother, Benjamin, would be receding into their frames, their painted eyes becoming pools of deeper shadow, watching. The house, Eighty Oaks, was not a structure but a second skin, a suffocating weight of history she had both loved and resented, an inheritance of quiet ruin.

Her hand, a network of blue veins and thin, parchment skin, rested on the arm of the chair. She willed it to rise, to strike a match, to light the kerosene lamp on the table. It remained. It was as if the darkness had a physical mass, pinning her. Let it, she thought. “Let the dark have its way. Let it swallow the sagging porch, the weedy garden, the memory of his hands.”

Regina.

This one was closer. A whisper from just behind her right ear. She felt the fine hairs on her neck prickle. It was not fear, not anymore. It was a familiar weariness, a conversation resumed after a brief, twenty-year pause. She had been a girl of twenty when they married him to her, a piece of land traded for a promise of debt relief. He was thirty, already haunted by a future he couldn’t control, his family’s fortune leaching away into the unforgiving soil. He had a kind smile that never reached his eyes, and hands that were gentle but cold.

She remembered the first time she saw the cruelty in him. Not cruelty toward her, never that, but toward the world. A hired man had dropped a crate of china, a last, shattered remnant of his mother’s pride. Benjamin’s face had gone still, a mask of calm, but his eyes held a black, impotent fury. He had paid the man and sent him away, his voice soft as silk. But that night, in this very room, he had drunk until the mask cracked and he wept, great, ragged sobs that seemed to tear something loose inside his chest. She had learned then that a man’s soul could be a room locked tight, and the key thrown away.

The darkness pressed in. She could hear the small, secret life of the house now: the scuttling of a beetle in the wainscoting, the groan of a beam cooling after the day’s heat, the thin, high whine of a mosquito near her ear. And beneath it all, the sound of the land, the ceaseless, patient hum of the cicadas in the trees, a chorus for the dying day.

“I’m here,” she thought, the words forming in her mind but making no sound. “I’ve always been here. You don’t have to keep callin’.”

A floorboard creaked, a specific one, three feet from her chair. The one that always sang under a certain weight. Her breath caught in her throat, a dry, painful little hitch. The air stirred, bringing with it the undeniable, faint fragrance of his particular brand of tobacco, a scent she had not truly smelled in two decades. It was as real as the dust on her tongue.

And then she saw it. Or her mind, in the absolute black, painted it for her. A shimmer, a concentration of the gloom that took the shape of a man’s shoulder, the slope of a bowed head. It was not a ghost in a sheet, but a memory made manifest, a stain of sorrow on the fabric of the house.

He was sorry. That was the message, the sum of all these whispers. He was sorry for the silences that stretched longer than the front porch. Sorry for the money that vanished like water in sand. Sorry for the child they never had, the one whose absence was a fourth presence in every room. Sorry for leaving her alone with the decaying weight of Eighty Oaks, a widow to a ghost long before he was dead.

A tear, warm and surprising, traced a path through the powder on her cheek. It was not for him, not entirely. It was for the girl she had been, who had believed she could fill the empty rooms with laughter. It was for the years that had passed in a procession of identical days, marked only by the slow fading of the wallpaper and the deepening cracks in the ceiling.

Outside, a bird called, a lone, clear note in the twilight. The generator, with a sputter and a reluctant cough, shuddered back to life. The single bulb in the foyer flickered, then blazed, a harsh, yellow intrusion. The room snapped back into existence, sharp and prosaic. The wingback chair was just a chair. The hallway was empty. The scent of tobacco was gone, replaced by the smell of hot dust on the lampshade.

Regina sat, blinking in the sudden light. The weight was gone. The silence was just silence again. She slowly, stiffly, raised her hand and wiped the tear from her face. She was alone. She had always been alone. But for a moment, in the forgiving dark, she had not been. And that, she knew, was the true haunting. Not the ghost, but the memory of not being lonely. She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes, waiting for the night to finish its fall.

*****

New Yesterdays is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.