Excerpt: The Woman Who Came Before

When you don’t know the sounds of a house yet, the night is a landscape of worrisome noises-- wind in branches you can’t see but can almost feel breaking against the house like the grasping bones of a giant hand. The ticking and bumping (“Is that a rat? Or a mouse?") of the heat coming on and going off, the rattling and tapping of a hood vent in gusts of heavy rain. A neighbor’s dog, howling to be let in after dark. The dripping of a faucet with a broken washer, that slowly grows into a whistling rush, an unsettling burble, if left unrepaired long enough. The quiet squeak of an unsecured bathroom door falling open again after someone gets up in the night to pee.
Then there are the noises you can’t place, no matter how hard you think about it, coming out your bleary-minded sleep state to realize that you think you heard something; a short, sharp cry, a faint tinkle of glassware in another room, the soft echo of a tune from below the stairway. You think about what you heard, and realize two things; it’s not something you should have heard, since the only other person in the house is fast asleep next to you, and has been. And they didn’t hear the sound, or you trying to wake them up to catch it before it died.
You’re in your new house, essentially alone, and sleepy, and so you convince yourself that you misheard something natural, and normal to the night. That you’ll find something that fell off a shelf near the window during a high gust, or any other explanation that makes sense and doesn’t leave you with unanswered questions. With unanswered feelings of anxiety, that the place you’ve arrogantly called yours, because of the mere signing of some papers and a couple of handshakes and forced smiles, has belonged to someone else in the past, who might still be there, in some way. In some form.
It’s just the boiler downstairs. It’s just the sump-pump, right? Nothing unusual.