After seventy-three years on this earth, I know a dozen flavors of silence. There is the soft hush after a long day, when dishes are washed and lights are low. There is the heavy quiet of grief, when even the ticking of a clock feels loud.
And there is the wrong kind of silence, the kind that feels like a held breath right before something breaks.
That Thanksgiving, the silence was wrong. I lay in bed for a moment, watching the faint pattern of morning light on the ceiling.
On holidays, I am usually awake before the sun, already mentally basting turkeys and counting place settings. My body is an old clock; it knows the rhythm of family gatherings.
In my mind, I could almost hear it: the thud of little feet in the hallway, the cartoon theme songs leaking under the door, the comforting gurgle of the coffee maker that my son, Michael, always started for me.
None of those sounds were there. For a few seconds, I thought maybe I’d woken up too early, caught the house still sleeping. Then my ears adjusted to the quiet, and I realized it wasn’t sleep.
It was absence.
My knees complained when I swung my legs over the side of the bed, but that was nothing new. I reached for my blue robe hanging on the bedpost, the one I’ve had so long the cuffs have gone a little shiny, and shrugged it on.
It smelled faintly of laundry detergent and the lavender sachets I tuck into my drawers. Harold used to say I always smelled like a linen closet.
It used to annoy me.
Now I would have given anything to hear him tease me again. When I opened my bedroom door, the hallway was bathed in pale gold light from the window at the far end. Normally, that kind of light makes a home feel warm.
This morning, the warmth stopped at the walls.
“Michael?” I called, my voice echoing down the hall. “Amanda?”
Nothing.
I listened harder, the way you do when you’re sure you must have missed something. No cartoons from the den.
No whispered sibling arguments over a toy.
No clatter of pots or the hiss of a preheating oven. No soft scolding from Amanda telling the kids not to wake Grandma. I checked the guest room where my grandchildren always insisted on sleeping when they stayed over.
The beds were made, sheets pulled tight enough to bounce a coin.
The stuffed rabbit and superhero bear that normally sat on the pillows were gone. So were the mismatched socks usually abandoned on the floor.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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