Hang Up the Phone

Sylvie is, in earnest, a creature of the night, a woman of candle-lit reading and record-player crooning and the all-encompassing sense of comfort that comes from knowing nobody expects anything of her before the sun rises. There is a marked difference between the shadows made stark by sunlight and the dimness that accompanies the closing of blinds, the locking of doors, the closing of eyes, and that difference is where Sylvie makes her home, in the crevices between light and the absence of it.

Tonight she has invited Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into that crevice with her, and she is enraptured by the story-within-a-story, the danger of curiosity, the tragedy of creation. So enraptured, as a matter of fact, that the first knock goes unnoticed—so many things do go bump in the night, after all, and why should this one pierce her awareness any differently? It’s a light, rhythmic thing, a familiar bum-ba-bum that mimics her own heartbeat.

But the second knock is louder, firmer, intentional. BUM-ba-bum.

Nobody should expect anything of Sylvie in the dark, least of all the only person who has ever knocked to that particular tune. That is why the knock on the door makes her go wholly, entirely still.

The clock on the mantle—analog, because Sylvie does not want any part in the digital revolution and has remained steadfastly stubborn despite Harris’s insistent pleas—reads 11:59, the thin silvery minute hand nearly centering itself over its broader brethren, but not quite.

Not quite.

If she’s quiet, they’ll go away, whoever it is. Any normal person would be sleeping at this hour, she can’t possibly be expected to answer the door. But Sylvie’s thoughts are traitorous, wild things, and faces flip through her mind’s eye like a rampant deck of cards before settling on one in particular. Wouldn’t that be something, she thinks. She mimics the knock soundlessly on the cover of her book. Bum-ba-bum.

Something in her knows who is at the door, although it is impossible.

Something in her knows, although they have not spoken in five years now, although she should be across the sea in Marseille, although she was not given the address of Sylvie’s modest little brownstone for very good reason.

The very good reason feels less solid in the fluidity of the late hour, tinted by slivers of moonlight spidering their way through cracks in the blinds. Anything is possible at a time like this.

She marks her page silently in her book. There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.

There is no third knock, not yet, only a heavy sigh that doesn’t seem like it truly comes from the other side of the thick oak door. “Sylvie, I know you’re awake.”

I’m not, she almost says, nearly laughs from muscle memory alone.

Sylvie, I know you’re awake.

I’m not.

Oh, so you don’t want any of this cake from Tenner’s, then?

I actually don’t know who said that. I am so wide awake, I’ve never been more wide awake in my whole life. Hey—give me that!

The voice should surprise her, but doesn’t. What surprises her is the little spark of pleasure deep in her gut, a small thing that starts to grow and make a lantern of her ribcage, steady and warm. Sylvie should be afraid, she thinks, or angry, or worried, because absence did not make the heart grow fonder, it only grew a hard shell around it that even Harris could not break through, not all the way.

It is midnight.

“Sylvie. Please.”

When Sylvie was six years old, she scraped her knee on the playground. She was in the midst of a game of tag, and an errant rock had come between her and escape. James from Ms. Holloway’s class had tagged her and kept on running, laughing aloud, with no regard for Sylvie’s bloodied knee or the hot tears she was fighting to hold back.

A hand appeared in front of her, skin freckled and warm, a blue bracelet tied around its wrist.

“What a butt,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose in James’s general direction. Sylvie swiped her hand across her wet eyes and took the girl’s hand.

“What a butt,” she agreed. And that was how Sylvie and Thea became best friends.

From that point on they were inseparable, all the way through grade school and into the daunting halls of the junior high, through drama and sports tryouts and good and bad grades. They remained steadfast even in high school, that horrifying place where friend groups formed and shattered and shifted by the day. When Thea had her first kiss in the empty freshman locker bay, the first thing she’d done was run to tell Sylvie. When Sylvie’s mother told her art was not a real career, she went to cry on Thea’s shoulder. When Sylvie got her cat, a little gray thing named Lady with paws dipped in snow, Thea helped her pick out the collar.

They were roommates in college, obviously. They did life hand in hand, side by side. Sylvie was much a part of Thea as Thea was a part of her. Sylvie had fallen in love and Thea was supposed to be the maid of honor, obviously. (Just like Sylvie would have been her maid of honor if Matthew from the science department hadn’t turned out to be a massive idiot. What a butt, Sylvie had said when Thea had collapsed into her arms. She’d laughed, wet and disbelieving. What a butt, she’d echoed.)

There is a third knock. Bum-ba-bum.

It is 12:01. A new day in the darkness, and her old best friend is outside her door.

“Excuse me,” she whispers to Lady, dislodging the cat from her lap and moving to undo the deadbolt. Her hand hovers above the door handle. She is being an idiot. Thea has been radio silent for five years and there is no reason a ghost should be outside her door.

But curiosity is a powerful thing.

Thea looks precisely as Sylvie remembers her. Red hair tumbles down her shoulders, some of it caught in the silk scarf around her neck, and her eyes are wide and green and relieved.

“I don’t have much time,” she says.

Sylvie is back on the playground with tears in her eyes. “How?” she whispers. Her hand reaches out without her say-so, clasping Thea’s in what feels like a half-tangible grip. As if she is here, but not really.

Thea’s gaze traces their hands in the air, the golden ring on Sylvie’s finger. Lady bumps against Sylvie’s ankles, then blinks up at Thea and immediately begins to purr.

“Oh,” Thea murmurs. “Hello, love.”

“You’re not here,” Sylvie insists, swiping agitatedly at her tears. “You can’t be here.”

“I can’t,” Thea agrees. “Or I couldn’t, but now I am, but I will not be again quite soon.”

“Can’t you stay?”

Thea’s small, sad smile is answer enough.

“I just wanted to tell you that you’ve got to stop waiting.”

Sylvie doesn’t ask what she means, because her book lay open on the table next to the phone, beside an old tourist map of France.

“I finished my masterpiece,” Thea says, squeezing Sylvie’s hand as much as you can really squeeze when you’re sort of only half-there and have been dead for five years. “Short-lived, maybe, but. I had to make sure you promised to finish yours.”

Her gaze travels to the book on the table. Its title is not visible from here, but Thea knows what it is anyway.

“The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream,” she reads from nothing but memory. “I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.”

“Is that what it’s like?” Sylvie asks. Thea knows what she means.

She frowns in the way that means she is not upset but reflective, then says, “Yes, I suppose it was a bit like that. I am not here, but I’m here, and this feels as real to me as before, or before felt as pretend to me as now. Does that make sense?”

It does not, and Sylvie only smiles. “I miss you so much.”

“I know,” Thea says, nodding to the phone. “Please, stop it.” It’s such a Thea thing to say that Sylvie nearly cries all over again. “You are twenty-seven. You are married to the love of your life. You are a genius and an artist and you have a lovely little cat who somehow has not gotten any bigger since high school. You have a home that is so Sylvie it makes me want to cry. You have to hang up the phone, my love.” Her smile is wry but real. “I have no more stories of France. Nothing has changed there in a very long time, you know.”

“I have stories for you,” Sylvie says, a bit petulantly. “Everything has changed here in the last five years, you know.”

“And when you do reach the end, you won’t have good reception either, and so you better have a lifetime of those stories to tell me. I’m awfully bored with mine.”

There has never really been any arguing with Thea.

“I love you,” Sylvie says, because she already feels that her best friend is fading again, slipping through the cracks in the proverbial pavement, feeling one more year, one more ocean away every second.

“Yes, I love you too.” Thea’s mostly voice, now. “Don’t let the cat out, darling.”

Sylvie had not even been there—France. Thea was on a solo trip, something about self-discovery and the pursuit of true art, and Sylvie only knew something was not right when she stopped getting long-distance calls at strange hours of the night. She had taken to staying up late, craving her friend’s brightly-colored descriptions of the street vendors and motorcycles and wide-eyed boys in bars. Sylvie found she quite liked the night, and Lady was herself a mostly nocturnal creature, so it worked out.

It was Thea’s mother who called Sylvie in tears with the news. That one of those wide-eyed boys had in fact taken Thea on one of those motorcycles, and she had never gotten off.

She’d always insisted on cremation. When I die, Sylvie, you’ve got to make them burn me, I simply cannot have everyone staring at my face like that, how unnerving. Sylvie boarded a flight to France and scattered Thea’s ashes along the Huveaune River. That had been that. Five years ago.

Lady has stepped onto the front porch, leaving two tiny, dainty front pawprints in the snow. Sylvie bends to scoop her up, and footsteps pad out of the hall behind her.

“Who was that?” Harris mumbles, midnight-drowsy and confused.

Sylvie gazes out at the snow. There are no footprints besides Lady’s, no vehicles, nothing to disrupt the fresh sheet of fluff enveloping the sidewalk and the street.

“Nothing,” she says. “No one. I thought I heard…”

She must look crazy, but Harris only smiles tiredly and says, “Come to bed, Syl.”

Sylvie nods, goes to redo the deadbolt on the door, convinced she’s imagined it all. How absurd; Thea, a ghost, a midnight conversation in an empty doorway. But as she slides the bolt home and dislodges her sleeve ever so slightly, her gaze catches on her wrist.

On it is a worn blue bracelet.