The Porch Light at the End of the Road

The first evening the porch light came on, Louise drove past before she understood what she had seen. She stopped beside the drainage ditch and looked in her rearview mirror. There it was, a pale yellow circle at the end of the road. Beneath it stood the house where her grandmother had lived, its windows dark, its roof sagging toward the chinaberry tree. They had disconnected the electricity eleven years ago. Louise knew because she had paid the final bill. Behind her, someone blew a horn. She pulled onto the shoulder and waited until the road was empty before driving home.

October had come to south Louisiana with its usual small promises. A cool morning. A brown leaf floating in the birdbath. By afternoon, Louise’s blouse stuck between her shoulder blades, and the grocery-store pumpkins sweated beneath their display of artificial leaves. She had lived alone long enough to have habits she would have found embarrassing to explain. She greeted the house when she entered. She left the radio on while she showered. Sometimes she set her supper across from the empty chair, then moved it back.

That evening, she ate standing at the kitchen counter. She considered calling the electric company, but they'd ask questions about accounts and ownership. Her grandmother’s property had passed to an uncle, then to his children. Nobody wanted it enough to repair it or small enough to sell. Someone must have finally done something. She rinsed her plate. Before bed, she checked that her porch light worked.

By Thursday, someone had swept the steps. Louise slowed without meaning to. The old drifts of leaves were gone, and the broken flowerpot beside the railing had disappeared. A fern hung from the hook above the porch swing. No car sat in the yard.

She drove past again the following evening. A cardigan lay across the swing. Even from the road, she recognized the mustard-colored wool and the brown buttons her grandmother had replaced with mismatched ones from a sewing tin. Louise pulled over. Her grandmother had been buried in that cardigan. She remembered arguing with the funeral director because he had suggested a blue dress. Her grandmother disliked blue. Louise had explained this with a firmness she had never managed while the woman was alive. Now the cardigan moved slightly in the porch breeze, one sleeve slipping through the swing’s chain. Louise drove home with both hands tight on the wheel.

That night, she dreamed of the kitchen. Not anything happening in it. Only the room itself: the flour canister, the curled edge of the linoleum, the little wooden stool she had stood on to wash dishes. In the dream, she was waiting for permission to get down. When she woke, her feet were pressed together beneath the blanket.

On Sunday, she went to the house in daylight. The grass brushed her calves. Small burrs caught in her trousers. At the steps, she paused to listen, but only the dry ticking of insects and a truck changing gears somewhere beyond the trees answered. The fern was gone. So was the cardigan. Leaves filled the porch, damp and flattened, some old enough to have become part of the wood. The swing hung crookedly from a single rusted chain.

Louise stood on the bottom step. From here she could see the kitchen window. A strip of brittle lace remained on its rod. Beyond it, the room was empty. She took out her phone and photographed the porch. Then she photographed the light fixture. There was no bulb. She was putting the phone away when she heard a chair scrape across the kitchen floor. Louise stepped backward into the grass.

“Hello?”

Nothing answered. She waited, embarrassed by how badly she wanted someone to appear—a cousin, a workman, anyone with keys and an ordinary reason for being there. Another sound came from the kitchen. A teaspoon touching the inside of a cup. Louise left without turning around.

At home, she enlarged the photographs. The empty socket was plain enough. So were the leaves, the broken swing, the fern hook with nothing hanging from it. She studied the kitchen window. Something pale sat in the lower corner. A reflection, perhaps, although it seemed too far inside the room. She enlarged it until the image broke apart. It looked like a child’s hand resting against the glass. Louise put the phone facedown. For a while she sat very still, listening to the refrigerator run.

She could have taken the highway home from work. It added twelve minutes and two traffic lights. On Monday, she did. On Tuesday, she turned onto her grandmother’s road. She told herself she needed to know whether anyone else could see it. But no other cars were there, and by the time the house appeared, she had forgotten the explanation.

The porch light was burning. The fern hung green and full. Both swing chains hung straight, and the cardigan lay where it had been before. Someone had set a glass of iced tea on the railing. Louise stopped at the yard's edge. The front screen door opened. She could not see who stood behind it. The porch light illuminated the steps but left the doorway strangely dim.

Then her grandmother said, “There you are, Cricket.”

Louise’s foot slipped from the brake. The car rolled forward before she caught it. Nobody called her that anymore. Nobody had since she was nine, when her grandmother decided she had grown too old for pet names.

“I’ve kept your supper warm.”

Louise stared at the doorway. Her grandmother had been dead eleven years, and in all the years before that, she had never kept supper warm for anyone. If you were late, you ate what was left.

“Come on,” the voice said. “You must be tired.”

Louise began to cry so suddenly that she made a small, startled sound. The screen door opened wider. She put the car in reverse. As she backed down the road, the voice called after her. This time it sounded less certain.

“Was it something I said?”

She took the highway for three days. She slept with the television on and woke each morning to strangers discussing weather in places she had never been. On Friday, she found a burr on her bedroom carpet. A little brown hook of a thing, caught beside the bed. She must have carried it home on her trousers. She vacuumed the room.

That evening, while washing a cup, she caught the smell of her grandmother’s hand cream. Rosewater, with something medicinal underneath. Louise turned off the tap. The smell faded.

“Enough,” she said aloud.

The house settled around her.

Saturday afternoon, she called her cousin Paul. He answered from somewhere loud.

“Has anybody been working on Grandma’s place?”

“Working on it how?”

“Cleaning up. Turning the power on.”

Paul laughed. “I wish.”

She asked whether anyone had a key.

“Probably half the parish. Why?”

For a moment she considered telling him. Instead, she said she had seen a light.

“Kids, maybe. Don’t go fooling around out there by yourself. Floor’s rotten.”

Before hanging up, he asked if she was all right.

“Yes,” Louise said.

It was such an easy answer. She had been giving it to people for most of her life.

She went back at dusk. Later, she would remember that she had brushed her hair before leaving. That she had changed out of the old shirt she wore around the house. The porch light was on. A second glass of tea stood beside the first. Louise stopped at the foot of the steps.

“I know you’re not her.”

The swing moved once, gently, though the air was still. From inside came the sound of a chair being pushed back.

“Of course you do.”

The voice was her grandmother’s, but softer than Louise remembered it. She could hear the effort in that softness, the care with which each word was being placed.

“What are you?”

The screen door opened. Her grandmother stood behind it in a pale cotton dress. Not as she had been at the end, shrunken and furious in a hospital bed, but as she had looked when Louise was small. Her hair was pinned up. Her feet were bare. Louise gripped the railing. The woman looked down at her hand.

“You still do that.”

“What?”

“Hold on to something when you’re afraid I’ll be cross.”

Louise let go. For the first time, the woman smiled.

“I won’t be.”

A plate waited on the kitchen table behind her. Louise could see butter beans, rice, a biscuit split open beneath a square of melting butter. She had not eaten butter beans in years.

“I can do it differently,” the woman said.

Louise looked up. “What?”

“This time.”

Somewhere in the trees, a bird gave a single sharp cry. The woman pressed a hand against the screen.

“You can tell me about your day. I’ll let you finish.”

Louise’s mouth opened, but no words came.

“And if you break something, we’ll clean it up.”

She had never told anyone about the bowl. She had been seven. It was a cheap bowl, white with yellow flowers, and her hands were wet from washing it. For the rest of that winter, she had eaten from a plastic margarine tub. The woman watched her remember.

“I should have picked it up myself,” she said.

Louise sat down on the bottom step. For years she had imagined an apology arriving in the mail, although she knew how foolish that was. A letter discovered in a drawer. Something written when her grandmother was alone and could bear to be truthful. Now the words were here, coming through a screen door.

“Why didn’t you love me?” Louise asked.

The woman became very still. Behind her, the kitchen seemed to draw away. The table remained where it was, but the darkness beyond it deepened until Louise could no longer see the far wall.

“I did,” the woman said.

Louise shook her head. The woman waited.

Then she said, “I didn’t know how.”

Louise closed her eyes. That was closer. That was something she had told herself, on generous days. A floorboard creaked. When she opened her eyes, the woman was leaning toward the screen.

“Is that better?”

Louise rose. The woman’s smile remained, but something behind it had gone alert.

“What did you say?”

“I want to get it right.”

A small metallic sound came from the kitchen. A spoon against a cup. Louise looked past the woman. A child sat at the table now, her back to the door. Her hair had been cut unevenly above her shoulders. One bare foot hooked around the leg of the chair. Louise knew that haircut. She had done it herself with the sewing scissors. The child was eating from a yellow margarine tub.

“Who is that?”

The woman did not turn. “You,” she said.

The child stopped eating.

“Look at me,” Louise whispered.

The little girl’s shoulders rose almost to her ears.

“Please.”

“She doesn’t like being watched,” the woman said.

But Louise remembered. Watching had never been the trouble. It was turning around without permission. She stepped toward the door. Immediately, the woman moved aside. The opening beyond her was wide enough for Louise to enter, and from somewhere deep inside came the smell of clean sheets dried in sunlight. Her grandmother’s good sheets. The ones Louise had never been allowed to sleep on.

“We’ve made your room ready,” the woman said.

Louise looked down at the threshold. The brass strip was polished bright. Beneath it, caught between the wood and the metal, lay a small white crescent. A child’s fingernail. At the table, the girl began to tremble. Louise stepped backward. The woman’s face changed—not into something monstrous, but into an expression so familiar that Louise felt seven years old before she understood it.

“Don’t make a scene.”

The child flinched. That was what saved her. Louise backed down the steps.

“You don’t get to keep her,” she said.

For a moment, the woman looked genuinely puzzled. Then she glanced into the kitchen.

“Oh,” she said. “That one.”

Louise ran. Behind her, the screen door struck its frame.

She reached her car before the voice began again. It called from the porch in her grandmother’s voice, then Paul’s, then a voice she could not place but almost recognized. Each one asked her to come back. She locked the doors. As the engine turned over, she heard a little girl shout from inside the house.

“Don’t tell it where we live.”

Louise drove until she reached the highway. She spent the night in a motel beside the interstate, with the bathroom light on and a chair wedged beneath the door handle.

In the morning, she called Paul. This time she told him the house needed to come down. He agreed too quickly. She wondered what he remembered. They discussed costs. Contractors. The practical difficulty of getting machinery down the narrow road. Louise let him talk. Outside her motel window, a man was loading suitcases into a car. His daughter stood beside him in pajamas, holding a paper cup with both hands.

Before hanging up, Paul said, “You sound funny. Where are you?”

Louise watched the child blow across her drink.

“Away,” she said.

She returned home after lunch. The house smelled faintly stale. Her breakfast cup was still in the sink. Sunlight lay across the kitchen floor. She walked through every room. Nothing had moved. By evening, she felt foolish enough to make supper. She ate at the table, facing the empty chair.

When the porch light came on, she could see its reflection in the kitchen window. She had forgotten about the timer. Louise stood to draw the curtain. Outside, beneath the yellow light, someone was sitting on her steps. A little girl with uneven hair. Louise covered her mouth with her hand.

Without turning, the child spoke. “I didn’t tell.”

From the darkness at the edge of the yard came the scrape of a chair being pulled across a floor. The girl lowered her head.

“But you left the light on.”