Silence in the dark

I haven’t been able to sleep since my daughter’s ghost started visiting me at night.

I wasn’t sleeping well before, but at least I got an hour or two before daylight broke through the curtains.

We had our daughter when we were teenagers, a few months out of high school. That caused tension with my wife’s Catholic family. But we faced her mother and grandmother together during the pregnancy, and it helped that we got married at the courthouse a month before our daughter was born.

She came into the world at four in the afternoon, surrounded by all the people who loved her and all the fear and worry her family had about the situation faded away the moment they got to hold her for the first time.

Sabrina always had trouble sleeping, right from the moment we brought her home from the hospital. My wife had early starts most mornings so that she could catch the bus into the university before dawn, so it would fall on me to settle Sabrina at night. It would take hours some nights to get her down to sleep. I would sit on the end of the bed near her feet, and I would stroke her hair and back until she closed her eyes. I would stay there in the dark long after she fell asleep.

I didn't want to wake her.

We buried her under a willow tree last summer in the city cemetery. A week after the funeral, I found myself in the bakery section at the supermarket staring at a small chocolate cake. I couldn’t figure out for the longest time why I was looking at it. Then, almost an hour had passed before it hit me that she was going to be twelve next month.

My wife worked as a teacher, but she had to stop. Every day, she would see little girls who looked just like Sabrina, and she would just fall to pieces.

She spent a few weeks in bed after she left work, but just because she is able to walk about the house now doesn’t mean she is able to go back to work. Her therapist says that she needs to take this one day at a time, and her transition to work should be done slowly. Something that she is taking her time to do.

I’m not able to make the same choice to stay home as she did. The way our finances were split up, my job paid for the apartment, and the bills, and my wife’s would pay for Sabrina’s gifts, school and anything else that was fun our daughter would want to do. Since she is gone, my wife has no motivation to leave the house.

I don’t blame her.

I would shut myself away forever if I could.

I work in a factory running a metal press, a job a computer could do, but thanks to the unions and health and safety mandating that human eyes are needed to man the machine so that no accidents occur, I run the press ten hours a day. I press a green button once five sheets of steel enter my press station. It takes thirty seconds from me pressing the button before the arm of the press compresses the five sheets into thinner sheets of metal that are moved off by a machine and cut into panelling.

It takes me twenty seconds to walk from the button to the metal press. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds to walk. Ten seconds to find peace. Not the first time something like this has been overlooked.

My station is the only one where the metal railing that would stop someone from climbing onto the machine has been cut away. This is so the long sheets can slide into the base to be pressed, and with every hour that passes, I consider that maybe just maybe if I am fast enough, I won’t even feel it as five thousand tons of pressure is pressed into my body.

Inevitably, the work day ends, and I come home. I try to be normal and watch TV with a drink, but it’s all garbage, the TV and the beer. My wife goes to bed, and I usually end up sitting in Sabrina’s room for a few hours before I go to sleep.

Her bedroom is the same as the day she died. The toys she was playing with last are still in the same places; the pictures are left half-coloured on the table, and the sheets are pulled back to the head of the bed. I can still smell the strawberry body wash she used in the shower on the sheets.

My wife can’t even come in. I don’t blame her for not being able to. Seeing that everything looks just the way it was before she died tricks me into thinking sometimes that maybe, just maybe, the whole thing has been a nightmare. I could wake up at any moment in bed, pull back the covers, walk into the kitchen, and she will be right there making breakfast for herself before school. Her blonde hair pulled back for school with her favourite blue ribbons, a smile so bright it lights up the whole room. I’d run forward to hold her and kiss her and tell her she’s not going to school and we stay home, just the two of us, and we just stay there, and I would hold her like I used to.

I need to stop going in there.

Every time I leave, I hear her as I go to bed. My wife is in bed, passed out with sleeping pills her therapist suggested would help. There are footsteps down the hallway, in ours, not the neighbours above and below. They are hers. I know my daughter’s footsteps.

I used to check the house before going to bed, but after a while, I stopped because I knew it was her.

Tonight, like every other night that she has appeared to me. Her ghostly presence enters the bedroom and looks at me from the end of the bed. It’s only for a few seconds, a minute at most. But time thins out when she comes to visit, and it feels like every second is an hour. She then sits on the end of the bed near my feet. She touches my leg and makes my whole body run cold. She is always silent. She never talks.

Until tonight.

She sat there for a while and said nothing. Then came the sobs. She looked at me, and for the first time, I felt like she was actually looking at me. She just sat there and stared at me, and finally, the silence of the night was broken by her soft voice. “I remember...” she said, “I remember everything”

“I’m sorry,” I start, my voice no more than a breath, “I’m so sorry”

“When are you going to tell Mum?” she asks me.

“Tell her... what sweetie?”

She didn’t answer right away. She looked over her shoulder where my wife slept and then looked back at me. “When are you going to tell her what you did to me?”