Grief stains a place. When something terrible happens in a dwelling, that thing remains long after the home’s owners move on. You can feel it in the bedrock, something sorrowful lingers. That’s what happened to my old home. The hardwood floors absorbed too many tears, and every step welled up trauma through the nerve endings of my feet. I could barely sign the bill of sale to the two smiling 30-somethings who bought it when I couldn’t take another step. Tom and I had been like them.
The baby seemed like she was meant to happen. I’d gotten my teaching license. Tom received a promotion. The stars were aligning. We had each other, and soon we’d have little Caroline.
“It’s bad luck naming her this early,” Tom told me one night as I pressed my head against his chest.
The gentle thumping of his heart bobbed me up and down like a boat on rolling waves.
“You’re being superstitious.”
“Naming her makes it all seem much more real.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m only… nervous. I want to be a good dad.”
I kissed him after he admitted that and rose to hold him like an infant against my chest. I think about that moment a lot. Three hearts beating as one. For one second, we were a family. That’s as close as we ever got.
Caroline stopped kicking a week later.
“I don’t understand, she’s… the baby’s not developing right?” I asked our family doctor during a panicked visit.
The doctor explained there was something wrong with her chromosomes. They weren’t developing fast enough, or there weren’t enough of them. It all blurs into shock and tears now.
Nobody ever tells you about the backtracking you have to do after a failed pregnancy. I had to explain it to my mom and dad, my in-laws, and even a fucking nosy painter who kept asking why we needed to change our spare bedroom walls from pink to eggshell. The worst were the kids I taught. I came back from medical leave to find my classroom wallpapered with condolence cards, each saying in unique child-like euphemisms: “Sorry you’re not a Mom.” I tore them down after the semester ended.
I hoped the experience would make Tom and me stronger, motivate us to want to try again. However, I realized that wasn’t happening once conversations changed from discussing the future to discussing takeout plans. Days became a scavenger hunt of ways to kill time. We became strangers in our dream home, roommates of convenience. I ended it, but we’d been over long before we sat down at the kitchen table one gloomy Sunday and hashed everything out. I honestly didn’t care. One less reminder of Caroline. Of our family that was supposed to be. The last one we sold under-market value to those 30-somethings I mentioned earlier.
The process of finding my next home during the divorce was more of a smear of time and strange apartments than something deliberate. I jumped at the first one-bedroom pad I could find. It was downtown, as far away from the suburbs as I could get.
My new place was a maze of cheap drywall and popcorn ceilings. Bits and pieces of every previous decade’s design clichés could be spotted in the lodging’s construction. There was 70s retro molding, a shag carpet straight from the 60s. The fridge was dipped in a horrific Pepto Bismol pink that looked as if it’d been left by the previous residents, Ken and Barbie. The Fridge was complemented by an ornate pantry cabinet made of oak so dark that I imagined it was reclaimed from a sunken pirate ship. Those domestic horrors had nothing on the walls though. Thick dark green wallpaper coated every inch of the interior, paper tendrils suffocating any barren spot they could find. It seemed more suited to a library or smoking room than a small one-bedroom apartment. Light died in those walls.
“It is removable, right?” I asked the landlord during my tour.
He ran his hands over the siding, measuring the grooves and heaviness with which the decoration had been applied.
“Should be. Technically, the last owners weren’t supposed to put this up without written notice.”
“Shouldn’t you guys remove it before a new tenant moves in?”
“Technically we’re supposed to leave it as is.”
I could tell “technically” was a favorite word of his.
“Since this was put up without our notice, it counts as natural wear. We can have someone remove it… but it looks pretty stuck on. If you’re willing to chip in I bet we could negotiate-”
I cut him off and explained the current state would be fine. We left shortly after and I signed a twelve-month lease by the mailboxes. It must seem odd as to why I would choose to live in that awful place. No girl pictures her dream home having lime green walls. However, I have a talent for talking myself into bad situations. A cynical voice inside me so often sounds like sanity.
The rent was cheap, and it was only a year’s lease. Lord knows I could use the extra cash as the divorce proceeded. This would do, I told myself as movers stacked boxes in the then-empty apartment. I kept repeating that to myself: This would do, as if repetition would manifest into reality.
I sat alone at the end of move-in day. The shadows of the living room’s plantation shutters created great bars that etched themselves across my couch and coffee table. Across me. The apartment was always ready to remind me what my new home was. The weight of my circumstances bore in as life sat before me packed in neat little boxes with labels like “books” and “silverware.” It was as if time flipped an hourglass and now sand drowned me. I spent the first night crying, vocal cords echoing like chalk dragging across a blacktop’s surface before passing out in the early hours of the morning.
I wonder if my sobs that night awakened it? Perhaps, it heard my tears and mistook them for its mother’s. For you see, the crying in my walls started the next day.
I couldn’t tell exactly when it began. I can tell you that once it did, it didn’t stop. A baby’s cry seeped through my porous walls, breaking against the wooden beams and plaster of the apartment. It tore across the living room, bounced around the kitchen, and finally belched into my bedroom.
It was everywhere and nowhere at once.
When I toured, there’d been no hint of neighbors. No pounding music, no scurrying of footsteps. Only sunshine and silence. The landlord clearly knew when to show the unit. At first, I brushed the crying off: Only an infant who lives in the complex. Not ideal, but livable.
Then - as things seemed to do - it got worse.
The child was a rooster who loved its work, letting loose a shrill wail every morning until she eventually stopped sometime at night. The crying refused to fade into the background. It lived in the air at a pitch that constantly threatened to increase if I wasn’t properly unsettled. Worse, it triggered something within me. A fifth night of constant ear-shattering noise made my hands shake like I’d skipped all my meals. Hours passed where I could hardly hold my own sobs as a response to the audible assault.
“Oxytocin.” The doctor said when I went in for a check-up on my shakes. “Your body has been through a lot and, well…”
His diagnosis was my insides were mistaking the child’s whimpers as my own phantom infant’s. Internal circuitry flipping mental and chemical breakers in my cerebellum to generate a physical response.
“You’ll be fine. I’ll prescribe something to help you calm down.” My doctor said.
Fine, a word doctors love to use. I tried explaining this sensation felt different. It wasn’t a fight-or-flight response. It was like bits of sanity were being stripped away by a wrench.
“Have you tried talking to your neighbors about the noise?” The doctor asked in that oblivious all-knowing tone men perfected centuries ago.
Of course I’d spoken with my neighbors. What else do you do about this kind of problem? I went upstairs two days into the sobbing spells, gritting my teeth and presenting a kind face, to ask the mother of the brat to kindly shut it the hell up. I tried the upstairs apartment first. It was the most likely culprit. I realized I was wrong when the owner arrived at the door though.
“Yes?” An elderly woman cooed at me while adjusting coke-bottle glasses.
I explained I was her new neighbor, playing the song-and-dance of proper domestic etiquette. I peered into her musty place while we talked, noting litters of pill bottles and porcelain figurines hanging on every shelf. But there were no toys. No cribs. None of the accessories kids bring with them. I cut to the chase and interrupted her as she told me about some tapas restaurant a block away from our building.
“I’m sorry. This might seem like a strange question, but you don’t happen to have any children? Or maybe grandkids?”
“I do. Two.” The old woman said.
She pulled out a framed Polaroid of two young men in their 30s crowded beside her and some blue 70th birthday balloons.
“They seem lovely,” I said, handing it back.
Next, I checked with the burnouts who lived in the neighboring unit. They were musicians whose ashy roaches I’d sometimes spot by the garbage chute.
“What? Kids, uh, no man. My roommate Tony’s dealing with a paternity thing.” A pimply man in a Nirvana shirt explained. He shouted to an unseen member of the household. “Tony, that bitch didn’t bring your kid over recently, right?”
A muffled murmur replied, inaudible to me.
“Yeah, no. No kids here. Did you check with the upstairs neighbor?”
The rest of the day I became a door-to-door saleswoman. I was met by an endless procession of confused faces and head-scratching. By four, I’d checked every unit and a deep sense of dread filled me like a bottle.
There wasn’t a child under the age of eight in the whole complex.
I hypothesized that the baby was being hidden. Maybe there was a fee associated with having an unlisted occupant in the home, or worse, perhaps the poor thing had been stolen. I suddenly felt very guilty over my hatred of it. People hid stranger things in apartments before. During a frantic Google search for solutions, I’d learned about a man who’d made meth in his apartment for ten years under his neighbor’s nose. The police only ever found out about his cooking when the chef got lazy mixing chemicals and an explosion made it very obvious what had been going on. The article ended by noting authorities only ever found one of the cook’s arms. It’d blown clean off and lodged in a mailbox.
Out of options, and still wanting to believe myself sane, I purchased a decibel meter. If I could pinpoint where the noise was emanating from I could go to the landlord. The meter included a black plastic wand that made me feel like a TSA agent as I scanned the apartment. I went from end to end hunting the weeping. I started with the ceiling, which came in at 87 dBs, the sound level of a busy day of traffic (A fact I learned on the box).
Hope welled in me but was squashed as I kept checking. In the kitchen, the meter read 87 dBs. Then I went to the living room, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Every, single, one: 87 dBs. The sound never gave a hint of dipping by a single decibel. I thought the fucking thing was broken. I turned it off, replaced the windscreen on the wand, the batteries, and tried again. The sound scale remained static. According to the meter, the crying was coming from every inch of the apartment equally.
I resolved that it had to be an issue with the wand; Some cheap piece of sound equipment that didn’t work right. It wasn’t possible that the crying could be coming from every part of the apartment. It was a mistake. It had to be. I tossed the dB meter onto my fading baby shit brown couch and opened a microphone app on my phone. I hit record and allowed the ongoing tidal wave of tears to pour into its speaker. Ten seconds later, I hit stop and stepped out of the apartment to get clear of the crying. I clicked play on the new recording.
The only sound the phone picked up was the hum of my air conditioning.
I escalated things. I bought ceiling tiles, those big flat asbestos-filled puzzle pieces found in every office and public school in America. I pasted them over any naked section of my ceiling. The effort took two days and three trips to Home Depot. The result: 87 dBs.
The renovation had done as much as a polite “shh.”
I searched for alternative ways to cope. I stayed out more in month three of my lease. I spent hours at coffee shops, went to movies I’d seen before, and graded papers in the classroom till my eyes turned red from strain. I’d go anyplace that wasn’t home. But the coffee shops would close, the movies would end, and I’d run out of papers to grade. Eventually I had no other choice than to go back to the apartment. Back to the ever-present cry of the walls.
I tried earplugs, five different brands of noise-canceling headphones, a white noise machine, music, the TV, and eventually my own screaming. The moans bested them all. I eventually broke down and drove to the landlord’s office.
“Please, you must do something… the crying… it’s never-ending.” I explained to the snake of a manager who’d trapped me in that place.
“You tried checking with the neighbors?” The landlord said.
“There’s not a child in the complex, but I hear it sobbing all the time. I can’t sleep… I…” A little emotion escaped before I quickly pulled it back within the seawalls of my tear ducts. That was enough to persuade him.
“Okay, okay. Jesus. Let’s go look.” The landlord said.
He followed me back to the apartment. My keys jingled in my hand as I shook with eagerness, hoping to put an end to the acoustic waterboarding. I unlocked the front door and we stepped inside to be greeted by the most startling noise I’d endured during the whole torturous experience.
Silence. Not even the chirps of the birds or the shuffling of the old woman upstairs pierced the sonic space. There was only the quiet I discovered during my initial tour.
“I don’t understand… I… I swear it was here an hour ago.”
The landlord rolled his eyes, checking a knockoff Rolex clinging to his wrist.
“Wait, stay a bit longer. I’m sure it will-”
“I’ve got to go prepare an email about the water shutoff tomorrow. I don’t appreciate you taking up my time with your crazy-”
“Did you just call me crazy?”
“Lady, you don’t think I wouldn’t get a hundred emails a day if there was some brat causing a ruckus? Shit, I get a hundred emails anytime that old deaf bitch in 206 plays her records.” He said, heading for the door to escape our conversation.
“Fine! Fuck this then. Take this for a thirty days’ notice.”
The landlord paused and turned back to me. His expression changed from annoyance to the grim look of a shark hunting prey.
“You have nine months left.”
“If you won’t fix the problem, I don’t see what choice I have.”
The landlord nodded, cold calculations turning over in his mind. His eyes locked on the ceiling. He pointed to the tiles I’d pancaked above.
“Did you submit a request to hang those?”
Shit.
“Uh, no. But, they wouldn’t have been needed in the first place if you’d-”
“Technically, you half-assedly cocking those things to the ceiling counts as disrepair.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Lotta bad chemicals in them. We don’t recommend tenants do major renovations without a permit first. If you broke your lease early, I’d have to note the state you left this unit in and, possibly, take legal action. It’s all outlined in your renter’s agreement, which I’m sure you read. It protects me and other property owners from… less desirable tenants. You understand.”
If I jumped ship he’d snatch up my entire security deposit and then back-charge me for every little crack and ding in the place. Not to mention, he’d surely make finding another apartment impossible. I imagined myself cramped in my boxy car, everything I owned shoved in the backseat as I frantically called building after building for a vacancy.
“Whatever you decide, let me know. I’d be sad to see you leave.” He said, walking off to inform the other tenants there’d be no hot water for their morning showers.
Alone again, I sat on my couch waiting for the first shriek from the walls. An hour later, it arrived.
I was out of options. There were nine months to go on a lease that would leave me deaf and insane. I had to find a way out. Any way out. I went to the records office downtown and searched through renter’s law statutes like an ambulance chaser to find a loophole that could sever the umbilical cord of the apartment from me. I pulled files for my building, digging for reports or incidents that would nullify the remaining time. Then, by divine intervention (or beginner’s clerical luck) I found two legal sheets hastily stapled to a blueprint of my building’s water lines.
They were death disclosures.
I ripped them open and poured over the details. Three deaths had occurred in my building. One was clearly outlined: an actress who couldn’t take the constant rooms filled with girls who looked like her and decided to hang herself. Tragic, but nothing to do with my problem. I pushed that file aside and pivoted to the next document. The hair stood up on my neck as I read it. This one had everything in the world to do with me.
The other two deaths occurred in my apartment.
There were no details of who died, or from what. All the document stated was that two souls one day closed the door to my unit and never left. I brought the file to the record hall’s receptionist desk.
“This disclosure for a property is missing information.” I said as I handed the file to a clerk, a stern-looking woman with a needle for a nose. She skimmed the papers, as if she’d find something I’d missed.
“It is possible the property owner asked those documents to be redacted.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“If the deaths were related to a homicide, yes. However, landlords have the right to not disclose non-violent deaths from things like illnesses, overdoses, that sorta grim stuff. It could harm property values. I’d imagine it’s hard to rent a place if you can look up every Sam and Sally that died there. My advice, check with your landlord.”
The words stung. That paunchy fading-haired goon wasn’t going to tell me shit… but then I looked at the date of the report. The notion of speaking with that gargoyle seemed silly. I didn’t need him. I needed someone who’d lived in the complex when these two passed five years ago. Best of all, I already knew someone that did.
I’d only ventured so far as my upstairs neighbor Esther’s front door during the last visit. But, as I sat with her in her kitchen over a cup of tea, the loneliness of her abode truly crept into my soul. It was the same layout as my spot below, but with an air of resigned melancholy that stretched from every corner like that hideous green wallpaper. Esther had all these shelves of glass animals and little Hummel figurines - creepy doll-eyed porcelain corpse statues that glared back at you as you observed them. Her walls were plastered with black-and-white photos of the past. Distant friends, old acquaintances, and long-dead relatives. In the kitchen, her two strapping sons watched over our conversation in a photo displayed in a glass china cabinet. Esther was much younger in the photo with her boys. Much happier looking. I couldn’t help but wonder when the last time they called was.
“That’s the thing they never tell you about children. When they’re born they need you every waking hour. Feed them, change them, hold them, sing to em’. Then, one day, they stop needing you… and then you need them.” Esther said as she sat across from me. “They’re good boys. I see them around the holidays. They gave me grandkids, so I can’t complain… even if they’re little shits.”
I almost choked on my tea at her bluntness.
“Sorry, dear.” She chuckled. “My filter ain’t what it used to be. Happens when you get old. Do you have any kids?”
“Uh, no. I’m divorced.”
“What’d the prick do?”
“Nothing really, he was just a guy. You forget about that once you’ve been married to one for a while.”
“My Sammy was the same, poor fella. You stick with them through it though, if they’re good eggs. Sammy was.” Esther drank her tea to avoid going any deeper on the topic.
I saw an opening to get at the heart of what I came for.
“You’ve lived here awhile?”
“Ten years now I think. Since Sammy passed.”
“Are you close with anyone in the building?”
“Not really. There’s something about living next to and on top of folks that makes ‘em seem miles away.”
My hand stuttered over the cell phone in my pocket.
“Esther, I hate to bring this up… it’s not very pleasant.”
I handed her photos of the death report. The old woman pulled a set of readers from her knit sweater and examined the ghastly ledger.
“What is uh…” She mumbled.
“You lived here when these people died, right? They lived in my apartment a couple of years ago.”
“I’m not so sure I should be talking about that. I don’t want to be sharing nasty stories that’ll keep you up at night.”
Esther sipped her tea, looking away from me.
“Believe me, they won’t.” I said. “I know it might be uncomfortable, but I need help on this. I have to know what happened. You’re my last hope.”
The old woman sighed.
“I can only tell you what I heard and saw. To be honest, I’m not very proud of how I responded. I had a case of pneumonia and… Well, I wish somebody in the building would’ve done something is my point. It was drugs was the building gossip. The woman who lived there in your unit was into them, nasty stuff. I don’t know the details, but I’d find needles in the dumpsters on garbage day. I saw her around the complex high as a kite when she was pregnant. She lived on her own, single mother. She kept to herself mostly. Although she always held the door open for me if we crossed paths. I always thought that was sweet.”
“When she brought her baby home from the hospital it cried for weeks. I could always hear her shouting at it, begging with it to stop. The only time the poor babe did was when her mom would sing in the morning. She had a lovely voice I enjoyed waking up to. Her favorite was that song about the mockingbird that won’t work. You know the one.”
I nodded. The tune danced in my memory. And if that mockingbird don’t sing…
“Then, I didn’t see the mother for about a month during the holidays. However, I heard the little one. The sweet thing cried hoarse for three days. There was no singing to stop it. It got so bad that I knocked on her door because I was so worried. When nobody answered, I called the landlord. He claimed he’d check on her, I don’t think he ever did though. I resolved to call the cops the next day if it kept up. But, on the fourth day, the crying stopped and never started again. At first, I was relieved. It was giving me migraines and I was sick at the time. I figured the Mom left with the baby for Christmas, or it’d only been a bad spell. I swore I heard doors opening and closing below like someone was still in the apartment. So, I didn’t think anything of it when it was quiet for the next month… and the next. The downstairs neighbors were the ones who called the cops when bad smells began drifting into the courtyard.”
Esther trailed off for a moment, silence gripping us in a psychic hold. I could see the toll I was putting her through in retelling the morbid tale. Regret was painted in her wrinkles. I patiently waited for her to compose herself.
“I came home one day from the market to an ambulance parked in front of the building. I saw the child one last time that day. A fireman was carrying it out, wrapped in a blanket. Such a tiny thing. She couldn’t have been more than six months old. David, an old neighbor, overheard one of the paramedics say they’d found the mom in the kitchen with a needle in her arm. I guess the little one passed from neglect. It was crying for help. I could’ve done something if I’d known. I tried to help… I called the landlord and I…”
Esther broke in the middle of her story, stopping herself from getting too worked up.
“I’m sorry. It’s just a sad thing. I always wonder if I could’ve done something different. I suppose all people do in situations like that.” Esther sipped her tea and leaned back in her chair. The weight of the tale swelled in the kitchen as new knowledge and horror washed over me. I don’t remember a word after she finished her story.
The next thing I can recall was sitting alone in the dark later, alone with the crying in the witching hours. Sound lost its essence after awhile. If you listen to a white noise machine long enough you’ll hear voices in the static: Ghosts trying to make contact from the other side with pulsating vibrations. The baby’s crying was the same. I understood now.
After speaking to Esther, I knew the full terror of what’d happened within the olive apartment walls five years ago. I couldn’t drown out the babe’s sobs, but I could listen to them, decode them. I suppose all mothers do the same with their children’s cries. I devoted myself to the wall’s sighs. They feasted on the sorrow inside me like a bird feeder nourishing a newborn chick. My landlord couldn’t hear the tears. Neither could the neighbors. No one heard the crying in the walls because the tears weren’t meant for them. They were meant for her mother… for me.
“Mommy…” I heard it wailing as I - for the first time - truly listened.
I was finally ready to answer. I walked to the wallpaper and pressed my hands against its leafy surface. I felt the apartment reproduce its crying.
“Free me.”
My body moved on autopilot, nails digging into the soil-like surface. I expected resistance, but the paper crumbled like dead skin into my palms. I delved my nails into the barriers, possessed with the sort of strength mothers are capable of when they hear their young scream.
“Free me.” The walls exclaimed.
I tore in deeper, concrete and cardboard splintering and filling between the gaps of my chewed-up nails. Soon I reached the surface beneath. It was soft and porous, muscular and fleshy. The paint on it was so pale that it was as if light had never touched it. I struggled to find a loose corner, anchoring all my strength toward ripping the wall apart.
“Free me.”
I dug further still while blood coagulated in great gobs and ran down the webbing of my hands. Warm fetid liquid drizzled through the vacant groove on my ring finger. I had to free her. She had spent so long in this rayless tomb. She needed me.
Finally, the wallboard gave way completely and I was confronted by the naked surface of the wall… and something stared back at me. A tiny eye blinked in the home’s flesh, forged from a compost of concrete and dead skin.
The infant’s eye blinked as the air of the apartment uttered one clawing word: “MOMMY.”
The apartment wretched, flapping back and forth, scraping itself against my eardrums, begging for every inch of the green covering to be torn clean. The eye fused to support beams turned red as the home’s howling rose worse than ever before. I fumbled back and the wall wretched out a mouth from a quivering mass of dermal plasterboard. It was a crooked maw of children’s teeth shouting out at me.
“MOMMY!”
It was no help. The naked walls still cried in pain, and slowly their bawling blended with my own. Mother and daughter crying as one. What could I do to ease its suffering? How could I help my little baby girl?
And then it came to me as if the child had put the idea there herself. A tune rose from my belly like fire from a dragon’s breath. A gentle coo, slow and rhythmic.
“Hush little baby… don’t say a word… momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”
The singing clashed against the hard edges of the apartment’s neglect-stung sobs. I felt the space’s fleshy paneling rise and fall with wispy breath, a fever of sorrow breaking within it architecture.
“If that mockingbird doesn’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.” I said, pawing at the home’s viscous exterior.
I laid my head against the siding. Minutes turned to hours, hours to days. Days became eternity.
“And if that diamond ring is brass. Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.”
And at last, the cries stopped.
Epilog
Mary and Wallace stepped onto the empty apartment’s floorboards. They let out a creak as the newlyweds crossed the entryway into the living room, daylight giving the spot a romantic glow. Wallace, as he did on all the previous tours, went immediately to measure the space where the couch would go.
“Right here. Sundays we watch football, and then after we stumble over to the bars for happy hour. It’s perfect.”
Mary smiled, not wanting to argue over her hatred of all the things Wallace expressed his love for. The complex’s bald landlord brought up the rear, waving his hand toward the inside.
“What do you think?” He asked. “We had this unit open up. Two tenants moved out at the start of the year.”
Mary walked around to the kitchen, twirling a mail key that’d been left on the counter. It was rare they’d been able to find a deal on a place. The last spot Wallace and her visited had been 500 dollars out of their price range. But not this spot. This was a steal. She tossed the mail key in her hands like a quarter.
Heads, they put an offer in. Tails, they go back to looking at places in the suburbs.
She dropped it onto the linoleum counter with a clang.
“Where’s the master bedroom?” She asked.
Mary saw it moments later. She slipped off her shoes and spread her toes on its shag carpet.
“Honey, they have a jacuzzi near the laundry room.” Wallace shouted from down the hall.
Her husband was always more excited about the amenities than the spaces themselves. To Wallace, one bedroom was as good as the next, so long as there was a shower and a place to watch the big game.
“We might need to update the carpet,” Mary replied. “Feels old.”
She crossed onto the white tiles of the adjoining bathroom, sunbeams from the skylight reflecting in the fresh sunshine. Mary shut her eyes and tried picturing herself stepping into the bathroom on a hypothetical Sunday morning.
Two hands wrapped around Mary’s shoulders. She spun around, as Wallace scooped her up from behind. She batted playfully at him.
“If you don’t like it, we can keep looking.” Wallace said, missing the surprise on her face.
“Can we sleep on it?” Mary asked.
“Sure. Anything for you.” Wallace said, kissing her forehead. “Let’s see if the washers take credit cards like that last place. Gonna be more laundry to tackle soon.”
He put his arms around Mary’s stomach, petting it gently. He squeezed his wife once more and left her alone in the bathroom. She turned to follow him out when a dull noise filtered in like a breeze. A soft and slow song gently lulled in the bathroom walls.
Mary scanned for the source, hunting it to the closet. It was a woman singing; her voice permeating amongst the closet’s mirrors and empty rod coat hangers.
“Hush little baby… don’t say a word… momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.” A gentle voice cooed through the drywall.
Wallace trudged back into the bathroom.
“Hey? What are-”
“Shh. Listen.”
Mary waved for him closer to the wall.
“If that mockingbird doesn’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.” The woman’s whisper floated through the plaster separating the apartment units.
“Guess the neighbors have a baby,” Wallace said. “Does that knock this place out of the running?”
“Maybe… let’s figure it out over dinner.” Mary said.
Wallace helped her to her feet, walking hand-in-hand like they had when they were first dating.
As they left the bedroom, Mary spared one last glance at the closet wall. For a second, she swore it looked like it was breathing.