Quinn's Room
Estimated reading time: 36 minutes (6888 words)
There are a lot of bad things about selling a haunted house. To begin with, do you even need to put that in the listing? Or can you disclose it after you’ve already accepted an offer, and see if that squelches the deal, hoping it won’t? I’m not sure if the open house looky-loos who want to tell you you’re crazy are worse than the ones looking to meet a poltergeist.
Crazy is decidedly the first option. Some level of mental sickness makes you hear and see things that are not there. There may not be a need for institutionalization, and hopefully medication or a change of scenery can resolve things, or at least cordon them off, but something is not right. Maybe they can get better. Or maybe it’s just a matter of time until the next shoe drops and they go off on some hallucinatory bender. Then what happens? It is truly a sad situation to have someone with that level of distance between themselves and reality. Yet some people have no problem showing up at an open house at your home, or condo, as the case may be, and getting mad at you and whoever needs help. “This place isn’t haunted. Someone needs to get back on their meds,” they’d cackle. Misplaced laughter is one of the most hurtful sounds humans can make.
We throw around the term “crazy,” don’t we? Maybe we picture one of the Three Stooges, probably Larry, with his clown hair, in a straitjacket. It’s funny. Most people don’t think about the real harm done by those with severe mental illness. The horror, the depravity, the true suffering that some of them can cause. Cutting and killing, torture, rape, long term malignant injury to themselves and others. Plucking out their own eyes, eating feces, and worse. I was once at a party and talked with a guy who was a social worker at a jail. He had some interesting stories. In a different age it might be called “evil,” but now we know it as mental illness. The consequences of their actions are the same, no matter what we call it. Would the looky-loos act that way, with such a lack of compassion, towards their own loved ones? Or is that level of cruelty reserved for strangers who invite them into their own homes, their most personal of spaces, because they need to move out? “These weirdos think their condo’s haunted. They must be crazy. And the fixtures in the master bath are dated.”
Then there are the goths, or whatever you want to call them. Not all fit the stereotype, but many do. They’re dressed in black—black boots, black pants, black t-shirts—and have a variety of dyed hair, piercings, tattoos, or eyeliner. They’re not there to put in an offer, but instead they want to be spooked, feel a cold pocket of air, or talk to their dead aunt. They come away disappointed when nothing happens, but not angry. “This place isn’t haunted,” they say, shaking their heads on their way out as they discard the blue booties that covered their shoes. They’re sad, but sad for themselves, sad for the missed paranormal adventure. They don’t seem to take the next step to think about the people who would write “Potentially haunted by ghost” in the listing, or to consider what sort of trauma the sellers are experiencing.
We didn’t buy a haunted condo, of course. Jennifer and I got engaged on Thanksgiving. It was a great run through Christmas and New Year’s, and then we began looking for a home and planning the wedding simultaneously. There were a lot of balls in the air as we toured buildings and venues, and met with real estate agents and photographers, etcetera. The home came together quickly, and we both agreed we ended up in the best place we looked at. There was one unit early on in Logan Square that was probably the best, but we weren’t really ready to buy and it sold in a few days. We looked all over—Lakeview, Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Bucktown, Andersonville, Lincoln Square. We even looked at a few high rises in River North, but we knew that wasn’t what we wanted. I don’t like the phrase “starter home,” but we were looking for a five-to-eight-year place. Kids would come along at some point, which likely meant the suburbs for better schools, but for the time being Jennifer and I both wanted to be in the city. A decent public elementary school was important in case our timeline stretched out, but we weren’t going to be there forever. Three bedrooms would allow room for a baby or two, but being close to public transit was key for the work commute.
Planning the wedding was more complicated. We were both raised nominally Christian, me nominally Episcopalian and Jennifer nominally Catholic. Until planning the wedding, I’m not sure when either of us was last inside a church—likely at someone else’s wedding or funeral. Our parents were much the same, and I wouldn’t categorize them as churchgoers once we went off to college and they were done trying to instill good values in children. No one was pushing for a church wedding, but it seemed like we should have one, like that’s just how people got married. Long story short, it was a headache. Since we didn’t go to church we had to shop for one we liked, but they weren’t necessarily too keen on marrying interlopers who just showed up for a nice backdrop. We wanted the reception venue to be close to the church so we couldn’t pin that down until we had a church, and some venues worked with different caterers so we couldn’t nail that down either. We also needed to transport the guests from the church to the reception, so we were looking at party busses. Eventually it became clear that the logical decision was just to cut out the church. Jennifer’s parents are lawyers and they have a close family friend who’s a judge. She was going to be at the wedding anyway, so we asked her to officiate and picked a venue with Grant Park views that said they could turn over the room between the ceremony and reception during cocktail hour. That made things easier, but we still had invites and menus and flowers, and a DJ and everything else.
The point is, buying a condo was the easier life event that year, and we loved it. With three bedrooms we had a master, a dedicated guest room, and then a second guest room/office with perhaps too much furniture. The kitchen/living/dining room was a large open-concept space, with high ceilings, sleek modern cabinets, and stainless appliances. We had a private deck up on the roof, as did other units in the building, garage parking, and it was walkable to the L and various restaurants, bars, and shops. It’s a great unit, and in some ways I’m sad to leave it. We had three-plus great years there without any hint of anything paranormal going on. Obviously, some lights burned out, we had a couple of leaks, our washer/dryer rattles when the unit above runs their washer/dryer, and during the winter there’s a clicking sound when someone else’s heat turns on. Those are all normal parts of condo living. The first sign of change was sometime in the middle of the night, with Jennifer shaking me awake.
“Chris. Chris.”
“What?”
“Shhhh. I heard something.”
“What?”
“Shhhh. In the house! I heard something. Like a doorknob or something.”
I reached for my glasses on the nightstand, quietly so as not to alert anyone but quickly in case they already knew we were up. The brain is interesting in those first moments after waking in the middle of the night, somehow hyper-vigilant but not quite logical. I was listening for footsteps or closing doors or breaking glass, but didn’t hear anything as I tried to be quiet and keep the bedsprings from squeaking. With my glasses on, even in the dark, I could see from the bed to the silver deadbolt on the front door. It was still locked.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“I heard something. I heard something,” Jennifer repeated, already unlocking her cell phone and preparing to call 911.
I keep a baseball bat next to my dresser in the bedroom. It was a souvenir from a long weekend in Louisville and is theoretically a discarded Derek Jeter model, but I suspect they just burn a signature onto bad bats they churn out by the dozen depending on what they think will sell to tourists. I keep the bat primarily for decoration, but at the same time, Chicago.
I slid out of bed as quietly as I could so as not to alert any intruders, and took up the bat in both hands while Jennifer showed me she was ready to hit the call button on a moment’s notice. I flipped on the hall lights and watched and listened. Nothing. I moved down the hall slowly, flipping on lights and scanning the bedrooms and bathroom while making my way towards the living room. Nothing in there either, and doubling back I took more time examining the fully illuminated home to look under beds, in closets, and behind the shower curtain.
“Nothing. Maybe you heard something outside.”
“It was in the house,” Jennifer said.
I suggested the black lab that lived upstairs. “Maybe Rosie?” We could hear her run back and forth excitedly whenever Cindy came home, and she had a reputation in the building as a night owl. “I don’t know. I checked everywhere.”
“I could swear I heard something. It was like a door closing, the spring, and then tapping or slapping.”
I shrugged, or said something noncommittal, and took one more pass through the house shutting off lights and allowing one more chance for the intruder to sneeze or myself to notice an open window or out of place something. Seeing none, and with all the lights now off again, I made sure the front door was still locked and slid back into bed next to Jennifer. I was asleep a few minutes later, and the whole event was so inconsequential we didn’t mention it in the morning.
A few days later, though, it happened again.
“Chris. Chris. Shhhh. I heard it again. There’s something in Quinn’s room. In the closet. I heard tapping.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“It stopped, but I heard it. I just heard it. There was tapping in Quinn’s closet.”
The layout of our place has our bed against the wall, and the other side is the closet of the guest bedroom. The fact that Jennifer could pinpoint the location to that closet actually wasn’t surprising—it’s just the other side of the wall behind the headboard. What got me in that half-twilight of waking was that she called it Quinn’s closet. We had just lost him. I’ll spare you the details, but if you’ve been through a miscarriage at six months then you know what I’m talking about. If not, now you know enough.
We settled on the name surprisingly early, or at least early compared to many of our friends with kids. Jennifer’s dad is Quinton and mine is David, so Quinn David came quickly and without much discussion or any argument. The name made it quite tangible after that. Very rapidly “it” became “he” became Quinn, with a “hi Quinn” after returning home from work spaced between “good morning Quinn” and “goodnight Quinn.” The guest bedroom became Quinn’s room, as in the sentence, “we need to paint Quinn’s room.” We went to doctor’s appointments for Quinn. “Damn Quinn!” when out for dinner and Jennifer couldn’t order a cocktail or burrata. We weren’t superstitious and freely disclosed the name, so friends and family began sending us onesies and other outfits with “To Quinn” written on the card. We know a lot of couples who don’t disclose the name or even the sex, so they get a lot of gray gifts. Quinn received blue clothing with dinosaurs and bears and trucks on them.
It hadn’t been Quinn’s room for several months, however. I rolled out of bed again and grabbed the bat, and again listened carefully at the threshold before flipping on the hall lights. Once again no response to the light, the front door was still locked, and nothing looked amiss. I stepped down towards the guest room, listened, and felt around the door jamb for the light switch.
Although we talked about painting the guest room, we never actually got around to it. In one of those expecting books it says the real urge to nest and set up the baby’s room comes alive in the last few months. It’s hormonal, or something. We didn’t get that far. Still, one of Jen’s cousins gave us the changing table and crib their kids outgrew, and there was a bouncy seat and a stroller and various other things piled up on the adult bed in the room. There was plenty we hadn’t done yet and weren’t prepared for—no diapers or diaper bag yet, and various other items on the registry for the shower that never happened never arrived.
We were still too shell shocked to do anything with the room after Quinn, although sometimes I would catch Jennifer standing at the doorway staring into it, and every now and then I had the urge to take everything out to the dumpster. I didn’t, though, and all that stuff was still piled up as it had been, without any sign of tampering by an intruder. We hadn’t really talked about it but understood we’d try again, so getting rid of everything didn’t make much sense if we’d use it with the next one. Quinn David, though, I don’t think we can use again. Quinn David was him. That name’s been used already.
I didn’t like going into the guest room anymore, but Jennifer said the tapping was in the closet so I stepped in, my bare feet registering the difference between the hardwood in the hall and the shag rug Jennifer had laid out in the space between the changing table, crib, and adult bed.
I opened the closet door. Muslin blankets, a baby monitor still in the box, stacks of board books, and a smattering of clothes from newborn up to 2T. Bottles and a pump, plastic plates and spoons, stuffed animals, and a collection of diaper creams. We weren’t even fully ready, but there was so much stuff already in the closet. Jennifer also had three large stacks of her sweaters, and we even had unopened wedding gifts that we hadn’t managed to clean out of the guest closet yet. It was a jumble, but a jumble with everything in its place, just as it had been. Nothing that could have been tapping or banging or rattling or dripping.
I closed the closet door, did a quick loop through the remaining rooms, and returned to bed.
“Nothing.”
“Did you look in Quinn’s closet?”
“I looked everywhere. I don’t know if you heard a pipe or something outside or what.”
“It wasn’t a pipe. It was in Quinn’s closet.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
The next morning Jennifer suggested “maybe we have mice.”
“Mice?”
“What I’ve been hearing. Could it be mice?”
“I haven’t seen any mice. I haven’t seen any droppings. We don’t leave food out. I haven’t even heard anything.”
“I heard something,” Jennifer said.
“I’m just saying I don’t know if it’s mice.”
“That’s all I can think of and I know I heard something. Let’s get some traps.”
Spiders and flies and run-of-the-mill pests don’t bother Jennifer too much, at least not any more than anyone else. She’s able to kill her own spiders, and has a non-toxic, vinegar based solution for killing fruit flies. Beyond that, though, I knew there wasn’t any point in arguing with her about mice. There was another long weekend in Wisconsin where she came back convinced we’d picked up bed bugs. Something had bitten us up in Madison, that much is true, but there was no indication anything followed us home. Still, she called in an exterminator for a $115 inspection, and we made a trip to Target for spray bottles filled with isopropyl alcohol and special covers for the box spring and mattress. Clothing went through a few hot cycles in the wash, and our suitcases and everything else was sprayed liberally with alcohol and placed in the bathtub to dry.
This time it was a Saturday run to Home Depot for mouse traps. A lot of mouse traps. We popped off the toe kicks under the kitchen cabinets and placed some there, and put at least one in every other room and closet in the house. It seemed like overkill but was still cheaper than the bedbug remediation, so I went along with it. Jennifer and I did the rest of the house before going into the guest room. Jen wanted one under the changing table, crib, and bed, and then two in the closet, since that’s where she’d been hearing noises.
The traps were all empty Sunday morning, but when we went to inspect the guest bedroom Jennifer was sure something was off.
“My sweaters are on the floor,” she said, opening the closet door.
“So?”
“They were on the shelf.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. And I wouldn’t leave them on the floor. I took out a couple and checked for moth holes, but I put them back on the shelf. I didn’t leave them on the floor.”
“They probably weren’t balanced right when you put them back,” I said.
“All of them? They all fell? And I put them back fine.”
“Maybe the mice were cold.”
“I’m not kidding!” Jennifer said. She was angry with me, and her tone was short and her lips tightened like a pair of scissors.
“I’m just asking what you think happened? It wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, so someone broke in and knocked over your sweaters?”
“I don’t know,” Jennifer said, “but it wasn’t mice.”
We looked at each other, and then at the sweaters on the closet floor. Finally Jennifer bent over to pick them up, and I went to get a glass of water from the kitchen.
We checked the traps again that night before going to bed, along with all the windows and the front door, and generally scanned the place, trying to memorize where everything was and what would seem out of place in the morning.
Jennifer woke me again sometime after three. I listened but didn’t hear anything. We both got out of bed this time, but I left the Jeter bat in our bedroom.
“It was from Quinn’s room again. It was . . . I don’t know, it was muffled. Kind of like footsteps, like creaking, but maybe talking.”
“Talking?”
“More like footsteps, but not like only footsteps. Creaking. Maybe something else.”
Whatever it was, there was no one in the guestroom or anywhere else. None of the mousetraps were sprung. The condo was only six years old when we moved in—the first owners similarly moved in after getting engaged, and then moved out to the suburbs with a three year old daughter and another on the way. It was new construction, and while there were a few creaking floorboards here and there, there weren’t many. I stepped around the guest bedroom as I did my inspection, and none of the floorboards creaked. The rug didn’t cover the entire room, but where it was it completely eliminated the sound of any footsteps. I looked at the bed, the piles of new baby supplies, and the pictures on the walls. Everything was where it should be. I did the same in the other rooms and the only possibility was the remote, but I leave it on the couch half the time and on the coffee table the other half, and this time it was on the couch, so that looked fine.
“I don’t see anything and we’ve got work in the morning,” I said.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“What do you believe?”
Jennifer wasn’t a lawyer but had too much of her parents in her, and could put on quite a cross-examination when she wanted to.
“I believe you heard something,” I said.
“What do you think I heard?”
“I don’t know. Rosie or Cindy or something outside. The L? The place rattles when a big delivery truck goes by or someone blasts their speakers.”
“You don’t think I know what a delivery truck sounds like? Did you hear music?”
“I don’t know.” I glanced at the clock on the microwave. “I don’t know what you heard but it’s three-nineteen and we’ve got to be up for work in a few hours. You heard something but I don’t know what it was and I know the house is secure.”
“I heard it coming from Quinn’s room.”
“Ok. There’s no one in there now. Can we go to bed?”
We did. The morning is generally a rush to make coffee, shower, dress, and have a bite to eat before getting out the door. Jennifer went right into the bathroom for the first shower, and I took the chance to audit the condo again. Even the remote was still where I remembered it this time.
I wish I could say things calmed down after that. Every couple of nights there’d be something—tapping or creaking or some sort of unexplained noise. Jennifer would wake me up and ask if I’d heard it, but I hadn’t. We’d walk the house but eventually I’d stay in bed while she did, and sometimes I was asleep before she even got back to bed. Sometimes I’d be up for hours afterwards, unable to fall back asleep, waiting and listening and hoping to hear something, or wondering why exactly Jennifer kept hearing things in “Quinn’s room.”
It was increasing, too. The sounds weren’t every night yet, but they were coming more frequently. There were more and more mornings where we’d wake and before going off to work Jen said there was a mug or a knife or a blouse or a purse or something that wasn’t where she’d left it the night before. There were times we’d be sitting on the couch watching tv after dinner in those few short hours before bed, and Jennifer would suddenly turn, as if catching something out of the corner of her eye, and ask if I saw that reflection in the window. I hadn’t, but looking outside there also weren’t any cars on the street, and it also wasn’t the reflected glow from the television.
“It’s laughing.”
“What?”
Jennifer was again shaking me awake, and the red numbers on my nightstand clock said 2:38. “Laughter. Do you hear that? Baby laughter.”
I didn’t hear anything. “Baby laughter?”
“Like, what a baby would do. Cooing. Soft crying. Did you hear it?”
I listened. “No.” I squinted at the alarm clock again and felt for my glasses. I was exhausted from weeks of this.
“It stopped. It’s Quinn.”
I had been expecting that conclusion, so it didn’t take me by as much of a surprise at it should have. “It’s not Quinn.”
“It is. I know it. He’s still here.” Jennifer got out of bed and went into Quinn’s room.
I still hadn’t heard anything. Despite all the times she woke me or saw a flicker or thought a vase wasn’t where she had left it, I hadn’t heard or seen anything. I suppose, in a way, that’s not proof of anything. I’ve always taken an agnostic approach to things like ghosts, aliens, etcetera. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t buy into every Billy Bob who claims he was driving his pickup along some rural road when he was sucked into the sky by a beam of light and probed. I think most UFOs probably are birds or lint on the lens and a trick of perspective. I’m much the same way with ghosts. Most are lies, perhaps to draw in tourist dollars to a dying hotel or make small children behave. Others are mistakes, misperceptions, picture frame hooks that suddenly give out or an odd deer seen at the wrong angle at twilight along the side of the road who happens to look like a weeping woman. Those things happen. There should be a scientific testing and debunking of wiccans dancing around Stonehenge and talking of past lives, but aren’t people who refuse to acknowledge the possibility of aliens just like those who persecuted Galileo because he refused to say the sun revolved around the earth? We’re not even the center of our solar system, let alone the universe. Isn’t it very self-absorbed to believe absolutely that there isn’t life somewhere else?
So, let’s assume for the sake of argument that there are ghosts. Why would everyone have to experience the ghost the same way, or at all? Logically, if they have the power to exist in some afterlife other-world, why wouldn’t they also have the power to laugh and only have it heard by a chosen few? Of course, all of that presupposes that there are ghosts in the first place, and that’s only one of a few distinct possibilities. While I’ll give an agnostic benefit of the doubt to aliens, aliens are at least real. That is, they’re matter. If life forms exist billions of light years from here, but for space and time, I could touch them and feel them and poke them. If aliens exist, they at least have to obey the basic laws of physics and science and the universe. Ghosts are different. Ghosts are not premised on a vast and diverse universe, which at least we know is true. Ghosts are premised on some sort of unmeasurable, unquantifiable, untestable, afterlife. I’m as open minded as the next guy, but that’s very different. Meeting an alien would say a lot less about the nature of reality than meeting a ghost would.
Jennifer came back to bed. “He stopped. There’s nothing there anymore.”
I like to think that one of my talents is knowing when to pick my battles. The middle of the night, with work in the morning, was not a good time to fight. Neither was the morning rush on the way out the door. But then when I got home the timing didn’t seem any better. I’m not sure if there is a good time to discuss whether or not your home is haunted, or what hallucinations your spouse may be experiencing. Besides, maybe it wouldn’t happen again, but of course it did.
Eventually we did talk about it, at least in an oblique, factual sort of way setting forth our positions. I hadn’t heard or seen anything, but Jen had and she knew it was Quinn. Some people believe in ghosts. Others don’t. Couples have bridged greater divides. She’s also a pescatarian and I love hamburgers with blue cheese crumbles, and we actually never hung too many pictures on our walls because she didn’t like the ones I had in my place and I didn’t like the ones she had in her place. To the extent we had a ghost, he was relatively benign, even to Jennifer. Some noises at night, the odd reflection here and there, an object being moved but not while anyone was there to watch it float across the room. All things considered, that didn’t seem so bad.
Except for the fact that it was. It was like that dull headache that won’t leave you alone all day. Or the contact lens that doesn’t sit right, or has something under it you think will blink out, that nags at you and needles you and drives you crazy all day long until you finally come home and take it out. The noises became more frequent, an every-night sort of occurrence, and though I was no longer getting out of bed each time, Jen would shake me awake before going to Quinn’s room. Sometimes I’d fall back asleep quickly and other times I wouldn’t, my brain too busy to sleep. The lack of sleep got to me, got to us both. In some ways it was as if we really did have a newborn, waking every few hours to feed, but we didn’t have any parental leave and had to go to work the next morning. We were exhausted, and with that we were sharp and angry with each other, little things setting us off. Without going into too much detail about our sex life, let’s just say given that we were normally angry and tired, some of the prerequisites for trying to have another baby were missing.
Sometimes in the morning I’d find Jen had moved into Quinn’s room in the night, and was sleeping on the shag carpet, the grownup bed still piled high with unused baby supplies. Other times I’d wake from a nap on the weekend or come back from running errands and find her sitting in there, just sitting. I came to hate Quinn’s room. I wouldn’t go in there. I never even heard anything, but it felt like that room had been taken over, invaded, and suddenly the whole unit felt a lot smaller. We lost a third of our bedrooms, and according to Jen even the other rooms would have doors close or soap disappear without explanation, and they too became suspect. It’s quite a thing to feel like your own home has turned against you. But even with the walls closing in on us, or at least on me, Jennifer wanted to go out less and less. “Shut-in” is too strong a word, but she didn’t want to leave the condo if she could avoid it. She never expressly said that she didn’t want Quinn to be alone, but more and more that was how it felt. Friday and Saturday nights out became meals ordered in, and potential long weekends away were declined in favor of something local, which would then fall through, so we’d spend the weekend on the couch watching tv, waiting for an odd flicker or reflection on the screen. And let’s not forget that all of those little impositions, all of those little reworkings of our lives, were premised on Jennifer actually hearing something cry or laugh each night, actually knowing that papers in the office had been shuffled about or that stuffed animals that had been in the closet were now in the crib. That would be bad enough, but the other possibility was that Jen was slowly losing her mind.
We didn’t go back to New Jersey for Christmas that year. I hadn’t been home since last Christmas, but there was something about Christmas being on a Wednesday and Jennifer had a bunch of work deadlines, and by the time we checked flights were outrageously expensive. Besides, celebrating Christmas by people who couldn’t even find a church to get married in almost felt like cultural appropriation, and maybe there was a better time to see my siblings and my parents could come out in the spring when Chicago weather was better and fewer flights were canceled. Jen was very logical about her reasons for staying home.
We did see Jennifer’s family on Christmas Day, but she refused to stay over even though her brother was in from Denver, and we spent the night back at our place. We had a smattering of decorations and two stockings from an aunt, but no tree or creche. That may have been what did it for me, or the winter darkness or lack of sleep or the steady drip of claustrophobia in my own home. By early January it was too much.
“I think we should move.”
Jennifer looked at me, puzzled.
“I can’t go on like this,” I said. “We’re up every night. We’re exhausted. We’re fighting. We’ve got to change something and the only thing I can think of is that we have to move. We were never going to live here forever anyway. We can look for someplace in the city or move out to the suburbs now, but we can’t stay here.”
“It’s Quinn,” she said. “He’s here. What if he can’t find us?”
“I don’t want him to find us. That’s the problem. We need to go someplace he can’t find us.”
“No,” Jennifer said. “We can’t leave him. I’m not going to leave him.”
The conversation was longer than that, but that was the gist of it, and it just kept going around in circles for a while. I remember that Jennifer didn’t hear anything that night, and I was hopeful that maybe that would be the start of something. Maybe something would click for her, and maybe she wouldn’t hear anything the next night or the night after that either, and maybe everything would just slowly fade away and go back to normal. But that didn’t happen. She heard him the next night, and the next few nights after that, and then the toaster was on the floor of the kitchen one morning, which obviously wasn’t where I had left it, though who knows what Jennifer did while I slept. I wasn’t sure what else to do, but things weren’t getting any better as the new year dragged on through winter’s darkness and cold and, gradually, a touch more warmth and a touch more light into March.
Then COVID happened. Everyone was locked down, quarantined in their homes. We sprayed alcohol on all the doorknobs using the same sprayers we got for the bedbugs, and constantly washed our hands. There are actually streaks now on several of our doors where the alcohol dripped down and damaged the paint job. We ordered huge quantities of food for delivery from the supermarket, and an auxiliary pile of cans and peanut butter and dry goods grew up next to our pantry, which couldn’t hold everything after we sanitized each item with a bleach wipe. We felt like heroes for tipping 20% on takeout orders. My mom mailed us cloth masks she had sewn, and now, more than before, Jennifer refused to leave the house.
There were a couple of weeks when we were simply in our unit, locked down but for a few exceptions, not even working because work hadn’t figured out what to do with us yet. Then work returned, but remotely and without anything that might be called normalcy. Jennifer was constantly on Zoom calls through the day, so she got the second guest bedroom/office, where she could close the door and have privacy. I set up on the dining room table.
There was no break from home, no break from each other, no ability to wander around some store downtown for thirty minutes before getting on the L and apologizing when you got home—“ah, sorry, got hung up at work.” More than before, more than even when Quinn took over his room, the unit was closing in on me.
And yet, as the weeks and months of confinement dragged on through the spring and into the summer, the teleportation, at least, ended. Maybe it was something about being home all day, but the houseplants and table lamps and coffee maker soon stopped moving around by themselves, and all the kitchen cabinets were still closed in the morning. Jen stopped seeing streaking reflections in windows or mirrors or the switched off tv. The unusual events in our master closet or the hall bath petered out, ever so slowly, almost imperceptibly. The noises in the night from Quinn’s room, however, the cooing or crying or laughter, and the tapping, remained. They did become less frequent, but every few nights Jennifer would still shake me awake and ask if I heard it too, or else I’d wake when I felt her slide out of bed to go into Quinn’s room.
Remote work through that summer and into the fall, though, wasn’t as demanding as in-person. I found time for naps many days, and could recapture some of the sleep I’d lose at night. We had a COVID world to navigate, and thus a new topic to discuss rather than the old one to avoid. We knew people who got sick and knew of people who died, but for the most part we considered ourselves lucky and didn’t take any direct hit from the pandemic. We worked remotely but we still had jobs, we didn’t have any kids in school we suddenly had to teach algebra, and the biggest impact we felt was the inability to travel or eat in restaurants or see friends and family in person. That too is a sort of Chinese water torture, as were the makeshift desks and haircuts and bad backs from bad chairs.
I don’t know what it was precisely, but eventually Jennifer said, “I think Quinn will be able to find us.” Again, there was more to the conversation than that, but she was willing to move out to the suburbs, closer to her parents.
That was all it took for me. I frankly didn’t care if she thought Quinn could find us or realized he was never in our place to begin with. I didn’t care if she got a message from planet Zebulon or the ghost of Abraham Lincoln told her to go west. I had wanted out for months, and the fact that Jen now agreed was all that mattered. I didn’t want to mess things up by asking too many questions. I hated the condo and Quinn’s room and Quinn. The sooner we got out, the better. I called up the mortgage guy we used last time and set about getting pre-approved. I called up the agent we used last time too, and had him set up a suburban search for us while also making out a contingent listing of our condo. Jennifer insisted we disclose that it was haunted. Stuart thought that was odd—rightfully so—and I think he was concerned about how it would impact his commission. In the end, I think he was attracted to the novelty, and agreed.
Despite COVID, the real estate market was actually very strong. Stuart set up a bunch of open houses. Jen was willing to go sit in a park for the showings, but she required that I stay behind. I don’t know if she was worried about someone conducting an exorcism while we were out or if she thought Quinn would be bothered by being left alone with strangers, but I had to pretend to be Stuart’s associate. I put on a mask and showed strangers where the HVAC was, and took them down to the storage locker in the basement. I listened sympathetically while they talked about the “nutty” listing, and had to explain that “no, no one was murdered here.”
When not showing our place we were out in the suburbs looking at houses. Jennifer was very big on a strong K-12 school system, a nice-sized backyard, a playground within walking distance, and four bedrooms. She never expressly mentioned Quinn, but when she said “I think the kids would like this,” or “this is a house we could grow into,” I was never quite clear on exactly who she was talking about.
I don’t see why Jennifer is necessarily wrong. If there can be ghosts, what’s stopping them from moving out to the suburbs? It seems like ghosts are often fixed to a particular spot, perhaps where they died some horrible death, but there’s no logical reason for that, at least not in our case. I hope he doesn’t. Let’s be done with it. We’ll move, and he won’t come, and things will go back to the way they were, only now we’ll have a finished basement and an attic and a yard. That would probably be best. But what if Jennifer gets worse and not better? Perhaps the change of scenery will set her off, and she’ll want to come back for him, or something worse will find us out there. What if it never was Quinn in the first place, but something else? Either way, what to make of the last year, even if everything goes back to normal? Can someone have a year of madness, and then be fine forever and ever after that? Is there more madness ahead?
On the other hand, why didn’t Quinn let me see him or hear him? Why did he choose only Jennifer, albeit in taps and laughs and flashes of light? I could have been a good father to him, or does he know something I don’t? Did he come only to Jennifer for the same reason he miscarried in the first place, and he has no use for me anymore? Will the next one think the same? What if it’s only ever going to be Jennifer and me in our big four bedroom house in the burbs? I’m not sure if I want our condo to be haunted or not. We still haven’t put in a bid on a house in the suburbs, and we haven’t accepted an offer on the condo yet either.
John Power was born and raised in and around New York City, graduated from Washington and Lee University in Virginia, lived in Warsaw, Poland, and has lived in Chicago for the last 15 years.
Power’s stories have appeared in The William & Mary Review, Barzakh Magazine, West Trade Review, Cleaning Up Glitter, The Book Smuggler's Den, and The Great Lakes Review, among others. His most recent novel, "Participation", is available on amazon.com, as is an earlier novel, "Toy With the Flame". His first novel, "Golden Freedom", is available on lulu.com.