The Apron Strings

It was the night of the Harvest Moon Ball, and I, a junior at Maplewood High, had spent the entire day fussing over my dress, my hair, and the endless photographs in my grandmother’s rose garden. The garden, with its overgrown hedges and the rusted iron gate that groaned like a dying animal, was my favorite place on the property, though my mother always said it was bad luck to linger there after dusk.

The ball itself was a blur of cheap decorations and sweaty palms. My date, a quiet boy named Eliot, kept stepping on my toes, but I didn’t mind. The real trouble started at the after-party, a gathering at a barn on the outskirts of town. The barn was owned by a family named the Holloways, and they had a reputation for strange happenings, though everyone chalked it up to tall tales and too much moonshine. When we arrived, the barn was nearly empty. The few kids who were there muttered about a change of venue, and soon everyone piled into trucks and drove off to a bonfire by the lake. I told Eliot I was feeling dizzy and asked him to take me home.

The drive back was silent, the only sound the crunch of gravel under the tires and the low hum of the radio playing a song I didn’t recognize. My house, a sprawling Victorian with a wraparound porch, stood at the end of a long, tree-lined driveway. The porch light was on, but the rest of the house was dark. I thanked Eliot, ran inside, and quickly changed into my flannel pajamas, the ones with the little moons and stars. I heated up a bowl of leftover stew from the fridge and carried it up to my mother’s room, where I planned to wait for her. She was at a charity gala for the historical society and wouldn’t be home until late.

The room smelled of her lavender sachets and the faint trace of her rose-scented perfume. I sat on the edge of her bed, flicking through channels on the old television set, the blue light casting dancing shadows on the floral wallpaper. I took a bite of the stew, and then it happened. A heavy drowsiness washed over me, like a blanket of wet wool. My eyelids grew heavy, and the room seemed to tilt. I felt myself slipping, not into sleep, but into a strange lucid state where I was both in the room and somewhere else entirely.

The somewhere else was a vast, dark plain under a starless sky. I stood on brittle grass that crunched beneath my bare feet, though I knew I was still lying on the bed. A wind, cold and carrying the scent of turned earth, whispered through the emptiness. And then I heard it: a man’s voice, deep and resonant, calling my name, Maribel. It wasn’t menacing; it was almost gentle, like a father calling a child in from the dark. ‘Maribel,’ he said, and I felt a pull toward him, a longing that was not my own. ‘Come, it’s time.’ I shook my head, my voice a silent protest in that dreamlike space. ‘I’m not ready,’ I said, though no sound escaped my lips.

The voice didn’t insist. It simply faded, and I was jolted back to the room, the stew bowl still warm in my hands. I could hear my mother’s car pulling into the driveway, the crunch of tires on gravel. My heart was pounding, and a chill ran down my spine. I put the bowl aside and rushed to the window, watching as my mother stepped out, her silver dress shimmering under the porch light. She looked up at the window and waved, and I waved back, forcing a smile. When she came inside, I didn’t tell her about the voice. I was afraid she’d think I’d been dreaming, or worse, that she’d know something wasn’t right.

But the incident didn’t end there. Over the following weeks, I began to notice things out of the corner of my eye: a flicker of movement in the garden, a silhouette at the edge of the tree line. And sometimes, in the dead of night, I’d hear the voice again, calling my name, always the same gentle summons. It grew harder to resist, and I started to sleepwalk, waking up in odd places: the attic, the cellar, once even at the edge of the rose garden with my feet bare and the night air cold on my skin. My mother, worried, took me to doctors, but they found nothing. Then one evening, I decided to tell her the truth, sitting across from her at the kitchen table, the same table where she’d taught me to fold pie crusts, where my grandmother had left her apron hanging on the hook by the door.

My mother listened, her face pale, and when I finished, she fetched an old, yellowed photograph from a drawer. It showed a man, a handsome man with a kind face, standing in front of our house, but the house looked older, as if from a different time. ‘That’s your great-great-grandfather, Elias,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He was a caretaker for the estate before it was ours. He died in the garden, right around this time of year, a hundred years ago.’ She paused, her eyes meeting mine. ‘The story is, he was waiting for his wife, who never came home from a ball. He called out for her until his voice gave out, and then he just… vanished. Some say he still waits for someone to take her place.’

The truth settled over me like a shroud. The voice in my dream, the pull I felt, it wasn’t a stranger’s call. It was an old spirit, bound to this land, seeking a companion in death. I looked at the apron still hanging by the door, a thing I’d always found comforting, now a symbol of something else entirely. The next day, I found a small, leather-bound journal in the attic, written in a spidery hand. It was Elias’s diary, and inside, he described the same sensation I had felt: the drowsiness, the other place, the voice calling him. He had written, ‘She came to me in a dream, but I was not ready. Now I fear I never will be.’ The journal ended there.

That night, I listened to the wind outside, and when the voice came again, I steeled myself. I stood at the window, looking out at the rose garden bathed in moonlight, and I spoke aloud, though my voice was barely a whisper. ‘I am not ready,’ I said. ‘And I will never be.’ The voice fell silent, and for a moment, the world felt still. I don’t know if I broke the cycle, but the calls stopped. I slept through the night without wandering, and the shadows at the edge of the woods no longer seemed to move. But sometimes, when I’m alone, I catch a whiff of rose perfume and turned earth, and I wonder if Elias found his peace, or if he’s still waiting out there, patient as the ground.

The apron still hangs by the door, and my mother has taken to wearing it when she cooks. She says it’s a family heirloom, and that the stains are from years of love. I don’t tell her that I once saw a man in a flannel shirt and work boots, standing in the garden, his face turned up to the window where she now stands, his mouth open, as if calling a name. I keep my secret, as I always have, only now I know it’s not just my secret. It’s his too, and perhaps, one day, it will be my daughter’s.