The Gibberish in the Van

The day my niece Hazel died, the sky was the color of bruised plums. She had been born just three weeks earlier, a fragile wisp of a thing with translucent skin and a whisper of a heartbeat. The doctors had said she would never leave the hospital, and they were right. Her body was a battlefield of failures—a collapsed lung, a malformed heart, and a leukemia that ate at her tiny bones. They fed her through a tube that snaked into her nose, and even then, she whimpered in pain. When her heart finally gave out, I felt a numb relief. She was free of her suffering, and I told myself that was enough.

At the funeral, we stood in the gravel lot of Cedar Grove Memorial, a cemetery that smelled of wet earth and cut grass. My cousin, Hazel’s father, held a single white rose, his knuckles white as the petals. They lowered her tiny coffin into the ground—a box so small it looked like a shoebox, and I thought how wrong that was. As the first handful of dirt clattered onto the lid, the priest said, ‘Ashes to ashes.’ And in the silence that followed, I heard it.

A thin, high-pitched gurgle, like a baby trying to talk. It came from the direction of the grave, or maybe from behind me. I turned, but everyone else stood still, heads bowed. My sister-in-law wiped her eyes. My brother shifted his weight. No one else seemed to notice. I chalked it up to the wind or my imagination. We filed back to the cars, and I climbed into the back of my brother’s van, the one with the faded bumper sticker that said ‘I Brake for Yard Sales.’

The drive home was two hours of silence and the occasional sniffle. I was exhausted, having slept poorly all week. I closed my eyes, and as my head nodded against the window, I heard it again. That same gurgling babble, almost like a child trying to form words, coming from the empty seat beside me. My eyes snapped open. The seat was empty, just a car seat buckled in, covered with a gray blanket. My brother was muttering to himself up front, his knuckles pale on the steering wheel. I told myself it was the whine of the tires on the asphalt, the drone of the engine. I pulled my jacket over my head and tried to sleep.

When we got home, I practically fell out of the van, my legs heavy as lead. My brother, Daniel, was already at the door, unlocking it with shaking hands. I caught his arm and asked, ‘Hey, did you hear anything weird at the funeral? Like, a baby noise?’ He stared at me for a long moment, his face unreadable. Then he said, ‘I heard it too. In the car. I thought I was losing it.’ A cold knot formed in my stomach. We stood in the doorway, the hallway dark behind us, and I felt a draft that smelled of talcum powder and decay.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my childhood bed, the same one I’d had since I was ten, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that had faded to a sickly yellow. The house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of the floorboards. Then I heard it again—that soft, wet babbling, coming from the corner of my room. I turned on the lamp. The corner was empty, but the air felt heavier, as if something was pushing down on the room. I whispered, ‘Hazel?’ The babbling stopped.

The next morning, Daniel looked worse than I felt. Dark circles under his eyes, his hair disheveled. He said he’d heard it all night, coming from the baby monitor we’d set up in the nursery—a room that had never been used. The monitor was on the kitchen counter, its little speaker crackling with static. He unplugged it, but the battery light was still on. He shook it, and it let out a faint, garbled sound that made us both jump. We decided to drive back to the cemetery later that day, to make sure everything was okay. Maybe it was just grief playing tricks on us. Maybe we needed closure.

At the cemetery, the groundskeeper was there, a wizened old man with a limp. When we told him we wanted to check the grave, he gave us a strange look. ‘There’s nothing to check,’ he said. ‘Your niece’s casket was empty when they lowered it. The funeral home made a mistake. They buried a box of sand.’ Daniel went white. He grabbed the man’s arm, demanding to know where the body was. The old man shook his head, his eyes clouded. ‘I don’t know, son. But I heard her cry that day. When they closed the lid. I thought it was my imagination. But now I’m not so sure.’

We drove back home in silence, the van’s engine a low growl. The babbling had started again, but now it wasn’t coming from the seat beside me. It was coming from inside the dashboard, muffled and rhythmic. I slammed my palm against the plastic, and it stopped for a moment, then resumed, as if it were singing a song. Daniel pulled over, his hands shaking. He killed the engine, and in the sudden stillness, we both heard it clearly: a toddler’s voice, but slightly off, as if recorded on a warped tape, saying, ‘Mama. Mama. Mama.’

We didn’t sleep that night. We sat in the living room, all the lights on, the television blaring some old sitcom. But the sound cut through the canned laughter. It came from the vent in the ceiling, from the floorboards, from the walls. Daniel said, ‘Maybe she’s not dead. Maybe they made a mistake.’ But I remembered her in the hospital, her little chest rising and falling with the help of machines, her eyes never opening. I knew she was gone. But something was here, something that wore her voice like a hand-me-down.

At 3 AM, the front door creaked open. No one was there. The wind blew in, and the smell of that talcum powder, mixed with the metallic scent of blood, filled the room. And then I heard it, distinct and clear, right at my ear: ‘I’m cold.’ I grabbed Daniel’s hand, and he was shaking. The door slammed shut by itself. And the babbling started again, but this time it was accompanied by dragging noises, as if something was being pulled across the floor. We ran to the kitchen, and there was the baby monitor, sitting on the counter with its light on, and from its speaker, a low, gurgling laugh.

We didn’t know what to do. We called the funeral home. The director, a tight-lipped woman named Mrs. Kessler, insisted there had been no mistake. ‘The body was cremated,’ she said. ‘We have the ashes.’ But when we opened the urn we had taken home, instead of gray dust, we found a handful of white sand, and a tiny, plastic teddy bear. The babbling from the monitor grew louder, and then the kitchen lights began to flicker. In the flicker, I saw the shadow of a small child in the hallway, standing just at the edge of the light. It was wearing a white hospital gown. It was Hazel.

Daniel screamed and grabbed my arm, and we ran out of the house, into the cold night. We drove to the cemetery, to Hazel’s grave, and I dug with my bare hands in the raw earth, the dirt crusting under my nails. We found the casket, still new, and we pried it open. Inside, there was no box of sand. There was her tiny body, blue and still, but with its eyes open. And as I looked down, the mouth moved, and a voice, as clear as a bell, said, ‘Why did you leave me?’

I woke up in my bed, gasping. The room was bright with daylight. Daniel was shaking my shoulder, saying, ‘You were screaming in your sleep.’ I looked at him, and I saw the same terror in his eyes. He said, ‘I had the same nightmare. We both did. That can’t be a coincidence.’ And as he said it, I heard it again, that faint, chattering gibberish, from under my bed. I looked down, and there was a small, white hand reaching out from the shadows.

We haven’t gone back to that house. We’re living in a motel on the edge of town, and we’ve changed our names, but it doesn’t matter. She followed us. I hear her in the hum of the air conditioner, in the rustle of the curtains. Last night, I felt a tiny hand pat my cheek in the dark. The gibberish has become words now. She says, ‘Come play, Auntie. Come play.’ And I know that someday, I will. There’s no running from a voice that comes from inside you.