The Girl in the Static

My mother still doesn’t like to talk about it. She says that when she looks at me now, she sometimes sees the outline of that other child superimposed over my face, like a ghost in a photograph. I was three when it happened, and I’m twenty-one now, but the memory of that night clings to her like a damp shawl. I don’t remember it myself, not consciously, but I have dreams where I’m standing in a room that smells of wet plaster and old copper, and there’s a humming sound, like a refrigerator that’s been left too long, and a girl with hair the color of burnt toast is whispering secrets into my ear.

We lived then in a small town called Pemberton, in a house that was perpetually too warm, with radiators that clanked and sighed like a sleeping animal. The house was old, built in the 1920s, and my parents had always said it had good bones, but my mother now says there was a wrongness to it, a subtle tilt in the floorboards that made you feel like you were always walking uphill. I don’t remember the house, but I’ve seen photos: a two-story brick structure with a wraparound porch and a tall, narrow window on the second floor that looked out onto the street. My room was at the end of the hall, and I had a new Barbie, a gift from my great-grandmother, with a shiny pink dress and hair that was so blond it was almost white.

My mother was exhausted that evening. She had spent the day dealing with a burst pipe in the bathroom, and the plumber had left a mess of spilled tools and dirty footprints. She gave me my bath, scrubbing the grime from my knees, and the water was so warm it turned my skin pink. She dried me off, slathered me in lavender lotion, and then set me down in the living room. ‘Sweetie, I’m going to take a quick shower,’ she said, her voice thin with fatigue. ‘You can play with your new friend for a bit.’ She meant the Barbie, of course, but I looked at her with that solemn, unnerving focus that toddlers have, and said, ‘I’m going to play with my new friend. She’s in the hallway.’ My mother didn’t think anything of it. She laughed, ruffled my hair, and went up the stairs.

The shower felt like heaven. The heat of the water, the steam, the scent of her rose shampoo—it all washed away the day’s stress. She took her time, humming along to a song on the radio she had crackling in the background. She must have been in there for twenty minutes. When she finally turned off the water and stepped out, she wrapped a towel around herself and padded to the bedroom to get dressed. She called out for me, but there was no answer. She called again, louder, but the house was silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator downstairs. Dread pooled in her stomach.

She searched the living room first. No me. The kitchen, with its worn linoleum and the smell of old grease. No me. The dining room, where the heavy oak table sat like a rook waiting to move. No me. She ran up the stairs, her heart thumping, and checked her bedroom, the guest room, the bathroom. Nothing. The only room left was mine—the last door on the left. She pushed it open, and the room was empty. The Barbie lay on the floor, its plastic arm bent at an unnatural angle, its hair askew. My mother’s mind raced: a kidnapping? An intruder? But the doors were locked, the alarm was set, and she had been home the whole time. She checked the closets, under the bed, and even the small window that had a sill too high for a three-year-old to reach. Nothing.

Panic set in. She raced down the stairs, her wet hair leaving a trail of drips, and she did a second sweep of the house, now noticing things she had missed: a pencil on the floor, the couch pillows askew, a strand of red thread caught on the doorknob of the coat closet. She flung open the closet door, but it was just coats and shoes. She checked the basement, but the door was heavy and she had to struggle with the lock. She descended the stairs into the dusty dark, calling my name, and the only response was the settling of the house, the creak of the beams. She came back up, tears streaming, and was about to call 911 when she heard it: a faint giggle from the attic. The attic door was a small, almost invisible hatch in the ceiling of the hallway. She had never given it much thought. She dragged a chair from the kitchen, shoved it beneath the hatch, and climbed up. The attic was filled with boxes and old furniture, and in the corner, illuminated by a shaft of light from a tiny, grimy window, she saw me.

I was sitting cross-legged on a dusty wooden floorboard, my back to her, my head tilted as if I were listening to something. A little girl was squatting beside me, her hair a dull, burnt brown, wearing a dress that looked like it had once been white but was now a beige ghost of a color. The girl was whispering in my ear, and I was nodding, a solemn expression on my face. My mother said she felt a coldness, like someone had opened a freezer door, and the air in the attic was thick and heavy, almost greasy. ‘Marion!’ she shouted, and I slowly turned, but the other girl didn’t. The girl just kept whispering, and I looked at my mother with a vacant expression, my eyes not quite focusing. Then the humming started, a low, resonant hum that seemed to come from the walls themselves, and the air got colder. My mother scrambled across the floor, grabbed me by the arm, and yanked me away. The moment my hand left the girl’s, the humming stopped, and the girl slowly dematerialized, like smoke from a snuffed candle. I started to cry, a wailing, inconsolable cry, and my mother held me tight, sobbing herself as she carried me down from the attic.

She never spoke of it to anyone outside the family, not even to my father, who was away on a business trip. She just held me that night in her room, rocking me until I finally fell asleep. The next morning, she said, I woke up as if nothing had happened, chattering away about the Barbie, and I had no memory of the attic or the girl. But she couldn’t shake it. She became obsessed with the house, her questions at the local library revealing that the house had a dark history: in the 1950s, a little girl had died in a fire in that same house, in the attic, where there had been an old storage room. Her name was Annette, and she had been just about my age. I know this because my mother kept a folder, a thick manila folder, with newspaper clippings and notes. She must have thought I’d never find it, but I did, when I was sixteen, buried in a box in the garage.

My abilities—if you can call them that—have diminished over the years. I can’t see spirits clearly anymore, not unless I’m caught off guard. Sometimes, just before falling asleep, I’ll see a flicker in the corner of my eye, and I’ll know it’s there. But I’ve learned to ignore it. I’ve learned to keep my eyes focused on the present. But sometimes, when I’m home alone, I’ll hear a faint humming, like an old refrigerator, and I’ll feel a cold draft on my neck. And once, just once, I looked into a mirror and saw, behind my own reflection, the faintest outline of a small figure with burnt-brown hair, standing in a doorway that shouldn’t have existed. I blinked, and it was gone. I told no one. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to know that maybe I left something up there, something that followed me down. All I know is that my mother now refuses to step foot in that house, and we sold it when I was seven. She says it was because of the roof, but I know the truth. She’s still running from that night, from the girl in the attic, from the child she found sitting in the static of the air, whispering secrets to her daughter. And I’m running too, even if I don’t know what from.