The Portrait of the Empty Chair

It began with the chair in the hall. My brother, Theo, and I had grown up in Rosewood, a town where the old money built houses that leaned against the trees like they were tired. Our grandmother’s house—the one we inherited—sat at the end of Fenwick Lane, a Victorian with a wraparound porch and a mansard roof that collected leaves and secrets. After she passed, the family gathered there for the reading of the will, and we decided to keep it. My mother, Claire, had never liked the place. She said it smelled of damp lace and old grief. But she went along with it because my father, Samuel, couldn’t let it go.

That autumn, after the first frost, Theo turned four. He was a quiet child, with wide green eyes that seemed to register things the rest of us missed. My mother often said he had an old soul. She meant it as a compliment, but there was a nervousness in her voice when she said it. She would rock him by the upstairs window, humming lullabies, and sometimes she’d stop mid-hum, staring at the glass as if she saw something reflected there. When I asked what was wrong, she’d just shake her head and say, ‘Nothing, Al, just the leaves.’

But the leaves weren’t the only things that moved. It started with the telephone. The old rotary in the hall would ring in the middle of the night, a sharp, piercing sound that cut through the creaks of the house. My father would answer, his face pale under the little lamp, and after a moment he’d say, ‘No, sorry, you have the wrong number,’ and hang up. This happened for three weeks. Every night, the same ring, the same silence on the other line. Then one night, when I picked up before my father could, I heard a woman’s voice, thin and like cloth tearing, say, ‘Where is he? Where did you put him?’ I dropped the phone, and it clattered against the oak floor, and my father ran out of his study. He stared at the receiver, then at me, and said, ‘Don’t answer that again, Al.’ But I never found out who ‘he’ was.

My mother’s experience happened on a Tuesday. I was at school, and my father was at work, so it was just Theo and her. She had put him down for his nap in the small bedroom that faced the garden. He had been sleeping peacefully, but at 3:00 in the afternoon, he began to cry. It was not a hungry cry or a tired cry. It was a desperate, unbroken wail, the kind that makes a mother’s skin prickle. She rushed in and found him sitting up in his crib, his face red and streaked, pointing at the wall. She followed his finger and saw the portrait of my grandmother—the one that had hung in the parlor since before I was born. It had been moved to that room only a week ago by my father, who said he wanted to keep it close. In the portrait, my grandmother is seated in a high-backed chair, wearing a string of pearls, her lips slightly parted as if about to speak.

My mother asked, ‘Theo, why are you crying? What’s wrong?’ He didn’t answer, only kept pointing at the painting. She went to it, looked at it, and saw nothing unusual—only the faded oil, the cracked varnish, and the faint smile she had always found slightly off. She tried to soothe him, but he cried for hours, his little body shaking, until he finally wore himself out and fell asleep in her arms. When she told me about it later, she said, ‘He wouldn’t stop pointing at her. And the whole time, I had the feeling she was looking back at me, not at your brother. At me, like she knew something.’ I asked what she meant, and she said, ‘I don’t know. It felt like she was waiting for me to leave the room.’ She never said that again.

A few days after, I decided to test something. I had heard from a friend in school about a trick to talk to spirits using a mirror and a candle. I didn’t believe it, but I was curious. I waited until everyone was asleep, then crept into the room where the portrait hung. I set a small hand mirror on the dresser opposite the painting, so that the portrait was reflected in it. I lit a white candle and sat on the floor, staring into the mirror. The candle flickered. In the reflection, the woman in the painting seemed to shift. Her head, which had been slightly tilted to the right, now turned to face me directly. I felt a cold breath on my neck, but I was the only one in the room. The candle went out. In the dark, I heard a rustling, like silk skirts, and a voice whispered, ‘You’re in my chair.’ I turned around, and the painting was empty. The chair in the portrait was empty. I bolted from the room and didn’t sleep until dawn.

The next morning, my father found the portrait turned to face the wall. He said he didn’t do it. My mother said she hadn’t either. Theo, when asked, just looked at the wall and said, ‘She’s angry we moved her.’ My father laughed it off, but I saw him glance at the painting sideways. That afternoon, he called a priest, who came and blessed the house. The priest left in a hurry, mumbling something about a ‘seal’ that had been broken. My father didn’t tell us more.

After that, the presence seemed to multiply. Doors would open and close on their own. The smell of lavender, my grandmother’s perfume, seeped from the walls. And in the night, we’d hear the sound of a rocking chair on the floor above, even though no one in our family rocked. The rocking always stopped when my mother called out, ‘Enough, Mother!’ But she later admitted she didn’t know why she said that.

The worst was the night my father had a heart attack. He was in his study, going through old family papers, when he clutched his chest and crumpled. My mother found him just in time to call an ambulance. He survived, but in the hospital, he confessed to her that in the moments before his attack, he had seen his mother—my grandmother—standing in the doorway, not as an old woman, but as a young bride, holding a folded shawl. She had pointed at him and said, ‘You took my chair, Samuel. I want it back.’ My father had no idea what she meant. But the next morning, my mother went into the parlor and moved the wooden chair that had belonged to my grandmother into the far corner. She said she felt a release, like something had been holding its breath.

We sold the house six months later. The new owners called my father after a week, asking about the portrait. They had found it in the attic, wrapped in a tarp. My father said, ‘We left it. It’s yours now.’ They sent it to auction. I don’t know who bought it. But sometimes, late at night, I think about that empty chair in the painting, and I wonder if my grandmother is still looking for a place to sit. And I wonder if, one day, she’ll find a room in my new apartment, and point a finger at my empty chair, and say, ‘You’re in my spot. Move or give it back.’

I still have the mirror from that night. I keep it in a drawer, wrapped in a cloth. But every once in a while, I feel the urge to look into it, just to see if there’s something else reflected. So far, it’s just my face. But the face in the mirror has started to smile a little too wide, and I never smile that way. So I keep it hidden. Because I know that if I ever look again, the woman in the painting might be sitting behind me, waiting for me to turn around. And I’m not yet ready to leave this chair of mine.