The Thin Walls of Cul-de-sac 14

In the summer of 2014, my father moved his girlfriend, Delia, into our house on Cul-de-sac 14, a quiet street lined with identical brick homes. My mother had passed the previous winter, and the house still smelled of her lavender sachets. Delia was a woman with sharp, calculating eyes, and she wasted no time rearranging the kitchen and throwing out my mother’s things. My father, Mark, was a tall man with a permanent tremble in his hands, a symptom of the pills he took too often. Delia had her own habits, and together they made a sort of chaotic team, always chasing the next high.

I was fifteen, and I’d learned to make myself invisible. My room was a fortress at the end of the hall, door locked, headphones on. I waited for the sound of the front door clicking shut and the engine of my father’s truck rumbling away before I’d emerge, like a mouse after a cat. That day, they left for ‘errands,’ which meant a trip to the pharmacy that sometimes took hours. I counted five minutes, then made my way to the bathroom at the end of the hall.

The bathroom was small, with a cracked linoleum floor and a mirror that fogged up permanently. I ran the tap, watching the water swirl, when I heard it: a faint, rhythmic tapping, like a fingernail against glass, coming from behind the medicine cabinet. I froze, listening. It stopped. I shrugged it off as the house settling—old pipes, maybe a squirrel in the walls—and went about my business.

But the next week, it happened again. I was in the living room, reading, when I heard a woman’s voice, muffled, as if coming through a wall. It was singing, a lullaby I vaguely remembered from my own childhood. I turned to the wall adjacent to the bathroom, pressing my ear against the cool drywall. The singing stopped. I told myself it was the neighbor’s TV, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Delia started complaining about the voices around the same time. At dinner, she’d set her fork down and stare at the hallway. ‘She’s talking to that woman again,’ she’d mutter, pointing at the bathroom. My father would roll his eyes. ‘There’s no one there, Delia. You’re off your meds.’ But I knew she wasn’t imagining it. I’d heard it too.

One night, I couldn’t sleep. I crept to the bathroom, my heart hammering. The door was ajar, and a sliver of dim light leaked out. I pushed it open. Delia was standing at the sink, staring into the mirror, her hands gripping the porcelain. She was whispering, a rapid stream of words I couldn’t understand. Then she turned to me, her eyes wide, and pointed at the corner of the ceiling. ‘She’s right there. She’s been watching us. She says you’re listening.’

I backed away, my skin crawling. The next day, I noticed the floorboards near the bathroom were loose. I knelt down, and with a little prying, lifted one. Underneath, I found a small, faded photograph of a woman with my mother’s smile. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, was a date and the words ‘For my daughter.’ I felt a chill run down my spine. My mother had been dead for over a year, but she was still here, in the walls, in the pipes, watching over us in the only way she could.

I never told my father or Delia what I found. I let them continue their pointless arguments, Delia’s accusations of voices, my father’s dismissals. But I knew the truth. The thin walls of Cul-de-sac 14 were not just shielding us from the neighbors; they were hiding a presence that would never leave. And sometimes, late at night, I would press my ear to the bathroom wall and hear my mother’s lullaby, and I would whisper back, ‘I hear you, Mom. I’m still listening.’