The Third of January

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until the third of January, 2006. I was nineteen, home from university for the holidays, and my grandmother, Elsie, had passed away just a week earlier. The house felt different, heavy with that particular silence that follows death. That night, I was lying on my bed, staring at the television, which was playing some late-night rerun I wasn’t really watching. My mother had emptied Elsie’s wardrobe that day, and now her clothes hung on a rail in my room, a faint smell of lavender and mothballs drifting from them.

My brother, Leo, had given Elsie a small, red teddy bear, a silly thing with a football motif, back in the hospital on Christmas Day. He’d forgotten it when we left, and my mother had retrieved it after she died. A few weeks later, my mother heard Leo padding down the stairs in the middle of the night. She followed him to the kitchen, where he was pouring a glass of water. When she asked what he was doing, he said, ‘For Nan, she’s got a nasty cough.’ They went back upstairs together, and my mother found a pile of tissues surrounding the teddy bear, which Leo had placed on the bedside table. It was unsettling, but I chalked it up to a kid’s imagination. A few months later, though, Leo lost the bear entirely, and we all forgot about it.

That night, as I lay there, my eyes drifted from the screen to the top of the television, and my heart froze. There, perched on the edge of the set, was the red teddy bear. The same one Leo had lost. It was facing me, its small black button eyes fixed in my direction. I hadn’t seen it in months, and I knew for a fact that no one had placed it there. A cold draft slithered across the room, and the clothes on the rail stirred as if a hand had brushed through them.

I tried to rationalize it. Maybe Leo had found it and put it there. Maybe my mother had. But the way it sat, so deliberate, made my skin crawl. I called out, ‘Mum?’ My voice came out as a croak. No answer. I got up slowly, never taking my eyes off the bear, and reached for the door. As my hand touched the handle, I heard a faint, dry cough behind me. It came from the direction of the wardrobe, soft and raspy, like an old woman clearing her throat.

I spun around. The bear hadn’t moved. But the clothes on the rail swayed slightly, as if someone had just brushed past them. The cough came again, louder, closer. ‘Nan?’ I whispered, my throat tight. A cold, invisible hand seemed to press against my chest, and the smell of lavender intensified, choking me. I stumbled backward out of the room, slamming the door shut. I leant against the wall, panting, and heard a low chuckle from inside, followed by the sound of fabric rustling.

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat in the living room with all the lights on, trying to convince myself it was a nightmare. But when morning came, I forced myself to go back to my room. The bear was still there, on top of the TV, facing me. And on the floor beneath it, there was a single, crumpled tissue, damp as if from a cough.

From that day on, the bear moved. Sometimes it would appear on my pillow, or on the kitchen table, or once, in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the sink, watching me brush my teeth. Every time I saw it, I’d feel a chill, and I’d hear that dry cough, a reminder that Elsie was still there, not fully letting go. My mother found Leo the next morning, sitting on the floor with the bear in his lap, crying. He said, ‘Nan wants to stay with us.’ When my mother asked why, he just pointed at the bear and whispered, ‘She’s not done coughing yet.’

We tried to get rid of the bear. We threw it in the bin, but it reappeared in my room the same night. We burned it in the backyard, but the next morning, it sat charred and smoking on the doorstep, its button eyes gleaming. Eventually, we stopped trying. We learned to live with it, with the cough, with the sense that someone else was always there. But I never again lay on my bed facing the television without first checking the top of the set. And I never mentioned the third of January, because that was the day I learned that some people, no matter how much you love them, never really leave. They just wait, with a dry, rattling cough, for you to acknowledge that they’re still listening.