The Third Visit

The first time we admitted Abuela Rosa to St. Catherine’s, the air in her room felt thick enough to chew. It was her third bout with pneumonia in as many years, and the doctors spoke in low, urgent tones that my cousin Mateo had to translate for her. Abuela only nodded, her eyes fixed on the yellowed ceiling tiles, as if counting the stains. During the week, Mateo and his older brother, Diego, took shifts. On weekends, it was my sister, Lucia, and me. The hospital was old, with corridors that smelled of antiseptic and despair. I hated it there. From the moment I stepped into Abuela’s room, I felt a prickling at the back of my neck, like someone was breathing down it. I’d spin around, expecting a nurse or doctor, but the doorway was always empty. ‘It’s just your imagination,’ Lucia would say, but she avoided the room’s far corner where the shadows seemed to cling.

After five weeks, Abuela was discharged. She came home to her small, cluttered apartment in the old part of town, where the radiators clanked and the walls seemed to sweat. We thought the ordeal was over. But two weeks later, the knocking started. I was in the bathroom, running the water for a shower, when I heard it—three sharp raps on the door. ‘Just a minute!’ I called, but when I opened it, the hallway was empty. The lights in the living room flickered, and Abuela was asleep in her armchair, her breathing labored but steady. I shrugged it off.

But it didn’t stop. Every time I entered the bathroom, the knocking would come. And it grew bolder. One evening, I heard a voice—not Abuela’s, not Lucia’s—a rasping whisper that seemed to slither under the door. ‘Let me in.’ I froze. The water from the shower was still running, filling the room with steam, and in the mirror, I saw a smudge of black on my shoulder, like a handprint. I turned to look, but it vanished.

I told Lucia, but she dismissed it. ‘You’re tired. The hospital got into your head.’ But then she started hearing it too—the knocking from her room at night, three raps, always three. And Abuela grew worse. She’d wake up gasping, clawing at her chest, her eyes wide with terror. She’d mutter in Spanish, something about ‘la que espera’—the one that waits.

One night, I was alone with Abuela. Lucia had gone out, and Mateo and Diego were at their own place. I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, when the knocking came again, harder this time, rattling the door. And then the voice, clearer than ever: ‘You opened the door for me once. You’ll let me in again.’ I looked at the mirror, and my reflection wasn’t mine. It was an old woman with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, her mouth stretched in a grin too wide. She wore a hospital gown, yellowed and stained.

The lights went out. The knocking became pounding, and the door began to splinter. I screamed for Abuela, but she didn’t answer. I forced myself to open the door, and the hallway was empty. But in Abuela’s room, I found her sitting up in bed, her breathing peaceful for the first time in days. She looked at me calmly and said, ‘She’s gone now. She was tired of waiting.’ I asked her who, and she pointed to the bathroom door. ‘She used to wait there, in the hospital. She was in the room next to mine. She died alone, no one came. She wanted company.’

I never heard the knocking again. But sometimes, late at night, I catch a whiff of antiseptic in my own bathroom, and I see a faint smudge on the mirror that wipes away too easily. And when I’m alone, I feel a cold breath on my neck, and a whisper that says, ‘I found you.’ Abuela passed away peacefully a month later, but I know she took the old woman with her. The problem is, I think she left something behind in my bathroom, waiting for the next person to open the door.