The Window in the Wall

I was twelve when my grandmother, Elsie, moved into our house. She had been living alone for years, but after the diagnosis, my parents decided she needed care. The disease had already stolen most of her words, but she still had her moments of clarity, small islands in a foggy sea. She would sometimes hum old hymns I vaguely recognized, and once, she called me by my late grandfather’s name, which made my mother weep.

Our house had a peculiar feature: a small, round window set high in the wall of my bedroom. I had always thought it was pointless, just a decorative afterthought. But Elsie loved it. She would ask me to help her into a chair by that window, and she would stare out at the backyard for hours, her hands folded in her lap, like she was waiting for someone to arrive. I never asked who.

A month after she moved in, she grew worse. She no longer recognized my face, only stared at me with a puzzled, distant look. She stopped speaking entirely, and her body curled into a tight ball on her hospice bed in the living room. My parents hired a nurse to stay with her, but at night, the house would fall into a heavy silence that felt thicker than the dark.

One night, I woke suddenly, as if someone had called my name. The room was black, but the window let in a pale shaft of moonlight that fell across the floor. I turned toward the window, and there, in the glass, I saw her reflection. She was not in the room, but outside, standing on the roof, staring in. Her face was a pale blur, her hair a wild tangle, and her eyes, even in the dark, seemed to pierce through the glass. I blinked, and she was gone.

The next morning, I told my mother, but she dismissed it as a dream. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, watching the window, waiting. The moon was full again, and around midnight, I saw a shadow pass across the glass. This time, she was inside the room. She stood at the foot of my bed, her old housedress hanging limp, her feet bare, her skin the color of forgotten milk. She did not speak. She only pointed at the window.

I followed her gaze. In the glass, I saw a new reflection: not mine, not hers, but a room I had never seen—a sunlit kitchen with daisy-patterned curtains, and a young woman with auburn hair who looked startlingly like Elsie in an old photograph. The woman was laughing, reaching for someone out of frame. As I watched, the image shifted. The kitchen faded, replaced by a dark, rain-streaked night. The woman was older now, weeping in a rocking chair, her hands clutching a faded photograph.

I turned to ask my grandmother what this meant, but she was gone. The room was empty. Yet, the image in the window remained, cycling through scenes: a man in a uniform, a funeral, a child’s laughter, a house empty of all but dust. Finally, the scenes stopped on a bedroom, and in the bed, an old woman lay curled, her mouth open in a silent scream. It was Elsie, the night she died.

The window went dark. I heard the nurse’s footsteps in the hallway, and the front door opening, and the quiet murmur of my parents. But I couldn’t move. I was frozen, staring at the glass, which now showed only my own terrified reflection. But my reflection did not look afraid. It looked tired. It looked like it knew the end would come, and it was ready.

I never told anyone about that night, but I kept the window covered with a heavy blanket. It didn’t help. Even in darkness, I could feel her presence, waiting. And sometimes, at the edge of sleep, I would hear a soft tapping on the glass, like a finger, asking to be let in. I always rose, I always looked, but I never found her. Only the moon, and the black trees, and the knowledge that some doors, once opened, cannot be closed. And that window, though I bricked it up years later, still casts a shadow in my dreams, a hole in the wall that leads to her world.