Spaces and Echoes

by Carl Tait

Lucas stepped through the front door of his parents’ house and wondered, for the briefest instant, why his mother didn’t call out to greet him.

Her death had surprised no one. Helen Godsey had lived on high-fat, sugar-laden foods since her childhood, and the damage to her health hadn’t been frightening enough to dislodge her from that course as she aged. Her doctor had expressed frank astonishment that she lived into her eighties.

Lucas closed the door behind him, hearing a thwick as the wood met the spongy weatherstripping before the latch clicked into place. After that, silence. It made his ears hurt.

The house sat away from the main roads in the Atlanta-suburbs—an advantage for those seeking privacy, but the near-total quiet could be unnerving for those used to more lively environments. Lucas could never live in the house himself, despite how much he might regret selling it.

He walked down the hallway with its pale hardwood flooring and passed into the living room. Through the large trapezoidal windows that ascended to the vaulted ceiling, the late afternoon sun cast sharp shadows across the floor. He squinted, turned to one of the bookcases, and took in the mountain before him. Reasonably well organized, he thought, but would that make it easier to work through the collection? In some cases, yes. He couldn’t imagine keeping multiple shelves of books on the Civil War, or the Encyclopædia Britannica from the 1950s. Nor was he inspired by the rows of crumbling paperbacks from the same era.

He pulled out one of the books at random, littering the floor with flecks of desiccated paper. A short-story anthology from Alfred Hitchcock, with the director’s doughy face staring out from the faded cover. Good book, decrepit condition. Lucas suspected this would be a recurring theme as he worked through his parents’ carefully chosen but tired belongings.

He put the book back on the shelf and wiped his hands on his pants. He left the living room, intending to go to the kitchen for a snack, then stopped himself. No snack. Too fat already. Get to work. He tried to imagine the admonition spoken in his mother’s voice, but it made him sad and he pushed the thought aside.

He turned away from the kitchen and walked down the hall to the master bedroom. Might as well start on the hardest part first, he thought. It was to be far from the most difficult task, though he would not realize that until later.

Moss-green carpeting welcomed him into the bedroom, the cushy underpadding a soothing change from the hardwood floors. He avoided the large walk-in closets on his right, their doors opening into darkness. Passing the master bathroom, he approached the hospital bed where his mother spent the final months of her life. His matter-of-fact reaction surprised him.

Why was he not horrified or repelled? At least part of his equanimity was a reflection of his mother’s own attitude. Helen met death with acceptance and composure, reassuring her friends she was content with the life she’d lived. The contrast with his father was stark. Six years earlier, Daniel Godsey had struggled through his final illness with fury and regret, rivaling the lamentations of his beloved King Lear.

Lucas looked at the hospital bed and shrugged. What was he going to do with it? Maybe give it to a charity? He had no need of it himself. He suspected this would be another repeated litany as he emptied the house.

He turned away and began to walk out of the room to fetch his delayed snack. As he passed the bathroom, he noticed the light was on. Funny. He didn’t remember it being on when he walked by a couple of minutes earlier. He reached into the room and flicked the switch, shivering as his fingers brushed the old-time textured wallpaper.

********************

As Lucas savored the final bite of his oatmeal creme pie, he made up his mind. Start downstairs and work upwards. No aimless hopping from room to room. No lingering over memories. Too much to do. He made his way back to the hall and headed downstairs. The extra-thick carpeting on the steps felt unpleasantly squishy under his now-bare feet and he reached the bottom of the staircase with relief.

Which room first? The den? He walked in, looked around, and sighed. On two walls hung the abstract expressionist paintings that an artist friend gave his father decades earlier. The canvases bore smears and swirls of dark blue enlivened with orange and green blobs. Lucas had grown up with the art and felt mild affection for it. He couldn’t imagine anyone else being interested in these odd works by a no-name artist.

He surveyed the rest of the room. The battered but comfortable burgundy leather chairs appeared unchanged since his childhood. Across the room, a massive 1970s television stared at him with its dead green eye, broken since the previous century. Along the other walls of the room stood rickety bookcases pressed against each other, every shelf stuffed.

No. Too many books.

He turned and left the room.

He passed through the next door on his right, stepped onto the guest room’s pale pink carpet, and switched on the overhead light, illuminating the old-fashioned bed filling most of the room. He admired the dark oak headboard with large, graceful designs cut into the wood. He knew the history: his father’s father bought the bed as a teenager with the money from his first job.

What was Lucas supposed to do with it? He already owned a bed he liked. Treasured family heirloom or not, his grandfather’s bed had no place in his life. He already felt guilty about getting rid of it.

Beyond the bed, he saw another family relic: his grandmother’s cedar chest. He remembered its sweetly resinous aroma but couldn’t recall what it contained, so he walked the short distance to it, caressing the bed’s smooth footboard along the way. He opened the chest and his eyes fell shut.

He remembered.

His mother had used this chest as the repository for her own mother’s belongings. Here rested his granny’s life in a few cubic feet of storage—neatly bound piles of letters, photos framed behind smeary glass, a few items of clothing in plastic bags, unlabeled cookie tins containing mysteries. He knelt by the chest and began gently extracting the contents.

Two hours passed. Some of the work was easy. His great-aunt Nelle’s long and rambling letters might have been meaningful to his granny, but he found them inconsequential. They went into a trash bag without regret. He found other letters involving more interesting relatives and set them aside, promising himself to read them later, though he suspected he wouldn’t. He removed old photos from splintery frames, retaining the sepia-toned images while discarding their bulky window-dressing. He thought the bagged clothing would be just as simple, and most of it was. His grandmother’s yellowed wedding dress and several other pieces migrated directly into the trash.

Then came a simple item that stayed his hand: a blue rubber bathing cap. When he removed the cap from its plastic wrapping, a piece of paper fell out. It was a note in his mother’s handwriting.

“This is the swimming cap that Mother liked to wear,” he read. “She was always so happy in the water.”

The memory was a jolt of warmth and tenderness. Lucas remembered his granny at the beach, playing and waving her arms and wearing that silly blue cap. He remembered her ready smile, her frequent and joyous laughter, her exuberant and unselfconscious love.

Did anyone else remember?

Probably not.

His granny’s generation was gone. His mother, an only child like himself, was also gone.

The sadness overwhelmed him. His granny had been a key figure of his childhood. Now she had slipped from the world’s memory and he was the last auditor of her fading echo. Soon there would be only silence.

He put the bathing cap with the items to keep.

********************

Lucas required comfort food for dinner. At the Old Hickory House, he ate two large bowls of Brunswick stew with a speed that earned a startled look from his server. Craving more, he returned to his car, drove to the mother church of Krispy Kreme near the Fox Theatre, and ordered a dozen hot glazed doughnuts, salivating as he watched the golden rings pass under a stream of icing en route to the green and white box that a smiling cashier thrust into his hands.

He sat down at a bare table near the register and systematically demolished the sugary treats, stopping when he realized he’d eaten eleven without pausing. He glanced at the cashier, who looked away, no longer smiling. Ashamed, he closed the box and left. No one would be able to say he’d eaten a dozen doughnuts at one sitting.

He ate the last one while driving back to the house.

As he pulled into the driveway, he was glad he’d left the lights burning on the front porch. The wan and artificial glow simulated a welcome much better than darkness. He parked and went inside with one hand clutching his bloated stomach.

What to do next? He’d finished the guest room and didn’t want to keep anything in the den. That took care of the downstairs and he was too full to decide on the next step. Why not watch a movie?

The only working television was in the master bedroom. He tried to convince himself this was not a problem, but felt uneasy as he entered the room this time. What was different from his afternoon visit?

No sunlight. Just the light from a glass globe attached to the high ceiling, plus a bulky lamp on the bureau. In the feeble lighting, the starkness of the hospital bed unsettled him. Its cold metal frame failed to fill the large space formerly occupied by his parents’ king-size bed, which had impressed its boundaries in the carpet.

He rooted through the disorganized DVD collection next to the television, which included a few horror movies he’d given his mother over the years because she enjoyed them. Midway through the pile, he found a choice that pleased him: The Legend of Hell House. He chuckled as he popped the disc into the player and settled into the room’s lone remaining armchair.

He tried to enjoy the film, appreciating its moody excellence, but soon realized it was a poor choice. He had thought a haunted-house movie would make his parents’ empty home feel less creepy by comparison, but the film had the opposite effect. When Roddy McDowall started screaming and writhing on the floor, Lucas pressed the remote’s stop button and turned off the television. His hands shook slightly as he rose from the armchair, not screaming himself but feeling like he might.

He looked around the room, trying to find something positive and reassuring, and his eyes settled on the piles of CDs and cassette tapes on his father’s nightstand. He flipped through the recordings. Mozart. Bach. Some more Mozart. His father treasured these composers. Daniel Godsey never possessed any appreciable musical skills as a performer, but his listening was wide-ranging and passionate, his opinions firm and grounded. He had adored Mozart’s operas and Bach’s orchestral suites, especially the celebrated Air on the G String.

Lucas’s gaze shifted to the storage space in the headboard. He smiled when he saw the ancient analog clock with a built-in cassette player. His father liked falling asleep to classical music, and preferred to make selections from his own collection rather than listening to whatever was playing on WABE that night. Lucas picked up the clock, wanting to use it in his father’s honor while in the house. He wrapped the cord around the aging timepiece and left the room, leaving all the lights on.

He trudged upstairs to the bedroom of his youth. Flicking on the light, he eyed the shelves holding his belongings with apprehension. Stacks of box games, a collection of intricate puzzles, a number of scholastic awards, and other tattered memorabilia. These items all carried meaning for him, but he had no space in his small apartment to keep them now. He dreaded making the hard choices that lay ahead.

He plugged in the old clock and struggled to set the correct time. As he twisted a knob on the side panel, numbers printed on small plastic cards flapped forward like something from a 1970s TV game show. He overshot the correct time by two minutes and found he didn’t care.

After pulling off his sweaty clothes, he turned out the light, lay down on his bed, and fell asleep within moments.

********************

His dreams were a disconnected sequence of surreal tableaux. He was driving on a deserted highway with no exits. He was pushing a shopping cart down the aisle of a post-apocalyptic grocery store. He was eating a bowl of cereal polluted with sour milk. He was conducting an orchestra.

The orchestra was the most fun. They were performing a Bach suite. Dum dah dah dum Dum dah dah dum.

Oh, it’s the Air on the G String, Lucas thought. He hoped his father was in the audience. Dum dah-dah dee-dee-dee dah dah Dah.

Lucas became aware he was dreaming but clung to the music. So real. Almost like he was actually hearing it.

His eyes snapped open.

It wasn’t a dream. His bedroom was filled with music.

In a panic, he reached for the light on his bedside table and turned it on. The cassette player in his father’s old clock had come to life, the spokes turning in an unhurried fashion as they dragged the aging tape through the mechanism. He located the stop button and pressed it, replacing the sound of Bach with his heart’s urgent thumping.

He studied the clock and found a second knob on the side panel that adjusted the time at which the cassette would start playing. It was set for 6:30 am—the appalling hour at which his father routinely awoke. The joys of analog machinery: the alarm remained primed for its morning duties ever since his father set it many years ago. It only needed to be plugged in.

His heart rate returning to normal, Lucas turned out the lamp and rolled over, confident he could get back to sleep.

He couldn’t.

After an hour of annoyed thrashing and readjustments, he gave up. He arose from the bed and headed to the bathroom for a shower he hoped would rejuvenate him.

It did, a little.

********************

An hour later, Lucas sat in the kitchen finishing his breakfast of scrambled eggs and Pop-Tarts. His plate shone with the butter he used to make the eggs as tasty and unhealthy as possible. He knew his mother would’ve enjoyed them.

He paged through the morning paper while reminding himself he needed to cancel the subscription. Pulling out a pen, he dove into the daily crossword puzzle, and was lost in solving the intricate center portion when a noise distracted him. Static? Had his father’s clock turned on its built-in radio?

No, not static.

Water.

A running shower.

His stomach flipped. He felt certain he’d turned off the shower earlier. Rising from the table, he left the kitchen and walked into the hall. His anxiety increased when he discovered the noise wasn’t coming from upstairs.

The shower was running in his parents’ bathroom.

He returned to the kitchen and opened the cutlery drawer. He hoped to find a butcher knife but settled for the dull carving tool his father used to slice the Thanksgiving turkey.

Pushing aside the cascade of images from slasher movies pouring through his mind, he walked down the hall and into the master bedroom, its lights still ablaze from the previous night. He entered the bathroom and stood in front of the shower curtain, picturing himself as Norman Bates rather than one of his victims. He grabbed the curtain and pulled it back, violins screeching in his brain.

Nothing.

The shower pelted the empty bathtub with forceful streams of hot water, steam already clouding the room. Lucas pressed the large control knob on the wall and the flow stopped. He listened to the drain slurp up the remaining water.

Thud. The knob popped out on its own and the shower resumed its deluge. He shut it off again. This time it turned back on immediately.

No ghosts and no killers, Lucas thought. Just a broken shower valve. I did not need this.

He returned to the kitchen to call a plumber, wondering how much the repair would cost.

Two hours later, he closed the front door behind the departing plumber. The expense had been surprisingly modest. The plumber had known and liked Daniel and Helen, and was reluctant to charge anything at all. He said the repair was simple and it was lucky that Lucas was around when the valve gave out. Yeah, so lucky, Lucas thought. He’d nearly defecated in terror when the shower turned on by itself.

Fatigue overwhelmed him. He turned from the door and plodded into the living room, deciding a nap on the red velvet couch was necessary. He sat down on a plush cushion and reflexively surveyed the room as he removed his shoes. His eyes halted on a black lace fan mounted in a heavy display frame. Whose fan was that? His great-grandmother’s? Great-great-grandmother’s? He couldn’t remember. His mother considered it a family treasure and he felt guilty for his indifference toward it. Helen would’ve expected him to treat the fan with reverence.

He stretched out on the couch and closed his eyes. He felt lost in the empty house and the silence. The space around him seemed to grow larger as he passed through a murky fog, drifting toward sleep. As he slipped into the liminal space between consciousness and slumber, he seemed to see a shape in the mist. It was moving in his direction.

“Lucas.”

His eyes flew open in terror. The voice of Helen Godsey was unmistakable.

“Mom?” he said.

No answer.

Of course she’s not here, Lucas told himself. Don’t be an idiot.

His rational protestations proved ineffective. He stood up, decided he needed to be somewhere else, grabbed his keys, and headed out the door.

********************

Lucas pulled into the Waffle House parking lot and felt himself relax. The location on Roswell Road had been an iconic restaurant of his youth; a welcome postlude to the boredom of Sunday school and church, as well as a warm and familiar haven at any hour.

Inside, a luminous array of dangling white globes and the appetizing smell of perpetual breakfast greeted him. He always ate in a booth with his parents, but he chose a counter seat on this occasion, settling onto a padded stool and swiveling to face the grill. He closed his eyes and absorbed the sounds and scents that surrounded him.

“Lucas Godsey!”

It was not his mother’s voice, but it got his attention nonetheless. He blinked as he stared at the familiar face. “Claudia? Oh, my God! How are you?”

The server grinned and put her hands on her hips. “I’m just fine, sugar. How you been? I’m sorry about your mama; I read about her in the paper. When you get to be my age, you start with the obituaries.”

Lucas tipped his head. “Thanks. It’s been tough. I came here to unwind.”

“What can I get you? A waffle with a side of country ham?”

“Did I ever order anything else?”

“Not even when you were little. Waffle and ham coming up.” She scrawled the order onto a yellow pad, tore off the sheet, and posted it for the cook.

While awaiting his food, Lucas contented himself with looking around the restaurant. The crowd was light on a weekday afternoon, leaving the booth where he’d usually sat with his mother and father vacant. He was glad. He had proprietary feelings about that booth, even though he didn’t want to sit there alone.

On the countertop in front of him, two plates arrived with a gentle clunk. He looked up into Claudia’s old-lady glasses.

“Enjoy your food,” she said. She walked away to take the order of a young couple who had just seated themselves.

Lucas prepared his waffle with too much butter and far too much syrup. He tried to eat without gluttony, slicing off small bites of the crispy waffle with affected care and pairing them with modest chunks of country ham, but the delicious food made restraint difficult.

Claudia posted the young couple’s order for the cook and returned to Lucas. “It’s always good to see you. How long you in town?”

He shrugged. “As long as it takes to clean out my parents’ house and get it ready to sell.”

“Oh, honey, that’s so hard. I went through it with my mama and daddy twenty years ago and still dream about it.”

“There’s too much stuff. Okay, I know some of it is easy to let go. Clothes and boring furniture.”

“Mm-hmm. I remember,” she said, nodding.

“But I keep finding things I want to save, and I don’t have enough space to keep all of it. What am I supposed to do with the family heirlooms?”

“Do they mean anything to you?”

“Some of them, yes. Mostly, no.”

Claudia sighed. “People always think their children are gonna fight over who gets to keep Aunt Beulah’s sugar bowl. Then it turns out all the kids think it’s ugly and nobody will take it. Every generation wants to hold on to different things.”

Lucas squinted as he considered this idea. “But there’s so much that’s connected with my own life. Getting rid of those souvenirs feels like punching holes in the past.”

“Let the past be. You’ve already lived it. Keep what brings you good memories and don’t worry about the rest.”

Lucas swirled his final piece of waffle in the puddle of syrup that remained on his plate. He wondered if he should bring up the most delicate point and decided he should. “It’s all so creepy. I’m in the house and my parents aren’t, but it feels like they are. Weird things keep happening. It’s like someone is trying to talk to me.”

Claudia put her hand on the counter and leaned forward, her ample stomach pressing into the Formica. “There are no ghosts. The house isn’t talking to you. You’re just determined to hear something.”

Lucas swallowed the last bite of his waffle and nodded slowly. “None of it is real,” he said.

“And all of it is,” she answered. “We all have our stories. Take care, sugar.”

********************

Dum dah dah dum Dum dah dah dum

Bach’s Air on the G String emerged from Daniel Godsey’s cassette-player alarm clock as Lucas stirred in his bed. He rolled over and turned on the light with a fond smile. He enjoyed having his father’s music nudge him awake, but had reset the alarm for a much later hour of the morning.

He was finished with the house. He had filled five cardboard cartons with carefully chosen items, made his peace with leaving the rest behind, and called a local auction house to see if anything was worth selling. The appraiser took a few pieces on consignment and said the rest wasn’t worth much. They weren’t interested in his great-great-grandmother’s black fan, and neither was Lucas. He felt a residual twinge of guilt, but only a small one.

He called a couple of as-is home buyers to get bids and accepted the larger amount without hesitation. Just a week earlier, he would’ve found this inconceivable, but his morose indecision had mutated into an urge to complete the task quickly and definitively.

On his final morning in the house, he sat at the kitchen table eating vanilla ice cream for breakfast. Through the large front window, he could see a pink dogwood swaying gently in the April breeze. His mother cherished that tree, and he hoped the house’s next occupants would draw similar joy from it.

He loaded the five boxes of mementos into his car. With a jolt, he noticed that their combined bulk was about the same as the old cedar chest in which his mother had packaged the remnants of her own mother’s life. He considered taking a valedictory walk through the house but decided against it. He was done. It was time to let the house cede its identity to new owners. He locked the front door for the last time and went to his car.

As he started the engine, he began to cry.

About the Author

Carl Tait is a software engineer, classical pianist, and writer. His work has appeared in After Dinner Conversation (Pushcart Prize nominee), Mystery Magazine (cover story), the Literary Hatchet, the Saturday Evening Post, and others. He also has a story in Close to Midnight, a horror anthology from Flame Tree Press. Carl grew up in Atlanta and currently lives in New York City with his wife and twin daughters. You can find him on X – @carltait, Bluesky – @carltait.bsky.social, or at his website carltait.com.