Narrator: Pauline R. | Worcestershire, England
I waited nearly a year before telling anyone about my husband coming to the back door. That sounds like the start of a comforting story. Some days it feels like one. Other days I wish I had never seen him.
He died in February. In April, on an ordinary Thursday, I looked up from washing a saucepan and saw him standing on the path outside the kitchen.
He wore his blue gardening jumper. There was a pale smear on one shoulder from the time he’d painted the shed without changing. I had donated that jumper with the rest of his things.
He wasn’t smiling. He looked distracted, as if he’d come out to fetch something and couldn’t remember what. I put the pan down so carefully that I remember the sound of its handle touching the draining board.
By the time I reached the door he was gone.
He returned the following Thursday. Same time, just after six. This time I stayed by the sink. He looked towards the window and raised one hand, not quite a wave. A question, perhaps. I raised mine. His face eased a little.
For several weeks that was all. I would be in the kitchen. He would stand on the path for a minute or two. I began looking forward to Thursdays with an intensity that embarrassed me. I stopped answering the telephone around six.
Then one evening he came up to the glass.
His face was almost right. The small broken veins beside his nose were there, and the uneven eyebrow. But he was breathing with his mouth open, making no mist on the cold pane. When he spoke, the sound seemed to come from behind me in the kitchen.
“Will you let me in now?”
I couldn’t answer. He put his forehead against the door and waited. My husband had never been a patient man. Seeing him stand so still made me afraid in a way I hadn’t been before.
I left the kitchen and rang my daughter. She came over. He was gone when we looked out together. She stayed two nights and took the spare key home so I would have to call her if I needed anything.
I don’t stand at the sink on Thursdays now. Sometimes, from the sitting room, I hear a soft knock at the back door. I don’t go through.
I am frightened of opening it. I am also frightened that he will eventually stop coming, and I will have spent whatever time I was given hiding in the other room.
