It finally happened! I’d been hoping on all my lucky stars that it would have happened before Ben left for his business trip last week. Three days in California—not forever, but it is when the only child you’ll both have is sure to take her first steps at any moment. Sure enough, about an hour after he left, I was reading in the nook when Ellie stood up in the center of the room, wobbled a bit, then took six steps to where I sat. Six, my new favorite number! When she got to me, I scooped her up and twirled her around the room, both of us shrieking with excitement. Tears were streaming down my face too, partly because it meant my child was no longer an infant in my eyes, and partly because Ben had missed it. I Face Timed him once he made it to the airport, but of course she didn’t walk for him. The little bugger.

Oh, exciting news—the renovations are almost done. The master bathroom looks fantastic, and although the kitchen is a definite improvement I’m not overjoyed with the glittery backsplash. It looked more subdued in the showroom. I considered asking Ben to have it ripped out since I think it clashes with the rest of the house; these late nineteenth century Tudors are charming, and I love that ours turned one hundred and fifty the year after we bought it. But I knew that we couldn’t justify that expense, and certainly not my main wish of installing central heating. The existing radiators and the living room fireplace will have to suffice come winter. Oh well. The nursery is last on the list. Then finally a stop to all this banging and dust. I can’t wait. It’s is the smallest room in the house—basically a closet, and even though it’s fine for Ellie now, I know that she’ll appreciate the added thirty square feet once she ages. That’s what the blueprints say we’ll gain by knocking out the plaster wall that one of the former owners installed to likely insulate the room from the north facing brick wall.

Ellie is walking everywhere now. It’s amazing how fast babies adapt to their newfound independence. I’m glad I put up both baby gates because while I was folding laundry in our bedroom the other day, Ellie walked off without me realizing it. She was only gone for five seconds, but when I ran out to find where she was I saw her standing at the gate blocking the staircase leading to the main floor. I shuddered at the thought of what might have happened if the gate hadn’t been there. Speaking of negative thoughts, that reminds me that dad is going in for another procedure next week. His heart again. It makes me sad to see him so feeble these days, after he’s worked so hard his whole life. As they say—youth is wasted on the young.

Another migraine yesterday. Spent the whole day in bed with the shades drawn. Thank goodness Ellie was an angel and slept most of the day. Woke up today feeling fine, a blessing because I knew Ben was coming home today and I didn’t want to miss Ellie walking for him. When I heard his car pull into the driveway, I sat in the family room balancing Ellie in a standing position, my intention being to have her walk to him as he came in. A memorable homecoming. But when she saw him walk through the front door, she plopped down on all fours and crawled to him! I cried out in frustration, but Ben just laughed as he picked her up and kissed her. Thankfully, she did finally walk for him later on. I guess mom was right about my stubbornness being passed on to my children as God’s punishment for the trials I’d put her through as a kid.

Ben and I discussed the last renovation plans over dinner. The workers were set to arrive tomorrow. A one-day job, two at the most. I told him I wanted to do the painting and finally put up the Whinnie-the-Pooh border I’ve been meaning to add for months. It’ll be fun to decorate the new brick accent wall, too. I’ve been needing to occupy myself with something other than my weekly in-person book club and caring for Ellie. Maybe another year and I’ll go back to work, although if Ben had it his way, I’d stay home with Ellie until she starts school. Um, no.

Once the work began, I stayed in the living room with Ellie while Ben was upstairs with the workers to help coordinate things. For an hour I listened to them bang and rip away what sounded like large chunks of wall, until a minute-long pause came, followed by Ben poking his head around the staircase opening and yelling down for me to come take a look at something they’d found. Putting Ellie in her playpen so she wouldn’t be exposed to the dust, I went upstairs and found Ben and the workers discussing something as they faced the newly exposed brick wall. When they stepped aside I realized it wasn’t the wall itself he’d called me upstairs to see, but a dozen large black-and-white portraits—each eighteen by twenty-four inches in size and encased in bronze-colored frames—leaning against the wall. Most of the subjects were children between about three and fifteen years of age, with two being infants cradled by their seated parents. All of the subjects appeared to be from the Victorian age, evidenced by their clothing, the old-world tapestries hung behind them, and the antique furniture staged beneath or around them. Most of them had been photographed while standing, with the exception of the infants and several of the younger children. Ben picked up a standing, unsmiling child’s portrait for us to better view it.

“Why does no one from back then smile?” I asked.
“No one did in those days. It took too long for the photograph to take,” he said. Studying it, I was amazed at how the child—a handsome dark-haired boy of about seven and dressed in a suit—still held such youthful exuberance in his eyes after what had likely been over a century.
That’s when the head contractor stepped forward and pointed to something I hadn’t seen before—a partially obscured metal stand at the boy’s feet. “He’s dead.”
I frowned. “What?”

The contractor pointed out the ends of two metal braces extending up from the stand—one holding the boy’s head in place and the other clamped firmly around his waist. “Memento Mori,” he said, nodding to himself. “Photographing the recently dead in Victorian times, as commemoration. My aunt ran a studio once and told me about it.” Ben and I both studied the portrait more closely. He was right. Looking through the other portraits, not only were the other children observed with similar brace-like devices holding them upright, each of their limbs (including those of the cradled infants) were positioned unnaturally. The contractor explained that their eyelids had either been glued open, or the closed lids painted to look like eyes. A closer inspection of the photos found a familiar section of exposed brick wall and window behind the hanging tapestries, one matching a section of wall and window in our living room.

Ben and I laughed it off, but later on over dinner we revisited the idea, agreeing that whoever had taken the photos had likely once used the home as a photography studio. The apparent fact that they’d also photographed children’s corpses and made them look life-like weighed heavily on me, especially since if true, it meant that they or someone else had intentionally sealed them behind one of the walls where my daughter slept. It was such a morbid notion that soon after I asked Ben to get rid of them. He did, and took them to an antique dealer. The man studied them and authenticated their age as being late Victorian. As for the children truly being dead or not, he couldn’t be sure. Either way, I was glad they were gone, the bonus being that the frames had been worth a combined five hundred dollars. A nice off-set to the work we’d just done.

About a week later something strange happened while Ben was at work that I’m not sure how to explain. I had just walked into our bedroom with a basket of laundry when I noticed our wedding photo facing backward atop the dresser. Sometimes I’ll move it and the other photos beside it when I’m dusting. But I’d just dusted two days ago, and I’ve never once turned it around backward out of my belief that it’s bad luck. I was sure it had been facing properly several minutes before since it’s my habit to glance at our smiling faces in it every time I come or go. It probably shouldn’t have bothered me enough to bring it up to Ben over dinner, but that’s what I did. Deciding that he’d done it for some reason and that I must have missed noticing it before, I asked him to please not ever turn it backward in the future since I considered it a bad omen. He laughed and said it must have been me that had turned it, because he never touches it. That angered me because I’d basically just told him it wasn’t me, that he should know that if I asked him why he’d done something it wasn’t because I’d done it and forgotten. He apologized, but still insisted he wasn’t responsible. We finished dinner in silence, me picking at my food and trying to get Ellie to finish hers, stealing little glances up at Ben to see if he had changed his mind. If he had, he didn’t let on.

Something similar happened a few days later. While Ben was putting Ellie down for bed and I was getting out of the shower, I heard something fall onto the bedroom wood floor. I turned and saw our wedding photo lying on the floor, face-down. I assumed that Ben had moved it closer to the dresser’s edge, and that the weight of me walking across the floor had caused it to shift slightly and fall. But as I picked it up, I remembered having been bothered enough by the first incident to put a strip of grip tape beneath both of the frame’s corners and the stand itself. Replacing it in that position, annoyed that the glass had cracked, I tested it by attempting to slide it across the dresser surface. It wouldn’t budge. When it still didn’t move after I stomped back and forth across the bedroom floor several times, I stood staring at it, my arms crossed as a disturbing thought entered my mind. While I’d been in the shower, Ben had knocked the portrait onto the floor without bothering to replace it. Accidents happened, but I considered it a grossly insensitive thing for him to not care enough to replace it. I took care of nearly everything else in the house, after all. But I chose to forget it for the one-off thing I hoped it was. He’s been stressed at work lately, and with my postpartum causing me mood swings, I didn’t want the argument for either of our sakes.

Two days later, I went into our bedroom closet for something and found one of my favorite dresses missing. I’d assumed that Ben had taken it to the cleaners since I’d asked him to take a different dress, and that he’d gotten them confused. But later that day, after I’d come back from a walk with Ellie and was making lunch, I found it the kitchen trash can, ripped to shreds. I stared at it dumbly for several moments before bursting into tears. Ben has always hated it because he thinks it’s too short to be worn in public. The last time I wore it to his colleague’s cocktail party he complained all evening that the other men he worked with were ogling me because of it. I remember giving him a half-hearted promise on the way home that I’d donate it with some other things the following day, opting to appease his sometimes overly jealous streak in lieu of my own desire to wear what the hell I wanted. But that had been over a month ago, and I’d never donated it. Surely, he would have been upset to see it still hanging there. But could his jealousy possibly have been severe enough to warrant him ripping it (not cutting it) into shreds and disposing it like so much trash?

I stewed all day, picking up my phone a dozen times and beginning to dial his work extension before hanging up. I felt silly bothering him at the office over something he likely meant no ill will over. I had promised to get rid of it, after all. Still, I found myself anxious all day, unable to concentrate and staring out the bay window at the leafless trees. When he finally walked through the front door at five thirty, I was already a wreck. He sensed something was wrong right away and asked me about it. I told him. When I’d finished, he stood with a perplexed expression on his face before denying it and asking if I was joking.

“Why would I joke about something like that?” I asked him, bitterness tinging my voice. When I showed him the torn up dress, he gave me a look I haven’t seen since our early dating life when he’d caught me lying about another man. I was twenty at the time, and regretted it so much I never lied to him about a man after that. Now, I wasn’t sure what bothered me more, him thinking that I was lying and blaming him for the dress, or his silent insinuation that someone else had been over. I was still so angry later that night that I beat him to the punch and slept on the living room couch, with Ellie in her Pack ‘N Play beside me. I slept better than I thought I would, only waking once to go to the bathroom and another time due to a weird dream where Ellie was whispering in my ear. Dream-Ellie had used more advanced vocabulary than the occasional ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ she actually knows. I remember waking and rolling over to find her sleeping peacefully, a smile on my lips because it had seemed so real, and sweet to hear how she might sound as a slightly older child.

Make up sex is only as good as the extended afterglow it produces, I think. Ben and I have always been good that way—quick to fight but quicker to forgive. I woke to the smell of bacon and pancakes, and shuffled into the kitchen with Ellie on my hip to find Ben standing at the stove wearing the Want My Meat? apron I’d given him last Christmas as a gag. “Yes, please,” I said, letting him see my eyes linger over the apron’s words. I put Ellie upstairs in her crib before we made fast love in the bedroom, then ate breakfast with Ellie stuffing pancakes into her mouth. We didn’t speak about the dress, concentrating instead on his new account at work and our upcoming trip to the coast. I can’t speak for Ben, but for my sake I chalked the dress incident up to one of those things in life that are either simply inexplicable or are of such minor consequence that it doesn’t pay to overthink them. Mom taught me that.

Life went on uneventfully until a week or so later, when something odd happened while I was putting Ellie down for bed. She’d been sleeping with us the past few nights since I’d felt the nursery had seemed much colder and darker with the newly added space. Sophie, our cat, is more human than animal at times, and began displaying an immediate overprotective nature to Ellie since the day we brought her home from the hospital. Ever since, she’s shown the deep maternal instinct to Ellie that I have no doubt she would have shown to her own litter had we not had her spayed, going so far as to sleep in her room whenever Ellie does. No doubt sensing a normal bedtime routine, Sophie followed me up the stairs into the nursery. Moments after I’d entered the darkened room and laid Ellie in the crib, Sophie emitted a loud hiss from behind me. Immediately, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and my exposed skin turned to gooseflesh. I knew what she’d hissed at before I’d spun around. A mouse. I’d seen them occasionally in the house, including the nursery. Now, as I clutched my face with both hands and stared wide-eyed into the strip of darkness of the room’s newly opened space, I imagined some long-fanged rodent with tufts of matted hair crouching there. Ben has laid traps after we’ve seen them scurry from behind the refrigerator, or heard them scratching behind the baseboards. But this wasn’t me hearing a sudden “snap” of a sprung trap in the middle of the night, Ben snoring beside me in bed. It was here, a very present danger. I wanted to step forward to slap on the light, afraid of what I’d see but not wishing to confront it in the dark. Ever the protector, Sophie sprang in front of me and stood protectively between me and the darkened space, her back arched and tail straightened, with claws extended. I called her name but she refused to move. She hissed into the darkness again, a long, primal sound I’ve never heard from her before, until she finally heeded my call of her name. Even then, she kept a keen eye on the rectangle of blackness the hallway light wouldn’t penetrate, and only seemed to relax once I steeled myself to slap the light switch on to find nothing there.

Maybe the fright was a good thing. Ben and I had sex again before going to sleep. Twice in one day for the first time since I can remember. Afterward, lying sweating beside each other in bed, he joked that maybe we should demolish the archway in the kitchen next. We both laughed.

The laughter was short-lived, because dad died the next day. It was sudden. He’d been over at the house the day before to see Ellie’s remodeled room, and he’d seemed fine climbing the staircase. A heart attack at home. Nothing anyone could have done, even if they’d been standing there with a phone in their hand, the doctors said. I’m crushed, and feel empty. We gave him a beautiful service the following Saturday, sans flowers and dirges, since dad never wanted those. It gave me a strange comfort knowing he didn’t have to go through life without mom anymore. People always comment how peaceful the dead seem lying in their caskets. Seeing him like that at the funeral made me think about those dead children propped up in braces, their heads and bodies supported, their eyes glued open or the lids painted. Even the infants’ chubby cheeks, likely from cotton the embalmer had stuffed into their mouths. As creepy as those thoughts seemed to me, I couldn’t help but understand that to those children’s families, the act of posing them dead like that had been one of reverence. Who was I to say what was macabre. Maybe in a hundred years people will be aghast at me keeping mom and dad’s ashes on the mantle as I’ve chosen to do.

Ben took a few days off work but finally went back the Monday after the funeral. I’ve gone back to having Ellie sleep in her own room again, even though there’s still something about the nursery I don’t like. It’s coldness. And the darkness that even her lamp and hallway light don’t seem to reach. Ben says that the exposed brick wall might be causing the temperature to drop a few degrees, but it seems colder than that. I haven’t seen or heard any mice recently, but as a precaution I asked him to set more traps in the crawlspaces and attic. He just nodded.
Then, a few nights later in the middle of the night, something that even my faintest sensibilities could not attribute to mice. The sound of footsteps in the upstairs hallway. I’d assumed Ben had woken to get a drink from downstairs or to use the bathroom with the light off, but when I rolled over he was there beside me, asleep. My next thought was that somehow Ellie had gotten out of her crib and was sleepwalking up and down the upstairs hallway. But that was ridiculous. The crib was certified child-proof, and even if she’d somehow gotten out there was no way she could have produced the quickly paced, heavy footsteps I’d heard. I propped myself up onto one elbow and turned my ear toward the open bedroom door to listen for the noise again. When it didn’t come for another minute, I’d just begun to lay back down when I heard the footsteps again, this time moving in the direction of the nursery. I should have woken Ben. Ours is a relatively safe neighborhood, but a house down the street was burglarized one night last year while the family was asleep. No one was hurt, and the burglar ran from the home when confronted by the husband. Despite the rarity of such a thing happening again, it wasn’t out of the question. Stupidly, I eased out of bed and crept to the doorway, peeking in the direction I’d heard the footsteps and tip-toeing down the bare floorboards. Ellie’s room is at the end of the hall nearest the staircase. In the hallway nightlight’s glow I detected what I thought to be slight inward movement from her bedroom door, and a barely audible creak from the rusty hinge. My heart began to pound, and all my senses heightened as motherly instinct overcame my body. I was certain that an intruder was now entering the room where my baby daughter slept.

I threw the door open and flipped the light on. Nothing, except Ellie lying asleep in her crib, and Sophie curled on the floor nearby. I picked Ellie up and hugged her warm form close to my chest. She stirred awake, but I shushed her and she fell immediately back to sleep. As I left the room with her still clutched to me, I glanced back at the darkened space where those portraits had been hidden away in the wall for likely a century or more. Thinking of them made me shiver. I know it’s irrational, but as I closed her door behind me and hurried back into our bedroom—loyal Sophie on my heels—I decided to have a serious talk with Ben about it in the morning.

When I brought up the strange things that have happened since our renovation, adding the footsteps I’d heard the night before, he rolled his eyes. “Footsteps?” he asked, giving me that look a parent gives an over-imaginative child. “Yes,” I said, annoyed he wasn’t taking me seriously. When he laughed, I lost it, slamming the glass I’d been holding onto the counter harder than I’d intended. It shattered, and a shard cut my finger. Holding my bleeding finger beneath the running tap, I told him that under no uncertain terms was I imagining it, going so far to say that I now believed that by selling those portraits we’d somehow displaced entities in the house we shouldn’t have.

“What do you want me to do, hire a priest to come sprinkle holy water?” he asked.
“No. I was thinking of buying back the portraits then burning them,” I said.
His jaw dropped. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. What’s the name of the place you sold them to?”

He shook his head. “This is crazy. Knocking down that wall has caused more trouble than it’s been worth.”
I considered something, then came to lay a hand on his chest. “Agreed. We’ll burn them and let those children’s spirits go where they’re supposed to. Then we’ll close the space back up to set things right.”
He gave me a stern look. “Look, I know you’re still reeling from—”
“You have no idea what I’m reeling from,” I said, incensed that he’d tried to feel for me. “Please don’t ever do that.”

We went back and forth for the next hour, until finally Ben threw up his hands and told me he was tired of hearing about it, that if that’s what I really wanted to do, he’d go buy them back in the morning and call the contractor to re-do the job. Ben may not be an overly prideful man, but he’s still a man. Another thing my mother taught me was to always allow a man to save face whenever possible. If made sense to me that he’d be embarrassed to un-do the work we’d just paid to have done. I’d come up with a way to prevent that, if I could.
We were in luck, sort of. All of the portraits were still there, save for one. An antique collector had bought one of them the day before, he said, but privacy laws prohibited him from disclosing the man’s name. When Ben asked the dealer how much it would cost to buy back the ones that were available, he almost choked at the answer—double! Still, we accepted; it was worth it to set things right again, I felt. As we drove home in silence, all but one of the portraits in the truck’s bed, my heart pounded like a drum. Thoughts swirled in my mind, ones I can’t properly attribute to just this thing that was happening. Was I still sad about the miscarriage? Yes. I’d gone to counseling, but it hadn’t helped. Maybe, just maybe, this new idea would make me feel better. Make everyone feel better.

Later on, instead of watching him mope around about the added lost money and him watching me compulsively clean the house, I told him that I needed a break from it all—from him, from the house, even from Ellie. As an escape, I went to my book club after taking the last few weeks off after dad. The girls were all super supportive of me since they knew what had happened, and a few of them took me out to coffee afterward. In confidence, I asked my closest friend of the bunch, a very nice East Indian woman named Gita, if she believed in spirits that inhabit homes. She said that Hindus like her generally believe that to be the case, adding that more often than not the spirits offer comfort and should be embraced. I’m sure she assumed I was speaking of dad’s spirit and not a different one. Just what that spirit was, I couldn’t be sure. Either way, I didn’t correct her.

Not only did I heed mom’s advice about protecting a man’s ego, I did her one better. I took the initiative by hiring a different contractor to do the work. When I told Ben that I’d already taken care of it, and had even taken a loan from my 401k so as to protect our cash emergency fund, he began to argue the point before I told him that I’d heard the footsteps again the night before, several of them, in fact, like children running in the hallway. I’d heard their echoey whispers, too. He looked at me oddly when I’d said that, as if I were a stranger telling him an obvious lie instead of his wife. Then he said that once the work was finished, he didn’t want to hear another word about footsteps or disturbed wedding portraits, that this whole affair had gone on long enough. I agreed, kissing him on the cheek before turning to take Ellie with me to our bed. Ben just stood there rubbing his head in silence.

The new contractor began the today, just as the first snow flurries of the season began to fall from the gray November sky. Winter was here. While the workers hauled studs and sheets of drywall upstairs, I sat reading in the nook with Ellie playing beside me on the floor. Ben had offered to take the day off to oversee the project again, but I told him that he’d already missed enough work because of this, and dad too. Besides, I was more than capable of handling it, and it gave me a sense of satisfaction knowing that for the first time since losing the baby, I was fully taking charge of my happiness. Per my instructions, before the last section of drywall had yet to be placed in the same spot the old wall had been, the contractor set his tools down and walked out to his truck. A private moment of commemoration just for me, I’d told him. I set Ellie in her Pack ‘N Play then went out to the garage to get the wrapped item I’d kept hidden in the rafters for the past several days. A gift not just for myself, but our entire family, one I’d paid an antique dealer a thousand dollars to buy for me on condition of anonymity. A Victorian portrait of a seven-year-old boy, handsome even in death as he stood unsmiling and propped by an almost-hidden stand, and me kissing his cheek before placing the portrait behind the wall, because deep down I know the baby was a boy.

Now I’ll have one.