Page 7 of Call Off the Dark

Helen pulled her Sylvia Plath poetry book from the collection and fanned through the pages. She hadn’t always read poetry. Before Tyler’s death, she’d read mostly historical fiction. She’d wanted exciting character arcs and climactic endings, not circular words.

Now poetry was all she could read. Oh, she missed all those castles and battles. The faraway worlds delivered the highest stakes of all—kingdoms on the brink of collapse. Yet none of those books had been able to hold her attention after Tyler was gone. The irony was that after his death she’d needed to escape from reality more than anything, but instead she’d found herself staring at the type on the paper, turning from page six to seven only to flip back to five and realize she had no idea what the name of the main character was. Her mind couldn’t hold the storyline when it was already crowded with the real one she was living and reliving. There was no castle wall tall enough to keep the memories out. Moats and spires. Memories of Tyler’s death could swim and fly right over it all.

And so Helen had given up reading altogether. For months.

Until the soggy Sunday she’d wandered into a used bookshop on Second Avenue. She’d had no umbrella with her, so her jeans had been wet all the way up her thighs to where her raincoat stopped, but she’d barely noticed the weight of the denim cling. She’d stared absently at the fiction section for a long time but not pulled a single book from the shelves.

Then she’d drifted into the poetry section.

The name Sylvia Plath had caught her eye. Helen had thought, oven; suicide. And then, Did her hair singe off of her scalp? And then, Wait, no. It must have been a gas oven. Of course. She simply faded away. Helen didn’t know why that had never occurred to her before. Previously, the thought of Sylvia’s death had been so horrifying that Helen had avoided actively imagining it but had vaguely assumed the woman cooked her own head.

That day in the shop, Helen had pulled the book from the shelf and opened it to the first page.

Ten pages later, she’d felt the knowledge heavy in her chest that Sylvia Plath was dead and buried and couldn’t write anymore, but she’d felt glad these pages lived on. Helen could finally read again. She had bought the book.

Sometimes when she read Sylvia’s poems, she couldn’t help but think about Sylvia and the oven. What disturbed Helen most of all was that she remembered being a person, lifetimes ago it seemed, who used to think, How in the world does a person stick her head in an oven and just turn it on?

But now Helen understood how sometimes it just comes to that.

Standing in front of the crackling fire, she slid the Plath book back onto the mantel and took down the thick hardbound W. B. Yeats compilation. Her favorite poem of his, “When You Are Old,” she’d read hundreds of times. On lonely nights, his words comforted her changing face and her pilgrim soul, as he so aptly described them, but her bookmark wasn’t tucked there. It was toward the back of the book, in the biography section. Only recently, she’d discovered the forty pages detailing Yeats’s unusual life, including his belief in ghosts and the occult. He’d been a member of a society called the Ghost Club, and he believed his poetry was delivered in part from the spiritual realm.

She reread a passage she’d circled last week in black ink:

Yeats believed that in death, we love with the same love and hate with the same hate. The tortured souls, the unresolved, they search for windows back into our world. If we grant them passage, ghosts can be just as real as the mortal walking. Yeats believed we lived with ghosts all around us.

Helen closed the book. She needed to summon her own ghost today.

Chapter Five

The cellar below was full of cobwebs. A door off the kitchen pantry led down a narrow set of stairs to the dim, dank concrete room with a low ceiling. There, Helen stored the food she’d jarred herself as well as the cans she’d bought at the store.

She also kept secrets down there.

When Helen had awoken that morning, it hadn’t been her intention to hold a séance. Her intention had been to get her chores done. Though she didn’t think of the things she did in the cellar as séances. She simply thought of it as talking to Tyler.

As Helen reached for the can of beans, her eyes drifted to the box tucked away on the lowest shelf. It was concealed behind her stack of how-to books—how to garden, how to can food, how to sew—all guides that she’d read hopefully at first, then half-heartedly, then begrudgingly, and now she was ready to throw the whole sorry bunch in the pond.

Candles peeked out from the top of the hidden box, and she felt the tug on her soul. She told herself that if she could get the stew simmering quickly enough, she would return and try.

But five minutes later, the can of beans was abandoned on the floor and burning candles were carefully arranged around her favorite photograph of Tyler. She had taken it herself when they had been at the ocean together. His sandy-colored hair lifted in the wind at a weird angle, but that sudden gust had made him forget himself for a second. Normally he would get camera-shy, but that time she’d managed to catch the playful glint in his blue eyes, the sparkle he often had when he looked at her. In that moment, Tyler wasn’t posing dutifully, like he usually did for her. No, he was just a man looking at her the way he always did, and she’d encapsulated it forever.

Helen stared down at Tyler’s face, the candlelight playing across the photo, then she closed her eyes, still holding its image in her mind.

“Tyler,” she said. “I just wanted to try again. I still think of you every day, every minute. Maybe you know that. I hope so.” She felt the pressure building behind her eyes. “I hear your name in my head. It’s caught in my throat, and it sits under my tongue, and it repeats inside me. All day long.”

In the beginning, his name in her head was like the ticking of a metronome. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler. Sometimes comforting, sometimes maddening. When it was the latter, she’d drive out the pounding of his name by holding the poetry lines there instead. Now she was so used to it that it felt almost like a second heartbeat.

Helen took a deep breath. “I’m trying, I am. I’m trying to be a good wife to Wade. I made this choice. I chose this road. I’ve made mistakes. I’m not perfect, I know that. You know that. It’s hard, though. I just . . .”

She was having a difficult time finding the words this time. “Do you remember the story you told me about the sailors who floated at sea?” Her voice cracked. Of course he remembered. The story had been a true one, a news piece from the 1980s. Three sailors had been lost at sea, their boat capsized. They’d survived for days by doing the dead man’s float. They’d waited it out, face down in the water, arms spread wide, bobbing up for breath every so often.

Helen was doing the dead man’s float every day. Initially she’d thought Wade was the rescue boat coming to pluck her from the sea, but she knew now that wasn’t the case. She was still floating, her face in waters that were darkening again the more days she spent out here with Wade. She didn’t need to explain that to Tyler, though. He knew.

Tears slipped out of her closed eyes as she whispered, “I think the coyotes are coming for me.” That was why they howled: to let her know she was next. Ridiculous, she knew. What a ridiculous thought, but she’d always been able to say ridiculous things out loud to Tyler. He’d always gently cradled her darkest thoughts.

Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

Helen opened her eyes and wiped her face. “Tyler? I need to know you’re okay. I still need a sign, something from you. I still can’t figure any of this out. Why you’re gone and I’m here. None of it makes sense to me.”