The Night Caller
by
James H Lewis
When her cell phone
roused her from sleep, Teri Bevan thought it must be morning, but when she
stared at the screen, it read 12:44. Someone had interrupted her first decent
night’s slumber since her husband Mark had died of a heart attack on a flight
home from the Twin Cities.
She muttered a sleepy hello into the phone and heard something rustling
like dry leaves, scraps of paper, or starched sheets. “Who is this?” she
whispered.
The noise turned to scratching, like someone running their fingernails
over material. She spoke a third time, then hung up. At the foot of the bed,
Fred, her beagle, stirred, but continued his heavy breathing. “I’m glad
someone’s sleeping,” she said.
Teri lay awake for nearly an hour, turning the pages of her life with
Mark, their first date, wedding, his unwavering support both times she
miscarried. When his lifelong friend Jake Weatherby threw over his wife for his
young nurse, Mark had embraced her and, with tears rolling down his cheeks,
said, “I would never do that to you. I would never leave you.” Thirteen days
later, he left, just not in the way either of them had imagined.
Finally giving up, she got out of bed and grabbed her phone. She shoved
her feet into her pink slippers and descended the stairs with Fred following
her, wagging his tail in the expectation she’d interrupted her sleep to give
him a treat.
As she brewed a cup of herbal tea, she saw her phone was in sleep focus.
Shouldn’t that have silenced the call? She turned the mood off to search the
recent call list. At first, she didn’t comprehend what she was seeing, so she
scrolled through other calls, then back to the top. There it was: Mark,
12:43 AM.
Someone using her late husband’s phone had called her an hour before.
But
that was impossible, for Mark’s cellphone was in front of her, attached to its
charging cord. She opened it and searched for recent calls. Teri, 12:43 AM.
My God, she thought, someone has broken into the house, someone who might
still be here.
#
The patrol officer
was young and earnest, treating her as though she was his mother, which she was
old enough to be. He wandered through both floors of the house, stepping aside
to push open the door to each room and closet before he entered. He checked all
the windows and the rear door. “You’re certain you locked the front door?” he
asked.
“Locked and bolted,” she said, kneading her hands as she stood
in the
middle of the kitchen in her housecoat.
The officer looked down at Fred, whose bark had awakened half the
neighborhood when he arrived. “And your dog didn’t sound an alarm?”
She shook her head. “He slept through it. He always alerts me when someone
comes to the door. You heard the racket he made when you arrived.”
“And your husband’s phone was sitting where it is now?” he
said.
She assured him that after picking it up, she’d returned it to where
it
now rested. “After my husband died, I was going to turn it in,” she explained.
“The counselor at the funeral home advised me to keep it active for at least a
year, that he might have messages from utilities, financial matters, that sort
of thing.”
“Good advice,” the officer said. He placed both hands on the pass-through
counter . “Did you use his phone before you turned in tonight?”
Teri hesitated as she searched her memory. “After dinner, I paged through
his emails to see if there was anything I should attend to.”
“That’s it, then,” he said. “It’s an accidental
dial. Some people call it
a pocket-dial, but if you leave the phone on, it can automatically trigger a
call. Always push the side button when you’re finished,” he said, “like so.”
Teri wasn’t satisfied, but there was nothing more the officer could do.
He
agreed to stay outside in his cruiser until another call came in. While that
was of some comfort, she couldn’t fall back to sleep until dawn poked holes in
the venetian blinds, and then only for an hour.
The following morning, she took both phones to the electronics store. The
sales assistant, who looked no older than eighteen, inspected both phones and
gave her the same assessment. “You butt-dialed it,” he said. He smirked as
though, at forty-seven, she was too old to understand.
#
Two nights later, her phone rang at
1:21. Once more, the sound of rustling turned to scratching, like a cat
sharpening its claws on the back of a chair. Racing downstairs and almost
tripping on the bottom step, she opened Mark’s phone to find it had dialed her
number. She checked all the doors and windows but found no sign of entry.
“What’s happening to me?” she cried, for now she suspected she was going mad.
She shivered with fear, turned on the gas fireplace, wrapped herself in a
blanket, and huddled on the sofa until morning, Fred snoring at her feet.
A week later, the caller rang again. Behind the rustling sound, she heard
a muffled voice as though coming from the end of a long hallway. Her hand shook
the next morning as she fought her way through the phone tree of her cell phone
carrier. The tech support agent treated her like a child, insisting no one
could call from a phone not in their possession.
She argued with the woman, who finally said, “Just turn it off.”
The solution was so simple she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her.
Once a week, Teri fired up Mark’s phone long enough to check for anything that
needed her attention, usually a recurring subscription to a professional
publication. Then she’d leave it off. She received no more calls and, as summer
approached, she resumed sleeping through the night. Mark’s absence left a
gaping hole in her life, but a group of girlfriends dragged her out for lunch,
and the diversion so lifted her spirits she made it a weekly event.
At the end of June, Teri sat down to pay bills. She turned Mark’s phone
on
and scrolled through his emails. By now, she’d transferred most accounts to her
own name. Finding nothing to address, she wondered if it might be time to close
the account.
She paid most bills through her bank, but the county would only accept her
property tax bill by check. But where was the checkbook? In this age of credit
and debit cards and automatic payments, she’d had no need of it until now.
“Mark,” she said aloud, “where did you stick the checkbook?”
Her phone dinged. She looked at the message: Back of top right desk
drawer.
“Oh, God,” she said, a chill washing over her despite the heat
of the day.
She stumbled into the den, opened the drawer, and fished out the checkbook.
Teri held her hand to her mouth. A stream of tears welled in her eyes and
overflowed their banks as a warm glow enveloped her. “Oh, Mark,” she said. “You
promised you’d never leave me. How could I have forgotten?”
* * *
