The children are all in bed. Tucked tightly beneath their blankets their tiny bodies twitch with sleep. Susan checks on them before tiptoeing downstairs. She tries her best to be quiet, skipping the creaky step at the bottom of the staircase.
The house is perfection in the wee morning hours. The TV that usually erupts with colors and sounds is a quiet black box. The toys lie dormant in the corner waiting to come alive with play and get scattered across the living room carpet. This is Susan’s only time alone, and she cherishes it. She wraps her baby blue robe around herself and ties the belt closed. Sunlight is only just beginning to bleed into the darkness. A mockingbird twitters in the tree outside the living room window.
Susan turns on the brass floor lamp and settles into the sofa. She likes to start the day by taking a few minutes to listen to the house. She never realized how noisy houses could be until she bought one of her own. The water heater is like a gassy old man constantly burping. The air conditioner clatters when it turns on. The walls moan under the pressure of the wind. The roof creaks as the boards expanded under the heat of the sun.
When she and Lester first bought the house all of these sounds made her nervous. She thought that every noise was a sign that their new home might tumble to the ground around them. When the children came, their shrieking laughter and urgent cries masked these noises. Soon she became too busy to fret about the sounds the house made.
It wasn’t until she was alone one day in May that she noticed the house again. She was sick. Her head was swimming in mucus and her brain was so tired she couldn’t even follow the plot of a simple sit-com. She sat on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon listening to what she first perceived as nothingness, waiting for the children to come home from school. The air conditioner spring to life pushing cold air through the vent above her head. Susan’s ears honed in on the rattling of the ducts. Then the water heater started and the refrigerator. Something fell on the roof and Susan could hear it slide down the shingles before tumbling into the grass. The house surrounded her with sound, distracting her from her aching head.
The sounds the house made no longer filled her with anxiety. They were friendly, like a call from an old friend. That day she lay on the couch listening until the children came home with their boisterous laughter clamoring for her attention.
The early mornings are the best time to reconnect with the house, her friend who never sleeps. “Good morning,” Susan says aloud, her eyes still closed. She listens as the house talks back, spilling the secrets it’s stored up over the years. She listens to the rattles and groans until she hears footsteps upstairs and knows it’s time for everyone else’s day to begin.