A Certain Kind of Love by Chad Gayle

Harold never thought of the house as being haunted. He dared not tell anyone that he shared his bed with his dead wife’s ghost, nor had he allowed anyone to enter or even look in the house after Maddy’s spirit came back from wherever it was she had ventured to after she died. But he didn’t think that there was anything unpleasant or unusual about cohabitating with Maddy’s post-corporeal presence in the tiny cottage they’d lived in for most of their lives. As shocked as Harold was to find Maddy waiting for him in the kitchen three days after her body was laid to rest, he’d quickly grown accustomed to the idea of her staying in the house with him. It was her house too, he thought, and she had every right to be there. It didn’t make any difference that she was dead.

Living with a ghost presented Harold with a number of challenges, however, and foremost among these was Maddy’s “tether”, which was the word she used to describe the force that kept her anchored to the Earth. Unfortunately for Harold, his physical presence in the house served as that tether, which meant that he couldn’t be outside of their quaint little cottage for more than a few minutes at a time. Thus he couldn’t do any of his own shopping or go fishing or golfing, because any distance he put between himself and Maddy would wear on her tether until it snapped—and then she would disappear, this time for good.

And so Harold lived the life of a shut in. He stopped seeing his old friends, who wondered for a while why he never came to visit but eventually accepted his decision to live alone and apart from them. Strangers did his yardwork and left his groceries on the porch; he got his medications in the mail. When he received a summons for jury duty, he had to jump through all sorts of hoops to convince the clerks at the county courthouse that he suffered from an acute case of agoraphobia, and when it was time to renew his driver’s license, he chose to let the license lapse rather than risk leaving the house to get his eyes checked. He was assiduous about taking his vitamins and nutritional supplements, lest he get sick, and he flossed two, sometimes three times a day because he knew he would never sit in a dentist’s chair again.

Maddy showed her appreciation for the sacrifices he made in various ways. She never commented on the general clutter that grew like moss over everything in the house, the papers and packaging and broken things that Harold meant to repair but never did, and she was very good about reminding Harold of the calls he had to make to the pharmacy or to the bank that cashed his monthly Social Security checks. She amused Harold with updates that she passed along from friends and relatives who had died before she had, and she recalled, with startling clarity, the moments of joy they’d shared early on in their marriage, long before they became accustomed to the routines that would define their later lives. She could fill an afternoon or an evening with these stories, which became ingrained in Harold’s memory like indelible carvings cut in the face of a granite cliff.

It was a pleasant enough existence in spite of the things Harold missed, and he was mostly content until he noticed an unusual mole on the inside of his thigh one morning after he got out of the shower. The mole was misshapen and ugly and was as big as a button, and although he knew he needed to have it looked at, he was afraid to go to the doctor because going to the doctor would mean losing Maddy—again. So he told himself that it didn’t look so bad, that mole, and tried to pretend that it wasn’t there.

By the end of the month, however, the mole had grown larger, and now it was too big to be ignored. Harold worried about it constantly, fretting and fidgeting whenever he sat down and pacing relentlessly when he was up and about, but Maddy didn’t seem to notice how bothered he was, or if she did, she chose not to say anything about it. She simply carried on telling the same stories and making the same observations, and if he was short with her, she only scolded him a little, the way she might scold a surly child. Finally he couldn’t take it any more; while she was recounting the story of how they’d met for at least the ten-thousandth time, he broke down and started to cry, and when she asked him what was wrong, he told her everything.

Even in her ghostly form, Maddy’s sadness was easy to see, and while she hovered near him, floating just above the floor, a wistful look gathered in her opalescent eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Harold.”

“You don’t need to be sorry.”

“Yes I do, because I’ve been keeping something from you, something I should have told you long ago.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about us. About what’s changed since I came back.”

“I don’t see that anything’s changed, and I’m perfectly happy with how things stand between us.”

A tiny grin kinked her ethereal lips, and she wrinkled her nose as if she was about to sneeze.

“Are you, Harold? Haven’t you noticed that since I came back, we never fight. We never argue or seem to get in each other’s way.”

Harold cocked his head to one side. “Not a bad thing, is it, not to fight?”

She let her grin give way to a look of concern once more. “It wouldn’t be if I was the same, but I’m not, Harold. It pains me to say this, but I’ve known for some time that the feelings I have for you now are merely a shadow of what I felt when I was flesh and blood. It’s love, yes, but it’s only a certain kind of love, a love that’s... incomplete. Like me.”

Harold wanted to argue the point, but he knew that Maddy was right. He’d had the same misgivings but never wanted to hold this ghostly version of Maddy to a standard that was out of her reach, and so he’d pretended that his feelings for her hadn’t worn thin.

Still, he didn’t want her to go, and he said so. She reached for him; he watched her hand rest gently against his bare arm, but he felt nothing.

“I need some time to think, Harold.”

“All right,” he said. “Should I go upstairs?”

She shook her head. “I’d rather you waited outside. Why don’t you go sit in the swing in the back yard?”

The idea made him uncomfortable but she hardly ever asked him for anything, so he went through the back door into the yard and eased himself into the creaky old swing where they’d once spent evenings sitting together out under the stars. The unmown grass reached up to his calves, and while bees buzzed and the hum of distant traffic wafted into his ears, Harold looked up at the tapestry of clouds woven across the bright blue sky and thought not of Maddy but of the times he’d spent as a boy wandering through the woods and swimming in cool, clear ponds where fish flashed like silver bullets under the water. For a moment, he was at peace, but then he realized that more than a few minutes had passed since he’d come outside, and he leapt out of the swing with a gasp.

Hobbling on stiff knees across the yard, he hurried into the house, forgetting to close the back door.

Maddy was gone.

Standing by the sofa where he’d last seen her, he thought his eyes would fill with tears, but the tears never came, and as he stood there staring at the trash that lay about the living room, he suddenly became aware of the holes in his ragged, tattered shirt and his old, worn out socks, and he was ashamed of himself in a way that he’d never been while Maddy’s ghost lived with him.

He went to find the phone. When he had it in his hand, he called his doctor and made an appointment to have the ugly mole examined. Then he sat down and made a list of chores that needed to be done around the house; after he started cleaning, he didn’t stop until he was dead tired and couldn’t clean any more.

He took the bus to the doctor’s office the next day.

A week later, after the mole had been removed, Harold’s test results came back. He was lucky; the ugly mole wasn’t cancerous.

Hearing the news over the phone, Harold thought of Maddy and how happy she would be, and then he began to wonder where he’d put his fishing pole. After a thorough search of the house, he found it in the attic, and as he was coming back down the attic stairs, he remembered the name of a friend of his who also lived alone, an old coot named Carl. He decided to give Carl a call.

They went fishing the next day.

Chad Gayle

Chad Gayle’s speculative fiction has appeared in DreamForge Magazine, Zooscape, and Cosmic
Horror Monthly. Proud husband to the world's most amazing veterinarian and father to two
humans and three felines, he’s also a New York photographer whose photographic work has
appeared online and in print.

Website: https://chadgayle.com/
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