Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
The Name I Stopped Answering To
After a car accident in which her younger sister was killed, a woman stops answering to her own name, and the name keeps arriving anyway, called softly from the rooms of her flat by her sister's voice.
- perspective: first
My sister was called Clare, and I was called Clara, and for most of our childhood people got us confused on the telephone. We used to say it was a family joke. Mum said it was the Irish in us. We both answered to either name, usually just to be polite, and when Clare was killed on the ring road two years ago, in the rain, on the way home from a late shift at the hospital, I found that I could not bear to hear my name spoken at all. It sounded like hers.
So I stopped answering to it. At the funeral, when the vicar said Clara, I looked at the floor. At the solicitor's office, when the receptionist called out, I did not move until she came over and touched my arm. At work I started signing my emails with an initial, then with nothing, then with a little drawing of a bird I used to make for her when we were small. My friends were patient, and then less patient, and then they stopped asking.
The name kept coming anyway. In the flat, mostly. Late at night, when I was half asleep on the sofa with the television on. A voice from the kitchen, soft and clear, saying *Clara, are you still up?* I would open my eyes and the room would be empty and the kitchen light off, and I would lie there with my heart thumping, knowing it was not her, and knowing that she was the only person in the world who had ever called me that in exactly that tone.
I went to the doctor. He said grief can produce auditory hallucinations, that it was quite common, that I should not be alarmed. He suggested I might want to speak to someone about my sister. I did not tell him that I had started leaving the bedroom door open at night, and that in the mornings the bed was always a little warmer on the side nearest the window.
The voice has grown more insistent since the spring. It does not only say my name now. It tells me things. Where I left my keys. That the milk is going off. That I should eat something green. It sounds like her. It has her small dry laugh, the one she always used at the end of a joke, and her habit of stretching out my name like a question, *Claaara?*, with a rising note at the end that made me want to say yes.
Last night I got up at two and went to the bathroom mirror, and I said my name out loud, the way the doctor had told me to, to see if it still felt like mine. My mouth formed it. Clara. The reflection in the mirror did not move. But from the hall behind me, very close, a voice I knew better than my own said it back, warmly, the way you return a smile across a crowded room.
*Clara. There you are.*
I did not answer. I stood at the sink and held very still, and after a while the voice began to laugh, very softly, in the dark of the flat, and I heard footsteps going away down the corridor toward the kitchen, light and quick, the way Clare always walked when she was home and happy and had nowhere else to be.
I have started answering again. Only in the mornings, when the light is clear and the flat is quiet and no one else can hear. I say my name aloud, the whole of it, and I wait. The voice answers from the kitchen, every single time, and I go in to find the kettle already on, and two cups out on the table, one of them still warm.