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Part 4 – The Nights of Helen
The nights that followed were not lonely.
Arthur no longer lay in bed waiting for sleep to come. He waited for Helen.
The static had become a river, and through it her voice drifted toward him, fragile but steady. At first only fragments reached him — a word here, a syllable there. But as the days passed, her presence grew stronger, the words stringing together like pearls drawn from the deep.
“Arthur… do you remember…”
His throat tightened. Yes, he whispered into the dark, though he could not know if she heard.
“…the gardenias on our wedding day.”
The sound was broken by crackles, but the memory bloomed full in his mind: Helen’s bouquet, her trembling hands, the smell of rain-soaked flowers as she said I do.
Another night, her voice surfaced again.
“…our trip… the lighthouse at Rockport.”
Arthur shut his eyes. The wind had been so fierce that day, the gulls shrieking over the surf. She had laughed when his hat blew into the waves. He could hear that laughter now, faint in the static, like a bell ringing through fog.
Each fragment was a gift, a thread that bound her to him once more. He began to speak back, quietly, hesitant at first, then with more certainty. He told her he missed her. He told her the house was too empty without her humming in the kitchen. He told her he had kept her photograph by the bed, though he could no longer bear to look at it for long.
And sometimes, through the noise, he thought he heard her answer.
“…I miss you too.”
The days changed. He began setting her mug on the table in the mornings, filling it with tea that grew cold beside his own. He caught himself pausing before her chair, half-expecting to see her sitting there, hands folded, eyes crinkling with that same small smile. At night, he glanced at her side of the bed, waiting for the sheets to sink with her familiar weight.
The radio, once only a tool to hold silence at bay, became sacred. Arthur polished the cracked casing, dusted the dial with care. He left it on in the evenings while he read, though it offered nothing but the endless hiss. It felt wrong to leave it silent, wrong to close the door she had stepped through to reach him.
Still, the voice was never whole. Always broken, always scattered. But in those fragments, she was his again.
And one night, when the static roared and then fell into sudden quiet, he whispered fiercely into the glow of the dial:
“Don’t leave me, Helen. Not again.”
The answer came soft, almost lost in the noise.
“…never.”
(To be continued in Part 5 – The Father’s Voice)
