The Shape the River Remembers

They say the Lord gives and takes in equal measure, but I have known Him to take things He never rightly gave me to begin with.

His name was never written down in any family Bible, never announced in a drawing room or sewn into a sampler, and yet he lingers—quiet and constant—as though he were stitched into the hem of my very breath. A ghost, yes, but not in the rattling chains sense. More the way honeysuckle returns each spring to the fence rail, even after the house has burned down.

I first saw him—if I saw him at all—on the river path behind the old orange grove, the one that only fruits on one side now. Mama always said that land was “touched,” though whether by holiness or heartbreak she never did say.

He stood under the cypress with the posture of someone who’d once been kissed in a thunderstorm and never fully dried out. I do not know his name, only that he looked at me like I was something he’d lost in another life and didn’t expect to find so plain.

I do not know how long I stared, nor whether I said a word, but something in the air that day changed from sugar to smoke. You could feel it in your teeth, sharp and low, like the ache before a rain.

After that, I found him everywhere.

Not in body, mind you—never once in daylight. But in the crease of a curtain, in the unsettled hush of a clock that should have struck. I heard him in the sound the back gate makes when you’ve sworn it’s latched. I smelled him in tobacco that hadn’t been lit since Daddy died, the good kind, the Virginia leaf rolled tight and smoked only on good news.

He was not a suitor, not a soldier, not a cousin of any sort. But he held court in my quiet like a crow on a grave post—uninvited, unmovable, and, heaven help me, welcome.

Miss Adeline called it “a fanciful affliction.” Said it would pass like milk sickness or spring fever. But it never did. Instead, it grew. He grew. In dream and reverie. In afternoons I spent sitting by the parlor window pretending to mend, though the same stitch came undone each time I drew thread.

I asked the Lord to take it from me, this longing. I asked with fasting, with salt, with silence. I dipped my fingers in the river and prayed until they wrinkled like old love letters. But the river only gave me reflection, never release.

I tried to prove he was never real. I turned my mind into a courtroom and laid out evidence like pie crust. No footprints. No name. No letters. No talk among the servants, who always know first when something’s truly strange. But I forgot—

Some absences weigh more than presence ever could.

And ghosts need no proof, only breath enough to be remembered.

One night, just past the hour when owls begin their courtship, I followed the sound of something too soft to be real but too persistent to be ignored. It led me again to that same orange grove—bare now, limbs bent like arthritic fingers—and there he was. Not older, not changed. The years don’t dare touch such things.

He didn’t speak. He never did. But I understood him the way one understands thunder: not in words, but in the shape silence makes after.

I said, “I would’ve waited longer, if you’d asked me.”

And I swear the wind itself bowed a little.

He reached for my hand, not to hold it, but to pass through it, like sunlight through lace curtains. I felt it. Felt him. A warmth without touch, a hush without quiet. And then he was gone.

Not disappeared—spent.

I never saw him again after that.

But he’s still here. In the hallway that’s always cold no matter how the fire burns. In the way the river near the grove curves slightly wrong, like it once tried to follow someone who wouldn’t stay. In the sound of my own name, which no one says the way he didn’t.

I married a kind man. Bore him children who carry my mouth but not my silence. I serve tea. I nod. I attend. I wear blue on Thursdays for no reason anyone knows.

But I have never walked past that grove again. And I never eat oranges.