My grandmother died in February, and my mother and I spent a weekend in March clearing out her house. It's the kind of work that is heavy in ways that have nothing to do with the physical weight of boxes, and we moved through the rooms carefully, giving things the time they deserved before deciding their fates.
In the attic, under a folding table, there was a box.
It was a puzzle box — one of those old wooden-sided ones that craft stores used to sell, designed to look like a decorative chest. A thousand pieces, according to the label on the bottom, which was the only label. No image preview on the outside. No title. My grandmother had loved puzzles; I found four others in the attic, all finished and mounted, hung on the walls like paintings. This one was unassembled.
I took it home. I started it on a Saturday in April, more as an act of grieving than entertainment, a way to sit with the quiet in my apartment and think about her without it swallowing me.
The edge pieces went quickly. By the end of the first evening I had the border and the broad shapes of the image beginning to resolve. It was a photograph, rendered in that hyper-detailed photographic style that good puzzle manufacturers used in the '90s. An interior. A house. I assumed it was a stock image — the kind of generic domestic space puzzle manufacturers used when they didn't have a license for a landscape or a painting.
By the end of the second evening, I stopped assuming that.
The room in the puzzle was a living room. It had the same layout as mine. Not similar — not the general layout of a thousand apartment living rooms. The window was in the same position. The doorway to the kitchen was in the same position. I put down the piece I was holding and sat for a long time, telling myself I was pattern-matching, that humans are designed to find familiar shapes in noise, that it was coincidence.
On the third evening I finished enough of the image to see the hallway.
The hallway in the puzzle led back from the living room the way my hallway leads back from my living room. The hall table was wrong — mine is wood, and the puzzle showed something metal — but the proportion of the space, the way the light fell, the framing of the far wall: it was my hallway.
And in the hallway, in the mid-distance, slightly out of focus the way things are slightly out of focus in photographs not centered on the subject, there was a person standing.
I cannot describe them clearly because the focus made it impossible. They were adult-height. They were facing the camera — facing, therefore, toward me, across the living room. Their posture was entirely still.
I have about two hundred pieces left to complete the puzzle. The section I haven't finished yet contains the hallway figure. Each piece I add brings them into slightly clearer resolution.
I have not added a piece in three weeks.
I called my mother and described what I found. She was quiet for a moment and then said she didn't know where my grandmother had gotten that puzzle. She said she had never seen it before. She said she was sure it was a coincidence.
Then she said: "Don't finish it, sweetheart."
She didn't explain why. She sounded very certain.
The box is in my closet now. The unfinished puzzle is in the box. I think about the figure in the hallway sometimes — about how much more clearly I could see them with just a few more pieces. About whether they're looking at the camera, or past it, at something standing just behind where the photographer must have been.
I'm not going to finish it.
I'm pretty sure I'm not going to finish it.