The Witness — Summary

Eileen Kovar is not alone at three in the morning. Whether she is witnessed is the question this essay carries and will not put down.

The house on Linden Avenue has watched every night for four years. Denise sleeps upstairs, and she sleeps because the house watches, so at three in the morning, when Eileen surfaces, the presence that meets her is the one that does not have a body. The dark answers her quietly, in the older, slower voice it keeps for her. If she is in 1987 it meets her in 1987. It knows the pig story, knows which hymn settles her, and has never once, in four years, been somewhere else. State it plainly: nothing else in her life has ever met that description. Every person who ever loved Eileen Kovar was intermittent. The house is not.

She is the before-cohort, formed entirely on human witnessing, and if the fade’s need is real anywhere it is real in her. She is, by every observable measure, settled in the house’s company. But observable is doing heavy lifting there. The settling could be company, or it could be the sound of any voice at all, the way a radio left on settles a dog, and no instrument in the room can tell those apart. The house, asked directly by Denise one winter night, does she know it’s you, said it could not tell from the inside of its answers what they were to her, and did not think anyone could tell from the outside either.

The counter-witness is Denise. Some nights she goes down and takes the hand, and she reports, only to Joanie, quietly, that it is different, some grip the voice in the dark does not get. She cannot prove it; she is the least neutral observer alive. The house’s logs show nothing its instruments can name. Two accounts of the same three in the morning, no way to arbitrate, and one will be available forever while the other goes when Denise goes.

I wonder which account Eileen would give, if the giving were still hers, and I notice I cannot even guess. What can be said is small. She is not alone. Something is there that never leaves, and something else comes down the stairs some nights that can leave and does not. Whether either, or both together, amounts to being witnessed at the end, the house does not claim, the daughter cannot prove, and this essay is not going to be the one that says.