If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

When I found the article, I cut it out and put it in a box at the top of my closet. A tiny town in Kentucky, the impossible event its people claimed they’d witnessed. It was ridiculous. A miracle, tucked between advertisements and church notices. I read it twice, then dismissed it.

Still, I kept it.

Maybe it was a hoax by some mountain people desperate for attention to a failing town. But they didn’t strike me as wanting to be intruded on. Maybe they didn’t think they were capable of being wrong, of their eyes deceiving them. Whatever the case, I dismissed it entirely, but I still saved the article. I didn’t want to lose the thread.

This was only a few months after I lost my husband, and much of that time is a blur. I still felt as if there was something between me and the world. In some lights it was a window, in others a mirror.

The people in Kentucky claimed they’d seen a man die and then emerge from a small limestone cave on a local man’s property very much alive a few days later. A week after I read it, I was desperate enough to rent a car and drive to that town.

It only took a few days to find someone willing to take me to the cave. Through my grief ,it seemed the best and only thing to do. Grief had taken me a long way in those months, and what had once seemed obviously ridiculous now had a logic to me that I didn’t mind following.

I still wore the necklace he’d given me the year we married, a thin gold chain I’d never once taken off. It had a habit of twisting on itself overnight so that I’d wake with it wound tight at my throat, the clasp turned round to the front.

The cave was in a hollow straight off from a small tobacco farm. It was maybe ten feet deep, eight feet wide, set into the earth. I could feel cold coming off the rock. I could see nothing special about it. My husband could see the layers of time in a place like this, but I could not. I camped out inside and stayed awake through the night, but nothing happened. Other than the sounds of night birds, it was completely silent. The funeral was awful.

On the drive home, I realized I’d lost my sanity, and I was done. I couldn’t stand the thought of returning to my house. I was done searching for an answer and done with life. I could not face going home, so I decided to check into a motel. I told the desk clerk I needed a room for one night. He gave me a key to room 12. There was a small painting hung crooked in the hallway outside the door, a dark oval of rock in a wooded hollow, the kind of thing you’d find at any roadside motel and not think twice about.

I sat in the dark with the door locked, thinking of my husband’s face and trying to come to terms with what I had decided. But there was one thing I hadn’t done yet, even inside the cave. Death wasn’t going anywhere—what could it hurt to try once more. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. I spoke aloud to the empty room.

“Is anyone there? If you can hear me, please show yourself. This is my last request. I want my husband back. And I am willing to do or give anything.”

It felt pathetic, but it felt charged, too. I would go insane and grieving in this motel, pleading to the end for nothing. I looked at my face in the mirror, alone, undignified. I couldn’t even keep him from going into the earth alone. In what would be my final moments, I found no peace.

Not even a minute later, I heard the sound of a car door open.

I looked out into the motel parking lot. My car was still the only one parked outside, but the passenger side door was open. I went out there and got into the driver’s side.

It looked like a man, but the longer I stared the less that shape held. Its face would resolve into features and then slip away, like a name I almost remembered. Its skin seemed too smooth in some places, too bright in others, catching the light without quite reflecting it. Its eyes did not have color so much as layers—white, then a pale blue, then something else, shifting like there were more eyes behind them, more souls. When it spoke, I heard it inside my head; its lips did not move.

I’m going to take you somewhere, and once I do, you must do as I tell you.

I drove through the night, the man watching me all the while. Sometimes I thought he was sitting beside me, and sometimes I thought he was somewhere behind my left shoulder, just out of sight, but every time I looked he was in the passenger seat, turned toward me. When other cars passed us, I could not see anyone inside them. Just the suggestion of forms behind the glass.

Once, a pair of headlights rose up ahead, high and sudden. They came toward us too quickly, too directly, and something in me recognized the angle. I braced in the old way. My hands locked on the wheel. I prepared for the sound of impact, for shattering.

The light slid past, silent.

At some point I noticed the chain at my throat had drawn tight again, twisted twice round. I put my fingers to it and felt the clasp turned under my hair as if someone had tightened it while I wasn’t looking.

It was near dawn when it became clear we had reached our destination. A dirt road and an old farmhouse. Nothing else. We got out of the car, and I followed it inside.

The old house was a wreck. Full ashtrays and drug paraphernalia sat on every table. It seemed abandoned, but it didn’t feel empty. I walked with it out to the yard, where a stone patio stood. It lifted a rock and brought up what looked like a yam or root in its outstretched palm.

Eat this.

***

My grief had made me like an animal for so long I didn’t even question it. Whatever it was, it had no flavor. I ate half the root, and it took the other and slowly chewed and swallowed. It brought back an image of my husband’s hand closing over mine at our kitchen table, so strong I forgot where I was for a moment. It nodded at me as if to tell me that, whatever was happening, it had begun.

Again I thought its face was something I recognized, but it changed before I could place where. I followed its lead to an unkempt field. It stood there with me as the sun started to rise. Still standing, it began to shake and then knelt down to the ground. It dug a hole with its hands and brought up red clay, which it shaped into a mound. I felt my guts spasm violently, like a contraction, and I began to empty my stomach’s contents onto the mound again and again until it seemed there was nothing left. Others like the man stood in a circle, watching. One of them, further back than the rest, stood with his chin tipped, a thin chain rising from his throat into the dark above him as if it were attached to something up there I couldn’t see, holding him just slightly off the ground. So far away. One turn had gone round his neck and was supporting his whole weight. I couldn’t get it off him. The rope was snagged on something further up. His tongue was still moving, but he was black in the face, and he was dead. He would have died anyway before I could’ve gotten to him.

Images of my husband played over my mind—the two of us on the porch the summer we married, his hand shading his eyes against the sun, laughing at something I could no longer hear the words to. Him teaching himself to fix the old radio in the garage, swearing at it under his breath.

It brought me inside the farmhouse where I slept for a full day and night, dreaming the whole of his life, moments I’d been there for and things I’d missed—his private joys and pain, his thoughts, his anger, his forgiveness. But this time when I woke up, he was there with me. I’d spent so many days locked in what felt like a living hell. For me, the day he died had never ended. But now he was back. I watched him for what felt like hours, touching his hands, his face, his hair. It was him, unmistakably. Out of the strong came something sweet.

He didn’t respond, but he didn’t seem upset. He smiled if I smiled at him. I guided him out of the derelict house and into the car. There was no sign of them.

On the drive, I considered whether I had lost my senses. But everything since that night in the cave had felt real, realer than anything I’d ever felt in my life. I had everything I’d hoped for—another chance.

But over time I came to see he isn’t my husband at all. First, he started to repeat himself, asking me the same questions again and again. Then he seemed to forget everything. But I knew I couldn’t ascribe real problems to my husband. We had been through something otherworldly. Some mornings I’d find him standing at the window facing the yard, looking where he'd buried his dog as a boy, where it rested for twelve months before badgers and foxes dug it up and ate it. Until one day it all came to a terrible place when I was in a car crash that forced me to spend a few nights in the hospital. I couldn’t do anything; I was concussed and groggy. I’d been gone nearly two days when I returned home, but my husband didn’t seem to notice I’d been gone at all. He went through the usual motions as if nothing were wrong, no acknowledgment. He didn’t appear to have eaten or drunk anything.

***

Daniel, my husband, had been thirty. He took a wrong turn and misjudged the distance. The rope had gone round his neck. I couldn’t get it off him. He was snagged on something. His tongue was still moving, but he was black in the face, and he was dead. He would have died anyway. I couldn’t get to him in time.

Daniel showed no recognition of photos of himself. I didn’t know what to do next. I only hoped this deal I’d made, whatever it was, meant I could still see him one day, wherever he was. Daniel was gone. This was not him.

What I did next I did on pure instinct. I put him in the car with me and drove through the night to the old farmhouse.

As I neared the dirt road, I coughed up mouthful after mouthful of dead leaves, dry and bitter, clinging to my tongue and teeth.

Once I was sure I was in the right place, I stepped out of the car and went up to the house. The yard was quiet. No sign of them. No movement at all.

“I did what you asked,” I said. “I brought him back.”

Out of the strong came something sweet.

I stood there, waiting for more, but nothing followed. The words lingered, strange and complete.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

No answer came.

I went to the window. My husband was no longer in the car.

He was seated at a plain wooden table inside the house. And I was there with him.

The room was clean and bright. Sunlight through unbroken glass. The two of us sat close together. I drive too fast and I’m too distracted. I drive too fast to a small hollow in a Kentucky town, distracted, and miss a blind curve, or maybe I knew where I’d be if I did. Racing to get to my husband. Daniel drove like an old person, but he loved mountain climbing. He didn’t think he could get hurt. He told me over and over to watch the wet roads. I can't get to him. He's strangled on something from above.

***

I reached up to my throat, standing there in the yard, in the cold. The chain was wound tight, three times round, the clasp somewhere underneath, the gold pressed into my skin in a violent line I didn’t let myself follow any further than that. The woman at the table wasn’t looking out at me, had no reason to, would never think to check the window for someone standing in the frost in her nightclothes.

***

What I remember next is the motel sign, the same flickering vacancy, the same key already sweating in my palm as if it had never left it. Room 12. In the hallway, the painting hung the same crooked way, the stone in it lit from some angle no window could account for.

Is anyone there? I’m willing to do or give anything.