11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

C aro : As per your request last week, I am texting you your daily reminder.

Caro : Henry is a ghost.

Me : Thanks, Caroline.

Caro : Did it help?

Me : No.

Late July brings the peak of summer to Michigan: long days of bright sunlight, a bit of a drought, and the sort of humidity that makes my hair go from a curl to a cloud of frizz in six seconds flat. Thankfully, my grandmother is willing to run the air conditioning in the house “now that there is someone to share it with.”

“We’ve made so much progress,” she marvels after I finish giving her a tour around the folders of scanned documents and typed stories compiled on my laptop. “I’m just astounded by your speed. It’s like we pull one box out and the next day, it’s completely scanned and cataloged. It’s so much work but you’re done, quick as a flash!”

“Oh, you know what they say,” I reply, hoping my laugh doesn’t sound too forced, “if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.”

“Well, I’m just loving watching all of the progress you’re making and seeing the passion you put into the project. And, of course,” she adds, patting my hand, “I’m loving the time we get to spend together.”

It’s been six weeks since I moved in for the summer, and Grandma and I’ve been able to go through about a third of the attic. Considering that each box takes us at least two days to sort, talk about, and then even longer to scan and catalog, it is truly impressive. The secret, though, is Henry.

When my grandma goes off for her many septuagenarian activities and lunches with her friends, Henry comes over and helps me with my family project. He claims that if I’m going to help him break his curse, he wants to help me with my project, too. Really, I think he’s just lonely. And like with my grandmother, much of the world we are scanning and typing up is familiar to him. For me, it’s foreign; for him, the photos remind him of the time he was alive, moments when these very people were still laughing on the porch, walking through the fields, going to the church in town.

So, while I transcribe the evening’s interviews, Henry scans in photos, carefully labeling them based on the sticky notes I’ve placed on each one. Sometimes, when we listen to recordings of my grandma telling a story, he laughs and has other commentary to add.

At one point in a recording, Grandma Lydia says, “Oh my, well. These boxes are so full of random clutter. All of us Fabers are terribly sentimental, even over people and things long dead and gone,” to which Henry laughs and says, “Me too, Lydia, me too.”

That one nearly makes me spit out my mouthful of coffee.

I have a backlog of Grandma Lydia recordings, growing longer every day. They take up the most time, so Henry ends up hearing some of the very first stories she’d told me. I’m listening to the story of King pulling my great-grandmother out of the river when Henry makes a noise of surprise.

“That was me, you know,” he comments. “I pulled her out.”

“What?”

Henry bobs his head. “Yep. And I let King off the leash and tugged him down to the riverside by his collar, hoping that he would draw attention to her.”

“I don’t understand how you managed it. I thought you couldn’t touch anyone,” I say .

“It was quite the shock, honestly,” he admits. “I don’t know how I did it. The only way I can rationalize it is that somehow I was able to touch her clothes and that through that, I was able to pull her out. Usually, I can’t even do that—it’s as if someone’s clothes count as their person. Obviously, I’m grateful that it worked. I don’t know how I’d have been able to ever get over that, otherwise. Watching her drown.”

“That would have been horrifying,” I agree. Not only would Henry have had to live with that trauma of watching a child die while being helpless to interfere, but I wouldn’t even exist.

Other stories come up. How his oldest brother had fought in the First World War and lived, but it had shaken him up so much that he struggled with PTSD for years. How, so soon after, he watched two generations of his family leave for other wars, some never to come back at all.

He tells me a story about my great-great-grandmother Florence: how she wanted to leave and move to the city, but her family wouldn’t let her. Instead, she did a correspondence class, first to learn shorthand and then to learn typing. I had been avoiding asking him about her, simultaneously scared to hear stories about the woman he had once been prepared to marry and desperately curious.

“I bought her a typewriter as a wedding gift,” he says, looking down at his own fingers, tapping away on the keys of his laptop. Apparently, Henry has had no problem using technology ever since he mastered touching physical items—unless it’s a touchscreen, in which case it doesn’t pick up on his touch at all. It’s why he uses a flip phone, with buttons he actually has to push. “It was a Remington Portable, in green. I wanted to buy it new, but after the rings and the cost of refurbishing the old stone house, I didn’t have much money left over.” Henry doesn’t call his house “the little house in the woods” like my family does, mostly referring to it as “the old stone house.” Little turns of phrase like this remind me of how our worlds overlap but aren’t covering each other completely. How he has lived more lives—and different times—than me.

“I’m sure she loved it,” I reassure him.

“I’m sure she did too,” he agrees. “Although I never had the chance to give it to her. It was up in the bedroom that would have been ours after our wedding, a ribbon tied on it.” He looks lost in the memory, fingers still on the keyboard.

“Tell me about her,” I say after a few moments have passed.

He glances at me, a slight bit of side-eye. “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” I say, swallowing the knot in my throat. “I want to know what she was like. And about you and her.” It’s not a lie. I want to know everything about their relationship. It’s been a masochistic refrain in the corner of my mind these past two weeks. How did they meet? What was dating like for them? How long were they engaged?

And: When he looks at me, does he see me? Or does he see the shadow of her?

Does he miss her still?

Does he love her still?

“Well, we grew up as neighbors. Although, before the houses were built in ’28, we were spread further apart. The house I grew up in is actually down the road. It’s been torn down now for decades. I was buddies with her brother, although not close. Friends of convenience, really. He was a few years older than me, and I was the closest boy his age within a mile. Anyway, Florence and I didn’t spend much time together until she was sixteen or seventeen. I knew her from school but was working with my uncle and didn’t date much.”

“But you dated Florence?”

Henry laughs. “You could say that. Florence… well, you and her might share the same hair qualities and a few of the same mannerisms, but she actually was more like your cousin Caroline, personality-wise. A real spitfire. Feisty. She and I butted heads a few times before we became friends. She…” Henry chuckles at a memory and twists to face me. “Well, you two share this in common: she was whip smart and couldn’t resist a good mystery. Doggedly pursued answers to questions, too.”

“So you became friends, then?”

“Yes, although loosely. I would see her when I was with her brother. I fell in love with her later.”

“What did you like most about her?” I ask, even though I hate to ask, hate to know.

“She was so determined. I loved that about her,” Henry says. “Her family wanted her to fall in line. Be part of the family business, to stay on the farm and help with it and her younger siblings until she was married. She loved them but wanted more from her life. What she really wanted was to go to college, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. That’s when she enrolled in that correspondence course. She just couldn’t not pursue what she dreamed of.”

“She sounds inspiring,” I offer.

“She was.” He looks at me now, and we’re face to face. “I loved her, Rency. I really did. I thought she was so fun and incredibly clever. But now that I’m older, I’m not sure that I could’ve been the man she needed. She needed someone who wouldn’t hold her back, and I think I would have.”

“Really? You don’t seem the type.” It’s hard to imagine Henry as the sort who would take a spirit and try to reign it in.

Henry’s laugh is self-deprecating. “Not now, I hope. But then, I think I was. I think I’d been programmed that way, with a rigidity of expectations. I loved her determination, her intelligence, but I wouldn’t have known how to foster it. I bought her a typewriter, but would I have encouraged her to go to college? To have a career she would love? I’m not sure. After I died, I watched her meet someone else, get married to someone else. I saw him make decisions I feel like I would have made, and they made her unhappy. I’m not sure she’d have had any better a life with me than with him.”

“Did she have a bad life? With the man she married?”

Henry shrugs. “I don’t think I would call it bad. But I know she wanted more than what she had. And maybe she let those dreams fade away and replaced them with new dreams. After I died… well, I watched from afar, but…” He shakes his head.

I nod. But it was too hard to get too close. To watch life unfold as you stand at a distance.

I feel it myself, in a less weighty or tangible way: what it is like to see things right there, at your fingertips, but unable to reach for them.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That must have been incredibly difficult.”

“It was… excruciating.” Henry states it simply. “But it was a long time ago. Truthfully, now those decades are like… I don’t know how to describe it.” He pauses, then taps the screen of his laptop. It’s a photo of my grandmother, laughing and ankle-deep in Oak River. “It’s like this photo. Black and white, flattened. It still stirs emotion… it’s just not in technicolor. It’s not 4K, 3D, IMAX. I loved Florence, I loved my brother and sister, loved the generations of nieces and nephews I never was able to hold but whose cradles I rocked at night when they were colicky. In the moment, the emotions were sharp and full and colorful. But now, they are faded and gray. Old memories, poorly preserved. They are the past. I hold on to them, but they’re behind me. Does that make sense?”

Henry’s stare is intent, purposeful. He wants me to understand: that was then, this is now.

“Yes,” I say. “It does. I just don’t want to bring up anything that… well, that’s still tender.”

“Don’t worry about that. Don’t hold yourself back. I want to share those moments with you. To keep them alive in another person’s memories, even if I…” he trails off, but I get it.

He wants the memories to live on, even if he’s already dead.

“Okay,” I agree. “I won’t hold back, then. ”

Henry’s smile is soft, a bit tender. “Good. Now load another photo into the scanner. You’re slacking. What will Lydia say?”

The sound of tires crunching on the dirt of the road alerts me to my grandmother’s arrival. Henry hears it too and begins to pack away all of the items he’d brought with him back into his backpack. It took practice, he’d explained to me before, to move items between the physical world and through the veil into his own layer of existence, but small items like laptops were easier than other things. “I think it’s because they have so many small parts. It’s like a handful of rice instead of a big rock,” he’d explained.

This doesn’t make much sense to me since they’re all connected and soldered together anyway, but I didn’t ask more about it. Usually, when I press Henry about a specific aspect of the Ghost Rules, he just laughs, shrugs, and says, “I don’t make the rules, I just live here.”

What would this scene look like if Grandma Lydia was in the house? Would she see a floating laptop lift from the table just to disappear mid-air?

Dig-Dong-Ding-DONG.

“That’s weird. Grandma must have forgotten her keys,” I say, pushing back from the table. I should really get Grandma a smart doorbell. Then, she could ring it if she ever got locked outside and I could see her from my phone app.

I don’t even check before yanking the massive wooden door open, so when it’s not my grandma, my heart lurches in surprise. It doesn’t calm down when I realize who it is—Nathan, the relator, and his ghost shadow.

Mallory.

“Can I help you?” I ask, attempting to keep my eyes on Nathan instead of taking the opportunity to stare at Henry’s aunt, face-to-face. She doesn’t know I can see her, and I want to keep it that way. But Mallory’s eyes narrow, and I’m starting to worry that she’s already caught on when Nathan flashes a salesman smile at me.

“Good afternoon, Miss Faber. I am just stopping by to follow up with you about our conversation a few weeks ago, outside my office. Do you remember?”

“Of course.” How could I forget? I force myself to stare at him, pasting on my own cool smile, even as Mallory paces behind him.

“I brought some paperwork. It’s a list of comparative properties and their value, based on property and square footage. I thought you might be interested in the number. It’s quite substantial and I’m sure that I could find a buyer quickly once it goes on the market.”

Nathan extends a folder to me, but I don’t make any move to take it. “I’m not the homeowner,” I remind him. “If you want to talk about the property, you should speak to my grandmother. Besides,” I add, “why don’t you track down whoever owns the place across the street? Maybe they would be willing to sell. It’s what, fifty acres?”

“Ha!” Mallory barks, and my eyes fly to her at the outburst.

Of course, she notices.

“So you can see me,” she says, focusing on me with an intensity that makes the hair on the back of my neck raise.

“Besides,” I continue, trying to play it off like I’m looking behind her, out towards the remains of Karl’s house, “it burned down a few weeks ago. Maybe they are looking to get it off their hands.”

“Don’t ignore me,” she snaps, stepping closer. Nathan twitches just a bit at the edge in her voice. How long has she been haunting him? He’s nearly perfected the art of pretending she isn’t there, like she isn’t a voice constantly ordering him around.

“I think the previous owner passed away, willed it to someone—”

Mallory pushes in front of Nathan, half through him, and it’s the thing that jars me into breaking. Henry never pushes through anyone, always carefully going around them at a respectful distance, preserving their autonomy. Nathan shutters at the ghostly pass-through, and it seems as if Mallory is going to do it to me, too, or maybe something worse—can she do something worse?—when she stops in her tracks, half an arm’s length from me.

“Aunt Mallory,” Henry says from behind me. “What an unexpected… surprise.” Just the sound of Henry’s voice relaxes my shoulders. I hadn’t realized how tense they were .

“Just a surprise? Not a pleasure, Henry?”

“Certainly not. It wasn’t before, decades ago, and now that you’ve burned down my house, it’s even less so.”

Mallory tilts back her head and laughs. “Oh, excellent. I thought you lived there. I’m happy to find out I was right.” Henry doesn’t react to her delight, letting the half-truth of where he lives slide by. “When I saw your name on those tax papers, I wasn’t completely sure it was you. Once I convinced Nathan here to take me back to my old stomping grounds, I was surprised to see both of these old piles of sticks still standing. To think I used to want one just like it!” She scoffs, and I wish I could punch her in her snotty, smug face. Not that I have ever punched anyone in my life, it’s just that the idea of it is even more enticing when I know that I can’t. “Land around here… well, let’s just say that Nathan and I have done our fair share of property flipping. In fact, we’ve got a little patch of land right next door waiting for a few more acres to get added to it so we can bundle it. Developers will pay top dollar for a chunk of fifty acres or more.” She smirks. “Thought I’d do you a favor and give you a new development opportunity yourself.”

“I’ll be sure to note that on the insurance claim,” Henry deadpans.

“Take these,” Nathan interjects, again attempting to pass me the folder. He’s uncomfortable with Henry—maybe the idea of two ghosts is too much for him—and it’s clear that he’s ready to end this conversation. Seeing how twitchy he is makes me wonder how much of a willing participant he is in Mallory’s scheme.

I shake my head at him. “No, thank you.”

“Why are you really here, Mallory?” Henry asks. I want to step back, to press my shoulder against him so we are a unified border of ghost and flesh, a barrier set into my grandmother’s home, but I know instinctively that if Mallory knows that I can touch Henry, we’ll lose whatever advantage or edge we have on her. Instead, I take comfort in knowing that he’s behind me—that he literally has my back.

“Oh, I’m just checking things out,” Mallory says, feigning breeziness. “When I met this girl here a few weeks ago, I thought that she might have seen me, but that’s not something that has ever happened before. Then, the night of the fire, I thought it was suspicious—the way you two clearly could see each other.” She eyes me, curiosity open on her expression. “I wonder how we are related. Something… unsavory, I would assume.” She sneers, looking back at Henry. “Funny how you ended up related to one of them even after you died, huh?”

The implication rankles me, but I don’t take the bait. I’m not going to reveal that it’s through ink and not through blood that we are tied.

“No need to be rude,” I tell her.

Mallory looks down her nose at me. “Hmm. I’m not so sure.” Her eyes flick back towards Henry, evaluative.

“That’s not what I meant,” Henry says. “I mean, why are you here ? Why haven’t you crossed over?” He’s pushing the conversation, looking for the answers he and I haven’t been able to figure out ourselves. Mallory’s initial motivation for cursing Henry is clear, but why is she a ghost? And why hasn’t she left the mortal world for whatever else lies on the other side?

“Believe me, if I could, I would. After a few decades, even this gets boring. Although, I suppose accumulating wealth and power never gets old, even when it’s done with some strings attached.” She eyes Nathan, who has the decency to look annoyed with the fact that his ghost aunt called him a puppet but doesn’t have the guts to say anything back to her. “Let’s just say that generational wealth didn’t end just because I died.”

“So you can’t cross over, then?” I ask. “Or break your curse in some other way?”

Mallory raises a perfectly shaped brow. “Whatever curse I’m under is tied to Henry’s. His curse is broken, mine is broken. So until he decides to move on, I’m stuck here.” She laughs, and it’s like nails on a chalkboard to my ears. “I’ve been pretty confused for the past century. I really thought that I was stuck here because I killed him, but I guess the spell was right. Sacrifice for sacrifice, a balanced curse.”

“So why don’t you break the curse, then, if you know so much on the topic?”

“Curses are spells, and spells need spell books. Let’s just say that my own special brand of magical book has been missing… well, ever since my last curse, the night I killed Henry.”

“Missing?” I echo. “You lost it?” In my mind’s eye, I’m reviewing the blur of the hazy dream memory, searching for that detail. A book, a book. Was there one? I can’t remember. It’s been almost two weeks since my last disassociated glimpse into that time-tossed memory and everything seems faded.

“Listen, you little mortal baby ,” Mallory hisses, focusing her hateful gaze back on me. “I don’t like your tone. I may not have a book, but I can make your life—”

“Don’t you dare speak to my—my family that way,” Henry says, cutting her off. He shifts past me, careful not to brush against me. “You have no business here. I think this conversation is over.”

Mallory glares at him, then huffs in annoyance. “Ugh. You always were such a goody-goody, Henry.” Glancing behind her shoulder, she exchanges a look with Nathan before turning back to face us. “We’ll be back. Next time, maybe we will catch your granny.” She spins on her heel, walking down the porch steps and leaving Nathan to scramble behind her.

Henry and I watch them get into Nathan’s car and back down the driveway, the vehicle practically launching down the gravel road in a cloud of dust.

“Good riddance,” I mutter. She is exceedingly unpleasant. I wonder how many people she terrorizes by proxy.

Henry turns to me. Surprisingly, his expression is bright. “I think I know what book she was talking about.”