15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15

C aro : Hey.

Caro : How are you doing?

Me : Doing okay, you?

Caro : Good, good. Just editing the photos from the last wedding I shot.

Caro : Want me to come over later today?

Me : It’s okay, I know you’re busy.

Caro: I’m doing that elopement tomorrow and it’s just in the morning. I can come over after? I should be done by one.

Me: Really, I’m fine!

My mug shatters on the floor, sending a wave of coffee and hunks of ceramic across the floor. I yelp, jumping back from the splatter.

“Are you okay in there?” Grandma Lydia calls from her cozy corner.

“Fine,” I call back. “Just clumsy. I broke one of your mugs.” Disoriented, I grab the paper towels and crouch down, mopping up the milky liquid. How had it happened? I swear that one moment I had the mug in my hand and then the next it was cracking against the hardwood floor, splashing against my bare feet.

I’ve been feeling odd these past few days. Excessively clumsy, for one. I feel strange in my own body, absentminded and tripping over things I normally would breeze right past. I almost elbowed over a vase of flowers yesterday, so perhaps spilling something was just on my clumsy bingo card. Plus, after days of feeling no hunger at all, last night I woke up early in the morning, ravenous. I was so hungry that I microwaved myself a double piece of lasagna from the fridge at two a.m., unable to lay in bed any longer without food.

I stick my head into Grandma’s cozy corner room, where she’s looking over my way, concern on her features. “I’m so sorry about the mug,” I tell her.

“Oh, those old things? I don’t care about them at all. Do you need help?” She sets down her iPad, looking like she is about to get up.

“No, no, I’m fine. Stay in there until I have it cleaned up so you don’t step on any glass.”

“If you insist.”

“Yes, I do,” I reassure her. “It mostly just cracked into three big pieces, but I’ll still get the wet sweeper for any shards.”

The pieces of mug are quickly picked up, and I manage to spot mop the area of the kitchen without any other mishaps.

“All clear,” I announce a few minutes later. Grandma Lydia is already at the doorway to the kitchen, a look of concern on her face.

“What,” I say, looking down at my feet. They’re unscathed. “I’m fine. Didn’t step on a single piece!”

“Rency, dear,” she says, coming to sit at the kitchen bar. “Are you okay?”

I reach up and pull down a new mug. “I’m doing fine, Grandma.” I feel her eyes on me as I pour myself a new mug of coffee.

“I’m worried about you. You haven’t been yourself the past week or so. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you picking at your food every night.”

“It’s not your food, Grandma, I swear. Everything you make is delicious.”

“I know that ! I’ve been cooking since I was fifteen. I’m an old pro by now. And that’s my point, Rency. Usually you eat breakfast and, even though I know you snack for lunch, you always eat dinner. And, well…” She pauses, waiting for me to put the milk back in the fridge and have my full attention. When I do, she reaches out to hold one of my hands. “I thought maybe you were happy here this summer.”

“I am,” I reassure her, patting her hand as it grips my own. “I love working on our family history project together.”

Grandma Lydia shakes her head. “I don’t believe it. Are you bored of it now? It’s okay if you are. We can spend the last weeks of your summer some other way.”

“No, I’m not,” I say. “I swear, I love it.” It’s true. Hearing her stories at night, listening to the recordings during the day… I know I’m going to cherish these memories forever. Getting to write down the stories of our family, to trace back each branch of our family tree, has been the perfect summer project.

“Then what’s wrong?”

I make a split decision to tell her just a bit about how I am feeling. “I’ve sorta been seeing someone, but… casually,” I confess. “And I developed feelings for him. But it’s not going to work out. We talked a few days ago, and even though we agreed to be friends, I guess I’ve been off ever since.”

I can tell that my grandma wants to ask a million questions. She nods slowly, a careful expression on her face. “So you broke up?”

“We weren’t ever dating. That’s part of the problem, I think. That I let myself like him so much, and now that we aren’t even dating, the feelings are there and I don’t have any closure.” The closure would be when I moved away, or when we broke his curse, but obviously I can’t tell my grandma that.

“And you told him you like him?”

My curls drift around my shoulders as I shake my head. “No. I knew it wasn’t going to work out from the start. He…” I scrabble for what to say, how to explain without lying or running myself into a corner. “He lives far away.”

“He doesn’t want to date long distance? What, he doesn’t think it’s worth the hassle?” she asks, pursing her lips in what I know is a look of disapproval.

“It’s complicated,” I say, trying to back this conversation up. “Either way, it’s put me in a funk. That we won’t be together.”

She nods again, head tilted in evaluation. “I understand. But I don’t like it.”

I sigh, putting my head down on my arm. “Me neither,” I tell her. “I don’t like it at all.”

“Would you like me to not go to the lake house next week? I can cancel, you know. Or move the date.”

The lake house. I forgot that she was going to drive out to Lake Michigan to stay with my aunt and uncle in a few days to spend some time relaxing on the beach and play Wordle in a new chair—an adventurous woman, my grandmother.

“No way,” I protest. “I’m fine. Just in a funk. I swear. You go, have a good time.”

She smiles softly, patting me on the shoulder as she stands up. “Okay then. You tell me if you change your mind, though, yes? I have to leave for my appointment or I’ll be late, but you eat a piece of cake now, won’t you? No boy is worth not having a slice of my carrot cake for.”

I make a grunt of agreement. I’d know—I ate a slice straight off the platter last night.

Over the past five days, I try to tell myself that Henry wasn’t really rejecting me. That he is right—that me leaving at the end of the summer and living my life is the logical response to the situation. That it isn’t me, but the scenario. After all, no matter what, the situation will end in heartbreak.

Henry is a ghost.

We will break the curse that holds him here on earth.

Henry will cross over.

I will go back to my regular life.

And even if we don’t break the curse—even if I move into my grandmother’s house—there isn’t a happy ending for the two of us, no matter what paper was signed or whose ring is on whose finger.

I considered yanking it off, after that night. What was I doing? I’d asked myself, staring at the way the moonlight caught in the diamond’s cut. My emotions have completely overwritten my defense mechanisms. The past, normally a place of predictable and safe refuge, has folded on top of the present, and I’m caught in the middle.

Still, I don’t take it off. In fact, where it had felt wrong to wear it before, it feels wrong not to wear it. I hate it; I love it.

Henry noticed right away, but he hadn’t said anything. Instead, I watched his eyes dart from my hand and away while his own hand, devoid of a ring, reached up to rub the back of his neck. I wonder if he regrets putting it on my finger. Still, I can’t convince myself to take it off. He said I should wear it if I want, and now I do.

I do, I do, I do.

It’s stupid and I know it’s too soon, but I would say it at the altar, standing in front of a pastor, facing a courthouse judge, if only it meant I could keep him. I’d pledge my life in connection to his own if it meant he could stay.

Instead, all I’ll be left with are a few black-and-white photos, a ring, and a memory.

It’s enough to make me not want to find Mallory’s book. If I don’t find the book, the curse isn’t broken. If the curse isn’t broken, I can keep whatever scraps of Henry I can manage to hold on to. I know it’s selfish, but I can’t help the thought from bubbling up, over and over again.

Today, though, I’m fighting that feeling. Henry, in a rare change from our predictable schedule, told me that he has something to do in town—yes, it was that cryptic of a text—so he can’t see me until tonight. So, instead of scanning or transcribing today, I return to the attic. We’ve been through every box in my grandmother’s house and in Karl and Henry’s pole barn, but with no new leads, I feel compelled to check them over again.

I want to be a good enough person to let him go. A good enough friend.

Love is wanting the highest good for someone , he had said. I want the highest good for him, I swear I do. So I will check the boxes again, search high and low and leave no stone unturned. I just hate that it will hurt me.

Still, when I’m up in the darkness of the attic, it’s hard to peer through each box with true conviction. The spooky filtered light and the way I have to stoop in most areas of the attic doesn’t help either, and with my recently acquired struggle to walk without feeling as if my limbs are somehow disconnected from my body, it’s no surprise that I trip and bang into one of the side panels of the attic wall—

Which promptly falls to the ground with an echoing bang and a cloud of dust.

Sneezing and huffing in annoyance, I use my fingertips to scrape the thin panel from the ground and lift it back against the insulation-filled eaves. I wince as one of the rough edges bites into my palm, and as I muscle it back to lean against the framing studs, I notice that, piled under the blown-in insulation, there is a box.

Specifically, an old wooden cigar box.

I can barely shift the panel to prop it against the wall, I’m shaking so much from the discovery.

I don’t bother taking the box downstairs. I sit right there, on the plywood floor of the attic, and unlatch what I already know, in my gut, will be something important.

The contents of the box are simple and few:

A silk flower crown, curled up to fit in the box tightly.

A letter, folded up but not sealed, with Henry’s name written on the front of it in looping script.

A man’s gold wedding band.

A card with “Congratulations on your Wedding” written on the front.

And a small, leather-bound book.

I can’t look anymore. I’m scared to confirm what I have just found. Instead, I carefully pack everything into the small wooden box and I carry it down to the floor below, retreating to the bedroom I’ve claimed as my own this summer.

On my quilt, the items look less like secretive magical objects designed for a strange, unknown ritual and more like the sorts of historical family items I’ve spent all summer looking at with my grandmother. I examine each carefully, as if I’m an archivist and not a woman who has somehow magically tied herself to a cursed ghost through an unknown and questionable ritual of antiquated matrimony and for whom the contents of the box dictate said ghost’s future.

The silk flowers are beautiful despite their age, their petals still soft, and the colors still vibrant. I don’t place it on my hair, although I know it would look good there, just like it would have looked beautiful on my great-great-grandmother’s identical curls.

I do hold the ring, its weight heavy in the center of my palm. It’s not inscribed, but I know it must have been Henry’s.

I leave the folded-up letter unread. It’s not addressed to me, and Henry might be technically dead, but to me he’s very much so alive. He should read it before I do. The congratulatory card, though, I can’t help but open. The message inside is a simple well-wishing from Henry’s younger sister. I rarely think about her, but seeing the neat script and sweet words nearly breaks my heart.

I leave the leather-bound book for last.

Henry greets me with a smile when I open the door for him that evening. For a while after the revelation that he could touch me, Henry didn’t seem to try to keep any physical space between us. As if we were friends, he wouldn’t try to not touch me, so we’d brush shoulders in passing and occasionally our hands might touch. After our conversation on Sunday, though, he carefully keeps an inch or two between us, as if too much familiarity will break my resolve. Maybe break his own resolve, too.While we usually spend most of our time at the kitchen table, I’ve left the box on my bedroom dresser, so I lead Henry up to my room. I’ve gotten exceedingly good at not making a sound as we go up or down the steps.“How was your morning?” I ask once we are carefully tucked away in my room.

“Good.” He grins. “Productive, considering I’m a ghost.”

“That’s great.” I fold myself onto the bed, legs crossed. I want to ask him what he did—I’m genuinely curious—but the knowledge that the book is there, right there, and inside of its cover, there are potential solutions to his curse dominates my thoughts. “So toda—”

“I went to the la—oh, you can go first,” he says when our voices layer over each other.

“No, you,” I insist.

“I went to the lawyer’s office in town,” he says. “It wasn’t in my range before—you know, I could barely make it to the church some days, let alone all the way downtown—but now that we’re ma—we’re connected, it seems like I can go basically anywhere. Regardless, I dropped off some papers that I was too scared to mail in.”

“Papers?”

“Yes. They’re notarized documents about the property. Karl had it all signed over to me before his death, official with his lawyer and everything, but obviously there was some confusion since I’m impossible to find because I’m dead. Still, after I paid the taxes earlier this summer, I got a letter in the mail from the lawyer, basically saying, “Hello, if you’re getting this mail, you need to send in some paperwork.” I had the paperwork, only I didn’t want to send it in the mail because it’s the only notarized copy I have, and if I lose it…” Henry shrugs. “I’m a ghost. I could never get the papers redone. There would be no one to witness the notarization, and Karl passed away.”

“So, what does this mean?” I ask. “Didn’t you officially sign the documents before? What changed?”

“I added your name to everything before I put it in the drop box at the office.”

“What?” I splutter. “What do you mean, you added my name?”

“Well, there is a little line on the paperwork that was left blank when I signed it all, for my spouse, and I added your name. I did have to forge your signature. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I… what? Why would you do that?”

“Oh, you do mind?” he asks, wincing at my confused expression. “Sorry. I should have asked.”

“No, I mean, I guess? But no, I’m saying, why would you sign anything over to me?”

Henry spreads his hands out in the empty space in front of him, palms up. “Rency. I–I have no one. You’re the only one. Why wouldn’t I? And besides, even if I wasn’t—if we weren’t—even if I wasn’t connected to you, I see how much you love Lydia’s place, and I can’t think of anyone else who would care about this land the way you do. I don’t want it to just get bulldozed and developed into mini-mansions. I’m too sentimental for that. And besides, you’ll need it more than I ever will.”

“I don’t know what to say.” I’m shocked by the gesture, tangled up in gratitude and confusion. The man tells me to move on and then gifts me his property, all in the same week.

He shrugs, runs a hand through his hair. “You don’t have to say anything. I’ll pay the taxes, I’ll manage it until I’m gone. ”

“Thank you,” I say, sliding off the bed to stand in front of him. “Thank you. Sorry, I should have said that first. I was just surprised. No one has ever even bought me flowers, let alone secretly given a lawyer paperwork that signs over fifty acres to me.”

“Fifty acres and a burned-out shell of a house,” he reminds me.

I laugh. “Right. And a burned-out shell of a house.” I want to touch him. To wrap my arms around him in a hug. To replace the tracks in his hair his fingers left with my own. I almost do, even though we are clearly on a touching ban.

“Well, you’re welcome.” The swoop of his bangs falls across his forehead and I know exactly how he will push them back. When was it, when I started to know the angle of every movement? To be able to predict his next move?

It feels like I’ve known him for lifetimes.

“Were you going to tell me something?” Henry asks.

“Oh! I can’t believe I forgot,” I exclaim, turning towards the dresser to grab the box. “I found this today, in the eaves of the attic.”

“The eaves?”

“Mmmhmm.” I tell him the story as he sits on the edge of the bed, opening the box to spread out each item out on the quilt. “I knocked against one of the panels, and it wasn’t nailed in. It was partially covered by the insulation that they blew in before, but I noticed it right away.”

I watch as he traces the petals of the flower crown. His eyes dart to my face and I wonder if he’s imagining what it would have looked like on Florence’s similar waves of hair. The congratulatory card is at the top of the box now and raw emotions flicker across his face at the words inside. If he could cry, would the words bring him to tears? Not for the first time, I want to sob at the idea of Henry watching every generation of his family turn over, turn over, turn over. Intimacy lost, connections dissolved, caught in between life and death.

He swallows thickly, setting it down carefully next to the crown.

The letter, unread, is next.

“I didn’t read it,” I inform him.

He frowns lightly, looking down at it. “I don’t remember it. I think I remember my sister’s card and Florence talking about the flowers, but… not this.”

“Who is it from?”

Henry shrugs. “Let’s find out.” He flips it open, the trifold of the paper, aged and delicate, in his hands. “From Florence,” he says. “It’s her handwriting.” His eyes dart down the page. “Her signature, too.” He clears his throat. “Dear Henry,” he starts to read. “I—”

“No!” I say, cutting him off. “You don’t have to read it out loud.”

Henry’s eyebrows lift. “I might as well. I don’t have anything to hide.”

I cross my arms around my midsection. “It’s personal. At least read it yourself first. ”

“If that’s what you prefer,” he replies.

“It is.” I know she’s long gone and that he’s out of reach, but I don’t want to read a love letter for Henry written by his lost lover on their wedding day. Instead, I watch Henry read it. It’s not long, and it takes him no time at all. He’s somber when he finishes, a look of sadness on his face. He folds it back up and holds it out for me to take.

“Later,” I suggest. “The box isn’t empty.” I gesture to the box, where, on top of the book, sits the gold ring. “Your wedding ring?”

Henry nods. “That’s right.” He picks it up, spins it around between two fingers. “I never wore it.”

“You can now,” I offer. “If you want to, of course.”

His eyes flit to my finger, the ring he slid on a few days ago still there. “I’m not sure that this ring feels like it’s mine.”

I lift my hand, and the diamond catches in the light. “But this should feel like mine?”

He smirks, a faint tug up on one side of his mouth. “Well, it does have your name on it,” he jokes.

“I’m serious,” I tell him. “What’s holding you back?”

“Your ring was gifted to you. It was taken care of, held on to. Passed down for generations. This one… it’s been separated. Detached. I’m not sure if… I don’t know if I should wear it.”

I move to my dresser and scoop up the necklace my ring used to hang from. “May I?” I ask, holding out my hand. He places the ring in the center of my palm, and if I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d say it had warmed from his touch. Pulling the necklace through the loop, I unclasp it and step behind Henry to fasten the chain around his neck.

“When you decide you can wear it, it will be here for you,” I tell him. “Whenever you decide it’s worth reattaching yourself to it again.”

He turns to face me, disrupting the card and the flower crown and the box of remaining items next to him on the quilt. “But that’s just it, Rency,” Henry says, seafoam eyes lonely. “I can’t ever reattach myself. You understand?”

“I do understand,” I tell him, words sticking in my throat.

“If I could, I would. If there was some way… but there isn’t.”

I nod, trying not to feel the sharpness in my chest, the way my heart aches at the truth of his words. “I know,” I say. “But at least we have the book.” I point at the spread of items.

“ The book?” he says, tone sharpening. He returns to the box, lifts up the leatherbound text. “This is the book? Mallory’s book?”

“That’s right.”

He scoffs. “Way to bury the lead, Rency.”

I shrug. “The other stuff was important, too. And besides, I think I found out how to break the spell.”