17. Chapter 17

Chapter 17

E ven though I can’t seem to get my heart rate under control in the hours after I wake up from my dream, I manage to wait to text Caro until after I’m sure she’s done with her morning photography job. I try to keep the tone light, but she knows an SOS text when she sees one. Within a few minutes of her read receipt, my phone lights up with a call.

“Hey cousin,” she chirps, concern breaking through her sunny greeting. “I got your text. I am free still, actually. Want me to come over?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind.” My hands shake as I grip my phone.

“Fantastic! I’m about ten minutes from my apartment, so I’ll change and then make my way over. Should I pick anything up? Pack an overnight bag? Grab some ice cream? ”

The thought of ice cream makes my stomach clench. “No ice cream,” I tell her. “But if you’re willing to stay overnight, that would be so great.”

Caroline promises to be there within an hour. When we hang up, I tell her that I love her just like I always do, but it feels heavier now.

After waking up from my dream last night, I couldn’t fall back asleep. My fingers itched to text Henry—he didn’t sleep, after all, and it’s not as if we’ve never texted late at night in the past. He might not think anything of it: another dream, another restless night. I don’t, though. Instead, I’d lain on my back, staring at the way the shadows moved across my ceiling, thinking about death.

Was I dying? Somehow had I gotten tangled in the strange fabric between life and death?

Would I, like Henry, watch everyone and everything I loved fade away? Burn? Die?

Faced with this possibility, I felt like the world’s biggest coward. What had I been scared of my whole life? Why had I always held back, never taken the leap? Now faced with the prospect of not existing at all, it felt like a huge, colossal waste.

A waste of hope and dreams. A waste of opportunities. A waste of who I could have been.

And so, right then in the middle of the night, on the cusp of disappearing altogether, I decided that I wasn’t going to hold back anymore. If this is it, I don’t want to regret anything, especially not those few things I could still control. I’m going to be brave.

Since then, I’ve been a whirlwind of frenzied activity. I handwrite a dozen letters to my parents, my older brother, to Caroline, Grandma Lydia, and even Javier. I can’t believe these are my last days before slipping into a half-life, but if they are, then I don’t want to leave any of the people I love wondering about me. When it’s early enough, I call my mom and we talk on the phone for two hours. She tells me about her veggie garden and how she’s looking forward to seeing Grandma Lydia later this week at the lake house, how she misses me being near her at home but hopes I’m having a phenomenal time with Caro.

I secretly record the conversation, hoping that even when I become unable to touch anything, when the physical world is no longer my home, Henry will be able to play the conversation back for me.

And Henry. He’s another issue entirely.

If I am a ghost, if this mortal life is slipping away from me… what does that mean for Henry and me?

I refuse to think about it, but my mind bounces into the question over and over again. Can we be together if I’m a ghost?

No, no, no. We’re going to break the curse. Our ghostly marriage will be annulled and I will stop disappearing, he will cease to be a ghost, and I will live out the rest of my mortal life while Henry moves on to whatever beyond there is.

He needs to know what is happening to me, but I feel like I know what he will say. If there is a chance that I can be saved, then nothing has changed. The reverse ritual needs to be done today, as planned. If I really am a ghost, which I have been starting to believe more and more, he will want to break the curse as soon as possible.

With Caroline coming over, though, there is a timeline for telling him. After all, she’ll be here when we do the ritual—moral support for me, more than anything. So, hands trembling, I tap out a text. It takes me a few tries to get a full message composed. I’d thought my phone was on the fritz, but it turns out that it’s me who’s on the fritz. The phone won’t record every few taps, as if my fingers have no effect on the touchscreen—another sign that I’m not long for this layer of existence.

Me: Hey. Are you nearby? Or wandering?

Henry is a surprisingly responsive texter. I never have to wait long for a response, and today is no different.

Henry: Nearby. In the barn. Want me to come over?

Me: No, it’s okay. I’ll come to you?

Henry : See you soon.

The afternoon sun is hot, and the smarting feel of it on my skin is a welcome reminder that part of me is still physically here. Normally, I’d be wincing, annoyed that I forgot my sunscreen and worried about a burn, but for today, I’d take a burn if it meant that I could stay alive.

Inside the insulated pole barn, the temperature drops. There’s only one window, and it faces the forest, so it’s shaded and cool inside. The door is unlocked, so I’m surprised when the lights are off and Henry isn’t anywhere to be found.

“Henry?” I call out, gripped by the irrational fear that, in just the few minutes since I texted him, he’s disappeared, gone to the other side, or faded out of existence and I never got to say goodbye.

“Up here!” he answers, voice echoing down the stairs. I walk past one of the mirrors that he’s been refurbishing, but there is no sign of me at all.

Upstairs, Henry is sitting at his desk, the surface in more disarray than I’ve ever seen before. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says, distraction clear in his voice. His eyes dart to me, but just for a second. “I have some papers here for you. They’re important, but I made a bit of a guide for you so that you don’t forget since we don’t have much time.”

“Henry,” I interrupt.

“Mostly they are legal, but these—”

“Henry!”

He looks up at me, then, startled. His expression shifts to concern, though, when he sees my stiff posture, the way my arms wrap around my torso. His chair swivels away from him when he stands, the force of the movement pushing it across the floor in an unusual display of his presence.

“What is it?” He’s next to me in a second, reaching for me but pulling back right at the last second. I hate it—hate that we have grown so close and yet are impossibly apart, hate that my death is the only thing that could bring us together, hate that I desperately want to live but intensely want to be with him.

“I need to tell you something,” I say, not knowing how else to start.

“Okay,” he says slowly, concern written all over his face. “Do you need to sit down first? You’re not looking very well.”

“That’s just it,” I say. “I haven’t been feeling well. I’ve been feeling strange. Off, you know? Like something is wrong, inside me. I haven’t had any appetite at all, except for these strange bouts of being completely ravenous. I’ve been feeling ill, really.”

Henry tries to herd me over to the worn loveseat that occupies one side of the office, but I evade him, pacing instead. “Have you seen a doctor?”

I shake my head. “No, no nothing like that. But I have had these other… symptoms, I guess you could call them. When I go up the steps at Grandma Lydia’s, I don’t make any noise at all anymore, and I thought I was just getting at creeping up them without them creaking. But then I’ve gotten so clumsy in other ways, as if things that I think are there I just pass right through, and then things that I think I won’t bump into, I do.”

I can tell by his expression that Henry is starting to catch up with the logic of my rambling. My brief glance at his face shows a dawning realization, and if he could become any paler, I think he would.

“And then, there is this past weekend. I didn’t realize it until later, but I kept accidentally sneaking up on Javier when I was visiting Caroline, and I think that’s because of this. Plus, sometimes mirrors don’t show my reflection—like, it just happened when I walked up here. My phone is messed up, too. And then last night, it was the most bizarre thing, but I had this dream. You were there, and you couldn’t see me and you said to me, Rency—”

“You’re a ghost,” he finishes. He’s shocked—almost as shocked as the moment he learned he could touch me. I don’t think he’s blinked in a full minute. (Do ghosts blink? I do so twice, just to check that I’m still alive.)

“Yes,” I say, stopping in front of him. “That’s what you said in the dream, too. Did—was it not a dream? Did you have it too?”

“No, I didn’t, but…” Henry has a look on his face that can only be described as devastated. “Rency,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “This is my fault. I did this. I turned you into a ghost.”

Now it’s my turn to usher him over to the sofa. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” I tell him as he sits. If he had a corporeal presence, the sofa might have groaned from how heavily he sits. I perch on the edge of one arm. Surprisingly, his coming undone has steadied me. “I was the one who signed the marriage license, remember? That’s the real origin of this problem.”

He scrubs his face with one hand, distress marking his features. “But that… I don’t think that’s what has made you a ghost. It’s me,” he groans. “I did it.”

“How?” None of this makes sense anyway, so if he has some knowledge of this otherworld, now would be the time to trot it out. “It’s not like you cursed me yourself.”

“I might as well have. It’s a symptom of… of my attachment. The things I start to become attached to, the things I… I love? They start to get pulled into the veil. Think about my home in the woods. It doesn’t exist at all but for its place in the veil.”

My heart stops in my chest—metaphorically, mind you, I’m not a ghost yet—at his words. It feels ridiculous how hearing him talk about love, even in the lightest, most nondescript reference to me, is impossible for my brain to ignore. My brain insists that the idea of him feeling enough for me that I’m slipping into his world as a result is romantic.

He’s compared you to a house full of stuff , I remind myself. That’s not exactly a confession of everlasting love.

“What will happen to the little house in the woods when we break the curse?” I ask.

Henry shakes his head. “I don’t know, Rency. I’m scared that it will disappear. Or, at the very least, be stuck in the veil.”

“Meaning that if we don’t break the curse soon, breaking the curse for you would mean that for me….” I drift off, trying to put the pieces together.

Henry’s eyes are luminous, his expression somber. “You’d be stranded there, alone in the veil.”

****

Caroline has spent the last twenty minutes trying to talk me out of being a ghost. After Henry and I broke the news to her, she became determined to prove to me—and to herself, it seems—that there is no possible way I’m a ghost.

Most of her tests fail. The mirror only sometimes shows my appearance. I run up and down the stairs three times; only once did they let out a sound even close to resembling a squeak or creak or moan. She takes a dozen pictures of me with her camera. I’m only in some of the photos. In the others, it’s like I was never there at all.

“It’s like you’re flickering,” she says. “Sometimes you’re there, sometimes you’re not.”

“Probably because I’m not fully a ghost yet. That would explain the lack of hunger that turns into being ravenous for no reason at all.”

“Well, what are we going to do about it?” she huffs. “If you are flickering, how do we keep you on this side instead of in… what do you call it?”

“The veil,” Henry and I say simultaneously.

“The veil,” Caroline agrees. “How do we keep you from getting stuck in the veil?”

Henry and I exchange a look, one that makes my heart sink straight into my stomach. “We found Mallory’s book. And we think we know how to break the curse. We need to do the counter-curse, though, and soon.”

“Today, if possible,” Henry adds.

Caroline checks her watch. “It’s three. Grandma will be home soon. She’ll want to have an early dinner, as usual. She doesn’t know I’m here, though, so she’s not got anything special planned, right?” I nod. “Perfect. I’ll tell her I’m here to take you out for the evening, and then we’ll meet up when we can?”

I nod, looking towards Henry. “That works for me.”

“Me too,” he agrees.

So that’s that. In just a few hours, we will break the curse .

I won’t be a half-ghost.

And Henry will be gone.

Forever.

Caroline is creeped out by the idea of going into the pole barn, but since she can see it without me holding her hand, she reluctantly agrees that it is the best place for the ritual. When we arrive and climb the stairs up to the office, Henry already has everything set up. Even though there isn’t anything overly creepy about the atmosphere, it feels heavy. Weighed down.

In the hours before we met up again, Caroline and I cried together. What if it didn’t work? What if I disappeared? I confessed to her my own inner conflict, how I’ve slipped into love and haven’t been able to pull myself back out. How I want to be brave and selfless, but how I feel like my heart is breaking into a thousand pieces, scattering in all directions. I want to live; I want to be with him. I want to break his curse; I want him to stay.

At the end of it all, nothing has changed. Bravery is facing fears, and every one of them must be faced tonight.

So when we climb the steps up to Henry, I have my armor up. There’s no evidence of my earlier tears, and my heart is sealed up tightly. I’m ready to do what needs to be done.

The counter-curse has been written. Henry has an old lamp already lit, its kerosene fuel and sooty smoke tainting the air of the loft. Even the hair is prepared, although the ribbon is gone. Henry sees me looking at it. “It’s not all of it,” he says. “Just in case it doesn’t work and we have to try again.”

I nod, feeling numb.

Caroline’s hand tightens in mine. “Are we all set, then?” she asks.

No , I want to scream. No no no no I’m not ready yet.

Henry meets my eyes from across the room. “Nearly,” he answers, not looking at my cousin. “But I was wondering if I could have a few minutes alone with Rency?”

“Of course,” Caroline says. I know her well enough to hear the sadness marring her usually bright, bouncy cadence. “Just call for me when you’re ready. Don’t worry about me—there’s plenty of furniture downstairs to sit on.” She squeezes my hand before letting it fall, and I can hear the sound of her feet clunking down the plank steps as she descends.

“When I’m gone, you can sell it all,” Henry says. He still hasn’t looked away from me, but I can’t maintain eye contact any longer.

I frown at the non-sequitur. “Sell what? The barn?” I shake my head. “I won’t.”

“The furniture is what I meant. Because Caroline made that comment about things to sit on…” he drifts off, and the space between us feels vast and uncomfortable. My resolution to not be selfish and to keep my feelings to myself weighs heavier and heavier on me each second .

“Rency,” Henry says, and I look back over to where he stands. The table, prepared with the items we will need to send him across to the other side, is like a barrier between us. Who is it protecting?

“Henry.”

“Can I…” He pauses, rubs the back of his neck, frowns. “Screw this,” he says, striding over to me. He stops inches from me and grabs my hands in his own. He hasn’t done anything so unrestrained since the day I tried to tell him I’d stay here in Oak River to be with him for however long that would last, and he made me promise I’d live my life without him.

He pulls me into his arms. Was there something tortured in my expression that told him this is what I’m longing for? To be pressed up against him, to be held close?

“I would live another lifetime in the veil if it was fair to you, Rency, I swear I would,” he murmurs into my hair. “But nothing could convince me that it would be.” I’m already primed for tears after crying earlier today, so those two sentences are all it takes for a few tears to escape from my eyes. I squeeze them closed. “It would be no life for you at all.”

“Love is wanting the highest good for someone else,” I repeat back to him, half choked by the thickness in my own throat.

“I want the highest good for you,” he says, an echo of the words he spoke before. “Please don’t hate me for not being able to stay away from you now, only to leave.”

“I could never,” I whisper. “I don’t regret it at all.”

Henry doesn’t kiss me then—not really. He uses the pads of his thumbs to wipe away my tears. He caresses my hair, presses his lips lightly against my forehead, and his nose brushes against my own.

“I might have some seriously questionable theology at this stage in my not-afterlife, but I believe this,” Henry says, pulling back, his hands back to holding mine. “Someday, wherever our souls reside, we will meet again. So, until then, live a good life, Rency Faber.”

I nod, but like times before, he doesn’t let me get away with a half-response. “No,” he says. “Promise me, out loud. Promise that you won’t be too scared to chase what you want the most. What’s in your heart.”

“I will do my very best to live a good life,” I promise. I can’t promise the last part—my heart wants him the most. Right now, there is nothing else there but that desire. He pulls me against him again and I hold him tightly, clinging to him as if that will somehow keep him here.

Just the barest rays of sunlight are pushing beyond the tops of the trees by the time we start the ritual. Without the light streaming in from the skylights, the upper floor of the pole barn is bathed in twilight and the kerosene lamp has become a legitimate source of light. I don’t turn on the lights. I don’t want this to be a well-lit memory, I don’t want this banishment to be anything but a shadow in my mind when it’s over.

Caroline sits on the couch Henry had abandoned, watching quietly from the side as Henry and I stand around the lantern. She can’t see Henry this way, but we decided it was too risky for me, half-ghost-half-girl, to hold her hand during the ritual. Besides, I’m trembling internally, like there is something wrong deep inside me, and I don’t want her to know how scared I am.

Henry can tell. His eyes look otherworldly and near cat-like, pale and almost reflective in the shine of the lamp. I wish I could take a photo to capture the color, that there will be any evidence of his laugh after this hour has passed, that I could have something of him to bring with me as I live out my life without him.

“Are you ready?” he asks, voice steady.

I nod. It’s a lie, of course—how could I ever be ready?—but not saying it out loud makes me feel as if I’m lessening the deception. The paper in my hand is crumpled along the edges from me gripping it too tightly. Henry and I had decided to keep the rhyme scheme of the original curse, regardless of how silly it made us feel, and so the counter-curse still has a neat little rhythm.

“Hair first, then read the words, yes?”

“Yes.” My hand shakes as I pick up the lock of hair.

“Rency,” he says, and my eyes dart up to meet his gaze. “You can do this.”

I hate that he’s right. I thought about asking Caroline to do it for me instead, but I knew I would regret not being strong enough to follow through with my promise to myself: To break Henry’s curse. To be brave.

“I can,” I echo.

“Let’s begin, shall we?”

I take a deep breath before pushing the hunk of hair into the lantern. The smell of it on fire is objectively gross, and the fumes burn my nose.

The words of the counter-curse catch in my throat; I have to restart when I stutter out the first syllables.

“I release you from the veil

Breath, Life, Love yours to avail

Untethered well, for this reversal prevails.”

The moment the words leave my lips, I feel sick.

It’s over, it’s done. The counter-curse is complete.

I expect very little from this spell but for Henry’s rapid disappearance. I don’t anticipate a bolt of lightning, a sudden chill in the air, a poof of black smoke to signal the end of his time in-between. And it’s good I don’t, because none of those happen.

Including Henry’s disappearance.

Long moments stretch out in front of us as I stand there, my eyes locked on his, waiting for him to vanish.

But he doesn’t.

“Is it done?” Caroline asks. “Has Henry… crossed over? Are you a full person again?”

“No,” I say as Henry tips his face heavenward, eyes squeezed shut in what I can’t decide is an expression of relief or anguish. “It didn’t work. We didn’t break the curse.”