7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

M y leg has been bouncing non-stop. All the way through dinner, dessert, and decaf coffee, I can’t hold back the strange urgency swirling inside me. Caroline is chatty and hasn’t seen Grandma in a while, so she carries most of the conversations. She and my grandma Lydia are cut from the same cloth, no matter how much they tease each other. Both are bright, vivid personalities, artists at heart. Grandma Lydia creates with her garden in the summer and her textiles in the winter—knitting hats and gloves and my beloved thick wool socks—while Caroline creates with her photography. Together, they are non-stop banter and laughter.

Typically, I would be pulled into it all, too. Around Caroline, I am always a brighter, wittier person. Tonight, though, I can’t embrace the colorful conversation—my inner self is still stuck in the black-and-white photocopied images I brought home with me. Like stolen evidence or a secret file, I shoved the folder of newspaper clippings in my sock and underwear drawer. Little good it did me, the hiding away of evidence—I still feel haunted by the sight of my Henry looking back at me from photographs taken decades ago.

If Caroline notices that I’m distracted, she doesn’t say anything. I sit through dinner and dessert, appetite gone and heart pounding out an anxious, clenching beat until Grandma Lydia decides to turn in for a chapter of her novel and a cup of sleepytime tea in her room.

The second we hear Grandma Lydia’s door close, Caroline whirls around from where she was pretending to make tea to stare at me, eyes bright and a grin spread across her face.

“Okay, cousin. Time to spill the beans about your man,” she says, playful. “I’ve been waiting for hours. I sat through dinner and dessert and three rounds of Hearts and now you owe me. Did you text him? Did he—Uh, why do you look like that?”

“I have something I need to tell you about him,” I say, the words sticking in my throat. Now that I can finally tell someone, the words feel ridiculous. Completely out of touch with reality. Nonsensical. “I—”

Caroline’s eyes widen, all humor wiped from her face. “What happened?” she asks when I pause. “Did—Did he do something to you? Say something? Are you okay?”

“No, no he didn’t do anything,” I reassure her. “It’s just… ”

It’s just that I think that maybe I am going crazy.

It’s just that I think that the guy I have a crush on is a figment of my imagination.

It’s just that my Henry looks exactly like the man that our great-great-grandmother, whom I’m named after, was going to marry, and I signed the marriage license that was going to be theirs, and did my subconscious somehow summon his existence from the blurry newspaper article I only half glanced at in the funeral home?

“It’s just what?” she prompts.

“I have to show you something.” I grab her wrist and tug her towards the stairs. She doesn’t balk—Caroline loves a good intrigue, and I’m quite positive she’s half worried for me and half rabid with curiosity.

“Oh em gee,” she hisses as we climb, humor in her voice. “Did you kill him? Is he dead? Are you going to show me his body?”

“Not quite,” I mutter. “But almost.”

“What?” Caroline yelps.

“Shh! Grandma’s getting ready for bed.”

Caroline is hot on my heels, and as she enters the room, I close the door and lock it.

“You’re sort of freaking me out here, Rency.”

I point at the bed and she sits. The file is right where I left it, and I ignore her snicker as I pull it out in a cascade of fluffy socks and muted color boyshort undies.

I set the folder on her lap, opening it up. Henry is still there. My Henry. No , I tell myself. Not my Henry—the dead Henry. I point at the black-and-white picture of him: a bit grainy, considering the age and technology, but unmistakably him. The pulled-to-the-side grin, the slight lift of his chin as he stares straight on, the same haircut—shorter on the sides and longer on the top, although slicked back a bit in this photo.

“That’s him. Henry.”

“Oh-kayyy,” Caroline replies, stretching out the word. “Well, like I thought, he’s super handsome.”

“Caroline.”

“What? You said I couldn’t comment on his physical attractiveness until I’ve seen him, and now that I have, I get to say that he’s a hottie. Cute vintage haircut, sexy smile. He looks like he’d have a nice laugh.”

“Caroline. This is Henry. Henry Bakker. Henry Bakker is this guy—” I push the papers aside and start jabbing at his image, repeated over and over again in a dozen forms. “And this guy in front of the grocery store with his family, and this guy with a basket of apples, and this guy in front of the arcade alley shops when it first opened, and this guy dressed in a suit in an engagement photo with our great-great-grandma Florence. ”

“I am really confused right now,” Caro says, lifting her hands up. “What—are you saying that your Henry looks just like this Henry?”

“No. I mean, yes, I am trying to say that, but I’m also trying to tell you how freaky this is. This Henry is Henry Bakker. The same Henry Bakker who was going to marry Florence Faber—our great-great–grandmother—in 1929. The same Henry Bakker whose marriage certificate I signed. He looks just like my Henry Bakker. Zero differences. He has the same name. He—he even looks the same age. Has the same haircut, even. And then, what, my name is the same? And then I sign the certificate and what, I meet him? This is just… isn’t it freaky?”

“I am not sure I’m following,” Caroline says, shrugging. “It’s just a coincidence. I mean, the only other explanation would be that he’s like, I don’t know, some sort of Tuck Everlasting lives-forever-boy.”

“Or,” I say, trying not to sound completely unhinged, “what if he is a ghost?”

Caroline blinks twice at me before bursting out in laughter.

I’m about to defend myself—to explain how it could be a logical conclusion, considering what Grandma Lydia had told me about the Bakker house, about the potential disappearance of the little house in the woods, how the garden across the street grows every year with no human assistance—when a deafening explosion rattles the windows of the house, shattering the peace of the night.

“What was that?” Caro asks, voice shaky. I’m already at the window, looking to see if it was the little house in the woods. That direction, there’s nothing but darkness.

“Come on,” I say, grabbing up the photocopies and shoving them into my open drawer. I’m down the stairs before I hear her steps behind me, out onto the porch before she’s even in the hall, bursting out of the house into the cool summer air before she can catch up.

Across the street, the Bakker house is on fire.

“Call 911,” I say, feeling for my own phone in my pockets. I’ve left it, but Caro’s already dialing.

“Hello, 911? Yes, I need to report a house fire.” The same feeling I had a handful of times since moving here this summer grips me. A fizziness, a strangeness that I can’t quite put my finger on. Caroline is rattling off the address to me as I watch the flames lick up the house.

The house is practically a mirror image of Grandma Lydia’s. A 1928 Sears Hillrose , I can hear her say. It feels like an omen, for old Henry to be dead and for my Henry to be alive. For this house to burn and for Grandma’s to be standing. For my namesake to have a blank line that I signed, her wedding ring around my neck, as if I’m a modern imitation of the original model. The logic is tangled in my mind, the threshold of past and present swirling together.

“Rency! Is anyone in the house?” Caro asks, shaking my arm. Her tone tells me it’s not the first time she’s asked. “The dispatcher wants to know.”

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t think so. Karl passed away.” And yet, as I say it, I see something—a shadow, passing in front of the flames. Outside, but close to the fire—too close.

It’s just a shadow, I tell myself. No one lives there anymore. From here, the house is distant. We may be neighbors, but this area is rural. Grandma’s driveway is long—so is Karl’s—and the fields and tall grasses surround the house.

But then, I see two figures, or is it three?

And I start to run.

“Rency! What are you doing, you psycho!”

I don’t know what grips me—curiosity or insanity, I couldn’t say—but I ignore Caroline’s words and am crossing over the dirt of the unpaved road before I can even register the bite of the gravel road on the soles of my bare feet. The grass on the other side is damp and cold, slippery underfoot, but I keep running. I know what I saw. I’m not crazy.

The heat of the fire is more than I could have imagined, and I don’t get close to the wall of flames eating away at the wood. Instead, I run toward the other side of the house, to where I saw the shadows disappear.

Something small and furry bolts out from the smoldering floorboards of the porch, launching itself towards me. I flinch, and my feet slip out from under me on the slick grass. The hard fall on my tailbone jars some sense into me. It also gives Caroline—who managed to slip into some flip flops, at least—a second to catch up.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she pants. “What if there is another explosion?”

“I saw someone,” I insist. “Someone was here.”

“You just told me to tell the fireman that no one lived here!” she says. It’s more like a shout, pitched loud over the roar of the fire. It’s consuming everything—the wood and paint, the shingles and shutters, every memory made inside it .

“I swear I saw someone.” My eyes are darting around, struggling to make sense of anything in the waves of heat and carryover of smoke. “Look! There!” I point.

“I don’t see anything,” she insists, gesturing with her hand. Her phone is clutched in it, and it’s like she just realized she still had it. She quickly lifts it to her ear. “Hello? Sorry, sorry,” she says into it. “No, I don’t think anyone is in the house. Are the firetrucks on their way?”

I don’t wait to hear the answer—it doesn’t matter anyway, because I’ve just realized who it is, and I’m more than half convinced they can’t be burned anyway. Still, I run in that direction, leaving Caroline behind. I hear her call my name, but I don’t stop. This can’t go on any longer.

It’s only been a half day, and I already feel half mad.

Here I am, missing a man I barely know—a man who stars in my dreams as if the protagonist of a film I’ve never seen—and who turns out to be the identical twin of my great-great-grandmother’s dead fiancé. Tell me I’m not losing it.

Henry’s in profile, gesturing with one hand and talking to someone around the corner. The flickering of the flames cast his face in wavering shadows, accentuating the slash of his jaw. His expression is angry. He said he was a distant relative of Karl’s. If he’s not a ghost like I think he is, then maybe this house was supposed to be his.

And if he is a ghost, this would have been his home, long ago, and now it’s burning to the ground.

I don’t say anything as I approach, but seeing the anger in the expression on his face stops me in my tracks. I’m close enough to hear just the tendrils of his words, a handful of fragments that sound like words like ashes and burn and maybe evil . But that’s all I hear before something alerts him to my presence—a shadow, darting past me and toward him. He twitches to look at the small animal—a lanky black cat, I realize—and I catch his eye.

I don’t know if the double take he does is flattering or not. “What are you doing here?” he shouts, voice almost lost in the crackle of the flames and the approaching sirens. The words echo in my mind, bringing the words out of the haze of post-dream memory. Hadn’t he said that same thing to someone else, too?

“I live next door,” I point out. “What are you doing here?”

Walking closer, I’m a few feet away when I hear Caroline yelling my name.

“What are you doing, Rency? You are so unhinged tonight. The firefighters are almost here, come on.”

“The smoke is bad for your lungs,” he says, ignoring my previous statement. His eyes dart between me and Caroline and whoever he was just talking to.

“Speak for yourself,” I tell him.

“What?” Caroline says, just a dozen or so feet away. “Rency, come on.”

“You should go with her,” Henry encourages me. “It’s too dangerous to be this close to the house.” He’s distracted, which piques my curiosity. I take another few steps closer, wanting to see what’s around the corner. I never do, though, because there is a shout as something—could it be part of the roof?—crashes down in a cloud of ash and sparks. At the same time, the approaching sirens have reached a crescendo, and if I could see past the house and out towards the road, I’m sure I’d see them rumbling down the long driveway, rushing towards the burning house. Plus, Caroline has just grabbed me, pulling me back towards the front of the house, clearly wanting to get further away from what is undeniably a stupidly close proximity to Karl’s rapidly incinerating house. But the moment her hand makes contact with my forearm, she yelps.

“Who is that?” she says.

“Who is who?” Henry is looking away from me, but instead of the person around the corner, his eyes are locked on Caroline. He looks shocked, and when I glance over at Caroline, she’s pointing at Henry.

“It’s Henry,” I say. I literally just showed her a picture of him five minutes ago.

“He—I—”

Whatever she was going to say gets lost because Henry and I are both distracted, our attention pulled to two darting figures, running beyond him and into the forest.

Henry says something that sounds like a curse and looks between us and them. Before I can ask any more questions—about why he’s here or who those people are or what the heck just happened with him and Caroline—he points behind us.

I turn. A pair of firefighters are clomping towards us, gesturing for us to get back further from the house.

And when I look back to see if Henry is coming along, he’s disappeared.

Caroline is suspiciously quiet as we watch the firefighters put out the last of the fire from the safety of our own porch. They clearly didn’t trust us any closer to the fire, so they told us to stay put back on our own property. The risk of me bolting is gone. My nostrils are filled with smoke and so is my head, the possibilities and implications and conclusions of what’s happening a hazy swirl inside of me.

Grandma Lydia has joined us, but she’s quiet, too. Thankfully, she didn’t see Caroline and I dashing around the neighbor’s burning house, only arriving, she claims, when the fire trucks pulled down our lonely dirt road.

“Such a shame,” she repeats for the third time. She sniffs, and I wrap an arm around her in a half-hug. “I wonder what started it.”

“It’s very sad,” I agree. “At least no one was inside.” She pats my arm in agreement, and I squeeze her gently before letting her go.

After an hour, the firefighters have everything under control, leaving behind a gutted, smoldering skeleton of a house. Grandma Lydia makes her way up to bed as the fire trucks depart, and Caroline and I wait until everything is quiet before going back upstairs.

This time, it’s Caroline who is desperate to say something. She points at the bed in an imitation of my own behavior earlier, but I refuse to sit.

“I smell like a chemical fire,” I tell her.

“Well I feel like a chemical fire,” she says. Her hands are shaking, and she rubs them against her shorts. She pulls open my sock and undie drawer, snatching the papers up.

“He looks just like the pictures, right?” I say after a moment of her stunned silence. Of course she’s freaking out. I mean, I was—I am —freaking out about it too.

She’s holding the zoomed-in image of Henry and Florence in her hands, frowning. “Rency, when you ran out there and I followed you, I swear there wasn’t anyone else there. And you were, like, talking to nothing, just shouting at no one in the darkness. And then when I grabbed your arm, I saw him .” She shakes the paper. “This guy. The swoopy hair and the nice lips. He was right there.”

“Henry.”

“Yes. He wasn’t there, and then I touched you, and he was there. And I can’t believe I’m saying this and I can’t believe you , the most pragmatic and rational person I have ever met, said it first but… I think Henry is a ghost.”