Chapter Five #2
She gives me a very annoyed look. “This is my office, Harlowe. If you want to leave, you can leave.”
“Fine.” This is useless. Whether this is actually Professor MacAndrew sitting across from me or not, she’s clearly not going
to leave, and I know better than to waste time fighting with her. I never won an argument with Professor MacAndrew. I’m pretty
sure she considered it her duty to make her advisees’ lives a living hell in order to prepare us for the cutthroat world of academia. Which I’m still not sure is a thing the way she made it out to be.
So I leave her sitting at the table and head for the bifold door to the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“I’m leaving,” I say. “As you suggested.” And I walk into the kitchen.
“There you are,” my dad says. He’s standing by the stove, holding two mugs. “Change your mind about that coffee?”
“Where do you think we are?” I ask.
He blinks at me. “What do you mean?”
“Where are we standing, Dad? Right now?”
He glances around the kitchen and then at me, from the corners of his eyes, a slightly confused smile on his face, like he
thinks I’m playing some kind of trick on him. “In my kitchen. Which I know still needs some work, but it’s coming together.”
He sounds so sure of himself that I look around, half expecting the cupboards to look different, or the window over the sink
to look out on a different view. “In your kitchen,” I repeat.
“That’s what I said.”
“In Michigan.”
“That’s right.” He gives me a crooked, uncomfortable grin.
I have been in my dad’s kitchen in Michigan exactly once. I was halfway through writing my thesis. Jackson and I had lived in our apartment for less than a year. My dad invited me out in the summer, and for once, guilt got the better of me.
He went on and on about how he hadn’t seen me enough. How bummed he was that my mom saw me more often than he did. How much
he wanted to show me the house he was building on the shores of Lake Michigan.
So I went.
I spent five days with my dad and his new family, in the house he was building for them. For five days, Dad and I pretended
everything was fine. And then, when I left, we never talked about those five days again.
And I never went back.
I stare at him, and then, on impulse, I lean forward and poke him in the shoulder.
“Ouch!” he says. “What was that for?”
He’s real. He’s solid.
Cold sweat breaks out on my forehead and down my back. “What are you doing here?”
“Just thought you might like coffee,” he says, holding up the mugs.
This is as useless as when I asked Professor MacAndrew. “I don’t want coffee right now. I’m just . . . I’m trying to enjoy
some time alone. Could you leave me alone?”
He shifts, rubbing at his rumpled, blond-gray hair. “Well, you could take a walk or something, if you need some space.”
“Why don’t we both take a walk?” I glance over my shoulder toward the dining room.
“What about the coffee?”
“We could have coffee when we get back.” I take a step toward the kitchen doorway. Maybe I can lure him out. Maybe I can get him to follow me out of the cottage, and once he’s out . . . I don’t know. I suppose I could lock the door. Maybe eventually he’d go away.
But he doesn’t follow me. He just shakes his head and sets the mugs down on the counter. “I’ve got to get to some stuff around
the house. I don’t think I can take a walk right now.”
Great. So he won’t leave either?
I don’t waste more time arguing. I’m getting angry now. Angry and impatient. I push past my dad, around the L-shape of the
kitchen, and out into the hallway. And then I wrench open the bathroom door.
The rush of running water fills the room—the shower is on, and behind the curtain, a shadow moves.
I grab the shower curtain and yank it aside. Jackson yelps, slips, and grabs on to the built-in soap dish to keep himself
from falling on his ass. “God, Harlowe, what the fuck?”
“You said we just moved in together, right?”
He wipes water out of his eyes. “Are you joking?”
I let go of the shower curtain, and it gently swings back between us. I don’t want to keep looking at him. If I do, I’m going
to scream. “No, Jackson. I’m dead serious.”
“Look, if this is about the couch, it doesn’t have to mean anything, okay?” He leans his head around the shower curtain. “It’s just a piece of furniture.”
“What are you talking about? Why are you asking about a couch?”
“Because we’ve been talking about it for weeks.” His eyebrows pull together, water dripping from his lashes. “We need a couch.
I have been asking you about a couch. I’m getting kind of tired of you blowing me off. We’re adults, Har. We need a couch.”
I stare at him. Jackson has had the same haircut the entire time I’ve known him—close cut, neat, something that went seamlessly from a scientific conference where he pulled out computer glasses to present from a PowerPoint to the drag shows we used to go to with Rika and Yasmin in grad school, back when he’d still throw on the occasional mesh tank top.
But now that I’m looking closely, even under the water running over his face I can see that there are fewer lines around his eyes.
The crease between his eyebrows isn’t quite as deep.
He’s asking me about a couch because this is Jackson from six years ago, back when we first moved in together, into the apartment
that he’s keeping. He brought a bed from his previous apartment. I brought a small dining table from mine. We had bits and
pieces, but neither of us had a couch.
It took us a month to pick one out. Because every time he pushed, every time he bothered me about it, I got hit with a shivery
feeling of panic. The kind that made my mind freeze up. Even though I’d made the decision to move in with him, even though
I told myself I was doing everything I wanted to do, as soon as he brought up a couch, I just wanted to run.
“Harlowe,” Jackson says.
I reach out and awkwardly prod at his face with my fingers. He’s just as solid as my dad. The water running down his face
is real. And wet.
“What the hell?” Jackson pulls back, spluttering. “God, what is going on with you?”
“Can you leave the bathroom?” I ask.
Jackson yanks the shower curtain closed. “Okay, whatever this is, can we talk about it later?”
I wipe my hand off on my pants, leaving damp patches. That was real. That sure felt real.
My heart thuds against my ribs. I need to get to the bedroom. I need to open the last door and see if the other Nathan is
there.
“Will you think about the couch?” Jackson says.
“Yeah, fine, whatever,” I mutter, leaving the bathroom. As soon as I close the door, the sputtering rush of the shower vanishes as abruptly as if someone switched off a television.
I pause. The hallway is completely quiet now.
I turn the knob and open the bathroom door again, and it’s like the TV switched back on. There’s the whoosh of the shower. Jackson is vaguely humming something off-key.
The bathroom door isn’t that thick. If anything, it’s kind of thin. A little basic. It can’t be that soundproof.
But as soon as I pull it closed again, the sound cuts out. I press my ear up against the door, but I can’t hear a thing. There’s
just silence. Like no one is in the room at all.
My heart thuds louder. I can hear my pulse in my ears.
I close the pocket door that leads to the laundry room and the kitchen. I close the dining room door.
Silence.
“Professor MacAndrew?” I say.
No answer.
“Dad?”
Still no answer. And when I lean my ear against the dining room door, it’s just like the bathroom door—there’s no sound. The
room might as well be empty.
Last night, when I came back to the cottage, it was quiet. And I hoped that meant whatever I’d seen had just been a fluke.
But if the doors were closed—and they had been, hadn’t they?—then maybe it wasn’t a fluke at all. Maybe everyone was still
there, waiting . . .
I turn and go down the hall to the bedroom.
The doorknob still feels loose in my hand as I turn it, and it takes a few tries before the latch catches and the knob turns.
I open the door to the bedroom, but just like when I woke up this morning, the room is empty. There’s no sign of the other
Nathan, the younger one, who I saw yesterday.
My breath escapes my chest until my lungs feel empty. I sit down on the bed, pulling my phone out of my pocket.
I don’t know if any of this is making any more sense, but I have at least one more thing to google. I open a browser window
and type, Can you touch hallucinations?
I scroll through the results, skimming entries from all the same sources I looked at before. They all say the same thing:
Tactile hallucinations are a real thing, but they involve sensations like bugs crawling over your face, not poking your dad
in the kitchen or prodding your ex-boyfriend’s face in the bathroom.
I toss my phone onto the bed.
This should be a point in the pro column. Another signal that I can’t be hallucinating after all. Even if there’s no sign of another Nathan in here.
Except if I’m not hallucinating, what the hell is going on?
I look around the bedroom—at the off-white walls, the narrow dresser, the curtains billowing gently on either side of the
open window. “Is this you?” I say, more or less to the whole room.
There’s no answer, obviously. I’m talking to a house.
I lie down on the bed, on my back, and throw an arm over my eyes. After a few minutes, something heavy jumps onto the bed.
I jerk, raising my arm, and find myself staring into the gray, furry face of Sir Duke. He settles himself on my chest, so
close to my face that his whiskers tickle my nose.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” I say.
He only starts to purr again. The same low, gravelly rumble I heard yesterday.
I close my eyes, too tired to make him move. “How did you even get in?”
More rumbling.
I put my arm across my face again.
Okay. So I seem to have three uninvited time-traveling roommates in my summer rental. They won’t leave the rooms they’re in. And they can’t be hallucinations because I can touch them.
And I have no idea what they are or why I keep seeing them.
Which means, I realize with a horrible sinking feeling, I also have no idea how to get rid of them.