The Veil Between Us

10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

C aroline : Did anything else happen after I left?

Caroline : Interesting stories?

Caroline : Any more touching?

Me : Henry is a ghost, Caroline.

Caroline : Keep telling yourself that.

Me : Believe me, I am.

It’s barely ten p.m., but I’m already in bed. I don’t know what to do with myself, don’t know how to sort out the spin of emotions inside me. My evening of sorting through dusty boxes left me feeling lost in time. Hearing my grandmother tell stories about her family, long gone now, left me aching for love lost.

Left me wondering if Henry’s ‘I’ll see you later’ would be as soon as tonight.

After Grandma Lydia went to bed, I made list after list, trying to distract myself from the feelings I couldn’t seem to shake. I wrote a list of chores I promised to do, a list of things to do in my family history project, and a list of things to keep me busy that were decidedly not talking to Henry or thinking about Henry.

And then, a list of questions to ask Henry, a list of potential rules that dictate Henry and Mallory’s ghost realm lives, a list of reasons not to fall for Henry.

That list is short. It only has four things on it:

I’m leaving at the end of the summer.

I don’t have time to commute back regularly.

His dead fiancée is my great-great-grandmother.

He’s a ghost.

That one I wrote a few times.

I know I am going to have to repeat that list of reasons to myself over and over again, but right now there is another thought that has been holding my attention. Because, even though I can not let myself get attached to Henry, I still want to help him.

He’s cursed.

But what if I help him break that curse?

Curses are made to be broken, right? After spiraling for a bit while attempting to even accept the idea of curses being real, I fall into an Internet hole, feeling very much like Bella Swan typing up her little scraps of knowledge into Google, searching for answers to the questions I have about the mysterious boy I have a crush on.

Except, I remind myself, I do not have a crush on him. Absolutely not.Henry is a ghost.

And while Bella Swan wanted to become a vampire, I have no desire to be dead.

Regardless, I’m invested. Instead of sleeping, I pull out my laptop and pour through every creepy forum post and strange website I can find, reading about curses and trying to avoid surveys about the best essential oil to balance my inner energies and ads selling me cheap glass crystals. I don’t believe in what they’re selling me, even if at the core of it all I’ve had to accept the most ridiculous idea of them all: that Henry is a ghost, trapped in the veil between worlds because of a curse.

There is a trend that I notice across websites. A shared lore. Curses have weaknesses. Curses can be broken.

And I want to break Henry’s curse. I’m a researcher, a fact-finder, a historian. This might be the strangest use of my skill set, but it’s within it, nevertheless. This is part of what I am here to do in Oak River in the first place, I tell myself. To better understand my own family’s history. This is a part of that history, however, tangentially.

Yes, breaking Henry’s curse is a great idea, the perfect addition to a summer otherwise dominated by dusty boxes. I just needed to do some Internet sleuthing, to check out some books from the library. I’m hyperfocusing on doing exactly that when I hear the first click of stone against the glass of my windows. At first, I’m so immersed in this corner of the Internet that the first two don’t register as anything unusual. The next throw must have been of a larger stone or with more force, because the third makes a CLONK! that immediately pulls me out of my research spiral.

Below my window, Henry waves up at me. Even in the shadowed light from the house, his eyes are bright stars, shining almost catlike in the darkness. “Is now too soon?” he calls, voice loud in the silence of the rural night.

“Shhh!” I hiss. “You’ll wake up Grandma Lydia!”

He smirks at me, and my heart skips a beat. “Rency, I’m a ghost. No one can hear me. You’re the one who needs to shush.”

Oops.

“Is now too soon?” he repeats.

I shake my head. “Now is good.”

“Then come let me in.”

I’m not a sneaky person by nature, so I’m proud when I manage to creep down the creaky steps without them whining too much. I’m nearly shaking with anticipation as I open the door, both from the fact that I’m essentially letting a boy sneak into my house—in spite of my age, it still feels a bit naughty considering that it’s my grandmother’s house—and the delight of being in Henry’s presence again.

It’s because you have questions to ask him, I try to tell myself as I pull open the door. It’s not because every time he smiles at you your insides turn into mush.

“Can’t you just woosh through the walls?” I ask as he steps inside.

“No,” he says, watching me as I carefully close the heavy wooden door and twist the deadbolt. “I think it has something to do with thresholds. Boundaries, borderlines… they seem to have some sort of significance. Maybe because as a ghost I’m stuck in this strange in-between layer. The veil.”

I tilt my head, motioning to the stairs. Going up is more challenging than going down, and the stairs let out a few squeaks as I make my way up. Henry, of course, is silent behind me.

Even though “getting caught” wouldn’t look like anything other than me walking through the house alone at night, I let out a sigh when I finally close my bedroom door. An overhead light feels too harsh, so I twist on one of the nightstand lamps. Henry lingers by the door, not helping himself to any of the seating options. I linger near the edge of my bed, not knowing if I should launch a barrage of questions or wait for him to say something.

Henry is unabashedly staring at me, an edge of something akin to hunger in his expression. “I was worried it was too soon to come back,” he says.

“Grandma goes to bed around nine,” I reassure him. “She’s fast asleep by now.”

“That’s good, but I meant too soon in general.” He leans against my closed door, arms crossed over his chest. “Less than twenty-four hours ago, Karl’s house burned down and you realized I was a ghost.”

“I actually realized you were a ghost before that,” I admit. “Not that much earlier, but… yeah. I was processing it.”

“Is that why you didn’t text me?” he asks, tilting his head slightly, causing his hair to fall across one eye. I wonder if he would have styled it differently, had he been able to. Can ghosts get haircuts? Use hair gel?

“I mean, it’s a pretty notable barrier for any sort of friendship,” I say, deflecting, stumbling over the last word. I sit on the edge of my bed, reaching for my laptop so I have something to do with my hands.”

“But if you hadn’t realized?” he asks. “Would you have texted me? Given me your number?”

Yes . I want to say. I was scared to admit it then and can barely say it to myself now, but it’s the truth. I like him; I would have called. I can’t get him off my mind.

“Probably. I mean, I can’t fix the gutters myself,” I tell him, keeping my voice flat.

Henry huffs out a laugh, seeing through my bluff. He pulls out a cell phone from his pocket. It’s chunky—a flip phone. “All right then. Let me send you a text so I can work you into my busy schedule.”

My heart pounds as I tell him my number. His hands fly over the keys, each making the soft click of an analog button. My phone lights up next to me, his number on the screen, followed by a simple text .

Monday, 9:30 a.m. 50 dollars. Cash.

“Fine,” I agree, looking back up at him. He’s staring again, waiting to see what I will do next. The joke’s on him, though, because I don’t know what to do.

I rarely do.

Especially since every interaction with him sweeps me further and further into a river of emotion I should not allow myself to be carried away in. I can’t help it, though. I opened the dam just a crack, and everything is ready to pour through, to overwhelm the small gap in a deluge. I pick up my phone, swipe the lock screen away, and add his name. I would take a picture of him—the way he’s looking at me is a memory I’d like to keep, to store next to his name in the careful file of my phone’s directory—but I can’t. He’s a ghost: it wouldn’t appear any more than his reflection in the mirror. Henry is a ghost , I tell myself. The reminder is less and less effective every time I have to use it.

“If it wasn’t what happened at the fire that tipped you off, what was it?” Henry asks. He still hasn’t moved from the frame of the door, and I’m not sure if I should invite him to sit next to me or to have a seat in the chair. (Do ghosts experience fatigue? I add it to my mental list of ghost questions.)

“I saw a picture of you. Well,” I amend. “I saw a picture of you when I signed the marriage license, I suppose, but it was blurry. This other one I saw when I was doing some research for my family history project with Grandma. It was just so obviously you that it made a bunch of things click in my brain, even though I couldn’t figure out how we managed to touch the same things and how I could see you and pay you and how you could have a cell phone.”

A smile tugs at the corner of Henry’s lips. “I was enjoying spending time with you too much to tell you,” he says. “And besides, I don’t think I’ve ever had to tell someone I was a ghost since I first died. Those in my family who could see me had known me practically since birth. I was just as real to them as anything. But with you… I was shocked, at first, that you could see me. I thought about showing you I was a ghost—shaking your hand or something. But then, the idea of you realizing and then me having to stay away so you wouldn’t have to question your sanity… well, it felt really lonely,” he admits. He shoves his hands into his pockets, a casual pose that somehow seems vulnerable. “I decided to just work through the week and then disappear. No harm, no foul. Then, when you told me that you were Lydia’s granddaughter, I knew for sure that we weren’t related. And, well, I couldn’t stay away. And now…”

The unfinished phrase hovers between us. I wonder if his hands, held captive in his pockets, are to hold him back from touching me. I want to tell him that it’s okay, that I understand—if I hadn’t touched anyone in nearly a century, I would be starved for human contact too.

“And now I know you’re a ghost,” I finish.

“Yes. That too.” One hand appears to push his hair back from his face. “Do you have the photo? The one you saw?” he asks. I nod. “ Can I see it?”

“Oh! Of course.” I scramble from the bed, yanking open the drawer where the images are stashed. I try to not feel self-conscious about the hand-knit socks and the plain underwear, but I still quickly remove the folder and shut the drawer.

I spread the images out onto the quilt. Now that I know Henry is a ghost, they seem even more unreal to me, like still images from a movie of a fake character in a made-up world. Henry is quiet as he peers at them in the dim light of the lamp.

“This is the one,” I say, tapping on the printout.

The image is labeled with his name, the date (1929—the year of his death), and “Oak River Historical Society Centennial Collection.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen these pictures,” Henry says. It’s a nice picture by any standard. The image is clear, the lighting artistic—near perfect. Henry is looking directly into the camera, chin tilted up just so, one eyebrow arched slightly. He looks just as he does now, although perhaps his hair is a bit different than it is today. Longer then, I suppose.

Henry’s moved on, looking at a second printed photograph. It seems like it might have been taken by the same photographer, at the same time. It has the same quality of expression, the same slant of light, except Henry is looking away from the camera, in three-quarter profile. He must have posed for it, but the effect is that it was a flash moment, captured as he gazes away.

Henry isn’t touching the pictures at all. He’s tilted forward at the waist, his hands clasped behind his back as if he’s scared that any contact with them could dissolve them into dust .

“They’re nice photos,” I tell him, watching his expression. He’s silent, serious. Do these photos bring him back to that moment? When someone told him, “Yes, just like that. Now, chin up! Find the light with your face”? Who was the photographer? A stranger, lost to memory? A family member, long buried? I’m lost in the idea of that history, what it might be like to be so distant from a past life.

“Sorry,” he apologizes, breaking the silence. “I don’t mean to be strange. I haven’t seen myself in… well, in a half-century or so.” His voice is low. “I think I forgot what I looked like.” The idea hits me hard—to lose everyone you love, to watch it all fade, and then to lose even a basic sense of yourself. To lose a solid physical form would be hard enough. To lose an understanding of that form would add insult to injury.

He straightens, meeting my curious gaze. “Do I still look like the man in this photo?”

I nod. “Almost exactly so.”

“What’s different?” With permission to stare, I trace every inch of his face with my eyes.

“Your hair is a bit more trimmed now, on the sides,” I decide. “It looks fresher.”

Henry makes a noise of agreement. “I got it cut, right before the wedding.”

“And the way the photo was taken, how it’s in black and white… I don’t know what color your eyes were, but they look darker in this photo.”

“They were green,” he offers. He’s watching me watch him, and I feel his eyes on my own face. “But dark, nearly hazel. Have they changed?”

“Yes, I think so,” I say. We were standing side by side, but now I shift to face him, tilting my head to capture different slants and angles as his pale eyes catch in the light. “They’re really bright now. Seafoam, almost.”

“Specific,” he murmurs. My face warms, and under his own careful consideration, the flush doesn’t escape his notice. The corner of his mouth tips up, a touch of a smirk. “You’ve thought about it? How to describe the color?”

Even though I shouldn’t, even though I should step away and remind myself of my very important mantra, I don’t. “Yes,” I confess. “It’s unusual. And…”

“And what?”

“Very pretty.”

“Pretty.”

“You have nice eyelashes,” I continue. “Dark. They frame your eyes well.”

My hand has gotten away from me. It’s touching the swoop of his dark bangs, right where they fall over his forehead to reach down and touch his eyebrows. At the contact, Henry closes his eyes, inhaling sharply. I yank my hand back, embarrassed.

“Sorry—” I start to say, but his hand darts out to grab my wrist.

“Do it again,” he says, voice thick. His eyes open, and they’re vivid and clear and I can hardly breathe when he looks at me, especially when it’s like this. “Please, Rency. Do it again. ”

He brings my hand up but releases it while it’s still hovering over his hair, as if scared that he’s forcing me to do something I don’t want.

He’s not.

I step closer, unable to reach up and run my hand through his hair if there are more than mere inches between us. In the process, my hip brushes his thigh, my shoulder touches just under where his own begins.

“Your hair is almost fully brown, but not quite,” I tell him. “It’s just a bit reddish. Outside, in the sunlight, it’s more obvious. It’s harder to tell now, when it’s dark.” The strands of his hair are soft, and each slow stroke causes my palm to tingle with that trace of something otherworldly.

Henry’s breathing is uneven. When my hand makes its way to the back of his head, fingers against the closer-cropped hair at the nape, he reaches to pull me closer to him in a smooth, welcome motion. He’s not warm, but his body is solid and his movements are definitive, and the spread of his hand against my lower back heats me up from the inside.

My face is already tilted up towards his, so when he looks down at me, our noses are dangerously close to brushing, lips dangerously close to touching. If he had breath, I would feel it across my cheek.

“Henry.” His name comes out breathy, laced with more intention than I meant to infuse. When he exhales—a habit, I suppose, rather than a necessity—it’s shaky, and when he shifts back, he steadies me with two hands on my waist. Still, he presses his forehead to mine, eyes closed.

“I can’t, Rency. I can’t. I’m…”

A ghost.

“Of course,” I reply, pulling away. His hands don’t drop away immediately as I step back and instead trail around my hips until I’m too far away for contact, as if he’s not willing to break off the touch himself.

I can’t believe I let myself do that—to touch him, to let myself feel what I’ve been wanting to feel for him. Turning back to the photos, I pretend to study them.

“Rency.” Henry’s voice is soft, filled with regret.

“It’s okay,” I reply, not looking at him, not looking at anything at all. “I really do understand. Obviously.”

Henry is a ghost Henry is a ghost Henry is a ghost.

“I’ve… I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry.”

“No apology necessary,” I reassure him. I almost sound like I’m okay. Thankfully, Henry doesn’t keep going. Instead, he steps back in line with me so that we are again shoulder to shoulder, two friendly acquaintances perusing photos together. I remind myself that my newly minted decision to help him break the curse—which I hadn’t even told him about yet—is a decision to help him move on to whatever otherside existed. It is a decision that necessitates his leaving me.

So instead of thinking about how much I wish he would have pressed his lips against my own, I focus on the spread of photos on the quilt.

When I’d looked at these in the past, it had either been under the conditions of shock or panic, so this is the first time I’ve truly closely examined most of them. A group photo captures my attention.

“Is your aunt in this photo?” I ask, passing it to him.

“I remember this one,” he answers, taking it from me. “I think she was there. Ah, yes. Right here.” He holds out the photo, finger hovering just under one of the small faces lined up in front of the Oak River Grocery.

His aunt Mallory is pretty. Her outfit is stylish, her hair very on-trend for the times. She looks classy, more put together than the other women in the photo. Something about her is strangely familiar, though. I’m frowning, squinting at the picture to try to figure out what doesn’t sit right for me, when it hits me.

“Henry,” I say, a strange sense of déjà vu washing over me. “I… I’ve seen this woman before. I think I know who she is.”

“Of course you do,” Henry says, unphased.

“What?”

“Of course you do,” he repeats. “You saw her last night. I was talking to her then. And you’ve seen her in your dreams too, right?”

Things are starting to connect in my mind. Henry said he didn’t know she was still lingering until last night—of course it would have been then.

“She’s the one who started the fire,” he continues. “Although I’m still unclear as to why. It seems odd that she still holds a vendetta against my family, after all this time, especially since Karl has been dead for a while and there aren’t any other living relatives. I mean, all the paperwork is in my name, and I paid the taxes, but I am literally a ghost, so—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I cut him off. “I think…” My brain is rushing to unscramble the data as it’s being collected, to pattern it into some significance. I tap on the picture.

“This woman. I saw her with a realtor who tried to get me to talk to him about Grandma Lydia selling her house. She was muttering things to him, asking him questions and pushing him to find out more, and he was so strange and…” I cut myself off, going over to my laundry basket. I dig through it and find the shorts I wore into town that day. The business card he gave me is still in my pocket, and I pass it to Henry as I continue.

“Somehow she’s connected to him, and he’s connected with the development projects for the area. So maybe she found out about you through him? About the property? Don’t realtors have databases and information on properties? Owners and tax assessments and appraisal data?”

“Nathan vanVals,” Henry says, reading off the business card. “vanVals is Mallory’s maiden name. He must be a relative.”

“So he’s a relative and a realtor, and they are looking at land in the area. Why the obsession with the property? Was he the man with Mallory the night Karl’s house burned down?”

Henry’s tapping the card in his hand, contemplative.

“Well, if she’s attached herself to him, so it seems likely. She can interact with him like I interacted with my own family, and she’s prompting him to do something, so there must be something going on. I’m just at a loss for what it could be.”

“Do you think it has something to do with the curse?” I ask.

Henry lifts a shoulder. “Maybe.”

I hesitate for a moment, then ask, “Have you ever tried to break it? The curse?”

Henry shifts his weight. “I have,” he admits. “A few times. It’s never worked out. I didn’t believe in curses when I was alive. Now that I’m dead and living one, I still can hardly believe it. At one point, I was obsessed with finding a way out. It was right after the Second World War. I was… in a bad place.”

The pain in his voice is obvious. If the circumstances were different, I would put my hand on his arm. I would reach out, touch him.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, condolences the next best thing to the tenderness I want to show him. “I can’t imagine what it was like to live through all of that. The Great Depression, the wars…”

“It wasn’t good. And I, of course, was quite powerless. Had to just watch it all unfold, for my family and everyone else, in both the world of the living and my own fragment of existence. I couldn’t stop any bit of it. It was so close to my own death, and I didn’t learn how to meaningfully engage with even the lightest objects for a few years.” He laughs to himself, a sound tinged with bad memories. “I remember when I couldn’t even open a door, let alone flip the pages of a book.”

“Look how far you’ve come!” I tease, trying to lighten the conversation a bit. “You’ve successfully pulled an entire house into your ghosty lair.”

He laughs at that, and it sounds less heavy. I smile too .

“I want to help you break the curse,” I tell him. “If I can.” Before my heart can run away with me, I continue, as if saying it out loud with certainty will protect me from the feelings of attachment that have already formed. “I’m leaving at the end of August. But that’s weeks away. Plenty of time to help.”

Henry’s face is neutral, his responding nod tight, but I get the sense that it’s a purposeful, careful neutrality.

“If that’s how you want to spend your time this summer, I’ll accept the help.”

“It is,” I say, pleased that he’s agreed. Truthfully, I probably would have tried to solve the mystery even if he had said no—I can’t imagine my brain would have just let it go. “So, it seems like the two things to figure out are what Mallory is up to and for you to tell me everything you know and have tried to do to break the curse.”

It turns out that Henry hasn’t ever gotten very far in his investigation. The problem, he explains to me, is that curses aren’t exactly uniform things that are easy to find information on. The “facts” are fictitious in some forms, occultish in others. Common knowledge of things like cosmic balance and curse breaking would lead to an assumption that there is some counter-curse, but knowing the origins of the original curse is the key to breaking it .

“Then let’s find the original curse,” I tell him. “Do you remember it?”

“Not really. It has some sort of rhyme, but other than that, I don’t remember anything specific enough to even Google.”

Well, that’s no good. “Maybe now that we know who she is and you both have overlapping ranges of movement, we can try to get information out of her about it. Like, trap her in a conversation about it or something.”

Henry crosses his arms. Before, when he was leaning against the door of my bedroom, the pose looked casual. Now it looks self-protective.

“Maybe,” he agrees, a slight frown creasing his forehead. “But she’s evil. Someone to avoid. I don’t think it’s possible to hurt me anymore, but what about you?”

“What about me?” I echo. “Meaning? Like, she could curse me?”

“I don’t know. We’re connected now, but you’re as mortal as ever. I think it would be better if you could avoid her. When I saw her last night, probably with this Nathan guy here”—he lifts the business card—“she seemed as vindictive as ever. Laughed when she saw me, actually, and not in a nice way.”

“I mean, she did burn down your house,” I point out.

“Exactly. So don’t go looking for her, okay? Let me handle that.” I don’t want to agree—she really could be the key to this all. Henry sees my hesitation and hits me with a quirked brow.

“Fine, fine,” I agree, caving. “I won’t seek her out. But you better believe that if I see her or her little minion again, I’m going to ask questions.”

“Fine,” he agrees.

We look at the photos more and I get the sense that neither of us wants to part ways but that we have come to a standstill of sorts.

“It’s getting late,” Henry says, glancing at his watch.

“Is it?” I ask. He shows me his wrist. The timepiece on it is an antique, with stars on the dial and a moon peeking out of clouds at the bottom. Its charming face tells me it’s past midnight. “You’re right.”

I can’t help myself; I want another little scrap of contact before he leaves, so I reach out to touch the gold rim of his watch. “An antique?” I ask.

“I suppose it is, now,” he agrees. “It was new when I got it, in the 1950s.”

“It’s beautiful. Very classy.”

“Thanks. It doesn’t really matter when you’re a ghost, but it’s a Rolex 6062.”

“I’m sure I would be impressed if I knew anything about watches at all,” I reassure him.

We stand in silence again, the moment stretching between us.

“Walk me out, then, Rency?” Henry finally says softly, eyes never leaving my face.

“Oh, of course,” I say, scrambling over to the door. He follows me down the stairs to the living room. When I open the front door, it creaks just slightly .

“We can WD-40 that on Monday,” he offers, grinning when I wince at the sound. “But it will be another ten dollars.”

“Oh shush, you.”

“It’s the original door, if you can believe it,” Henry comments. His eyes look past me, back into the house. “I helped build this house. I haven’t been in it since… well, since before I died. Until we met, it was outside of my range. Well—” He smirks. “I guess I should say until we got married , it was outside my range.”

“Don’t remind me,” I say, feeling my cheeks heat. “I still don’t know why I did that. What came over me. I just… it felt like I was supposed to do it. Like it was meant to be.”

Henry’s expression shifts from playful to something serious, intense. “Maybe it was.” It’s the last thing he says before slipping into the dark of the night, a ghost surrounded by the soft blink of fireflies.

Later, as I lay in bed, I think about that idea—of us being meant to be. I want to agree. I want it to be true. But how could it be that we were meant for each other when there is this veil between us?