Story: Long Way Down

Once Henry Nolan had been dead a whole year, he started appearing in my house.

Like, I’d be wandering aimlessly around the kitchen, microwaving popcorn or something, and there he’d be—lurking in the space between the back door and the cabinet, tall and pale and thin. Or I’d be camped out on the living room floor, math homework spread out in front of me like I was actually going to do it, and I’d look up, and Henry Nolan would be sitting on the couch across from me, hands folded patiently in his lap.

I guess I should’ve been surprised, but I wasn’t. Weird things had been happening in Caldwell for as long as I could remember. And you don’t move into a dead boy’s house without at least wondering what would happen if the dead boy had never quite moved out.

But if I turned away from him and started rummaging through the fridge, or turned the TV volume up really loud and stared intently at the pages of my trig book for once, he would just sit there, like he was waiting for me to notice him.

And eventually, just as suddenly as he’d shown up, he would disappear again.

***

After about a month, I’d gotten used to our little routine. Sure, it still didn’t do my heart rate any favors to look up and see someone skulking around the dining room or framed outside my window—but it wasn’t too much of an adjustment.

And then one night, under threat of death from my mother, I was slumped over the desk in my room, pretending I had this Pythagorean Theorem thing in the bag and that I wasn’t totally doomed for tomorrow’s quiz.

And a low, scratchy voice said, “You do realize these are all wrong.”

I whirled around despite myself. Henry Nolan was leaned over my shoulder, hands clasped neatly behind his back, blue button-up and khaki slacks just as neat as they’d been when the high school had bussed all of us out to his funeral. His messy brown hair had been carefully parted then, but now it was sticking up a little.

“Like, all of them,” he added, frowning down at my trig worksheet.

“Since when do you talk?”

He straightened, but kept staring abstractedly down at my homework. “Since I built up enough strength to, I guess.”

“Why are you even here?”

Instead of answering, he looked around the room. I hadn’t done much to change it when we’d moved in, just added some posters and a few medals I’d won with the girls’ swim team. But even that seemed kind of tasteless now, watching a dead boy gaze around at what used to be his.

“Where’s my dad?” he finally asked, voice raspier than ever.

I stared at him. His dark eyes were fever-bright and surrounded by bruised-looking circles, and his skin had a sickly bluish tint to it, but he seemed calm. Careful. Nothing like I would’ve been if I’d kicked the big bucket a few weeks into the summer before my senior year.

Maybe it was that collectedness that made me feel like he wasn’t going to freak out and go all vengeful spirit on me, but I shrugged. “He moved out. A little bit after...you know.” Henry’s mom had died maybe a decade ago, so now that Henry was gone, his dad was the only Nolan left. “He lives on the other side of town now.”

I’m not sure what kind of response I’d expected. But he only stood there, looking skinny and lost and too boyish to have been cut down in his prime like that.

After a minute, he knelt down beside my desk, looking over my worksheet again. “My God, you suck at math.”

He spent the next hour alternating between ragging on my math skills and helping me work through all the problems again, and then he flickered out and disappeared.

***

Eventually, when it looked like Henry had decided he was haunting my house for the long haul and my math grades had picked up enough to make me grateful, I decided to learn a little more about him.

I’d just finished ninth grade when he’d died, so I’d been kind of self-absorbed. But I remembered he’d been the hero of the baseball team, had worked after school at his dad’s auto shop. He’d wanted to win a baseball scholarship and get out of Caldwell.

And now he was stuck here. All the stuff I found online said spirits stuck around if they had revenge or unfinished business to deal with. But all Henry seemed to want to do was haunt the fridge and fix my math grades.

I learned he’d apparently started having seizures a few months before he died. A few people said his dad must’ve gotten drunk again and finally pushed him down too hard.

But most people figured he’d had one of those seizures and bashed his head on the way down.

***

“Trevor Marshall got a tattoo for you,” I told Henry one night, while he looked over a practice test for me. “It’s pretty cool.”

He was quiet for a minute. “We were always going to get matching tattoos once we turned eighteen.”

“What kind?”

He unbuttoned his sleeve, bared his forearm. Little pink scars dotted the pallid skin. “Right here. We were—”

But I was still looking at the cigarette burns.

“Henry?” I said after a minute. “How’d you die?”

He paused. Rolled the sleeve back down, careful as ever. “That seems rude to ask.”

I stared. “If your dad really—if you’re here for revenge or tell people how you really died—”

“If I wanted revenge, don’t you think I would get it?” He looked away. “Being left to himself is already the worst punishment Dad could ask for. I don’t want anything else.”

I didn’t argue.

The fact that he was even here at all seemed to do that for me.



Author's Note: This week, my story was based on the tale of Andrew Coffey. In this story, a dead man from Andrew Coffey's town reappears to Andrew a number of times, after supposedly drowning years before. In the end, Andrew wakes up beside his horse, and realizes the entire thing was a dream. I took the main idea for my own story, but turned the dead man and Andrew into a couple of modern-day high schoolers instead.

Bibliography: Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs. Source: Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook.

Image Credit: "Math" by Akash Kataruka. Source: Flickr.