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The house looks much creepier in person, Dan must admit. It’s an old Victorian place painted a dismal grey with multiple bay windows and iron fencing surrounding the wrap-around porch. There’s a tower in the back with a single window and Dan gets the feeling that this house is one that is skipped when Halloween comes around. Dan’s not mad about it. It means it will take people some time to notice that he doesn’t age.
Inside is better. The rooms are already mostly furnished—golden mirrors and strange trinkets atop dressers decorate seemingly endless hallways; the dark wall-papered walls making them seem smaller than they actually are. Each of the three bedrooms has a metal-framed bed, completely dustless and made up to perfection. The two living rooms have flower-printed couches and the larger of the two has a fireplace. The dining room is fit for eight with high backed, mahogany, chairs.
Dan feels like he’s home. The Victorian age was the era he grew up in before becoming immortal and this is the first house he’s lived in since then from that time. Victorian houses are so expensive now and this one was strangely cheap. But Dan isn’t one to question, so he bought it.
He’s glad most of the house is furnished. He can’t be bothered to go out in search of pieces to match the Victorian vibes. Plus, he doesn’t have many belongings of his own to fill up the entire space. Only a couple of suitcases he brought from his old place have travelled with him here. He begins to unpack.
The main thing: clothes. He still has his wedding suit from 1840 along with the gold pocket watch Sullivan had given him. It’s still in its velvet pouch, taken out only rarely and for the occasional cleaning (everyone who touches it says Dan could sell it for a pretty penny and Dan never does). There are a couple of pieces from various eras: a black morning coat from the early 1900s, a tan suit jacket from the 1920s, a spiked leather jacket from the 1950s, and a pair of bell bottoms from the 1970s that people always ask where he thrifted them from. Other clothes litter the suitcase, but most of them are more modern as to fit in.
Other things are more personal. Along with the pocket watch is a majolica ceramic tea set from the 1870s his mother gifted him, the two first-edition volumes of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, and Sully’s lover’s eye the other man had commissioned someone to paint Dan’s eye even though the fad was long over (Sully had been immortal for about half a century longer).
Dan unpacks more mundane things in the silence of the house. He’s plugging in his diffuser in the living room with the fireplace when the hair on the back of his neck stick up like a cat’s. Slowly, he glances around the room, wondering if maybe someone or some creature is peeking through the window. While the sun is setting and it’s hard to see out the window with all the light’s on, Dan can’t see anything that would have caused him to be on edge. He chalks it up to being in a new house and continues on. He drops oil into his diffuser so that it begins emitting its Honey Clementine smell.
By the time he’s mostly unpacked, Dan has a hankering for food. Pizza, specifically, but he’s not all that picky. Despite being immortal, he does get cravings for food, although it isn’t a necessary thing. After a while, the hunger pains fade into nothingness and he’s able to keep on living without eating. That’s how he and Sully lived through the Great Depression on a tight budget.
He makes sure to turn off the diffuser before heading out in search of fast food, one of the modern inventions he enjoys every now and again.
The town his house is in is in a medium-sized community. There’s no cell service, which is uncommon since that’s usually only the case in smaller areas. He avoids small towns completely as everybody always knows everybody and its usually more eyes on him than he wants. The common questions always arise: where are you from? What do you do for a living? Why did you move?
Choosing a place to live always stresses Dan out. He’s always on edge for somebody he knew to recognize him. Even though he changes up his style and dyes his hair often, he’s had the occasional person find themselves in the same place Dan is. Usually when that happens, Dan waves it off, blaming it on how he looks exactly like his father, Daniel Sr.
It’s lonely, of course, keeping everyone he meets at a distance. There’s no one to talk to about what’s truly going on in his mind. He can complain about rising prices and the weather and the state of the country just like everyone else, but they’re hardly deep conversations.
Sully was supposed to be his person. His husband. A fellow immortal who knows what it’s like to live for centuries, watch society evolve, people live and die, wars fought and ended. How, when there’s no end goal in sight—no ticking time bomb spurring them to do—the meaning of life becomes quite meaningless.
And now Sully’s not his anymore. Gone off with another immortal man.
As he begins walking down the street, a woman with curly hair and round glasses waves him down. “You’re the newcomer?” she asks before adding, “my name’s Blair.”
Dan puts on an easy smile. “Nice to meet you. I’m Dan. Just moved in this evening.”
Blair gives a pointed look towards the house. “It’s a lovely place.” She turns her focus back to Dan. “Some say it’s haunted.”
“Haunted?”
Blair nods enthusiastically. “Legend has it that a strange family lived in it during the Victorian age—a mother, father, a sister, and a brother. Very closed off, not very social. Strange happenings occurred while they lived: a rotten stench permeating the building, plants and vines growing out of wack, the children standing in the front yard for hours on end, barely moving, just watching. Then the sister moved away, the parents died, and only the brother remained. These days, a handful of folks in town claim to have seen a person looking through the window in the tower; a bald man with a beard.” Blair relaxes into a smile before shrugging. “Of course, I’m not entirely sure whether I believe in ghosts or not, but it makes for a good story.”
Dan doesn’t necessarily believe in ghosts either, but bids Blair farewell.
When he arrives back home, well-fed, the smell of sweet citrus meets his nose and he relaxes his shoulders at the familiar scent. In no time, this place will feel like home—he’s sure of it.
He stops in his tracks when he sees the diffuser still on. Dan nears the geometrical pear-shaped object and frowns at it before turning it off. Maybe the new setting caused him to forget to turn it off before he left the house. Moving often turns ones mind forgetful. He clicks the thing off before his nose hairs start to burn off from the pure amount of scent in the house.
Remembering Blair’s words, about the ghost in the tower, Dan searches for the ladder up to it. He didn’t explore there earlier, completely forgetting it since the entrance is clearly hidden somewhere.
Eventually, he finds it in a hallway closet; there’s a square trapdoor in the ceiling with a rope dangling from it. When Dan pulls it, a dozen or so wooden stairs drop from the ceiling. He climbs up slowly, putting pressure on the next stair in case the wood has rotted. The stairs are surprisingly still strong.
The tower was clearly used as a bedroom and it’s decorated differently than the rest of the rooms in the house. The bed is a little more crinkled, the floors a little more scuffed. It feels more lived in. A wooden toy box is at the foot of the bed, a bookshelf in the corner with about three dozen hardcover books arranged in neat rows. Some old toy soldiers sits atop the bookshelf along with an old jump rope. The soldiers remind him of his own childhood. His parents gifted him a dozen toy soldiers for his sixth birthday. He played with them long after it was considered cool and eventually gave them to a younger cousin. The single window of the tower has a little reading nook below it; the cushions are haphazardly thrown about the velvet seat. Above the bed is a map of the world, surely out of date by now.
Whoever has cleaned the bottom floors of the building has obviously ignored this part of the house.
It’s sad, looking at the room. Some kid had forgotten their toys here. Dan gently reaches out to touch the spines of the books, recognizing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.
All of a sudden, one of the little toy soldiers turns to face him, his arms up, holding the miniature rifle. The barrel of the gun is pointed directly at Dan’s chest.
Ghost, is Dan’s first thought, even though he doesn’t really believe in them (although, he is immortal, so who is he to say something does or does not exist?) He instinctively retracts his hand and, in case the ghost of the bald man with a beard is with him in this very room, Dan decides to say something. Why not? Best case scenario, there’s no ghost and he just feels stupid talking to no one. Worst case scenario, there is a ghost and he’s approachable towards him and therefore the ghost won’t be banging his cupboards and causing him lack of sleep.
“Hello, Ghost,” Dan says, keeping his voice as neutral as possible. If there is a ghost, he assumes it’s probably best not to show fear on his face or in his voice. “My name’s Daniel Layton, but you can call me Dan.” He pauses once again, straining his ears to hear if anything happens. If the ghost might talk back. “I bought your house today; I hope you don’t mind. I quite like it, it reminds me of my childhood home.” And, because he’s either talking to a ghost or empty air, Dan decides to throw caution to the wind and say, “I’m immortal. Was born in 1815. Had a house a little less nicer than this one. Really liked 1920s fashion, hated the 1880s, owned a toy soldier like those, and elytra dresses really creeped me out.”
Dan waits a little longer in the tower, stock still. When he doesn’t hear anything, he heads back down, folding the stairs back up as he found them.
Dan goes to bed.
When he wakes up, one of the toy soldiers from the tower is laying on the pillow next to him and, in the condensation in the window, someone has written “Hello Dan.”
~~~
Dan is living with a ghost. He shouldn’t be surprised, honestly. Immortals exist, why shouldn’t ghosts? Maybe vampires and werewolves exist too.
At first, he thinks the ghost is some type of evil spirit needing to be helped along to the afterlife. The toy soldier seemed like it was saying “I’m watching you” and the greeting on his window was more than a little creepy, especially when the water droplets ran down the window and reminded Dan of blood.
But, as time goes on, Dan doesn’t think the ghost is all that evil. The ghost doesn’t wail in the dead of night, doesn’t scare him in the shower, doesn’t bang on pots and pans. What he does do is hide the toy soldier somewhere around the house every morning, dust every bedroom, and occasionally click his diffuser off and on. Although, after some time, Dan leaves out a note for the ghost explaining that the diffuser can’t be on for more than an hour or so and the ghost quits playing with the switch.
Dan starts talking to himself, a little for the ghost’s sake and a little for himself to ward off the loneliness that’s starting to eat at him. Even though the divorce happened in 1976 (Dan remembers this very vividly because he was wearing double denim and Sully a deplorable wide-collared shirt under a sweater), he’s feeling extra sore about it now. Like everything else, he blames the new house.
Dan wakes up one morning and shakes out a bowl of cheerios. The toy soldier tumbles out and plops into the milk. Dan can’t help but smile at the thing. Yesterday it was in the medicine cabinet, the day before was under the rug in the living room, the day before that was in the tissue box in the smallest bedroom. He quite likes the little game the ghost plays.
He fishes out the soldier and, in a joking manner, says to the room, “I hope the soldier doesn’t give me lead poisoning. I can’t die but I, unfortunately, can still get sick for a short period of time.” Dan sets the soldier next to the stove for the ghost to take and hide again tomorrow.
The ghost almost certainly has a physical form, one that Dan has yet to see. If Blair’s story is anything to go by, he’s bald with a beard. Not much to go by, but he takes this knowledge to the local library and asks the librarian there about the family who used to live in his house.
“The Blakes,” the librarian says, his name tag reading ‘Ben’. Ben leads Dan to a section of the library that smells of paper and pure history. “Edward and Rose Blake along with their two children, Charlotte and Laurie. The parents and Charlotte all have gravestones at the church down the road; Laurie’s is strangely missing.” Ben pulls out a thick, hardcover, book and offers it to Dan. “Some more history on the families who used to live around here would be in this book. The Blakes don’t have the longest section, as most of their lore comes in the form of oral anecdotes. And who knows how trustworthy those can be.” Ben chuckles. “If you need anymore help, I’m just at the front desk.”
Dan finds a table in a secluded corner and opens the book, carefully flicking through the yellowed pages until he finds the passage about the Blakes. Indeed, it’s quite short and mostly about things he already knows.
The better find is the picture of the family, all looking very serious as they stare into the camera. The background is a plain wall; Edward and Rose are in the back while their two children stand in front of them. Charlotte looks to be about ten in the photo, Laurie a tad younger. Laurie’s not looking directly into the camera lens; instead, he’s staring slightly to the left. Dan wonders what or who he’s looking at.
When he glances down the page, he sees a serious wedding photo of a woman in a long veil seated on a chair with a man in a suit standing next to her. The caption below reads, “Enoch and Charlotte Moore (née Blake) on their wedding day.”
Dan’s grateful that smiling in photos became fashionable once the 1920s hit.
And that’s all on the Blake family. Dan supposes it makes sense. The mystery of the family is what really makes the ghost story so intriguing. If everyone knew everything about Laurie’s life, people couldn’t create their own narrative.
He’s about to exit the library when he remembers all the books in Laurie’s bookshelf up in the tower. Laurie’s probably only read the same 36 books since he became a ghost (Dan assumes Laurie is unable to leave his house, as that’s usually how it goes in the movies). And that’s a sad existence, only reading pre-Victorian era and Victorian era books after death.
Dan checks out L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Stephen King’s Carrie, and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. He isn’t exactly the best at picking books, but Dan decides that these are alright choices from diverse time periods and across different genres.
When he gets back to the house, he climbs up to the tower for the second time. He avoids going up in there usually, but he wants to hand-deliver the books to Laurie to show that they’re specifically for him, not something Dan picked up for himself.
He lays the books on top of the bookshelf and recedes to the bottom floors once again.
~~~
The next morning, three of the four books are sitting on the bureau next to the front door (Carrie, Fahrenheit 451, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). The toy soldier is in his right shoe.
Dan gets more books from the library. The Hunger Games, Charlotte’s Web, The Princess Bride, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Each morning, three or four of the past books are waiting on the same bureau so they can be brought back in exchange for new ones.
Dan’s considering getting an ebook reader for Laurie. But would a ghost know how to use such a thing? How do you explain to a person who has no concept of what the internet is and ebooks are? Laurie was an adult when the first telephones were being invented. Jumping straight into the online world and what it can do would definitely be overwhelming.
He eventually decides against it. Besides, he enjoys going to the library and picking out books. He’s doing it so often that Ben probably thinks he’s a quick and avid reader due to how often he’s returning and taking out new books. Dan wonders if ghosts need to sleep. If not, that would explain how Laurie has enough time to read so many books.
On one particular day, when Dan is out in the back garden on the bench getting some fresh air, a floating book makes its way over to him.
For the first time since he’s moved here, Laurie’s grey form flickers into view and Dan knows what to expect from Blair: bald with a beard, but her description wasn’t nearly enough to create something in his mind close to what Laurie actually looks like.
Laurie appears to be about Dan’s own age; his nose straight and his beard looks like it would have been orange when he’d been alive. His eyes have a hardness to them that Dan can’t exactly decode, but he wants to learn more.
“There’s more of this one, it says so on the back,” Laurie says, and he holds out Anne of Green Gables. “I’d like the rest.”
Laurie’s very to the point and Dan wonders if he should bring up the fact that Laurie’s here. Corporally, he’s here. But Laurie didn’t mention it, so Dan decides to follow his lead. “I think there are, like, a bunch. I’ll definitely take a look, though.”
Dan watches Laurie’s floating figure; where his legs would be is fine, white, mist. Laurie’s curiously looking at him too.
“You’re immortal.” Laurie’s the first to break the ice.
“You’re a ghost,” Dan responds with.
Laurie doesn’t say anything for a long second. And then he disappears, Anne of Green Gables floating higher and higher in the direction of the tower.
“I guess the conversation’s done,” Dan says with a frown. He would have liked to get to know Laurie a bit more and about being a ghost. He wonders if Laurie has questions about his immortality. Immortality is something Laurie will never experience and dying and becoming a ghost is something Dan will never experience. And yet, Dan feels as though the two are not exactly so dissimilar to one another. The watching your loved ones die. The change that no regular mortal human will ever be able to see. The loneliness.
Dan checks out the other seven Anne of Green Gables books and leaves them in the tower.
~~~
“Are you sick?”
It’s five days later and Laurie flickers into view for a second time, hovering in the doorway of Dan’s bedroom.
Dan stares up at the ceiling and simply blinks. “No.” Although his heart feels as though it’s being ripped out, his eyes are permanently watery, and his mind can’t seem to stop bringing images of Sully into his mind. All the times Sully dragged him to another world expo, running around like a child and pointing various things out to him, exclaiming, “can you believe this? This is history in the making!” The time he and Sully went to the opening of Disneyland in 1955 and they rode the Mad Tea Party ride until they were sick with dizziness. When Sully made Dan excited about life, about waking up in the morning, because as long as he was with Sully, life meant something.
Laurie debates something in his head before drawing closer to Dan’s bed. “You don’t usually lay in bed until noon,” Laurie comments.
“I don’t.” And Dan doesn’t know whether he wants Laurie to stay and talk with him or have his day of peace on the anniversary of his divorce. Eventually, his need to talk to someone who knows that he’s immortal wins out and he says, “Did you know I used to be married?”
Laurie hovers by the window, and the sun becomes a little more muted behind Laurie’s ghostly figure. “I always wanted to marry somebody,” is what Laurie mutters quietly.
“136 years,” Dan says blandly, not looking Laurie in the eye. “136 years of memories down the drain.” He snorts. “I thought the relationship was going well, but he popped it on me one day out of the blue. Talking about how he didn’t think we were all that compatible. One hundred and thirty-six years of marriage and he decides then to ask for a divorce.
“And of course I agreed. Who am I to say no? Should I have fought for us more than I had? Maybe. But I want Sully to be happy. I just thought that that happiness also included me.”
Dan finally looks at Laurie who’s just staring at him with those eyes of his. Dan looks away and instead stares down at his hands over the comforter. “Christ. And here I am, almost half a century later, still hung up on the man. Sully’s probably still living large with his boyfriend or has found a new beau.” A wry smile finds its way onto Dan’s face at the pun only he gets. “Either way, he’s definitely not thinking about me.”
“When I learned my sister’s husband, Enoch, cheated on her at five months pregnant, I punched him in the face so his nose was permanently crooked and he lost a tooth.” When Dan looks over at Laurie, the ghost is grinning.
“Can you still punch?” Dan asks.
Laurie floats towards the bed and he sends a punch into the mattress. “I can but, unfortunately, I’m tethered to this building. So I wouldn’t be able to find your ex-husband to punch him even if I wanted to. Unless you lured him here. Then I’d happily do so.”
Dan finds the idea of Sully being punched by a ghost funny and he lets out a little chuckle. “Just the fact that you’re willing to do it makes me feel a little better.” He props himself up a little in bed and decides to change the subject by saying, “how far along are you with Anne?”
“Started the last one this morning,” replies Laurie with a frown. “I liked them better when Anne was the main character. I don’t necessarily care about her children’s lives.”
Dan has very little knowledge about Anne of Green Gables, only glancing at their summaries when he checked them out at the library. He’s intrigued as to why Laurie finds them so interesting. “I might read them myself after you’re done with them.” He’s not the fastest reader, nor is he able to read through the night like Laurie does, but what he does have is an eternity to read them.
Laurie seems to be thinking about immortality too, for he asks, “What’s it like? Being immortal, I mean.”
Dan takes some time to think of an answer. “It’s...it’s...strange,” he finally settles on a sufficient enough word. “On one hand, I have all the time in the world to travel, meet new people, have new experiences, see things change that not a lot of people get to see.” He swallows. “On the other, I can’t exactly make lasting relationships unless the other person is also an immortal, or some sort non-mortal.” Dan gestures to Laurie. “People die. I see the tragedies, the conflicts. It’s lonely when you can’t share all of yourself with someone else.”
Laurie nods silently.
Dan knows Laurie knows exactly what he’s talking about, and Dan finds some comfort there.
~~~
From then on, Laurie shows up more often in his ghost-form rather than floating about invisible. Dan talks to him more and more, enjoying the company and the fact that he doesn’t have to hide anything about himself.
Laurie doesn’t talk about his past much. Not that Dan isn’t trying. He’s curious. Only in little snippets does Laurie mention bits and pieces of when he was alive; Dan has to put them together like a puzzle to make the full picture of Laurie Blake.
One day, they’re discussing games they used to play as children and Dan mentions brewing “potions” and “stews” with dirt, rocks, and leaves from outside before serving it proudly to his parents. Laurie says, offhandedly, “the town didn’t like us and my mom didn’t allow me outside much. So as our form of entertainment, Lottie and I would stand in the garden, people-watching and making stories about their lives.”
Then, another time, when they’re playing chess in the sun room, Laurie mentions how Lottie always won their games together; how she was better at everything. How she was the favourite child. “We were quite close despite it,” Laurie tells Dan. “It’s not like she could help it, either, and she shielded me from everything the best she could.” He doesn’t elaborate on what “everything” means, but Dan can give his best guess.
When Dan’s cooking his supper and Laurie’s choosing a new oil for the diffuser, Laurie mentions his father. “Dedicated his whole life to making the elixir of life. Our basement was his lab where he tried different mixtures. Our house constantly smelled which didn’t help our image around town.” Laurie eventually chooses Vanilla Lavender, although a day later Honey Clementine is back in and Laurie claims it’s his favourite.
“I was an angry child,” Laurie says, as Dan tries de-weeding the garden. He can’t stand the way it looks, so unkempt. Besides, he loves the idea of watching a garden grow. “My mother wanted me to take it out on the garden, as that was a thing she did when she got irritable. But it was never something I was interested in. Which just made her more exasperated with me.”
“You don’t seem very angry now,” Dan comments, wiping away the sweat on his forehead with the back his glove. “Beating the vengeful ghost stereotype, anyway.”
“Spending two centuries alone as a ghost really mellows one out,” Laurie says and, even though Dan isn’t looking at him, he hears the grin on his face. “And sometimes it comes out—you’ve seen me losing at board games. But anyway, temper tantrums, yelling matches; I definitely wasn’t a model child like Lottie.” He says this with no malice in his voice and, not for the first time, Dan wonders what Laurie and Charlotte were like as children. Dan doesn’t have any siblings of his own, although he wanted one when he’d been young. Would they have become an immortal, too? Or would Dan’s hypothetical sibling being another victim to time?
~~~
“What’s it like? To travel the world?” Laurie says one night, when Dan is trying to get through the second Anne of Green Gables novel, Anne of Avonlea. Laurie’s fiddling with the radio dial, finding a good station to listen to. (Dan has decided to slowly introduce modern technology to Laurie. Showing him pocket-sized cellphones, the internet, VR headsets, colour television, and other things all at once might just kill Laurie for a second time).
Dan places his thumb on the page he left off before glancing up at the ghost who’s seated across from him, the diffuser between them. They’ve gotten into a good rhythm in the year since he’s moved in: they talk over breakfast before Laurie goes off on his own to do whatever ghosts do while Dan walks to the local cafe to do work (since wi-fi doesn’t work in the house, for some reason. Probably a ghostly reason). Then, Dan eats lunch at said cafe and goes to the library to get three or four new books at the library before returning to the cafe to work for a little longer. Once home, at supper, Laurie reappears where they read together or garden together or just talk.
Dan likes Laurie. With his witty humour, his laugh, his thoughtfulness. “It’s wonderful,” Dan tells Laurie. “I wish we could travel together. I wish you could see as much it as I’ve had. You’d love it.” He’d love to see Laurie experiencing the world for the first time.
Laurie frowns and sighs, finally settling on a station that’s playing Taylor Swift’s Snow on the Beach. “I do too. When I was younger, I dreamed of stealing away on a ship and becoming a pirate to see the world.”
Not for the first time, Dan wonders how Laurie died. The ghost has never mentioned it at all, nor how he became a ghost in the first place. Then again, Dan hasn’t exactly told Laurie the specifics of his immortality, although there’s not much to say. There was no magical potion, herb, or wizard who gifted/cursed him so. One day, he just stopped ageing. Dan almost wishes it was more exciting than that. What kind of story is his? As far as he can tell, his immortality just came upon him. He was never afraid of death or was ever searching immortality out like Laurie’s father. He didn’t ask for this life. (Would he choose it, were he given the choice?)
“There was this other ghost, for a time,” Laurie continues, his eyes downcast, and Dan is jolted out of his thoughts. “Lived across the street and we could talk if we stood just inside the invisible boarders surrounding our respective houses. Died in the 1980s, Brooke. She travelled a lot while she lived and would tell me stories about it.” There’s a pause and the soft sounds of Taylor Swift is the only thing Dan can hear. “Her house burned down and I haven’t seen her since.”
Dan doesn’t know what to say. Eventually, he settles on, “I can do that for you, too, if you’d like. Telling you about my travels.” He would have done so earlier, but he didn’t want to seem like he was bragging.
Laurie turns the dials again and a new song starts playing. Dan doesn’t recognize it.
“You can’t stay forever, either,” Laurie says.
Dan purses his lips. It’s been at the back of his mind, of course, he just didn’t want to say so. He usually stays in one place for about five years, nothing compared to the eternity he and Laurie will experience in the long run. It’ll feel like a second, in the grand scheme of things. Thousands of years from now, when Dan is still walking on the earth, will he still think back to Laurie, or will enough time have passed, so many more experiences made, that Dan won’t even remember the Victorian house with a ghost living within its walls? “I know. I wish I didn’t have to.”
Laurie sighs deeply and clicks on the diffuser which has been off since that afternoon. Dan watches as Laurie takes in a deep breath. (Can ghosts smell things? It certainly seems so; Laurie’s been playing with the diffuser since Dan first moved in).
Dan wishes wi-fi worked in the house. Video calling would work well to keep in contact even though it’s not the same as being there, but it would be better than nothing. And he knows landlines would be the perfect solution, but places are increasingly getting rid of them, preferring cellphones. He can’t promise that every house he lives in will have a landline anymore. He leans back on the couch and something hard digs into his back. He twists his arm around to see what it is and, when his hand wraps around the thing, he feels the familiar coldness of the toy soldier.
When Dan brings it forward, a sad smile spreads on Laurie’s face. “My sister gifted me them after she moved away with Enoch. I owned a similar set of them when I was younger but I buried them in the forest behind the cemetery while playing. She sent these soldiers a little after the wedding.”
Dan lights up. “That’s it!” he exclaims.
Laurie looks at him skeptically.
“Letters. Postcards. Pictures of all my travels. When I eventually have to move, I can send you stuff and you can send me letters back. You can still walk around the property so you can put outgoing letters in the mailbox and receive mine!” He’s bubbling with excitement at the thought.
Dan sees Laurie’s face slowly change; his eyes widen, his face becomes softer. “...That could work,” he breathes quietly. It’s clear he doesn’t want to get his hopes up, but it doesn’t dim Dan’s mood. Someone to talk to again; someone to confide with.
“I’d keep the house, of course,” Dan continues on. He doesn’t want what happened to Brooke to happen to Laurie. “Upkeep it from afar, depending on what you think needs to be done. Maybe, if you’d still like to have people live with you, we could rent it out.” Dan sees Laurie’s face. “Or not. We don’t have to do that; that’s fine.
“But we have time to figure it out. I’m here for another four years, at least.” Something’s settling in Dan’s mind, something inexplicable. He’s not healed from the scars Sully left him with, not by a long shot. This isn’t romantic love, at least not yet. It’s hope. Companionship, even if just platonic. A previously meaningless life being moulded into something meaningful.
This time, Laurie nods more enthusiastically. His eyes look more different than usual. It’s like they’re sparkling. “I think I’d like that. Sending and receiving letters. You.”
A smile grows on Dan’s face and, for the first time since 1976, Dan is excited for the future.