Eddie is still an emotionally fragile girl when she reaches high school. She spent a few years learning at home and, when she returns to school, it is to a neighbouring district. She is bookish and quiet, her free time spent alone in the library where she studies designs for steam powered things. Her favourite projects are those she can build and she always chooses the elective courses that allow her to create something. Daisy has built her a workshop in the lower level of the barn where she has a boiler and a drive shaft and all manner of steam driven tools, many of which she has built under Thomas' careful, but distant supervision. She has dragged his tools and his watchmaker's cabinet into her own space. Enola's trunk is always open and she studies his designs in earnest. They are elegant, functional, and fascinating.
She is seventeen when she determines for certain that she wants nothing to do with her peers. She attends the cast party for the high school play. As the set designer, she is someone they rarely saw, invited, but not really welcomed. After she is greeted by the hosts, she settles into a tacky green vinyl chair in one corner. The gathering is everything she imagined- loud, mindless, and accompanied by terrible music. She stays only because she has a slight crush on one of the understudies. The later the night gets, the more uncomfortable she becomes. Someone brings bottles of wine from the kitchen. Then another someone starts passing a joint around. And yet another someone opens a mint tin to share pills that have no label. The boy she is watching comes to talk to her for a little while, then brings her a drink. She trusts him. She should not. She is getting groggy as she watches other boys push themselves onto girls who look to be as woozy as she is. She passes out in the chair.
When she wakes at dawn, she is the only person not sleeping. There are half naked teenagers all over the room. She struggles to sit up, panic rising in her chest as she checks her own clothes. They are all where they should be.
A familiar voice comes from beside her, "You're safe. But I do think you should call for the authorities."
She turns and sees Thomas perched on the arm of her chair, "Have you been there all night?"
"Yes. And the young man you were watching- I believe he is called Ben?" She nods, "He had best not come near you again. He tried and I made myself as visible as I could. I believe whatever he took earlier in the night made my presence quite clear. His expression was amusing."
"Wait, are you telling me my crush tried to...?"
"I do not know. But I was unwilling to discover his intent."
She gathers her things, "Let's get out of here." She drives home as fast as the law allows, sometimes a little faster. As soon as she is in her front door, she calls the police and makes an anonymous report.
She hears rumours at school that the police found more drugs in the house than she ever saw. She determines there is no reason to socialize with her peers if they are just going to do stupid things. She returns all her attention to her tinkering. Her quiet, consistent life is what she wants, and the only excitement she wishes for is the excitement of discovery. She shares what she learns with Thomas. She sits at her workbench and he hovers over her shoulder, watching intently, asking questions as she works with wires and microcircuits, technology that makes her world run in the same way that steam did his. But the modern electric everything, wires so tiny they are printed, not hand run, cannot enchant her in the same way and Eddie always returns to Thomas' steam engines. There is something incredible and elemental about powering machines by belts and heat and water. She cuts wood for the pile when it dwindles, determined that there should always be the means to bring the boiler to a full head of steam.
The household does change, though, when May Ellen dies. One less voice at the table, and one more trip to Elmwood Cemetery. Eddie and Rose pay little attention to the funeral, their minds elsewhere, the cemetery a reminder of something they don't want to think of as a part of their future. May's brother, Richard, his son, Alan, and Alan's partner, Theodore, are faces they have only rarely seen and they feel awkward trying to converse with them. Instead, they huddle together at the cafe they stop in after her burial and pretend that there aren't other people around them.
Eddie's first relationship is an accident. She falls in step with a young man on the way out of her college chemistry class and feels obligated to strike up a conversation. He asks her to coffee. Within a few months, she is spending nights at his apartment. But things take a turn for the worse. He is controlling, he does not like when she disappears back home for the weekend without telling him, and he discourages the little gear-turned inventions that she often wants to bring over to show him. There is always an excuse. A friend's kitten. The project he has on every coffee table. The holiday decorating he never gets around to doing. Then he shoves her. Later, he slaps her.
Thomas does not like what he sees. He asks Eddie often if she is all right and she always tells him she is, that she can handle herself. That it is none of his business. But he cannot help himself. He watches. Rose causes far less worry. She rarely dates and when she does, she dates women. The ones she has dated have never wanted to control her. Thomas wonders if it has something to do with the area she studies. Perhaps fewer troublesome individuals populate the library sciences.
He always tells Eddie that he will respect her mind, her decision to stay, even if it hurts to watch. And she thanks him, even though she knows she is making a terrible decision. But when she misses a period, her boyfriend's rage is far greater than it ever has been and he punches her in the stomach before tossing her against a wall. He storms out of the apartment. Eddie pries herself from the floor, shuddering. Cool hands steady her.
"Slowly, dear girl."
"What the fuck just happened?"
"You know as well as I."
"But over a pregnancy test? I don't even have it yet."
"And what will happen if you are?"
She sighs, "He'll kill me."
"Gather your things. Leave, Eddie. Please, I beg of you. I cannot herald another young death."
"Yeah. I think I have to, don't I?"
"Have to what?" her boyfriend asks as he returns to the apartment.
She shrinks against the wall as she notices there is a gun in his hand, "Oh god, don't."
"Tell me what you have to do."
"Get the hell out of here."
"No, bitch, you're never leaving."
While Thomas knows this particular person probably cannot see him, or is not willing to see him, and he is not supposed to intervene in death, he once again finds himself desperately unwilling to merely observe. He remembers the feeling of the Japanese soldier passing through him, live grenade in hand, as her boyfriend raises his weapon. Thomas gathers all the ghostly strength he can muster to slam the hand holding the gun to the ground. Eddie grabs her bag and runs out of the apartment.
Surprised that he could do anything at all, Thomas wills himself seen and prays to whatever in the universe makes a person ready to see the dead to allow him just one moment. Eddie's boyfriend stares in horror as Thomas fades into view, glaring at him. He says nothing, just glowers, attempting to be as frightening as a dead man could be.
"What the fuck are you?" Thomas steps closer. "Get back!" He raises his gun. Thomas disappears.
Eddie hasn't stopped running and she does not stop until she is safely in her dorm room, every lock on the door fastened tight. She calls the police and tells them everything. And then she tosses herself onto her bed and cries. Thomas finds her. He stays even when the officers come to speak to her, invisible beside her, a hand on her back. And he is there all through the night until her room-mate returns.
The restraining order is enough to reassure Eddie for a little while, but a a few months later, he walks through it and attacks her in her dorm room. Thomas has been following Rose, but something tells him he needs to find Eddie- she is pinned to the bed when he arrives. His appearance is enough to scare, but not enough to get her ex-boyfriend to leave. Eddie calls the police once again while Thomas, now the target of his ire, draws him closer to the boiling electric kettle. He lunges and Thomas vanishes, slipping away to stand between him and Eddie. He stumbles onto the kettle and howls as the scalding water splashes on his chest. He staggers towards the bathroom she shares with the room next door. Eddie locks him in. When the police arrive, he is pounding on the door, screaming. They take her statement and arrest him as he blathers about ghosts. Thomas once again stays with her until her room-mate returns.
She is glad to graduate less than a month later so she can officially be done with the university. She returns to her family and her steam engines.
Not long after, family returns to her. A letter addressed to May Ellen McMichael arrives at the house. Maria opens it. Eliot's body has been recovered from a mass grave in Saipan. He will be arriving in the United States shortly and they would like to know where to bring him. Maria knows exactly what to do and in a few weeks, they fill the space that has been waiting for him in Elmwood for 59 years. Young soldiers fold the flag from his coffin and present it to his granddaughter. But the funeral is not only attended by the young. There are old men there, men who remember Eliot Carter Cushing McMichael as a skilled medic with a gentle way of reassuring even the most fatally wounded men that they were in good hands. These stories captivate the little family. None of them met him. None of them know much about him. But now he is a real person remembered by Marines and Midshipmen.
Thomas remembers some of these stories. But it is easy even for a ghost to forget and the words bring back so much from those few days in 1944. Beyond all, though, he remembers their first encounter, the young man visiting Allerdale Hall oh his sister's insistence who asked after that he not speak to his family. Thomas wonders what he would think of the fact that his granddaughter, great granddaughter, and great great granddaughter all have known him since their birth and have asked him to live so openly in their household. He hopes that he would be understanding.
Daisy, Eddie, Maria, Nellie, and Rose invite Richard, Alan, and Theodore to their house on their way home from the funeral, but they decline. Their journey to Traverse City is long and, though a rest might be nice, they want to be home before too late. They do agree to eat together, though, and to one final stop in Brush Park to the vacant lot where Edith and Alan's house once stood. There are a few fragments of brick scattered around the lot and Eddie picks one up to take home.
"You wouldn't remember it, Rose, but you met Edith- Eliot's mother- in this house. She was a lovely woman. Died the year you were born," Nellie tells her daughter.
Rose nods, not entirely interested. But Eddie is, and she tries to imagine what the house might have been like inside as Nellie describes the fireplace beside which Edith sat and read.
Daisy turns to her, "You look like you're thinking."
"Yeah. I never saw this place. Are there pictures?"
"I'm sure there are. All Edith's stuff is in the basement. And a good chunk of Charlotte's things. Some of my mother's stuff, too."
"I keep wondering what it was like to get that telegram."
"She kept a journal. She probably wrote about it."
"Do you think the telegram's there?"
"Might be somewhere- it came to Maria. May would have had it. I remember when the two officers came to the door to tell us that my brother was dead. The letter they brought with them is in Mom's stuff. So's the one they brought when Dad died. It's not the kind of thing you throw away, even if you never want to see it again. There's a reason Mom always said she's smuggle any of us to Canada if there was ever another draft."
"Didn't Eliot enlist?"
"Yeah. He wanted a choice. Dad did, too. But my brother didn't."
"That's a lot of people to lose."
"Mom had a little brother who died when he was just a baby, too. And Eliot's son drowned when he was three."
"Holy shit, has this family had a generation where nobody's died tragically?"
"Not until Nellie, Rose, and you."
"Wow."
Daisy lowers her voice, "Eliot's grandson, Alan, over there, was a twin. Max died when he was just a baby."
"Damn. That explains all the little lambs in the cemetery. Wait, what about Edith? She and Alan lived a long time, didn't they?"
"They did. I don't know how Thomas fits into the picture, but he's family somehow. And he looks like he was stabbed in the face- that would be pretty tragic. He'd be about the same age as them."
"Oh. Right."
"If you're interested in the family stories, we'll make a tree and go through the stuff downstairs. Mom never touched any of Edith or Charlotte's things. They died the same year; she just never felt up to it."
"Would any of Eliot's things be down there? I feel like I need to look into his military service, figure out where he was. I've never even heard of Saipan."
"Rich would have that. Let's ask him while we're here."
"Are you sure? I mean, we just buried his dad."
"It'll be OK." Daisy wanders over to where Richard is waiting, "Hey. Question for you." He raises an eyebrow, "Do you know much about your dad's military service? Eddie was asking me about it. Neither of us know anything about Saipan."
Richard shakes his head, "No, I don't. I knew he was in the Navy, but other than that...today's the first day I heard he was a medic. I was four when he died. There's a lot I don't know."
"Do you have anything that might help her look him up?"
"There's a box in the attic I can mail to you. I don't really care to go through it. I'd rather just keep moving forward. It's not like the dead can talk."
They all say their goodbyes and part ways.
Back in Stockbridge, Daisy brings her mother's boxes up from the basement and sets them out in the living room, "I don't know where you want to start, but this what I can probably help you the most with. There's a lot here. And this is all just my mother's stuff. This doesn't even touch Charlotte and Edith's boxes. I think Alan's papers are mixed in with Edith's."
"Let's start with a family tree. And then we're going to figure out what to do with all this. How to preserve it."
"Do we really have to, Ed? There's so much here... Just think of all the time this is going to take!" Rose protests.
"You're a library person, you're supposed to like organizing stuff."
"Yeah...stuff that somebody else already numbered and made a system for. I'm just the one who tends it's local incarnation. Seriously, though- do you know now many documents you've got just in this one box? There's got to be a few hundred..."
"Then I guess I'd better get started. Let's stack these by the drafting table in my room. I've got a lot of letters to read."
Daisy picks up a box, "I'll help you move these. Then we're drawing a family tree. It's hard enough to keep everybody straight when you do have one, no sense in starting off at a disadvantage wondering who the heck these people are Mom's writing to."