Emily checked her cell phone. It was nearly midnight and time to be going home. Mom wouldn’t start worrying for another hour. It was sky-watching time, so being late wasn’t unusual.
Caleb held on for dear life as she drove them back to Belfast, real fear on his face for the first several miles, only to be replaced by hooting and hollering as adrenaline rushed through him on the ride.
“What manner of conveyance is this?” he asked, his voice shaking a little.
“How long are you going to keep up this pretense?” she asked.
“Pretense?” he asked, his face appearing to be a mask of innocence. “I think I must have died and gone to heaven. None of this is real and I may wake up face down in a ditch, or it might be that my mind has taken me to a faraway place so I can avoid the torture of the British.”
“Caleb,” she said. “I’m serious now. I don’t know where you’ve come from, but you were clearly in need of clean clothes and food, so where are you really from?”
“I told you, miss. I’m from Nashua, New Hampshire.”
“How did you get here?”
“On the ship the U.S.S. Warren, which is now at the bottom of Penobscot Bay,” he said. “I told you, we scuttled our ships, and we’ve been ordered to cross back to Boston overland. I was with a group, but one of the militia members, Benjamin Haskins, took a musket round, and we were separated from the main body of men. I buried him on the bank of the river yesterday morning and have been trying to catch up with the rest of the men since.”
“What do you think the date is?” Emily asked.
“It’s August the eighteenth,” he said. “Unless I lost track of time.”
“Well, you’re right,” she said. So that meant his mental faculties were still intact. He knew the date. The problem was the year. “You actually think you’re from the Revolutionary War,” she said.
“Revolutionary?” he asked. “That’s an interesting description of our present troubles with the British. I suppose you could call it a revolution, but I see it more as maintaining an established state of being. We’ve been an independent, sovereign nation for years now. Britain just doesn’t want to accept it. It’s less about fighting to be independent and more about defending the independence we’ve already achieved.”
“Okay,” Emily said. “Tell me what happened, if you were there.”
“We landed hundreds of marines more than two weeks ago, but then we didn’t provide them sufficient naval support. We were too slow. I don’t mean to speak badly about the commodore, but he became timid when he should have been brave. We took some damage to the forestay and main, but we had thirty-two guns, which are sitting below the waves, now worthless. We were forced to retreat upriver by the British navy, once they arrived. I still think we could have taken them if we could have just been more coordinated. Instead, we fled. Like cowards. And we burned our own ships. Like cowards.”
“You’re talking about the Penobscot Expedition,” Emily said, looking at him in wonder.
“I don’t know it by that name,” Caleb said. “We called it nothing so grand. It was the assault on Fort George. A disaster by any— Aaaah!”
His sudden yell caused Emily to nearly lose control of the car.
“What on earth? What was that?” she asked.
“The sudden lights in our faces from another conveyance coming toward us. I thought we would collide!”
“It’s just another car going the other way,” Emily said. “See this double yellow line?”
“I do, you are right on top of it.”
“It only seems that way,” she said, “Because of the angle from your point of view. I am to the right of the lines. People coming the other way will also be on the right. That’s how we avoid collisions. Don’t be afraid.”
They arrived at the house about fifteen minutes later, although the ride was not without a few moments of subdued panic from Caleb whenever they met an oncoming car. Emily watched him grip the dash each time it happened. But once he got used to it, he became enthralled by all the lights and buildings in the town.
“It’s like New York City,” he said.
“Nothing like that,” Emily said, giggling.
“I’ve never actually been,” he said. “I was just guessing.”
They snuck in quietly through the front door, which Emily locked behind them.
“My mother is upstairs, sleeping,” she whispered. “We need to be quiet.”
Caleb stopped in the entry, taking in the home, his eyes rising to the vaulted entry ceiling, glass windows, and chandelier.
“Wonders,” he whispered.
He glanced at the polished hardwood floor, taking tentative steps, and then chose to walk on the carpet runner instead, stopping to look at framed photos on the wall.
Emily stopped when she heard him gasp behind her and turned to look.
“It’s you!” he said, pointing to her eighth-grade photo. “But younger.”
“Yes,” she said, taking a step back toward him. “Nearly six years ago.”
“You were always lovely, then,” he said. But then he covered his mouth with his hand, his eyes wide. “My apologies for vocalizing that.”
Emily blushed, took him by the hand and led him into the kitchen where she opened the refrigerator.
Caleb stopped and gaped. “It has a light inside. And it’s like winter! An ice box with a light.”
He watched Emily move back and forth between the abundance of produce and the counter where she placed ingredients, and then overwhelmed by what he was seeing, Caleb opened and closed the refrigerator six times, watching as the light turned off and came back on each time.
“Sit,” she said, indicating one of four padded wooden stools on the other side of the counter.
Caleb did as she asked, watching as Emily constructed a pair of ham and Swiss sandwiches with lettuce and pickles, topped off with a dab of spicy mustard on brioche buns. She added barbecue potato chips and root beers to their late dinner.
Caleb tested the root beer. “It sparkles!” he observed. “It is quite good.”
He smiled and then looked around the open concept downstairs. “So much isinglass,” he observed. “But it is so clear to see through!”
“It’s just glass,” Emily said. “Glass windows.”
“But there is so much of it,” he said. “It must not handle winters well.”
“Seems to do okay,” Emily said. “I think it’s two layers of glass.”
Caleb took a tentative bite of the sandwich, chewed, then smiled. “This is delicious,” he said.
“Thank you,” Emily said. “It’s easy to cook when there’s no cooking to do.”
“Are you a good cook?” he asked.
“I do pretty okay,” she said.
“I’m sure you do,” he said, scratching his scraggly beard while she looked at him thoughtfully. “You live here with your mother? What about your father?”
“Divorced,” Emily said. “When I was a baby. He lives in California now.”
“Divorced? Are you scandalized?”
“Sadly, it’s become normalized since the Revolutionary War.”
“You have used that phrase a few times.”
“That’s how we know it,” she said. “It was our war for independence from Britain.”
“It is a shame we did so poorly,” he said sadly.
“We lost some battles, but we won the war,” she replied, smiling. “We have been independent from Britain for two and a half centuries.”
Caleb stopped chewing and stared at her, raising his eyebrows.
“Yep, it’s true.”
“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “The sacrifices were worth it after all.”
Emily couldn’t think of a good response to that, so she just nodded as he sat there in silence, finishing his sandwich.
Caleb finished first, enjoyed his potato chips (which he spent as much time examining as eating), and covered his mouth to hide a belch after finishing his root beer. “Excuse me,” he said.
After the meal, Emily busied herself cleaning up and wiping down the counter.
“Water is so easy to obtain,” Caleb observed. “It seems like it’s everywhere.”
Emily caught him eyeing the butcher block knife set.
“What?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, being careful with his words. “You have ready water, and knives, and I have not had a good shave in weeks.”
He scratched his scraggly beard as he said it.
“I think I could help you with that with better tools,” Emily said.
“You wish to groom me?” he asked.
Emily paused, wondering how she had arrived in this situation. Either one or the other of them was crazy or, maybe it was just the situation that was crazy. Or maybe it was all a dream. In any case, it surprised her when she heard herself say, “You could use a trim.”
Fifteen minutes later in the downstairs bathroom, he sat on the toilet with his shirt off and a towel wrapped around his shoulders. An electric trimmer covered with stray hairs sat on the sink. Emily sat on a stool in front of him, tilting his head back with her left hand, and using a safety razor with her right hand to clean up the stubble on his chin.
She worked in silence as they sat close to each other, and it amazed her just how young he appeared now, as the last remnants of his beard went down the sink. He was a very handsome young man, and she found herself very drawn to him. The more time she spent in close proximity to him, the stronger the pull until she felt her heart racing as she finished the last strokes of the razor.
“These strange machines will launder my clothing?” Caleb asked as he listened to the washing machine tumble next to him.
“They’ll be clean and smelling fresh in the morning,” Emily said. She warmed two washcloths in the sink, using the first to clean the remaining shaving cream from his face and the second to simply wrap his jaw and cheeks to steam his skin.
Caleb’s eyes were closed in a blissful peace and more than once he whispered something about heaven.
When she unwrapped the last washcloth, he opened his eyes, blue as the morning sky, and Emily was shocked at just how close her face had come to his. It was almost as if her mind was no longer in control of her body, which seemed to make decisions for her.
Oh, I’m in trouble! she thought.
She stood up and backed away from him, but it took all of her will to do so.
“What do you think?” she asked, pointing him to the mirror.
He stood and turned to look. His reflection smiled at her. “A very good shave,” he said. “Thank you. I feel almost human again.”
“Almost human?” she asked.
“I was a sailor for so long,” he said.
“Sailors aren’t humans?” she asked, chuckling.
“It’s debatable,” he offered.
“The guest bedroom is right across the hall. I’m going to leave the light on down here so you can go back and forth to the bathroom if you need it, okay?”
“Thank you, Miss Emily,” he said.
She nodded as he left the bathroom, leaving her to clean the sink and sweep up the floor where bits of his beard had littered the cold tiles.
Emily climbed the stairs, but stopped at the landing, looking back down at the door to the guest bedroom. It was slightly ajar. Wouldn’t it be best to warn him about her mother? She should probably talk with him about what to expect in the morning, right? Best not to leave that to a surprise.
She hesitated at the edge of the landing and then slowly walked down the stairs and approached the gap in the door.
“Caleb?” she asked. “Everything okay?”
She pushed the door just slightly, and it opened a bit more—enough for her to peek in.
He was standing, shirtless, the skin of his arm and shoulder nearly glowing from the light of the bedroom lamp.
Against her better judgment, moving slowly as a war raged within her, she pushed the door the rest of the way open to see him, naked from the waist up.
They both stood there, taking each other in. She fidgeted while he stood calmly, broad-chested, but with wonder in his eyes.
“Emily,” he began, “should this all prove to be a mere dream—though a most wondrous one at that—or should I awaken in some distant infirmary, a prisoner of war at Fort George, or perishing in a ditch of thirst, I must speak these words to you now, whilst I am able.”
“What words?” she asked, barely whispering.
“If you are a dream, you are the most beautiful of all dreams,” he said.
She blushed and looked down at the oriental rug on the floor, trying to get lost in its patterns.
“Good night, Caleb.”
“Good night, Miss Emily,” he replied.
Emily hurried up the stairs to her room, pushing the door closed with her back and leaning heavily on the door, more out of breath than she expected. Despite the late hour, sleep evaded her for a long time.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.