Essie didn’t linger long on the wedding photos, just long enough to tell me a funny story about how her great-uncle had forgotten his best man speech and after stammering for a few moments, had instead — I don’t know what. I wasn’t listening at that point. I was staring at the older man posed with the groom in one of the pictures. He was a good few years younger and less wrinkled, but he was unmistakably the creepy old man from my dreams.

One of the diagrams hanging on the wall of the schoolroom was a family tree. I’d noticed it earlier, but hadn’t really examined it until around a few days after that lucid dream. One afternoon during a math lesson, Essie excused herself to go to the restroom, and after skimming over my lesson plans again, I got up and went over to the wall to look at the maps. One of the world maps was old, from the mid-twentieth century judging from the presence of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, but Patience had acquired a pretty new one at some point as well, and there were maps of the United States, Canada, and several U.S. states, mostly in the South but also including Oregon and Colorado. These maps had pins on them, usually a good distance from the nearest big city; the one on the Georgia map was in northern Taine County, about where we were. And hanging between the maps of Georgia and Tennessee was a large handwritten Oldcroft family tree.

The handwriting was small, and in several hands. I had to lean close to read it. Of course I looked first near the bottom for Patience and Essie, and found a whole crowd of their distant cousins, but not them. Every name was annotated with not just a date or dates, but a location as well, and none of the names at the bottom with no death date were in Georgia.

Then I found Patience and Essie a few inches from the bottom, and realized that they were fewer generations removed from the seventeenth-century patriarch and matriarch at the top of the tree than most of their living cousins. When I found them, I saw where Essie’s deadname had been whited out and written over with her chosen name: Esther Daisy Oldcroft, 2015- , Georgia. Naturally, I next looked to see if I could learn anything about her father, though I knew it was none of my business — I’d gathered enough from Patience’s silence to know he wasn’t in the picture for whatever reason. Her father, Roy Theodore Oldcroft, was still alive and listed as living in North Carolina. But unlike with most of the couples on the tree, there was no marriage date listed for him and Patience. And if I went back up a few levels, I found that Roy and Patience had the same great-great-great-grandparents. That squicked me out for a moment until I did the math and realized that they probably didn’t share much more genetic information than two random white southerners.

Next I looked at Patience’s parents (married in 1990, both died in 2009), and then her grandparents, looking for the grandfather who lived down the road and was causing so much trouble for Patience and Essie.

All four of Patience’s grandparents were dead. The most recent, her paternal grandfather, had died in 2020.

I was pretty sure Patience had referred to “my grandfather,” but maybe it was Essie’s great-grandfather on her father’s side that they were talking about? I checked. Roy Oldcroft had one of his grandmothers still living, but both of his grandfathers were dead, too.

That couldn’t be right.

Just then Essie came back from the restroom. “Oh! You’re looking at the family tree me and Mommy made! It’s really neat, huh?”

“It is,” I said, forcing a smile even as my mind raced, trying to process what I’d just learned. “You and Mommy made this? How long did it take you?”

She scratched her head. “Several months, I guess? Mommy got together all the old family books and the new stuff like wedding invitations and letters saying ‘We had a baby!’ and stuff like that. See here,” she said, pointing to the bottom layers, where I could recognize her handwriting on some of the youngest members of the family — babies born in the last couple of years in Oregon, North Carolina, and Alberta.

I let Essie ramble about how they’d made the family tree, and how their first attempts had run into trouble with not having enough room for the more prolific branches of the family until they started over with a bigger piece of posterboard, smaller handwriting and better planning, and then a story about how they’d traveled to visit their North Carolina relatives and she got to hold her baby cousin Nina, she was so cute! and... and... and... If Patience’s grandfathers were both dead, and so were her father and all her great-grandfathers, who was it that she kept having loud phone conversations with?

Was she not talking on the phone at all?

I was too dazed to resume the math lesson right away, so I let Essie keep talking about her family for a while longer, nodding and asking occasional questions whose answers, half the time, went in one ear and out the other.

If Patience was telling the truth when she said Essie had only been living as a girl for four months, she would have transitioned a good three years after her grandfather died. So why was Essie so upset about her grandfather being transphobic about her? He would have died when she was five. I told myself she probably had some early signs of being trans that her grandfather came down hard on, several years before she informed her mother she was a girl. But it must have been really traumatic if she was still having bad dreams about him three years later. Three years is forever for an eight-year-old.

No, that didn’t fit. She always talked about him in the present tense. He “hassles us and makes Mommy do stuff she doesn’t want to,” he “is being so mean about it.”

“Do you have any family photo albums?” I asked. “In a book, or on the computer either one?”

“Oh yeah, we’ve got both. Mommy has the pictures from when we went to North Carolina on her computer, but there’s lots of old ones in the books downstairs. C’mon!” I followed her eager footsteps downstairs to the parlor, where she pulled two books almost too heavy for her to lift off of one of the bookshelves. I helped her by taking one of them, and we went over to the sofa and opened them on the coffee table.

I won’t go into a lot of detail. She showed me some very old photos from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, or more likely copies thereof, and then got into more recent relatives, skipping a few pages at a time as she shared disconnected anecdotes about her ancestors and other relatives. Then we came to her mother’s parents’ wedding pictures.

Essie didn’t linger long on them, just long enough to tell me a funny story about how her great-uncle had forgotten his best man speech and after stammering for a few moments, had instead — I don’t know what. I wasn’t listening at that point. I was staring at the older man posed with the groom in one of the pictures. He was a good few years younger and less wrinkled, but he was unmistakably the creepy old man from my dreams.

We never did get back to studying math that day.

* * *

Of course I tried to chalk it up to some form of mental suggestion. There were several framed family photos in different rooms of the house, and surely I’d seen a photo of the old man without consciously thinking about it, giving nightmare fodder to my subconscious. But that evening after supper, I examined every photo on the walls of the downstairs rooms, and none of them portrayed the old man from the wedding photos or my dreams. After Patience and Essie had gone to bed, I got out the photo album again and looked more closely. The album ended in the early 2000s, probably around the time Patience’s parents switched to a digital camera, but before that there were several more photos of Patience’s paternal grandfather. The latest pictures of him showed an even stronger resemblance to the man in my dreams.

And those dreams were coming back, after a reprieve of about a week. Fortunately, so far my lucid dreaming exercises were working out. Whenever my grandfather or Patience’s grandfather showed up, I would change the scene, and after one or two, or on one occasion three scene changes, I managed to get away from them. Fantastical settings seemed better at shutting them out than real-world settings. I ran into Essie pretty often in these lucid dreams; sometimes she was the one to remind me I was dreaming, turning the tables after that first lucid dream where I’d told dream-Essie that we were dreaming.

One morning after dream-Essie and I had had a picnic under a glass dome on Europa, where our transphobic ancestors hadn’t followed us, I got up and fixed breakfast, growing a little concerned when neither Patience nor Essie came downstairs at the usual time. When I was finished eating and washing up, Patience came downstairs and said, “I’m sorry, but Essie isn’t feeling well. Maybe you could do lessons this afternoon, but let’s not count on it. Why don’t you take the day off and go somewhere?”

“I hope she feels better soon,” I said. This was the first possible evidence I’d seen of any physical disability. But maybe it was all mental issues, like the nightmares she’d been having; maybe they’d come back worse than usual last night, and she hadn’t slept enough.

I decided to go for a walk after breakfast. I didn’t want to go into the woods by myself, so I walked down the driveway and along the dirt road. The road was twisty and surrounded by dense woods on both sides, with an occasional mailbox and a driveway snaking off into the woods like the Oldcrofts’. I walked the better part of a mile before I ran across an old cemetery, on the same side of the road as the Oldcrofts’ property. You find these tiny single-family cemeteries all over Georgia, most of them maintained now by a local historical society if they’re still maintained at all; I’d seen a few before. There was one a couple of miles from South Taine Elementary that I used to pass by on the way to work. I walked into the cemetery and looked at some of the graves.

This one looked better-maintained than most, based on the recently-cut grass and the flowers on one of the double graves. I recognized several names from the family tree, going back to the mid-1800s. The graves with the fresh flowers belonged to Patience’s parents. And to their left were the graves of Patience’s father’s parents. Their double headstone showed signs of having been first placed when Patience’s grandmother died in 1998, and the date of her grandfather’s death having been carved in later, in lettering that didn’t quite match the rest. Her mother’s parents didn’t seem to be buried here; according to the family tree they’d both died in the early 2000s, and had lived in Tennessee.

I remembered what Patience had said when I was interviewing. “My grandfather is... down the road, and calls and drops in at unexpected times.” She hadn’t said “He lives down the road,” because, I realized, that would have been a lie. No, he was buried down the road. And he was haunting his granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

And me.

I wanted to sit down and think, but I didn’t want to do it anywhere near that cemetery. I walked a little way back toward the house and leaned against a tree. No cars had come along during my walk, and none came along for another twenty minutes after that as I put together the clues I’d tried hard not to see.

Patience had told Essie, before she hired me, not to say much about her great-grandfather. And Essie had looked guilty and been apologetic when she slipped up and said too much about him. Patience probably didn’t want me thinking Essie was delusional, seeing her dead great-grandfather. She was having periodic loud conversations with him in the middle of the night, so she’d told me that he called at odd hours to cover for that.

When Essie had nightmares or night terrors, was he just haunting her dreams, like he did mine, or was she waking up and seeing his ghost in her room?

I thought about the other weird things that had happened lately and wondered if they were connected to the ghost, and how. Those sudden, unforecasted storms the day I interviewed and the day I moved in... could Patience’s grandfather have caused them, trying to stop me from coming or just hassle me? If he didn’t approve of Patience letting Essie transition, he obviously didn’t approve of her hiring a trans teacher either, as evidenced by his haunting my dreams. Those coincidences where Essie and I both had nightmares on the same nights... and those lucid dreams where I told Essie she was dreaming in both her dream and mine. I’d suspected that if I dug deeper and asked Essie for more details, I would find they were exactly the same, shared dream. Had that happened because Patience’s grandfather was haunting both our dreams? Was he haunting Patience’s dreams as well? She seemed to be able to see and hear him while awake, to judge from the arguments I’d overheard or heard Essie tell me about. One of those had even been during the day.

I also remembered Essie’s feat of magnetic levitation, but I couldn’t figure out how it fit in. She’d looked guilty after doing that, same as when she slipped up and said too much about her great-grandfather. And hadn’t she looked guilty after I dozed off while teacher her about the history of India?

At last I stood up straight and started walking back to the house, determined to ask Patience some pointed questions.

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