Henry pulled at the wide door with both hands, grunting as it rolled on its track to the right. The barn was dark, save for the slivers of moonlight that streamed in between the gaps in the wooden slats.
The scent of hay overwhelmed his nostrils as he took a step into the barn, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows. Everything appeared as usual. The hay was stacked by the bushel in the far right corner. A wheelbarrow and wood working table were to his immediate right. Tools of various shapes and sizes were stacked and hung on metal hooks on the left hand side.
And somewhere was Henry’s dead daughter, sobbing like an ordinary thirteen year old girl was prone to do.
He followed the sound until he saw her, stretched out between two wood piles, cradling her head in her arms as she shook.
“Layla, what’s the matter?” Henry asked softly, bending with his palm out as if to stroke her hair.
But she was too quick. She pushed herself up from the ground, and was back on her feet within seconds. She stared at him with a mixture of concern and uncertainty. For the first time, Henry noticed the cream-colored lace gown he buried his daughter in made Layla appear much younger than she was.
Layla paced across the dirt floor, the end of her dress twirling as she moved.
“I… I don’t know,” she whispered. “This morning I went down by the pond near the basil field. I was just sitting there, dipping my feet into the water, when it felt like I wasn’t in control of my mind.” She shrugged helplessly as she walked.
“Whatever do you mean?” Henry asked. He adjusted his thick sweater around himself once more against the biting chill.
Finally, Layla stopped pacing and turned to face her father. Her mouth, usually spread wide in a full-fledged grin drooped in the corners. Her blonde hair lay limp against her shoulders. Her pupils turned white in death, but he could still recall their former color—the same color the leaves in the apple orchard turned when spring was in full bloom.
“I don’t know, Daddy. It’s almost as if… as if I’m starting to remember moments from the day I died,” she said.
Tears formed in Henry’s eyes as they looked at each other. Flashes of that day floated to the front of his mind… how the breeze made the previous crop of wheat stalks shimmy under the cloud-less blue sky. The soft cawing of a crow perched on the wooden fence that ran behind the barn. The lilting giggles of Layla, emanating from the lush, rolling fields in the near distance.
“It’s wretched enough that you experienced it once, my dear,” Henry said, trying to be tender. “Surely you don’t want to experience it again?”
Layla sighed, and dug at the dirt floor with her left big toe. “I just think I have the right to know,” she murmured quietly. Wayward strands of her light blonde hair fell forward as she stared at her feet.
Henry opened his mouth and then closed it again, unsure of what to say. All of his life he had been the type of person who scorned the tenets of most pseudo sciences. Apparitions, astrology, telepathy… it was all rubbish in the man’s eyes. He never allowed Layla to read about haunted places growing up—not because he was afraid she would be scared, but because he refused to let her believe in something that was not born of science, born of logic. Even God had no place at Mr. Hayward’s table.
And then Layla appeared on his doorstep, fresh from the grave she had been buried in. Nothing seemed logical to Henry after that.
Still, he readily gave up on his paradigms if it meant having his daughter return to him—if not alive then close enough. The two fell into their habitual way of interacting. Layla would sit across from her father in their metal fishing boat as he attempted to catch a trout. She would help him tend to the chickens and the cows, who lived in wooden pens beside the barn. They even took turns reading the poetry of Walt Whitman aloud, lounging about on the rug in front of the fireplace.
On one such night, Layla admitted she could not recall what happened to her.
“It felt almost as if my life had been a dream and all of the images and textures of it dissolved the moment I first opened my eyes,” she told him.
She picked at the thick threads of the rug beneath her, and looked at her father with moist eyes. “Would you tell me what happened, Daddy?” she asked.
Henry sighed as he looked at his daughter’s iridescent white pupils, staring at him from her otherwise familiar face. The fire crackled beside them.
“It was an accident, sweetheart,” Henry said, not meeting her gaze as he fidgeted with the book in his hands. “One minute you were there, and the next… you were gone. You may wish to know what happened that day, but it was excruciatingly painful for me. I’d readily give up the memory of it if I could.”
Chastised for her morbid curiosity, Layla bit her lip and nodded in silence. Of course that had had been unbearable for her father. It was wretched of her to even ask. Somehow, she found her way back to him, to home and that was all she could have ever asked for.
Within mere moments, she accepted the fact that she would never know what caused her death and not mentioned it since that night, until now in the darkness of the barn. But the second those memories were within reach…
Henry smiled at his daughter as she finally stopped fidgeting in the barn. What transpired a year ago felt like five. She had been so content with his explanation then. He looked at the way her pale, square jaw was set, and he knew he had not heard the end of it.
In the days that followed, Henry saw very little of his daughter. She wandered without purpose through the acreage of the farm, trailing her small, pale hands along the rows of leeks, lettuce, and chard. Whenever she would wander back into the farmhouse, he would ask her what she was doing.
“Thinking,” she’d reply. And she would say nothing more.
The truth was she was trying to recreate the fleeting moments when fragments of her death bombarded her brain. It wasn’t a glimpse into her demise that she saw. It had been her bare feet, trekking over a shallow hill at the far west corner of their farm. The slightly ticklish sensation of grass blades grazed against the bottoms of her feet.
Layla wasn’t quite sure how she knew that what she envisioned had been the last day of her life. It was a gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach telling her it was so.
Her thoughts never wavered from that mysterious day as she wandered through her father’s land. What had she been doing? Where had she been going? The feet she had seen were undoubtedly hers, and yet their objectives and motives were as foreign to her as if she experienced a vision of a complete and utter stranger.
It was that nagging question that kept her outside, without purpose and without direction. Layla sighed and scanned the horizon. She spotted her father standing on their back porch, a hand at his brow to keep the sun from his eyes. She didn’t have to see his facial expression to know he harbored a look of concern as he peered out at her.
She would not tell him what she was trying to do. She had the right to know what ended her short life, but she also knew she had no right to ask her father to re-live that horrific day. She was his daughter. She was all he had.
Henry Hayward had always been a no-nonsense sort of fellow, and that became more and more apparent to Layla as she became a teenager. Anything that did not fall under the scientific method was considered new age in his eyes—a term synonymous with rubbish in his own humble opinion. However, everything they had thought was true, everything that made up the confines of their reality was shattered the moment she showed up, as a ghost or something much more, on the front porch.