was trapped in a museum of another life.I
I could hear Eamon up and moving when the light broke in the sky, but I sat still on the edge of the bed, studying the frozen world around me. The bedroom took on a dreamlike quality in the early morning light, the tiny remnants that had made up my life coming into focus.
There was evidence everywhere that this place had been home to me, down to the way the clothes were folded and how things had been arranged on the dressing table. The stones and feathers and seeds that littered the windowsill. That was something I’d done even as a child, dropping little treasures into my pockets only to forget about them until later. There was a similar collection in the eave of my bedroom window at home.
I picked up one of the spotted feathers, brushing its tip against my fingers. There was no mistaking that I’d chosen this place, like Eamon said, and I’d been happy here.
Somehow, I was sure of that. So, why had I left?
I’d spent hours replaying that vision of Mason in my mind.
It felt embedded there. As if I’d only stumbled upon something that had been buried long ago. I could recall every single detail, but I couldn’t place that night anywhere. We’d
been at the river more times than I could count, but this had been different. There’d been something about the way he’d looked at me.
My feet found the floor and opened the wardrobe, letting the door swing open. This time, I let myself study its contents. My fingers skimmed along the soft cotton dresses and shirts that hung inside, a small but utilitarian array of what a woman in a 1951 farming town might need. They were colors I would have picked, I thought. Colors I did pick.
My hand stopped on a fold of delicate white lace tucked behind the others, and I twisted a finger into it, my throat closing. It was a wedding dress. In a series of lightning-quick flashes, I could see it. The weave of the lace draped over my arm. The brush of the hem along the floor and the milk-white color that warmed against my wavy hair. A string of bluntly spliced moments, a cracked mirror of reality, skipped through my mind. They were colors in a kaleidoscope that changed without warning to make a new picture.
I pulled my hand back, pressing my knuckles to my ribs, where my heart was pounding, and pushed the images from my thoughts before that picture could fully come alive.
I shoved the clothes to one side of the wardrobe, hiding the white lace from view, and pulled a blue dress from one of the hangers. The door of the wardrobe closed, making the whole thing rattle, and I stepped away from it, swallowing hard. I tugged the nightgown over my head and folded it neatly. The locket watch still hung around my neck, the air making gooseflesh rise on my skin despite its warmth. With any luck, that door would appear before the sun went down again, and the mark I left on this place would be almost undetectable. I’d go back to Mason. Back to the Jasper I knew.
I shrugged on the dress, buttoning it up and letting the locket fall inside. The fabric was soft and lived in, a bit loose
around my frame, and I tried not to think too hard about why.
Had this body changed after I had a child? Had love and marriage softened my curves in the five years I’d been here?
I turned toward the mirror, my skin crawling as I studied the image of me standing in that room. It was me, painted onto the canvas of a life I hadn’t lived. The worst of it was that I looked like I belonged here, seamlessly rendered into the scene.
I smoothed my hands over the dress before running my fingers through my hair and letting it fall over one shoulder in an attempt to make my reflection more familiar. On the outside, I was like any of the women in those photographs that were stored in our basement. It was convincing, even if I didn’t feel anything close to normal on the inside.
My eyes fell to the little dish on the dressing table that was made of abalone or some kind of oyster shell. In its center, the gold ring stared up at me. It was just a simple, smooth band, too small for Eamon’s hands. When I blinked, I could see it on my own finger. I’d left that behind, too. It hadn’t occurred to me until then how strange it was that for an entire year, he’d kept the room that way, filled with my things. Her things. Had he still been hoping his wife would come back?
When I finally got the nerve to open the bedroom door, the hinges creaked, filling the silence of the house. I came around the corner of the kitchen, steps halting when I saw Margaret.
Not Eamon.
She stood in the middle of the sitting room, folding the afghan that had been draped over the sofa the day before.
Eamon had slept there, leaving the blankets behind, but he was nowhere to be seen now.
“Morning,” she chirped, a bright smile finding her lips when she saw me.
Her blond hair was curling at her temples, her cheeks pink. I couldn’t get over how impossible it was to stand there in front
of Gran, but a whole different version of her.
“Morning,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Gran thought it would be good if I came over today.” She draped the afghan over the back of the sofa. “Keep an eye on the three of you.”
It took me a moment to understand that the Gran she knew, her grandmother, was Esther.
The curtain on the other side of the sitting room moved just slightly, and small fingers pulled the checkered fabric back enough for Annie to peek out at me. She was perched on her little bed, her shoes toppled to the wood floor.
The stockings that covered her small feet were dusted with the same dirt that stained the hem of her dress, a characteristic that made her feel more real to me. I’d only caught glimpses of her before, like a photograph taken out of focus. But now I could see her. Really see her.
Her lips twisted to one side of her mouth as she pulled the curtain back farther, but she only looked at me with those wide, brown eyes. They were the exact same color as Eamon’s, another detail that felt like something clicking into place.
I could feel more pieces just like it lined up and waiting to fall like dominoes. I waited, half bracing myself for another speeding train of images to push back into my thoughts. But they didn’t come.
“Hi,” I said, the lonely word carrying with it a thousand questions.
What was an appropriate introduction between a mother and child who didn’t remember each other? What did it mean that this girl had come from me and yet, I could hardly bear to look at her?
Margaret’s eyes went from me to Annie, waiting.
“I’m June,” I tried again.
I didn’t know what else to call myself, and I figured it was the least confusing thing to say. Surely, she would have known me as Mama. Or Mommy. Thinking this gave me that falling sensation again, like I was dropping through the air.
Without a word, Annie climbed from the bed. Her eyes were fixed on me as she stepped with silent feet across the floor, toward the kitchen. Then she was out the back door.
“Does she talk?” I stared at her little bed, where a rag doll had been left behind. “I haven’t heard her say a word.”
Margaret smirked. “She talks plenty. But she’s something of a quiet creature, like Eamon.”
Eamon hadn’t struck me as the quiet type in the couple of days I’d known him. Half of the time, he’d been shouting at me. But her answer to my question made me feel embarrassed.
“I don’t really know anything about children,” I admitted, though I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Margaret or myself now.
“I know.”
She gave me a sympathetic smile, like she could tell what I’d been thinking when my eyes landed on Annie. I’d spent years faced with my own death, lived and breathed grief since I was a child, but that was nothing compared to this. I didn’t even have a name for the feeling inside of me.
Margaret’s eyes sheepishly dropped from mine, and she went into the kitchen, taking the percolator from the stove and dumping the grounds inside.
“Where is he?” I asked.
She glanced at the window. “Working. He’s out there before sunup most days.”
I went to the back door, watching the wall of tobacco rustling in the wind. “Who helps Eamon with the crop? I haven’t seen anyone in the fields.”
“You did. You did it together.” She turned on the water, pulling the block of soap closer to the sink. “He had a couple hired hands from town, but…” She didn’t finish, her lips pressing into a line as if she’d caught herself before she said something she shouldn’t.
I couldn’t tell where exactly her and Esther’s loyalties lay.
Esther had seemed almost protective of Eamon, and she hadn’t hidden the fact that she expected me to keep my distance from Margaret. We were blood, but I’d abandoned them, too, along with a husband, a child, and a farm. The list of things I’d left behind was growing.
If Eamon was running this place alone, I didn’t know how that was possible. I leaned into the door with one shoulder, studying the faint yellowing tobacco leaves along the rows farthest from the house. I’d noticed them yesterday, and it wasn’t good, no matter what decade of farming we were in.
During an uncommonly wet season, the water would have drained down those hills, and if blight had taken hold, it could ruin the whole crop before Eamon could harvest. From the look of it, he’d barely been able to keep this place going.
Margaret turned off the water, scrubbing the pot in the sink and I took the dry rag that hung above the stove, drying the bowl she’d already finished.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Sixteen.”
Sixteen years old. I’d guessed she was about that age, but hearing her say it made her look even younger to me. She carried herself like someone who wasn’t a child, but that youth in her face was unmistakable. There was a shine to her that was untouched. She had maybe ten years left with Esther
before she died, according to what Gran had told me. Then she’d take over running the farm herself.
I watched her from the corner of my eye. If I was here now, did that mean that all this time, Gran remembered me? She grew up knowing Eamon and Annie, yet Gran had never said a word about them. I’d always thought there weren’t things hidden between us, but that wasn’t true. Gran had kept a multitude of things from me.
“You know…” I set the bowl on the shelf, trying to decide how to ask the question. “You know who I am, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That you’re my…”
“Grandmother?” She looked amused by the question. “Yes.”
A laugh escaped me. The situation was so bizarre that I didn’t know how to feel about it. What would it have been like to grow up knowing about all of this? The door. The episodes.
The splitting of time. Gran had been given all that knowledge so young, but she hadn’t given any of it to me.
She bit down on her bottom lip, like she was second- guessing whatever she was thinking. “It’s strange. I feel like I have so much to tell you, but then I remember.” She stopped herself.
I knew what she was going to say. That I didn’t know her.
The dimming excitement in her eyes when she’d come down the stairs yesterday had told me the same thing.
“Were we close?” I asked. “Before, I mean.”
She nodded, the half smile on her face turning a little sad.
“But you don’t seem angry with me, like the others.” I took a chance in saying it.
Margaret’s full lips pressed into a line again, exactly the way I remembered Gran doing when she was thinking hard
about something. “I think you have your reasons.”
Have. I twisted the rag in my hands, staring at her. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. There was something strange about the words. They were so present.
Like the future me she knew and loved, the one who’d lived here, wasn’t really gone.
I wanted to ask her what she thought those reasons were. If she knew where I went and why. But Esther’s warning came back to me. This Margaret was still just a kid.
“So, Esther really sent you to watch me?”
Margaret gave me an apologetic look.
“I get it. They don’t trust me.”
“They’re angry because…” Her hands stilled on the pot.
“You left Annie.” She looked up at me.
“I know.”
“No, I mean…” She took the rag from my hands, wiping the suds from her arms as she turned toward me. Her voice lowered. “The day you left, Eamon came home and Annie was alone. You’d left her here.”
My fingers slipped from the edge of the counter. “That’s not possible.”
Margaret’s mouth twisted to one side, almost exactly like Annie’s had.
I could feel the tremble in my hands now, an ache traveling up my arms, to my shoulders.
“No,” I tried again. “You don’t understand. That’s not possible.”
“I’m only telling you because—” She hesitated. “I mean, that’s why they’re so angry. Why they don’t trust you.”
I stared at her, speechless. There was no way I’d left my own child. I knew what it was like to be abandoned by a mother. I’d never do that. Ever. So, why did it turn my stomach? Why did I have the feeling that she wasn’t lying?
“Sorry.” Margaret paled. “I just thought you should know.”
She returned her attention to the pot, sinking her hands back into the water, and I bit the inside of my cheek. I didn’t know what else to say. I certainly wasn’t going to ask any questions.
Not when the weight of the answers could crush me.
I pushed out the back door, following the wall of tobacco so closely that the leaves brushed my arm as I passed. When I saw Eamon through the open doors of the barn, I stopped short. He stood with Annie braced in one arm, her little legs swinging around him as he unspooled a line of wire on the ground. Even when he lowered down on one knee to cut it, she still clung to him, a small white flower twirling in her fingers.
I walked toward them slowly, arms wrapped tightly around myself. Annie’s hand was hooked around Eamon’s neck, her wispy blond hair falling down her back. I scrutinized every detail of those tiny hands and that round face. The way she looked cradled in Eamon’s arms. Even if I didn’t want to believe it, this child was mine. A part of me did know her, even if I couldn’t remember her. It was the same feeling I’d had when I’d stood in front of that crumbling house two days ago.
When Eamon rose back to his feet, I took a step in the other direction, moving out of his line of sight before he could spot me. My hand found the fence posts of the small, overgrown garden tucked against the house, and I lifted the gate latch, letting myself inside. The plants had been overtaken, strangled by weeds that rose almost halfway up the fence. It had been left untended, maybe for as long as I’d been gone.
There were tomato plants, onions, squash, and herbs. In one corner, I could see the sprouts of a sweet potato vine and the leaves of a cucumber plant withering on the chicken wire. It was a garden of dying things.
I sank to my knees, impulsively tearing at the mounds of clover and dandelion and nut grass. I ripped them from the earth, frantically trying to clear the overgrowth as the panic rose inside of me. My heart was still racing, my throat aching with the scream that had been trapped there since the moment I’d seen Eamon’s face. It was a growing, spreading fever inside of me. A feeling that had edges sharp enough to cut me deep. This was a nightmare. All of it. And I couldn’t wake up.
I wrenched another handful of weeds from the earth as I blinked back the tears in my eyes. Again, I looked to the fields in the distance, desperately searching for any sign of the red door.
It would appear, I told myself. It was only a matter of time.
And when it did, I would be ready.
