hat morning was different.T
Eamon and I moved like planets around each other in the kitchen, the smoke from the cast iron making the light hazy and the air rich with the smell of bacon. Annie was sitting on top of the table with a bowl of black cherries, bare feet dangling over the wood floor.
There was a sudden ease in the house, like an unclenched fist, and I wondered if it was because more of the truth had worked its way out between us. Eamon had let me see what lay behind that clenched jaw and those pensive eyes. I hadn’t been able to tell if he’d meant to do it, or if it had just happened, but he hadn’t hidden that pain from me when he had the chance.
My life ended when you left.
The echo of it inside of me made me shudder.
He handed me a bowl without looking in my direction, but instead of an attempt to avoid me, it appeared to be more a movement that was done by memory. It felt like a lived-in thing. Was this how we’d looked, standing side by side in the kitchen as the sun rose each morning? Was this our rhythm?
He reached over my head for two mugs, and for once, I didn’t lean away from him when he got close to me. I could
smell that summer scent, sun-warmed wood and grass. I found myself inhaling before he pulled away, and it lit on my tongue in a way that didn’t feel new anymore.
He poured the coffee with one hand, a distracted look on his face as he pushed the bacon around in the pan with the other.
Without any apparent thought, he set the spatula down and moved the sugar bowl toward him. I watched as he opened it, scooping two spoonfuls into one of the cups. The cup closest to me.
I stared at it as he turned his attention back to the sizzling pan. Two spoonfuls of sugar. That was how I’d always taken my coffee, and he knew it. But there was no evidence on his face that he was even aware of what he’d done. It had been a mindless movement, a pattern that was familiar to him, with me standing in the kitchen at his side.
My hands curled around the mug, sliding it toward me. The heat burning against my palms was also waking along the crests of my cheeks. He knew me. I was still trying to wrap my head around that.
He knew me.
The same questions replayed over and over in my head.
Why had I left this? How had I left this? How could I have just walked away?
I was only just beginning to think of those choices as my own. In some ways, maybe it wasn’t true, but with each passing day, I found it harder to separate myself from the June who’d lived here.
I looked across the room to the rifle that was hanging on the wall. I’d spent the night thinking about what Caleb had said and that look on Eamon’s face in the police station. If he was afraid that Nathaniel would hurt me, would he have killed him? Was he even capable of that? I didn’t know.
I’d thought more than once about the episode I’d had in my bathroom the morning I thought I had seen blood beneath my fingernails. I remembered that ribbon of red in the water, the smell of it in the air. I could see that flash of memory that had found me in the police station, the sound of myself gasping as I ran through the field.
And I’d felt that soul-deep love in the memory I’d experienced last night. If I knew Eamon had killed someone, would I have covered for him, like Caleb said?
Eamon pulled on his overshirt, stretching his stiff shoulder as he glanced out the window, toward the barn. He started toward the door, adjusting the collar around his chin.
I hadn’t said anything, but I’d been watching the color change in the field, marking the difference by the day. From the look of the tobacco, the blight was spreading. Slowly, but it was. I wasn’t sure the crop would make it. Not at this rate.
“I could help,” I said, chancing a look over my coffee cup.
He stopped, holding the back door open.
“I know how to irrigate the field and trim the infected stalks without contaminating the others.”
“I know you do.”
I stared at him. Of course he did.
“Margaret will be here soon.” He changed the subject. “The Faire’s tonight, so she’ll be here until the afternoon.”
He looked away from me, as if that would soften the meaning of the words. Each morning, he never disappeared into the fields until Margaret had arrived. And he wouldn’t stay out there if I was the only one at the house with Annie.
The last time he’d done that, I’d left her.
I cleared my throat, trying to loosen the thick feeling there.
“I think we should go. To the Faire, I mean.”
He stared at me. “I don’t think so.”
“There were people on the street who saw me go into the police station yesterday. If we’re the only ones in town who aren’t there, which we would be, then they’re going to think we have something to hide.”
He didn’t deny it. “What about Caleb?”
“You said yourself that if he had anything real, he would have made an arrest.” I waited, and when he didn’t respond, I set the mug down on the counter. “If you’re telling the truth about there being nothing to find, then all we have to do is keep things from getting out of hand until the door reappears.”
“What do you mean, if I’m telling the truth?”
I leveled my gaze at him. “We both know you’re not telling me everything, Eamon. But the only choice I have right now is to trust you.”
He didn’t deny it. He also didn’t argue with the fact that going to the Faire was our best option.
“Just…” His hand squeezed the doorjamb. “If you’re going to work in the garden, can you leave the gate open while you’re in there?”
“The gate? Why?”
He ran a hand through his hair uncomfortably. “So that I can see you from the fields.”
I pressed my lips together, eyes tracing that stiffness along his shoulders as he said it. He wanted to be able to check on me, to keep me in sight.
“Just call out if you need me. I’ll hear you,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight.”
I only half admitted to myself that I hoped it was true. It had been five days since I’d come through the door, and it hadn’t reappeared. Now I was almost afraid that it would. That I’d
cross back without ever really knowing what happened here. I didn’t know if I could live with that.
The sunlight glowed around Eamon’s frame as he walked toward the barn, and Callie’s ears perked up behind the fence.
I watched until he was out of sight and then looked back to Annie. Her feet swung softly as she watched me with a steady, focused gaze. Was there something new in her expression, or was I imagining it?
I took a step toward her, inspecting every inch of her I could take in. I still hadn’t had memories of her push through, and I suspected that might be because they were buried the deepest.
Still, I was getting hungrier for them, the urge to chase them down growing by the day. There was a part of this story I’d never understand until I remembered her. There was a version of me that I’d never know.
Her toes brushed my legs, their shadows painting the floor.
“We’re going to the Faire tonight,” I said, my voice finding a calm that I hadn’t yet been able to muster. “Won’t that be fun?”
She nodded, picking up another cherry with her sticky fingers. “Will there be cake?”
I went rigid, mouth dropping open as I stared at her. She was looking right at me, eyebrows raised as she waited for her answer. But I’d never heard her voice before. She’d never spoken a single word to me.
“Will there?” she asked again, that tiny sound like a bell.
If there was anything strange about the moment to her, I couldn’t tell. She said it like we were continuing a conversation that already existed.
“I—I don’t know,” I said through a stilted breath. “We’ll have to see when we get there.”
“Okay.”
She twirled a stem in her fingers, the sight summoning endless memories of picking cherries over the backyard fence back home. The neighbor’s cherry tree drooped past its boundary in the corner of the yard, where a small pile of bricks was stacked so that I could reach the lowest branches. I’d pick every single one I could find, and after a while, she’d finally come outside with a little ladder and let me fill a basket.
The neighbor. I could see her face, her dark hair pulled back in a clip and painted fingernails. But I couldn’t dredge her name up from my mind. It was just barely out of reach.
I stared into Annie’s bowl of cherries, thinking hard now.
I’d known the woman almost my entire life, even before we’d moved into the house next door. I’d visited her at the courthouse many times when I was trying to find documentation on my mother. She’d baked that blueberry pie Mason and I had eaten, for god’s sake.
My mind snagged, an incomplete feeling souring the memory. There was an empty place where something had once existed. Why couldn’t I remember her name?
A hand went to my mouth, fingers pressed to my lips, when I placed the sensation. It was the same one I’d had when I couldn’t remember that song Gran used to sing. Like there was a hole torn through my mind and it had simply fallen out. Only now it was different. Before, just the words had been beyond reach, but I couldn’t even think of the melody as I stood there.
I couldn’t even picture Gran’s face when she sang it.
And there’d been something else. A shop I couldn’t remember downtown, even though I’d walked Main Street every single day.
Annie jumped down, leaving the bowl of cherries behind, and I struggled to feel my feet beneath me. It was almost as if the memories were fading. Slowly disappearing behind a fog.
I went to the counter beside the back door, ripping a page from the notepad. As fast as my hand would move, I wrote it down—the entire memory of the cherry tree. Those stacked bricks, the glare of the sun, the basket on my arm, the sparrows up in the branches. I recorded every detail except the woman’s name, even noting her hair color and the shape of her glasses and the ring she always wore on her right middle finger with an opal at its center. When I couldn’t think of a single thing more, I set down the pen, folding the paper once, then again.
Margaret pushed through the front door, making me jolt, and I moved my hand behind my back, stuffing the paper into my pocket. I hadn’t even heard the truck pull up.
She stood in the doorway, twisting the long blond braid that hung over her shoulder around her fingers.
The page in my pocket was like a live coal, but I didn’t know what exactly I was hiding. I only knew that I couldn’t fully tell where the alliances of this family lay. I’d gotten the impression that Margaret and June had been in league with each other in a way that Esther hadn’t been. But Esther and Eamon hadn’t been the only ones to keep the truth about my mother and the murder investigation from me. Margaret had, too.
“You okay?” Her wide blue eyes were glassy. She looked like she might cry.
“I’m fine.” I tried to smile, but it faltered when I remembered that had been my dynamic with Gran, too. Her worried and me trying to reassure her.
Margaret fidgeted again with the end of her braid, and for a moment, it felt as if she was going to say something else. But as soon as I was sure she was about to speak, she moved past me, to the kitchen.
I watched as she started on the dishes, cutting a piece of the soap block to lather on the bristled brush. She had that look on her face now that she always did when things were moments from coming apart. Her first instinct was to control what she could, whether it was changing the oil in the farm truck or cleaning out a closet or washing the dishes in the sink. Gran hadn’t just been the glue of our family. She’d been that for this one, too.
I reconsidered pressing her for whatever it was she was about to say, but I wasn’t the same June she’d trusted. And if this Margaret was anything like Gran, she wouldn’t be pried open.
I went into the bedroom, leaving a crack in the door as I made my way to the bed and reached behind the mattress.
When I found the fold of burlap I’d left there, I pulled it free.
Quietly, I slipped the folded paper from my back pocket inside, eyes catching on the next page—the list of years I’d
written down.
1912
1946
1950 1951
I’d already begun to think that they must revolve around crossings. 1912 was when Esther left me on the other side of the door. I met Eamon in 1946, and I left in 1950.
If you could cross only three times, then the older me, the one who’d lived in this time with Eamon, had used all my chances when I left. Wherever I was, I couldn’t come back. So why had I written 1951 at the end of this list? I couldn’t return; yet, in a way, I had, hadn’t I? But as a version of myself who had passed through the door only once.
Coincidence. Luck. Happenstance. This was none of those things.
I was less convinced than ever that walking through the door that day was an accident. It also couldn’t be possible that of all places and times, I’d ended up at this exact point.
Had I written the year 1951 because I’d known, somehow, that I’d be back? I’d thought that Susanna had brought me through the door, but now I wondered if the person who’d sent me here was me.
