I’m dreaming of Eamon.
In the drifts of shallow sleep, I can feel his hands dragging up my body. The weight of him between my legs. I can hear him breathing until there’s the break of a moan in his throat. I can taste salt on my tongue and see bare, moonlit skin.
I’m not asleep anymore. This is the in-between place, like being stuck between two stitches in a seam.
A rush of heat pours into me, spreading like wildfire as my hands find his face. His mouth is on my throat, my shoulder, leaving a tingling trail in its wake, and all I can think is that I don’t want him to stop.
He doesn’t.
The heat inside of me is liquid. It’s simmering now, on the edge of spilling over as I move against him. I can hear myself make a sound, and his hands tighten on me, but when I finally open my eyes, he isn’t there.
he dream faded and I closed my eyes tighter, trying toT hold on to it. But the more my mind woke, the further it drew away from me. My hands twisted in the sheets as it bled into a sea of black, my heavy breaths the only sound in the sunlit room around me.
I could still feel him. Taste him. The smell of his body was swirling in the air, but when I turned my face to see the other side of the bed, it was empty.
It was a dream, yes. But I’d been dreaming of a memory.
I waited for my heartbeat to find its rhythm and for the burning on my skin to cool. It was like he’d really just been there. Like we’d just…I pressed my hands to my face, trying to think about anything else. Anything besides the slide of his skin against mine. Slowly, the live-wire feeling began to dim, and my breaths slowed, one by one.
The memories that had found me before were one thing, but this, I didn’t know if I could take this. They were coming out of nowhere now, sometimes hitting me before I even saw them coming. And at the same time, there were more things that were getting harder to recall.
I reached beneath the pillow to the edge of the mattress. I’d fallen asleep trying to redraw the image in my mind—the memory of the cherry tree. But after less than one day, I’d been unable to reconstruct it.
I unfolded the paper I’d written on, my eyes moving over the words in fits and starts. I understood them. They made sense, the scene written out like the page of a book. A girl picking cherries from a tree until the neighbor comes outside with a ladder. Only now I didn’t remember any of it. It was like hearing a story told about a stranger.
I refolded the paper, pressing it to my chest as my heart sank. My theory had been right. I wasn’t just gaining memories. I was losing them, too.
A plate sat on the table when I came out of the bedroom, a small knife at its side. Through the open back door, I could see the empty barn, and I bit the inside of my cheek. Eamon had left me breakfast, a thick slice of crusty bread topped with a
wedge of cheese. Beside it sat a hard-boiled egg and a mug of coffee.
We’d driven back from the Faire in complete silence, and when we got home, Eamon put Annie to bed. I shut myself in the bedroom, one hand pressed to the door as I listened to his footsteps move across the house. I hadn’t told him about what Caleb had said to me. I hadn’t told Esther or Margaret, either.
All I could think about now was how I’d felt when Eamon’s mouth was just a breath from mine. How his hand had twisted in my dress.
I ate and washed my plate, going out onto the porch when I saw Annie hanging on the railing of the paddock to watch Callie. I made my way toward them, fingers skipping lightly over the knotted wood fence.
“I was wondering where you were,” I said, smiling when Annie looked over her shoulder at me.
The closer I got, the more still the horse was, and when I reached for her, she touched her muzzle to my palm. Her warm breath enveloped my hand as I stroked up to the place between her eyes. She leaned into it, calming under my touch.
“Callie,” I said, softly, trying it out. The name felt so known to me now.
She settled, pressing her nose to my shirt, and I leaned into her, breathing through the choked feeling in my throat. I was still stuck in the dream I’d had of Eamon, drifting between the many memories that were now filling my head. Somewhere between this world and another, I was losing myself.
My eyes drifted over the fields until the sunlight glinted off the windshield of Esther’s truck coming over the hill.
I exhaled, letting my hands fall from the mare’s mane.
Margaret pulled in, getting out of the truck and tossing the keys to the seat. She had that glow about her from last night,
like she was still buzzing from the revelry of the Faire.
“So?” I said, making my best attempt at acting as if everything was okay. “Did you dance with him?”
She blushed, shoulders drawing up around her ears.
“Twice.”
I laughed, and it felt good. I missed that mischievous glint in Gran’s eyes. The way she could make things sound like a secret.
Margaret climbed the steps of the porch with Annie and they went inside, leaving me alone with Callie. I could finally see Eamon out in the fields, on the north side of a hill that overlooked the house. He was hauling a load of yellowed, cut tobacco stalks up onto his shoulder. They were ones he’d been forced to cut in an attempt to prevent the blight from spreading. But it was too late. It was here. The only thing to do now was to keep as much of it healthy before harvest as possible.
Another truck drove past, and the man behind the wheel lifted a hand into the air, waving. I waved back.
It was Percy Lyle, the pig farmer who ran a farm up the road.
My hand dropped back to my side as I played the evening over again in my head. The dance with Eamon, the conversation with Caleb, the eerie sight of Mimi Granger.
Margaret said that the Crawleys lived on Hayward Gap, and if Percy had come to get Eamon that night to tell him Callie had gotten out, then Eamon and Nathaniel could have crossed paths. But no one was here to see it. But there was someone who saw something that night.
That look in Mimi’s eyes when she saw me at the Faire wasn’t from too many glasses of ale. It had been on her face
that day I came through the door, when she saw me from her porch, too.
She’d known something. She’d seen something.
I looked up the road, where Percy’s truck vanished over the hill. Beyond it, the turn onto the river road was only a mile or so from that old farmhouse with the mailbox that read GRANGER.
In the distance, Eamon was out of sight in the fields again. I knew what he’d say if I told him what I was thinking. He and Esther both would think I was insane. But if neither of them was going to tell me what really happened that night, I had to find out for myself.
I opened the driver’s-side door of Esther’s truck and snatched the keys up from the seat. Before I could think better of it, I shoved them into the ignition. I was up the road before I saw anyone come out onto the porch, and I figured I had maybe ten minutes before Margaret got far enough out into the field to find Eamon and tell him what I’d done.
I turned off of Hayward Gap, eyes drifting to the rearview mirror. I was half afraid that I’d see the red flashing light of Caleb’s police car there, but the road was clear.
The Granger farm was the only one in at least a three-mile stretch, the driveway one long track between two fields. At its end, the house sat behind a tall golden green sea of alfalfa. I turned onto the drive, the tires sliding in the dirt when I hit the brakes.
There was a flash of a shadow in the front window of the house when I came to a stop. I got out of the truck and climbed the steps, pounding a fist on the door. I could hear the clatter of a dish inside. Footsteps.
The wind rippled through the field, an expanse that stretched all the way to the tree line, where the river narrowed
after it flowed past the flower farm. I tried to picture a woman running, a child in her arms. I tried to trace her path to the road, but there was nothing.
I knocked again. This time, harder.
“Mrs. Granger! Please, I just want to talk to you.”
It was a few seconds before the door swung open, and behind it, Mimi stood with a stricken look. She changed her mind almost as soon as she saw me, and she scrambled to close the door again. I shoved my boot in front of it, keeping it open.
Her rasping breath was on the verge of a cough, her pallid skin colorless as she peered up at me. “Leave! Or I’ll call the sheriff!”
“I only want to ask you a question.” I put my hands up in front of me, trying to calm her. “And then I’ll go. I swear.”
She still looked like a wild animal with those yellowed, owlish eyes, but her thin lips pursed, like she was waiting.
I lowered my hands, glancing over my shoulder to the field on the west side of her property. “I just want you to tell me what you saw that night.”
“What?” she croaked.
“The night you told Sheriff Rutherford about. When you saw me running through that field.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What is this?”
“I just need to know exactly what you saw.”
“I told him what you did. I told him exactly what you did.”
“I don’t remember!” The words crashed into one another, making Mimi flinch.
I knew it was the wrong thing to say, a dangerous thing to admit. She could go straight back to Caleb and tell him
everything. But there was something about the way she was looking at me that made the words spill from my mouth. Like if she could somehow see how lost I was, she would help me.
She would tell me the truth.
Mimi’s hand fell from the doorknob as she stared up at me.
She was quiet for a long moment before she came outside. The shawl around her shoulders was pulled tight now, her crooked brow relaxing.
“Please,” I said again, my voice tired.
She let the screen door close, turning toward the west field.
Her hand lifted, and she pointed one knobby finger at the rocking chair that sat at the corner of the porch. “I sit out here at night just after the sun goes down, when it cools off and the mosquitoes clear out. I was sittin’ in that chair there when I saw you.”
“What was I doing?”
She shrugged. “Runnin’.” The way she said it unleashed a dread within me. This woman wasn’t lying.
“Where, exactly?”
That same finger traced a path from the tree line in the distance to the fence that lined the road. “You were comin’ from the river.”
The river. That’s where Nathaniel had been murdered, but his body was found far downstream from here, closer to the falls.
“You were wearin’ a white dress and it had red splotches all over it, on your chest and legs. It was on your arms, too. In your hair.”
My stomach lurched.
“You had that little girl. You were carryin’ her in your arms, and when you made it to the road, you just disappeared. So, I
called down to the sheriff’s office and told them they needed to send someone over to check on things.”
“I didn’t say anything?”
She shook her head. “I called out to you, but it was like you didn’t hear me. You had this look on your face…like…I don’t know how to describe it. You looked like you weren’t really there. Almost like you were sleepwalkin’ or somethin’.”
My eyes fixed on that field, trying again to imagine myself there.
“You really don’t remember any of this?”
“No,” I whispered. “I don’t.”
We stood there in a long silence as I watched the field. Only weeks ago, they’d found that shoe in the tedder—the one I’d sworn I’d never seen. Mimi had no reason to lie about what she saw that night. No reason to call the sheriff before Nathaniel’s body was even found. And then there was the fact that the timing lined up. If I’d walked back from Esther’s, I would have passed just beyond that tree line. If I had to, I could have cut through the field.
Mimi didn’t say another word as I walked back to the truck.
I pulled onto the road as she stood on the porch and watched me. She had one hand up to block the sun from her eyes, the other propped on her hip.
I believed that she saw me the night of the Midsummer Faire, but it was a memory I didn’t have yet. That’s what this felt like, inheriting moments until they made an entire reality.
Bit by bit, I was getting pieces. If that was true, then eventually, I would feel as if I’d lived this life. I’d recapture it, in a way.
It had never been clearer to me than it was now that this wasn’t just about the June who came through the door five years ago. It was about Susanna and the baby she’d asked
Esther to take through that door. It was about the minister’s body found in the river. I still didn’t know if Eamon was actually capable of killing someone, but these were single stars in a constellation I couldn’t fully see.
The brush of something across the top of my leg made me look down, and I sucked in a breath as a chill ran up my spine, settling between my shoulder blades.
The world blotted out like drops of water, a broken reflection on the surface of a puddle. Esther’s truck was gone, but I was still moving. My hands were still gripped to the steering wheel, but the dash was replaced by the cracked one in the Bronco. The familiar smell of oil filled the air, and the unraveling, softened leather was smooth beneath my fingers.
It’s happening again.
A hand is lazily draped over my knee, hooking to the inside seam of my jeans, and I follow the arm to the passenger seat, where Mason sits beside me.
His other arm is propped on the open window, fingers raking through his hair. The top buttons of his shirt are undone, the tan line at his wrist showing. But this touch—I look down to that hand on my leg. It’s the kind of touch that never passes between us.
“Mason,” I hear myself say.
His face finally turns to look at me, no trace of surprise there. As if I never left. As if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be sitting beside me.
“Yeah?” He answers.
I stare at him, my lips parting to say something when the car jerks around me, tearing me from the memory.
In an instant, the interior of Esther’s truck materialized, the Bronco vanishing, and my eyes focused on the road. It was
curving, and the truck was drifting off the shoulder, toward the ditch.
I cranked the steering wheel to the left, slamming on the brakes, and the truck fishtailed as it came to a stop. Smoke from the tires filled the air, and as it cleared, I could see the trees that lined the river.
I looked around me, breaths heaving. There wasn’t another car in sight.
Slowly, I let my head turn back toward the passenger seat, now empty. Only seconds ago, it had felt like I could reach out and touch him. But Mason was gone.
I pushed the door open, getting out. The turnoff was overgrown, with wildflowers coming up between the cracks in the tar, and the river was just visible through the trees. It was a perfect half-moon of green water with a sandy bank.
This memory had been like the other one of Mason—when I’d been on the riverbank with a fire going and he was asking me if I was going to get in. This moment, too, had never happened. I would remember him touching me like that. But if these really were memories, when were they from?
I reached through the open window of Esther’s truck, opening the glove box. My hand pulled back when I saw the handgun, but I reached beneath it, searching for paper and a pencil. I found an invoice from a farm supply in Asheville, and I turned it over on the hood of the truck, scribbling.
There was only one time period when those memories with Mason could have taken place. I’d gone through the door in June of 2023, my time. The future me went through in 2024.
There were at least six months of life that I was missing in the span of that time. These memories with Mason were what happened to the June who didn’t go through the door until months after Gran’s funeral. It was a period of time I’d skipped. I’d missed it, because I’d gone through the door early.
I pushed the hair out of my face, closing my eyes and drinking in that sound of the water. When Mason and I were kids, we’d climb up onto the bridge with bottles of Coke we’d bought at the grocery and swing our feet out into the air until we were so hot, we had to jump. The river was always clear and cold, and it tasted sweet on my tongue.
I’d sink down and let the roar drown everything else out as I watched the light ripple above me in bursts that looked like stars exploding. And when my lungs couldn’t stand it any longer, when it felt like there was a storm in my chest, I’d shoot up to the surface, gasping for air.
That’s what this felt like.
I stared at the paper, the hood of the truck hot beneath my hands. In the distance, the dragonflies skipped across the river.
I didn’t know how I felt about the idea of Mason and me.
Knowing it was never possible had been a refuge. So, what had changed? I couldn’t help but think that maybe that night at the house, a bottle of whiskey between us as I told him I was sick, had shifted things. If I hadn’t walked through that door, was that what would have happened? Was that what was waiting when I went back? If there was a world where Mason and I were more, maybe that’s what I’d gone back to. But then why build a life with Eamon in the first place?
We’d been so good at pretending, Mason and me. But maybe our days of pretending were over.
