y feet paced the length of the upstairs hallway untilM they were taking me down the staircase, my eyes still glued to the photograph. I held it out before me, tracing the tip of the woman’s nose. The shape of her chin. When I reached the bottom step, I pried my focus from the picture, finding the one that sat framed on the table below the hall mirror.
It was the only photo of my mother displayed in the house. I passed it every time I came down the hallway, its image burned into my mind like a brand. I stared at it. The chill that had raced up my spine was now a cold blanket wrapped around me. I wasn’t imagining things this time. It looked just like her.
My eyes drifted through the sitting room to the basement door, and then I was walking again, pacing past the fireplace, the afternoon light pooled on its wide, flat stones. My hand tightened on the photograph, and I pressed it to my chest as I reached for the glass knob and turned it. The door swung open, bringing with it the cool, damp air. The basement smelled like fresh mud in the summer, and it thickened as I went down the steps, reaching into the darkness for the string that hung from the single lightbulb.
I gave it a tug, and the tinny fizz of electricity filled the space, making the small room come to life around me. There
wasn’t much down there except for the peaches and plums we’d canned last season and the clothes washer, but Mason had built metal shelves along one wall for us after the basement flooded a couple of years ago. We’d transferred everything from disintegrating cardboard boxes to clear plastic bins. I pushed the first few to the side, looking for the only one that wasn’t labeled. It had been intentional on my part because I hadn’t wanted to draw Gran’s attention to what was inside.
I was sixteen years old when I first started looking into my mother’s disappearance. I’d figured out at a young age that Gran didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, she didn’t want to talk about my mother at all. That framed photo on the table by the stairs was the only evidence in this house that Susanna had ever even existed.
It began with a newspaper clipping I’d found at Birdie’s.
That single tether to the mystery had turned into an obsession.
Before that, Susanna had been no more than another town rumor to me. Part of the folklore that lived in these mountains.
Seeing it in print, her name inked onto paper, had somehow made her come alive in my mind. It took some convincing, but I’d enlisted Ida at the courthouse to help me meticulously compile every bit of information that could be found on my mother and what had happened to her.
I slid the bin from the shelf and lowered it to the ground, my bare feet now cold on the basement floor. The lid came off with a pop, and I peered inside at a large accordion folder. The file was thick, its edges worn. I hadn’t opened it in years, but it was heavier than I remembered. The feel of it brought back memories of the summer afternoons I’d spent in Mason’s garage. I’d sprawl out on the old, tattered sofa, notating and cross-referencing and cataloging every piece of paper while he played video games on an old box TV set.
The research had taken over my entire life for the better part of a year, something I’d had to keep hidden from Gran. There
had been a feeling of urgency to it. Like it was my only chance to understand what happened. Only, it didn’t matter how much I colored in the picture or filled in the blanks. All these years later, I only had more unanswered questions.
I sank back and pulled the folder into my lap, unlacing the twine and bending the flap backward so that I could read the labels. It was everything I’d collected. Stacks of articles, photographs, and copies of the police report were arranged with dates and sources.
The sheriff gave me what few answers he could. There were statements filled with stories about Susanna that turned my stomach—glimpses of what I imagined would be my own future. Then there were little things, too, like library records of the last book she’d checked out. The purchase agreement for the Bronco, which she’d paid cash for after years of saving. A bill from the cafe showed what she’d ordered the morning she disappeared: pancakes. There had been something so heartbreaking about that particular detail. In a matter of hours, Susanna would be gone forever. But that morning, she’d eaten pancakes.
There were several newspaper articles, mostly about her disappearance, from the Jasper Chronicle, the Citizen Times in Asheville, and The Charlotte Observer. But there was also one announcing that a twelve-year-old Susanna had won the sixth grade spelling bee.
I fished the stack of photographs from one of the sections and clumsily spread them out on the floor beside me, my eyes searching the many faces of Susanna Farrow. A baby in Gran’s arms. A toddler in a pair of overalls, chest bare beneath the sagging straps. A young girl blowing out birthday candles. A teenager with wide, wire-rimmed glasses in the fields at the farm. My frantic hands finally stilled when I found the one I was looking for—a Susanna who was in her early twenties, I guessed.
She stood beneath the dogwood tree in the front yard, one hand absently reaching for the low-hanging branch beside her.
Her hair was long and down, face turned to the street as if the picture was snapped the moment she saw someone coming down the sidewalk. On the outside, she looked so normal. So ordinary in the kind of way I’d always longed for. No hint or shadow in her eyes of what was to come.
I slid the photo across the floor, placing it beside the one I’d found in the envelope, and shivered. The two pictures sat side by side, different sizes, one in black-and-white, and one in faded color. But the two women were like perfect symmetry.
They weren’t just similar. They were exactly the same.
I pulled my hand back, finding the pound of my heart beneath my robe and pressing my hand to it. It couldn’t be her.
My mother had been born decades later, and the resemblance wasn’t so strange when you took into account that the woman’s face was turned a little to the side. There was also the age of the photograph. It wasn’t in bad condition, but it wasn’t as sharp and clear as the one I’d taken from the folder.
It wasn’t her, I told myself again. I pulled my hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ear. Of course it wasn’t her, but where did Gran get it? And why had she sent it to me?
I tried to think back to the week before she died, my mind skipping over the days. They’d been ordinary. Runs to the shop and the farm, the grocery. She could have mailed it from anywhere. But why mail it at all? Why not just give it to me?
Those were the kinds of logical questions I’d stopped asking the worse her mind got.
The more the years drew on, the more time Gran spent in that other place. She’d be standing at the sink and washing dishes, kneeling in the garden, or sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, but in her mind, she’d slipped away to somewhere else. She’d talk to people who weren’t there. Hum
songs I’d never heard. She’d go out to the shed looking for something that didn’t exist. Over the years, she drifted back and forth over that line. For the last six months of her life, she all but lived on the other side of it.
In those last few weeks, Gran was slowing down. Getting quieter. She was sleeping longer and not wanting to leave the house. I’d had a sense she was coming to the end, even though she didn’t say it and neither did Dr. Jennings. But there’d been something different about her.
That single thought is what finally made it click—that maybe it didn’t make sense because it didn’t actually mean anything. How Gran got her hands on a picture of Nathaniel Rutherford, I didn’t know. But she probably thought the same thing I did—that it looked like Susanna—and somewhere in the thick mist of her mind she’d decided to mail it to me.
I couldn’t see a ring on the woman’s finger, but the inscription called her Nathaniel’s wife. And then there was the way she leaned toward him, like there was a center of gravity I couldn’t see. Or maybe it was the wind giving her a gentle nudge in his direction.
“June?”
A muffled voice upstairs called my name, making me jolt.
“June!”
Birdie. I hadn’t even heard her come in. I looked down at the photos on the floor, as if just remembering where I was.
The open bin. The basement. My loosely tied robe.
“Shit.” I groaned. The tub. I’d left the water running.
I pushed the folder from my lap, dumping it and the pictures into the bin. My hands clumsily got the lid back on before I slid it against the wall and climbed the wooden steps to the sitting room.
“June!”
When I made it back to the second floor, Birdie was pulling towels from the hall closet. Water covered the tile, reflecting the light coming through the window. The old claw-foot tub was filled to the brim, its surface rippling beneath the dripping faucet.
“I’m so sorry.” I took another towel from Birdie’s hands, crouching to spread it across the doorway before the bath water could spill onto the wooden floorboards. “I forgot it was running.”
“Where were you?”
I sopped up the water on my hands and knees, out of breath.
“June? Where were you, honey?”
“Downstairs,” I answered.
“But I was just down there.”
“In the basement, I mean.”
Her eyes focused more sharply on me before moving over the bathroom. That look was scrutinizing. Almost suspicious.
The overflowing tub was exactly the kind of thing Gran would have done. I didn’t know how many times I’d come home to a smoke-filled kitchen or all the windows propped open during a storm. But this wasn’t that, was it?
“I was just changing over the laundry,” I lied, stomach turning when I began to worry that she might go and check.
I didn’t want to tell her about the picture. Maybe because it felt like something I didn’t understand. It had been my name on the envelope; Gran had specifically meant it for me.
It doesn’t mean anything, I reminded myself. She was sick, June.
I got back to my feet, glancing down the hall to my open bedroom door where I could see the edge of the quilt that was draped over my bed. The mail was still scattered where I’d left it, the journal tucked safely under the mattress.
Birdie’s hand lifted, pressing to my cheek. “You’re flushed, dear. Are you feeling all right?”
“Fine.” I smiled, still trying to slow my racing heart.
Birdie didn’t look convinced. “You know, I don’t need to go to Charlotte tomorrow. Why don’t I cancel?”
“No,” I said, too quickly. “We’re already behind schedule.”
That was true. We were expanding the willow grove at the farm, and she was going to Charlotte to pick up the new trees.
With Gran and the funeral, we’d already pushed it a week, and we couldn’t postpone again with the Midsummer Faire coming up.
“I’m sure Mason can go,” she said.
“He’s got enough to do. I’ll help him at the farm, you go to Charlotte.” When her mouth twisted to one side, I exhaled on a laugh. “It’s just a little water, Birdie. Relax.”
“All right, if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
I closed the bathroom door, shutting myself inside, and the smile melted from my face. I stood there, silent, as her hesitant footsteps disappeared. A few seconds later, I could hear her filling the kettle at the sink downstairs.
The water on the floor wasn’t warm anymore. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been down in the basement. For a fraction of a moment, fear sliced hot through my mind at the thought that maybe I’d imagined it all. That maybe that letter, the photograph, hadn’t even been real.
My hand instantly went to the pocket of my robe, desperately searching for the picture. As soon as my fingertips found it, I let out a painful, relieved breath and pulled it free.
Nathaniel Rutherford’s dark eyes met mine, so focused and calm that I almost expected him to move. For his finger to flick the ash from that cigarette, or for the collar of that crisp white shirt to shift in the wind.
In the mirror, the image of me was a faint echo of the woman standing beside Nathaniel. From this angle, the birthmark that stretched below my ear looked like blood. My reflection was blurred, the glass fogged with steam. I wiped the flat of my palm across it in an arc, watching as the reflection began to fade again.
Second by second, it was disappearing. Just like me.
