didn’t have a birthday. Not a real one, anyway.I
Working backward from Dr. Jennings’s guess that I was about seven months old when I was found on Market Street, I’d let Mason choose a day. Partly because it bothered him I had no birthday and partly because something had to be written down on school or medical forms when it was asked.
He chose March 20, and Gran figured it was a good date because the spring equinox often fell on that day. A few months later, the state of North Carolina issued me my first birth certificate.
I stood over the desk in the sitting room, staring at the papers that covered its surface. A nearly empty plate with the remnants of Ida’s casserole sat beside my birth certificate.
Susanna Farrow was listed as my mother, but the space for the father’s name was blank.
I’d pulled out every single document and photo in the house I could find. Pictures that hung on walls. Tax records stuffed in the back of the desk drawers. A stack of meaningless invoices that had somehow made it to the house from the shop. They littered the sofa, the coffee table, the fireplace, the floor…they stretched to the edge of the kitchen and the hallway.
I’d missed something. I must have. I’d been at it for hours, tiptoeing through the maze and trying to stitch together a story that made sense. But the deeper I went, the more wayward it was. Somehwere along the way, I’d missed something. I must have.
The first time Susanna went missing, she’d returned to Jasper after a few months. There wasn’t much documented about it. The family had kept things as quiet as possible, and Birdie told me that it had later come out that she’d been in Greenville, South Carolina, where she’d met someone. The ordeal was mostly chalked up to the fact that Susanna wasn’t well anymore. She did strange, unpredictable things.
Not long after her return, Gran and Birdie learned she was pregnant, and only a few months later, she went missing again.
During that time, I was born, though no one knew exactly when or where. When Clarence found me on Market Street with no clue as to where Susanna was, the police checked hospital logs within two hundred miles trying to track down any record of either of us. There was none. Not for a June Farrow or an unidentified woman matching Susanna’s description who’d given birth to a baby girl.
My bare feet slid over the smooth floorboards as I crouched beside the sofa, picking up one of the xeroxed copies of my mother’s picture.
She could have given birth somewhere else, maybe at someone’s home or a clinic, but where had she and I been during the seven months after I was born? How did a young woman in her third trimester just disappear and then slip back into Jasper undetected to leave her baby behind?
I stood in the center of the sitting room, turning slowly as my eyes ran over the papers that blanketed the floor. Pictures of the Farrow women were arranged in a chronological line
along the edge of the fireplace. Esther, Fay, Margaret, and Susanna.
The framed photograph I’d taken off the wall in Gran’s room was of her grandmother Esther. She’d started the Adeline River Flower Farm and raised Gran after Gran’s mother, Fay, died of scarlet fever.
In the picture, Esther stood in the eastern field of the farm, which we now called field six. A wall of towering sunflowers bloomed behind her, and her hands were twisted in the apron around her skirt, like she was uncomfortable with the photo being taken. It would have been just a few years before buyers started driving up into the mountains from Knoxville and Charlotte to stock the farm’s flowers in downtown shops and hotels.
I moved on to the sheet of paper draped over the arm of the sofa. It was an old purchase order, made back in 1973 by Gran. Seeds, chicken wire, and a new push plow were among the items listed, and her writing was even and flowing. Not like it had been in the last years when her hands shook. Fifty years ago, she was a single mother running the farm, no clue as to what dark fate awaited her daughter.
What if Susanna could have somehow slipped into the past?
I was only just beginning to let myself imagine it.
The pieces did fit, but only if I forgot everything I knew to be true about the world.
A chill slithered up my spine. This was far beyond seeing a man in a window or a horse running in an empty field. More terrifying than hearing the sound of car engines on an empty road. It was an entirely different reality. Complete and utter madness.
My thoughts stumbled ahead clumsily. Maybe they’d never found my mother’s body because she wasn’t dead. Maybe
there was no trail to follow because she’d vanished. Not just from Jasper, but from this…
“Timeline.” I whispered the word.
Was that what you called this? A timeline? Putting it that way made it sound like there was more than one, and even thinking it made my stomach drop with dread. It was the most insane thought I’d ever had. So why didn’t I feel crazy?
From the moment I’d seen that envelope from Gran, I’d been pulling at a thread that seemed to have no end. Like the toss of a stone into a well, when you’re waiting, breath held, to hear it hit the dark water below. But that silence just kept going.
Dr. Jennings’s warning about paranoia and delusions resounded in my head. I’d been recording my episodes in detail for the last year, but this was different territory. It felt dangerous.
I took the laptop from where it was buried beneath the papers on the desk and sat down on the floor. The light of the screen lit the dark room in a pale blue glow as I stretched my hands over the keys.
I swallowed hard before I typed “define delusion” and hit enter.
The search engine instantly populated.
Noun: a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially in mental conditions.
Trying again, I typed “delusion vs hallucination.”
A number of articles came up, and I clicked on the first one.
An illustrated picture of the human brain filled half the page, but the winding pathways were drawn like roots. From them, a large tree was growing, branches outstretched like uncurling fingers.
I scanned the text until I found what I was looking for.
Therefore, a hallucination includes seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or feeling something that isn’t there.
My notebook was filled with those, and they seemed to track with Gran’s symptoms.
On the other hand, delusions are false beliefs despite evidence to the contrary.
I exhaled, somewhat relieved. There was evidence. It was scattered all over the sitting room like confetti. I hadn’t made up the coincidences between my mother and Nathaniel Rutherford’s wife. I also hadn’t imagined the connections between myself and their daughter, June Rutherford.
My hands tightened into fists automatically. That name still felt like a choking vine, but the irrefutable part of this was that people couldn’t just travel through time.
I’m not sick, honey. I’m just in two places at once.
I’d never really thought about those words. I’d never had to, because we knew that Gran’s mind was broken, just like my mother’s was. The pattern was there, and so was the inevitable outcome. But Dr. Jennings had said himself that this form of dementia or cognitive decline didn’t follow the rules in textbooks. He didn’t even have a theory about what it could be.
When I followed that line of thinking, it led to only one place. One question that felt like the tip of a needle. If I touched it, it would prick me.
What if Gran wasn’t mad?
I stopped myself, backtracking the speeding train of thoughts before they led somewhere truly horrifying. The idea was a threshold. One I wasn’t sure I could come back from if I crossed it. But I didn’t feel like I had a choice anymore.
I went back to the desk, finding my notebook. My hands hesitated on its worn cover. I’d lost that apprehensive, nauseous feeling I’d had all the other times I’d opened it.
There was something about it now that felt scientific. Clinical.
I turned to the first page, staring at the date.
July 2, 2022 8:45 P.M.—At the greenhouse. Someone was calling my name.
The first time it happened, I was at the farm, in the greenhouse we used for starting our autumn harvest seeds. I’d stayed late after the fieldworkers had all gone home, and I was working when I heard someone calling my name. It was the very first time I heard that voice that was now familiar. The one that covered me in a feeling of warmth. It was so clear and loud that I hadn’t questioned it even for a second.
I answered, but the voice only called my name again. And again, until I’d pulled the gloves from my hands and walked outside, searching the darkening fields for a face. But there was nothing. No one. And the voice just went on.
It was several seconds before I realized what was happening, and it was like being hit by a rogue wave, the rush of it coming all at once. It didn’t matter that I’d been standing on that shore my whole life, waiting for it. It still felt like the world split in two when it finally arrived.
The next entry was three days later, just when I’d begun to convince myself that I’d imagined the whole thing.
July 5, 2022 2:11 P.M.—A horse running on the side of the road. She disappeared.
The pages were filled with dozens of other dates and times.
Music. The smell of bread baking in the oven. There were times I’d seen someone in a reflection or heard footsteps in the house. Once, I’d even called Mason out to the farm late at night, convinced someone had broken in.
Each time, I pushed the hallucination away, breathing deep and closing my mind to it until it stopped. I repeated the words. It’s not real, June.
If Gran really was in two places at once, could that mean that I was, too?
A tap on the door sounded, and I turned to see the shoulder of Mason’s jacket through the curtain.
I let out a frustrated breath, closing the notebook and covering it with a few of the pages that were scattered across the desk. I stepped carefully over the documents on the floor until I was in the hallway. His shadow rocked back and forth in front of the window before I opened the door, and he took a step backward when I pushed through the screen.
His gaze went from me to the inside of the house as I closed the door behind me. “Hey.”
“Hi.” I tried to sound normal.
Mason’s clothes were covered in dirt and pollen, which meant he was on his way home from work. “I called earlier,” he said. “Was worried when you didn’t come by the farm.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy to call me back?”
I glanced at the street, where a car was pulling into one of the driveways. I could lie to Mason, but I couldn’t look him in the eye when I did it. “I’ve just been dealing with some of the paperwork left from Gran.”
He wasn’t buying it. I could tell by the way his head tilted a little to one side. “June.”
“What?”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I snapped.
“Nothing?” His eyebrows lifted knowingly. “Really?”
I stared at him, digging my heels in.
He let the silence drag out for a few seconds before he stepped past me to the door.
“What are you—” I caught hold of his arm, but he pulled free, letting himself inside. “Mason!”
I followed, wedging myself ahead of him in the narrow hallway. When he reached the sitting room, I put a hand on his chest to stop him. But he froze as soon as he saw what I was trying to hide.
His eyes moved over the room slowly, landing on every scrap of paper I’d laid out. He was still—not just physically, but something about his countenance changed, making the house feel colder. When he finally looked at me, there was a strange look in his eyes.
“June.” His voice lowered. “What is this?”
I exhaled heavily, pressing both palms to my cheeks as if to cool the heat igniting there. “It’s just family stuff.”
“Why is it all over the house like this?” He was holding back now, being careful.
“I’ve just been…looking into something.”
“Looking into what?”
“Just something about my mom.”
“What about her?” he pressed, his voice taking on an edge.
“Nothing!” I shouldered past him to the kitchen. When I reached the counter, I folded the foil back over Ida’s old Pyrex dish and yanked open the fridge.
From the corner of my vision I could see Mason studying the empty bins and the accordion file that was now lying limp on the table. He was behind me a few seconds later, arms
crossed over his chest. The expression on his face was almost angry, but I didn’t know what he had to be mad about. I was the one losing my mind.
I traded the casserole dish for an untouched blueberry pie and fished two spoons from the crock beside the stove. I didn’t bother grabbing bowls, heading back to the table.
“You need to talk to me. I’m worried,” he said.
“You’re worried?” I muttered, taking a seat. I set the pie between us, handing him a spoon.
“Yes. I’m worried. Something’s off with you. It has been for a while. And now I find you shut up in the house with this shit everywhere?”
I smiled bitterly. “You think I’m losing it.”
“I don’t know what’s going on. That’s why I want you to talk to me.”
I shoved the spoon into the pie, eating straight out of the pan. I’d known it would come to this eventually. Mason knew me too well. I couldn’t hide from him.
“You can trust me, June. You know that.”
I did know. There wasn’t anything I could say that would push Mason away. In fact, I’d tried. We’d made an agreement years ago that he’d be the first person I called when it started, but the moment I told him, the moment I said it out loud, it would all be true. That would make it real.
I dropped the spoon onto the table, pressing my hands to my face again. There was no point in lying anymore. I knew that.
But it was just so hard to say.
I drew in a deep breath and stood, going to the shelf on the far wall for the whiskey decanter. “Sit down.” I took two of the etched lowball glasses from the hutch, setting them onto the table.
“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working.”
“Please just sit down.” I was exhausted now.
Mason was already pouring the whiskey when I took the chair across from him, and when he picked up his glass, I followed. I took it in one swallow, wincing as the burn traveled down my throat. The smoky smell of it filled the air around us, and as soon as I set down the glass, Mason refilled it.
“It’s happening,” I said.
My voice was so quiet that I wasn’t completely sure I’d spoken aloud. But Mason’s face changed, his eyes jumping back and forth on mine. His grip tightened on his glass.
“It’s been happening,” I breathed. “For about a year now.”
All at once, it became definitive. Conclusive.
“A year.”
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why do you think?” I smirked, tears biting the back of my throat.
“Okay.” The word stretched unnaturally.
I could see it in his eyes. He’d shifted gears to damage control, and I wasn’t entirely sure I didn’t need it. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him that there was nothing he could do to make this okay. He was a man who needed to feel like he was fixing things. Always finding the loose knots in people and tightening them up before they could unravel. I wasn’t going to take that away from him.
“Well, what do you mean it’s happening. What’s happening exactly?”
“I’m seeing things. Hearing things. Getting mixed up about what’s real.”
“What kinds of things?”
“I don’t know.” I flung a hand in the air between us.
“Everything!”
Mason looked at me a long time before he picked up his glass and drank. I was glad I couldn’t hear what he was thinking. Besides Birdie, he was the only person I had in the world, and that filled me with a tremendous amount of guilt.
“Have you made an appointment with Dr. Jennings?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ve been going to see him for the last few months.”
“Well, I’d like to go with you next time. Talk to him about what kind of plans we need to make.”
“It doesn’t have to be we,” I whispered.
He waited for me to look at him, and when he spoke, he didn’t hesitate on the words. “It’s always been we.”
An acute pain bloomed inside of me, unfurling beneath my skin. This was exactly what I didn’t want, and it was also maybe my only option. The truth was, if the roles were reversed, I’d do the same for him.
“It’s one thing to say you’ll be there when you’re an eighteen-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything about life.
It’s another to be us, now.”
“Have things really changed that much?” He was trying to make me laugh, but I couldn’t feel any warmth inside of me.
“Don’t you…” I turned the glass on the table. “Don’t you want something more? A family? A different life outside of the farm and Jasper?” It had been years since I’d asked him that question.
Mason shrugged. “Maybe one day. That’s not what I want now, though.”
I caught a tear at the corner of my eye before it could fall.
“Maybe I’m still waiting for you to suddenly realize you’re in love with me.”
I did laugh then, because it was tragically funny and sadly, somewhat true. I could imagine a life where we were together, married, maybe even with children. But that life could only belong to a June who wasn’t born a Farrow. And I’d somehow managed to keep my heart from getting broken by Mason Caldwell. He’d managed to do the same with me.
“Have you told Birdie?”
I shook my head. “I will. Soon.”
It was all settling. Not just what I’d told him, but what it meant. This was the beginning of the end, and even if we’d known it was coming our whole lives, it was still terrifying.
“And what’s going on in there?” He gestured to the sitting room. “Really.”
“You don’t want to know,” I muttered.
His eyebrows raised again.
I sighed, getting to my feet, and walked around the corner of the wall. I took the photograph Gran had sent me from the mantel of the fireplace and the one of my mother from the table. When I came back into the kitchen, Mason’s glass was empty for the second time. I set the picture from 1911 down in front of him, sinking back into my chair.
“I was opening a stack of mail yesterday and there was an envelope from Gran. It was posted a few days before she died, and this was the only thing inside.”
He studied the faces in the photograph before flipping it over and reading the name. “Who is that?”
“Nathaniel Rutherford,” I said, watching his eyes widen.
“The guy who—”
“Was murdered,” I said. “Yes. And that woman is his wife.”
I placed the second photo beside it, and he leaned in closer.
“Okay, so it’s the same woman. What of it?”
I set a finger on the one of my mother. “Only, it can’t be.
That’s my mother, Susanna.”
He looked confused now, trying to track.
I reached across the table, turning the first photo over so he could read the inscription on the back. “This was taken in 1911. This one”—I pointed to the other photo—“was sometime in the eighties.”
“So, it’s not the same woman.” He looked up at me.
I said nothing, silently hoping he was about to offer some kind of explanation I hadn’t yet thought of.
“Then they just look alike. But why would Margaret mail this to you?”
“I have no idea. So, I started digging, trying to figure out who Nathaniel Rutherford was married to.” I paused. “Mason, her name was Susanna Farrow.”
He leaned back in his chair, studying me.
“She has the same birth date as my mother, except for the year, obviously. And she had a daughter named June.”
I couldn’t read the look on his face now. It was as misplaced as I felt.
“Her daughter was born around the same day and month as the birthday you chose for me. And she died the exact same day and month I was found in Jasper—October 2nd.”
“June…”
“I mean, isn’t that weird?” I was looking for reassurance now.
“Yeah. It’s weird.”
“But…I don’t know. There’s also something wrong about it.”
“Well, it’s not like it’s her,” he said.
I bit down on my lip, pulse skipping.
“Wait.” He set his elbows on the table, his face turning serious again. “You actually think it’s her?”
I raked my hands through my hair. “I don’t know what to think. I mean, tell me how this is possible. What are the odds?”
“I can’t explain it to you. It was more than a hundred years ago. Things get lost over that much time.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but his hand lifted between us, stopping me. “June, you’re throwing a lot at me right now.
You just told me my best friend in the entire world is sick and she’s not going to get better. And now you’re telling me she thinks her mother…what? Went back in time?”
“I know it’s crazy.”
“Yeah.” He nearly laughed again, but now it sounded like a panicked thing. Like he was just beginning to reckon with the fact that I was really, truly broken.
We sat there for a long moment before he set a hand on my arm, squeezing gently. “Look, this…” His eyes dropped to the photos that sat between us. “This isn’t what’s important right now.”
I let out a breath, giving up. His eyes stared into mine, as if he were waiting to be convinced that I’d drop it. When I nodded, he finally let me go. I should have called him that night a year ago, like I’d promised. Maybe then I wouldn’t
have ended up here, caught in the labyrinth of Nathaniel Rutherford and my mother and a child that had barely existed.
“When does Birdie get back?” he asked.
I could hear the real question behind the words. When will there be someone here to keep an eye on you?
“Tomorrow.”
“I’m going to stay over tonight.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I’m not asking.”
He reached for the whiskey, refilling my glass before he filled his again.
The prick behind my eyes didn’t fully give way to tears until more than an hour later, as I was lying in the dark of my room, the sound of Mason’s deep sleeping breaths drifting up the stairs. And even then, I swallowed them down before they could fall.
I wanted to let it go, like he said. I wanted to focus on what was important. But the photograph felt…intentional. Planned.
Like Gran was trying to tell me something.
There was too much to think about. Too many swirling words inside of my head. I couldn’t draw them into a straight line. Gran. The photograph. The dates. My mother. Birdie.
Mason. It was all one never-ending maze, making me feel like my edges were beginning to fray. And they were.
