The Unmaking of June Farrow(36)

Esther hauled the cheesecloth up out of the sink, giving it a shake before she dropped whatever was encased within it into a bowl on the counter.

“I have questions.” I sat down in one of the chairs, watching her.

She gave me a look I couldn’t quite place. “I’m sure you do. But I’ll tell you now that you should be careful which ones you ask. You might not want all the answers.”

It sounded exactly like something Gran would say, but I was finished with riddles and half-truths. I wasn’t going to play that game anymore.

“I think I deserve to know what’s happening to me,” I said.

She continued working, almost as if she hadn’t heard me. But a few seconds later, she sighed. “You’re not wrong about that, I suppose.”

She seemed to make up her mind, rinsing her hands in the bowl of water that sat on the counter. The expression on her face was unreadable, and I began to wonder if she was nervous. She fidgeted with the towel tucked into the waist of her skirt before she sat down on the other side of the table.

Her hands folded in front of her. “So, where should we start?”

“How about explaining how I got here. How all of this . . .” I lifted a hand, gesturing to the kitchen around us. “. . . is possible?”

“Well, I know less about that than you may imagine,” she answered. “I honestly don’t know how it began. My mother told me what her mother told her—that any woman in our bloodline will see that door at one point or another, and eventually, she’ll walk through it.”

That choice of words made me sit up straighter in the chair. “What do you mean eventually? Like, it’s inevitable?”

“There hasn’t been a Farrow I know of who’s managed not to go through the door. It doesn’t stop appearing. Sure, you might decide you’ll never walk through it, but it comes again. And then again. Until one day, you’ve finally got a good enough reason to open it.”

Her eyes studied me, head tilting like she was trying to see if I knew from experience what she meant.

“It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t even know about any of this until yesterday.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you were six years old or if you were eighty. We’re like moths to the flame, and once you cross, it begins.”

“What begins?”

“The fraying.”

I waited.

She set her elbows on the table, as if settling in. Had she been the one to tell me all of this before? “I’ll explain it to you the way it was explained to me. Time is like a rope, made of many fibers, and when they’re bound up together, they make one strong timeline.”

She stared at me, waiting to be convinced of whether I was following.

“But once you cross it, it begins to fray. Those fibers loosen. Unwind. Eventually, they are bound to unravel. Then you don’t have one timeline anymore.”

Two places at once. Two times at once. The episodes weren’t hallucinations or delusions or any other kind of conjuring in the mind.

“So, they’re real? The things I’m seeing and hearing?”

She nodded. “They’re just parallel threads.”

“But.” My mind went to that notebook tucked under my mattress. “I only went through the door yesterday. If it starts after you cross, why did the episodes start a year ago?”

Esther squinted. “A year ago?”

“Yeah.”

“Exactly?”

“Almost. The first one was July second, 2022.”

There was an unmistakable reaction that rippled through Esther’s body, but she recovered well, tucking a stray hair behind her ear and clearing her throat. “Well, this isn’t the first time you’ve crossed, June.”

As soon as she said it, I realized I already had the pieces of that puzzle. My mother disappeared when she was pregnant with me. She most likely gave birth to me on the other side.

“Are you saying that I was born here, in this time?”

“Well, not in this time, obviously. You were born in the year 1912. But your mother took you to 1989. The fray is different for all of us. Sometimes it takes months for it to begin, sometimes years. Decades.”

The explanation was a sound one, practiced and carefully constructed, but she still looked shaken. Uncomfortable, even.

“For my mother,” She continued, “it began only a few months after she crossed, and it was swift, breaking her mind in a matter of years. For me, it took a long time to come on, and it’s been slow and steady.”

“So, you’re . . . ?”

“Sick? It has nothing to do with being sick. It’s more like having two sets of eyes, one that sees this world and one that sees the other. Eventually, they start bleeding into each other, and that’s where the madness lies.”

“But how do you stop it?”

“You can’t. The door appears to the Farrow women, and at one point or another, they will walk through it. And once you’ve crossed, your mind never fully crosses back.”

I stared into the steam rising from my coffee cup, that familiar, bleak feeling settling back over me. I’d felt that pull. The draw to the door had been like a string tugging me toward it. Had I even hesitated before I reached for the knob? I couldn’t remember now.

“I suppose at one time or another, it was a useful gift.” Esther paused. “But like everything else, it comes with a cost.”