The Unmaking of June Farrow(69)

“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 back corner of the yard. There was a small pile of bricks stacked beneath it 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. That 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 back 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 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 in 1912. 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.