“All right.” The wheels of her chair squeaked before I heard her nails on the keyboard. “Easy enough, I guess.”
I could imagine her there behind the high counter, chin tipped up so she could read the computer screen through the bifocal area of her glasses.
“Now, let’s see here.” Her voice trailed off as she kept typing. “Got it. What exactly are you looking for?”
“The name of the woman he married.”
The murmur of her reading under her breath was barely audible over the phone, and the damaged cord crackled again, making me wince. She made a sound that was followed by another silence.
“Sorry, Ida. I didn’t hear you.”
“I just—well, this is odd, isn’t it?” Another nervous laugh escaped her.
“What is?”
“It says right here . . .” She began to read. “ ‘Having applied for a license for the marriage of Nathaniel Rutherford, of Jasper’ ”—she took a breath—“ ‘age twenty-five years, to resident of Jasper—’ ”
The phone cut out again and I pinched my fingers to the cord, holding it in place.
“To Susanna. It says Susanna Farrow.”
My fingers slipped from the cord, finding the locket around my neck. I was sure the moment it left her mouth that I’d heard her wrong. That the voice in my mind whispering my mother’s name was just too loud. It was drowning everything else out.
“I’m—I’m sorry?” I stammered.
“That’s what it says, honey. I’m lookin’ at it right now.” She continued, “ ‘。 . . united in matrimony Nathaniel Rutherford and Susanna Farrow the parties likened above, on the ninth day of September 1911 at First Presbyterian Church in Jasper.’ ”
I stared at the wall, a numb sensation bleeding through me.
“I didn’t know you all were related to that family.”
“We aren’t,” I said, the words made of air.
“Well, this woman was a Farrow. Doubt that’s a coincidence in a town this small. Your own mother must have been named after her.”
I blinked, fitting her words to the fragments of thought that were struggling to come together. Of course. That would explain it. Maybe someone up the line in the family had married Nathaniel Rutherford. But I didn’t remember Gran ever talking about another Susanna Farrow, and there was no gravestone in the cemetery for one. She’d always been so serious about making sure I knew the family’s history.
Except for when it came to Susanna, I realized.
I swallowed. “Can you find her birth record? Something that has her parents’ names or . . . ?”
“Let’s see.” Ida typed away for a few long seconds before she clicked her tongue. “I don’t see anything for that name. The only one pulling up for a Susanna Farrow is for your mother back in 1966. But you already have all that.”
I did. Thanks to Ida, I had a copy of every scrap of paper on my mother that could be found in the courthouse.
“Not unusual for that time, though.” She thought aloud. “That far back, women birthed babies at home all the time and there wasn’t much reason to record the birth with the county.”
I leaned into the counter, thinking.
“You could try the church,” she said.
“The church?”
“It’s been here longer than the courthouse, and they kept detailed records on births, marriages, and deaths. It’s worth a try if this woman was married to the minister.”
When I said nothing, she spoke again. “Want me to call over there?”
“No, that’s all right. Thanks, Ida.”
“No problem, honey.”
I hung up the phone, one hand still gripped on the receiver as I bit down hard on my thumbnail. In the span of a few moments, that compulsive need I’d had to understand the photograph had turned into a slithering thing. As if the second Ida said my mother’s name, she’d uttered the words of a forbidden spell. The name carried a hallowed kind of resonance. One that had captured the town’s imagination for years and given birth to a hundred stories. So had Nathaniel’s.
My eyes went to the window. I could still hear it—that high-pitched tinkle of the wind chimes—and it struck me that I didn’t know where they were coming from. The only ones we’d had hanging in the garden had been blown down in a storm more than a year ago. They were still sitting on the potting bench outside, waiting for a new string.
The sound grew louder. More painful. My chest rose and fell as I made my way to the front door, pulling it open. The screen slammed and I went out onto the porch, searching the rafters, where a turtle dove peered over the edge of a nest.
The wind chimes weren’t there.
I pressed my hands over my ears when the ringing gave way to a sharp pain in my head. But the chimes didn’t stop. They didn’t dim. The ringing rose, the notes fusing together until it was one long, earsplitting scream in my mind.
And then, all of a sudden, like the wind snuffing a candle’s flame, it stopped.
Five
Dr. Jennings’s office was a tall but narrow three-story building downtown, a contradictory combination of old and new. The room was painted in a pale shade of green. It matched a row of 1970s cabinets that hung above a small porcelain sink lined with glass jars of cotton balls and gauze bandages, and though the door was still fit with what looked to be its original glass knob, a brand-new ultrasound machine sat in the corner, its screen aglow.
A tray that held three vials of my blood sat beside me on the paper-covered table, my name scrawled across the stickers in black ink. I stared at them, listening to the scratch of Dr. Jennings’s pen on paper as he flipped through my notebook. He was the only one who’d ever looked inside.
Gran had never been one for doctors, but Dr. Jennings had made his calls anyway, insisting that what was happening to her followed no textbooks or standards of practice that he’d ever seen. She thought that he looked at her as some kind of science experiment, but I found the doctor to be more like a man with a chessboard than anything else. He wanted to be the first to solve the riddle of the Farrow women.
He’d failed with Gran. I was his second chance.
“They’re definitely increasing in frequency. You’re right about that. How many episodes would you say this week?” He looked up, meeting my eyes expectantly.
His once-brown hair was nearly all gray, his face significantly aged in the years since I was a child. But he still had that gentle way about him, as if he feared one wrong word would send me running straight out of the room.
“June?”
“Six, I think.” I cleared my throat when the words came out sounding cracked.
“Okay.” He scribbled away, the pen looping across the page. I could see the word hallucination.
That label had never felt right. The things I saw were different. It was a hollowed-out, floating feeling, like the meandering path a single dandelion seed takes through the air before it eventually lands. A real thing just barely out of reach.
“Have you noticed if any of these episodes have been accompanied by any . . . physical symptoms? Fainting? Vision changes?”
“No.”
My eyes focused on the chart that hung on the wall behind him. It was a diagram of the human heart, with detailed renderings of the muscle and tissue, and I immediately thought how fortunate I would be to have something as simple as a heart problem. There were surgeries for that. Clinically proven medications to prescribe. Transplants, even. Labels identified its components in words like chamber, ventricle, atrium, valve. It all looked so simple. Like the parts of a machine. But the human brain was like the uncharted depths of the oceans. Science was still wading around in the shallows.