When I was a child, the kids at school said it was the devil’s mark, and though I’d never admitted it to anyone, I’d sometimes wondered if it was true. No one in Jasper had ever seen us as normal because my grandmother had never been normal. She’d never believed she was sick, either, saying that she was simply in two places at once.
Before I’d even registered the sting behind my eyes and the quiver of my bottom lip, a hot tear was falling down my cheek.
“I know,” I whispered, glancing to my grandmother’s face in the second photograph on the table. “I promised I wouldn’t cry.”
But that ache inside of me wasn’t just the pain of losing her. It was the relief, too, and that was something else I’d never said aloud. In those last years, Gran had all but lived inside of her own broken mind, shut away from our world for weeks at a time. It was one thing to miss her when she was gone. It was another to miss her when she was still here, in this house with me. For the last few months, I’d found myself longing for the end as much as I’d dreaded it.
The pop of wood made me blink, and my head turned to the hallway, where the light from the porch was coming through the front door’s oval stained glass window. But the moment my eyes focused, a prick crept over my skin again, making me still. The frame of a man was visible on the other side—the same one I’d seen at the church.
There, behind the glass, eyes as black as inkblots fixed on me as the bright orange glow of a cigarette ignited in the darkness.
It’s not real.
I clenched my teeth, jaw aching as I willed myself to blink. But this time, he didn’t disappear. A curl of smoke twisted in the haze of the porch light, and I was sure for a moment that I could smell it in the air.
I closed my eyes again, counting three full breaths before I opened them. The cigarette glowed again. He was still there.
My fingers slipped from the locket, and I started up the hall, heels knocking like a heartbeat until my hand found the brass knob. I yanked the door open, my vision swimming as the night air spilled back into the house. The place on the porch where the man had stood only seconds before was now empty. Finally, he’d vanished.
I pushed through the screen door, searching the darkness. The yard was quiet, the rocking chair still as the tin light swayed gently overhead.
“Everything okay, June?”
Ida Pickney’s high-pitched voice made me jump, and I sucked in a breath. She stood on the porch of the house next door, already changed out of the dress I’d seen her wearing at the burial. An unopened newspaper was clutched in one hand as her eyes moved over me slowly.
“Fine.” I forced a smile, trying to slow my breathing.
Ida hesitated, hands fidgeting with the rubber band on the paper. “Can I get you anything, dear?”
“No, I just . . .” I shook my head. “I just thought I saw someone on the porch.”
The look on her face went from hopeful to worried in an instant, and I realized my mistake. That was how it had started for Gran—seeing things that weren’t there.
I pressed my palm to my forehead, giving a nervous laugh. “It was nothing.”
“All right.” She forced a smile. “Well, you just call over if you or Birdie need anything at all. You will, won’t you?”
“Of course. Night, Ida.”
I slipped back inside before she’d even answered, locking the dead bolt behind me. My steps were slower as I made my way back toward the stairs, but my palms were slick, my unraveling hair curling with damp. When I reached the mirror, the locket caught the light, and I saw that the trail of the tear that had fallen a moment ago still striped my cheek. I wiped it with the back of my hand.
“It’s not real.” The words were barely audible under my shaky breath. “There’s nothing there.”
I ignored the sick, sinking feeling in my gut again. The one that whispered at the back of my mind the thought that I wouldn’t let fully come to the surface. A year ago, I would have told myself it was just a trick of the light through the glass. Not a wrinkle of the mind. Not a fine crack in the ice. It was the porch light swinging. The shadow of a tree branch.
But I knew. I’d known for some time now.
My eyes trailed down the dark hallway, to Birdie’s bedroom door. I hadn’t told her about the flashes of light that had begun to appear at the corner of my vision last summer. I hadn’t told her about the echo of voices that drifted in the air around me or the fact that more and more each day, my thoughts felt like sand seeping through the floorboards.
It came for my grandmother, as it came for my mother, and now it had come for me.
For years, the town of Jasper had been watching me, waiting for the madness to show itself. They didn’t know it was already there, brimming beneath the surface.
My future had never been a mystery. I’d known since I was very young what lay ahead, my own end always so sharply visible in the distance. That was why I’d never fall in love. Why I’d never have a child. Why I’d never seen any point in the dreams that lit the eyes of everyone else around me. I had only one ambition in my simply built life, and that was to be sure the Farrow curse would end with me.
It was as good a place as any to end a story. I wasn’t the first Farrow, but I would be the last.
Two
The larkspur was blooming, and that was the first real sign of summer in the mountains.
I worked my way down the narrow row, wedging myself against the wall of dahlias at my back that wouldn’t wake for another couple of weeks. Not until midsummer, Gran had always said, and every year she was right.
I tugged at the collar of my coveralls, pulling it up against the heat of the rising sun. The mornings were cool, the best time to cut, and they were also quiet. Birdsong and the sound of the river behind the tree line were the only companions in the fields at that time of day. Most of the hands were down at the barn getting ready to work, but I’d been at it for hours, happy to have a reason to leave the silence of the house on Bishop Street.
Bright golden pollen covered the knuckles of my worn leather gloves as I found the end of the flower stalks by memory. One by one, I worked down the groupings of leaves until I reached the place to cut. I’d been using the same snips since I was thirteen, a pair of wood-handled clippers I’d notched my initials into and refused to replace.
The Farrow women had a touch. When farms had sprung up from valley to valley and everyone else in North Carolina was planting tobacco, the Farrows were growing flowers. It had kept the farm working for the last 118 years, and long before there was internet or travel guides, it had been one of the things that Jasper was known for—a peculiar little farm that was growing flower varieties even the richest growers in New England hadn’t been able to get their hands on. The mystery had made the farm something of a legend, even if the women who ran it weren’t exactly considered polite company.
My great-great-grandmother Esther had never come clean about where she’d gotten those seeds, though people in Jasper had their guesses, including some local lore that she’d made a deal with demons. It was more likely that at some point, someone who’d come to work on the railroads had sold them to her. But that wasn’t the kind of story that people liked to tell.