“How old are you?” I asked.
“Sixteen.”
Sixteen years old. I’d guessed she was about that age, but hearing her say it made her look even younger to me. She carried herself like someone who wasn’t a child, but that youth in her face was unmistakable. There was a shine to her that was untouched. She had maybe ten years left with Esther before she died, according to what Gran had told me. Then she’d take over running the farm herself.
I watched her from the corner of my eye. If I was here now, did that mean that all this time, Gran remembered me? She grew up knowing Eamon and Annie, yet Gran had never said a word about them. I’d always thought there weren’t things hidden between us, but that wasn’t true. Gran had kept a multitude of things from me.
“You know . . .” I set the bowl on the shelf, trying to decide how to ask the question. “You know who I am, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That you’re my . . .”
“Grandmother?” She looked amused by the question. “Yes.”
A laugh escaped me. The situation was so bizarre that I didn’t know how to feel about it. What would it have been like to grow up knowing about all of this? The door. The episodes. The splitting of time. Gran had been given all that knowledge so young, but she hadn’t given any of it to me.
She bit down on her bottom lip, like she was second-guessing whatever she was thinking. “It’s strange. I feel like I have so much to tell you, but then I remember.” She stopped herself.
I knew what she was going to say. That I didn’t know her. The dimming excitement in her eyes when she’d come down the stairs yesterday had told me the same thing.
“Were we close?” I asked. “Before, I mean.”
She nodded, the half smile on her face turning a little sad.
“But you don’t seem angry with me, like the others.” I took a chance in saying it.
Margaret’s full lips pressed into a line again, exactly the way I remembered Gran doing when she was thinking hard about something. “I think you have your reasons.”
Have. I twisted the rag in my hands, staring at her. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. There was something strange about the words. They were so present. Like the future me she knew and loved, the one who’d lived here, wasn’t really gone.
I wanted to ask her what she thought those reasons were. If she knew where I went and why. But Esther’s warning came back to me. This Margaret was still just a kid.
“So, Esther really sent you to watch me?”
Margaret gave me an apologetic look.
“I get it. They don’t trust me.”
“They’re angry because . . .” Her hands stilled on the pot. “You left Annie.” She looked up at me.
“I know.”
“No, I mean . . .” She took the rag from my hands, wiping the suds from her arms as she turned toward me. Her voice lowered. “The day you left, Eamon came home and Annie was alone. You’d left her here.”
My fingers slipped from the edge of the counter. “That’s not possible.”
Margaret’s mouth twisted to one side, almost exactly like Annie’s had.
I could feel the tremble in my hands now, an ache traveling up my arms, to my shoulders.
“No,” I tried again. “You don’t understand. That’s not possible.”
“I’m only telling you because—” She hesitated. “I mean, that’s why they’re so angry. Why they don’t trust you.”
I stared at her, speechless. There was no way I’d left my own child. I knew what it was like to be abandoned by a mother. I’d never do that. Ever. So, why did it turn my stomach? Why did I have the feeling that she wasn’t lying?
“Sorry.” Margaret paled. “I just thought you should know.”
She returned her attention to the pot, sinking her hands back into the water, and I bit the inside of my cheek. I didn’t know what else to say. I certainly wasn’t going to ask any questions. Not when the weight of the answers could crush me.
I pushed out the back door, following the wall of tobacco so closely that the leaves brushed my arm as I passed. When I saw Eamon through the open doors of the barn, I stopped short. He stood with Annie braced in one arm, her little legs swinging around him as he unspooled a line of wire on the ground. Even when he lowered down on one knee to cut it, she still clung to him, a small white flower twirling in her fingers.
I walked toward them slowly, arms wrapped tightly around myself. Annie’s hand was hooked around Eamon’s neck, her wispy blond hair falling down her back. I scrutinized every detail of those tiny hands and that round face. The way she looked cradled in Eamon’s arms. Even if I didn’t want to believe it, this child was mine. A part of me did know her, even if I couldn’t remember her. It was the same feeling I’d had when I’d stood in front of that crumbling house two days ago.
When Eamon rose back to his feet, I took a step in the other direction, moving out of his line of sight before he could spot me. My hand found the fence posts of the small, overgrown garden tucked against the house, and I lifted the gate latch, letting myself inside. The plants had been overtaken, strangled by weeds that rose almost halfway up the fence. It had been left untended, maybe for as long as I’d been gone.
There were tomato plants, onions, squash, and herbs. In one corner, I could see the sprouts of a sweet potato vine and the leaves of a cucumber plant withering on the chicken wire. It was a garden of dying things.
I sank to my knees, impulsively tearing at the mounds of clover and dandelion and nut grass. I ripped them from the earth, frantically trying to clear the overgrowth as the panic rose inside of me. My heart was still racing, my throat aching with the scream that had been trapped there since the moment I’d seen Eamon’s face. It was a growing, spreading fever inside of me. A feeling that had edges sharp enough to cut me deep. This was a nightmare. All of it. And I couldn’t wake up.
I wrenched another handful of weeds from the earth as I blinked back the tears in my eyes. Again, I looked to the fields in the distance, desperately searching for any sign of the red door.
It would appear, I told myself. It was only a matter of time.
And when it did, I would be ready.
Fourteen
By the time the sky was glowing gold over the hills, I’d cleared an entire section of the little garden. The once-buried plants were now haloed in dark, rich soil, their leaves open to the sun, and when I looked at them, I felt like I could breathe just a little deeper.
I stretched my hands open in front of me, knuckles stinging. The cuticles of my fingernails were torn and bleeding, my palms scraped and red. But that aroma—the sweetness of rich soil and the bright, sharp scent of green—was a known thing to me.
The smell of smoke had filled the air for most of the afternoon, and I scanned the sky until I spotted the drifting trail over the field. It was moving. The pillar of gray reached the edge of the plot, and Eamon appeared, pushing through the leaves on the other side of the house with a rod cast over his shoulders. A handkerchief was pulled up over his nose, a ring of sweat staining the neck and chest of his shirt.
He’d been in the fields all afternoon, coming from and going to the barn with the same rig. It was a wide wooden dowel that reached out to either side of him, and from both ends, a chain was fixed that suspended two metal containers that looked like lanterns. Smoke spilled from the holes in the metal, creating a cloud around him.