The memories that had found me before were one thing, but this, I didn’t know if I could take this. They were coming out of nowhere now, sometimes hitting me before I’d even seen them coming. And at the same time, there were more things that were getting harder to recall.
I reached beneath the pillow to the edge of the mattress. I’d fallen asleep trying to redraw the image in my mind—the memory of the cherry tree. But after less than one day, I’d been unable to reconstruct it.
I unfolded the paper I’d written on, my eyes moving over the words in fits and starts. I understood them. They made sense, the scene written out like the page of a book. A girl picking cherries from a tree until the neighbor comes outside with a ladder. Only now I didn’t remember any of it. It was like hearing a story told about a stranger.
I refolded the paper, pressing it to my chest as my heart sank. My theory had been right. I wasn’t just gaining memories. I was losing them, too.
A plate sat on the table when I came out of the bedroom, a small knife at its side. Through the open back door, I could see the empty barn, and I bit the inside of my cheek. Eamon had left me breakfast, a thick slice of crusty bread topped with a wedge of cheese. Beside it sat a hard-boiled egg and a mug of coffee.
We’d driven back from the Faire in complete silence, and when we got home, Eamon put Annie to bed. I shut myself in the bedroom, one hand pressed to the door as I listened to his footsteps move across the house. I hadn’t told him about what Caleb had said to me. I hadn’t told Esther or Margaret, either. All I could think about now was how I’d felt when Eamon’s mouth was just a breath from mine. How his hand had twisted in my dress.
I ate and washed my plate, going out onto the porch when I saw Annie hanging on the railing of the paddock to watch Callie. I made my way toward them, fingers skipping lightly over the knotted wood fence.
“I was wondering where you were,” I said, smiling when Annie looked over her shoulder at me.
The closer I got, the more still the horse was, and when I reached for her, she touched her muzzle to my palm. Her warm breath enveloped my hand as I stroked up to the place between her eyes. She leaned into it, calming under my touch.
“Callie,” I said, softly, trying it out. The name felt so known to me now.
She settled, pressing her nose to my shirt, and I leaned into her, breathing through the choked feeling in my throat. I was still stuck in the dream I’d had of Eamon, drifting between the many memories that were now filling my head. Somewhere between this world and another, I was losing myself.
My eyes drifted over the fields, hoping for the first time in days that I’d see that door. Instead, the sunlight glinted off the windshield of Esther’s truck as it came over the hill.
I exhaled, letting my hands fall from the mare’s mane.
Margaret pulled in, getting out of the truck and tossing the keys to the seat. She had that glow about her from last night, like she was still buzzing from the revelry of the Faire.
“So?” I said, making my best attempt at acting as if everything was okay. “Did you dance with him?”
She blushed, shoulders drawing up around her ears. “Twice.”
I laughed, and it felt good. I missed that mischievous glint in Gran’s eyes. The way she could make things sound like a secret.
Margaret climbed the steps of the porch with Annie and they went inside, leaving me alone with Callie. I could finally see Eamon out in the fields, on the north side of a hill that overlooked the house. He was hauling a load of yellowed, cut tobacco stalks up onto his shoulder. They were ones he’d been forced to cut in an attempt to prevent the blight from spreading. But it was too late. It was here. The only thing to do now was to keep as much of it healthy before harvest as possible.
Another truck drove past, and the man behind the wheel lifted a hand into the air, waving. It was Percy Lyle, the pig farmer who’d come to find Eamon at the Faire last year to tell him Callie had gotten out.
The thought came instantly.
I waved back, hand dropping to my side as I played the evening over again in my head. The dance with Eamon, the conversation with Caleb, the eerie sight of Mimi Granger. That look in her eyes wasn’t from too many glasses of ale or an imagined story. It had been on her face that day I came through the door, when she saw me from her porch.
She’d known something. She’d seen something.
I looked up the road, where it vanished over the hill. Beyond it, the turn onto the river road was only a mile or so from that old farmhouse with the mailbox that read GRANGER.
In the distance, Eamon was out of sight in the fields again. I knew what he’d say if I told him what I was thinking. He and Esther both would think I was insane. But if neither of them was going to tell me what really happened that night, I had to find out for myself.
I opened the driver’s side door of Esther’s truck and snatched the keys up from the seat. Before I could think better of it, I shoved them into the ignition. I was up the road before I saw anyone come out onto the porch, and I figured I had maybe ten minutes before Margaret got far enough out into the field to find Eamon and tell him what I’d done.
I turned off of Hayward Gap, eyes drifting to the rearview mirror. I was half afraid that I’d see the red flashing light of Caleb’s police car there, but the road was clear.
The Granger farm was the only one in at least a three-mile stretch, the driveway one long track between two fields. At its end, the house sat behind a tall golden green sea of alfalfa. I turned onto the drive, taking the turn so fast that the tires slid in the dirt when I hit the brakes.
There was a flash of a shadow in the front window of the house when I came to a stop. I got out of the truck and climbed the steps, pounding a fist on the door. I could hear the clatter of a dish inside. Footsteps.
The wind rippled through the field, an expanse that stretched all the way to the tree line, where the river narrowed after it flowed past the flower farm. I tried to picture a woman running, a child in her arms. I tried to trace her path to the road, but there was nothing.
I knocked again. This time, harder.
“Mrs. Granger! Please, I just want to talk to you.”
It was a few seconds before the door swung open, and behind it, Mimi stood with a stricken look. She changed her mind almost as soon as she saw me, and she scrambled for the door again, as if changing her mind. I shoved my boot in front of it, keeping it open.
Her rasping breath was on the verge of a cough, her pallid skin colorless as she peered up at me. “Leave! Or I’ll call the sheriff!”
“I only want to ask you a question.” I put my hands up in front of me, trying to calm her. “And then I’ll go. I swear.”
She still looked like a wild animal with those yellowed, owlish eyes, but her thin lips pursed, like she was waiting.
I lowered my hands, glancing over my shoulder to the field on the west side of her property. “I just want you to tell me what you saw that night.”
“What?” she croaked.
“The night you told Sheriff Rutherford about. When you saw me running through that field.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What is this?”
“I just need to know exactly what you saw.”
“I told him what you did. I told him exactly what you did.”