“Yes,” I answered. “I killed him.”
The gun went off, the sound exploding in my ears, and it echoed into the hills. I waited for an eruption of pain in my chest. My stomach. But when I looked down, there was no bloom of red. He’d fired the gun, but he hadn’t shot me.
Slowly, my eyes lifted. Tears glimmered in Caleb’s eyes as he stared at me, and I didn’t know if they were for Nathaniel or for Susanna. Only one of them deserved any kind of pity.
“He held me under the water.” My voice broke. “He held me there while my daughter watched from the riverbank.”
He believed me. It was etched deep in the lines of his face. The tears brimming in his eyes finally spilled over, but his face didn’t change. He stood there, freed from the lie he’d been telling himself for his entire life. He’d been a child who believed the story he’d been told because he needed to survive. Now it was time to let that story go.
“You’ll find our mother buried under the oak tree at the corner of the woods beside the falls. She deserves a grave, Caleb.”
He moved to reach for his belt, and I flinched, drawing my cuffed hands back to my chest. But he hooked one finger into a small set of keys and tossed them to the ground, turning his back to me. I watched, completely numb, as he got into the car. Stood there frozen as it pulled onto the road.
Leaflets of paper flew out the driver’s side window as he took off, fluttering in the air before they floated to the ground. I walked toward them as they scattered in the road, stopping short when I looked down at the one beside my feet.
It was the photograph. Nathaniel’s sharp-edged form. That cigarette in his hand. My mother, face turned as she smiled at him. She’d had no idea what that sinister love would set into motion.
Thirty-Two
July 2, 1950
It comes on an ordinary day, at an ordinary hour, and the moment I feel it, my whole world stops.
That buzz in the air is one I know. I can feel it reach into the house, wrapping its tendrils around me.
The door.
Moonlight is cast across the wall of the sitting room, making everything look black-and-white. I see myself in the reflection of the kitchen window, the strap of my nightgown slipping from my shoulder. I’m standing over the stove, where the kettle is whirring, my blond hair hanging in a braid that almost reaches my waist.
Not now.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.
I meet my own eyes, letting myself paint that image in my mind. Me. In this home. A mother. A wife. I’ve prepared for this, but I still have to press my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound that breaks in my chest. I have to breathe through it so that I don’t wake her.
Through the open door of my bedroom, Annie is asleep beneath my quilts. I can hear her breathing.
The burn in my throat is nothing to the pain behind my ribs as my feet take me across the kitchen. She is bathed in blue light, her hair like silver. She’s asleep, I tell myself. Eamon will be home any minute. She won’t wake. She won’t even stir.
I have no choice but to hope it’s true.
It’s been almost eighteen months since I last saw the door, and every day that passes is a day that Caleb Rutherford could discover the truth. It’s only a matter of time before the it finds its way into the light. When it does, I’ll have lost my chance.
I step into the room, rounding the bed. Annie’s cheeks frame a perfect pink mouth, and I press my lips to her temple. I inhale her scent as deep into my lungs as I possibly can.
There isn’t time to second-guess it or wait for Eamon’s headlights on the road. My feet take me to the dressing table, and I pull the ring from my finger. I drop it into the dish below the mirror and remember the words I wrote on that envelope—a message that will be carried through time, back to me.
Trust me.
I hope that I will.
I open the back door, not bothering to wrap a shawl around my shoulders or take the lantern with me. The tobacco fields are so thick that the wind makes the leaves look like dark water in the moonlight. That vibration on the wind is even more alive out here, and I follow it into the nearest row. The plants swallow me up, my bare feet sinking in the soft, damp soil, and I walk, hands catching the leaves as I pass.
I see it a few paces later. The chipped red paint. The shimmer that surrounds it in the air.
The door sits in the middle of the field, hidden from the rest of the world.
I am a stone sinking into a deep, dark sea. And I’m not coming back.
I reach the door with a final, silent footstep, and the wind picks up, pulling my nightgown around me. It’s the same door that has appeared for the last five years, and the last time I opened it, I’d been someone else. I had no idea what waited on the other side.
The weight of the locket is suddenly heavy around my neck, and I reach inside my nightgown, pulling it free. It clicks as it opens, and I turn its face toward the moonlight. The hands are set to 2022. A place where I exist, where a thirty-three-year-old June Farrow is caring for her ailing grandmother and trying to keep the farm running. Afraid of the future. Grieved by the past. And I’m putting every bit of hope I have in her.
I lift my unsteady hand, and the moment my fingertips touch the doorknob, I don’t give myself time to change my mind. I turn it. Pull it open. What lies on the other side is a blackness I have never seen. It’s a darkness that eats itself. A thick wall of nothing.
I’m shaking as my foot crosses the threshold. My breath is a storm inside my head, and when I pull the door closed behind me, the crack of moonlight becomes a sliver. A knife in the dark.
It disappears with a click.
I’m
I
Thirty-Three
1952
Susanna Rutherford’s body was exhumed from its thirty-four-year resting place on July 3, 1951.
They found her beneath the oak tree, right where Nathaniel said she would be.
I stood on the north side of the river as the men worked, shovels in hand and white T-shirts marked with dirt as they dug. On the other side, Caleb was watching, and I could tell the exact moment they found her. A silence fell over the woods, even the birds going quiet.
She was bones and dust, had been for years, and in some way, that felt not too unlike the myth I’d always known her as. She was a prism that colored me and my world with a story. We were the limbs of a broken tree with poisoned roots.
We laid Susanna to rest three days later, and those same men who’d been at the river dug another hole in the ground. The headstone that Nathaniel had erected all those years ago still stood in the churchyard, making her the first Farrow to be buried within the fence of that cemetery. But no one ever dug up the small grave beside it for her daughter, June Rutherford.
A year later, I sat on the stool in front of the dressing table in my bedroom as Margaret wove tiny chamomile blooms through the braids in my hair. She was humming a song to herself, a glimpse of that little girl I had once known visible in the reflection as I watched her.
I could remember her now. Eleven years old. Twelve. Thirteen. Now she was seventeen, on the cusp of womanhood. She’d asked me once what it was like between us before I came here, and even though I’m not supposed to talk about the future, I told her that she was a mother to me. My dearest friend. And looking at her now, it was still true.
I still had the memory of that night on the hill with the sun going down and the fiddle playing when Birdie—Annie—reached for my hand and we said goodbye to Gran. But before I was born, she’d be the one to say goodbye to me. Soon, that memory would be gone, and I’d have to relive it before I could remember it again.