Glancing down at my engagement ring, I think, Elliot and I have what it takes. We know each other so well. We’ve always been side by side….
The birthday girl slowly pushes herself out of her chair, taking her beau’s arm. They move along together, stooped and crooked and leaning. The sight is sweet and heart tugging. I hope my parents live to this ripe old stage of life. I hope they’ll have a long retirement…someday…years in the future when my father finally decides to slow down. This disease can’t take him at fifty-seven. He’s too young. He’s too desperately needed, both at home and in the world. He has work to do yet, and after that, my parents deserve a retirement with quietly passing seasons and time to spend together.
A tender feeling settles in my chest, and I push away these thoughts. No overwhelming displays of emotion in public—Leslie’s frequent reminder. Women can’t afford it in this arena. It’s seen as incompetence, weakness.
As if I didn’t know that already. A courtroom isn’t much different. Female lawyers are always on trial in more ways than one. We have to play by different rules.
My father salutes Frank as they meet near the podium. The man stops, straightens, and returns the gesture with military precision. Their gazes meet, and the moment is pure. It may look perfect on camera, but it’s not for the camera. My father’s lips press into a tight line. He’s trying not to tear up.
It isn’t like him to come so close to letting it show.
I swallow another swell of emotion. A breath shudders past my lips. I press my shoulders back, turn my eyes away, and focus on the window, studying the woman in the garden. She’s still standing there, gazing off. Who is she? What is she looking for?
The boisterous chorus of “Happy Birthday” seeps through the glass and causes her to slowly turn toward the building. I feel the tug of the song. I know that the cameras are likely to sweep my way, and I’ll look distracted, but I can’t quite extricate myself from staring at the path outside. I want to see the woman’s face, at least. Will it be as blank as the summer sky? Is she merely addled and wandering, or has she skipped the festivities on purpose?
Leslie yanks my jacket from behind, and I snap to attention like a schoolgirl caught talking in line.
“Happy birth— Focus,” she sings close to my ear, and I nod as she moves off to gain a better angle for snapping cellphone photos that will go on my father’s Instagram. The senator is up on all the latest social media, even though he doesn’t know how to use any of it. His social media manager is a whiz.
The ceremony continues. Camera flashes erupt. Happy family members wipe tears and take videos as my father presents a framed congratulatory letter.
The cake is wheeled up, a hundred candles blazing.
Leslie is delighted. Happiness and emotion swell the room, stretching it like a helium balloon. Any more joy and we’ll all float away.
Someone touches my hand and wrist, fingers encircling me so unexpectedly that I jerk away, then stop myself so as not to cause a scene. The grip is cold and bony and trembling but surprisingly strong. I turn to see the woman from the garden. She straightens her humped back and gazes up at me through eyes the color of the hydrangeas back home at Drayden Hill—a soft, clear blue with a lighter mist around the edges. Her pleated lips tremble.
Before I can gather my wits, a nurse comes to collect her, taking a firm hold. “May,” she says, casting an apologetic look my way. “Come along. You’re not supposed to bother our guests.”
Rather than releasing my wrist, the old woman clings to it. She seems desperate, as if she needs something, but I can’t imagine what it is.
She searches my face, stretches upward.
“Fern?” she whispers.
CHAPTER 2
May Crandall
AIKEN, SOUTH CAROLINA, PRESENT DAY
On occasion, it is as if the latches in my mind have gone rusty and worn. The doors fall open and closed at will. A peek inside here. An empty space there. A dark place I’m afraid to peer into.
I never know what I will find.
There’s no predicting when a barrier will swing wide, or why.
Triggers. That’s what the psychologists call them on TV shows. Triggers…as if the strike ignites gunpowder and sends a projectile spinning down a rifle barrel. It’s an appropriate metaphor.
Her face triggers something.
A door opens far into the past. I stumble through it unwittingly at first, wondering what might be locked inside this room. As soon as I call her Fern, I know it’s not Fern I’m thinking of. I’ve gone even further back. It’s Queenie I see.
Queenie, our strong mama, who marked all of us with her lovely golden curls. All but poor Camellia.
My mind skitters featherlight across treetops and along valley floors. I travel all the way to a low-slung Mississippi riverbank to the last time I saw Queenie. The warm, soft air of that Memphis summer night swirls over me, but the night is an impostor.
It is not soft. It does not forgive.
From this night, there will be no returning.
Twelve years old, still thin and knobby as a front porch post, I dangle my legs under the rail of our shantyboat, watching for a gator’s eyes to catch the amber flicker of lantern light. Gators shouldn’t stray this far upwater on the Mississippi, but there’s been gossip about sightings around here lately. This makes looking for them a game of sorts. Shantyboat kids take their entertainment where they can find it.
Right now, we need a distraction worse than usual.
Beside me, Fern climbs the rail and searches the woods for fireflies. At nearly four years old, she’s learning to count them. She points a stubby finger and leans out, mindless of gators. “I seen one, Rill! I seen ’im!” she cries.
I grab her dress to pull her back. “You go fallin’ off, I ain’t jumping in after ya this time.”
Truth told, it probably wouldn’t hurt her if she tumped over. It’d teach her a lesson. The boat’s tied up in a nice little backwater across the river from Mud Island. The water is only hip deep on me off the Arcadia’s stern. Fern might could touch the bottom on her tiptoes, but all five of us swim like pollywogs anyhow, even little Gabion, who can’t talk a full sentence yet. When you’re born on the river, you take to it as natural as drawing breath. You know its sounds and its ways and its critters. For river rats like us, the water’s a homeplace. A safe place.
But something’s in the air just now…something that’s not right. A spat of gooseflesh runs up my arms and needles my cheeks. There’s always been a knowing in me. I’d never tell a living soul of it, but it’s there just the same. A chill settles through me in the airless summer night. Overhead, the sky is thick, and the clouds are ripe as melons fair to bursting. There’s a storm coming, but what I feel is something more than that.
Inside the shanty, Queenie’s soft groans come faster now, mindless of the midwife woman’s molasses-thick voice: “Now, Miz Foss, you gots to stop pushin’, and you gots to stop now. This ’ere child come out wrong sided, he ain’t gon’ be long fo’ this world, and you ain’t neither. That’s it now. You jus’ quieten down. Be easy.”
Queenie gives a low, wrenching sound that’s like a boot sucking out of thick bayou mud. She’s birthed the five of us with hardly more than a heavy breath, but it’s taking so much longer this time. I rub the sweaty chill off my arms and feel like something’s out there in the woods. Something evil. It looks our way. Why is it here? Did it come for Queenie?
I want to scamper down the gangplank and run along the shore and yell, “You git on now! You git away! You can’t have my mama!”
I’d do it. I’m not afraid there might be gators. But instead, I sit still as a killdeer bird on a nest. I listen to the midwife’s words. She’s loud enough, I might as well be in the shanty.
“Oh, lands! Oh, mercy. She got more’n one inside. She do!”