I’d been telling myself it was just a photograph. Just a name. But that wasn’t true, was it? Something bigger was happening here.
My head turned to the white picket fence that encircled the graveyard, my eyes searching the stones. The red door was gone, but on the hill beside the tree line, I spotted it: RUTHERFORD. The name was engraved on a red marble stone. I took a step, and another, my open hand hitting the fence posts until the splintered wood was scraping my palms.
NATHANIEL RUTHERFORD
The closer I got, the clearer the name on the stone beside it became.
SUSANNA RUTHERFORD
But it was the smaller one beside them that I was looking for.
The grave was marked with a worn, wind-washed granite, and the writing was shallower, obscuring the inscription.
I sank down, jaw clenching when I came face-to-face with it, and my hand lifted, tracing the moss-covered letters with the tip of my finger.
June Rutherford
Beloved Daughter
March 14th, 1912—October 2nd, 1912
October 2. All at once, the weight left my body. I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me. June Rutherford died on October 2, the exact same day of the year that Clarence Taylor discovered me in that alley.
“Five, six, seven,” I counted. “Seven months.”
The same age I was when I was found.
I reluctantly glanced to Susanna’s headstone. The date of birth was September 19. The same as my mother’s.
My thoughts began to poke at the edges of something I couldn’t quite bring into focus. I couldn’t explain this away even if I tried. What was it that Gran had told me? That she was in two places at once? That the Farrow women were different. Her words swirled inside my head, making me feel like everything was upside down.
I’d chosen the wrong rabbit hole, I thought.
The roaring was so loud in my ears now that it was painful, a widening rift in my mind. Was it possible that Susanna wasn’t missing? That maybe she’d only gone someplace else, a place no one could find her?
Slowly, I turned to where the door had stood in the middle of the cemetery, my eyes lifting from the grass as I strung the idea together. Where, exactly, did it lead? The fact that I was even considering it was only a confirmation that every thought, every inclination I had couldn’t be trusted. I couldn’t make this fit together. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Six
I didn’t have a birthday. Not a real one, anyway.
Working backward from Dr. Jennings’s guess that I was about seven months old when I was found on Market Street, I’d let Mason choose a day. Partly because it bothered him I had no birthday and partly because something had to be written down on school or medical forms when it was asked. He chose March 20, and Gran figured it was a good date because the spring equinox often fell on that day. A few months later, the state of North Carolina issued me my first birth certificate.
I stood over the desk in the sitting room, staring at the papers that covered its surface. A nearly empty plate with the remnants of Ida’s casserole sat beside my birth certificate. Susanna Farrow was listed as my mother, but the space for the father’s name was blank.
I’d pulled out every single document and photo in the house I could find. Pictures that hung on walls. Scraps of receipts in the back of the desk drawers. The contents of Gran’s bedside table. They littered the sofa, the coffee table, the fireplace, the floor . . . they stretched to the edge of the kitchen and the hallway.
I’d missed something. I must have. I’d been at it for hours, tiptoeing through the maze and trying to stitch together a story that made sense. But the deeper I went, the more wayward it was.
The first time Susanna went missing, she’d returned to Jasper after a few months. There wasn’t much documented about it. The family had kept things as quiet as possible, and Birdie told me that she’d been in Greenville, South Carolina, where she’d met someone. The ordeal was mostly chalked up to the fact that Susanna wasn’t well anymore. She did strange, unpredictable things. Was it really so odd that she’d left and come back?
Not long after her return, Gran and Birdie learned she was pregnant, and only a few months later, she went missing again. During that time, I was born, though no one knew exactly when or where. When Clarence found me on Market Street with no clue as to where Susanna was, the police checked hospital logs within two hundred miles trying to track down any record of either of us. There was none. Not for a June Farrow or an unidentified woman matching Susanna’s description who’d given birth to a baby girl.
My bare feet slid over the smooth floorboards as I crouched beside the sofa and set the plate on one of the xeroxed copies of my mother’s picture.
She could have given birth somewhere else, maybe at someone’s home or a clinic, but where had she and I been during the seven months after I was born? How did a young woman in her third trimester just disappear and then slip back into Jasper undetected to leave her baby behind?
I stood in the center of the sitting room, turning slowly as my eyes ran over the papers that blanketed the floor. Pictures of the Farrow women were arranged in a chronological line along the edge of the fireplace. Esther, Fay, Margaret, and Susanna.
I picked up the framed photograph I’d taken off the wall in Gran’s room. It was of her grandmother Esther. She’d started the Adeline River Flower Farm and raised Gran after Gran’s mother, Fay, died of scarlet fever.
In the picture, Esther stood in the eastern field of the flower farm, which we now called field six. A wall of towering sunflowers bloomed behind her, and her hands were twisted in the apron around her skirt, like she was uncomfortable with the photo being taken. It would have been just a few years before buyers started driving up into the mountains from Knoxville and Charlotte to stock the farm’s flowers in downtown shops and hotels. That’s when the paper trail really began to pick up with the farm.
I moved on to the sheet of paper draped over the arm of the sofa. It was an old purchase order, made back in 1963 by Gran. Seeds, chicken wire, and a new push plow were among the items listed, and her writing was even and flowing. Not like it had been in the last years when her hands shook. My mother had been about thirteen years old when Gran was running the farm as a single mother, no clue as to what dark fate awaited her daughter.
What if Susanna could have somehow slipped into the past? I was only just beginning to let myself imagine it.
The pieces did fit, but only if I forgot everything I knew to be true about the world.
A chill slithered up my spine. This was far beyond seeing a man in a window or a horse running in an empty field. More terrifying than hearing the sound of car engines on an empty road. It was an entirely different reality. Complete and utter madness.
My thoughts stumbled ahead clumsily. Maybe they’d never found my mother’s body because she wasn’t dead. Maybe there was no trail to follow because she’d vanished. Not just from Jasper, but from this . . .