The long, faceted chain glittered as I lifted it from Birdie’s hand and the pendant swung into the air, cold and heavy. Its round face was etched in a complex pattern, worn from the years of my grandmother’s fingers, and her grandmother’s before her.
I opened the clasp and the mother-of-pearl watch face stared back up at me. It was set with not two hands, but four, and each of them varied in length. It was a strange piece of jewelry, made to look like a watch. But the numbers were off-kilter, some of them missing. Ten and eleven were gone, and a zero stood in place of the twelve. The hands never moved, two of them perpetually stuck on the one, the other two pointing to nine and five. The numbers that were scratched from the mother-of-pearl surface could still be seen if I tilted it toward the light, a defect that Gran didn’t know the origin of.
Birdie looked sad, brushing a thumb over my cheek before she kissed it. Her eyes searched mine for another moment before she let me go.
“Good night, honey.”
I waited for her bedroom door to close before I turned back toward the mirror. My fair hair was darker in the weak light, and it was already escaping from the bun I’d tamed my waves into. The chain of the locket slipped through my fingers as I dropped it over my head, letting the gleaming pendant come to rest between my ribs. I closed my hand over it, rubbing my thumb over the smooth surface.
I glanced at the picture of my mother nestled at the corner of the table before studying my own face in the reflection. My light brown eyes were the only thing I’d ever gotten from Susanna, and every time I thought of it, it made me feel like I was looking at a ghost. I traced the dark red birthmark tucked beneath my ear with the tip of my finger. It stretched down around my jaw, coming to a point along my throat.
When I was a child, the kids at school said it was the devil’s mark, and though I’d never admitted it to anyone, I’d sometimes wondered if it was true. No one in Jasper had ever seen us as normal because my grandmother had never been normal. She’d never believed she was sick, either, saying that she was simply in two places at once.
Before I’d even registered the sting behind my eyes and the quiver of my bottom lip, a hot tear was falling down my cheek.
“I know,” I whispered, glancing to my grandmother’s face in the second photograph on the table. “I promised I wouldn’t cry.”
But that ache inside of me wasn’t just the pain of losing her. It was the relief, too, and that was something else I’d never said aloud. In those last years, Gran had all but lived inside of her own broken mind, shut away from our world for weeks at a time. It was one thing to miss her when she was gone. It was another to miss her when she was still here, in this house with me. For the last few months, I’d found myself longing for the end as much as I’d dreaded it.
The pop of wood made me blink, and my head turned to the hallway, where the light from the porch was coming through the front door’s oval stained glass window. But the moment my eyes focused, a prick crept over my skin again, making me still. The frame of a man was visible on the other side—the same one I’d seen at the church.
There, behind the glass, eyes as black as inkblots fixed on me as the bright orange glow of a cigarette ignited in the darkness.
It’s not real.
I clenched my teeth, jaw aching as I willed myself to blink. But this time, he didn’t disappear. A curl of smoke twisted in the haze of the porch light, and I was sure for a moment that I could smell it in the air.
I closed my eyes again, counting three full breaths before I opened them. The cigarette glowed again. He was still there.
My fingers slipped from the locket, and I started up the hall, heels knocking like a heartbeat until my hand found the brass knob. I yanked the door open, my vision swimming as the night air spilled back into the house. The place on the porch where the man had stood only seconds before was now empty. Finally, he’d vanished.
I pushed through the screen door, searching the darkness. The yard was quiet, the rocking chair still as the tin light swayed gently overhead.
“Everything okay, June?”
Ida Pickney’s high-pitched voice made me jump, and I sucked in a breath. She stood on the porch of the house next door, already changed out of the dress I’d seen her wearing at the burial. An unopened newspaper was clutched in one hand as her eyes moved over me slowly.
“Fine.” I forced a smile, trying to slow my breathing.
Ida hesitated, hands fidgeting with the rubber band on the paper. “Can I get you anything, dear?”
“No, I just . . .” I shook my head. “I just thought I saw someone on the porch.”
The look on her face went from hopeful to worried in an instant, and I realized my mistake. That was how it had started for Gran—seeing things that weren’t there.
I pressed my palm to my forehead, giving a nervous laugh. “It was nothing.”
“All right.” She forced a smile. “Well, you just call over if you or Birdie need anything at all. You will, won’t you?”
“Of course. Night, Ida.”
I slipped back inside before she’d even answered, locking the dead bolt behind me. My steps were slower as I made my way back toward the stairs, but my palms were slick, my unraveling hair curling with damp. When I reached the mirror, the locket caught the light, and I saw that the trail of the tear that had fallen a moment ago still striped my cheek. I wiped it with the back of my hand.
“It’s not real.” The words were barely audible under my shaky breath. “There’s nothing there.”
I ignored the sick, sinking feeling in my gut again. The one that whispered at the back of my mind the thought that I wouldn’t let fully come to the surface. A year ago, I would have told myself it was just a trick of the light through the glass. Not a wrinkle of the mind. Not a fine crack in the ice. It was the porch light swinging. The shadow of a tree branch.
But I knew. I’d known for some time now.
My eyes trailed down the dark hallway, to Birdie’s bedroom door. I hadn’t told her about the flashes of light that had begun to appear at the corner of my vision last summer. I hadn’t told her about the echo of voices that drifted in the air around me or the fact that more and more each day, my thoughts felt like sand seeping through the floorboards.
It came for my grandmother, as it came for my mother, and now it had come for me.
For years, the town of Jasper had been watching me, waiting for the madness to show itself. They didn’t know it was already there, brimming beneath the surface.
My future had never been a mystery. I’d known since I was very young what lay ahead, my own end always so sharply visible in the distance. That was why I’d never fall in love. Why I’d never have a child. Why I’d never seen any point in the dreams that lit the eyes of everyone else around me. I had only one ambition in my simply built life, and that was to be sure the Farrow curse would end with me.
It was as good a place as any to end a story. I wasn’t the first Farrow, but I would be the last.
Two