I could still feel that cold air that surrounded him. I could feel the throb where his fingers had clenched down on my arm. There was no mistaking that look in Caleb’s eyes. He wanted to hurt me.
The pop and fizz of the camera’s flash sounded again and the darkness washed out, blinding me. When my eyes focused, they settled on an old woman behind the back end of the tent. She wore a burgundy dress, her white hair pinned up on top of her head. She was watching me with ice-blue eyes, her wrinkled mouth twisting.
Mimi Granger. The women who’d seen me running through her field that night.
The terror on her face was like a beacon, the same expression I’d seen that day I’d stood on the road in front of her house. She shuffled backward, a hand drifting out behind her as if she was afraid she might fall.
Her gaze didn’t break from mine as she shrank back into the party, and then her dress was no more than a stroke of blood red flitting through the crowd.
Twenty-Two
I’m dreaming of Eamon.
In the drifts of shallow sleep, I can feel his hands dragging up my body. The weight of him between my legs. I can hear him breathing until there’s the break of a moan in his throat. I can taste salt on my tongue and see bare, moonlit skin.
I’m not asleep anymore. This is the in-between place, like being stuck between two stitches in a seam.
A rush of heat pours into me, spreading like wildfire as my hands find his face. His mouth is on my throat, my shoulder, leaving a tingling trail in its wake, and all I can think is that I don’t want him to stop.
He doesn’t.
The heat inside of me is liquid. It’s simmering now, on the edge of spilling over as I move against him. I can hear myself make a sound, and his hands tighten on me, but when I finally open my eyes, he isn’t there.
The dream faded and I closed my eyes tighter, trying to hold on to it. But the more my mind woke, the further it drew away from me. My hands twisted in the sheets as it bled into a sea of black, my heavy breaths the only sound in the sunlit room around me.
I could still feel him. Taste him. The smell of his body was swirling in the air, but when I turned my face to see the other side of the bed, it was empty.
It was a dream, yes. But I’d been dreaming of a memory.
I waited for my heartbeat to find its rhythm and for the burning on my skin to cool. It was like he’d really just been there. Like we’d just . . . I pressed my hands to my face, trying to think about anything else. Anything besides the slide of his skin against mine. Slowly, the live-wire feeling began to dim, and my breaths slowed, one by one.
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.