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.
The curse on the Farrows had broken the natural laws of the world, and with it had come so much suffering. But in this, there’d been the most unexpected of gifts. Looking back, I understood that sadness I’d seen in Birdie’s eyes when I left the house that day. It was the same reason she’d hesitated before she’d handed me that envelope.
It was a goodbye.
That moment was dimming, like the rest of them. It had been a year since I left, and the memories of this life were still coming, but the patches were few and far between. I had a new notebook now—one where I’d written every memory I could think of that I would miss. I recorded them in as much detail as I could recall, making a kind of archive of the life I’d lived. Cooking with Gran in the kitchen. Making garlands in the shop with Birdie. Countless summer afternoons with Mason at the river.
On the other side of the door, I become a myth, not unlike my father and my mother. Children will tell stories of seeing me in the woods. There will be rumors that I’d thrown myself from the falls, but life will go on. Three years after I cross, Birdie’s full, beautiful life—her timeline—will end. And with it, so will the Farrows’. Mason will inherit the Adeline River Flower Farm, and he’ll eventually fall in love with a woman who came to work as an intern one summer.
On this side of the door, I will live a life I thought I never deserved. Not even one year after we bury Susanna, Caleb will leave Jasper. For reasons I’ll never know, he will keep my secret.
It takes almost two years for the door to show up again, then five and a half. Eleven years after that, once the very last of my memories have faded, it will appear a final time.
Eamon and I will plant fields and tend them. We will raise our daughter, and even after we are too old to farm, we will spend the rest of our lives in this little yellow house on Hayward Gap Road. Annie will grow. She will age. She will never see the red door.
Margaret tidied the braid pinned across the crown of my head, and I caught her hand with mine when it landed on my shoulder.
I haven’t told her that she will bear a child—Susanna—on September 19, 1966. My own timeline will overlap with my mother’s for just over twenty years before I die. I will watch her be born, then she will watch me be born, and this cycle, this revolution, will begin again.
I would spend the rest of my life walking the precarious line of what I would and would not tell Margaret and Annie. What to leave to fate and what to prepare them for. They’d done the same for me, and it hadn’t been perfect, but it had been a life full of love.
It was almost overwhelmingly painful to be so happy.
“Thank you,” I said, emotion thick in my throat. “For everything.”
Margaret gave me her sweet smile. “You’re welcome.”
Annie held a crystal perfume bottle to her freckled nose, and I wrapped my arms around her tightly, burying my face in her hair.
This changes everything.
And it had.
“You ready, Annie Bird?” I said.
She slid off my lap and skipped from the room in a wordless answer.
I tucked a stray, waving strand behind my ear and rose to my feet. The white lace dress draped over my curves, its delicate hem brushing my feet. I looked at myself in the mirror before Margaret handed me a bouquet of black-eyed Susans, aster, and bee balm she’d picked with Annie.
When we came down the back steps, the tobacco fields were bursting with green. It would be a good harvest. A healthy one.
Eamon and Esther were waiting beside the patch of wildflowers that lined the fence. In the distance, the mountains were a sea of rolling blue beneath a cloudless sky.
Esther gave me a kiss, taking Margaret’s hand, and beside them, Annie watched with a dandelion twirling between her palms. We stood there, four generations of Farrow women, cursed to live between worlds. But in that moment, in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we existed only in one.
When his gaze met mine, Eamon’s mouth tilted in a grin that I now recognized as distinctly his. I loved it. I loved him. More than I ever thought was possible for one being to hold inside of them.
Eamon had asked me to marry him again, and I’d said yes, because even though I could remember that day as clearly as if this body had been there, I would marry him a thousand times.
When I reached him, he took my hand, holding it to his chest. I could feel his heartbeat there.
This is real, I told myself.
And then I spoke my vows into the summer wind. That I’d love him forever. That I would always, always come back. That no matter what, I would find him.