Page 14

I did. Thanks to Ida, I had a copy of every scrap of paper on my mother that could be found in the courthouse.

“Not unusual for that time, though.” She thought aloud. “That far back, women birthed babies at home all the time and there wasn’t much reason to record the birth with the county.”

I leaned into the counter, thinking.

“You could try the church,” she said.

“The church?”

“It’s been here longer than the courthouse, and they kept detailed records on births, marriages, and deaths. It’s worth a try if this woman was married to the minister.”

When I said nothing, she spoke again. “Want me to call over there?”

“No, that’s all right. Thanks, Ida.”

“No problem, honey.”

I hung up the phone, one hand still gripped on the receiver as I bit down hard on my thumbnail. In the span of a few moments, that compulsive need I’d had to understand the photograph had turnedinto a slithering thing. As if the second Ida said my mother’s name, she’d uttered the words of a forbidden spell. The name carried a hallowed kind of resonance. One that had captured the town’s imagination for years and given birth to a hundred stories. So had Nathaniel’s.

My eyes went to the window. I could still hear it—that high-pitched tinkle of the wind chimes—and it struck me that I didn’t know where they were coming from. The only ones we’d had hanging in the garden had been blown down in a storm more than a year ago. They were still sitting on the potting bench outside, waiting for a new string.

The sound grew louder. More painful. My chest rose and fell as I made my way to the front door, pulling it open. The screen slammed and I went out onto the porch, searching the rafters, where a turtle dove peered over the edge of a nest.

The wind chimes weren’t there.

I pressed my hands over my ears when the ringing gave way to a sharp pain in my head. But the chimes didn’t stop. They didn’t dim. The ringing rose, the notes fusing together until it was one long, earsplitting scream in my mind.

And then, all of a sudden, like the wind snuffing a candle’s flame, it stopped.

Dr. Jennings’s office was a tall but narrow three-story building downtown, a contradictory combination of old and new. The examination room was painted in a pale shade of green. It matched a row of 1970s cabinets that hung above a small porcelain sink lined with glass jars of cotton balls and gauze bandages, and though the door was still fit with what looked to be its original glass knob, a brand-new ultrasound machine sat in the corner, its screen aglow.

A tray that held three vials of my blood sat beside me on the paper-covered table, my name scrawled across the stickers in blue ink. I stared at them, listening to the scratch of Dr. Jennings’s pen on paper as he flipped through my notebook. He was the only one who’d ever looked inside.

Gran had never been one for doctors, but Dr. Jennings had made his calls anyway, insisting that what was happening to her followed no textbooks or standards of practice that he’d ever seen. She thought that he looked at her as some kind of science experiment, but I found the doctor to be more like a man with a chessboard than anything else. He wanted to be the first to solve the riddle of the Farrow women.

He’d failed with Gran. I was his second chance.

“They’re definitely increasing in frequency. You’re right about that. How many episodes would you say this week?” He looked up, meeting my eyes expectantly.

His once-dark hair was nearly all white, his smooth black skin dotted with tiny moles across his cheekbones. His face had significantly aged in the years since I was a child, but he still had that gentle way about him, as if he feared one wrong word would send me running straight out of the room.

“June?”

“Six, I think.” I cleared my throat when the words came out sounding cracked.

“Okay.” He scribbled away, the pen looping across the page. I could see the wordhallucination.

That label had never felt right. The things I saw were different. It was a hollowed-out, floating feeling, like the meandering path a single dandelion seed takes through the air before it eventually lands. A real thing just barely out of reach.

“Have you noticed if any of these episodes have been accompanied by any…physical symptoms? Fainting? Vision changes?”

“No.”

My eyes focused on the chart that hung on the wall behind him. It was a diagram of the human heart, with detailed renderings of the muscle and tissue, and I immediately thought how fortunate I would be to have something as simple as a heart problem. There were surgeries for that. Clinically proven medications to prescribe. Transplants, even. Labels identified the organ’s components in words likechamber, ventricle, atrium, valve. It all looked so simple. Like the parts of a machine. But the human brain was like the uncharted depths of the oceans. Science was still wading around in the shallows.

“I think we should take into consideration that you’ve been under some significant stress. I know that Margaret’s death wasn’t exactly sudden, but you’re grieving, and that takes a toll on both the body andthe mind. It’s possible that these episodes have been exacerbated by that stress.” He looked up from the notebook, setting it into his lap.

I wasn’t going to tell him that my stress had multiplied even more in the last twenty-four hours, when I received a letter from my dead grandmother that had a picture from 1911 of a woman who looked exactly like my missing mother. I wasn’t going to tell him about the news articles or the call to the courthouse, either. Just thinking of it made me feel off-balance.