Two deaths under similar circumstances, and then two funerals in the same town, and yet Priscilla Sparrow had had exactly zero attendees at hers, while the doctor’s was oversubscribed. I can’t explain the dearth of mourners at Priscilla Sparrow’s grave, only perhaps to suggest that habitual bitterness reaps emptiness in this life. Of course, the doctor had his own emotional issues, but he still had plenty of folks flocking around his grave at the end. Somehow, he managed to have it all the way he wanted, exerting influence from the grave. I guess death changes less about a body than you’d imagine.
One thing it didn’t change was Robert Morgan’s relationship with Bobbie. The whole time the town was muttering its prayers and dabbing its eyes, I was searching and searching for a sign of Bobbie, but in the end, I had to concede that he wasn’t coming.
“He knows Robert Morgan passed away, doesn’t he?” I asked Amelia.
She scowled, and I corrected myself. “Of course he knows. Marcus wouldn’t keep something like that from him. Besides”—I jutted my chin toward the grave—“I think it’s pretty obvious.” I fell silent. The air between us had been chilly ever since our falling- out on her last cleaning day, and I shifted, uncomfortable and unsure about how to clear it.
“The doctor said some mighty odd things the night he died,” I finally mused, at a loss for what else to talk about.
Next to me, Amelia stiffened and stretched her neck.
“Something about California,” I continued. “You think he could know anyone in California?” Amelia looked white. I waited to see if she would answer, but she didn’t, so I shook my head. “I didn’t think you would. I guess some things about Robert Morgan will always stay a mystery.”
I moved up to the gaping hole that contained Robert Morgan, Amelia staying by my side, and we stood silently for a moment, sunk in our own private thoughts. Amelia took a deep breath and almost started to say something, then closed her mouth.
“Were you going to ask if I’m going to the wake?” I filled in for her. It was as though we were back to our early days together, I thought, where I carried all the conversational burden. “Because the answer is no.” It was going to be at Sal Dunfry’s house—my old childhood home—but the thought of crushing together with the whole town in those familiar rooms was too much. Besides, I had some other, unfinished business to which I wanted to attend. Amelia suddenly grabbed my elbow, however, her words falling out pell-mell, her tongue so thick, I had trouble understanding her.
“Truly, I’m sorry for what I did. I let years go by when I should have said something.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Why, Amelia, whatever are you talking about?”
Amelia was about to continue, but Vi Vickers’s loud voice interrupted her. “At least we don’t need to worry about her falling in,” Vi was snickering to Sal.
Sal giggled and rolled her eyes toward me. “She’d get stuck halfway down.”
Amelia sucked in her gut, and for the first time in her life, she looked prepared to make a mess instead of clean one up. “I wouldn’t talk like that, Vi,” she said loudly and distinctly. “I know some ugly things about you, too.”
Vi gasped when she heard Amelia speak and then blushed about a hundred different shades of red, but before I could thank Amelia, she disappeared into the trees. Having her stick up for me like that was so against her nature that it melted something in me. I realized how constant Amelia had been in my life, from the first day she’d snatched the doll leg from me in Brenda’s kitchen, to all the times she’d tagged home from school behind Marcus and me, to our coffee-fueled chats in the doctor’s kitchen. I’ll catch her later, I thought. I’ll tell her everything, from what the doctor said would happen to me to what I did for him and Priscilla. We had a whole summer’s worth of talking to do, me and Amelia. First, though, I wanted to pay my respects to Priscilla Sparrow. In the years since her death, I had resisted visiting her grave, figuring what was over was over, but the doctor’s dying had brought Prissy back up in my memory again strong, and I knew that it was time to lay her down to rest in my own mind, along with the doctor.
Her grave was on the opposite end of the cemetery from Robert Morgan’s, but you had to know where to look. There wasn’t even a headstone—just a painted wooden cross—and I wasn’t sure if that was because stone had cost too much or because she had no one to do those things for her. I plucked a clutch of Queen Anne’s lace—a weedy flower, true, but also prim and mannered as Miss Sparrow had been—and laid it on top of the grass under the cross. I crossed my hands and bowed my head, and then, because I was pretty sure no one else had said it, I started whispering the Lord’s Prayer.
“It’s a little late for that.” Marcus’s voice floated through the air to me. I opened my eyes.
“Marcus. You scared me.”
“Seems your natural reaction to me these days.” He grinned, but his eyes remained sad.
“That’s not true.” But even as I spoke, I could feel my heart hammering up a ruckus against my ribs, as if it wanted to be let out into the wide blue world. I put a hand on my chest. “How did Bobbie take the news about his father? I didn’t see him today.”
“He hasn’t said much the last few days. Just goes to work, or out to meet Salvatore. He helped me dig the grave, though, if you can believe that. Just grabbed an extra shovel, put his neck down, and set to work. You never saw anyone dig so hard.”
I was silent for a moment, remembering my first weeks in Robert Morgan’s house with Bobbie and how fiercely he’d clung to his mother’s blue dress. “We were never very good with death,” I finally said. “We never talked much about his mother dying. Robert Morgan wouldn’t let us dwell on it.”
Marcus worked his tongue over his teeth. “Well, now he’s got two dead parents locked up in that head of his. One of these days, something’s got to give.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he’ll move back to the house now.” My throat tightened with anticipation of how good it would be to have him under the roof again, to hear his footsteps clattering up and down the attic steps.
Marcus shook his head. “No. I already asked him about that. Says he’s not ready.”
“Oh.” I tried to keep the disappointment from coating my voice, but Marcus picked up on it.
“Solitude can be a blessing, Truly. You just haven’t tried it. It might do you some good. It did me good after the war, I can tell you. Just me, and a backpack, and the open road.”
Not when your body is a ticking time bomb, I thought. Solitude is not good then. I bowed my head. “I guess. Seems like I might be a touch lonely, though.”
“Well, it’s not like the doctor was great company.”
“No.”
Marcus stared down at the dirt heaped in front of us on top of Priscilla Sparrow’s grave. “Now there was a lonely woman. Do you remember how god-awful strict she was back in school?”
I nodded. “But inside, she wasn’t as bad as you think. Especially later, when she got so sick. Why, when she came to see me last—” I clapped a hand over my mouth, realizing too late what I had just said.
Marcus narrowed his eyes. “Go on,” he said.
“I was just going to say that she was tender inside, that’s all,” I stammered, but it was too late. The wheels and dials were turning lickety-split in Marcus’s head. “Truly, what was in your basket that day you and I met in the cemetery? Tell me you weren’t gathering the kinds of plants I think you were.”
I opened my mouth, prepared to deny everything, but one look at Marcus and I knew that among all the people on earth, I’d never be able to lie to him. “It wasn’t my idea,” I croaked, “it was Priscilla Sparrow’s. I found Tabitha’s shadow book. It turns out it’s really an old quilt that’s been in the family for years. Maybe you noticed it? The one hung in the parlor with all the plants on it?”
Marcus furrowed his brow. “That thing with all the twisting vines?”
I nodded. “They were sewn there for a reason.”
Marcus frowned. “So the legends about Tabby are true, eh?”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
Marcus kept his face pointed to the ground. “You gave the drink to the doctor, too, didn’t you?” He squeezed his lips tight.
Miserable, I nodded. Marcus put his hands flat down at his sides, and in that moment I finally saw that he wasn’t small so much as compact. Like a coil burrowed into itself. For such a slight man, he suddenly looked surprisingly tall. He glanced up, startling me. “Do you know why I became a gardener?” he asked, white around the lips. “Do you even know why I choose to live out here among all these rotten old tombstones?”
“Well, you get the cottage for free, and—”
Marcus cut me off. “It has nothing to do with money. Nothing at all.” He stared over the graves. “I know when I came home you thought I was nuts, going on about the catacombs of Paris and their five million bones, but look at all these rows of people here, tucked up beside each other like they’re lying in a giant bed. That’s all the earth really is—a final resting place. But it’s one we need to tend, because one day we’ll be there, too. I learned that all too well in Vietnam. You know, once I had to make the same choice you made for the doctor. I think I did the right thing, but it’s something I never want to do again. I can’t imagine why you would even do it once.”
I set my jaw. “It’ll have to be live and let live, I guess.”
Marcus screwed up his mouth. “I don’t think that’s quite the correct terminology for this discussion.”
I took a step toward him, unwilling to let the subject turn into a swamp between us. “But it’s over now.” I remembered the extra jars I’d stored in the pantry for myself—just in case—but figured I didn’t need to say anything about them. It wasn’t as though I were planning on giving out the potion to anyone besides myself, and it wasn’t doing any harm all bottled up, dusty in the dark. “No one knows,” I said. “No one will ever know.”
Marcus eased away from me. “You don’t get it, Truly. I’ll always know, and you will, too. There will always be ghosts between us. You’ll see.” Isn’t that part of love, I wanted to ask, carrying someone else’s ghosts for them? But before I could, he wheeled around on his good leg and hobbled across the grass, leaving a ragged, vegetative trail I was sorry I could not follow.
Much has been documented about the soul’s response to death, but I think the human body’s reaction is just as inscrutable. Is it such an outlandish concept, I wonder, to imagine that the body has its own rituals and protocols for loss and that those rites remain mysterious and distant from what goes on in our minds? And maybe it’s necessary and proper that they should be so, for without that gap, we would probably never let ourselves be transformed. I know I wouldn’t have, but I didn’t get to make that choice—or maybe I should say I didn’t have to make it. Either way, something began happening to me right after the doctor died.
He’d given me the name of a new doctor in Hansen—a Dr. Redfield. He was a man about the same age as Robert Morgan who’d worked in Albany for years but liked country life better. “I’ve given him copies of all your records,” Robert Morgan assured me a few weeks before he died, “and he knows all about your case. He can provide you with your medication, and oversee your symptoms. He’ll even travel out to the house. Just call him.”
A few days after the doctor’s funeral, I found the number and began to dial. I still had about a week’s worth of medicine, but I would need to get more, and sometimes it could take a few days. As I was about to push the last button on the phone, however, I caught a glimpse of myself in the foyer’s oval mirror, but where a glimpse was all I could ever catch of myself before, this time I found that the narrow frame was able to hold my entire reflection. I examined the newly bared planes of my cheeks, tilting my face first one way, then the other, then lifting my chin to see how much more neck I had. The fresh summer air licked and tickled my throat, and I shivered. Is this how it is for everyone, I wondered, to be so plain to the world? I remembered when Marcus had comforted me after Miss Sparrow had taken my mother’s mirror. What was it he had said? That reflections were just little particles of light? I liked that idea—that even I consisted of tiny fragments that could be rearranged.
As if in a trance, I slowly lowered the receiver back into its cradle and dropped the paper with Dr. Redfield’s number. I turned my face from side to side, but every angle confirmed what I suspected. I had shrunk a little. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible, especially since the doctor had told me I would keep increasing in size, but the mirror wasn’t lying. Instead of spreading as wide and thick as the chestnut tree outside of the schoolhouse, here I was with the flesh on me limning the general shape of my bones. I rushed upstairs and dug the farm clothes from my youth out of the back of my closet, and for some inscrutable reason, they fit again, the plaid flannel and soft denim nestling against my skin like old, familiar sheets.
To celebrate, I gathered up all the balloonlike rayon dresses I’d worn over the years, balled them together in the downstairs fireplace, and watched them singe and cinder. It was so satisfying watching them burn that before I half knew it, I’d gathered up a whole other load of junk and set fire to it, too. Recipe cards, the yellowed stacks of magazines from my room, the dried flowers off the parlor mantel—all of them went up in smoke. The next morning, I washed the quilt in lavender soap and hung it in the sun to dry, its wet batting pulling the line low. I took down the curtains to wash them, too, but decided the windows looked better without them, so I rolled them into a ball, shoved them in the fireplace, and ignited them. I added the flattened needlepoint pillows off the sofa—grungy from years of dust—and the doilies off the backs of the chairs and then ran for dear life when the room erupted in a choking cloud of noxious smoke. When I finally got up the courage to reenter the parlor, the fire had gentled down to a glowing heap of ash, and the floorboards in front of the hearth were pitted and scarred from live embers.
By week’s end, I had burned the oilskin from off the kitchen table, the ancient pack of playing cards August had given me in childhood, and most of the doctor’s clothes. My fires grew too noxious and large for the little hearth in the parlor, so I moved my operation outside and set off my blazes in Marcus’s flower beds, pleased to see them scorch, too. Serves him right, I thought, though for what, I couldn’t really say. Every day, I came up with a different reason.
Who knows how much more I would have burned if I hadn’t burned myself first? Again, it’s the old lesson of bitterness eliciting like. To anyone else, I would have looked like a larger-than- average woman clearing the detritus of decades out of a house no one had much use for anymore, but if you’d come closer, you might have been disturbed by the way the reflected flames danced and leapt in my eyes. You would have noticed me standing smoke side to the fires when I didn’t have to, just so I could gulp in one more acrid taste of the past before it floated upward without me. With every crackle and snap of heat, I could feel myself getting tighter and smaller, until I felt so immune to the world’s ills that I grew reckless. I fed the fires higher and higher until one afternoon a rogue ember burned a crescent into my palm.
Hissing with pain, I went to the dispensary, to see if the doctor had any old cream or balm. Away from the fire, my cheeks cooled and tingled, even though the air was moist. The center of my hand throbbed and beat—a rhythm my temples picked up and began to copy. With my good hand, I groped along the top of the doorjamb for the hidden key, then shoved open the screen door and unlocked the doctor’s office. It was the one place I had avoided since his death, and even though it had been only about a week, the air inside was as thick and stale as old rubber. I groped my way to the light switch and flicked it on.
I opened the door to the medicine cabinet and found a sample tube of antibiotic cream and a roll of gauze. Winding the white fabric around my hand, I continued to inspect the room. The doctor and Amelia had pretty well cleaned it out at the beginning of his illness. His desk was bare of his usual files and folders, and he’d either destroyed all his old patient records or sent them on to the clinic in Hansen. I idly pulled open one of the metal drawers and was surprised to see a few files remaining. One of them was Priscilla Sparrow’s, and one of them was mine.
Mine was so thick that I had trouble holding the whole thing in one hand. I flipped it open and right away saw a decade’s worth of blood test results, measurements, and other numbers. I scanned through this information quickly, not daring to let myself put an actual number to my weight and height after all these years. I still didn’t want to know. The back of the folder held his notes, and I read these more thoroughly. Subject recalcitrant, one sentence read. Refuses to follow dietary advice. I turned the page. Subject’s bone structure more in keeping with a male’s. Subject shows increased musculature. Subject’s heart shows evidence of gross enlargement. Prognosis poor. I sighed and shoved the papers back into the folder, then set the folder on top of the filing cabinet. The doctor’s history of me was like a faulty, oversized shadow. One more thing to be burned.
On the wall above the doctor’s desk, his books still held all their old posts on the shelf. Anatomy texts, drug indexes—there were enough words, I thought, to write the human body into existence ten times over, a hundred different ways. I ran my fingers down the spines of the books then back again. Each time, my fingers kept hooking on the last book in the row. It was slightly out of kilter with the other volumes, as if someone had recently taken it off the shelf. I peered at it more closely. Someone had taken it down. I scowled. Who could it have been? The doctor? But he hadn’t left his bed before his death. Bobbie had keys to the house, but as far as I knew, he hadn’t been back. That left only Amelia. But she hadn’t been in the doctor’s office since he’d died, I didn’t think, and it would have been totally unlike her to move only one item in a room and then not clean it up properly.
Curious, I fanned the pages open in my hand. Pen-and-ink drawings—precise and delicate as spiderwebs—wavered, depicting all the mysteries of the body. The beefy heart. Clusters of cauliflower buds on the lungs. Blood vessels that narrowed into fronds of capillaries, looking more like ferns than part of the flesh. But then something stuck in between the pages caught my eye. A small bit of paper—the corner of an envelope. I plucked it out and held it up, and then gasped. It was a return address, and the name I was reading, in very familiar handwriting, was my sister’s.
What was a letter from my sister doing in Robert Morgan’s bookcase, I wondered, and when would she have had the occasion to send him a letter? As far as I could remember, they’d never been apart after their marriage until she’d left him. I took down the next book and flipped through it, but there was nothing—just pages of ink. I did the same with all the other books, until the desk behind me was full, but there was no other sign of any correspondence from my sister. Bewildered, I stared down at the scrap of paper again and saw what I hadn’t before. The envelope had been torn so that half the address was missing, but there was enough left for me to make out some of the words—11 Palm something—and the state that the letter had been sent from. California.
All the air left my body, and I slumped against the desk. I remembered what the doctor had said the night he died. Had he really been talking about Serena Jane? It didn’t make any sense, though. My sister lay in the Aberdeen cemetery, boxed, buried, and weighted down right next to all the other Morgans. I could go there anytime I wanted and touch the heavy block of stone with her name on it. But the grieving mind is an irrational thing. It tricks us, overlooks details, stops paying attention halfway through the story, and thus ignores all other potential endings.
Seized with curiosity, I yanked open the center drawer of the doctor’s desk and dug around. Except for a few yellowed receipts, it was empty. Same with all the other drawers, except the last one. There, underneath a copy of his will, which I’d already gone over, was something I never even knew existed—the deed to the Dyerson farm. I pulled it out and examined it. What I was holding was a copy, I surmised, and it had been amended several times. At one point, the doctor had possessed the farm, I saw with surprise, but now, under Owner, there was a new name, one I never really expected to see scrawled on a Morgan document. Amelia Ann Dyerson.
Like a frame stilled from a moving picture, an image of Amelia frozen halfway up the stepladder in the doctor’s office with a bundle of papers in her hand suddenly stuck in the reel of my mind. I remembered all her recent stop-and-start, partial confessions, her paleness when I’d brought up the topic of California at the doctor’s graveside, and instead of the anger I expected, I felt the blood run as cool and calculating through my veins as Robert Morgan’s had done in his life. Amelia had had something to do with the disappearance of my sister’s letters and the secret of her existence—the only thing I didn’t know was why, and I wasn’t sure I cared to, either. Some betrayals are so huge, nothing can ever whittle them down.
Locking up the doctor’s office and sliding the key back into its hiding place, the mysterious scrap of paper tucked safely in my pocket, I began racing through a mental slew of wild possibilities. What if my sister was still alive? What if I could find her again? What if Bobbie could have his mother back? Was there such a thing as redemption?
Outside, evening had begun to come on. The first bats were tickling the pale sky, and the fireflies were getting ready to light themselves up and dance. It was still hot, though. Across the yard, my fire had mellowed but gave out an occasional crackle, like something alive. The burn on my palm throbbed, keeping time with the blood pounding in my temples, my ears, and I knew for certainty that my heart was shrinking and that I would take Amelia down with it.