Some people, when confronted with a mystery, will go forth immediately and scour the earth for answers, overturning furniture, comparing the angles of doors and windows, checking under flower pots, certain they’re on the right path. Maybe they’re impatient, or maybe they’ve read too many detective stories. They’ve gotten so accustomed to getting the solution that they think it’s their natural-born right. It never occurs to them there might not be one—not a good one, at least. Not one that makes any sense. Me, I’ve never been a big reader. I figure that if a secret has an answer, it’ll out on its own if it’s meant to, and if it doesn’t, then maybe providence has a better reason for keeping it hidden than you think. But some mysteries are too big for one person to hold on to for long, and some are too tantalizing to let lie fallow, and those are the worst kind of all, for they end up being the real heartbreakers. They are the ones where once you know the story, you wish you didn’t.
I didn’t go chasing after the truth right away—it was like the burn on my hand. Too recent, too raw, still oozing and sore. It needed time to set and heal before I went digging in the coals again. I needed to grow a second skin. To compensate, to keep my mind tethered to the present, I continued my efforts of cleaning out the doctor’s house. I ventured into the attic and dug through all the boxes and trunks, setting aside any treasures I thought might be valuable. I polished the banister and the mahogany dining table and chairs. I even got out a toolbox and tightened up the washers on all the sinks.
The burned spot on my palm gradually turned into a congealed, red lump of a scar, but it itched like the dickens. Nothing I put on it—the doctor’s cream, petroleum jelly—helped. So one afternoon, I threw whatever calming herbs I could think of—chamomile, mint, comfrey—into a pot and brewed out the oils, catching them with one of the doctor’s glass beakers. Then I mixed all of that into some softened beeswax, and spread it on my hand. Immediately, my skin settled down and felt cool and regular, and in a week, the scar was beginning to fade. I’d promised myself that I was done with the quilt, but this wasn’t technically going back on my word, I figured. I had made up this mixture on my own. Still, it was close enough to Tabby’s cures for me to fold up the quilt and put it away in the back of the linen closet. You’ve been enough trouble, I said to it. History’s done with you now.
Who knows if I would have left it there, but Vi Vickers dropped by with a case of hives the next day, wanting to see if the doctor had anything left over in his office she could use. “Please,” she howled, her eyelids crusted and swollen. “I can’t drive all the way out to Hansen like this, and Art’s out golfing for the afternoon. Besides, it’s Sunday. Everything’s closed.”
She was right. She did look awful. So what I did next, I did without thinking—grabbed the tin of balm I’d made and held it out like an offering. “Here—” I pried off the lid. “Try this. Maybe it will work.” Vi smeared some on her cheeks and tried to give back the container, but I shook my head. “Keep it.” I closed the door, smiling, understanding that where I had hidden the quilt didn’t really matter because it was already mapped in my mind. It was up to me, I realized, to decide how I would navigate it. History didn’t just happen. It was made.
The next day, I decided that if I was finally going to bring everything on the quilt out into the light, I was going to do it whole hog, in front of God, the town, and everyone. I went upstairs to fetch Tabby’s handiwork out of the closet. It could use some more sunlight, I decided—an entire day hung on the line. As I stepped out onto the porch, I found a potted geranium propped on the boards with a note attached: Thanks for the balm, Truly. It also cures circles under the eyes! Love, Vi. I smiled and nudged the container with my foot, happy to see something growing after all the weeks I’d just spent staring at ash.
Vi must have a big mouth, because word got around, and soon I had people dropping in for all manner of minor aches and pains, asking if I could do something about indigestion or if I knew any way to get rid of three-week cough. “I’m not a doctor,” I protested. “I really don’t even know the first thing about this stuff.”
“I know,” Sal insisted, seeking to cure a patch of eczema on the back of her hand, “but you worked wonders on everyone else. Couldn’t you just give it a try?”
I studied the quilt and made up another balm—the same as Vi’s but with more comfrey—and dropped it off at her house, which was really my old house. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked, swinging the front door open wide to reveal glossy floorboards and the rich smell of something with cinnamon in it baking. I peeked around her and saw gingham-checked chairs in the living room and a porcelain umbrella stand next to a chest of drawers. I remembered the dingy wallpaper we’d had when I lived there with my father and the way a week’s worth of letters used to cover the floor, and I shook my head. Time had gone by, it was true, just not nearly enough.
“Maybe another day.” I waved. “I have to go.”
“Well, thanks again,” Sal called after me. “And you look good, Truly. Are you losing weight?”
“Nah.” I grinned. “You’re just getting used to me big.”
Sal shrugged and closed her door. But I went home and looked in the mirror again, not daring to believe what I saw. I hadn’t had any medication for days, but I could tell I hadn’t grown. I certainly wasn’t any taller, and my hands hadn’t become the size of baseball mitts. In fact, I was cinching my belt one hole tighter and then one more, and none of my buttons ever busted open anymore.
That was all guesswork, though. To definitively test my mass, I knew there was only one way. I would have to step on the scale in the doctor’s office, and so I did, moving the bar for myself for the first time ever, astonished when the weights didn’t slide all the way to the end. I peeked at the number, then compared it with the ones I remembered from the doctor’s chart and found a small difference. Don’t get me wrong. I was still the same old me, but what the doctor had predicted—my bones getting so big that I’d just sink my way into the earth—not only wasn’t happening, it was all going the other way. How would Robert Morgan have explained what was happening to me? I wondered. He no doubt would have had some fancy medical theory for my shrinking, but as far as I was concerned, the lightening of my body came as much from being free of him as anything else. At last, with no one measuring me or sizing me up, I was finally free to be whatever size I wanted.
During this time, I saw Amelia. Of course I did. In a town the size of Aberdeen, people are as like to stick in your craw as not, even when you don’t want them there. Even Marcus couldn’t keep from running into me from time to time, though when he did he would just tip his hat and move to the other side of the street. I accepted his coolness, understanding the reason for it, but with Amelia I was more calculating, drawing her in closer and closer while I considered how and when I would confront her.
She began visiting me more and more regularly, amused by all the concoctions I was making and impressed by the gifts folks left on the back porch. Baskets of peaches. A loaf of fresh bread. A hand-knit scarf with a note that said it would match my eyes. In the house, jewel-colored bottles of tinctures lined the windowsills, and the air continually smelled like wet grass and peppermint.
She seemed amazed by the quilt. Now that my secret was out, I always had it on display. She paused in her dusting now to regard Tabby’s handiwork, draped over the back of a kitchen chair, then she drifted into the pantry and began tipping bottles up to the light. I glanced over to see what she was holding. “That’s for headache.”
Her fingers roamed to another bottle.
“I’m not sure yet about that tonic. Maybe for sore muscles.”
She reached up to the top shelf and hefted one of the emerald jars of Tabby’s potion in her hand. The liquid was dusty now, dulled down but no less potent for all that.
“Put that one back,” I snapped. “It’s for no one.” It was like the scrap of letter that I’d put in my bedside drawer upstairs, I thought. It was merely a relic, a fragment of something I didn’t want to think about. Amelia looked hurt but set the jar back in its place. Good, I thought. Now we both have our secrets.
“Did you hear about Bobbie?” I finally asked, keeping my voice matter-of-fact. “He got some write-up in the local paper about his cooking. Apparently, he’s got a real gift.”
Amelia’s eyes swelled with pride, and she nodded.
“I think he’s going to be okay,” I continued. “Why, I bet Marcus puts on five pounds having Bobbie live with him.” At Marcus’s name, I frowned and shut up, and Amelia, sensing my ire, closed the door to the pantry and resumed her dusting.
We spent the rest of the afternoon more or less in silence, nursing lemonade on the front porch. I was tempted that afternoon to confront her, to lay the whole puzzling mess of Serena Jane in her lap and see what she had to say for herself, but I wasn’t done punishing her yet. The longer I stayed sullen and sulky, the more uncomfortable she grew, and it pleasured me to watch her nervous fingers tug on her braid. I relished the times she knocked and knocked at the front door, then finally slunk away like a banished dog when I refused to answer, or the awkward silences between us whenever she brought up Marcus. And that’s another thing, I thought, the unfamiliar sensation of rage swilling through me, making me feel all-powerful. Marcus belongs with me. That garden should have been mine. Even if I’m dead and gone, they shouldn’t be together.
No matter how I imagined it, it peeved me to picture Marcus kneeling in the dirt in back of Amelia’s house, just as it galled me to think that somewhere out there, my sister might be trailing her bare feet through the sand and rough water of a California beach, wondering about the cracked sidewalks and crooked fences that she’d left behind in Aberdeen and wondering about Bobbie, too. What if she hears about the doctor’s death? I wondered. What if she comes strolling back into town?
The days of summer continued to heat up, and the scrap of envelope in my drawer curled and dried until I thought it might float away, but it didn’t. Instead, the notion of it billowed and swelled like a thunderhead until I finally couldn’t take it anymore. If I kept all the questions I had inside of me, I knew, they would multiply and multiply, until I really did come apart at the seams. And I didn’t want that. Quite the opposite. No, I decided, the time had come. I needed to let the clouds inside me burst.
At the end of August, on the last real dog day of the year, Amelia came knocking as sure as the sun, two paper sacks full of vegetables clutched in her skinny arms. She had her on usual black-and-white attire, and there were little stray hairs curling at her temples. But whenever I picture Amelia, it is her mouth I always think of—lips as crooked and thin as her father’s, but at the same time as resolute and hard as her mother’s, for they gave nothing away very easily, especially a confession.
“What’s in the sacks?” I asked, unlatching the kitchen screen door for her.
Today, Amelia was effusive. Her words tripped out of her mouth lightly. “Beets. Lettuce. Baby carrots and greens.” She put the bags on the counter. The heady smell of fresh dirt swam through the air.
I kicked a chair out from the table, refusing to look at her. “Have some coffee. I’ll put a pot on.”
Amelia blew a wisp of hair off her shiny forehead. “Too hot. Got any iced tea?”
I opened the icebox. “Orange juice or lemonade.”
“Lemonade.” Amelia sank into the chair. She squinted at me. “You look different. And what are you doing at the back of the house? Looks like a war zone.” Now that my hand was better, I’d resumed my burning of decades of the house’s trash, in spite of the heat. Watching the flames dance and spit somehow dampened my sense of rage and made me feel calmer.
I sloshed lemonade into a pair of glasses. “Spring cleaning.”
“It’s almost autumn.”
I shrugged. We sat in silence for a moment, watching our glasses sweat. Finally, I took a deep breath. “You know, there’s still a whole heap of stuff out there in the doctor’s office.”
Amanda stared down at her lemonade. “Autumn’s around the corner. I could get to it then.”
I took a sip from my glass and set it down, back in the precise spot it had been. It seemed important in that moment not to alter anything more in the world than I had to. “I’ve been out there already, you know. When I burned my hand.” I held up my palm, healed now but for a faint half-moon.
“Oh?” Amelia’s eyes were definitely her father’s, I decided—heavy-lidded, thick-lashed, built for gambling.
“Seems the doctor tidied most things up himself.”
“I’ll scrub the room for you, then.”
I continued on as if I hadn’t heard her. I felt terrible toying with Amelia this way, but at the same time, I couldn’t contain my fury. “I mean, not everything is gone, of course,” I said. “His books are still there. And there was this.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the scrap of envelope with 11 Palm and California written on it. “Along with this.” I pulled out the copy of the deed to the farm.
It’s an interesting sensation when intense anger is finally realized. It’s as if after watching a top spin for hours, it suddenly stops and falls over. Your eyes keep darting and twitching, not wanting to believe what they see. I waited. There was an uncomfortable wall of silence between us, and then Amelia stretched out a hand and touched the scrap of envelope with the tip of one finger. “Where was it?” she breathed.
“Inside a book. Is this what I think it is?”
Amelia nodded, her eyes still downcast. I leaned back hard against my chair, and it crackled and groaned. “I don’t understand. I thought she committed suicide.”
“It was someone else.” Amelia’s voice was a whisper—a mayfly skimming the surface of a pond. “Not Serena Jane.”
“But how did Robert Morgan get the body?”
“He said it was her. He made me say it, too. He said if I didn’t, he’d take the farm.” Amelia cupped her head in her hands, and that action told me enough. It was Robert Morgan, after all. How had anything in this town ever happened but through his lies, intimidation, and tall tales?
I pictured my sister’s square, blunt headstone. “So that’s not Serena Jane buried in the cemetery.” Amelia shook her head again, and her passivity infuriated me.
Amelia sniffed. “He—he said that if you ever knew, he would know. He said he’d call in every last creditor in three states. I tried to get him to give the letters to you, or at least to Bobbie, but he said what was done was done, and that should be the end of it.”
I sat back again. Her pragmatic answer shocked me. All this time I had assumed she’d kept the location of my sister a secret out of a kind of jealousy, but I had only been flattering myself, I realized. When it came down to it, Amelia was a Dyerson through and through, wheeling and dealing, always dodging the bullet of debt. She did it to save her own skin, I thought, not mine. I remembered Robert Morgan leveraging the same threat to get me to move in with him and wondered what Amelia would have done in my place. Would she have made the same sacrifice? I suddenly hated the Dyersons and their long-faced hard luck. No wonder they were such sad cases, I thought. They all but opened their arms to the world’s abuse. They never even tried to change a thing. I smacked the table. I would never be like that, I knew. I couldn’t in the body I’d been given, and this, more than anything, made me realize that whatever Amelia had been to me, it was never a sister. I laid my head down on the table. So much for trying to keep the universe in place, I thought.
Of course, what was done was done. Wasn’t that what I had been telling myself ? Had I been wise to bow to the greater pull of the past, I wondered, letting it suck me into the mystery of the quilt and now of my sister? I didn’t have an answer at that moment, but the time had come, I thought, to address the question and begin living in the present. I couldn’t stay angry forever, or I’d burn myself up. I knew that. I needed to try to forgive Amelia.
I unfolded my fingers and took a breath. “I’m angry, Amelia. So angry I can almost not see, but too many years have gone by. What I figure we need now is a fresh start. No Robert Morgan. No creditors. Tell me where the letters are, and we’ll go from there.”
Amelia’s mouth froze into the shape of a zero, and I remembered how much trouble she’d had reciting her elocution lessons for Miss Sparrow, how no matter what she did, she could never get any part of the story straight. “Sorry, Truly,” she babbled. “So, so sorry.” She covered her face with her hands.
My stomach churned with a bad premonition. “Amelia, what have you done?” The past was so tantalizingly close, it seemed, all I wanted to do was reach out and bite it. “Tell me, where are the letters?”
Amelia heaved a huge sigh. “Burned.”
“Burned.” Neither a question nor a declaration, but an echo, hollow and loose.
Amelia elaborated. “The doctor burned them. I watched. We built a little fire in the parlor, and he threw the envelopes in.”
Inside my chest, my heart flapped ragged and sere. “Why would you help him? How could you? And where was I?”
“You came into the parlor, remember, to tell us there was pie? You didn’t know what we were doing. Robert Morgan shouted at you, and then you went back to the kitchen.” I thought briefly back to that afternoon, when Amelia had been crouched in the corner, ash dusting her hair, and the doctor had snapped at me so suddenly. Amelia took a deep breath and continued her explanation with difficulty. “I was trying to get him to give me back the farm. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to come back there and live with me like it used to be… . Truly, please say something.”
I stared at the scar on my hand. All this time I’d been trying to cinder the remnants of the past when the item I most wanted was already up in smoke. I closed my eyes and pictured waves washing sand off a beach. “I will never forgive you for this, Amelia,” I finally said, my voice as low and rough as it’s ever been.
I heard a sob catch in Amelia’s throat. She stretched a thin arm across the table toward me, but I jerked my hands away. “Get out.” I turned my head and closed my eyes, wanting her to go more than anything, wishing she would disappear and leave my beautiful blond sister in her place. When I opened my eyes, however, Amelia surprised me. She was standing in front of me with the jar of Tabby’s herbs, a calculating glint in her eye. She shook the jar, loosening sediment and small particles, sending them swirling.
“Give me that.” I lunged for it.
Amelia widened her eyes. She mimed drinking the concoction, then pointed toward the doctor’s office, a question hanging on her lips.
I gasped. “How do you know about that?”
Her voice croaked out rougher than I’d ever known it. “I heard you and Marcus talking about it on the day of the doctor’s funeral. You thought I’d gone, but I hadn’t. You just didn’t see me.”
“The doctor asked me to do it,” I said coldly. “It was his idea.”
Amelia worked her mouth. She was thinking.
“He was sick, and confused,” I said. “He was going to die anyway.”
Amelia jutted out her chin, defying me to contradict her. She pushed out her words with difficulty. “So tell me, Truly, was it mercy or murder?”
I rounded on Amelia and snatched the jar out of her hands. “Does it matter? He never had a chance anyway. I just hurried nature along. And if it evened up some old scores, so what?”
It was still better than what she had done, I reasoned. I had merely taken life, but she had gone beyond death and erased my sister’s existence. Her accusations niggled at me, however, reminding me of the price Marcus predicted I would have to pay for following the doctor’s wishes. Mercy, I was discovering, was a heavy blade that could cut both ways. It wasn’t always kind. I set the jar on the kitchen table and folded my arms. “We’re done. Get out.”
Amelia knew all about mercy, though. She’d spent a lifetime courting it. I watched her sink to her knees. When she looked up at me, her eyes were as shiny and black as the graveyard crows. “Please,” she whispered, “forgive me. You’re all my family. I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t forgive me.”
On a different day, perhaps, when the air wasn’t hot as a crucible, when there was a little lick of breeze, I might have relented, but the kitchen was close, and all I could feel was my own sweat, welling up so fast, it threatened to choke me. I was sick of life, sick of the cicadas shrilling all through the night, sick of the twists of vines crawling over all the fences when they would only drop their leaves in a few weeks and die. I closed my eyes. “Go,” I seethed, and waited till I heard the back door close as softly as a sigh.
I went through the house, pulling the shades down in all the windows and turning off the lights, so mired in sorrow that I didn’t even notice that Amelia had taken the jar of Tabby’s herbs with her. It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned of their absence, and remembered her anguish, and, with my heart in my mouth, asked myself if I would have gone after her if I’d known, dragging the heavy, burdensome sword of mercy in the dirt behind me.