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.
I
wish I could say I was the one who found Amelia, but it was Marcus who discovered her curled like a snail in her vegetable beds when he showed up to weed. Already, the bugs were feasting on her. A conga line of ants was parading in and out of her left ear, and a spider was tentatively exploring the cavities of her nostrils. A trail of green liquid ran down one side of her mouth into the vegetation. Marcus reached down and brushed the insects away from her cheek, then straightened up, parked his hands on his hips, and limped over to his truck.
The sound of frantic knocking woke me, then I heard Marcus’s voice calling me, and I rushed downstairs. “What is it?” I asked, my dressing gown half-open over my pajamas. “Has something happened to Bobbie?”
Under the last fingers of dawn, the shadows under Marcus’s eyes were deeper and his irises were the color of a pond right before it freezes. He put a fist to his mouth and coughed. “It’s Amelia. You need to come with me. Oh, Truly, what have you done?”
We didn’t say a word to each other the whole bone-rattling ride out to the farm, but when we arrived, I was surprised that Marcus drove past the house and straight out to the barn. “What are we out here for?” I asked, slamming the truck door, but Marcus still didn’t say anything, and when I entered the barn, I saw why.
He had laid out Amelia the old-fashioned way, on a board between two trestles. In spite of the plentiful holes in the roof, the light was still dank and dim, but Marcus lit a kerosene lantern that smoked and sputtered, then set it up high to spread the light. At Amelia’s feet, I saw the empty jar.
“Oh, my God.” I turned away, but Marcus was behind me, and he forced me to face Amelia.
“I moved her in here. I found this lying next to her.” He indicated the empty jar. “How could you do it again, Truly? I thought you were sorry! Why did you give her that stuff?”
A fly buzzed near my ears. The sun was coming up, and the heat would soon begin to bring pests, I knew, as well as a stench. We had to call someone. “I—I didn’t give it to her,” I whispered. “I swear. She took it.”
“Why?” Marcus’s voice was a hammer driving a nail.
I bowed my head. “We had words. Well, I did. I didn’t give her the chance to have them back.”
Marcus walked closer to Amelia. A ray of light was beginning to stroke her hair. “Over what? What could she have possibly done?”
I wrapped my arms around myself. Where did I start? I wondered. With the fact that my sister was really alive? Or that Robert Morgan had buried someone in her name? Or maybe with the welt on my hand and the day I’d found the scrap of a letter? When it came down to it, maybe words were what had fueled this mess. After all, my life under Robert Morgan’s roof had started with a note from Serena Jane, just as Amelia’s life had ended because of one.
“I guess you could say that our words undid us,” I finally muttered.
Marcus cocked his head. “I don’t understand.”
And so I told him then in the close air of the barn about Robert Morgan whispering, “California,” and Amelia helping the doctor burn the letters and how one small fragment had slipped out of the past like an ember shooting up a chimney. And I didn’t stop there, either. I told him all about the doctor’s diagnosis of me, and how I’d let that secret isolate me from the very ones I loved the most—Amelia and Marcus, but especially Marcus—and how Robert Morgan had been wrong in the end. I explained about the quilt being used for better and for worse, and how, even though I wanted to, I knew I’d never be able to untangle myself from its mess of threads and roots. I told him about how the angel wings that Tabitha had sewn had seemed to become embedded in my own flesh.
When I was finished, tears the size of raindrops were sliding down my cheeks, and my breath was coming in such jerky gasps that I almost didn’t even notice Marcus taking me into his arms.
“Hush,” he whispered. “It’s all right. I’m here.” And for the first time since that afternoon in the cemetery, he put his lips to mine.
There are some confessions you must make face-to-face, some truths so painful that you must utter them not eye-to-eye, but directly into the other person’s soul. “You were right,” I said, my mouth pressed against Marcus’s. “I should never have made the drink. This is all on my hands.”
Marcus squeezed me. “No. You couldn’t have known this would be. You aren’t responsible.” He backed away from me but kept my hands gripped in his. “Listen, Truly,” he began, “about what you did for the doctor and Priscilla Sparrow—”
“I should have listened,” I interrupted. “I shouldn’t have ever done it.”
He stopped me with another kiss. “No. You did right. I know it better than anyone. I did the same thing, remember?”
I nodded and was silent, remembering his letter and what he did for his wounded friend. “Is it murder or a mercy when one of the needs in life turns out to be death?” I whispered, remembering Amelia’s final question, but Marcus didn’t have an answer. We just stood together, heads bowed, hands clenched, our hearts pushing blood through our bodies—mine large, his small—in the same languid cadence.
“We need to do something,” I finally murmured, turning my head toward Amelia.
“You stay here.” Marcus unwound his fingers from mine and headed toward the barn door. “I’ll be right back, and then I’ll let you handle the details.”
He returned with a bucket, and vinegar, and sponges. Powder, and oils, and a sheet. Dried herbs, a coin, and a length of red yarn. Candles to keep the flies at bay. He replenished the kerosene in the lantern, then left me alone. Working in small patches, I first bathed the length of Amelia’s arms with vinegar, then slowly moved down her torso to her legs and feet. I oiled her brow with the essence of rose, anointed her cheeks and chin, and fixed a coin under her tongue. I loosed her braid and combed powder through her hair, then bound it again with the red yarn, snipping off a lock for a keepsake. I rubbed beeswax into her fingernails, daubed each palm with ashes I found in the corner, and made sure the hollows in between her toes each held a sprig of dried forget-me-not. When I was finished, I folded her hands on top of her chest and laced the stem of a purple thistle in her fingers for divine protection and luck.
There was peace in washing the dead, I discovered—a preternatural quiet absent from any other activity. As I moved around the examining table, I hummed the half-remembered hymns of childhood, joining phrases and melodies into a ragbag of devotional noise. The only religion the Dyersons had ever followed had been the path of hard luck, and its golden rule was simple. You did what you had to do when it needed to be done. I smoothed the last pieces of Amelia’s hair down along her brow and stepped back to review my work. Outside the window, I could see Marcus hacking at a thicket of bushes like a sour angel, already resenting the first licks of autumn. The winters drove him crazy, and it occurred to me that he needed a greenhouse—a condensed universe where the laws of nature were suspended.
Of course, the world doesn’t really work that way, but it helps if you imagine that it does. With every breath, there are choices to make—sometimes to take a life and sometimes merely to ease the pain of it—and sometimes those choices have consequences that you never foresaw. Nevertheless, I decided right then that I would keep doing what I could, brewing separate infusions for life and death and putting them up on the shelf until someone asked me to take them down. I leaned down and kissed Amelia. I finished winding a bit of thread around the tip of her index finger, binding it tight so she wouldn’t ever forget me, and then I stepped out into the day, making sure to leave the door ajar for the souls among us who wished to enter and for the spirits that had chosen to go.
A young, ponytailed official from the coroner’s office came to cart Amelia’s body away, shaking his head at the string tied around her finger, the red yarn in her hair, and the thistle wound in between her fingers.
“We haven’t seen this shit since the nineteenth century,” he said, zipping Amelia into industrial plastic. “We’ll let you know when you can come get her,” he told me, slamming the van door and gunning the engine. Marcus and I walked out of the barn together and watched the van drive away, and I was glad he was standing behind me, his knees pressed into the backs of mine, keeping me straight and strong.
“We need to tell Bobbie,” I murmured. “One of us should. He ought to know about the letters.”
“He leaves for work at four,” Marcus said. “He’s around the cottage until then. I can make myself scarce. Here’s my key in case he’s not there.”
“Thank you.” I turned around to face him, shy in front of him. “Marcus…” I lowered my eyes. “About earlier in the barn—”
He cut me off. “Let’s not worry about what’s done anymore. When all this is over, let’s make a fresh start, the right way.” He slid his wounded hand out for mine, and I accepted it, matching the scar on my palm to the patches and lines on his, wondering what kind of seed we would plant together and how tall we could coax it grow.
Bobbie greeted me with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of a puppy, flinging open the cottage door and clapping his hands. He was wearing shorts and a gauzy linen shirt that showed off the new muscles in his chest. “Aunt Truly! Can you believe how hot it still is? Do you want some water?”