Chapter 2 Cora
“She’s back,”
Cora gasps at six that morning. She fumbles for the lamp, twisting the tiny switch until a glow bathes her bedroom. She smiles up at the ceiling, the one she has stared at for fifty-five years, ever since she moved into this house as a married woman. “She’s back.”
She cackles, forcing wakefulness into her limbs as she gets out of bed, smoothing her plait of hair over one shoulder. She knows she should cut it. That keeping it, this long rope of white and gray, is fanciful. But it’s how she’s worn her hair all her life, and she’ll be damned if she’ll change that now.
She pads out of her bedroom, leaving the indentations of two people on the crinkled sheets. She doesn’t like to make the bed this early. It’s not the first thing she wants to do each day, day in, day out, for time eternal. It’s not the way she wants to begin her morning. The hallway is dark, but she detests using the electric just for herself. So she fumbles her fingertips along the wallpaper, feeling the familiar grooves, the slight ridge where Howard didn’t hang it quite right. It used to annoy her, but like everything, time has smoothed that frustration away. She relents when she gets to the kitchen, flipping the switch to light the space where she has spent most of her hours, her days. She starts this day the way she likes to start them all—by making coffee.
She makes her coffee slowly, savoring each step. And as each moment passes, with every breath, she thinks of Carrie. How her arrival must have felt momentous, as it does to Cora. How Carrie will have stepped across the threshold of Ivy’s cottage, her eyes snagging on every detail, snapping to the light switch she knows won’t work. Standing in the kitchen at the back and staring up at the vast, all-consuming mountains. Cora hopes Carrie greeted them. She hopes they will welcome her grandniece home.
As she crosses her own kitchen, she wonders if Carrie will stay this time. If this cottage, Ivy’s cottage, will be the glue that holds her here. If it’s enough.
Cora reaches up, hooking her fingers around the handle of the four-cup French press in the cupboard, and pulls it toward her. She hums a tune that suddenly surfaces in her mind, a tune that conjures up scabbed knees and school dinners of lumpy mashed potato and conkers foraged in the woods, tied with string. She remembers how she and her sister would smash them together, enjoying epic battles that trailed across the autumns of her girlhood. Cora falters for a moment, picturing Ivy’s narrowed eyes, her nimble fingers, her gray cardigan with the patches on the elbows and the hole on the left sleeve, right near her wrist. She blinks down at the spoon in her hand and forgets where she is.
Then the scent plumes up from the coffee bag and she resumes her humming as the kettle boils, thoughts of conkers and Ivy swept somewhere back to the recesses of her mind. She swirls the hot water into the press, the grounds coloring it like dirt. She gets two mugs out of the dishwasher. Her favorite. Howard’s favorite. A smile tucks itself into the corners of her mouth as the back door opens, letting in a cloud of cold and dark.
“Carrie’s at Ivy’s,”
she says without turning around, knowing he’ll be knocking off his boots, blowing on his fingers. She can taste the frost on the air that’s just rushed inside, an early sign that winter is coming. “She must have got in late yesterday.”
Howard shuffles to the sink, turns the tap on, and washes his hands with the soap Cora likes to make. It leaves the scent of lavender, which he hates, but he’s never told her. “I’m surprised you haven’t gone over there already.”
“Before the poor girl has time to wake up? Nonsense.”
Cora tsks, grasping her own mug. Smiling again and staring out the window, she takes the first perfect sip. “These young people sleep in nowadays. And she’s had a long drive.”
She nods to herself. “I’ll go over there at nine-thirty.”
“Of course you will.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Howard sighs, muttering about one of the chickens, Queenie, the layer he got last year. He doesn’t stop muttering as he wanders off into the lounge to find his slippers, the sign that he’s ready for Cora to make him his breakfast. Two boiled eggs. Soldiers. Another round of coffee to ward off the mountain chill.
But Cora is miles away. Years away. She’s drifting on the current of a conversation she had the day Carrie left. The day the world came unstitched, when she and Ivy stopped talking and everything changed. She drinks the rest of her coffee leaning against the old Belfast sink, remembering the days and months that followed.
She wants Carrie to feel the roots of Woodsmoke. Her roots that bind her to this place, that bind every Morgan woman. She’s not sure if Carrie has felt their tug while she’s been gone, but she imagines this place hasn’t quite let her go. The mountains don’t like letting people go. Not before their time, anyway. She knows that even Lillian, Carrie’s mother, feels that tug from miles away. She left Woodsmoke, and now she’s too afraid to return and face whatever the mountains throw at her in reprimand for leaving. Wild places can be vindictive like that.
She wonders if Carrie is haunted still by the day she left. Or whether she’s folded it away in her mind, let it slip all the way under until it’s lost somewhere far away.
Cora clears her throat, reboils the water in the kettle. She sets about making breakfast, cracking the eggs to poach them, the way she likes them, and placing two more in a saucepan for Howard. She can’t remember how Carrie likes her eggs, and for a moment that bothers her. Scrambled? Or perhaps fried, on slabs of white bread thick with butter? The corner of a slice of toast slips through her fingertips and she drops it, butter smearing the flagstone floor.
“Just my luck,”
Cora says, her eighty-year-old knees creaking as she bends to wipe it up. A blast of cold air finds its way through a crack in the window frame and she sniffs. The scent of frost burns her nose—too sweet, too bitter. She frowns, wondering if it means something after all, this early sign of winter. A decade on, and now everything, she realizes, is about to change again.
She butters more toast, cuts it on the diagonal, and places the slices in the toast rack. She knows you’re meant to butter toast at the table, but it always goes too cold. She likes the butter melted in, turning to sunshine on her plate.
Cora brings it all to the table, and as Howard shuffles his way in, she thinks about how he used to look. How he seems to have crumpled like a tissue in the last few years. He used to bring her flowers, and she would kiss that shiny brown forehead, dipping her chin and patting his cheek. He was always shorter than her, even in school, a boy who never sat still, always moving, always talking and planning and sketching thoughts in the air with his hands. He wasn’t intimidated by a tall woman, or by her last name. In fact, he embraced it. She kept her surname when they married, just as every Morgan woman does. And he kept his.
She pulls out a chair, the legs scraping against the floor, just as he does the same.
And she freezes.
Howard looks up at her, something like fear glinting in his eyes, but only for a heartbeat. Cora looks to the door, as if she can see through it. Past it. All the way to ten years ago, when Carrie left and broke her heart.
The world seems to hold its breath.
Then a tap, quiet and hesitant, sounds at the door.
“She’s here,”
Cora breathes.