Chapter 7 Carrie
When she awoke, the sky had changed. It was no longer blue. Everywhere she looked, blue was replaced with gray: her school dress, the wallpaper in her bedroom, the sky itself above her. Lillian Morgan had stolen the book and made a bargain with the mountains, and for that . . . she paid the price. Her bargain cost her the color blue, but it gave her the love of her life.
—Cora Morgan, February 15, 1984
“Bastarding thing,”
I screech, dropping the wallpaper stripper on the floor. I place my hands on my hips, take a deep breath, and close my eyes. My wrists, my entire hands, are cramped up and aching, however often I swap the tool from left to right. And this is the first wall. The first bedroom. I have two more to go after this one, and this wallpaper is sticking to the plaster, stubborn as shit.
I eye the curls of wallpaper littering the floorboards, the ones I’ve managed to scrape away from the decades-old glue. Tiny flowers peep up at me, forget-me-nots, roses, and sprays of baby breath woven over a cream background. As I grit my teeth, my gaze travels to the ominous patch overhead. Damp. The mildew is spreading like an ink blot, steadily taking over an entire corner near the window.
“That’s a tomorrow problem,”
I mutter, checking the time. It’s already eleven, and I’ve only had one coffee today. This feels like at least a two-coffee, one-tea morning. I push back my hair and knead my left palm as I clunk down the stairs. All the while, the to-do list revolving around in my head is growing longer. Wallpaper stripping. Sorting out the damp. New soffits and fascias. Replastering? I fill the little travel kettle with a groan, then watch it until it rattles to a boil and I can make a cup of bitter instant coffee.
I fidget in my pocket, pull out my phone, and perch against the old farmhouse table. Every inch of me wants to open Instagram, to gorge on photos of other people’s lives, all the places they’re traveling to, the food they’re eating. To bask in the romanticized version of the day-to-day and let my own fall away. But I don’t. Instead, I pull up the notes app and do what I’ve always done when I feel the world overwhelming me like a wave. Like when my exams were coming up and all I had was a pile of half-read textbooks, not enough class notes, and too many doodles in my sketchbook. Or like when I first left Woodsmoke, money in my bank account, passport in hand, and bought an interrail pass on a whim to travel through the major cities of Europe. I make a list.
Walk around the cottage and make a list of things that need work.
Read the surveyor report. Properly.
Go food shopping.
Avoid the wine aisle.
Buy chocolate instead.
Call parents.
I open a fresh note on the app and stand up. There’s something about making a list that always grounds me. It reminds me of my purpose and gives me something concrete to focus on. I learned this trick—probably from the advice column in some magazine—after my brain felt scrambled and overwhelmed getting ready for school exams. Now, whenever I’m planning a backpacking trip, or relocating to a new country, or getting ready for a gallery showing, I make a list.
I pour the coffee into a travel mug so it will stay warm, swirling in a heaped teaspoon of sugar to hide the burned and bitter taste. As I walk around the cottage, the anxiety built up inside me unspools, turning into certainty. A plan. The list on my phone gets longer, but I categorize each point by room, order them, then color-code them. Pink, blue, green, yellow. Each area of the house sorted, stored, and assessed in priority order. When I finish with the list, I take a few pictures, then upload them to Instagram with cheery captions. I drop my phone back into a pocket and take a sip of the coffee. There. I have made it.
This isn’t all a huge mistake.
I’m staring out the window, up at the mountains, when I hear the faint jingle of a FaceTime call. I muddle through the pockets of my denim dungarees for my phone, only finding it after I’ve missed the call. It was Mum. Again. I haven’t spoken to either of my parents since I left, haven’t wanted to admit that this isn’t going as well as I hoped it would. But I’ve been here a week. It’s time to put on a brave face and cross number 6 off the list.
There’s not enough signal in the cottage or the field for a proper video call, so I track farther from the cottage, toward Woodsmoke and the main telephone mast on the edge of town. When I’ve got it in sight, I down the last of the coffee (lukewarm and acrid—should have added an extra sugar) and press my lips together before clicking on her number. Mum answers almost immediately.
“Hello! Carrie? Blasted thing, it’s just a blank screen—”
“Mum, I’m here!”
I suppress a sigh. Every. Single. Time. “You just need to turn the camera on! That’s it, yes, turn it on!”
They pop up on the screen, two furrowed brows with reading glasses perched on their noses, Mum’s with a purple beaded cord draped around her neck. Their faces are pressed up to the camera, squinting at it like it’s the world’s most complex invention.
“Aha! We got it, Lillian!”
Dad lifts his coffee mug, and we pretend to clink on-screen. I hide my smile behind my travel mug. Give Dad a car to fix or a map to read and he’s brilliant. But hand him a laptop or a phone and he acts like he’s defusing a bomb.
“How’s the house going, love?”
Mum asks, sipping her usual milky Earl Grey tea. “Not roughing up your hands too much, I hope. Hold them up to the screen, let me check . . .”
I roll my eyes, holding them up so she can inspect them. They’re chapped and dry, a couple of plasters on my fingers. My nails are cut as short as I can bear, and honestly, it’s the first time I’ve ever looked at them with pride. They aren’t covered in nail varnish, perfectly smooth and well moisturized, or flecked with paint or chalk from hours with a new canvas. They’re worker’s hands.
Of course she winces, though she quickly looks away so I don’t see. I catch the look she shoots off into the corner of her conservatory, wait for the ripple of admonishments poised on the tip of her tongue. Before she retired, Mum was a beauty therapist and an at-home Body Shop consultant. She would set up little parties in our lounge, invite all the mums around Woodsmoke in a bid to make friends with the gossipy mothers of the girls I went to school with. She would use me as a model to peddle the Body Shop makeup and skin care products, which I always wiped off at the first opportunity, feeling like an oily clown.
But it was the home beauty and health treatments she created that I loved. The ones she poured into little cork-stoppered glass bottles with labels tied around the necks with twine. Her own collection of recipes that Cora has carefully copied into the Morgan Compendium. These were what the mothers all secretly wanted and would stash in their bags and coat pockets before leaving her parties.
“The house is . . . going,”
I say with a laugh, glad that they can’t actually see Ivy’s cottage, or the lack of progress I’ve made. “More work than I thought, but I should be done by the end of the winter, as planned.”
“Are you sure you don’t need help? I can drive up for the weekend, bring a few of the lads—”
“Dad!”
I say, shaking my head. “You promised!”
He runs a hand over his forehead, his tell for all the nerves building under his skin. He’s just worried about me.
“You should drive up in the spring,”
I tell him, “after the snow’s cleared.”
I fix a smile on my face. So Dad won’t worry. So he won’t try to rescue me. “You know I want you to see the place when it’s in good shape. You’ll spoil the surprise.”
He nods uncomfortably, glancing over at Mum. I’m not convinced she’ll join him. I doubt she’ll ever set foot in Woodsmoke again unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.
“What is it?”
“Your great-aunt phoned.”
“And?”
I ask, shifting my weight to the other foot as a breeze ruffles my collar, sending a trickle of chill down the back of my neck.
“Cora’s . . . worried. She said you haven’t called round since you first arrived last week, and she mentioned the early frost—”
“I greeted the mountains, Mum. You don’t need to worry. It was the first thing I did.”
Mum blinks, and Dad shifts away from the screen. Mum has only admitted once that, after she left Woodsmoke, she finally felt like she could breathe. When you accept the magic of Woodsmoke and the mountains, either you embrace it, as Cora did, or like Mum and Ivy, you fear it. There’s no in-between place. Most of the folks of Woodsmoke are like Mum.
“Nothing else has happened? You know how I feel about Woodsmoke. I don’t like to think of you there all alone. Don’t meddle in anything, will you? Don’t stray from the path—”
“Mum—”
“We both know what can happen,”
she says quietly. “We both know all the stories are true.”
I think of the wildflowers left on the doorstep of Ivy’s cottage and wonder if I should tell her. And should I confess that I felt like someone followed me down the mountain that first night and tapped at the caravan window? Should I mention the man I’ve seen? Or worse, admit that I’m not sure he’s human? But I don’t say anything. My mum left Woodsmoke for a reason. The magic of this place overwhelmed Lillian, frightened her with its enormity, its greed. After I left, there wasn’t a weighty enough anchor to keep her here. She doesn’t want to revisit the place or the stories woven through it. There is no wonder embedded in them for her, only fear.
“The man in the hardware store, he said Ivy had a good send-off. Cora made a spread and . . . I should have come back for it, shouldn’t I? I should have just booked a ticket and come back for a couple of nights.”
Mum frowns at the screen. “Ivy knew you loved her. Eating cake and avoiding talk of the book with Cora at her wake wouldn’t have made a difference to her passing. She knew.”
“Cora talked about the book?”
“She talked enough. We only stayed the one night, at Cora’s,”
Mum says, looking away from the screen. “That was plenty. That my mother even kept the book for as long as she did . . . Better that it stays with Cora. Better it’s buried with her when she passes.”
“Still, I should have . . . I don’t know.”
I blow out a breath.
“Everything all right, love? Really?”
“Everything’s fine. I’ll go and see Cora again. I’ve just been busy.”
Mum nods uneasily. “Sure, love. Sure.”
I capture her eyes with mine across the miles and miles that divide us, trying to pour reassurance over this thread of a connection. “You know why I’m here, why I had to do this.”
I glance away, at the field surrounding me, then farther still, my gaze traveling past the trees to the three mountain peaks dominating the skyline. “After all these years, I have to find out if I truly belong here. It’s haunted me. I have to know if this is just the town where I grew up . . . or if it’s home.”