Chapter 11 Cora
She walked to the town square with her sisters, perusing the ribbons in the haberdashery window. She saw his reflection behind her and turned, finding his eyes like ink as they trailed over her. Afterward, Sylba spoke of this man with eyes as navy as the night. But no one else could remember seeing him. It was almost as though she had imagined him entirely.
—Tabitha Morgan, July 19, 1929
What she never told anyone was what happened afterward. All they saw was a runaway girl that day.
But Cora knew different.
As she mutters, pulling on her warmest coat, tying her headscarf, checking that she’s stuffed some tissues into her pocket, she clicks her tongue at Kep, whose ears prick up, her gaze fixed on Cora. She needs fresh air to stir her stew of memories. She leaves the house, Kep at her heels, and drinks in the crisp morning air.
It wasn’t winter when it all changed ten years ago, but spring, with the frost behind them, the fields no longer crackling with ice. Carrie seemed haunted, with dark crescent moons under her eyes. Skin white as porcelain, collarbone jutting from that dress. She looked fit to shatter, too fragile to be real. In the years Carrie grew silent, when too long passed between each letter, Cora wondered if she had somehow dreamed her. Imagined her. And she would speak to Howard, a great babble of incoherence, about Carrie, her baby grandniece. Her girl. The one she wished, more than anything, was her own and not Ivy’s.
And every time, Howard reassured her, though his patience was growing thin and frayed. Carrie is real. She’ll be back one day. You have to have patience. You have to understand.
But eventually Cora could picture only the day Carrie left, seeing all those hairpins in a pool on her sofa. And the sight of Carrie, running as fast as she could, away from Woodsmoke, away from her legacy, her home.
Carrie kept saying, over and over, that she knew it would happen. That she knew it would come to this. She couldn’t go through with it, she couldn’t make everyone happy, she felt suffocated, trapped, she had to break free. As she pulled each pin out of her hair, her slight arms laced with blue veins, she trembled all the more. Shaking not just with sorrow but with relief.
Cora ponders it all now as she sets off on her walk, wending through the back ways, the cut-throughs between the fields. The silent ways. The narrow ways. The ones not marked on the maps detailing Woodsmoke. Whistling to Kep every once in a while, calling to the dog, her old voice grating against the silence.
“Come along, Kep!”
There’s no one about, just her and Kep. While Kep nuzzles the mulch and leaves, Cora strides through the past, where she can usually be found these days. In a way, Ivy gave her sister a gift by leaving the cottage and candles to Carrie. Cora and Ivy hadn’t spoken in six years, and the turn of each season had been marked with festering resentment between them. It had dug its claws into Cora and refused to let her go, even when she knew she should apologize for what she did. Even when she knew she was in the wrong. But every time she nearly walked this way with the intention of visiting Ivy to patch things up, to admit that the spell should have never been cast, she always stumbled and turned another way. It was envy really, all muddled up with pride. Carrie still made the effort to write to Ivy, but she seldom wrote to Cora. No. Cora was the one who was forever left out. Forgotten. The blood between her and Carrie wasn’t thick enough, apparently.
But in leaving Carrie the cottage, Ivy had wedged a door open for her granddaughter to return. And Cora knew it wasn’t just about Carrie. Ivy had left Cora something in her will too. Not that Carrie knew about that, or Howard, or anyone. Ivy had left her a quilt, the nine-patch she’d coveted for years. Stitched into the border on the left corner was a note: “Forever your sister.”
Cora gasped when she found it, tracing the tiny stitches with her fingers. It was so Ivy. In life, she had been the one with the granddaughter to pass the book to. But in death, she had ensured that Carrie would have to return to Woodsmoke. Return to Cora, so she wouldn’t be the last Morgan here. This was what caught her in the end, what pressed the grief into her. That careful, stitched note that took Cora right back to when they were girls. When Ivy was just her sister and there wasn’t a whole lifetime of bad decisions and secrets between them. Ivy always seemed to have more—more love in her life, more luck. But with Carrie returned, perhaps Cora would get the chance to feel like a real grandmother. Perhaps now she wouldn’t be the last Morgan woman left in Woodsmoke.
Forever your sister.
Cora sighs as she rounds the curve of the path, picturing those stitches, the hands that made them. Like chalk and cheese, her and Ivy. Ivy may have lured her back, but Cora doesn’t know how to pin Carrie down and make her stay. It won’t do to march over there and insist upon it, or to call in the favors that would bring the tradespeople running to the cottage. If anything, that would speed up Carrie’s departure. She purses her lips and whistles to Kep. It will take a more subtle approach. Far more subtle than Cora is suited to.
And she knows that Ivy is most likely watching from afar, having the last laugh.
The trees strangling each side of the path suddenly fall away, revealing the fields glinting with the first frost of winter. Cora halts, eyeing the light trickling over the blades of grass, how it coats everything with a layer of glitter. She loves this time of year. It’s when the mountains are most alive. With the frost come the old tales, the ones about women who lose their hearts. It comes with sighs and longing, wending down the old, ancient paths. It comes with the tale that she rediscovered in the book only yesterday—of a man who appears as the frost shrouds the mountains, then disappears as the frost thaws in the spring.
It’s a tale Cora can’t shake. She’s already reread it three times since yesterday, following the faded loops of Grandmother Tabitha’s handwriting, fascinated not because it’s a love story but because it’s not. The story shows how treacherous these mountains can be. How they can beckon you with a sweet smile, a dark sweeping gaze. Then shred your heart come springtime, when their love melts away.
When she pauses to catch her breath, her eyes return to the mountains. Forever returning. She traces the height of them, the trees clinging to their sides. Then her eyes travel down, down, to the field just east of Woodsmoke. Where Ivy’s old cottage is still stubbornly clinging to the earth. Cora knows she shouldn’t, but what harm is in it, really? She nods, having convinced herself, and hands Kep a treat from her pocket. After handing out the warnings and the salt to all those other young women in town, why not Carrie? Surely she’ll be more cautious than the other women in Woodsmoke, more aware of the mountains and their mischief. But Cora has to be sure.
“Just a small detour is all,”
she says to Kep. “Howard won’t miss us.”
Then she steps off the path to make her way across the fields, headed straight to the cottage she hasn’t visited in six years.
Cora means to go in. She really does. But something keeps her feet stuck to the dirt, wedging her boots into the unforgiving ground. She stands rooted, just beyond the threshold, Kep sniffing around her as though it’s just a regular day. But this isn’t a regular day. Not for Cora. This is the day she’s returning to her sister’s cottage, knowing that she won’t find her inside. She’ll never find her again. She gasps suddenly, covering her mouth, and a single tear slips down her cheek.
Forever your sister. Those three little words echo inside her, thrumming in her heart, and she sniffs. Finding a tissue up her sleeve, she quickly wipes away the tear, annoyed with herself. She’s not accustomed to this grief that’s fresh and nimble and quick. It darts in when she least expects it, spilling out of her eyes and bleeding into her thoughts.
“I’m a silly old woman,”
she mutters to herself, shoving the tissue deep in her coat pocket. Kep sneezes, and Cora sighs, about to turn away. What’s done is done, she thinks. Ivy’s cold in the ground. We’ll never get those years back now. But . . . she can see movement in the cottage, just through the window. Someone’s there.
Cora dithers, wondering if she should knock on the door. Whether she should turn away, stop her meddling, her prying. She sees a single discarded yarrow flower, its stem sliced as though with a pocketknife. She knows yarrow was one of Ivy’s favorites, but she can’t imagine Carrie finding the secret patches on the mountains. Cora remembers the page in the book. The note Clemence Morgan left, about wildflowers and about the disappearance of her sister, Abigail. Cora hisses through her teeth, wondering as her eyes dart to the mountains, to the path at the edge of the field, whether she should intervene. Then she remembers the tale of Sylba. The young woman who met a man with eyes the color of an inky night . . .
Cora finds the remnants of salt and dried lavender sprinkled across the threshold and relaxes a little. At least Carrie hasn’t forgotten. At least she knows how to protect herself, unlike those other young women in town. But wildflowers in October, and with an early frost . . .
Cora wonders if Carrie is indeed safe in Woodsmoke, or if she is the one unbalancing everything.
Cora wonders if it’s already too late.