Chapter 53
Carrie
Two Weeks Later
I drive over to their house after the wake, going alone with Kep. I need to feel close to them. When I kick off my black heels in the hallway, my presence ripples through the silence. Kep whines and wanders away to search for them, nosing his way into the kitchen, and I let her. This is her goodbye as well, after all.
I can feel the house stirring beneath my stockinged feet, and maybe it’s them here with me. Maybe Cora is trailing her fingertips along the wall, walking behind me as I step like a ghost through the rooms. I stand on the threshold of the lounge, holding the keys to the front door in my palm. It’s all so perfect, so neat and orderly. Just like Cora. I sniff, pressing my rouged lips together. I didn’t wear mascara today. My eyes are red and raw from the past two weeks, and the red slash of lipstick was the only color I could stand.
“You know why I’m here,”
I say into the listening quiet. “I know you will have left it for me, and I’ve come to collect.”
I move into the kitchen, eyeing the now-empty yard out back. The chickens were collected, taken to a local farm, and Kep came to live with me, so we could walk the old ways between the fields together. It’s what Howard would have wanted.
I run a hand over Cora’s favorite mug, pressing my fingertip into the chip near the handle. There are certain things in this house that I won’t be able to let go of. Not costly items, but things that I know she loved. Things like this mug, and Howard’s. Items that still carry the imprint of their souls.
I turn to the bedroom, the room that is beckoning, calling to me. It takes only a handful of heartbeats to find the book, on top of the wardrobe. It’s like Cora is guiding me, showing me the path I need to follow to find it, where to reach for it.
How to claim it.
It’s heavy, weighed down by the many stories of the mountains. The many moments pressed into it in fading, handwritten ink. I cradle it to my chest and sniff again, knowing I can’t turn it to ash, as Howard wanted. I can’t set fire to Cora’s legacy, the legacy of so many Morgan women before me, to the thread binding me to her. It feels like I’m holding her life right here in my arms. As though the body we buried today was just a vessel, just a fleeting cage, and this is the real her. The truth of her is right here, nestled in these pages.
I imagine her watching me, willing me to take a look. To seek out the secrets inside, to finally understand what the Morgan women have carried with them, generation after generation—the ancient ways of the mountains. I sink to the floor, lean against the bed, and open to the beginning. Some of the pages are so old and frail that I’m worried they will tear like tissue beneath my fingertips. I’ve read a few of these stories before, but that was years ago. Today, reading this book as an adult, and knowing I am its keeper, feels different. Monumental. I read a few words, carefully turning the pages, then move quickly to the back.
To the final story.
“Of course,”
I breathe. Cora has written the last story in the book. Her careful script, slightly slanted, crawls across the pages, detailing a story about two sisters, one tall and fair, one brittle and bitter. The book is given to the fair sister, who does not care for it. The other sister covets it, and a chasm opens between them, growing wider with each passing year.
Then the fair sister offers up the book to the bitter sister. She gives her the book, wanting her to be happy. They seal the gift of the book with blood from a slash across their palms. The bitter sister believes that there was no cost to this transaction, that somehow she had paid no price for accepting the book from her sister.
Until . . .
I gasp.
The fair sister has a grandchild. A girl with stars for eyes, who loves adventure, who falls in love with an apple thief, who paints and draws and creates and wonders . . .
That grandchild is me.
“Oh, Cora,”
I say, a sob catching in my throat. I read on. The bitter sister knows the mountains did not claim a price from her sister—they claimed it from her. They robbed her of the chance to hold her own child, to ever have children. The bitter sister believed that the child who had stars for eyes and loved the mountains should have been hers, but was gifted to another. To the fair sister’s daughter, who had no lasting love for Woodsmoke.
My fingers stray to my throat, eyes growing wide as I read on.
When the bitter sister learns that the child plans to leave, she cannot stand it. She makes a new deal with the mountains, offers fresh blood in the moonlight. To cut the tie she had made with that love potion to the apple thief, to stop her from leaving Woodsmoke and her. But the bargain sours, turning into a curse, a curse that robs the child of all she loves, and all who love her. She leaves the apple thief, her home, the bitter sister, and the fair sister. She leaves every love of her life; she leaves the mountains . . .
I turn the page with shaking fingers.
Then the fair sister dies, and the child is beckoned back. But the mountains do not welcome her. Instead, they punish her for leaving. They curse her to fall in love with the man who appears with the frost . . . who disappears as the frost thaws.
I run a finger over these words, seeing the faint markings of a footnote, the reference at the end to the page where the frost tale begins. Cora believed it. She truly believed it.
“Matthieu,”
I say, running my finger back over the words. “You mean Matthieu.”
I turn another page, expecting the tale to continue. But it’s blank. I turn the next page, the next, my fingers frenzied and trembling, searching for the ending. But there’s no ending to the story.
Only empty space, dozens of blank pages. I laugh, tipping my head back, and wonder if she didn’t know.
But maybe she wanted me to find my story unfinished. To carry our collected stories and write my own. The story of the girl who finally found where she belonged. Who came home.