Chapter 3
Now
My roommate, Carla, was gone for the evening, probably out with her boyfriend. Her absence felt like another kind of sign. And as I slipped into my comfiest pajamas and pulled a half-empty bottle of Two Buck Chuck from the fridge, I knew I was about to do a stupid thing.
No. Not a stupid thing.
The stupid thing.
I pressed the bottle to my lips and took a deep swig.
Long time, no see, the message had read. And then that name. That impossible name.
I took another pull, grimacing as the sour burn slid down my throat.
Getting buzzed off cheap, out-of-date wine gave me an excuse for reaching for the kettle.
Everyone does dumb things when they’re tipsy, right?
So what if I knew better than trying to read my own leaves?
Who cares if in doing so, I was breaking my own heart?
I’d chug the wine, then steep the tea, and conjure up my sister. Same old song.
I paced tight loops in my tiny living room, while thoughts paced loops in my mind. Who’d left that message? Why’d they left it? Was it connected to the body in Moss Grove?
How did they know where I was?
I wasn’t impossible to find if someone knew how to look. And for years I’d existed in a state of limbo, constantly waiting for the cops to show up and haul me off.
Time had muffled that fear. And now, a decade later, just as I’d made peace with my current life, the ghost of my past had finally caught up with me.
I downed another gulp of wine.
Then, I made myself a cup of tea.
The Sight had sparked awake in me for the first time when I was a little girl, but it had taken an entire childhood of focused work to get to a place where I could use it at will. Anyone could drink tea and look up shapes on a tasseomancy book. Hell, there was probably an app for it.
What we did—what I did—was more. What once felt like drowning, after Hattie-May and Ruth’s teachings, came as simple as breathing. Or it had, once upon a time.
My aunts had taught me to ease open the internal door and focus the chaos of fate into a conduit. Some used cards or palms or roots or any number of things. But for the Robbins women, the conduit was tea. Always tea.
Hattie-May liked to say it was because the tea was of the earth and nourished the body. Ruth would grumble that we used tea because it was four dollars a tin down at the market. I didn’t care so much why we’d used it. It only mattered that it worked.
Or at least, it had worked, once upon a time.
If something is happening, the leaves will show me. They must. I could hear the lie in my head but I pushed forward, working with frenzied fingers. The pomp and ceremony had fallen away a long time ago. On the surface, the process was simple. Boil water. Add leaves. Steep. Drink.
Of course there was more than that. There were rules that had been drilled into me since before I’d lost all my baby teeth.
The first was the easiest. Focus. Everything means something, but not everything means something to you. Fate is wild and connected, and you must focus your intention on the matter at hand, not get distracted by the rest. Pulling on loose threads that “could be” helped no one.
The second was obvious. Consent. Or as Aunt Ruth said, Don’t put your nose where it ain’t welcome. Divining a future without consent is a violation, even graver if the other person doesn’t have the Sight themselves. Doing so is committing violence. And that is never okay.
When I was a kid, Frances and I had gotten into an argument, and I’d threatened to read her leaves to prove her wrong. Ruth overheard and lost her shit. She warned me that if I crossed that line, she’d throw out every last bit of tea in our home and stop my teaching altogether.
I didn’t know if she meant it, but I’d never made that threat again.
The third and the most menacing is the curse. I remember sitting cross-legged at the shabby coffee table in the living room, my aunts perched on the sofa, hands folded. Frances playing on the front porch. Milly, we have to tell you something important, something you cannot ignore.
And so they explained. Balance is delicate.
Those gifted with the Sight are one step ahead of fate, and fate liked to even the score.
Which meant there’s a price to pay. If a Robbins woman looks into the fate of her beloved, she will always, without question, see some impending doom.
Aunt Ruth had smacked her palm against her thigh as she’d explained.
“Once that train’s left the station, there’s no stopping it. ”
I asked if either of them had ever been dealt the curse, and they’d looked at each other somberly before telling me stories of how the Robbins line is riddled with stories of lost love and heartbreak.
Of fates read. Of beloveds doomed to becoming cursed things.
I didn’t realize until much later that they’d never actually answered my question.
And thinking of this lesson now, knowing how I’d played fast and loose with the rules, made me sick.
I shook off the memory and brought my favorite mug—thrifted, ceramic, and in the shape of Garfield—to the sofa and drained the brew.
It was bitter, but no worse than the wine.
The dregs clumped and scattered in the bottom of Garfield’s hollow body.
The Sight, that awareness—that place, that thing—inside me seemed to cock its head, paying attention.
And for a moment, as I always did, wine-drunk and staring into my own leaves, I allowed hope to slip in.
Hope that the Sight hadn’t completely abandoned me when I abandoned Tennessee.
With my eyes shut, I focused on reaching into that thrumming maw of everything, the tug guiding me to the internal door.
I willed it to throw itself open with abandon and drown me, as it once had so willingly.
I’d settle for a whisper. A scream. Anything.
I could feel it there, in my chest. I just needed to access it.
The noise of the world fell away and…
Nothing.
I tried again, focused harder. Still, no flash of vision, no new divination in my teacup. No thrum or surge or drowning. No ache.
My eyes fluttered open and I raked a hand over my face, prepared for the inevitable shame. I’m an idiot. How could I truly think—hope believe wish—that after ten years, tonight would be different. Why would it?
Inside my cup there were no new secrets. No new truths. Only the same thing—the same cruel thing—that appeared ever since I’d ran away.
I sat Garfield on Carla’s Ikea coffee table hard enough to chip away part of his orange tail and leaned back into the sofa.
Sister. That’s what the leaves said. Every single time since leaving Tennessee.
Sister, sister, sister.
Taunting me. Cursing from behind that still-shut door.
Fine. I sat down on the sofa and waited for her to appear.
Because we were tethered, and the leaves had a way of summoning her that I couldn’t understand.
When I’d first seen sister in my fate, I’d grown teary-eyed.
Two weeks after I’d ran away, I’d ripped open a tea bag I’d stolen from the diner, pouring the grainy leaves into a cup of tap water.
The thing inside me barely stirred. There was no vision, no drowning, behind the internal door.
Yet, I was so relieved to be shown the thing I missed most that I’d barely noticed.
Sister.
It would be impossible to explain the depth of soul-shattering hope I felt in that moment, thinking I’d be reunited with Frances soon.
Later that evening I was bussing tables, practically humming, when I overheard some high school girls talking loudly with their parents about an upcoming tristate mathlete competition, nervous because they were up against a gifted school from Chattanooga, Tennessee, that was supposedly unbeatable.
There’s this ringer, some genius girl, they’d said.
My ears had perked up, but I hadn’t realized they were talking about Frances—my Frances—until later, because that would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?
It kept happening. The internal door would barely crack. My leaves would whisper sister. News of Frances would cross my path.
A random newspaper left in a corner booth featuring a story about Frances’s team taking second place in that same competition.
Years later, an Auburn sorority stopping into the diner on their way to spring break in Destin, listing the freshmen who couldn’t come.
More time passing and a social media post circulating about a girl missing from her college dorm. Frances’s butter-yellow hair in the background of the photo of the campus-wide candlelight vigil. And with each sighting I learned a little more.
Frances had it all.
Sorority. Career. Marriage. A whole life that, once upon a time, I’d dreamed of for the both of us. Now, out of reach for me except as a voyeur, when I dared peek into my teacup, or sometimes, my sister’s Instagram.
It felt like a punishment. One that perhaps I deserved.
My body buzzed with nervous energy. How would she appear this time? I didn’t have to wonder for long. The local news played on the television, and when the camera cut away from the newsroom, I got my answer.
Sometimes fate was like that. So quick. So insistent.
Frances. Sister.
My breath caught in my chest.
I rose, stepping over the coffee table, pausing a foot from the television screen.
There was Frances, with her blond hair rippling around her shoulders like a sheet of banana taffy, wearing an expensive floral dress and heels, right at home next to her suit-clad husband. Her smile and posture were poised, perfect, but to me they rang hollow.
The camera panned across the steps of a large building identified by the running script near the bottom of the screen as the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. A crowd watched as a plump, red-faced man accepted an award.
“Earlier today, former Alabama governor Walsh ‘Washy’ Anderson accepted the Douglas Roberts Humanitarian Award for his work with foster youth.”
As a reporter spoke, my eyes never strayed from my sister.
“The former governor and First Lady of Alabama and their two sons and adult grand-kids gathered on the steps of the capitol building for the ceremony. What a good-looking family. Don’t you agree, Joe?”
And it was true: They were a good-looking family, dressed in designer suits and dresses, not a highlighted hair out of place, with rows of bleached smiles. Expensive. Southern. Preppy.
Frances was tucked close to her husband, as if she were made for this. As if she hadn’t been raised, same as me, feral and barefoot down a driveway hung with bones, by women who sold poison and dealt in divination. As if our mama wasn’t still in jail for shooting our daddy.
No article I’d ever read about my sister and her well-to-do in-laws had ever brought that up. Not even the spread in Southern Living. The Andersons were the Alabama Kennedys, and I guess for them, everything was for sale, even the correct pedigree.
The reporter droned on, and I stared at the screen, transfixed.
Frances’s fingers twitched.
Suddenly, I jolted, my mouth dry as sand. The hand signal was gentle and small, created to go unnoticed by anyone who wasn’t us. It was meant to deal with middle school bullies and prying Puddle Creek busybodies. A secret SOS, our sign for help. Back when she trusted me to keep her safe.
I knelt, leaned forward, my nose almost touching the television screen. Frances’s fingers were still and straight. Her hand gently pressed to her side.
Had I imagined it?
I squinted, shoulders seized to my ears, breath held. Waiting.
Waiting waiting waiting.
There. Her fingers made the upside-down peace sign, curling in and out, in and out, as if she were scratching her upper thigh.
Not my imagination.
It would’ve been easy to convince myself I was being ridiculous. Delusional, even.
Except for the body that was found in Moss Grove.
Moss Grove, where my sister lived in a rambling farmhouse, penned in by pristine whitewashed fence.
And what about that damned message?
Could Frances have received the same?
I inhaled slowly, but there was no calming my racing heart. It hammered against my chest.
I squinted at the screen a moment longer, then sat back. No. The wine must’ve hit me harder than I realized, because I was being crazy. This was crazy. If my sister was in trouble, she would go to her well-connected husband.
The camera zoomed in tighter to where the Anderson grandsons stood. First it focused on the twins, Barry and Brett, and their families, then it panned to the younger brother, Burt, with his wife, Frances. Perfect. Poised. Terrified.
I gnawed at my bottom lip. There was no mistaking it.
My little sister was spooked.
No one else would notice, but she was my sister. No matter how she pretended otherwise, I knew her like no one else.
Frances was afraid.
And calling for me.