Chapter 1
Was it a day, a week, a month?
What I know is this: I wake one morning and think, Jesus fucking Christ, it’s cold.
Then: Sorry, Lord.
Cussing like some scummy teenager is not the ideal way to start a day. Still: it is cold. Colder than usual.
And darker than usual?
Calm yourself, Natalie. A little cold never hurt anybody.
When my sister and I were little, it was a Christmas Eve tradition for my mother to tell us stories about our ancestors, how they came to America through Ellis Island, then crossed the West on horse and buggy, laying stake to the most fertile land they could find.
“The days of yesteryear were not for the faint of heart,” my mother would drone on, a distant, romantic look in her eye.
“Think how brave your great-great-great-grandparents had to be. Imagine facing down Indians with arrows. Defending your cattle from wolves. Catching fish straight from the stream. Drinking milk straight from the udder. Imagine, girls, trying to stay alive through the coldest, longest, darkest winters you can imagine, without even the dream of electricity to keep you warm.”
I’d started doing that with my own children, too. Talking about the olden days as if they were something I could speak to, when the truth was I’d never been truly cold a day in my life.
Until now.
The power is definitely out. Why isn’t the generator kicking on?
Relax.
But I can’t. My thoughts are flowing quickly.
I’m wide awake from the cold, making a quick mental list of the handymen we could call to fix the power, of whom I could possibly blame for this mishap—I should investigate the warranty on the generator, it’s only five years old—and then finally I remind myself again to stop, Natalie, breathe.
This is not the right time in the day to be thinking about chores.
It’s the time of day to ground my thoughts in spiritual gratitude; to center myself before the blessed chaos of another day.
I give a little shiver-shake of my head, try to start again.
Thank you, Father, for Caleb. Thank you for the Inheritance. Thank you for Clementine, Samuel, Stetson—
I reach for our comforter to pull it tighter around me. Then I freeze.
This is not my comforter. My fingers are not clutching the flannel-linen hybrid duvet I bought the previous summer.
Instead, I’m shivering beneath a stiff, thin quilt.
Cautiously, I pull a hand out from under the covers and run my fingers across the surface, feeling what appear to be the thick tracings of hand-knitted designs.
The first snake of fear slithers through me. “Caleb,” I whisper.
No response.
If my body’s clock is correct—and it always has been, every single day of my life—then it’s near-exactly six in the morning.
Surely Caleb is already up and out at the barn, performing the daily milking.
Surely this unrecognizable quilt is just some rag from the linen closet that the cleaner chose to use until our normal duvet was clean.
So why hasn’t my alarm gone off yet?
Panic seizes me. I lurch for the bedside table, where I leave my phone to charge each night.
My hands slap air instead of smooth walnut.
I fall out of the bed and onto the floor, knees cracking painfully against the hardwood.
I cry out in the darkness, then clap a hand over my mouth, suddenly terrified of making a noise.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
This time, I don’t pause to apologize to the Lord. There’s no time to apologize. Slick-knived thoughts are running through my brain, each one making me gasp a little in the refrigerated quiet.
I’ve been abducted.
Kidnapped.
Someone must be here with me.
Someone is going to kill me.
I’m too young to die.
Too beautiful to die.
It’s always the young, beautiful ones who die.
Right as I’m about to pass out from fright, I hear something familiar: a ripple of children’s laughter.
I pause. Cock my head at the sound.
More laughter. Multiple children. Little girls, it sounds like. My girls? Then there’s another whisper, an older voice, shushing them sternly.
Clementine? Is that you?
Then: another bright peal of laughter. A decade’s worth of motherhood places that voice at four years old, maybe five.
Jessa? Junebug?
I move into a sitting position on the floor, stare in the direction of the sound. Slowly my eyes adjust to the darkness. Soon I can see the faint outline of a door.
Speak, I tell myself. Say something. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
There’s an immediate reply from the other room. “Mama, we’re having breakfast!”
A current of queasy relief flows through me.
I stand up, ignoring all the sensory information my feet are screaming upward to my brain—this frigid, knotted, lumpy floor is not your Brazilian-imported hardwood—and walk toward the sound, trailing my fingers along the wall until I reach the door and find the doorknob, my doorknob, in the black.
I open the door, exposing the dark hallway.
This is my doorknob and that was my quilt and this is my house. It’s cold because there was a storm and the power went out. Things feel different because it’s dark and you’re afraid, and everything feels different in the dark when you’re afraid.
I march forward through the hallway, which is dark but not as dark as the bedroom.
I move quickly, trusting my instinctual knowledge of this house.
I’ve spent so many evenings awake in the middle of the night in this home, so brain-dead and exhausted from round-the-clock breastfeeding that I might as well have been the actual walking dead.
I know this house like I know myself. And with each correctly placed step, I become more relieved, and I walk a little faster.
What a strange way to wake up, I think with a rising happiness.
What a terrible dream. As I make the final steps before the turn into the kitchen, I think about how this would make for a good video later on in the day.
Afternoon, y’all. Had the weirdest experience this morning, I’m sure all you hardworking mamas will understand …
I turn the corner and step into the warm light of the kitchen and stop short.
This is my home.
This is not my home.
I’m looking at my kitchen, which is also somehow not my kitchen.
The size and layout and decorations are near-exactly the same—the same dining table, the same chairs, the same wooden countertops—but the floorboards are wider and uneven, and there are no overhead lights.
No light whatsoever, I realize slowly, except for the fireplace.
In my house, the kitchen fireplace is nonfunctional.
In this house, the flames pop and crackle in the cold, providing the only light in the room. Illuminating the others.
Sitting by the fire are my children, who are also not my children.
Four of them. Two girls, two boys, all wearing raggedy-looking clothes that remind me of a pioneer reenactment.
The oldest, a dark-eyed girl, who looks to be a teenager.
Hair pinned and plaited. She’s like Clementine, but not Clementine.
She’s also the only one who isn’t looking directly at me.
She’s braiding the little girl’s head with perfect, unyielding focus.
All these children look like they could be my children. None of them are my actual children.
I take one step back, then another. A floorboard creaks beneath my feet.
The older girl’s eyes snap up and meet mine.
I know fear. I have, on more than one occasion in my life, felt it so powerfully as to be crippled by it.
A week before I was set to leave home for the first time to go to college, I was born again in my church.
Right before the pastor dunked my head into the warm pool water, my knees buckled in fright.
There it was, flooding through my body as the priest held me limply up by the armpits: a drowning sense of human inadequacy.
A blank terror at what this world would become, if not for the saving grace He offered us.
For those three seconds before I went underwater, I felt a complete and total clarity of how broken everything was.
My life, my family, my country, my planet.
We, all of humanity, were alone, weren’t we?
Was He even coming to save us? Or were we abandoned, stuck on this forsaken rock, spinning dizzily through the black toward nothing?
Then I dropped beneath the water, and the fear fell away, and the warmth—the love—came tunneling through.
I felt fear again when I was giving birth for the first time. I was twenty years old, in the hospital, and the nurses were offering banal little platitudes I could just barely hear over the sound of my own panicked gasps: You’re so strong, just a few more pushes now, you can do this, Mama—
In the instant before my daughter came screaming into the world, I felt, for the second time in my life, a debilitating certainty of the wrongness of the situation.
Mama, I thought, who is Mama? I’m Natalie.
My name is Natalie. I was not ready to be a mother.
I felt this certainty in the deepest parts of my body, and so it seemed inevitable that He would intervene before this mistake of parenthood developed further.
She’s going to come out blue. Or maybe He was going to punish me in some other way: Caleb was going to slip and fall and hit his head on the corner of the bed, my mother was going to suffer a fatal car accident on the way to the hospital.
A trade must take place for this life to enter the world.
As my body slowly halved open like a peach, I realized it was me who was losing my life; me who would vanish from the world to make room for this new child.
I will never be Natalie again. I will only ever be Mama.
For one single moment, I wished the child gone. Not just out of me, but out of this world. Erased. Then the room was filled with her bellowing, and the fear fell away, and the love—or something like it—came tunneling back through.