Chapter 32 #2
I studied all of these clues for myself, including using software to play the entire album backward.
I could see how someone looking for a message might hear something in the sounds beneath the guitar, but to me it sounded like recording fuzz.
All of it, honestly, seemed like too much of a stretch.
I couldn’t help feeling like these fans were just getting off on being spooked, rather than searching for the real truth.
And above all, this idea kept eating at me—if she knew exactly how and when she was going to die, why hadn’t she stopped it somehow? In the cabin memory, she had seemed determined to stop the curse, no matter what it took.
But they weren’t all dead ends—on one subreddit, buried deep in a link to an album of photos, I found a rare image that’d been taken at a Cursed Woman show in Austin.
It showed Belle in a black dress, her hair natural and wavy, thick black shadow smudged around her eyes.
The top of her dress had come undone, and I saw something on her chest. At first glance, it appeared to be a shadow or a smudge, but there was more than one, spaced out over her skin.
I remembered what I’d seen years ago in that photo of her at Bellewood, the dark lines beneath the chiffon.
It reminded me a bit of my own birthmark, and I wondered if we’d both been marked, and what it meant.
I posted about it on the page, and while some seemed to dig it, most voted me down as a poser. I apparently didn’t know what I was talking about.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I received the message. A user named maryshelley25—the name my mother famously used to check in to hotels on the sly—had DMed me a link to a lo-fi website dedicated to the conspiracy of Belle Powers’s death.
This page was different from the others—it focused on the real circumstances around her death, not secret messages in album art.
My mother’s plane crashed into the ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, around 10:30 p.m. on July 25, 1982.
Micah and I had spent an afternoon in the main branch of the Nashville Public Library that first summer looking at the news clippings of the crash, but I had forgotten the details.
I clicked on a link labeled “black box evidence” and it took me to an official report filed by the National Transportation Safety Board.
It stated in a thick typewritten font that the plane had not malfunctioned prior to impact.
There had been no strange weather event or interference from any other aircraft.
I came to the final line of the report, and my blood went cold.
It was as if the plane suddenly fell from the sky.
For Christmas, Hess came to Arizona. We usually spent it in Nashville at her house with the other girls’ families, but I made an excuse about not feeling like traveling. I was still using the miscarriage as a cover with Hess and Micah, and I wondered how long it would last.
I had stopped leaving the house very much, except for the occasional walk to the grocery store when I was feeling solid.
Driving was out of the question now, as was any situation where I felt I couldn’t easily leave.
Sometimes, even when I was just walking around, I would start to feel light headed, and then I couldn’t feel my feet against the pavement, and I would imagine myself walking out into traffic and ending up tangled beneath someone’s car.
Or falling over the side of an overpass onto the hard cement below.
Other times, it felt like I was simply fading from existence, my body evaporating cell by cell into the desert air until I was only soft vapor.
I kept Micah in the dark about all of this, and instead made up an excuse about a sensitive project requiring an NDA.
I knew I couldn’t tell him about the curse; his reaction when I first brought it up was evidence enough.
He would think it was crazy, and would try to stop my research, and I couldn’t risk him derailing my efforts now.
I had to keep going. I only had six months left until I turned 33.
But I agreed to go to a therapist at his request, and I told her about the new panic that was like the old claustrophobic panic but much, much worse.
I told her that sometimes it wasn’t enough to be able to escape wherever I was—sometimes my body itself felt like it was closing in on me.
Even more than an airplane, it was the only space I truly couldn’t escape.
I thought of telling her about the visions of my death, but that was dangerously close to the curse, which I would certainly not be mentioning.
I worried that if someone had these types of visions, did the therapist assume they wished for death?
Was it some sort of subconscious suicidal tendency in their eyes?
I was afraid of being misinterpreted and misdiagnosed.
I didn’t want to die; in fact, I was doing everything I could to try to stop it.
So I mostly kept my mouth shut, and I didn’t expect her to be able to help, but it did feel good to unburden myself in small ways to someone else.
To cope with the panic, she trained me to imagine a safe place. And when this didn’t work, to imagine Micah’s comforting presence in these new panic-inducing situations.
But while Micah had once been a source of comfort and stability, now it was more complicated. When he was around, I pretended everything was fine, clenching my teeth the entire time. It took so much energy that I would be exhausted afterward and have to make an excuse to escape and rest.
On Christmas Eve, Hess prepared the full Southern feast that I usually looked forward to every year.
I moved the food around and took a few bites to make her happy, but something about the glossy richness of the food, like a staged photo from an old-fashioned cookbook, made me want to gag.
It was a quieter meal without the flurry of grandchildren and a wine-drunk Phoebe making everyone laugh, but it wasn’t stiff.
I participated well enough, and I got Micah on a glassblowing tangent that lasted a good twenty minutes, eating up most of the time.
Late that night, after they had both gone to bed, I snuck downstairs with the hope of spending some time in the basement where I did my research. But I found Hess sitting on the couch in the dark, the only illumination the warm light of the Christmas tree.
“Honey, come sit with me for a minute,” she said, unsurprised.
I obeyed and snuggled under a blanket next to her.
“You know, your mother hardly ever slept. She said she didn’t like to waste the time.”
I didn’t know where this was going. “I usually sleep fine, I just couldn’t tonight. Maybe it was all the wine.” I smiled playfully at her, but she didn’t return it.
“I’m going to tell you something I should have told you a long time ago.” Hess took a deep breath and placed her hands in her lap.
“Okay.” I was on edge now, but I also couldn’t wait to hear what she would say.
“When your mother and I first met, she told me that the women in her family were cursed to die at 33. I didn’t think she really believed it then.
Your mother was always making up stories for her songs, so I thought it was just something from her imagination.
I didn’t realize it was real for her until years later. ”