Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
I woke to a soft cooing on my birthday. I was thirty-four.
And I was alive.
There was a part of me that still didn’t believe it. I scanned around the cabin, attempting to verify its authenticity. Was this the real world? Was I in a dream? A simulation? Had there ever been a real world to begin with, or had it always been something else, something that couldn’t be verified?
I took a deep breath and asked myself if it mattered.
In this dimension, whatever it was made of, or whoever was pulling the strings, I had Eos, or E for short, who was lying against my chest in the rocker where we’d both fallen asleep after a three a.m. feeding.
In this world, I had Micah. I looked over at the bed and watched his chest rise and fall, his sandy hair now threaded with silver.
And somewhere in the cabin was my mother. Likely already up and making a simple birthday breakfast in her cabin fleece and diamond necklace. Hess was often only a few feet away, having moved in with us to help out with the baby.
I carefully moved E to her crib, praying that she wouldn’t wake.
I watched her serene, unmarked form illuminated by dawn and tried not to think about what lay ahead of her, of what kind of curses she would battle in this life.
Then I threw on my jacket and pulled on my boots.
If she woke, Micah or Hess would feed her the pumped milk in the fridge.
I left through the back door and walked with my hands in my pockets toward my favorite trail heading north up to the nearest peak.
I could feel the new heft of my body as the path steepened.
I’d gained weight from the baby and my meds, but there was also a pervasive exhaustion that pulled me down like strong gravity.
I told myself to power through. The air was crisp against my cheeks as I hiked uphill, listening to the birdsong.
Sometimes it still felt like a struggle to get out of bed, and I avoided most large gatherings if I could help it.
But the medicine and the therapy helped curb the hallucinations, the delusions, and the anxiety.
I could see now how I had gotten lost in a world my mother had seeded early in my life, that had then sprouted and become its own strange universe.
Not everything could be explained, but I was okay with that.
I could live in the in-between, and still keep my feet on the ground.
I had found things to keep me tethered—our little family of me, Micah, E, and Hess.
Living in this cabin, surrounded by the peace of this forest. And a special new project I’d been working on.
I’d listened to every one of Lou’s tapes, and I’d learned how greatly they diverged from the stories the world told, many of them crafted by Lou herself, and how wrong, and in some cases, how right, I’d been about her.
Now I was going through the process of transcribing them into a coherent, written form.
I wasn’t planning to publish the stories; I would never violate her privacy like that. But maybe one day, when E was older, I would share my mother’s story with her, and she would understand where she came from without being haunted by it.
My doctor had said there was a chance she could develop mental illness like me, and Lou, and the women before her, but it was not guaranteed.
The environment she grew up in and the experiences she had were also thought to play a role, and so maybe there was a chance for her, with Micah, Hess, and me there to protect and guide her, and to be there to support her if she started to struggle.
In this way, perhaps the curse could finally be broken.
We hadn’t found Lou yet. Given how rough she’d been living, she could have died and been buried as Jane Doe, the gravedigger having no idea he was piling dirt on top of a country icon.
Or she could still be out there, living in the woods like the beguiling witch she was. Free as she always wanted to be.
The truth was, we would probably never know, and wasn’t that like her, in the end? Even after listening to hundreds of hours of her life story, Belle Powers remained a mystery.
When the light began to materialize around me, I knew it was time to go back.
I approached the cabin from the front this time, and I saw Hess sitting in a wooden rocker on the porch, looking out over the mountains with her mug of coffee. I sat in the chair beside her, and we watched the sun slowly peek over the ridge, making the fog glow like electric fluff.
E laughed as Micah played with her in the living room, the little sounds of life adding music to the light spreading over the horizon.
Hess and I looked at each other, and we both had tears in our eyes.
Somewhere out there, Lou was watching us, and she was saying, “Damn, that’s beautiful.”