“Jane?” Helen said, and the woman looked up at her, opened her mouth to speak, to tell Helen something, something important, Helen knew, but no sound came out.
The room flickered with light; the beam of a flashlight dancing through the window.
“Helen?” Nate called, coming through the door, shining his light on her. “Helen, my god! What are you doing out here?”
“I…” She glanced to the center of the living room. Hattie and Jane were gone.
I don’t know what I’m doing here. Maybe I’m going crazy.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “So I came up here. Thinking about the kitchen. What kind of countertops do you think would work with a slate floor?”
“Well, come back to bed, okay? It’s, like, three in the morning. I was worried sick when I woke up and couldn’t find you.”
“Sure,” Helen said, “of course. I’m sorry, I’m just…excited, I guess.” She smiled what she hoped was a reassuringeverything’s finesmile.
As they walked out the front door, she looked back over her shoulder and thought she just caught the outline of a simple stool sitting in the darkness. She closed the door.
CHAPTER 20
Jane
SEPTEMBER 3, 1943
When Jane woke up, she didn’t know it was to be her last day on earth. She roused her children and husband, made coffee and oatmeal just like every other morning. Her husband, Silas, read the paper.
“More news about the war, Daddy?” her son asked.
“We sunk a Japanese submarine,” her husband said.
“Boom!” shouted the boy.
“No shouting or explosives allowed at the table, please,” Jane pleaded.
Her daughter scowled into her oatmeal, whispered to her doll.
Jane looked at the photographs of the people in the newspaper and thought she herself was not unlike them: a paper woman, one-dimensional. That’s what her family saw. But really, she was more like the chains of paper dolls her daughter would cut from leftover newspaper: folded together, she looked like one, but once you opened her up, you saw she contained multitudes.
There were stories, she knew, about people who led double lives. Spies. People who had affairs.
Everyone had secrets.
Everyone told lies.
She comforted herself with these facts. She told herself she was not alone.
Her husband, he knew nothing about her. Not really. He called her a good girl. She had told him she was an orphan and he had taken pity on her, said, “How terrible to have no one in the world.” And she had cried. It wasn’t just for show. She had cried because she knew he was right.
She missed Mama.
She missed her with the dull ache of a phantom limb, like some basic part of her had been ripped away.
And almost every night, in the darkest hours, she was back in that old root cellar in Hartsboro.
She would remember, with chilling detail, how she’d hid in the root cellar for what felt like days, though surely it was only hours. Time moved slowly in the dark, when you were alone with just your own grim thoughts and spiders to keep you company.
Crouched down on the bare dirt of the root cellar floor, listening carefully for the scuttle of a rat, she went over everything that had led her there to that moment. The root cellar was the only thing left from her mother’s family home, which had burned to the ground, killing Jane’s grandmother years before Jane was even born.
“Someone from town started that fire,” Mama told her once, when Jane had asked about the fire that had killed her grandmother, destroyed everything her mama knew and loved, leaving nothing behind but a cellar hole lined with rocks, some charred wood, lilac trees in the dooryard. And the old root cellar off behind the house. The fire didn’t damage that at all. Over the years when she was growing up, Jane would go there and just sit, look at the jars of canned goods her grandma had put up long ago. It was like going to a museum. The museum ofWhat Came Before.Of the Breckenridge family house. Of glass jars full of applesauce and string beans labeled in her grandmother’s careful hand. She never stayed long and never closed the door, because there were spiders and rats living down there.
