Sara
January 31, 1908
Auntie.
I blinked once, twice, three times, yet she still stood in my doorway, an actual flesh-and-blood being. Surely this was no spirit: she had form, substance; snow dripped from her clothes, and her body cast a long shadow behind her.
Gertie had run off as soon as she heard Auntie’s voice outside, probably gone back to the closet to hide.
Shep was by my side, growling low in his throat. Auntie gave him a look, and he slinked off, tail between his legs.
“Are you…” I stammered. “Are you one of them? Have you come back from the dead?”
Perhaps I had gone mad after all.
I still held Martin’s gun in my hands, gripping the stock so tight my fingers turned white. Auntie just glanced at it and laughed. It sounded like wild wind through a dry cornfield.
She was older. Her once raven-colored hair was now steely gray and in wild tangles, tied in clumps with rags and bits of leather. She had feathers and beads and pretty little stones woven into her hair. Her skin was dark brown and wrinkled. She wore a fox pelt draped over her shoulders.
“Would it be easier for you,” Auntie asked, “if I were a sleeper?”
“I…”
“Easier to believe you were right all these years, that I lay dead in the ashes of my home?” Her face grew stormy.
“But how? How did you survive?” I remembered the heat of the fire, the soot that rained down and covered us; how, in the end, there was nothing left but a few charred remains and that old potbelly stove. “I heard the gunshot. I watched your cabin burn to the ground.”
Auntie chuckled bitterly. “Did you think it would be so easy to kill me, Sara?”
I remembered Buckshot, his fur singed, taking off into the woods. Was he following Auntie?
“Kill me and leave my remains to rot in the ashes?”
I took a step back, suddenly frightened. “I tried to stop him,” I said, voice shaking. “I even tried going in after you once the house was in flames, but Father stopped me.”
Auntie moved forward, gave a disappointed shake of the head. “You didn’t try hard enough, Sara.”
“And you’ve been alive all this time?” I asked, disbelieving. “Where have you been?”
“I went home. Back to my people. I tried to leave my past behind, to forget all of you. But, you see, I couldn’t forget. Whenever I got close, all I had to do was look down at my hands.” Auntie removed her gloves, showing hands and fingers thick with white, gnarled scars. “I’ve got another on my belly, too, from your father’s shotgun. The wound got infected. It was a terrible mess.”
Auntie rubbed her stomach with her scarred right hand.
She raised her eyes to meet mine; hers were as black as two bottomless pits. “But sometimes the scars that hurt the worst are the ones buried deep down inside, isn’t that right, my Sara?”
I said nothing, my eyes fixed on her gruesome pale hands.
“I knew that one day I would return. I would return and keep to my word: you would pay. You would pay for what you and your family did to me. Turning your back on me, after all I did for you. I nursed you, brought you up as if you were my own child, and this was how you repaid me, by trying to burn me alive?”
“But it wasn’t me! It was Father. He was mad with grief.”
She smiled a sinister smile. “Madness is always a wonderful excuse, don’t you think? For doing terrible things to other people.” There was a little glint in her dark eyes. “To other people’s children.”
My heart went icy as a terrible realization bore down on me. “How long have you been back in town?” I tried to keep my voice calm.
“Oh, a little while now. Long enough to see your poor family struggle along. Your limping husband, who fights with the land rather than working with it. Your daughter. Your beautiful little daughter. So tiny. So delicate. So like you at her age.”
“Gertie,” I said, voice faltering. “Her name is Gertie.”
