PROLOGUE
August 1909
The first time Opal heard the voice she stood ankle-deep in the Ohio River. It was night, and the water was a universe of stars. Opal wiggled her toes, then dared herself farther until she was calf-, then knee-deep. Her skirt clung to her legs. She willed herself to be brave.
Above, the crescent moon looked like a sickle her husband swung to cut wheat. She could not make out the man up there. She remembered the poem her old schoolteacher once had the class recite:
Our man in the moon drinks claret,
With powder-beef, turnip, and carrot.
If he doth so, why should not you
Drink until the sky looks blue?
The poem had stirred something inside her.Why should not you?Someone had taken a sickle to the moon, and, like wheat, it would grow again. Opal dug her toes into the mud to steady herself. Herbody felt tingly, floaty from the medicines. Since Madame de Fleur left she hadn’t been herself. Her husband declared it anunusual episode.
Opal took a few steps deeper, pulled her legs forward until she submerged herself to her waist. Her skirt bloomed around her, petals and she was the pistil. Her husband grew medicinal crops in their fields, studying them to determine the timing of the harvest. When the pistils darkened, when they curled inward like a hooked finger, the plants were ready to be picked.
Now, she glided her hands through the water, and she felt something. Not the floating fabric of her skirt or a rock in the riverbed. No, something invisible that caused her skin to tighten against her bones, then a jolt she could only later describe as a shock of electricity.
She heard the nattering of late summer cicadas, then a rustling from the thicket of trees. “Who’s there?” she called out, but darkness cloaked the world around her. Still, Opal wasn’t afraid. What could she lose that she hadn’t lost already? She pondered the sky for a moment, how the stars now made her think of Oren somewhere up there, among them.
Oren, her first love, gone twelve years now. The last time she saw him, he was nothing more than a bundle of sheets and wet rags, his skin waxy and gray, his eyes darting back and forth like an animal that’d been caught. How could she tell him all that’d happened since? How her grief had been ordinary—nausea, listlessness, the feeling her body had been turned inside out, like a pocket emptied of its contents—until it wasn’t, until it became a fact, not a feeling, the new life inside her. How could she tell him that at sixteen her mother had taken her to see a doctor to cure her of her shame, how that doctor performed a procedure to render her sterile, how a year later this man would become her husband. How she’d lived as his wife for ten years. How she’d met Madame de Fleur and—
Those on the Other Side can see the wider scope of possibility. They’re no wiser; they merely have access to the fuller story.Souls without bodies, Madame de Fleur had explained. Opal remembered the timeshe and the woman visited Mound Hill, how Opal picked a yellow mum to set on Oren’s headstone, and how Madame de Fleur asked her, what comfort did she expect to find in stone?My dear, those on the Other Side crave what we all do: contact. Touch.
Now Opal felt that ordinary grief again. Her body was not her body. There in the river, Opal grasped for something—an object just out of reach—but found only damp night air. The current urged her deeper. She inched farther. An aura ringed the moon. She didn’t see a man up there.
Still, she sensed a presence, someone calling from the distance. The field of stars looked vast and flat, but in the dark of it, she found a speck of moving light. Then another. Falling stars. The meteors from the comet all the papers talked about, still months away. Halley’s Comet—a possessive phrase, as though one could own a mass of distant light, something that couldn’t be held even if it could be touched.
The water sloshed beneath her chin now. The river smelled like a body in need of washing. She drifted from the shore until her toes could no longer skim the riverbed. She floated for an instant, then held her breath and allowed herself to sink.
Beneath the water, the world fell silent. Bubbles dropped from her nose like little stones. Only weeks ago, Madame de Fleur had hidden herself beneath this river, then emerged in the moonlight. After that, everything had changed.
Opal wanted to understand the woman, to feel what she’d felt. Now, the water gently pulled her, the pressure a kind of embrace. Now, the cold stung her skin. Now, her lungs began burning, and Opal longed for it, this kind of pain. She swam downward. Her fingers grazed the pebbled riverbed, but her body was buoyant. She had to keep kicking, struggling to stay beneath the water. How had the woman submerged herself for so long when hiding required this much effort?
She stopped resisting and allowed herself to rise, but then, that terrible tug. Her skirt tangled on a root growing up from the riverbed. Opal was stuck.
Frantically, she stretched her arms upward; she kicked until her thighs felt afire. Her husband had told her drowning felt like pneumonia, only quicker, but now time slowed. Dull whooshing. Heavy limbs. Her fingers worked to unfasten her skirt. The surface above appeared like a mirrored sky, impossible to reach.
Yet, a body wants to survive.
A body needs another body to do so.
Her legs heaved another kick. Her skirt ripped. An unseen force pushed her upward, toward the light of the night. Her head breached the surface, and she gasped for air, and in the coming up she knew.Sheknew. This, perhaps, marked her first true moment of clairvoyance. Her grief was not ordinary. It was not even grief.
She was pregnant.
The moon hung high. Opal floated on her back, breathless, aware of the life inside her, despite the impossibility of it. Later, she might say the baby had saved her, but it was her own body that pushed her toward the surface, wasn’t it? She brought her hands to touch the flat of her stomach. And that’s the moment she finally heard it—the voice the woman had told her about—thin but clear. The voice said this:
Save her.
1986
The soap’s purity is your surety. [I]ts whiteness cannot tell a lie.
—N. K. FAIRBANK COMPANY
