For one single moment, I wished the child gone. Not just out of me, but out of this world. Erased. Then the room was filled with her bellowing, and the fear fell away, and the love—or something like it—came tunneling back through.
I thought I knew true fear. But this, what I’m feeling now, is not a fear I’ve ever known. The feeling inside me is big and black and bottomless. It feels like plummeting into Hell.
“Mama,” the younger girl says. She’s small and freckle-cheeked, one half of her head braided neatly, the other half long and bed-headed, swinging by her waist. I’ve never seen her before in my life, and yet she says it again, that sacred call. “Mama?”
She’s the one who laughed, and then who called for me. I stare at her, nausea roiling my insides. She is of me, and not of me. So close, so similar,and yet.The dissonance sends my mind skittering out of control. I think of plastic dolls. I think of aliens, and skin suits. I think—oh,God—of my own children, taking off their own faces and handing them to strangers to wear like rubber masks. I let out a noise. It sounds like a moan, it feels like a gasp, and I finally think to say: “Who are you?”
The children look at one another.
“Mama,” the young one says again.
My voice rises in pitch.“Where am I?”
“Uh-oh,” a little boy says. Eight years old, maybe nine. He looks like my Samuel, my Stetson, but he’s neither.
“It’s us, of course,” the older boy says. He looks to be about thirteen.
“Barn,” the oldest girl says. She’s looking at me, but her hands are working of their own volition, braiding the younger girl’s head with a force that makes my own scalp hurt. The little girl says nothing, just looks at me with big baby eyes while her head is yanked left, then right.
“Go to the barn,” the oldest girl says impatiently.
I stumble across the room to the front door. My hand is wrapped around the doorknob when I see something and freeze.
There, carved into the threshold of the front door, are notches and scribbles. Dozens of them. Names and numbers, positioned in a vertical line. A list. No—a record.
At the doorknob’s height, a series of particularly clear markings:MAEVE,1852;MAEVE1853;MAEVE,1854. Height measurements. Which means—whichcan’t possiblymean—
I follow the line of measurements, gaze traveling uneasily upward. By the first pane of window:NOAH, 1853,then by the second pane:ABEL, 1854.And then, at exactly the level of my eyesight: a freshly notched entry.
MAMA,the carving reads.1855.
No. No no no no no no—
I rip open the door and step out onto the porch, stumbling down the stairs and taking a few steps into the darkness before I stop short. There it is again: a scene I recognize intimately, which slowly disintegrates into the uncanny. Like an evil sister of nostalgia. There’s the big red barn, and the chicken coop, and the sloping road that disappears over the backside of a hill. There’s the world I built for myself—poring over every blueprint, taking years to get it totally right—except, except,except:there are no driveway lights here. No lights above the entrance of the barn, either. Everything is bathed in shadows beneath the still-black sky. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see how the barn looks old and worn and unloved. The roof has a deep bow. The chicken coop is not the thirty-thousand-dollar technological marvel we bought years earlier, with an automatic door that opens and closes at sunrise and sunset to protect the chickens from foxes and mountain lions and bears. Instead, it’s a small shed with a thatched overhang. Even the chickens look different in the dim moonlight. Thinner. Less friendly.
Hello, ladies.
My body is so flooded with cortisol, I feel paralyzed.
Oh, God. Help me.
“Natalie.”
I spin around. A figure is standing by the barn, the barn that is both mine and not mine. He begins to walk toward me, and suddenly the moonlight illuminates his face.
It’s Caleb. Unlike the children, who look like waxy versions of my own,thisis my husband, with the soft face and the plaid shirt and the puppy dog—
Eyes.
I step back. He stops walking. The two of us stand there, silent, about ten feet between us.
This man’s eyes are not my husband’s eyes. This man’s eyes are black and cold and dead. The more I look at him, the more unfamiliar he becomes. He’s Caleb, and then he’s a distant relative of Caleb’s, and then he’s a stranger, an older man, staring at me in the dead of night. Distantly, I register how cold I am. I look down at myself, take in the strange nightgown I’m wearing. A floral, cotton thing I’ve never seen before in my life.
“Natalie,” he says again.
I think about running. My legs don’t move.
Wake up, Natalie. It’s time to wake up.
