And I’m never coming back.
TWO
Headphones on—the Smashing Pumpkins howling in my ears—I stretch out on my stomach, drawing the outline of his face, the curve of his jaw, his translucent eyes like fresh grass or a blue pond. It feels like tipping into a fairy tale, losing myself in the image taking shape at the end of my pencil, as the soft evening wind carries scents of earth and faraway rain in through my open bedroom window.
Usually, I sketch only faces, but I wasn’t close enough to see the small details (a freckle here, a stray hair across an eyebrow there), so I draw his shoulders, his torso, the paperback book in his hands. He leans against the elm tree, the afternoon sun speckled through the branches, slightly kissing his cheekbone, while his eyes are just barely lifted… meeting mine. Yet… he walked away after his eyes strayed over me. Grazed my flesh.
As if he felt nothing at all.
My head thumps, a tiny insect scratch at my skull.How could he so easily turn away?I draw him in my notebook to make sense of him. To fill in the parts I don’t understand.The boy has no name.A stranger. And in a town this small, you know when someone new moves in. You know the names of everyone, you know how longthey’ve lived in Cutwater and the reasons they’ve never left.
But this boy… is something new.
I pull the headphones off, needing the silence to try and bring him to mind, capture some detail I missed. But he’s already starting to fade from my memory, the shadowed parts of his cheekbones becoming less distinct. The sound of the creek fills my ears—cold glacier water twisting its way down from the Middle Fork Mountains, then cutting south across Winterset Valley before turning into the lowlands and running straight under the Goode family home. But it’s not the creek’s fault it found itself here—caught up in the folklore and long-ago curses that haunt this house—it was my great-great-grandfather Fern Goode who built the house over the creek, who deemed it a reasonable place to make a homestead, in the lowest, swampiest soil in town.
A fool’s undertaking.
But over the gurgle and rush of the creek, I hear another sound….
The wind has died down, the woods fallen still, but the noise echoes softly through my bedroom window: a breaking open, like tissue paper. Like eyelashes on the surface of tepid bathwater. So gentle and quiet, it’s hardly there at all.
I sit up, knowing the sound as clearly as if it were a scream from fearful lungs. I’ve heard it season after season, since the spring I was born. I leave the Walkman on my bed, move to the back door, and step out into the night. It’s late, near midnight. But the noise is unmistakable—the heavy teardrop heads of the tulips are beginning their slow unfurling. Petals peeling open, tufts of silklike layers bending themselves back to peer up at the clear, moonless sky.
The tulips are finally blooming.
An effort that happens only at night, only in the dark, as if they don’t want to be seen. A secretive, seductive unveiling. Like ladies peeling away their robes. Showing their pale skin to the stars.
With my heart thudding in my ears, I move down the back steps, over the churning creek, and into the garden. The wind stirs, changing direction—it begins blowing from the east. An omen. A portent. I hold in my breath, witnessing the awakening of a plague.
In this dull light, the soft blooms with their snow-white petals and garish red streaks seem innocent enough—a garden of flowers to mark the changing season. But they are not harmless. They are responsible for every bad thing that’s ever happened in this family. I reach out a hand, running my fingertip over one of the newly opened petals. The stalks are unusually,unnaturallytall, the swaying heads of each flower grazing my shoulders—a crop that reaches the height of cornstalks some years. I draw the air tight into my lungs, each particle heavy with an intoxicating sweetness, making me dizzy, and I know what will come.
Tulip season has begun.
Madness season, most call it.
Because the locals in town don’t know that the tulips are to blame. They don’t know that these blooms are the source of their twisted-up desire each spring.
But from this moment on—until the tulips wilt back into the soil—locals will feel themselves inextricably, irresistibly drawn to the Goodes, to Archer and me. They will feel a nudge in our direction, a prick at the base of their necks that is nearly impossible to ignore.
When the flowers crack open to reveal their inner petals, theneedothers feel for us becomes something abnormal.
A hunger.
A feral wildness that is sometimes dangerous.
A love that becomes greed.
Standing in the garden, the spring air filled with the soft perfume of their petals, I think again of my great-great-grandfather—a man who sailed across the Atlantic from the Netherlands with a small linen pouch tucked into his waistband, a dozen tulip bulbs hidden inside.Secreted away.He claimed they were the rarest of bulbs—heirlooms saved from the infamous tulip madness that ravaged Holland in the 1630s. But when Mom told the story, she said he likely stole the tulips, killed a man—a royal gardener—who kept the bulbs in a dark, dry basement. Stolen or bartered, the bulbs contained a madness that made people crave them—a delirium of love and devotion. And when he planted the bulbs into this swampy soil, he hoped to make his fortune: he would sell the flowers, be adored and revered, admired from one county line to the other. But instead locals in Cutwater feared my great-great-grandfather. They thought it ill-conceived to build a house over Forsaken Creek, in the marshy lowlands. “No rational person would build their home so carelessly,” they whispered. And that first spring, when the tulips bloomed, showing their lurid white petals cut through with scarlet veins, the locals called it a curse and refused to buy a single bloom.
In time the tulips spread, the small garden became a sea of blooms, and some in town found themselves drawn to Fern Goode for reasons they couldn’t make sense of—they fell in love with him every spring, like clockwork. And when he had three sons—whogrew to be as tall and broad as Norwegian spruce trees—love befell them just as easily. A wild, feverish kind of love. And with each generation, with each Goode who was born into the house, the madness-invoked love became more deeply woven, more troublesome, the blooms braiding themselves into the blood and bones of every Goode.
Inescapable.
I drop my hand from the petal and turn on my heel.
When I was younger, I thought the tulips beautiful, enchanted, but now I hate them. Now I wish I were a girl with a different last name. Any name that wasn’t Goode.
Inside the house, I close my bedroom window—so the scent of flowers won’t saturate my room—then I sink beneath the sheets, pulling a pillow over my head. I don’t want to hear the soft splitting-open of tulips.
