by Rory Power
I don’t care. “That doesn’t explain—”
“I know.” She’s sharp for a moment, before it drifts away. “We lost a lot that year. Had to lay off a bunch of people. But it was one harvest. And we had plenty to fall back on.”
I glance out the back door, toward the porch there and the fields beyond. “It was more than one harvest, wasn’t it?”
Gram laughs, low and bitter. “Every year after that. Worse and worse. I sold half the farm to Richard’s parents, hoped they might be able to keep it going. That way if I went under, there’d still be some work.”
Richard. Mr. Miller. How can she say his name so simply, like she didn’t wash his blood out from under her nails?
She gets up abruptly, takes her glass of orange juice to the sink and finishes it in one swallow before rinsing it. I watch the rounded shape of her shoulders, the white of her knuckles. “By ’eighty-one I’d stripped half of what I had left. Nothing out east would grow. So.”
“So?” I press.
She sets the glass down and turns to face me. I can’t see anything but the shape of her, the light over the stove catching her hair. “So then I heard about ridicine. You asked me before what it is. It’s a chemical. It was meant to be used on hybrid crops. Sometimes you splice two kinds together and you get a sterile seedling. So you treat it with something like ridicine.”
“It was banned,” I say, and her head turns more fully toward me. “You used it anyway.”
She takes a breath, and for a moment I think she’ll deny it. But then she lets it out, so slow, and says, “Yes. I did.”
“Why?” Connors said it could kill people. I don’t understand what it could give Gram that would be worth the risk.
“It was meant for lab conditions,” Gram says. “You’d treat a hybrid on the cell level. Tiny amounts.”
That is not what happened here at all.
“But I needed my land to grow,” she continues, her voice louder now, more alive. “I needed to get Fairhaven back to how it was. People were depending on me. This town was depending on me.”
I picture the fields nearest the house. They’re different from the others. The corn still living, but wrong. Off. Like the bodies in the apricot grove.
“It stimulated growth.” Defensiveness in the hold of her body, in every word. “It turned sterile plants fertile. And yes, it was dangerous. I knew that. But it was just me. It didn’t matter. I had to try.”
No, you didn’t.
“I treated the land with it. For at least two years, and nothing happened.” She swipes at her cheek roughly, and I realize that she must be crying, the close shadows of the kitchen hiding it from me. “But you treat anyplace long enough with something and it’ll start to build up.” She pauses for a moment as she slips on a pair of pink oven mitts and pulls the casserole out of the oven, setting it on a rack to cool. Just like Gram, I think, to keep on as if everything is normal. “It built up in the land. It built up in me, too.”
She laughs then, almost bitter. “Would you believe I didn’t care much for Scripture before all this?”
“Scripture?” Why are we talking about this now?
“Really,” she says. “I went to church now and then, but . . . Anyway. I spent a good two years out there. Trying to work the land on my own. Trying to get it to give me something back. And then it did. It gave me Jo.”
This. This is what I need. This is how I understand myself, and Tess, and all those girls in the grove. “Gave you Jo how?”
Gram makes an exasperated sound. “Do I need to explain the mechanics of birth to you, Margot?”
“You’re the one talking about Scripture,” I say, but Gram’s already going on.
“The ridicine did what it was supposed to. Gene duplication. Only, in me.” Gram’s hand drifts across her stomach. “I had your mother right there in the apricot grove. I didn’t realize she was coming until it was too late. There was quite a lot of blood.”
“But that’s only one,” I say. “And they were twins.”
“Yes.” She sounds exhausted. “Katherine came differently. I went back out to the grove the next day and there she was. Half buried. Just a little thing. Just like her sister.”
It cracks open in my chest, something I’ve known since I saw those girls in the grove. Katherine and Jo. Mirror twins. One born from Gram and one born from the earth. Pieces fitting together, everything I’ve seen and tried to ignore all part of the same puzzle.
Blood on Nielsen land. Give it enough, and it might give something back.
“Is that why?” I ask. “Why they were different?” Why Katherine got sick and Mom didn’t. Why the fire ruined one and saved the other.
“I’ll never know for sure,” Gram says, and I tamp down a flare of frustration. “But chemicals break down. They decay. And that certainly happened to Katherine. Not Jo, though. I always supposed it processed differently in her. Passed itself on.” She nods to me. “After all, here you are. Come from your mother just like she came from me.”
But not the girls in the grove. The ridicine kept inside or sent down the line—it doesn’t make a difference. Damage done no matter what, and we’ve all ended up back here, haven’t we?
I shake my head, ignore the flash of pain and get up, cross the room to lean against the counter next to her.
Gram looks at me. In the yellow light her skin is sickly and thin. Tear tracks fresh on her cheeks, wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time.
“I’m sorry,” she says. I haven’t heard her sound old until now. It makes my heart clench, an ache I recognize from years with Mom. “I really am.” She reaches out, touches the edge of the cut she left me.
I step back. I don’t want that from her. I want answers. “They didn’t show up with Katherine and Mom, did they?”
“No. No, it was just the twins,” she says softly. “Until Katherine died. Until your mother put her back in the grove. Like planting a seed, I suppose.”
The truth of what happened like a black hole, both of us walking the rim of it. Katherine didn’t just die. Mom killed her, and she did it because Gram said someone had to.
“But Mom burned the grove down,” I say. A reminder to myself that Mom tried. She did.
Gram nods. “She thought it would be over that way. We both did. But the grove grew back, and it’s never really over, is it? You’re proof of that. They all are.” Gram settles back against the counter, and her shadow reaches out, blends into the dark. “It was easy enough when they were young. I could take them in, give them a few months of a good life before I put them down.”
I flinch. Putting them down—that’s exactly what it was.
“But they got older and older,” she goes on. “I’d find them in the grove and they’d be, well. Your age, I imagine.” Her voice goes tight, frustration wound through. “There was an order. There was a process. I had it under control.”
She never did. Not for a second. Doesn’t she understand? The apricots, teeth inside like pits. The corn, growing like blood and body. It’s everywhere. A whole living system, all of it linked together. She took those girls, made their cradle a grave, and it just kept tumbling over itself. Worse and worse. But she won’t admit it.
“I did,” she says. “I had it. And then one runs away right when you get here and—” She breaks off. I watch her swallow hard, watch her composure come back. “I was going to have another chance, with you. I wasn’t going to lose you like I lost Jo, after Katherine. I never thought I’d see her here again.” She laughs, the sound empty and harsh. “But what a lucky thing.”
“Lucky?” I wouldn’t call it that. I’ve never felt lucky in my life.
“That mess with the body, out on the highway. Your mother came here just in time. I was going to point the police to her and they’d leave us alone.” She wipes her palms on her skirt, adjusts the lie of it. “Then Theresa decided to make a scene.”
“It wouldn’t have worked anyway.” I smile, h
appy to have this over her. “Mom’s gone. She left.”
Gram snorts. “I suppose that’s no surprise. I’m surprised she came at all. She barely lasted two months here, after Katherine. I don’t think she could bear being here. Especially not once she knew about you.”
“And is that what’s next for me, then?” I say. “Another Nielsen girl?”
I don’t miss the way Gram’s eyes drop briefly to my stomach. “Not,” she says, “if we put a stop to all this. Which is what I was trying to do. I didn’t realize it was spreading past my land. If I’d known sooner . . . Well. I didn’t.”
“And you had to kill the Millers for that?” She looks a bit startled. I keep on. “I saw. I went to the house. Gram, how could you do—”
“I didn’t need all of them,” she says. “Just Tess. But it didn’t work out like that.”
Mr. Miller, wrapped around his daughter. The phone by Mrs. Miller’s hand. I will never forgive her for that. Whatever else I make myself understand, that will never be part of it.
The Millers—one name on that list of loose ends checked off. Then me.
There’s another, though. We both know it. Her.
I watch as she reaches into the nearby cutlery drawer and takes out a fork before spearing a bite of casserole straight out of the dish. There’s a weariness to her, so heavy she can barely stand upright.
Like planting a seed, she said about putting Katherine back.
But if that were true—if Katherine was really the start of everything—wouldn’t it be over by now? Mom knew enough. She’d seen the fire mark her sister’s skin. She’d seen what it could do. And she burned Katherine’s body.
I came along anyway.
There’s something else to this. I shut my eyes. Put myself back in the grove, at the nest of Nielsen girls. All of us with the same face. With mine.
But it isn’t mine, is it? And it isn’t Mom’s. I’ve always thought I looked like her, but the truth is that really, we both look like Gram. We both have her face.
Vera Nielsen, over and over again. Every one of us, just her. Mom, Katherine, me, those girls. Stranger than daughters. Stranger than sisters.
And of course it’s that way. Her genes, her DNA, warped by the chemical but still just hers—nothing else added in. Gram, and the rest of us. Branches off the root; patterns in the ink. Copies of the original.
I’m looking at Gram and I’m looking at myself, at my own face in fifty years. Watching myself as I turn to the sink and wash my hands again, as I try to get clean of Tess’s blood.
“I’m . . . ,” I start. “We’re . . .” I can’t finish, but Gram nods anyway.
Mom, living with her own copy for seventeen years. Does she know? Does she know we’re both just Gram all over again?
And that’s where the worst of it is hiding, where I have to fight a sob down my throat, because maybe I’m not a daughter at all. If we’re the same person, what does that make us to each other? All I’ve been for my whole life is a daughter, and what’s left if I’m not that?
I look down at my hands, half expecting to see them gone translucent and decayed like the girls in the grove. But no. I’m still in my body. I’m still myself. And I won’t let this take me apart. I know who I am. Margot, I’m Margot, and that’s the truth that matters. I have hurt and I have loved in ways that Gram never will. I am someone all my own.
And she’s something else. She’s Gram, the beating heart in a living system. Gram, pushing the Nielsen blight further with every breath she takes. Gram, Gram, sitting in this house and doing nothing.
She’s how it stops. How nothing like Tess ever happens again. How I make it right. I think she knows that too. Mom certainly did. A lighter in my pocket. Her rule, ringing in my head.
I came here for Gram. For a family that might love me. And I could have it. I could stay here, I could wrap myself up in my last name and watch the mess we’ve made swallow the whole town. Watch what happened to Tess happen to a hundred other people, and one day, one day, have a daughter of my own, and pass it on to her. Isn’t that what I want? To be somewhere only I can belong?
But it’s not love, to give your wounds to someone else. I won’t be part of it. Not anymore.
“I’m going,” I say. And Gram, she just watches me. Steady, and still, and if I didn’t know better I’d say she looks relieved.
“All right,” she says.
I take the lighter from my pocket. Flick and catch, flick and catch.
I leave the photograph to burn.
TWENTY-NINE
When the fire department finally arrives, they’re too late. I’m at the top of the driveway, shivering and barefoot, and I know without looking that the fire has climbed from the front porch, where I set it, to the second floor. Every door still open. Every window still unlocked. Gram still inside. She won’t ever come out again.
At the station they sit me down in the conference room with a blanket around my shoulders. Officer Anderson can barely look at me. He’s across the table from me, the blinds pulled down. The station has an interrogation room, but nobody wanted to put me in there. Nobody wanted to make this into something they had to handle. Fairhaven burned down with Gram inside. The fields leveled and black. The Miller farm flickering with police lights in the early morning.
I tell Anderson about finding Gram at Fairhaven, after the fundraiser. About the strike of the shovel against my skull. He takes pictures of the side of my head, of my hands, of the dirt under my nails from clawing my way out of the ground. And I spin it like this—that after I came to, I went back to the house and found Gram, full of remorse for what she’d done to the Millers. That she set Fairhaven on fire and wouldn’t come out. Penance, I say. I can’t tell if Anderson believes me, but it’s not like he has other stories to choose from.
“Why did she do it?” he says when I’m done. “Did she say anything about that?”
“She said she was angry with them,” I say. “For doing so well when she was failing.”
Not quite a lie, but not even close to the whole truth. I sound like I’m a hundred miles away, my voice quiet and thick. This is shock, I know. But knowing that doesn’t break me out of this bubble, this careful, deliberate calm. I’m glad for it.
“Three people dead, because of that,” Anderson spits, coming around the table to sit down again.
“Four,” I say. This matters. Maybe not to anyone else, but it does to me. “You weren’t counting her.” I want to lie down. I want to shut my eyes and wake up in a hundred years. “So what happens now?”
“To you?”
No, not to me. The police will call my mom. She won’t come back for me. I know that already. “To the land,” I say. “To the town.”
Anderson raises his eyebrows, like he didn’t think I’d care. “Nothing, to the town,” he says. “Vera was dangerous. We’re better off without her.”
I wait for the flare of anger, for words defending Gram to fill my mouth. But they don’t come. I might be better off too. Or I will be.
“And the land?”
“You mean your future inheritance?” Anderson watches me for a moment. This is nothing like our first conversation, here in the same room. Gram’s gone and he’s exhausted, and I think he’d rather be anywhere else, but there are things that need doing. Questions that need asking, just for the sake of saying he did.
“I guess,” I say. My inheritance came to me in a different form. It never occurred to me to wonder about land, or money, or anything I could touch.
“Well, there are wills for this sort of thing,” he says. “Provided Vera’s didn’t burn to a crisp. But I’d imagine you or your mom can expect—”
“We don’t want it.” What I want is for it to disappear. To never be anything again but ash. To sit there for years and years until it gets back, somehow, to what it was. “And the Millers? What will you do about them?” I ask. “It was my grandmother. You know that.”
“Yes,” Anderson says. He shuts his eyes, tips his head
back. “But she’s dead.”
Thanks to me. Because I did what had to be done. What my mother taught me to do.
Maybe I should be the one to call her. Maybe I should be the one to tell her I did what she never could.
“Do you need me to give you her number?” I say. “You probably have to call her, right?”
Anderson shuts the folder and looks up at me with a frown. “Who? Your mother?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t have to call her.” He gets up, nods to one of the rooms off the bullpen. “She’s already here.”
I feel half myself as I watch him open the conference room door. As he leads me into the bullpen, my legs unsteady, my hands clutching the blanket. She’s here. She’s here. She left but she’s here.
The room Anderson leads me to is somebody’s office, but they’ve put Mom there. She’s behind the desk, slumped over, and by the number of seltzer cans on the desk in front of her, she’s been there a while.
How long has it been since they took me from Fairhaven? It could be years, or heartbeats.
“Miss Nielsen?” Anderson says, and my mom jerks upright. Circles deep under her eyes, grease thick in her hair. She lurches to her feet the second she sees me. I stare at her close-bitten nails, at the raw skin of her cuticles. A wreck of a person. That’s what she is.
And we’re the same. That’s me, standing on the other side of the desk. And I’m her. And we’re both of us really Vera underneath it all, and I don’t know how to hold that together. I don’t know how to look at Josephine Nielsen and not see my mother.
I bet Anderson expects one of us to say something. But we just look at each other, the promise she made and broke echoing between us.
“I’ll give you two a minute,” Anderson says at last. “Let me know if you have any questions.”
Just a few, I think, and he shuts the door.
“So,” I start with. “Hi.”
Three days ago I’d have done anything before making the first move. It would’ve been so important to me to make her go first. To make her be the one to reach out. It doesn’t matter anymore.
