Even though Annie can’t see her, she knows Caroline’s black eyelashes will be fluttering and her cheeks will be flushed with red and she’ll be smiling the slightest smile. It’s the same way she looks when she leans over a baby carriage and babbles on about the sweetness of babies. She is seeing her future, her entire perfect future, and Annie is seeing nothing.
“I see something too,” Annie says. “Yes, I see something. Right there. I see him. I see my husband too.”
But she sees no one, nothing. This is how it goes between Annie and Caroline. Caroline all the time getting the better of things. She isn’t prideful about it. She never brags. She doesn’t even seem to notice she always does best or looks best or is best. The not being prideful and the not bragging and the not even seeming to notice make it all the worse. And now Caroline has stolen Annie’s vision, and it’s likely she’s stolen Annie’s husband.
“I see dark hair,” Annie says, her lies spreading out before her. “Brown. He has brown hair. That’s my husband. He’s tall and slender. The one with brown hair. He’s mine.”
As she tells her lies, Annie pushes away from the well, her stomach already queasy. Caroline stands too, holding the light so it catches her under the chin like it did in the bedroom. Her eyes sink into their sockets, her nostrils flare, and her cheekbones protrude.
“I saw him,” Caroline says.
In the slow way a person does when just waking up, Caroline opens and closes her eyes. She exhales one loud, long breath, and lets her arms drop to her sides. The flashlight dangles from one hand and throws a circle of light at her feet.
“The most handsome man ever,” she says. “The man I’m going to marry.”
She pauses, her eyes closed. She’s savoring Annie’s vision. Right this minute, she’s falling in love with Annie’s husband. Not only is Caroline stealing Annie’s first kiss, she’s stealing Annie’s future too.
“Now we have to find him,” Caroline says.
“That’s a damn fool thing to say,” Annie says, staring at the yellow patch of ground near Caroline’s feet. “Everyone knows you’re going to marry Olsen Weber. Was it Olsen Weber you saw down there?”
“No, it was not,” Caroline says, twisting her face as if she’s smelling the same foul smell as Annie, though it’s probably the thought of Olsen Weber causing that face. He’s one of many boys Caroline fancied for a short time before deciding he didn’t quite fit.
“The man I saw was striking, powerful,” Caroline says. “Successful, and rich too.”
“How can you figure all that from the looks of him?”
There’s something on the ground at Caroline’s feet, a twig maybe, a fallen branch, definitely something Caroline would trip over if Annie were to startle her and cause her to take a backward step or two.
“I know because I know,” Caroline says. “He had dark hair and blue eyes.”
“You’re lying.”
It might not be proof positive Caroline’s lying, but every dark-haired man Annie has ever seen has had dark eyes.
It’s times such as this when Annie wishes she’d be altogether good or altogether bad, because living somewhere in between is like having those cicadas buzzing in her ears. Rolling her hands into fists, she takes a step toward Caroline. And as Annie thought she would, Caroline takes a step away. That something on the ground creeps into the light.
“I’m not lying. Clear as day. I saw him clear as day.”
“Then it’s my husband you were seeing,” Annie says. “My husband down there.”
Annie slides one foot forward and then the other.
“It’s my day and my husband.”
Caroline takes another backward step, smaller this time because she bumps up against something that makes her stop and look at the ground.
“I saw blue eyes,” she says, turning and shining the light around her feet. “Yes. Yes, he had blue eyes and dark hair.”
Her back is to Annie, and Caroline is spraying the light across a patch of ground a few feet in front of her. Those are tomato plants, heavy with green tomatoes. They have fallen over, haven’t been properly staked. And there’s something on the ground, a large stick probably meant to hold up the tomatoes.
“He looked right at me,” Caroline says, squatting to prop up one of the top-heavy plants. Still holding the flashlight in one hand, she does her best to gather the leafy stems, but without twine and a stake, the plant falls again. As she works, the light bounces around the small overgrown garden.
“Pity,” she says, stands, stretches her arms out to her sides, and tips her head toward the sky. She turns in a slow circle until she’s facing Annie.
“It was like he knew it was me,” Caroline says. As if remembering Olsen Weber again, or, more likely, smelling the foul thing Annie is again smelling, Caroline twists her face up for a second time. “Like he already loves me. Yes, he had blue eyes.”
Slowly at first, but faster when Caroline doesn’t move, Annie begins waving Caroline away from the garden. When she still doesn’t move, Annie reaches out, grabs the flashlight first and then Caroline’s arm. With one good tug, Caroline is at her side. Annie holds her by one wrist, squeezing so hard Caroline swats at her and cries out.
“Look,” Annie says and points the flashlight on the ground a few feet from the small plant Caroline had been trying to rescue.
It’s a slender arm. That’s the thing she is first certain of. And as she lets the flashlight slide up that arm to the shoulder and the tangle of wiry long hair spread across what must be the side of a face, the smell is the next thing Annie is certain of. She gives Caroline another yank, nearly knocking her from her feet, and they run.
4
I’M STILL LACING my boots as I walk out the door. Hunched over and moving with an awkward gait, I tug those laces tight, tie off the both, and glance back at the house. It stands already in the shadows, though the sun has barely risen. No one watches me from the doorway or from the window. Not Juna or Dale. Not Daddy. No one is watching, so I walk faster and faster still. I take deep breaths of clean morning air to flush the smoke from the cigars Daddy is all the time sucking on. I fan my blouse and my skirt because the stink of them clings to my clothes, and I walk faster and faster until I’m running.
Ellis Baine always gets an early start. He and his brothers will be driving by on their way north of town to check the land passed down through their mama’s side of the family. They always do it first thing and leave the youngest two to see to what needs doing. If they spot me walking alongside of the road, they’ll offer me a ride. They do it for Juna most mornings. She tells me this at the end of each day, even knowing what an ache I have for Ellis. She tells me how they hoist her onto the back of that truck, talk with her and smile at her until they drop her wherever she’s going. Sometimes Ellis hops down ahead of her, reaches up, and lets her fall into his arms as she hops down too. She tells me even though I have such an ache.
Up ahead, the lay of the hills is such that the sun breaks through and the shadows end. The hollyhocks are in full bloom here. They’re waist-high already, and by July, they’ll be covered in mites. I run on toward that sunlight and toward the road and hope like hell Ellis and his brothers didn’t already pass by.
There was a woman in my childhood, Mary Holleran, and I know her still, who knew I was a girl when I was no more than a sickness that woke Mama every morning for six weeks. On Sundays, after the preacher finished preaching, Mary Holleran and the other women would gather around Mama, all of them congregating on the worn, dry grass outside the church’s double doors, and Mary would close her eyes and lay her hands on Mama’s belly. The women would cackle, Mama would say, debate the height of the bump in her belly, the flush in her cheeks, the thickness of her hair. They would pat Mama’s damp face with a kerchief, lead her into the shade thrown by a cluster of red maples, and sit her on a stump or the tail end of a wagon.