The Virginia that features on postcards, with its green-eyed, lazy summers and patchwork autumns, keeps a secret, and that secret is the mean Appalachian winters. High in the hills, along the land’s curving backbone, the wind changes its mind every minute, finds its way to any exposed softness in a person that may have gone unnoticed.
Born on an unwelcoming February day, Adella Shaw’s baby girl had been perfectly ordinary, her small body slippery and fragile. People can forget that they are animals, but a mother cannot. Dell had never recognized the animal in herself as much as the moment she beheld her animal baby, from her own animal body. The child’s eyes were ordinary blue, although to Dell they were the blue of ghosts held just at bay, their expression curious and wild, as if to ask: why have you brought me here, and what do you mean to do about it? Cradling the baby in the mottled firelight, paralyzed by a sudden, violent love, Dell found that she had no answer.
There is some deep, inherent fault line in me, something I can’t fix. If there weren’t something wrong with me I would surely be crying.
Dell held the baby all night and half of the next day, the little girl’s weight in her arms intoxicating as a spring breeze, a newness that illuminated everything she thought she had known. But Dell knew also that she was poorly made for mothering. She recognized a bad mother when she saw one, a skill sharpened with years of practice. Still, she savored the hours with the child, until the church lady came the next day, bearing a clipboard and promises that there were families who wanted a baby. Mothers and fathers, people who did things on purpose. Dell was not a stranger to the kinds of choices you only get to make once. She left her child behind and walked out into the winter afternoon, promising never to come back.
Winter melted, and the spring blossomed into summer heat. On one of the countless mountainsides above the Shenandoah Valley, a parking lot opened from the road, obscured by an overgrowth of locust and kudzu. There, Dell’s psychic shop occupied the second floor of a beige-painted cinder block building, upstairs from a laundromat. A wide bank of jimsonweed grew waist-high in the ditch at the roadside, with its poison white-and-violet-swirled flowers, wide as a hand, beginning to open in the waning afternoon light.
The parking lot was empty, save for her green Volvo station wagon, and a litter of bottles and fast food cartons discarded by passersby. Watching from the window at the front counter, through the curlicues of the neon sign that read THE PSYCHIC IS IN, Dell looked past the parking lot and down to the valley, where she could see her hometown, Blyth, as if it were a dog that had laid down at her feet. A tired old dog, flea-bitten with gossips, blind in one eye. A brown, naked strip cut through the forest in the distance, where a gas pipeline lay under the ground, thin as a ribbon. The water hasn’t been right since they built that thing, Aunt Myra always said, after eminent domain kicked her off her land, when the government forced the sale of the land for the construction. It never will be again.
The shop walls were lined with dried flowers, a cast-iron skillet, a faded red baseball cap hanging on a nail. The psychic shop looked more like a witch’s den. But then, Dell wasn’t a proper psychic. Couldn’t look at a stranger’s hand and know their secrets. She read palms, or tarot cards, or stars. But those things only told her what people wanted to talk about. Take Rhonda, for instance, here every Thursday afternoon, always worrying on about a new lover, or an old one. Thursday a week ago, Dell had traced Rhonda’s palm and said: “You say he loves you? Rhonda, there’s never been a Libra that didn’t say exactly what you wanted to hear.” A Libra herself, she knew this for a fact.
But today, Rhonda was late. Dell walked away from the light, back behind the bamboo panels, to the sofa and coffee table where she sat her customers. A half-busted cuckoo clock, a lucky thrift store find, hung on the wall, though it had never kept the time reliably. She reached up to nudge the second hand.
“It’s ten past four, little bird,” she said. “You still in there?” She brushed dust from the clock onto her dress, a blue prairie-style frock that might have been fashionable ten years ago. At the sound of footsteps on the stairs, she tied her hair back over one shoulder, its long waves the soft brown of walnut shells. As she opened her mouth to greet Rhonda, the clock issued a guttural click, as if winding itself. The wooden bird lurched out of its house and cried out one lone chime.
The door opened with a jingle. Tearing her eyes from the cuckoo bird, Dell shook her head with relief.
“Rhonda, come on back. I’m glad you’re finally here. For a minute I thought there was a ghost.” From its perch on the wall behind her, the bird continued to squeak.
“Adella. It’s you.”
Before Dell could register her mother’s voice, she was wrapped in a cool, fragrant embrace. Anita was soft but slim, with whittled cheekbones and a glossy waterfall of brown hair. In contrast to Dell’s bare feet, Anita wore black leather sandals, toenails painted red. She was so pretty most people forgot to wonder if she was anyone’s mother, or sister, or wife.
Anita held her tight, swaying on her feet. “I’ve worried about you all year. It is so good to see you.”
The cuckoo clock continued to chirp its lopsided, redundant note. Dell pulled out of her mother’s hug, gritting her teeth. She whirled on her heel, tore the clock off the wall, and clutched it against her chest, where, despite her efforts, it continued to sing. She felt her eyes sting. It was too soon to see Anita, but Dell knew it would have always been too soon.
“You weren’t supposed to come here.”
Her mother couldn’t hear her, buoyed on a vibrant cloud of emotions that nearly painted the walls. She lifted a hand and fanned at her prettily watering eyes, a theatrical gesture that had never failed to set Dell’s teeth on edge.
“I have ten dollars that say you guilted my cop brother into finding some way to look me up. And another ten if you forget I’m here and walk back out.” Dell shoved the cuckoo bird back into its house with her fingertip.
“If you really wanted to run, you’d be more than an hour away.” Anita’s nose pinched in a scowl. “Dell, you need to come home. Something’s happened.”
“Don’t bother.” Her heart ticked against the whirring clock. “Whatever it is, I don’t care. Nothing is gonna make me leave here.”
“You don’t think your father would rest easier knowing you were with family? Not here, in this… whatever you call it?” Anita took the red baseball cap from its hook on the wall.
“Anita, give that back.” Dell shifted the clock to one arm and reached for the hat but Anita stepped back, holding it out of her reach.
“Would it kill you to call me Mom?”
“It might.” Dell snatched the hat from her mother and held it against the clock in her left arm. The clock pattered against Dell’s ribs, so that she couldn’t tell whether the cuckoo bird wanted into her chest, or her own heart wanted out. Hands full, she had to nod at the door instead of pointing. “Get out.”
Anita picked up her handbag, eyes narrowing. “You’re a psychic now, is that it? Then I guess I didn’t need to come. I guess you already know your baby’s missing. Good as homeless. Right?”
The whirring clock and the red cap dropped from Dell’s arms, leaving them empty. “Mom, what?”
“Maybe you can divine where she is, too.”
“Wait.”
Anita breezed past the bamboo panels. The falsely cheery jingle of the door rang out once more as it closed behind her.
The room dimmed in her absence. This was the Anita that Dell remembered. Pretty as sin, and just as syrupy-sweet, until the second you slighted her. Nothing had changed. Dell blinked and saw the baby’s tiny hands, her wide blue eyes, a blue she could drift away in. Before she knew it, she was running to the door.
Dell tripped down the stairs and out into the parking lot. Behind the tinted windshield, Anita patted her cheeks dry with a tissue.
“Wait a minute,” Dell called. “Please, Mom.” As she stepped off the curb to approach the car, Anita steered toward the road, leaving Dell clasping her hands, following her mother’s exit with a hopeless stare. Anita’s dramatic exits were only business as usual, but the jolted, cuckoo-bird patter in Dell’s chest slowed to a halt. As Anita’s car turned toward the left, Dell saw the pickup truck coming from the opposite direction at full speed.
Pummeled forward, the car crunched against the side of an underpass. The double impact of the collision rang like a screeching, metallic ker-plop. After the noise there was quiet, the sudden absence of birdsong.
Dell’s eyes swiveled between the truck and Anita’s battered car, until she saw a man exit the truck and run toward the sedan. It was crinkled like foil, having collided and skidded a few yards along the concrete wall. Dell walked barefoot across the road, hung behind him as he leaned over the shattered driver’s side window. The truck driver was a middle-aged man with a flannel shirt over his paunch.
“She alive?”
As Dell spoke, she saw Anita’s shoulders rise and fall. Breathing. That was something. She was bleeding from a contusion on her temple, leaning forward so far, her chin pressed into her neck at an acute angle.
“Can you reach the keys?” she whispered.
The man reached in, his arm just brushing Anita’s shoulder, turned the engine off. As he drew back, the top of his arm caught the jagged glass that lined the window, blood welling up underneath it.
“Oh, shit. You should sit down. Come on.” Dell pointed at the guard rail by the side of the road, scanning his shirt for bloodstains, anything misaligned. “Wait here. I’m gonna call for help.”
She returned with a dish towel and a cup of water, sat next to him on the railing. “Ambulance is coming. They said not to move her. I told them to hurry, but you know.”
“Takes a while, out here.”
“Yeah. Let me see that.” Dell held out her hand, gesturing for his arm. Poured some water on the towel, let his arm rest across her knees as she dabbed at the blood. Funny how this never left her: see a hurt, want to soothe it, wrap it up. Like she had ever successfully fixed one thing. His hands were shaking bad enough he probably couldn’t have done it himself, anyway.
“She came out of nowhere,” the truck driver said, arms crossed, hands squeezing his biceps.
“She always does,” Dell said. She watched his arm as blood seeped up again, patted it with a clean corner of the towel. Palm up, she saw that the pad of his ring finger was marked with a row of short, horizontal dashes, a sign of misfortune.
“You know her?” He looked up at the building behind them. “You’re the psychic, right? Is she one of your customers?”
Dell glanced out at the wreck. “She’s my mother.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry.”
She wrapped the towel around his arm and scooted away. “It wasn’t your fault. Just bad luck.”
The truck driver reminded her of her father, without the pale cheeks and empty eyes. Dad, but sober.
One of Dell’s old tricks to calm herself was to look around her, find three things, and they had to be real things. Say their names, either out loud or in her head. She counted: jimsonweed, Anita’s wrinkled-up car, the valley in the distance.
Though it was summer, a strange, cool breeze whistled through the clearing. The weather here did not follow the season’s rules. The land was a keyhole between mountains, the notch in their collarbone. From here, it had once been possible to see straight into the next state on a bright day, and though the haze of a nearby factory prevented that now, the view retained a stark elegance. She had spent the last year cataloging every notch in the hills, every constellation, the family of deer that pecked around the parking lot looking for scraps. In the springtime, a black bear had come down from the woods, skinny and ragged, a mother who had given her sustenance to her cubs and gone foraging. Ravenous enough to dig through trash, risk human company. Dell knew that bone-hungry feeling, the empty that winter leaves.
An ambulance arrived, followed by a police car. As paramedics unloaded, someone approached her with a warming blanket. Dell refused it, then realized she was shivering, from shock, she thought, not at the accident but at the infernal nerve of Anita to track her down and turn up in her store.
“Do you want to ride along, or follow us to the hospital?”
Dell’s response was brief.
“Do you think she’ll come to in the ambulance?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
Dell turned and walked back inside the shop, leaving the crew stammering in the afternoon breeze. She turned off the lights in the den, left the cuckoo clock crying on the sofa. In her bedroom down the hall, she turned up the covers on her twin bed, pulled the shades over the windows so the mountains could not see in. She looked around her at all the treasured junk, bones, feathers donning the walls. Things she’d collected lovingly, a crow lining its nest. There was a line of poetry she’d read once that stuck in her head, now resurfacing: These gleaming shards I have braced around the wreckage. Yet, shards were shards, gleaming or not, and wreckage was still wreckage. Anita was right. It was time to go.
Dell stepped into her black silk flats, flipped off the sign. It was a superstitious habit to keep her red canvas bag packed and ready, hanging by the door. That she should use it to return to Blyth seemed like the final act in a mean prophecy, her feet moving ahead with or without her heart. She walked to her station wagon, threw open the door, tossed the bag onto the passenger seat. The engine started with its familiar cough and growl. She rested her head on the steering wheel and saw, between her knees, an old bloodstain on the seat cushion.
Leaving him, leaving home, being alone up here, even letting someone else be your mother. I would do it all again. Her faith that the child was safe and loved had been her salvation, her only reward for all her loneliness. Her heart raced unevenly like a busted cuckoo clock. Bloodstain, spare change, red canvas bag.
If every mother knows that sudden, violent love that swells as she holds a newborn, then every mother also knows the partner that comes holding its hand. Just as sudden as the love that paralyzed Dell when she held the baby girl, the familiar fear resurged to eclipse it, gray as an early dawn, mean as the February wind off the mountain. Fear that stilled her fluttering heartbeat, cutting right through the high summer haze. If I can just find you safe and loved, it will all have been worth it. When I find you, then I’ll know.