Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 13

Get up, Natalie, my mother whispers into my ear. Come on, now. It’s time to wake up.

I can’t do it, Mama. I can’t do this.

Of course you can.

How do you know?

I know you can because you have to. Now get up.

Get up, Natalie.

NATALIE, GET UP .

I startle awake. Clementine is sitting at the foot of the bed, looking at me.

No, not Clementine. Mary. Frowning at me with interest. Between her tightly pulled braids and her navy buttoned dress, she looks in every way like the sternest candy striper on the planet. “It’s time to get up,” she says again.

“No.” The word shapes itself like a sob.

“Yes,” she says firmly. “You’ve been in bed for long enough. Your fever has broken, and it’ll be good for you to move around.”

The more I blink awake, the more aware I am of my leg. My God, it hurts. I close my eyes, desperate to fall asleep and wake up somewhere else.

“Come on.” She shakes my good leg, and I moan pitifully. “You have to get up. I can’t keep neglecting all the other work I need to do in order to tend to your violent moods.”

I open my eyes and look at her incredulously. “Is that what you would call what happened to me? A violent mood ?”

She rolls her eyes, smooths the wrinkles off her lap, and stands up.

“You people are criminals,” I hiss wildly. “You’ll rot in jail for what you’ve done to me.”

For a moment, I think she’s going to walk out the door without answering me. But then she points a finger at me and snaps, “If you’re not up in five minutes, I will come back here and saw your foot off myself.”

She stomps out of the room before I can respond.

I feel like I’m living in the aftermath of a failed punch line.

As I slowly sit up, wincing at the throbbing in my leg, a distant memory surfaces: Mary, leaning over me, her voice a distant echo, her face a rippling reflection: She’s lucky she didn’t snap the bone clean in two.

And then Old Caleb, amending angrily from across the room: It’s not luck, it’s science. That trap is meant to catch ferrets and squirrels and marmots, it doesn’t have the force necessary to crush a human bone!

And the babies, all those babies—what a strange, terrible dream. It seemed to last forever. A whole lifetime, caught up in a single nightmare, with the doctor and the midwife and my husband standing over me—

My husband.

Hold on.

Old Caleb. Where has he been sleeping, if not here in this room?

Another strange vision surfaces, half memory, half recollected fever dream: Old Caleb walking through my bedroom in the darkness. Crawling into bed with me.

And me, pinned to the bed by my own terror, moaning in pain and fear. Did it happen, or did I dream it? Us, lying there, side by side in the pitch-black? What I remember: feeling each of his heartbeats like they were my own. The two of us, like a pair of foxes tucked into a knoll. And then he turned to me and said in my mother’s voice, IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD, NATALIE —

No. That can’t be right. In fact, I think wildly, looking around the room, None of this can be right.

“Mama?”

I glance sharply at the doorway. There’s Maeve again. Sweet small thing. My brittle heart softens at the sight of her face. I think of my own little girls. Jessa, Junebug; how Caleb would sometimes walk into the bedroom to see me snuggled together beneath the covers with them. How he would chuckle and call them my little shadows. They’d crawl back inside you if they could.

Yes, I think bitterly. The little girls love me. It’s the older ones who give me trouble.

Well. If Mary will go on hating me, might as well make a friend of Maeve. “Good morning, sweetie pie.”

Maeve’s face lights up. Before I can say anything else, she crosses the room and climbs into bed with me, her fingers snarling into my hair, her breath warming my ear. I wonder if she loves me like a child loves her mother, or like a child loves a new pet. “How’s your foot, Mama?”

“It’s—” A whimper escapes me. “It honestly hurts a lot.”

“Poor Mama.” She strokes my face gently, her little face crumpled with almost comically adult concern. “Poor, poor, Mama.” She’s like a little kitten, purring at the first gentle hand. As we lie there, she tells me about her dreams, one by one. She was a princess, then a pony, then a princess pony. She flew through the sky. Whoosh. She held the whole world in her cupped hands, and it felt cold and smooth like a marble, and in the marble she’d seen me, tiny as a chicken, waving up at her. Hello, Big Maeve! Peep peep!

“Maeve,” I say, “Mary wants me to get out of bed. But what in the Lord’s name am I supposed to do?”

“Chickens,” she says immediately. “Little ladies.”

A chill runs through me. “Yes. Let’s go see the ladies. First I need to get dressed.” But my foot. How am I supposed to walk? And then I see it, placed carefully by the door: a hand-carved walking stick.

I ask Maeve to help me pick out my outfit for the day, and she thrills at the idea. I’m hoping the activity will kill at least forty-five minutes; it can’t be later than seven in the morning, and the promise of the day looms impossibly before me. Every minute I spend with Maeve, in here, is one less minute I have to be out there. It’ll be cute, I tell myself glumly as we get out of bed. You can try on a bunch of different outfits, like some romantic comedy montage. See, Natalie? See how you can create fun no matter where you are?

Quite the contrary. Unfortunately, all I apparently have to choose from is an unbelievably sad little bureau with three drawers, each one containing the same kind of god-awful clothing the others have been wearing. The shirts and the skirts are so dated they look like costumery. Civil War–drab fashion. The fabric manages to be depressing and colorless and stiff, all at once. I feel a sharp pang for my closet at home. My garment bags, my steamer. My sweaters, fluffy and fitted and oversized, each one plucked to perfectly match my exact coloring, which is Light Summer, according to the colorist expert I’d met years earlier. I look best in lilacs and chocolates, the purest vanilla creams. And while the clothing I’m looking at now technically has colors, somehow the fabric still feels colorless, like it’s designed to match the skin tone of a corpse.

The first drawer contains three prairie dresses, neatly folded into a row of what I would kindly describe as faded earth tones, olive and taupe and gray, as well as two additional nightgowns, both of which are the kind of white that makes me think of teeth in need of a good bleach. (Perhaps the single most valuable learning of college: that teeth could, and should, be bleached.) I pull out the olive-colored prairie dress. “This’ll do.”

Next drawer: sweaters, all in bruisy blues and gym-class grays. My God, is everything starched cotton? I feel a near-romantic yearning for linens and flannel blends. Wool! How have I been so unappreciative of wool? Just the thought of cashmere makes my throat tighten. Even a terrible polyester blend would make me cry in relief. I take a deep breath, then sigh all my frustration out. I pull one depressing gray sweater out of the pile of folded depressing gray sweaters. Then I give Maeve my best cheery look, even though I’m starting to feel a little suicidal. I slip on a piece of fabric that feels like a burlap sack, then find a small, sad pair of lace-up boots by the bureau. I put one on; it fits snug around my foot. Practically form-fitted. I leave my bandaged foot free.

“Well?” I say to Maeve, once I’m dressed. “What do you think?” I do a little spin, and she laughs and claps for me. I don’t need a mirror to know it looks terrible on me. I feel like an American Girl doll. I fix the buttons on my sweater and say to Maeve, “Chickens?”

“Chickens,” she agrees, and reaches for my hand.

The sky is a light purple when we step outside. It’s early morning. Maeve guides me down the steps and toward the coop. I limp slowly forward, resting all my weight on the carved handle of the walking stick with each half step. The blood has rushed downward; my leg is now pounding with near-excruciating heat. It feels like I’m rising to a boil from the inside out.

I glance over at the mountains, their peaks and crags lit with the rising sun, and feel a sudden and overwhelming urge to bash my head against something hard. The night before (or maybe the night before the night before, or the night before the night before the night before ), when I was lying in bed alone, delirious with pain and panic, I tried to convince myself that the things I’d seen weren’t actually there; that in my fear, I’d misunderstood a cardboard cutout for the real thing. You’re on set, I told myself while I was shivering and moaning and crying beneath that kill-yourself quilt. You’re at Universal Studios, thousands of miles away from your home. It’s all a big, fancy, expensive illusion. Even the steel trap, even the pain—all of it is a magic trick, a miracle sleight of hand.

As I walk outside in the frigid mountain air, the words that had worked so well to comfort me now ring hollow and childish. The great, shark-bite gash on my ankle is not fake. The pain is not imagined. Those mountains in the distance are not cardboard. This crisp, thin air is not being pumped through a vent. I’m still exactly where I’ve always been. If anything, it’s everyone and everything else in my life that have left, my real family and my real house and my real clothing. My whole world has packed up and left me behind. All of it, replaced by cheap impersonations. Like one of those artificial pioneer villages you see advertised on the billboards along Route 66.

At that moment, Mary steps out onto the front porch with a rug and beats it over the side of the railing. I watch the dust carry away in the air. It’s such a perfectly trained moment, like something out of a movie, that I think suddenly: Too perfect.

A second later, Maeve is tugging me along, chattering her good morning to the rising sun and the falling moon and the big purple sky, when I trip on something with my good foot and cry out.

I look down and see something by my boot. There, buried halfway in the dirt, is something small and black.

“Mama,” Maeve chirps.

“Hold on,” I murmur. I drop to a one-legged crouch and pick gently at the nub until I’m able to pull it out of the packed earth. It rolls lightly across my palm, leaving a trail of dust, coming to rest at the center of my love and lifelines.

It’s plastic. It looks like a broken piece of lapel microphone, the kind you clip to a shirt collar or tuck away by a windowsill. I’ve used them thousands of times before.

I scrutinize the little black nub. I haven’t been taken away to some faraway film set—but perhaps the film set has come to me.

“Mama!” Maeve says, more impatiently now.

“I’m coming!” I glance quickly at the house, and then over my shoulder at the fields. I tuck the nub into my skirt pocket and stand up.