Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 2

Was it a day, a week, a month?

What I know is this: I wake one morning and think, Jesus fucking Christ, it’s cold.

Then: Sorry, Lord.

Cussing like some scummy teenager is not the ideal way to start a day. Still: it is cold. Colder than usual.

And darker than usual?

Calm yourself, Natalie. A little cold never hurt anybody.

When my sister and I were little, it was a Christmas Eve tradition for my mother to tell us stories about our ancestors, how they came to America through Ellis Island, then crossed the West on horse and buggy, laying stake to the most fertile land they could find. “The days of yesteryear were not for the faint of heart,” my mother would drone on, a distant, romantic look in her eye. “Think how brave your great-great-great-grandparents had to be. Imagine facing down Indians with arrows. Defending your cattle from wolves. Catching fish straight from the stream. Drinking milk straight from the udder. Imagine, girls, trying to stay alive through the coldest, longest, darkest winters you can imagine, without even the dream of electricity to keep you warm.”

I’d started doing that with my own children, too. Talking about the olden days as if they were something I could speak to, when the truth was I’d never been truly cold a day in my life.

Until now.

The power is definitely out. Why isn’t the generator kicking on?

Relax.

But I can’t. My thoughts are flowing quickly. I’m wide awake from the cold, making a quick mental list of the handymen we could call to fix the power, of whom I could possibly blame for this mishap— I should investigate the warranty on the generator, it’s only five years old— and then finally I remind myself again to stop, Natalie, breathe. This is not the right time in the day to be thinking about chores. It’s the time of day to ground my thoughts in spiritual gratitude; to center myself before the blessed chaos of another day.

I give a little shiver-shake of my head, try to start again.

Thank you, Father, for Caleb. Thank you for the Inheritance. Thank you for Clementine, Samuel, Stetson—

I reach for our comforter to pull it tighter around me. Then I freeze.

This is not my comforter. My fingers are not clutching the flannel-linen hybrid duvet I bought the previous summer. Instead, I’m shivering beneath a stiff, thin quilt. Cautiously, I pull a hand out from under the covers and run my fingers across the surface, feeling what appear to be the thick tracings of hand-knitted designs. The first snake of fear slithers through me. “Caleb,” I whisper.

No response.

If my body’s clock is correct—and it always has been, every single day of my life—then it’s near-exactly six in the morning. Surely Caleb is already up and out at the barn, performing the daily milking. Surely this unrecognizable quilt is just some rag from the linen closet that the cleaner chose to use until our normal duvet was clean.

So why hasn’t my alarm gone off yet?

Panic seizes me. I lurch for the bedside table, where I leave my phone to charge each night. My hands slap air instead of smooth walnut. I fall out of the bed and onto the floor, knees cracking painfully against the hardwood. I cry out in the darkness, then clap a hand over my mouth, suddenly terrified of making a noise.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

This time, I don’t pause to apologize to the Lord. There’s no time to apologize. Slick-knived thoughts are running through my brain, each one making me gasp a little in the refrigerated quiet.

I’ve been abducted.

Kidnapped.

Someone must be here with me.

Someone is going to kill me.

I’m too young to die.

Too beautiful to die.

It’s always the young, beautiful ones who die.

Right as I’m about to pass out from fright, I hear something familiar: a ripple of children’s laughter.

I pause. Cock my head at the sound.

More laughter. Multiple children. Little girls, it sounds like. My girls? Then there’s another whisper, an older voice, shushing them sternly.

Clementine? Is that you?

Then: another bright peal of laughter. A decade’s worth of motherhood places that voice at four years old, maybe five.

Jessa? Junebug?

I move into a sitting position on the floor, stare in the direction of the sound. Slowly my eyes adjust to the darkness. Soon I can see the faint outline of a door.

Speak, I tell myself. Say something. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

There’s an immediate reply from the other room. “Mama, we’re having breakfast!”

A current of queasy relief flows through me. I stand up, ignoring all the sensory information my feet are screaming upward to my brain— this frigid, knotted, lumpy floor is not your Brazilian-imported hardwood— and walk toward the sound, trailing my fingers along the wall until I reach the door and find the doorknob, my doorknob, in the black.

I open the door, exposing the dark hallway.

This is my doorknob and that was my quilt and this is my house. It’s cold because there was a storm and the power went out. Things feel different because it’s dark and you’re afraid, and everything feels different in the dark when you’re afraid.

I march forward through the hallway, which is dark but not as dark as the bedroom. I move quickly, trusting my instinctual knowledge of this house. I’ve spent so many evenings awake in the middle of the night in this home, so brain-dead and exhausted from round-the-clock breastfeeding that I might as well have been the actual walking dead. I know this house like I know myself. And with each correctly placed step, I become more relieved, and I walk a little faster. What a strange way to wake up, I think with a rising happiness. What a terrible dream. As I make the final steps before the turn into the kitchen, I think about how this would make for a good video later on in the day. Afternoon, y’all. Had the weirdest experience this morning, I’m sure all you hardworking mamas will understand…

I turn the corner and step into the warm light of the kitchen and stop short.

This is my home.

This is not my home.

I’m looking at my kitchen, which is also somehow not my kitchen. The size and layout and decorations are near-exactly the same—the same dining table, the same chairs, the same wooden countertops—but the floorboards are wider and uneven, and there are no overhead lights. No light whatsoever, I realize slowly, except for the fireplace. In my house, the kitchen fireplace is nonfunctional. In this house, the flames pop and crackle in the cold, providing the only light in the room. Illuminating the others.

Sitting by the fire are my children, who are also not my children.

Four of them. Two girls, two boys, all wearing raggedy-looking clothes that remind me of a pioneer reenactment. The oldest, a dark-eyed girl, who looks to be a teenager. Hair pinned and plaited. She’s like Clementine, but not Clementine. She’s also the only one who isn’t looking directly at me. She’s braiding the little girl’s head with perfect, unyielding focus.

All these children look like they could be my children. None of them are my actual children.

I take one step back, then another. A floorboard creaks beneath my feet.

The older girl’s eyes snap up and meet mine.

I know fear. I have, on more than one occasion in my life, felt it so powerfully as to be crippled by it.

A week before I was set to leave home for the first time to go to college, I was born again in my church. Right before the pastor dunked my head into the warm pool water, my knees buckled in fright. There it was, flooding through my body as the priest held me limply up by the armpits: a drowning sense of human inadequacy. A blank terror at what this world would become, if not for the saving grace He offered us. For those three seconds before I went underwater, I felt a complete and total clarity of how broken everything was. My life, my family, my country, my planet. We, all of humanity, were alone, weren’t we? Was He even coming to save us? Or were we abandoned, stuck on this forsaken rock, spinning dizzily through the black toward nothing?

Then I dropped beneath the water, and the fear fell away, and the warmth—the love—came tunneling through.

I felt fear again when I was giving birth for the first time. I was twenty years old, in the hospital, and the nurses were offering banal little platitudes I could just barely hear over the sound of my own panicked gasps: You’re so strong, just a few more pushes now, you can do this, Mama—

In the instant before my daughter came screaming into the world, I felt, for the second time in my life, a debilitating certainty of the wrongness of the situation. Mama, I thought, who is Mama? I’m Natalie. My name is Natalie. I was not ready to be a mother. I felt this certainty in the deepest parts of my body, and so it seemed inevitable that He would intervene before this mistake of parenthood developed further. She’s going to come out blue. Or maybe He was going to punish me in some other way: Caleb was going to slip and fall and hit his head on the corner of the bed, my mother was going to suffer a fatal car accident on the way to the hospital. A trade must take place for this life to enter the world. As my body slowly halved open like a peach, I realized it was me who was losing my life; me who would vanish from the world to make room for this new child.

I will never be Natalie again. I will only ever be Mama.

For one single moment, I wished the child gone. Not just out of me, but out of this world. Erased. Then the room was filled with her bellowing, and the fear fell away, and the love—or something like it—came tunneling back through.

I thought I knew true fear. But this, what I’m feeling now, is not a fear I’ve ever known. The feeling inside me is big and black and bottomless. It feels like plummeting into Hell.

“Mama,” the younger girl says. She’s small and freckle-cheeked, one half of her head braided neatly, the other half long and bed-headed, swinging by her waist. I’ve never seen her before in my life, and yet she says it again, that sacred call. “Mama?”

She’s the one who laughed, and then who called for me. I stare at her, nausea roiling my insides. She is of me, and not of me. So close, so similar, and yet. The dissonance sends my mind skittering out of control. I think of plastic dolls. I think of aliens, and skin suits. I think— oh, God —of my own children, taking off their own faces and handing them to strangers to wear like rubber masks. I let out a noise. It sounds like a moan, it feels like a gasp, and I finally think to say: “Who are you?”

The children look at one another.

“Mama,” the young one says again.

My voice rises in pitch. “Where am I?”

“Uh-oh,” a little boy says. Eight years old, maybe nine. He looks like my Samuel, my Stetson, but he’s neither.

“It’s us, of course,” the older boy says. He looks to be about thirteen.

“Barn,” the oldest girl says. She’s looking at me, but her hands are working of their own volition, braiding the younger girl’s head with a force that makes my own scalp hurt. The little girl says nothing, just looks at me with big baby eyes while her head is yanked left, then right.

“ Go to the barn, ” the oldest girl says impatiently.

I stumble across the room to the front door. My hand is wrapped around the doorknob when I see something and freeze.

There, carved into the threshold of the front door, are notches and scribbles. Dozens of them. Names and numbers, positioned in a vertical line. A list. No—a record.

At the doorknob’s height, a series of particularly clear markings: MAEVE, 1852; MAEVE 1853; MAEVE, 1854. Height measurements. Which means—which can’t possibly mean —

I follow the line of measurements, gaze traveling uneasily upward. By the first pane of window: NOAH, 1853, then by the second pane: ABEL, 1854. And then, at exactly the level of my eyesight: a freshly notched entry.

MAMA, the carving reads. 1855.

No. No no no no no no—

I rip open the door and step out onto the porch, stumbling down the stairs and taking a few steps into the darkness before I stop short. There it is again: a scene I recognize intimately, which slowly disintegrates into the uncanny. Like an evil sister of nostalgia. There’s the big red barn, and the chicken coop, and the sloping road that disappears over the backside of a hill. There’s the world I built for myself—poring over every blueprint, taking years to get it totally right—except, except, except: there are no driveway lights here. No lights above the entrance of the barn, either. Everything is bathed in shadows beneath the still-black sky. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see how the barn looks old and worn and unloved. The roof has a deep bow. The chicken coop is not the thirty-thousand-dollar technological marvel we bought years earlier, with an automatic door that opens and closes at sunrise and sunset to protect the chickens from foxes and mountain lions and bears. Instead, it’s a small shed with a thatched overhang. Even the chickens look different in the dim moonlight. Thinner. Less friendly.

Hello, ladies.

My body is so flooded with cortisol, I feel paralyzed.

Oh, God. Help me.

“Natalie.”

I spin around. A figure is standing by the barn, the barn that is both mine and not mine. He begins to walk toward me, and suddenly the moonlight illuminates his face.

It’s Caleb. Unlike the children, who look like waxy versions of my own, this is my husband, with the soft face and the plaid shirt and the puppy dog—

Eyes.

I step back. He stops walking. The two of us stand there, silent, about ten feet between us.

This man’s eyes are not my husband’s eyes. This man’s eyes are black and cold and dead. The more I look at him, the more unfamiliar he becomes. He’s Caleb, and then he’s a distant relative of Caleb’s, and then he’s a stranger, an older man, staring at me in the dead of night. Distantly, I register how cold I am. I look down at myself, take in the strange nightgown I’m wearing. A floral, cotton thing I’ve never seen before in my life.

“Natalie,” he says again.

I think about running. My legs don’t move.

Wake up, Natalie. It’s time to wake up.

“What’s happening?” I say. “Where am I?”

“Christ,” the man mutters. He rolls his eyes, then throws his hat to the ground, making me jump and sending a small puff of dust into the cold air. “You’re home, Natalie,” he says. “Now, for the love of God: get inside before you catch a chill.”

“Wh-who are you?”

“I’m your goddamn husband,” he snaps. “I’m Caleb.”

Maybe this is a dream. It’s illogical like a dream, it’s terrifying like a nightmare—but then if it’s happening in my head, why are my knees aching so horribly from the fall out of bed? Why can I feel my lungs heaving in my chest, my terror vibrating through my body like something trapped and desperate to escape?

“Take me home. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you. I have money. Lots of it. You probably know that, don’t you? Is that why you took me here? Do you want money?”

“Natalie—”

Something snaps in me. “Stop saying my name!”

He lets out an aggravated noise and begins to walk toward me again. “If you’re going to start shouting like that—”

Finally, my nervous system shifts into drive. I break into a run.

As I fly down the road, I feel the whining strain of muscles gone soft, but I don’t care. Now is not the time to worry about pulled muscles. Now is not the time to think about anything but flight. I sprint through the darkness, very distantly registering the pain in the soles of my feet as my skin is ripped apart by the gravel. Right as I begin to think ahead—whether the closest neighboring house is five miles away or eight, whether it would be smarter to run along the road, looking for a passing car, or to disappear into the woods—I trip and pitch forward and oof —

My body skids and rolls.

Just scrapes. Get up, Natalie. You can do this. Get up and run.

On the other side of my fear: shoes on gravel, coming closer.

I’m gasping and rolling on the ground, trying to find my center of gravity, trying to place my palms flat on the earth so I can push myself back up and keep running, but the night sky is so black it looks like dirt, and the dirt is so black it looks like outer space, and I keep grabbing at air, and the air is filled with dust, and my vision is rolling, and I think to myself, Get up, and I’m trying— Lord, I am trying —but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

The footsteps disappear.

Silence.

I roll over onto my side, gasping, grabbing. Then I see the man standing a few feet away, watching me with a passive, unimpressed expression. Arms folded. “Get up,” he says, echoing my thoughts.

Run, Natalie. Fight.

I turn onto my side and scream. I tell myself to say help, but I’m not sure if I do. The noise of my own voice is too loud in my ears to discern any words.

I see in my periphery the man drop to one knee. A fresh current of panic surges through me. He tries to gather me into his arms. I thrash my arms and legs. He leans forward and easily pins my arms down, then maneuvers my wrists so he’s holding both in one grip, his other hand free. In an instant, without any conscious thought, I spit into his face. This shocks him. He stares at me, cheek glistening in the moonlight as I wriggle desperately beneath him.

“ Fuck you, ” I snarl. The first time I’ve ever said that phrase aloud in my life.

The man wipes his face with the back of his sleeve. Then he says, “A good wife doesn’t speak to her husband that way.”

He rears back and slaps me so hard the whole world turns black.