“If you’ve been seeing old George,” the caretaker informed her, “it might mean trouble is about to befall ye.” He tilted his head back, twirled his mustache, and let out a cackle that Natalie was certain was intended to make the whole story sound like well-intended play, a fun little joke.
But it didn’t. Not to her. It sounded awful. It grated like two pieces of metal rubbing together inside her ears.
∞ ∞ ∞
After that, it seemed to Natalie that everywhere she went, she only barely escaped something catastrophic: She passed by fender benders that had happened so recently, the drivers were still pulling themselves from their cars. She stuck the heel of her shoe in something wet at the top of the stairs in the TV studio, and caught herself at the railing before taking a painful tumble. The car parked next to hers at her apartment complex was stolen. Disaster circled her like a vulture anxious for a chance to swoop in and pick the flesh from her bones. But for some reason, she kept escaping it.
How long would that last, though? George had saved her from loneliness last winter. Was he keeping her safe now? Had he planted the idea in her head with his Mayday distress signals that she needed to look out? Could that keep her safe forever?
December—Damien wanted to get married in December. Just like his last name. Just like George had once promised her: in December, he’d sworn, her life would change. And it had—for the better. Next December, her life was poised to change all over again—in a permanent way. But for better or for worse?
She needed to talk to George. Just like she had before. But “George” was nowhere.
Natalie began to feel perpetually on-edge. She kept sweating straight through the powder on her face. She had to remind herself to eat. Her hands trembled.
But she did sleep—oddly, she had no trouble with that. She slept hard—like she had when she was a child—and she dreamed vividly. Mostly, she dreamed of the plane she’d seen; the burning wreckage was always there when she closed her eyes. And the cries of “Mayday Mayday Mayday…” continued to pulse in her ears when she woke. And the cracking—the splintering sounds—they were louder than ever before, exploding the moment she and Damien met up for breakfast on her balcony.
Her dreams of the plane intensified. The flames she saw when she closed her eyes climbed higher, curling around the edges of George’s silhouette. She screamed as the wreckage engulfed him.
In one dream, she ran straight into the fire, calling his name. “No, no,” she cried out. She needed him. He’d come back because he had something to tell her.
“George,” she begged, lunging forward. She didn’t care if the flames licked her fingers. She had to get to him. She had to find out if Damien was the danger. That’s how she was interpreting it. She needed to make sure it was right.
Instead of heat, her fingers hit something soft. Her eyes opened; her hands were on her blanket. She was sitting up in bed. Sweaty. Breathless.
“Mayday Mayday Mayday…” she heard, the cries louder than ever before.
Between the distress calls, she heard her apartment door click open. The sound of Damien’s voice came to her faintly—beneath the terrified “Mayday. Mayday!”
“Coming,” she called, untangling herself from her sheets. Her head was pounding and her mouth was dry. She raced to find a T-shirt that wasn’t drenched in sweat.
“I overslept,” Damien was already apologizing. “Looks like you did, too.” But it was so hard to hear him, with George’s cries still thundering in her ears. And she was hot—so hot, it felt to her as though she was the one standing in the middle of flames. The fire was radiating like a fever. It was making her sick to her stomach.
Down in flames, she kept thinking to herself. I’m going down in flames.
Damien had donuts. Glazed donuts, powdered donuts. Picked up from the gas station on the corner.
“Come on—we’re running late,” she barely made out.
She turned, staggered toward the balcony. It didn’t occur to her that they could possibly eat at her table. For some reason, it had to be the balcony, even this morning, even though they tended to take their time there, talking and eating in a way that always felt like a Saturday morning.
She slid the door open and took a step outside. The morning light was bright—like slivers of glass. She was still so hot. Woozy. Cracking sounds filled her ears, answering the pounding of her head with its own syncopated rhythm. That awful cracking—the sound of boards splintering. Everything was breaking. And the frantic voice kept demanding, pleading—“Mayday Mayday Mayday…”
Another voice came to Natalie—another shout. Damien. Was he angry? Or afraid? Or even worse—was he warning her, too?
But she couldn’t take it, not anymore. I know, I know, she wanted to shout back. She was ruining her life. That was it—that was what George wanted her to know. Wasn’t it? She stepped farther into the sunlight. She wanted to get away from the cracking and the shouting and the “Mayday Mayday Mayday…”
Suddenly, she was falling. Just like she fell the day she met George.
Was this it? The way that George was going to finally show himself to her? He was going to catch her all over again. Of course he was—he was going to rescue her. Just like the caretaker promised. That was the story, wasn’t it?
Rescue, rescue—yes. How beautiful.
Thank you, she thought, letting go of her plate, throwing her arms into the air.
A pair of hands grabbed her wrist. George.
The wooden balcony collapsed. She had no floor beneath her. She was falling. The hand tightened around her wrist. The weight of her body pulled against her arm, wrenching her shoulder. She screamed when the pain hit.
She dangled. The balcony had completely given way. Boards lay shattered against the ground.
The splintering sound ceased.
“Natalie,” Damien insisted. “Use your feet. Come on. I can’t pull you back in by myself.”
Her head spun. She was still trying to comprehend what was going on. Was that the splintering sound she’d been hearing every morning? The balcony was giving way?
Below, residents of their apartment building were gathering. Shading their eyes with their hands. Shouting. Dialing 911.
But Damien still had her by the wrist. She could see his summer blue eyes above her.
She pressed her feet against the brick wall, climbing like it was a rock wall at the gym. Pushing herself up as Damien pulled.
He wrapped her into his arms. Tugged her to her feet.
Applause erupted from the ground.
“Can you stand? Are you okay? Natalie? Answer me.” Damien appeared frantic. He started to pat her down as soon as he tugged her a safe distance from the sliding glass door, checking her for injuries. “Not a scrape,” he said. “Except for the scratch above your eyebrow. Thank God.”
Natalie reached up, touching her stinging left eye. Glanced at the blood on her fingertips.
She turned to look through the door once more, staring at the happy faces of her neighbors below, waving to her. She believed that among them, she saw a green military woolen coat—even now, here in the spring.
The old caretaker stood along the back edge of the crowd, too. His head turned, it seemed to Natalie, in a way that said he was staring at the green coat. Or was he? Did he see George?
Natalie’s trembling fingers went to her sweaty forehead once again—George had been desperate to save her from a physical disaster. That was it—the balcony, all this time. Not Damien!
Her breathing slowed. Her forehead stopped pounding. Her ears filled only with the sound of birds—happy birds, birds no longer fighting over territory but perching in finished nests.
She reached for Damien—she would take him home, she thought. That weekend. To meet those girls on her phone, her family. “Come December,” she would tell them all. Her life would change then—for the better. She was sure of it now.
The figure in the coat slowly began to disappear, taking with him the haunting M
ayday distress call…and the last of her lingering fears.
Chasing June
What happens when you dare to disturb the dust that has long settled, changing life as it’s always been?
Annie Ames steps from the pages of “January Thaw” to return again to her childhood hometown, hoping to start a new project: a book documenting the romantic folklore surrounding the legend of Amos Hargrove, the town founder. But no one likes the fact that she’s “disturbing the dust”—rifling through old memories and a more than century-old legend. Hoping all is not lost, Annie pays a visit to Mary, the town’s oldest resident. Opening an old trunk in Mary’s attic, she discovers a treasured antique wedding shawl as well as a few life-altering truths about an old friend…and about the legend of Amos Hargrove and his sweetheart, Finley.
Dust swirled around the grille of Justin’s eight-year-old Impala. It danced across the windshield, trickled through the open window, surrounded Annie’s sunburned right arm, invaded her eyes. But then again, dust had been swirling along every path that she and Justin had chosen to walk in the town of Finley—as had the odd feeling she carried in her heart.
It itched, the feeling. Like an uncomfortable woolen sweater. Scratching and picking at it, though, alleviated nothing.
“It’ll be different this time,” Justin promised from the driver’s seat. “This interview, it’ll—” He paused, his features shifting into the critical expression he wore (wrinkled forehead, drawn-tight lips) when revising his latest manuscript. “Mary’s the wisest woman in all of Finley. And the oldest. You know how it happens sometimes with older people—they want to tell their stories. I mean, these are the people who have never picked up a pen in their lives, and yet, here they are, with the sudden urge to write a memoir. Mary—she’s still completely together. As mentally sturdy as she ever was. But nobody’s got forever. Get to the jumping-off place, and you want to make sure you leave behind something of yourself. A story’s a really powerful thing to leave behind.”
Annie squirmed in her seat. Justin’s words weren’t helping, either.
“Come on,” Justin groaned. “You couldn’t have expected stubborn Finley-ites to just roll over and sit up for us.”
Annie sucked in a breath, not sure how to respond. Frankly, she had. Well—not to roll over and play dead, necessarily, but to be flattered. To jump at the chance to relate what they knew about the legend of Amos Hargrove. Share what they’d seen.
Only, no one was telling Annie anything—even though she was one of them. And she did, in fact, get the very distinct feeling that she was the reason no one was talking. Their refusals were usually given while looking at her face, not Justin’s.
In a way, she couldn’t quite understand the fences the Finley residents were building around their tales. The “Keep Out” signs they’d posted on their stories the moment they’d seen Annie walk up their driveways. After all, those anecdotes of Amos had always been fun to imagine, but about as true and reliable as the horoscopes printed in The Finley Times.
Justin had personally introduced Annie to the new guy at the paper who wrote the horoscopes. He literally used the dartboard method to determine what kind of Tuesday all Finley Capricorns were set to have.
Maybe she had simply breathed in too much New York air. Maybe it had soured her a little, made her less likely to believe in the miraculous. Did everyone in Finley know that was how she felt? Was it obvious? Is that why they didn’t want to talk to her?
There it was again—the weird feeling that swarmed inside of her, flying about like the particles of red dust that covered the paths she had grown up walking. She rubbed her chest. What was that feeling? It was awful, whatever it was.
The whole thing had all started just a little over a month ago. Or maybe, Annie’d often caught herself thinking lately, the truth was that it had started last winter. In the middle of a January storm, when she and Justin had found themselves iced into Finley’s one and only coffee shop one night, mending their fractured friendship. Afterward, she had returned to New York to complete the final semester of her MFA. And they had returned to their old pattern of sharing their creative ideas: Annie e-mailing her latest sketch, Justin e-mailing back a piece of flash fiction to fit it. Or vice versa—Justin e-mailing a page of sweeping, literary character description, and Annie drawing the individual as she’d seen him in her mind. Back and forth, back and forth, partners in dreaming once again, just as they’d been when they were teenagers and “fully grown” only in the physical sense; when sidewalk chalk and tetherball sets had been shunted to the dark back corners of closets, but still not given up completely.
The e-mails had come regularly, even though the two of them had their own deadlines—Justin to please the editor at The Finley Times and Annie to meet the final requirements to graduate “with flying colors”—a phrase that had been making her chuckle to herself every time it floated through her head. She’d used it in one of her messages to Justin—an art student graduating with flying colors—and he had written her back immediately, something about the paint fumes getting to her, and she had laughed and felt happier than she had since leaving home. Justin was hers, she’d felt, in the way of family or mirror reflections: an always kind of way.
It changed things, having him in her life again—even if “having him” really just amounted to lines on her computer screen. Still, those lines of type made her apartment feel like less of a box. More than any houseplant or throw pillow or post-semester party ever could. His words on her computer screen made that tiny space feel like home.
And so she’d thought nothing of photographing one of the portraits she had completed for her final student exhibition and e-mailing that, too. “What should I call her?” she’d asked, after typing a giant all-caps MAIN CHARACTER FOR YOUR NEXT NOVEL into the subject line.
He had called her instead of writing. “Where did you see that picture?” he asked. “I never showed it to you, did I?”
“What are you talking about? I made her up.” It was the most impressive part of the entire painting—the fact that the subject had sprung from Annie’s head—and not in a blurry, hazy smear that needed refining, but in minute detail. Faces and figures usually required strong source material: dozens of photographs taken of the subject from multiple angles, in varying amounts of sunlight. But not this one.
“You didn’t make anything up. That’s Finley.”
“Finley who?”
“Finley, Ann. As in: Amos Hargrove’s Finley. The woman he named our hometown after.”
But Justin didn’t need to remind Annie who Amos Hargrove had been in life. She knew the story, as everyone who had ever lived in Finley knew it: How he had returned from the Civil War to find that his fiancée had become another wartime casualty—succumbed not to a bullet wound, like so many of his fallen fellow soldiers, but to pleurisy. Amos had been convinced they would one day be together again, but the story shifted here a bit, depending on who was doing the telling: Amos had been convinced by what? Or whom? Some said his own family’s church, others said his own desperate broken heart, and still others claimed, vaguely, it had some sort of Native American influence. Regardless of the reason, all agreed Amos had devoted his life to developing the town he’d named for her, his Finley, the only woman he ever loved.
That much had remained largely unchanged over the years, most of the details as static as sentences in a printed book. But the legend of Amos—that was another thing entirely. It had grown over time, extending and elongating and turning wilder, trailing through the streets like some sort of indestructible native vine. Amos was still in town, or so the stories went. He was trying desperately to find her, his Finley (the possible reunion was so popular around Valentine’s Day that kids in elementary school—including Annie, years ago—had taken to drawing giant swirling “A”s and “F”s on their construction paper cards). Amos was a wayward soul still looking for his sweetheart. And while he searched, he was also taking care of the people in his town. The guy certainly h
ad time on his hands, some of the good-natured jokes went. Lots of it. And besides, he had to make sure that the town he had created for her, his love, his Finley, would remain the perfect place for the two of them to finally meet again.
Annie expected to be drowning in tall tales of the inexplicable, of spine-tingling ghost-like encounters, of sudden twists of luck. Everyone in the town of Finley had one. Why, step in for meatloaf and garlic mashed potatoes at the Corner Diner or a whiskey sour at the Twinkle Star Bar out by the highway, and your ears would pick up on the stray words of more than one ongoing Amos story. The idea that he was a spirit manipulating events—it seemed to work for just about everyone: the devout and the barely-religious both. Even the skeptics kept a little slice of their hearts open for Amos. Justin did. Annie—well, her imagination breathed on the canvas. In the real world, she tended to be a bit more cynical.
“I’ve never seen any picture of Finley,” Annie’d insisted over the phone that night. “I’ve never tried to draw her—not once. How could I, when I don’t know what she looked like? This is a completely different person. You’re trying to creep me out. Not working, O’Dell.”
The very next weekend, Justin had sent Annie an e-mail with the subject line PROVING YOU WRONG. When Annie’d opened it, she’d discovered that Justin had attached a picture of a tintype in a frame, hanging on a wall in a house, surrounded by ancient floral wallpaper.
Annie had felt as though she’d literally seen a ghost. It was the same face. The same ringlets framing the same youthful smile. It was Finley. That’s who she had painted.
But how? She was certain—more certain than ever before, actually—that she had never seen this tintype. She had never seen Finley’s face before the night she had begun to paint her.
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