The Grace Year(58)

He doesn’t reply, but there’s a sound—like something heavy and wet, slowly sizzling in a pan.

A flash of movement catches my eye. I squint into my mangled flesh.

The room begins to lurch, but my feet are firmly planted on the ground.

“Maggots,” I whisper. “The smell is coming from me. It’s the smell of death.”





I dream. Strangely enough, not of the girl, not of home, but of here—this place, this poacher. A cool rag on my forehead. Biting into soft wood when he cuts away decrepit flesh. The woozy droplets of blood being wrung from a bandage into a worn copper bowl. The steady sound of a thick needle. In and out. Out and in.

Sometimes I think I see hazy light spilling through the cracks in the wood; other times, it’s so dark that it feels as if I’m floating through space, unmoored from the gravity holding me to this earth.

I try to keep track of time, but my mind is lost in shadow. In memories.

I imagine it’s like being in the womb. The thrum of a heartbeat in the distance. The rushing sound of blood swirling all around me. I wasn’t allowed in the room for Clara’s birth because I hadn’t bled yet, but I was there for Penny’s. They say by your fifth, the baby just slides right out, but that’s not what I witnessed. I saw violence. Pain. The shifting of bones. I tried to turn away, but my mother grabbed me, pulling me close. “This is the real magic,” she whispered. At the time, I thought she was delirious, mad from exhaustion, but I wonder if she knew the truth. If she was trying to tell me something.

I feel myself teetering on a razor’s edge, as if one grain of sand in the wrong direction could tip the scale, taking me down to the depths of nevermore, and yet I’m still here. I’m still breathing.

Sometimes I talk just to hear the sound of my voice. To know that I still have a tongue. A throat. I ask questions—Who are you? Why haven’t you killed me—but they’re never answered. Instead, the poacher sings. Songs of old. Songs I’ve only heard on the breeze, a passing whistle escaping the trappers’ lips as they head back north. Or maybe he isn’t singing at all. Maybe he’s talking. Softly, the words bending in and out of my consciousness.

“Drink,” he says, holding the cup to my lips.

I’m trying to focus in on him, but it’s like smoke drifting through my fingers.

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Ten sunrises, nine moonfalls,” he says, adjusting the rolled-up fabric beneath my head. “It’s for the best, considering what I had to do to you.”

I try to move my arms and my legs, just to know that I still have them, but it brings a fresh wave of pain.

I remember the last time I was awake. The last time we spoke. He said my name.

“How do you know my name?”

“You need to drink.” He tilts the cup. It’s hard to swal low the sweet thick liquid. It’s hard to swallow at all. Like my body forgot how.

But I can feel the poppy spreading through my chest, my limbs, making my eyelids feel as if they’ve been threaded with heavy cinder.

“How do you know my name?” I ask again.

I’m expecting nothing, but instead, a soft voice emanates from beneath his shroud. “That was a mistake.”

I study him, the wide space between his eyes that gets knotted up … I always thought it was anger, hatred, but maybe I was wrong … maybe it’s concern.

“Please,” I whisper. “We both know I’m probably not going to make it.”

His eyes veer to my wound. “I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

There’s a long unbearable pause. The heaviness that accompanies a deep, dark truth.

With only the sound of the wind howling through the trees, the slow crackle of the fire, he says, “I knew who you were as soon as I saw your eyes … you have the same eyes.”

“The girl from my dreams,” I say with a tight inhalation of breath, the memory of her coming back to me all at once. “You’ve seen her, too … who is she?”

“What girl?” He places his inner wrist against my forehead. I want to flinch away from his touch, but his cold skin feels like a much-needed balm to my burning flesh. “Your father,” he says, staring down at me. “You have his eyes.”

“My father?” I try to sit up, but the pain is too intense. I knew my father had been sneaking off to the outskirts for years, but I never imagined this. “Are we…?” I try to finish the sentence, but it feels like there’s a boulder in my throat. “Are we … relations?”

“Brother and sister? No.” The poacher unwraps my bandage; his nostrils flare. Either the idea repulses him just as much as it repulses me, or it’s in response to the wound. Maybe both. “Your father’s not like that. He’s a good man.”

“Then why?” I ask, fighting to stave off the lull of the poppy. “Why does he go there?”

His eyes narrow on me. “You really don’t know?”

I shake my head, but my skull feels like it’s full of heavy water.

“He treats the women of the outskirts, the children … he saved Anders,” he says as he gently crushes herbs in a small stone vessel.

“Anders?”

He lets out a sigh, as if he’s mad at himself for saying too much. “You probably don’t remember, but he paid me a visit a few weeks ago.”