Today's Reading
The day Evie discovered we weren't really sisters, I pretended to be as surprised as she was, both of us staring wide-eyed at a certificate we'd found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in our mother's bookcase. Evie was ten then, and no longer aware of anything before Mama and me. But I knew that Evie had come to us almost two years old, not as an infant, and that she had arrived on my sixth birthday. An unexpected gift.
When we unfolded the paper that accounted for her birth and noted the strange name next to Mother—Becca P. Chambers—I cried, so alarming Evie that she swore never to tell anyone what we had discovered. She stroked my hair and wiped my face with her fingertips and promised that I would be her sister until the day she died. That no one would ever know. She thought I was crying because we were not born sisters, or because I was afraid of our mother's reaction if we were found out. But seeing that name, I was devastated at the sure knowledge that Evie, with her tumble of curls and her sweet charm and all her colors, had a mother other than ours and I did not. It was almost more than I could bear.
In bed that night, I tried to remember Evie in those first days after she arrived. And though I had not entirely forgotten life in that house—blue like a robin's egg and so close to a railroad track that the floorboards trembled when a train rumbled by—only snatches of memory were left to me. I could picture Evie eating oatmeal from a white bowl with a blue rim, could see her standing in front of a window, her doll, Maggie, dangling from her hand. And I could still call to mind, sharp and clear and stirring a vague sense of unease, a boxy green truck parked in front of the house on that rainy night—my birthday—and a figure in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbing the front steps with a small child—Evie—then turning back to the truck alone.
I could recall almost nothing else of the time before our mother, my mother, moved us away from that house by the tracks. But later, in another house, the house on Clay Mountain, there was a night when I woke to the muffled sound of Evie crying in our bed and looked over to see her sitting up, the blanket pulled over her knees, her face buried in it.
"What's wrong, Evie?" I asked her.
"I don't know," she sobbed. "It's a silver feeling." Then she curled up close to me and rested her head on my shoulder until she fell asleep.
Silver, I know now, is the color of loss.
NELL
1971
North Carolina
CHAPTER ONE
Nell drove home to Clay Mountain for her mother's birthday, but she really went for Evie. It was mid-April, the time of year when spring, after its usual false starts and snowy setbacks, emerges in earnest, affirmed by the most trustworthy of wildflowers—bloodroot and trout lily and phlox, toothwort and golden ragwort.
This had been, for Nell, the first place and the last that had felt like home, despite it all, and when she rounded a hairpin curve in her aging, boatlike Chrysler and was met by the New River running alongside her, it was, as always, a reunion.
Before she'd left Clay Mountain for Charlotte at nineteen, striking out on her own in the big city twenty-three years ago now, she and Evie had, over the years, first waded, then fished, then canoed the river, that progression having marked their growth more fully than the penciled lines on their closet wall where they had measured each other's heights from time to time. It could reasonably be said that the Blue Ridge, with its peaks and balds and falls and valleys, the snowy winters and the summer storms, had raised the two of them as much as—more than, in Nell's view—their mother, Hazel, had, though they were all transplants, not born to the mountains.
Unlike Nell, Evie had stayed. She had migrated only as far as the township of Lillett, thirty minutes from where Hazel still lived in the small, clapboard house they had come to when the girls were so young and Hazel had moved them away from Mississippi, where life had been strange and secretive and unsettling. Where Nell had first learned the futility of asking her mother for answers. Where Evie, not quite two years old and a stranger to Nell, had appeared on their porch one rainy night with only a scant amount of clothing folded into a wicker handbasket and a cloth doll snugly swaddled in flannel.
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