KATE MUIR COULDN’T STOP the inevitable. Couldn’t stop dragging around a worthless, damaged ability that would, year after year, destroy her. She hated her cursed fate. She would give anything to sever the curse, hack it away like a toxic poison ivy vine. But that wasn’t an option, not according to her mama, who assured her this ability would make Kate’s life a tragedy, trapping her forever inside her mind with no escape. No redemption.
Kate kicked her sandaled feet through fresh pine needles and bright-green sycamore leaves that had only yesterday been part of the forest canopy above her. Last night’s storm—in its desperate madness—had stripped trees of their summer growth and coated the forest floor like a crisp, verdant blanket, potent with scents of sweet sap and rain-soaked earth.
Midsummer storms blown in by east winds brought mischief and rebellion. The oppressive summer heat had been replaced with a cool breeze, making it feel as though autumn crept in early and without permission, like the weather was up to something.
Gentle breezes in July could never be trusted. July was anything but gentle; July was intense, sweltering, burning. July made people in Mystic Water want to live in the water like mermaids. A few dozen people would dive into Jordan Pond in July and not emerge until Labor Day.
Normally, Kate loved summer vacation, the days that stretched out long and free. During the summer, she didn’t worry about whether or not her classmates liked her or if they would avoid her during group activities. She wouldn’t have to suffocate beneath their pity, wouldn’t have to hear anyone whisper the name Evan. It didn’t matter if she was the darkest face in the woods or if she was so skinny that her sixteen-year-old body still resembled a boy’s. She could just be. Outside among the flowers and the wildness of the forest, Kate felt free.
But today the world around her seemed to be plotting for a surprise attack, tugging her into a false sense of security, cooling her with its whispery breeze, coaxing her to relax. But she couldn’t. Her fingers tingled, and she felt as unsettled as a caged canary in a coal mine. The periwinkle-blue sky stretched like a bowl over the too-quiet woodlands.
The silence reminded Kate of the caves upriver, where the deeper you ventured, the stiller and more extreme the darkness became—a silence so profound that you could hear the heartbeats of those around you. Now in this wooded hush, she heard nothing but her own breath, which unnerved her. Where were the birds, the chittering squirrels? The breeze died, further dampening life. Kate started humming one of her mama’s Cherokee songs, trying to settle her anxiety. It didn’t help.
Ahead, the pine trees became sparse, leaving an open space covered in
juvenile ferns and mats of soft ocher and blue-green moss. A cluster of mauve flower heads stretched their blooms above darker foliage, testing the afternoon sunlight. Eupatorium purpureum, Kate thought. Joe-Pye weed to everyone else. July was too early for blooming Joe-Pye weed, but the plants boasted their blood-red stalks and deep-pink buds. A harbinger that something was definitely out of sync.
Monarch butterflies darted in and out of the flowers, acting just as surprised as Kate was to see the plants. Kate knelt in front of the blooms. The storm had not snatched the vibrant petals from their delicate stalks. An orange-and-yellow butterfly fluttered above her, and she reached out her hand like a damsel asking a prince for the honor of kissing her hand. The monarch landed on her knuckle and shivered against her skin.
Almost instantly, a dark veil dropped over Kate’s vision, graying the colors and creating a world that was clouded and out of focus. She recognized the rush of icy prickles across her taut skin. A sickly sensation gathered in her stomach, causing heat to rise inside her like a stoked fire. Instinctively, she lay flat on her back, spreading her arms out as though she might create an angel in the pine needles. The butterfly flapped its wings above her, sending sighs of air across her cheeks. Before the darkness overtook her, Kate breathed in the scents of burning rub
ber, sour breath, and men’s cologne.
***
When Kate was five years old, she experienced her first premonition. She’d woken up disoriented on the floor of her bedroom, drooling on the threadbare rug, arms and legs crumpled beneath her. Broken images of her parents, a man with blue eyes, and a semitruck with shattered headlights lingered in her mind for a few seconds, but the vision soon burned away like fog in sunlight. She didn’t tell her parents what happened, mostly because she didn’t understand it herself. Kate didn’t have another vision for five years.
On her tenth birthday, Kate watched her older brother, Evan, swim through the gentle currents of the Red River, which snaked behind their house. During heavy spring rains, the river swelled and flooded the banks like the Nile, leaving behind fertile soil where cattails and American lotus thrived. When the summer heat parched the land and the thin blue skies withheld rain for weeks, the river turned into a rock-filled creek where tadpoles flailed in tiny puddles.
“Hey, birthday, girl!” Evan climbed onto a water-slicked rock and called her to join him, motioning enthusiastically as the sunlight turned his skin to the color of caramel.
The heavy rains had swollen the river to twice its summertime size, and swirls of water churned and gurgled as it rushed by. Kate shook her head, but Evan’s laugh could persuade a recluse to rejoin society, and she knew she wouldn’t stay on the riverbank. Not with his attention so focused on her, knowing he wanted to spend time with her.
Kate put one foot into the water, but her vision tunneled, her legs buckled at the knees, and she fell sideways like a discarded doll. She knocked her head on the smooth stones and succumbed to the persistent darkness.
When Kate awoke, her clothes were soaked. She blinked up at her mama whose dark eyes were as large as walnuts and lips were taut and trembling; her sharp cheekbones angled and gleamed like polished obsidian. Evan hovered nearby; his grass-green eyes were overly bright, and the muscles in his neck strained against his skin.
“What happened?” Kate mumbled, her voice thick and unsure.
“You fell in,” Evan said. “The current dragged you downstream about fifty yards. I didn’t think I could get to you before you rounded the bend—”
“But you did,” her mama interrupted. “Help me get her inside.”
Once inside the house, her mama forced Kate to stay awake and sit at the kitchen table. Her head throbbed like an intruder was trying to push its way out of her skull, and she couldn’t stop shivering. Something was different inside her; her bones ached with the awareness. Kate’s mama wrapped her in a wool blanket like a swaddled baby to help battle the October chill.
“What did you see?” her mama asked as she busied herself in the kitchen, staring at the kettle as if willing it to whistle. Her pacing caused pots to rattle in the cabinets.
Kate’s insides clenched. “What do you mean?” But Kate knew what her mama meant.
“She was out cold,” Evan said. “She didn’t see anything.”
Kate shuddered and avoided her mama’s intense gaze. Images surfaced in her mind: blue eyes and fingers linked with hers, an upside-down car. She kept seeing a man with dark hair, laughing, picking daisies from the forest and then headlights shining through the fog straight into her eyes, blinding her, and her heartbeat exploded. She tried to remember what happened, how the images might be connected, but her thoughts muddied as the seconds ticked.
Dissatisfied with her answer, her mama sent her daddy and Evan to the store for traditional remedies—Tylenol—but Kate knew Evan had disobeyed. She felt her brother’s presence in the hallway, just out of her mama’s sight in the kitchen.
Her mama poured boiling water into a teacup. She placed a tea infuser stuffed full of dried lavender into the steaming liquid and set the cup in front of Kate. She motioned for Kate to swirl the infuser around through the liquid. The clinking of metal against porcelain exaggerated how silent the rest of the house was, as if everything else had stopped and waited for what was coming. Kate’s body started trembling.
“Little Blackbird,” her mama said, “it’s time you know the truth. You are cursed.”
“What?” Kate asked, dropping the tea infuser. Her fingers itched, and she reached up to touch the darkening bruise on her forehead.
“My grandmother had premonitions too. Her life was a tragedy because
of it. You will see slivers of the future. Both your own and futures belonging to others. You cannot change them. You cannot interfere with what you see. That alone will drive you crazy.”
Her mama walked to the suncatcher hanging above the kitchen window. She lifted the colorful glass in her fingers, tracing the bronze welding lines connecting the fragments together. Vibrant flashes of light danced across the kitchen floor. “Sometimes you will see the future in broken pieces. It will be like trying to make complete pictures out of the shattered glass in a suncatcher. Impossible. Other times the future will be a clear path, but you cannot change it. You can only see and know—but never act.”
Kate grasped the teacup to hide her unsteady hands. The words tragedy and broken joined the ache in her head, hammering away like a woodpecker on a mature pine. Her tongue tasted like dry earth and bitter leaves.
Her mama walked to her and stood beside the table. Her strong gaze locked onto Kate’s face. “No matter what you see, you cannot try to alter it. Interfering with the future is forbidden. There are no exceptions.”
“Forbidden?” Kate asked. The word sounded archaic, plucked from a fairy tale. “By who? What if I see something bad happening to someone else?”
Her mama shook her head. “No exceptions. Changing the future could have terrible consequences.”
“But what if I could help—”
Her mama stamped her foot. “No exceptions. Now, drink your tea.”
Kate glanced up and caught Evan’s eyes in his hiding place just inside the shadowed hallway. His brow wrinkled when he frowned.
“Can I control when these visions happen?”
“No.” Her mama returned to the stove. “They will come whenever they want to, even at the most inconvenient times. But the tea will help. It helped my grandmother not lose control as often. The lavender soothes, and a calm mind does not receive as many visions.”
What if she had a vision in school? She grimaced. “But I don’t want to be different. I want to fit in.”
“Fit in with
whom?” her mama asked.
Kate shrugged and looked away from her mama’s knowing gaze. “Other kids? The kids in town?” Anyone.
Evan waved at her from the hallway. When she looked at him, he mouthed, “You fit in with me.”
“Little Blackbird,” her mama asked, “why do assume you don’t fit in?”
She looked at her mama, but she had already turned away. “What happened to your grandmother?”
“She lost her mind,” her mama said matter-of-factly. “Ended up ranting and blubbering like a child.” Her mama’s sigh caused the dishtowel to shudder on the counter. “There was too much in her head, too much that wouldn’t leave. Trapped there by the curse.” Only then did her mama turn to her and offer a comforting smile. “Drink your tea.”
Later that night Kate sat cross-legged on the floor with her back propped against her bed. Her birthday joy curdled like buttermilk. She forced herself to eat cake after dinner, but now her growing despair caused her stomach to respond like she’d eaten hemlock flowers.
“Hey,” Evan said, pushing open her bedroom door and walking in. He sat beside her, stretching out his long muscular legs beside hers. “Not quite the birthday you imagined.”
Kate mimed handing Evan a box. “You’ll never guess what your gift is—a curse.”
Evan leaned his shoulder against hers. Her trembling lip stopped his teasing. “Hey, I’m sorry. Mama . . . well, she’s like the rosa rugosa.” When Kate looked at him, he added, “Beautiful and hardy but with great, big thorns.”
“I’m not sure what’s worse, that she told me I’m cursed or that she said her grandma went insane.” Kate stared at her open palms. “Here’s to the future.”
“What I meant was,” Evan said, “it might not be as bad as she says. Maybe it will be cool to see things, to know what’s happening.”
Kate half-smiled at him. Evan, the relentless optimist.
“Maybe you could get a second opinion,” he offered.
“From a doctor?”
He shook his head. “I was thinking about one of Mama’s people. Aurora Catawnee—”
“The crazy lady?” Kate balked. “No way. Everyone knows she’s kooky.”
Evan’s eyebrows raised. “Have you ever met her?”
“No.”
“So you’re basing your judgment of her on someone else’s opinion?” he asked. “That’s shaky ground, Little Blackbird. I’ve met her a few times. She’s wise and has a way of speaking that makes you feel calm. If Mama’s grandma had what you have, Aurora Catawnee will know all about it. Maybe it’s worth learning what she knows, hear another perspective.”
Kate shrugged. She wasn’t ready to talk about the curse with anyone yet, and what could a kooky old Cherokee woman possibly know anyway?
After her birthday, Kate had premonitions at least once a month, sometimes as often as once a week if she forgot to drink lavender tea daily. Her mama explained how the tea would slow the premonitions, perhaps even put them to sleep for a while. Kate fretted about having an episode—as she’d named them—during school. Wasn’t it bad enough that she was already physically different with her too-black eyes, hair as dark as ravens, and skin the color of Georgia clay? Now her insides were jumbled, broken, and manic. Now she saw familiar faces in her visions—her schoolmate Sally’s blue eyes haunted and lost, a schoolmate Mikey skipping rocks across the river, her daddy’s tears on his fingers.
None of her visions made sense. Most of them frightened her. Sometimes she’d wake in the middle of the night and eat dried lavender by the handfuls just to stop seeing anything at all.
Kate never had the same vision twice, and she never had premonitions that followed a chronological timeline. Not until three months after Evan turned eighteen and he left for college.
She’d been dreading his departure for college like someone walking a pirate ship plank. She’d never known life in Mystic Water without Evan. He was a shield, a first line of protection between her and the whole world. Most days Kate felt Evan was the only person who really saw her. Saw her and loved her just as she was. What would life be like witho
ut him singing “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” through the garden? Who would make her laugh at the dinner table when Mama was discussing her midwifery and Daddy’s mind was preoccupied with work, imagining architectural designs, mm-hmming and saying, “Yes, love” in all the right spaces?
The state university offered Evan a football and an academic scholarship. Everyone in town overflowed with excitement for him, slapping his back and telling him they couldn’t wait to see all he would accomplish. No one doubted he would succeed, because Evan had remarkable talent. There didn’t seem to be anything he couldn’t master. Many believed Evan’s athletic prowess was his greatest talent; others said it was his uncanny ability to remember everything he read. Kate believed his greatest talent was making her feel like she belonged somewhere, ...
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