“You know what’s stupid? I have books under my bed.” I just said it, like it was something I said all the time.
“What?”
“Novels. Tolstoy. Salinger. Vonnegut. And I read them. You know, because I want to.”
She rolled over, propping her head on her elbow. “Yeah? What do your jock buddies think of that?”
“Let’s just say I keep it to myself and stick to my jump shot.”
“Yeah, well. At school, I noticed you stick to comics.” She tried to sound casual. “Silver Surfer. I saw you reading it. Right before everything happened.”
You noticed?
I might have noticed.
I didn’t know if we were speaking, or if I was just imagining the whole thing, except I wasn’t that crazy—yet.
She changed the subject, or more accurately, she changed it back. “I read, too. Poetry mostly.”
I could imagine her stretched out on her bed reading a poem, although I had trouble imagining that bed in Ravenwood Manor. “Yeah? I’ve read that guy, Bukowski.” Which was true, if two poems counted.
“I have all his books.”
I knew she didn’t want to talk about what had happened, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to know. “Are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What happened back there?”
There was a long silence. She sat up and pulled at the grass around her. She flopped around on her stomach and looked me in the eye. She was only a few inches away from my face. I lay there, frozen, trying to focus on what she was saying. “I really don’t know. Things like that just happen to me, sometimes. I can’t control it.”
“Like the dreams.” I watched her face, looking for even a flicker of recognition.
“Like the dreams.” She said it without thinking, then flinched and looked at me, stricken. I had been right all along.
“You remember the dreams.”
She hid her face in her hands.
I sat up. “I knew it was you, and you knew it was me. You knew what I was talking about the whole time.” I pulled her hands away from her face, and the current buzzed up my arm.
You’re the girl.
“Why didn’t you say something last night?”
I didn’t want you to know.
She wouldn’t look at me.
“Why?” The word sounded loud, in the quiet of the garden. And when she looked at me, her face was pale, and she looked different. Frightened. Her eyes were like the sea before a storm on the Carolina coast.
“I didn’t expect you to be here, Ethan. I thought they were just dreams. I didn’t know you were a real person.”
“But once you knew it was me, why didn’t you say anything?”
“My life is complicated. And I didn’t want you—I don’t want anyone to get mixed up in it.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I was still touching her hand; I was so aware of it. I could feel the rough stone beneath us, and I grabbed for the edge of it, supporting myself. Only my hand closed around something small and round, stuck to the edge of the stone. A beetle, or maybe a rock. It came off from the stone into my hand.
Then the shock hit. I felt Lena’s hand tighten around mine.
What’s happening, Ethan?
I don’t know.
Everything around me changed, and it was like I was somewhere else. I was in the garden, but not in the garden. And the smell of lemons changed, into the smell of smoke—
It was midnight, but the sky was on fire. The flames reached into the sky, pushing forth massive fists of smoke, swallowing everything in their path. Even the moon. The ground had turned to swamp. Burned ashen ground that had been drenched by the rains that preceded the fire. If only it had rained today. Genevieve choked back the smoke that burned her throat so badly it hurt to breathe. Mud clung to the bottom of her skirts, causing her to stumble every few feet on the voluminous folds of fabric, but she forced herself to keep moving.
It was the end of the world. Of her world.
And she could hear the screams, mixed with gunshots and the unrelenting roar of the flames. She could hear the soldiers shouting orders of murder.
“Burn down those houses. Let the Rebels feel the weight of their defeat. Burn it all!”
And one by one, Union soldiers had lit the great houses of the plantations ablaze, with their own kerosene-laden bed sheets and curtains. One by one, Genevieve watched the homes of her neighbors, of her friends and family, surrender to the flames. And in the worst of circumstances, many of those friends and relatives surrendered as well, eaten alive by the flames in the very homes where they were born.
That’s why she was running, into the smoke, toward the fire—right into the mouth of the beast. She had to get to Greenbrier before the soldiers. And she didn’t have much time. The soldiers were methodical, working their way down the Santee burning the houses one by one. They had already burned Blackwell; Dove’s Crossing would be next, then Greenbrier and Ravenwood. General Sherman and his army had started the burning campaign hundreds of miles before they reached Gatlin. They had burned Columbia to the ground, and continued marching east, burning everything in their path. When they reached the outskirts of Gatlin the Confederate flag was still waving, the second wind they needed.
It was the smell that told her she was too late. Lemons. The tart smell of lemons mixed with ash. They were burning the lemon trees.
Genevieve’s mother loved lemons. So when her father had visited a plantation in Georgia when she was a girl, he had brought her mother two lemon trees. Everyone said they wouldn’t grow, that the cold South Carolina winter nights would kill them. But Genevieve’s mother didn’t listen. She planted those trees right in front of the cotton field, tending them herself. On those cold winter nights, she had covered the trees with wool blankets and piled dirt along the edges to keep the moisture out. And those trees grew. They grew so well that over the years, Genevieve’s father had bought her twenty-eight more trees. Some of the other ladies in town asked their husbands for lemon trees, and a few of them even got a tree or two. But none of them could figure out how to keep their trees alive. The trees only seemed to flourish at Greenbrier, at her mother’s hand.
Nothing had ever been able to kill those trees. Until today.
“What just happened?” I felt Lena pull her hand away from mine, and opened my eyes. She was shaking. I looked down and opened my hand to reveal the object I had inadvertently grabbed from under the stone.
“I think it had something to do with this.” My hand had been curled around a battered old cameo, black and oval, with a woman’s face etched in ivory and mother of pearl. The work on the face of it was intricate with detail. On the side, I noticed a small bump. “Look. I think it’s a locket.”
I pushed on the spring, and the cameo front opened to reveal a tiny inscription. “It just says greenbrier. And a date.”
She sat up. “What’s Greenbrier?”
“This must be it. This isn’t Ravenwood. It’s Greenbrier. The next plantation over.”
“And that vision, the fires, did you see it, too?”
I nodded. It was almost too horrible to talk about. “This has to be Greenbrier, what’s left of it, anyway.”
“Let me see the locket.” I handed it to her carefully. It looked like something that had survived a lot—maybe even the fire from the vision. She turned it over in her hands. “february 11th, 1865.” She dropped the locket, turning pale.
“What’s wrong?”
She stared down at it in the grass. “February eleventh is my birthday.”
“So it’s a coincidence. An early birthday present.”
“Nothing in my life is a coincidence.”
I picked up the locket and flipped it over. On the back were two sets of engraved initials. “ECW & GKD. This locket must have belonged to one of them.” I paused. “That’s weird. My initials are ELW.”
“My birthday, your initials. Don’t you think that’s a little more than weird?” Maybe she was right. Still—
“We should try it again, so we can find out.” It was like an itch that had to be scratched.
“I don’t know. It could be dangerous. It really felt like we were there. My eyes are still burning from the smoke.” She was right. We hadn’t left the garden, but it had felt like we had been right there in the middle of the fires. I could feel the smoke in my lungs, but it didn’t matter. I had to know.
I held out the locket, and my hand. “Come on, aren’t you braver than that?” It was a dare. She rolled her eyes, but reached toward it all the same. Her fingers brushed against mine, and I felt the warmth of her hand spreading into mine. Electric goosebumps. I don’t know any other way to describe it.
I closed my eyes and waited—nothing. I opened my eyes. “Maybe we just imagined it. Maybe it’s just out of batteries.”
Lena looked at me like I was Earl Petty in Algebra, the second time around. “Maybe you can’t tell something like that what to do, or when to do it.” She got up and brushed herself off. “I’ve gotta go.”
She paused, looking down at me. “You know, you’re not what I expected.” She turned her back on me and began to weave her way through the lemon trees, to the outer edge of the garden.
“Wait!” I called after her, but she kept going. I tried to catch up with her, stumbling back over the roots.
When she reached the last lemon tree, she stopped. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
She wouldn’t look at me. “Just leave me alone, while everything’s still okay.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Seriously. And I’m trying, here.”
“Forget it.”
“You think you’re the only complicated person in the world?”
“No. But—it’s sort of my specialty.” She turned to go. I hesitated, and put my hand on her shoulder. It was warm from the fading sun. I could feel the bone beneath her shirt, and in that moment she seemed like a fragile thing, like in the dreams. Which was weird, because when she was facing me, all I could think of was how unbreakable she seemed. Maybe it had something to do with those eyes.
We stood like that for a moment, until finally she gave in and turned toward me. I tried again. “Look. There’s something going on here. The dreams, the song, the smell, and now the locket. It’s like we’re supposed to be friends.”
“Did you just say, the smell?” She looked horrified. “In the same sentence as friends?”
“Technically, I think it was a different sentence.”
She stared at my hand, and I took it off her shoulder. But I couldn’t let it go. I looked right into her eyes, really looked, maybe for the first time. The green abyss looked like it went somewhere so far away I could never reach it, not in a whole lifetime. I wondered what Amma’s “eyes are the windows to the soul” theory would make of that.
It’s too late, Lena. You’re already my friend.
I can’t be.