crowded around.
My father and brothers shoveled bread and stew into their mouths, not even looking up. I took my seat next to my sister, and my mother handed me a bowl without saying a word.
“Where have you been, child?” my father asked.
I froze. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, staring into my stew. “I was doing my stretches outside.”
I felt his eyes on me and winced.
Tessa, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut and focusing on the dirt, the shapes, the sounds pulsing from Mary’s tongue. Ta.
“Eat your stew,” he said, in a voice so tight I thought it might whip out and lash me. Later, I knew, he would make up for whatever he was holding back now.
CHAPTER TWO
I came from a long line of farmers whose lives were controlled by seasons and whose skin was hard against the wind. My family had been on that Kansas land longer than anyone could remember, and our name was Riley, a name marked on our front gate and on the windowsills, we were so proud of it. The Rileys were a strong clan, my mother always told us. We came from the earth and our arms hung heavy at our sides.
When I was born the midwife lifted me into the air and screamed; she thought my mother had birthed some kind of rodent, I was so small. Once they’d finally cleaned me off enough to see that I was a normal baby—though I was about a third of the size of the usual kind—my mother decided not to call me Geraldine after her sister, as she’d planned to do. “Geraldine is no name for a munchkin,” she said. “Geraldine is a name that’d stretch two city blocks.” So my mother plucked a name out of the sky and called me Tessa, and I got a Geraldine for a sister two years later—a baby sister as big as a tree stump.
I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that my mother hated having such a strange creature emerge from her body, but she tried her hardest to challenge fate and whatever devil had played such a trick on her. She taught me to do backbends and headstands and cartwheels, and made me do stretches every day in the kitchen window, but while Geraldine grew and grew till her head bumped the ceilings of the shops in town, I remained what I was: a terrible mistake. Please, I whispered into air every night, holding the word on my tongue like sugar, but when I got to four feet, time stopped for me and the world went on and left me behind.
Probably my mother tried loving me as long as she did out of disappointment, pure and simple. Geraldine, despite her gift for growing, was an ill-tempered, dumb child at best, one who snorted and cried when she didn’t get enough to eat, and my brothers were not good for much besides hauling in our crops and trampling down everyone else’s. Of course, when it came down to it, my siblings were far better children than I and kept that farm running and food on our plates, but I think my mother could have used someone to talk to sometimes, someone with a bit of soul in them. I guess it’s an easy thing for me to say now, when seeing my mother again is about as likely for me as sprouting fins, but I think my mother could have found a friend in me back then if I hadn’t shamed her so much. Some things aren’t ever meant to be, I guess. All I know is that it’s a terrible thing to be born someone’s failure in this world.
When all is said and done, though, maybe that was what saved me. I was so light my feet barely made dents in the moist earth outside. Sometimes I passed a mirror and wasn’t sure whether I was reflected back in it. And little by little I just slipped away; people have a habit of doing that sometimes—just falling away, out of some lives and into other ones, out of one world and into the next. I ate dinner with my family every night, and I slept in the bed my father had carved for me when I was less than a year old, but little by little they just stopped seeing me is all. By the time I was twelve, plenty of times my parents didn’t even notice whether I was in a room or out of it, and more than once my mother ran right into me because she didn’t know I was there.
Once I stopped staring out the windows and longing to feel the ceilings of buildings with my head, the world took on a different shape. I stopped even pretending to do chores. The days became silent and mine, and I began to think that maybe there were other things besides rows and rows of corn and radishes, and I began listening to the silence in the house, wondering at what lay beyond the fields and the trees that marked out our land.
And then the world opened itself to me like a mouth.
The next day, as soon as the dishes were washed and dried, I sneaked out into the early afternoon and set off running, as if I couldn’t get to the library fast enough. I didn’t even look at the landscape around me or slow down for breath when a gaggle of teenaged girls laughed as I ran past.
“Weirdo!” they called. “Freak!”
I didn’t pay attention. Everything in the world that mattered to me was reduced down to that library across town.
But the moment I burst in the doors of Mercy Library, I became shy, and nervous. I stood by the door, unsure what to do next.
“Tessa,” Mary said, looking up from the front desk. Her eyes immediately dropped to my arms and legs. “Your parents weren’t too mad? You’re okay?” She walked over and put her hand on my shoulder, looked at my neck and face.
“No, it was fine. I’m fine,” I said. I smiled up at her.
She breathed out. “Good,” she said, laughing. “You look like you could use some relaxing. Why don’t we make some tea? They’ll be lining up any second, so we have to hurry.”
She rushed through the stacks, pulling me after her, back to an old stove tucked in the corner. I was so excited I was practically skipping. When we came to the makeshift kitchen, I laughed out loud. Everything with Mary was a great adventure. I loved the little stove, the jars of dried herbs lined above it. I loved the elaborate locked box made of ivory sitting on a table to the side.
“What’s in here?” I asked.
“More herbs,” Mary said, “for every kind of ailment. Powders and vials.” She leaned in to me, put her face next to mine. “You can cure most anything with these herbs, you know. Sprinkle them into tea and soup. Bite down on a clove for a toothache, brew up mixtures of mint and nettle and fireweed to soothe a broken heart.” She held up a small bag and let me peer into it: the herbs glimmered and shifted inside, and a faint whiff of smoke drifted into the air.
“You are a witch!” I said.
“I’m gonna get you and make you ride my broomstick!” She reached out for me and I screamed and laughed. “Here, we’ll need a stool for you, won’t we?” she said then, standing up. “So you can make tea, too.”
I beamed up at her, unable to imagine anything more exciting.
Mary pulled up a stool from one of the stacks and set it in front of the stove, then pointed out all the various herbs on the shelves above. I could just reach them from the stool, my belly pressed into the front of the stove. We set a pot of water to boiling. As we waited, we wrapped two small piles of herbs in two cheesecloth pouches and dropped them into two mugs. “Now you just pour the water over and let it brew,” Mary said, ruffling my hair.
Tea in hand, we made our way back to the front desk. I couldn’t take my eyes off my cup and walked slowly, deliberately. With relief, I set it down on the desk and breathed in the hot herb scent.
Suddenly the door slammed open. I turned to see a woman walking hesitantly into the room, someone I didn’t recognize from the farm or square.
“Hi,” she whispered, approaching Mary and eyeing me nervously. “Can you help me? They say you can see the future.” She walked in small steps toward the desk.
Mary set down her tea and laughed, a warm, rich laugh that made me think of honey. “I used to know a woman who could see the future—visions, she called it—but I’ve never had that gift, my friend.”
The woman just stood there. “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said. “I’m being eaten alive, and there’s nothing I can do. Please