Dove
This was how she knew the end was near.
At nighttime, after she’d gone to bed and begun the welcome voyage toward sleep, her friends would appear. They fluttered the curtains and stirred the dust, bringing with them the smell of long-ago, faraway places.
When she was young, she would’ve thought them ghosts, but at the clear-eyed age of ninety-five she knew better. They were only memories, flickers of her past. The stories she’d kept hidden for so long that she almost didn’t recognize the players when they reentered the stage.
The visits (she liked to think of them as visits) had started in the summer when she still lived at the Alabama house across the road from Pritchard Hospital. In July, she’d seen her mother, the Major, and Dell. Then in August, Ethel and Erma and Jimmy Singley. Also, Old Steadfast and Arthur showed up. Come that September—when the business with the Honeysuckle Girls came to a head—Jinn, Collie, and Trix arrived, laughing and fiercely beautiful. They filled the room with the smell of wine. It was her first night back in California that brought the most welcome guest—her greatest friend and staunchest ally, Charles. He sat on his side of their bed and sang to her, and she kept her eyes on his strong, safe profile until sleep descended.
She was glad to see them all. Their presence brought her comfort. When they were alive, some had not treated her well; some had even been cruel, but she didn’t mind now. That was one of the many blessings of old age. This softening of memory, the melting away of grudges. Forgiveness was no longer something to strive for. Now it entered her room through an open window.
One chilly night toward the end of October, Dove was awakened by a dream she couldn’t remember. She looked at the clock, but she’d left her glasses outside and couldn’t see the time. She could see the shadow man who sat motionless in the slipper chair beside her dressing table. He watched her with eyes that glittered.
“You,” she said, her voice filled with wonder and the edge of a memory she would have rather not revisited.
“You shouldn’t have run, Ruth,” the shadow man said. “You brought so much sorrow by doing that. So much pain.”
“I’m sorry.”
It was all she could think to say, although she knew it certainly didn’t make up for what she’d done.
He rose then, letting the faint light fall over him, and when he held up a length of faded pink ribbon, it seemed to glow in the light of the moon.
“You belonged to him,” he said. “You always belonged to him.”
It wasn’t true, but she knew it was pointless to argue. He’d spoken with the zeal of a convert, and that was a thing she was well acquainted with. As soon as she realized this, she also realized something else, something she should have known sooner, from the first moment she’d opened her eyes.
The figure in the dark wasn’t a ghost, or an ephemeral memory from her past, but a real flesh-and-blood man. And he hadn’t come as a friend. He’d come for revenge.
Chapter One
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Present
The narrow black ribbon of asphalt unfurled before me like a road to an unknown land. I pointed the nose of the rental car down its path, between the alley of hulking oak trees, and with grim purpose, slammed my foot on the accelerator.
I’d been fearful and fretting about this night for months, and I was more than ready to lay my eyes on the building at the end of this drive. Nothing was scarier than the thing you couldn’t see.
Right now, all I could see were trees. In the soft early-summer twilight, the ancient oaks looked like the horror movie version of the drive leading to a psychiatric hospital. Knotty branches twisted into nightmarish appendages. Tormented limbs, entreating an unseen, uncaring God. But these trees, bark spotty and covered with spongy moss, were the real deal. And so was the institution that remained maddeningly out of sight at the end of this road. PRITCHARD PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, the elegant metal sign had read. So it had to be there.
“Kudos to Dracula on the landscape design,” Danny said from the back seat, reading my thoughts. “Very on-brand.” Ray-Bans held back his thick, gloriously unruly red hair, giving him that insouciant devil-may-care look. But looks were deceiving with my brother. His anxiety was a constant hum, just below the glossy surface. It was just part of who he was. Maybe part of who he would always be.
The whole flight he’d been doing his nervous throat-clearing thing. Back out on the highway, when we’d passed the newer section of the hospital, New Pritchard it was called, he’d started up the wrist tapping—an antianxiety technique he’d learned from his own ninety-day hospital stay. Good thing the rental company’d had an adapted car with a spin knob and left foot accelerator. With my condition, driving was always a challenge. But at least it kept me too busy to be nervous.
Now if only Danny and Mom could hang on, at least through tonight’s ceremony. I sped up—and also may have muttered something not so nice about my dead grandmother, Dove Jarrod.
I should’ve been above such pettiness. She’d been dead eight years, and I was a twenty-four-year-old woman who’d made her choices deliberately and with the full knowledge of everything they entailed. Danny, two years my senior, and I both worked with our mother at the family business, the Charles and Dove Jarrod Foundation. Danny was Mom’s assistant, and I was the director of fundraising. I’d been there three years, and for most of that time, it had been a safe, steady place to work. Even fulfilling at times—in spite of the fact that I was, in essence, continuously lying to everyone.
But still, I couldn’t resist the jab at Dove. The childish impulse to tell her—wherever she happened to be—just how little I thought of her.
It gave me a charge, but not as electrifying as the one I got from thinking about the adventure that lay ahead. Danny had been sober for almost three and a half years now, and Mom’s anxiety seemed relatively under control. In fact, recently she’d actually gone on a date with a man from her church, a guy who owned an HVAC company and looked like Ernest Hemingway. Consequently, I’d begun to feel like I might be able to extricate myself, to explore what a future apart from my family might hold. Moving not only felt possible, it felt exciting. Like, at last, I could do something for me. Pull out one Jenga block—me—without toppling the whole structure.
And so, this past winter, I’d secretly applied to Colorado State’s occupational therapy program. After two nail-biting months, I had been accepted and was planning on breaking the news this evening after the dedication ceremony. It would be hard, but I hoped they’d understand. I’d head up one more push for the foundation—the documentary shoot that we were wrapping tonight—and then I’d say goodbye to my family, knowing I’d done right by them in every way I could.
This was how decent adult people treated each other, I thought. This was family. See, Dove?
“I really appreciate both of you coming,” Mom said in the seat beside me. Pretty in a new periwinkle-blue dress and pearls, she wore her honey-colored hair in the same low knot that Dove used to. She was kneading her knuckles, and her gaze darted from me to Danny, then out the window. “You can’t know how much.”
“The dedication of a creepy, formerly haunted insane asylum in our dear grandmother’s name?” Danny said. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”