The Mill Girls

Photo by Esther Ann on Unsplash

Biddeford, Maine, 1854

We learned about the wild woman from the men who escorted us back to our boardinghouse after a lecture, the deadline of our curfew looming. The men also worked at the mill and were surprised—or pretended to be surprised—that we had not heard of her. A week earlier, the boys who were paid pennies to pull eels off the canal grates had spotted her, crouched on all fours, taking sloppy bites out of a raw fish, her ankles and one of her hands submerged in the cloudy water of the lagoon. When the boys tried to approach her, she growled and bared her yellow teeth. “They said she was half feral,” one of the men told us, his own yellowed teeth showing as he grinned.

Caroline’s grip on my arm tightened. The lecture had been on the rights of workers, and there was a revolutionary excitement, stoked almost to giddiness by the lurid descriptions of the woman’s ferocious sneer and matted hair. The night was prickly with cold, and the moon painted a silver strip down the center of the river. The mills stood like fortresses, their tall chimneys turned to shadows against the sky. It was barely October, but already it was dark when we woke and dark when we left the mill.

The men described the woman’s rolling eyes, her mouth that hung partially open, her torn dress. They wanted us to grasp their arms. They wanted to hear us shriek. I’d been in the city six years, longer than most of the other girls, and I saw through these men. I could recognize the curious mixture of disgust and desire in their voices. I knew that they were picturing exposed flesh, tangled hair, and the curves of the wild woman’s body, shivering with every ragged breath. They would feel the same mixture of longing and revulsion if they actually succeeded in pulling one of our group aside to push up against in the dark. I’d heard enough stories about girls who had let themselves be led. These men didn’t understand how to love, or even see, all of a woman. To them, our true selves would only ever be mirages that flickered in and out of view.

Dorcas, with a smile almost as mischievous as the men’s, asked where the woman slept at night.“Maybe she has a cozy den, down near the riverbank,” one of the men suggested. “Or she finds a warm corner of the empty mill, then scurries out again before the bell tolls. Perhaps she’ll oversleep one morning and you’ll startle her awake.”

Maryanne, a new arrival from a New Hampshire dairy farm, asked, “Where do you think the woman came from?”

“Not a good home like yours,” the man said.

By bedtime, every girl in our boardinghouse knew about the wild woman. In my diary, I’d sketched a portrait of what she might look like. I gave her a long black cloak, curled lips, and carnivorous teeth.

As we were preparing for bed, I asked Caroline if she was afraid. Like the men, I wanted her to be.

“It’s probably just the eel boys’ imaginations run wild. Or the men trying to wind us up. You aren’t scared, are you, Lucy dear?” Caroline’s cheeks were pink from the lingering cold, and her bottom lip had a slim crack down its center. She leaned over to peek at my half-open diary. I snapped it shut.

“Who do you think she is?” I asked.

“If she’s real at all, I’m sure she’s just some poor woman who can’t find work, or who got herself into trouble and is too ashamed to return home.” In our world, trouble meant only one thing: pregnant with no husband to claim her.

“You two are no fun,” Dorcas said from her bed. “Enough with your reason. Let us have our monster.”

“This was a private conversation,” Caroline said, laughing.

“No such thing in this house.”

“I have a bad feeling,” Aure said, in her lovely Canadian accent that sounded like her mouth was full of cotton.

“Don’t be silly. Those brutes were only trying to frighten us,” Dorcas said.

“You seemed very pleased to let James frighten you,” Caroline said, and then dodged Dorcas’s hurled pillow.

“I don’t like this place,” Aure insisted. “I’ve felt for a long time that something is wrong.”

Dorcas made a face at us over Aure’s turned head.

Caroline, who sat with the new girls at dinner when they were weepy and so homesick they couldn’t eat, went over and perched on the edge of Aure’s bed. “This life just takes some getting used to.”

Aure had been having nightmares since she’d arrived. She didn’t like that we were surrounded by water, even though the island was barely an island at all. The river was swift and powerful on either side of us, but there were little bridges that connected us to town, and the train came howling by every hour to remind us of the outside world.

Emilienne, already lying down, urged us to go to sleep, and we complied. Though we were lively enough, there was no evening when our hands and backs didn’t ache. Sleep was always a relief.

I heard the ruffling of the others’ shallow mattresses as they burrowed into their scratchy bedclothes. Caroline pulled our blanket up, but carefully so it did not scrape against my neck or chin.

At night, after curfew, we were locked in. Some of the other girls found this to be an indignity. Maryanne said it made her feel like Rapunzel, locked away in a tower, which implied she was waiting to be rescued. But we were locked in with one another, with our secrets, with our hot breath, with the reassuring pop of embers in the fireplace, with the low moan of a girl in troubled sleep, with the quiet murmuring of her bedmate soothing her away from fear. Sometimes I suspect that I would not have minded if we were locked in always, or if the bridges and the railroad fell away.

I woke to Caroline’s lips against my shoulder blade, where she’d pulled aside my gown. Her hand was coiled around the small mound of my stomach. I listened for even breathing from the other beds. We tried not to disturb the others, though there is no privacy in the boardinghouses, nothing to guard against the gossip that spreads like a contagion. I pushed against Caroline and she let out a short hiss of air. Our room was never quite dark in the winter, which made it harder to pretend we were alone, but it allowed me to see the flush of Caroline’s pretty cheeks and her sly and eager smile when I finally rolled over to take her in my arms.

Caroline is not the first girl I’ve been with. By the time we grew closer, I’d earned a reputation for such things. But Caroline is the first who didn’t inquire about walking by the river in the evening, only to say, “I’m so lonely,” or, worse, that she needed to practice for her wedding night. I would have been offended had I not felt the change in the girls’ breath and tightening of their grasp, or seen the dewy, far-off look in their eyes afterward, full of gratitude and lightness. They arrived to this city from their quiet farms wanting to be remade, and I remade them. They would remember me forever, and I was already forgetting them. When I’d told Caroline this, she complained that I would forget her too. Then you should not leave me, I’d said.

When I moved away from Caroline, I felt, as I always did, like I was sinking into a deep river, its inky blackness a wonder and a relief. Sleep opened wide around me, and I was sinking, sinking, when I felt Caroline’s rough lips and the shiver of her finger running along my jaw.

“Again?” I whispered, laughing. Caroline grinned down at me, and then underneath my soft laughter there came a sharper laugh, high-pitched and raucous. My laughter died in my throat and Caroline put her palm over my mouth, as if that thrilling sound were coming from me. We scrambled against the wall and held each other.

Emilienne and Aure sat up in their bed, their eyes wide and questioning. Aure reached across the room and shook Dorcas and Maryanne awake. The six of us listened to the laughter crackle through the night.

“Is that coming from inside the boardinghouse or out?” Dorcas asked.

“It’s the wild woman,” Aure whispered with an authority that made it true.

Caroline kept the bedcover pulled tight around her shoulders but crawled forward so she could peer out the window, which looked out at the shadowed street. “There,” she said, pointing to a figure I could barely make out. Caroline inched the window open. “Hello,” she called. “Are you all right?”

Aure hushed her. As soon as Caroline had spoken, the laughter stopped. I couldn’t tell if the person on the street had turned toward us or not. The figure seemed to sway back and forth slightly. We watched until it moved away, disappearing from the range of our view.

“Is she gone?” Emilienne asked. When Caroline nodded, she added, “Do you think she’ll come back?”

Aure answered in French.

“Okay, girls,” Dorcas said in her rough, strong voice. “There’s nothing to be done tonight. Let’s go back to sleep or we’ll regret it.”

I felt Caroline’s heart beating against my back when I leaned against her. From our room, we could hear the river, roaring over the dam and swirling against the rocks. As I drifted to the brink of sleep, I kept thinking that I heard the start of that wild, startling laugh again, but it was only ever the rush of the water.

The next morning, the girls filing through the mill gate gripped one another’s hands, jumped at sudden noises, and looked more closely at the long shadows in the mill courtyard. They were drowsy and bruise-eyed. They laughed more easily, whispered more keenly. Those who had slept through the peculiar barking laughter or had rooms in boardinghouses farther away were envious, and those who’d caught a glimpse of the woman were smug and self-important in their retellings.

Not everyone agreed on what the laugh sounded like or how long it had lasted. I overheard one girl, with very blonde hair and rabbit teeth, say that it was not laughter at all, but a woman sobbing. Maryanne said it sounded like a mix between a woman and a dog. A girl who also hailed from Buxton, who’d grown up a few farms over from my family’s property, said she’d heard the woman call her name.

You’d think nothing extraordinary ever happened at the mills, the way we clamored over a simple laugh and a silly rumor started by the eel boys. But that’s not true—life in Biddeford was stranger and more exciting than most of us could have imagined. More had happened to me in those six years than in my entire life beforehand. I’d met a woman who walked the high wire in a circus. There was a girl whose father lost both his hands in an accident at a cannery and then wandered off into the woods one night and never returned. I knew of two girls, who were not related, who had identical birthmarks, which were purple and shaped like the head of a lamb. I had watched a clump of a careless girl’s hair get caught in the machines; I saw the shocking eggshell-white of bone before the blood swallowed her whole head. I’d watched a busker eat a silk scarf and then cough up a bouquet of flowers in its place. The boardinghouse next to ours had been robbed one night while the girls slept, unaware. I’d witnessed a girl become so mad that her face turned plum colored, and she shrieked and struck another girl; I’d seen men wield their anger in this way, full of swagger and danger, but it had not occurred to me that women could as well. At night, the girls played the piano in the parlor of our boardinghouse, and traded books, and shared secrets, and we discovered that when you meet enough people, there is always someone who can relate to even the most unusual circumstances of your life, and always someone whose life is so different from your own, it’s almost inconceivable. And Caroline happened there, of course, and the girls before her, who are nothing to me now.

There was no paucity of excitement in our lives, but each new experience was an event to be mulled over, dissected, shared with a friend, or carefully inscribed in our diaries and letters home. We were all paying such close attention. And if you had heard the laughter, perhaps you would understand why it was not so easily forgotten.

I’ve failed, I think, in my description of the laugh: how piercing it was, how it made its way into us and unwound itself, pushing aside everything else. If a flare lamp could laugh as it was being lit, that’s what the laugh sounded like. It was the laugh that a drowning person would give if they enjoyed drowning, or maybe it was like the laugh of the river as it pulled a person under.

The work at the mill, once you are good at it, once you are strong, is monotonous. I worked in the weaving room, though I started as a spinner. The mill is sweltering and loud. There were times when the roar of the machines grated on my nerves like the whine of a rusty hinge, and I worried it would drive me mad. There were also entire days when I lost myself in the heat and the flecks of cotton that caught the light and looked like snow. I felt, with my hands moving deftly, my arms strong, and my mind sharp, closer to God than I have ever felt in church. On some days, the best days, I became absorbed in stories I invented or thoughts of Caroline. I entered a sort of pleasant trance, and I was almost sorry when the day ended or the bell rang for break.

I have always been a watcher, even back home on my parents’ farm, when all I had to watch were the chickens and the grackles and my loud, dumb younger brothers, playing soldiers or pioneers. Caroline worked near my station, and I loved to watch her move. She was surprisingly quick for such a solid, wide-hipped girl, and her fingers seemed as if they were part of the mill’s machinery. Occasionally, she caught me watching and winked.

We were all distracted that day. Elizabeth, a slender girl of only fourteen, pulled me from my reverie to tell me that she had heard the mysterious woman was a witch who could grant wishes or bestow curses. “What would you wish for?” she yelled against the whir of the machines. I shrugged, not even attempting to holler my reply to her. I raised my eyebrows to throw the question back. “A raise!” she yelled. “Or a home-cooked supper.”

My true answer is that I would have wished for time to stop, so that all the mill girls would stay young and lithe forever. I’d wish to always be able to return to the boardinghouse in the evening, bone-tired, to find Maryanne at the piano bench throwing her clopping melodies into the parlor, to always share my bed with Caroline, to always be able to stand on the Main Street bridge and watch the water thrumming below me. I’d like to fend off, for as long as a spell could keep the wheel of time from creaking back into motion, the moment when I would have to leave the mills. For none of us good, proud, marriageable girls were ever meant to stay.

When the bell rang for our break, I could tell I was not the only one dazed and almost reluctant to leave my station, to follow the trail of breadcrumbs back out of the forest of my mind.

At supper, the girls were eager to share what they’d learned about the wild woman, who now had a name. In another life, she’d been Miss Valentina, a medium and fortune teller from Boston who’d graced the parlors of wealthy widows and grieving parents and men who wanted to know their fates. When I asked Dorcas how she could be sure this explanation was the real one, as opposed to the rumors that the woman was a sorceress or a creature that was half-dog or merely a vagrant, Dorcas snapped that we didn’t know yet, but she was convinced. Another girl said she’d read about Miss Valentina in The Boston Post years before. There was a picture with the article, and she’d never forgotten the woman’s wolfish eyes and the way they appeared to be looking at the reader from the page.

“Enough of this gossip,” Mrs. Johnson, our housemother, said. She was kind, in her stern, removed way, but her sworn duty was to our parents, not to us. And our parents had one stipulation—that we remain decent and properly innocent for when we returned. They feared we’d become that loathsome species: a girl of the town, who walked home late at night from lectures with flirtatious men and talked with confidence about mediums and spirits.

We wanted to respect Mrs. Johnson, but supper was short, and we’d be torn away from one another so soon. After a moment of quiet chewing, Caroline said, “But how did the great Miss Valentina wind up here, wearing rags and haunting the lagoon?”

Dorcas pointed a spoon at her. “That’s the question. A long way down from the drawing rooms of Boston’s elite.”

“Jim told me that her brother owns the pharmacy on Main Street. He and his wife took her in when she lost her mind. But she still sometimes sleeps in the alleyways.”

“I wonder if speaking in the voices of the dead is what drove her mad,” Maryanne said.

Aure crossed herself. Her food was barely touched.

“This must be the perfect place to commune with the dead,” Dorcas said. “All those canal suicides. All those lonely ghosts of poor ruined girls.”

“She’s just teasing,” Caroline assured Aure. I knew, though, that Caroline was intrigued. She liked to learn the names of plants and knew the stories behind all the constellations. She wanted to understand as much of our world as was possible.

“Enough.” Mrs. Johnson clapped her hands against the edge of the table. “You’ll be late. Clear your plates, please.”

As we scrambled out the door, Mrs. Johnson held me back. “I’ve got a letter for you,” she said. “Your mother claims you still haven’t written back. They are anxious to hear from you.”

This was my parents’ third unanswered letter. I let it wrinkle in my pocket as I moved between the looms at my station. I’d skimmed the contents before plodding out into the autumn’s early darkness. My father was still ill. My sister was getting married. I was needed, urgently, at home. In the last letter, my mother’s neat, smooth writing had inquired if I’d met a man. We will not be angry. Everyone misses you. You’ll be welcomed home, no matter who he is. She could see no other reason why I’d stayed away so long. I’d saved enough; the work was hard; I was almost twenty-two.

I know I’m lucky to have a mother whose love burns so brightly, whose desperation was born from concern, who would rather have her daughter beside her than earning a few extra dollars a week. I know I should not wish to be an orphan. I know the letter should not have made me want to disappear.

The first time I’d returned to Buxton, I felt like I was living outside my body. I watched myself help prepare supper, or go out in the crisp morning to milk the cow, or laugh demurely, or lie awake listening to the slow huff of the wind and the high whine of the crickets. There were two versions of myself, I realized, sharing one body. Biddeford had cleaved me in two.

My hands were shaking. I took a step back from my station. The machines bellowed, and the knowledge that they could not be stopped or silenced made me want to sink to the ground. I bit the side of my cheek until I tasted blood. I focused on the squeeze of my feet inside my too-small shoes and the pinch of flesh between my teeth. I waited to come back into myself.

One of the loom fixers appeared at my side. “Are you all right, Lucy?” he yelled. I returned to my work, which was answer enough for him.

One of the girls, who had a brother in Cambridge, obtained a periodical on famous mediums. It contained little information about Miss Valentina, but there was a picture of her, dressed in a long gown with an elegant fur shawl. Miss Valentina’s nose was sharp, her eyes were deep and penetrating, and her expression was haughty. There was no doubt that she bore some resemblance to the woman we now occasionally glimpsed shuffling down Main Street or muttering to herself by the mill gates. In the periodical, she was described as a “conduit for the spirits and a Clairvoyant.” Caroline paid one week’s wages for the magazine, and then tore out the picture of Miss Valentina and tacked it over our bed.

The woman in the picture had an imperiousness that our wild woman lacked, but they shared identical broad shoulders and shrewd dark eyes. Every time I saw the woman, she was wearing the same dirty shawl. Her fingernails were so long they’d begun to curve over on themselves. Sometimes she was not wearing boots, and I wondered how she could stand the cold through her stockinged feet. She screamed curses when people got too close to her. She seemed drawn to the mill and the river. Once, I glanced out the mill window and saw her standing in the courtyard, her neck tipped back. It seemed as if she was staring directly at me, but how could that be possible? She was so far below and the mill had so many windows. I looked away swiftly when she raised her clawed hand, and did not look back to see if she was waving or pointing or simply adjusting her hair.

November fell on us like a door slamming shut. The long nights spread their wings around the city, ice floes appeared in the river, the frozen ground snapped beneath our feet, and the smoke from the oil lamps made our throats scratchy and raw. Girls still talked about Miss Valentina, but with less hushed excitement. She became part of the landscape, a slightly sinister figure who had failed to live up to her promise. I received another letter—this time in my brother’s clumsy handwriting, in which he threatened to fetch me himself if I did not return. I finally wrote, promising I’d be home by the New Year. I said nothing of this to Caroline and tried to pretend that month would never come. When I could not sleep, which was often, I watched Miss Valentina’s picture, as if it would provide an answer. Sometimes, in the darkened room, while Caroline slept untroubled beside me, I imagined that I saw Miss Valentina’s eyes blinking languidly, her chest rising and falling slowly. I felt that there was a connection between us, though I couldn’t say what. I had no dead that I wanted to speak with, no thread that tied me to the spirit world. But some part of me was certain that Miss Valentina was waiting for me, though that is easy to say in retrospect.

The afternoon we finally met Miss Valentina was so cold, the grass was tipped with white, though it had not snowed. Still, I insisted Caroline take a stroll with me after church. All morning, as we sat in the narrow pews, I’d itched to touch Caroline. I turned to gaze behind me and let my hot breath spread across her neck, so she would be thinking of me too.

“You’ve been acting so peculiarly lately,” Caroline said as I pulled her toward the river. She’d assumed we would stroll through town, peering into shop windows at dresses we couldn’t afford.

“I want to be alone with you,” I said.

Caroline waited for me to explain further. When I didn’t, she unlaced her fingers from mine and dropped my hand. “Why won’t you talk to me? There is always some mysterious storm thrashing behind your eyes, but you pretend you are not preoccupied. You say only a fraction of what you think.”

“What will happen when we leave here?”

“Oh, this again,” Caroline said, her expression softening. “My love. We’re here, together. We will know what to do when the time comes.”

“It’s coming,” I said. When Caroline turned to me, alarmed, I quickly added, “One day.” Her eyes fluttered back to the ground.

What did I think would happen in January? I would disappear in the night, and she’d wake to find my side of the bed cold, my trunk gone? The truth is that I figured my departure wouldn’t matter much, in the end. This year or the next or the next, Caroline would return to her family and the preacher’s son her mother wanted her to marry.

“Where are you leading me?” Caroline asked. The river thundered beside us. We were almost to the canal that ushered the water into the lagoon under the mill. Soon, we’d arrive at the spot where Caroline and I first kissed, in the shadow of an elm that would now be leafless and offer no protection. I stopped and grabbed the rough fabric of Caroline’s dress. I thought to pull her toward me but couldn’t bring myself to move.

“What’s wrong, Lucy?” She looked at me warily. “Are you ill?” She put a hand on my cheek and stroked away a tear, then ran her thumb over my mouth. I closed my lips around it.

We heard the snap of the frozen grass at the same moment. Caroline snatched her hand away and we turned. Miss Valentina, in her matted shawl, was watching us, a thin smile on her pale pear-shaped face.

My first instinct was to flee, but Caroline called out, “Good morning!” before I could react.

Miss Valentina laughed—that same stunning, mirthless laugh that had cracked the night open the month before. It carried over the wind and mimicked, somehow, the pounding water of the falls. The laugh turned into a wet cough.

Caroline stepped forward, unable to resist the pull of someone who might need help.

“Do not come closer,” Miss Valentina said, with surprising command. I caught the faint hint of an accent similar to Aure’s and Emilienne’s.

“Miss Valentina,” Caroline said. “Right?”

“No one calls me that now.”

“Martine, then.”

I turned to study Caroline’s profile. Where had she learned the woman’s real name? Why had she not shared it with us?

The woman, too, was startled. She flashed her dark eyes at Caroline and snarled—a real snarl, inhuman and instinctual. I moved to Caroline’s side, but Caroline didn’t seem frightened. She tilted her head and put her hands up in a conciliatory way. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The woman took a step toward us. At the same time, the wind changed, and I caught her smell: musk, urine, a fetid ripeness.

“You’re an interesting one,” the woman said to Caroline. Then she turned to look at me, swinging her whole head instead of only moving her eyes. “And you, even stranger. Underneath.”

“May I ask . . .” Caroline said, and then she trailed off. The two strongest impulses in her were at war: her curiosity and her kindness.

“You want to know if The Great Valentina can really speak in the voices of the dead. Or maybe you want your future told.” The woman scanned the river, then looked up at the sky, then at something behind us. “Show me your palm,” she said. Caroline held it out, and Miss Valentina peered into it, then lifted it to her face and sniffed like a bloodhound. “You may choose. Would you rather know about your future or my past?” she asked.

“You,” Caroline said without hesitation. “Please.”

“How unexpected,” the woman said. She smiled. Shrugged. “If you really want to know, it was my brother’s idea to offer my services as a medium and fortune teller. We needed the money. He came up with the flashy name and the doctored boots and the secret pockets. I came up with the tricks with the candlelight. I became quite good at finding clues that revealed secret after secret. People give so much away. They cannot hide what is precious to them. But, at some point, I stopped needing to pretend. I opened a channel. Or maybe we’d been mistaken. Maybe I was never really a fraud.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shall I show you?” Miss Valentina’s eyes trailed toward the river again, then slowly back to Caroline’s face. “Would you like that?”

“I would,” Caroline said, her enthusiasm poorly concealed. “If it wouldn’t hurt you.”

I studied the jumping movements of Miss Valentina’s eyes and couldn’t understand how Caroline did not realize that we were in the presence of madness, that there was danger gathering like a coiled spring.

“It always hurts, my dear. But there is someone here for you, and it is growing harder to keep her out.”

If I had not seen what happened next, I would not have believed it. All at once, Miss Valentina’s face changed. Her cheekbones jutted out more, her jowls narrowed, her mouth tightened, her posture grew coy and girlish. Her gaze fixed on Caroline so intensely, I felt as if I did not exist.

“You’ve gotten thicker around the waist,” the woman said in a voice that was high and tinny, with no trace of accent. “It suits you.”

Caroline took a step back, as if she’d been slapped. She let out a breathless exclamation, a sound that I took to mean denial.

“Have you forgotten me so soon?”

“Please,” Caroline said. “Stop.”

The woman gestured at me without shifting her eyes. “She’s a quiet one. I know you like the quiet ones.”

“I don’t know who you are,” Caroline cried.

“You never did.” The woman gave a small, tinkling laugh. “You never really knew me. You thought that I had an unclean mind. Like you.”

“Enough,” Caroline whined.

“I did not have an unclean mind. I was weak, at first. But in the end, He showed me the way to be better, to be good.”

“Josephine,” Caroline said softly, and she began to weep. “I’m so sorry.”

For a moment, it seemed as if all sound and color seeped away. I tried to steady myself. Josephine had been a girl in Caroline’s former boardinghouse, a close friend of Caroline’s I’d never met. Josephine had woken early one morning to meet the train and then hurled herself in front of it. Caroline, who was always so open, did not like to talk about the girl or her death.

“Caroline,” I said. “What does she mean?”

“I’m so sorry,” Caroline said again, though I couldn’t tell whom she was addressing.

“It’s cold here,” the girl said to Caroline. “And sometimes I miss you.”

“I miss you too. I did not mean to hurt you, ever. Oh, God.” Caroline could not stop crying long enough to say all that she wanted to say.

Caroline had told me that I was the first and only girl she’d loved, but I could not deny the strange intensity of emotion that passed between Caroline and the spirit of this girl. Was I jealous? Perhaps, for one hot and searing moment. But behind that angry slice of emotion, there was a wash of curiosity and a pang, even, of desire. I shook my head. I had to push all that aside. For, although my thoughts were riotous, the one realization that clanged loudly and clearly above all else was that Miss Valentina was not a fake. Her powers were real.

I took a step forward, ignoring the roiling in my stomach at the woman’s stench and her wind-chapped skin. I grasped her shoulder and shook her. “Miss Valentina,” I said firmly. “Martine!” The woman’s face unmolded. Her back straightened.

“Wait,” Caroline gasped. “Wait!”

“Please,” I commanded. “Tell me. If I leave this place and return to my parents’ farm, will I ever come back?”

The woman’s eyes rolled for a moment and then locked on to me. She gave a clipped yell, and her hot, stinging breath was rancid. She clawed at my hand, trying to push me away. The jagged edge of her fingernail caught me under the jaw. I felt a tearing. Still, I did not let go. “What will happen to me and Caroline?” I demanded. The woman swiped wildly again, and I felt warmth spreading across my forehead. My right eye was forced closed by a rush of blood. Only then did I step back to grab at my face. Caroline was closer than I’d realized, and I crashed into her, tripping backward when my foot had nowhere to land. Pain lanced my side. My head struck the cold ground, and my skull was filled with a loud hissing, like the water bubbling over the falls. I rolled over and retched.

After this, there are gaps in my memory: dark clouds obscuring events that Caroline explained to me later. I don’t remember Caroline leaving me, sprawled on the stiff grass, so she could find help. I don’t remember Miss Valentina straightening her shawl and simply continuing her walk, calm now that I was not clutching at her collar. I don’t remember slinging my arm over the shoulders of the kind man who assisted Caroline in leading me back to the street. But I do recall stopping to rest on the steps of the boardinghouse next to ours, watching the swishing tail of a horse and a muddy puddle rippling in the chill wind. I recall waking up in damp sheets and watching a rat watch me from the corner. Something was quite odd about the arrangement of our room. And then I realized: there was a slant of daylight cutting the floor in two. I had never seen our room from the low angle of our bed in the late afternoon. I have other snatches of memory: Mrs. Johnson tipping a bowl of fragrant broth into my mouth; Caroline wiping my forehead with a cool rag; the doctor dabbing something onto the cut on my neck that jolted me awake with an eruption of pain; Dorcas—gruff, impatient Dorcas—crying as she held my wrist and prayed.

The hazy remembrances of my few wakeful hours during that hot and fretful week are covered in a gauzy film. But I can recall, with stunning clarity, the precise images of my dreams. The scenes arrived without context—bright, vivid flashes in a deep purple sea of sleep. I saw: a market street on a rainy day, a young boy handing me a bushel of garlic. I saw, through the panes of a first-floor window: Caroline, dressed smartly and gripping a parcel, walking swiftly, then turning to unlatch a gate. I saw: a train car with red curtains, a blur of tree trunks and brick-colored leaves, my own nervous hands clasped together in my lap, Caroline in the seat across from me. I saw: a slice of golden sunlight caught in Caroline’s tangled hair as we lay together in bed in an unfamiliar wood-paneled room. I saw: Caroline chopping carrots in a tidy kitchen while a tabby cat begged for scraps at her ankles.

Caroline tells me that I spoke in my sleep, though none of it meant anything to her. She tells me I fought against the doctor when he tried to change the bandage on the deep scratch under my jaw, which was red and oozing and kept my fever high. She told me, when she was sure she wouldn’t be overheard by anyone else, that she’d even caught me trying to reopen the wound. She claimed that I resisted as she tried to hold me down, that I said I wasn’t finished seeing.

My mother and my eldest brother came to fetch me. Dorcas and Maryanne gave up their bed for them until I was strong enough to travel. At the station, Caroline wept when she saw us off.
“I fear I’ll never see you again,” she told me, while my mother and brother stood on the platform and pretended not to listen.

“We will be together soon,” I said. “I promise.”

“I don’t understand what’s changed in you. Are you angry about Josephine? She’s not important.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “It’s not true.”

“Please, don’t leave,” she begged.

“I will explain it all later. I’ll write to you.”

I couldn’t reveal, yet, why I was no longer scared of losing Caroline, why I knew it did not matter if I returned to my parents’ farm, which is where I am now.

I’m not sure how long it will be before I wake next to Caroline in that sunlit wood-paneled room from my dream, or watch her prepare a stew in our small kitchen, but I am certain that future awaits us. I know because I have seen it. I know because Miss Valentina passed to me, for a time, her great and terrible gift of sight.

My mother plies me with all my favorite foods. She asks if I need any clothing mended, if I would like to rest. She remarks, with noticeable distress, about the new way I wear my hair. She looks up sharply when I tell my youngest brother the story of Orion’s fierce battle with the scorpion and explain the three bright stars of his belt. She eyes me with suspicion as I prepare the beans for supper, my thoughts taking me back to Main Street, to the river, to the boardinghouse.

She is catching on. She knows I am not the girl who left all those years ago. On previous visits, I was so desperate to show her how the city was harmless, how it had not changed me. But I’ve moved freely on moonlit streets, and I know how to laugh with my whole body, and I like the purr of the machines under my hands, and I like the purr of another’s body under my hands, and I am strong and getting stronger. Our families were so worried about the city’s temptations and its corrupting influences. They’d heard the town could transform their daughters into people they hardly recognized. And they’d been right to be afraid. For who among us would ever be the same?