There was more disappointment.
There was Tom.
Sam learned about him three nights after the birth certificate had been torn in half, when her mother’s fever worsened and Stacy began to talk to the walls. It was past midnight, that hollow hour when the silence in East End felt heavy enough to bruise. The house was completely dark except for the single yellow bulb left burning in the bathroom, a light Stacy insisted on keeping on because she was terrified of what waited in the shadows, though she would have choked on her own tongue before she admitted it.
Sam had been asleep on the couch, wrapped in a thin, mildewy blanket that smelled of damp basement and Mawmaw Lucy's menthol cigarettes, when the sound woke her.
It wasn’t the cough this time. It was talking; a low, rapid, urgent stream of words, Stacy’s voice stripped of its usual razor-wire edge and reduced to a flat, rhythmic chant, as if she were reciting a lesson to a classroom of dead children.
Sam got off the couch, her bare feet silent on the cold linoleum, and walked to the bedroom doorway.
Stacy was sitting straight up in the bed, her eyes wide and glassy, staring directly at the far corner of the ceiling where the plaster had bubbled from an old roof leak. Her hands, thin and dry as parched corn husks, were plucking frantically at the top sheet, bunching the fabric up into tight knots and then smoothing it out again. She was sweating so heavily her nightgown was plaster-wet against her collarbones, and her dark hair was stuck to her forehead in wet, jagged strips. She looked to Sam like a woman who had just been dragged, gasping, from the bottom of the Tug River.
"He tied us to the porch rail," Stacy said. Her voice was clear, too clear, devoid of the gravel that usually lived in her throat. "Me and Carla. Like dogs. He said we was makin’ too much noise in the kitchen, but we was just playin’ with the spoons. It was winter. I was four. Carla was six. We wore our little coats, the red ones with the plastic buttons, but it wasn't enough. I remember the wind coming off the water. I remember my fingers goin’ numb until they felt like little wooden pegs. Carla cried until her mouth went dry and nothing came out but a whistlin’."
Sam stood frozen in the doorframe, her hand gripping the molded pine casing. She had heard whispers about Tom, her grandfather, the bootlegger, the man who had died before she was born but Mawmaw Lucy never allowed his name to linger in a room. He was just Tom, the bad one, the one who had left a cold draft in their blood. But she had never heard this. Never the details.
"He'd sell his liquor from the basement," Stacy continued, her eyes never leaving the corner of the ceiling, her fingers still plucking, plucking at the sheet. "Folks would come at all hours of the night. Men with dirty hands, coal dust ground so deep into their knuckles they looked like iron. And when he got drunk enough on his own run, he'd get mean. Not hittin’ mean. Worse. He liked to scare. He liked to see us cry because it proved we was there. He'd hold our faces over the stove burner. Not touching the iron, not actually burnin’ the skin, but just close enough. Close enough to feel the hair on your eyebrows singe. Close enough to smell the heat. He'd look right down at us and he’d say, 'This is what hell feels like. You're all goin’ there.
Every last one of yea.'"
Sam wanted to pull the door shut. She wanted to run back to the couch, bury her head beneath the mildewy blanket, and pretend the house was empty. But she stayed. She stayed because the silence in the hallway felt like a weight she had to hold up, because Stacy was speaking to the shadows, and if Sam didn't listen, the dark would eat the words and keep them forever.
Stacy whispered, her voice dropping into a wet, shredded register. "Pearl knew. Lil Granny. She’d trade Carla for a bottle sometimes. Send her upstairs with the men when they was waitin’ on their cases. Said it was just sittin’. Just keepin’ 'em company so they didn't get restless. But I knew. I was four years old and I knew what the creakin’ in the rafters meant. And Pearl would take the bottle of Virginia Gentleman and go to her room and lock the door, and she wouldn't come out until the next afternoon when the sun was already behind the
hill.”
“Jake...” Stacy whispered.
The name seemed to come from somewhere farther away.
Then she was quiet for a moment, her fingers worrying the sheet.
“Poor Jake.”
Pearl. Lil Granny. The name felt like a knot of pine needles in Sam’s throat. She thought of the photograph she had found in the metal cash box, Mawmaw Lucy young and severe, standing before a background of nothing. She thought of Carla, her aunt, always loud, always laughing at things that weren't funny, her hand always resting protectively over her pregnant belly. She thought of a little red-haired girl being led up the dark stairs of a bootlegger's house by a man with coal-dusted hands, while her grandmother drank herself blind in the kitchen below.
"Carla don't remember," Stacy whispered, her hands finally going still, her fingers resting flat against the sheet like dead leaves. "Or she says she don't. Blocked it out. But I remember. I remember the ropes on the porch rail. I remember the heat from the burner. I remember the way Tom smelled. Whiskey and sour sweat and something sweet, like rotting fruit left in a warm drawer. He died when I was seven. His liver just gave out and turned to mush. And I stood at his grave in the mud and I didn’t cry. I was seven years old and I was already out of tears."
Stacy stopped. Her chest was heaving under the damp nightgown, her breathing shallow and rapid, a dry rattling in her throat.
Sam stepped into the room, her bare feet silent on the floorboards, and sat lightly on the edge of the mattress. She reached out and took her mother’s hand. It was scorching, the skin dry and rough, the fever radiating from her palm like heat from a radiator.
Stacy’s eyes focused then, slowly, the glassy film clearing as they adjusted to Sam’s face. She looked at her daughter, but she looked through her too, as if Sam were only a window showing her the past.
"You," Stacy said, her fingers tightening around Sam’s wrist with a sudden, claw-like strength. "You got his eyes. The turned one. Tom had a lazy eye. Did ya know that? Everybody always said you got it from Ray, but it's Tom. It's his blood. His mark. You can't outrun it, Jessica."
Sam felt her stomach drop, a physical sickness rising in her throat. The eye. The alignment that had made her the target of every schoolyard joke, the defect she had hidden behind her hair and prayed over in the dark, was not a random mistake of muscles. It was inheritance. It was Tom Maynard reaching up from his grave under the maples, putting his finger on her face, and claiming her as his own.
"I ain't him," Sam snapped, trying to pull her hand back.
"Ain't ya?" Stacy’s laugh was a wet, bitter rattle that ended in a cough. "You're a Maynard. You're Ray's daughter. You're Tom's grandbaby. Blood tells, honey. Blood always tells."
She coughed again, a long, hacking spasm that bent her double, her forehead almost touching her knees. Sam held her mother's shoulders, feeling the bones sharp and fragile beneath the wet nightgown, feeling the heat of the fever burning through her own palms. When the spasm finally passed, Stacy collapsed back onto the pillows, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow and dry.
"Go to sleep, Jessica," she murmured into the dark room. "Go to sleep and don't dream."
But Sam did dream.
The hallway was long and narrow, and the carpet was the color of old blood.
It swallowed the sound of her footsteps as she walked, barefoot, her nightgown brushing against the walls. She did not have her glasses, and without them, the doors on either side of the passage were only smears of brown and white against the red. She did not know where she was, or where the hallway led, but she knew she could not stop.
Behind the first door, a baby was crying. It wasn't the healthy, angry cry of an infant who wanted milk; it was the dry, whistling wail of abandonment, the sound of something small left in a dark drawer for too long. She pressed her ear to the wood and heard Mawmaw Lucy’s voice, soft and broken, repeating a single phrase: Come back, come back, come back.
The lost baby. The one in the cardboard box in the closet. The baby who had died before it could have a name.
Behind the second door, she heard the wind. A cold, winter wind that whistled through floorboards, and beneath it, the dry chatter of small teeth. She opened the door a crack and saw two little girls tied to a porch rail in the snow, their coats too thin, their lips blue. One was Carla. One was Stacy. They did not look at Sam. They only stared at the locked house door, waiting for someone to come out. Waiting for someone who never would.
Behind the third door, she heard a man’s voice. Low, melodic, and full of teeth. This is what hell feels like.
She did not open that door. Leaking from beneath it, staining the red carpet black, was the rancid smell of whiskey, sour sweat, and rotting fruit. She knew whose hands were waiting on the other side of that wood.
She began to run.
The passage ran with her, extending itself into the dark, the doors multiplying until they were a blur of brown and white and secrets. Behind one, she heard a woman’s laugh, a sound like a screen door squeaking and the clink of a bottle against glass. Pearl. Behind another, she heard a gunshot, sharp and final, and then a man’s scream. Jake. Mawmaw Lucy's only son, shot by his girlfriend, his blood soaking into a rug that no one would ever manage to clean.
She ran until her lungs burned, until her bare feet bled into the red carpet, until she reached the final door at the very end of the hall.
This door had no knob. It had only a tarnished brass nameplate, the letters carved deep, spelling out a name she was still trying to understand.
JESSICA RAY-ANN MAYNARD.
She reached out to touch the brass, and her hand passed through the wood like it was water. She fell forward, into the dark, into the name, into the heavy, inescapable bloodline that was waiting to swallow her whole.
She jolted awake to the morning light and the smell of Mawmaw Lucy in the kitchen.
Sam lay on the couch, her nightgown soaked with sweat, the blanket tangled around her ankles, her heart still performing its rabbit-thump against her ribs. The hallway from her dream lingered behind her eyelids, a red smear she could not blink away.
She sat up slowly, her head heavy and dull. In the kitchen, Mawmaw Lucy was at the stove, stirring a pot, the steam carrying the warm, sweet smell of chicken and thyme through the house like a promise. She looked up when Sam entered the kitchen, her face softening in a way it rarely did.
"Your mama's fever broke," Mawmaw Lucy said, her voice gravel and honey. "She's sleeping real now. Not that talking-in-her-sleep nonsense."
Sam nodded. She walked to the sink, poured herself a glass of water from the tap, and drank it standing up. The water was cold and tasted of the mountain, but when she looked through the window, she saw only the backyard; the patch of hard dirt and weeds where nothing had ever been able to grow.
"Mawmaw," Sam said, her glass resting against her lip. "Who was Jake?"
The spoon stopped.
Mawmaw Lucy stood very still, her back to Sam, her shoulders drawing up toward her ears until she looked like she was preparing for a blow.
"Where'd you hear that name?"
"Mama was talkin’," Sam said. "In her sleep."
“What else she say?”
Sam hesitated. “Nothin’. Just his name.”
Mawmaw Lucy stared at her. “Why?”
Sam looked down into her glass. “I dreamed about him.”
Mawmaw Lucy set the spoon on the counter with a soft click. She turned around, and Sam saw that her eyes were wet, the deep lines around her mouth folding like paper.
"Jake was my son," Mawmaw Lucy said, her voice dropping into the gravel. "My only boy. He was. he was twenty-four when he died. His girlfriend shot him. They was arguing over something stupid, I don't even remember what. She went to prison. He went in the ground." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, a rough, impatient gesture. "I don't talk about him.
Sam. It's like picking a scab. Ain't nothing but blood underneath."
"I'm sorry," Sam whispered.
"Ain't your fault." Mawmaw Lucy turned back to the stove, her shoulders staying high and defensive. "You can't choose your blood, baby. But you can choose what you do with it. Jake chose wrong. He chose a woman who was all storm and no harbor. But he was good. He was gentle. Not like–“
She stopped.
Not like Tom. Not like his grandfather. The words hung in the warm, herb-scented air of the kitchen, unspoken but heavy.
Sam set her glass in the sink. She looked at her hands, small, the knuckles scarred from a fall off the concrete steps last summer, the nails bitten down. She looked at her reflection ghosted over the window glass, her ponytail falling apart, her left eye turning slightly toward the dark of the woods.
"Mawmaw," she said. "Am I gonna turn out like them? Like Tom? Like Pearl?"
Mawmaw Lucy was quiet for a long time. The soup bubbled in the skillet, a low, steady rhythm. Outside, a coal truck rumbled past on the hard road, its diesel engine rattling the windowpane.
"You know what Clara Cline told me?" Mawmaw Lucy said finally, her voice soft. "The night you was born?"
Sam shook her head.
"She said, 'This one's got a warrior's cry.'" Mawmaw Lucy turned around, her face, proud and sure. "She said she'd delivered a hundred babies in these hills and she could always tell which ones were fighters. You was a fighter, Sam. From your very first breath."
Sam. Not Jessica.
"You got Maynard legacy, yeah," Mawmaw Lucy continued, stepping closer. "You got Ray's temper and Tom's eye and God-knows-what from Pearl. But you also got me. You got Stacy, for all her faults. You got whatever Clara Cline saw in you when she pulled you out screaming. Blood tells, yeah. But it ain't the whole story. You gotta write the rest yourself."
Sam stood at the sink, the morning light falling across her face, and she felt the weight of the name, the lineage, the long red hallway with its endless locked doors. She felt it all pressing down on her twelve-year-old shoulders.
But she also felt the small, stubborn warmth in her chest. The memory of Mawmaw Lucy's hand on hers, rough and dry and strong. The idea of her own first scream, loud and angry and alive, refusing to be silent until someone held her.
"I'm gonna check on Mama," Sam said.
"She's sleeping," Mawmaw Lucy said. "Let her be."
But Sam went anyway. She stood in the doorway of the back room and watched Stacy sleep. The fever was gone. Her face looked almost peaceful, though every now and then her mouth tightened as if something in her dreams had followed her there.
Sam had spent most of her life thinking of her mother as angry.
Mean.
Broken.
Now, for the first time, she wondered what had happened to the little girl underneath all of that.
The little girl tied to a porch rail.
The little girl watching her sister disappear upstairs.
The little girl who had stood beside a grave at seven years old and discovered she had nothing left to cry with.
Sam looked at her mother for a long time.
Then she pulled the door nearly closed and walked back toward the kitchen.
Mawmaw Lucy was still there, washing the spoon she'd been using to stir the soup.
Sam stopped beside her.
“Mawmaw?”
“Hmm?”
“Was Mama always like this?”
Mawmaw Lucy looked at her.
“Like what?”
Sam thought about it.
“Scared.”
Mawmaw Lucy's hands went still in the dishwater.
“No,” she said after a moment. “She wasn't.”
Sam nodded.
She didn't ask what happened.
Not this time.
She walked back to the couch and sat down beneath the mildewed blanket, pulling it around her shoulders even though the morning had already warmed the room.
She thought about Tom.
About Pearl.
About Jake.
About Stacy.
About all those locked doors in the hallway of her dream.
For the first time, they didn't look like doors belonging to monsters.
They looked like doors belonging to people.
People who had been hurt.
People who had hurt other people.
People who had carried things they never learned how to put down.
Sam closed her eyes.
Somewhere inside the house, her mother coughed once in her sleep.
Sam listened.
Then she whispered, so quietly that nobody could hear her,
“I ain't gonna hate you for it.”
She wasn't sure whether she was talking to Stacy or to herself.
Blood tells, she thought. But it ain't the whole story.