The Unmaking of June Farrow

by Adrienne Young

It was a strange piece of jewelry that most closely resembled a watch. But the numbers were off-kilter, some of them missing. Ten and eleven were gone, and a zero stood in place of the twelve. The hands never moved, two of them perpetually stuck on the one, the other two pointing to nine and five. The numbers that were scratched from the mother-of-pearl surface could still be seen if I tilted it toward the light, a defect that Gran didn’t know the origin of.

My world was a very small one, made up of only a few people and places, and it felt like it was shrinking by the second.

October 2. All at once, the weight left my body. I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me anymore. June Rutherford died on October 2, the exact same day of the year that Clarence Taylor discovered me in that

“Maybe I’m still waiting for you to suddenly realize you’re in love with me.”

“I’m not her!” The words finally broke, my whole body trembling. I was desperate for them to be true, but they weren’t. I’d been here. These people knew me. That June, the one who’d married this man and had his child, was me. The space between the two was narrowing fast, like a crashing wave seconds from hitting the sand.

“The only thing I really know about you, June—” My fingernails bit my palms. “Is that I never really knew you at all.”

I was trapped in a museum of another life.

This was the field that I had planted. With my very own hands. And then I’d left it all to rot.

see Eamon sitting up stiffly, as if his whole body hurt. He’d slept the rest of the night in that bed, him and Annie tangled together, and I’d had to force my eyes to stop finding them as I moved quietly through the house. They, too, felt like a fixed point. A gravity relentlessly pulling at my edges.

The line between suspicion and fear was a thin one.

My life ended when you left. The echo of it inside of me made me shudder.

“You may have ruined my life, June. But first, you gave me one.”

I’d never felt fear like that. Not ever. And I didn’t think there was any way to ever come back from that explosion of light that had birthed a universe inside of me when she said that word. Mama.

I made a promise. One I’ve kept for a very long time, Birdie had said. “Who is Birdie?” I whispered.

Crying

I drop it into the dish below the mirror and remember the words I wrote on that envelope—a message that will be carried through time, back to me. Trust me. I hope that I will.

We stood there, four generations of Farrow women, cursed to live between worlds. But in that moment, in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we existed only in one.

Eamon had asked me to marry him again, and I’d said yes, because even though I could remember that day as clearly as if this body had been there, I would marry him a thousand times.