The Cherry Robbers

by Sarai Walker

Women are raised to be accommodating, so I suppose a woman who draws clear lines that others are not allowed to cross becomes remarkable for that fact alone.

I’m not pretending to be Sylvia Wren anymore. I’ve become her.

When you live in defiance of yourself, you can adapt to your circumstances, but remnants of who you are at your core remain. A bit of wildness that can’t be tamed.

The tapping on the glass is always the first sign of what’s to come.

But even at that age, I knew that it was often women who suffered the consequences of men’s actions.

As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t the house that was haunted but Belinda herself. I grew up believing our mother was haunted, and since my sisters and I had each lived inside her for nine months, I wondered if we were haunted too.

Belinda had uttered only a couple of sentences in the softest tone of voice, but they knew what she was capable of. Her propensity for drama was endless.

Rose had died giving birth to Belinda in 1900. Rose’s mother, whose name was Dollie, had died giving birth to Rose in 1873. Dollie’s mother, whose name was Alma, had died giving birth to Dollie in 1857.

She was the first mother in her maternal line to survive childbirth in eighty-nine years.

Our mother’s terror was our lullaby. My sisters had always told me to ignore it.

Her secret snake, to represent her name; unlike her daughters, she wasn’t a flower.

When we were younger, our mother took us on occasional walks in the forest when she wasn’t too tired; she would teach us about moss and ferns—our grandfather had been a botanist and she learned all about them from him.

I knew I’d imagined the headless bride, but it bothered me that she had looked as if she were really there, in a grave.

Blood splatter and pastry, these are the things I remember.

When Belinda was a baby, she screamed. She screamed so loudly that her wails filled the whole house and could be heard out on the street. She paused her screaming only to eat and sleep, and she would only sleep after she had completely exhausted herself, her throat red and raw.

“When do you hear your mother screaming?” Levi asked. “Always,” Belinda said, placing her hands over her bandaged ears.

The flowers, she said, had healed her.

The house was paid for in blood money, and she could see the spirits that haunted it night after night.

She might have warned of something terrible happening, which I realized then didn’t have to mean death. There were many kinds of terrible.

Numbness—it was working surprisingly well for me; I should have tried it long ago.

I carried the burden of her unhappiness whether I acknowledged it or not. I hadn’t asked to be born, but somehow I was complicit in what her life had been.

“Well, sometimes the artist thinks she’s conveying one thing, but in the end, she gives us something else entirely. It’s what I love about art. So much of it comes from a hidden place in our mind.”

Running away, as I had suspected, wasn’t an easy thing to do; if it was, more women would do it.

fear that continuing to write about it cheapens it in some way, as if it can be described, as if the twenty-six letters of the alphabet can contain it,

“It’s easier to say that women like my mother are crazy. Then you don’t have to listen to them. And so maybe in a way she became crazy. Maybe she could communicate only by screaming.”

Yesterday I’d told him that no one believes women and that everyone prefers to think we’re crazy; now he was doing that exact thing to me without apparently seeing the irony.

“How about Sylvia?” she asked. “That’s pretty. I like that.” “At last!” She was delighted. “The book says it means ‘from the forest.’ I thought you might like that.” She gestured to my mural and the forest in the corner.

Abigale Calisher

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

But I think I’ve finally come to realize that it’s my destiny to be one of the madwomen. One of the women who speaks the truth no matter how terrifying it might be. One of the women who stands apart from the crowd, focusing not on their angry faces and disapproval but looking above them at the sky, which is in a vibrant shade of hyacinth blue that matches the flowers growing in the garden.

Looking back, I made the most of the life I fought so hard to have. I knew it needed to matter.

The title of this novel is borrowed from “Cherry Robbers,” a poem by D. H. Lawrence, who lived for a time in New Mexico.

Belinda Holland Chapel is very loosely inspired by the life and legend of Sarah Winchester. Mary Jo Ignoffo’s Captive of the Labyrinth:

I did not write Iris Chapel/Sylvia Wren to be a fictionalized version of Georgia O’Keeffe, but O’Keeffe’s influence is obviously significant in the novel.