Chapter 1

I admit, I had seen a ghost or two.

The childhood night my mother’s father died, when silver moonlight graced the floorboards and the antique furniture in our front room, I came upon my grandma Letty— gone one year and a month—rocking in my mother’s chair, next to the upright piano.

Uncle Bert—gone since 1896—stood on our front porch at sundown on Independence Day 1912. The bitter smoke of his fat cigar stole through the metal screen of our front door, spoiling the aroma of Mama’s cherry pie. A half hour after he left, we received a telephone call from my cousin, saying my aunt Eliza had died of appendicitis.

Uncle Bert again smoked on our porch the day my brother Billy was shot in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918.

I likely don’t need to mention that these Uninvited Guests were not welcomed sights. My mother saw them, too, and she agreed, such visits always signaled loss. Their presence suggested that the wall dividing the living and the dead had opened a crack, and one day that crack that might steal us away to the other side.

Grandma Letty paid another call to our house October 4, 1918. I saw her but a moment, standing in the yellow haze of twilight near the lace curtains of my bedroom, just an hour before my father and brother killed a man.

*

Our front door blew open and whacked the wall. The dogs barked. Someone

“What on earth happened?” she asked, her voice coming as a muffled shriek beyond the walls of my upstairs bedroom.

I rubbed at my forehead, finding my skin covered in sticky sweat. Spurred on by the panic surging through the house, I managed to climb out of bed after three days spent on my back with the flu. My legs buckled. I grabbed hold of my bedside table and knocked copies of Motion Picture magazine and Emily Dickinson’s Poems to the floor with thumps and smacks and the wild fluttering of pages. The stripes of my brown and yellow wallpaper blurred and rippled before my eyes.

“What happened?” shouted Mama again, from down below.

I pushed myself upright, fetched my robe from the back of my door, and eased my way down the staircase on the legs of a feeble old woman, not a twenty-five-year-old young lady used to farm work and activity. To keep my balance, I clung to the rail with both hands, as if clutching the helm of a sinking ship.

Down in the front room, my father guided my seventeen-year-old brother, Peter, toward the kitchen by half-dragging the boy beneath his armpits. Peter’s right fist swelled and purpled and no longer looked like a human hand. Something dark lined the crevices in his knuckles and stained Father’s overalls. The two of them resembled each other with such chilling similarity at the moment—wheat-blond hair, stocky Illinois builds, large blue eyes, dazed by booze and some unknown horror. The house reeked of whiskey because of them.

Mama hounded the men into the kitchen. I clasped my temples to keep my head from swaying off my neck and rolling to the ground—which it seemed inclined to do—

“What did you do?” Mama grabbed Peter by the wrist and pumped cold water from the sink over those ballooning fingers. Peter hollered with the same unholy racket he had made when he knocked out two teeth jumping off a fence at the age of five.

Father, his face bright red, perspiration dripping off his nose, braced himself against the kitchen table. “The Krauts killed our Billy,” he said in a voice slurred and gravelly, “and they dumped this damned flu into our country. I read it in the paper. They turned the germs loose in an American theater.”

“What did you do?” asked Mama again. “Whose blood is this?”

Father lowered his head toward the table and swayed. “The damned Kraut went and died.”

I pulled my robe around my chest.

Mama turned off the water and gaped at my father.

“What are you talking about, Frank? What German went and died?”

Peter leaned over the sink and vomited. Father just stood there at the table and rocked from the alcohol and the aftermath of whatever violence they had just wreaked upon some poor soul.

“Those Krauts who own that furniture store—the last store in town owned by German immigrant bastards . . .” Father cleared his throat with a grinding ruckus that reminded me of our old tractor sputtering its last breaths. “One of them got himself killed.”

Mama gasped. Before she could utter a word, Father added, “The police know.

Everything will be fine. We don’t want another Collinsville case, like that Prager

He said all of this with his face hanging down toward the uneven grain that ran in scraggly lines across the table’s blond wood.

Mama paled. “Are you saying that you and Peter killed a man tonight?”

“No.” Father shook his head. “That wasn’t a man. He was a German.”

I turned and staggered out of the room.

I was done.

Our oak staircase seemed to stretch four stories high above me, but I grabbed the handrail and forced myself to ascend the steps, my breathing labored, the muscles in my back and legs quivering and threatening to send me toppling back down to the ground floor. My parents’ shouts and cries down below roused me out of the delusion this was all just the hallucination of a fever dream.

“Stop yelling at me, Alice!” said Father from the kitchen, his voice volleying across the dark-wood walls around me. “It was just a German. A goddamned German. You should be proud of your boy and me. You should be proud.”

I shook all over and panted for air. Upstairs, the stripes on my bedroom walls continued to wiggle and blur, but I somehow changed into a skirt and a blouse and packed two canvas bags full of clothing, toiletries, Emily Dickinson’s poems, and Peter’s old copy of J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, which I read to him when he was no more than ten. I also grabbed Billy’s letters from the front, including my favorite one: an optimistic note that included Billy’s caricature of one of my piano students—prim little Ruby Rogers—putting Kaiser Wilhelm to sleep by boring him with a sonata. Kaiser Willie snoozed on our settee and rested his feet on one of the hounds, while Addie

I buttoned up my green wool coat and fitted my knit cloche over my hair, which I didn’t even bother taking the time to pin up. With both suitcases and my purse in hand, I turned my back on the lace and ruffled bedroom that had housed me from infancy to womanhood, and I shut the door behind me.

Mama sat at the bottom of the staircase and cried into a handkerchief monogrammed with a gold R for our surname: Rowan. She looked hunched and small and old in the black dress she wore to mourn Billy. Her neck straightened when I brushed past her with my bags. Her damp brown eyes peered up at me with almost childlike astonishment.

“I need to go, Mama.” I rested my luggage on the floor and wrapped my hand over her shoulder, which drooped from her stooped-over posture. “It’ll likely take me a while to fully recover from this illness, but I can’t stay here another minute.”

She nodded with her lips pursed and grabbed hold of my fingers, her hand as cold as winter. “You should have left years ago, Ivy. You’re twenty-five, for goodness sake. You wasted so much of your youth hiding away in this—”

“Don’t.” I squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t make me feel like an old maid again. You know quite well I stayed because of—”

“I know.” She nodded, her eyes moist and bloodshot. “Billy always called you ‘Wendy Darling’ because of how much you watched over him and Peter, didn’t he?”

“That’s what happens”—I peeked over my shoulder, toward the sound of Father clanking the neck of a whiskey bottle against an empty glass in the kitchen—“when one lives with Captain Hook.”

“You should have gotten yourself married to Wyatt Pettyjohn after school.”

“I’ve always been too choosy. You know that.”

“Life’s too short to be that choosy.”

“For some people it is. But for others”—I swallowed and turned away from her white-streaked hair and red-rimmed eyes—“life’s far too long to not be selective.”

She removed her hand from mine.

I bent forward and kissed her cheek, tasting salt and the burn of her sorrow. “I’m not going far,” I said, my voice low, my lips shaking. “Probably just in town for now.”

“I can’t even remember the last time you went to town.”

“Helen dragged me out to a Douglas Fairbanks picture the night before she left. Remember?”

“That was way back in July.”

“I know.” I stood up straight, my hand still upon her. “Come stay with me if you feel like leaving, too. I know the farm is doing well right now, but all that prosperity isn’t worth”—I glanced back toward the kitchen again—“this.”

“Yes.” She wiped her eyes. “I will, darling. I’ll join you if I need to.”

I let her go, and a connection snapped. A binding stronger than the cord that had once tethered me to her womb frayed and split into two, and my stomach ached. The pain hit me again when I opened the front door and walked out on the commotion of Peter blubbering in the kitchen and Father choking on his drink. Despite my discomfort, I ducked my head out from under the black cloud that would now haunt my family worse than my Uninvited Guests, and I left that troubled white farmhouse.