This I Know Read online

  This I Know

  ELDONNA EDWARDS

  JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR NOTES

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  PART TWO

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  EPILOGUE

  JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Eldonna Edwards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  The JS and John Scognamiglio Books logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2017955612

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1286-8

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: May 2018

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1288-2

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-1288-9

  Kensington Electronic Edition: May 2018

  For Queenie, LuLu, Izzy, Ree, and Gus;

  and in loving memory of Nete.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One day I woke up and realized I’m one of the luckiest writers ever, ever, ever. Writing is a mostly solitary effort, but midwifing a story into a published book requires an amazing team of extraordinary individuals. How fortunate am I to have found Claire Anderson-Wheeler, the most enthusiastic agent an author could ever hope to have on her side? She rooted for my little cast of characters as if they were her own family, and I consider her part of mine.

  Many thanks to my amazing editor, John Scognamiglio, whose name I can finally pronounce, and who fell in love with Grace on his first date with this book. Your editorial support combined with your trust in my instincts provided a perfect balance of guidance and empowerment. From answering all my newbie questions, to creating a stunning cover, to getting the word out ahead of release, the entire Kensington staff has been absolutely incredible.

  Thank you to all the seasoned authors who held my hand on the debut path, offering advice and shadowing me through the various benchmarks between first draft and publication. A special shout-out to Donna Everhart, who generously shepherded me throughout this process. Thanks also to WFWA, hands down one of the best writers’ groups on the Internet. It’s so refreshing to see writers champion each other within such a competitive arena.

  I’m forever grateful to my early readers—especially my siblings, who cheered me every step of the way. You can move a girl away from her family but you can’t move the family out of the girl. Thank you, Anna Banana Unkovich, for your happy faces, sticky notes, and constructive remarks in the margins of my tattered manuscript, but mostly, for your unwavering friendship. I love you.

  Thank you to my loving parents, Rev. Lew and VaLoyce Edwards, without whom this story never would have been born. I miss you every day.

  My deepest gratitude goes to my beloved partner Brer (William Braddock), who pored over these pages through many months, more times than I can count. His brilliant, kind, and valuable suggestions helped make THIS I KNOW the best book it could possibly be. You had me at “I’m not crying, you’re crying!”

  AUTHOR NOTES

  Given that I’m a preacher’s kid from the Midwest who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, people are bound to ask if this story is autobiographical. The answer is yes and no. Aside from Aunt Pearl, who I based upon my beloved Aunt Ruth, and Joy Carter, a darn close replica of my older sister, Anita, the characters are a collage of every person I’ve ever met, read about, seen in film or just dreamed up in this overactive brain. Every story begins with “What if . . . ?” and here’s where truth and fiction part ways. What if my dad had been a bit of a tyrant rather than the loving, compassionate, imperfect man that he was? What if instead of a rebellious teen with a wild imagination, one of his children was born with something that challenged his deeply held convictions? What if his beautiful wife fell into a deep depression after birthing all those kids? (I’m number five of seven children.) What if I swapped some of the characteristics of my family members, my townspeople, and our many congregations and molded them into fictional characters who remind us that despite our differences, we all just want to belong? THIS I KNOW is an homage to all of you, all of us, who grew up with a profound assuredness in divine order and yet sometimes wondered, what if . . . ?

  PART ONE

  Jesus loves me, this I know

  For the Bible tells me so.

  —Children’s hymn by Anna B. Warner

  March 13, 1958

  I’m spooning my Other, my belly to his back. I love the way his body feels against mine. Although we’ve changed positions many times, we always come back to this. Over the last month our warm-water pool has slowly transformed into a room with soft walls shaped like us. Now we’re squeezed so snugly together I sometimes forget where I leave off and he begins.

  From the time we joined each other in the darkness we’ve felt as one, exchanging thoughts merely by thinking them. If a question forms in my mind, he answers. We know each other as well as we know ourselves.

  I am to go first. A few days ago my Other slipped away from the entrance to the world and waited while I settled into the soft floor of this now nearly waterless ocean. I’d always assumed he would lead the way.

  Our mother sang to us this morning. Sometimes she reads to us or occasionally she just talks, as if she knows we can hear her voice above the thundering of her heart. I wish she could hear my thoughts as clearly as I hear her laugh. I’d tell her how wonderful it’s been, this liquid home where she’s nourished us with her rich blood. And I’d assure her we’re healthy and anxious to be in her arms.

  I’m afraid, I think to him.

  It’ll be okay, he thinks back.

  I don’t want to leave you.

  I’m right behind you.

  What if the door closes?

  It won’t.

  The walls are closing in. The pressure against my body is nearly unbearable as our mother pushes me out of the safety of our home. She’s crying, begging us to come to her. I close my eyes and allow myself to be funneled into the snug passageway.

  He’s right behind me. He’s right behind me. He’s right behind me. . . .

  1

  Spring 1969

  I make people nervous, even Daddy. Especially Daddy. I know this by how they look away, as if their darkest secrets will be exposed like tea leaves scattered in the snow. The truth is, I can’t know another’s thoughts without their permission. I have to be invited. It’s one of the rules that goes along with having what I sometimes think is a curse but what Aunt Pearl calls a gift. I’d give anything to be normal like the rest of my sisters.

  If you asked when I first realized I had the Knowing, I wouldn’t be able to say. It started like a seed and then grew bit by bit, just slow enough not to notice. I guess I was
born with it. Maybe it was just supposed to be a regular amount of intuition. Maybe when Isaac died I ended up with a double dose, like dots sliding off dominoes placed end to end on a crooked table.

  Even Billy Wolf—the meanest kid in Cherry Hill—won’t give me the full Evil Eye. He aims it at my shoes or my chest or lately at my crotch, yet he still looks away sooner than he does with other kids. It’s hard to imagine out-creeping Billy.

  I know things, such as when the telephone’s going to ring. Sometimes I hear and see things, too. Like the red bulge inside the back of Hope’s head that no one else sees or the lilies under the snow that I can smell long before they bloom. And that I really do hear my brother’s voice. We talk to each other all the time.

  I don’t remember when I started hearing Isaac’s voice separate from my own. To me they were always just thoughts, my thoughts, from a different side of me that was still part of me. According to my family, from the moment I was able to make sounds I talked aloud to myself, babbling on and on in a language nobody but me understood. When I was about three years old I saw a photograph of Mama when she was pregnant with us. I was filled with wanting something I couldn’t name. When I pointed to Mama’s belly in the picture, she said, “That’s you in there with your brother, Isaac.”

  I tried to grab the photo. She wouldn’t let me have it. I searched the house for days, but she must have hidden it away. I kept crying, “Isik! Isik!” They thought I was saying “I sick” and kept taking my temperature and feeding me soda crackers. Mama asked me where it hurt, but I couldn’t describe the pain. I was screaming in my head that I wanted him, that Other I couldn’t name before she showed me the photo. Nothing soothed me until I heard the voice in my head and realized for the first time that it wasn’t my voice, it was his. Ours.

  I’m right here.

  And just like that, I stopped crying. From then on I carried on full conversations with my brother. Up until this year my parents ignored it, calling Isaac my imaginary friend. “Isn’t that sweet,” they’d whisper, “how little Grace talks to her dead twin?” Then they’d sigh like it was so sad.

  Since I’m now eleven I guess I’ve outgrown cute. The last time I got caught talking to Isaac was on my birthday. I’d saved a piece of cake and a candle and brought it up to my bedroom closet. I was singing “Happy Birthday” to Isaac when the door flew open and Daddy stood glaring down at me. My sisters snickered behind him until Daddy stomped his foot and yelled, “Stop it!”

  I was so startled by his booming voice I dropped the piece of cake and the candle landed in my lap, catching my dress on fire. Daddy grabbed me and furiously patted away the flames.

  “No more, Grace! You could have set the house on fire, do you realize that? Burned us all down.”

  Mama came up later and tried to comfort me. She lay on my bed and curled herself around me.

  “Why can’t I talk to him?” I said through sobs.

  “Because he’s gone and talking doesn’t bring him back.”

  “But he’s not gone, Mama. He’s here.”

  Then she started crying and it was me comforting her instead of the other way around. She begged me not to talk to Isaac because it upset Daddy and made her sad. I don’t like when Mama’s sad. I promised her I’d stop. I didn’t stop. I just hide it better. I’m good at hiding things, especially my feelings.

  I love my Daddy so much, but it doesn’t feel like he loves me the same way back. Like he loves me because he owes his devotion, not because I’ve earned it. I don’t think anyone in this family knows how lonely I feel sometimes. Just once I wish Daddy would look at me with the same gleam in his eyes he does with Joy and Chastity or even poor Hope.

  Mama says how I was born is how I live, my thoughts racing faster than what I know what to do with them. She claims I came hurtling into the world screaming bloody murder as if I were trying to raise the dead. Then she gets a faraway look that feels as if someone has pulled the scenery from the room and you’re left standing in the dark with no walls and no ceiling. I know she’s thinking about Isaac and that if I’d been born second they’d have their boy, the wish God never granted them and the thing I believe she’s never forgiven Him for.

  I got the rest of the story from Aunt Pearl. She told me our family was in Mississippi visiting Daddy’s relatives when Mama’s labor started early. The doctors were confused because normally boy-girl twins don’t share the same sac. “It was quite unusual,” she’d said. “Probably why Isaac got strangled by the cord and died before the doctor could save him.”

  Mamma was distraught. We stayed with Aunt Pearl until after the funeral; then Daddy drove straight through the night back to Michigan. He couldn’t wait to take Mama away from the place that housed all that sadness. What he doesn’t understand is that she brought the memory of that dead baby with her, packed her grief into every last bag before we drove out of Rankin County. Of course I brought Isaac with me, too. We might no longer share a womb but we share most everything else.

  There’s something else I carried with me from Mississippi. Even though I learned to speak in the North just like my sisters, people say I sound a bit like my Aunt Pearl. I guess when I was born part of me got planted in the South. A twang rides on my words and I can’t do anything about it. To tell you the truth, I don’t want to. When Aunt Pearl visits us I know why. Her voice is like honey, slow and dripping. She calls me Sweet Pea, but it comes out all at once missing the t. “SweePea,” she’ll say. “Come here, shoog, and sit on Aunt Pearl’s lap.” Not only do my knees wobble when she talks to me like that, but Aunt Pearl has about the best sittin’ lap I’ve ever been in. Her big bosoms like to wrap around each side of my face and hold me tight just like when Isaac and I were in Mama’s belly.

  Folks don’t believe me when I tell them I remember being in the womb. They think it’s my wild imagination. “There goes Grace in her fantasy world,” they say. But I know what I know. The thing is, they could remember, too, if they wanted. Maybe they don’t because they’d be sorry they were ever born if they recalled the sweetest place they’ve ever been and how they had to leave it.

  I don’t remember being born so much as I remember being unborn, when it was just the two of us wrapped around each other, waiting for everything and nothing at the same time. I remember those moments right before we separated and then all that light blinding me, a sudden sorrow, my lungs filling with air. As soon as I was out, a door closed behind me and I forgot him until much later when I saw that picture of Mama pregnant with us. When the images and thoughts came back, they were like a movie playing on the walls of my brain.

  That’s why I love the closet in my bedroom. It’s the closest I can get to being back where we started. I like to sit on the rickety board over the heating duct that runs between my room and Hope’s. If I’m real quiet I can imagine the thrum of the furnace is Mama’s heartbeat. And this is where Isaac sometimes comes to visit me. Not in his body, but in a place that is both inside and outside of me. I hear his voice and I feel his presence just like I know my cat, Pippy, is at the end of my bed even when we’re not touching. I only have to call my brother inside my mind and just like Pippy he shows up.

  * * *

  After breakfast I sneak upstairs and close the closet door behind me. I’m not afraid of the dark.

  “Isaac?”

  Yes?

  “I was just thinking. What if I killed myself so I could be with you?”

  But you are with me.

  “No, I mean with you. Out there.”

  Oh, Grace. No. That wouldn’t be a good thing.

  “Why not?”

  Because then we’d have to start over.

  “What do you mean? Start what over?”

  Well, we’re like parts of a story. If you died the story would end too abruptly and without completion. We’d have to start the story all over again.

  Isaac uses big words because he’s not a baby anymore. But the way he says them I almost always get the meaning.

  �
��Maybe you could remember not to get tangled in the cord and we could be together.”

  That’s not how this story goes, Grace.

  I lean back against the wall, hoping the dresses hanging on the rod will muffle the cry in my voice. “Why does our story have to be such a sad one?”

  He’s quiet for a minute.

  Grace, do you love me?

  “Of course I do. More than anyone in the whole wide world.”

  And I love you. This isn’t a sad story. It’s a love story.

  The back door slams downstairs, lifting me off the board. Mama’s already started taking laundry baskets outside.

  “Isaac?”

  Yes?

  “How come nobody else can hear you?”

  Because they’re not connected to me like you are.

  “Not even Mama?”

  Not even Mama.

  “I don’t feel like I’m connected to anyone in this family besides you.”

  Oh, but you are. You’re very important to them.

  The door slams a third time. Three baskets. We’ve got a lot of hanging to do this morning.

  “I better go.”

  Yes. She needs your help.

  “Bye, Isaac.”

  Goodbye, Grace.

  And just like that I feel him go. Not like something leaving the world. More like just leaving the room.

  * * *

  Saturday is when we change the bedding. Mama says nobody has whiter sheets than she does. I can tell by the way she says it she’s real proud of this even though Daddy preaches that pride is a sin. Mama hands me a pillowcase from the basket and takes one for herself. She snaps it out straight like she’s done a thousand times before. I try to do the same but it flaps back in my face. Mama laughs. It’s the kind of laugh that makes you feel loved, not teased. She peels it off my face and kisses my damp forehead.