Magical realism meets Southern Gothic in this commanding young adult debut from Ciera Burch about true love, the meaning of home, and the choices that haunt us.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Ciera Burch’s Something Kindred, which releases on April 2nd 2024.
Welcome to Coldwater. Come for the ghosts, stay for the drama.
Jericka Walker had planned to spend the summer before senior year soaking up the sun with her best friend on the Jersey Shore. Instead she finds herself in Coldwater, Maryland, a small town with a dark and complicated past where her estranged grandmother lives—someone she knows only two things her name and the fact that she left Jericka’s mother and uncle when they were children. But now Jericka’s grandmother is dying, and her mother has dragged Jericka along to say goodbye.
As Jericka attempts to form a connection with a woman she’s never known, and adjusts to life in a town where everything closes before dinner, she meets “ghost girl” Kat, a girl eager to leave Coldwater and more exciting than a person has any right to be. But Coldwater has a few unsettling secrets of its own. The more you try to leave, the stronger the town’s hold. As Jericka feels the chilling pull of her family’s past, she begins to question everything she thought she knew about her mother, her childhood, and the lines between the living and the dead.
There are only two things I know about my grandmother.
One: Her name is Carol Annette.
Two: She left Mom and Uncle Miles for good on a Tuesday morning, after promising to take them to the ice cream shop when they got out of school.
That’s why it makes no sense that Mom has dragged us from New Jersey, all the way to Maryland, to take care of her for the entire summer. Except for the fact that my grandmother has cancer. I think the idea of losing her permanently freaks Mom out more than she’d ever admit.
Death does that.
So, here we are. Standing outside Douglas Memorial Hospital with mosquitoes buzzing in our ears, skin growing sticky with sweat under the afternoon sun, Mom trying to work up the nerve to go inside.
“Mom— ” I start.
The automatic doors open before I can say anything else,
and it’s a relief when Uncle Miles steps through them. It’s weird seeing him here. We usually meet him at rest stops the size of small towns, cramming months’ worth of conversation into half an hour as he gulps down coffee.
“You good, kid?” he asks, pulling me into a hug first.
“Could be better,” I mumble against his chest. He smells like dryer sheets and the cab of his truck.
He snorts and lets go, turning to Mom. She’s quick to wrap him in a hug. He towers over both of us but leans down and patiently waits as she holds his face in her hands. They mostly look alike except Uncle Miles has small patches of pale skin that creep up his neck and jaw, dotting the space above his right eyebrow and curling around the shell of his left ear. But they’ve got the same eyes, wide and long- lashed.
When he presses his left hand into Mom’s, it’s white all the way to the wrist.
“You ready?” he asks.
Anxiety settles over me like a familiar second skin. The trip down was normal, the same as any other long drive. It was easy to forget the dying stranger waiting for us in a hospital bed. But now I’m nervous. I’ve never had grandparents before, and I’ve never known a person who was dying. Now they’re one and the same.
I wait for Mom to answer for the both of us and look at her when she doesn’t. She’s let go of Uncle Miles, and her arms are curled tightly around herself now, nails digging into the skin. Her jaw’s clenched. Her eyes are bright with something I don’t recognize.
Still, she walks through the automatic doors when they open for her, leaving us to follow.
Mom’s quiet when the old woman working the front desk addresses her by name and gives us our visitor passes. She’s quiet all the way up to the third floor, the top floor in this tiny hospital. It smells like sour milk and Lysol. She’s quiet until just outside room 355, when she turns to me and takes my hand.
She grips it like I’m five years old and we’re crossing a busy street before she opens the door.
Loud, echoing laughter greets us.
The first glimpse I get of my grandmother is of her open- mouthed smile. She’s looking away from us, toward two full- figured women in the corner wearing too much costume jewelry. When they catch sight of us, their eyes flit between Mom, Uncle Miles, and me.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” one says. A giant rhinestone but-terfly hangs from her neck. “Welcome home, Lacey.”
Mom doesn’t respond, but her grip on my hand tightens painfully when my grandmother looks in our direction. The room is silent. Even the click of the door, shutting as the women slip out, is muffled.
I glance at Mom. I watch the muscles in her throat work as she swallows, and I imagine a lifetime of one- sided conversa-tions disappearing with the motion.
In the stretching silence, I turn to look at my grandmother. I notice her shock of silvery hair first, stiff enough to make itself known as a wig. She looks so much like Uncle Miles that there’s
a strange recognition when I glance at her, a stutter step of sur-prise. She has the same tilt to her head, the same small, pointed ears and high cheekbones. And her eyes. Brown, the skin beneath them vaguely bruised- looking. They look like Uncle Miles’s. Like Mom’s. Like my own. A genetic family heirloom.
One of the only things she left behind with her kids when she left them.
“Lacey.” She speaks first, her voice warm. The vowels in Mom’s name stretch with familiarity and the hint of an accent.
“Mama.” I blink at the title and how easily it sits on her tongue. Mom takes half a step forward and stops. She looks more unsure than I’ve ever seen her. “You look . . .” She clears her throat. “It’s been a while.”
“It’s been a lifetime,” my grandmother says. Her eyes flicker from Mom to Uncle Miles. She looks slightly surprised, like she can’t believe how old they’ve gotten. Her hands twist themselves into the bedsheets. Maybe it’s from her that Mom and I get our bad nerves, the restlessness of our hands.
The recognition of myself in this woman pushes back my anxiety and makes room for anger. Why should she get to show up in any part of me, or Mom, when she decided to make herself a stranger?
“Glad to see you’ve filled out. You wasn’t nothing but sharp edges and scraped knees as a little girl.” She laughs, and it sounds like a scoff. “Used to drive me crazy.”
Silence. And then Mom’s voice: “I’m not a little girl anymore.”
“Of course not. But in my mind, you’re always a little irl, running around the yard covered in dirt. And Miles right behind you, chubby legs all bit up by mosquitoes.”
She smiles at her children. They don’t smile back.
“If this is a game of trading memories,” Mom says, “you’ll win. Most of ours don’t have you in them.”
I try not to smile. One point for Mom.
My grandmother doesn’t flinch. Is she updating the mental
mage of that little girl in her head? Fast- forwarding through thirty years of birthdays? Her expression softens. “I’d hate to think what the ones that do must feel like.”
“Speaking of new memories,” Uncle Miles cuts in, gestur-ing to me. I will myself not to shrink as everyone’s eyes follow.
The stranger in the hospital bed smiles. “You must be . . .” “Jericka. Yup. Hi.”
She looks me over, then laughs, loud. “You’re almost the spit-
ting image of what I pictured Lacey looking like all grown- up.” She glances at Mom. “Well. Nearly grown.” Her eyes find mine again. “Jericka, huh?”
I nod. Her stare is intense, like my answer to her not- really-
a- question makes up the whole of my identity: Jericka, huh? I wait for her to say something else. Something meaningful? Something movie- meeting perfect? I’m the long- lost grand-daughter, after all. Shouldn’t we be hugging or crying or—
“Good to meet you,” she says.
She looks exhausted, like the few minutes of reunion have worn her out. Mom notices, too. She clears her throat. “Maybe we should let you get some rest. We still need to go by the house and unpack and— ”
“She’s getting released today,” Uncle Miles reminds her. “Not this second, though, right?” There’s a sharpness to her voice that I recognize as nerves.
He shrugs. “Hour or two. Only Everett’s on call today and the man works slow.”
Gram nods in agreement. So does Mom. However she feels about being back, it’s clear she’s still at least a little in tune with this town. With its people.
“Shouldn’t I call you something?” I ask, suddenly anxious to etch out a place for myself among them. “Grandma? Carol Annette?”
A thoughtful look crosses her face. “Gram would be fine,” she says at last.
“Cool,” I say. “Great.”
Gram. I test out the word in my head. It feels too familiar, like there should be history behind it instead of all the nothing that’s there.
A cough comes from next door, hacking and violent. One of the machines attached to Gram beeps. This image of her in bed, gaunt- eyed and tiny, is frustrating. I try to imagine her walking out the front door and never coming back. It’s hard to hate her for the past considering her present.
But I hold on to my anger with both hands. I’m angry on Mom’s behalf and angry with her for dragging me here.
“I think I’m going to grab some air,” Mom says suddenly. She rubs her bad wrist— broken as a little girl and not quite right since— and heads for the door.
“I’ll go with you,” I say, but she shakes her head.
Then she’s gone, and it’s just me and Uncle Miles and the stranger that is my grandmother.
I stand awkwardly by the door, caught between wanting to run after her and waiting here. Uncle Miles shoots me a sympathetic smile.
“I’ll be here awhile,” he says, though he told Mom this would be quick. “Wanna grab us some coffees from downstairs before you go?”
I jump at the opportunity to get out of the room. “Yes, please.” I hold my hand out for money and raise my eyebrows when he drops a five into it.
He chuckles. “Small town,” he reminds me. “That’ll be enough.”
◊
Miraculously, there’s a “café” in this hospital. It’s not big, about the size of a waiting room, with a vending machine and a display table stacked high with overripe fruit. But the high-light is the small coffee counter in the corner. Slouched against it with her back toward me, a girl about my age scrolls on her phone.
“Excuse me.”
Her head jerks up in surprise. She raises her eyebrows as she turns around. “First customer of the day,” she says, though it’s past noon. She doesn’t bother putting her phone away. “Who are you?”
I blink. “Is that something you ask everyone?”
“That’d be a waste of my time since I know everyone here. But not you.” She leans forward against the counter and smiles. “You’re new.”
There’s a gap between her front teeth big enough to fit the tip of her tongue into. Her skin’s a deep mahogany, and my eyes linger on her a little longer than I mean them to, piecing and re- piecing her features together. Long face. High cheekbones. A cluster of dark beauty marks on one cheek. She’s pretty, I real-ize, in the way that some people are— without question.
I look away quickly, toward the menu. There are only a handful of choices, a few variations of coffee and hot chocolate in calligraphy that’s hard to read. No iced coffee in sight.
“What do you recommend?”
“Can’t go wrong with black,” she says. “Plus, we’ve got the best coffee in town.”
“Best?” My eyes find hers again. “Or only?”
Her laugh is full- bodied. “Go taste the coffee down by the
gas station and you tell me.”
I grimace, picturing oil in a to- go cup. “Got it. Black it is. And a hot chocolate.”
I pull out Uncle Miles’s five, but she waves me off and steps away to prepare the drinks. I watch her hands, bright purple fingernails gleaming against the coffeepot. “I’m Kathleen, by the way,” she says. “But Kat will do.”
Kat’s a nice nickname. It fits her better than Kathleen seems to, somehow. The shortness of it. The punchiness.
“You got a name?” she asks when she glances over at me, eyebrows raised.
Right. Obviously. “Jericka.”
“You’re Miles’s niece.” It’s a fact, not a question. When I frown, she smiles. “He has single- handedly drunk enough coffee the past couple weeks to keep us in business the rest of the year. Plus, you look like him.”
A small jolt of pleasure goes through me. No one’s ever said that before. There’s never been anyone to compare me to but Mom.
“Besides,” she adds, “the whole town’s been betting on whether you and your mom would show up.”
I frown. “What are you talking about?”
Kat grimaces. “My dad says I don’t watch my mouth as much as I ought to. All I meant is that people always show up here again, no matter how long ago they left. That’s what the old people claim, anyway. So, yeah.” She shrugs, giving me an apologetic smile. “They’ve been betting, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for new folks.”
“Is that what everyone does here for fun?” I ask, annoyed now. “Wait for other people to come back?”
“Or wait to die. Not a ton else to do in good ol’ Coldwater.” She winks at me. “But, hey, you’re only visiting, right?”
