Before We Were Yours

Rill and Fern make it back home to the Arcadia, but it’s not as they imagined. Food is scarce and their father is haunted and mostly intoxicated. Rill tries to talk sense into him, to get him to see that they need to move upstream to find something to eat, but “[h]is words are mumbled” (302). Rill can only make out the last few: “[N]ot without Queenie” (302), who is buried in a pauper’s grave nearby. Rill realizes that her father has “lost his mind to whiskey and he doesn’t want to come back” (302). He has suffered too much to be a real father. Now Rill has to somehow care for Fern who “is scared to death” (304) all the time.

Silas is a support to Rill, offering her food when she can’t find much of her own. But she knows action must be taken. The shantyboat, which is in bad condition, needs to be unmoored and moved up the river. She is in bed with Fern, contemplating what to do, when she feels the boat lurch. She “scramble[s] for the boathook […] but the pole isn’t where it should be” (305). The Arcadia drifts and “the hull hits something hard” (305). Before Rill can do anything, the boat is on fire. She jumps into the water, telling Fern to grab onto her. Rill goes under and sees “a light and inside it […] Queenie reaches for me […] but the river tugs me away” (305), yanking her back to the surface of the water where her sister is screaming for her, barely treading water.

A stranger comes out into the water and pulls them to safety, asking: “Was there anybody else on the boat?” (305). Rill tells them her father was, but it’s clear that it’s too late to save him. Silas wants to try and go back and get Briny, even his body, but Rill tells him, “We have to go. Before the men come again. They’ll take us to the children’s home again” (309). Silas understands and agrees. Rill thinks in that moment: “I love Silas. I know I do” (309). As they shove off again in Zede’s boat this time, she knows “Rill Foss has to die” (311) now that Briny and the Arcadia are both lost for good.

Having learned the truth of her grandmother’s life, Avery knows what she must do. She goes to visit May Crandall whose “countenance bores through [her]” again (316). May tells her about her reunion with the Seviers, how she thought they would never forgive, but they did, instantly: “They were understanding of what we had done” (314). And they were good parents who gave Fern and May a good life. May tells her, “We were loved and cherished and protected” (315) by the Seviers.

As for Silas, she never saw him again, although she thought of him often. She’d always imagined that Arney and Silas married but in actuality, Arney’s life took a different turn. She “married a soldier […] lived overseas […] was happy seeing the world” (317). May tells Avery that Arney credited May with saving her but really, May asserts: “We saved each other (317).

Avery decides she must reunite the sisters—May and Grandma Judy. Together, she and Trent spirit May out of the nursing home and to the hideaway home on the river. She waits there with Trent as Avery rounds up her parents and Grandma Judy. Avery’s parents are displeased with the adventure, which is too much for Grandma Judy, they think. They want Avery to explain herself, but instead, Grandma Judy and May explain when they are united: “May’s eyes fill” and she “beckon[s] her sister to her” (325). Because of Grandma Judy’s faulty memory, she has to be reminded by May that Lark and Camellia are both gone. It is just the two of them. But the photo jogs her memory of the sisters’ day with “three dragonfly bracelets […] to remember the three we never saw again. Camellia, Gabion, and my twin brother” (325). The gathering was for the four sisters to celebrate Camellia’s birthday.

At this point, Senator Stafford asks to be alone with his wife, May, and Grandma Judy. They tell him everything, all about his family’s secret humble origins, all about Miss Tann and the baby abductions. While they wait outside, Trent points out that Avery isn’t wearing her engagement ring and asks if this means he can hold her hand. She agrees.

In the brief final chapter of the book, the two sisters sit in the nursing home together. They are now both residents of the same home, with Grandma Judy still residing in her Memory Care Unit. But it is May who does most of the memory work. She tells Grandma Judy stories of “Queenie and Briny and our life on the river” (333). The two women are visited by Avery and “her beau, Trent” (333). Watching the two passionate lovers duck behind an arbor to be alone, the elderly sisters chuckle. May observes: “We Fosses have always been an impassioned lot. I don’t think that will ever change” (334).