The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman (4)

She saw Haylin walking down the path. At first she thought she had conjured him, and perhaps he was a ghostly image of himself, but no, it was Hay. He was so tall she spotted him right away, wearing the same denim jacket he’d had since he was fifteen. Franny sat on the rock, knees to chest. She was a mess and damned herself for being so. The last time she’d seen him, she’d caused a scene in the hospital. Now she vowed to be calm and collected. She had lost him, so her heart shouldn’t be thudding against her chest. It was over, and she should be happy that he had been saved from throwing in his lot with an Owens woman.

She wore old sneakers and jeans and a black and white striped T-shirt she’d found in the ninety-nine-cent bin at the thrift store where they’d sold their mother’s beautiful clothes. She hadn’t even brushed her hair that morning.

Haylin spied her and waved, as if they’d seen each other only hours before. He came to sit beside her. “Don’t tell me you’ve been waiting here all these years?” Franny laughed out loud. Hay smiled, pleased he could make her laugh. But his hurt made him say more. “I know you haven’t been waiting for me. I’ve come here every time I’m home and you’re never here. So I gave up on us.”

Franny threw a hand over her mouth as if holding back a sob. Her eyes were rimmed with tears.

“Franny.” He hadn’t really wanted to hurt her.

“I’m not crying, if that’s what you think,” Franny responded, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“I know that. Do you think I’m an idiot?” They both laughed then. “Don’t answer that,” Hay said with a grin.

He was attending Yale Medical School, Franny’s father’s alma mater. It made perfect sense that he would become a doctor. He had always wanted to do good in the world. And it made sense, too, when he revealed he’d placed distance between himself and his family.

“I don’t go home anymore,” he said, morose as he always was when thinking about his heritage. “It’s like a fucking mausoleum with my father getting richer on the war, and my mother drinking so she won’t go berserk because she’s married to him.”

“Where do you stay when you come to New York?” When Hay glanced away, Franny knew. “Oh.” She could barely bring herself to say it. “With Emily.”

“You remember her name,” he said, surprised.

“Of course I do. Emily Flood, your roommate.”

“You don’t usually take note of people.” He flushed when Franny threw him a deadly look. “Well, you don’t!”

“Of course I took note of her, Haylin. How could I not?”

“Yeah,” Hay said, feeling more like an idiot than ever.

“So where is she? I’m shocked that she lets you out of her sight. Maybe you’d better run on back to her.”

“I don’t understand why you’re mad,” Hay said, frustrated and unwilling to bear her anger. “You’re the one who didn’t want me.”

“I had no choice! I had my brother and sister to see to. There was the accident to deal with. Or do you blame me for that?”

Franny stood up with the intention of leaving. When Hay took her arm, she glared at him. But he was looking at her the way he used to, when he was the only person in the world who really knew her.

“Don’t go yet,” he said.

“Why? You’re with Emily.”

“I am,” Haylin said.

“And do you blame me for that, too?”

She was heartless. The Maid of Thorns.

Haylin shook his head. If only he would stop looking at her like that. So she took it further.

“Well I’m glad you’re with her,” Franny said. “You’ll be happier than you would have ever been with me. She’s normal!”

Lewis was perched above them, ever vigilant, upset they were arguing. Hay called the bird to him and the crow skimmed the air and came to perch on the rock. He gazed at Franny for too long, and just when it seemed he might say something that would change their path, he snapped out of it. “I should probably leave Lewis with you. I don’t really have time for a pet.”

“I’ve told you! He’s not a pet! He comes and goes as he pleases. Isn’t it clear? He’s chosen you, Haylin. I don’t blame him.”

“Well, he can’t stay with me anymore. Emily has a fear of birds.”

“What if she does?”

“We live together in New Haven.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

He looked at her, but she simply stared. She wanted him to say it.

“I’m here for you.”

“But you live with her!”

“What should I have done? You never answered any of my letters. I thought you hated me because we were together when the accident happened.”

“What’s done is done. I don’t think either one of us should come here anymore.” He had made his choice, Franny thought. Emily. And there was the curse to protect him from. She refused to be responsible for any of his sorrow. “We were young and now we’re not.”

Haylin laughed a short unhappy laugh. His shoulders were hunched, the way they were when he sulked. “We’re twenty-four, Franny, for Christ’s sake. We have our whole lives to live. You’re going to let me marry her? Is that what you want?”

“Apparently that’s what you want.”

When she walked away she felt as though she were falling. It seemed as if the world was a snow globe that had been shaken, and where she’d ended up had nothing to do with where she had begun.

When she reached the zoo, Franny stopped and sat on a bench, with Lewis perched beside her.

“I suppose you’re mine,” she told him. In response he did the oddest thing; he sat on her lap and let her pet him, something he’d never done before. He made a funny clacking noise, then took to the sky. Was he letting her know that if she ran she could catch up with Haylin? She knew the paths he took to cut across the park. But his life was set out before him, and he would be better off without her, and because she still had no idea how to break the curse, Franny walked home, four miles as the crow flies. When she reached 44 Greenwich Avenue she went inside alone, and only the crow knew that it was possible for a woman to claim to have no heart at all and still cry as though her heart would break.

Vincent and William flew to San Francisco, a city cast out of a dream. It was the Summer of Love. Free love and a free society had called a hundred thousand people to the city. There were indeed flowers everywhere, and along the bay the scent of patchouli and chocolate infused the air. Strangers embraced them as they walked down Haight Street. In Manhattan, theirs was a secret society, but here the doors were open to everyone. They camped out in Golden Gate Park surrounded by eucalyptus trees, and when a pale mossy rain began, they raced for the shelter of the public library. There in the stacks they met a couple who invited them to their apartment in the Mission, where they spent the night on a quilt on the floor, entwined and madly in love. It was true, Vincent was in love, despite the warnings, despite the world, despite himself. This was what he had seen in the mirror in his aunt’s greenhouse, the image that had terrified him because from that moment he knew what he wanted, a life he thought he’d never have, and now, at last, he did.

In the morning they were given a breakfast of toast and honey-butter and orange tea.

“Are you always so kind to strangers?” William asked their hosts.

“You’re not strangers,” they were told, and it seemed in this city, at this time, they were embraced by those who saw them for who they were.

They rode around in a convertible Mustang, borrowed from a cousin of William’s who lived in Mill Valley. The cousin had informed them California was not like New York; they did not need to keep themselves hidden. They had the nerve to kiss on a dock with a view of Alcatraz and the bright blue water of the bay. They went to clubs in the Castro District where they felt completely at home dancing until they were exhausted. They drove along in the pale light of dawn in an ecstasy of freedom. Magic was everywhere. They spied people wearing feathers and bells on Mount Tamalpais, and in cafés in the North End, and all along Divisadero Street, where young girls handed out magical, ceramic talismans in the shape of a triangle or an eye. Blessed be, they called, and indeed Vincent and William felt blessed to be in California.

In Monterey they slept in a cabin overlooking the ocean and made love in the blaze of the pure yellow sunlight and felt something dark lift away from them. They had been hidden, casting a clouding spell wherever they went in New York, but they would do that no longer. It was the end of secrets, the end of lies, the beginning of everything they did not yet know. Something was about to happen; they could both feel it. Vincent thought about the black mirror in his aunt’s greenhouse. There had been so many images, but now as his future became his present he recognized the visions he had seen.

William was acquainted with a publicist working for the record producer Lou Adler, who had come up with the idea for the Monterey Pop Festival, held on the weekend of June 16, 1967, inviting the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin and the Who and Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding and many others for three days of music, and love, and peace. Somehow William had talked his friend into letting Vincent perform. When Vincent heard the news he hesitated; he was a street singer, not meant for large venues, but in the end he was talked into it and William slipped a roadie ten bucks so Vincent could use a guitar. He wore black and took off his boots and socks. William placed a wreath of leaves on his head just before he went onto the stage.

It was an odd hour, dusk, a dim, murky time no one wanted to claim on the stage. So there he was. A nobody. Vincent and a borrowed guitar. No one knew him; no one cared. He seemed calm if you didn’t look too closely at his beautiful, worried face. When he began people had their backs to him, but the microphone was turned up suddenly, by William’s hand no doubt, and Vincent’s soaring voice drifted over the crowd, as though it were an enchantment. A quiet fell as darkness sifted down from the trees.

When I was yours, who was I then?

I heard your voice, but that was when

I had a heart, I had a harp, I had your love, the knife was sharp.

I walked at night, I longed to fight.

Isn’t that what betrayed is? Isn’t that when fear exists?

When you hide who you are and you take it too far, when you’re a man.

I called on angels when I faced a wall,

but just like Joshua’s, it began to fall.

I cried blood-red tears, despite my fears.

Isn’t that what betrayal is? Isn’t that when fear exists?

I walked at night, I had the sight and still I lost despite the call.

I walk at night, without a fight.

I’ve tried before, I’ve locked the door, I’ve done it wrong, I’ve done it right.

Afterward, there was a moment of silence, then a huge wave of applause. William took Vincent’s arm as they ducked behind the stage.

“Man, you cast a spell,” one of the promoters said to him, but Vincent paid no attention. He was looking beyond those crowding around him. A little girl with gray eyes was standing in the yellow grass. Hadn’t he seen her before?

He left the business of saying good-bye to William, and went over to the child. “I know you,” he said.

“I know you back,” she piped up.

She was Regina Owens, now six years old. Her mother, April, was behind her, her pale hair so long she could sit on it if she pleased, her skin tanned from her time in the desert. She looked like a creature that couldn’t possibly be part of the mortal world.

“My dear cousin,” she said, embracing Vincent. William, never shy, came to introduce himself. April looked at him, then at Vincent. She smiled slyly. “I see who you are now that you’re a man. Let me guess. This was the date for which you couldn’t be late. You certainly had me fooled.”

“I thought no one could do that,” Vincent remarked.

“You always blocked me,” April said with a measure of sadness.

“You’re related,” William said, wanting to break the tension between these two. “I can tell by the eyes.”

“Distantly,” Vincent said as he accepted some daisies Regina had picked. “Several times removed. Probably by hacksaw.” He grinned and April grinned back at him.

“No, by carving knife,” she said prettily. “That’s the way an Owens removes you from his life.”

April and Regina were currently living in Santa Cruz in a small wood-shingled cottage that was provided when April found employment as the gardener and housekeeper on the estate of the owners, wealthy San Franciscans who wanted to be closer to nature, but hardly ever got out of the city. She planned to return to the desert to attend to her research with spiders, but for now Regina needed school and the companionship of other children. “Stay with us tonight,” April insisted. “We so rarely have interesting guests. You’re here, we’re here. Clearly it was meant to be.”

Regina had taken hold of Vincent’s hand. Because of the weight and heat of her small hand in his, he didn’t say no. April had hitchhiked to Monterey with her daughter, so they drove back in the borrowed Mustang, top down. While they sped along the curving highway William slipped a recording he’d made into the tape player.

“You made a tape?” Vincent asked William.

“I wanted to save the moment. And maybe send it to a radio station.”

“No,” Vincent said. He knew where fame would lead him, to the darkest side of himself. It was something he didn’t need.

April leaned forward, her arms on the edges of their seats. She held her hair back from her face with one hand, intent on the song.

Saul went down to the oldest road to meet the Witch of Endor.

She spoke, but he couldn’t hear. She saw his fate, but he had no fear.

No predictions could make him stay. He was told the truth, but still he strayed.

Isn’t that what love makes you do? Go on trying even when you’re through.

Go on even when you’re made of ash, when there’s nothing left inside you but the past?

When I was yours, who was I then?

I heard your voice, but that was when

I had a heart, I had a harp, I had your love, the knife was sharp.

I walked at night, I cared with all my might.

Isn’t that what betrayal is? Isn’t that when fear exists?

Isn’t that what happens when you hide who you are, even love can’t take you that far, when you were a man.

“Who was the Witch of Endor?” Regina asked her mother.

“A wise old woman who could foretell the future.”

“Could she really see a person’s fate?”

“Fate is what you make of it, my aunt always says. You can make the best of it or you can let it make the best of you. My cousin knows that. He loved to get the best of other people.”

William was driving and therefore didn’t see the worried expression cross Vincent’s face. There was something in April’s knowing tone that made him uncomfortable.

In Santa Cruz they had dinner outside, at a weathered wooden table set beneath a trellis teaming with flowering vines. The pale blooms gave off the bittersweet scent of almonds, reminding Vincent of their aunt’s greenhouse.

“It’s so familiar,” he said.

“Oleander,” April responded. “It’s poisonous.”

She had been inspired by the greenhouse in Isabelle’s garden and grew herbs that weren’t native to California.

As a girl, April couldn’t wait to leave home, yet now she favored wildflowers that could be found when traipsing through the woods in Massachusetts. Sunflower, wild bean, wintergreen. Blue flag, used for skin conditions. Blue vervain, for headache and fever, cardinal plant, appreciated by the native people as a love charm. Skullcap, for nervous conditions. She asked Regina to give William a tour of the greenhouse so he could see for himself. Vincent stood, about to join in, but April caught his eye and gestured for him to stay. “Don’t leave, Cousin, it’s been too long since we’ve spoken.” He felt he had no choice but to sink back into his chair, though he had a feeling of dread. April was a wild card. You never knew what she’d do or say. Now, for instance, as soon as William and Regina were out of earshot she turned to Vincent. “You know, don’t you?”

“April, don’t play games.” Vincent stretched out his long legs. He was all in black and he’d kicked off his shoes. He realized that he felt more at home singing in a subway station or in the park on a summer evening than he had in Monterey. All that time of playing around with The Magus, thinking he sought fame, and now it was the last thing he wanted. He was rattled by the festival, and had little patience for April’s mockery. “Your charm was always telling it like it is.”

“Well, you always knew what your charm was, especially that summer when you were fourteen and fucking everything in sight. Of course, this was before you knew who you preferred.” April gazed searchingly after William, who was bending down to fit his tall frame through the pitched doorway of the greenhouse. He was so courteous, listening to Regina’s ongoing lecture concerning the uses of poisonous plants. Vincent, too, watched William, intent on his form. He had a masculine grace that was enchanting.

“I don’t care what you think about me and William, so if you want to make nasty remarks, go right ahead. It will feel like old times.”

April reached over and took Vincent’s hand. “Tell me you don’t remember.”

He looked at her blankly. Family was always such a bother.

April raised an eyebrow, disappointed in his lack of recollection. “I came to your room. Into your bed.”

It had happened on a night when there was a rainstorm, when the sparrows took shelter in the branches of lilacs below the window. They’d told no one, and had never even spoken of it afterward.

“Oh, that,” Vincent said. He remembered now. Of course. A quick crazy fuck with their hands over each other’s mouths so no one would hear the heat of their sudden passion. Their aunt had given him a disquieting look in the morning, but his sisters, prescient as they were, seemed to have no idea of what had gone on.

“We are extremely distant from each other in the family tree,” April went on. “Third cousins twice removed. It’s fine genetically.” She studied his puzzled face and laughed. He had no idea what she was getting at. “You really don’t know! And you’re supposed to be the one with the sight. It just goes to show, people see what they want to see.”

“April,” Vincent said. “Don’t fuck around with me.”

“I think it was quite the opposite. You were the one fucking with me, darling.”

Annoyed, Vincent stood, making haste to follow William, but before he could April reached for him. Her tentative touch made him stay. She was emotionally raw, something he hadn’t thought was in her nature. Although she had been so vulnerable when she’d come to visit them after the summer, running off before they’d spoken.

“All right, then,” April said. “Perhaps you are clueless. Well here it is, my dear. She’s yours.”

Bewildered, Vincent watched the little girl in the greenhouse. She was gathering purple echinacea flowers for William. They had grown almost wild in Aunt Isabelle’s garden and had been used throughout time as a cure for scarlet fever, malaria, diphtheria, blood poisoning, and the common cold. Regina laughed as William accepted her gift, then bowed.

“Can’t you see yourself in her?” April asked.

“You said her father drowned.”

“What was I to say? That I fucked a distant cousin who was fourteen and too stupid to use a condom? And now here she is. An amazing child we share. A double bloodline. The problem is, I think she may live twice as fast. I saw it when she was an infant, and I think Franny did as well when I came to visit.”

“Franny?” He had a flicker of panic.

“Don’t worry. She doesn’t know you’re the father. That spell we placed on her in the library so she wouldn’t know what we were doing lasted. But she knows the fate. Something our girl has inherited. From both of us, really. A life line that is regrettably short.”

Vincent was stricken. “You know that for a fact?”

April dissolved into tears. “I’m giving her the best life I can. She’ll grow up, I know that much, and really, who knows how much time anyone has?”

“What will you tell her?” Vincent leaned forward into the last rays of yellow light. “About me?”

“I’ll tell her you’re a very special cousin.”

Vincent nodded. His grief was in his expression.

“It’s too late to have regrets,” April said. “Maybe I should have told you, but you were hardly interested in such things. You were a boy. Life is a mess, that’s what Isabelle told me when I decided to have the child, but all we can do is live it. She was right. I’m glad at last you fell in love.”

“You know that’s impossible for us,” Vincent reminded her.

“Bullshit,” April said, for she had been in love with him that summer. Her first and only true love as a matter of fact, and nothing horrible had happened. Instead, something wonderful had occurred. Their daughter. “We just have to fight harder for what we want.”

William and Regina approached the patio, holding hands and singing their own version of “I Walk at Night.” William carried the bunch of cut flowers with their purple-red blooms.

I had a garden, I had a dove, I had a tree, I had your love.

“Let’s bring out dessert,” April said. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have made Auntie Isabelle’s tipsy chocolate cake. Instead we have a raspberry mousse.”

“I thought you were making macarons,” Regina said, for those were her favorites. “Vincent and William would love them.”

“Not enough time,” April informed the sad little girl.

“Someday we’ll have macarons from Paris,” Vincent said to cheer her. “But tonight we’re having a moose for dessert and I want the antlers.”

Regina laughed as she climbed onto his lap, a child who was completely comfortable with who she was. “Sing to me,” she said. “I want to remember you when you’re gone.”

Vincent smoothed down her hair. It was black, like his, straight as sticks, and her smile could undo a person, at least it had done so to him.

“I’ll send you a tape,” William assured the little girl. “Or even better, I’ll have it made into a record.”

Regina clapped her hands happily and said, “Then I’ll play it every night when we get a record player.”

“We’ll send you one of those as well,” Vincent told her.

“Do me a favor,” April said. She had reappeared with their dessert and some coffees and had overheard his promises. She knew Vincent as well as anyone, and she knew how easy it was for him to forget something that was terribly important to someone else. The smell of the dessert’s berries and sugar was so intoxicating bees gathered round and April had to bat them away with her hand. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Jet took the bus without telling anyone. It was the first of March, Levi’s birthday, and the forsythia was blooming. She wore her black dress and tied a scarf over her head. She had her purse and nothing else. She had discussed coming here with Rafael when he’d surprised her by reserving a room at the Plaza Hotel for a night. When the elevator opened at the seventh floor Jet realized he had asked for room 708, and she said she would prefer if they could have a different room, one that was their own.

“What we are is separate from Levi,” she’d said. “Even if I go to visit his grave, it has nothing to do with us.”

When she got off the bus she walked to the west, stopping in a field to collect some daffodils that were the color of new butter. She tied a bunch together with blue string. The sun was pale and the air was cool and fresh. It was two miles out to the cemetery and she walked quickly, ducking behind greenery each time a car passed by.

At the cemetery gates a waiting hearse idled, which gave her pause, but the funeral that had taken place had ended, and there was no one in sight when the hearse pulled away. There were many surnames she recognized in the older section of the cemetery: Porter and Coker and Putnam and Shepard. People had been called Wrestling and Valor and Worth and Redeemed, for it was those virtues their families hoped they would possess. When Jet neared the graves of the Willard family she came upon an angel marking the resting place of a baby named Resign Willard, who had lived for one day.

Levi’s grave was in a newer section beyond a huge field of grass. She set the daffodils in front of the simple stone that had been placed in the ground. He had been eighteen. Barely a life. Suddenly exhausted, Jet lay down on the grass beside him. She still wore the ring Levi had given her, even though the moment when he told her to close her eyes so he could give her this birthday gift felt so far away. They had likely been together twenty times, an entire world created in just days. She imagined Levi next to her, in his black jacket. Many of the Hathorne family had been buried nearby. They were her family as well as his, a fact that was terribly uncomfortable. No wonder the Owens family had kept this secret. No wonder so many had fled Massachusetts. Even the witch-hunter’s own relation Nathaniel Hawthorne had placed the w in his name to distance himself from his cruel ancestor, his writing driven by his desire to make amends for all the evil his great-great-grandfather had done in the world.

Not far from here was a tree where the witches were hung, sentenced by the man who had been the father of Maria Owens’s child. In 1692, he had been appointed chief examiner of the witch trials. He had sentenced and overseen the hanging of nineteen innocent people, convincing the court to accept spectral evidence, which meant what was said was gospel without any proof. Women could turn into crows. A man could be the devil’s apprentice. His cruelty was legendary. He refused to hear recanted testimonies, concluding those accused were guilty before they were tried, badgering the accused, causing them to be murdered, thereby setting upon himself, and all that followed him, the curse they now shared. After a conviction, property could be taken and distributed as the judges saw fit. Hathorne had married a Quaker girl of fourteen years of age, built a mansion, and fathered six children. He did as he wished to Maria Owens, who was without parents or guardians, using her as he saw fit, and in her youth and inexperience she believed she loved him, but it was as a crow loved his cage.

Jet shaded her eyes and looked into the sky. She saw that a man was watching her and quickly scrambled to her feet. Her heart was pounding. She was so close to the hanging tree she felt dizzy. She had the blood of both accuser and accused running through her. The man stayed where he was. He was carrying a bunch of daffodils. They stared at each other, the only people in the cemetery. Before the Reverend could come any closer and chastise her and call out that she was a witch and a demon and had caused his son to die, Jet took off running. She ran so fast all she could hear was the blood pounding in her ears. She wanted to be dead and be beside Levi, but she was alive and so she ran. She didn’t stop in town, she didn’t wait for a bus. Instead, she found her way to Magnolia Street.

She knocked on Aunt Isabelle’s door. The light was on, but no one answered, so she went round to the garden. Isabelle was in the greenhouse beginning her seedlings. She didn’t seem the least surprised to see her niece on the threshold.

“You could have come here if you wanted daffodils,” she said when Jet walked in.

True enough, the yard was thick with them at this time of year, a sea of yellow. Jet saw that the garden was far ahead of the rest of town. The wisteria was already blooming; the climbing roses were budding.

“Looks as though you saw a ghost,” Isabelle said.

“I saw Levi’s father.”

“That Reverend doesn’t own the cemetery and he doesn’t own this town. You have your right to Levi’s memory.”

“I want to get rid of it,” Jet said.

“Do you?”

“I want to have no memory of him. Please,” she said to her aunt. “Please do this for me. I know you can do things like that. And I can pay you.” Jet was in tears.

“Jet, if I did that, then you wouldn’t be you.”

“Good! I don’t want to be me.” Jet had come to sit on a wooden bench, her hands folded on her lap. “I let Franny think I drank courage.”

“But you did,” her aunt said.

Isabelle signaled for Jet to follow her back to the house. There was a woman pacing on the porch. She stopped when she saw Isabelle. “Oh, Miss Owens,” she said. “If you could spare me a moment.”

“You’ll have to wait,” Isabelle told her. “Just sit down and be quiet.”

Jet followed her aunt into the kitchen, where Isabelle put up the kettle.

“I don’t want to keep that woman waiting,” Jet said.

“She’s waited twenty years for her husband to love her, she can wait another twenty minutes.”

When the tea was brewed they both sat down and had a cup.

“Taste familiar?” Isabelle asked.

“It’s what I had before.”

“You asked for caution but I gave you this. It was what you needed. And it’s what you have.”

Jet laughed and drank the rest of the tea. Was this what courage felt like?

“Once you forget a piece of your past, you forget it all. That’s not what you want, dear.”

Jet went to embrace her aunt, who was surprised by the unexpected show of emotion.

“I have a client,” Isabelle said. “Time for you to go.”

“Will her husband love her?”

“Would you want love you had to buy?” Isabelle asked.

Isabelle then called Charlie Merrill, who came in his old station wagon to give Jet a ride to the bus station. As they drove, Jet asked if he would take a detour. The cemetery gates were closed, but Charlie knew the trick to picking the lock with a screwdriver. He pushed the gates open for her and waited in his car, happy to listen to a basketball game on the radio.

It was nearly dark and Jet was glad she knew the way. She cut across the grass, luminous in the fading light. She was entitled to her memory and to this place.

Here lies the life I might have had once upon a time, the man I might have loved for all my life, the days we might have had.

Jet went to his headstone and knelt down. There were two bunches of daffodils. The Reverend hadn’t thrown hers away.

She lay down beside him once more, and this time she told him she would never forgive the world for taking him, but she had no choice but to go on. She was alive. She walked back in the pitch dark, glad she could see Charlie’s headlights cutting through the night.

“Everything all right?” Charlie Merrill said when she climbed back into the car. It smelled like cough drops and flannel.

Jet nodded. “I think I’ll go to the bus station now.”

He drove her there in time for the last bus. When he pulled over, Charlie handed her a paper bag. Inside was a small thermos and something wrapped in wax paper. “Your aunt sent along some tea. I think there’s some cake in there, too.”

Jet threw her arms around the old man, utterly surprising him.

“She’s a good lady,” he said, as if explaining her aunt to her. “Anyone who knows her knows that.”

He waited, his car idling, until the bus pulled away. It was likely Isabelle told him to do so, and he always did as she asked. His two boys had been heroin addicts; one was in prison by the time he was twenty, the other went half-mad with drugs. She’d fixed them both with one of those mixtures of hers. Afterward there’d been a knock at their door even though everyone knew Isabelle Owens didn’t call on people. She came to see the boys every night for two weeks, watching over his grown sons as if they were babies until they were well again. She charged him nothing for doing so. Now when his sons saw her on the street, or when they were working on her house and she looked in on them, the boys would elbow each other and stand up straight. They were still afraid of her even though she’d sat by their beds and fed them soup with a teaspoon.

So Charlie stayed and waved as Jet got on the bus, and Jet waved back, and when she realized she was starving and hadn’t eaten all day, she was glad to have the chocolate cake her aunt had sent along, and grateful to have been convinced that forgetting her loss would be worse than the loss itself. So she sat there remembering everything, from the beginning of her life to today. By the time she recalled the pale yellow of the daffodils she’d picked that morning, she had reached New York.

The announcement was in The New York Times on March 21, Franny’s birthday, a day that had always proved inauspicious. It was the unluckiest day of the year, but it was also the day to celebrate Ostara, the spring equinox, when eggshells must be scattered in a garden, for new growth and transformation is possible, even for those who consider themselves to be unfortunate.

Perhaps publishing on this date was an oversight; but whether intended or not, it had the effect of injuring Franny more fully than she already was. Vincent tried to hide it, he threw the Times in the trash, but Franny found it when she took the garbage out to the bin. It was opened to the engagement announcements, and there it was in her hands, an arrow to wound her.

Haylin Walker, son of Ethan and Lila Walker of New York and Palm Beach, is engaged to Emily Flood, daughter of Melville and Margot Flood of Hartford, Connecticut. The groom is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Medical School. The bride, a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Radcliffe College, is currently working at Talbots in Farmington, Connecticut.

Franny couldn’t read on. Not about how the groom’s father was the president of a bank and how his wife was on the board of the opera, not about how the bride-to-be’s parents were both doctors who raised boxer dogs that showed at the Westminster Kennel Club. Dating someone else was one thing, but this was marriage, this was the end of hope that it might ever be different between them.

Franny burned the newspaper in the fireplace. The smoke was gray and gave off the bitter scent of sulfur. Afterward, she propped open the windows, and yet her eyes continued to tear.

When Vincent came into the room there was still a gritty mist hanging in the air.

“Hay’s engaged,” Franny told her brother. “You shouldn’t have tried to hide it from me.”

“You should ignore it, Franny. How many years did you think he would wait for you? Ten? Twenty?”

“Shouldn’t he have waited?”

“Not when you told him to go away. People believe you when you say things like that. You never told him you loved him, did you?” Vincent held up his hands. “Do as you please.”

After he went upstairs, she did exactly that.

She phoned Haylin’s parents’ number, which she had memorized when she was ten years old. When a housekeeper she didn’t recognize picked up, Franny said she was calling about the engagement party. The housekeeper assumed she was a guest invited to the celebration that evening. Yes, yes, Franny said. What was the time? She had forgotten.

She wore her funeral dress, for her other clothes were all too casual. She slipped on a pair of her mother’s old stiletto heels bought in Paris. They were red, which made Franny feel her kinship with her mother anew.

The sky was a mottled pink and gray when she took a cab to Park and Seventy-Fourth Street. Her chest hurt when the cab pulled up at the Walkers’ address. Their apartment took up an entire floor. Tonight it glowed like a firefly. Franny went inside the building, following an older couple and taking the elevator with them so she might be considered a member of their party. “Such an exciting occasion,” the woman said to Franny.

“Yes,” Franny murmured in response. She had worn her brilliant hair twisted up so as not to call attention to herself, but she noticed the man staring at her shoes. Her mother’s red high heels. She kept her eyes downcast.

“And to think Ethan always feared his son would be a failure,” the woman went on. She was older but wore a Mary Quant miniskirt, along with a silk blouse and a long rope of pearls. The elevator opened directly into the apartment, and when it did Franny felt as though she were dropping back through time.

The party was crowded with guests, but otherwise it seemed exactly as it had when they were in grade school and Haylin had first brought her home, only after she had made a solemn promise not to tell anyone how he lived. It was after they had met in the lunchroom, when she had given him half of her tomato sandwich and he had eaten it without complaint, though it lacked salt and mayonnaise. The decor hadn’t changed since that time; the same pale pearly wool carpets, silk wall coverings, persimmon-colored sofas. Someone offered to take her coat.

“Oh, no thank you,” Franny said. “I’m cold.”

Indeed, she was shivering. She was out of place with or without her coat; nothing she had on seemed appropriate for this gathering. The women were in jewel-toned cocktail dresses, the men in well-tailored suits. Franny stayed on the edge of the huge formal parlor, where glasses of champagne were offered and hors d’oeuvres were served on polished trays. She thought she spied Emily through the crush, but there were so many tall, pretty young blond women she couldn’t be sure. There was a table littered with silver gifts. Platters, serving trays, candlesticks. Due to Franny’s presence, many of the smaller silver pieces tarnished and turned black. She walked away from the table, embarrassed by what witchery could do. She avoided the other guests, but she couldn’t hide from Haylin, who came up behind her and put a hand on the small of her back. She felt the heat of his touch through her coat. She tried to catch her breath.

“I couldn’t send you an invitation,” he said. “You never told me where you lived.”

He was in an expensive suit, his hair cut short. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him in a suit before. But it was still him, her dearest friend, no matter what he wore, no matter whom he had promised to marry.

There were spots of color on Franny’s cheeks and her hair had begun to unwind. She wanted to say, Run away with me. Now I know nothing else matters. I don’t care if we come to ruin.

In her black coat with her shining red hair, she was impossible to miss. From across the room, Haylin’s father spied her. He glared and gestured for his son to get rid of her.

“Let’s step outside.” Haylin led her to the elevator. He pushed the button for Lobby, but halfway down he stopped the elevator’s descent and drew Franny to him. In an unexpected show of intimacy he put his mouth against hers. It was so fast and intense nothing could stop what happened next. It didn’t matter where they were; it didn’t even take courage to do this. It was fate and they didn’t try to fight against it. Franny threw herself at him and Haylin didn’t stop her or himself, although by now Emily Flood was wondering where he’d gone, worrying because she’d seen a tall pale woman with red hair. She still had nightmares about Franny, for after Franny’s visit to the hospital, it had taken Emily months to win back Haylin’s affections. Don’t you see? she had told him. She’s never coming back to you. She doesn’t care or she would have come to Cambridge with you.

What Emily Flood had feared had come to pass. It all happened too fast and then they realized where they were and what they had done. Haylin backed away, pulling up his pants like a fool, pained by his own actions. He was not a disloyal man, yet he had just betrayed his fiancée. “I’m getting married,” he said, shaking his head as if puzzled by his own statement.

“I know. I read about it in The New York Times.” Franny tilted her chin up, ready to be hurt by whatever he would next say. She felt this was her last chance, and she was taking it.

“I have to marry her,” Hay told her.

“Do you hear yourself? Have to?”

Haylin groaned and said, “You always do this to me. You make me think I have a chance.”

The elevator alarm went off. Haylin did his best to stop it, but in the end he had to punch the up button for the sirens to subside. The elevator resumed, climbing back to the seventeenth floor. When the doors opened, Ethan Walker was there. Both Haylin and Franny blinked and looked guilty.

“I thought I made myself clear,” Haylin’s father said. “Get rid of her.”

Mr. Walker was utterly impossible to see into, closed as a locked vault. Franny, however, was completely transparent at this moment, a woman in love who had just been fucked in the elevator and clearly didn’t give a damn about anyone else’s feelings, certainly not those of the bride-to-be, who had gone off to lock herself in the bathroom to weep, terrified she had already lost Hay before he was hers.

“Don’t make an ass out of yourself,” Walker said to his son. “She dumped you and she’ll do it again. Do the right thing for once in your life.”

Franny saw the expression set on Hay’s face. When his father left them, she tugged on Hay’s sleeve. “Don’t listen to him. You never have before.”

Haylin looked at Franny. “It’s not about him, Franny. You know I don’t care about my father’s opinion. But all those years! You should have contacted me.”

“I didn’t want to ruin your life,” Franny explained.

Hay laughed bitterly. “But now you do?”

Franny recoiled, stung. “Is that what I’m doing?”

Hay appraised her coolly and she could see how she’d hurt him. “I don’t know, Franny. You tell me. Because I’m not sure I want my life ruined.” He shook his head, his confusion evident. “I keep thinking about when I was drowning and you didn’t come in after me. And when we were going to school together, and you didn’t come with me.”

“But you didn’t drown! And you did fine without me at school! But you resent me for everything. I see I shouldn’t have come.”

Franny hastened into the elevator, but Hay threw his arm across the door, making certain it wouldn’t close. “I couldn’t go through losing you again,” he said. “It killed me. It took me years to get over you.”

“But you did get over me. You found someone else. I didn’t.”

“Tell me you won’t walk away again and I’ll call the whole thing off.”

Franny took a step back, startled by his raw emotion.

“Tell me,” he demanded. “And I’ll do anything. I’ll hurt her if I have to.”

That was when Franny saw Emily. She had come to search for Hay and was watching them from the parlor. Franny lost her voice then, and felt the courage drain from her body. Who did she think she was to cause another woman such grief? Perhaps Emily was Haylin’s fate and Franny would only be interfering in what was meant to be.

“You still can’t make a promise to me,” Haylin said, and in that moment he let the elevator go.

On the street Franny hailed a cab. She rode along past the gates into the park she and Haylin used to walk through. Love had to happen without any certainty, the ultimate leap of faith. But Haylin now stood beside Emily Flood while Franny was headed downtown, weeping as she looked out at the world she had once known.

Once a month Jet went to Massachusetts. She told no one in her family, but they knew. Sometimes Franny packed her a lunch and left it on the kitchen table. A cucumber sandwich, some cookies, a green apple. Vincent often left out cash for the bus. She was grateful, but she never discussed her plans with them. She simply went early on the last Sunday morning of the month. When she got to town, she took the local taxi to the cemetery, and she always brought daffodils no matter the season. She sometimes stopped at the local grocery that sold flowers. Everyone knew who she was but treated her politely all the same. In the spring she walked to the cemetery, and she picked her own flowers, the ones that grew in the fields that were the color of butter.

Isabelle did not consider it rude that Jet didn’t stop in to see her, although once or twice she had spied her niece walking through town. One time in particular she’d happened to be going to the library when she noticed Jet standing in front of the Willards’ house. Maybe it was a good sign or maybe it wasn’t. Only time would tell. The Willard home was a white house with green shutters, more than two hundred years old, with a huge garden that had never regained its former glory once the Reverend had cast down salt on the day when April Owens blundered in, aiming to pick some of his pie-plate-size roses. Now the rosebushes were bare and the leaves curled up. The only things that grew here were daffodils, and Jet was surprised to see that there were hundreds of them.

There was an apple tree that Levi had told her about. He’d said he loved to climb the tree and pick crisp McIntosh apples, but now the bark of the tree was leathery and black, the boughs were twisted and bare. It hadn’t borne fruit for years.

Jet was leaning on the white fence looking up at the second-floor window where Levi’s room had been when the Reverend came out. He was putting out the trash, but he saw her and stopped. They looked at each other in the fading light.

“I’d like to see his room,” Jet said.

The Reverend no longer attended to any services. He didn’t attend to anything. He no longer watered or weeded his garden. The gutters on the house were sagging, and the roof needed work. There were two rocking chairs on the porch he never sat in. He didn’t want neighbors passing by to greet him or wish him well or ask him how he was faring. He looked at the Owens girl with the dark hair and her serious pale face with the scar on her cheek and then he signaled to her. He didn’t know what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all, but he watched her come into the yard and up the porch steps.

“I appreciate it,” she said. “Thank you.”

She followed the Reverend into the house and up the stairs. The carpeting was beige and the walls were white, but yellowing. There was the scent of mothballs and of coffee that had recently been brewed. No lights were turned on. The Reverend didn’t like to spend the money on electricity bills, plus he could see just fine until it was pitch dark. After dark he went to bed. Or he sat by his window, looking into the yard as if he could see back through time into the past. His wife had died much too young, of cancer, and maybe that was when everything started to go wrong. He was strict with his son, and he feared bad luck, and then it seemed he had brought it upon himself, and upon everyone near him.

“Watch your step,” he found himself saying, for the stairs were steep.

Once inside, the Reverend switched on a lamp. Jet had wanted to see Levi’s room ever since they’d met. Whenever they sat in the park he would describe it in the greatest of detail. The blue bedspread, the trophies he’d won on the swim team, photographs of his mother and father on a picnic out by the lake. The wallpaper was blue and white stripes, the rug was tweed. Jet stood in the doorway now. If she closed her eyes she could see him sitting on the bed, grinning at her, a book of poems in hand. Her eyes were brimming and hot.

“Unable are the Loved to die, for Love is Immortality,” Jet said, quoting Emily Dickinson.

When she opened her eyes the Reverend was standing beside her, crying. They stood together like that until the light changed, with bands of blue falling across the floor.

After a time, Jet followed him downstairs. He opened the screen door for her and they walked into the garden of daffodils. Everything else was black. Even the soil.

“I can drive you to the bus station,” the Reverend said.

“That’s okay, I like to walk.”

He nodded. He liked to walk, too.

“You can come by next time,” he said. When she looked at him, confused, he added, “I know you’re here every month. I see you at the cemetery, but I don’t want to disturb you. I know you want your time with him.”

Jet stood on the sidewalk and watched him walk back up the steps to the porch. The lamp had been left on in Levi’s room and it cast a yellow glow. Jet waved and then turned. She walked the long way to the bus station. She liked to walk through town, especially in the fading light. It brought her comfort to know that for more than three hundred years people in her family had been in this town, walking where she walked now. The next time she came she wouldn’t wear this black dress, which was too warm for the season. And she would come earlier in the day so she would have more time, because for the first time in a long time, she felt she had all the time in the world.

On June 28, 1969, the weather was hot, eighty-seven degrees, unusual for the time of year. New York City grew steamy, as if the heat rose from its core. On Christopher Street, between West Fourth and Waverly Place, the Stonewall, a restaurant that had originally been a stable, was burning from the inside out. The heat was trapped and it had to rise up. Organized crime ran it as a gay bar and everything about it was illegal. There was no liquor license and corrupt officials were handed enough cash to look the other way. Sometimes they did, but sometimes they chose not to despite the payoffs. There were raids and customers, including trans people, drag queens, and the young and the homeless, were beaten and humiliated and jailed, dragged onto the street, cuffed, bloodied, and facing a legal system that saw them as without rights.

Late on this particular night, Vincent was walking with his dog when he came upon a crowd that was growing by the minute. He could have gone in another direction, but he came this way. Later he would wonder if he knew, if he needed to see for himself who he was and where he belonged. He usually paid no attention to anyone when he walked his dog at night, as he would have paid no mind to the crowd, which had been growing in number ever since the brutal arrests, had the police not encircled the area.

Eight officers who had beaten customers were trapped inside, and when tactical forces arrived as backup, a riot began. Garbage cans and bricks were being used by the crowd to defend themselves. Vincent stood there, frozen. When confronted with the enormity of what was happening, the pure revolutionary action of standing up to be who you are, he was unable to move. Be yourself, his aunt had told him. Was this who he was, a man who feared to show himself? A rabbit? He could not have despised himself more at that instant.

“Why don’t you do something?” someone shouted.

One of the homeless kids from Christopher Park was being beaten, doing his best to protect his face with his hands. Before he could think, Vincent pushed the officer off. He concentrated and a hail of stones fell, scattering several of the officers. When the kid limped away, the officer went for Vincent, tackling him. Vincent toppled, his face hitting the cement. Harry was barking like mad, and would have attacked whoever came after him next, but Vincent gathered his wits and rose to his feet, calling the dog off. They ran down West Fourth Street, off the pavement, cutting off traffic. Vincent was bleeding, a gash down the left side of his skull.

He let the dog into the yard at 44 Greenwich before going to the ER at St. Vincent’s. For days afterward there were riots, and many of the wounded would be brought here. Vincent himself had a concussion and was in need of stitches, and there was the matter of his hand, which had bent backward during his fall. They sent an intern to take care of him.

“What have you done to yourself?” the tall rangy intern asked.

When Vincent gazed up he saw Haylin Walker, in his scrubs, a look of worry on his face.

“There’s a riot out there, Dr. Walker. I didn’t do this to myself.”

Haylin then recognized him. “You!” He threw an arm around Vincent so heartily Vincent winced in pain.

“Are you sure you’re a doctor?” Vincent asked.

Hay grinned. He still had the same easy smile he’d had at fifteen. “Pretty sure. I just got posted to a residency at Beth Israel.”

He was good at stitchery, and, because there were many other patients waiting for him on this day, extraordinarily fast. “There. Your looks won’t be ruined. What a mess today has been.” He got to work on a cast. “You may have trouble with this hand for a while.”

“I was lucky. It’s mayhem out there.”

Hay looked embarrassed, but he swallowed his pride to ask, “How’s Franny?”

“Considering you let her go, do you care?”

Hay gave Vincent a look, then took a moment to sit beside him on the gurney.

“Does anything turn out the way we want it to?”

Vincent got up, leaving Haylin to the line of patients waiting for him. “You want to be smart?” Vincent said before he went to check out. “Don’t waste time when there’s someone you love.”

When Vincent came home, Franny made him lie in bed with an ice pack on his skull.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” Vincent explained, but the night had done something to him, and, in fact, he no longer felt as alone in this life. He was part of something bigger than himself. All the same, he wanted to protect William. “Do not call him,” he told Franny. “He’s out at Sag Harbor with his family. I don’t want him to worry.”

But William had the sight, and knew something was amiss. When he turned on the news the riots were on every channel. He came the next morning, driving his father’s old Jeep, parking illegally, pounding at the door. Franny let him in and he paced in the parlor while she told him what had happened. He was already damning himself for not being a part of it.

He went upstairs and knocked at Vincent’s door. When there was no reply he said, “I’m not taking no for an answer.”

Vincent came to the door, his appearance shocking. William embraced him, then stepped back to take a better look. “We’re getting out of the city,” he said.

He found Vincent’s suitcase and began packing.

“Why go?” Vincent said. “We can’t escape from who we are.”

“Of course not. Why would we want to do that?”

Vincent laughed, for he agreed. “We wouldn’t.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Vincent. Because I certainly don’t wish to be anyone other than who I am and I don’t wish to deny it. I’m taking you to see someone who had to do that all his life.”

“Who’s that?” Vincent asked.

William opened the bedroom door. It was time for them to leave.

“My father.”

They went to the town of Sag Harbor, where William’s family had a home dating back hundreds of years. The house had been a summer place, a ramshackle wood-shingled building with huge porches that overlooked the glassy sea and the shoreline of Shelter Island. But it had been insulated and a heating system had been put in. Now William’s father lived there year-round. He was tall and Vincent saw that William resembled him in many ways, not just in his appearance, but also in his calm demeanor, which belied a passionate heart.

“William used to row out to the island in storms just to see if he could. He went in a hurricane once, despite my warning. He wasn’t one to ever back down.” William’s father had been waiting for them at the far end of a great green lawn. He embraced William, and then embraced Vincent as well, extremely happy for their company. “My son has always been brave and he reveals that to all who know him. I’ve always envied him this quality, for it escaped me completely.”

They cut across the lawn, then walked down a lane past a small cemetery, where the Grants had always been buried, the first being Everett Rejoice Grant, who had died in 1695. Family mattered to the Grants. William had been an only child, but that had been made up for by scores of cousins and friends. William’s mother had an apartment in New York, and stayed there year-round, but she came out to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family, despite having a separate life from her husband.

It was a clear, bright, beautiful day, the air tinged with salt, the climbing roses blooming. The graveyard was filled with sunlight.

Retired now, Alan Grant had been at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan for nearly thirty years. All the while William was growing up, his father didn’t come home until late, sometimes not until nine or ten, and then he would sit up even later, files spread out over the dining room table. He got lost in his work, and often forgot his family. Those days, however, were long gone. Today he had set out lunch for his guests on a porch that overlooked the sea. There were oysters and a salad and white wine. There were roses in a milky vase in the center of the table on a white lace cloth that had belonged to William’s great-grandmother.

“I hear you were there at the riots,” Mr. Grant said. “My darling son has always thought he could win over everything nature set before him, and I admire his attitude. We must fight against bigotry in all its forms, for it is prejudice that ruins a society.”

“So says the DA,” William said, clearly proud of his father.

“I’m proud of you, too,” Mr. Grant said, toasting Vincent.

Vincent was abashed. “Me? I did nothing. I just stumbled into it and managed to get myself beat up.”

“It’s more than that. I’m proud you can be honest about who you are.”

“Well, it’s recent, believe me.”

“I have every cause to believe you, especially because you are with my son. He knows truth when he sees it.”

After lunch, Vincent and William walked down to the shoreline. The beach was rocky, covered with small mossy stones at low tide. Out in the water there was a blue heron that looked like Edgar, the stuffed bird in the shop. Herons mate for life, and Vincent thought this was a good sign, and an even better sign that Mr. Grant had seemed to like him.

“My father felt he had to hide the fact that he was homosexual. My mother knew, of course, and they had their arrangement, but at work and in the larger world, he couldn’t have anyone know. It would have likely meant his job and would have left him open to blackmail, which he paid off once or twice. It was not a way to live, and it took a toll. On all of us, but especially on him. We loved him, but he despised himself, so it made for rocky going sometimes.”

Vincent recounted the story his aunt had told about their cousin Maggie, who, having denied who she was, was turned into a rabbit. “That clearly didn’t happen to your father.”

“No. In spite of all of us, he managed to have quite a life of his own. He’s no rabbit. He’s a fox.”

They both laughed.

“Well, so are you,” Vincent said.

“He taught me what to be and what not to be and I’m grateful that I live in this time, now, with you. It’s far from perfect but it’s not what my father went through. He was the one that was usually out rowing, if you really want to know, not me, and sometimes I feared he wouldn’t come back. That he’d just keep going until he reached a place where he could be happy. Or happier. He took on the worst cases, murder, rape, because he wanted to change the world in his own way, but also because he needed to fight, and he couldn’t fight for himself. That’s one of the attributes that first attracted me to you. You’re a fighter.”

“Am I?” Vincent said.

“You’ll see. When the time comes. You’ll fight for the life you want.”

After walking for a while, they stopped by a tide pool, and took off their shoes, and then, as if having the same thought at the same time, they undressed and raced into the water, whooping, for it was cold as ice. Vincent was alive, more alive than he’d ever imagined he’d be. He dove into the water and everything was green. His mind was clear and cold. His heart pounded in his chest. He was caught up in the water, but he knew he couldn’t drown. All the same, William reached for him and steadied him, then pulled him out of the tide.

“You’re mad,” William said. “There’s a current.”

“It doesn’t matter to us.”

Vincent threw his arms around William. He dared to think that at last he was truly happy. He looked out to Shelter Island. He had the urge to swim for it, to try something impossible, for everything he’d done up to this time seemed selfish and small.

“You matter more than anything to me,” William said.

Vincent shook his head. “You think too highly of me.”

“I know exactly who you are,” William responded. “Just as I always knew who my father was. And I loved him, not despite it, but because of it, the way that I love you because of who you are.”

One still night, people happened upon a deer lying on the ground in Washington Square Park. No one knew where it had come from, although there were said to be deer in the Bronx and perhaps this one had come down along the riverside. It was an albino deer, said to bring bad luck. It was curled up beside a wooden bench, and the next morning all the children in the neighborhood came to see it. There it still was, sleeping in the park, and even children who didn’t believe in fairy tales found themselves believing. They stood on the concrete paths, in awe of the woodland creature. It was so silent and it didn’t seem the least bit afraid. The children left hay and grass, and a few brought other offerings: sugar, blankets, sweet herbs.

For many it was a time when miraculous things happened every day. This past summer, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had been the first people to reach the moon, on Apollo 11, landing in the Sea of Tranquility. It seemed the distance between earth and the stars and planets was growing smaller, and perhaps the world, that floating blue orb, could be better than it had ever been. But there was no peace to come; instead there was unrest in cities that were brutal and brutally hot. In the park there were swarms of bees, so many that Franny took to wearing a scarf when she sat beneath the Hangman’s Elm. She brought the deer a bowl of cool water, but it refused to drink. She could see in its eyes that it had given up.

Sometime in the night, someone shot the deer with a bow and arrow, as if hunting season had been declared in Manhattan. People were outraged and a sit-in began, with many of the protesters the same children who had tried their best to save the deer. The mayor took up the cause and a collection was raised so the deer could be buried on the grounds of the Cloisters.

For days after the murder of the deer, there was a trail of blood on the concrete path where the poor creature had last lain. Near that place the children of PS 41 planted a rosebush one murky afternoon. It bloomed overnight with masses of white flowers, though the blooms were out of season. It was a miracle, everyone said, and some were satisfied, but to anyone with the sight there was still a sense of doom in the park. Franny stopped going to Washington Square. Instead, she sat shivering in their own small garden and she waited for whatever was bound to happen when a white deer appears, when white roses bloom overnight, when bees follow you home to nest in your rooftop.

It didn’t happen until October. A letter arrived at 44 Greenwich on a Sunday afternoon, a time when mail wasn’t delivered. There was no stamp and no return address, but the cream-colored stationery and the slanted handwriting were instantly recognizable. The missive was addressed only to Franny.

“Aren’t you the lucky one?” Vincent said drily. He had stopped by for coffee, as he often did in the morning when William left to teach his classes.

Franny looked at the envelope on the floor by the mail slot. She had no urge to retrieve it, in fact she had gone quite cold with dread. In the end, Jet was the one to get the letter. She looked at her sister and Franny nodded. “You open it.”

Wren hopped on Jet’s lap as she sat down to inspect the envelope. When the cat batted a paw at the letter there was the thrum of a bee.

“Better take it outside,” Jet suggested to Franny. “It’s addressed to you, after all.”

Franny went out to the rickety back porch. The city smelled like possibility and corned beef hash. Franny used a dull knife to slit open the envelope, then watched as a bee rose into the cloudy air. The last time they’d seen bees they had portended a death.

The note inside was brief.

Come today.

Isabelle did not often make requests, and when she did it was best to comply. So Susanna Owens had believed and so her daughter did as well. Franny packed a suitcase and took the bus to Massachusetts within the hour. Jet had packed her a lunch, a tomato sandwich and a green apple and a thermos of Travel Well Tea, composed of orange peel, black tea, mint, and rosemary. Riding through the lush New England countryside, Franny thought of the first summer they’d come to visit, when Haylin wrote letters every day. She thought she could have what she wanted; she thought she could see the world from above, as if it were a distant blue ball whose sorrows had nothing to do with her. She had wanted to be a bird, but now she knew, as she looked out the window to see Lewis following, that even birds are chained to earth by their needs and desires.

There was a chill in the air and Franny wore her mother’s ember spring coat and tall lace-up black boots, along with jeans and a shirt that had been Vincent’s castoff. She had an awful feeling in the pit in her stomach. A one-line message was never good. It meant there was no recourse to something that had gone wrong. For what you can fix, there are a hundred remedies. For what cannot be cured, not even words will do.

To Franny it seemed that nothing had changed when she walked toward Magnolia Street, except that the Russells were no longer in residence. The house had been painted and two unfamiliar girls played in the front yard. Franny stopped and leaned over the fence, curious.

“What happened to the family before you?” she asked.

“They were stinkers,” one of the girls said.

“We had to burn sage in all the rooms,” the older of the two sisters confided. She was all of ten. “Bad karma. We got the sage from the mean old lady at the end of the street.”

Isabelle.

“What made her mean?” Franny asked.

“She always wore black and a pair of old boots,” the older sister said. The girls suddenly stopped their play and looked at Franny more carefully. Her black coat, her boots, her blood-red hair piled atop her head. “Oh,” both sisters said thoughtfully.

The girls’ mother came to the door with a skeptical expression. “Lunch,” she called, clapping her hands. When the girls skittered into the house their mother walked onto the porch, hands on her hips, eyes fixed on Franny. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Franny detected a stain on the porch beneath the gray paint. Crimson. She felt her face grow flushed. She knew what it was and it didn’t bode well. “What happened to Mrs. Russell?”

“Are you a relative?”

Sometimes the truth was the best way to find out more of the truth. “I’m Franny Owens. I think you got some sage from my aunt.”

The neighbor continued to be wary. “What if I did?”

“If you did, I’m glad she could help you.” The woman relented and came a little closer. She no longer seemed quite as guarded, so Franny went on. “Mrs. Russell was involved with my brother,” she explained. “So I just wondered.”

“Well, it’s a good thing he wasn’t around when it happened. Her husband? He was kind of a mild-mannered guy? He murdered her. I take it she had all kinds of improper flirtations. We got a great price on the house because of the crime, but I’ve had to go to your aunt half a dozen times to try to rid the place of her aura. It still smells of burning rubber in the basement.”

“Try some lavender sachets. Put them in every room and bury one under this porch.”

“Frankly, it’s good you’re here,” the neighbor confided. “Your aunt hasn’t had the porch light on for weeks. People in town are a bit worried about her, but we all know she values her privacy.”

Franny thanked the neighbor and walked on. October was such a tricky month. Today, for instance, it was as chilly as wintertime, but the sun was bright. The weather report predicted that the following day would be in the sixties. Vines snaking around the old house were still green, but there were no leaves, only thorns. When Franny went through the gate she noted the garden hadn’t been put to bed as it usually was at this time of year. The beds had not been raked, tender plants had not been taken into the greenhouse, where they would winter over in the faint sunshine. The new neighbor had been correct: the porch light, always turned on to let those in need of a remedy know they were welcome to call, burning for more than three hundred years, was turned off. Moths caught inside the glass dome were fluttering about helplessly.

Finding the door unlatched, Franny shoved it open. Colder inside than out. A sign of a passing over to come. Franny kept her coat on. Her throat tightened as she walked through the house, the echo of her heels clattering on the wooden floor. There were dishes in the sink, unwashed, and dust glazed the furniture. Isabelle was always meticulous to a fault. Now there were ashes in the fireplace. Herbal encyclopedias were scattered over her bed. There was one book of poems, a present from Jet one Yule. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Franny came to see that the back door had been left open. A beetle squatted on the threshold. Deathwatch beetles are wood borers; they can be heard in the rafters calling for mates and there was a call from somewhere inside the ceiling. There was nothing Franny could do about the beetle hiding in the attic, but she stepped on this one and crushed it flat, then went on to the garden. The lilacs were bare but she swore she could smell their scent. If there are lilacs, her aunt had told her once as they’d worked in the garden, there will be luck. The spindly plant in the backyard of 44 Greenwich was one of the reasons she’d decided it was the right house for them.

She went on to the greenhouse, thinking of the night she learned to make black soap, and in doing so learned who she was. The door was ajar and she peered inside. There was Aunt Isabelle sitting in a wicker chair.

“You received my note,” Isabelle said when Franny came to her, her voice a dry rasp. Her skin was sallow and she was clearly chilled to the bone, for she wore a sweater, a coat, and a shawl. Still she trembled. “I won’t play games with you. It’s pancreatic cancer. One can’t escape every evil under the sun.”

Franny sank onto the wicker ottoman and took her aunt’s hands in her own. Her emotions swelled into panic. “Is there no cure?”

“Not yet.” Isabelle was honest above all things, a trait Franny admired. It was an important rule. Nature could be shifted, but not controlled. “Not for me,” Isabelle said. “But, darling, you can cure yourself. I wanted to make certain I spoke to you about this matter right away.”

Franny smiled softly. It was so like her aunt to worry about her when she was the one who was dying. “I have no disease.”

“You will,” Isabelle said. “Unless you love someone.”

Franny bent to rest her head on her aunt’s knees. “You know I can’t. It’s not possible in our family.”

“Maria Owens did what she did for a reason. She was young and she thought damning anyone who loved us would protect us. But what she had with that terrible man wasn’t love. She didn’t understand that when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse, it’s what life is, my girl. We all come to ruin, we turn to dust, but whom we love is the thing that lasts.”

“Maybe I’m afraid of love,” Franny admitted. “It’s too powerful.”

“You?” Isabelle scoffed. “Who chose courage? You’re stronger than you know. Which is why I’m leaving you what matters most. The book.”

Franny raised her head, touched by her aunt’s generosity. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “Can we change what’s happening to you? You once said that just as anything whole can be broken, anything broken can be put back together again.”

Isabelle shook her head. “Everything except for this. Death is its own circle.”

“How long do you have?” she asked her aunt.

“Ten days.”

Then and there they began the work that would take ten days to complete. They shielded the furniture from daylight and dust by laying down white sheets. They made soap out in the garden, the best batch that had ever been prepared. If used once a week it could take years off a person’s appearance. They wrapped the portrait of Maria Owens in brown paper and string for storage, then put bay leaves and cloves in the closets to keep moths away. They telephoned Charlie Merrill, who could be trusted to keep their business private, and had him exterminate the attic and the rafters to rid the house of beetles. Before he left, they asked him to fashion a plain pine coffin and to please do so quickly. He stood there, blinking, choked up and not knowing quite what to say to Miss Owens.

“I can’t do that,” he said, distraught.

“Of course you can. And I’ll appreciate it, just as I’ve appreciated all of your hard work over the years,” Isabelle told him.

She handed him a check for ten thousand dollars, since she had been underpaying him for fifty years, and when he protested she simply wouldn’t hear anything more.

“We have too much to do to argue,” she said and off she and Franny went to the pharmacy, where they ordered hot fudge sundaes with marshmallow cream at the soda fountain.

“Much too fattening,” Aunt Isabelle said. Her hand shook each time she lifted the spoon.

“But we don’t care,” Franny said, though she had noticed that Isabelle was only taking small bites and that her silver sundae cup was overflowing with melted ice cream.

They saw to all of their chores, readying the house and the garden, and on the eighth day, when Aunt Isabelle could barely walk, they had Charlie take them to the law firm in Boston that the Owens family had always used. There a will was taken from a file. It had been drawn up after Franny had come to spend the summer. Isabelle now confided that she had known right then. Franny was the next in line.

Once they’d been ushered into a private office, they sat in oxblood-red leather chairs facing the lawyer, Jonas Hardy, a young man with sad, moody eyes. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all worked for the Owenses. He shyly addressed Franny. “You are the trustee for your brother and sister when it comes to the house, in which you have equal shares. Everything else, however, goes directly to you. That includes all belongings: furniture, dishes, silver. There is a trust used to manage the house, so you never have to worry about taxes or upkeep. But you can never sell the house, you understand.”

“Of course she understands,” Isabelle said. “She’s not a nincompoop.”

Franny signed the necessary papers, then they had tea and sugar cookies.

“Your aunt gave me this tea when I first met her,” Jonas Hardy said. “She sends a box here to the office every year.” He lifted his cup. “Thank you, Miss Owens!”

Franny took a sip. Courage.

They all shook hands when the papers had been signed and the tea had been drained to the last drop, and then Franny and her aunt got into Charlie’s waiting car, and they navigated the bumpy streets of Boston, which had been cow paths when Maria Owens first came to set up the initial trust for her daughter and her granddaughter and all the daughters to follow. Aunt Isabelle rested her head back and dozed. She woke once when they hit a pothole and was clearly disoriented. “Is this New York?”

“No. We’re going home,” Franny assured her.

When they arrived at Magnolia Street, Franny brought her aunt into the house and up to bed. She helped Isabelle undress and gently pulled her nightgown over her head. Her aunt was still shivering, so Franny found some wool socks and a knitted shawl. She brought in a basin of warm water and used a soft washcloth to clean her aunt’s face and hands with black soap. In the morning she phoned Jet and Vincent and told them to come. They rented a car and arrived on the afternoon of the ninth day, having sped along the Mass Pike at ninety miles an hour, fearing that time was against them. They trooped into the house and, without bothering to remove their coats, came to sit at the foot of Isabelle’s bed. They were all silent, too dazed for any emotion. All three had been half convinced Aunt Isabelle would live forever. What was happening seemed impossible. Things ended, and then they began again, only they would begin without Isabelle.

A sparrow darted inside the house and flew around the room. Franny fetched a stepladder from the linen closet, climbed up, and held out her hand. “Don’t come back here on Midsummer’s Eve,” she told the bird. “There won’t be anyone here to rescue you.”

Because there was a wind from the north, and their aunt’s condition was precarious, Franny took the sparrow down to the stairwell landing so she could pry open the green glass above the window seat. She watched as the bird lifted into the air. When she turned she was stunned. Her aunt was beside her.

“How did you get here? Let me help you back to bed,” Franny said.

“I want to give you this.” There on the velvet seat cushion was Maria Owens’s sapphire. Franny had read about it in Maria’s journal, the jewel her lover had given to her. “Wear it and your heart will come back to you. Do it now.”

Because her aunt was so insistent, Franny slipped on the necklace, tucking it under her blouse. It was surprisingly warm.

Jet came to the top of the stairs and called to Franny. “Hurry. She’s failing.”

“No. She’s right here.” But when Franny looked there was no one beside her. She ran upstairs, where her aunt signaled for her to come near. Franny went to her bedside and knelt down beside her.

“Oh, dear aunt,” Franny said. “I have so many more things I want to discuss with you. You can’t go now.”

“I don’t make all the decisions, you know,” Isabelle managed to say. “I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate.”

Vincent had edged closer to the door. His face was ashen. It was an awful sight to see such a strong woman become so weak, like a moth folding up on itself. “I don’t know if I can stay,” he murmured.

“You’ll stay,” Franny told him. “We owe her that and more.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Isabelle managed to say.

Franny patted her arm. “Don’t exert yourself,” she urged their aunt.

Isabelle had very little energy. She gestured for Franny to lean in as she spoke her last words. No one heard but Franny, for the message was a final gift, and one that brought Franny to tears.

When Isabelle sighed, the last of her breath rose to the ceiling, then followed the path of the sparrow, into the hallway, down the stairs, out the window. By then the house was dark. Somehow night had fallen. It was after midnight. The tenth day. Time had passed so quickly they hadn’t even noticed.

The sisters washed their aunt with warm water and black soap, then dressed her in white. They went down to the garden, where the night was starry and clear. Later, Charlie came with his sons to carry their aunt down from her room in the coffin. She was taken in their van to the old cemetery where the children’s parents had been buried. They knew she didn’t want any fanfare, therefore no service was held. They sent a telegram to April in California, and to the Owenses in Maine, and to the ones in Boston, with the date and time of Isabelle Owens’s death. Contributions in her name could be made to the town library. Charlie’s two sons, who had been cured of drug addiction and thievery by Isabelle Owens, and who’d always been afraid to look her in the eye, wept as they lowered the coffin. Jet had phoned April when they’d learned Isabelle had taken ill, and April had sent a huge flower arrangement of white roses and ferns. Jet gave the blessing from the book of poems she had given her aunt.

In this short Life

That only lasts an hour

How much—how little—is

Within our power.

“She was a good woman,” Charlie said.

Vincent insisted on refilling the grave himself. He stripped off his black jacket and his boots and socks, then labored, digging, until he was sweating through his white shirt. He’d brought along a bottle of whiskey, and they all toasted to the memory of Isabelle Owens.

When Franny told her brother and sister they had inherited the house, all three knew they needed to return to Manhattan. As they were bound not to sell the property they would let it stand empty. Franny hired Charlie to be the caretaker, to make certain that no one vandalized the house in the absence of any tenants, and ensure that vines or roots which might disturb the plumbing or the foundation be cleared away. When they returned to the house, Franny gave Charlie the chickens, and said they might be reclaimed someday, but until then he was entitled to all the eggs they would lay.

When the Merrills had gone, Jet came to stand beside her sister. They looked out at the garden, which had now turned to straw. Isabelle had done all of the autumn planting, but she wouldn’t see anything bloom in the spring. “What did she say to you at the end?” Jet asked. She’d been wondering ever since their aunt had whispered something that had brought Franny to tears.

“She said you and I should share the Grimoire. She said the sight would come back to you.”

A blister arose on Franny’s tongue as she spoke. Ever since she and Jet had shared a room, they had shared all that they had, but the one thing Franny wanted to keep for herself was her aunt’s last words.

Jet took her sister’s hand. “You were her favorite.”

It was true. Early that morning Franny had found a card Isabelle had left under her pillow. If there be a cure, seek till you find it. If there be none, never mind it.

Today everything smelled earthy, the rich scent of mulch and decaying leaves and roots. It was an ending and a beginning, for the month itself was like a gate. October began as a golden hour and ended with Samhain, the day when the worlds of the living and the dead opened to each other. There was no choice but to walk through the gate of time. Franny had already packed up her suitcase and carried the Grimoire with her. The book, and all it contained, was now theirs.

While they waited for Vincent to shower and change, the sisters took a final inventory of the house. They found the keys to the front door in the silverware drawer, and Isabelle’s bankbook in the vegetable bin. They packed up the remedies stowed in the cabinets into several boxes that would fit neatly in the trunk of the rented car.

The sisters sat in the shade of the arbor beside the shed. Wisteria grew here in spring and spread out like a canopy; grapes twisted along the structure in late summer. The town was sleepy, but without Aunt Isabelle’s presence it was empty as far as Franny and Jet were concerned. They were tempted to uncover the black mirror in the greenhouse and take one last peek at the future, but they restrained themselves. Instead, they crammed the car with belongings, locked the front door, and cut down an armful of bare lilac branches to take with them before latching the gate. What the future would be was yet to be discovered. As for the past, they already knew it too well.