Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman (4)

LEVITATION

ALWAYS keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don’t think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year. It is the season of reversals, when the birds no longer sing in the morning and the evenings are made up of equal parts golden light and black clouds. The rock-solid and the tenuous can easily exchange places until everything you know can be questioned and put into doubt.

On especially hot days, when you’d like to murder whoever crosses you, or at least give him a good slap, drink lemonade instead. Go out and buy a first-rate ceiling fan. Make certain never to step on one of the crickets that may have taken refuge in a dark corner of your living room, or your luck will change for the worse. Avoid men who call you Baby, and women who have no friends, and dogs that scratch at their bellies and refuse to lie down at your feet. Wear dark glasses; bathe with lavender oil and cool, fresh water. Seek shelter from the sun at noon.

It is Gideon Barnes’s intention to ignore August completely and sleep for four weeks, refusing to wake up until September, when life is settled and school has already begun. But less than a week into this difficult month, his mother informs him that she’s getting married, to some guy Gideon has been only dimly aware of.

They’ll be moving several miles down the Turnpike, which means that Gideon will be going to a new school, along with the three new siblings he’ll meet at a dinner his mother is giving next weekend. Afraid of what her son’s reaction might be, Jeannie Barnes has put this announcement off for some time, but now that she’s told him, Gideon only nods. He thinks it over while his mother nervously waits for a response, and finally he says, “Great, Mom. I’m happy for you.”

Jeannie Barnes can’t believe she’s heard correctly, but she doesn’t have time to ask Gideon to repeat himself, because he ducks into his room and thirty seconds later he’s gone. He’s out of there, pronto, just as he’s going to be in five years, only then it will be for real. Then he’ll be at Berkeley or UCLA, instead of racing down the Turnpike, desperate to be gone. He’s driven by instinct; there’s no need to think, because inside he knows where he wants to be. He arrives at Kylie’s house less than ten minutes later, drenched with sweat, and finds her sitting on an old Indian bedspread under the crab apple tree, drinking a glass of iced tea. They haven’t seen each other since Kylie’s birthday, yet when Gideon looks at her she is unbelievably familiar. The arch of her neck, her shoulders, her lips, the shape of her hands, Gideon sees all this and his throat goes dry. He must be an idiot to feel this way, but there’s nothing he can do. He doesn’t even know if he can manage to speak.

It is so hot the birds aren’t flying, so humid not a single bee can rise into the air. Kylie is startled to see Gideon; the ice cube she’s been crunching on drops out of her mouth and slides down her knee. She pays no attention to it. She doesn’t notice the plane flying above, or the caterpillar making its way across the bedspread, or the fact that her skin feels even hotter than it did a minute ago.

“Let’s see how fast I can put you in check,” Gideon says. He has his chessboard with him, the old wooden one his father gave him on his eighth birthday.

Kylie bites down on her lip, considering. “Ten bucks to the winner,” she says.

“Sure.” Gideon grins. He has shaved his head again, and his scalp is as smooth as a stone. “I could use the cash.”

Gideon flops down on the grass beside Kylie, but he can’t quite bring himself to look at her. She may think this is just a game they’re about to play, but it’s much more. If Kylie doesn’t go for the jugular, if she doesn’t pull out all her best moves, he’ll know they’re not friends anymore. He doesn’t want it to be that way, but if they can’t be their true selves with each other, they might as well walk away now.

This sort of test can make a person nervous, and it’s not until Kylie is considering her third move that Gideon has the guts to look at her. Her hair isn’t as blond as it was. Maybe she dyed it, or maybe the blond stuff washed out; it’s a pretty color now, like honey.

“Looking at something?” Kylie says when she catches him staring.

“Die,” Gideon says, and he moves his bishop.

He takes her glass of iced tea and gulps some of it down, the way he used to do when they were friends.

“My sentiments exactly,” Kylie says right back.

She has a big smile on her face and her chipped tooth shows. She knows what he’s thinking, but then, who wouldn’t? He’s about as transparent as a piece of glass. He wants it all to be the same and all to have changed. Well, who doesn’t? The difference between him and Kylie is that she already knows they can’t have it both ways, whereas Gideon still hasn’t a clue.

“I missed you.” Kylie’s voice is offhand.

“Yeah, right.” When Gideon looks up he sees that she’s staring at him. Quickly, he shifts his gaze to the place where the lilacs used to grow. There are only some twiggy-looking things with black bark. On each twig is a row of tiny thorns so sharp even the ants don’t dare to come near.

“What the hell happened to your yard?” Gideon asks.

Kylie looks over at the branches. They’re growing so quickly they’ll reach the height of a good-sized apple tree before long. But for now they seem harmless, just wispy shoots of brambles. It’s so easy to ignore what grows in one’s own garden; look away for too long and anything can turn up—a vine, a weed, a hedge of thorns.

“My mom cut the lilacs down. Too much shade.” Kylie bites down harder on her lip. “Check.”

She’s taken Gideon by surprise, moving a pawn he hadn’t paid much attention to. She’s got him surrounded, allowing him one last turn out of kindness before she moves in for the kill.

“You’re going to win,” Gideon says.

“That’s right,” Kylie says. The expression on his face makes her feel like crying, but she’s not going to lose on purpose. She just can’t do that.

Gideon makes the only move he can—sacrificing his queen—but it’s not enough to save him, and when Kylie puts him in checkmate, he salutes her. This is what he wanted, but he’s all confused anyway.

“Do you have the ten with you?” Kylie asks, even though she couldn’t care less.

“Over at my place,” Gideon says.

“We don’t want to go there.”

On this they both agree. Gideon’s mother never leaves them alone, she’s constantly asking if they want something to eat or drink; maybe she figures if she leaves them alone for a second they’ll find themselves in big trouble.

“You can owe me until tomorrow,” Kylie says. “Bring it over then.”

“Let’s just go for a walk,” Gideon suggests. He looks at her then, finally. “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

Kylie pours the rest of the iced tea on the grass and leaves the old bedspread where it is. She doesn’t care if Gideon isn’t like anyone else. He has so much energy and so many ideas percolating inside his head that a band of orange light rises off him. There’s no point being afraid to see people for who they really are, because every once in a while you see into someone like Gideon. Deception and dishonesty are alien to him; sooner or later he’ll have to take a crash course in the ABCs of bullshit to ensure that he won’t get eaten alive out in the world he’s so anxious to get into.

“My mom’s getting married to some guy, and we’re moving to the other side of the Turnpike.” Gideon coughs once, as if something had stuck in his throat. “I’ve got to switch schools. Lucky me. I get to matriculate with an entire building full of shit-eating imbeciles.”

“School doesn’t matter.” Kylie scares herself when she gets so sure of things. Right now, for instance, she is absolutely certain Gideon won’t find a better friend than the one he’s found in her. She’d bet her savings on it, and still be willing to add her clock radio and the bracelet Gillian gave her for her birthday into the bargain.

They’ve begun to walk down the street, in the direction of the YMCA field.

“Where I go to school doesn’t matter?” Gideon is pleased and he doesn’t know quite why. Maybe it’s just that Kylie doesn’t seem to think they’ll see each other any less—that’s what he hopes she believes. “You’re sure about that?”

“Positive,” Kylie tells him. “One hundred percent.”

When they get to the field they’ll find shade and green grass and they’ll have time to think things over. For a moment, as they turn the corner, Kylie has the feeling that she should stay in her own yard. She looks back at the house. By morning they’ll be gone, on their way to the aunts’. They’ve tried to talk Gillian into coming along, but she simply refuses.

“You couldn’t pay me to go. Well, I’d agree to do it for a million bucks, but nothing less.” That’s what she’s told them. “And even then you’d have to break both my kneecaps so I couldn’t leap out of the car and run away. You’d have to anesthetize me, maybe perform a lobotomy, and I’d still recognize the street and jump out the window before you pulled up to the house.”

Although the aunts have no idea that Gillian is east of the Rockies, Kylie and Antonia both insist they’ll be devastated when they discover how near Gillian is and that she chose not to visit.

“Believe me,” Gillian tells the girls, “the aunts won’t care if I’m there or not. They didn’t then and they certainly wouldn’t now. They’ll say, ‘Gillian who?’ if you mention my name. I’ll bet they don’t remember what I look like. We could probably pass on the street and be nothing more than strangers. Do not worry about the aunts and me. Our relationship is just what we want it to be—absolute and utter zero, and we like it that way. ”

And so tomorrow they’ll be leaving for vacation without Gillian. They’ll fix a picnic lunch of cream cheese and olive sandwiches, pita pockets stuffed with salad, Thermoses filled with lemonade and iced tea. They’ll pack up the car the way they do every August, and get on the highway before seven, to avoid traffic. Only this year Antonia has vowed she will cry all the way to Massachusetts. She’s already confided to Kylie that she doesn’t know what she’ll do when Scott goes back to Cambridge. She’ll probably spend most of her time studying, since she needs to get into a school somewhere in the Boston area, Boston College, maybe, or, if she can get her grades up, Brandeis. On the trip to the aunts’ she’ll insist on stopping at rest areas to buy postcards, and after they’ve settled into the aunts’ house she plans to spend every morning lying on a scratchy wool blanket set out in the garden. She’ll rub sunscreen on her shoulders and legs, then she’ll get to work, and when Kylie looks over at the message her sister is writing to Scott she’ll see I love you scrawled a dozen different times.

This year, Gillian will wave good-bye to them from the front porch, if she isn’t already moved in to Ben Frye’s house by then. She’s been moving in slowly, afraid that Ben will go into shock when he realizes she has a zillion and one bad habits; it won’t take long before he notices that she never rinses out her cereal bowls or bothers to make the bed. Sooner or later he’ll discover that the ice cream is always disappearing from the freezer because Gillian is feeding it to Buddy as a special treat. He’ll see that Gillian’s sweaters often are crumpled into balls of wool and chenille on the floor of a closet or under the bed. And if Ben grows disgusted, if he should decide to kick her out, say good-bye, rethink his options, well, then let him. There’s no marriage license and no commitment, and Gillian wants to keep it like that. Options, that’s what she’s always wanted. A way out.

“I want you to understand one thing,” she’s told Kylie. “You’re still my favorite kid. In fact, if I’d had a daughter I would have wanted her to be you.”

Kylie was so stricken by love and admiration that she almost felt guilty enough to admit that she’d been the one who’d had all those anchovy pizzas delivered to Ben’s house, back when she’d felt so betrayed; she’d been the one who’d put ashes in Gillian’s shoes. But some secrets are best kept to oneself, particularly when they cover up a silly act of childish pique. So Kylie said nothing, not even about how much she would miss Gillian. She hugged her aunt and then helped load up another box of clothes to haul over to Ben’s place.

“More clothes!” Ben held a hand to his forehead as though his closets couldn’t stand any more additions, but Kylie could see how delighted he was. He reached into the box and pulled out some black lace panty hose, and with three quick knots he turned them into a dachshund. Kylie was so surprised that she applauded.

Gillian had arrived with another box—this one filled with shoes—which she balanced on her hip so she could applaud as well. “You see why I fell for him,” she whispered to Kylie. “How many men can do that?”

When they leave in the morning, Gillian will wave until they turn the corner, and then, Kylie is sure, she’ll drive over to Ben’s. By then they’ll be headed for Massachusetts; they’ll start to sing along with the radio, just as they always do. There’s never any question about how they will spend their summer vacation, so why is it that Kylie suddenly has the notion that they may not even carry their suitcases out to the car?

Walking to the field with Gideon on this clear hot day, Kylie tries to imagine leaving for the aunts’, and she can’t. Usually she can picture every part of vacation, from packing up to watching rainstorms from the safety of the aunts’ porch, but today when she tries to envision their week in Massachusetts, it all comes up blank. And then, when Kylie looks back at her house, she has the strangest feeling. The house seems lost to her in some way, as though she were looking at a memory, a place she used to live in and will never forget but one she can’t go back to, not anymore.

Kylie stumbles over a crack in the sidewalk, and Gideon automatically reaches out, in case she falls.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Kylie thinks about her mother, cooking in the kitchen, her black hair tied back, so that no one would ever guess how thick and beautiful it is. She thinks about the nights when she was feverish and her mother sat beside her in the dark, with cool hands and cups of water. She thinks of those times when she locked herself in the bathroom because she was too tall, and her mother calmly spoke to her from the other side of the door without once calling her foolish or silly or vain. Most of all, she remembers that day when Antonia was pushed down in the park and the white swans, spooked by the commotion, spread their wings and flew right toward Kylie. She can remember the look on her mother’s face as Sally ran across the grass, waving her arms and shouting so fiercely the swans didn’t dare to come closer. Instead, they rose into the air, flying so low to the pond that their wings broke the water into ripples, and they never returned, not ever, not once.

If Kylie continues to walk along this leafy street, things will never be the same. She feels this as deeply as she’s ever felt anything. She’s stepping over a crack in the concrete into her own future, and there won’t be any going back. The sky is cloudless and white with heat. Most people are inside, with fans or air conditioners turned to high. Kylie knows that it’s hot in the kitchen where her mother is fixing a special dinner for tonight. Vegetarian lasagna and green bean salad with almonds, and cherry cheesecake for dessert, all homemade. Antonia has invited her sweetie pie, Scott, to a farewell meal, since she’ll be gone for a whole week, and Ben Frye will be there, and Kylie just may ask Gideon as well. These thoughts make Kylie feel sad—not the dinner, but the image of her mother at the stove. Her mom always purses her lips when she’s reading a recipe; she reads it twice, out loud, to ensure that she won’t make any mistakes. The sadder Kylie feels, the more convinced she is that she shouldn’t turn back. She’s been waiting all summer to feel like this, she’s been waiting to encounter her future, and she’s not going to wait a second longer, no matter whom she has to leave behind.

“Race you,” Kylie says, and she takes off running; she’s down the block before Gideon comes to his senses and charges after her. Kylie is amazingly fast, she always has been, although now she doesn’t seem even to be touching the ground. Following her, Gideon wonders if he’ll ever catch up, but of course he will, if only because Kylie will throw herself onto the grass at the far end of the field, where the tall, leafy maples cast deep pools of shade.

To Kylie these trees are comforting and familiar, but to anyone accustomed to the desert, to a man who’s used to seeing for miles, past the saguaro and the purple dusk, these maples can seem like a mirage, rising above the green field from out of the heat waves and the rich, dark soil. Natives say that more lightning occurs in Tucson, Arizona, than anywhere else on earth; if you’ve grown up close to the desert you can easily chart a storm by the location of the lightning; you know how long you have before you’d better call in your dog, and see to your horse, and get yourself under a safe, grounded roof.

Lightning, like love, is never ruled by logic. Accidents happen, and they always will. Gary Hallet is personally acquainted with two men who’ve been hit by lightning and have lived to tell the tale, and that’s who he’s been thinking about as he navigates the Long Island Expressway at rush hour, then tries to find his way through a maze of suburban streets, passing the Y field when he makes a wrong turn off the Turnpike. Gary went to school with one of these survivors, a boy who was only seventeen at the time he was hit, and it messed up his life from that day on. He walked out of his house, and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled out in the driveway, staring up at the indigo sky. The fireball had passed right through him, and his hands were as charred as a grilled steak. He heard a clattering, like keys being jangled or somebody drumming, and it took a while for him to realize that he was shaking so hard the sound he was hearing was being made by his bones as they hit against the asphalt.

This fellow graduated from high school the same year Gary did, but only because the teachers let him pass through his courses out of kindness. He’d been a terrific shortstop and was hoping for a try at the minors, but now he was too nervous for that. He would no longer play baseball out on the field. Too much open space. Too much of a chance he’d be the tallest thing around if lightning should decide to strike twice. That was the end for him; he wound up working in a movie theater, selling tickets and sweeping up popcorn and refusing to give any patrons their money back if they didn’t like the film they’d paid to see.

The other guy who was hit was even more affected; lightning changed his life and every single thing about it. It lifted him up, right off his feet, and spun him around, and by the time it set him back on the ground, he was ready for just about anything. This man was Gary’s grandfather, Sonny, and he spoke about being struck by what he called “the white snake” every single day until the day he died, two years ago, at the age of ninety-three. Long before Gary had ever come to live with him, Sonny had been out in the yard where the cottonwoods grew, and he’d been so drunk he didn’t notice the oncoming storm. Being drunk was his natural state at that point. He couldn’t recall what it felt like to be sober, and that alone was enough of a reason for him to figure he’d better go on avoiding it, at least until they put him in his grave. Maybe then he’d consider abstinence; but only if a good foot of dirt had been shoveled on top of him, to keep him in the ground and out of the package store over on Speedway.

“There I was,” he told Gary, “minding my own business, when the sky came down and slapped me.”

It slapped him and tossed him into the clouds, and for a second he felt he might never come back to earth. He got hit with enough voltage for his clothes to be burned to ashes as he wore them, and if he hadn’t had the presence of mind to jump into the scummy green pond where he kept two pet ducks, he’d have burned up alive. His eyebrows never grew back, and he never again had to shave, but after that day he never had a drink again. Not a single shot of whiskey. Not one short, cold beer. Sonny Hallet stuck to coffee, never less than two pots of thick, black stuff a day, and because of this he was ready, willing, and able to take Gary in when his parents couldn’t care for him any longer.

Gary’s parents were well intentioned, but young and addicted to trouble and alcohol; they both ended up dead long before they should have. Gary’s mother had been gone for a year when the news came through about his father, and that very day Sonny walked into the courthouse downtown and announced to the county clerk that his son and daughter-in-law had killed themselves—which was more or less the truth, if you consider a drinking-related death a suicide—and that he wished to become Gary’s legal guardian.

As Gary drives through this suburban neighborhood, he’s thinking that his grandfather wouldn’t have liked this area of New York much. Lightning could come up and surprise you here. There are too many buildings, they’re endless, they block out what you ought to see, which, in Sonny’s opinion, and in Gary’s as well, should always be the sky.

Gary is working on a preliminary inquiry begun by the attorney general’s office, where he’s been an investigator for seven years. Before that he had a background of wrong choices. He was tall and lanky and could have considered basketball as a possibility, but although he was dogged enough, he didn’t have the raw aggression needed for professional sports. In the end, he went back to college, thought about law school, then decided against spending all those years studying in closed rooms. The result is that he’s doing what he’s best at anyway, which is figuring things out. What sets him apart from most of his colleagues is that he likes murder. He likes it so well that his friends rib him and call him the Mexican Turkey Vulture, a carrion creature that hunts by scent. Gary doesn’t mind the kidding and he doesn’t mind that most people have an easy answer that allows them to believe they’ve gotten a fix on the reason why he’s so interested in homicide. They point straight to his family history—his mother died of liver failure, and his father probably would have done so as well, if he hadn’t been murdered first, over in New Mexico. The fellow who did it never was found, and, frankly, nobody seemed to look very hard for him. But the circumstances of Gary’s past aren’t what drives him, no matter what his friends think. It’s figuring out the why of things; the final factor that makes a person act can be so damn elusive, but you can always find some motivation, if you look hard enough. The wrong word said at the wrong time, a gun in the wrong hand, the wrong woman who kisses you just right. Money, love, or fury—those are the causes for most everything. You can usually uncover the truth, or a version of it at any rate, if you ask enough questions; if you close your eyes and imagine the way it might have been, how you might have reacted if you’d had enough, if you just couldn’t find it in you to care anymore.

The why in the case he’s working on is clearly money. Three kids from the university are dead because someone wanted bucks badly enough to sell them rattlesnake seeds and jimsonweed without once giving a good goddamn about the consequences. Kids will buy anything, especially East Coast kids who haven’t been warned their whole life long about what grows in the desert. One seed of rattlesnake weed makes you euphoric, it’s like LSD growing free. The problem is, two can cause your death. Unless, of course, the first has already done that job nicely, which was the case with one of the kids, a history major from Philadelphia who had just turned nineteen. Gary was called in early by his friend Jack Carillo in homicide, and he saw the history major on the floor of his dorm room. The boy had had awful convulsions before he died; the whole left side of his face was black and blue, and Gary suggested that no one would consider it tampering with the evidence if they put some makeup on the kid before his parents arrived.

Gary has read the file on James Hawkins, who’s been selling drugs in Tucson for twenty years. Gary is thirty-two, and he vaguely remembers Hawkins, an older guy the girls used to whisper about. After dropping out of high school, Hawkins got into trouble in various states, Oklahoma for a while, then Tennessee, before returning to his hometown and getting sent to the lockup on charges of criminal assault, which, along with drugs, seems to be his forte. When he couldn’t bullshit his way out of a bad situation, Hawkins was known to go for his opponent’s eyes, using the heavy silver ring he wore to gouge and dig. He acted as though no one could stop him, but it’s pretty much the end of Mr. Hawkins’s criminal career now. The history major’s roommate positively identified him—from his snakeskin boots to the silver ring decorated with a cactus and a rattlesnake and the cowboy he may have imagined himself to be—and they’re not the only ones to have picked out his photo. Seven other students, who were lucky enough not to take the bogus drugs they bought from him, have identified this loser as well—and that should be that, except no one can find Hawkins. They can’t find his live-in girlfriend, either, from all accounts a good-looking woman who seems to have been a hostess at every half-decent restaurant in town. They’ve checked the bars Hawkins frequented and questioned all three of his alleged friends, and no one’s seen him since late June, when the university let out.

Gary has been getting into Hawkins’s life, trying to figure him. He’s been frequenting the Pink Pony, which was Hawkins’s favorite place to get drunk, and sitting on the front patio of the last house Hawkins rented, which is why Gary happened to be there when the letter arrived. He was sitting in a metal chair, his long legs stretched out so he could prop his feet up on the patio’s white metal railing, when the mailman walked right over and dropped the letter on his lap and demanded the postage due, since the stamp had fallen off somewhere along the way.

The letter was crumpled and torn in one corner, and if the flap hadn’t already been open, Gary would have just taken it over to the office. But an opened letter is hard to resist, even for someone like Gary, who’s resisted a lot in his life. His friends know enough not to offer him a beer, just as they know not to ask him about the girl he was married to, briefly, right after high school. They’re willing to do this because his friendship is worth it. They know that Gary will never deceive them or disappoint them—that’s the way he’s built; that’s the way his grandfather raised him. But this letter was something else; it tempted him, and he gave in to it, and, if he’s going to be honest, he still doesn’t regret it.

Summer in Tucson is seriously hot, and it was a hundred and seven degrees as Gary sat out on the patio of the house Hawkins used to rent and read that letter addressed to Gillian Owens. The creosote plant that grew beside the patio was all but popping with the heat, yet Gary just sat there and read the letter Sally had written to her sister, and when he was done he read it again. As the afternoon heat finally began to ease up, Gary took off his hat and dropped his boots down from the metal railing. He’s a man who’s willing to take chances, but he has the courage to walk away from impossible odds. He knows when to back off and when to keep trying, but he’d never felt like this before. Sitting out on that patio in the purple dusk, he was long past considering the odds.

Until Sonny died, Gary had always shared a house with his grandfather, except for his brief marriage and the first eight years with his parents, which he doesn’t remember out of sheer willpower. But he remembers everything about his grandfather. He knew what time Sonny would get out of bed in the morning, and when he’d go to sleep, and what he’d eat for breakfast, which was invariably shredded wheat on weekdays, and on Sundays pancakes, spread with molasses and jam. Gary has been close to people and has a whole town full of friends, but he’d never once felt he’d known anyone the way he felt he knew the woman who wrote this letter. It was as if someone had ripped off the top of his head and hooked a piece of his soul. He was so involved with the words she’d written that anyone passing by could have pushed him off his chair with one finger. A turkey vulture could have landed on the back rung of the chair he was sitting in, screamed right in his ear, and Gary wouldn’t have heard a sound.

He went home then and packed his bag. He called to tell his buddy Arno at the AG’s office that he had found a great lead and was going after Hawkins’s girlfriend, but of course that wasn’t the whole truth. Hawkins’s girlfriend wasn’t the one he was thinking about when he asked his closest neighbor’s twelve-year-old boy to hike by each morning and set out some food and water for the dogs, then took his horses over to the Mitchells’ ranch, where they’d be turned out with a bunch of Arabians much prettier than themselves, and maybe learn a lesson or two.

Gary was at the airport that evening. He caught the 7:17 to Chicago, and he spent the night with his long legs folded up on a bench at O’Hare, where he had to change planes. He read Sally’s letter twice more in midair, and then again while he ate eggs and sausage for lunch in a diner in Elmhurst, Queens. Even when he folds it back into its envelope and places it deep inside the pocket of his jacket, the letter keeps coming back to him. Whole sentences Sally has written form inside his head, and for some reason he’s filled with the strangest sense of acceptance, not for anything he’s done but for what he might be about to do.

Gary picked up directions and a cold can of Coke at a gas station on the Turnpike. In spite of his wrong turn near the Y field, he manages to find the correct address. Sally Owens is in the kitchen when he’s parking his rented car. She’s stirring a pot of tomato sauce on the back burner when Gary circles the Honda in the driveway, gets a good look at the Oldsmobile parked in front, and matches its Arizona license plate number to the one in his files. She’s pouring hot water and noodles into a colander when he knocks at the door.

“Hold on,” Sally calls in her matter-of-fact, no-nonsense way, and the sound of her voice knocks Gary for a loop. He could be in trouble here, that much is certain. He could be walking into something he cannot control.

When Sally swings the door open, Gary looks into her eyes and sees himself upside down. He finds himself in a pool of gray light, drowning, going down for the third time, and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it. His grandfather told him once that witches caught you in this way—they knew how much most men love themselves and how deeply they’ll let themselves be drawn in, just for a glimpse of their own image. If you ever come face to face with a woman like this, his grandfather told him, turn and run, and don’t judge yourself a coward. If she comes after you, if she has a weapon or screams your name like bloody murder, quickly grab her by the throat and shake her. But of course, Gary has no intention of doing anything like that. He intends to go on drowning for a very long time.

Sally’s hair has slipped out of its rubber band. She’s wearing a pair of Kylie’s shorts and a black sleeveless T-shirt of Antonia’s and she smells like tomato sauce and onions. She’s out of sorts and impatient, as she is every summer when she has to pack for the trip to the aunts’. She’s beautiful, all right, at least in Gary Hallet’s estimation; she’s exactly the way she is written down in her letter, only better and right here in front of him. Gary’s got a lump in his throat just looking at her. He’s already thinking about the things they could do if the two of them were alone in a room. He could forget the reason he’s come here in the first place if he’s not careful. He could make a very stupid mistake.

“Can I help you?” This man who’s arrived at her door wearing cowboy boots coated with dust is lean and tall, like a scarecrow come to life. She has to tilt her head to get a glimpse of his face. Once she sees how he’s looking at her, she takes two steps back. “What do you want?” Sally says.

“I’m from the attorney general’s office. Out in Arizona. I just flew in. I had to transfer in Chicago.” Gary knows this all sounds awfully stupid, but most things he’d say at this moment probably would.

Gary hasn’t had an easy life, and it shows in his face. There are deep lines he’s too young to have; there’s a good deal of loneliness, in full view, for anyone to see. He’s not the kind of man who hides things, and he’s not hiding his interest in Sally right now. In fact, Sally can’t believe the way he’s staring at her. Would somebody really have the nerve to stand in her doorway and look at her like this?

“I think you must be at the wrong address,” she tells him. She’s sounding flustered, even to herself. It’s how dark his eyes are, that’s the problem. It’s the way he can make someone feel she’s being seen from the inside out.

“Your letter arrived yesterday,” Gary says, as if he were the one she’d actually written to rather than her sister, who, as far as Gary can tell from the advice Sally gave her, doesn’t have a brain in her head, or—if she does—it’s not one she pays much attention to.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sally says. “I never wrote to you. I don’t even know who you are.”

“Gary Hallet,” he introduces himself. He reaches into his pocket for her letter, although he hates to give it up. If they examined this letter in Forensics they’d find his fingerprints all over it; he’s folded and unfolded it more times than he can count.

“I mailed that to my sister ages ago.” Sally looks at the letter, then at him. She has the funny feeling that she may be in for more than she can handle. “You opened it.”

“It was opened already. It must have gotten lost at the post office.”

While Sally is deciding whether or not to judge him a liar, Gary can feel his heart flopping around like a fish inside his chest. He’s heard about this happening to other men. They’re going about their business one minute, and suddenly there’s no hope for them. They fall in love so hard they never again get up off their knees.

Gary shakes his head, but that doesn’t clear up the matter. All it does is make him see double. Momentarily there are two Sallys before him, and each one makes him wish he weren’t here in an official capacity. He forces himself to think about the kid at the university. He thinks about the bruises up and down the kid’s face and the way his head must have hit against the metal bed frame and the wooden floor as he thrashed about in convulsions. If there’s one thing in this world Gary knows for a fact, it’s that men like Jimmy Hawkins never pick fair fights.

“Would you know where your sister might be?”

“My sister?” Sally narrows her eyes; maybe this is just one more heart Gillian broke, arriving to plead for mercy. She wouldn’t have taken this fellow for such a fool. She wouldn’t have figured him to be her sister’s type. “You’re looking for Gillian?”

“Like I said, I’m doing some work for the attorney general’s office. It’s an investigation that concerns one of your sister’s friends.”

Sally feels something wrong in her fingers and toes that is a whole lot like the edge of panic. “Where did you say you were from?”

“Well, originally, Bisbee,” Gary says, “but I’ve been in Tucson for nearly twenty-five years.”

It is panic that Sally is feeling, that much is certain, and it’s creeping along her spine, spreading into her veins, moving toward her vital organs.

“I pretty much grew up in Tucson,” Gary is saying. “I guess you could say I’m chauvinistic, because I’m convinced it’s the greatest place on earth.”

“What’s your investigation about?” Sally interrupts before Gary can say more about his beloved Arizona.

“Well, there’s a suspect we’re looking for.” Gary hates to do this. The joy he gets out of a murder investigation isn’t happening for him this time around. “I’m sorry to inform you of this, but his car is parked out there in your driveway.”

The blood drains out of Sally’s head all at once, leaving her faint. She leans against the doorway and tries to breathe. She’s seeing spots before her eyes, and every spot is red, hot as a cinder. That goddamn Jimmy just doesn’t let go. He keeps coming back and coming back, trying to ruin someone’s life.

Gary Hallet stoops down toward Sally. “Are you okay?” he asks, although he knows from her letter that Sally’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t tell you right away if something was wrong. It took her nearly eighteen years before she gave her sister a piece of her mind, after all.

“I’m going to sit down,” Sally says, casually, as if she weren’t about to collapse.

Gary follows her into the kitchen, and watches as she drinks a glass of cool tap water. He’s so tall he has to duck in order to pass through the kitchen doorway, and when he sits down he has to stretch his legs straight out so his knees will fit under the table. His grandfather always said he had the makings of a worrywart, and this pronouncement has turned out to be true.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he tells Sally.

“You didn’t upset me.” Sally fans herself with her hand, and still she’s flushed. Thank goodness the girls are out of the house; she has that to be grateful for at least. If they get dragged into this, she’ll never forgive Gillian, and she’ll never forgive herself. How did they ever think they could get away with it? What idiots, what morons, what self-destructive fools. “You didn’t upset me a bit.”

It takes everything she has to keep her nerve and look at Gary. He looks right back at her, so she quickly lowers her gaze to the floor. You have to be extremely careful when you look into eyes like his. Sally drinks more water; she goes on fanning herself. In a predicament such as this, it’s best to appear normal. Sally knows that from her childhood. Don’t give anything away. Don’t let them know what you feel deep inside.

“Coffee?” Sally says. “I’ve got some that’s hot.”

“Sure,” Gary says. “Great.” He has to talk to the sister, and he knows it, but he doesn’t have to rush. Maybe the sister just took off with the car, but it’s just as likely she knows where Hawkins is, and Gary can wait to deal with that.

“You’re looking for one of Gillian’s friends?” Sally says. “Is that what you said?”

She has such a sweet voice; it’s the New England vowels she’s never quite lost, it’s the way she purses her lips after each word, as though tasting the very last syllable.

“James Hawkins.” Gary nods.

“Ah,” Sally says thoughtfully, because if she says any more she’ll scream, she’ll curse Jimmy and her sister and everyone who ever lived in or traveled through the state of Arizona.

She serves the coffee, then sits down and starts to think about how the hell she’s going to get them out of this. She’s already done the laundry for their trip to Massachusetts; she’s gassed up the car and had the oil checked. She has to get her girls out of here; she has to figure out a really good story. Something about how they bought the Oldsmobile at auction, or how they found it abandoned in a rest area, or maybe it was just left sitting in the driveway in the middle of the night.

Sally looks up, ready to start lying, and that’s when she sees that this man at her table is crying. Gary is too tall to be anything but awkward in most situations, but he’s got a graceful way of crying. He just lets it happen.

“What’s wrong?” Sally says. “What’s the matter?”

Gary shakes his head; it always takes a while before he can talk. His grandfather used to say that holding tears back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you’re left with a stub of a neck and nothing more. Gary has cried more than most men ever will. He’s done it at rodeos and in courts of law; he’s stood by the side of the road and wept at the sight of a hawk someone has shot out of the sky, before going to get a shovel from the back of his truck so he can bury the carcass. Crying in a woman’s kitchen doesn’t embarrass him; he’s seen his grandfather’s eyes fill with tears nearly every time he looked at a beautiful horse or a woman with dark hair.

Gary wipes at his eyes with one of his big hands. “It’s the coffee,” he explains.

“Is it that bad?” Sally takes a sip. It’s just her same old regular coffee that hasn’t killed anyone yet.

“Oh, no,” Gary says. “The coffee’s great.” His eyes are as dark as a crow’s feathers. He has the ability to catch someone by the way he looks at her, and make her wish he would go on looking. “It’s coffee in general that does this to me. I get reminded of my grandfather, who died two years ago. He sure was addicted to coffee. He had three cups before he opened his eyes in the morning.”

Something is truly wrong with Sally. She can feel a tightness inside her throat and her belly and her chest. This could well be what a heart attack feels like; for all she knows she could end up unconscious on the floor in seconds flat, her blood boiling, her brain fried.

“Will you excuse me for a minute?” Sally says. “I’ll be right back.”

She runs upstairs to Kylie’s room and switches on the light. It was nearly dawn when Gillian got home from Ben’s, where half of her belongings are now taking up most of his closet space. Since she has today off, her plan was to sleep as long as possible, go shopping for shoes, then swing by the library for a book on cell structure. Instead, the shades are being cast open and sunlight is spilling across the room in thick yellow stripes. Gillian squirms beneath the quilt; if she’s quiet enough, maybe this will all go away.

“Wake up,” Sally tells Gillian and she gives her a good shake. “Someone’s here looking for Jimmy.”

Gillian sits up so fast that she hits her head on the bedpost. “Does he have a lot of tattoos?” she asks, thinking of the last person from whom Jimmy borrowed too much money, a guy named Alex Devine, who was said to be the singular human life form able to exist without a heart.

“I wish,” Sally says.

The sisters stare at each other.

“Oh, god.” Gillian is whispering now. “It’s the police, isn’t it? Oh, my god.” She reaches to the floor to grab for the nearest pile of clothes.

“He’s an investigator from the attorney general’s office. He found the last letter I sent you and traced you here.”

“That’s what happens when you write letters.” Gillian is out of bed now, pulling on jeans and a soft beige blouse. “You want to communicate? Use the damn phone.”

“I gave him some coffee,” Sally says. “He’s in the kitchen.”

“I don’t care what room he’s in.” Gillian looks at her sister. Sometimes Sally really doesn’t get it. She certainly doesn’t seem to understand what it means to bury a body in your backyard. “What are we going to tell him?”

Sally clutches at her chest and goes white. “I may be having a heart attack,” she announces.

“Oh, terrific. That’s all we need.” Gillian slips on a pair of flip-flops, then stops to consider her sister. Sally can have a fever of a hundred and three before she thinks to complain. She can spend the whole night in the bathroom, brought to her knees by a stomach virus, and be cheery by the first light of morning, down in the kitchen, already fixing a fruit salad or some blueberry waffles. “You’re having a panic attack,” Gillian decides. “Get over it. We have to go convince that damn investigator we don’t know anything.”

Gillian runs a comb through her hair, then starts for the door. She turns when she senses that Sally isn’t following her.

“Well?” Gillian says.

“Here’s the thing,” Sally says. “I don’t think I can lie to him.”

Gillian walks right up to her sister. “Yes, you can.”

“I don’t know. I may not be able to sit there and just lie. It’s the way he looks at you....”

“Listen to me.” Gillian’s voice is thin and high. “We will go to jail unless you lie, so I think you’ll be able to do it. When he talks to you, don’t look at him.” She takes Sally’s hands in her own. “He’ll ask a few questions, then he’ll go back to Arizona and everyone will be happy.”

“Right,” Sally says.

“Remember. Don’t look at him.”

“Okay.” Sally nods. She thinks she can do this, or at the very least she can try.

“Just follow my lead,” Gillian tells her.

The sisters cross their hearts and hope to die, then swear they’re in this together, forever, till the absolute very end. They’ll give Gary Hallet simple facts; they won’t say too much or too little. By the time they have their story worked out and go downstairs, Gary has finished his third cup of coffee and has memorized every item on the kitchen shelves. When he hears the women on the stairs, he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and pushes his coffee cup away.

“Hey there,” Gillian says.

She’s good at this, that’s for sure. When Gary stands to greet her she sticks her hand out for him to shake just like this was a regular old social event. But when she really looks at him, when she feels his grip on her hand, Gillian gets nervous. This guy won’t be easy to fool. He’s seen a lot of things, and heard a lot of stories, and he’s smart. She can tell that just by looking at him. He may be too smart.

“I hear you want to talk to me about Jimmy,” Gillian says. Her heart feels too big for her chest.

“I’m afraid I do.” Gary sizes Gillian up fast—the tattoo on her wrist, the way she takes one step back when he addresses her, as if she expects to be hit. “Have you seen him recently?”

“I ran away in June. I took his car and hit the road and haven’t heard from him since.”

Gary nods and makes some notes, but the notes are just scribbles, nothing but nonsense words. Ivory Snow, he’s written at the top of the page. Wolverine. Apple pie. Two plus two equals four. Darling. He’s jotting down anything in order to appear concentrated on official business. This way, Sally and her sister won’t be able to look into his eyes and sense that he doesn’t believe Gillian. She wouldn’t have had the nerve to take off with her boyfriend’s car, and Hawkins wouldn’t have let it go so easy. No way. He would have caught up with her before she reached the state line.

“Probably a smart move,” Gary says. He’s done this before, smoothed out the doubt so it doesn’t seep through his voice. He reaches into his jacket pocket, takes out Hawkins’s legal record and spreads it across the table for Gillian to see.

Gillian sits down to get a better look. “Wow,” she says.

Jimmy’s first arrest for drugs was so many years back he couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Gillian runs her finger down a list of crimes that goes on and on; the misdemeanors becoming more violent with every year, until they veer into felonies. It looks as if they were living together when he was picked up for his last aggravated assault, and he never bothered to mention it. Unless Gillian is mistaken, Jimmy told her he’d gone to Phoenix to help his cousin move some furniture on the day of his court date.

She cannot believe what an idiot she was for all those years. She knew more about Ben Frye after two hours than she knew about Jimmy after four years. Jimmy seemed mysterious back then, with deep secrets he had to keep. Now the facts are apparent; he was a thief and a liar, and she went and sat still for it for longer than would seem humanly possible.

“I had no idea,” Gillian says. “I swear to you. All that time, I never asked him any questions about where he went and what he did.” Her eyes feel hot, and when she blinks it doesn’t do any good. “Not that that’s any excuse.”

“You don’t have to make any excuses for who you love,” Gary says. “Don’t apologize.”

Gillian will have to pay even more attention to this investigator. He’s got a particular way of observing things that catches you up short. Why, before he introduced the idea that love was blameless, Gillian never once stopped to consider she might not be responsible for everything that went wrong. She glances over to gauge Sally’s reaction, but Sally is staring at Gary and she has a funny look on her face. It’s a look that worries Gillian, because it’s totally unlike Sally. Standing there, with her back against the refrigerator, Sally seems much too vulnerable. Where is her armor, where is her guard, where is the logic that can put it all back together again?

“The reason I’m looking for Mr. Hawkins,” Gary explains to Gillian, “is that it appears he sold some poisonous plant matter to several college students which has been the cause of three deaths. He offered them LSD, then went and supplied them with the seeds of some highly hallucinogenic, highly toxic weeds.”

“Three deaths.” Gillian shakes her head. Jimmy told her there’d been two. He told her it wasn’t his fault; the kids were greedy and stupid and tried to trick him out of the money he was rightfully due. “Fucking spoiled brats,” that’s what he’d called them. “College-boy babies.” He could lie about anything, as though it were a sport. Gillian feels ill thinking how she automatically believed Jimmy and took his side. Those kids must have been looking for trouble. She remembers thinking that. “This is awful,” she tells Gary Hallet about the deaths at the university. “It’s horrible.”

“Your friend has been identified by several witnesses, but he’s disappeared.”

Gillian is listening to Gary, but she’s also thinking about the way things used to be. August in Tucson can bring the desert floor up to 125 degrees. One broiling week, soon after they’d first met, she and Jimmy didn’t even leave the house—they just switched on the air conditioner and drank beer and fucked each other every way Jimmy could think of, which mostly had to do with his immediate gratification.

“Let’s not call him my friend,” Gillian says.

“Fine,” Gary agrees. “But we’d like to catch up to him before he sells any more of this garbage. We don’t want this to happen again.”

Gary stares at Gillian with his dark eyes, which makes it difficult to look away or manage a half-decent fabrication. Maybe this gal knew about the college kids dying, and maybe she didn’t, but she certainly knew something. Gary sees that inside her—he can tell by the way she stares at the floor. There is culpability in her expression, but that could be only because she was the one James Hawkins came home to on the night the history major went into convulsions. Maybe it’s because she’s just realized who it was she was fucking and calling sweetheart all that time.

Gary is waiting for Gillian to declare herself in some way, but Sally is the one who can’t keep her mouth shut. She’s been trying, she’s been telling herself not to talk, to go on following Gillian’s lead, but she can’t do it. Could it be she’s compelled to speak out only because she wants Gary Hallet’s attention? Could it be she wants to feel exactly the way she does when he turns to her?

“It won’t happen again,” Sally tells him.

Gary meets her gaze. “You sound pretty certain of that.” But of course, he knows from her letter how sure of herself she can be. Something’s not right there, she wrote to Gillian. Leave him. Get your own place, a house that’s yours alone. Or just come home. Come home right now.

“She means Jimmy will never go back to Tucson,” Gillian hurries to say. “Believe me, if you’re after him, he knows it. He’s stupid, but he’s not an idiot. He’s not going to go on selling drugs in the same town where his clientele have been dying.”

Gary takes his card out and hands it to Gillian. “I don’t want to scare you, but this is a dangerous person we’re dealing with. I’d appreciate it if you’d call me if he tries to contact you.”

“He won’t contact her,” Sally says.

She cannot keep her mouth shut. It’s simply impossible. What is wrong with her? That’s what Gillian’s glare is asking, and that’s what Sally is asking herself. It’s just that this investigator gets such a worried look when he focuses on something. He’s a man of concern, she sees that. He’s the kind of man you’d never want to lose once you’d finally found him.

“Jimmy knows we’re through,” Gillian announces. She goes to pour herself a cup of coffee, and while she’s at it she sticks an elbow into Sally’s ribs. “What’s wrong with you?” she whispers. “Will you just shut up?” She turns back to Gary. “I made it perfectly clear to Jimmy that our relationship was finito. That’s why he won’t contact me. We’re history.”

“I’m going to have to have the car impounded,” Gary says.

“Naturally,” Gillian says graciously. If they’re lucky, this guy will be gone in under two minutes. “Go right ahead.”

Gary stands and runs his hands through his dark hair. He’s supposed to leave now. He knows that. But he’s dragging his feet. He wants to go on looking into Sally’s eyes, and drown a thousand times a day. Instead, he takes his coffee cup to the sink.

“You don’t have to bother with that,” Gillian tells him warmly, desperate to be rid of him.

Sally smiles when she sees the way he places the cup and the spoon down so carefully.

“If anything does happen to come up, I’ll be in town until tomorrow morning.”

“Nothing will happen,” Gillian assures him. “Trust me.”

Gary reaches for the notebook he keeps to remind himself of details and flips it open. “I’ll be at the Hide-A-Way Motel.” He looks up and sees nothing but Sally’s gray eyes. “Someone at the rental car desk recommended it.”

Sally knows the place, a dump on the other side of the Turnpike, near a vegetable stand and a fried-chicken franchise known for its excellent onion rings. She could not care less if he’s staying in a lousy motel like that. She doesn’t give a damn that he’s leaving tomorrow. As a matter of fact, she’ll be leaving, too. She and her girls will be out of here in no time. If they wake early, and don’t stop for coffee, they can make it to Massachusetts by noon. They can be opening the curtains in the aunts’ dark rooms to let in some sunlight just after lunch.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Gary says. He spies the half-dead cactus on the window ledge. “This is definitely not representative of the species. It’s in sad shape, I’ll tell you that.”

Last winter, Ed Borelli gave each of the secretaries at the high school a cactus for Christmas. “Plop it on your windowsill and forget about it,” Sally had advised when complaints were raised about who on earth would want such a thing, and other than slosh some water onto its saucer now and then, that’s exactly what she herself has done. But Gary is paying the cactus a good deal of attention. He’s got that worried look, and he’s fumbling with something stuck between the saucer the cactus rests on and its pot. When he turns back to face Sally and Gillian, he seems so pained that Sally’s first thought is that he’s pricked his finger.

“Damn it,” Gillian whispers.

It’s Jimmy’s silver ring Gary is holding on to, and that’s what’s causing him such pain. They’re going to lie to him and he knows it. They’re going to tell him they’ve never seen this ring before, or that they bought it in an antique store, or that it must have dropped from the heavens above.

“Nice ring,” Gary says. “Real unusual.”

Neither Sally nor Gillian can figure how this can be possible; they know for a fact that ring was on Jimmy’s finger, it’s buried out back, and yet here it is in the investigator’s hand. And he’s looking at Sally now; he’s waiting for an explanation. Why shouldn’t he be; he’s read a description of this ring in three depositions: A rattler on one side of it, he remembers that. A coiled snake, which is exactly what he’s got now.

Sally feels that heart-attack thing again; it’s something wrong in the center of her chest, like a red-hot poker, like a piece of glass, and there’s nothing she can do about it. She couldn’t lie to this man if her life depended on it—and it does—and that’s the reason she doesn’t say a word.

“Well, look at that.” Gillian is all wonder and sugar. It’s so easy for her to do this, she doesn’t have to think twice. “That old thing’s probably been there for a million years.”

Sally’s still not talking, but she’s leaning all her weight against the refrigerator, as though she needed help to stand up.

“Is that so?” Gary says, still drowning.

“Let me take a look.” Gillian goes right up to him and takes the ring out of his hands and studies it as if she’s never seen it before. “Cool,” she says, giving it back. “You should probably keep it.” This is such a nice touch she is truly proud of herself. “It’s much too big for any of us.”

“Well, great.” Gary’s head is pounding. Fuck it. Fuck it all. “Thanks.”

As he slips the ring into his pocket, he’s thinking that Sally’s sister is really good at this; she’s probably well aware of James Hawkins’s whereabouts as of this very second. Sally, however, is another story; maybe she doesn’t know anything, maybe she’s never seen this ring before. Her sister could have her fooled completely, could be siphoning money, groceries, family heirlooms to Hawkins as he watches TV in some basement apartment in Brooklyn, waiting for the heat to die down.

But Sally isn’t looking at him, that’s the thing. Her beautiful face is turned away because she knows something. Gary has seen it before, countless times. People who are guilty of something think they can hide it by not looking you in the eye; they presume you can read their shame, that you can see in through their eyes to their very soul, and in a way they’re right.

“I guess we’re done,” Gary says. “Unless there’s something you’ve suddenly thought of that I should know.”

Nothing. Gillian grins and shrugs. Sally swallows, hard. Gary can practically feel how dry her throat is, how the pulse at the base of her neck is throbbing. He’s not certain how far he would go to cover for someone. He’s never been in the position before, and he doesn’t like the feel of it, yet here he is, standing in a stranger’s kitchen in New York on a humid summer day, actually wondering if he could look the other way. And then he thinks about his grandfather walking to the courthouse to legally claim him on a day when it was a hundred and twelve in the shade. The air started to sizzle; the mesquite and the Russian thistle burst into flame, but Sonny Hallet had thought to bring a container of cool spring water with him, and he wasn’t even tired when he walked inside the courthouse. If you go against what you believe in, you’re nothing anyway, so you might as well stick to your guns. Gary’s going to fly home tomorrow and hand this case over to Arno. He can’t even pretend it will turn out all right: that Hawkins will surrender, and Sally and her sister will be proven innocent of assisting a murder suspect, and Gary himself will start writing to Sally. If he did, perhaps she wouldn’t be able to throw away his letters; she’d have to read each one again and again, exactly the way he did when hers was delivered, and before she knew it, she’d be lost, the way he seems to be at this very moment.

Since none of this is going to happen, Gary nods and heads for the door. He has always known when to step aside, and when to sit by the road and just wait for whatever was going to happen next. He saw a mountain lion one afternoon because he decided to sit down on the bumper of his truck and drink some water before changing a blown tire. The mountain lion came padding toward the asphalt, as if it owned the road and everything else, and it took a good look at Gary, who had never before been grateful for a flat tire.

“I’ll have the Oldsmobile picked up by Friday,” Gary says now, but he doesn’t look behind him until he’s out on the porch. He doesn’t know that Sally might easily have followed him, if her sister hadn’t pinched her and whispered for her to stay where she was. He doesn’t know how badly this thing inside Sally’s chest hurts her, but that’s what happens when you’re a liar, especially when you’re telling the worst of these lies to yourself.

“Thanks a million,” Gillian sings out, and by the time Gary turns to look behind him, there’s nothing to see but the locked door.

As far as Gillian’s concerned, it’s all over and done with. “Well, hallelujah,” she says when she goes back to the kitchen. “We got rid of him.”

Sally is already dealing with the lasagna noodles that have been congealing in the colander. She tries to pry them out with a wooden spoon, but it’s too late, they’re stuck together. She dumps the whole thing into the trash and then she starts to cry.

“What is your problem?” Gillian asks. It is times like these that provoke perfectly rational people to say what the hell and light up cigarettes. Gillian looks through the junk drawer, hoping to find an old pack, but the best she comes up with is a box of wooden matches. “We got rid of him, didn’t we? We seemed totally innocent. In spite of that damn ring. I’ll tell you that thing scared the pants off me. That was like looking the devil right in the eye. But honey, we fooled that investigator anyway, and we did a good job of it.”

“Oh,” Sally says, completely disgusted. “Oh,” she cries.

“Well, we did! We pulled it off, and we should be proud of ourselves.”

“For lying?” Sally rubs at her leaking eyes and nose. Her cheeks are red and she’s snuffling like crazy and she can’t get rid of that awful feeling in the dead center of her chest. “Is that what you think we should be proud of?”

“Hey.” Gillian shrugs. “You do what you have to.” She peers into the trash at the globby noodles. “Now what do we do for dinner?”

That’s when Sally throws the colander across the room.

“You are in bad shape,” Gillian says. “You’d better call your internist or your gynecologist or somebody and get a tranquilizer.”

“I’m not doing this.” Sally grabs the pot of tomato sauce, to which she’s added onions and mushrooms and sweet red pepper, and pours it into the sink.

“Fine.” Gillian is ready to agree to any reasonable plan. “You don’t have to cook. We’ll get take-out.”

“I’m not referring to dinner.” Sally has grabbed her car keys and her wallet. “I’m talking about the truth.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Gillian goes after Sally, and when Sally keeps heading toward the door, Gillian reaches for her arm.

“Don’t you dare pinch me,” Sally warns her.

Sally walks out onto the porch, but Gillian is still right behind her. She follows Sally down the driveway.

“You’re not going to see that investigator. You can’t talk to him.”

“He knows anyway,” Sally says. “Couldn’t you tell? Couldn’t you see by the way he was looking at us?”

Just thinking about Gary’s gaunt face and all the worry that was there makes her chest feel even worse. She’s going to find herself suffering from a stroke or angina or something before this day is through.

“You can’t go after that guy,” Gillian tells Sally. There’s not a bit of nonsense in her tone. “We’ll both be sitting in jail if you do. I don’t know what would make you even consider this.”

“I’ve already decided,” Sally says.

“To do what? Go to his motel? Get down on your knees and beg for mercy?”

“If I have to. Yes.”

“You’re not going,” Gillian says.

Sally looks at her sister, considering. Then she opens the car door.

“No way,” Gillian says. “You’re not going after him.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Maybe I am.” She isn’t going to let her sister screw up her future just because Sally feels guilty about something she didn’t even do.

“Oh really?” Sally says. “How exactly do you plan to get to me? Do you think you could possibly ruin my life any more than you already have?”

Wounded, Gillian takes a step back.

“Try to understand,” Sally says. “I have to set this right. I can’t live this way.”

A storm has been predicted, and the wind has begun to rise; strands of Sally’s black hair whip across her face. Her eyes are luminous and much darker than usual; her mouth is as red as a rose. Gillian has never seen her sister look so disheveled, so unlike her usual self. At this moment Sally seems to be someone who would rush headlong into a river, when she hasn’t yet learned how to swim. She’d jump from the branches of the tallest tree, convinced all she needed for a safe landing were her outstretched arms and a silk shawl to billow out and catch the air as she fell.

“Maybe you should wait.” Gillian is trying her sweetest voice, the one that has talked her out of speeding tickets and bad affairs. “We can discuss it. We can decide together.”

But Sally has made her decision. She refuses to listen; she gets into her car, and short of jumping behind the Honda to block it, Gillian can’t do anything but stand and watch as Sally drives away. She watches for a long time, too long, because, in the end, all Gillian is watching is the empty road, and she’s seen that before. She’s seen it much too often.

There’s a lot to lose when you have something, when you’re foolish enough to let yourself care. Well, Gillian has gone ahead and done it by falling in love with Ben Frye, and her fate is now out of her hands. It’s riding along, sitting shotgun in that Honda with Sally, and all Gillian can do is pretend that nothing is wrong. When the girls come home, she says that Sally’s out running errands, and she orders from the Chinese take-out place on the Turnpike, then phones Ben and asks him to pick up dinner on his way over.

“I thought we were having lasagna,” Kylie says as she and Gideon set the table.

“Well, we’re not,” Gillian informs her. “And can’t you use paper plates and cups so we don’t have to mess around with washing dishes?”

When Ben arrives with dinner, Kylie and Antonia suggest they wait for their mom, but Gillian won’t hear of it. She starts dishing out shrimp with cashews and pork fried rice, the sort of carnivorous fare Sally would never allow on her table. The food is good, but it’s a dreadful dinner anyway. Everyone is out of sorts. Antonia and Kylie are worried, because their mother is never late, especially on a night when there’s packing left to do, and they both feel guilty eating shrimp and pork at her table. Gideon isn’t helping matters; he’s practicing his belching, which is driving everyone but Kylie completely crazy. Scott Morrison is the worst, gloomy as can be at the prospect of a week without Antonia. “What’s the point?” is his response to just about everything this evening, including “Would you like an eggroll?” and “Do you want orange soda or Pepsi?” Eventually Antonia bursts into tears and runs from the room when Scott answers the question of whether or not he’ll write while she’s away with his same old “What’s the point?” Kylie and Gideon have to plead Scott’s case through Antonia’s closed bedroom door, and just when Scott and Antonia have made up and are kissing in the hallway, Gillian decides enough is enough.

By now, Sally has probably spilled her guts to that investigator. For all Gillian knows, Gary Hallet has gone over to the mini-mart on the Turnpike that’s open all hours and rented a tape recorder so he can get her confession in her own words. Trapped with no recourse, Gillian has a major migraine, one that Tylenol couldn’t begin to cure. Every voice sounds like fingernails against a chalkboard, and she has absolutely no tolerance for even the smallest piece of happiness or joy. She can’t stand to see Antonia and Scott kissing, or hear Gideon and Kylie teasing each other. All evening she’s been avoiding Ben, because for her Scott Morrison’s philosophy really holds true: What is the point? Everything is about to be lost, and she can’t stop it; she might as well give up and call it a day. She might as well phone for a taxi and climb out the window, with her most important belongings tossed into a pillowcase. She knows for a fact that Kylie has plenty of money saved in her unicorn bank, and if Gillian borrowed some she could get a bus ticket halfway across the country. The only problem is, she can’t do that anymore. She has other considerations now; she has, for better or for worse, Ben Frye.

“It’s time for everyone to go home,” Gillian declares.

Scott and Gideon are sent away with promises of phone calls and postcards (for Scott) and boxes of saltwater taffy (for Gideon). Antonia cries a little as she watches Scott get into his mother’s car. Kylie sticks her tongue out at Gideon when he salutes, and she laughs when he takes off running through the damp evening, clomping along in his army boots, waking the squirrels that nest in the trees. Once those boys are gotten rid of, Gillian turns to Ben.

“Same goes for you,” she says. She’s throwing paper plates in the trash at breakneck speed. She already has the dirty silverware and the glasses soaking in soapy water, which is so unlike her usual messy self that Ben is starting to get suspicious. “Vamoose,” she tells Ben. She hates it when he looks at her that way, as though he knew her better than she knew herself. “These girls have to finish packing and be on the road by seven a.m.”

“Something is wrong,” Ben says.

“Absolutely not.” Gillian’s pulse rate must be a good two hundred. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Gillian turns to the sink and gives her attention to the soaking silverware, but Ben puts his hands on her waist and leans against her. He’s not so easily convinced, and Lord knows he’s stubborn when he wants something.

“Go on,” Gillian says, but her hands are soapy and wet and she’s having difficulty pushing him away. When Ben kisses her, she lets him. If he’s kissing her, he can’t ask any questions. Not that it would do any good to try to explain what her life used to be like. He wouldn’t understand, and that may be the reason she’s in love with him. He couldn’t imagine some of the things she’s done. And when she’s with him, neither can she.

Out in the yard, twilight is casting purple shadows. The evening has turned even more overcast, and the birds have stopped calling. Gillian should be paying attention to Ben’s kisses, since they may well be the last they share, but instead she’s looking out the kitchen window. She’s thinking about how Sally may be telling the investigator what’s in her garden, way in the back, where no one goes anymore, and that’s where she’s looking while Ben kisses her; that’s why she finally sees the hedge of thorns. All the while no one was watching, it has been thriving. It has grown nearly two feet since this morning, and, nurtured by spite, it’s growing still, coiling into the night sky.

Gillian abruptly pulls away from Ben. “You have to go,” she tells him. “Now.”

She kisses him deeply and pledges all sorts of things, love promises she won’t even remember until the next time they’re in bed and he reminds her. She works hard, and at last she wins.

“You’re sure about this?” Ben says, confused by how hot-and-cold she is, but wanting more all the same. “You could spend the night at my place.”

“Tomorrow,” Gillian vows. “And the next night and the night after that.”

When at last Ben leaves, when she’s watched out the front window to make certain he’s really gone, Gillian goes into the yard and stands motionless beneath the murky sky. It is the hour when the crickets first begin to call out a warning, their song quickened by the humidity of the coming storm. At the rear of the yard the hedge of thorns is twisted and dense. Gillian walks closer and sees that two wasps’ nests hang from the branches; a constant buzzing resonates, like a warning issued, or a threat. How is it possible for these brambles to have grown unnoticed? How could they have allowed it to happen? They believed him to be gone, they wished it to be so, but some mistakes come back to haunt you again and again, no matter how certain you are that they’ve finally been put to rest.

As she stands there, a fine drizzle begins, and that’s what makes Kylie come after her, the fact that her aunt is standing out there all alone, getting wet without seeming to notice.

“Oh, no,” Kylie says when she sees how tall the hedge of thorns has grown since she and Gideon played chess on the lawn.

“We’ll just cut them down again,” Gillian says. “That’s what we’ll do.”

But Kylie shakes her head. No clippers could get through those thorns, not even an ax would do. “I wish my mom would get home,” she says.

Laundry has been left on the line, and if it stays out it will be soaked, but that’s not the only problem. The hedge of thorns is giving off something nasty, a mist you can barely see, and the hems of each sheet and shirt have become blotchy and discolored. Kylie may be the only one who can see it, but every stain on their clean laundry is deep and dark. Now she realizes why she hasn’t been able to imagine their vacation, why it’s all been a blank inside her head.

“We’re not going to the aunts’,” she says.

The branches of the hedge are black, but anyone who looks carefully will see that the thorns are as red as blood.

Puddles are collecting on the patio by the time Antonia pushes open the back door. “Are you guys crazy?” she calls. When Gillian and Kylie don’t answer, she takes a black umbrella from the coat rack and runs out to join them.

A storm with near-hurricane-force winds has been predicted for late tomorrow. Other people in the neighborhood have heard the news and have gone out to buy rolls of masking tape; when the wind arrives to rattle their windows, the glass will be held together with X’s of tape. It’s the Owens house that’s in danger of being blown off its foundation.

“Great way to start a vacation,” Antonia says.

“We’re not going,” Kylie tells her.

“Of course we’re going,” Antonia insists. “I’m already packed.”

In her opinion, it’s truly creepy out tonight; it makes no sense to be standing here in the dark. Antonia shivers and considers the overcast sky, but she doesn’t look away long enough to miss seeing that her aunt has grabbed Kylie’s arm. Gillian holds on tight to Kylie; if she dared to let go she might not be able to stand on her own. Antonia looks to the rear of the yard, and then she understands. There’s something under those horrible thornbushes.

“What is it?” Antonia asks.

Kylie and Gillian are breathing a little too quickly; fear is rising off them in waves. It’s possible to smell fear like this; it’s a little like smoke and ashes, like flesh that’s come too close to a fire.

“What?” Antonia says. As soon as she takes a step toward the bushes, Kylie pulls her back. Antonia squints to see through the shadows. Then she laughs. “It’s just a boot. That’s all it is.”

It’s snakeskin, one of a pair that cost nearly three hundred dollars. Jimmy would never go to Western Warehouse or anyplace like that. He liked more expensive shops; he always preferred items that were one-of-a-kind.

“Don’t go over there!” Gillian says when Antonia starts to retrieve the boot.

The rain is coming down hard now; there’s a curtain of it, gray as a blanket of tears. In the place where they buried him, the earth looks spongy. If you reached your hand in, you might just be able to pluck out a bone. You might be dragged down yourself, if you weren’t careful, deep into the mud, and you’d struggle and you’d try to draw a breath, but it wouldn’t do the least bit of good.

“Did either of you find a ring back here?” Gillian asks.

The girls are both shivering now, and the sky is black. You’d think it was midnight. You’d think it was impossible for the heavens to have ever been blue, like ink, or robins’ eggs; like the ribbons girls thread through their hair for luck.

“A toad brought one into the house,” Kylie says. “I forgot all about it.”

“It was his.” Gillian’s voice doesn’t even sound like her. This voice is too thick and sad, and much too distant. “Jimmy’s.”

“Who’s Jimmy?” Antonia says. When no one answers her she looks to the hedge of thorns, and then she knows. “He’s back there.” Antonia leans against her sister.

If it storms as badly as the meteorologists have predicted and the yard should flood, then what? Gillian and Kylie and Antonia are drenched through and through; the umbrella Antonia holds aloft can’t protect them. Their hair is plastered to their heads; their clothes will have to be wrung out in the shower.

The ground near the thornbushes looks indented, as if it were already sinking in upon itself or, worse, sinking in on Jimmy. If he rises to the surface, like his silver ring, like some horrid, wicked fish, it will be over for them.

“I want my mother,” Antonia says in a very small voice.

When they finally turn and run for the house, the lawn squishes under their feet. They run even faster; they run as though their nightmares were right behind them on the grass. Once they’re inside, Gillian locks the door, then drags a chair over and positions it under the doorknob.

That dark June night when Gillian pulled into the driveway under a circle of light may as well have been a hundred years ago. She isn’t the same person she was when she arrived. That woman who tiptoed up to the front door with the sort of urgency only desperation can dispense would have already packed her car and been gone. She would never have stuck around to see what that investigator from Tucson would do with everything Sally told him. She wouldn’t have remained in the vicinity, and she wouldn’t have left a note behind for Ben Frye, even if she cared for him the way she does tonight. She’d be halfway through Pennsylvania by this time, with the radio on, loud, and a full tank of gas. She wouldn’t bother to look in her rearview mirror, not for a minute, not once. And that’s the difference, it’s simple and it’s plain: The person that’s here now isn’t going anywhere, except into the kitchen to fix her nieces some camomile tea to settle their nerves.

“We’re perfectly fine,” she tells the girls. Her hair is a disaster and her breathing is ragged; mascara is streaked across her pale skin in wavering lines. Still, she’s the one who’s here, not Sally, and it’s up to her to send the girls to bed and to assure them that she can take care of things. No need to worry, that’s what she tells them. They’re safe and sound tonight. While the rain pours down, while the wind rises in the east, Gillian will think of a plan, she’ll have to, because Sally could no more help her figure out what to do than she could leap from a tree and fly.

No longer balanced by logic, Sally is weightless tonight. She, who has always valued the sensible and the useful above all else, lost her way as soon as she drove down the Turnpike. She couldn’t find the Hide-A-Way Motel, though she’s passed it a thousand times before. She had to stop at a gas station and ask directions, and then she had her heart-attack thing, which forced her to search out the filthy restroom, where she washed her face with cool water. She looked at her reflection in the smudged mirror above the sink and breathed deeply for several minutes until she was steady once more.

But she soon discovered that she wasn’t as steady as she’d thought. She didn’t see the brake lights of the car ahead of her after she’d pulled back onto the Turnpike, and there was a minor fender-bender, which was completely her fault. The left headlight of her Honda is now barely attached and is in danger of falling off completely every time she steps on the brake.

By the time she finally pulls up to the Hide-A-Way, her family at home is halfway through dinner, and the parking lot of the fried-chicken franchise diagonally across the Turnpike is packed with customers. But food is the last thing Sally wants. Her stomach is jumpy and she’s nervous, she’s insanely nervous, which is probably why she brushes her hair twice before she gets out of the car and starts for the motel office. Pools of oil shimmer on the asphalt; one lonely crab apple tree, plopped down in the single plot of earth and surrounded by some red geraniums, shudders when the traffic on the Turnpike zooms by. Only four cars are parked in the lot, and three are real bombs. If she were looking for Gary’s car, the one farthest from the office would seem the most likely choice—it’s a Ford of some sort and it looks like a rental car. But more than that, it’s been left there so neatly and carefully, exactly the way Sally would imagine Gary would park his car.

Thinking about him, and his worried look, and those lines on his face, makes Sally even more nervous. Once she’s inside the motel office, she rearranges the strap of her purse over her shoulder; she runs her tongue over her lips. She feels like somebody who’s stepped outside her life into a stretch of woods she didn’t even know existed, and she doesn’t know the pathways or the trails.

The woman behind the desk is on the phone, and it seems she’s in the middle of a conversation that could go on for hours.

“Well, if you didn’t tell him, how could he know?” she’s saying in a disgusted tone of voice. She reaches for a cigarette and sees Sally.

“I’m looking for Gary Hallet.” Once Sally makes this announcement, she thinks she must really be crazy. Why would she be looking for someone whose presence spells calamity? Why would she drive over here on a night when she’s so confused? She can’t concentrate at all, that much is obvious. She can’t even remember the capital of New York State. She no longer recalls which is more caloric, butter or margarine, or whether or not monarch butterflies hibernate in winter.

“He went out,” the woman behind the desk tells Sally. “Once a moron, always a moron,” she says into the phone. “Of course you know. I know you know. The real question is, Why don’t you do something about it?” She stands, pulling the phone behind her, then lifts a key from the rack on the wall, and hands it over. “Room sixteen,” she tells Sally.

Sally steps back as if burned. “I’ll just wait here.”

She takes a seat on the blue plastic couch and reaches for a magazine, but it’s Time and the cover story is “Crimes of Passion,” which is more than Sally can bear at the moment. She tosses the magazine back on the coffee table. She wishes she had thought to change her clothes and wasn’t still wearing this old T-shirt and Kylie’s shorts. Not that it matters. Not that anyone cares what she looks like. She gets her brush out of her purse and runs it through her hair one last time. She’ll just tell him, and that will be that. Her sister’s an idiot—is that a federal offense? She was warped by the circumstances of her childhood, then she went out and screwed things up for herself as an adult to ensure that it would all match. Sally thinks about trying to explain this to Gary Hallet while he’s staring at her, and that’s when she realizes she’s hyperventilating, breathing so quickly that the woman behind the desk is keeping an eye on her in case Sally should pass out and she has to dial 911.

“Let me ask you this,” the woman behind the desk is saying into the phone. “Why do you ask me for advice if you’re not going to listen to it? Why don’t you just go ahead, do whatever you want, and leave me out of it?” She gives Sally a look. This is a private conversation, even if half of it is going on in a public place. “You sure you don’t want to hang out in his room?”

“Maybe I’ll just wait in my car,” Sally says.

“Super,” the woman says, shelving her phone conversation until she has her privacy back.

“Let me guess.” Sally nods to the phone. “Your sister?”

A baby sister out in Port Jefferson, who has needed constant counsel for the past forty-two years. Otherwise, she’d have every single credit card charged to the max and she’d still be married to her first husband, who was a million times worse than the one she’s got now.

“She’s so self-centered, she drives me nuts. That’s what comes from being the youngest and having everyone fuss over you,” the woman behind the desk announces. She’s slipped her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. “They want you to take care of them and solve all their problems and they never give you the least bit of credit for anything.”

“You’re right,” Sally agrees. “Being the baby does it. They never seem to get over it.”

“Don’t I know,” the other woman says.

And what of being the oldest, Sally wonders as she goes outside, stopping at the vending machine beside the office to get herself a diet Coke. She steps over the rainbow-edged pools of oil on her way back to her car. What if you’re forever trapped into telling someone else what to do, into being responsible and saying “I told you so” a dozen times a day? Whether she wants to admit it or not, this is what Sally has been doing, and she’s been doing it for as long as she can remember.

Right before Gillian had her hair chopped off, and set every girl in town marching into beauty shops, begging for the very same style, her hair had been as long as Sally’s, perhaps a bit longer. It was the color of wheat, blinding to look at under the sun and as fine as silk, at least on those rare occasions when Gillian chose to brush it. Now Sally wonders if she was jealous, and if that was why she teased Gillian about what a mess she always looked, with her hair all bunched up and knotted.

And yet on the day Gillian came home with her hair cut short, Sally was shocked. She hadn’t even consulted with Sally before she’d gone through with it. “How could you have done this to yourself?” Sally demanded.

“I have my reasons,” Gillian said. She was sitting in front of her mirror, applying blush into the hollows of her cheeks. “And they are all spelled C-A-S-H.”

Gillian swore that a woman had been following her for several days, and had finally approached her that afternoon. She had offered Gillian two thousand dollars, there, on the spot, if Gillian would accompany her to a salon and have her hair clipped off to the ears so this woman with short, mousy hair could have a false braid to wear to parties.

“Sure,” Sally said. “Like anyone in their right mind would ever do that.”

“Really?” Gillian said. “You don’t think anyone would?”

She reached into the front pocket of her jeans and pulled out a roll of money. The two thousand, in cash. Gillian had a huge smile on her face, and maybe Sally just wanted to wipe it right off.

“Well, you look awful,” she said. “You look like a boy.”

She said it even though she could see that Gillian had an incredibly pretty neck, so slim and sweet the mere sight of it would make grown men cry.

“Oh, who cares?” Gillian said. “It’ll grow back.”

But her hair never grew long again—it wouldn’t reach past her shoulders. Gillian washed it with rosemary, with violets and rose petals and even ginseng tea—none of it did any good.

“That’s what you get,” Sally announced. “That’s where greed will take you.”

But where has being such a good girl and a prig taken Sally? It’s brought her to this parking lot on a damp and dreadful night. It’s put her in her place, once and for all. Who is she to be so righteous and certain her way is best? If she’d simply called the police when Gillian first arrived, if she hadn’t had to take charge and manage it all, if she hadn’t believed that everything—both the cause and the effect—was her responsibility, she and Gillian might not be in the fix they’re in right now. It’s the smoke emanating from the walls of their parents’ bungalow. It’s the swans in the park. It’s the stop sign no one notices, until it’s too late.

Sally has spent her whole life being vigilant, and that takes logic and good common sense. If her parents had had her with them she would have smelled the acrid scent of fire, she knows that she would. She would have seen the blue spark that fell onto the rug, the first of many, where it glittered like a star, and then a river of stars, shiny and blue on the shag carpeting just before it all burst into flame. On that day when the teenagers had had too much to drink before they got into one of their daddies’ cars, she would have pulled Michael back to the curb. Didn’t she save her baby from the swans when they tried to attack her? Hasn’t she taken care of everything since—her children and the house, her lawn and her electricity bill, her laundry, which, when it hangs on the line, is even whiter than snow?

From the very start, Sally has been lying to herself, telling herself she can handle anything, and she doesn’t want to lie anymore. One more lie and she’ll be truly lost. One more and she’ll never find her way back through the woods.

Sally gulps her diet Coke; she’s dying of thirst. Her throat actually hurts from those lies she told Gary Hallet. She wants to come clean, she wants to tell all, she wants someone to listen to what she has to say and really hear her, the way no one ever has before. When she sees Gary crossing the Turnpike, carrying a tub of fried chicken, she knows she could start her car and get away before he recognizes her. But she stays where she is. As she watches Gary walk in her direction, a line of heat criss-crosses itself beneath her skin. It’s invisible, but it’s there. That’s the way desire is, it ambushes you in a parking lot, it wins every time. The closer Gary gets, the worse it is, until Sally has to slip one hand under her shirt and press down, just to ensure that her heart won’t escape from her body.

The world seems gray, and the roads are slick, but Gary doesn’t mind the dim and somber night. There have been nothing but blue skies in Tucson for months, and Gary isn’t bothered by a little rain. Maybe rain will cure the way he feels inside, and wash away his worries. Maybe he can get on the plane tomorrow at nine twenty-five, smile at the flight attendant, then catch a couple of hours’ sleep before he has to report into the office.

In his line of work, Gary is trained to notice things, but he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing now. Part of the reason for this is that he’s been imagining Sally everywhere he goes. He thought he spied her at a crosswalk on the Turnpike as he was driving here, and again in the fried-chicken place, and now here she is in the parking lot. She’s probably another illusion, what he wants to see rather than what’s right in front of him. Gary walks closer to the Honda and narrows his eyes. That’s Sally’s car, it is, and that’s her, there behind the wheel, honking the horn at him.

Gary opens the car door, gets into the passenger seat, and slams the door shut. His hair and his clothes are damp, and the bucket of chicken he has with him is steamy hot and smells like oil.

“I thought it was you,” he says.

He needs to fold his legs up to fit in this car; he balances the bucket of chicken on his lap.

“It was Jimmy’s ring,” Sally says.

She didn’t plan to spill it immediately, but maybe it’s just as well. She’s staring at Gary for his reaction, but he’s simply looking back at her. God, she wishes she smoked or drank or something. The tension is so bad that it feels as though it were at least a hundred and thirty degrees inside the car. Sally is surprised she doesn’t just burst into flame.

“Well?” she says finally. “We were lying to you. That ring in my kitchen belonged to James Hawkins.”

“I know.” Gary sounds even more worried now than before. She’s the one, and he knows it. Under certain circumstances, he might be willing to give up everything for Sally Owens. He might be willing to leap headlong into this ravine he feels coming up, without considering how fast he’d be falling or how brutal the moment of impact might be. Gary combs his wet hair back with his fingers and, for a moment, the whole car smells like rain. “Have you had dinner?” He lifts the bucket of chicken. He’s also got onion rings and fries.

“I couldn’t eat,” Sally tells him.

Gary opens the door and sets the bucket outside in the rain. He has definitely lost his appetite for chicken.

“I might pass out,” Sally warns him. “I feel like I’m going to have a stroke.”

“Is that because you understand I have to ask if you or your sister know where Hawkins is?”

That is not the reason. Sally is hot right down to her fingertips. She takes her hands off the steering wheel so steam doesn’t rise from beneath her cuticles, and places both hands in her lap. “I’ll tell you where he is.” Gary Hallet is looking at her as if the Hide-A-Way Motel and all the rest of the Turnpike didn’t even exist. “Dead,” Sally says.

Gary thinks this over while the rain taps against the roof of the car. They can’t see out the windshield, and the windows are fogged up.

“It was an accident,” Sally says now. “Not that he didn’t deserve it. Not that he wasn’t the biggest pig alive.”

“He went to my high school.” Gary speaks slowly, with an ache in his voice. “He was always bad news. People say that he shot twelve ponies at a ranch that refused to hire him for a summer job. Shot them in the head, one by one.”

“There you go,” Sally says. “There you have it.”

“You want me to forget about him? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“He won’t hurt anyone anymore,” Sally says. “That’s the important thing.”

The woman who works in the motel office has run outside, wearing a black rain poncho and carrying a broom she’ll use to try to unclog the gutters before tomorrow’s predicted storm. Sally herself isn’t thinking about her gutters. She’s not wondering if her girls thought to close the windows, and at this moment she doesn’t care if her roof will make it through gale-force winds.

“The only way he’ll hurt someone is if you keep looking for him,” Sally adds. “Then my sister will get hurt, and I will, too, and it will all be for nothing.”

She’s got the sort of logic Gary can’t argue with. The sky is getting darker, and when Gary looks at Sally he sees only her eyes. What’s right and what’s wrong have somehow gotten confused. “I don’t know what to do,” he admits. “In all of this, I seem to have a problem. I’m not impartial. I can pretend to be, but I’m not.”

He’s staring at her the way he did when she first answered the door. Sally can feel his intentions and his torment both; she’s well aware of what he wants.

Gary Hallet is getting leg cramps sitting in the Honda, but he’s not going anywhere yet. His grandfather used to tell him that most folks had it all wrong: The truth of the matter was, you could lead a horse to water, and if the water was cool enough, if it was truly clear and sweet, you wouldn’t have to force him to drink. Tonight Gary feels a whole lot more like the horse than the rider. He has stumbled into love, and now he’s stuck there. He’s fairly used to not getting what he wants, and he’s dealt with it, yet he can’t help but wonder if that’s only because he didn’t want anything too badly. Well, he does now. He looks out at the parking lot. By afternoon he’ll be back where he belongs; his dogs will go crazy when they see him, his mail will be waiting outside his front door, the milk in his refrigerator will still be fresh enough to use in his coffee. The hitch is, he doesn’t want to go. He’d rather be here, crammed into this tiny Honda, his stomach growling with hunger, his desire so bad he doesn’t know if he could stand up straight. His eyes are burning hot, and he knows he can never stop himself when he’s going to cry. He’d better not even try.

“Oh, don’t,” Sally says. She moves closer to him, pulled by gravity, pulled by forces she couldn’t begin to control.

“I just do this,” Gary says in that sad, deep voice. He shakes his head, disgusted with himself. This time he’d prefer to do almost anything but cry. “Pay no attention.”

But she does. She can’t help herself. She shifts toward him, meaning to wipe at his tears, but instead she loops her arms around his neck, and once she does that, he holds her closer.

“Sally,” he says.

It’s music, it’s a sound that is absurdly beautiful in his mouth, but she won’t pay attention. She knows from the time she spent on the back stairs of the aunts’ house that most things men say are lies. Don’t listen, she tells herself. None of it’s true and none of it matters, because he’s whispering that he’s been looking for her forever. She’s halfway onto his lap, facing him, and when he touches her, his hands are so hot on her skin she can’t believe it. She can’t listen to anything he tells her and she certainly can’t think, because if she did she might just think she’d better stop.

This is what it must be like to be drunk, Sally finds herself thinking, as Gary presses against her. His hands are on her skin, and she doesn’t stop him. They’re under her T-shirt, they’re into her shorts, and still she doesn’t stop him. She wants the heat he’s making her feel; she, who can’t function without directions and a map, wants to get lost right now. She can feel herself giving in to his kisses; she’s ready to do just about anything. This is what it must be like to be crazy, she guesses. Everything she’s doing is so unlike her usual self that when Sally catches sight of her image in the cloudy side-view mirror, she’s stunned. It’s a woman who could fall in love if she let herself, a woman who doesn’t stop Gary when he lifts her dark hair away, then presses his mouth to the hollow of her throat.

What good would it do her to get involved with someone like him? She’d have to feel so much, and she’s not that kind. She couldn’t abide those poor, incoherent women who came to the aunts’ back door, and she could not stand to be one of them now, wild with grief, overcome with what some people call love.

She pulls away from Gary, out of breath, her mouth hot, the rest of her burning. She has managed to exist this long without; she can keep on doing it. She can make herself go cold, from the inside out. The drizzle is letting up, but the sky has become as dark as a pot of ink. In the east, thunder sounds as the storm moves in from the sea.

“Maybe I’m letting you do this so you’ll stop the investigation,” Sally says. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe I’m so desperate I’d fuck anyone, including you.”

Her mouth tastes bitter and cruel, but she doesn’t care. She wants to see that wounded look on his face. She wants to stop this before that option is no longer hers. Before what she feels takes hold and she’s trapped, like those women at the aunts’ back door.

“Sally,” Gary says. “You’re not like that.”

“Oh, really?” Sally says. “You don’t know me. You just think you do.”

“That’s right. I think I do,” he says, which is about as much of an argument as Sally’s going to get.

“Get out,” she tells Gary. “Get out of the car.”

At this moment, Gary wishes he could grab her and force her, at least until she gave in. He’d like to make love to her right here, he’d like to do it all night and not give a damn about anything else, and not listen if she told him no. But he’s not that kind of man, and he never will be. He’s seen too many lives go wrong when a man allows himself to be led around by his dick. It’s like giving in to drugs or alcohol or the fast cash you’ve just got to have, no questions asked. Gary has always understood why people give in and do as they please with no thought of anyone else. Their minds shut off, and he’s not going to do that, even if it means he won’t get what he really wants.

“Sally,” he says, and his voice causes her more anguish than she would ever have imagined possible. It’s the kindness that undoes her, it’s the mercy in spite of everything that’s happened and is happening still.

“I want you to get out,” Sally says. “This is a mistake. It’s all wrong.”

“It isn’t.” But Gary opens the door and gets out. He leans back down, and Sally makes herself look straight ahead, at the windshield. She doesn’t dare look at him.

“Close it,” Sally says. Her voice sounds fragile, a shattered, undependable thing. “I mean it.”

He closes the car door, but he stands there watching. Even if she doesn’t look, Sally knows he hasn’t walked away. This is the way it has to be. She’ll be removed forever, distant as stars, unhurt and untouched, forever and ever. Sally steps on the gas, knowing that if she turned to see, she’d find he was still standing in the parking lot. But she doesn’t look back, because if she did she’d also discover how much she wants him, for all the good it will ever do her.

Gary does watch her drive away, and he’s watching still when the first bit of lightning cracks across the sky. He’s there when the crab apple on the far side of the parking lot turns white with heat; he’s close enough to feel the charge, and he’ll feel it all the way home, as he’s high above them in the sky, headed west. With a close call like that, it makes perfect sense that he’ll be shaking as he turns the key in his own front door. As Gary understands it, the greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself, and he and Sally have both served themselves from the same table tonight, the only difference being that he knows what he’s missing, and she has no idea of what’s causing her to cry as she drives down the Turnpike.

When Sally gets home, her dark hair loose, her mouth bruised by kisses, Gillian is waiting up for her. She’s sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea and listening to the thunder.

“Did you fuck him?” Gillian says.

The question is both completely startling and totally commonplace, since it’s Gillian who’s asking. Sally actually laughs. “No.”

“Too bad,” Gillian says. “I thought you would. I thought you were hooked. You had that look in your eye.”

“You were wrong,” Sally says.

“Did he at least make you a deal? Did he tell you we’re not suspects? Will he let it slide?”

“He has to think it over.” Sally sits down at the table. She feels the way she would if someone had smacked her. The weight of never seeing Gary again descends like a cloak made of ashes. She thinks about his kisses and the way he touched her, and she gets turned inside out all over again. “He has a conscience.”

“Just our luck. And it only gets worse.”

Tonight the wind will continue to rise, until there’s not a single trashcan left standing on the street. The clouds will be as tall as black mountains. In the backyard, beneath the hedge of thorns, the earth will turn to mud, and then to water, a pool of deception and regret.

“Jimmy’s not staying buried. First the ring, then a boot. I’m afraid to guess what’s going to come up next. I start to think about it, and I just kind of black out. I listened to the news, and the storm that’s coming is going to be bad.”

Sally moves her chair closer to Gillian’s. Their knees touch. Their pulse rate is exactly the same, the way it always was during a thunderstorm. “What do we do?” Sally whispers.

It’s the first time she’s ever asked for Gillian’s opinion or advice, and Gillian follows her example. It’s actually true, what they say about asking for help. Take a deep breath and it hurts a whole lot less to admit it out loud.

“Call the aunts,” Gillian tells Sally. “Do it now.”

ON the eighth day of the eighth month the aunts arrive on a Greyhound bus. The minute the driver hops down, he makes certain to get their black suitcases from the luggage compartment first thing, even though the larger of their suitcases is so heavy he has to use all his strength just to budge it and he nearly tears a ligament when he lifts it out.

“Hold your horses,” he advises the other passengers, who are all complaining that they’re the ones who must have their suitcases now in order to catch a connecting bus or run to meet a husband or a friend. The driver just ignores them and goes about his business. “I wouldn’t want you ladies to wait,” he tells the aunts.

The aunts are so old it’s impossible to tell their age. Their hair is white and their spines are crooked. They wear long black skirts and laced leather boots. Though they haven’t left Massachusetts in more than forty years, they’re certainly not intimidated by travel. Or by anything else, for that matter. They know what they want and they’re not afraid to be outspoken, which is why they pay no attention to the other passengers’ complaints, and continue to direct the driver on how to place the larger suitcase on the curb carefully.

“What have you got in here?” the driver jokes. “A ton of bricks?”

The aunts don’t bother to answer; they have very little tolerance for dim-witted humor, and they’re not interested in making polite conversation. They stand on the corner near the bus station and whistle for a taxi; as soon as one pulls over, they tell the driver exactly where to go—along the Turnpike for seven miles, past the mall and the shopping centers, past the Chinese restaurant and the deli and the ice cream shop where Antonia has worked this summer. The aunts smell like lavender and sulfur, a disquieting mixture, and maybe that’s the reason the taxi driver holds the door open for them when they arrive at Sally’s house, even though they didn’t bother to tip him. The aunts don’t believe in tips, and they never have. They believe in earning your worth and doing the job right. And, when you come right down to it, that’s what they’re here for.

Sally offered to pick them up at the bus station, but the aunts would have none of that. They can get around just fine on their own. They prefer to come to a place slowly, and that’s what they’re doing now. The lawns are wet, and the air is motionless and thick, the way it always is before a storm. A haze hangs over the houses and the chimney tops. The aunts stand in Sally’s driveway, between the Honda and Jimmy’s Oldsmobile, their black suitcases set down beside them. They close their eyes, to get a sense of this place. In the poplar trees, the sparrows watch with interest. The spiders stop spinning their webs. The rain will begin after midnight, on this the aunts agree. It will fall in sheets, like rivers of glass. It will fall until the whole world seems silver and turned upside down. You can feel such things when you have rheumatism, or when you’ve lived as long as the aunts have.

Inside the house, Gillian feels twitchy, the way people do before lightning is about to strike. She’s wearing old blue jeans and a black cotton shirt, and her hair’s uncombed. She’s like a kid who refuses to dress up for company. But the company’s arrived anyway; Gillian can feel their presence. The air is as dense as chocolate cake, the good kind, made without flour. The ceiling light in the living room has begun to sway; its metal chain makes a clackety sound, as if somewhere a top had been spun too fast. Gillian yanks the curtains back and takes a look.

“Oh, my god,” she says. “The aunts are in the driveway.”

Outside, the air is turning even thicker, like soup, and it has a yellow, sulfury odor, which some people find rather pleasant and others experience as so revolting they slam their windows shut, then turn their air conditioners on high. By evening, the wind will be strong enough to carry off small dogs and toss children from their swing sets, but for now it’s just a slight breeze. Linda Bennett has pulled into her driveway next door; when she gets out of her car, she has a bag of groceries balanced on her hip and she waves to the aunts with her free hand. Sally mentioned that some elderly relatives might arrive for a visit.

“They’re a bit odd,” Sally warned her next-door neighbor, but to Linda they look like sweet little old ladies.

Linda’s daughter, who used to be Jessie and now calls herself Isabella, slides out of the passenger seat and wrinkles her nose—through which she has taken to wearing three silver rings—as if she smells something rotten. She looks over and sees the aunts studying Sally’s house.

“Who are those old bats?” the so-called Isabella asks her mother.

Her words are carried across the lawn, each nasty syllable falling into Sally’s driveway with a clatter. The aunts turn and look at Isabella with their clear gray eyes, and when they do she feels something absolutely weird in her fingers and her toes, a sensation so threatening and strange that she runs into the house, gets into bed, and pulls the covers over her head. It will be weeks before this girl mouths off to her mother, or anyone else, and even then she’ll think twice, she’ll reconsider, then rephrase, with a “Please” or a “Thank you” thrown in.

“Let me know if you need anything during your visit,” Linda calls to Sally’s aunts, and all at once she feels better than she has in years.

Sally has come to stand beside her sister, and she taps on the window to get the aunts’ attention. The aunts look up and blink; and when they spy Sally and Gillian on the other side of the glass, they wave, just as they did when the girls first arrived at the airport in Boston. For Sally to see the aunts in her own driveway, however, is like seeing two worlds collide. It would be no less unusual for a meteorite to have landed beside the Oldsmobile, or for shooting stars to drift across the lawn, than it is to have the aunts here at last.

“Come on,” Sally says, tugging on Gillian’s sleeve, but Gillian just shakes her head no.

Gillian hasn’t seen the aunts for eighteen years, and although they haven’t aged as much as she, she never quite took notice of how old they were. She always thought of them together, a unit, and now she sees that Aunt Frances is nearly six inches taller than her sister, and that Aunt Bridget, whom they always called Aunt Jet, is actually cheerful and plump, like a little hen dressed up in black skirts and boots.

“I need time to process this,” Gillian says.

“Two minutes had better be enough,” Sally informs her, as she goes outside to welcome their guests.

“The aunts!” Kylie shouts when she sees they’ve arrived. She calls upstairs to Antonia, who rushes to join her, taking two steps at a time. The sisters make a dash for the open door, then realize that Gillian is still at the window.

“Come with us,” Kylie says to her.

“Go on,” Gillian advises the girls. “I’ll be right here.”

Kylie and Antonia hurry to the driveway and throw themselves at the aunts. They hoot and holler and dance the aunts around until they are all flushed and out of breath. When Sally phoned and explained about the problem in the yard, the aunts listened carefully, then assured her they’d be on the bus to New York as soon as they set out food for the last remaining cat, old Magpie. The aunts always kept their promises, and they still do. They believe that every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

For instance, the aunts had never expected their own lives to be so completely altered by a single phone call in the middle of the night those many years ago. It was October and cold, and the big house was drafty; the sky outside was so gloomy it pushed down on anyone who dared to walk beneath it. The aunts had their schedule, to which they kept no matter what. They took their walk in the morning, then read and wrote in their journals, then had lunch—the same lunch every day—mashed parsnips and potatoes, noodle pudding, and apple tart for dessert. They napped in the afternoon and did their business at twilight, should anyone come to the back door. They always had their supper in the kitchen—beans and toast, soup and crackers—and they kept the lights turned low, to save on electricity. Every night they faced the dark, since they could never sleep.

Their hearts had been broken on the night those two brothers ran across the town green; they’d been broken so hard and so suddenly that the aunts never again allowed themselves to be taken by surprise, not by lightning, and certainly not by love. They believed in their schedules and very little else. Occasionally they would attend a town meeting, where their stern presence could easily sway a vote, or they’d visit the library, where the sight of their black skirts and boots induced silence in even the rowdiest book borrowers.

The aunts assumed they knew their life and all that it would bring. They were well acquainted with their own fates, or so they believed. They were quite convinced nothing could come between their present and their own quiet deaths, in bed, of course, from pneumonia and complications of the flu at the ages of ninety-two and ninety-four. But they must have missed something, or perhaps it’s simply that one can never predict one’s own fortune. The aunts never imagined that a small and serious voice would phone in the middle of the night, demanding to be taken in, disrupting everything. That was the end of parsnips and potatoes at lunch. Instead, the aunts got used to peanut butter and jelly, graham crackers and alphabet soup, Mallomar cookies and handfuls of M&M’s. How odd that they would be grateful to have had to deal with sore throats and nightmares. Without those two girls, they would never have had to run down the hall in their bare feet in the middle of the night to see which one had a stomach virus and which one was sleeping tight.

Frances comes to the porch to better assess her niece’s house.

“Modern, but very nice,” she announces.

Sally feels the sting of pride. It’s as high a compliment as Aunt Frances would ever give; it means that Sally’s done it all on her own, and done well. Sally’s grateful for any kind words or deeds; she can use them. She was awake all night because every time she closed her eyes she’d see Gary so clearly it was as if he were there beside her at the kitchen table, in the easy chair, in her bed. She has a tape that keeps playing inside her head, over and over, and she can’t seem to stop it. Gary Hallet is touching her right now, he has his hands on her as she leans to grab her aunt’s suitcase. When she tries to lift this piece of luggage, Sally is shocked to discover she hasn’t the strength to do it alone. Something inside rattles like beads, or bricks, or perhaps even bones.

“For the problem in the yard,” Aunt Frances explains.

“Ah,” Sally says.

Aunt Jet comes over and links her arm through Sally’s. During the summer that Jet turned sixteen, two local boys killed themselves for her love. One tied iron bars to his ankles and drowned himself in a quarry. The other was done in on the train tracks outside of town by the 10:02 to Boston. Of all the Owens women, Jet Owens was the most beautiful, and she never even noticed. She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her. The only one she ever cared for was that boy who was hit by lightning when he and his brother went tearing off across the town green to prove how brave and daring they were. Sometimes, late at night, Jet and Frances both hear the sound of those boys laughing as they run through the rain, then stumble into the darkness. Their voices are still young and filled with expectation, exactly as they sounded at the moment they were struck down.

Lately, Aunt Jet has to carry a black cane that has a carved raven’s head; she’s bent over with arthritis, but she never complains about the way her back feels when she unlaces her boots at the end of the day. Each morning she washes with the black soap she and Frances mix up twice a year, and her complexion is close to perfect. She works in her garden and can remember the Latin name of every plant that grows there. But not a day goes by that she doesn’t think about the boy she loved. Not a moment passes that she doesn’t wish that time were a movable entity and that she could go backward and kiss that boy again.

“We’re so glad to be here,” Jet announces.

Sally smiles a beautiful sad smile. “I should have invited you a long time ago. I didn’t think either of you would like it.”

“That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing,” Frances informs her niece. “That’s why language was invented. Otherwise, we’d all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Sally agrees.

The suitcases are lugged inside, which is no easy job. Antonia and Kylie shout, “Heave ho!” and work together, under the aunts’ watchful eyes. Waiting by the window, Gillian has considered escaping through the back door so she won’t have to face the aunts’ critique on how she’s messed up her life. But when Kylie and Antonia lead the aunts inside, Gillian is standing in the very same spot, her pale hair electrified.

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies, for instance, and women who’ve been in love with the wrong man too often. The aunts cluck their tongues as soon as they see this grown woman who once was their little girl. They may not have had regular dinnertimes or made certain that clean clothes were folded in the bureaus, but they were there. They were the ones Gillian turned to that first year, when the other children at nursery school pulled her hair and called her the witch-girl. Gillian never told Sally how awful it was, how they persecuted her, and she was just three years old. It was embarrassing, that much she knew even then. It was something you didn’t admit to.

Every day Gillian came home and swore to Sally that she’d had a lovely afternoon, she’d played with blocks and paints, and fed the bunny that eyed the children sadly from a cage near the coat closet. But Gillian couldn’t lie to the aunts when they came to fetch her. At the end of each day her hair was in tangles and her face and legs were scratched red. The aunts advised her to ignore the other children—to read her books and play her games by herself and march over to inform the teacher if anyone was nasty or rude. Even then, Gillian believed she was worthy of the awful treatment she got, and she never did go running to the teacher and tattle. She tried her best to keep it inside.

The aunts, however, could tell what was happening from the sorry slope of Gillian’s shoulders as she pulled her sweater on and because she couldn’t sleep at night. Most of the children eventually tired of teasing Gillian, but several continued to torment her—whispering “witch” every time she was near, spilling grape juice on her new shoes, grabbing fistfuls of her hair and pulling with all their might—and they did so until the Christmas party.

All the children’s parents attended the party, bringing cookies or cakes or bowls of eggnog sprinkled with nutmeg. The aunts came late, wearing their black coats. Gillian had hoped they would remember to bring a box of chocolate chip cookies, or perhaps a Sara Lee cake, but the aunts weren’t interested in desserts. They went directly to the worst of the children, the boys who pulled hair, the girls who called names. The aunts didn’t have to use curses or herbs, or vow any sort of punishment. They merely stood beside the snack table, and every child who’d been mean to Gillian was immediately sick to his or her stomach. These children ran to their parents and begged to be taken home, then stayed in bed for days, shivering beneath wool blankets, so queasy and filled with remorse that their complexions took on a faint greenish tinge, and their skins gave off the sour scent that always accompanies a guilty conscience.

After the Christmas party, the aunts took Gillian home and sat her down on the sofa in the parlor, the velvet one with the wooden lion’s feet whose claws terrified Gillian. They told her how sticks and stones could break bones, but taunting and name-calling were only for fools. Gillian heard them, but she didn’t really listen. She put too much worth in what other people thought and not enough in her own opinion. The aunts have always known that Gillian sometimes needs extra help defending herself. As they study her, their gray eyes are bright and sharp. They see the lines on her face that someone else might not notice; they can tell what she’s been through.

“I look awful, right?” Gillian says. There’s a catch in her voice. A minute ago she was eighteen and climbing out her bedroom window, and now here she is, all used up.

The aunts cluck louder and come to embrace Gillian. It is so unlike their usual cool style that a sob escapes from Gillian’s throat. To their credit, the aunts have learned a thing or two since they were snagged into raising two little girls. They’ve watched Oprah; they know what can happen when you hide your love away. As far as they’re concerned, Gillian is more attractive than ever, but then the Owens women have always been known for their beauty, as well as the foolish choices they make when they’re young. In the twenties, their cousin Jinx, whose watercolors can be found in the Museum of Fine Arts, was too headstrong to listen to a word anyone else said; she got drunk on cold champagne, threw her satin shoes over a high stone wall, then danced on broken glass until dawn and never walked again. The most beloved of the great-aunts, Barbara Owens, married a man with a skull as thick as a mule’s who refused to have electricity or plumbing put into their house, insisting such things were fads. Their favorite cousin, April Owens, lived in the Mojave Desert for twelve years, collecting spiders in jars filled with formaldehyde. A decade or two on the rocks gives a person character. Although she’d never believe it, those lines in Gillian’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside.

“Well,” Gillian says when she’s done crying. She wipes at her eyes with her hands. “Who would have thought I’d get so emotional?”

The aunts settle in, and then Sally pours them each a small glass of gin and bitters, which they always appreciate, and which they particularly like to get them started when there’s work to be done.

“Let’s talk about the fellow in the backyard,” Frances says. “Jimmy.”

“Do we have to?” Gillian groans.

“We do,” Aunt Jet is sorry to say. “Just little things about him. For instance—how did he die?”

Antonia and Kylie are gulping diet Cokes and listening like crazy. The hair on their arms is standing on end; this could get really interesting.

Sally has brought a pot of mint tea to the table, along with a chipped cup her daughters gave her one Mother’s Day, which has always been her favorite. Sally can’t drink coffee anymore; the scent of it conjures Gary up so completely she could have sworn he was sitting at the table when Gillian was pouring water through the filter this morning. She tells herself it’s the lack of caffeine that’s been making her lethargic, but that’s not what’s wrong. She’s been unusually quiet today, moody enough to make Antonia and Kylie take notice. She seems so different. The girls have had the feeling that the woman who was once their mother is gone forever. It’s not only that her black hair is loose, instead of being pulled away from her face; it’s how sad she looks, how far away.

“I don’t think we should discuss this in front of the children, ” Sally says.

But the children are riveted; they’ll die if they don’t hear what happened next; they simply won’t be able to stand it.

“Mother!” they cry.

They’re almost women. And there’s not a thing Sally can do about it. So she shrugs and nods to Gillian, giving her the okay.

“Well,” Gillian says, “I guess I killed him.”

The aunts exchange a look. In their opinion this is one thing Gillian is not capable of. “How?” they ask. This is the girl who would scream if she stepped on a spider in her bare feet. If she pricked her finger and drew blood she’d announce she was ready to faint and then proceed to fall on the floor.

Gillian admits she used nightshade, a plant she always had contempt for when she was a child, pretending it was ragweed so she could give it a good pull when the aunts asked her to clear out the garden. When the aunts ask for the dosage she used and Gillian tells them, the aunts nod, pleased. Exactly as they thought. If the aunts know anything, they know nightshade. Such a dosage wouldn’t kill a fox terrier, let alone a six-foot-tall man.

“But he’s dead,” Gillian says, stunned to hear that her remedy could not have killed him. She turns to Sally. “I know he was dead.”

“Definitely dead,” Sally agrees.

“Not by your hand.” Frances could not be more certain of it. “Not unless he was a chipmunk.”

Gillian throws her arms around the aunts. Aunt Frances’s announcement has filled her with hope. It’s a silly and ridiculous thing to possess at her age, particularly on this awful night, but Gillian doesn’t give a damn. Better late than never, that’s the way she sees it.

“I’m innocent,” Gillian cries.

Sally and the aunts exchange a look; they don’t know about that.

“In this case,” Gillian adds when she sees their expressions.

“What killed him?” Sally asks the aunts.

“It could have been anything.” Jet shrugs.

“Alcohol,” Kylie proposes. “Years of it.”

“His heart,” Antonia suggests.

Frances announces that they may as well stop this guessing game; they’ll never know what killed him, but they’re still left with a body in the yard, and that is why the aunts have brought along their recipe for getting rid of the many nasty things one can find in a garden—slugs or aphids, the bloody remains of a crow, torn apart by his rivals, or the sort of weeds that are so poisonous it’s impossible to pull them by hand, even when wearing thick leather gloves. The aunts know precisely how much lye to add to the lime, much more than they include when they boil up their black soap, which is especially beneficial to a woman’s skin if she washes with it every night. Bars of the aunts’ soap, wrapped in clear cellophane, can be found in health-food stores in Cambridge and in several specialty shops along Newbury Street, and this has bought not only a new roof for their old house but a state-of-the-art septic system as well.

At home the aunts always use the big cast-iron cauldron, which has been in the kitchen since Maria Owens first built the house, but here Sally’s largest pasta pot will have to do. They’ll have to boil the ingredients for three and a half hours, so even though Kylie is always nervous that someone down at Del Vecchio’s will recognize her voice as the one belonging to the wise-acre who had all those pizzas delivered to Mr. Frye’s house a while back, she phones in and asks for two large pies to be delivered, one with anchovies, for the aunts, the other cheese and mushroom with extra sauce.

The mixture on the back burner starts to bubble, and by the time the delivery boy arrives, the sky has grown stormy and dark, although beneath the thick layers of clouds is a perfect white moon. The delivery boy knocks three times and hopes that Antonia Owens, whom he once sat next to in algebra, will appear. Instead, it’s Aunt Frances who yanks open the door. The cuffs of her sleeves are smoky, from all the lye she’s been measuring, and her eyes are as cold as iron.

“What?” she demands of the boy, who has already clutched the pizzas tightly to his chest simply because of the sight of her.

“Pizza delivery,” he manages to say.

“This is your job?” Frances wants to know. “Delivering food?”

“That’s right,” the boy says. He thinks he can see Antonia in the house; there’s somebody beautiful with red hair, at any rate. Frances is glaring at him. “That’s right, ma’am,” he amends.

Frances reaches into her skirt pocket for her change purse and counts out eighteen dollars and thirty-three cents, which she considers highway robbery.

“Well, if it’s your job, don’t expect a tip,” she tells the boy.

“Hey, Josh,” Antonia calls as she comes to collect the pizzas. She’s wearing an old smock over her black T-shirt and leggings. Her hair has turned to ringlets in all this humidity and her pale skin looks creamy and cool. The delivery boy is unable to speak in her presence, although when he gets back to the restaurant he’ll talk about her for a good hour before the kitchen staff tells him to shut up. Antonia laughs as she closes the door. She’s gotten back some of whatever she’d lost. Attraction, she now understands, is a state of mind.

“Pizza,” Antonia announces, and they all sit down to dinner in spite of the awful smell coming from the aunts’ mixture boiling on the rear burner of the stove. The storm is rattling the windowpanes and the thunder is so near it can shake the ground. One big flash of lightning, and half the neighborhood has lost its electricity; in houses all along the street, people are searching for flashlights and hurricane candles, or just giving up and going to sleep.

“That’s good luck,” Aunt Jet says when their electricity goes as well. “We’ll be the light in the darkness.”

“Find a candle,” Sally suggests.

Kylie gets a candle from the shelf near the sink. When she passes the stove she holds her nose closed with her fingers.

“Boy, does that stink,” she says of the aunts’ mixture.

“It’s supposed to,” Jet says, pleased.

“It always does,” her sister agrees.

Kylie returns and places the candle in the center of the table, then lights it so they can go on with their supper, which is interrupted by the doorbell.

“It better not be that delivery boy back for more,” Frances says now. “I’ll give him a real piece of my mind.”

“I’ll get it.” Gillian goes to the door and swings it open.

Ben Frye is on the porch, wearing a yellow rain slicker; he’s holding a box of white hurricane candles and a lantern. Just seeing him makes a chill go down Gillian’s spine. From the first, she’s been figuring that Ben was taking his life in his hands each time he was with her. With her luck and her history, anything that could go wrong would. She’d been sure she’d bring disaster to whoever loved her, but that was back when she was a woman who killed her boyfriend in an Oldsmobile, now she’s someone else. She leans out the front door and kisses Ben on the mouth. She kisses him in a way that proves that if he was ever thinking of getting out of this, he’d better stop thinking right now.

“Who invited you here?” Gillian says, but she has her arms around him; she’s got that sugary smell anyone who gets too close to her can’t help but notice.

“I was worried about you,” Ben says. “They can call this thing a storm, but it’s really a hurricane.”

Tonight, Ben has left Buddy alone to bring the candles over, even though he knows how anxious thunder makes the rabbit. That’s what happens when Ben wants to see Gillian, he has to go on and do it, no matter what the consequences. Still, he’s so unused to being spontaneous that whenever he does something like this he has a slight ringing in his ears, not that he cares. When Ben returns to his house he’s bound to find a telephone book shredded or the soles chewed off his favorite running shoes, but it’s worth it to be with Gillian.

“Get out while the going’s good,” Gillian tells him. “My aunts are here from Massachusetts.”

“Great,” Ben says, and before Gillian can stop him he’s inside the house. Gillian tugs at the sleeve of his rain slicker, but he’s on his way to greet their guests. The aunts have serious business ahead of them; they’ll flip their lids if Ben careens into the kitchen assuming he’s about to meet two dear old ladies. They’ll rise from their chairs and stomp their feet and turn their cold gray eyes in his direction.

“They arrived this afternoon and they’re exhausted,” Gillian says. “This is not a good idea. They don’t like company. Plus, they’re ancient.”

Ben Frye pays no attention, and why should he? The aunts are Gillian’s family, and that’s all he needs to know. He lopes right into the kitchen, where Antonia and Kylie and Sally stop eating the minute they see him; quickly they turn to see the aunts’ reaction. Ben doesn’t catch on to their anxiety any more than he notices the fiery scent rising from the pot on the stove. He must presume the smell emanates from some special cleaning fluid or detergent, or perhaps some small creature, a baby squirrel or an old toad, has curled up to die underneath the back doorstep.

Ben goes over to the aunts, reaches into the sleeve of his rain slicker, and pulls out a bunch of roses. Aunt Jet accepts them with pleasure. “Lovely,” she says.

Aunt Frances runs a petal between her thumb and forefinger to verify that the roses are real. They are, but that doesn’t mean Frances is so easily impressed.

“Any more tricks?” she says in a voice that can turn a man’s blood to ice.

Ben smiles his beautiful smile, the one that made Gillian weak in the knees from the start and that now reminds the aunts of the boys they once knew. He reaches behind Aunt Frances’s head, and before they know it, he has pulled from thin air a chiffon scarf the color of sapphires, which he proudly presents.

“I couldn’t accept this,” Frances says, but her tone isn’t quite so cool as before, and when no one’s looking, she loops the scarf around her neck. The color is perfect for her; her eyes look like lake water, clear and gray-blue. Ben makes himself comfortable, grabs a piece of pizza, and begins to ask Jet about their trip down from Massachusetts. That’s when Frances signals to Gillian to come close.

“Don’t screw this one up,” she tells her niece.

“I don’t intend to,” Gillian assures her.

Ben stays until eleven. He fixes instant chocolate pudding for dessert, then teaches Kylie and Antonia and Aunt Jet how to build a house of cards and how to make it fall down with a single puff of air.

“You got lucky this time,” Sally tells her sister.

“You think it was luck?” Gillian grins.

“Yeah,” Sally says.

“No way,” Gillian says. “It took years of practice.”

Just then the aunts both tilt their heads at the very same time and make a very little noise low in their throats, a kind of click so close to silence that anyone who wasn’t listening carefully might mistake it for the faint call of a cricket or the sigh of a mouse beneath the floorboards.

“It’s time,” Aunt Frances says.

“We have family business to discuss,” Jet tells Ben as she leads him to the door.

Aunt Jet’s voice is always sweet, yet the tone isn’t one someone would dare to disobey. Ben grabs his rain slicker and waves to Gillian.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” he declares. “I’ll come over for breakfast.”

“Don’t screw this one up,” Aunt Jet tells Gillian after she’s closed the door behind Ben.

“I won’t,” Gillian assures her as well. She goes to the window and takes a look at the backyard. “It’s awful tonight.”

The wind is tearing shingles from the roofs, and every cat in the neighborhood has demanded to be let in or has taken refuge in a window well, to shiver and yowl.

“Maybe we should wait,” Sally ventures.

“Bring the pot around back,” Aunt Jet tells Kylie and Antonia.

The candle in the center of the table casts a circle of wavery light. Aunt Jet takes Gillian’s hand in her own. “We have to see to this now. You don’t put off dealing with a ghost.”

“What do you mean, a ghost?” Gillian says. “We want to make certain the body stays buried.”

“Fine,” Aunt Frances says. “If that’s how you want to look at it.”

Gillian wishes she’d had a gin and bitters herself when the aunts did. Instead, she finishes the last of her cold coffee, which has been sitting in a cup on the counter since late afternoon. By tomorrow morning the creek behind the high school will be deep as a river; toads will have to scramble for higher ground; children won’t think twice about diving into the warm, murky water, even if they’re dressed in their Sunday clothes and wearing their best pair of shoes.

“Okay,” Gillian says. She knows her aunts are talking about more than a body; it’s the spirit of the man, that’s what’s haunting them. “Fine,” she tells the aunts, and she swings open the back door.

Antonia and Kylie carry the pot out to the yard. The rain is quite near; they can taste it in the air. The aunts have already had the girls bring their suitcase over to the hedge of thorns. They stand close together, and when the wind rustles their skirts the fabric makes a moaning sound.

“This dissolves what once was flesh,” Aunt Frances says.

She signals to Gillian.

“Me?” Gillian takes a step backward, but there’s no place to go. Sally is right behind her.

“Go on,” Sally tells her.

Antonia and Kylie are holding on to the heavy pot; the wind is so strong that the hedge of thorns whips out, as if trying to cut them. The wasps’ nests sway back and forth. It is definitely time.

“Oh, brother,” Gillian whispers to Sally. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

Antonia’s fingers are turning white with the effort she needs not to drop the pot. “This is really heavy,” she says in a shaky voice.

“Believe me,” Sally tells Gillian. “You can.”

If there’s one thing Sally is now certain of, it’s how you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do. Those are her daughters, the girls she wanted to lead normal lives, and she’s allowing them to stand over a pile of bones with a spaghetti pot filled mostly with lye. What has happened to her? What has snapped? Where is that logical woman, the one people could depend on, day after day? She can’t stop thinking about Gary, no matter how hard she tries. She actually called the Hide-A-Way to ask if he’d checked out, and he has. He’s gone, and here she is, thinking about him. Last night, she dreamed of the desert. She dreamed the aunts had sent her a cutting from an apple tree in their yard and that it bloomed without water. And in her dream the horses that ate apples from that tree ran faster than all the others, and any man who took a bite from a pie Sally fixed with these apples was bound to be hers, for life.

Sally and Gillian take the pot from the girls, although Gillian keeps her eyes closed as they turn it over and pour out the lye. The damp earth sizzles and is hot; as the mixture seeps deeper into the ground, a mist appears. It’s the color of regret, it’s the color of heartbreak, the gray of doves and early morning.

“Step back,” the aunts tell them, for the earth has begun to bubble. The roots of the thornbushes are being dissolved by the mixture, as are stones and beetles, leather and bones. They can’t move away fast enough, but still something is happening beneath Kylie’s feet.

“Damn it,” Sally cries.

Right under Kylie’s feet the earth is shifting, falling in on itself, like a landslide, going down. Kylie feels it, she knows it, yet she freezes. She’s falling into a hole, she’s falling fast, but Antonia reaches to grab the back of her shirt and then pulls. She wrenches Kylie back so hard and so fast that Antonia can hear her own elbow pop.

The girls stand there, out of breath and terrified. Without realizing it, Gillian has latched on to Sally’s arm; she’s holding on so tight that Sally will have the marks of her sister’s fingers on her skin for days afterward. Now they all step back. They do it quickly. They do it without having to be told. A thread of blood-red vapor is rising from the place where Jimmy’s heart would have been, a small tornado of spite that disappears as it meets the air.

“That was him,” Kylie says of the red vapor, and sure enough, they can smell beer and boot polish, they can feel the air grow as hot as embers in an ashtray. And then nothing. Nothing at all. Gillian can’t be sure if she’s crying, or if the rain has begun. “He’s really gone,” Kylie tells her.

But the aunts are taking no chances. They’ve carried along twenty blue stones inside their largest suitcase, stones Maria Owens had brought to the house on Magnolia Street more than two hundred years ago. Stones such as these form the path in the aunts’ garden, but there were extras stored beside the potting shed, enough to fashion a small patio in the spot where the lilacs once grew. Now that the hedge of thorns is nothing but ashes, it’s easy for the Owens women to put down a circle of stones. The patio won’t be fancy, but it will be wide enough for a small wrought-iron table and four chairs. Some of the little girls in the neighborhood will beg to have tea parties out here, and when their mothers laugh and ask why this patio is better than their own, the little girls will insist the blue stones are lucky.

There’s no such thing as luck, their mothers will tell them. Drink your orange juice, have your cakes, keep your party in your own backyard. And yet, every time their mothers’ backs are turned, the little girls will drag their dolls and teddy bears and china tea sets over to the Owens patio. “Good luck,” they’ll whisper as they clink their cups together in a toast. “Good luck,” they’ll say as the stars rise above them in the sky.

Some people believe that every question has a logical answer; there’s an order to everything, which is neat and based purely on empirical evidence. But really, what could it be but luck that the rain doesn’t begin in earnest until their work is done. The Owens women have mud under their fingernails, and their arms ache from carting those heavy stones. Antonia and Kylie will sleep well tonight, as will the aunts, who have been plagued by insomnia from time to time. They will sleep the whole night through, even though lightning will strike in twelve separate places on Long Island before the storm is over. A house in East Meadow will be burned to the ground. A surfer in Long Beach who always longed for hurricanes and big waves will be fried. A maple tree that has grown in the Y field for three hundred years will be split in two and will have to be taken down with chain saws to make certain it won’t collapse on top of the Little League team.

Only Sally and Gillian are awake to watch when the worst of the storm arrives. They’re not worried by weather reports. Tomorrow there will be branches strewn across the lawn, and the trashcans will roll down the street, but the air will be fragrant and mild. They can have their breakfast and coffee outside, if they wish. They can listen for the song of sparrows who’ve come to beg for crumbs.

“The aunts didn’t seem as disappointed as I thought they’d be,” Gillian says. “In me.”

The rain is coming down hard; it’s washing those blue stones out in the yard clean as new.

“They’d be stupid if they were disappointed,” Sally says. She loops her arm through her sister’s. She thinks she may actually mean what she’s just said. “And the aunts are definitely not stupid.”

Tonight Sally and Gillian will concentrate on the rain, and tomorrow on the blue sky. They will do the best they can, but they will always be the girls they once were, dressed in their black coats, walking home through the fallen leaves to a house where no one could see into the windows, and no one could see out. At twilight they will always think of those women who would do anything for love. And in spite of everything, they will discover that this, above all others, is their favorite time of day. It’s the hour when they remember everything the aunts taught them. It’s the hour they’re most grateful for.

ON the outskirts of the city the fields have turned red and the trees are all twisted and black. There is frost covering the meadows and smoke rising from the chimneys. In the park, in the very center of town, the swans rest their heads beneath their wings for comfort and warmth. The gardens have been put to bed, except for the one in the Owens yard. Cabbages are growing there, although some of them will be plucked from the rows this morning, and cooked with bouillon. Potatoes have already been dug up, boiled, and mashed, and are currently being flavored with salt, pepper, and sprigs from the rosemary that grows beside the gate. The willowware serving bowl has been rinsed clean and is drying on the rack.

“You’re using too much pepper,” Gillian tells her sister.

“I think I can manage to make mashed potatoes.” Sally has fixed them at every Thanksgiving dinner she’s cooked since she first left the aunts’ house. She is completely sure of what she’s doing, even though the kitchen utensils are old-fashioned and a bit rusty. But of course, since Gillian is such a changed woman she gives advice freely, even when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

“I know about pepper,” Gillian insists. “That’s too much.”

“Well, I know potatoes,” Sally says, and as far as she’s concerned, that had better be that, especially if they want to serve dinner at three.

They arrived late last night; Ben and Gillian are staying in the attic, Kylie and Antonia are sharing what used to be a sitting room, and Sally is in the chilly little alcove up near the back stairs on a fold-out cot. The heat’s on the fritz, so they’ve dragged out all the old feather quilts and built a fire in every fireplace, and they’ve called the boiler man, Mr. Jenkins, to come repair whatever’s wrong. Even though it’s Thanksgiving morning and Mr. Jenkins doesn’t want to leave the comfort of his easy chair, when Frances got on the phone with him they all knew he’d be there by noon.

The aunts keep complaining that too much fuss is being made, but they smile when Kylie and Antonia grab them and kiss their cheeks and tell them how much they love them and insist they always will. The aunts are advised that they mustn’t be concerned that Scott Morrison is taking the bus up from Cambridge, since he’ll bring a sleeping bag and will camp out on the living room floor; they’ll barely even be aware of his presence, and that goes for the two roommates he’s bringing along as well.

The only cat left is Magpie, who is so ancient he gets up only in order to get to his food bowl. The rest of the time he’s curled onto a special silk cushion on a kitchen chair. One of Magpie’s eyes doesn’t open at all anymore, but his good eye is fixed on the turkey, which is cooling on an earthenware platter in the center of the wooden table. Buddy is being kept in the attic—Ben is there with him, feeding him the last of the carrots from the aunts’ garden—since Magpie has been known to catch baby bunnies who cower between the rows of cabbage. He’s been known to eat them whole.

“Don’t even think about it,” Gillian tells the cat when she sees him eyeing the turkey, but as soon as her back is turned, Sally takes a bit of white meat, which she herself would never eat, and feeds old Magpie by hand.

The aunts usually have a broiled chicken delivered from the market on Thanksgiving Day. One year they made do with frozen turkey dinners, and another year they said to hell with the whole silly holiday and had a nice pot roast. They were thinking of doing up another roast this year when the girls all insisted on coming to visit for the holiday.

“Oh, let them cook,” Jet tells her sister, who can’t stand the clinking and clanking of pots and pans. “They’re having fun.”

Sally stands at the sink, rinsing off the potato masher, the very same one she used as a child when she insisted on making nutritious suppers. She can see through the window to the yard, where Antonia and Kylie are running back and forth, chasing away the squirrels. Antonia wears one of Scott Morrison’s old sweaters, which she has dyed black, and it’s so big that when she waves her arms at the squirrels she looks as if she had long woolen hands. Kylie is laughing so hard she has to sit down on the ground. She points to one squirrel who refuses to move, a mean granddaddy who’s screaming at Antonia, since he considers this to be his garden; the cabbages they’ve been gathering he’s been watching all summer and fall.

“Those girls are pretty cute,” Gillian says when she comes to stand beside Sally. She meant to argue some more about the pepper, but she drops the subject when she sees the look on her sister’s face.

“They’re all grown up,” Sally says in her matter-of-fact voice.

“Yeah, right,” Gillian sputters. The girls are chasing the granddaddy squirrel around in a circle. They shriek and throw their arms around each other when he suddenly jumps onto the garden gate and glares down at them. “They look real mature.”

In the beginning of October, Gillian finally received word from the attorney general’s office in Tucson. For more than two months the sisters had been waiting to see what Gary would do with the information Sally had given him; they’d been moody and distant from everyone except each other. Then, at last, a letter came, registered mail, from someone named Arno Williams. James Hawkins, he wrote, was dead. The body had been found out in the desert, where he must have been holed up for months, and in some kind of drunken stupor he’d rolled into his campfire and been burned beyond recognition. The only way they’d been able to identify him after he’d been brought down to the morgue was through his silver ring, which had melted somewhat and which was now being sent to Gillian, along with a certified check for eight hundred dollars from the sale of the Oldsmobile they’d impounded, since Jimmy had listed her as his only next of kin down at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which, in a way, was more or less the truth.

“Gary Hallet,” Gillian said right away. “He slipped that ring to some dead guy who couldn’t be identified. You know what this means, don’t you?”

“He just wanted to see that justice was done, and it has been.”

“He’s completely hooked.” Gillian couldn’t seem to let this go. “And so are you.”

“Will you please shut up?” Sally had said.

She refused to think about Gary. She really did. She rubbed at the center of her chest with two fingers, then grabbed her left wrist between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand to check her pulse rate. She didn’t care what Gillian said; something was definitely wrong with her. Her heart did actual flip-flops; it beat too fast and then too slow, and if that didn’t mean she had some sort of condition, she didn’t know what did.

Gillian shook her head and groaned; that’s how pathetic Sally had looked. “You really don’t know. That heart-attack thing you’ve been having? It’s love,” she crowed. “That’s what it feels like.”

“You’re nuts,” Sally had said. “Don’t think you know everything, because let me tell you, you don’t.”

But there was one thing Gillian did know for sure, and that was why, the very next Saturday, she and Ben Frye got married. It was a small ceremony at the town hall, and they didn’t exchange wedding rings, but they kissed for so long at the counter in the hall of records that they were asked to leave. Being married feels different this time to Gillian.

“Fourth time’s the charm,” she says to people who ask her what the secret of a happy marriage is, but that’s not the way she feels about it. She knows now that when you don’t lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that’s one recipe that can’t be tampered with.

Sally goes to the refrigerator for some milk to add to the mashed potatoes, although she’s sure Gillian will tell her to add water instead, since she’s such a know-it-all lately. Sally has to push several covered dishes around and as she does a lid falls off a shallow pot.

“Look here,” she calls to Gillian. “They’re still at it.”

In the pot is the heart of a dove, pierced by seven pins.

Gillian comes to stand beside her sister. “Somebody’s getting spelled, that’s for sure.”

Sally carefully puts the lid back in place. “I wonder what ever happened to her.”

Gillian knows she’s talking about the drugstore girl. “I used to think about her whenever things went wrong,” Gillian admits. “I wanted to write to her, to let her know I was sorry I said all those things to her that day.”

“She probably jumped out a window,” Sally guesses. “Or she drowned herself in the bathtub.”

“Let’s go find out,” Gillian says. She puts the turkey on top of the refrigerator, where Magpie can’t reach it, and quickly shoves the mashed potatoes in the oven to keep them warm, along with a pan of chestnut stuffing.

“No,” Sally says, “we’re too old to snoop.” But she lets herself be pulled along, first to the coat closet, where they each grab an old parka, and then out the front door.

They hurry down Magnolia Street and turn onto Peabody. They pass the park, and the town green, where lightning always strikes, and head straight for the drugstore. They pass several closed shops—the butcher, and the baker, and the dry cleaner’s.

“It’s going to be closed,” Sally says.

“No way,” Gillian tells her.

But when they get there, the drugstore is dark. They stare through the window at the rows of shampoos, at the rack of magazines, at the counter where they drank so many vanilla Cokes. Everything in town is closed today, but as they turn to go they see Mr. Watts, whose family has owned the drugstore forever and who lives in the apartment above. He’s following his wife and carrying the two sweet potato pies they’re taking to their daughter’s over in Marblehead.

“The Owens girls,” he says when he spies Sally and Gillian.

“Check.” Gillian grins.

“You’re closed today,” Sally says. They trail Mr. Watts, though his wife is waiting at the car, signaling for him to hurry. “What happened to that girl? The one who stopped talking?”

“Irene?” he says. “She’s in Florida. She moved there about a week after her husband died last spring. I think I heard she’s already remarried.”

“Are you sure we’re talking about the same person?” Sally asks.

“Irene,” Mr. Watts assures them. “She’s got a coffee shop down in Highland Beach.”

Gillian and Sally run all the way home. They’re laughing as they run, so they have to stop every now and then to catch their breath. The sky is gray, the air is raw, yet it doesn’t bother them in the least. All the same, when they reach the black gate, Sally suddenly stops.

“What?” Gillian says.

It can’t be what Sally thinks. What she thinks she sees is Gary Hallet out in the garden, crouching down, digging at the cabbages, and that just cannot be.

“Well, look who’s here,” Gillian says, pleased.

“They did it,” Sally says. “With the dove’s heart.”

As soon as he sees Sally, Gary stands, a scarecrow in a black coat who doesn’t know whether or not he should wave.

“They did not,” Gillian says to Sally. “They didn’t have anything to do with it.”

But Sally doesn’t care if Gillian phoned Gary last week and asked what on earth he was waiting for. It doesn’t matter if he’s had the aunts’ address folded into his coat pocket ever since that phone call. By the time she runs down the bluestone path, it doesn’t make a bit of difference what people think or what they believe. There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.