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Premonitions
Crossed knives set out on the dinner table means there's bound to be a quarrel, but so do two sisters living under the same roof, particularly when one of them is Antonia Owens. At the age of sixteen, Antonia is so beautiful that it's impossible for any stranger seeing her for the first time to even begin to guess how miserable she can make those closest to her. She is nastier now than she was as a little girl, but her hair is a more stunning shade of red and her smile is so glorious that the boys in the high school all want to sit next to her in class, although once they do, these boys freeze up completely, simply because they're so close to her, and they can't help embarrassing themselves by staring at her, all googly-eyed and moon-faced, infatuated beyond belief.
It makes sense that Antonia's little sister, Kylie, who will soon be thirteen, spends hours locked in the bathroom, crying over how ugly she is. Kylie is one inch short of six feet, a giant, in her book. She's as skinny as a stork, with knees that hit against each other when she walks. Her nose and eyes are usually pink as a rabbit's from all the sobbing she's been doing lately, and she's just about given up on her hair, which has frizzed up from the humidity. To have a sister who is perfect, at least from the outside, is bad enough. To have one who can make you feel like a speck of dust with a few well-chosen mean words is almost more than Kylie can take.
Part of the problem is that Kylie can never think of a smart comeback when Antonia sweetly inquires whether she's considered sleeping with a brick on her head or thought about getting herself a wig. She's tried, she's even practiced various mean putdowns with her one and only friend, a thirteen-year-old boy named Gideon Barnes, who is a master at the art of grossing people out, and she still can't do it. Kylie is the sort of tender spirit who cries when someone steps on a spider; in her universe, hurting another creature is an unnatural act. When Antonia teases her, all Kylie can do is open and close her mouth like a fish that has been thrown onto dry land, before locking herself in the bathroom to cry once more. On quiet nights, she curls up on her bed, clutching her old baby blanket, the black wool one that still does not have a single hole, since it somehow seems to repel moths. All up and down the street the neighbors can hear her weeping. They shake their heads and pity her, and some of the women on the block, especially the ones who grew up with older sisters, bring over homemade brownies and chocolate cookies, forgetting what a plateful of sweets can do to a young girl's skin, thinking only of their own relief from the sound of crying, which echoes through hedges and over fences.
These women in the neighborhood respect Sally Owens, and what's more, they truly like her. She has a serious expression even when she laughs, and long dark hair, and no idea of how pretty she is. Sally is always the first parent listed on the snow chain, since it's best to have someone responsible in charge of letting other parents know when school will be closed in stormy weather, rather than one of those ditsy mothers who are prone to believe life will work itself out just fine, without any intervention from somebody sensible. All over the neighborhood, Sally is well known for both her kindness and her prudent ways. If you really need her, she'll baby-sit for your toddler at a moment's notice on a Saturday afternoon; she'll pick your kids up at the high school or lend you sugar or eggs. She'll sit there with you on your back porch if you should find some woman's phone number written on a slip of paper in your husband's night-table drawer, and she'll be smart enough to listen rather than offer some half-baked advice. More important, she'll never mention your difficulties again or repeat a word you say. When you ask about her own marriage, she gets a dreamy look on her face that is completely unlike her usual expression. "That was ages ago," is all she'll say. "That was another lifetime."
Since leaving Massachusetts, Sally has worked as an assistant to the vice principal at the high school. In all this time, she has had fewer than a dozen dates, and those attempts at romance were set up by neighbors, fix-ups that went nowhere but back to her own front door, long before she was expected home. Sally now finds that she's often tired and cranky, and although she's still terrific looking, she's not getting any younger. Lately, she's been so tense that the muscles in her neck feel like strands of wire that someone has been twisting.
When her neck starts to go, when she wakes up from a deep sleep in a panic, and she gets so lonely the ancient janitor at the high school starts to look good, Sally reminds herself of how hard she has worked to make a good life for her girls. Antonia is so popular that for three years running she's been chosen to play the lead in the school play. Kylie, though she seems to have no close friends other than Gideon Barnes, is the Nassau County spelling champion and the president of the chess club. Sally's girls have always had birthday parties and ballet lessons. She has made absolutely certain that they never miss their dentist appointments and that they're at school on time every weekday morning. They are expected to do their homework before they watch TV and are not allowed to stay up past midnight or idly hang out on the Turnpike or at the mall. Sally's children are rooted here; they're treated like anyone else, just normal kids, like any others on the block. This is why Sally left Massachusetts and the aunts in the first place. It's why she refuses to think about what might be missing from her life.
Never look back, that's what she's told herself. Don't think about swans or being alone in the dark. Don't think of storms, or lightning and thunder, or the true love you won't ever have. Life is brushing your teeth and making breakfast for your children and not thinking about things, and as it turns out, Sally is first-rate at all of this. She gets things done, and done on time. Still, she often dreams of the aunts' garden. In the farthest corner there was lemon verbena, lemon thyme, and lemon balm. When Sally sat there cross-legged, and closed her eyes, the citrus scent was so rich she sometimes got dizzy. Everything in the garden had a purpose, even the lush peonies, which protect against bad weather and motion sickness and have been known to ward off evil. Sally isn't sure she can still name all the varieties of the herbs that grew there, although she thinks she could recognize coltsfoot and comfrey by sight, lavender and rosemary by their distinctive scents.
Her own garden is simple and halfhearted, which is just the way she likes it. There is a hedge of listless lilacs, some dogwoods, and a small vegetable patch where only yellow tomatoes and a few spindly cucumbers ever grow. The cucumber seedlings seem dusty from the heat on this last afternoon in June. It is so great to have the summers off. It's worth everything she has to put up with over at the high school, where you have to always keep a smile on your face. Ed Borelli, the vice principal and Sally's immediate superior, has suggested that everyone who works in the office have a grin surgically applied in order to be ready when parents come in and complain. Niceness counts, Ed Borelli reminds the secretaries on awful days, when unruly students are being suspended and meetings overlap and the school board threatens to extend the school year due to snow days. But false cheer is draining, and if you pretend long enough there's always the possibility that you'll become an automaton. By the end of the school term, Sally usually finds herself saying "Mr. Borelli will be right with you" in her sleep. That's when she starts to count the days until summer; that's when she just can't wait for the last bell to ring.
Since the semester ended twenty-four hours earlier, Sally should be feeling great, but she's not. All she can make out is the throbbing of her own pulse and the beat of the radio blaring in Antonia's bedroom upstairs. Something is not right. It's nothing apparent, nothing that will come up and smack you in the face; it's less like a hole in a sweater than a frayed hem that has unraveled into a puddle of thread. The air in the house feels charged, so that the hair on the back of Sally's neck stands up, and her white shirt gives off little sparks.
All afternoon, Sally finds she's waiting for disaster. She tells herself to snap out of it; she doesn't even believe it's possible to foretell future misfortune, since there has never been any scientific documentation that such visionary phenomena exist. But when she does the marketing, she grabs a dozen lemons and before she can stop herself she begins to cry, there in the produce department, as though she were suddenly homesick for that old house on Magnolia Street, after all these years. When she leaves the grocery store, Sally drives by the YMCA field, where Kylie and her friend Gideon are playing soccer. Gideon is the vice president of the chess club, and Kylie suspects he may have thrown the deciding match in her favor so she could be president. Kylie is the only person on earth who seems able to tolerate Gideon. His mother, Jeannie Bames, went into therapy two weeks after he was born; that's how difficult he was and continues to be. He simply refuses to be like anyone else. He just won't allow it. Now, for instance, he's shaved off all his hair and is wearing combat boots and a black leather jacket, though it must be ninety in the shade.
Sally is never comfortable around Gideon; she finds him rude and obnoxious and has always considered him a bad influence. But seeing him and Kylie playing soccer, she feels a wave of relief. Kylie is laughing as Gideon stumbles over his own boots as he chases after the ball. She's not hurt or kidnapped, she's here on this field of grass, running as fast as she can. It's a hot, lazy afternoon, a day like any other, and Sally would do well to relax. She's silly to have been so certain that something was about to go wrong. That's what she tells herself, but it's not what she believes. When Antonia comes home, thrilled to have gotten a summer job at the ice cream parlor up on the Turnpike, Sally is so suspicious she insists on calling the owner and finding out what Antonia's hours and responsibilities will be. She asks for the owner's personal history as well, including address, marital status, and number of dependents.
"Thanks for embarrassing me," Antonia says coolly when Sally hangs up the phone. "My boss will think I'm real mature, having my mother check on me."
These days Antonia wears only black, which makes her red hair seem even more brilliant. Last week, to test out her allegiance to black clothes, Sally bought her a white cotton sweater trimmed with lace, which she knew any number of Antonia's girlfriends would have died for. Antonia tossed the sweater into the washer with a package of Rit dye, then threw the coal-colored thing into the dryer. The result was an article of clothing so small that whenever she wears it Sally frets that Antonia will wind up running off with someone, just the way Gillian did. It worries Sally to think that one of her girls might follow in her sister's footsteps, a trail that has led to only self-destruction and wasted time, including three brief marriages, not one of which yielded a cent of alimony.
Certainly, Antonia is greedy the way beautiful girls sometimes are, and she thinks quite well of herself. But now, on this hot June day, she is suddenly filled with doubt. What if she isn't as special as she thinks she is? What if her beauty fades as soon as she passes eighteen, the way it does with some girls, who have no idea that they've peaked until it's all over and they glance in the mirror to discover they no longer recognize themselves. She's always assumed she'll be an actress someday; she'll go to Manhattan or Los Angeles the day after graduation and be given a leading role, just as she has been all the way through high school. Now she's not so sure. She doesn't know if she has any talent, or if she even cares. Frankly, she never liked acting much; it was having everyone stare at her that was so appealing. It was knowing they couldn't take their eyes off her.
When Kylie comes home, all sweaty and grass-stained and gawky, Antonia doesn't even bother to insult her.
"Didn't you want to say something to me?" Kylie asks tentatively when they meet in the hallway. Her brown hair is sticking straight up and her cheeks are flushed and blotchy with heat. She's a perfect target and she knows it.
"You can use the shower first," Antonia says in a voice so sad and dreamy it doesn't even sound like her.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Kylie says, but Antonia has already drifted down the hall, to paint her nails red and consider her future, something she has never once done before.
By dinnertime Sally has nearly forgotten the sense of dread she carried around earlier in the day. Never believe what you can't see, that's always been Sally's motto. You have nothing to fear but fear itself, she quoted again and again when her girls were little and convinced monsters resided on the second shelf of the laundry closet in the hall. But just when she's relaxed enough to consider having a beer, the shades in the kitchen snap shut all at once, as if there is a buildup of energy in the walls. Sally has made a bean and tofu salad, carrot sticks, and cold marinated broccoli, with angel food cake for dessert. The cake, however, is now doubtful; when the shades snap closed the cake begins to sink, first on one side, then on the other, until it is as flat as a serving plate.
"It's nothing," Sally says to her daughters about the way the shades seem to have been activated by a strange force, but her voice sounds unsteady, even to herself.
The evening is so humid and dense that laundry left on the line will only get wetter if left out overnight. The sky is deep blue, a curtain of heat.
"It's something, all right," Antonia says, because an odd sort of wind has just started up. It comes in through the screen door and the open windows, rattling the silverware and the dinner plates. Kylie has to run and get herself a sweater. Even though the temperature is still climbing, the wind is giving her the shivers; it's making goose bumps rise along her skin.
Outside, in the neighbors' backyards, swing sets are uprooted and cats claw at back doors, desperate to be let in. Halfway down the block, a poplar tree cracks in two and plummets to the ground, hitting a fire hydrant and crashing through the window of a parked Honda Civic. That's when Sally and her daughters hear the knocking. The girls look up at the ceiling, then turn to their mother.
"Squirrels," Sally assures them. "Nesting in the attic."
But the knocking continues, and the wind does, too, and the heat just rises higher and higher. Finally, near midnight, the neighborhood quiets down. At last people can get some sleep. Sally is one of the few who stay up late, in order to fix an apple tart—complete with her secret ingredients, black pepper and nutmeg—which she'll freeze and have ready to take to the block party on the Fourth of July. But even Sally falls asleep before long, in spite of the weather; she stretches out under a cool white sheet and keeps the bedroom windows open so that the breeze comes in and wraps around the room. The first of the season's crickets have grown quiet and the sparrows are nesting in the bushes, safe within a bower of branches that are too delicate to support a cat's weight. And just when people are beginning to dream, of cut grass and blueberry pie and lions who lie down beside lambs, a ring appears around the moon.
A halo around the moon is always a sign of disruption, either a change in the weather, a fever to come, or a streak of bad fortune that won't go away. But when it's a double ring, all tangled and snarled, like an agitated rainbow or a love affair gone wrong, anything can happen. At times such as this, it's wise not to answer the telephone. People who know enough to be careful always shut their windows; they lock their doors, and they never dare to kiss their sweethearts over a garden gate or reach out to pat a stray dog. Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.
High above the neighborhood, the ring has already begun to twist around itself, an illuminated snake of possibility, double-looped and pulled tight by gravity. If people hadn't been sound asleep, they might have gazed out their windows and admired the beautiful circle of light, but they slept on, oblivious, not noticing the moon, or the silence, or the Oldsmobile that had already pulled into Sally Owens's driveway to park behind the Honda Sally bought a few years ago to replace the aunts' ancient station wagon. On a night such as this, it's possible for a woman to get out of her car so quietly none of the neighbors will hear her. When it's this warm in June, when the sky is this inky and thick, a knock on the screen door doesn't even echo. It falls into your dreams, like a stone into a stream, so that you wake suddenly, heart beating too fast, pulse going crazy, drowning inside your own panic.
Sally sits up in bed, knowing that she should stay exactly where she is. She's been dreaming about the swans again; she's been watching them take flight. For eleven years, she has done all the right things, she's been conscientious and trustworthy, rational and kind, but that doesn't mean she can't recognize the sulfurous odor of trouble. That's what's outside her front door now, trouble, pure and undiluted. It's calling to her, like a moth bumping against a screen, and she just can't ignore it. She pulls on jeans and a white T-shirt and gathers her dark hair into a ponytail. She's going to kick herself for this, and she knows it. She'll wonder why she can't just ignore that jangly feeling that comes over her and why she's always compelled to try to set things right.
Those people who warn that you can't run away because your past will track you down may be right on target. Sally looks out the front window. There on the porch is the girl who could get into more trouble than anyone, all grown up. It's been too many years, it's been an eternity, but Gillian is as beautiful as ever, only dusty and jittery and so weak in the knees that when Sally throws open the door, Gillian has to lean against the brick wall for support.
"Oh, my god, it's you," Gillian says, as if Sally were the unexpected visitor. In eighteen years they have seen each other only three times, when Sally went west. Gillian never once crossed back over the Mississippi, just as she'd vowed when she first left the aunts' house. "It's really, really you!"
Gillian has cut her blond hair shorter than ever; she smells like sugar and heat. She's got sand in the ridges of her red boots and a little green snake tattooed on her wrist. She hugs Sally fast and tight, before Sally can have time to consider the lateness of the hour and the fact that perhaps Gillian might have called, if not to say she was arriving, then just sometime in the past month, only to let Sally know she was still alive. Two days ago Sally mailed off a letter to Gillian's most recent address, in Tucson. She gave Gillian hell in that letter, about her trail of broken plans and missed opportunities; she spoke too strongly and said too much and now she's relieved that it's a letter Gillian will never get.
But her sense of relief surely doesn't last long. As soon as Gillian begins to talk, Sally knows that something is seriously wrong. Gillian's voice is squeaky, which isn't like her at all. Gillian has always been able to think of a good excuse or an alibi in seconds flat because she's had to soothe the egos of all her boyfriends; usually she's cool and composed, but now she's all but jumping out of her skin.
"I've got a problem," Gillian says.
She looks over her shoulder, then runs her tongue over her lips. She's as nervous as a bug, even though having a problem is nothing particularly new. Gillian can create problems just by walking down the street. She is still the kind of woman who cuts through her finger while slicing a cantaloupe, and then is rushed to the hospital, where the ER doctor who has stitched up her finger falls head over heels for her before she's even been sewn back together.
Gillian stops to take a good look at Sally.
"I can't believe how much I've missed you."
Gillian sounds as if she herself was surprised to discover this. She's sticking her fingernails into the palms of her hands, as if to wake herself from a bad dream. If she weren't desperate, she wouldn't be here, running to her big sister for help, when she's spent her whole life trying to be as self-sufficient as a stone. Everyone else had families, and went east or west or just down the block for Easter or Thanksgiving, but not Gillian. She could always be counted on to take a holiday shift, and afterward she always found herself drawn to the best bar in town, where special hors d'oeuvres are set out for festive occasions, hard-boiled eggs tinted pale pink and aqua, or little turkey-and-cranberry burritos. One Thanksgiving Day Gillian went and got the tattoo on her wrist. It was a hot afternoon in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the sky was the color of a pie plate, and the fellow over at the tattoo parlor promised her it wouldn't hurt, but it did.
"Everything is such a mess," Gillian admits.
"Well, guess what?" Sally tells her sister. "I know you won't believe this, and I know you won't care, but I've actually got my own problems."
The electricity bill, for instance, which has begun to reflect Antonia's increased use of the radio, which is never for an instant turned off. The fact that Sally hasn't had a date in almost two years, not even with some cousin or friend of her next-door neighbor Linda Bennett, and can no longer think of love as a reality, or even as a possibility, however remote. For all the time they've been apart, living separate lives, Gillian has been doing as she pleased, fucking whomever she cares to and waking at noon. She hasn't had to sit up all night with little girls who have chicken pox, or negotiate curfews, or set her alarm for the proper hour because someone needs breakfast or a good talking to. Naturally Gillian looks great. She thinks the world revolves around her.
"Believe me. Your problems are nothing like mine. This time it's really bad, Sally."
Gillian's voice is getting smaller and smaller, but it's still the same voice that got Sally through that horrible year when she couldn't bring herself to speak. It's the voice that urged her on every Tuesday night, no matter what, with a fierce devotion, the kind you acquire only when you've shared the past.
"Okay." Sally sighs. "Let me have it."
Gillian takes a deep breath. "I've got Jimmy in the car." She comes closer, so she can whisper in Sally's ear. "The problem is…" This is a hard one, it really is. She has to just get it out and say it, whispered or not. "He's dead."
Sally immediately pulls away from her sister. This is nothing anyone wants to hear on a hot June night, when the fireflies are strung across the lawns. The night is dreamy and deep, but now Sally feels as if she's drained a pot of coffee; her heart is beating like mad. Anyone else might assume Gillian is lying or exaggerating or just goofing around. But Sally knows her sister. She knows better. There's a dead man in the car. Guaranteed.
"Don't do this to me," Sally says.
"Do you think I planned it?"
"So you were driving along, headed for my house, figuring we should finally see each other, and he just happened to die?"
Sally has never met Jimmy, and she can't say she's ever really spoken to him. Once he answered the phone when she called Gillian in Tucson, but he certainly wasn't talkative. As soon as he'd heard Sally's voice, he shouted for Gillian to come pick up.
"Get over here, girl." That's what he'd said. "It's your goddamn sister on the phone."
All Sally can remember Gillian's telling her about him is that he served some time in the penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit, and that he was so handsome and so smooth he could get into any woman simply by looking at her the right way. Or the wrong way, depending on how you wanted to evaluate the consequences, and whether or not you happened to be married to this woman when Jimmy came along and stole her before you had an inkling of what was going on.
"It happened in a rest area in New Jersey." Gillian is trying to quit smoking, so she takes out a stick of gum and pushes it into her mouth. She has a pouty mouth that's rosy and sweet, but tonight her lips are parched. "He was such a shit," she says thoughtfully. "God. You wouldn't believe the things he did. Once we were house-sitting for some people in Phoenix, and they had a cat that was bothering him—I think it peed on the floor. He put it in the refrigerator."
Sally sits down. She's a little woozy hearing all this information about her sister's life, and the concrete stoop is cool and makes her feel better. Gillian always has the ability to draw her in, even when she tries to fight against the pull. Gillian sits down beside her, knee to knee. Her skin is even cooler than the concrete.
"Even I couldn't believe he'd actually go and do something like that," Gillian says. "I had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and let it out of the fridge or the thing would have frozen to death. It had ice crystals in its fur."
"Why did you have to come here?" Sally says mournfully. "Why now? You're going to ruin everything. I've really worked hard for all this."
Gillian eyes the house, unimpressed. She truly hates being on the East Coast. All this humidity and greenery. She'd do almost anything to avoid the past. Most probably, she'll find herself dreaming about the aunts tonight. That old house on Magnolia Street, with its woodwork and its cats, will come back to her, and she'll start to get fidgety, maybe even panicky to get the hell away, which is how she ended up in the Southwest in the first place. She got on a bus as soon as she left the Toyota mechanic she'd left her first husband for. She had to have heat and sun to counteract her moldy childhood, with its dark afternoons filled with long green shadows and its even darker midnights. She had to be very, very far away.
If she'd had the cash, Gillian would have run out of that rest area in New Jersey and she would have kept running until she got to the airport in Newark, then flown someplace hot. New Orleans, maybe, or Los Angeles. Unfortunately, right before they left Tucson, Jimmy informed her they were penniless. He'd spent every cent she'd earned in the past five years, easy enough to do when you're investing in drugs and alcohol and any jewelry you took a fancy to, including the silver ring he always wore—which had cost nearly a week of Gillian's salary. The only thing they had after he was done spending was the car, and that was in his name. Where else could she have gone on a night as black as this? Who else would take her in, no questions asked—or, at least, none she can't think up an answer for—until she gets back on her feet?
Gillian sighs and surrenders her fight against nicotine, at least temporarily. She takes one of Jimmy's Lucky Strikes out of her shirt pocket, then lights up and inhales as deeply as she can. She'll quit tomorrow.
"We were about to start a new life, that's why we were heading for Manhattan. I was going to call you once we were settled. You were the first person I planned to have visit our apartment."
"Sure," Sally says, but she doesn't believe a word. When Gillian got rid of her past, she got rid of Sally as well. The last time they were supposed to get together was right before Jimmy and the move to Tucson. Sally had already bought the tickets for herself and the girls to fly to Austin, where Gillian was working as a concierge-in-training at the Hilton. The plan had been to spend Thanksgiving together—which would have been a first—but Gillian called Sally two days before she and the girls were set to take off, and she told Sally to just forget it. In two days, she wouldn't even be in Austin anymore. Gillian never did care to explain what went wrong, whether it was the Hilton, or Austin, or simply some compelling need to move on. When dealing with Gillian; Sally has gotten used to disappointment. She would have worried if there hadn't been a hitch.
"Well, I was planning to call you," Gillian says. "Believe it or not. But we had to get out of Tucson really fast because Jimmy was selling jimsonweed to the kids at the university, telling them it was peyote or LSD, and there was sort of a problem with people dying, which I had no idea about until he said, 'Get packed, pronto.' I would have called before I arrived on your doorstep. I just got freaked out when he collapsed at that rest area. I didn't know where to go."
"You could have taken him to a hospital. Or what about the police? You could have called them." Sally can see in the dark that the azaleas she recently planted are already wilting, their leaves turning brown. In her opinion, everything goes wrong if you give it enough time. Close your eyes, count to three, and chances are you'll have some sort of disaster creeping up on you.
"Yeah, right. Like I could go to the police." Gillian exhales in little, staccato puffs. "They'd give me ten to twenty. Maybe even life, considering it happened in New Jersey." Gillian stares at the stars, her eyes open wide. "If I could just get enough money together, I'd take off for California. I'd be gone before they ever came after me."
It's not just the azaleas Sally could lose. It's eleven years of work and sacrifice. The rings around the moon are now so bright Sally's convinced everyone in the neighborhood will be awake before long. She grabs her sister's arm and digs her fingernails into Gillian's skin. She's got two kids who are dependent on her asleep in the house. She's got an apple tart she has to take to the Fourth of July block party next weekend.
"Why would they come after you?"
Gillian winces and tries to pull away, but Sally won't let go. Finally, Gillian shrugs and lowers her eyes, and as far as Sally's concerned that's not a very comforting way to answer a question.
"Are you trying to tell me that you're responsible for Jimmy's death?"
"It was an accident," Gillian insists. "More or less," she adds when Sally digs her nails in deeper. "All right," she admits when Sally begins to draw blood. "I killed him." Gillian is getting pretty shaky, as if her pressure had started to drop a degree a second. "Now you know. Okay? As usual, everything's my fault."
Maybe it's only the humidity, but the rings around the moon are turning faintly green. Some women believe that a green light in the east can reverse the aging process, and sure enough Sally feels as though she were fourteen. She's having thoughts no grown woman should have, especially not one who's spent her whole life being good. She notices that there are bruises all up and down Gillian's arms; in the dark they look like purple butterflies, like something pretty.
"I'm never getting involved with another man," Gillian says. When Sally gives her a look, Gillian goes on insisting she's through with love. "I've learned my lesson," she says. "Now that it's too damn late. I just wish I could have tonight, and call the police tomorrow." Her voice is sounding strained again, and even littler than before. "I could cover Jimmy with a blanket and leave him in the car. I'm not ready to turn myself in. I don't think I can do it."
Gillian really sounds as if she's cracking up now. She has a tremor in her hand that's making it impossible for her to light another cigarette.
"You have to stop smoking," Sally says. Gillian is still her little sister, even now; she's her responsibility.
"Oh, fuck it." Gillian manages to light the match, then her cigarette. "I'll probably get a life sentence. Cigarettes will just shorten the time I have to serve. I should smoke two at a time."
Although the girls weren't much more than babies when their parents died, Sally made snap decisions that seemed forceful enough to carry them both along. After the sitter they'd been left with became hysterical, and Sally had to get on the phone with the police officer to hear the news of their parents' death, she told Gillian to choose her two favorite stuffed animals and throw all the others away, because from then on they'd have to travel light, and take only what they could care for themselves. She was the one who told the silly babysitter to look for the aunts' phone number in their mother's datebook, and she insisted she be allowed to call and announce that she and Gillian would be made wards of the state unless a relative, however distant, came forward to claim them. She had the same look on her face then as she does now, an unlikely combination of dreaminess and iron.
"The police don't have to know," Sally says. Her voice sounds oddly sure.
"Really?" Gillian examines her sister's face, but at times like this Sally never gives anything away. It's impossible to read her. "Seriously?" Gillian moves closer to Sally, for comfort. She looks over at the Oldsmobile. "Do you want to see him?"
Sally cranes her neck; there's a shape in the passenger seat, all right.
"He really was cute." Gillian stubs out her cigarette and starts to cry. "Oh, boy," she says.
Sally can't believe it, but she actually wants to see him. She wants to see what such a man looks like. She wants to know if a woman as rational as herself could ever be attracted to him, if only for a second.
Gillian follows Sally over to the car and they lean forward to get a good look at Jimmy through the windshield. Tall, dark, handsome, and dead.
"You're right," Sally says. "He was cute."
He is, by far, the best-looking guy Sally has ever seen, dead or alive. She can tell, by the arch of his eyebrows and the smirk that's still on his lips, that he sure as hell knew it. Sally puts her face up to the glass. Jimmy's arm is thrown over the seat and Sally can see the ring on the fourth finger of his left hand—it's a big chunk of silver with three panels: a saguaro cactus is etched into one side panel, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, and in the center there's a cowboy on horseback. Even Sally understands that you wouldn't want to get hit if a man had that ring on; the silver would split your lip right open, it would cut quite deep.
Jimmy cared about the way he looked, that much is clear. Even after hours slumped over in the car, his blue jeans are so crisp it appears that somebody tried hard to iron them just right. His boots are snakeskin and they obviously cost a fortune. They've been very well cared for; if somebody spilled a beer on those boots by accident, or kicked up too much dust, there'd be trouble, you can tell that by looking at the polished leather. You can tell just by looking at Jimmy's face. Dead or alive, he is who he is: somebody you don't want to mess with. Sally steps away from the car. She'd be afraid to be alone with him. She'd be afraid one wrong word would set him off, and then she wouldn't know what to do.
"He looks kind of mean."
"Oh, god, yeah," Gillian says. "But only when he was drinking. The rest of the time he was great. He was good enough to eat, and I'm not kidding. So I got the idea of a way to keep him from being mean—I started giving him a little bit of nightshade in his food every night. It made him go to sleep before he could start drinking. He was perfectly fine all this time, but it must have been building up in his bloodstream, and then he just conked out. We were sitting there in the rest area and he was looking through the glove compartment for his lighter, which I bought for him at the flea market in Sedona last month, and he got bent over and couldn't seem to straighten back up. Then he stopped breathing."
In someone's backyard a dog is barking; it's a hoarse and frantic sound that has already begun to filter into people's dreams.
"You should have phoned the aunts and asked about the correct dosage," Sally says.
"The aunts hate me." Gillian runs her hand through her hair, to give it some fullness, but with this humidity it stays pretty limp. "I've disappointed them in every way."
"So have I," Sally says.
Sally believed the aunts judged her as far too ordinary to be of any real interest. Gillian felt sure they considered her common. Because of this, the girls always felt temporary. They had the sense that they'd better be careful about what they said and what they revealed. Certainly they never shared their fear of storms with the aunts, as if after nightmares and stomach viruses, fevers and food allergies, that phobia might be the last straw for the aunts, who had never particularly wanted children in the first place. One more complaint might send the aunts running to collect the sisters' suitcases, which were stored in the attic, covered with cobwebs and dust, but made of Italian leather and still decent enough to be put to good use. Instead of turning to the aunts, Sally and Gillian turned to each other. They whispered that nothing bad would happen as long as they could count to a hundred in thirty seconds. Nothing could happen if they stayed under the covers, if they did not breathe whenever the thunder crashed above them.
"I don't want to go to jail." Gillian takes out another Lucky Strike and lights it. Because of her family history, she has a real abandonment anxiety, which is why she's always the first to leave. She knows this, she's spent enough time in therapy and paid enough bucks to discuss it in depth, but that doesn't mean anything's changed. There is not one man who's gotten the jump and broken up with her first. That's her claim to fame. Frankly, Jimmy comes the closest. He's gone, and here she still is, thinking about him and paying the price for doing so.
"If they send me to jail, I'll go nuts. I haven't even lived yet. Not really. I want to get a job and have a normal life. I want to go to barbecues. I want to have a baby."
"Well, you should have thought of that before." This is exactly the advice Sally has been giving Gillian all along, which is why their phone conversations have gone from brief to nonexistent in the past few years. This is what she wrote in her most recent letter, the one Gillian never received. "You should have just left him."
Gillian nods. "I should have never said hello to him. That was my first mistake."
Sally carefully searches her sister's face in the green moonlight. Gillian may be beautiful, but she's thirty-six, and she's been in love far too often.
"Did he hit you?" Sally asks.
"Does it really make a difference?" Up close, Gillian certainly doesn't look young. She's spent too much time in the Arizona sun and her eyes are tearing, even though she's no longer crying.
"Yes," Sally says. "It does. It makes a difference to me."
"Here's the thing." Gillian turns her back on the Oldsmobile, because if she doesn't she'll remember that Jimmy was singing along to a Dwight Yoakam tape only a few hours ago. It was that song she could listen to over and over again, the one about a clown, and, in her opinion, Jimmy sang it about a million times better than Dwight ever could, which is saying quite a lot, since she's crazy for Dwight. "I was really in love with this one. Deep down in my heart. It's so sad, really. It's pathetic. I wanted him all the time, like I was crazy or something. Like I was one of those women."
In the kitchen, at twilight, those women would get down on their knees and beg. They'd swear they'd never want anything again in their lives, if they could just have what they wanted now. That was when Gillian and Sally used to lock their pinkies together and vow that they'd never be so wretched and unfortunate. Nothing could do that to them, that's what they used to whisper as they sat on the back stairs, in the dark and the dust, as if desire were a matter of personal choice.
Sally considers her front lawn and the hot and glorious night. She still has goose bumps rising along the back of her neck, but they're not bothering her anymore. In time, you can get used to anything, including fear. This is her sister, after all, the girl who sometimes refused to go to sleep unless Sally sang a lullaby or whispered the ingredients for one of the aunts' potions or charms. This is the woman who phoned her every Tuesday night, exactly at ten, for an entire year.
Sally thinks about the way Gillian held on to her hand when they first followed the aunts through the back door of the old house on Magnolia Street. Gillian's fingers were sticky from gumballs and cold with fear. She refused to let go; even when Sally threatened to pinch her, she just held on tighter.
"Let's take him around the back," Sally says.
They drag him over to where the lilacs grow, and they make certain not to disturb any of the roots, the way the aunts taught them. By now the birds nesting in the bushes are all asleep. The beetles are curled up in the leaves of the quince and the forsythia. As the sisters work, the sound of their shovels has an easy rhythm, like a baby clapping hands or tears falling. There is only one truly bad moment. No matter how hard Sally tries, she cannot close Jimmy's eyes. She's heard this happens when a dead man wishes to see who's next to follow. Because of this, Sally insists that Gillian look away while she begins to shovel the dirt over him. At least this way only one of them will have him staring up at her every night in her dreams.
When they've finished, and returned the shovels to the garage, and there's nothing but freshly turned earth beneath the lilacs, Gillian has to sit down on the back patio and put her head between her legs so she won't pass out. He knew exactly how to hit a woman, so that the marks hardly showed. He knew how to kiss her, too, so that her heart began to race and she'd start to think forgiveness with every breath. It's amazing the places that love will carry you. It's astounding to discover just how far you're willing to go.
On some nights it's best to stop thinking about the past, and all that's been won and lost. On nights like this, just getting into bed, crawling between the clean white sheets, is a great relief. It's only a June night like any other, except for the heat, and the green light in the sky, and the moon. And yet, what happens to the lilacs while everyone sleeps is extraordinary. In May there were a few droopy buds, but now the lilacs bloom again, out of season and overnight, in a single exquisite rush, bearing flowers so fragrant the air itself turns purple and sweet. Before long bees will grow dizzy. Birds won't remember to continue north. For weeks people will find themselves drawn to the sidewalk in front of Sally Owens's house, pulled out of their own kitchens and dining rooms by the scent of lilacs, reminded of desire and real love and a thousand other things they'd long ago forgotten, and sometimes now wish they'd forgotten still.
ON THE MORNING of Kylie Owens's thirteenth birthday, the sky is endlessly sweet and blue, but long before the sun rises, before alarm clocks go off, Kylie is already awake. She has been for hours. She is so tall that she could easily pass for eighteen if she borrowed her sister's clothes and her mom's mocha lipstick and her aunt Gillian's red cowboy boots. Kylie knows she shouldn't rush things, she has her whole life ahead of her; all the same, she's been traveling to this exact moment at warp speed for the duration of her existence, she's been completely focused on it, as if this one morning in July were the center of the universe. Certainly she's going to be a much better teenager than she ever was a child; she's half believed this all her life, and now her aunt has read her tarot cards for her and they predict great good fortune. After all, the star was her destiny card, and that symbol ensures success in every enterprise.
It makes sense that Antonia's little sister, Kylie, who will soon be thirteen, spends hours locked in the bathroom, crying over how ugly she is. Kylie is one inch short of six feet, a giant, in her book. She's as skinny as a stork, with knees that hit against each other when she walks. Her nose and eyes are usually pink as a rabbit's from all the sobbing she's been doing lately, and she's just about given up on her hair, which has frizzed up from the humidity. To have a sister who is perfect, at least from the outside, is bad enough. To have one who can make you feel like a speck of dust with a few well-chosen mean words is almost more than Kylie can take.
Part of the problem is that Kylie can never think of a smart comeback when Antonia sweetly inquires whether she's considered sleeping with a brick on her head or thought about getting herself a wig. She's tried, she's even practiced various mean putdowns with her one and only friend, a thirteen-year-old boy named Gideon Barnes, who is a master at the art of grossing people out, and she still can't do it. Kylie is the sort of tender spirit who cries when someone steps on a spider; in her universe, hurting another creature is an unnatural act. When Antonia teases her, all Kylie can do is open and close her mouth like a fish that has been thrown onto dry land, before locking herself in the bathroom to cry once more. On quiet nights, she curls up on her bed, clutching her old baby blanket, the black wool one that still does not have a single hole, since it somehow seems to repel moths. All up and down the street the neighbors can hear her weeping. They shake their heads and pity her, and some of the women on the block, especially the ones who grew up with older sisters, bring over homemade brownies and chocolate cookies, forgetting what a plateful of sweets can do to a young girl's skin, thinking only of their own relief from the sound of crying, which echoes through hedges and over fences.
These women in the neighborhood respect Sally Owens, and what's more, they truly like her. She has a serious expression even when she laughs, and long dark hair, and no idea of how pretty she is. Sally is always the first parent listed on the snow chain, since it's best to have someone responsible in charge of letting other parents know when school will be closed in stormy weather, rather than one of those ditsy mothers who are prone to believe life will work itself out just fine, without any intervention from somebody sensible. All over the neighborhood, Sally is well known for both her kindness and her prudent ways. If you really need her, she'll baby-sit for your toddler at a moment's notice on a Saturday afternoon; she'll pick your kids up at the high school or lend you sugar or eggs. She'll sit there with you on your back porch if you should find some woman's phone number written on a slip of paper in your husband's night-table drawer, and she'll be smart enough to listen rather than offer some half-baked advice. More important, she'll never mention your difficulties again or repeat a word you say. When you ask about her own marriage, she gets a dreamy look on her face that is completely unlike her usual expression. "That was ages ago," is all she'll say. "That was another lifetime."
Since leaving Massachusetts, Sally has worked as an assistant to the vice principal at the high school. In all this time, she has had fewer than a dozen dates, and those attempts at romance were set up by neighbors, fix-ups that went nowhere but back to her own front door, long before she was expected home. Sally now finds that she's often tired and cranky, and although she's still terrific looking, she's not getting any younger. Lately, she's been so tense that the muscles in her neck feel like strands of wire that someone has been twisting.
When her neck starts to go, when she wakes up from a deep sleep in a panic, and she gets so lonely the ancient janitor at the high school starts to look good, Sally reminds herself of how hard she has worked to make a good life for her girls. Antonia is so popular that for three years running she's been chosen to play the lead in the school play. Kylie, though she seems to have no close friends other than Gideon Barnes, is the Nassau County spelling champion and the president of the chess club. Sally's girls have always had birthday parties and ballet lessons. She has made absolutely certain that they never miss their dentist appointments and that they're at school on time every weekday morning. They are expected to do their homework before they watch TV and are not allowed to stay up past midnight or idly hang out on the Turnpike or at the mall. Sally's children are rooted here; they're treated like anyone else, just normal kids, like any others on the block. This is why Sally left Massachusetts and the aunts in the first place. It's why she refuses to think about what might be missing from her life.
Never look back, that's what she's told herself. Don't think about swans or being alone in the dark. Don't think of storms, or lightning and thunder, or the true love you won't ever have. Life is brushing your teeth and making breakfast for your children and not thinking about things, and as it turns out, Sally is first-rate at all of this. She gets things done, and done on time. Still, she often dreams of the aunts' garden. In the farthest corner there was lemon verbena, lemon thyme, and lemon balm. When Sally sat there cross-legged, and closed her eyes, the citrus scent was so rich she sometimes got dizzy. Everything in the garden had a purpose, even the lush peonies, which protect against bad weather and motion sickness and have been known to ward off evil. Sally isn't sure she can still name all the varieties of the herbs that grew there, although she thinks she could recognize coltsfoot and comfrey by sight, lavender and rosemary by their distinctive scents.
Her own garden is simple and halfhearted, which is just the way she likes it. There is a hedge of listless lilacs, some dogwoods, and a small vegetable patch where only yellow tomatoes and a few spindly cucumbers ever grow. The cucumber seedlings seem dusty from the heat on this last afternoon in June. It is so great to have the summers off. It's worth everything she has to put up with over at the high school, where you have to always keep a smile on your face. Ed Borelli, the vice principal and Sally's immediate superior, has suggested that everyone who works in the office have a grin surgically applied in order to be ready when parents come in and complain. Niceness counts, Ed Borelli reminds the secretaries on awful days, when unruly students are being suspended and meetings overlap and the school board threatens to extend the school year due to snow days. But false cheer is draining, and if you pretend long enough there's always the possibility that you'll become an automaton. By the end of the school term, Sally usually finds herself saying "Mr. Borelli will be right with you" in her sleep. That's when she starts to count the days until summer; that's when she just can't wait for the last bell to ring.
Since the semester ended twenty-four hours earlier, Sally should be feeling great, but she's not. All she can make out is the throbbing of her own pulse and the beat of the radio blaring in Antonia's bedroom upstairs. Something is not right. It's nothing apparent, nothing that will come up and smack you in the face; it's less like a hole in a sweater than a frayed hem that has unraveled into a puddle of thread. The air in the house feels charged, so that the hair on the back of Sally's neck stands up, and her white shirt gives off little sparks.
All afternoon, Sally finds she's waiting for disaster. She tells herself to snap out of it; she doesn't even believe it's possible to foretell future misfortune, since there has never been any scientific documentation that such visionary phenomena exist. But when she does the marketing, she grabs a dozen lemons and before she can stop herself she begins to cry, there in the produce department, as though she were suddenly homesick for that old house on Magnolia Street, after all these years. When she leaves the grocery store, Sally drives by the YMCA field, where Kylie and her friend Gideon are playing soccer. Gideon is the vice president of the chess club, and Kylie suspects he may have thrown the deciding match in her favor so she could be president. Kylie is the only person on earth who seems able to tolerate Gideon. His mother, Jeannie Bames, went into therapy two weeks after he was born; that's how difficult he was and continues to be. He simply refuses to be like anyone else. He just won't allow it. Now, for instance, he's shaved off all his hair and is wearing combat boots and a black leather jacket, though it must be ninety in the shade.
Sally is never comfortable around Gideon; she finds him rude and obnoxious and has always considered him a bad influence. But seeing him and Kylie playing soccer, she feels a wave of relief. Kylie is laughing as Gideon stumbles over his own boots as he chases after the ball. She's not hurt or kidnapped, she's here on this field of grass, running as fast as she can. It's a hot, lazy afternoon, a day like any other, and Sally would do well to relax. She's silly to have been so certain that something was about to go wrong. That's what she tells herself, but it's not what she believes. When Antonia comes home, thrilled to have gotten a summer job at the ice cream parlor up on the Turnpike, Sally is so suspicious she insists on calling the owner and finding out what Antonia's hours and responsibilities will be. She asks for the owner's personal history as well, including address, marital status, and number of dependents.
"Thanks for embarrassing me," Antonia says coolly when Sally hangs up the phone. "My boss will think I'm real mature, having my mother check on me."
These days Antonia wears only black, which makes her red hair seem even more brilliant. Last week, to test out her allegiance to black clothes, Sally bought her a white cotton sweater trimmed with lace, which she knew any number of Antonia's girlfriends would have died for. Antonia tossed the sweater into the washer with a package of Rit dye, then threw the coal-colored thing into the dryer. The result was an article of clothing so small that whenever she wears it Sally frets that Antonia will wind up running off with someone, just the way Gillian did. It worries Sally to think that one of her girls might follow in her sister's footsteps, a trail that has led to only self-destruction and wasted time, including three brief marriages, not one of which yielded a cent of alimony.
Certainly, Antonia is greedy the way beautiful girls sometimes are, and she thinks quite well of herself. But now, on this hot June day, she is suddenly filled with doubt. What if she isn't as special as she thinks she is? What if her beauty fades as soon as she passes eighteen, the way it does with some girls, who have no idea that they've peaked until it's all over and they glance in the mirror to discover they no longer recognize themselves. She's always assumed she'll be an actress someday; she'll go to Manhattan or Los Angeles the day after graduation and be given a leading role, just as she has been all the way through high school. Now she's not so sure. She doesn't know if she has any talent, or if she even cares. Frankly, she never liked acting much; it was having everyone stare at her that was so appealing. It was knowing they couldn't take their eyes off her.
When Kylie comes home, all sweaty and grass-stained and gawky, Antonia doesn't even bother to insult her.
"Didn't you want to say something to me?" Kylie asks tentatively when they meet in the hallway. Her brown hair is sticking straight up and her cheeks are flushed and blotchy with heat. She's a perfect target and she knows it.
"You can use the shower first," Antonia says in a voice so sad and dreamy it doesn't even sound like her.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Kylie says, but Antonia has already drifted down the hall, to paint her nails red and consider her future, something she has never once done before.
By dinnertime Sally has nearly forgotten the sense of dread she carried around earlier in the day. Never believe what you can't see, that's always been Sally's motto. You have nothing to fear but fear itself, she quoted again and again when her girls were little and convinced monsters resided on the second shelf of the laundry closet in the hall. But just when she's relaxed enough to consider having a beer, the shades in the kitchen snap shut all at once, as if there is a buildup of energy in the walls. Sally has made a bean and tofu salad, carrot sticks, and cold marinated broccoli, with angel food cake for dessert. The cake, however, is now doubtful; when the shades snap closed the cake begins to sink, first on one side, then on the other, until it is as flat as a serving plate.
"It's nothing," Sally says to her daughters about the way the shades seem to have been activated by a strange force, but her voice sounds unsteady, even to herself.
The evening is so humid and dense that laundry left on the line will only get wetter if left out overnight. The sky is deep blue, a curtain of heat.
"It's something, all right," Antonia says, because an odd sort of wind has just started up. It comes in through the screen door and the open windows, rattling the silverware and the dinner plates. Kylie has to run and get herself a sweater. Even though the temperature is still climbing, the wind is giving her the shivers; it's making goose bumps rise along her skin.
Outside, in the neighbors' backyards, swing sets are uprooted and cats claw at back doors, desperate to be let in. Halfway down the block, a poplar tree cracks in two and plummets to the ground, hitting a fire hydrant and crashing through the window of a parked Honda Civic. That's when Sally and her daughters hear the knocking. The girls look up at the ceiling, then turn to their mother.
"Squirrels," Sally assures them. "Nesting in the attic."
But the knocking continues, and the wind does, too, and the heat just rises higher and higher. Finally, near midnight, the neighborhood quiets down. At last people can get some sleep. Sally is one of the few who stay up late, in order to fix an apple tart—complete with her secret ingredients, black pepper and nutmeg—which she'll freeze and have ready to take to the block party on the Fourth of July. But even Sally falls asleep before long, in spite of the weather; she stretches out under a cool white sheet and keeps the bedroom windows open so that the breeze comes in and wraps around the room. The first of the season's crickets have grown quiet and the sparrows are nesting in the bushes, safe within a bower of branches that are too delicate to support a cat's weight. And just when people are beginning to dream, of cut grass and blueberry pie and lions who lie down beside lambs, a ring appears around the moon.
A halo around the moon is always a sign of disruption, either a change in the weather, a fever to come, or a streak of bad fortune that won't go away. But when it's a double ring, all tangled and snarled, like an agitated rainbow or a love affair gone wrong, anything can happen. At times such as this, it's wise not to answer the telephone. People who know enough to be careful always shut their windows; they lock their doors, and they never dare to kiss their sweethearts over a garden gate or reach out to pat a stray dog. Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.
High above the neighborhood, the ring has already begun to twist around itself, an illuminated snake of possibility, double-looped and pulled tight by gravity. If people hadn't been sound asleep, they might have gazed out their windows and admired the beautiful circle of light, but they slept on, oblivious, not noticing the moon, or the silence, or the Oldsmobile that had already pulled into Sally Owens's driveway to park behind the Honda Sally bought a few years ago to replace the aunts' ancient station wagon. On a night such as this, it's possible for a woman to get out of her car so quietly none of the neighbors will hear her. When it's this warm in June, when the sky is this inky and thick, a knock on the screen door doesn't even echo. It falls into your dreams, like a stone into a stream, so that you wake suddenly, heart beating too fast, pulse going crazy, drowning inside your own panic.
Sally sits up in bed, knowing that she should stay exactly where she is. She's been dreaming about the swans again; she's been watching them take flight. For eleven years, she has done all the right things, she's been conscientious and trustworthy, rational and kind, but that doesn't mean she can't recognize the sulfurous odor of trouble. That's what's outside her front door now, trouble, pure and undiluted. It's calling to her, like a moth bumping against a screen, and she just can't ignore it. She pulls on jeans and a white T-shirt and gathers her dark hair into a ponytail. She's going to kick herself for this, and she knows it. She'll wonder why she can't just ignore that jangly feeling that comes over her and why she's always compelled to try to set things right.
Those people who warn that you can't run away because your past will track you down may be right on target. Sally looks out the front window. There on the porch is the girl who could get into more trouble than anyone, all grown up. It's been too many years, it's been an eternity, but Gillian is as beautiful as ever, only dusty and jittery and so weak in the knees that when Sally throws open the door, Gillian has to lean against the brick wall for support.
"Oh, my god, it's you," Gillian says, as if Sally were the unexpected visitor. In eighteen years they have seen each other only three times, when Sally went west. Gillian never once crossed back over the Mississippi, just as she'd vowed when she first left the aunts' house. "It's really, really you!"
Gillian has cut her blond hair shorter than ever; she smells like sugar and heat. She's got sand in the ridges of her red boots and a little green snake tattooed on her wrist. She hugs Sally fast and tight, before Sally can have time to consider the lateness of the hour and the fact that perhaps Gillian might have called, if not to say she was arriving, then just sometime in the past month, only to let Sally know she was still alive. Two days ago Sally mailed off a letter to Gillian's most recent address, in Tucson. She gave Gillian hell in that letter, about her trail of broken plans and missed opportunities; she spoke too strongly and said too much and now she's relieved that it's a letter Gillian will never get.
But her sense of relief surely doesn't last long. As soon as Gillian begins to talk, Sally knows that something is seriously wrong. Gillian's voice is squeaky, which isn't like her at all. Gillian has always been able to think of a good excuse or an alibi in seconds flat because she's had to soothe the egos of all her boyfriends; usually she's cool and composed, but now she's all but jumping out of her skin.
"I've got a problem," Gillian says.
She looks over her shoulder, then runs her tongue over her lips. She's as nervous as a bug, even though having a problem is nothing particularly new. Gillian can create problems just by walking down the street. She is still the kind of woman who cuts through her finger while slicing a cantaloupe, and then is rushed to the hospital, where the ER doctor who has stitched up her finger falls head over heels for her before she's even been sewn back together.
Gillian stops to take a good look at Sally.
"I can't believe how much I've missed you."
Gillian sounds as if she herself was surprised to discover this. She's sticking her fingernails into the palms of her hands, as if to wake herself from a bad dream. If she weren't desperate, she wouldn't be here, running to her big sister for help, when she's spent her whole life trying to be as self-sufficient as a stone. Everyone else had families, and went east or west or just down the block for Easter or Thanksgiving, but not Gillian. She could always be counted on to take a holiday shift, and afterward she always found herself drawn to the best bar in town, where special hors d'oeuvres are set out for festive occasions, hard-boiled eggs tinted pale pink and aqua, or little turkey-and-cranberry burritos. One Thanksgiving Day Gillian went and got the tattoo on her wrist. It was a hot afternoon in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the sky was the color of a pie plate, and the fellow over at the tattoo parlor promised her it wouldn't hurt, but it did.
"Everything is such a mess," Gillian admits.
"Well, guess what?" Sally tells her sister. "I know you won't believe this, and I know you won't care, but I've actually got my own problems."
The electricity bill, for instance, which has begun to reflect Antonia's increased use of the radio, which is never for an instant turned off. The fact that Sally hasn't had a date in almost two years, not even with some cousin or friend of her next-door neighbor Linda Bennett, and can no longer think of love as a reality, or even as a possibility, however remote. For all the time they've been apart, living separate lives, Gillian has been doing as she pleased, fucking whomever she cares to and waking at noon. She hasn't had to sit up all night with little girls who have chicken pox, or negotiate curfews, or set her alarm for the proper hour because someone needs breakfast or a good talking to. Naturally Gillian looks great. She thinks the world revolves around her.
"Believe me. Your problems are nothing like mine. This time it's really bad, Sally."
Gillian's voice is getting smaller and smaller, but it's still the same voice that got Sally through that horrible year when she couldn't bring herself to speak. It's the voice that urged her on every Tuesday night, no matter what, with a fierce devotion, the kind you acquire only when you've shared the past.
"Okay." Sally sighs. "Let me have it."
Gillian takes a deep breath. "I've got Jimmy in the car." She comes closer, so she can whisper in Sally's ear. "The problem is…" This is a hard one, it really is. She has to just get it out and say it, whispered or not. "He's dead."
Sally immediately pulls away from her sister. This is nothing anyone wants to hear on a hot June night, when the fireflies are strung across the lawns. The night is dreamy and deep, but now Sally feels as if she's drained a pot of coffee; her heart is beating like mad. Anyone else might assume Gillian is lying or exaggerating or just goofing around. But Sally knows her sister. She knows better. There's a dead man in the car. Guaranteed.
"Don't do this to me," Sally says.
"Do you think I planned it?"
"So you were driving along, headed for my house, figuring we should finally see each other, and he just happened to die?"
Sally has never met Jimmy, and she can't say she's ever really spoken to him. Once he answered the phone when she called Gillian in Tucson, but he certainly wasn't talkative. As soon as he'd heard Sally's voice, he shouted for Gillian to come pick up.
"Get over here, girl." That's what he'd said. "It's your goddamn sister on the phone."
All Sally can remember Gillian's telling her about him is that he served some time in the penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit, and that he was so handsome and so smooth he could get into any woman simply by looking at her the right way. Or the wrong way, depending on how you wanted to evaluate the consequences, and whether or not you happened to be married to this woman when Jimmy came along and stole her before you had an inkling of what was going on.
"It happened in a rest area in New Jersey." Gillian is trying to quit smoking, so she takes out a stick of gum and pushes it into her mouth. She has a pouty mouth that's rosy and sweet, but tonight her lips are parched. "He was such a shit," she says thoughtfully. "God. You wouldn't believe the things he did. Once we were house-sitting for some people in Phoenix, and they had a cat that was bothering him—I think it peed on the floor. He put it in the refrigerator."
Sally sits down. She's a little woozy hearing all this information about her sister's life, and the concrete stoop is cool and makes her feel better. Gillian always has the ability to draw her in, even when she tries to fight against the pull. Gillian sits down beside her, knee to knee. Her skin is even cooler than the concrete.
"Even I couldn't believe he'd actually go and do something like that," Gillian says. "I had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and let it out of the fridge or the thing would have frozen to death. It had ice crystals in its fur."
"Why did you have to come here?" Sally says mournfully. "Why now? You're going to ruin everything. I've really worked hard for all this."
Gillian eyes the house, unimpressed. She truly hates being on the East Coast. All this humidity and greenery. She'd do almost anything to avoid the past. Most probably, she'll find herself dreaming about the aunts tonight. That old house on Magnolia Street, with its woodwork and its cats, will come back to her, and she'll start to get fidgety, maybe even panicky to get the hell away, which is how she ended up in the Southwest in the first place. She got on a bus as soon as she left the Toyota mechanic she'd left her first husband for. She had to have heat and sun to counteract her moldy childhood, with its dark afternoons filled with long green shadows and its even darker midnights. She had to be very, very far away.
If she'd had the cash, Gillian would have run out of that rest area in New Jersey and she would have kept running until she got to the airport in Newark, then flown someplace hot. New Orleans, maybe, or Los Angeles. Unfortunately, right before they left Tucson, Jimmy informed her they were penniless. He'd spent every cent she'd earned in the past five years, easy enough to do when you're investing in drugs and alcohol and any jewelry you took a fancy to, including the silver ring he always wore—which had cost nearly a week of Gillian's salary. The only thing they had after he was done spending was the car, and that was in his name. Where else could she have gone on a night as black as this? Who else would take her in, no questions asked—or, at least, none she can't think up an answer for—until she gets back on her feet?
Gillian sighs and surrenders her fight against nicotine, at least temporarily. She takes one of Jimmy's Lucky Strikes out of her shirt pocket, then lights up and inhales as deeply as she can. She'll quit tomorrow.
"We were about to start a new life, that's why we were heading for Manhattan. I was going to call you once we were settled. You were the first person I planned to have visit our apartment."
"Sure," Sally says, but she doesn't believe a word. When Gillian got rid of her past, she got rid of Sally as well. The last time they were supposed to get together was right before Jimmy and the move to Tucson. Sally had already bought the tickets for herself and the girls to fly to Austin, where Gillian was working as a concierge-in-training at the Hilton. The plan had been to spend Thanksgiving together—which would have been a first—but Gillian called Sally two days before she and the girls were set to take off, and she told Sally to just forget it. In two days, she wouldn't even be in Austin anymore. Gillian never did care to explain what went wrong, whether it was the Hilton, or Austin, or simply some compelling need to move on. When dealing with Gillian; Sally has gotten used to disappointment. She would have worried if there hadn't been a hitch.
"Well, I was planning to call you," Gillian says. "Believe it or not. But we had to get out of Tucson really fast because Jimmy was selling jimsonweed to the kids at the university, telling them it was peyote or LSD, and there was sort of a problem with people dying, which I had no idea about until he said, 'Get packed, pronto.' I would have called before I arrived on your doorstep. I just got freaked out when he collapsed at that rest area. I didn't know where to go."
"You could have taken him to a hospital. Or what about the police? You could have called them." Sally can see in the dark that the azaleas she recently planted are already wilting, their leaves turning brown. In her opinion, everything goes wrong if you give it enough time. Close your eyes, count to three, and chances are you'll have some sort of disaster creeping up on you.
"Yeah, right. Like I could go to the police." Gillian exhales in little, staccato puffs. "They'd give me ten to twenty. Maybe even life, considering it happened in New Jersey." Gillian stares at the stars, her eyes open wide. "If I could just get enough money together, I'd take off for California. I'd be gone before they ever came after me."
It's not just the azaleas Sally could lose. It's eleven years of work and sacrifice. The rings around the moon are now so bright Sally's convinced everyone in the neighborhood will be awake before long. She grabs her sister's arm and digs her fingernails into Gillian's skin. She's got two kids who are dependent on her asleep in the house. She's got an apple tart she has to take to the Fourth of July block party next weekend.
"Why would they come after you?"
Gillian winces and tries to pull away, but Sally won't let go. Finally, Gillian shrugs and lowers her eyes, and as far as Sally's concerned that's not a very comforting way to answer a question.
"Are you trying to tell me that you're responsible for Jimmy's death?"
"It was an accident," Gillian insists. "More or less," she adds when Sally digs her nails in deeper. "All right," she admits when Sally begins to draw blood. "I killed him." Gillian is getting pretty shaky, as if her pressure had started to drop a degree a second. "Now you know. Okay? As usual, everything's my fault."
Maybe it's only the humidity, but the rings around the moon are turning faintly green. Some women believe that a green light in the east can reverse the aging process, and sure enough Sally feels as though she were fourteen. She's having thoughts no grown woman should have, especially not one who's spent her whole life being good. She notices that there are bruises all up and down Gillian's arms; in the dark they look like purple butterflies, like something pretty.
"I'm never getting involved with another man," Gillian says. When Sally gives her a look, Gillian goes on insisting she's through with love. "I've learned my lesson," she says. "Now that it's too damn late. I just wish I could have tonight, and call the police tomorrow." Her voice is sounding strained again, and even littler than before. "I could cover Jimmy with a blanket and leave him in the car. I'm not ready to turn myself in. I don't think I can do it."
Gillian really sounds as if she's cracking up now. She has a tremor in her hand that's making it impossible for her to light another cigarette.
"You have to stop smoking," Sally says. Gillian is still her little sister, even now; she's her responsibility.
"Oh, fuck it." Gillian manages to light the match, then her cigarette. "I'll probably get a life sentence. Cigarettes will just shorten the time I have to serve. I should smoke two at a time."
Although the girls weren't much more than babies when their parents died, Sally made snap decisions that seemed forceful enough to carry them both along. After the sitter they'd been left with became hysterical, and Sally had to get on the phone with the police officer to hear the news of their parents' death, she told Gillian to choose her two favorite stuffed animals and throw all the others away, because from then on they'd have to travel light, and take only what they could care for themselves. She was the one who told the silly babysitter to look for the aunts' phone number in their mother's datebook, and she insisted she be allowed to call and announce that she and Gillian would be made wards of the state unless a relative, however distant, came forward to claim them. She had the same look on her face then as she does now, an unlikely combination of dreaminess and iron.
"The police don't have to know," Sally says. Her voice sounds oddly sure.
"Really?" Gillian examines her sister's face, but at times like this Sally never gives anything away. It's impossible to read her. "Seriously?" Gillian moves closer to Sally, for comfort. She looks over at the Oldsmobile. "Do you want to see him?"
Sally cranes her neck; there's a shape in the passenger seat, all right.
"He really was cute." Gillian stubs out her cigarette and starts to cry. "Oh, boy," she says.
Sally can't believe it, but she actually wants to see him. She wants to see what such a man looks like. She wants to know if a woman as rational as herself could ever be attracted to him, if only for a second.
Gillian follows Sally over to the car and they lean forward to get a good look at Jimmy through the windshield. Tall, dark, handsome, and dead.
"You're right," Sally says. "He was cute."
He is, by far, the best-looking guy Sally has ever seen, dead or alive. She can tell, by the arch of his eyebrows and the smirk that's still on his lips, that he sure as hell knew it. Sally puts her face up to the glass. Jimmy's arm is thrown over the seat and Sally can see the ring on the fourth finger of his left hand—it's a big chunk of silver with three panels: a saguaro cactus is etched into one side panel, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, and in the center there's a cowboy on horseback. Even Sally understands that you wouldn't want to get hit if a man had that ring on; the silver would split your lip right open, it would cut quite deep.
Jimmy cared about the way he looked, that much is clear. Even after hours slumped over in the car, his blue jeans are so crisp it appears that somebody tried hard to iron them just right. His boots are snakeskin and they obviously cost a fortune. They've been very well cared for; if somebody spilled a beer on those boots by accident, or kicked up too much dust, there'd be trouble, you can tell that by looking at the polished leather. You can tell just by looking at Jimmy's face. Dead or alive, he is who he is: somebody you don't want to mess with. Sally steps away from the car. She'd be afraid to be alone with him. She'd be afraid one wrong word would set him off, and then she wouldn't know what to do.
"He looks kind of mean."
"Oh, god, yeah," Gillian says. "But only when he was drinking. The rest of the time he was great. He was good enough to eat, and I'm not kidding. So I got the idea of a way to keep him from being mean—I started giving him a little bit of nightshade in his food every night. It made him go to sleep before he could start drinking. He was perfectly fine all this time, but it must have been building up in his bloodstream, and then he just conked out. We were sitting there in the rest area and he was looking through the glove compartment for his lighter, which I bought for him at the flea market in Sedona last month, and he got bent over and couldn't seem to straighten back up. Then he stopped breathing."
In someone's backyard a dog is barking; it's a hoarse and frantic sound that has already begun to filter into people's dreams.
"You should have phoned the aunts and asked about the correct dosage," Sally says.
"The aunts hate me." Gillian runs her hand through her hair, to give it some fullness, but with this humidity it stays pretty limp. "I've disappointed them in every way."
"So have I," Sally says.
Sally believed the aunts judged her as far too ordinary to be of any real interest. Gillian felt sure they considered her common. Because of this, the girls always felt temporary. They had the sense that they'd better be careful about what they said and what they revealed. Certainly they never shared their fear of storms with the aunts, as if after nightmares and stomach viruses, fevers and food allergies, that phobia might be the last straw for the aunts, who had never particularly wanted children in the first place. One more complaint might send the aunts running to collect the sisters' suitcases, which were stored in the attic, covered with cobwebs and dust, but made of Italian leather and still decent enough to be put to good use. Instead of turning to the aunts, Sally and Gillian turned to each other. They whispered that nothing bad would happen as long as they could count to a hundred in thirty seconds. Nothing could happen if they stayed under the covers, if they did not breathe whenever the thunder crashed above them.
"I don't want to go to jail." Gillian takes out another Lucky Strike and lights it. Because of her family history, she has a real abandonment anxiety, which is why she's always the first to leave. She knows this, she's spent enough time in therapy and paid enough bucks to discuss it in depth, but that doesn't mean anything's changed. There is not one man who's gotten the jump and broken up with her first. That's her claim to fame. Frankly, Jimmy comes the closest. He's gone, and here she still is, thinking about him and paying the price for doing so.
"If they send me to jail, I'll go nuts. I haven't even lived yet. Not really. I want to get a job and have a normal life. I want to go to barbecues. I want to have a baby."
"Well, you should have thought of that before." This is exactly the advice Sally has been giving Gillian all along, which is why their phone conversations have gone from brief to nonexistent in the past few years. This is what she wrote in her most recent letter, the one Gillian never received. "You should have just left him."
Gillian nods. "I should have never said hello to him. That was my first mistake."
Sally carefully searches her sister's face in the green moonlight. Gillian may be beautiful, but she's thirty-six, and she's been in love far too often.
"Did he hit you?" Sally asks.
"Does it really make a difference?" Up close, Gillian certainly doesn't look young. She's spent too much time in the Arizona sun and her eyes are tearing, even though she's no longer crying.
"Yes," Sally says. "It does. It makes a difference to me."
"Here's the thing." Gillian turns her back on the Oldsmobile, because if she doesn't she'll remember that Jimmy was singing along to a Dwight Yoakam tape only a few hours ago. It was that song she could listen to over and over again, the one about a clown, and, in her opinion, Jimmy sang it about a million times better than Dwight ever could, which is saying quite a lot, since she's crazy for Dwight. "I was really in love with this one. Deep down in my heart. It's so sad, really. It's pathetic. I wanted him all the time, like I was crazy or something. Like I was one of those women."
In the kitchen, at twilight, those women would get down on their knees and beg. They'd swear they'd never want anything again in their lives, if they could just have what they wanted now. That was when Gillian and Sally used to lock their pinkies together and vow that they'd never be so wretched and unfortunate. Nothing could do that to them, that's what they used to whisper as they sat on the back stairs, in the dark and the dust, as if desire were a matter of personal choice.
Sally considers her front lawn and the hot and glorious night. She still has goose bumps rising along the back of her neck, but they're not bothering her anymore. In time, you can get used to anything, including fear. This is her sister, after all, the girl who sometimes refused to go to sleep unless Sally sang a lullaby or whispered the ingredients for one of the aunts' potions or charms. This is the woman who phoned her every Tuesday night, exactly at ten, for an entire year.
Sally thinks about the way Gillian held on to her hand when they first followed the aunts through the back door of the old house on Magnolia Street. Gillian's fingers were sticky from gumballs and cold with fear. She refused to let go; even when Sally threatened to pinch her, she just held on tighter.
"Let's take him around the back," Sally says.
They drag him over to where the lilacs grow, and they make certain not to disturb any of the roots, the way the aunts taught them. By now the birds nesting in the bushes are all asleep. The beetles are curled up in the leaves of the quince and the forsythia. As the sisters work, the sound of their shovels has an easy rhythm, like a baby clapping hands or tears falling. There is only one truly bad moment. No matter how hard Sally tries, she cannot close Jimmy's eyes. She's heard this happens when a dead man wishes to see who's next to follow. Because of this, Sally insists that Gillian look away while she begins to shovel the dirt over him. At least this way only one of them will have him staring up at her every night in her dreams.
When they've finished, and returned the shovels to the garage, and there's nothing but freshly turned earth beneath the lilacs, Gillian has to sit down on the back patio and put her head between her legs so she won't pass out. He knew exactly how to hit a woman, so that the marks hardly showed. He knew how to kiss her, too, so that her heart began to race and she'd start to think forgiveness with every breath. It's amazing the places that love will carry you. It's astounding to discover just how far you're willing to go.
On some nights it's best to stop thinking about the past, and all that's been won and lost. On nights like this, just getting into bed, crawling between the clean white sheets, is a great relief. It's only a June night like any other, except for the heat, and the green light in the sky, and the moon. And yet, what happens to the lilacs while everyone sleeps is extraordinary. In May there were a few droopy buds, but now the lilacs bloom again, out of season and overnight, in a single exquisite rush, bearing flowers so fragrant the air itself turns purple and sweet. Before long bees will grow dizzy. Birds won't remember to continue north. For weeks people will find themselves drawn to the sidewalk in front of Sally Owens's house, pulled out of their own kitchens and dining rooms by the scent of lilacs, reminded of desire and real love and a thousand other things they'd long ago forgotten, and sometimes now wish they'd forgotten still.
ON THE MORNING of Kylie Owens's thirteenth birthday, the sky is endlessly sweet and blue, but long before the sun rises, before alarm clocks go off, Kylie is already awake. She has been for hours. She is so tall that she could easily pass for eighteen if she borrowed her sister's clothes and her mom's mocha lipstick and her aunt Gillian's red cowboy boots. Kylie knows she shouldn't rush things, she has her whole life ahead of her; all the same, she's been traveling to this exact moment at warp speed for the duration of her existence, she's been completely focused on it, as if this one morning in July were the center of the universe. Certainly she's going to be a much better teenager than she ever was a child; she's half believed this all her life, and now her aunt has read her tarot cards for her and they predict great good fortune. After all, the star was her destiny card, and that symbol ensures success in every enterprise.