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By then, Sally was crying too. When she was a girl, the aunts had been the ones to sit up with her all night whenever she'd had an ear infection or the flu; they'd told her stories and fixed her broth and hot tea. They were the ones who'd rocked Gillian when she couldn't fall asleep, especially at the start, when the girls first came to live at the house on Magnolia Street, and Gillian couldn't sleep a wink.
There had been a rainstorm the night that Sally and Gillian were told their parents weren't coming back, and it was their bad fortune that another storm struck when they were in the plane on their way to Massachusetts. Sally was four, but she remembers the lightning they flew through; she can close her eyes and conjure it with no trouble at all. They were right up in the sky alongside those fierce white lines, with no place to hide. Gillian had vomited several times, and when the plane began to land she started to scream. Sally had to hold her hand over her sister's mouth and promise her gumballs and licorice sticks if she'd only be quiet for a few minutes more.
Sally had picked out their best party dresses to wear for the trip. Gillian's was a pale violet, Sally's pink trimmed with ivory lace. They were holding hands as they walked through the airport terminal, listening to the fu
Sally was grateful for all the aunts had done, really she was. Still, she had made up her mind. She would get the key at the realtor's for the house she would later buy, then get hold of some furniture. She would have to find a job eventually, but she had a little money from Michael's insurance policy, and frankly she wasn't going to think about the past or the future. She was thinking about the highway in front of her. She was thinking about road signs and right turns, and she just couldn't afford to listen when Antonia started to howl, which set Kylie off as well. Instead, she switched on the radio and sang along and told herself that sometimes the right thing felt all wrong until it was over and done with.
By the time they turned into the driveway of their new house, it was already late in the day. A band of children was playing kickball in the street, and when Sally got out of the car she waved and the children waved back, each and every one of them. A robin was on the front lawn, pulling at the grass and the weeds, and all up and down the street, lights were being turned on and tables were set for di
Every summer, in August, they would visit the aunts. They would draw in their breath as soon as they turned the corner onto Magnolia and could spy the big old house with its black fence and green-tinted windows. The aunts always made a tipsy chocolate cake and gave Antonia and Kylie far too many presents. There were no bedtimes, of course, and no well-balanced meals. No rules were put forth about drawing on the wallpaper or filling the bathtub so high that bubbles and tepid water sloshed over the sides and dripped down through the ceiling of the parlor. Every year the girls were taller when they arrived for their visit—they knew this because the aunts were seeming smaller all the time—and every year they went wild: they danced through the herb garden and played softball on the front lawn and stayed up past midnight. Sometimes they ate nothing but Snickers and Milky Ways for nearly the whole week, until their stomachs began to ache and they finally called for a salad or a glass of milk.
During their August vacations, Sally insisted on getting the girls out of the house, at least in the afternoons. She took them on day trips, to the beach at Plum Island, to the swan boats in Boston, out into the blue bay in Gloucester on rented sailboats. But the girls always begged to return to the aunts' house. They pouted and made Sally's life miserable, until she gave in. It wasn't the girls' bad temper that convinced Sally to turn back for the house, it was that they were united in something. This was so unusual and so delightful to see that Sally just couldn't say no.
Sally had expected Antonia to be a big sister in the same ma
Their closeness may have been the result of sharing the attic bedroom, or only because the girls had no choice of playmates, since the children in town still crossed over to the other side of the street when they passed the Owens house. Whatever the reason, it brought Sally great joy to see the girls at the kitchen table, heads bent near enough to touch as they worked a puzzle or made a card to send off to Gillian at her new address in Iowa or New Mexico. Soon enough, they'd be at each other's throats, arguing over petty privileges or some nasty trick of Antonia's—a daddy longlegs left under Kylie's baby blanket, which she continued to be attached to at the age of eleven and even at twelve, or dirt and stones slipped into the bottom of her boots. And so Sally allowed the girls to do as they wished, for that one week in August, even though she knew, in the end, it was not to their benefit.
Each year, as their vacation wore on, the girls always slept later and later in the day; black circles appeared around their eyes. They began to complain about the heat, which made them too tired to even walk to the drugstore for ice cream sundaes and cold bottles of Coke, though they found the old woman who worked there fascinating, since she never said a word and could make a banana split in seconds flat, peeling the banana and pouring out the syrups and marshmallow whip before you could blink your eyes. After a while, Kylie and Antonia were spending most of their time in the garden, where bellado
There is always a time when Sally knows they have to leave. Each August, a night comes when she wakes from a deep sleep, and when she goes to the window she sees that her daughters are out by themselves in the moonlight. There are toads between the cabbages and the zi