Chapter Thirteen

“You disappear, except for your name,” explains Sandra Durant. “I’m just a name on a passenger manifest. In the newspaper. On a crawl on the cable news.” She motions with her finger—and you notice the polish is salmon, every bit as vibrant as Valerian’s but perhaps more girlish and childlike—toward Ashley, who is sitting rather primly on the couch. “She used to love to eat canned peaches in heavy syrup. She tells me she mastered the can opener in first grade and would snack on them after school and on weekends. Now no one will ever know that. Soon, no one but her mother will recall that she could make an origami swan—and eventually her mom will forget that detail, too. She’ll forget what it was like watching Ashley learn to ride her bicycle. And some new technology will replace the video that her father made of her doing cannonballs into a swimming pool one afternoon, and no one will duplicate the disk onto whatever comes next. And so that splash and the girl’s laugh will be gone, too. Gone forever. Eventually, all that will remain is her name.”

You ask, “And you?”

“And me? Orange marmalade. I loved it.”

“There’s more.”

“Of course there is.”

“Tell me one more. Tell me one more thing that no one will know from your name on the passenger manifest.”

“No one will ever know that at the end of my life my favorite color happened to be pink.” She holds up her hands and spreads wide her fingers, her palms facing her, so you can see those nails you already have noticed. “But who knows,” she adds, raising her eyebrows in mock earnestness. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I was already too old for Barbie pink.”

Garnet watched Hallie crushing the small purple seeds with the mortar and pestle, a little surprised by how much pleasure her sister was deriving from the chore. The seeds were about the size of sesame seeds, but they smelled like blueberries when they were mashed: The more of them Hallie turned to powder, the more the kitchen smelled like a fruit smoothie. Garnet had a sense that a big part of her sister’s contentment came from the obsessive amounts of attention Anise and Clary and Sage were lavishing upon the two of them. Garnet, on the other hand, found the women slightly annoying; their presence was growing invasive. She and her sister seemed to spend three or four days a week after school with them. The only days they didn’t wind up at Anise’s or Clary’s or Sage’s (and most frequently it seemed to be Sage’s) were those days when they had dance class or music lessons. Again today Clary Hardin had picked them up at the school entrance precisely at three o’clock and brought them to Sage Messner’s home to make tinctures or bake or tend to the seemingly endless tables of plants in that massive communal greenhouse. Garnet thought that she and Hallie spent more time in Sage’s kitchen or greenhouse than they did after school with kids their own age.

Which, maybe, was okay. Maybe they were fortunate to have the attention of these ladies. After the stories that Molly and her mother had told everyone of the blackout and their father’s disappearance—and then, far worse, his reappearance covered in blood—there was no way that any kids were going to be allowed to come to their house anytime soon. Maybe forever. And now the girls (and even the boys) in their classroom seemed to be a little scared of her and her sister. It was like they were the ones who made the strange potions—not the women.

Their mom had tried to reassure them that over time the kids in their class would come around, but Garnet wasn’t so sure. She saw how they kept away at dance class and school. Still, her mom was confident. In the meantime, she and Hallie spent time with their mother’s new friends, either this group of women or Reseda—and sometimes Reseda and Holly. It seemed there were two separate cliques. Clearly Reseda was an herbalist and a friend of these other, older women, but there was also some tension. She kept her distance; it was like she didn’t completely approve of them. And while Reseda’s greenhouse was much cooler—it had a comforting shape and small statues that reminded Garnet of fantasy creatures—she found that she had to be careful about what she was thinking when she was around Reseda. It was as if Reseda knew.

One time Garnet had asked her mom why she and Hallie didn’t just go home after school when they didn’t have dance class or music lessons, the way they had before that night when Dad tumbled down the basement stairs and fell on the knife. And her mom had explained that their father was working hard on the house and his stomach needed to heal. Garnet didn’t completely believe this: Either he was working on the house or his stomach needed to heal. Not both. It was like the old joke about why the little girl didn’t turn in her homework: Either she forgot it at home or the dog got sick on it. Both were overkill.

In any case, Garnet had now decided that she would ask her mom that night about moving. She decided that she’d had enough of Bethel. Maybe they could go back to West Chester. Sure, she and Hallie were always going to be the kids whose father’s plane had crashed into a lake. And she would always be the kid who had the seizures. (It hurt her feelings when kids would talk about her that way, but they did. Sometimes people presumed she was in a trance when she was having one, but she wasn’t. She was just, as one doctor liked to say, in her own world.) But at least she and Hallie had friends there.

“Lovely, Rosemary,” Sage Messner was saying to her sister. “The powder is finer than salt, isn’t it? It’s as wispy as talc.” The woman was hovering over Hallie with her hand on the girl’s shoulder. It still left Garnet feeling a little uncomfortable and disloyal in some way when these women called her and her sister by their new names. Mom didn’t seem to mind. And Hallie said she actually preferred being called Rosemary. But Calandrinia—and Cali for short? Over the last couple of weeks, she had grown to hate both the long and short versions of her new name.

“Now, your turn, Cali,” Sage said, her voice that singsong river of condescension. She always talked to Hallie and Garnet like she thought the two of them were preschoolers. So did Ginger and Clary. Anise tended to speak to them more like grown-ups. But she was also far more stern with the two of them.

“My turn to do what?” she asked. “I think the seeds are all ground up.”

“The hypnobium seeds are. But we still need to add the yarrow and the rose hips. If you only add hypnobium to a tea, you are likely to give someone a headache along with very scary—”

“Sage, that’s a lot more information than the girls need at the moment,” Anise said, cutting the woman off before she could finish her sentence. Garnet hadn’t realized that Anise had returned to the kitchen from the greenhouse.

“Along with what?” Garnet decided to ask, partly because she was curious but also because it was clear to her that Anise didn’t want her and Hallie to know.

“Instead of making them feel better, Cali,” Anise said simply but firmly. “Now you want to wash your hands thoroughly after working with hypnobium and completely rinse both the mortar and the pestle.” She barely glanced at Sage as she carefully poured the powder into a small glass spice jar. The ground-up seeds now resembled the old-fashioned sugar candy that some people gave away in straws on Halloween.

“I’m sorry, Anise,” Sage murmured, her voice low and soft, as if she hoped that no one else would hear her. But Anise seemed to ignore her as she screwed the lid on the spice jar and then ran hot tap water over the mortar and pestle. The moment the water hit the wood, the room was infused with the aroma of the herb and the kitchen smelled like someone was baking a blueberry pie.

“Next we need to prepare the rose hips,” Anise said, gazing out the kitchen window. “I think Sage thought that might be a nice task for you, Cali.”

“My name is Garnet.” It was an impulse; correcting Anise had been as instinctive just now as batting a mosquito. Still, she regretted the short sentence the moment the words had escaped her lips. Her sister poked her surreptitiously in the side.

“It is,” Anise agreed, turning off the water and using a dish towel with a rooster on it to dry the inside of the pestle, and for a second Garnet thought she might have worried for naught. But then Anise leaned over her, her face only inches away—Garnet could inhale the mint on the woman’s breath—and said, “But not when you’re with me.”

“Why?” Again, it was a reflex, and Hallie turned to her and silently mouthed her regular name, drawing out each of the syllables: Gar-net. Garnet didn’t usually like confrontations, but she didn’t understand the desire these women had to change her and Hallie’s names. She simply didn’t get it.

“I’ve told you, it’s a term of endearment. A term of inclusion. Of solidarity. Do you know what those words mean, Cali?”

She couldn’t have defined them in a spelling test, but she understood more or less what Anise was saying. She nodded. She wished she were back in her bedroom in West Chester that moment. She saw in her mind the windows there and her bed with the blue and gold comforter that matched the wallpaper: planets and stars and a cow jumping over the moon. She wondered where Mom had stored that comforter these days. The attic? A guest bedroom closet?

“You are now a part of my world, Cali,” Anise continued, emphasizing her new name, an undercurrent to her voice that was vaguely menacing. “You are a part of Sage’s world and Clary’s world and the world of some striking people who can make a difference for good or ill in all that you know. You are not a part of your precious Pennsylvania. You’re in New Hampshire. In Bethel. So don’t cross me. Not this afternoon. Not ever.” She brought her fingers to Garnet’s cheeks and gently grazed the skin there with her nails; when she did, the silver bangles on her wrist jingled like chimes. “Think of that skull you found in your basement. The bones you touched with those little fingers of yours. The next time you are pondering whether you like your name or whether you should follow one of my instructions, I urge you to recall that skull. Recall the eye sockets. Recall the jaw. Recall the very idea that someone was buried in your new house and how scared you were when you found the remains. You, too, Rosemary. Now, do you have any other questions?”

Garnet thought she was going to cry, and so she bit her tongue and breathed in deeply through her nose. Then she glanced at Hallie, who was staring down at her feet. Her sister was wearing blue jeans and what she called her cinnamon toast socks: They were brown with yellow spots.

“Good. And if it makes you more comfortable with your new names, rest assured that your mother is taking one, too. And she rather likes hers.” Abruptly Anise stood up to her full height. Garnet noticed that Clary and Sage were now standing beside Anise, the three of them looking like severe and demanding teachers, their eyes ominous and their arms folded across their chests.

“So, Cali,” Anise said finally, her voice once more sounding calm and caring and kind. “We have the rose hips to prepare. I believe Sage will show you how.”

When Emily walked into John’s office, he was pressing his phone against his ear with his shoulder, finishing a conversation with a client. He was rubbing a cream onto his hands. He smiled at her, motioned for her to sit, and said good-bye to whomever he was speaking with.

“Want some?” he asked, tipping the small compact with the cream toward her. “My hands are chapped raw after a White Mountain winter. Between the woodstove and the time I spend on the mountain, they’re an absolute disaster.”

She dipped two fingers into the compact and took some. She wondered if it was the same sort of cream Ginger Jackson had rubbed near her eyes that night at Reseda’s. “Did Ginger make this?” she asked.

“Nope. Clary.”

“Ginger makes something similar.”

“Of course she does. All the women do.” He paused and smiled. Then: “You must think we are all awfully vain.”

“No.” She decided to try a small joke, hoping she might learn from it. “But I do think you’re all witches.”

He laughed ever so slightly and shook his head. “More like chemists,” he said. “It’s not about spells and magic. It’s not about pendants and charms and”—he waved his hand dismissively—“crystals. It’s about chemistry. It’s about natural medicine.”

“Potions.”

He pretended to shush her, his eyes wide. “Tinctures,” he said, aware this was a semantic difference at best. Meanwhile, she felt her skin tingling where she had massaged in the cream. Already her hands looked better.

On the first spectacularly warm day of spring, you sit on the walkway outside your front door and watch the ants, which built a small hill between two edges of slate overnight. It is lunchtime, and you have brought with you a piece of banana bread that Anise baked. You decide that you really know nothing about bugs. Really, nothing at all. But in the past you have watched ants eat. Everyone has. You have watched them move crumbs that look proportionately like boulders. An efficient, almost robotic swarm. They break apart what they can and move what they can, carting the bounty above their heads and their trunks, disappearing either into anthills in the ground or nests behind the walls. They move in lines. You have seen it as you sat on the front stoop of your old house in West Chester and, years and years ago, as you would lie on the grass in Connecticut when you were a small boy.

And you are quite sure that you have never seen ants do this. Never. The small ones die within inches of the banana bread morsels. They take one of the minuscule crumbs you have broken off and collapse under its weight seconds after starting off. And the larger ones? They last a little longer. They stagger in circles as if they have grown disoriented—panicked—and then they wobble and crumple. It’s as if their tiny legs have just buckled.

You tell yourself that they were not really panicked. Not even scared. You know that an ant’s nervous system isn’t built that way. Most likely, they were merely confused, suddenly unsure of what they were doing or why they were dying. It just looked like they were scared.

Still, you cannot help but wonder what herbs would poison an ant—and what those herbs might do to a human.

It was sixty-five degrees outside, but Reseda could feel the temperature was about to plummet. The sun had been high overhead at lunchtime, but now a great swash of gunmetal gray clouds was darkening the sky, rolling in from the northwest and stretching deep into Canada. She gently shut the door to her greenhouse and turned toward Anise, who was misting the tentacles, nacreous as marble, that were branching out from the poisonous acedia. The acedia was spreading like a spider plant, and its tentacles were dripping over the sides of the pedestal on which it resided. Reseda knew that Anise didn’t approve; she felt it should be trimmed back, the shoots chopped and the toxins harvested. But Reseda was so pleased with her success with the plant that she couldn’t bear to don gloves and take a knife to it. Not yet. No one had ever had such a triumph with acedia. The plant was named after the Latin word for sloth because it was a sedative and, used improperly in a tincture, lethal. She wondered how she would feel about her achievement if it had been named for the Latin word for pride.

“What are you feeding the pilot?” she asked Anise now.

Anise continued to circle the plant, careful not to make eye contact with her.

“Crumpets,” she answered evasively, her voice uncharacteristically light. “Always vegan. Always delicious.”

“I’m serious.”

“I am, too.”

“I don’t see what good could possibly come from poisoning him.”

“Me, neither,” said Anise, and she put down the mister on one of the gardening tables and stroked the stone Baphomet’s beard. “Do you ever find it odd how out of touch a pilot is with the earth? Oh, they see how beautiful it is from twenty or thirty thousand feet. But their whole purpose is to separate themselves from the soil. To be above the ground, rather than one with it. You grow beautiful things, Reseda. That pilot never will. I’m really not all that interested in him.”

“But you have been constantly filling the Lintons’ refrigerator. Bringing them small confections with his name on them.”

“I’m a one-woman Welcome Wagon. You’re a real estate agent: That should make you happy.”

“Just because you put the captain’s name on it doesn’t mean he’s the only one eating it. I am sure the girls have eaten some of your … confections.”

“Perhaps. But it’s not like they’re hash brownies. Anything special in them would demand, well, repeat exposures.”

“Hallie had nightmares.”

“We all have nightmares,” Anise said, dismissing her concern. “I find both girls very interesting. Don’t you? I find them curious. Or do only the dead inspire you these days?”

“I worry about them,” she said, ignoring the dig. “They have endured an awful lot.”

“I agree. And that’s what makes them so … special. So receptive. It changes the brain chemicals. You know that as well as anyone.”

“You’re not trying to up the level of trauma?”

“Maybe a little. But mostly I’m just an observer. I’ve been watching them. We all have. I had them working at the communal greenhouse again this afternoon. And I know you’ve been watching them, too,” Anise said, and she turned to Reseda, though she did not meet her eyes. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You pretend you’re above that sort of thing: It’s too dark, it’s evil, it’s cruel.”

“A boy died. That seems to me far too high a price.”

“You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened. You’ve only heard the story from Clary and Ginger.”

Reseda gazed at a pair of water droplets descending the glass window near the steamer. “I know what Clary saw,” she said.

“You know what Clary thinks she saw,” Anise corrected her. “You know what Clary recalls. There is a big difference, Reseda. Remember, I was there, too; you weren’t.”

“I don’t want you to try again. They’re little girls.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t even know which one we would use. I really don’t,” Anise said, and she strolled over to a long table with cooking spices, inhaling the aroma from the basil. “But you know something?”

Reseda waited.

“If you were my age—good heavens, if you were Clary’s and Ginger’s and Sage’s age—you would view the twins more the way I do. You really would. It’s human nature.”

“Tell me: What are you feeding the captain?”

Anise smiled, but then she shook her head and her eyes grew narrow and reptilian. “You really think I’m a witch, don’t you?”

“Are you?”

“I just like to bake,” she said, refusing to answer the question. “That’s all. I just like to bake.”

Garnet had both books that Anise had given her sister and her open on the rug in the living room. She was lying on her stomach before them, near the warmth from the radiator, resting her chin in both hands. The books were so old and so heavy that the pages wouldn’t flip shut when she laid them flat on the floor. Whole sections had thick pages with nothing but handwriting—somebody’s cursive lettering. Recipes and formulas and diagrams, and some beautiful watercolor illustrations of flowers and ferns. They were more like scrapbooks than published books, she decided. They smelled a little musty and a little like one of the plants from Sage Messner’s greenhouse: maybe the one that had the red leaves that were shaped like the points on the wrought-iron fence by the cemetery. She found a picture of it in the book that had been presented to her, The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs, but it didn’t appear in the botany book that had been given to Hallie. The plant was called Phantasia. Much of the biology in her book was over her head, but Garnet found the elegant and precise drawings more interesting than she might have expected and the uses for the plants absolutely fascinating. She had, of course, thought about flowers as decorations and gifts; she had been aware that her mother used herbs as seasonings when she cooked; and certainly she understood the role that fruits and vegetables played in her health. But this was completely different: It was as if some plants and some herbs were medicines. It was as if others were—and the word lodged itself in her mind—magic. They affected how people behaved if they ate them or drank them. But it wasn’t like the way alcohol or drugs might change your behavior; that was random and unpredictable. She had seen adults drunk at her parents’ parties, and she had seen what alcohol did to people on TV shows and in movies. According to this book, however, some plants or combinations of plants, properly cured or steeped, could make people fall in love. Grow violent. Have visions. The book talked about making people act on their dreams, and dreams in this case had nothing to do with ambition. It was as if, with the right herbs in the right doses—the right tinctures—you could make someone’s nightmares feel real by the light of day.

Moreover, she realized that her book was part of a small encyclopedia. It said VOLUME I on the spine. She went to the back of the book to see how many volumes there might be and had to read something twice because it looked so strange. It seemed there was at least a second book. This one was called The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. It was Volume II. She made a mental note to ask Anise about that, if she ever got out of Anise’s doghouse. These women seemed to be interested only in plants—just look at all those greenhouses. But maybe she was mistaken. Maybe they did have other … interests.

Over her shoulder she heard Hallie coming down the stairs in her clogs and then joining her in the living room. Her sister sat on the carpet beside her and glanced at the books, but she wasn’t especially interested. She rolled her fingers around her bracelet and then touched Garnet’s wrist.

“How come you’re not wearing your bracelet?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just not.”

“You should.”

Garnet put her forehead down on the rug and closed her eyes. She breathed in the aroma of the books. She was home, the women weren’t here right now. What did it matter if she wasn’t wearing her bracelet?

“How does Dad seem to you?” Hallie asked. “He seems to talk less than ever.”

“I know.”

“He talks even less now than he did, like, two or three weeks ago,” said Hallie.

“Since the night he got hurt in the basement.”

“Yup. But you know what’s weird?”

Garnet waited. Everything these days was weird.

“He’s changed, but maybe it’s just who he is now. I’m getting used to it. In some ways, it’s like when he was still flying planes and gone a lot of the time. Know what I mean?”

Garnet knew precisely what Hallie meant. Before Flight 1611 had crashed, it was more normal having their father gone than it was having him home. Or, at least, it was as normal. The reality was that, for most of their childhoods, their father had been away from home three or four days a week. They—Mom and Hallie and she—were accustomed to being a household of three, and their mother had the single-mom drill down to a science. She knew how to run the house just fine when Dad was flying. In some ways, things even went a little easier when it was just the three girls. Dad wouldn’t suddenly be there wanting to bring them to and from dance class when their friend Samantha’s mom was already planning to pick them up at school and bring them to her house until Emily was finished at work. Dad wouldn’t suddenly want dinner to be a perfect replica of what the school nurse said dinner was supposed to look like, with just the right combination of meat and vegetables and grains. They could eat dinner in the den and watch TV. And Dad wouldn’t suddenly be checking to make sure they had made their beds before going to school or practiced the violin or the flute before going to sleep. The truth was, regardless of whether Dad was flying or he was sitting silently at the table and staring at something no one else seemed to see, the three females had figured out long ago how to manage.

Still, Garnet felt guilty even thinking such things, and so she found herself answering, “I know what you mean. But Mom says it just takes time. He’ll get better. You think he will, right?”

“Yeah. I’m sure he will,” Hallie said, but she sounded dubious. Then: “Want me to get you your bracelet?”

Garnet pushed herself to a sitting position. “Fine. Get me my bracelet. It’s on the top of my—”

But before she could finish, Hallie handed it to her. She had already retrieved it and brought it downstairs. “I saw it on top of your bureau,” she said. “And I figured you should be wearing it. You just never know when Reseda or Anise or someone is going to drop by the house.”

It had been clear to Emily throughout dinner that something was troubling the girls, though Garnet had seemed more out of sorts than her sister. (But wouldn’t it be worse, she asked herself, if something wasn’t troubling her children?) She watched them pick at their food, Garnet always seeming on the verge of bringing something up. Now Emily was going through their vocabulary words with them in Hallie’s bedroom on the third floor, helping them complete the workbook pages they had been assigned as homework. Chip was downstairs taping the frames of the doors in the entry foyer, because he was planning to paint it tomorrow. His stomach, he insisted, felt pretty good.

But she studied her girls as they worked. Hallie was sitting on her bed, while she and Garnet sat on the floor with their backs against it. She tried to focus, but as she watched the twins together in a moment of such comforting normalcy—upstairs in a bedroom doing their homework—she found herself wondering how so much of their life as a family had gone so terribly wrong. Actually, not how. The how was easy. It was the why. The why seemed almost Job-like. Inexplicable. Unreasonable. But the how? A person could trace the steps with ease. There was the plane crash, of course, that was where it all began. It was Flight 1611 that had led to Chip’s depression and PTSD, which in turn had resulted in their moving to northern New Hampshire. And then it was here in Bethel that his mental illness had worsened, perhaps—according to Valerian—because of the solitude. Not that taking a yoga class or volunteering at the library would have made a difference. But all those hours alone in this house scraping wallpaper and slathering paint on kitchen walls? It had exacerbated his disconnection from people other than his wife and his daughters. And so whatever demons he already had were transformed into the self-loathing that had led him to hurt himself.

And then Garnet had found the bones. Good God, her children would have had to have been mannequins not to have been out of sorts. It was a miracle that they could put one foot in front of the other and function at all.

No, it wasn’t precisely a miracle. It was Reseda. Anise. Holly. Clary. Ginger. Sage. It was all those remarkable women. It was John Hardin. It was all those remarkable people. They were strange, there was no doubt about it. They were obsessed with their greenhouses and gardens and quaint little remedies. But they were caring and giving and intellectually engaged. While the girls might feel a little ostracized at the moment by their classmates—though Emily honestly was convinced this would improve over time—they had been embraced by the most interesting women of Bethel. Verbena. This was the name that Clary and Anise were calling her now. John was, too, though for some reason she found his use of it a little troubling: It suggested a more public transformation than she was prepared to make at the moment, because he wanted to call her that at work. Moreover, she wasn’t enamored of the name—the connotation in her mind was the men’s talcum and soap she had sometimes placed under the Christmas tree for Chip, though Anise had reassured her that it had a long and rich feminine history as well. A mystical history. Anise had told her that another term for verbena was Juno’s tears, and she thought it might be a fitting name for Emily as she coped with the heartbreaking loss of Flight 1611 and her reawakening into a future she had never anticipated.

When Emily had told Reseda that some of the women now wanted to call her Verbena, her friend had shown absolutely no emotion, and for a moment she thought that perhaps Reseda didn’t approve—which made her fear that perhaps Reseda didn’t believe she was worthy of having a new name. Of becoming one of them. But then Reseda had nodded and said, “Yes, of course. We should have a christening. A rebirth into Verbena. It might be fun. We’ll view it as an excuse for a party.”

“Mommy?”

She looked over at Garnet. “Yes, dear?”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about vocabulary words. At least I should have been. Sorry.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the words, either.”

“No?”

“No. I want to move back to Pennsylvania.”

Emily rested her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and rubbed it softly. She was surprised by both the bluntness and the suddenness of her daughter’s request. “Sometimes I do, too,” she said, and she was about to say more: explain why that idea had its appeal but why, in the end, she would prefer to stay here in Bethel. At least for now. The reality was that there was a support group here. Moreover, she didn’t believe that her husband—their father—was capable of uprooting his life once again. In some ways, the man she had fallen in love with and married and raised the two of them with had died that awful afternoon last August. He had become a ghost of his former self, a wisp: He had become, sadly, the pilot who wasn’t Sully Sullenberger.

Meanwhile, she wasn’t even sure she was capable—not emotionally, not intellectually—of returning to a practice as demanding as the one she had left behind in Philadelphia.

“Then we might move back?” Garnet was saying. “There’s a chance?”

“I don’t want to,” said Hallie, and she glared down at her sister from the bed. “I know things have been kind of weird here. But it’s not like West Chester was so great.”

“You loved West Chester,” Garnet corrected her. “You were, like, the most popular girl in the class!”

“I was not!”

“You were! You totally were!”

Hallie sat back against her headboard and folded her arms across her chest.

“Let’s talk about this calmly,” Emily said. She gazed back and forth at her daughters and recognized in the two of them the odd penumbra of resemblance that strangers noted when they first met the girls. “Garnet, you go first. Why do you want to move back to Pennsylvania? And then Hallie, you can tell us why you don’t. Okay?”

Hallie gazed angrily out the window into the night, and Garnet nodded slowly, marshaling her ideas. Before she started to speak, however, the phone rang and Emily made a T with her hands, signaling a time-out. “Hold your thoughts,” she said to Garnet, and then she rose and ran down the stairs to the second floor to get the phone in her and Chip’s bedroom. She figured she reached it about a half second before the answering machine would have picked up.

“Good evening, ma’am. Is this Emily Linton?”

“Yes.” She didn’t recognize the male voice.

“My name is Sergeant Dennis Holcomb, I was one of the investigators from the Major Crime Unit who examined the remains your daughter found in your basement. We met your husband, the captain, that morning.”

“Yes. Of course.” She felt her heart thrumming in her chest; she feared this could only be more bad news.

“Well, we went and got a DNA swab from Hewitt Dunmore. There’s a match. He still claims he had no idea that his twin brother had been buried down there. Insists the bones must have preceded his family’s purchase of the house: Abenaki remains or fur trappers or loggers. He still says that door was just the old coal chute. But it’s pretty evident the remains are Sawyer Dunmore.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means the case is closed. The twelve-year-old’s death was ruled a suicide years ago; there was never any suggestion there may have been foul play. And New Hampshire law allows for burial on private property. Why the parents wanted the world to think they buried their boy in the cemetery—and how the mortician was or wasn’t involved—is anyone’s guess. But they’re all dead, and no laws were broken.”

“So we’re done?” she asked.

“More or less. I will tell you this: The medical examiner’s office said some of the bones are still somewhere in your basement—in that homemade vault. They couldn’t build a whole skeleton. So, you might want to discourage your little girls from playing down there. I know I wouldn’t want my little boy digging around that cellar.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, ma’am,” he said, and then he gave her his number in case she ever had any more questions. She, in turn, murmured her gratitude and hung up. When she went back upstairs to Hallie’s bedroom, both girls were sulking—clearly they had bickered while she had been gone—and neither wanted to discuss the pros and cons of leaving Bethel.

You hang up the kitchen phone only after both Emily and Sergeant Holcomb have hung up their receivers. You make sure that there is no one on the line to hear your click. Then you lean against the counter beside the oven. You glance down. The knife that Tansy left you is still underneath it. One time Desdemona pawed at a dust bunny there and Emily watched the cat while she was chopping an onion, but otherwise you have had little fear that someone will notice it there. Nevertheless, you are relieved the sergeant didn’t ask about it—that he didn’t ask Emily whether it had turned up. He might have. He might have said something as simple as We’ll get that crowbar and that ax back to you soon enough. They weren’t murder weapons, so we don’t need them. Or, Did you or your husband ever find that knife? Just curious. And then Emily would have asked you where the knife was, since clearly it wasn’t with the State Police. Yes, you were lucky. She might not have trusted you after that.

You hear a noise in the den and stroll there. As you expected, Ashley is playing with your daughters’ dolls, while Ethan watches. He glances at you and then back at his little girl. He tries not to share with her his utter contempt for you. But he is relentless, his judgment unforgiving and harsh. Why is it that the presence of this other father and daughter causes you such intense physical pain? It is not merely sympathy for all they have endured and all they have lost. For their unspeakable loneliness. It is the racking pain in your head, your abdomen, and lower back that causes you to close your eyes and breathe in deeply and slowly until the Advil kicks in and takes the edge off.

Ashley looks up at you and then drops the doll in the Civil War–era smock near the brick hearth for the woodstove. She looks a little disgusted, a little sad.

She deserves friends. She does. Yes. She does …

Clary Hardin switched on the dining room light in her home and heard the loud pop. She knew instantly that one of the bulbs had burned out and hoped it wasn’t the smiling cherub. They had absolutely no smiling cherubs left. When she surveyed the chandelier, however, she saw that it was indeed one of those bulbs that had blown. They’d have to replace it with one of their two remaining faces of despair.

“Another bulb go?” her husband asked, when he saw her standing underneath the chandelier, staring, her hands on her hips. He stood behind her and wrapped his hands around her waist, and she allowed her arms to fall to her sides.

“Yes,” she said. “We have got to get back to Paris.”

“Honey, you know that store closed in 1941. It was never going to survive the occupation. It was never going to survive the war.”

“Nevertheless: We have got to get back to Paris.”

“I know.” They had gone there on their honeymoon in 1934 and brought back that chandelier with them on the boat. It had dominated their first home, a two-bedroom apartment near the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. “Tell you what: We’ll go this autumn?”

“Once we’re revived?”

“Absolutely,” John agreed, and he kissed her on the back of her neck.

At night, after their parents had tucked her sister and her in and gone back downstairs to the second floor to get ready for bed themselves, Garnet watched the cold spring rain slap against a windowpane in her bedroom. She tried to study each of the water droplets as they ran down the glass, hoping to clear her mind of the moment when Anise had chastised her once again in Sage Messner’s kitchen. But she couldn’t escape the memory. It wasn’t merely that she didn’t want to be called Cali. It seemed like she was always getting in trouble. It wasn’t merely that she was jealous of the idea that these women wanted to call Hallie something normal like Rosemary. It was that she didn’t like the way the women looked at Hallie and her. She didn’t like the way they wanted her sister and her to be so interested in plants. And it seemed like Anise wanted to scare her—and, yes, that the woman usually succeeded. She realized that she was frightened of Anise, which was precisely why she hadn’t told her mother what sometimes occurred in the greenhouse. Before dinner she had considered telling her, but Hallie had argued successfully that this could only get the two of them in even more trouble when their mother confronted Anise—and, in a way that Garnet couldn’t quite fathom, she understood that this would endanger their whole family. The closest she could come to the issue was asking if they might move back to Pennsylvania. They couldn’t have their old house back, but maybe there was something for sale in a neighborhood just like the one they’d lived in most of her life. Maybe there was a nice house available somewhere that was far away from this creepy Victorian and Bethel and Anise. From all those kooky women.

For a long moment she stared at her dresser. She knew what was behind it. She had found it. Or, more accurately, Desdemona had found it. It was a small door—a hole, really—in the wall that connected to the attic on the other side. A few days earlier, Garnet had watched the cat sniffing there and then pawing at the edge. When she went to see what was so interesting to the animal, she had noticed it. It was a rectangle and it was just big enough for her to crawl through, but she only discovered it with Desdemona’s help because the edges were cut to blend into the red and green plaid of the wallpaper. And still, she had to slip a wooden ruler into the seam to dislodge the square, discovering that someone had cut away the plaster and horsehair and even sawed off a part of a beam, but the result was a passage into the attic. There was a six-inch length of twine stapled to the attic side of the doorway that served as a handle: Once inside the attic, a person could yank the block into place so it would blend into the wallpaper. The afternoon she found the small door, she had crawled through on her elbows and stood up in the attic. What struck her most wasn’t the idea that here was yet another disturbing quirk in the house—up there with those rickety back stairs from the kitchen and the door in the basement behind which she’d found the bones; rather it was how frigid the attic was compared to the rest of the house. After all, it wasn’t heated. So she had stood there with her arms around her chest, noting their old moving boxes, their old living room carpet rolled up in a tube, and that monster of an antique sewing machine that came with the house, and then crawled back through the passageway into her bedroom. Her instincts told her that this was, in some fashion, an escape hatch: A person would only travel from the bedroom to the attic this way, never the reverse. And it was nowhere near wide enough or tall enough to move anything from the attic to the bedroom. Nevertheless, once she was back in her bedroom that day, she had moved her dresser nearly two feet farther down the wall, so the door would be blocked by the piece of furniture. It threw off the symmetry of the room, but her mom clearly had enough on her mind that she hadn’t asked why her daughter had ever so slightly rearranged the furniture. And although the passageway was a little frightening, it was also interesting. A little magic. She had decided she would share its discovery with Hallie, but not yet with their mother.

Now she kicked off the comforter and climbed from bed and walked down the short hallway to Hallie’s room. They slept with their doors open and the hall light on these days, and so she figured that, if Hallie was awake, she was already aware that her sister was on the way to her bedroom. Just in case, she stood for a moment in the doorway, watching the shape of her twin huddled underneath her own quilt.

“Hallie?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “You awake?”

The body didn’t move, but she heard her sister grumble. “I am,” she said. “And I told you that, when it’s just us, I want you to call me Rosemary. Anise said it would help me get used to it. And you should start trying to be Cali.”

Garnet knew that Hallie was not going to be receptive at all to what she wanted to discuss, and she feared that she would probably wind up retreating to her own bedroom with her feelings hurt. But she also knew that she didn’t want to “start trying to be Cali,” and so she crossed the bedroom floor and climbed into bed beside her sister.

“I don’t want to be Cali,” she said once she was settled there, wrapping herself in a section of the quilt. Hallie sat up and yanked a part of the comforter back over her own shoulders. Garnet couldn’t quite make out her sister’s face in the dark, but she could tell that Hallie was glaring at her.

“Don’t be a pill. You don’t want to be left out again. Don’t make me have to take care of you here, too.”

Garnet knew what Hallie meant; she understood the lengths to which her sister had gone to include her in West Chester—to make sure that she was neither ignored nor picked on. But she also knew that her sister derived a measure of satisfaction from looking out for her. Hallie was going to grow into either one of those adults who took great pride in being needed or a mean girl who took pleasure in the fealty of her friends.

“I was doing fine here at school and at dance class. I was making friends just like you until Daddy …” She didn’t finish the sentence, though she really didn’t have to. Until Daddy freaked out Molly Francoeur.

“Well, none of that means anything anymore. We don’t have a lot of friends at school. We don’t have a lot of friends at dance class. We really don’t have anyone but the plant ladies. No one. Those people are our friends right now, they’re what we’ve got.”

“Great. A group of middle-aged and old ladies as friends. I’m so glad we live here. Let’s stay here forever.”

“Reseda’s not middle-aged. Holly’s not middle-aged.”

“The rest are like grandmothers.”

“You really don’t like them?”

“No,” Garnet said firmly. “I don’t.”

“Well, you’re making a mistake. I do like them. I want to be one of them.”

One of them. Garnet thought about what that meant and realized that she honestly didn’t know. She had heard of ladies’ garden clubs where the women made floral arrangements and tried to spruce up parks and neighborhoods; there was one in West Chester and there was probably one in Littleton or Bethel. But these plant ladies were different. She thought of the books they had given her sister and her. These women wanted to make potions and tinctures and teas—not arrangements.

“Hallie?”

“It’s Rosemary,” she reminded Garnet, her voice flat and blunt.

“Why do you think they want us to take new names?”

“God, will you let that go? What is the big freaking deal?”

“It’s just—”

“Would it make a difference if they didn’t want to call you Cali? Would you stop making waves if you had a name you liked?”

She curled her bare feet underneath the quilt and accidentally grazed Hallie. “Your feet are freezing,” her sister cried out.

“I know. Sometimes I just can’t get warm in my room,” Garnet said.

“One more reason why you should accept the fact that, from now on, you’re Cali.”

“My room will suddenly warm up like yours?”

Her sister shrugged. “Everything is easier. Everything is better.”

Garnet tried to imagine a plant name she might like, but she could only come up with the names of ordinary vegetables and fruits and trees. And the women didn’t seem to use them very often. “There will still be that hole in the wall,” Garnet murmured. “The one that goes to the attic. There will still be that draft.”

“The door fits tight. There is no hole. There is no draft.”

She knew Hallie was right. But, still, her room always seemed chillier than her sister’s. “It scares me.”

“The little door? I think it’s cool. You know I’m jealous. Someday I think we should switch rooms.”

“Maybe,” Garnet said, but she knew in her heart that they never would. She understood that there was a certain amount of bluster to Hallie’s confidence. Her sister was frightened by the door, too. “When will you tell people at school?” she asked after a moment.

“You mean about my new name?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know. Anise says to wait until September. We just come back after the summer and tell everyone we want to be called by our new names. And we’ll have had some sort of cool naming ceremony in the summer—outdoors, when it’s warm.”

“Assuming Mom doesn’t mind.”

“Obviously.”

“And we’re still living here.”

“Which we will be.”

Garnet sighed unhappily. “Do they scare you?” she asked after a moment.

“The plant ladies? No. I can see why they might scare you—because you’re still being stubborn. But once you get over that stubbornness, you’ll see. They only want us to be happy.”

“I think there’s more to it than that.”

“Like what?”

“They need us.”

“They need us?” Hallie repeated, her tone incredulous and condescending.

The idea was vague and not wholly comprehensible to Garnet; she was still formulating the notion in her mind. Volume II. The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. She had found nothing about it on the Internet. “Yes. I think they need us more than we need them.”

“Well, we need them a lot,” Hallie said. “I told you, they’re all we have.”

“Maybe. But do you see them spending time with any other kids? Wanting to give any other kids new names? I don’t.”

Hallie curled her knees up to her chest under the quilt and wrapped her arms around them. “So?”

“Why is that? Is it because we’re new and everyone else knows to stay away? Or is it because we’re twins? And, really, why do they want to rename us? You and me. Why do they want to teach us to make all those potions and teas and things?”

Outside, the rain continued to thwap against the window, and occasionally the glass rattled in its frame. Hallie seemed to consider this. “Mom said she might take a new name, too.”

“I know. It begins with a V.”

“You scared?”

“Sometimes. I wish we had houses nearby.”

“Like in West Chester.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You want to sleep in here tonight?” Hallie asked. And while this wasn’t why Garnet had come to her sister’s bedroom, she knew now that she did. And so she nodded and curled up under the sheets, and soon both girls were sound asleep.

Your plane is, finally, a triple-seven heavy. A Boeing 777. You know the flight deck, even if you have never flown one before. And you know this is a dream because you are alone as you do the preflight checklists from the captain’s seat and because this peculiar airport is in the middle of a harbor. Literally. All of the planes are floating on the water, a row of skyscrapers rising up from the ground along the edge of the surf in the distance. But the belly of the plane is also hooked on to a conveyor belt, and the belt runs on a track just beneath the surface of the water. It is like a train track. No, a roller-coaster track. Because a quarter mile to your right a camelback rises from the salt water, the track summiting higher than any roller coaster you have ever seen in your life—higher than any roller coaster ever built anywhere. Is it fifty stories high? Maybe. One of the skyscrapers along the beach is Boston’s Prudential Center (though clearly this is not Boston because all of the other towers are unrecognizable totems), and the track’s peak is about the same height as the Prudential. But the descent doesn’t go all the way back to earth, to the gently rolling waves. If the vertical climb is fifty stories, the drop is only twenty-five. Then the track angles up again, but the pitch is gentle, no more then five degrees. This is, you understand, the runway. A chain lift locked into the bottom of your plane will pull you along the surface of the water and up to the peak of the camelback. Then, like it would a roller-coaster car, gravity will send your plane plummeting down the other side, the antirollback locks disengaged. You will be traveling two hundred miles an hour, your engines will click on and you will feel the plane hurtling along this runway track in the sky. And then you will be flying, leaving the edge of the track as if it were the end of an aircraft carrier. This is how you take off. You watch a 737 do it. Then a CRJ. Then an Airbus. Then another CRJ. It’s beautiful the way these planes are launched. They leave the track roughly thirty stories in the air, turn right into the departure corridor, and grow smaller and smaller as they disappear into a soft blue sky, an egg-colored setting sun in the distance. And then it is your turn. The tower has cleared you, and so you inform your passengers and flight crew that you are number one for takeoff.

You sit straight in your seat, your hands on the yoke, and feel the plane lurching forward, jerking just like a roller-coaster car at first, and then you are climbing up the track. The plane rests at the summit for a second or two, the tower says go, the antirollback struts slip away, and the nose of your aircraft dips. And then you are rumbling down the far side of the track, the passengers behind you screaming—but not in terror, in delight, because this is, apparently, the tradition in this particular aviation culture. You have the feeling their hands are over their heads.

When you hit the bottom—and the start of that gently angled runway itself—your engines kick on. On the instrument panel you can see the turbines are spinning. All good. And then, a moment later, you are flying, angling into the departure corridor high over this bay and getting clearance from the tower to climb to five thousand feet. And there isn’t a bird in sight. Delightful.

But this is a dream, and do your dreams ever end well? Not these days. A flight attendant knocks on the door, and even though you are in the midst of your initial climb, you unbuckle your harness and see what he needs. He is a young man and his face is colorless. You walk into the first-class cabin and gaze at the floor where he is pointing: This plane seems to have a long row of baseboard heaters along the floor, and what is occurring is most visible before the feet of the passengers in the first row—the bulkhead seats—but is happening the entire length of the plane. Waves of what looks like woodstove or fireplace ash are spewing from the grates on both sides of the jet, rolling from the openings like lava and coating the floor and the feet of the passengers.

Meanwhile, the plane continues to climb, though there is no one on the flight deck piloting the aircraft, and you and the flight attendant conjecture amiably about the location of the fire. You seem to believe that the blaze must be out, because this is ash and it doesn’t seem to be causing the passengers any pain, so it must be cool. But then the plane begins to dive. Not only is it not climbing—or even gliding—it is plummeting, almost nose down. And so you leave the flight attendant to see if you can prevent the aircraft from breaking the surface of the water like an Olympic diver.

You climb into the captain’s seat on the flight deck and pull the yoke back as hard and fast as you can, and instantly the plane starts to rise; you hit the vertex of the parabola, the very bottom of the U, and you resume your climb. But in your haste to save the jet, you pulled back too fast and too hard. Yes, you are climbing. But it is only a slingshot effect. You pulled the triple-seven heavy out of its dive so quickly that you asked more of the metal than it could handle: You sheared off the wings. You are now in the front of a long tube, not a plane, that is going up but in a moment will reach the top of its arc and then fall headfirst into the earth. Into that bay. And behind you the passengers scream once again. They, too, have seen the wings ripped off, and this time they are screaming in horror at the imminence of their death.

And then you wake up.

You always wake up before your plane augers in.

You listen to Emily’s breathing beside you, her hair on her pillow wild like Venus’s when she was born in Botticelli’s painting. You feel your head pounding, and you know instantly that Ethan is with you. You turn toward the doorway, and there he is, beckoning you with one finger. It’s time. You climb from beneath the sheets, careful not to untuck them because Emily sleeps best when the sheets are tight, but tonight this is not merely because you are such a considerate husband. It is because you can’t risk her waking when you do what you have to do. This can’t continue. This can’t go on for you or Emily or your beautiful daughters. This can’t go on for Ethan or Ashley. God, poor, poor Ashley. You are all in pain. You are all unhappy.

Together with Ethan you go downstairs. You peer into the den, and there are Sandra and Ashley playing with Hallie’s and Garnet’s American Girl dolls on the floor. Sandra looks up at you and shakes her head no, but Ethan takes you by the elbow and pulls you along into the kitchen. There you fall onto your hands and your knees and reach underneath the oven, finding the blade of the knife with your fingertips. You pull it along the linoleum floor and then grasp the pearl handle in your palm.

“Let’s take the back stairs,” Ethan suggests, and you agree. You know why. It is because he does not want you to see Sandra again when you pass the den. He does not want you to be dissuaded from this hard, hard task by her disapproving eyes and, perhaps, her desperate entreaties. But there really is no danger of that. Not tonight. She is not connected to you the way Ethan and Ashley are. You don’t feel as profoundly what she feels; you don’t know as precisely what she thinks.

Still, you move gingerly up the back stairs and then as silently as you can along the second-floor corridor and up to the third floor. To Hallie’s and Garnet’s rooms. You hold your breath for long moments as you walk, the knife wrapped tightly in your fingers. The pain in your head and your side is excruciating. You will begin in Garnet’s room, for no other reason than it is nearer to the top of the stairs. You will place your left hand on her sleeping mouth so she cannot scream when she is awoken by the knife, moving in your right hand like a jackhammer. You will stab her in the chest and the abdomen. Then you will move to Hallie’s room.

You wonder: Are you dreaming now? Still? Perhaps at this moment you are in fact in bed beside Emily.

It was raining earlier tonight. No longer.

You gaze into Garnet’s room, and the idea that you might still be asleep becomes more pronounced when you see that she isn’t in bed. She should be. It’s the middle of the night. And so you go to Hallie’s room, presuming you will simply begin with her. Begin. Not stab. Did you want a euphemism? Is the actuality of slaughtering your twin girls really becoming too much for you?

Just in case, Ethan wraps his wet arm around your shoulder and guides you to Hallie’s room. And there you see your daughters together. At some point, for some reason, Garnet has gone to Hallie’s bedroom to sleep. So be it. Besides, there is a symmetry to handling it this way: They were born within moments of each other, and they will die within moments of each other. Born together, dead together. You cross to the far side of Hallie’s bed and stare down at them. You try not to view them as beautiful children, though you are their father and so the idea that they are is inescapable. But so is Ashley. So are all the children who died or were made orphans or lost a parent when you crashed Flight 1611 into Lake Champlain.

You are contemplating precisely how to begin, the knife at your side, when you hear your name.

“Chip?”

You look up. There in the doorframe is Emily. She is lit by the hall light behind her, but she has not turned on Hallie’s bedroom light. Her hand is near the wall switch. If she does, she will see the knife. You hold your breath.

“Chip?” she whispers again, her voice a little more urgent this time. She clearly has no plans to risk waking the children by turning on the light. You press the knife against your side, shielding it from her view. You join her and wrap your free hand around her waist. You pull her against you.

“I was watching them sleep,” you murmur, the words catching strangely in your throat. You look for Ethan, but he’s gone.

“Come back to bed,” she says.

“Yes, of course,” you agree, and together you return to your bedroom. There you slip the knife between the mattress and the box spring when you tuck back in the sheets. And you are thorough when you tuck them back in, because Emily likes a tight bed.