A ball was being walloped around by a bunch of unruly boys, and finally it was booted too hard. It flew into the bright blue air, then rolled along the grass, past a quince in bloom. Antonia had been imagining that she was a blue jay, free among the branches of a weeping birch. Now she happily jumped off the bench and scooped up the ball, then ran toward a boy who’d been sent to retrieve it. The boy wasn’t more than ten, but he was still as death, pale as paste, when Antonia approached. She held the ball out to him.
“Here you go,” Antonia said.
By then all the children in the park had stopped their playing. The swans flapped their big, beautiful wings. More than ten years later, Sally still dreams about those swans, a male and a female who guarded the pond ferociously, as though they were Dobermans. She dreams about the way the aunts clucked their tongues, sadly, since they knew what was about to happen.
Poor Antonia looked at the boy, who had not moved and did not even appear to be breathing. She tilted her head, as though trying to figure whether he was stupid or merely polite.
“Don’t you want the ball?” she asked him.
The swans took flight slowly as the boy ran to Antonia, grabbed the ball, then pushed her down. Her black coat flared out behind her; her black shoes flew right off her feet.
“Stop it!” Sally called out. Her first words in a year.
The children on the playground all heard her. They took off running together, as far away as possible from Antonia Owens, who might hex you if you did her wrong, and from her aunts, who might boil up garden toads and slip them into your stew, and from her mother, who was so angry and protective she might just freeze you in time, ensuring that you were forever trapped on the green grass at the age of ten or eleven.
Sally packed their clothes that same night. She loved the aunts and knew they meant well, but what she wanted for her girls was something the aunts could never provide. She wanted a town where no one pointed when her daughters walked down the street. She wanted her own house, where birthday parties could be held in the living room, with streamers and a hired clown and a cake, and a neighborhood where every house was the same and not a single one had a slate roof where squirrels nested, or bats in the garden, or woodwork that never needed polishing.
In the morning, Sally phoned a real-estate broker in New York, then lugged her suitcases out to the porch. The aunts insisted that, no matter what, the past would follow Sally around. She’d wind up like Gillian, a sorry soul that only grew heavier in each new town. She couldn’t run away, that’s what they told her, but in Sally’s opinion, there was no proof of that. No one had driven the old station wagon for over a year, but it started right up and was sputtering like a kettle as Sally got her girls settled into the backseat. The aunts vowed she’d be miserable and they shook their fingers at her. But as soon as Sally took off, the aunts began to shrink, until they were like little black toadstools waving good-bye at the far end of the street where Sally and Gillian used to play hopscotch on hot August days, when they had only each other for company and the asphalt all around them was melting into black pools.
Sally got onto Route 95 and went south, and she didn’t stop until Kylie woke, sweaty and confused and extremely overheated beneath the black woolen blanket that smelled of lavender, the scent that always clung to the aunts’ clothes. Kylie had been dreaming that she was being chased by a flock of sheep; she called out “Baa, baa” in a panicky voice, then climbed over the seat to be closer to her mother. Sally soothed her with a hug and the promise of ice cream, but it was not so easy to deal with Antonia.
Antonia, who loved the aunts and had always been their favorite, refused to be consoled. She was wearing one of the black dresses they’d sewn for her at the dressmaker’s on Peabody, and her red hair stuck out from her head in angry wisps. She gave off a sour, lemony odor, which was a mixture of equal parts rage and despair.
“I despise you,” she informed Sally as they sat in the cabin of the ferry that took them across Long Island Sound. It was one of those odd and surprising spring days that suddenly turn nearly as hot as summer. Sally and her children had been eating sticky slices of tangerine and drinking the Cokes they’d bought at the snack bar, but now that the waves had grown wilder, their stomachs were lurching. Sally had just finished a postcard she planned to send to Gillian, although she wasn’t certain whether her sister was still at her last address. Have finally done it, she’d scrawled in handwriting that was looser than anyone would have expected from someone so orderly. Have tied the sheets together and jumped!
“I will hate you for the rest of my life,” Antonia went on, and her little hands formed into fists.
“That’s your prerogative,” Sally said brightly, though deep down she was hurt. She waved the postcard in front of her face in order to cool off. Antonia could really get to her, but this time Sally wasn’t going to let that happen. “I do think you’ll change your mind.”
“No,” Antonia said. “I won’t. I’ll never forgive you.”
The aunts had adored Antonia because she was beautiful and nasty. They encouraged her to be bossy and self-centered, and during that year when Sally had been too sad and broken to speak to her children, or even take an interest in them, Antonia had been allowed to stay up past midnight and order adults around. She ate Butterfingers for dinner and smacked her baby sister with a rolled-up newspaper for fun. She had been doing just as she pleased for some time, and she was smart enough to know all that had changed as of this very day. She threw her tangerine down on the deck and squashed it beneath her foot, and when that didn’t work she cried and pleaded to be taken home.
“Please,” she begged her mother. “I want the aunts. Take me back there. I’ll be good,” she vowed.
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.