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.