Ben smiles his beautiful smile, the one that made Gillian weak in the knees from the start and that now reminds the aunts of the boys they once knew. He reaches behind Aunt Frances’s head, and before they know it, he has pulled from thin air a chiffon scarf the color of sapphires, which he proudly presents.
“I couldn’t accept this,” Frances says, but her tone isn’t quite so cool as before, and when no one’s looking, she loops the scarf around her neck. The color is perfect for her; her eyes look like lake water, clear and gray-blue. Ben makes himself comfortable, grabs a piece of pizza, and begins to ask Jet about their trip down from Massachusetts. That’s when Frances signals to Gillian to come close.
“Don’t screw this one up,” she tells her niece.
“I don’t intend to,” Gillian assures her.
Ben stays until eleven. He fixes instant chocolate pudding for dessert, then teaches Kylie and Antonia and Aunt Jet how to build a house of cards and how to make it fall down with a single puff of air.
“You got lucky this time,” Sally tells her sister.
“You think it was luck?” Gillian grins.
“Yeah,” Sally says.
“No way,” Gillian says. “It took years of practice.”
Just then the aunts both tilt their heads at the very same time and make a very little noise low in their throats, a kind of click so close to silence that anyone who wasn’t listening carefully might mistake it for the faint call of a cricket or the sigh of a mouse beneath the floorboards.
“It’s time,” Aunt Frances says.
“We have family business to discuss,” Jet tells Ben as she leads him to the door.
Aunt Jet’s voice is always sweet, yet the tone isn’t one someone would dare to disobey. Ben grabs his rain slicker and waves to Gillian.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” he declares. “I’ll come over for breakfast.”
“Don’t screw this one up,” Aunt Jet tells Gillian after she’s closed the door behind Ben.
“I won’t,” Gillian assures her as well. She goes to the window and takes a look at the backyard. “It’s awful tonight.”
The wind is tearing shingles from the roofs, and every cat in the neighborhood has demanded to be let in or has taken refuge in a window well, to shiver and yowl.
“Maybe we should wait,” Sally ventures.
“Bring the pot around back,” Aunt Jet tells Kylie and Antonia.
The candle in the center of the table casts a circle of wavery light. Aunt Jet takes Gillian’s hand in her own. “We have to see to this now. You don’t put off dealing with a ghost.”
“What do you mean, a ghost?” Gillian says. “We want to make certain the body stays buried.”
“Fine,” Aunt Frances says. “If that’s how you want to look at it.”
Gillian wishes she’d had a gin and bitters herself when the aunts did. Instead, she finishes the last of her cold coffee, which has been sitting in a cup on the counter since late afternoon. By tomorrow morning the creek behind the high school will be deep as a river; toads will have to scramble for higher ground; children won’t think twice about diving into the warm, murky water, even if they’re dressed in their Sunday clothes and wearing their best pair of shoes.
“Okay,” Gillian says. She knows her aunts are talking about more than a body; it’s the spirit of the man, that’s what’s haunting them. “Fine,” she tells the aunts, and she swings open the back door.
Antonia and Kylie carry the pot out to the yard. The rain is quite near; they can taste it in the air. The aunts have already had the girls bring their suitcase over to the hedge of thorns. They stand close together, and when the wind rustles their skirts the fabric makes a moaning sound.
“This dissolves what once was flesh,” Aunt Frances says.
She signals to Gillian.
“Me?” Gillian takes a step backward, but there’s no place to go. Sally is right behind her.
“Go on,” Sally tells her.
Antonia and Kylie are holding on to the heavy pot; the wind is so strong that the hedge of thorns whips out, as if trying to cut them. The wasps’ nests sway back and forth. It is definitely time.
“Oh, brother,” Gillian whispers to Sally. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Antonia’s fingers are turning white with the effort she needs not to drop the pot. “This is really heavy,” she says in a shaky voice.
“Believe me,” Sally tells Gillian. “You can.”
If there’s one thing Sally is now certain of, it’s how you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do. Those are her daughters, the girls she wanted to lead normal lives, and she’s allowing them to stand over a pile of bones with a spaghetti pot filled mostly with lye. What has happened to her? What has snapped? Where is that logical woman, the one people could depend on, day after day? She can’t stop thinking about Gary, no matter how hard she tries. She actually called the Hide-A-Way to ask if he’d checked out, and he has. He’s gone, and here she is, thinking about him. Last night, she dreamed of the desert. She dreamed the aunts had sent her a cutting from an apple tree in their yard and that it bloomed without water. And in her dream the horses that ate apples from that tree ran faster than all the others, and any man who took a bite from a pie Sally fixed with these apples was bound to be hers, for life.
Sally and Gillian take the pot from the girls, although Gillian keeps her eyes closed as they turn it over and pour out the lye. The damp earth sizzles and is hot; as the mixture seeps deeper into the ground, a mist appears. It’s the color of regret, it’s the color of heartbreak, the gray of doves and early morning.
“Step back,” the aunts tell them, for the earth has begun to bubble. The roots of the thornbushes are being dissolved by the mixture, as are stones and beetles, leather and bones. They can’t move away fast enough, but still something is happening beneath Kylie’s feet.
“Damn it,” Sally cries.
Right under Kylie’s feet the earth is shifting, falling in on itself, like a landslide, going down. Kylie feels it, she knows it, yet she freezes. She’s falling into a hole, she’s falling fast, but Antonia reaches to grab the back of her shirt and then pulls. She wrenches Kylie back so hard and so fast that Antonia can hear her own elbow pop.
The girls stand there, out of breath and terrified. Without realizing it, Gillian has latched on to Sally’s arm; she’s holding on so tight that Sally will have the marks of her sister’s fingers on her skin for days afterward. Now they all step back. They do it quickly. They do it without having to be told. A thread of blood-red vapor is rising from the place where Jimmy’s heart would have been, a small tornado of spite that disappears as it meets the air.
“That was him,” Kylie says of the red vapor, and sure enough, they can smell beer and boot polish, they can feel the air grow as hot as embers in an ashtray. And then nothing. Nothing at all. Gillian can’t be sure if she’s crying, or if the rain has begun. “He’s really gone,” Kylie tells her.
But the aunts are taking no chances. They’ve carried along twenty blue stones inside their largest suitcase, stones Maria Owens had brought to the house on Magnolia Street more than two hundred years ago. Stones such as these form the path in the aunts’ garden, but there were extras stored beside the potting shed, enough to fashion a small patio in the spot where the lilacs once grew. Now that the hedge of thorns is nothing but ashes, it’s easy for the Owens women to put down a circle of stones. The patio won’t be fancy, but it will be wide enough for a small wrought-iron table and four chairs. Some of the little girls in the neighborhood will beg to have tea parties out here, and when their mothers laugh and ask why this patio is better than their own, the little girls will insist the blue stones are lucky.