It’s just what I wanted, Sally wrote. Every single thing. Come visit us, she begged, but she knew Gillian would never come back of her own free will. Gillian had confessed that when she even thought the name of their town, she broke out in hives. Just seeing a map of Massachusetts made her sick to her stomach. The past was so wretched she refused to think about it; she still woke in the night remembering what pathetic little orphans they’d been. Forget a visit. Forget any sort of relationship with the aunts, who never understood what it meant for the sisters to be such outsiders. Someone would have to pay Gillian a quarter of a million, cash, to get her to cross back over the Mississippi, no matter how much she would love to see her dear nieces, who were, of course, always in her thoughts.
The lesson Sally had learned so long ago in the kitchen—to be careful what you wish for—was so far and so faded it had turned to yellow dust. But it was the sort of dust that can never be swept up, and instead waits in the corner and blows into the eyes of those you love when a draft moves through your house. Antonia was nearly four, and Kylie was beginning to sleep through the night, and life seemed quite wonderful in every way, when the deathwatch beetle was found beside the chair where Michael most often sat at supper. This insect, which marks off time, clicking like a clock, issues the sound no one ever wants to hear beside her beloved. A man’s tenure on earth is limited enough, but once the beetle’s ticking begins there’s no way to stop it; there’s no plug to pull, no pendulum to stop, no switch that will restore the time you once thought you had.
The aunts listened to the ticking for several weeks and finally drew Sally aside to issue a warning, but Sally would pay no attention. “Nonsense,” she said, and she laughed out loud. She tolerated the clients who still came to the back door at dusk every now and then, but she would not allow the aunts’ foolishness to affect her family. The aunts’ practice was rubbish and nothing more, a gruel mixed up to feed the delusions of the desperate. Sally wouldn’t hear another word about it. She wouldn’t look when the aunts insisted on pointing out that a black dog had taken to sitting out on the sidewalk every evening. She wouldn’t listen when they swore that the dog always pointed its face to the sky whenever Michael approached, and that it howled at the sight of him and quickly backed away from his shadow, tail between its legs.
In spite of Sally’s admonition, the aunts placed myrtle beneath Michael’s pillow and urged him to bathe with holly and a bar of their special black soap. Into his jacket pocket they slipped the foot of a rabbit they had once caught eating their lettuce. They mixed rosemary into his breakfast cereal, lavender into his nightly cup of tea. Still they heard the beetle in the dining room. Finally they said a prayer backward, but of course that had consequences of its own: soon everyone in the house came down with the flu and insomnia and a rash that wouldn’t go away for weeks, not even when a mixture of calamine and balm of Gilead was applied to the skin. By the end of the winter, Kylie and Antonia had begun crying whenever their father tried to leave the room. The aunts explained to Sally that no one who was doomed could hear the sound of the deathwatch beetle, and this was why Michael insisted that nothing could possibly go wrong. All the same he must have known something: He stopped wearing a watch and set back all the clocks. Then, when the ticking grew louder, he pulled down all the shades in the house and kept them drawn against the sun and the moon, as if that could stop time. As if anything could.
Sally didn’t believe a word the aunts said. Still she grew nervous from all this talk of death. Her skin became blotchy; her hair lost its shine. She stopped eating and sleeping and she hated to let Michael out of her sight. Now whenever he kissed her, she cried and wished she had never fallen in love in the first place. It had made her too helpless, because that’s what love did. There was no way around it and no way to fight it. Now if she lost, she lost everything. Not that it would happen just because the aunts said it would. They were know-nothings, as a matter of fact. Sally had gone down to the public library and looked through every entomological reference book. The deathwatch beetle ate wood and nothing more. How did the aunts like that! Furniture and woodwork might be in danger, but flesh and blood were safe, or so Sally then believed.
One rainy afternoon, as she was folding a white tablecloth, Sally thought she heard something. The dining room was empty and no one else was home, but there it was. A click, a clatter, like a heartbeat or a clock. She covered her ears with her hands, allowing the tablecloth to tumble to the floor in a heap of clean linen. She refused to believe in superstition, she wouldn’t; yet it was claiming her, and that was when she saw something dart beneath Michael’s chair. A shadowy creature, too swift and too artful to ever be caught beneath a boot heel.
That night, at twilight, Sally found the aunts in the kitchen. She dropped to her knees and begged them to help her, just as all those desperate women before her had done. She offered up all that she had of any value: the rings on her fingers, her two daughters, her blood, but the aunts shook their heads sadly.
“I’ll do anything,” Sally cried. “I’ll believe in anything. Just tell me what to do.”
But the aunts had already tried their best, and the beetle was still beside Michael’s chair. Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene. On a spring evening that was particularly pleasant and mild, Michael stepped off the curb on his way home from the hardware store and was killed by a car full of teenagers who, in celebration of their courage and youth, had had too much to drink.
After that, Sally didn’t talk for an entire year. She simply had nothing to say. She could not look at the aunts; they were pitiful charlatans, in her opinion, old women who wielded less power than the flies left to die on the windowsills, trapped behind glass, translucent wings tapping weakly. Let me out. Let me out. If she heard the rustle of the aunts’ skirts announce their entrance into a room, Sally walked out. If she recognized their footsteps on the stairs, as they came to check on her or wish her good night, she got up from the chair by the window in time to bolt her door, and she never heard them knocking; she just put her hands over her ears.
Whenever Sally went to the drugstore, for toothpaste or diaper rash cream, she’d see the drugstore girl behind the counter and their eyes would lock. Sally understood now what love could do to a person. She understood far too well to ever let it happen to her again. The poor drugstore girl couldn’t have been much more than thirty, but she seemed old, her hair had already turned white; if she needed to tell you anything—a price, for instance, or the special ice cream sundae of the week—she’d have to write it out on a pad of paper. Her husband sat on the last stool at the counter nearly all the time, nursing a cup of coffee for hours. But Sally barely noticed him; it was the girl she couldn’t take her eyes off; she was looking for that person who had first appeared in the aunts’ kitchen, that sweet rosy girl filled with hope.