when they spied from the safety of the stairs.
'I saw it once.' Gillian looked particularly pale; her fair hair stuck out from her head in a cloud.
Sally drew away from her sister. She understood why people said blood could turn to ice. 'Without me?'
Gillian often came to the back stairs without her sister to test herself, to see how fearless she could be. 'I didn't think you'd want to. Some of the things they do are pretty gross. You won't be able to take it.'
After that, Sally had to remain beside her younger sister on the stairs, if only to prove that she could. 'We'll just see who can take it and who can't,' she whispered.
But Sally never would have stayed, she would have run all the way to her room and locked the door with a deadbolt, had she known that in order to compel a man to marry you when he doesn't wish to, something horrible has to be done. She closed her eyes as soon as they brought the mourning dove in. She covered her ears with her hands so she wouldn't have to listen to it shriek as they held it down on the countertop. She told herself she had cooked lamb chops, she had broiled chicken, and this wasn't so different. All the same, Sally never again ate meat or fowl or even fish after that evening, and she got a shivery feeling whenever a flock of sparrows or wrens perched in the trees startled and took flight. For a long time afterward she would reach for her sister's hand when the sky began to grow dark.
All that winter, Sally land Gillian saw the girl from the drugstore with Mr. Halliwell. In January he left his wife to marry her, and they moved into a small white house on the comer of Third and Endicott. Once they were man and wife, they were rarely apart. Wherever the girl went, to the market or her exercise class, Mr. Halliwell would follow, like a well-trained dog that has no need for a leash. As soon as school let out, he would head for the drugstore; he would show up at odd hours, with a handful of violets or a box of nougat, and sometimes the sisters could hear his new wife snipe at him, in spite of his gifts. Couldn't he let her out of his sight for a minute? That's what she hissed to her beloved. Couldn't he give her a minute of peace?
By the time the wisteria had begun to bloom the following spring, the girl from the drugstore was back. Sally and Gillian were working in the garden at dusk, gathering spring onions for a vegetable stew. The lemon thyme in the rear of the garden had started to give off its delicious scent, as it always did at this time of year, and the rosemary was less chalky and brittle. The season was so damp that the mosquitoes were out in full force and Gillian was hitting the bugs that had settled on her skin. Sally had to tug on her sleeve to get her to notice who it was coming up the bluestone path.
'Uh-oh,' Gillian said. She stopped smacking herself. 'She looks awful.'
The drugstore girl didn't even look like a girl anymore, she looked old. Her hair wasn't shiny, and her mouth had a funny shape, as though she'd bitten into something sour. She rubbed her hands together; perhaps the skin was chapped, but more likely she was nervous in some terrible way. Sally picked up the wicker basket of onions and watched as their aunts' customer knocked on the back door. No one answered, so she pounded against the wood, frantic and angry. 'Open up!' she called out, again and again. She kept right on knocking, and the sound echoed, unanswered.
When the girl noticed the sisters and headed toward the garden, Gillian turned white as a ghost and clung to her sister. Sally stood her ground, since there was, after all, nowhere to go. The aunts had nailed the skull of a horse to the fence, to keep away neighborhood children with a taste for strawberries and mint. Now Sally found herself hoping it would keep away evil spirits as well, because that's what the drugstore girl looked like, that's what she seemed to be as she flew at them, in that garden where lavender and rosemary and Spanish garlic already grew in abundance, while most of their neighbors' yards remained muddy and bare.
'Look what they did to me,' the girl from the drugstore cried. 'He won't leave me alone for a minute. He's taken all the locks off, even on the bathroom door. I can't sleep or eat, because he's always watching me. He wants to fuck me constantly. I'm sore inside and out.'
Sally took two steps backward, nearly stumbling over Gillian, who was clinging to her still. This was not the way people ordinarily spoke to children, but the girl from the drugstore obviously didn't give a damn about what was right or wrong. Sally could see that her eyes were red from crying. Her mouth looked mean, as if only bad words could come from between those lips.
'Where are the witches who did this to me?' said the girl.
The aunts were looking out the window, watching what avarice and stupidity could do to a person. They shook their heads sadly when Sally glanced at the window. They did not wish to be involved any further with the drugstore girl. Some people cannot be warned away from disaster. You can try, you can put up every alert, but they'll still go their own way.
'Our aunts went on vacation,' Sally said in a breakable, untrustworthy voice. She had never told a lie before, and it left a black taste in her throat.
'Go get them,' the girl shouted. She was no longer the person she used to be. At choir practice she wept during her solos and had to be led into the parking lot so she wouldn't disrupt the entire program. 'Do it now, or I'll smack you silly.'
'Leave us alone,' Gillian said from the safety of her hiding place behind Sally. 'If you don't, we'll put a worse curse on you.'
The girl from the drugstore snapped when she heard that. She grabbed for Gillian and flung her arm forward. But it was Sally she slapped, and she struck her so hard that Sally lurched backward and trampled the rosemary and the verbena. Behind the window glass, the aunts recited the words they were taught as children to hush the chickens. There had been a whole pen of scrawny brown-and-white specimens, but by the time the aunts got through with them they never screeched again; in fact, it was their silence that allowed for them to be carried off by stray dogs in the middle of the night.
'Oh,' Gillian said when she realized what had happened to her sister. A blood-red mark was forming on Sally's cheek, but Gillian was the one who started to cry. 'You horrible thing,', she said to the drugstore girl. 'You're just horrible!'
'Didn't you hear me? Get me your aunts!' Or at least that was what the drugstore girl tried to say, but no one heard a word. Nothing came out of her mouth. Not a shout or a scream and certainly not an apology. She put her hand to her throat, as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she'd needed so badly.
Sally watched the girl, whose face had already grown white with fear. As it turned out, the girl from the drugstore never spoke again, although sometimes she made little cooing noises, like the call of a pigeon or a dove, or, when she was truly furious, a harsh shrieking that was not unlike the panicked sound chickens make when they're chased and then caught for basting and broiling. Her friends in the choir wept at the loss of her beautiful voice, but in time they began to avoid her. Her back had become arched, like the spine of a cat who has stepped onto a burning hot coal. She could not hear a kind word without covering her ears with her hands and stamping her foot like a spoiled child.
For the rest of her life she'd be followed around by a man who loved her too much, and she wouldn't even be able to tell him to go away. Sally knew the aunts would never open the door for this client of theirs, not if she came back a thousand times. This girl had no right to demand anything more. What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn't let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for its sake. If the girl from the drugstore had been smart, she would have asked for an antidote, not a charm, in the first place. In the end, she had gotten what she'd wanted, and if she still hadn't learned a lesson from it, there was one person in this garden who had. There was one girl who knew enough to go inside and lock the door three times, and not shed a single tear as she cut up the onions that were so bitter they would have made anyone else cry all night long.
ONCE A YEAR, on midsummer's eve, a sparrow would find its way into the Owens house. No matter how anyone tried to prevent it, the bird always managed to get inside. They could set out saucers of salt on the windowsills and hire a handyman to fix the gutters and the roof, and still the bird would appear. It would enter the house at twilight, the hour of sorrow, and it always came in silence, yet with a strange resolve, which defied both salt and bricks, as though the poor thing had no choice but to perch on the drapes and the dusty chandelier, from which glass drops spilled down like tears.
The aunts kept their brooms ready, in order to chase the bird out the window, but the sparrow flew too high to be trapped. As it circled the dining room, the sisters counted, for they knew that three times around signified trouble, and three times around it always was. Trouble, of course, was nothing new to the Owens sisters,
