Her words are carried across the lawn, each nasty syllable falling into Sally's driveway with a clatter. The aunts turn and look at Isabella with their clear gray eyes, and when they do she feels something absolutely weird in her fingers and her toes, a sensation so threatening and strange that she runs into the house, gets into bed, and pulls the covers over her head. It will be weeks before this girl mouths off to her mother, or anyone else, and even then she'll think twice, she'll reconsider, then rephrase, with a 'Please' or a 'Thank you' thrown in.
'Let me know if you need anything during your visit,' Linda calls to Sally's aunts, and all at once she feels better than she has in years.
Sally has come to stand beside her sister, and she taps on the window to get the aunts' attention. The aunts look up and blink; and when they spy Sally and Gillian on the other side of the glass, they wave, just as they did when the girls first arrived at the airport in Boston. For Sally to see the aunts in her own driveway, however, is like seeing two worlds collide. It would be no less unusual for a meteorite to have landed beside the Oldsmobile, or for shooting stars to drift across the lawn, than it is to have the aunts here at Hast.
'Come on,' Sally says, tugging on Gillian's sleeve, but Gillian just shakes her head no.
Gillian hasn't seen the aunts for eighteen years, and although they haven't aged as much as she, she never quite took notice of how old they were. She always thought of them together, a unit, and now she sees that Aunt Frances is nearly six inches taller than her sister, and that Aunt Bridget, whom they always called Aunt Jet, is actually cheerful and plump, like a little hen dressed up in black skirts and boots.
'I need time to process this,' Gillian says.
'Two minutes had better be enough,' Sally informs her, as she goes outside to welcome their guests.
'The aunts!' Kylie shouts when she sees they've arrived. She calls upstairs to Antonia, who rushes to join her, taking two steps at a time. The sisters make a dash for the open door, then realize that Gillian is still at the window.
'Come with us,' Kylie says to her.
'Go on,' Gillian advises the girls. 'I'll be right here.'
Kylie and Antonia hurry to the driveway and throw themselves at the aunts. They hoot and holler and dance the aunts around until they are all flushed and out of breath. When Sally phoned and explained about the problem in the yard, the aunts listened carefully, then assured her they'd be on the bus to New York as soon as they set out food for the last remaining cat, old Magpie. The aunts always kept their promises, and they still do. They believe that every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.
For instance, the aunts had never expected their own lives to be so completely altered by a single phone call in the middle of the night those many years ago. It was October and cold, and the big house was drafty; the sky outside was so gloomy it pushed down on anyone who dared to walk beneath it. The aunts had their schedule, to which they kept no matter what. They took their walk in the morning, then read and wrote in their journals, then had lunch—the same lunch every day—mashed parsnips and potatoes, noodle pudding, and apple tart for dessert. They napped in the afternoon and did their business at twilight, should anyone come to the back door. They always had their supper in the kitchen—beans and toast, soup and crackers—and they kept the lights turned low, to save on electricity. Every night they faced the dark, since they could never sleep.
Their hearts had been broken on the night those two brothers ran across the town green; they'd been broken so hard and so suddenly that the aunts never again allowed themselves to be taken by surprise, not by lightning, and certainly not by love. They believed in their schedules and very little else. Occasionally they would attend a town meeting, where their stern presence could easily sway a vote, or they'd visit the library, where the sight of their black skirts and boots induced silence in even the rowdiest book borrowers.
The aunts assumed they knew their life and all that it would bring. They were well acquainted with their own fates, or so they believed. They were quite convinced nothing could come between their present and their own quiet deaths, in bed, of course, from pneumonia and complications of the flu at the ages of ninety-two and ninety- four. But they must have missed something, or perhaps it's simply that one can never predict one's own fortune. The aunts never imagined that a small and serious voice would phone in the middle of the night, demanding to be taken in, disrupting everything. That was the end of parsnips and potatoes at lunch. Instead, the aunts got used to peanut butter and jelly, graham crackers and alphabet soup, Mallomar cookies and handfuls of M&M's. How odd that they would be grateful to have had to deal with sore throats and nightmares. Without those two girls, they would never have had to run down the hall in their bare feet in the middle of the night to see which one had a stomach virus and which one was sleeping tight.
Frances comes to the porch to better assess her niece's house.
'Modern, but very nice,' she announces.
Sally feels the sting of pride. It's as high a compliment as Aunt Frances would ever give; it means that Sally's done it all on her own, and done well. Sally's grateful for any kind words or deeds; she can use them. She was awake all night because every time she closed her eyes she'd see Gary so clearly it was as if he were there beside her at the kitchen table, in the easy chair, in her bed. She has a tape that keeps playing inside her head, over and over, and she can't seem to stop it. Gary Hallet is touching her right now, he has his hands on her as she leans to grab her aunt's suitcase. When she tries to lift this piece of luggage, Sally is shocked to discover she hasn't the strength to do it alone. Something inside rattles like beads, or bricks, or perhaps even bones.
'For the problem in the yard,' Aunt Frances explains.
'Ah,' Sally says.
Aunt Jet comes over and links her arm through Sally's. During the summer that Jet turned sixteen, two local boys killed themselves for her love. One tied iron bars to his ankles and drowned himself in a quarry. The other was done in on the train tracks outside of town by the 10:02 to Boston. Of all the Owens women, Jet Owens was the most beautiful, and she never even noticed. She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her. The only one she ever cared for was that boy who was hit by lightning when he and his brother went tearing off across the town green to prove how brave and daring they were. Sometimes, late at night, Jet and Frances both hear the sound of those boys laughing as they run through the rain, then stumble into the darkness. Their voices are still young and filled with expectation, exactly as they sounded at the moment they were struck down.
Lately, Aunt Jet has to carry a black cane that has a carved raven's head; she's bent over with arthritis, but she never complains about the way her back feels when she unlaces her boots at the end of the day. Each morning she washes with the black soap she and Frances mix up twice a year, and her complexion is close to perfect. She works in her garden and can remember the Latin name of every plant that grows there. But not a day goes by that she doesn't think about the boy she loved. Not a moment passes that she doesn't wish that time were a movable entity and that she could go backward and kiss that boy again.
'We're so glad to be here,' Jet announces.
Sally smiles a beautiful sad smile. 'I should have invited you a long time ago. I didn't think either of you would like it.'
'That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing,' Frances informs her niece. 'That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.'
'You're absolutely right,' Sally agrees.
The suitcases are lugged inside, which is no easy job. Antonia and Kylie shout, 'Heave ho!' and work together, under the aunts' watchful eyes. Waiting by the window, Gillian has considered escaping through the back door so she won't have to face the aunts' critique on how she's messed up her life. But when Kylie and Antonia lead the aunts inside, Gillian is standing in the very same spot, her pale hair electrified.
Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies, for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often. The aunts cluck their tongues as soon as they see this grown woman who once was their little girl. They may not have had regular dinnertimes or made certain that clean clothes were folded in the bureaus, but they were there. They were the ones Gillian turned to that first year, when the other children at nursery school pulled her hair and called her the witch-girl. Gillian never told Sally how awful it was, how they persecuted her, and she was just three years old. It was embarrassing, that much she knew even then. It was something you didn't admit to.
Every day Gillian came home and swore to Sally that she'd had a lovely afternoon, she'd played with blocks and paints, and fed the bunny that eyed the children sadly from a cage near the coat closet. But Gillian couldn't lie
