Tonight, in that same yard where the chestnut tree still grows, there is something jostling the quince bushes. Gwen moves as close to her mother as she can get; she’s ice, inside and out.
“Mom?”
If Gwen sounds frightened, that’s because she is. This is not what she expected when she agreed to come east with her mother for the funeral. She figured she’d miss a week of school; she planned to sleep until noon every day and eat nothing but candy bars and cereal, full-out enjoying the break from real life. Now, on this dark night, she feels much too far from home. Who is this woman beside her, with the long dark hair and the sad countenance? Gwen, who’s brave enough—or foolhardy enough—to argue with security guards when she’s picked up for shoplifting at the Palo Alto Shopping Center, is actually shaking now. What has she let herself in for? How possible would it be to turn and run for home?
“Look,” March says to her daughter. “It’s only some rabbits.”
Sure enough, several brown rabbits are beneath the hedge of quince. The largest of them comes out, as if to do battle with March and Gwen, as if the entire hill belonged to a creature small enough to fit in a large sunbonnet or a cast-iron pot.
“Scat,” March tells the rabbit. “Go on.” When it doesn’t move she rattles her suitcase, and off goes the rabbit, into the woods. “See?” she tells her daughter. “No problem.”
But Gwen is far from convinced about this place. “Should we go in?” She is whispering, her voice a raspy, breakable thing.
“We’ll have to sleep on the porch if we don’t.”
They both have to laugh at this; it’s not too dark to see that the gutters have sloshed torrents of water over the porch. Not a place you’d want to spend the night, unless you were a centipede, or some other creepy-crawly. March reaches beneath the mailbox, and there is the extra key, wedged underneath, as always.
“You definitely lived here,” Gwen says.
March used to see this same sky every morning; she used to take these porch steps two at a time, always in a hurry, always wanting more. From where they stand, March can see Judith’s garden and instantly, she feels comforted. In spite of everything, some things remain constant. The garden is exactly as it was when March was a child. The spearmint still thrives in weedy bunches, and the scallions, with their sharp bitter scent, haven’t been the least affected by the chilly weather. The last of the season’s cabbages are nestled against the fence, as they always were in October, in neat, tidy rows, like well-behaved green toads.
Maybe she’ll regret coming back, but right now there is nowhere on earth that could feel more familiar. There, in the lower yard, March can make out the orchard, her favorite place of all. The apple trees are twisted, like little old men, their backs turned to the wind. March used to climb these trees every afternoon at this time of year, grabbing at Mc-Intoshes and Macouns, turning the stem of each apple exactly eight times as she recited the alphabet, the way girls do to learn the identity of their true love, making sure to pull the twig free only after she’d reached the first letter of his name.
2
He arrived like a bundle of mail, on a gray and windy day. March remembers it perfectly well: It was a Saturday and her father had been away for nearly a week, at a conference in Boston. For much of that time March had been slightly ill. with a low-grade fever and sniffles, and Mrs. Dale had kept her supplied with orange juice and mint tea. March had woken late that day, something she rarely did at the age of eleven, when it seemed that the whole world was right out in front of her, waiting and ready for her alone.
On that Saturday, March’s brother, Alan, normally the late sleeper in the family, was already in the kitchen drinking coffee when March traipsed in, searching for breakfast. Alan, who was ten years older than March, had graduated from Boston University, but he hadn’t done well. He’d registered to audit a few courses at Derry Law School, still hoping to follow his father in his profession, something he would never manage to do.
“We’ve got a boy,” Alan said.
“No we don’t.” Even at eleven, March knew that her brother was a braggart, and was careful not to believe much of what he said.
“Really,” Alan insisted. He had just begun dating Julie, the girl he would later marry, and was more good-natured than usual. He didn’t call March an idiot or a moron the way he usually did, or refer to her by her given name, Marcheline, for spite. “Dad brought him back from Boston. He found him wandering the streets or something.”
“Yeah, right,” March had said. “Liar.”