They had dinner together every night when Michael came home from work, and the aunts no longer shook their heads when they saw the healthy platters of vegetables Sally insisted on serving her daughters. Though they set no store by good manners, they didn’t cluck their tongues when Antonia cleared the table. They didn’t complain when Sally signed Antonia up for nursery school at the community center, where she was taught to say “Please” and “Thank you” when she wanted cookies and where it was suggested that it might be best not to carry worms in her pockets if she wanted the other little girls to play with her. The aunts did, however, put their foot down about children’s parties, since that would mean cheerful, rowdy monsters traipsing through the house, laughing and drinking pink lemonade and leaving piles of jelly beans between the couch cushions.
For birthdays and holidays, Sally took to giving parties in the back room of the hardware store, where there was a gum-ball machine and a metal pony that would give free rides all afternoon if you knew to kick it in the knees. An invitation to one of these parties was coveted by every child in town. “Don’t forget me,” the girls in Antonia’s class would remind her as the day of her birthday approached. “I’m your best friend,” they’d whisper, as Halloween and the Fourth of July drew near. When Sally and Michael took the children for walks, neighbors waved to them instead of quickly crossing the street. Before long, they found themselves invited to potluck suppers and Christmas parties, and one year Sally was actually placed in charge of the pie booth at the Harvest Fair.
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.