Outside, in the neighbors’ backyards, swing sets are uprooted and cats claw at back doors, desperate to be let in. Halfway down the block, a poplar tree cracks in two and plummets to the ground, hitting a fire hydrant and crashing through the window of a parked Honda Civic. That’s when Sally and her daughters hear the knocking. The girls look up at the ceiling, then turn to their mother.
“Squirrels,” Sally assures them. “Nesting in the attic.”
But the knocking continues, and the wind does, too, and the heat just rises higher and higher. Finally, near midnight, the neighborhood quiets down. At last people can get some sleep. Sally is one of the few who stay up late, in order to fix an apple tart—complete with her secret ingredients, black pepper and nutmeg—which she’ll freeze and have ready to take to the block party on the Fourth of July. But even Sally falls asleep before long, in spite of the weather; she stretches out under a cool white sheet and keeps the bedroom windows open so that the breeze comes in and wraps around the room. The first of the season’s crickets have grown quiet and the sparrows are nesting in the bushes, safe within a bower of branches that are too delicate to support a cat’s weight. And just when people are beginning to dream, of cut grass and blueberry pie and lions who lie down beside lambs, a ring appears around the moon.
A halo around the moon is always a sign of disruption, either a change in the weather, a fever to come, or a streak of bad fortune that won’t go away. But when it’s a double ring, all tangled and snarled, like an agitated rainbow or a love affair gone wrong, anything can happen. At times such as this, it’s wise not to answer the telephone. People who know enough to be careful always shut their windows; they lock their doors, and they never dare to kiss their sweethearts over a garden gate or reach out to pat a stray dog. Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you’ve had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.
High above the neighborhood, the ring has already begun to twist around itself, an illuminated snake of possibility, double-looped and pulled tight by gravity. If people hadn’t been sound asleep, they might have gazed out their windows and admired the beautiful circle of light, but they slept on, oblivious, not noticing the moon, or the silence, or the Oldsmobile that had already pulled into Sally Owens’s driveway to park behind the Honda Sally bought a few years ago to replace the aunts’ ancient station wagon. On a night such as this, it’s possible for a woman to get out of her car so quietly none of the neighbors will hear her. When it’s this warm in June, when the sky is this inky and thick, a knock on the screen door doesn’t even echo. It falls into your dreams, like a stone into a stream, so that you wake suddenly, heart beating too fast, pulse going crazy, drowning inside your own panic.
Sally sits up in bed, knowing that she should stay exactly where she is. She’s been dreaming about the swans again; she’s been watching them take flight. For eleven years, she has done all the right things, she’s been conscientious and trustworthy, rational and kind, but that doesn’t mean she can’t recognize the sulfurous odor of trouble. That’s what’s outside her front door now, trouble, pure and undiluted. It’s calling to her, like a moth bumping against a screen, and she just can’t ignore it. She pulls on jeans and a white T-shirt and gathers her dark hair into a ponytail. She’s going to kick herself for this, and she knows it. She’ll wonder why she can’t just ignore that jangly feeling that comes over her and why she’s always compelled to try to set things right.
Those people who warn that you can’t run away because your past will track you down may be right on target. Sally looks out the front window. There on the porch is the girl who could get into more trouble than anyone, all grown up. It’s been too many years, it’s been an eternity, but Gillian is as beautiful as ever, only dusty and jittery and so weak in the knees that when Sally throws open the door, Gillian has to lean against the brick wall for support.
“Oh, my god, it’s you,” Gillian says, as if Sally were the unexpected visitor. In eighteen years they have seen each other only three times, when Sally went west. Gillian never once crossed back over the Mississippi, just as she’d vowed when she first left the aunts’ house. “It’s really, really you!”
Gillian has cut her blond hair shorter than ever; she smells like sugar and heat. She’s got sand in the ridges of her red boots and a little green snake tattooed on her wrist. She hugs Sally fast and tight, before Sally can have time to consider the lateness of the hour and the fact that perhaps Gillian might have called, if not to say she was arriving, then just sometime in the past month, only to let Sally know she was still alive. Two days ago Sally mailed off a letter to Gillian’s most recent address, in Tucson. She gave Gillian hell in that letter, about her trail of broken plans and missed opportunities; she spoke too strongly and said too much and now she’s relieved that it’s a letter Gillian will never get.