“Coincidence,” Sally insisted.
“I don’t know about that.” Gillian shrugged. Anyone could see that the girl from the drugstore looked all lit up inside as she fixed hot fudge sundaes and rang up prescriptions for antibiotics and cough syrup. “She got what she wanted. However it happened.”
But as it turned out, the girl didn’t have exactly what she’d wanted. She came back to the aunts, more distraught than ever. Love was one thing, marriage quite another. Mr. Halliwell, it seemed, was not certain he could leave his wife.
“I don’t think you want to watch this,” Gillian whispered to Sally.
“How do you know?”
The girls were whispering right in each other’s ears; they had a scared feeling they didn’t usually have 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 and 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 corner 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.