“Damn it,” Sally cries.
Right under Kylie’s feet the earth is shifting, falling in on itself, like a landslide, going down. Kylie feels it, she knows it, yet she freezes. She’s falling into a hole, she’s falling fast, but Antonia reaches to grab the back of her shirt and then pulls. She wrenches Kylie back so hard and so fast that Antonia can hear her own elbow pop.
The girls stand there, out of breath and terrified. Without realizing it, Gillian has latched on to Sally’s arm; she’s holding on so tight that Sally will have the marks of her sister’s fingers on her skin for days afterward. Now they all step back. They do it quickly. They do it without having to be told. A thread of blood-red vapor is rising from the place where Jimmy’s heart would have been, a small tornado of spite that disappears as it meets the air.
“That was him,” Kylie says of the red vapor, and sure enough, they can smell beer and boot polish, they can feel the air grow as hot as embers in an ashtray. And then nothing. Nothing at all. Gillian can’t be sure if she’s crying, or if the rain has begun. “He’s really gone,” Kylie tells her.
But the aunts are taking no chances. They’ve carried along twenty blue stones inside their largest suitcase, stones Maria Owens had brought to the house on Magnolia Street more than two hundred years ago. Stones such as these form the path in the aunts’ garden, but there were extras stored beside the potting shed, enough to fashion a small patio in the spot where the lilacs once grew. Now that the hedge of thorns is nothing but ashes, it’s easy for the Owens women to put down a circle of stones. The patio won’t be fancy, but it will be wide enough for a small wrought-iron table and four chairs. Some of the little girls in the neighborhood will beg to have tea parties out here, and when their mothers laugh and ask why this patio is better than their own, the little girls will insist the blue stones are lucky.
There’s no such thing as luck, their mothers will tell them. Drink your orange juice, have your cakes, keep your party in your own backyard. And yet, every time their mothers’ backs are turned, the little girls will drag their dolls and teddy bears and china tea sets over to the Owens patio. “Good luck,” they’ll whisper as they clink their cups together in a toast. “Good luck,” they’ll say as the stars rise above them in the sky.
Some people believe that every question has a logical answer; there’s an order to everything, which is neat and based purely on empirical evidence. But really, what could it be but luck that the rain doesn’t begin in earnest until their work is done. The Owens women have mud under their fingernails, and their arms ache from carting those heavy stones. Antonia and Kylie will sleep well tonight, as will the aunts, who have been plagued by insomnia from time to time. They will sleep the whole night through, even though lightning will strike in twelve separate places on Long Island before the storm is over. A house in East Meadow will be burned to the ground. A surfer in Long Beach who always longed for hurricanes and big waves will be fried. A maple tree that has grown in the Y field for three hundred years will be split in two and will have to be taken down with chain saws to make certain it won’t collapse on top of the Little League team.
Only Sally and Gillian are awake to watch when the worst of the storm arrives. They’re not worried by weather reports. Tomorrow there will be branches strewn across the lawn, and the trashcans will roll down the street, but the air will be fragrant and mild. They can have their breakfast and coffee outside, if they wish. They can listen for the song of sparrows who’ve come to beg for crumbs.
“The aunts didn’t seem as disappointed as I thought they’d be,” Gillian says. “In me.”
The rain is coming down hard; it’s washing those blue stones out in the yard clean as new.
“They’d be stupid if they were disappointed,” Sally says. She loops her arm through her sister’s. She thinks she may actually mean what she’s just said. “And the aunts are definitely not stupid.”
Tonight Sally and Gillian will concentrate on the rain, and tomorrow on the blue sky. They will do the best they can, but they will always be the girls they once were, dressed in their black coats, walking home through the fallen leaves to a house where no one could see into the windows, and no one could see out. At twilight they will always think of those women who would do anything for love. And in spite of everything, they will discover that this, above all others, is their favorite time of day. It’s the hour when they remember everything the aunts taught them. It’s the hour they’re most grateful for.