One rainy afternoon, as she was folding a white tablecloth, Sally thought she heard something. The dining room was empty and no one else was home, but there it was. A click, a clatter, like a heartbeat or a clock. She covered her ears with her hands, allowing the tablecloth to tumble to the floor in a heap of clean linen. She refused to believe in superstition, she wouldn’t; yet it was claiming her, and that was when she saw something dart beneath Michael’s chair. A shadowy creature, too swift and too artful to ever be caught beneath a boot heel.
That night, at twilight, Sally found the aunts in the kitchen. She dropped to her knees and begged them to help her, just as all those desperate women before her had done. She offered up all that she had of any value: the rings on her fingers, her two daughters, her blood, but the aunts shook their heads sadly.
“I’ll do anything,” Sally cried. “I’ll believe in anything. Just tell me what to do.”
But the aunts had already tried their best, and the beetle was still beside Michael’s chair. Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene. On a spring evening that was particularly pleasant and mild, Michael stepped off the curb on his way home from the hardware store and was killed by a car full of teenagers who, in celebration of their courage and youth, had had too much to drink.
After that, Sally didn’t talk for an entire year. She simply had nothing to say. She could not look at the aunts; they were pitiful charlatans, in her opinion, old women who wielded less power than the flies left to die on the windowsills, trapped behind glass, translucent wings tapping weakly. Let me out. Let me out. If she heard the rustle of the aunts’ skirts announce their entrance into a room, Sally walked out. If she recognized their footsteps on the stairs, as they came to check on her or wish her good night, she got up from the chair by the window in time to bolt her door, and she never heard them knocking; she just put her hands over her ears.
Whenever Sally went to the drugstore, for toothpaste or diaper rash cream, she’d see the drugstore girl behind the counter and their eyes would lock. Sally understood now what love could do to a person. She understood far too well to ever let it happen to her again. The poor drugstore girl couldn’t have been much more than thirty, but she seemed old, her hair had already turned white; if she needed to tell you anything—a price, for instance, or the special ice cream sundae of the week—she’d have to write it out on a pad of paper. Her husband sat on the last stool at the counter nearly all the time, nursing a cup of coffee for hours. But Sally barely noticed him; it was the girl she couldn’t take her eyes off; she was looking for that person who had first appeared in the aunts’ kitchen, that sweet rosy girl filled with hope.
One Saturday, when Sally was buying vitamin C, the drugstore girl slipped her a piece of white paper along with her change. Help me, she had written, in perfect script. But Sally could not even help herself. She couldn’t help her children or her husband or the way the world had spun out of control. From then on Sally would not shop at the drugstore. Instead, she had everything they needed delivered by a high school boy, who left their order on the bluestone path—rain, sleet, or snow—refusing to come to their door, even if that meant forfeiting his tip.
During that year, Sally let the aunts take care of Antonia and Kylie. She let bees nest in the rafters in July and allowed snow to pile up along the walkway in January so that the postman, who had always feared that he’d break his neck one way or the other delivering mail to the Owenses, would not venture past their gate. She didn’t bother about healthy dinners and mealtimes; she waited until she was starving, then ate canned peas out of the tin as she stood near the sink. Her hair became permanently knotted; there were holes in her socks and her gloves. She rarely went outside now, and when she did, people made sure to avoid her. Children were afraid of the blank look in her eyes. Neighbors who used to invite Sally over for coffee now crossed the street if they saw her coming and quickly murmured a prayer; they preferred to look straight into the sun and be temporarily blinded, rather than see what had happened to her.
Gillian phoned once a week, always on Tuesday nights, at ten o’clock, the only schedule she had kept to in years. Sally would hold the receiver to her ear and she’d listen, but she still wouldn’t talk. “You can’t fall apart,” Gillian would insist in her rich, urgent voice. “That’s my job,” she’d say.
All the same, it was Sally who wouldn’t bathe or eat or play pattycake with her baby. Sally was the one who cried so many tears there were mornings when she couldn’t open her eyes. Each evening she searched the dining room for the deathwatch beetle who’d been said to have caused all this grief. Of course she never found it and so she didn’t believe in it. But such things hide, in the folds of a widow’s black skirts and beneath the white sheets where one person sleeps, restlessly dreaming of everything she’ll never have. In time, Sally stopped believing in anything at all, and then the whole world went gray. She could not see orange or red, and certain shades of green—her favorite sweater and the leaves of new daffodils—were completely and utterly lost.
“Wake up,” Gillian would say when she called on her appointed night. “What do I have to do to snap you out of it?”
Really, there was nothing Gillian could say, although Sally kept on listening when her sister called. She thought over her sister’s words of advice because lately Gillian’s voice was the only sound she wanted to hear; it brought a comfort nothing else could, and Sally found herself positioned by the phone on Tuesdays, awaiting her sister’s call.
“Life is for the living,” Gillian told her. “Life is what you make of it. Come on. Just listen to what I’m saying. Please.”
Sally thought long and hard each time she hung up the phone. She thought about the girl in the drugstore and the sound of Antonia’s footsteps on the stairs when she went up to bed without a good-night hug. She thought about Michael’s life and his death, and about every second they had spent together. She considered each one of his kisses and all the words he had ever said to her. Everything was still gray—the paintings Antonia brought home from school and slipped beneath her door, the flannel pajamas Kylie wore on chilly mornings, the velvet curtains that kept the world at bay. But now Sally began to order things in her mind—grief and joy, dollars and cents, a baby’s cry and the look on her face when you blew her a kiss on a windy afternoon. Such things might be worth something, a glance, a peek, a deeper look.
And when a year had passed, to the very day, since the moment when Michael had stepped off the curb, Sally saw green leaves outside her window. It was a delicate vine that had always wound its way up the drainpipe, but on this day Sally noticed how tender each leaf was, how absolutely new, so that the green was nearly yellow, and the yellow rich as butter. Sally spent a good portion of her days in bed, and it was already afternoon. She saw the golden light filtering through the curtains, and the way it spread out in bars across her wall. Quickly, she got out of bed and brushed her long black hair. She put on a dress she hadn’t worn since the previous spring, took her coat from the hook by the back door, and went out for a walk.
Again it was spring, and the sky was so blue it could take your breath away. It was blue and she could see it, the color of his eyes, the color of veins beneath the skin, and of hope and of shirts pinned to a laundry line. Sally could make out nearly every shade and hue that had been missing all year, although she still could not see orange, which was too close to the color of the faded stop sign the teenagers never saw on the day Michael was killed, and she never would again. But orange was never a great favorite of Sally’s, a small loss, considering all the others.