Fran is dealing with a particularly stubborn patch of dandelions when she hears the commotion next door. It is not one noise but many, a tangled cacophony of bangs, thumps, loud warnings to watch out! be careful, those are delicate! Knees firmly planted, she digs in the dirt and tries to ignore the ruckus, her eyes locked on the soil beneath her hands. The flowerbeds are her concern; whatever the neighbours might be getting up to, regardless of volume, is not. 

When she finally stands and turns to face the street, she tells herself that it is only to stretch her aching back and give her tired arms a rest. She’s not as young as she once was, after all.

The house next door is a blue bungalow, one of those gaudy new ones put in to slap a fresh face on the neighborhood. Next to Fran and Harriet’s little brick box it is a vulgar, sprawling monster, stretching languorously over the width of its lot. It was empty the day before, its SOLD sign swinging in the breeze, but now a moving van is parked at the curb, sweat-drenched men in overalls coming and going from its back like busy lines of ants. A glittering black beetle of a car sits in the driveway. The small lawn is littered with cardboard boxes, furniture, chests and baskets full to bursting. In the middle of it all stands a man in a grey suit, shouting orders with the speed and volume of a carnival barker.

Fran allows herself to drift closer to the fence that marks the edge of her property, squinting in the late afternoon sun. The man is middle-aged, dark-haired and imperious, with a strong chin and a hard, unmoving face. He stands with his legs open and his fists thrust deep into the pockets of his trousers.

“ ‘He doth bestride the world like a Colossus,’ ” she murmurs, almost without thinking. Forty years spent teaching high school English have left her seeing Shakespeare in places where Shakespeare simply is not.

“Henry!” A woman emerges from the black car like a butterfly, wrapped in vibrant shades of pink and yellow. She picks her way carefully across the lawn, one hand up to keep her hat perched on top of her brown curls. Her voice is a carrying bray that must have been to every finishing school on the East coast. “Are they nearly finished? We’re simply broiling inside that wretched car.”

We. Fran looks at the items on the lawn again, more carefully this time, and sees a doll that seems to have fallen from its box. It lies orphaned on the grass, its blue glass eyes staring blankly up at the sky. A child, then. She’s always hated living near children. 

The man—Henry—does not spare the woman a glance. “Why you would ask a fool question like that is beyond me,” he says. “No, Barbara, they’re not nearly finished. That’s why half of our worldly goods are cooking out here while you and the kid cook in there.”

Barbara glares at him, but his gaze is still on the movers as they heave items from the van to the lawn and from the lawn in through the front door of the house. She turns the glare on them instead, and a few of them glance back, clearly uneasy.

“We’re paying them by the hour.” That loud, rich voice carries easily over the fence—how much easier must it carry to the men themselves? “They ought to pick up the pace if they want to see any of that money.”

“The fact that we are paying them by the hour is precisely the reason why they will not pick up the pace,” says her husband, exaggeratedly patient. “Now will you please get back in the car until I get this sorted out? Better yet, go for a drive. Take the kid for ice cream or something. I promise I won’t let anyone run off with your wedding plates.”

For a moment Barbara looks ready to bite, but then inhales deeply, smoothing the front of her dress. “Just promise me you’ll make them hurry,” she says, her voice rather lower. Fran leans closer to the fence to hear. “You know I hate being alone with her. You know.”

Her husband turns to her, his rigid face softening just a little. A hand emerges from his pocket and hovers for a minute over her arm before landing in a ginger little pat. He opens his mouth to speak, but whatever words he begins to say are drowned out by a sudden crash, followed by the sound of metal plinking on the asphalt.

“That’s the silver, you ass!” he bellows, striding toward the movers. Barbara is left standing alone amidst her possessions, patting helplessly at her hair as the wind picks it up. She looks, Fran thinks, like a tulip, a lonely splash of colour in a field of green.

Behind her, there is movement in the black car. A little hand splays out against the rear window, pale as the underbelly of a starfish.

#

By the time Harriet gets home for dinner she has already met the new neighbours. This is not surprising; of the two of them she has always been the friendly one, willing and even excited to speak to strangers.

“They lived out west before,” she says, scooping up another generous spoonful of mashed potatoes. “Apparently he was a big shot in some kind of firm. Advertising, you know.” She pronounces the word with a sort of awed confusion. As a librarian, her understanding of other, more lucrative professions is muddled at best.

Fran spears a limp green bean on her fork with vicious accuracy. “Their things looked rich,” she says, remembering the gleam of mahogany and walnut on the lawn. “What did you say their last name was?”

“Burnell. Nee Marsdale, in her case. She’s just beautiful, isn’t she? That lovely hair.” Harriet sighs, one hand creeping up to pat her own neat silver crop. In her youth Harriet’s hair had been long and dark, a glorious fall of silk that looked almost blue in certain lights, but by the time she turned thirty silver had begun to weave itself into the black. By forty, she’d had no colour left at all. “She invited us over for dinner on Friday night. Isn’t that nice?”

“Nice,” Fran echoes flatly, taking a sip of her wine. It is nasty stuff, but she likes the look of it in the glass. Bright as a polished topaz, like the one her mother kept hidden beneath the socks in her bureau drawer. “Did she invite both of us? Or you?”

The question is a Russian doll with a dozen others inside of it.

“She told me to bring my husband,” Harriet says, smiling. “I told them that I was a widow, and that I live with a friend who helps me keep house. ‘Bring your friend,’ she said then, ‘I’m out of the habit of entertaining, and I need practice.’ You see, there’s no way for you to get out of it, Franny.”

A widow. Fran supposes that’s true enough. George had been twenty years older than Harriet; he’s probably dead by now. “So you’re the dour old widow and I’m your dried-up spinster friend,” she says. “What lively company we’ll be.”

The statement is bait, and Harriet does not rise to it. Instead she eats her dinner with every sign of enjoyment, even though the potatoes are lumpy and the roast leather-dry. Fran has never been handy in the kitchen, and lately she has been a sloppier cook than usual, letting the bacon burn and leaving the milk out on the counter to sour. She has always thought of keeping house as a silly hobby for women not clever enough to avoid men and marriage. That she now keeps theirs grates on her.

“Did you meet the girl?” she asks.

Harriet looks nonplussed. “The girl?” she repeats.

“The daughter. She didn’t get out of the car earlier, so I never did get a glimpse of her.”

She shakes her head, her mouth bowing downwards into a thoughtful little frown. “Well, no,” she replies. “Somehow I got the impression that they were childless—they certainly didn’t mention a girl, or any children, for that matter. How old do you suppose she is?”

“Seven, perhaps?” Fran guesses. “There was a doll on the lawn. I imagine seven is about the oldest a child could be and still want to play with dolls.”

“I was twelve and still playing with mine,” Harriet says. “Perhaps she was too shy this morning to leave the car. I expect we’ll meet her on Friday.”

Fran takes another sip of the terrible wine, wincing. “Certainly,” she replies, sounding a little vaguer than she means to. She is thinking of Barbara, how alone she looked there on the lawn, the desperate way she lowered her voice. She is thinking about the doll, lying in the grass, its golden hair tangled like drifting kelp.

#

After the supper dishes are washed and the last cup of tea finished, Fran and Harriet have a ritual. 

They sit in the parlour first, reading or knitting or listening to the radio. Harriet takes the rocking chair, her feet tucked neatly beneath her, while Fran sprawls out on the sofa, her feet kicked up onto its arms. The curtains are always open in the parlour, the bay window brightly lit. Anyone looking in could see the quiet scene they make, two crones twiddling away the hours together. A pair of harmless old biddies with no claws or teeth.

Harriet gets up first, as she always does. “I think I’ll turn in,” she says, and Fran does not spare her a glance, just a friendly nod as she squints through her glasses at the evening paper. She listens as Harriet leaves the room and pads gently up the stairs to begin her nightly toilette. She is old, but her hearing is sharp, and she knows exactly what each sound means. The rustling of cloth as she changes into her nightgown. The splash of water as she brushes her teeth. The humming noise she always makes as she rubs cold cream into her finely wrinkled skin.

Only after she hears the telltale squeak of the loose floorboard by the bed does Fran finally get up. She stretches luxuriously, trying not to hear her body’s symphony of creaking bones and cracking joints, and makes her way upstairs to the second bedroom.

“The second bedroom” is what they call it. Properly speaking, it is Fran’s bedroom; a few of her ugliest dresses hang in the wardrobe, and her nightgown is folded carefully beneath the pillow of the little single bed. She puts it on, shuffling her feet into the ratty pair of carpet slippers she keeps by the door, and turns off the overhead light. Taking a seat on the little bed, which is hard and smells like sheets that need turning, she puts her hands in her lap and waits.

This part of the ritual is more theatre than anything. The window of the second bedroom faces the side of the garden, not the street; even if any of the neighbours were to spy on them, she doubts that this would be their chosen target. But their habits are too deeply ingrained now for her to immediately get up. She must sit for a moment or two, for the look of the thing. Just in case.

There is nothing much to look at in the second bedroom. A cross-stitch of a Bible verse on the wall; a lace doily anchored with a jar of potpourri on the nightstand; a photograph of Harriet’s father propped on top of the wardrobe. She turns away from his flint-stern eyes and edges along the bed to peer out of the window. Beyond the fence is the inelegant sprawl of the house that is now the Burnell place. It has changed colour in the darkness, robin’s egg turned to muddy midnight blue. Its squat shape gives it an air of dissatisfaction, even sulkiness. The side facing her has only one window. No lights burn in the room beyond the glass. Fran stares at it without really seeing it, keeping time by the insistent ticking of the hallway clock.

Not long now, she thinks. Just a few more minutes.

A white shape moves in the darkness beyond the window of the house next door, a stirring like the restless rustle of doves. Fran starts and squints, leaning closer to the glass. It is a face, she realizes after a moment ticks by—a little face, round, with two dark pits for eyes. Like the moon, with its irregular grey smudges.

This, then, is the child, the one whose doll she had seen on the lawn. The one Mrs. Burnell spoke of with such pressing anxiety.

The face stays at the window, gazing out into the world. Its eyes do not seem to focus on any one thing. That little starfish of a hand comes up and presses itself against the glass, the fingers spasming. There is something pathetic about how blankly the child stares out into the garden, as though she wants nothing, and expects to get it.

“Poor little thing,” Fran murmurs, unexpectedly moved. She has seen looks like that before on the faces of her pupils, a dazed emptiness so complete that it became its own discomfiting presence in the classroom. It was a look particular to children from unhappy homes.

A trench opens in the white face, a long, pink slug of a tongue emerging. It presses itself against the window pane in imitation of the hand, leaving a slick trail of saliva as it licks slowly up the glass. And suddenly the eyes are not unfocused at all, but on her, the child’s gaze hooked neatly into hers.

Fran starts away from the window and shakes her head furiously. Shuffling backwards, she retreats into the hall, standing for a moment beneath the ticking clock to steady herself. Her heart is jumping a little inside her chest, an irregular gallop that sounds unusually loud in her ears. A heart attack, she thinks, is this what such a thing would feel like?

“Franny?” Harriet calls sleepily. She uses her quiet voice, the one specially pitched so no one else can hear it. If Fran were standing directly beneath an air raid siren, she would still hear that voice. “Come to bed, darling.”

And Fran does, closing her mind to the thought of that pale face at the window and retreating to the comforting circle of Harriet’s arms. 

#

When Fran tells Harriet about the face at the window the next morning, she laughs.

“Children,” she says, “are like puppies. They’ll lick anything that stands still long enough.”

Fran frowns. “I suppose,” she replies, stirring a lump of sugar into her coffee. “It was odd, though, her being up so late.”

Harriet shrugs and bends her head over her daily crossword. Her meagre breakfast sits neglected: burned toast and marmalade, rubbery eggs and orange juice from a can. “First night jitters, maybe,” she says. “I never can sleep the first night in a new place.”

That is true. Fran remembers the day that they first moved in together all those years ago, after Harriet had finally left her husband George. Remembers the two of them lugging their few boxes and trunks up three flights of stairs to their stuffy little attic apartment, how easily she had fallen asleep when they were done. She woke up hours later to find Harriet up and pacing, her cigarette trailing smoke behind her like a comet. The trains were keeping her up, their unfamiliar wails in the distance too eerie, too ghostly for her to sleep. They sounded, she told Fran, like women crying.

The place had been miserable, hot in summer and cold in winter, its mismatched furniture scarred and pitted from too much use. The dips in the mattress were from other bodies that had left their scents and sweat soaked into the fabric; the cracks in the linoleum spoke to former occupants, their moments of carelessness or rage. To stand it, they told each other fairy tales about their future. Slotted together in their hand-me-down-bed, they imagined the house they would someday own together, the things that they would fill it with, the garden they would plant outside. The clock in the hallway. The rocking chair in the living room. They believed in this imaginary home no more than they believed in glass slippers and poisoned apples, but it helped to have something to think about. 

And now here they are, in their house, this kitchen with its stiff muslin curtains, its humming refrigerator and gleaming chrome. A castle in the air, somehow fallen to earth.

“She looked at me,” she says. While Harriet’s gaze is still turned down to the crossword, mouthing a word and counting its letters on her fingers, she sneaks a second sugar lump into her cup. The doctor has ordered her to cut back, and Harriet usually takes it upon herself to guard the bowl. “I was sitting there on the bed, and she looked up and saw me. She stared.”

Harriet hums, tapping the newspaper with her fountain pen. Little droplets of ink speckle the page. “If I looked up and saw an old woman watching me through her window, I’d stare at her too,” she says. “Particularly if I were in the middle of doing something embarrassing.”

Fran feels again the recoil of those dark eyes meeting hers. There had been no embarrassment in that gaze, no discomfort.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I suppose that’s it.”

“Poor Franny.” Harriet finally looks up from her crossword, smiling fondly. Her eyes are pale, the lightest blue that Fran has ever seen. “You really are getting cabin fever, aren’t you? Perhaps you should get out of the house for a while today, darling. Go for a walk, clear your head.”

Those pale eyes had pulled her in when she had first seen them over twenty years ago. They had met while browsing the same rack of tawdry paperbacks in a drugstore, both of them absorbed in their search, scanning covers and titles for some indication that the contents would be relevant to their shared situation. It wasn’t until they both reached for the same book that Fran realized someone else was there. Drawing her hand back as though she’d been scalded, she turned to apologize to the other woman and found herself looking down into an impish face, younger than hers, dominated by round cheeks and a broad, wry mouth. And above them the eyes, the exact colour of a summer sky at the very start of the morning, and a dawning look of recognition—kinship—revelation.

“A walk,” Fran repeats, biting into a slice of toast. It splinters. “That’s a good idea, Hen. I’ll do that.”

#

Fran really does have every intention of going for a walk after she clears away the sticky mess of breakfast dishes. She pictures herself doing it: wiping the plates down and stacking them carefully in the drying rack, sweeping up the crumbs and spills of orange juice, cleaning off the plastic table mats, then putting on her jacket and walking out the door. Making her doddering old-woman way up the street, nodding genially to the neighbors, waving at passing cars. It is the kind of slow, empty thing her grandmother used to do after her husband passed. It is the kind of thing she ought to do, now that she is retired.

She wishes, not for the first time, that her pension had not been thrust upon her. She could have kept teaching. She knows she could have. 

Fran leaves every bowl and plate exactly where it is, puts on her ridiculous sunhat, and steps out into the garden behind the house. It’s the dahlias, she tells herself. They need seeing to.

The day is overcast, the wind sharper than usual, and she finds herself shivering. As a young woman she had been hale and hearty, always the fastest runner, the strongest swimmer. In college she had played lacrosse, was feared by opposing players and teammates alike for her ferocity and single-mindedness. Now, finally, age is making her feeble. The cold goes straight through her clothes, the heat leaves her useless and sopping with sweat. She is old—not only old, but an old lady, the misery borne by each of those words amplified and intensified by their commiseration.

“ ‘The weakest goes to the wall,’ ” she mutters to herself, and scowls at the memory of her younger self, plastered with mud and grass, waving a lacrosse stick. Joan of Arc at banner. She turns a cursory circle around the garden, patting at the dirt here and there, keeping one watchful eye on the lazy blue cat that is the Burnell house. She sees no movement beyond the windows, and wonders if the mother is still asleep.

“I like your flowers.”

The little voice, so high and sweet, still makes her jump, and she sternly tells her traitor heart to slow down as she shuffles closer to the fence. The child stands on the very tips of her toes on the other side, her dark eyes just peeping over the top. She is small and thin, neatly clad in a pink dress and shoes polished into little black mirrors. Her pale moon-face is solemn, its cheeks plump despite her thinness. Looking at her, Fran adjusts her initial assessment of the child’s age. Her voice is too carefully modulated, too mannered, for a child of seven. She might be nine or ten, though a small, spindly nine or ten.

“Thank you,” Fran says, leaning over just a little. A jump-rope dangles lifelessly from the child’s hand, as though she were about to play but then thought better of it. “But they aren’t mine, not really. My friend planted most of them.” And it is true—Harriet is the one who initially planned out the garden, ordered all the seeds from the winter catalogue and sketched out a blueprint for their summer at the kitchen table. All Fran does is maintain it, and she does a poor enough job at that. “What’s your name?”

“Grace,” the child replies. There is a curious lack of intonation in her voice. She might be saying anyone’s name. “Grace Elizabeth Burnell. And you are Fran. I heard my mother talking about you.”

Fran raises an eyebrow, intrigued despite herself. “Fran I am,” she says. “Frances Elizabeth Perkins. You see, we have something in common.”

The child says nothing in response to this. A shared middle name is apparently not firm enough ground on which to build a conversation. Fran tries again.

“What else did your mother say?” she asks. “When she was talking about me?”

Grace cocks her head, like a dog listening to some unfamiliar sound, and starts to count things off on her slender little fingers. “That you live next door,” she says, “and that you were a teacher once, and that your friend works in a library. And she said that you are coming for dinner.” Her little voice perks up suddenly on the word “dinner,” sounding brighter and more alive. “Tomorrow. Is that true?”

Fran can’t help but feel a pang at the child’s eagerness. How lonely must she be, that the presence of two strange old women at the dinner-table is cause for such excitement?

“I am,” she says, leaning closer. “After your father and my friend both come home from work. What do you suppose your mother will make?”

Grace shrugs. It is a strangely adult gesture on such a little person. “Oh, I don’t care,” she says. “I never much care what there is to eat.”

“You don’t care?” Fran realizes that she is speaking to the girl in her teacher-voice, a louder, sterner version of her normal voice. With effort, she modulates her tone into a friendlier version of itself. “Don’t you get hungry?”

The smile that appears on Grace’s round face spreads slowly, like a stain. “Oh, yes,” she replies. “I am hungry all the time.”

There is an eager undercurrent to her words that makes Fran take an involuntary step backwards. The child watches her, and the smile grows wider. So many teeth, thinks Fran, so many bright, white teeth, and that tongue cooped up behind them.

“Gracie!” The call comes from inside the house, a commanding bark that any child would find impossible to ignore. “You come inside right now, young lady. I don’t remember giving you permission to play outside in the muck in broad daylight.”

The smile disappears from Grace’s face. Her expression suddenly thunderous, she takes a begrudging step back from the fence, her eyes still locked on Fran.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, then turns abruptly and runs in through the back door of her house, letting it bang shut behind her.

It should not sound like a threat. And yet, Fran thinks. And yet.

#

At the table that night, Fran asks, “Where did Mrs. Burnell say they lived before?”

Harriet shrugs, sawing away at her meatloaf. “West, she said. One of the big cities, is my guess. Where else are there advertising jobs?”

“And she didn’t say why they came here?” Fran presses. She has not touched her own dinner. Ever since her encounter with Grace Burnell at the fence she has felt a strange, lurching queasiness in her stomach, a premonition that any food she puts into it will be rejected immediately.

“Just something about wanting to get out of the city air, that being in a smaller town would be good for them. They had a summer home before, somewhere in the country, but I gather there was some problem with the land, or the soil or something, and they had to sell it. Imagine, having two homes!” She shakes her head in wonder. “I saw her again this evening—Mrs. Burnell, that is. She was standing on her front step, smoking a cigarette and staring into space. She looked lost, the poor thing. She must be missing home.”

“Was the child there?” Fran tries to pose the question casually, but Harriet still throws an inquiring glance her way, eyebrows raised.

“The daughter? No, I still haven’t seen her. She doesn’t seem to get out much. Perhaps she’s sickly, and that’s why they decided to leave the city. I can’t imagine breathing in the nasty air they get out there would do any good for a child whose health is already delicate.”

Could the child be sick? Fran thinks of how small and slender she is, the paleness of her skin. It’s possible, she supposes.

“Hen,” she says, “are you sure we ought to go over there tomorrow night?”

Harriet’s wry mouth begins to bend in a perturbed frown. “Of course we ought,” she says, her voice suddenly sharp. “Honestly, Franny, I’m surprised at you. The poor things don’t know anyone in this town from Adam, they’re lonely and alone, they want to make friends, they want to meet their neighbours. Just think how you would feel in their shoes.”

But of course, the two of them had been in their shoes, years ago. They bought this house because it was in a town where they didn’t know anyone from Adam, fifty miles from Fran’s childhood home and seventy-five from Harriet’s. Here, no well-meaning family members or school friends could drop by without warning and see anything they were not meant to see. Old scandals could not follow them over the threshold. When neighbors made overtures of friendship, they were kindly but firmly rebuffed. Their loneliness is by design. Even now, they have few friends here, and that, they have always agreed, is best. Until now, apparently.

“I’m sympathetic, of course,” Fran says, although she isn’t. Why should she feel sympathy for this fancy young couple, this man with his Superman chin and grey suit, this woman fluttering uselessly across her lawn? Why should she feel sympathy for their staring child and her grasping starfish hand? “But…well, you know how it is, Henny. Talking to them when we see them outside is one thing. But if we sit down to dinner with them, who knows what they’ll ask us?”

“Good heavens, Frances, what do you suppose they’ll do, quiz us on the geography of the Isle of Lesbos? They’ll ask about the neighborhood. The people. The schools. And if they ask anything more personal, we know our stories well enough.”

“Yes, yes, our stories.” Fran stabs at her dinner. “Your poor dead husband, of course. And your poor friend, who was never lucky enough to find a man. Bunking together for lack of anything better to do.”

Harriet heaves an exasperated sigh. “What do you suggest, Fran? That we tell them that we’re a couple of old queers living in sin?” Even though they are indoors, alone, her voice dips down to the point of inaudibility on the word “queers.”

“That would be a memorable dinner party, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, you’re impossible!” Harriet throws her napkin down on her plate and stalks out of the kitchen, leaving her dinner untouched. Fran tries another forkful of meatloaf and sighs.

Maybe it won’t be so bad, dinner with the Burnells. At least she won’t have to cook.

#

That night, Fran lies on her back in their shared bed, listening to Harriet’s gentle, whispering snores. The two of them said little to one another before turning in for the night, and Harriet did not kiss her before falling asleep, as she usually does. Fran touches the edge of her mouth, lonely and awake.

She eases herself up out of the bed, shuffling her feet into their old slippers and shrugging into her dressing-gown. She knows herself well enough to know that there will be no sleep for her for hours yet, and lying awake in bed never does anything to help the matter. She may as well go downstairs and read for a bit. No—better yet, she’ll go into the backyard and breathe in the night air, let herself catch a bit of a chill. Maybe then she’ll be too sick to go next door for dinner tomorrow.

It is a childish plot, but that does not stop her from tiptoeing down the stairs and through the kitchen, slipping out the back door without a sound.

Night air is poison. That was a thing Fran’s grandmother had firmly believed and told her grandchildren, even though Fran’s parents had always said that Nana Bette was wrong about this, just as she was wrong about cats sucking the breath out of little children while they slept. But as Fran breathes in deep, she can’t help but feel a little thrill of wickedness. If her grandmother could see her now! She shivers and wraps her arms around herself, remembering the old woman’s wavering voice as she ordered her granddaughter to put herself tidy, walk slower, smile more.

“You’ll never catch a man looking like you do,” was her refrain at first, and then, later, “Why haven’t you caught yourself a husband, Frances?” As if a man were a thing to be caught, like a fish, or a cold.

The smell of cigarettes drifts her way, turning her head. Across the fence, Mrs. Burnell stands on her terrace, smoking with single-minded abandon. It is well past midnight, but she is not in her nightgown, and she has not wound curlers into her dark hair. The light burning above the door turns her skin to gold. Fran watches as the woman inhales deeply, the cherry a bright orange spark, and pulls it down to the filter. Looking at the remaining butt as if it has personally offended her, she drops it on the ground and fishes around in her purse for a new one. 

Harriet would call out to her, make some cheery remark about the weather or ask her how they are settling into their new home. Fran is not Harriet. She backs carefully into the shadows, watching Mrs. Burnell exhale plumes of smoke into the poisonous night.

“Careful,” she says, and at first Fran thinks she is speaking to her, but the woman does not glance her way. “You’ll ruin your shoes if you keep stepping in the mud, Grace.”

The child, then. Fran grimaces in confusion, wondering if it is indeed as late as she thought it was. But yes—she hears the clock on the mantelpiece chime the hour from inside the house with a single strike. One in the morning. Why on earth is the girl playing in the garden at this time of night?

“Grace Elizabeth, I said careful!” Mrs. Burnell’s voice raises, and she takes another furious drag of her cigarette. “Do you want me to drag you back inside before you’ve finished?”

Fran hears Grace respond from somewhere in the back of the garden, although she can’t quite make out the words. The voice, however, is unmistakably sulky.

“I won’t take that tone from you, miss. No more back talk.” But this Mrs. Burnell says as though she doesn’t really care. There is an air of defeat about her as she watches her unseen daughter, a slump to her shoulders and a sagging in her face. As she smokes, stares, squints into the dark, the door opens behind her, and her husband’s craggy head emerges.

“Why isn’t she finished yet?” he hisses. “For crying out loud, Barbara, I’m tired, I want to go to bed-”

She turns on him with a sudden athletic ferocity that shuts him up. “So go!” she snarls, rather loudly. Her voice is not soft at the best of times, and Fran wonders uneasily if it will carry up through the bedroom window. She does not want Harriet to wake. “No one asked you to stay up with us, did they? No one asked you to do anything! You’ve done enough!”

“Oh, so it’s my fault.” This sounds like the groove of a familiar argument, the kind that only ends when one or both parties die. “You had nothing to do with it, eh? You didn’t want a summer home so goddamn badly that you didn’t care where we bought the land. You didn’t let her run around unsupervised, getting into God knows what. You didn’t ignore it when she started coming home with-”

Mrs. Burnell makes a low, grating noise in her throat, like an engine turning over. “Go to sleep, Henry,” she says, clearly through gritted teeth.

Henry’s face twists. For a disconcerting moment Fran thinks he is going to cry.

“Sleep,” he says. The sound that comes from him then could be a laugh. It could be a groan, too. “How the hell am I supposed to sleep with that in the house?”

His wife glares at him. Fran cannot hear her reply, if she makes one, but he curses once more and withdraws, slamming the door so hard the light above it flickers. Mrs. Burnell barely glances at it. She turns again towards the garden, her eyes following her daughter beyond Fran’s line of sight. In the grass on the other side of the fence, something rustles and frantically squeaks before falling abruptly silent.

#

Fran sleeps late the next morning, and Harriet does not wake her, though when Fran shuffles into the bathroom she finds a lipstick print on her left temple. She lets her fingers brush against it, smiling. Harriet never stays angry for long. Fran, who nurses grudges as faithfully as Florence Nightingale, found this mystifying when they were younger. When they had their first fight, two decades ago. Fran had stormed out of their apartment to pace and growl in a nearby park for three hours. When she came home, she found Harriet waiting in her best dress, a bouquet of daisies in her hand. A dreamy song they both loved was playing on their wireless, the most expensive thing they owned. She stood and took Fran by the shoulders, kissing her.

“Dance with me,” she said, and they danced in the few square feet of space they had in their little room, and that was the end of it.

Harriet doesn’t stay angry for long, but she doesn’t change her mind, either. When Fran returns to their bedroom, she sees a dress of hers pointedly draped over the little pink armchair by the wardrobe. Blue, tea-length, with a modest white collar and a discreet print of flowers only a shade darker than the fabric.

“If you say so, Hen,” she says to herself, and holds it up against herself. A glance in the wardrobe mirror makes her scowl. Is that really her face, so gaunt and shriveled? Have her lips really diminished to those thin lines? And when, oh, when, did the varicose veins in her legs become so hideously prominent? She looks like she’s had all the juice sucked out of her. Disgruntled, she throws the dress back on the chair and stalks downstairs to fix herself breakfast.

She decides to take her tea into the garden afterwards, hungry for a bit of warmth on her face. It is an unusually hot day, and the neighborhood is quiet as a dream. The Burnell place lies dormant in the sunshine. Fran can’t help but glance over at the fence every so often, scanning it for a watchful pair of dark eyes.

What had the child been doing in the backyard so late at night? Why was her mother there watching her instead of herding her to bed? And what had her father meant about the summer home, the blood?

The looming threat of the dinner suddenly feels less like a dreary social obligation and more like an opportunity. Perhaps, when she is inside the house, she will be able to somehow put the pieces together and figure out what is afoot. Harriet will pull them out of themselves with the right questions, as she always does with new people—most of being a librarian, she always says, is knowing what questions to ask. By contrast, most of being a teacher is being able to piece things together with the barest evidence, using a quick eye and a quicker mind to figure out who threw that spitball, why isn’t that assignment finished, what is that terrible noise?

She smiles then, remembering how frequently her students had asked her to tell them the endings of the books they were reading for class. When she was just starting out, the question frustrated her; she couldn’t imagine why someone would demand to know the answer instead of simply finishing the book. Eventually she came up with a way to head off all such questions. Throwing her hands dramatically in the air, she would strike the closest thing to a pose she could manage and bellow in her most theatrical voice, “If you would know more, read on, dear friends! read on!”

She will read on.

#

Mrs. Burnell opens the door for them before the bell has even stopped ringing, fresh and resplendent in a primrose silk dress. Fran is taken aback by the force of her smile, the whiteness of her teeth.

“Come in, come in! Yes, Harriet, hello, and—Frances, isn’t it? So lovely to meet you, such a pleasure. Yes, we’re just in the living room right now—Henry has just gotten home from work, he likes to have a drink and relax a bit before he eats. Won’t you sit down? Here, this divan is just big enough for the two of you. I’m sorry the house is a bit of a mess, but we’ve only just moved in, and Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all. Dinner isn’t quite ready yet, but the roast is in the oven, and it shouldn’t be more than an hour or so. Would you like a drink? There’s all kinds of things in the cabinet here—gin, rye, vermouth, everything. Scotch on the rocks? An old fashioned? Coming right up!”

After this torrent of words she is abruptly silent, turning to fix their drinks at the little brass cart in the corner. Mr. Burnell, sitting by the window in a red wing chair, raises his glass to them in salutation. “Evening, ladies,” he says, then takes a sizeable swallow of whiskey. “Happy to have you here.”

“We’re so happy to be here,” Harriet replies, chipper as a chipmunk. “It is rather an honour to be the first guests in someone’s house, isn’t it? How have you found the town so far?”

While the two of them talk, Fran lets her eyes sweep the room. The house is open, walls but no doors separating the kitchen and living room. The high ceilings and wide windows make her feel as if she is sitting in an empty aquarium. It has the strange, impersonal smell of all new houses, fresh paint and new tile. The furniture is all expensive-looking, the rug underfoot stinking of money. Despite Mrs. Burnell’s protests to the contrary, there is no visible mess, though there isn’t much personality either—no photographs hung on the walls or placed on the tables, no knickknacks scattered on the mantelpiece. And not a single sign of the child. Fran wonders if she has been put to bed for the night.

“Old fashioned!” Mrs. Burnell all but sings, handing her a crystal tumbler. “And a scotch for you, Harriet. I’m just going to go check on that roast.”

She disappears into the kitchen. Fran hears a brief rattle of cutlery, then silence. She takes a sip of her drink and makes a face. She’s never really liked mixed drinks; an old fashioned has been her poison of choice at parties and bars for most of her life because she is never tempted to consume it quickly.

“Harriet tells me that you used to have a summer home out west, Mr. Burnell,” she says, turning to the host. He blinks, a bit vacantly.

“Henry,” he says after a moment, bestowing upon the both of them a broad white smile. “And yes, we did. Just a little place for us to get away from the city during the hot months. We’ve sold it since then, of course—no need to get away when you’ve already gotten this far!” He chuckles, clearly pleased with himself, and gets up to make himself another drink.

“Do you mind me asking exactly where it was?” Fran asks, and Harriet glances at her from the corner of her eye, puzzled. Her scotch is half gone already, her ice cubes melting into a low puddle of amber. Fran hopes she won’t get drunk. Of the two of them, she has always been the merrier, quick to get tipsy and loose at parties.

Mr. Burnell looks over his shoulder at her, his expression rather inscrutable. “The country,” he replies. His tone is markedly less friendly now, Fran notices. “Just outside of a town called Pearl. It was quaint. Quiet. Lots of space to run around.” He heaves himself back into his chair, the ice in his glass tinkling brightly.

“Of course—that’s so important, especially for children. All that energy! When I was a teacher I couldn’t wait for lunch or recess some days, just so they could work some of it off. It was the only way they were fit to teach.” Harriet laughs at that, though Mr. Burnell merely nods. “Have you found a school for Grace yet?”

“Grace?” His brows draw in for a second. When he is not smiling, his face is not handsome at all, but threatening in its heaviness and masculinity. “I’m sorry, I didn’t… have you met Grace?”

“Oh, barely. We spoke over the fence yesterday. She seems a very bright little girl. Will she be going to the local public, or are you thinking of private school?”

His hand tightens slightly on his glass, such a small gesture she almost misses it. “Grace is… not in the best of health,” he replies. “She contracted an illness last summer, and it has left her very weak. She will not be attending school for some time.”

“Oh, goodness!” Harriet cries out, then yawns. She looks surprised at herself, but continues. “I had a cousin who caught polio on a Boy Scout trip, and it simply ruined him. I hope it wasn’t anything that serious for Grace?”

“No, no,” he assures her. His gaze, when he turns it on Harriet, is noticeably warmer than it is for Fran. “The summer house bordered the edge of a swamp, and she slipped away from her mother and went to play there one day. Not the safest environment for a little girl, as you can imagine. She caught a… a viral infection of some kind, native to the land there. Nothing communicable, as far as we know.”

“Oh, good,” Harriet says, and yawns again, this time even wider. Had she not slept well the night before? “Goodness, all this yawning! You’re going to think I’m dreadfully impolite.”

“Not at all,” Mr. Burnell says, and smiles again. But this time the smile does not entirely wipe away the threat implicit in his rugged face, and Fran notices again the way his hand grips his glass, as though he longs to squeeze. “Tell me, how long have the two of you been living together?”

Is there a sneering emphasis put on the word “together?” Fran feels there might be. “We started rooming together back when Harriet’s husband died,” she says. They have their story well in place by now; she could tell it in her sleep if necessary. “That was between the Wars, towards the end of the Depression. Got to be such a habit that we never gave it up.”

“A habit!” Mr. Burnell raises his eyebrows. “And you never wanted a husband yourself, Frances? A good-looking gal like you?”

This could be an absurdly chivalrous compliment, a man in the prime of his life trying to make an old hag feel better about herself. But there is another question lurking beneath the first, one far more sinister in its implications. Two women, all those years living with one another, and you never tried to get out, find a man, have a real life? Whyever not? What’s wrong with you?

“I was always told,” Fran says, picking her words slowly and with care, “that I needed to do all kinds of things to get a man. Slow down, shut up, sit pretty and smile. I’ve never been particularly good at any of that, so I never got one.” She shrugs, hoping that it comes off as the gesture of a woman resigned to her spinsterhood but not happy about it.

“And so you set up house with Harriet,” Mr. Burnell says. “Your friend.”

Oh, she is not imagining it–there is a knowing twist to his mouth, a slight narrowing of his eyes. She takes another sip of her old fashioned and fights the urge to avert her gaze. 

“Yes,” she replies, and hopes that there is nothing in that one syllable that he can read into, no innuendoes for him to tease out. Beside her Harriet yawns again, mouth gaping like a roaring lion.

“Hmm.” Mr. Burnell twirls the ice in his drink, looking thoughtful. “You know, I had a pal in college who became a psychiatrist. He specialized in…odd gals, you know, single gals. He had a girl on his couch who hadn’t had a date with a man in ten years, she was that frigid and scared. Well, I say on his couch, but he was so good at it that she ended up in his bed. Pretty well cured her, as I understand it.” He laughs, and Fran swallows a rising tide of bile. She wants to finish her drink and smash the glass into his rugged head. “Maybe I can look him up for you, see if he can take a whack at you. At your brain, that is. It’s never too late, you know. For either of you.”

His eyes flick over to Harriet, who, Fran suddenly realizes, is slumped loosely over the side of the divan, her glass dangling from her fingertips. She gasps and sets her own drink down on the floor, but badly, and it spills all over the rug. Mr. Burnell swears and jumps to his feet, shouting that he needs a towel, Barbara, dammit, now!

“Hen,” Fran whispers, shaking her lover by the shoulder as fiercely as she can. Her pale eyes flutter open for a minute; the pupils are hugely dilated, and they register her only with effort. “Hen, darling, what’s the matter? Are you sick?”

Harriet mumbles something Fran can’t catch, then says, a little louder, “Don’t feel right. Drank too much, maybe…”

Her eyes shut again. Fran takes the glass from her fingertips and examines it, squinting. She’s not sure what she’s looking for, but knows it when she sees it: the faintest trace of white powder, clinging to the bottom of the glass.

“They drugged us,” she murmurs, looking down at her own glass on its side in a puddle of liquid. She gathers Harriet in her arms and tries to pull her from the sofa, but her legs suddenly give way beneath her, and the two of them fall to the floor. Fran gasps in pain as Harriet’s full weight falls on her, pinning her to the damp carpet. Something in her body seems to snap, and she finds she can’t move, can’t even try to wiggle out from under Harriet.

“Hen,” she gasps, “help me, please!” But Harriet is not responding, her limbs heavy as those of a dead woman.

Fran hears a little giggle coming from behind them. She tilts her head backwards and sees the Burnells standing there, the two parents side by side, the daughter in front of them. Mr. Burnell looks amused, Mrs. Burnell exhausted. Grace is smiling wide, her moon face shining as she looks down at the two of them on the floor.

Fran suddenly finds that her eyes are heavy, her limbs loose and soft. She can no longer feel whatever it was that snapped inside her. That, at least, is a blessing.

“We’ll have to tell someone about that swamp someday,” Mr. Burnell says to nobody in particular. He takes a step closer and leans over Fran, looming like Ozymandias. She can see up his nostrils. “I can’t think that whatever got Gracie would be any good to anyone, but you never know. They could use it as a biological weapon, maybe.”

“It’s going to ruin the rug,” says Mrs. Burnell, and Mr. Burnell spares her just one exasperated glance over his shoulder.

“Shut up about the rug,” he snaps, then turns back to Fran. “Now, we try to keep her happy. We let her out at night to catch whatever she can find. Rats, bats, shrews, dogs if she can get them. Anything living, that’s what she has a taste for now. But they always fight back, and they’re never enough. We’ve woken up a few times and found her staring at us, licking her chops. This way is better, you see? She gets fed. We don’t die. And you two, you don’t have anyone who will miss you, eh? A pair of old hens like you?” He glances over his shoulder again, and this time his expression is more complicated. There is love there, and fear, and disgust, all of them muddled together until she can hardly tell one from the next.

Perhaps there’s no telling them apart. Perhaps they’re all the same thing for him now.

“ ‘To eat us hungerly,”’ Fran mumbles, “‘and when they are full…’ ”

She can’t remember the rest of the quote.

Her eyes close. She feels rather than sees Mr. Burnell walking away, just as she feels his daughter approaching, falling to her knees in sheer delight at the feast laid out before her. In her mind’s eye she sees the child’s mouth open, those tiny white teeth preparing to bite. That tongue, lengthy and pink, straining towards them both.