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Evelyn sat at the table with the boy’s telephone and probed its buttons but could not make it speak. If she could make it speak, then her sister might understand. She might convince her of the danger the boy posed. To the garden, to both of them. She turned the scratched plastic over and over until her palms and fingers grew sweaty and she dropped it onto the wooden tabletop. It clattered heavily and the noise echoed around the kitchen and produced a feeling of such intense panic that Evelyn went back to their blankets and hid it in her nightdress again.

Lily and the boy came back briefly. Lily swapped her shoes for boots and rummaged in the dresser while the boy waited at the door.

“He’s finished all his jobs, so we’re going to do some painting,” she said. “Feel free to join us once you’ve had enough of your tantrum.”

Then they left her alone again.

Evelyn had one final fumble with the telephone and in her frustration pressed all the buttons at once as if she were attempting to crush the whole thing with her bare hands. The transparent window in one half of the phone turned from gray to a kind of phosphorescent green. Evelyn dropped it and watched it glowing. Another unwanted memory arose from that turquoise light: the smell of chlorine, humidity, her small toes on the edge of a tiled pool. She closed her eyes again.

The telephone made a noise, and when she opened her eyes, there were words across the screen: Have you found them?

Evelyn stared at the letters for a long time, as if each one needed careful deciphering. When the message was clear, she made an almost inaudible moan.

The boy was not alone. He was a forerunner of some kind, a herald of something more terrible. She thought of the scraps of paper in his bag, the picture of the house, the lines that led to and from and around it. Of course it was a map. Drawn by someone who had perhaps heard of the house but never seen it. Or, stranger still, by someone who had seen the house before its dilapidation. But who had sent him? And why? Perhaps Lily already knew.

Liars, Evelyn thought, the pair of them.

She wrapped the telephone in a handkerchief and then again in one of her mama’s work shirts. She had no idea how the thing worked but thought of it as a kind of conduit for all the poison that lay beyond the garden. What if someone was listening to her even now?

Decisiveness was all. She had vacillated ever since the boy had arrived. She took the bundle under one arm and marched out to the back of the house and threw the telephone, shirt and all, into the shallows of the lake. It floated there for a few seconds and then was swallowed by the marshy water. She went back to the toolshed and took the boy’s rucksack from the croquet box and did the same with this, poking it under the weeds with the longest rake she could find. She stood at the lake’s edge for a few minutes, then headed off toward the bottom of the lawn.

—

Lily was sitting on her stool beside the remains of the old greenhouse, its glass panes long since shattered. Her paints were beside her on one of the greenhouse shelves, which she could reach through the empty frame. The only colors that Lily had left were reds and oranges and obscure shades of brown. All the green had been used up long ago, and the blues and yellows shortly after that. She’d tried making her own pigments from the flowers in the garden but without much success.

The boy was sitting on the grass in front of a rowan tree, his good leg bent, his bad leg extended. Evelyn waited behind one of the rhododendron bushes, then crept in among its branches and crouched there, smothered by the flowers’ heavy scent, pricked and skewered in her back and thighs. She could see the edges of her sister’s painting. It was of the boy. Lily was his favorite, surely. Evelyn never painted pictures of him. Next to the stool Lily had three more sheets of paper that she had painted over countless times because there were no more in the house. They were stiff and ridged like corrugated iron.

“Such lovely long legs on you,” Lily said.

The boy waggled one foot, embarrassed.

She’d filled an empty can with water and she washed her brush in it. Evelyn looked at the design. A bleached picture of a pineapple, yellow rings at its base. She fancied she could taste the can’s contents, fleetingly. Something else the boy had scavenged? They had not eaten tinned food since the days before Papa left them. He was the one who had found the tins, she remembered. It was one of the few useful things her father had done.

Lily loaded the brush with paint and scraped it across the board again. The bristles were worn down to stubble.

“I suppose you wouldn’t have got this far with stumpy little legs, would you?”

The boy shrugged.

“You’re very lucky, you know. That Mama isn’t here anymore. She’d have had your guts for garters as soon as she laid eyes on you. I mean, I know I nearly had your guts for garters, but that was just because you surprised us.”

He leaned forward and examined something on his knee.

“Hold still,” she said. “I can’t paint you if you keep shuffling about like that.”

“I think your sister wants me to leave,” the boy said.

“Oh, nonsense.”

“I think she hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She might hate me, of course. That’s a possibility. She only seems to like me when I do what she says.”

“Would she make us leave?”

“I don’t think so, no.” She paused. “Although maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if she did.”

Evelyn wrapped her arms around herself, unable to believe what she was hearing. Unwilling to believe it.

“What do you mean?” said the boy.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Lily. “Sometimes I think it would be nice to talk to somebody else. I didn’t even realize how much I needed it until you arrived. You know, I think that’s why I was such a terror when I first saw you. I don’t think it was surprise at all. I think it was the opposite. Because I knew there was someone else out there, someone normal, whatever Evelyn or Mama used to say. Talking to me like I was a congenital idiot. Of course there was someone else. I thought about it all the time.” She paused. “God, yes. A chat and a cup of tea with someone other than my sister. Imagine that.”

Evelyn could not imagine it. Was this the truth, then? That Lily had been crawling the walls all this time, her heart set on abandoning Evelyn, and Mama, and the garden, at the first opportunity? In trying to protect her little sister from everything outside, had Evelyn only fostered in her a greater thirst for it? She felt like sobbing.

“The place you came from,” said Lily. “Could we get there?”

Evelyn did not know who, exactly, she meant by “we.”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t want to go back there.”

“It doesn’t sound so bad. From what you said?”

“It’s not bad. But there are better places. Better people.” The boy paused for a moment and stroked his arm as if to soothe himself. “I don’t want to leave this place,” he said. “It’s perfect.”

Lily laughed. “You should tell my sister that,” she said. “I’m sure she’d appreciate it.”

“She wouldn’t want to go, would she.”

“Evelyn? God, no.”

“Would you leave her?”

“No, of course not. I don’t think so. Though she can be hard work. Such a stickler. Half the time it’s no different from living with Mama.” She pointed her brush at him. “I didn’t even realize that until you got here.”

She went back to mixing her paints and the boy sat thinking.

“There might be another way,” he said.

“Another way to what?”

“If you want company.”

“Go on.”

“I could bring someone here.”

Lily’s brush hung poised above her board for a moment. The silence roared in Evelyn’s ears. She saw bright spots floating before her eyes. The world overexposed. She held her breath and waited for what her sister might say next.

“Oh gosh,” said Lily. “Well, I don’t know about that. Evelyn certainly wouldn’t have it.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Who is this someone?”

“Just a friend.”

Lily continued to paint without speaking, occasionally holding out her brush to gauge the boy’s proportions. Eventually she said:

“I suppose I might be able to bring Evelyn around.”

“Really?”

Lily put the wet brush to her lips, then laughed.

“No. Not really. I don’t know what I’m saying, she wouldn’t consider it for a moment. You were a surprise. But throwing open the gates and inviting people in? Can you imagine her face? No. She’d throw a wobbly if we even tried to mention it. Then she really might force us to leave. She’d invoke Mama. Conjure her spirit to hound us from the garden.” She paused and her smile disappeared. “Yes, Mama wouldn’t be happy at all.”

Lily glanced down at her painting.

“This one isn’t very good. Sorry. I think we should start again.”

She picked up another piece of paper.

“You talk about her a lot,” said the boy.

“Who?”

“Your mama.”

“Not much else to talk about round here.”

“What was she like?”

Lily set down her brush and looked at him. He seemed to hang on her reply, and fear it, too. He had never mentioned any parents of his own. Perhaps, Evelyn thought, he hoped Lily’s answer might fill a space somewhere in himself.

“Well,” said Lily. “That depends on which Mama you’re talking about. No one’s just one thing, are they? She changed a great deal. Of course she changed. Living somewhere like this.”

She paused again.

“She was fierce,” she continued. “She cared fiercely. And she was angry. But there were plenty of things to be angry about.”

“Like what?”

“You’ve seen what it’s like outside, haven’t you? No one’s patting themselves on the back about that.”

Evelyn did not want to hear any more. They had exchanged so much, the boy and her sister, and this was only one conversation. Who knew what else had passed between them? Lily’s world was a greater world, now, and Evelyn knew it. Perhaps it always had been that way. Populated with visions and memories and even hopes for the future. Lily pictured something where Evelyn saw only a featureless gray expanse. Her own world had never been larger than that slim corridor of green between the house and the wall, between the days before and the days to come. But it was too late to imagine anything different now. The admission that there was somewhere else, somewhere better perhaps, was not liberating but crushing. The shame of it. The waste, the waste.

Evelyn extricated herself from her hiding place and went back down the path, through the tunnel of hydrangeas and rhododendrons. She felt things unraveling. Perhaps this was how it ended, just as Mama had said. Again that needling regret that she had stayed her sister’s hand in the first place, that she had not finished the job herself when the boy was in her lap, limp and weak like an injured bird.

There would be no one else admitted to the garden. She was resolved on that. If others came, she would not welcome them in as Lily intended. She would welcome them as their mother had done. And she certainly would not allow herself to go with them.

She was halfway to the house when she suddenly felt so light-headed with rage and worry that she had to stop and steady herself. She stood with her head bowed and thought she should go back to them. Let them know she had heard every treacherous word. Send them packing to this other place, if that was what Lily really wanted. She looked down at the lawn and saw her own footprints coming toward her from the bushes. She bent over and placed all five fingers in the grass and found a layer of dust a quarter of an inch thick at its roots.

She stood up and looked around the rest of the garden. She remembered only one other time when the leaves had taken on this silvered look. When the air was always hazy, regardless of the weather. She knew what it meant, and the thought of it seemed to smother any urge to confront her sister or the boy. She drifted back to the house, noting with a strange disinterest the tiny eruptions that accompanied each step.