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She felt a tug at the back of her dress and jerked up like a marionette. She opened her eyes under the water and found it white with bubbles. Someone dragged her to the surface, where all was noise and movement, thrashing and gasping. It sounded like somebody else was drowning besides her. A long arm tightened around her waist and bore her up, towing her like some outlandish piece of flotsam toward the shore where the windup lamp was on its side in the grass. She felt the soft mud beneath her feet, but she couldn’t stand. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. She pitched over onto the grass and lay there, looking up at the night sky, her arms wrapped around herself as if to hold her bones together.

The boy stood over her with the lamp. He was panting.

“What are you trying to do?” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“Both of you. I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”

She rolled onto her side.

“Your sister is inside. The bees bit her.”

Evelyn looked back at the lake. The waves they had made were still nudging the dust and debris back toward the shore, and a few yards out was a circle of clear water, as if she had fallen through a hole in thin ice.

She seemed to lie there for hours. Her flesh and her clothes congealed like sodden tissue paper.

“What do I do?” he said. “She’s finding it hard to breathe.”

The first thing Evelyn thought to say was:

“She shouldn’t have been by the beehives anyway.”

The boy crouched beside her. “She wasn’t by the hives. It was outside.”

This made no sense to her.

“They bit her,” the boy said again.

“They stung her,” said Evelyn. “Bees don’t bite.”

“They got her on the neck and on her face.”

“There aren’t any bees outside. Where was she hiding?”

“She wasn’t hiding. There were bees in the trunk of a tree. Outside the wall.”

Evelyn sat up so her face was level with his. A thin film of dust covered his cheeks, as if he had applied some of Mama’s makeup. She tried to ascertain if this was another lie. Another trap. There were no bees, or trees, or anything else outside the wall. Evelyn would always tell herself that.

The kitchen appeared to be empty when she got back. The boy was trying to start the fire but didn’t know how. Her failed attempt at dough was still on the table, and there was flour all over the place. Only after a moment did Evelyn notice the blankets in their sleeping place were shaking.

She got down on the floor and crawled underneath them. Her sister’s breath was quick and shallow. She was wearing their mother’s dressing gown, the hood pulled up. She turned and held Evelyn around the waist despite her wet clothes and pushed her face up against her breastbone. Evelyn could feel the swollen welts against her cold skin.

Eventually Lily spoke.

“You’re soaked.”

“I went for a swim.”

“In your clothes? That wasn’t very clever, was it.”

“No. It wasn’t. Very silly of me.”

They spoke flatly and quietly. As if rehearsing lines from a play they had tired of.

“They stung me all over, Evie. Oh, my word, listen to me wheezing.”

“You’ll be all right.”

“What did Mama give me last time?”

“I don’t remember.”

“It was garlic and something.”

“Yes, garlic and something.”

“You don’t remember what the something was.”

“No.”

“I think we have garlic, though. Don’t we?”

“I think we do.”

Evelyn knew they had some in the hamper because she had made an inventory the previous night, but she made no move to fetch it.

“I’m sorry, Sissie.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

“You must really hate me.”

“Of course I don’t hate you.”

“I don’t hate you either.”

They lay in each other’s arms. Evelyn had no idea whether either of them was telling the truth anymore.

“Were you hiding by the hives? It was a very good hiding place. I looked and looked all day and didn’t find you. I suppose I didn’t look very hard around the hives because I know how much you hate them.”

“I wasn’t hiding, Evie. We left. Like you told us to.”

Evelyn felt a flush of shame. Her plunge into the lake had been a kind of savage baptism from which she had emerged anew. A different Evelyn had ordered them from the garden. Had packed their bags and destroyed her sister’s shoes.

“Did you really leave?”

“Had to get a bit of leg up from the boy. Very unsightly.”

If it was meant as a joke, it fell flat. Evelyn lay and thought. It still didn’t make any sense to her.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would the bees be out there?”

“There are things out there, Evie. I mean, we hardly went any distance. But I saw things. What were those bushes that Mama made tea out of? Spiky leaves and the big, tall flowers.”

“Acanthus.”

“I think I saw one of those.”

“You should have taken some leaves for your allergy.”

“Well. I wasn’t to know.”

Evelyn was quiet. The bees must have had some reason to venture beyond the wall. And she had always thought of herself and the bees as kindred spirits. She looked into the red darkness of her own eyelids and tried to picture the outside again. She tried to imagine leaving, but the vision would not come. It was all blank, all hopeless. Perhaps the lake had not really changed her at all.

“You don’t really want to leave here, do you?” Evelyn asked.

The pause seemed far too long.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so. I just thought…”

Evelyn tensed. “Thought what?”

“I just keep thinking. We have been here such a long time. Day after day after day. So many days.”

“I thought we weren’t counting.”

Lily rolled over and felt among the blankets for something. Then she stood up and took the lamp and went to the rear of the kitchen, where the great black wardrobe stood squarely in front of the door to the hallway.

“What are you doing?” said Evelyn.

She heard her sister open the door to the wardrobe, a door she had always been sure was locked. Lily slowly lowered herself onto the wooden floor and sat down inside it, her throat creaking and whistling.

“What is this?”

Evelyn crawled over to the wardrobe on her hands and knees. Past the boy, perched by the stove like a watchful bird. When she got there she could see the interior of the wardrobe lit by the lamp. The dark wood was not smooth but etched with hundreds, thousands, of tiny horizontal and vertical lines.

“That’s us,” said Lily.

“Us?”

“Every day we’ve been here. Since the storm.” She patted the wooden base. “I hid in here when I didn’t want to be around any of you. Mama didn’t know I had the key. Imagine.”

Evelyn gazed and said nothing. The tally started at the top of the wardrobe’s rear panel and the marks got progressively smaller, as if Lily had only anticipated a count of few hundred days to begin with. Now there were marks on the sides and the inside of the doors. Some almost too small to see. Others much larger and more violently gouged. Evelyn rested a fingertip on one of these, at the top of the wardrobe. She looked down at Lily.

“That was the day Papa left us,” said Lily.

Evelyn pointed to another at the very bottom, on the same panel.

“Mama,” said Lily.

“How many?” Evelyn asked.

“Oh gosh.” Lily frowned like she was thinking, but Evelyn suspected she knew the number exactly. “There’s about ten thousand on the sides. And about ten thousand on the back. And a few on the doors. And now I’m running out of space.”

They both sat in silence. Evelyn looked at the darkly crusted mess of her sister’s hair and then at the quivering gray centers of her eyes. She had been counting. All this time, it had been Lily, not Evelyn, who had kept the greater of their secrets.

Evelyn ran her fingers over the tallies again, as if they were an ancient inscription to be deciphered. But she could make no sense of it at all. As far as she was concerned, there was only the day, the one that she lived in, and the tasks that were assigned to it. She did not think about yesterday, or tomorrow. And all the while her sister had been thinking of the time yawning behind her, and time shrinking ahead of her. It was Lily who had really seen her future in the boy, not Evelyn. Evelyn had kept him for quite the opposite reason. To keep things exactly as they were. Well, that had not exactly worked out, had it, she thought bleakly.

“I don’t want to leave, Sissie.”

“Good.”

“Not anymore.”

Evelyn was very still.

“For the longest time it was all I thought about. I knew there must be somewhere else. And Mama must have known. We could have had lives, Sissie. Like in the book. We could have had children.”

“We’ve got the boy.”

“That’s not the same. And I know you know that.”

She pressed her face against Evelyn’s chest, and Evelyn felt her matted, sticky hair beneath her chin. On the reverse of the wardrobe’s open door was a mirror. Spotless, unlike the mirrors in the car, or the surface of the lake. She saw her reflection more clearly than she had in decades. Her lips blue from the cold and her face so deeply ridged she looked mummified. She stared and stared.

Lily sat up and saw the expression on her sister’s face and turned to look in the mirror herself.

“Oh, Sissie,” said Lily. “Look at me. I’ve swelled up like a party balloon.”

Evelyn blinked. “Like a what?”

“A party balloon.”

And there it was again. The space between them. Evelyn didn’t know what she meant. She heard the words and thought she could picture something, but what she pictured seemed so odd that it couldn’t have been real. Lily obviously knew what she meant when she said it. She remembered such things well enough. Her head was full of them, and Evelyn knew for certain, then, that even before the boy arrived, she and her sister had lived in completely different worlds, and the idea that they could know and understand even the smallest part of each other was a wishful illusion.