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Evelyn did not know how long she sat with her sister. She read from the book until the lamp wound itself down, and after that she tried to think of something to say but couldn’t. Evelyn had not wept for her mother when she died, and she did not weep for her sister now. Mama had become less and less tolerant of tears as she grew older. She needed tough girls if the garden was to survive. There seemed no point crying, anyway, since this was not just the end of Lily and the garden, but the end of all things, and under such immeasurable grief it seemed a tiny and futile gesture.

In the darkness she lay down beside Lily and held her, the curves of their backs and their bellies fitting snugly to each other. Hours passed and Evelyn found a few words. She whispered a mantra of apologies into Lily’s ear: for allowing the boy to stay, for not being honest about so many things, for siding with Mama on so many occasions. She asked Lily again and again: “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

Her sister’s body cooled against hers, and she got up, apologizing still, and fetched a blanket to put over her. The remains of the almanac fell out of the folds, its cover too loose because of the missing pages. Evelyn did not pick it up. She went and tried to restart the fire in their stove, but it only filled the kitchen with a pall of brownish, stinking smoke. She lay down again and pulled the blanket over them both. Part of her thought the warmth might revive Lily, as it had Mama.

Their mother had seemed to die and return to life several times over the course of her last months in the garden, going silent and still for days on end, then unexpectedly waking to remind them of some task they had forgotten, or to hurl volleys of salivary insults at both of her daughters or, more often, their absent father. Even after she had gone cold, Evelyn had continued her vigil, adding more blankets, forcing more soup between her mother’s stiff lips, not knowing if this was another temporary death. Lily had begun practicing her routine in those days. Evelyn had only really been sure that Mama was dead when the smell became intolerable and her mother’s skin began to shrink against the sharp angles of her skull.

—

Some hours later Evelyn heard footsteps overhead and felt as if she were back in one of her dreams. If they had been dreams at all. The steps were careful and deliberate. They crossed the kitchen ceiling, paused above the stove. Then they went to the far corner. Then they came back again and stopped above Evelyn’s head.

Evelyn knew it was the boy. No doubt he would come for her, too, unless she found him first. Perhaps this had been his plan all along, to claim the garden for himself, and the others. He’s not dangerous , she remembered saying, and in the heat of her shame and her rage she felt herself returned to life, as if dredged from the bottom of the lake.

She knew what she must do. She took up the sickle and the lamp and waded through the darkness to the back of the kitchen, where she set to the task that her sister had begun. The boy had taken the pruning knife with him—she would have to be careful about that, she thought—but he had left the poker and the claw hammer behind. She pried and jimmied the boards until her fingers were bleeding, and she felt an unexpected pleasure in the throb of her cuts and blisters. It was good to be working again, she thought.

She removed another two boards and was able to reach the doorknob. She stood for a long time with her hand on the cold brass ball, holding it tightly until it, too, was warm and clammy. She imagined opening the door and seeing Mama on the other side, her face sad and severe as it had been in life, looking down her long nose in disappointment. Then a tanned hand, etched with years of bramble scratches, grabbing her wrist and pulling her almost off her feet toward the kitchen table to be punished.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. And then added: “But you saw what he did to Lily.”

The knob was very loose and the mechanism seemed to disintegrate when she turned it. The door opened quite easily. She had expected a gust of wind, a howling, the sound of something being released, but none came. Beyond the kitchen it was cold and silent, and there was the same dark, damp, savory smell as the icehouse.

Evelyn stooped under the remaining board, then stood up. She held the sickle to her chest and raised the lamp.

She knew this hallway. She remembered it as if she had passed through it only days earlier, running to the stairs to get back to her bedroom. Such a strange mixture of relief and terror to see it again. It was a little narrower than she had expected, its walls speckled with a combination of damp and mold and a long-lost floral pattern on the wallpaper beneath. The carpet was like moss underfoot. She stood and listened but heard only her breath, reluctantly coming and going. Ahead were doors to the left and the right. Two more beyond that. A dizzying number, and these only what she could see.

A gust of wind struck the house and it shivered and settled. Evelyn crept forward very slowly, listening for the boy every four or five paces but hearing only the house itself.

There were too many things here. They cluttered and clogged the corners of the hallway like fungus. Mama had always made sure that the kitchen contained only what was needed—crockery and cutlery and tools for cooking and cleaning and making the fire. Anything that had no use was buried or burned. There were even some very useful things that she had looked upon with suspicion. The windup lamp, for instance, was something that Papa had given Lily. It, too, had gone into the ground when Mama discovered it, but Lily had unearthed it after their mother died and found it still worked. Mama had wanted to throw out the refrigerator and the machine that washed the dishes, but they were too heavy to move.

So many things. Evelyn thought she recognized them all. A low table, pushed against the right-hand wall, with a glass vase furred green and white, and a mug with something like clay at the bottom of it. Lamps with shades of brittle fabric, two on the table and one hanging from the ceiling like a huge half-opened flower. A dish of keys and two heavy plastic pebbles whose function she could not remember but whose smell brought Papa to mind with a painful intensity. Unbelievable amounts of paper, scattered across the table and the floor. Lily had only had her four pieces. Here were at least a hundred more, an embarrassment of riches, and Lily not around to see or make use of them. Glossy sheaves with colorful shapes and pictures of women and men, not men like the ones in the icehouse, but men who smiled and looked healthy. The pages were covered in printed text, like the book, whose meaning she understood only superficially, and in some places not at all.

Evelyn put down the sickle and held the edge of the table to steady herself. She pushed the corner of it into her palm until it left a blueish dent in the skin. She watched the blood rush back, amazed. She was only a few feet from the kitchen door, and already she felt, with a kind of elated terror, that it was the garden that had been a dream, the longest dream, and only here in the house was she truly seeing and feeling things for the first time—the pattern of the wallpaper, the hardness of the table, the coldness of the draft.

She opened the door to her left. She knew exactly what was inside. Or did she? The thought had occurred to her that she was not remembering these things at all but was mapping this house onto the house from the book. But no, here was the playroom and Evelyn knew every inch of it. Horses on the curtains and sagging boxes of board games on the windowsill, against the backdrop of Mama’s plywood boards. On the floor, a doll wearing a dress like their mother’s ball gown, and something half built in plastic bricks. Reds and blues and yellows. Colors bright and sad.

The ruin of Lily’s piano hunched in the corner. Evelyn struck a key, but it made no sound and something scuttled fearfully out from under the strings. She struck another. This one produced a short, dusty note, but even that was enough to conjure her sister, legs dangling from the stool that had seemed monumental to Evelyn from where she was playing on the floor. There was paper here, too. Lily’s drawings, people and monsters, jagged and gruesome and funny-looking. Her ballet shoes, hardly bigger than the doll’s.

Evelyn lowered herself to the floor and handled each object with great care. She sorted the scattered bricks carefully into piles according to shape and color. The gesture felt very familiar. It was like planting the beds. Or perhaps it had been the other way round, and all her neat rows and circles of flowers were the reenactment.

She looked at the collection of her own toys. How old had she been when that first storm hit? she wondered. Twelve or thirteen years old? The same age as the boy, perhaps. She didn’t know. She didn’t know how old she was now. Perhaps Lily could have told her. Perhaps it was all in her tally.

Evelyn heard a heavy thump overhead, and her heart felt like it was caught on a fishhook. The room bled and swam, and for a moment she thought she might be dying. Another thump, and rapid footsteps. She waited until the house was quiet again. It was a long time before her nerves settled and her sight cleared.

She still had to deal with the boy. There was much to see and to think about in the house, but she mustn’t let it distract her. She wondered what he was doing. She didn’t know whether he was looking for her or running away from her. Perhaps it didn’t matter. The house was a labyrinth, and she imagined her and the boy scurrying in blind circles, both of them expiring of hunger or thirst without ever seeing each other again.

She got up and went back to the hallway and took the sickle in her hand. It felt heavier than before.

At the end of the hall was a staircase. It was enormous and ascended in two right angles to the floor above. Each stair sagged in the middle like wet linen strung across the stairwell, and most of the banisters had collapsed. There was dust here, too, but a different kind, the dust of long, uncounted years.

“Here, boy,” she called aloud. “Here, beast of burden.”

Evelyn thought she heard whispering on the floor above, but she wasn’t sure if it was the wind or the boy or some other animal.

She tightened her knuckles on the sickle and went up the stairs. She stepped on the edge of the staircase, as she’d done when she was a child, so the wood wouldn’t creak and wake her parents. It was necessary now, too, since the center of each stair was so riddled with woodworm it had the appearance of honeycomb.

Halfway up she started coughing and had to rest for a moment, cursing her feebleness. What were the chances of her catching the boy by surprise if she wheezed like this everywhere she went? Maybe, she thought, she should just let the boy find her. She was so tired.

Don’t be a brat , she heard Mama say. We’re all tired.

On the upper landing there was a confusion of footprints in the dust. The boy’s. Evelyn stopped and listened again, but the creaking and whispering had stopped. He had come this way many times, and not only recently. Some of the older prints were already fading, and they were crisscrossed with the tracks of birds and squirrels.

Evelyn shone the lamp around. More doors, more rooms, more things. Another table of vases and two picture frames, both face down. She turned them over. She thought they were paintings at first, better than anything Lily had ever done, inconceivably detailed and lifelike. The first was a photograph of just her and Lily. They were outside, in the garden, sitting on the steps of the gazebo. A garden party. One of her father’s. Evelyn was sitting up very straight in a floral-patterned dress, looking earnestly at the camera. Lily was beside her, clasping her wrist and burying her face into her sister’s blond curls. Evelyn thought she remembered the photo being taken, or perhaps it was the photo that created the memory. Perhaps that was what the house was doing. And in fact, what did it matter, if her memories were true or not?

The next photo had been taken indoors. Her and Lily and Mama and a man who she knew straightaway was Papa. The background was plain, slightly blue, she thought, though she couldn’t see properly in the lamplight. The family had been arranged against a screen. The photo could have been taken anywhere. Mama was holding her and her sister, and Papa was standing behind Mama with his hands on her shoulders. None of them looked very happy—Papa in particular. He looked at lot like Lily, with a rounder nose than their mother, a rounder face, a face that Evelyn would have called kind had her mother not informed her that their father was anything but.

And where was Papa now? Dead, too, she assumed. He’d abandoned them at some point, between the digging out of the garden and the boarding up of the house, and after that Mama had forbidden them to speak of him. Forgetting Papa, forgetting the house, forgetting the world from before—it was all the same thing. It was selfish people like Papa who had ruined everything in the first place, long, long before the first storm had hit. Everything poisoned at the source.

Evelyn kept looking at her father’s face, and it was suddenly very clear why the idea of another garden was so terrifying to her. It was not just the thought that there were other people out there; it was also that Papa might somehow be with them, that he had survived and found sanctuary and was perhaps searching for his daughters.

Was that so hard to believe? What if he was the one who had sent the boy in the first place? What if he was the boy’s friend, on the other end of the telephone? She tried again to count up the years, to calculate if Papa might be alive or dead. She did not even know how long a man was supposed to live.

A sound behind her. She thought it was the boy, turned too quickly, swung the sickle and wrenched her poor, aching back. She staggered in a strange pirouette toward one of the doors on the landing and came to rest holding the door handle. She leaned on it, but the door was already open and she fell into the room beyond. The windows in here were all shuttered and she’d left the lamp on the landing, so she saw nothing of its contents. She crawled slow as stone through the pitch black until she found the edge of something that might have been a chair and then climbed into it, her old joints throbbing.

She sat opposite the door, but nothing came through it. The house was silent save for a trickle of dust from the rafters. Evelyn felt as if the floor was at a slight angle, a ship pitching under the new, unfamiliar weight of a woman and a boy. She waited and waited, wanting him to enter, hoping he would not.

Papa’s melancholy face returned to her in the darkness, and she tried with all her might to forget it.