Page 7

6

Evelyn dreamed of the egg in the small hours of the morning. She could hear the chick stirring in its shell from where she lay on the kitchen floor. A sticky sound like dry lips opening and closing. She got up and found the chick rolling about on the back step, oaring the air feebly with its tiny featherless wings. She fed it Lily’s unwanted crusts and gave it a saucer of milk, though somewhere in her waking mind she knew the pair of them had not had any milk since they were children. The chick quickly grew to be enormous, though it remained pink and veiny, its head too big for its body, its feathers sparse and matted. Its beak gaped, but Evelyn didn’t know what it was asking for. As it grew, it began to move quickly and erratically, and it became demanding, nipping violently at Evelyn’s feet and hands and chest, and she felt a sharp pain and then was awake without realizing, a hand at her heart, the light gray at the kitchen window.

She got up and retrieved the almanac and studied the map that spanned the first dozen pages. The line that marked the old wall of the estate was heavily penciled where they had buried previous omens and prodigies, so many crosses and lines it looked like a suture inexpertly stitched around the edges of the garden. There was a little space along the east side, she saw, a patch of undisturbed ground beyond the beehives and the lilac and the laburnum where they might lay the egg to rest.

She shook her sister gently.

“Are you coming?”

Lily muttered something inaudible and pulled the blanket over her head.

“I can do it by myself if you want.”

Her sister flung back the blanket, sighed, and stretched. She had slept in two of their mother’s summer dresses, one on top of the other, and a pair of misshapen leggings that sloughed at her knees and ankles.

“I’m coming,” she said.

“I think you should wear something more practical than that,” said Evelyn.

“Yes, yes,” said Lily.

“And the glasses.”

“If you insist.”

“I do.”

Evelyn kissed the crown of her sister’s head and went back to the dresser. In the smaller drawer next to the one where the almanac was kept there were three pairs of sunglasses. Evelyn took out a pair with tortoiseshell frames and another in luminous yellow plastic and put both in the pocket of her apron. Even if you weren’t planning on looking over the wall, it was a good idea to wear them, in case you accidentally saw something while you were working. The land outside was so dry and so bright it could blind you at a glance, Mama had said. It was not a claim either of them had ever wanted to put to the test.

Lily wriggled out of the two floral dresses and made a small pirouette, searching for something else to wear. Evelyn looked at her sister’s body. Lily was slighter than Evelyn and had lost whatever sinewy hardness she’d had when their mother had put them to work. Her hair was long enough to reach the small of her back, and she stood like some aged nymph in the pool of her clothes. A beautiful thing, for all her folds and wrinkles. Evelyn thought herself a twisted old root beside her sister, and always had. Her hair cut back to a few scant inches, as short as she could get it with the shears. “Tough as old boots,” their mama said. She had meant it as a compliment.

Lily stepped into some filthy dungarees and pulled them up over her shoulders.

“Ready?” Evelyn said.

“Ready.”

Evelyn opened the back door and found the egg lying unmolested under its tea towel. She handed it to Lily while she went to fetch the spade, and then the two of them set out together toward the eastern side of the garden. The morning was chilly and hushed. A low mist over everything, as if a levee had broken somewhere and the garden had been flooded up to their ankles.

When they got to the lilac bed the sun came up very suddenly, as if rising from behind the wall itself, rather than the distant and unseen horizon. It shone upon a litter of broken stones, seemed to single them out for illumination, bright and harsh.

The wall was broken. Where it had once stood at head height, there was now only a yawning space and beyond it the blank and dead vista of the world outside. Evelyn’s heart convulsed and she turned away quickly and fumbled in her pocket for the sunglasses. She held out Lily’s pair.

“Did you see it?”

“See what?”

“Outside.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I think I closed my eyes in time.”

Evelyn took a couple of breaths and then turned back slowly, her eyes fixed on the ground. She crouched and rubbed a hand over one of the fallen stones, and the ancient cement turned to dust on her fingertips. She felt the contours of the wall itself. There was an irregular V-shaped gap, and at its lowest point the wall was only about a foot high.

“How long has it been like this?” said Evelyn, and found her voice quieter than expected.

“I don’t know,” said Lily.

“What do you think happened?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. It’s a very old wall. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”

Evelyn looked at Lily. Unconcerned as ever. And wasn’t that Evelyn’s own doing? Keeping her sister in the dark as she had done; or rather, keeping her from the dark.

She sheltered where the wall was unbroken, her back to the stones, a hand to her sternum, as if to calm the wildness beneath. The wall had stood as long as the house. She’d never known any part of it to fall down, not since the storm.

Evelyn looked over at her sister and found her studying the loose stones.

“No need to get your knickers in a twist,” Lily said. “These aren’t so big. I’m sure it won’t be difficult to put them all back. Two big strong girls like us.”

Evelyn took another few breaths. “What if it’s too late, though?”

“Too late for what? We’ve only just woken up.”

“No, I mean what if something got in?”

Lily looked at her, eyes hidden behind the sunglasses. They were slightly too small for her face, and the arms bent outward to accommodate her skull. It was hard to read her expression.

“Got in?”

“Yes.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something from outside.”

A pause. “There isn’t anything outside, Evie.”

“The beehive, though.”

“I thought we decided you’d moved the beehive.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Well then.”

“And the window.”

“The window?” Lily frowned.

“When you were playing hide-and-seek,” Evelyn reminded her. She thought again of the apparitions she’d seen in the bushes as she’d stared out the kitchen window.

“Come here,” said Lily. She held Evelyn’s hand. “What’s got into you, Evelyn? Silly thing. How long have you spent trying to tell me there’s nothing out there, and now you sound just like Mama! Monsters over the wall, monsters under the bed. Good thing I’m a big, brave girl these days or I might start to believe you.”

She laughed.

Evelyn sat down, her body clutched like the husk of a spider. She did not care for the slight against their mother, nor for the suggestion that she was the one behaving like a child. Lily was only so blithely confident in their safety and their solitude because Evelyn had let her be so. The knowledge was just another burden she bore alone, as the elder sister. A memory so distant as to barely exist, but Evelyn had seen and smelled and tasted—yes, had she not tasted it?—what lurked beyond the boundaries of the garden, and she knew that their mama’s monsters were quite real.

“You’re right, we should try and put the stones back,” she said.

“After lunch.”

“Now.”

“Heaven’s sake, Sissie.”

“I think we should be sensible about this.”

Lily looked at her a moment and then levered herself to her feet. “Chop-chop, then,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll be overrun!”

Evelyn did not laugh at the joke.

The sun passed overhead and they worked through most of the day to put the wall back together, eyes always turned away from the outside world. Despite Lily’s optimism, the stones were too heavy for them to lift by themselves. They strained on each one together, groaning and abandoning them when their muscles protested—Evelyn’s back, Lily’s fingers. They fitted them into place as best they could, though they couldn’t work out the original order exactly. Even with their skin toughened from gardening, their hands bled.

The shadows in the garden were long by the time they finished. Lily massaged her forearms and admired their work. She wiped the sweat from her brow and looked very tired but was too proud to admit it. Evelyn stared at her raw fingers and began to worry anew. The whole day gone and she hadn’t even started the tasks she was meant to be doing, or those that were left over from the previous day.

When she looked up she saw Lily had gone to the wall and was poking a long finger into the holes where the stones were not quite flush. Then she watched in disbelief as her little sister bent her knees slightly and put her face to a chink and spied through it.

“Lily! What are you doing?”

“I’m wearing the glasses, aren’t I?”

“You still shouldn’t look.”

“It’s awfully empty out there. If I were a monster, I’d want to be in here, too.”

Lily did not turn around, but Evelyn saw the twitch in her jaw and knew that she was smiling.

“Have a look, Evie. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Just quickly.”

Evelyn pulled her away. “Stop it!” she said. “And stop making jokes about things outside.”

They stared at each other. Lily shrugged and one of the straps of her dungarees slipped from her shoulder.

Evelyn held out a hand. “Come on,” she said.

“What?” said Lily.

“The bird,” said Evelyn.

They dug a hole, and Evelyn unrolled the egg from its funeral shroud and planted it upright, as if it might sprout whenever spring reached that corner of the garden. Lily said a prayer, its words practically meaningless these days, before they piled the soil on top and patted it down. Evelyn stayed on all fours long after the service had finished, warm palms to the cooling earth, thinking, always thinking.