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After burying the egg, they made a tour of the whole garden wall. At intervals they had to step over small mounds of soil, some of them topped with stones, that marked the other items they had buried along the perimeter; a second wall within the first that was not visible. Countless skeins of their hair, feathers, freakish fruit and vegetables, pieces of jewelry and colored glass, a small plastic man in a helmet that they’d found in the grass long after the house and playroom had been boarded up. A specific kind of magic whose origins even Evelyn could not remember.

When they were satisfied that both walls, real and imagined, were intact and that the garden was safe, they returned to the kitchen. Evelyn stood on the back step and removed her sunglasses. The sky overhead was the color of a ripe peach.

“I’m sorry, Lily,” she said.

Lily looked surprised. “What for?”

“I don’t know why I’m worrying so much,” said Evelyn, though she knew well enough that walls did not fall down by themselves.

“I don’t know either, Sissie,” said Lily. “I don’t know what’s come over you.”

“You wanted to practice your routine and now it’s nearly suppertime.”

“We’ve got an hour or so, I think.”

“We’re meant to be wassailing.”

“Can’t we give it a miss?”

“No, Lily. Please. I’d feel much better if we did things properly. What’s the point of wassailing after we’ve picked the apples?”

Lily looked dejected but did her best to hide it. They were silent for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” said Evelyn again.

Lily raised her eyebrows and wagged a finger at her. “Come on, Evie,” she said. “Since when did we start using that word?”

Evelyn nodded. Lily was right to upbraid her, as strange as it felt. Neither of them had apologized about anything for many years. Attendant on apologies were fault and guilt and shame, and they had both made an unspoken agreement, a long time ago, that those things were their mother’s and did not belong in the garden, not anymore.

“Come on, then,” she said. “Let’s give those trees a good talking-to.”

Lily stuck a few spoons and spatulas in one pocket of her dungarees and a slice of bread in the other, then gathered up their two saucepans in her arms. Evelyn went to the store cupboard and took out two bottles of cider.

They made their way over the lawn and began their clamoring even before they had reached the edge of the orchard. They banged a saucepan each, Evelyn with a wooden spoon and Lily with a ladle, hollering and hooting as they passed beneath the branches. Evelyn found herself making more noise than usual. There was something frantic in her chanting, as if for the first time she really believed there might be some evil spirit that needed expelling.

After several rounds they met again at the largest of the apple trees. The same one Evelyn herself had planted, unless her memory failed her. Lily looked on despondently as Evelyn poured one of the bottles of cider around the roots, and then half of the other bottle into a saucepan.

“What a waste.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Why not?”

“They’ll hear you and they’ll turn the apples sour and rotten and there’ll be no pie for anyone.” Evelyn clicked her fingers. “Bread, please. You go and get the ladder.”

Lily handed her a slice of bread, and Evelyn soaked it in the saucepan of cider while her sister went back to the shed. She was gone a long time. The shade in the orchard deepened, and Evelyn did not care to look up from the roots into the twilight that shifted among the trunks. She had never been a particularly imaginative child—certainly not as imaginative as Lily—but now, after all that had happened, her visions were rich and darkly colorful. A bird crashed and twittered among the leaves and the sound of it left her breathless.

When Lily returned, she was staggering slightly under the ladder’s weight. Evelyn was relieved but did not say so. She took the ladder from her sister and stood it unsteadily between the thickest branches. Lily shook it slightly. She made a funny face at Evelyn, to disguise a genuine worry, Evelyn suspected. Too old to be climbing trees, both of them, and the ladder itself as rickety as they were.

Lily took the soaked bread and went up. The rungs creaked under her weight. Evelyn planted her feet and grasped the ladder’s splintered sides, strained to keep it upright. At the top Lily reached up and placed the bread in the crook of two branches, then began to look for another she could sit and sing from.

Evelyn stiffened suddenly. As if her body had heard something before her ears had. She listened above and beyond her sister’s protestations. Something lumbering among the trees. Bigger than a bird this time. She heard it twice and then heard nothing.

“Pay attention, Sissie,” said Lily.

She heard it again. Evelyn glanced behind her and found herself looking at an absence. A dull imprint in the darkness, the echo of something that had recently slipped out of sight. She couldn’t say if it was an animal or something else, if it had gone on four legs or two, if it had legs at all. She stared down the tunnel of hydrangeas toward the lawn, wanting and not wanting to see the thing again. Her eyes throbbed in time with her heart.

“What is that?” she said.

“What is what?” said Lily.

Evelyn let go of the ladder completely and turned around.

“Hold the bloody ladder!” cried Lily, but the thing was already wobbling, and by the time Evelyn had got her hands on it again it had tipped completely to one side and Lily was left hanging over the branch like a wet towel.

It was a moment or two before Evelyn turned from the darkness and went to help. She maneuvered herself beneath her sister and grasped at her calves, the skin papery and softly ridged with veins.

“I’ve got you, Lily,” Evelyn said, though she knew she could hardly support Lily’s weight if she fell. She could hardly support herself.

Lily gasped but said nothing.

“Can you get your legs a little lower?”

“I’m trying.”

“Let yourself down gently.”

“I said I’m trying .”

Lily slithered backward until Evelyn was able to grasp her around her thighs; then she let go completely, and Evelyn yelped as the two of them fell entangled into the long grass. They lay there panting. Evelyn did not want to move, for fear she had broken an arm or a hip. For fear of what might be waiting in among the trees and the bushes, waiting to fasten upon her like carrion. Lily sat up first.

“What on earth happened?” she said. “Why did you let go?”

Evelyn rolled onto her front and then got to her knees but no further. “I’m sorry.”

“Sissie! That word again. What was it?”

“I thought I saw something.”

Lily sighed. Evelyn squinted at her and found a pitying expression on her face.

“What?” Evelyn asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me, Lily. That face.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. What are you thinking.”

Evelyn waited.

“Well,” said Lily after a moment, “you’re not the first person to start seeing things that aren’t there, are you?”

“Oh, please!”

Lily looked at Evelyn very seriously and then clutched her shoulders.

“I couldn’t bear it, Sissie. If you started to go that way.”

“I’m not going the way Mama went. Not yet, anyway.”

But what if she was? That explanation was worse than the vision being real.

They extricated themselves from each other’s limbs, and Evelyn bent her arms and fingers experimentally. She looked around the orchard and found it empty and still. They helped each other to their feet and groaned with the effort.

“Are you all right?” Evelyn asked her sister.

“I think so. You?”

“I’ll survive. Come on. After all this nonsense we may as well get what we came for.”

They left the ladder where it lay and went about picking the ripest apples and putting them in the front pocket of Evelyn’s apron. They made their way quickly and wordlessly back to the kitchen. Evelyn was still trembling. Her mind conjured nightmare forms from the gloaming, and she cast her eyes down as they walked. Even here she thought she saw patches of grass that were flattened and smeared, though she couldn’t say if it was their own footprints she was looking at, or if it was nothing at all.

—

At the edge of the lawn, the bright square of the kitchen door seemed to Evelyn like the refuge of a distant harbor. When they reached the kitchen table, the lamp set on top of it, Lily turned and gasped. Evelyn’s whole body flushed and she spun around.

“What?” she said.

“You, Evie!” said Lily. She pointed at the pocket of Evelyn’s apron, swollen with apples. “You’re with child! At your age! A sign from God!”

Lily laughed, and Evelyn did, too, though it was more because she was relieved than because she found it funny. Lily pretended to be a midwife while Evelyn heaved the fruit onto the work surface, clutching her arm, telling her to push and breathe. The performance made Evelyn feel odd. She did not know where her sister had learned this act, or if it meant anything to her at all. It meant little to Evelyn herself. Like all of Lily’s jokes, it had been hollowed out by repetition, but Evelyn heard in it the echo of something she half understood but was at pains not to understand any further.

They were not long making the apple pie. Evelyn chopped the apples she had recently birthed while Lily rolled the pastry and designed the lid: an apple with a worm poking out of one side. It was less intricate than it might once have been, but it still elevated the pie out of the ordinary. They put it in to bake, and while they waited they ate a supper of tomatoes and fat broad beans, and Lily gobbled up the leftover raw pastry. She tried to teach Evelyn the harmony to a tune she’d been whistling, but Evelyn couldn’t whistle, much less sing, and they had a good laugh at this, too.

By the time the pie emerged from the oven, the evening was as warm and convivial as any other and Evelyn was feeling a good deal better. Lily stuck a finger in the apple pulp that had oozed from under the lid, tasted it, proclaimed it a triumph. The kitchen smelled heavenly. Lily brought over a knife from the drawer and stood poised to cut into it. Evelyn swatted her hand.

“Lily, behave! We can’t eat it now. It’ll be far too hot.”

Lily pouted. “But it’s nearly bedtime.”

“Then we’ll have to eat it tomorrow.”

“After all that work? Go on, just a little bit.”

“You’ll burn yourself.”

“I’m willing to suffer for my art.”

Evelyn laughed again. She covered the whole pie tin with a clean dishcloth and put it on the sideboard.

“Patience is a virtue,” she said. “If it disappears overnight, we’ll know exactly who to blame.”