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FOR YEARS AFTER ISOBEL LEFT town (was sent from town, to live with an aunt in San Francisco) Lynnie would sometimes see her at a distance, crossing a street or turning a corner. But just as Lynnie started after her Isobel would vanish, having been replaced by a substitute, some long-legged stranger with pale, floaty hair. And while Lynnie might have been just as happy, by and large, not to see Isobel, at those moments she was felled by a terrible sorrow, as though somewhere a messenger searching for her had been waylaid, or was lost.

It was sixteen years after Lynnie had watched Isobel disappearing from view in the back seat of her father’s car when Lynnie really did see her again. And then, although Isobel walked right into Lynnie’s shop, several long, chaotic moments elapsed before Lynnie understood who Isobel was. “Isobel,” she said, and, as the well-dressed customer browsing meditatively among the shelves and cases of expensive food turned to look full at Lynnie, the face that Lynnie had known so well—a girl’s face that drew everything toward it and returned nothing—came forward in the woman’s.

“Oh,” Isobel said. “It’s you. But Mother wrote me you were living in Boston. Or did I make that up?”

“You didn’t make it up,” Lynnie said.

“Well, then,” Isobel said, and hesitated. “You’re back.”

“That about sums it up,” Lynnie said. She let her hand bounce lightly against the counter, twice. “I hear you’re still in San Francisco,” she said, relenting—they were adults now.

“Mmm,” Isobel said. “Yes.” She frowned.

Lynnie cleared her throat. “And someone told me you have a baby.”

“Oh, yes,” Isobel said. “Two. And a husband, of course. All that sort of thing.” She and Lynnie smiled at one another—an odd, formal equilibrium.

“And you,” Isobel said, disengaging. “What are you doing these days?”

“This—” Lynnie gestured. “Of course, I have help now.”

“Heavens,” Isobel remarked unheatedly.

“‘Heavens,’” Lynnie said. “I know.” But either more of a reaction from Isobel or less would have been just as infuriating. “Heavens” or “How nice” was all that anyone had said when Lynnie retreated from Boston and managed, through effort born of near-panic, to open the store. All her life Lynnie had been assumed to be inadequate to any but the simplest endeavor; then, from the moment the store opened, that was something no one remembered. No one but her, Lynnie thought; she remembered it perfectly.

“Isn’t it funny?” Isobel was saying. “I drove by yesterday, and I thought, How nice that there’s a place like that up here now. I’ll have to stop in and get something for Mother, to cheer her up.”

“I’m sorry about your father,” Lynnie said.

“Yes,” Isobel said. “God. I was just at the hospital. They say the operation was successful, but I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. It seemed they might mean successful in the sense that he didn’t die during it.” Her flat green glance found Lynnie, then moved away.

“Hard to think of him … in a hospital,” Lynnie said. “He always seemed so—” He’d seemed so big.

“Strong,” Isobel said. “Yes, he’s strong all right. He and I are still on the most horrible terms, if you can believe it. It’s simply idiotic. I suppose he has to keep it up to justify himself. All these years! You know, this is the first time I’ve been back, Lynnie—he came out for my wedding, and Mother’s made him come with her twice to see the boys, but I haven’t been back once. Not once. And there I was today—obviously I’d decided to get here before he died. But did he say anything—like he was glad I’d come? Of course not. Lynnie, he’s riddled with tumors, he can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, but he behaved as though he were still sitting in that huge chair of his, telling me what I’d done to him.”

Lynnie shook her head. How easily Isobel was talking about these things.

“So,” Isobel said.

“Well,” Lynnie said.

“Yes,” Isobel said.

“I’ll wrap up some things for your mother if you want,” Lynnie said. “I’ve got a new pate I think she’ll like. And her favorite crackers have come in.”

“Lovely,” Isobel said. “Thanks.” She pushed back a curving lock of hair and scanned the shelves as though waiting for some information to appear on them. “So Mother comes into your store.”

“Oh, yes,” Lynnie said.

“Funny,” Isobel said. Isobel looked like anyone else now, Lynnie understood with a little shock. Very pretty, but like anyone else. Only her hair, with its own marvelous life, was still extraordinary. “How’s your mother, by the way?” Isobel said.

“All right,” Lynnie said, and glanced at her. “So far.”

“That’s good,” Isobel said opaquely.

“And at least she’s not such a terror anymore,” Lynnie said. “She’s living up north with Frank now.”

“Frank …” Isobel said.

“Frank,” Lynnie said. She reached up to the roll of thick waxed paper and tore a piece off thunderously. “My brother. The little one.”

“Oh, yes,” Isobel said. “Of course. You know, this feels so peculiar—being here, seeing you. The whole place stopped for me, really, when I went away.”

“I’m sure,” Lynnie said, flushing. “Well, we still exist. Our lives keep going on. I have the store, and people come into it. Your mother comes in. Cissy Haddad comes in. Ross comes in, Claire comes in. All six of their children come in.”

“Six—” Isobel stared at Lynnie; her laugh was just a breath. “Well, I guess that means they stayed together, anyway.”

“Mostly,” Lynnie said. But Isobel only waited, and looked at her. “There was a while there, a few years ago, when he moved in with an ex-student of his. Claire got in the van with the four youngest—Emily and Bo were already at school—and took off. It didn’t last too long, of course, the thing with the girl, and of course Claire came back. After that they sold the stone house. To a broker, I heard.”

“Oh,” Isobel said. Absently she picked up an apple from a mound on the counter and looked into its glossy surface as though it were a mirror.

“They’re renovating a farmhouse now,” Lynnie said. “It’s much smaller.”

“Too bad,” Isobel said, putting down the apple.

“Yes.”

“Was she pretty?” Isobel asked.

“Who?” Lynnie said. “Ross’s girl? Not especially.”

“Ah,” Isobel said, and Lynnie looked away, ashamed of herself.

Isobel started to speak but didn’t. She scanned the shelves again vaguely, then smiled over at Lynnie. “You know what else is funny?” she said. “When I woke up this morning, I looked across the street. And I saw this woman going out the door of your old house, and just for an instant I thought, There’s Lynnie. And then I thought, No, it can’t be—that person’s all grown up.”

*  *  *  *  *

For a long time after Isobel had left town, Lynnie would do what she could to avoid running into Ross or Claire; and eventually when she saw them it would seem to her not only that her feeling about them had undergone an alteration but that they themselves were different in some way. Over the years it became all too clear that this was true: their shine had been tarnished by a slight fussiness—they had come to seem like people who were anxious about being rained on.

Newcomers might have been astonished to learn that there was a time when people had paused in their dealings with one another to look as Ross walked down the street with Claire or the children. Recent arrivals to the town—additions to the faculty of the college, the businessmen and bankers who were now able to live in country homes and still work in their city offices from computer terminals—what was it they saw when Ross and Claire passed by? Fossil forms, Lynnie thought. Museum reproductions. It was the Claire and Ross of years ago who were vivid, living. A residual radiance clung to objects they’d handled and places where they’d spent time. The current Ross and Claire were lightless, their own aftermath.

Once in a while, though—it happened sometimes when she encountered one of them unexpectedly—Lynnie would see them as they had been. For an instant their sleeping power would flash, but then their dimmed present selves might greet Lynnie, with casual and distant politeness, and a breathtaking pain would cauterize the exquisitely reworked wound.

*  *  *  *  *

It is summer when Lynnie and Isobel first come upon Ross and Claire. Lynnie and Isobel live across the street from one another, but Isobel is older and has better things to do with her time than see Lynnie. And because Lynnie’s mother works at the plant for unpredictable stretches, on unpredictable shifts, Lynnie frequently must look after her younger brothers. Still, when Lynnie is free, she is often able to persuade Isobel to do something, particularly in the summers, when Isobel is bored brainless.

They take bicycle expeditions then, during those long summers, often along the old highway. The highway is silent, lined with birchwoods, and has several alluring and mysterious features—among them a dark, green wooden restaurant with screened windows, and a motel, slightly shabby, where there are always, puzzlingly, several cars parked. Leading from the highway is a wealth of dirt roads, on one of which Lynnie and Isobel find a wonderful house.

The house is stone, and stands empty on a hill. Clouds float by it, making great black shadows swing over the sloping meadows below with their cows and barns and wildflowers. Inside, in the spreading coolness, the light flows as variously clear and shaded as water. Trees seem to crowd in the dim recesses. The house is just there, enclosing part of the world: the huge fireplace could be the site of gatherings that take place once every hundred, or once every thousand, years. The girls walk carefully when they visit, fearful of churning up the delicate maze of silence.

For several summers, the house has been theirs, but one day, the summer that Lynnie is twelve and Isobel is just turning fourteen, there is a van parked in front. Lynnie and Isobel wheel their bicycles stealthily into the woods across the road and walk as close as they dare, crouching down opposite the house, well hidden, to watch.

Three men and a woman carry bundles and cartons into the house. Bundles and cartons and large pieces of furniture sit outside, where two small children tumble around among them, their wisps of voices floating high into the birdcalls and branches above Lynnie and Isobel. The woman is slight, like a child herself, with a shiny braid of black hair down her back, and there is no question about which of the men she, the furniture, and the children belong to.

Lynnie squints, and seems to draw closer, hovering just too far off to see his face. Then, for just a fraction of a second, she penetrates the distance.

The sun moves behind Lynnie and Isobel, and the man to whom everything belongs waves the others inside, hoisting up the smaller child as he follows. Just as Lynnie and Isobel reach cautiously for their bicycles, the man looks out again, shading his eyes. They freeze, and for a moment he stands there peering out toward them.

Neither Lynnie nor Isobel suggests going on—to town, or to the gorge, or anywhere. They ride back the way they’ve come, and, without discussion, go upstairs to Isobel’s room.

Isobel lies down across her flounced bed while Lynnie wanders around absently examining Isobel’s things, which she knows so well: Isobel’s books, her stuffed animals, her china figurines.

“Do you think we’re the first people to see them?” Lynnie says.

“The first people ever?” Isobel says, flopping over onto her side.

Lynnie stares out Isobel’s window at her own house. She doesn’t know what to do when Isobel’s in a bad mood. She should just leave, she thinks.

From here, her house looks as though it were about to slide to the ground. A large aluminum cannister clings to its side like a devouring space monster. “Do you want to go back out and do something?” she asks.

“What would we do?” Isobel says, into her pillow. “There’s nothing to do. There’s not one single thing to do here. And now would you mind sitting down, please, Lynnie? Because you happen to be driving me insane.”

As she leaves Isobel’s, Lynnie pauses before crossing the street to watch her brothers playing in front of the house. They look weak and bony, but the two older boys fight savagely. A plastic gun lies near them on the ground. Frank, as usual, is playing by himself, but he is just as banged up as they are. His skin is patchy and chapped—summer and winter he breathes through his mouth, and even this temperate sun is strong enough to singe the life out of his fine, almost white hair. She looks just like him, Lynnie thinks. Except chunky. “Chunky” is the word people use.

Inside, Lynnie’s mother is stationed in front of the TV. At any hour Lynnie’s mother might be found staring at the television, and beyond it, through the front window, as though something of importance were due to happen out on the street. The television is almost always on, and when men friends come to visit, Lynnie’s mother turns up the volume, so that other noises bleed alarmingly through the insistent rectangle of synthetic sound.

Lynnie brings a paper napkin from the kitchen and inserts it between her mother’s glass of beer and the table. “May I inquire … ?” her mother says.

“Isobel’s mother says you should never leave a glass on the furniture,” Lynnie says. “It makes a ring.”

Lynnie’s mother looks at her, then lifts the glass and crumples the napkin. “Thank you,” she says, turning back to her program. “I’ll remember that.” A thin wave of laughter comes from the TV screen, and little shapes jump and throb there, but Lynnie is thinking about the people from the stone house.

Lynnie’s mother can be annoyed when she knows that Lynnie has been playing with Isobel; Isobel’s father works for the same company Lynnie’s mother works for, but not in the plant. He works in the office, behind a big desk. Whenever Lynnie is downstairs in Isobel’s house and Isobel’s father walks in, Lynnie scuttles as though she might be trodden underfoot. In fact, Isobel’s father hardly notices her; perhaps he doesn’t even know from one of her visits to the next that she is the same little girl. But he booms down at Isobel, scrutinizing her from his great height, and sometimes even lifts her way up over his head.

Isobel’s mother is tall and smells good and dresses in neat wool. Sometimes when she sees Lynnie hesitating at the foot of the drive she opens the door, with a bright, special smile. “Lynnie, dear,” she says, “would you like to come in and see Isobel? Or have a snack?” But sometimes, when Lynnie and Isobel are playing, Isobel’s mother calls Isobel away for a whispered conference, from which Isobel returns to say that Lynnie has to go now, for this reason or that.

When Lynnie looks out the window of the room she shares with Frank, she can see Isobel’s large, arched window, and if the light is just right she can see Isobel’s bed, too, with its white flounces, and a heavenly blue haze into which, at this distance, the flowers of Isobel’s wallpaper melt.

*  *  *  *  *

One day, doing errands for her mother in town, Lynnie sees the woman from the stone house coming out of the bakery with the children, each of whom carefully holds a large, icing-covered cookie. The woman bends down and picks up one of the children, smiling—unaware, Lynnie observes, that people are noticing her.

Lynnie sees the woman several times, and then one day she sees the man.

She has anticipated his face exactly. But when he smiles at her, the little frown line between his eyes stays. And the marvelousness of this surprise causes a sensation across the entire surface of her skin, like the rippling of leaves that demonstrates a subtle shift of air.

When Lynnie sees Isobel she can’t help talking about the people from the stone house. She describes variations in their clothing or demeanor, compiling a detailed body of knowledge while Isobel lies on her bed, her eyes closed. “Should we give them names?” Lynnie says one afternoon.

“No,” Isobel says.
But Lynnie can’t stop. “Why not?” she says, after a moment.

“‘Why not?’” Isobel says.

“Don’t, Isobel,” Lynnie pleads.

“‘Don’t, Isobel,’” Isobel says, making her hands into a tube to speak through. Her voice is hollow and terrifying.

Lynnie breathes heavily through her mouth. “Why not?” she says.

“Why not,” Isobel says, sitting up and sighing, “is because they already have names.”

“I know,” Lynnie says, mystified.

“Their names,” Isobel says, “are Ross and Claire.”

Lynnie stares at her.

“They had dinner at Cissy Haddad’s house one night,” Isobel says. “Ross is going to be teaching medieval literature at the college. He’s in Cissy’s father’s department.”

“‘Department’?” Lynnie says.

“Yes,” Isobel says.

Lynnie frowns. “How do you know?” she asks. How long has Isobel known?

Isobel shrugs. “I’m just telling you what Cissy said.” She looks at Lynnie. “I think Cissy has a crush on him.”

“What else did Cissy say?” Lynnie asks unhappily.

“Nothing,” Isobel says. “Oh. Except that he’s thirty-five and Claire’s only twenty-three. She used to be one of his students.”

“One of his students?” Lynnie says.

“‘One of his—’” Isobel begins, and then flops down on the bed again. “Oh, Lynnie.”

*  *  *  *  *

One day Lynnie sees Cissy Haddad in the drugstore. Lynnie hurries to select the items on her mother’s list, then waits until Cissy goes to the counter. “Hi,” she says, getting into line behind Cissy. She feels herself turning red.

“Oh, hi, Lynnie,” Cissy says, and smiles wonderfully. “Are you having a fun summer?”

“Yes,” Lynnie says.

“What’re you doing?” Cissy says.

“Just mostly looking after my brothers,” Lynnie says. She feels bewildered by Cissy’s dazzling smile, her pretty sundress. “And riding around and things with Isobel.”

“That’s good,” Cissy says. And then, instead of saying something useful about Isobel, which might lead to Ross and Claire, she asks, “Are you coming to high school this year? I can’t remember.”

“No,” Lynnie says. “Isobel is.”

Cissy peers into Lynnie’s basket of embarrassing purchases.

“What are you getting?” she asks.

“Things for my mother,” Lynnie says, squirming. “What about you?”

“Oh,” Cissy says. “Just lipstick.”

*  *  *  *  *

One fall day when Lynnie gets home from school, her mother summons her over the noise from the TV. “You got a phone call,” she says shortly. “The lady wants you to call her back.” And Lynnie knows, while her mother is still speaking, whom the call was from.

Lynnie dials, and the soft, dark shadow of Claire’s voice answers. She is looking for someone to help with the children on a regular basis, she explains, several afternoons a week. She got Lynnie’s name from Tom Haddad’s daughter. She knows that Lynnie is very young, but this is nothing difficult—just playing with the children upstairs or outside so that she can have a couple of hours to paint. “I thought I would be able to do so much here,” she says, as though Lynnie were an old friend, someone her own age, “but there’s never enough time, is there?”

“I’ll need you just as much with the boys,” Lynnie’s mother says later. “And you’d better remember your homework.”

“I will,” Lynnie says, though, actually, beyond a certain point, it scarcely matters; however hard she tries, she lags far behind in school, and her teachers no longer try to stifle their exclamations of impatience. “I’ll do my homework.” And her mother makes no further objections; Lynnie will be earning money.

*  *  *  *  *

Claire leads Lynnie around in the house that used to be Lynnie and Isobel’s. Now it is all filled up with the lives of these people.

Everywhere there is a regal disorder of books, and in the biggest room downstairs, with its immense fireplace, there are sofas and, at one end, a vast table. A thicket of canvases and brushes has sprung up in a corner, and Lynnie sees pictures of the table on whose surface objects are tensely balanced, and sketch after sketch of Ross and the children. “What do you think?” Claire says, and it is a moment before Lynnie realizes what Claire is asking her.

“I like them,” Lynnie says. But in fact they frighten her —the figures seem caught, glowing in a webby dimness.

In the kitchen huge pots and pans flash, and a great loaf of brown bread lies out on a counter. Claire opens the door to Ross’s study; stacks and stacks of paper, more books than Lynnie has ever seen breed from its light-shot core.

Upstairs Bo and Emily are engrossed in a sprawling project of blocks. Emily explains the dreamlike construction to Lynnie, gracefully accepting Bo’s effortful elaborations, and when Lynnie leaves both children reach up to her with their tanned little arms.

*  *  *  *  *

Twice a week Lynnie goes to the stone house. Bo and Emily have big, bright, smooth wooden toys, some of which were made by Ross. Lynnie strokes the toys; she runs her hand over them like a blind person; she runs her hand over the pictures in Bo and Emily’s beautiful storybooks. But then Claire counts out Lynnie’s money, and Lynnie is to go. And at the first sight of her own house she is slightly sickened, as upon disembarkation—not by the firm ground underfoot but by a ghostly rocking of water.

When Claire finishes painting for the afternoon, she calls Lynnie and Bo and Emily into the kitchen. For a while, although Bo and Emily chatter and nuzzle against her, Claire seems hardly to know where she is. But gradually she returns, and makes for herself and Lynnie a dense, sweet coffee in a little copper pot, which must be brought to the boil three times. They drink it from tiny identical cups, and Lynnie marvels, looking at Claire, that she herself is there.

Some afternoons Ross is around. He announces that he will be in his study, working, but sooner or later he always appears in the kitchen, and talks about things he is reading for his book.

“What do you think, Lynnie?” he asks once. He has just proposed an idea for a new chapter, to which Claire’s response was merely “Possible.”

Lynnie can feel herself blush. “I don’t know,” she says.

Amusement begins to spread from behind his eyes. “Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, wary.

“Why?” he says.

“Because you just said it was,” Lynnie says, turning a deeper red.

He laughs happily and gives Lynnie a little hug. “You see?” he says to Claire.

*  *  *  *  *

When the snow lies in great drifts around the stone house, students begin to come, too, and sit around the kitchen. They drink beer, and the girls exclaim over Bo and Emily while the boys shyly answer Claire’s gentle questions and Lynnie holds her coffee cup tightly in misery. Now and again, as he talks to them, Ross touches the students lightly on the wrist or shoulder.

Late one Saturday afternoon, Lynnie is washing dishes in her own house when her mother walks in with several large grocery bags. “I was just in town,” she announces unnecessarily, and grins an odd, questioning grin at Lynnie. “Now, who do you think I saw there?”

“I don’t know who you saw,” Lynnie says, reaching for a dishcloth.

“The man you work for,” her mother says.

“How do you know who he is?” Lynnie says.

“Everybody knows who he is,” her mother says. “He was in the stationery store. I just went in to get some tape, but I stuck around to watch. Muriel Furman was waiting on him. She almost went into a trance. That poor thing.” Lynnie’s mother shakes her head and begins to unload groceries. “Homeliest white woman I ever saw.”

“Mother,” Lynnie says. She stares unhappily out the little window over the sink.

“I’ve seen the wife around a few times, too,” Lynnie’s mother says. “She’s a pretty girl, but I wish her luck with him.”

*  *  *  *  *

Lynnie has not been to Isobel’s house once this year. Isobel comes and goes with Cissy Haddad and other high-school friends. From across the street Lynnie can sometimes see their shapes behind the film of Isobel’s window. At night, when Isobel’s light is on and her window is transparent, Lynnie watches Isobel moving back and forth until the curtain closes.

One afternoon as Lynnie is arriving home, she almost walks into Isobel. “Wake up, Lynnie,” Isobel says. And then, “Want to come over?”

“Lynnie, dear,” Isobel’s mother says as Lynnie and Isobel go upstairs. “How nice to see you.”

It has been so long since Lynnie has been in Isobel’s room that Isobel’s things—the flouncy bed and the china figurines and the stuffed animals she used to see so often—have a new, melancholy luster. “How’s high school?” she asks.

“It’s hard,” Isobel says. “You won’t believe it.”

But Lynnie will. She does. Almost every day she remembers that that is where she is going next fall—to the immense, tentacled building that looks like a factory. She has reason to suspect that she will be divided from most of her classmates there, and put into the classes for people who won’t be going on to college—the stupid people—with all the meanest teachers. No one has threatened her with this, but everybody knows how it works. Everybody knows what goes on in that building.

Lynnie picks up a stuffed turtle and strokes its furry shell.

“How’s school?” Isobel asks. “How’s old Miss Fisher?”

“She doesn’t like me,” Lynnie says. “Miss Fish Face.”

“Oh, well,” Isobel says. “So what? Soon you’ll never have to see her again.” She looks at Lynnie and smiles. “What else have you been up to?”

Lynnie feels slightly weak because of what she is about to tell Isobel. She has been saving it up, she realizes, a long time. “Well,” she says slowly, “I’ve been babysitting for the kids at the stone house.”

“Have you?” Isobel says, but as she says it Lynnie understands that Isobel already knew, and although Isobel is waiting, Lynnie cannot speak.

“You know what—” Isobel says after a moment. “Lynnie, what are you doing to that poor turtle? But do you know what Cissy’s father said about that man, Ross? Cissy’s father said he’s an arrogant son of a bitch.” She looks at Lynnie, hugging her pillow expectantly. “I heard him.”

*  *  *  *  *

Lynnie and Claire and three students watch as Ross describes various arguments concerning a matter that has come up in class. The students look at him with hazy, hopeful smiles. But not Lynnie—she is ashamed to have heard what Isobel said to her.

Ross glances down at her unhappy face. “Apparently Lynnie disagrees,” he says, stroking a strand of her pale, flossy hair behind her ear. “Apparently Lynnie feels that Heineman fails to account for the Church’s influence over the emerging class of tradesmen.”

The students laugh, understanding his various points, and Ross smiles at Lynnie. But Lynnie is ashamed again—doubly ashamed—and leans for comfort into the treacherous hand that still strokes her hair.

Lynnie has two Rosses who blend together and diverge unpredictably. Many mornings begin drowsily encircled in the fleecy protection of one, but sometimes, as Lynnie continues to wake, the one is assumed into the other. He strokes Lynnie’s hair, inflicting injury and healing it in this one motion, and she opens her eyes to see her own room, and Frank curled up in the other bed, breathing laboriously, susceptible himself to the devious assaults of dreams.

*  *  *  *  *

In the fall, Lynnie is put, as she had feared, into the classes for the slowest students. Had anyone entertained hopes for her, this would have been the end of them.

A few of her old schoolmates are confined to her classes, but most have sailed into classes from which they will sail out again into college, then marriage and careers. She sees them only in the halls and the lunchroom and on the athletic fields. Every day they look taller, more powerful, more like strangers.

Most of those in her classes really are strangers. But in some ways they are as familiar as cousins met for the first time. Their clothes, for instance, are not right, and they are the worst students from all the elementary schools in the area. The boys are rough or sly or helpless, or all three, like her brothers, and the girls are ungainly and bland-looking. They stand in clumps in the halls, watching girls like Isobel and Cissy Haddad with a beleaguered envy, and trading accounts of the shocking things such girls have been known to do.

Oddly, Isobel is friendlier to Lynnie at school, in full view of everyone, than she is out of school, despite Lynnie’s stigma. “Hi, Lynnie,” she calls out with a dewy showpiece of a smile, not too different from her mother’s.

“Hi,” Lynnie answers, facing a squadron of Isobel’s friends.

*  *  *  *  *

One afternoon as Lynnie approaches her house a silence reaches for her like a suction. Her brothers are not outside, and the television is not on. No one is in the kitchen or upstairs. She sits without moving while the winter sky goes dark. Across the street Isobel turns on the light in her room and sits down at her little desk. After a while she leaves, turning off the light, but Lynnie continues to stare at the blank window. By the time Lynnie hears her mother’s car, her arms and legs feel stiff. She waits for a moment before going downstairs to be told what has happened.

Frank is in the hospital with a ruptured appendix, her mother says; her face has a terrible jellylike look. If she could see her own face, Lynnie wonders, would it look like that?

There will be no more going to the stone house; she will be needed at home, her mother is saying, staring at Lynnie as though Lynnie were shrinking into a past of no meaning —the way a dying person might look at an enemy.

The next day, Lynnie seeks out Isobel in the lunchroom. “A ruptured appendix,” Isobel says. “That’s really dangerous, you know.”

“My mother says Frank is going to be all right,” Lynnie says doggedly.

“Poor Lynnie,” Isobel says. “So what are you going to do if Ross and Claire hire someone else?”

Lynnie puts her head down on the lunch table and closes her eyes. The sweet, unpleasant smell of the lunchroom rises up, and the din of the students, talking and laughing, folds around her.

“Poor Lynnie,” Isobel says again.

*  *  *  *  *

Later that week, Lynnie brings Isobel to the stone house. Claire makes coffee, and when she brings out a third tiny china cup, Lynnie is unable to hear anything for several seconds.

Ross comes in, whistling, and lets the door slam behind him. “What’s this?” he asks, indicating Isobel. “Invader or captive?”

“Friendly native,” Claire says. “Isobel’s going to be our new Lynnie.”

“What’s the matter with our old Lynnie?” Ross says. He looks at Isobel for a moment. “Our old Lynnie’s fine with me.

“Oh, Ross.” Claire sighs. “I told you. Lynnie’s brother is sick.”

“Hmm,” Ross says.

“He’s in the hospital, Ross,” Claire says.

“Oh, God,” Ross says. “Yes, I’m sorry to hear that, Lynnie.”

“First day of the new semester,” Claire says to Lynnie. “He’s always disgusting the first day. How are your new students, my love?”

“Unspeakable,” Ross says.

“Truly,” Claire says. She smiles at Isobel.

“Worse than ever,” Ross says, taking a beer from the refrigerator. “There isn’t one. Well, one, maybe. A possibility. A real savage, but she has an interesting quality. Potential, at least.”

“I used to have potential,” Claire says, “but look at me now.”

Ross raises his beer to her. “Look at you now,” he says.

Ross holds the door as Lynnie and Isobel leave. “I’ve seen you in town,” he says to Isobel. “You’re older than I thought.”

She glances up at him and then turns back to Claire. “Goodbye,” she says. “See you soon.”

“See you soon,” Claire says, coming to join them at the door. “I do appreciate this. I’m going to have another baby, and I want to get in as much painting as I can first.”

“You’re going to have another baby?” Lynnie says, staring.

“We’re going to have hundreds of babies,” Ross says, putting his arms around Claire from behind. “We’re going to have hundreds and hundreds of babies.”

*  *  *  *  *

Afterward, Lynnie would become heavy and slow whenever she even thought of the time when Frank was sick. Their room was desolate while he was in the hospital; when he returned she felt how cramped it had always been before. Frank was testy all the time then, and cried easily. Her family deserved their troubles, she thought. Other people looked down on them, looked down and looked down, and then when they got tired of it they went back to their own business. But her family—and she—were the same whether anyone was looking or not.

Isobel’s mother stops Lynnie on the sidewalk to ask after Frank. The special, kind voice she uses makes Lynnie’s skin jump now. How could she ever have thought she adored Isobel’s mother, Lynnie wonders, shuddering with an old, sugared hatred.

At night Lynnie can see Isobel in her room, brushing her hair, or sometimes, even, curled up against her big white pillows, reading. Has Isobel seen Ross and Claire that day? Lynnie always wonders. Did they talk about anything in particular? What did they do?

At school, Isobel sends her display of cheery waves and smiles in Lynnie’s direction, and it is as though Ross and Claire had never existed. But once in a while she and Isobel meet on the sidewalk, and then they stop to talk in their ordinary way, without any smiles or fuss at all. “Claire’s in a good mood,” Isobel tells Lynnie one afternoon. “She loves being pregnant.”

Pregnant. What a word. “How’s Ross?” Lynnie says.

“He’s all right.” Isobel shrugs. “He’s got an assistant now, some student of his. Mary Katherine. She’s always around.”

Lynnie feels herself beginning to blush. “Don’t you like him?”

“I like him.” Isobel shrugs again. “He lends me books.”

“Oh.” Lynnie looks at Isobel wonderingly. “What books?” she says without thinking.

“Just books he tells me to read,” Isobel says.

“Oh,” Lynnie says.

*  *  *  *  *

It is spring when Lynnie returns to the stone house. She is hugged and exclaimed over, and Emily and Bo perform for her, but she looks around as though it were she who had just come out of a long illness. The big, smooth toys, the wonderful picture books no longer inspire her longing, or even her interest.

“We’ve missed you,” Claire says. Lynnie rests her head against the window frame, and the pale hills outside wobble.

But Claire has asked Isobel to sit for a portrait, so Isobel is at the stone house all the time now. The house is full of people—Lynnie upstairs with Emily and Bo, and Ross in his study with Mary Katherine, and Isobel and Claire in the big room among Claire’s canvases.

In the afternoons they all gather in the kitchen. Sometimes Mary Katherine’s boyfriend, Derek, joins them and watches Mary Katherine with large, mournful eyes while she smokes cigarette after cigarette and talks cleverly with Ross about his work. “Doesn’t he drive you crazy?” Mary Katherine says once to Claire. “He’s so opinionated.”

“Is he?” Claire says, smiling.

“Oh, Claire,” Mary Katherine says. “I wish I were like you. You’re serene. And you can do everything. You can paint, you can cook …”

“Claire can do everything,” Ross says. “Claire can paint, Claire can cook, Claire can fix a carburetor …”

“What a useful person to be married to,” Mary Katherine says.

Claire laughs, but Derek looks up at Mary Katherine unhappily.

“I can’t do anything,” Mary Katherine says. “I’m hopeless. Aren’t I, Ross?”

“Hopeless,” Ross says, and Lynnie’s eyes cloud mysteriously. “Truly hopeless.”

Now and again Ross asks Isobel’s opinion about something he has given her to read. She looks straight ahead as she answers, as though she were remembering, and Ross nods soberly. Once Lynnie sees Ross look at Mary Katherine during Isobel’s recitation. For a moment Mary Katherine looks back at him from narrow gray eyes, then makes her red mouth into an O from which blossoms a series of wavering smoke rings.

*  *  *  *  *

One day in April, when several students have dropped by, the temperature plummets and the sky turns into a white, billowing cloth that hides the trees and farmhouses. “We’d better go now,” one of the students says, “or we’ll be snowed in forever.”

“Can you give me and Lynnie a lift?” Isobel asks. “We’re on bikes.”

“Stay for the show,” Ross says to her. “It’s going to be sensational up here.”

“Coming?” the student says to Isobel. “Staying? Well, O.K., then.” Lynnie sees the student raise her eyebrows to Mary Katherine before, holding her coat closed, she goes out with her friends into the blowing wildness.

“We should go, too,” Derek says to Mary Katherine.

“Why?” Mary Katherine says. “We’ve got four-wheel drive.”

“Stick around,” Ross says. “If you feel like it.” Mary Katherine stares at him for a moment, but he goes to the door, squinting into the swarming snow where the students are disappearing. Behind him a silence has fallen.

“Yes,” Claire says suddenly. “Everybody stay. There’s plenty of food—we could live for months. Besides, I want to celebrate. I finished Isobel today.”

Isobel frowns. “You finished?”

“With your part, at least,” Claire says. “The rest I can do on my own. So you’re liberated. And we should have a magnificent ceremonial dinner, don’t you think, everybody? For the snow.” She stands, her hands together as though she has just clapped, looking at each of them in turn. Claire has a fever, Lynnie thinks.

“Why not?” Mary Katherine says. She closes her eyes. “We can give you two a ride home later, Isobel.”

Bo and Emily are put to bed, and Lynnie, Isobel, Ross, Claire, Mary Katherine, and Derek set about making dinner. Although night has come, the kitchen glimmers with the snow’s busy whiteness.

Ross opens a bottle of wine and everyone except Claire drinks. “This is delicious!” Lynnie says, dazed with happiness, and the others smile at her, as though she has said something original and charming.

Even when they must chop and measure, no one turns on the lights. Claire finds candles, and Lynnie holds her glass up near a flame. A clear patch of red shivers on the wall. “Feel,” Claire says, taking Lynnie’s hand and putting it against her hard, round stomach, and Lynnie feels the baby kick.

“Why are we whispering?” Ross whispers, and then laughs. Claire moves vaporously within the globe of smeary candlelight.

Claire and Derek make a fire in the huge fireplace while Ross gets out the heavy, deep-colored Mexican dishes and opens another bottle of wine. “Ross,” Claire says. But Ross fills the glasses again.

Lynnie wanders out into the big room to look at Claire’s portrait of Isobel. Isobel stares back from the painting, not at her. At what? Staring out, Isobel recedes, drowning, into the darkness behind her.

What a meal they have produced! Chickens and platters of vegetables and a marvelously silly-looking peaked and scroll-rimmed pie. They sit at the big table eating quietly and appreciatively while the fire snaps and breathes. Outside, the brilliant white earth curves against a black sky, and black shadows of the snow-laden trees and telephone wires lie across it; there is light everywhere—a great, white moon, and stars flung out, winking.

Derek leans back in his chair, closing his eyes and letting one arm fall around Mary Katherine’s chair. She casts a ruminating, regretful glance over him; when she looks away again it is as though he has been covered with a sheet.

Isobel gets up from the table and stretches. A silence falls around her like petals. She goes to the rug in front of the fire and lies down, her hair fanning out around her. Lynnie follows groggily and curls up on one of the sofas.

“That was perfect,” Claire says. “Ideal. And now I’m going upstairs.” She burns feverishly for a moment as she pauses in the doorway, but then subsides into her usual smoky softness.

“Good night,” Lynnie calls, and for full seconds after Claire has disappeared from view the others stare at the tingling darkness where she was.

Ross pushes his chair back from the table and walks over to the rug where Isobel lies. “Who’s for a walk?” he says, looking down at her.

Mary Katherine stubs out a cigarette. “Come on,” Ross says, prodding Isobel with his foot. Isobel looks at his foot, then away.

Ross is standing just inches from Lynnie; she can feel his outline—a little extra density of air.

“Derek,” Mary Katherine says softly. “It’s time to go. Lynnie? Isobel?”

“I can run the girls home later,” Ross says.

“Right,” Mary Katherine says after a moment. She goes to the closet for her coat.

“Come on, you two,” Ross says. “Up. Isobel? This is not going to last—” He gestures toward the window. “It’s tonight only. Out of the cave, lazy little bears. Into the refreshing night.”

Ross reaches a hand down to Isobel. She considers it, then looks up at him. “I hate to be refreshed,” she says, still looking at him, and shifts slightly on the rug.

“I don’t believe this,” Mary Katherine says quietly.

Lynnie sits up. The stars move back, then forward. The snow flashes, pitching her almost off balance. “Wait, wait,” Isobel says, scrambling to her feet as Mary Katherine goes to the door. “We’re coming.”

In the car Derek makes a joke, but no one laughs. Next to Lynnie, Isobel sits in a burnished silence. Branches support a canopy of snow over them as they drive out onto the old highway. Three cars are parked in front of the motel. They are covered with snow; no tire tracks are visible. All the motel windows are dark except one, where a faint aureole escapes from behind the curtain. Isobel breathes—just a feather of a sigh—and leans back against the seat.

*  *  *  *  *

Lynnie wakes up roughly, crying out as though she were being dragged through a screen of sleep into the day. Frank is no longer in his bed, and the room is bright. Lynnie sits up, shivering, exhausted from the night, and sees that the sun is already turning the snow to a glaze.

“You got in late enough,” Lynnie’s mother says when Lynnie comes downstairs.

“I tried not to wake you,” Lynnie says.

“I can imagine,” her mother says. “You were knocking things over left and right. I suppose those people gave you plenty to drink.”

“I wasn’t drunk, Mother,” Lynnie says.

“No,” her mother says. “Good. Well, I don’t want you staying late with those people again. You can leave that sort of thing to Isobel. She looked fairly steady on her feet last night going up the drive.”

Lynnie looks at her mother.

“I wonder what Isobel’s parents think,” Lynnie’s mother says.

“Isobel’s parents trust her, Mother,” Lynnie says.

“Well that’s their problem, isn’t it?” her mother says.

*  *  *  *  *

Isobel has stopped coming to the stone house, and her portrait leans against the wall, untouched since she left. But one day, at the beginning of summer, she goes along with Lynnie to see the new baby.

“He’s strange, isn’t he?” Claire says as Isobel picks him up. “They’re always so strange at the beginning—much easier to believe a stork brings them. Did a stork bring you, Willie? A stork?”

Through the window they can see Ross outside, working, and Lynnie listens to the rhythmic striking of his spade and the earth sliding off it in a little pile of sound. “We’re planting a lilac,” she hears Claire say. Claire’s voice slides, silvery, through the gold day, and Ross looks up, shading his eyes.

The sun melts into the sky. Lynnie hears Claire and Isobel talking behind the chinking of the spade, but then once, when there should be the spade, there is no sound, and Lynnie looks up to see Ross taking off his shirt. When had Claire and Isobel stopped talking?

Isobel stands up, transferring Willie to Lynnie.

“Don’t go,” Claire commands quietly.

“No …” Isobel says. Her voice is sleepy, puzzled, and she sits back down.

The room is silent again, but then the door bangs and Ross comes in, holding his crumpled shirt. “Hello, everyone,” he says, going to the sink to slap cold water against his face. “Hello, Isobel.” He tosses back dripping hair.

“Hello,” Isobel says.

Lynnie looks up at Claire, but Claire’s eyes are half closed as she gazes down at her long, graceful hands lying on the table. “Yes,” Claire says, although no one has spoken.

“Ross,” Isobel says, standing, “I brought back your book.” She hands Ross a small, faded book with gold on the edges of the pages.

He takes the book and looks at it for a moment, at the shape of it in his hand. “Ah,” he says. “Maybe I’ll find something else for you one of these days.”

“Mm,” Isobel says, pushing her hair back.

Willie makes a little smacking sound, and the others look at him.

“When’s good to drop things by?” Ross says.

“Anytime,” Isobel says. “Sometime.” She pivots childishly on one foot. “Saturdays are all right.”

Claire puts her hands against her eyes, against her forehead. “Would anybody like iced tea?” she asks.

“Not I,” Isobel says. “I have to go.”

*  *  *  *  *

The students have left town for the summer—even Derek. At least, Lynnie has not seen him since the night it snowed. And Mary Katherine herself is hardly in evidence. She comes over once in a while, but when she finishes her work, instead of sitting around the kitchen, she leaves.

Lynnie might be alone in the house, except for Bo and Emily. Claire is so quiet now, sealed off in a life with Willie, that sometimes Lynnie doesn’t realize that she is standing right there. And when Lynnie and the children are outside, the children seem to disappear into the net of gold light. They seem far away from her—little motes—and barely audible; the quiet from the house muffles their voices.

Ross is frequently out, doing one thing and another, and his smiles for Lynnie have become terribly kind—self-deprecating and sudden, as though she had become, overnight, fragile or precious. Now that Isobel has finally gone away, Ross and Claire seem to have gone with her; her absence is a vacuum into which they have disappeared. Day after day, nothing changes. Day after day, the sky sheds gold, and nothing changes. The house is saturated with absences.

Now Lynnie sees Isobel only as she streaks by in the little green car she has been given for her sixteenth birthday, or from the window in her room at night before she draws the curtain. One Saturday afternoon when Lynnie is outside with her brothers, Ross pulls up across the street. He waves to Lynnie as he walks up Isobel’s drive and knocks on the door. Lynnie watches as Isobel opens the door and accepts a book he holds out to her. Ross disappears inside. A few minutes later he reemerges, waves again to Lynnie, and drives off.

These days Lynnie’s mother is more irritable than usual. There have been rumors of layoffs at the plant. Once, when Lynnie is watching TV with her they see Isobel’s father drive up across the street. “Look at that fat bastard,” Lynnie’s mother says. “Now, there’s a man who knows how to run a tight ship.”

*  *  *  *  *

Even years and years later, just the thought of the school building could still call up Lynnie’s dread, from that summer, of going back to school. Still, there is some relief in finally having to do it, and by the third or fourth day Lynnie finds she is comforted by the distant roaring of the corridors, and the familiar faces that at last sight were the faces of strangers.

One afternoon the first week, she sees Cissy Haddad looking in her direction, and she waves shyly. But then she realizes that Cissy is staring at something else. She turns around and there is Isobel, looking back at Cissy. Nothing reflects from Isobel’s flat green eyes.

“Isobel—” Lynnie says.

“Hello, Lynnie,” Isobel says slowly, and only then seems to see her. Lynnie turns back in confusion to Cissy, but Cissy is gone.

“Do you want a ride?” Isobel asks, looking straight ahead. “I’ve got my car.”

“How was your summer?” Isobel asks on the way home.

“All right,” Lynnie says. The sky is a deep, open blue again. Soon the leaves will change. “I was sorry you weren’t around the stone house.”

“Thank you, Lynnie,” Isobel says seriously, and Lynnie remembers the way Cissy had been staring at Isobel. “That means a lot to me.”

Lynnie’s mother looks up when Lynnie comes into the house. “Hanging around with Isobel again?” she says. “I thought she’d dropped you.”

Lynnie stands up very straight. “Isobel’s my friend,” she says.

“Isobel is not your friend,” her mother says. “I want you to understand that.”

On Saturday, Lynnie goes back to her room after breakfast, and lies down in her unmade bed. Outside it is muggy and hot. She has homework to do, and chores, but she can’t force herself to get up. The sounds of the television, and of her brothers playing outside, wash over her.

A car door slams, and Lynnie gets up to look out the window—maybe Isobel is going somewhere and will want company.

But it is not Isobel. It is Ross. Lynnie watches as Ross goes up Isobel’s front walk and knocks on the door. The sound of brass on brass echoes up to Lynnie’s room.

Isobel’s car is in the driveway, but her mother’s and father’s are gone. Lynnie watches as Isobel appears at the front door and lets Ross in, and then as dim shapes spread in Isobel’s room.

Lynnie returns to her bed and lies there. The room bears down on her, and the noise; one of her brothers is crying. She turns violently into the pillow, clenched and stiff, and for a while she tries to cry, but every effort is false, and unsatisfactory. At certain moments she can feel her heart beating rapidly.

Later, when she gets up again, Ross’s car is gone. She turns back to the roiling ocean of sheets on her own bed, and reaches out, anticipating a wave rising to her, but it is enragingly inert. She grabs the unresisting top sheet and tries to hurl it to the floor, but it folds around her before it falls, slack and disgusting. The bottom sheet comes loose more satisfyingly, tearing away from the mattress and streaming into her arms like clouds, but a tiny sound bores into the clamor in her ears, and she wheels around to see Frank standing in the doorway with his hand on the knob. He looks at her, breathing uncomfortably through his mouth, before he turns away, closing the door behind him.

That night Lynnie’s mother sits in front of the television in the dark, like a priestess. The cold, pale light flattens out her face, and craterlike shadows collect around her eyes, her mouth, in the hollows of her cheeks. “And what do you think of your employer visiting Isobel?” she says.

Across the street, Isobel’s window blazes. “He lends Isobel books,” Lynnie says.

“I see,” her mother says. “Quite the little scholar.”

The next day, Lynnie rides her bicycle to the stone house to say that she will not be working there any longer. Pedaling with all her strength, she is not even aware of reaching the edge of town, though afterward she can see every branch of the birchwood along the old highway as it flashes by, every cinder block of the motel, even the paint peeling from its sign.

Claire stands in the doorway while Lynnie talks loudly, trying to make herself heard through the static engulfing her. She has too much homework, she tries to explain; she is sorry, but her mother needs her. Her bicycle lies where she dropped it in her frenzy to get to the door, one wheel still spinning, and while she talks she sees dim forms shifting behind Isobel’s window, a brief tumbling of entwined bodies on the damp leaves under the birches, the sad, washed light inside the old motel, where a plain chest of drawers with a mirror above it stands against the wall. In the mirror is a double bed with a blue cover on which Ross lies, staring up at the ceiling.

“Yes …” Claire is saying, and she materializes in front of Lynnie. “I understand …” From inside, behind Claire, comes the sound of Ross whistling.

*  *  *  *  *

It is the following week that Isobel leaves. Lynnie watches from her window as Isobel and her mother and father load up her father’s car and get into it. They are taking a trip, Lynnie thinks; they are just taking a trip, but still she runs down the stairs as fast as she can, and then, as the car pulls out into the street, Isobel twists around in the back seat. Her face is waxy with an unhealthy glow, and her hair ripples out around her. Lynnie raises her hand, perhaps imperceptibly, but in any case Isobel only looks.

So nothing has to be explained to Lynnie the next day or the next or the next, when Isobel does not appear at school. And she is not puzzled by the groups of girls who huddle in the corridor whispering, or by Cissy Haddad’s strange, tight greetings, or by the rumor, which begins to circulate almost immediately, of an anonymous letter to Isobel’s parents.

And when, one day soon after Isobel’s departure, Isobel’s mother passes her on the sidewalk with nothing beyond a rapid glance of distaste, Lynnie sees in an instant what Isobel’s mother must always have seen: an impassive, solid, limp-haired child, an inconveniently frequent visitor, breathing noisily, hungry for a smile—a negligible girl, utterly unlike her own daughter. And then Lynnie sees Isobel, vanishing brightly all over again as she looks back from her father’s car, pressing into Lynnie’s safekeeping everything that should have vanished along with her.