“What is it you want?” she said.

  “I told you. I want to share him.”

  Dorey got dressed in some old clothes of Lion’s—blue jeans, a white shirt—then she heated up the kuchen in a pan on top of the stove. She added a few extra spoonfuls of honey and some vanilla she found on a shelf. It was her mother’s recipe that she used, one she’d memorized and repeated to herself night after night, the way some people repeat a lullaby or a charm. The kuchen was hot and ready to eat before Violet packed up the few belongings she had that still mattered to her. It was a simple dish, after all, and the two women were nearly finished when Lion walked through the door.

  THE WEDDING OF SNOW AND ICE

  IN 1957, ON THE VERY RIM OF THE CAPE, a small town often didn’t feel small until the first snowfall of the season. In those muffled first moments, in the hush and stillness before the flakes began and the anticipation of the mess there’d be to dig out afterward, people congregated in the general store, there to stock up on candles and flashlights, franks and beans, and loaves of bread. People regularly knew each other’s business; now they could also recite what was in their neighbors’ refrigerators and cupboards. Then and there, the world shrank and became a smaller thing, simple as a driveway, a red wicker basket filled with bread and milk, a cleared road, a light in a neighbor’s window, a snow globe on a child’s shelf.

  At the Farrells’, they were taking down the barn, and when the first big flakes began to fall, all work had to stop. There was no point in risking a slip on the roof and the possibility of a broken arm or leg. The Farrells, after all, were a cautious breed. The father, Jim, and the two boys, Hank and Jamie, trooped into the kitchen, their faces ruddy, hands frozen in spite of woolen gloves. Grace Farrell had been listening to the weather reports on the radio and had made tomato soup from the canned tomatoes left from last August’s garden. The bowls of rich broth were so hot and delicious it made tears form in Jim’s eyes, although, frankly, the boys preferred Campbell’s.

  Still, at fourteen and seventeen, the Farrell brothers knew enough to compliment their mother’s soup. When they’d foolishly made their preference known in the past, their mother, mostly easygoing but with occasional frightening spikes of passion that surprised one and all, had spilled the entire contents of the pot down the drain. She, who liked things homemade and was known for her grape jam and Christmas pudding, announced she didn’t know why she bothered with any of it. She might just get herself a job, and then where would they be? Eating bread and butter and soup right out of the can. She’d been a nurse when Jim Farrell met her, and she’d given it up to take care of them, and did they even appreciate what she’d sacrificed? Why, next summer she might even let the garden go wild if that was how little they thought of the work she put in. The garden was a trial anyway, a constant war against the naturalized sweet peas, vines so invasive Grace Farrell yanked them out by the handful. In the early fall, she’d had the older boy, Hank, hack down the vines with an ax, then build a bonfire. The smoke that arose was so sweet Grace Farrell wound up crying. She said there was smoke in her eyes, but she got like that sometimes, as if there was another life somewhere out there she might be living, one she might prefer despite her love for her husband and sons.

  The sweet peas in the field were thought to have been set down by the first inhabitant of the house, Coral Hadley, who lost her husband and son at sea. Coral was said never to look at the ocean again after that, even though it was little more than a mile from her door. She dug in tightly to the earth, and there were people who vowed that her fingers turned green. When she walked down Main Street acorns fell out of her pockets, so that anyone following too closely behind was sure to stumble. Coral certainly did her best to cultivate this acreage. All these years later, her presence was still felt; odd, unexpected specimens popped up on the property, seeming to grow overnight. Peach trees where none belonged. Hedges of lilac of a variety extinct even in England. Roses among the nettle. The two-acre field rampant with those damned sweet peas, purple and pink and white, strong as weeds, impossible to get rid of.

  Grace Farrell had stated publicly that she would swear old Coral Hadley came back from the dead just to replant anything that had been ripped up. Surely a joke, considering that Grace was one of the most sensible individuals around, the last woman you’d ever expect might believe in ghosts, the first a body could depend upon in times of trial and strife. She’d had her hands full with those boys of hers: Hank was the dreamer who didn’t pay attention to his schoolwork. Jamie was the wilder one who simply couldn’t sit still. In grammar school the fourth-grade teacher, Helen Morse, had tied Jamie’s left arm to the desk in an attempt to force him to improve his penmanship by using his right hand, but Jamie had simply walked around the room dragging the desk along with him. He remained victorious, stubbornly left-handed.

  He certainly had energy, that boy. He had to be kept busy, for his own good as well as for the peace of mind of those around him. Fortunately, they didn’t have to think up projects. There were endless tasks around the house. The shaky old barn pulled down for safety’s sake, for instance, though the boys had loved to play there when they were younger, swinging from a rope in the hayloft, nearly breaking their necks every time. New kitchen cabinets had just been put in, and Jamie had helped Jim with that job as well. He’d been just as helpful when the dreadful stained carpeting was at last taken up, exposing the yellow-pine floors that were said to be soaked with Coral Hadley’s tears.

  There was always something gone wrong with a house as old as this one. Maybe Grace should have said no when Jim first took her to see the place. It was the week before their wedding, and Grace was still living with her parents up in Plymouth. She had recently given up her job at the hospital. Isn’t it gorgeous? he’d said of the farm. It looked like one of those tumbledown places you saw in the news magazines, with hound dogs lazing around the front door. The fields were so thick with milkweed back then that a thousand goldfinch came to feed every spring. Anyone wishing to reach the pond had to use a scythe to cut a path. All the same, the look on Jim’s face had made Grace say, Oh, yes. It had made her throw all good sense away. For an instant the house did look beautiful to her, all white clapboards and right angles; the milkweed was shining, illuminated by thin bands of sunlight, an amazing sight if you looked at it the right way, if you narrowed your eyes until everything blurred into one bright and gleaming horizon.

  Jim Farrell had grown up in town. His father had been a carpenter, and Jim, wanting steadier work, was the chief of the public-works department, the chief of three other men, at any rate. He was a good man, quiet, not one to shirk responsibility. People said he could smell snow, that he could divine a nor’easter simply from the scent in the air. The biggest storms smelled like vanilla, he’d confided to Jamie, the small ones like wet laundry. Tonight, Jim seemed antsy. He got like that when he simply couldn’t tell what the snow was up to, when the whole damn thing seemed like a mystery. His job, after all, was a cat-and-mouse game against nature and fate. Did he get the town plows out early? Did he conserve sand and salt for the next snowfall? Would the storm carve away at the dunes, which were already disappearing all along the shore?

  When Jim had finished his soup and taken his bowl to the sink, he stood at the window facing west. The field of sweet peas was already dusted white. Snow made him feel like crying sometimes—just the first flakes, the purest stuff.

  Behind the hedge of holly the Brooks house next door was dark.

  “Do you think I should go over there with some soup?” Grace had come up behind her husband. She liked the way he looked at snow, the intensity on his face, there when they made love, there whenever he was concentrating and trying to figure things out. “Hal might be away. I think he might still be working on that house in Bourne. She might be alone there with Josephine.”

  The Brookses were their closest neighbors, right there on the other side of the field, but there was no camaraderie between the families. Hal Brooks was a shit, there was no other way to say it, and even Grace, who was offended by bad language, would nod when someone in town referred to her neighbor that way. Lord, he’d been a mean snake all his life, the way Grace had heard it. Even as a boy, he’d shoot seagulls for sport, and once or twice a stray dog had disappeared on his property, only to be found strung up from one of the oak trees. Hal hadn’t changed with age, and people in town all knew what was going on over there. You could see it when the Brookses’ name came up. A nod. A stepping back. Some people had seen what went on with his wife, some had heard about it. The rest would simply cross the street when the Brookses were in town.

  “If she needs something she’ll come and get it, won’t she?” Jim said, although they both thought this probably wasn’t true.

  The boys were in the living room watching the new TV; they would watch anything that flickered up in front of them, and for a while at least Jamie, always so restless, would settle down. The boys didn’t need to know what went on at the Brookses’. When Grace and Jim had first moved in, Arly Brooks was the only occupant, a widower, a hardworking fisherman who kept his boat out in Provincetown. Hal had inherited the house from his father, and had come to claim it after the old man died. He’d arrived home from the Navy with this wife of his, ready to make enemies left and right no matter how many welcome baskets were brought to the door or how many women in town sent over pies. Jim Farrell didn’t want his wife next door for any reason, not even to take over a pot of soup.

  “Stay away,” Jim told Grace. “We all decide our own fates, and what they do is their business.”

  “Well, of course I won’t go over. But I might send the boys to shovel snow.”

  Jim couldn’t say no to that. Just last year, Mattie Hammond, eighty-four years old and all on her own, had been snowed into her cottage during a blizzard. The drifts had been so high, Mattie couldn’t open her front door and had nearly starved to death before Jim came to plow out the street. Despite the blanket of white that could cause semiblindness in some men while they were at the plow, Jim had noticed the square handkerchief Mattie had taped up in a window to signal her distress. There were some things Jim Farrell couldn’t deny a neighbor, particularly on a snowy night, and other situations Grace couldn’t turn away from either, and because they didn’t like to argue with each other, no matter their differences, they left it at that.

  Jim went out to his truck at four in the afternoon, headed for the department of public works. It was the hour when everything turned blue—the snow, the white fences, the white clapboards of the house—that luminous time when the line between earth and sky disappeared.

  “I want you boys to go shovel over at Rosalyn Brooks’,” Grace called into the living room. She had ladled out a separate pot of tomato soup despite what Jim had advised. “Take the shovels and bring this soup with you.”

  When there was no response, Grace went into the living room and stood in front of the TV. The boys would watch just about anything, but their favorite show was You Asked For It, on tonight at seven. There were the most amazing things out there in the world, and all you had to do was ask and you’d see it right in front of you, on your very own screen.

  “I’m turning this off,” Grace announced, then did so. “I want you to shovel.”

  “At the Brookses’,” Jamie said. “We heard.”

  “Can’t. I’ve got a history paper,” Hank said. “Sorry, Mom, but it’s due tomorrow.”

  Hank was having his troubles in school, so Grace let him stay and sent Jamie on his own, making sure he bundled up, handing him his hat, which he often managed to forget, watching to make certain he pulled on his scarf and his leather gloves. The pot of soup was under one arm, the shovel carried over his shoulder. He was a quiet boy, not much of a student, but lovable to his mother in some deep way, so that she worried about him as she didn’t anyone else in this world. Perhaps it was true that mothers had favorites, at least now and then. Grace watched Jamie disappear into the blue of the field and felt a catch in her throat. Love, she presumed. A moment of realizing exactly how lucky she was, of being grateful that she was not Coral Hadley, that her son was not out on the ocean, but was instead traipsing through the snowy reaches of their own familiar acreage.

  When he was alone, Jamie tended to hum. His mother was a fan of musicals, particularly The King and I, and Jamie found himself humming “Getting to Know You.” His mother loved Yul Brynner, for reasons Jamie couldn’t understand. The king he played was bald, for one thing; he was bossy as all get-out for another. All the same, the song stuck. Sometimes when Jamie walked through this field, in winter, at exactly this hour, he would see deer. There were wild turkeys too, crazy birds that had very little fear of humans and would run straight at you if you invaded their territory. There was a shortcut to the Brookses’, through the winterberry vines. The berries were shiny and red; sometimes you’d happen upon a skunk as you made your way through the brambles, and that skunk would just go on feeding, calm as could be, rightfully assured that few creatures other than the neighborhood dogs would be stupid enough to interrupt or attack.

  Jamie was in the winterberry, thinking about deer, singing softly to himself, when he heard it. A clap of thunder. A snowplow on the road. A firecracker. He stopped for a minute and breathed in snowflakes. When he breathed out, his breath was like a steam engine. It melted the snow off the winterberries. He listened. He was good at that, but he heard nothing, so he went on. He was that sort of boy, intent on the task at hand. He knew what his mother wanted him to do: shovel from the Brookses’ front door to their driveway. He and Hank had done it before, last year. Mr. Brooks hadn’t been at home, but Mrs. Brooks had made them hot chocolate, which they drank out on the front step. Now, alongside the Chevy, there was Mr. Brooks’ truck, a wreck of a thing, battered, leaking oil into the snow.

  Jamie tried to balance the soup on the front step, but the step was made from an uneven piece of stone. He went up to the door then, to deliver the soup before he started to work. His breath did the same thing to the glass window set into the door as it did to the winterberries, melted off the snow, then fogged it up. But even through the fog he could see Rosalyn Brooks, right there on the floor with no clothes on and something red all over her face. He should have backed away; he should have run home, done something, anything, but he had never seen a naked woman before, and it was as though he were hypnotized, frozen in place, while his breath kept melting the snow. One minute he had been a fourteen-year-old boy with nothing much on his mind. Now he was someone else entirely.

  He was still holding on to the pot of tomato soup when he opened the door. People didn’t lock up much in their town; there was nothing to steal and no one to steal it. Jamie walked in as though he’d been drawn inside by a magnetic force. The Brookses’ house was an old farmhouse, like the Farrells’, but it hadn’t been updated. It was cold and empty, and the only light turned on was in the kitchen, all the way down the hall. Everything looked blue inside the house, except for the thing that was red. It was blood that was all over Rosalyn Brooks, but when she looked up and saw Jamie she seemed most panicked by the fact that she was naked. She let out a strange sound and grabbed for a rag rug, trying to cover herself. It was a sob, that’s what Jamie realized. That was the sound.

  “I brought you soup,” he said. “It’s from my mother.”

  Mrs. Brooks looked at him as though he were crazy.

  “She makes it herself.” Jamie felt like running, but he didn’t seem capable of turning away. He had the feeling he might be paralyzed. “Are you all right?”

  Rosalyn Brooks laughed, or at least Jamie thought that’s what it was.

  “Just stay there,” he said. “I’ll get you something.”

  He put the soup on a tabletop and went to the hall closet, grabbing for the first thing he felt, bringing back a heavy black woolen coat.

  “It’s okay,” he said, because of the way she was looking at him. As though she was scared. “It’s a coat.”

  Rosalyn Brooks stared at him, then took the coat and put it on. Jamie Farrell looked away; all the same, he glimpsed her breasts, blue in the light of the house, and her belly, which was oddly beautiful. She had bruises all over, that much he noticed as well, on her legs and shoulders especially. He saw now that her lip was split open and she could barely see through the slits of her eyes.

  “Do you want me to heat you some soup?” It was so cold in the house that Jamie’s breath came out in billows, and he was embarrassed by his own heat. When Mrs. Brooks didn’t answer, he figured she wanted him to take the pot into the kitchen, but as he turned to head down the hall, Rosalyn lurched from her prone position and grabbed his pants leg. She did it so hard and so fast he almost fell over. She looked at him then in a way that convinced him something really bad had happened. Somebody else might have taken off running, back through the winterberries, snagging his clothes as he raced through the bushes, but Jamie crouched down beside Mrs. Brooks.

  “Where’s Josephine?” he asked.

  That was the Brookses’ little daughter. Josephine liked to pick the sweet peas in the field. She liked the pears that dropped to the ground from the big tree in the Farrells’ yard. Rosalyn looked up the stairs.

  “Is she in bed?”

  “Asleep.”

  At least Mrs. Brooks could talk. That was a relief.

  “My husband had an accident.”

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “Should we call my dad? He could help.”

  “No. You can’t call him.”

  He could tell that whatever had happened was bad from her tone. Still, he stayed. Maybe Jamie felt he owed Rosalyn Brooks his allegiance because he’d seen her naked, or maybe it was all that blood, or the way his breath was so hot and the house so very cold.

  “In the kitchen?”

  Mrs. Brooks nodded. She was not yet thirty, a young woman, pretty under other circumstances.