That’s what they wanted, Katherine and Sam both, to crawl beneath green leaves and branches and hide from the year they’d had, the year they were still stuck inside on the day they decided to spend their savings on the farm. They were rapt as the realtor told them there was a hillside of blueberries, the low-growing kind so perfect for jam. There was a fenced garden filled with June strawberries and summer raspberries so tart a single taste could make one’s mouth pucker, along with plenty of room for a vegetable patch of their own making, not that their children—a boy and a girl, Walker and Emma, aged ten and six—could be talked into eating lettuce and cucumbers, even the homegrown variety.

  Of course, they had to imagine all this, as it was January when they stood there. Still, they made an offer on the spot, on impulse, foolishly paying the asking price for a house no one else wanted, one that had been on the market for over a year. But Katherine and Sam were desperate, two drowning people out in the cold with the realtor, watching the sun go down on what would soon be their land. A summer house was never a necessary purchase, but this was a particularly rash decision, a foolhardy whim in a time of chaos, made at the exact hour when most people knew to avoid any serious change. Still, they went ahead with it, a leap of faith designed to convince themselves that, even though there was ice on the ground and a landscape of bleak, bare trees, there would indeed be summers to come, a time when blueberry jam would be simmering on the stovetop, when everyday life was restored.

  They’d been released from their duty at the hospital for a single day, this icy afternoon on the Cape that smelled like salt and straw, rescued by dear friends from out of town who took one look at them and insisted they go away and enjoy themselves. These friends had no idea that Katherine and Sam no longer enjoyed themselves, and had in fact stopped talking to each other months earlier. On the ride down to the Cape, for instance, they hadn’t bothered to speak, even though this was their day off. There seemed no point in conversation that didn’t pertain to their daughter’s medical condition. As they drove they looked out the window in silence, two stick figures who continued to exist even though every bit of life had been drained out of them, bled dry by panic and fear.

  And yet, when they’d walked down the dirt driveway to the farm, they’d both become giddy. In a fit of crazed good humor, a mood so unusual it felt as though they’d been drugged, they had made their offer, and in doing so they had opened themselves up to hope, to believing that Emma would turn seven in June, that she would pick blueberries later in the summer, make jam, run past the stretch of peach trees alongside her brother, Walker; that she would survive.

  They nearly forgot about the house in the spring, when Emma was so improved. It was a delight to have her back from the hospital, to regain a bit of their normal existence, to speak to each other, now and again, about ordinary things. Emma had lost all her hair the previous fall, when her chemotherapy had begun. Katherine had bought her daughter a dozen pretty hats, then locked herself in the bathroom to cry for the loss of Emma’s long, blond hair. Now the child’s hair had begun to grow back, first in a fuzz, then, astoundingly, in black tufts. Emma’s prognosis was excellent, and yet Katherine couldn’t allay her panic. Emma’s newly grown black hair made it seem as though she had fallen under a spell. Such things happened, the oncologist assured Katherine. Straight hair turned curly, fine hair grew in coarse and thick. All the same, it seemed like an enchantment to Katherine. The alchemy of how one thing became another was a puzzle that could never be solved: light became dark, joy turned to sorrow, and then—for the lucky, for the few—to joy once more.

  As for Emma, she didn’t mind the new color of her hair. If anything, she seemed to like the fact that it was now black, with waves that hadn’t been there before. Perhaps she valued the change as a sign that she had walked through fire and was still here, an announcement that this was a brand-new Emma, a girl who was well, one so strong she could arm-wrestle with her brother, and nearly beat him at the game.

  “I could be a witch for Halloween,” Emma said thoughtfully as she appraised herself in the bathroom mirror. “I could be a Gypsy queen.”

  Katherine, of course, never mentioned to anyone, not even to Sam, that when she caught sight of Emma in a darkened hallway the child no longer appeared to be her daughter, that good-natured blonde girl nothing could harm. She was someone different now, the little girl who knew more than she should, a shadow, a sprite, a witch, a queen.

  THEY MOVED INTO THE HOUSE ON THE FOURTH OF JULY weekend. Having plowed through traffic jams, they were sticky with sweat as they unloaded the rental truck. They’d packed up some old furniture from their first apartment and a few pieces Sam had inherited from his mother: a dining-room table, a sideboard, a dilapidated chair so comfortable the children argued over who would sit in it first.

  “I think we’re insane,” Sam said when he stopped to survey the house. He was a big no-nonsense man who rarely did anything on impulse.

  “We can sell it next year. Don’t worry,” Katherine told him, although what she really meant was: Don’t walk out on me now. All through the year she’d been afraid he might do that, be so overwhelmed by the possibility of tragedy that he’d leave before it actually happened. “Just this summer,” she begged. “Then we’ll see.”

  THAT WEEKEND THEY DISCOVERED THERE WERE quirks about the property. They learned soon enough, because Walker, out to explore the tall grass in their field, came back shouting that there was a tick in his hair. There were burrs stuck to his trousers, too, and he had narrowly avoided a rather large patch of poison ivy. Surprises existed inside as well, none of them pleasant. Pipes rattled, water tasted rusty, two burners on the stove didn’t work at all. The house hadn’t been lived in for more than a year, so it wasn’t a shock to find mice in the hall. But they were only babies, cute little things, and Emma threw a fit when Sam said he would set out poison.

  “Don’t you care about the value of life?” Emma had said to her father.

  People said long stays in the hospital could do this to a child, make her grow up fast, allow her to see what others might not. Certainly, this was true with the Gypsy queen, who collected each tiny mouse in an egg cup, and carried them to the tick-infested field, where they’d certainly be scooped up by hawks in no time flat. This little witch considered matters of life and death as she danced around the blueberry bushes, willing them to bear fruit, as she rescued spiders, watered the old strawberry plants, which were withered and spent. Katherine’s own black-haired wonder girl, back from the brink, watching for fireflies every night, as if they were the most marvelous sight in the universe, as if just being alive was more than enough.

  KATHERINE HADN’T BEEN THINKING MUCH ABOUT Walker. Nobody had, as a matter of fact, until he started to talk about the blackbird. Katherine had quit her job at the library when Emma was first diagnosed. Sam was a lawyer, and had to go back to town after the holiday. Right away, Katherine fell into a schedule of spending all her time with Emma. They pretended their life on the farm was an opera. Though Katherine was known for her off-key voice, and Emma wasn’t much better, they sang every request: Pass the peas! Look at the mockingbird! Do you want bubbles in your bath!

  “You guys are crazy,” Walker had muttered. And then, pointedly, to Katherine, “Everyone knows you can’t sing a note.”

  Walker had laid claim to a shed in the field, which he’d turned into a fort. He had very little patience with his mother and sister, and very little time to waste on them. Soon enough, he’d learned to pull ticks off without any help and burn them till they popped. He became adept at avoiding burrs and poison ivy. He was sunburned and rangy and hungry all the time. It was as if his body was preparing for a growth spurt to come; as if Walker, too, was preparing to become someone new.

  It wasn’t until the middle of July that Katherine noticed that her son had become secretive. He had lost some tender quality of childishness, overnight, it seemed. When Emma, always a rescuer, found a toad in their garden and made a house in a hole near the porch, Walker asked her why she was bothering with what was nothing more than a good meal for the owl that lived in their woods.

  “Toad à la mode,” he had said, and Emma, so busy saving any creature she came across, had cried at the notion that her toad was nothing more than a mouthful, a meal.

  “Do you have to behave so miserably?” Katherine had said.

  “What do you care?” Walker had stalked away, back to the field where the grass grew so tall it was indeed possible to disappear from sight.

  Talk of the blackbird began that same week. When a peach pie was found smashed to bits on the kitchen floor, with crust scattered everywhere, Walker insisted a huge bird had flown in through the window. When the laundry out on the line was found strewn about on the ground, Walker declared this same bird had picked the clothespins from the line one by one.

  “Well, tell that bird I’m going to pluck his feathers if I catch him. Tell him to stop being so troublesome.”

  That day, Walker disappeared for the entire afternoon. When Katherine couldn’t find him on her own, and the sun was beginning to go down, she frantically phoned the local police department. An officer came to the house to take down a description of Walker: ten and a half, fair hair, sunburned, skinny, angrier than most boys his age, probably wearing a bathing suit and sneakers.

  As it turned out, Walker came back soon after the police car left. By then Katherine was so frantic she’d phoned Sam twice and had bitten her nails to the quick. Twice, she’d searched the woods, and had mistakenly walked through a patch of nettles. She’d been in a panic, and now here was Walker, sauntering up the drive in the fading light.

  “Where were you?” Katherine cried. She grabbed him by the shoulders, too fierce, too harsh.

  “I walked to the beach. I left you a note on the door.” Walker pulled away. Lately, he couldn’t stand to be touched. They went to the door and there was indeed a silver thumbtack on the ground. But no note. “The blackbird must have taken it. He’s a practical joker.”

  “Right.” Katherine’s tone was clipped. She’d been imagining horrible things as she’d searched through the woods. She knew she should be relieved, but instead she was angry now, too.

  “It was him,” Walker insisted.

  Later in the week, when Katherine and Emma were clearing out brambles from around the blueberry bushes, Katherine asked if Emma had ever seen the bird Walker blamed for everything that went wrong.

  “I know the blackbird thinks it’s funny to steal things.”

  “How do you know?”

  Emma looked at Katherine with a serious expression. “Walker said so.”

  They’d met their closest neighbor recently, Josephine Brooks, who had lived her whole life in the house next door. They’d already promised Miss Brooks their extra fruit. It seemed there’d be plenty: the berries had already turned from green to a dull gray-blue. It was time to throw nets over the bushes, to protect them from birds.

  “And he’s different from other blackbirds,” Emma added as she worked. “He’s white.”

  “I see.”

  Miss Brooks had told them that Walker’s fort was used as a summer kitchen in times past. Most of their neighbors remembered the smell of sugar rising in the air whenever jam was simmered. There were wonderful preserves back then, made from beach plums and apricots and peaches and these same blueberries that had always grown wild.

  Sure enough, when Katherine checked, she found there was a fireplace in the shed, with two metal posts that could hold a large pot. She noticed that Walker had taken the broom from the house and had swept the summer kitchen clean. But there was something else that she saw: a secret kept, an old bow and a set of arrows, the sort of thing Katherine had always forbidden as too dangerous. She felt as though she was well within her rights when she took the bow and arrows and set them in the trash.

  But in the morning, when she got ready to go to the dump, the bow and arrows were gone. Not only that, the vegetable garden she and Emma had worked so hard to fill with tomatoes and cucumbers and peas had been dug up haphazardly, so that the vines were draped in the dirt and the new tomatoes had been shaken off, then smashed into worthless pulp.

  Katherine went up to Walker’s bedroom, angrier than she wanted to be. He looked younger when he was asleep, dirt-streaked, his scalp showing through his clipped hair. Last year, when she told him Emma had been diagnosed with leukemia, he’d been straight-faced; nothing showed through.

  No she hasn’t, he’d said to Katherine. You’re a liar.

  Now she woke him and asked what had happened to the garden. Walker shrugged, hazy with sleep.

  “It must have been the blackbird.”

  “I see. You had nothing to do with it. And did this bird give you the bow and arrows, too?”

  “I found them. Under the floor of the fort.”

  This might in fact be true. Miss Brooks had told Katherine that there had been a teen-aged boy who’d last lived here, and he might easily have fooled around with bows and arrows.

  “Well, you should have told me. Now I feel that I can’t trust you.”

  “That’s fine.” Walker got out of bed. He let the quilt drop on the floor. He looked taller than he had the day before. “That makes us equal.”

  Later, Katherine followed at a distance when Walker and Emma went into the woods. He had set up a target far past the field, where the coyotes whose young they heard yapping at night must live. The target was a bale of hay, most likely taken from the neighbor down the road, who had a corral and two ponies.

  “Let’s pretend I’m the Gypsy queen.” Emma quickly made herself comfortable on a fallen log covered with moss. In woods so dark, her hair didn’t look quite so black. “You have to do everything I say and win a prize that you present to me.”

  “I’ll be a knight,” Walker agreed. “No one’s ever beaten me at my own game. Not in all the land.”

  He sounded so young that Katherine felt like crying. She felt as though she were the evil queen, the one who sent the hero to a terrible fate, who asked him to collect golden apples, though he might meet an untimely death when attempting such an impossible task, when he might be lost forevermore.

  “What were you and Walker doing in the woods today?” Katherine asked later, after Emma had taken her bath and they were saying good night.

  “Nothing.” And when she realized that wasn’t enough, Emma added, “Playing queens and knights.”

  No mention of the bow and arrows or the target made out of hay.

  “And did you see the blackbird?”

  Emma shook her head. “But Walker said it would try to steal my hair clips, so I put them in my pocket. He’s white, you know, like snow.”

  “Emma, you know there’s no such thing.”

  These days, there was still sunlight at bedtime, and now flashes of drowsy light slipped around the window shade. Josephine Brooks’ lawn had been mowed earlier in the day, and there was the scent of cut grass. Katherine had taken to talking to Sam late at night; she’d bring the phone into bed with her, where she could whisper about her concerns.

  “They both insist it’s real,” Katherine told Sam. “At least they agree.”

  THE NEXT DAY WAS JAM DAY. THE BLUEBERRIES HAD all been picked, the twigs and leaves cleaned away. Katherine and Emma went into town for jam jars, and afterward Katherine made a stop at Town Hall. Miss Brooks had been pruning the old lilacs in the morning, and before they left for town, Katherine told her about the renegade bird that was supposedly doing so much damage; Josephine didn’t seem surprised. In fact, she was the one who suggested the stop at Town Hall.

  “Your boy’s not the first to have seen the bird. Supposedly, it was the pet of the sailor boy who lived in your house. The poor boy went off to sea with his father and he never came back. But the blackbird did. Or at least, that’s what people say.”

  “Well, it’s nonsense.” Katherine laughed.

  “A storm came up, if I remember correctly.”

  She had, Katherine soon discovered. The sailor who had built their house and his ten-year-old son had disappeared into the center of a huge, unexpected nor’easter. The boy’s name had been Isaac, and right away Katherine wished she didn’t know that fact. It made him seem realer, a boy who had run down the twisted steps from the second floor every morning, who swept out the summer kitchen on hot days, who could catch a bluefish in seconds flat.

  “It’s dusty here,” Emma said. She looked at the book of records Katherine had pulled down from the shelf. “Who are you reading about?”

  “A little sailor boy who disappeared in a storm. Isaac Hadley. He was only ten.”

  “That was young to die.”

  “It was.”

  Sunlight was pouring in through the dusty window, and more dust rose when Katherine closed the book.

  “You’re the ones who live in the sailor’s house,” the clerk said when Katherine returned the record book. “You know what they say, put out salt if you want to chase that old blackbird away. Or is it that salt will bring a sailor home from the sea?”

  “We don’t want to get rid of him,” Emma said. They went out to the car, which was hot as blazes. “I’ll bet Isaac was scared in that storm,” Emma said thoughtfully. “Everything he saw was dark. Black ocean. Black sky. Only the blackbird was white. Blackbirds aren’t supposed to be that color, but this one was. You know what would have made it better for Isaac?” Emma added. “If someone had been there with him, the way you were always there with me in the hospital.”

  “You know this is all just pretend, right?” Emma looked so healthy now; there were streaks of sun in her dark hair. She was long past her seventh birthday, a touchstone date, a step into the future. “There are no such things as ghosts, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not of boys and not of birds. There’s only the here and now, Emma.”