“And the once was and the soon is going to be,” Emma insisted.

  Katherine laughed and joined in. “And the should be and the could be and the would be.”

  They sang all the way home. Then they boiled the jam jars and carried the ingredients to the summer kitchen. As it turned out, it was the hottest day of the year, ninety-six in the shade, and much hotter once they got the fire going in the shed’s fireplace. They used old peach wood and oak branches and kindling Emma collected in a wicker basket. Walker saw the smoke billowing from the chimney, and came running. When he realized they were using his fort as a kitchen, he was furious.

  “You want everything that belongs to me. This place was mine,” he said, before he turned and stomped back into the woods.

  When the jam was done, they had twenty-four jars, one for every hour of the day, Katherine said. They piled up their finished product in the shade, then carried the cooking pot and what was left of the sugar through the woods. They were hot and sweaty and their mouths were blue from the extra fruit they had eaten. They looked for Walker, but there was nothing as far as the eye could see, except for swarms of mosquitoes. There was the evening star above them. Katherine asked Emma what she was wishing for.

  “What I’d like most of all,” Emma said. “Is for you to love Walker.”

  “But I do!” Katherine was shocked. “Of course I love him.”

  “I mean so it shows.” They had passed onto the lawn, each one holding a handle of the cooking pot. In the sunlight, Emma’s hair glinted golden. “Do it so he knows.”

  LATER, KATHERINE WENT BACK THROUGH THE WOODS and loaded all of the jars of jam into a cardboard box. She could see why Walker liked the summer kitchen. The heat was fading, so that the day already felt like a memory. There were fireflies drifting through the falling dark, and a few luminous clouds in the sky up above. Walker hadn’t come down for dinner; he’d stayed up in his room, exhausted, bad-tempered. Now, as Katherine walked home through the dusky woods, lugging the heavy jars, she thought, He’s ten. The same age as the boy lost at sea.

  Katherine went directly upstairs, where the rooms were hot and close. She had the feeling that love was an anchor, that it could save you when you were drowning, that all you had to do was hold tight.

  Walker was sprawled out on his bed, gazing out his window as fireflies floated by. One blink and they were gone. One radiant beam of light, and then nothing but the dark. Katherine lay down beside her son. He smelled of dirt and summer; he smelled exactly like the woods beyond their house, sharp and sweet and green.

  “What do you want?” He didn’t even look at her. Not a glance.

  “I thought I’d sing you to sleep,” Katherine said.

  Walker laughed, but the sound was dry, like something breaking. “You can’t sing. Everybody knows that.”

  “You’re right.” Katherine thought of the little sailor on his sinking ship, out in the coldest ocean. She hoped there were stars out that night, something to guide him. “I know I can’t,” she admitted. “But I thought I’d try.”

  WISH YOU WERE HERE

  IT WAS A TERRIBLE BIRTHDAY PRESENT, THE absolute last thing Emma would have wanted. To turn thirty was awful enough. To turn thirty after a divorce, with no child, and no career to speak of, other than the teaching job she’d fallen into at the very same school she’d attended as a teenager, now, that was downright dreadful. But of course she couldn’t say any of this out loud—she had to be grateful just to be alive. She’d nearly died when she was six, or so her brother, Walker, told her often enough. He showered her with more details than she’d ever wanted to know: how lucky she was, how other children with the exact same diagnosis had died in less than six months. Walker was a pediatrician now, with three children of his own and a great store of knowledge about leukemia. It was his specialty, actually, and he was thrilled and proud at the strides medicine had made. As for Emma’s illness, the treatments she’d had had cured her, but it also seemed likely they might have left her unable to have a child.

  “That wouldn’t happen these days,” Walker had told her. “They gave patients megadoses of chemo back when you were in treatment.”

  Well, maybe that was fate. Maybe she was meant to be alone. She was a runner, and wasn’t that the habit of a person who preferred to be on her own? She was no team player; she didn’t even care for tennis. She liked to run along the river when the sky was still dark. She thought of herself as a star shooting along Storrow Drive, measuring her strides against the flow of the Charles, racing toward Commonwealth Avenue. At that early hour, Boston seemed like Alexandria or Paris, mysterious and inky, a city filled with smoke and possibility. In the spring, there were scores of magnolias, like wild birds captured and caged. The scent of lilacs was dizzying.

  The route that Emma took had once been underwater, filled in a hundred years earlier with silt and mud, but watery still. Puddles collected. The air had a green tint. Ducks nested in the reeds. Emma was a city girl; to her, ducks were wildlife. Reeds were definitely flora enough. She liked soot, and heat, and grime, and, she was beginning to realize, if she didn’t actually like her aloneness, she was at least comforted by it. She should be grateful; she knew, she knew. She should be thrilled just to be alive. So why was it she preferred to expect nothing? Why was it she felt she’d already ruined everything? As though her life had somehow ended? There were times when she felt so insubstantial it was almost as though people could walk right through her. Lately, she couldn’t visit Walker and his family without becoming sick to her stomach.

  “You’re allergic to us, Sis,” Walker decreed, but that wasn’t it at all. If anything, Emma was allergic to herself. Sometimes, she broke out in a rash, and she knew the reason why. It was punishment for what she should have felt and didn’t. Deep down, she wasn’t grateful. That was the thing. Deep down, she wished she was six and it was the day before her diagnosis, the hour when she still believed in things.

  She was therefore expecting a horrible birthday, but she wasn’t expecting the package her mother sent up from Florida, where Emma’s parents had moved the year before. It was a manila envelope that arrived, too large to be a birthday card, too small to be a sweater or a shawl. When she’d turned twenty-eight, the year of her divorce, Emma had slept around. It was a shameful year; one of her worst. Her husband, Dave, had told her he felt as though he’d married a ghost. She was so unengaged, he blamed her for the way he’d turned to other women. After they broke up, Emma had wanted to prove that she was indeed alive. She had brought home men she didn’t care about, as if for spite. She had done things she’d be too embarrassed ever to admit aloud, even to her best friend, Callie. The worst instance? She’d had sex with someone else’s husband in the couple’s marriage bed. She’d seen a photograph of the other woman, the wife, and her children in the bedroom. The woman had been laughing; she’d thought she was happy, and afterward Emma had felt like writing her a note: Run away, that’s what she wanted to tell this man’s wife. What could he possibly be worth if he slept with me?

  Perhaps to heap more punishment upon herself, she went on to her next humiliation and took up with Alex Mott, who taught history, and who, in many ways, she despised for his rigidity and his contempt for his students. All the same, she’d gone into the utility closet with him during school hours, and she’d dropped to her knees just to hear what he would sound like when he climaxed. It wasn’t much, that’s what she’d discovered. It sounded as though someone was strangling, although whether that someone was herself or Alex, she wasn’t sure.

  During the year she’d been twenty-nine, Emma had had two dates and no sex. Frankly, she hadn’t even been approached for sex, except for that horrible Alex, who looked at her in a way that made her feel like running. Emma now had tremendous sympathy for the girls in her school who’d made the mistake of going too far with the wrong boy, girls who’d had their phone numbers written on bathroom walls. She thought people looked at her oddly during faculty meetings. Perhaps they all knew she’d had degrading, unsatisfying sex with someone she despised in the utility closet, or perhaps they simply disapproved of the fact that she graded some of the girls in her class far too easily, giving A’s to those who didn’t deserve them, merely because they’d been treated unfairly in matters of the heart.

  Emma took to running at the lunch hour just so she wouldn’t have to talk to Alex Mott or anyone else in the faculty cafeteria. She felt like a shadow-woman, a vapor in the hallways at school, a fleeting bit of light racing along the river. Thirty, she supposed, would mean the end of all human contact. Especially once school let out. Usually, she traveled in the summers, often to France, where she rented cheap apartments in August and went running for hours every day. But this summer, she’d made no plans. It seemed she hadn’t the fortitude to call a travel agent or phone a rental agent. She had stopped answering her phone when it rang. Who would be calling her? What did she have to say to anyone? So here she was in the heat of summer, alone on her birthday, which had fallen on a beautiful blue day. She was sitting on the floor of her apartment, a woman of thirty who should have been glad just to be alive, with a manila envelope in her hands. A gift from her parents.

  There were papers inside the envelope, a mishmash of documents, signed by both her mother and father. Emma wasn’t quite certain what it all was until she read the note her mother had enclosed: Happy birthday, baby girl. This was always meant for you.

  It was the farm they’d bought down at the edge of the Cape when Emma’s treatment was through. The very edge of the world, Emma’s father used to say when they drove out from Boston for the summer, and, certainly, it had seemed that way. It was the light that Emma remembered as so very different from city light, thin and yellow, with flecks of gold as the afternoon stretched on. Apricot light, her mother used to call it. Peach light. Summertime light that made a person forget gray skies and city life. The air was sweeter there, the cardinals were a deeper scarlet than their city cousins, and when the crickets called, it was possible to feel the vibration of their song. Each time they opened the car doors and crossed the grass, it was as though they had stepped off the globe, as though the world had stopped turning, as though they might, for a little while at least, be safe.

  Emma and her mother had made jam every summer, up until Emma was fifteen and Walker was eighteen and the two put forth a unified front, arguing to stay in town and get summer jobs. Really, they were selfish teenagers who wanted to hang out with their friends. They were in the bright apex of their lives, when the past was quite meaningless and the present all that mattered. Until then, making jam had been a tradition, the one thing Emma and her mother would do together, even when they weren’t getting along. Every year it was a new variety: blueberry, strawberry, blackberry, mint, corn relish, and, on autumn weekends, Concord grape made from the wild vines beyond the pond. But that was ages ago. For some time, Emma and Walker had been suggesting their parents sell the place. Walker went down with his family only for a week or two in August, Emma hadn’t been there for years, and the renters they’d recently had had been nothing but trouble. There’d been a fire one summer, when some idiots used the outhouse as a place to set up their barbecue. The poor old outhouse, unused, but still appreciated for the valiant way it held up the woody trumpet vine, had been turned to cinders. The applewood floors in the kitchen had been refinished so many times they were nearly worn away. One summer some children, whose family had rented the place for an entire month, had felt proprietary enough to carve their initials into the window ledges on the second floor, where Walker and Emma had had their bedrooms tucked under the eaves.

  “I told you you were the favorite,” Walker said when Emma called to tell him of her unwanted windfall.

  “I was the one to be pitied,” Emma said.

  “Never,” Walker told her. “Not you, kiddo.”

  “You have to say that. You’re a physician and can’t do any harm.”

  “I’m your brother. I could tease you unmercifully if I wanted to, harmful or not. Enjoy the house.”

  Emma planned to check out the farm, set it in order, and sell it as quickly as possible. She was practical that way, and if her parents said now that the house belonged to her, she could sell it if she so desired. To this end, Emma’s best friend and old college roommate, Callie Hecht, was enlisted to take a trip with her, back to the edge of the world.

  “Perfect,” Callie had said right away when Emma phoned. “It will be Midsummer’s Eve. We can call up some spirits.”

  Perfect also for Callie to leave behind her son and her daughter and her husband, David. The good David, they called him, as opposed to Emma’s ex, the evil David, the David with no heart, the one who was convinced he was living with a ghost. Callie was also leaving behind her family’s unruly black Lab, three cats, and a house in Nyack. She was more than grateful for the downtime, and swore she didn’t mind going out of her way, driving to Boston to pick up Emma. All the more time to be alone, she enthused.

  “You want alone?” Emma laughed. “Welcome to my life.”

  Callie double-parked on Commonwealth, and they packed up her station wagon with sleeping bags and pillows, along with huge amounts of groceries and bottles of wine, flashlights, candles, powdered milk, ground French-roast coffee.

  “We’re only going for a weekend,” Callie reminded her friend.

  “Trust me,” Emma had said. “You’ll see. There’s nothing there.”

  THE FIRST THING EMMA NOTICED WHEN THEY PULLED into the long dirt driveway was how abandoned the place looked. She was surprised to realize that the image of the house she kept in mind, even now, was the house as it had been that first year. She was glad that her mother couldn’t see what had happened to it. So much paint had flaked off the shingles, the house barely looked white. Part of the roof had flown off in a spring nor’easter, and the old summer kitchen had collapsed in the same storm and was now little more than a bundle of sticks. The unwieldy sweet peas had so invaded the field that anyone wishing to get to the other side would need to wield an ax in order to walk through.

  “I see what you mean,” Callie said. “This is bleak.” Then she and Emma got out of the car, and Callie shouted “Strawberries!” and took off running in the direction of the field.

  “Watch out for poison ivy!” Emma yelled after her, but it was too late. Callie was already deep into the poison ivy that always bordered the strawberry patch. She was beginning to itch when it came time to unload the car.

  “Well, at least I got us dessert,” Callie said. “In exchange for my pains.”

  The house was cold, the way abandoned houses are, the air inside cooler than the temperature outside. Breathe out, and the air turned to crystals. Breathe in, and it chilled to the bone. They opened the windows, let in some heat and some sun, then made up the beds in the attic. There was evidence of mice, and the rooms needed to be swept. And all the while they were working, Callie was itching like mad. In the afternoon, Emma drove down to the general store, in search of calamine lotion. Siggy Maguire was working the register, as she had for years. When Siggy realized who Emma was she inquired after her mother, then told Emma that last summer the renters they’d had had complained to everyone on the road that the house was haunted. They said a white bird had frightened their son; when the teen-aged girls in the family started fooling around with a Ouija board they’d scared themselves silly, and the whole family had packed up and left.

  “Good riddance,” Emma said smartly.

  “My sentiments exactly.” Siggy was very no-nonsense, and she’d always been so. “Tell your mom I’m still picking blueberries up on your hill like she said I could. They’re not going to waste. If I had the time, I’d clear out some of that poison ivy near the strawberry patch. I saw you lost a lot of trees and that shed of yours finally went down. Your mom always called one of the Crosby boys to take care of such things. I’ll do it for you if you like.”

  Emma agreed, thanked Siggy, then bought more than she should have to be polite. Along with the calamine lotion, she added another bottle of wine and some plum cakes, baked by Siggy’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, just to be neighborly.

  “I remember how cute you were when you first walked in here,” Siggy said as Emma was leaving. “Your hair was just starting to grow back.”

  “I must have looked terrible.” Emma laughed, embarrassed. “Cueball.”

  “Oh, no. You were cute as could be. That’s why I could still pick you out. That sort of thing makes an impression.”

  What sort of thing was that? Emma wondered as she drove back to the house. She took the long route, along the bay. Everything smelled like salt and heat. The eelgrass shimmered and the sand was covered with little scrambling crabs. Today was the longest day of the year, and, oddly, Emma was glad for that. She wanted the day to last. She pulled over onto the side of the road and closed her eyes and tried to imagine walking into the general store at the age of seven, with her scraggly hair, unself-conscious. Was she glad to be alive at that moment? Did she thank Siggy Maguire for the Milky Way candy bar she was given for free, just for being her cute self on that summer day? Just for having survived?

  Emma got out of her car. She could hear the drone of the cicadas. She planned to go for a short run, but instead wound up racing along the inlets of the bay for over an hour. There was sand in her shoes when she got back to the house. Her skin was shiny with sweat and salt.

  “Thank God you’re back,” Callie said by way of a greeting. Itch-ridden Callie had actually been waiting for Emma at the front door. Her arms were covered with poison-ivy bumps, even though she’d washed with the bar of brown soap she’d found in the bathroom. Emma poured calamine lotion onto cotton and watched as Callie covered the rashy spots. “This place is hellish,” Callie said. “While I was lying down I heard something underneath me. I shouldn’t have looked, but I did. There was a mouse under the bed. I screamed and it ran away. And then I ran away as well, and here I am, waiting for you.”