Emma laughed as she put away the provisions she’d bought at the store.

  “It’s not funny. You were right about this place. It really is a wreck. There’s no hot water, did you know that? And the groceries you brought? Well, good luck, because the refrigerator isn’t working.”

  Emma went to the fridge, moved it out from the wall, fiddled with the plug, then adjusted the temperature.

  “Voilà,” she said. “Modern life.”

  Callie was not impressed. “I’m lying down. If that mouse comes back, I’ll kill it. I swear I will. It is true what they say, this day really is endless.”

  This longest day of the year was known as Johnmas, or Sailor’s Eve, a good time to ask for whatever it was a person wanted most. It was the day that often marked the time sailors were in the middle of a sea voyage; most likely what they wanted most was to come home again. They wanted the sight of oak trees and of willows, the taste of sweet green water that would quench their thirst, the sound of a woman’s voice, no matter what her tone might be. When Callie went to lie down, Emma went out to explore the grounds and see what other damage she could find. Tomorrow she would ask Siggy for the name of a trustworthy real-estate agent, but for now she simply enjoyed the quiet. The pond was brackish, but there were still those Egyptian water lilies Emma had always liked. They looked like bits of sunlight on the dark-green water. Bits and pieces of gold.

  She walked over to explore the field of sweet peas. It would take a tractor to get rid of them all. Emma startled the finches feeding on purple thistle as she walked along the edges of the field; she could hear a skittering in the tall grass—field mice, most probably, or those little voles that made their way underground to the tenderest garden shoots. Halfway through the field, Emma tripped over a clod or a bump. She bent and found something odd: a row of undersized turnips were growing there. Emma got down on her hands and knees and dug them out. She took the turnips back to the house, got out an old cookbook, and had a steamy broth cooking by the time Callie came down from her nap.

  “Yum,” Callie said, but when she took her first spoonful of the soup, she burst into tears. “I miss my family,” she admitted. “Can you believe it? I must be crazy.”

  Emma tasted the turnip broth—just a spoonful, really—but her eyes grew moist as well. Crying turnips, truth-teller’s turnips, sweet, but somewhat difficult to eat. Emma had the feeling that if she took another spoonful she’d soon be under some sort of spell.

  “Maybe we’re meant to have a pizza.” Emma spilled the broth down the sink, and the two friends went out to a local bar, where they ordered a clam pizza and a large pitcher of beer, and soon felt much better. On the ride back to the farm, the sky was still light. There were ribbons of pale blue, and a pink tint that looked burning hot, heaven set on fire.

  “Midsummer’s Night,” Callie said. “When you become who it is you really are.”

  As they turned into the driveway, the approaching dark was already filling with fireflies. They ran into the house and rummaged around for two glass jars, then returned to the lawn to catch their prey, grabbing in the dark for the blinking globes of light. They brought the jars into the house and drank red wine in a kitchen that was illuminated only by fireflies. They got old books off the shelf, ones that had belonged to Walker when he was a boy. They read Indian stories about turtles that had made islands in the sea, and about a Viking named Thorwald who was said to be buried on a beach nearby, along with the ballast from his ship. They read that whales were thought to have the ability to chart the way home through the centuries, even when the landscape changed, when inlets were filled in and dike roads were built where once there had only been water. For them, the map remained the same.

  At midnight, Emma and Callie went back out to the lawn with the fireflies. They set them all free, unscrewing the jars in the meadow, making certain to avoid the poison ivy. Emma spun in a circle, and the light reflected off her skin. If this was the night when a person’s deepest self was revealed, then what was inside Emma as she twirled in the field, with the scent of pine and salt in the air? What she wished for most was to be the self she might have been if she’d never been sick, the person she could have become if she hadn’t been stopped in some way, if she hadn’t stopped herself. She looked at her hands in the firefly light, and she thought her husband had been right all along: she hadn’t been there.

  The next morning, Emma went down to the general store while Callie slept in. She bought the Boston Globe and some pancake mix, and then, at the very last moment, a bucket of white paint. Foolish, really. Total mistake. She’d never use it. She’d never painted a room, let alone a house. Up at the register, she asked Siggy if she knew of a good real-estate agent.

  “My cousin, Linda. She’d be only too happy to come look at your house, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Siggy wrote out the phone number. “I called one of the Crosby boys and he’ll be by to clean up that shed and the fallen timber. Whether you stay or whether you go, all that wood lying about is a hazard.”

  Emma made pancake batter when she got back to the house, adding the strawberries that had caused so much trouble. Because Callie was still asleep, she telephoned her mother down in Florida.

  “I can’t believe you gave me this house. I don’t even like houses,” Emma said. “I’m a city girl.”

  “You always liked that one,” Katherine told her. “When you first saw it you said it was the most beautiful place, even though it was the edge of the world and we might fall off. You were very brave.”

  “Remember Siggy Maguire? She said to say hi. She’s still picking your blueberries.”

  “One time I bought groceries there and Siggy ran out after us into the parking lot. She told me you were special.”

  “Yeah, I was special, all right. I was half bald and skinny as a rail. Remember, my hair grew in black for a while. I was a witch, Mother.”

  “Siggy didn’t mean it like that. She had tears in her eyes.”

  “I don’t know if I’m keeping it,” Emma said. “The house.”

  “It was bought on impulse, so it will probably be sold on impulse,” Katherine said. “I wish I was there with you.”

  “Is there any such thing as turnip jam?” Emma asked before she hung up. “I found a whole bunch of turnips in the field.”

  “Chutney,” her mother suggested. “Try that. That was next on my list, but we never got around to it.”

  When Callie woke up, her poison-ivy itch was worse than ever. The bumps on her arms were as swollen as bee stings. She had no interest in the strawberry pancakes, and why should she? She’d already decided to go home.

  “I’m sorry to do this to you,” she told Emma. “I hate to cut our weekend short, but I’m miserable.”

  They packed up the car, but at the last minute, Emma left her own bags in the hall.

  “I’m not going with you. I don’t want you to go out of your way for me. It will be faster if you just go directly to New York, and I can easily take the bus. It stops right on the corner by the general store.”

  “No,” Callie said. “I’d feel like a flat-leaver.”

  “It’s no big deal. Plus, I’m going to make turnip chutney. See?” There were the turnips lined up on the countertop. “I’ve got to stay. And I promise—I’ll send you some.”

  “The crying potion? No thanks. I don’t favor turnips.”

  Emma stood in the driveway and waved. She’d forgotten how still it was here; sometimes the wind was the only thing a person heard. She went out to the field and found twelve more turnips, each one a rosy-brown color, tinged purple and white at the edges. Even forgotten things grew, neatly, it seemed, in a row.

  Emma liked the earthy smell as she boiled the turnips in the kitchen, then diced them, along with onion and dried rosemary. The jelly jars were under the sink, and she washed them and boiled them in an old lobster pot. By now the windows of the house were too steamed up to look through. She thought about the person she’d been before she’d been ill, and the person she had become, and she didn’t see the slightest similarity. Who was that girl who people ran after in parking lots? Who brought tears to a stranger’s eyes? What might she have done if she hadn’t woken one morning with a swelling under her arm? Who might she have been able to love?

  Emma was thinking about this when she saw something outside the window. She felt a chill then, even though the kitchen was hot. As on any jam-making day, the temperature had risen since Emma had begun. It was always that way. Emma and her mother had made jam in the old fallen-down shed, never here in the kitchen, and now Emma knew why. The room had grown terribly warm. It was almost unbearable. Every window was steamy and damp, and water ran down the glass like teardrops.

  Through the steam and the glass, a shadow fell across the floor, a dark blink in the golden daylight. Had Emma seen something outside? She went to the window and cleared a circle of steam with the palm of her hand. There used to be coyotes, she remembered that, and this movement had been darting and quick, the way coyotes were. There used to be blackbirds, and whatever was out there was flickery, just flitting by.

  Emma saw nothing when she looked into the yard, but she left the jars boiling and went to have a closer look. There was sure to be no one there, she was all but convinced of it. She went striding out, confident she had imagined the shadow, sure of it really, and so she almost walked right into him: a boy of about ten, with blond hair. Quick as a coyote, clearly. Cautious as a blackbird, certainly. But nervy enough to watch her through the window. Not on his own property, that much was obvious. A little trespasser, it seemed.

  “I beg your pardon,” Emma said tartly.

  “You don’t have to.” The boy had a matter-of-fact, serious face. “It’s your house.”

  “That’s right. I know it’s mine. I’m Emma. I used to spend summers here.”

  She remembered that local people used to joke that the woods were haunted, that figures slipped in and out of the shadows. Emma’s brother, Walker, now consumed with facts and statistics, had believed in such things. Just because you don’t see a ghost, he once told Emma, doesn’t mean he’s not there.

  This boy in Emma’s yard had scratches all down his arms from jumping around in the brambles. He’d taken the laces out of his sneakers, and his ankles had a wobbly, coltish look. He was probably a fast runner. He could probably tell you the name of every constellation in the sky.

  “What are you making in there?” He was looking past Emma, through the door. Even out here, they could hear the roiling water in the big pot on the stove and the jars clinking as they boiled.

  “Turnip chutney. It’s like jam.”

  The boy wrinkled his nose. “Ugh. Turnips are good for nothing.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Emma said. “You didn’t say who you were, you know.”

  “I come here and go fishing all the time,” the boy said. “Don’t tell anyone or I’ll get into trouble.”

  “From your mother?”

  She saw now he had hazel eyes, the kind that could look green or gray or brown depending on his mood. She saw something there she used to feel herself and had forgotten about until this exact moment.

  “She’s dead,” the boy said.

  Emma took a step back. “Are you the Crosby boy Siggy sent over to clear out the shed?”

  The boy looked at Emma as though he could see her clearly for what she was: a fool who wasn’t even grateful to be alive.

  “I’m ten,” he said. “I don’t work. That’s my father.”

  He nodded, and Emma saw there was indeed a truck pulled over in the field, right in the spot where she’d found the turnips. The boy’s father was gathering the moldering oak planking, the roof shingles, the nails. The bed of the truck was already filled with wood, old branches, rotten floorboards, good for nothing or good for everything, it was impossible to tell.

  “I caught a hundred fireflies last night,” Emma said. “I read a book by their light.”

  “No you didn’t.” The boy had his hands on his hips. He wanted to believe her, but he didn’t know whether or not he should.

  “Come inside,” Emma told him. “I’ll show you how to make turnip chutney. We’ll see if it’s any good.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank the editors of the magazines in which some of these stories first appeared: the Boston Globe Magazine, Boulevard, Five Points, Harvard Review, Hunger Mountain, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review. Special gratitude to Richard Bausch for his kindness and generosity.

  Thank you to the women willing to run off to sea: Perri Klass, Alexandra Marshall, and especially Jill McCorkle. Thanks to my first readers: Maggie Stern Terris, Elizabeth Hodges, Carol DeKnight, Sue Standing, and Tom Martin. Gratitude to Elaine Markson and to Gary Johnson. To my sons, thank you for helping me to understand. And many thanks to Q, who showed me what courage looked like.

  ALSO BY ALICE HOFFMAN

  The Probable Future

  Blue Diary

  The River King

  Local Girls

  Here on Earth

  Practical Magic

  Second Nature

  Turtle Moon

  Seventh Heaven

  At Risk

  Illumination Night

  Fortune’s Daughter

  White Horses

  Angel Landing

  The Drowning Season

  Property Of

  FOR CHILDREN

  Green Angel

  Indigo

  Aquamarine

  Horsefly

  Fireflies

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