“What I want is to travel all over the world and play the piano,” said Billy Jackson. “What do you want?”

  “I want Charisse to live forever,” said Ferris.

  Billy Jackson took hold of Ferris’s hand. She could feel the music in him. His fingers thrummed and buzzed the same way guitar strings did after you plucked them.

  “Charisse says that every story is a love story,” said Ferris.

  “Yeah,” said Billy. “I know.”

  “Do you believe it, though?”

  Billy Jackson looked up at the sky. “Yes,” he said.

  Boomer barked again. The screen door to the steakhouse creaked open.

  “You big old mess of a dog,” Ferris heard Pearl say. “You big mess. I ain’t never in my life seen a dog with so much fur. I can’t tell one end of you from the other.”

  The screen door banged shut.

  Ferris leaned forward and looked over the edge of the roof. Boomer was standing with a big bone in his mouth, wagging his tail.

  “But what’s the point of love if people die?” Ferris said, still staring down at Boomer.

  “That’s what music is for,” said Billy Jackson.

  Which wasn’t really an answer; but still, it seemed like one.

  Billy Jackson started to hum.

  “ ‘Mysterious Barricades,’ ” said Ferris.

  Billy Jackson nodded. He kept humming.

  The two of them sat on the roof of the steakhouse until the first pinpricks of stars appeared, and then they walked back to Ferris’s house, Boomer trotting behind them carrying his big steak bone, Billy Jackson still humming, bats flitting around their heads, the crickets singing and singing—music everywhere.

  On Monday, Ferris and her mother and Charisse and Pinky went to the Devon Medical Center to see what was wrong with Charisse.

  Charisse wore a flowered dress. Pinky had on her black cape, and Ferris’s permed hair seemed to have grown even fuzzier and wilder.

  “It’s a permanent,” said her mother. “That’s what it’s called. A permanent. That means you’re in it for the long haul. Think about that the next time you stop in to visit your aunt Shirley.”

  Ferris thought about it. It didn’t cheer her up much.

  “Hello, hello,” said Dr. Trench when he walked into the examining room and found the four of them waiting for him. “How exciting! It’s the traveling circus.”

  “Something like that,” said Ferris’s mother. She sighed.

  “How are you, Sarah?” said Dr. Trench.

  “I’m fine. It’s Charisse we’re worried about.”

  “Hop up on the examining table, Mrs. Wilkey,” said Dr. Trench. “We’ll take a look under the hood.”

  “Hop up on the table?” said Charisse, her voice dripping with disdain.

  Dr. Trench smiled. “Now, now, Mrs. Wilkey,” he said.

  “Hop up on the table, and you’ll look under the hood?” said Charisse.

  “Let me try again,” said Dr. Trench. “If you would be so kind as to climb up on the examining table, Mrs. Wilkey.”

  Charisse stood up. With her head held high and her purse in her hands, she stepped toward the table.

  “Do you want help?” said Ferris.

  “I do not, darling,” said Charisse. She smiled at her. “It is, however, very kind of you to offer.”

  “I danced with your father, you know,” Charisse said to Dr. Trench once she was up on the table.

  Ferris thought that Dr. Trench seemed too old to have a father. His face was lined and weary-looking.

  “Oakley Trench. He and I danced together at the VFW,” said Charisse. “He was not a good dancer, but it made no difference. We were young.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Trench. “Please stick out your tongue, Mrs. Wilkey.”

  “I’m not here about my tongue.”

  “I can show you my tongue,” said Pinky. She was standing next to Dr. Trench, her black cape trailing on the floor.

  “No need,” said Dr. Trench to Pinky without turning around. “What are you here about, then, Mrs. Wilkey?”

  “I have puffy feet,” said Charisse. “And swollen ankles. I’ve never had puffy feet or swollen ankles. It’s unsightly. I’ve always prided myself on my elegant feet and my shapely ankles.”

  “Tell him how you feel, Charisse,” said Ferris’s mother. “Not how you look. How you feel.”

  “Will you pull my loose tooth?” said Pinky to Dr. Trench.

  Dr. Trench looked down at Pinky and studied her for a minute. “You’re a tough customer. I bet you could do it yourself with a pair of pliers.” He winked.

  “Sit down, Pinky,” said Ferris’s mother.

  “No,” said Pinky, and she left the examining room with an angry swirl of her black cape.

  Ferris was relieved to see her go.

  “Come back here,” said Ferris’s mother. But she didn’t say it like she meant it.

  Dr. Trench put his stethoscope on Charisse’s chest and listened intently. He looked like someone trying to crack a safe, working to get the combination to Charisse.

  “Hmmm,” said Dr. Trench.

  Ferris felt a sense of foreboding.

  She spelled the Mielk vocabulary word quietly to herself.

  F-O-R-E-B-O-D-I-N-G.

  She imagined Billy Jackson standing beside her, defining the word.

  “A feeling that something bad is going to happen,” she heard Billy Jackson say.

  “Hmmm,” said Dr. Trench again, the stethoscope still on Charisse’s chest.

  “Hmmm,” repeated Charisse. She rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue at Ferris, and Ferris was suddenly overcome by love for her grandmother—for her elegant feet and shapely ankles, her gnarled hands and bright eyes, her refusal to follow directions, her insistence on not letting anybody tell her who to be.

  “You are too much of a rule follower, Ferris,” Charisse had said to her once. “You have to insist on being yourself. Do not let the world tell you who you are. Rather, tell the world who you are. Pinky understands this. She takes it to an extreme, of course.”

  Ferris made sure that Dr. Trench couldn’t see her, and then she stuck her tongue out at Charisse.

  Charisse laughed, and Ferris felt another wave of love roll over her. The wave was so strong, so bright, that she had to bend over and take a deep breath.

  “What in the world are you doing, Ferris?” said her mother, who was digging through her purse, looking for something.

  There came a scream from somewhere in the building.

  “Oh no,” said Ferris’s mother, looking up from her purse. “Pinky.”

  “Pinky,” said Ferris.

  “Go get her,” said her mother.

  “Why do I always have to go get her?” said Ferris.

  “You’re her sister, that’s why. Go.”

  Ferris stepped out of the examining room and bumped into a nurse whose name tag read MARLA DEAN.

  “Excuse me,” said Ferris.

  Marla Dean was staring down at the palm of her left hand in wonder. There was some blood. Actually, there was quite a lot of blood.

  “She bit me,” said Marla Dean, still looking at her hand. “She was wearing a black cape, and she had the most beautiful face. She had the face of an angel, and she bit me.”

  Pinky did have the face of an angel—evidence, said Ferris’s father, of the universe having a fantastic and highly developed sense of humor.

  “ ‘Where are you going in such a hurry, sweetheart?’ That’s what I said to her,” said Marla Dean. “And I put out my hand, just . . . you know? As a calming gesture? And she took hold of it and bit me! She bit my hand.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ferris. It occurred to her that she would probably spend the rest of her life apologizing for Pinky. She started to run down the hallway.

  She looked in all the examining rooms, and then she went out to the waiting room, where she found Pinky sitting in an orange plastic chair with her legs crossed, turning the pages of a Highlights magazine.

  “Your hair looks stupid,” said Pinky when she saw Ferris. “I can’t believe how stupid it looks.” She bent her head and went back to studying the magazine. She turned a page. She had a very peaceful look on her face.

  “Did you bite a nurse named Marla Dean?” said Ferris.

  “I am an outlaw wanted in all fifty states!” shouted Pinky. She threw the magazine down and went racing out the automatic doors of the clinic, her cape flying behind her.

  “Is that your sister?” said the receptionist.

  “No,” said Ferris.

  “You have such interesting hair.”

  “Thank you,” said Ferris.

  She walked past the receptionist and through the doors and out into the parking lot, where, of course, Pinky was nowhere to be seen.

  That was how the visit to the doctor’s office went.

  It wasn’t until later in the day that Ferris learned what Dr. Trench had said—that Charisse’s heart wasn’t working the way it should.

  “How should it work?” said Ferris to her mother.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table. The magnolia tree was standing outside the window, looking in at them, listening.

  “It’s not pumping efficiently,” said her mother.

  Below them, in the basement, Uncle Ted was painting the history of the world. Ferris’s father was in the attic, assessing the raccoon situation.

  Before he’d climbed the attic stairs, he’d said, “I believe we may have more than one.”

  “More than one what?” said Ferris’s mother.

  “Raccoon,” said her father.

  “Larger problems loom on the horizon,” said Ferris’s mother.

  “The dogs bark but the caravan passes by,” said Ferris’s father when he left the kitchen and headed for the attic. He took a tennis racket with him for protection.

  Pinky was in her room. She had been grounded for an indefinite amount of time as a punishment for biting Marla Dean.

  Ferris and her mother had found Pinky downtown in Buoy Hardware, talking to Mr. Buoy.

  “What a charming child,” said Mr. Buoy.

  Mr. Buoy was even older than Charisse. He always wore a bow tie. He had a hearing aid in his left ear.

  “It was a delight to converse with her,” he said as he fiddled with his hearing aid. “She has a deep interest in all things hardware, particularly pliers.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Buoy,” Ferris’s mother had said as she pushed Pinky ahead of her out of the store.

  And now Ferris was sitting across from her mother, and Boomer was resting his head on Ferris’s left foot, and Ferris was learning that something was wrong with Charisse.

  “What does that mean?” said Ferris. “What does it mean not to pump efficiently?”

  Her mother looked her in the eye. She said, “There’s water around her heart. And that makes it hard for the heart to work. It’s a disease. It’s called congestive heart failure.”

  “Failure?” said Ferris.

  “There’s medicine for it,” her mother said gently. “Dr. Trench gave her the medicine.”

  “Okay,” said Ferris.

  She got up from the table and climbed the stairs to Charisse’s room, her heart heavy inside of her, Boomer following behind her.

  Charisse was asleep in bed, her hands folded on her stomach. Ferris walked into the room, but Boomer sat down in the hallway.

  Ferris climbed into the window seat. She stared hard at the threshold. She wanted desperately to see the ghost, but she couldn’t see anything except the carpet in the hallway and Boomer’s worried face.

  She picked up the worn pack of playing cards and shuffled them. Charisse had taught her how to shuffle cards; Charisse had learned from her father. “My father, your great-grandfather, was a rake, darling. A charmer, a ne’er-do-well, and a gambler of the worst sort. Why, when I was a child, he gambled this house away. Fortunately, fate intervened. Which is to say that my mother came to the rescue and secured a loan from her father. Those were turbulent times, but then I suppose all times are turbulent in one way or another.”

  Ferris shuffled the cards again, and then again. They made a fluttery, hopeful sigh. The only other noise in the room was the whistling sound Charisse’s breath made as it entered and left her body.

  Ferris put down the cards and got up from the window seat. She went to the bed and knelt down and put her left ear on Charisse’s chest.

  Charisse didn’t move.

  Ferris listened, and she heard it, Charisse’s heart. It was singing a half-broken, half-hopeful song that sounded like “I celebrate myself, and sing myself ”—Whitman’s words from Leaves of Grass.

  Charisse stirred. She put her hand on top of Ferris’s head.

  “You strange, wondrous child,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “Listening to your heart,” said Ferris. She didn’t move. “Tell me how you caught me. Tell me how you recognized me at first sight.”

  “Darling,” said Charisse. “She’s here.”

  “Who is?” said Ferris.

  “The ghost,” said Charisse. “She’s standing right in the doorway. Look.”

  Ferris lifted her head. Boomer was standing at attention. All his fur seemed to be electrified. He made a strange noise—a swallowed, strangled bark.

  “I don’t see her,” said Ferris.

  “Shhh,” said Charisse.

  A great gust of air blew through the room, and the pack of cards went flying up off the window seat. The cards swirled through the air and then landed, scattered, all over the floor.

  And then there was silence, stillness.

  Ferris could hear her own heart beating.

  And then she couldn’t even hear that.

  Everything stopped. The room seemed to hold its breath.

  Caesura.

  A Mielk vocabulary word—an interruption or break. A silence.

  Which was shattered by a high-pitched scream.

  “Yeth!” someone shouted. And then, “Out of my way, foolth!”

  Pinky.

  Pinky had pulled out two of her front teeth with a pair of pliers. One tooth had been loose; the other one Pinky had pulled as an “ecthperiment.”

  There was blood on the floor, little drops that led from Pinky’s room down to the kitchen and from there down to the basement, where Pinky had gone to show Uncle Ted her toothless, bloody smile.

  “I will not lie,” said Uncle Ted. “The child scared me.”

  They were at the dining room table—Ferris’s mother and father, and also Uncle Ted, who was unshaven and wild-eyed and still in his bathrobe, and Billy Jackson, who was sitting next to Ferris, in Charisse’s seat.

  Charisse had not come down to dinner. She was resting.

  Pinky was in her room doing who knows what. Plotting her revenge on someone, most likely.

  “The child looked like a ghoul,” said Uncle Ted. “She was absolutely dripping blood.”

  “I’m at wit’s end,” said Ferris’s mother. “Two teeth! One of them not anywhere near loose.”

  “They’ll grow back,” said Ferris’s father.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is she extracted her own teeth with a pair of pliers! She’s six years old! What’s going to happen when she’s a teenager?”

  “Let’s not think about that,” said Ferris’s father.

  A door upstairs slammed shut.

  “That better not be Pinky,” said Ferris’s mother. “I told her not to leave her room ever again.”

  Billy Jackson got up from the table. “Thank you, Mrs. Wilkey,” he said. “That was a really good supper.” He went into the living room and started playing the piano.

  “Ferris,” said Uncle Ted. “I wonder if I could have a word with you in private.”

  Ferris’s heart sank all the way down to her toes. Now she was going to have to tell Uncle Ted how she had betrayed him, how ignoble she had been.

  Plus: Charisse had heart failure! And Pinky had pulled her teeth out with a pair of pliers! And the ghost had thrown a pack of cards!

  It was all too much.

  “Yes, sir,” she said to Uncle Ted.

  The sound of “Mysterious Barricades” drifted into the dining room.

  “Billy?” called Ferris’s mother.

  “Yes, ma’am?” Billy Jackson called back, still playing.

  “I wonder if there’s a different song you could play?” asked Ferris’s mother.

  The piano music stopped.

  Another caesura occurred.

  “No, ma’am,” said Billy Jackson into the silence. “I mean, this is the song that wants to get played right now.”

  “I understand,” said Ted. “Sometimes, you just have to do what the music demands.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right,” said Billy Jackson.

  “It’s like with me and the painting,” said Ted.

  Ferris’s mother sighed.

  Billy Jackson came back into the dining room. “Could I see it?” he said. “Could I see your painting?”

  Which is how Ferris and Billy Jackson and Boomer ended up standing with Uncle Ted in the basement, staring at the foot.

  “It’s harder than I thought it would be. I could see it all in my mind’s eye; I truly could. The vision was delivered to me in what I think of as a biblical fashion. I’m not lying, son,” Ted said, turning to Billy Jackson. “Angels were moving their wings and sending out waves of light. That’s how it felt. But I have to admit that I’m having a hard time living up to that glorious inspiration.”

  Billy Jackson nodded. He adjusted his glasses. “I understand.”

  And then Ted turned to Ferris and asked the question she had been dreading. “Did you find out whether Shirley is softening toward me, honey? Do you think she could be working her way toward forgiveness, toward welcoming the prodigal husband home?”

  Ferris felt her face get hot. “No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know. Because the only thing that happened at the salon was that Shirley permed my hair.”

  “I did notice that your hairdo was somewhat changed.”

  Ferris took a big breath and said, “I ended up telling her about the foot, Uncle Ted, and she wasn’t very happy, and I’m not sure how any of it really happened.”