"Hey..." I came shuffling into the hal , my heart hammering out its usual crazy rhythm, my joints aching the way they always did whenever I sat stil for too long. "Wel ?"

Robert Morgan shrugged off his coat and slammed his keys down on the little round table, where they splayed like a pile of bones. He didn't even look at me. "It's what we expected. Funeral's tomorrow."

I expected Amelia to come over to me, but she didn't. She stayed put in the far corner of the foyer by the front door, gnawing viciously on her thumbnail. I sank down on the stairs, numb to my thumbnail. I sank down on the stairs, numb to my toes, feeling as if the last living part of me had just been amputated. We'd been separated since childhood, my sister and I, but always, in the back of my mind, I'd told myself that I wasn't alone. Now it real y was just me left to walk the earth. And Amelia. I looked over at her, and her eyes flickered uneasily to the doctor.

"Talk about it later," Robert Morgan growled. "Right now, go and get Bobbie. We have to tel him." But I couldn't move. "Get up," Robert Morgan said. "You can fal apart later. Right now I need help tel ing Bobbie."

I stayed where I was, though, elbows planted on knees. For some reason, al I could think about were the vinyl suitcases Amanda Pickerton had given my sister and me after our father died.

Mine had gotten lost in the detritus of the Dyerson farm shortly after I'd moved, but I'd never minded.

Serena Jane, however, had always kept hers at the back of her closet, ready for Hol ywood. Robert Morgan didn't know it, but on my first morning in the Morgan house, after I'd fried bacon for Robert Morgan and Bobbie, after I'd dried the pans, and made the beds, and swiped a rag around the toilet seats, I went through my sister's things. Most of them I didn't recognize. A pair of midheeled shoes in sensible tan. A silk dressing gown hung over a chair.

A string of pearls with a broken gold clasp. In the closet, her clothes were stil arranged like soldiers for a battle. She stil read movie magazines.

And then I saw her old suitcase sticking out from under the bed, its lid left open like a mouth grappling with an afterthought. Inside, there was a gaudy magazine picture of some Pacific idyl -palm trees, and lots of sand, and, most of al , an ocean as blue as my sister's eyes. Along the horizon, getting as far away as it possibly could, a tiny ship sailed.

I heard footsteps now and sat up straighter on the stairs, opening my eyes. Robert Morgan was shuffling back into the hal , marching Bobbie in front of him by the shoulders. "Son," he said, remaining behind him, "your aunt wants to tel you some news."

I opened my mouth to protest, but nothing came out. Bobbie tipped his elfin face up to me expectantly, al the sadness of missing his mother pinched up around his eyes, which were blue, just like Serena Jane's. He knows, I realized. He already knows. Suddenly, I knew what to do. I stood up and stuck out my hand.

"Come with me," I said. "I've got something to show you." Robert Morgan shot daggers at me, and Amelia was shaking her head, but I didn't care. I was d.a.m.ned if I was going to let Serena Jane's memory sink in a swamp of pond water. The world was bigger than that, I decided. It stil had me in it, after al . And it had Bobbie, too.

"Fol ow me," I ordered, marching back upstairs with Bobbie at my heels. I burst into Robert Morgan's room and opened the closet. "Your mother is gone from this world," I said. "I'm so sorry I have to be the one to tel you that. She was my sister, and I loved her, and the Lord knows I wil miss her, too.

Here"-I swept my arm toward the closet-"take anything you want."

I watched as he delicately touched the hem of a brown skirt, then the sleeve of a blouse. He ran his fingers across the clothes and back again, then buried his nose in an armful of dresses. "This one," he final y said, pinching the faded aquamarine fabric of a dress. It was Serena Jane's wedding dress.

"That one? Oh, honey, are you sure?"

Bobbie nodded fiercely.

"Okay." I lifted the hanger. "Anything else?"

Bobbie shook his head.

"Okay. We'l put this in your closet in your room, and any time you miss your mom, you can look at this and remember her, al right?"

Bobbie didn't say anything, just clutched the dress to his chest and pressed the satin to his nose-the only embrace he had left with his mother. I longed to go to him and put my own arms around him, but this was clearly a private moment, and he was stil getting used to me. I was afraid he would just shrug me off, angered by how little I resembled Serena Jane.

I did what I could. I stood in the same room with him, breathing the same stale air in and out, listening to the trees toss their branches like horse heads in the wind. Shh, shh, shhh, they whispered, doing al the soothing for me, making promises I wasn't sure I could keep. That everything would be fine. That I would be able to fil the hol ow would be fine. That I would be able to fil the hol ow blue void my sister had left. That in growing up, the gap-toothed, wide-eyed boy I saw standing in front of me wouldn't choke and fade but, rather, root and spread with the savage, persistent glory of a weed.

Chapter Fourteen.

At night, its blunt corners dul ed by moonlight and shadows, the Morgan house let its ghosts out to roam. In the summer, racked by heat and insects, the interior wal s of the house groaned like old dogs left to lie in the sun. And in winter, the radiators howled and clanged with the pent-up fury of banshees. It was during the winter, particularly, that I most felt the presence of the Morgan line. I would draw the curtains of my room tight against the cold and then lie tucked up in bed under the flowery quilt, watching the latest of late night TV and trying to ignore the sensation that the wal s were watching me. The door to my room tapped gently against the threshold, pul ed to and fro by licks of frigid air racing through the house, making a kind of mournful music.

There was little evidence of me in my room. My toothbrush, hairbrush, and a tube of lip balm sat on top of one bedside table, and a six-month-old People magazine was overturned on the other, its pages crinkled and turning to yel ow. I took the magazines from Robert Morgan's waiting room the magazines from Robert Morgan's waiting room before he threw them out, digesting the outdated love affairs of movie stars and the antics of rock singers with sanguinity. I'd never flown on an airplane, never tasted champagne, and never even bothered to open a bank account. What little money I needed was provided in the household account, leaving me to keep my own savings in the box underneath my bed. Occasional y, I added a twenty-dol ar bil here or a ten-dol ar bil there, until the wad of cash was as thick as my wrist. If I were to unfurl it, I imagined, it would swel and expand like a sail fil ing with wind, ready to take me and maybe Bobbie across the sea.

I came to understand that life at Robert Morgan's had its inside and its outside components.

Inside, there was television, food, and the sc.r.a.ping tick of the grandfather clock, and outside, there was the world of other people. Whereas my size had been a useful benefit at the farm (and sometimes even unnoticeable among the horses), it suddenly made me al thumbs in the china dol setting of the Morgan residence. During my first year there, I think I broke half of Maureen's old dishes, along with two of the spindly parlor chairs, an heirloom teapot, and an entire army's worth of vacuum cleaner parts.

Eventual y, I just resorted to doing things the way we'd done them at the farm, by the most elemental means possible. A broom replaced the vacuum, and on sunny days I hung the rugs out to beat. I cooked exclusively with the cast-iron pots. Even so, my body stil missed its old regimen of physical labor.

Trapped indoors al day, I began to feel pangs and pains that I'd never noticed before. In colder weather, the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet would go stinging numb, as though bees had been feeding on them. Sometimes spots danced in front of my eyes like polka dots on parade, and, of course, there was my stuttering heart. When I bent over and stood up quickly, or when I heaved myself upright in the morning, it contracted and fluttered, sending unfathomable messages down my veins.

And there were other changes, too. My jaw was growing squarer, it seemed, and my brow wider. But the worst was the weight I started to put on. Maybe it was because I wasn't doing farmwork anymore, or maybe it was the extra bites of food I snuck throughout the day, but as soon as I moved under the doctor's roof, I started gaining weight and couldn't stop. In August, I was wearing my usual overal s and rough men's shirts, but by October, springy new flesh coc.o.o.ned my bel y and thighs, wrapped around my shoulders, and began padding out my thighs. My shirts grew too tight, then my dungarees, until final y I had to haul Serena Jane's old Singer out of the closet and run up some loose dresses for myself. Amelia brought me the fabric- the plainest, darkest, st.u.r.diest she could find, the kind she would have chosen for herself to make her even more invisible. It didn't work that wel for me, though. The first morning I came down for breakfast in one of my new creations, both Robert Morgan and Bobbie stared at me, slack-jawed.

"Why are you wearing a nightgown? And why is it so dark?" Bobbie asked, his mouth half-ful of cereal. Bobbie loved color, much to Robert Morgan's dismay. He thought that boys should pa.s.s their lives attired in the sensible, manly hues of khaki, gray flannel, navy blue, and polished leather.

"It's a dress," I stammered.

"What happened to your other clothes?"

I blushed the hard, deep color of a plum.

"They're getting too smal . I guess I must be getting bigger."

"Cool!" Bobbie shouted, his mouth half-ful of toast. "When I grow up, can I be as big as you, Aunt Truly?"

Robert Morgan scowled and put down his newspaper. "You wouldn't want that, son. You have a hard enough time as it is."

It was true. Bobbie was stil having problems fitting in with Aberdeen's other boys.

During recess, he hung out with the girls his age near the swing or just moped around the schoolyard by himself. He never had any friends over. So I could understand why a boy like Bobbie would want to be as big as me. I could understand it very wel . I leaned over his chair. "Maybe one day," I whispered in his ear, and saw his face light up.

"Don't put ideas in his head," Robert Morgan barked, and laid his coffee spoon on his saucer. I glowered at him and swept the dishes into the sink, aware of the doctor's stare on me. I turned around. "You are putting on too much weight, though," he said. "You should let me examine you."

His eyes narrowed, as if he were already dreaming His eyes narrowed, as if he were already dreaming of some fancy medical report he could publish to wild acclaim. The Habits of an American Giantess, perhaps, with hand-inked il ustrations, charts, graphs, and al manner of pictorial data. No wonder my father had chosen whiskey for his cure-al , I thought.

"I feel fine, real y." The last thing I needed was the doctor's bony fingers prodding me like a Thanksgiving turkey. But it was too late. I could tel the idea was pinging around in Robert Morgan's head, and once he dreamed up a plan, you had about as much chance of getting him to give it up as you would growing wings out of your back and flying to the moon.

"It's irresponsible not to take care of your health. How much do you weigh now? Do you even know?"

I did not. It was probably a lot-I'd grant Robert Morgan that-but as far as I was concerned, that was my business. Except for my single visit to Robert Morgan's father, no one had ever measured me or weighed me, and I liked this freedom. It al owed me to think of my size with some relativity.

With August's horses, for instance, I had been an equal; with Amelia, I was simply solid; and with Bobbie, I knew, I was larger than life.

The doctor's voice broke into my daydream. "One of us is going to lose this argument, Truly, and it's not going to be me. When you come to your senses, I'l be in my office. We can begin an exam whenever you're ready."

I snorted. "The day I walk myself out there wil be the day hel has a rainbow hanging over it."

I looked out the window and was rea.s.sured to spy Marcus bent into the far hedges, his clippers scattering leaves and twigs. I wasn't sure what I was to him anymore, but I stil liked having him near me. Every other day, rain or shine, he showed up to garden, but we interacted little. He was much more heavily muscled now-taut in the cheeks and broad across his shoulders, possessing the body of a man, not a boy. In spite of myself, I remembered al his letters and then thought back to al the kisses I'd had to give him over the years on Valentine's Day, and I wondered if he remembered them, too. I half wanted him to and half didn't, and that indecision made me shy.

I knew that Marcus and I were something deeper and more primal than friends, but we spoke so rarely, we could have been mere recent acquaintances. As a result, I think we were reduced back down to our physical peculiarities. The way I saw it, he'd become a little man whose life had never gotten off the ground, who preferred plants to people, who fussed over his roses as if they were babies. And if I'm being honest, then I have to say that I probably didn't look like a prize myself. I was someone who towered over others but had forgotten about life's smal er blessings. Two or three times during the September hot spel , I'd gone out and offered Marcus lemonade, but it didn't lead to any conversation. None at al . He'd just taken the gla.s.s and gulped the liquid fast, and I'd stood there dumb, my cheeks redder than a rooster's comb.

Well, shoot, I thought now, wiping my hands on the dishrag and turning around to check that the doctor real y had skulked away. He tended to do that-disappear as soon as my back was turned -and it kind of gave me the creeps. On the other hand, it also left me plenty of time to attend to my own thoughts, and right now I thought that I could use the company of a trusted friend. Before I could think twice about it, I grabbed an old scarf off the coat pegs by the kitchen door, wrapped my throat warm, and trudged outside.

The leaves were half changed, and as a result the air looked dappled. I breathed in, appreciating the chil y edge on the breeze. I'd been living with the doctor only some two months, but in that time my lungs seemed to have forgotten the pleasure of raw air. I scuffed my boots in the gra.s.s, crunching a few leaves, relishing the sound. As I neared the back hedge, Marcus heard me swishing through the long gra.s.s and straightened up, wiping a streak of sweat off his brow with his bad hand.

Today, his gloves were off, and I clearly could see the damage that had been done. He was missing his third finger, and his thumb was fibrous and woody, like a stump of gingerroot. The skin puckered and pul ed. It looked painful, but I suppose it wasn't too bad if Marcus was able to work the clippers.

He saw me staring, cleared his throat, and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Hel o. This is a surprise."

I hugged my arms around myself, stil I hugged my arms around myself, stil unsettled by how much weight I'd recently gained.

"I'm just taking some air. It's supposed to rain a little later." I coughed a little. "I guess when the weather changes, we won't be seeing you so much."

A tiny smile twitched around Marcus's lips. "I don't know about that. I prefer the sun, sure, but I'm happy to carry on in the rain, too. Water's useful in its own way."

I ran my hand along the neat border of the hedge and tried to keep my voice casual. "Brings out the worms, right? And the spiderwebs?" I blushed, remembering how he had schooled me so long ago in the science of Spider-Man's amazing abilities.

Marcus fingered a leaf. "Yes, but don't say it like they're so unsavory. Most folks tend to overlook the dark, stinking parts of gardening, but that's where they go wrong. People think of gardening as a pastime, a hobby, but it's real y more than that." He b.u.t.toned up his jacket and glanced at the sky. "A garden is where you can find the whole spectrum of life, birth, and death. It's where poisons meet nectars, where sustenance chal enges rot. A garden, in short, is a theater for war." At the word war, he stopped short and bent over to pick up the clippers again.

I pinched a pair of the hedge leaves together for courage and kept my voice low and smooth, like a mel ow river rock. "Marcus," I urged, "I know we haven't talked in a long time, but I need to know what happened to you overseas. What happened to us?" I suppose the doctor's needling me about my weight over breakfast had made me brave. It just seemed to be the morning for uncomfortable topics. I didn't real y expect an answer, and in any case, I wasn't sure I was ready to hear one, but Marcus hefted the clippers from hand to hand and surprised me.

"Close your eyes," he said, and after a beat of silence, I did. When he started speaking again, his voice had a sour tinge in it that unsettled my stomach. He sounded almost like a stranger, and I found myself wondering if his letters (had he bothered to send them) would have been this bitter.

"Now, picture a palm-frond vil age-the prettiest place you ever did see. Bananas hanging in bunches and rice paddies al around. Friendly people decked in the most beautiful colors of cloth you could ever imagine. Chickens everywhere. Can you see it?"

I nodded, and Marcus continued, his voice a little softer. "Good. Now picture it al going up in flames. The rice paddies swimming with napalm, and a ten-year-old boy whose legs are in ribbons because of a grenade you threw." I heard the blade of the clippers snap, and I opened my eyes. Marcus was chopping at the hedge again, savagely this time, and not looking at me.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

Marcus shrugged. "You and the rest of America. But, you know, when I got hit in my own leg, I was pretty relieved. Not because I got sent home, but because of that kid. I figured we were even."

I plucked a stray leaf off my shapeless homemade dress. Nothing in the world, it seemed, was where it was supposed to be. My sister was cold in the ground. I was living with her husband in his house, and Marcus was stil trapped in a fiery hel in Asia. "I didn't think it would turn out like this," I murmured, choking back tears. "For one thing, I think I'm about two times bigger than when you left. I don't know what's wrong with me."

Marcus stopped clipping for a minute.

"You look fine to me. In fact, better than fine.

Sometimes there's nothing wrong with being big.

That's one thing you find out when you're smal ."

My breath swel ed in my throat. "Thanks,"

I stammered, and turned bright red. I wanted to hug Marcus, but he looked just as embarra.s.sed as I was, so I readjusted my scarf instead and started to inch back toward the house. "Maybe I'l come visit you next time you're here. I'l bring pie."

Marcus straightened up and smiled a little. "I'd like that. Oh, mind the asters," he cal ed as I b.u.mped into a riot of flowers intersecting the hedge bottom. "They're only in bloom another week or so.

Here-" He reached over, plucked several of the purple stars, and handed them to me. "Take them inside. They'l cheer the place up, and they're going to die anyway."

I hesitated. What he was offering wasn't a return to what we'd had, I knew, or even picking up where we'd left off. It was more like the line of the thin white scar curling over his blistered thumb- something new laid over something old. I reached something new laid over something old. I reached out to accept the flowers.

"Thanks." I tucked them safely inside my fist and sniffed their gra.s.sy odor on the way back to the house. Once inside, their purple would wither and leach, I knew, but out here, for the time being, it glowed as bright as the bluebel s st.i.tched on Tabitha Morgan's quilt. Maybe moments like these were like the threads running over those sc.r.a.ps of cotton, I thought, turning the ordinary fabric of life into something whol y unexpected. And maybe if I wasn't finding new material at hand, it was because I wasn't supposed to. Maybe I was supposed to sow from the seed that was already under my fingertips.

Chapter Fifteen.

Who knows how long the doctor and I would have played cat and mouse, but early that December, I opened my eyes to a pain so fierce marauding across the top of my skul that I knew immediately I needed more than the aspirin I usual y swal owed.

When I sat up in bed, my vision blurred and twisted like the picture on a failing television, making me squint. I realized I was staring at the cloth buds on Tabitha's quilt. They seemed to vibrate and whisper.

I c.o.c.ked my head, trying to catch their song, but a wave of nausea crashed over me, and I let myself flop back down on the mattress, grateful to close my eyes again. A few moments later, I opened them again to find Bobbie's face hovering anxiously over mine.

"Aunt Truly?" His voice seemed to be coming from someplace far away. He shook my shoulder. "Are you okay? What's wrong? Dad sent me in here to see what was taking you so long."

I fumbled for the alarm clock on my bedside table. "What time is it?" My words came out bedside table. "What time is it?" My words came out woody and dry.

"Seven-thirty. School starts in half an hour. And Dad wants his breakfast."

At the mention of food, my stomach roiled and lurched. I let out a burp and hauled myself upright again. I waited, but I felt a little better this time. Wel enough, maybe, to fry up an egg or two and pour some coffee. I looked again at Bobbie, whose outline was stil imprecise and fuzzy. Two weeks ago, I'd walked with him to lay some flowers on Serena Jane's grave, and he had bowed his head in a similar solemn pose, like a leaf curling into itself for the winter. I'd had the urge to wrap him tight in the wing of my coat and kiss him warm, but instinct told me he would only pul away if I tried. He was accustomed to me, but not yet attached. He let me read him stories and peck him good night on the cheek, but he stil stiffened when I went to embrace him, and when he left for school, he only waved briefly through the rectangle of the kitchen door before turning around and plodding glumly down the street.

But maybe he was fonder of me than I realized. I recognized an expression of concern colonizing his face now, as if he were contemplating the idea of al the adults in his life shriveling up and blowing away like corn husks. He'd just turned eight, but he was already hovering on the dark threshold of adult cynicism, I saw. One more push from the world, I suspected, and he'd shoot al the way through to the other side of mean, just like his father. Unless I could figure out a way to keep that from happening. I swung my feet onto the floor.

"I'm a bit lopsided this morning," I rea.s.sured him while the room righted itself and lurched again, "but I bet your daddy is a genius when it comes to healing. I bet he can make anyone better, even me."

Bobbie frowned and sat next to me on the bed. "I thought you said you'd be hel -bent before you let Dad lay a hand on you."

I scowled. That was true. Over the past month, al through the lead-up to Thanksgiving, Robert Morgan had kept up his pressure to examine me, and so far I'd resisted him step for step, a fact that left him practical y frothing at the mouth. He'd wheedled, and reasoned, and final y resorted to out-and-out insults. "You're as pigheaded and mean-minded as your father was, Truly," he p.r.o.nounced at the table one awful night. "You should be grateful you're living with a person of science and reason, and not stil stuck on that mudflat the Dyersons cal a farm."

"I liked it there," I replied calmly. "They were good to me."

"If they were so good to you, then why did they let you grow into a behemoth? Why didn't they ever bring you in to see my father when something could have been done?"

I put down my fork. "And pay with what?

A good tip at the track? Besides, when I was out there, I wasn't this heavy. It's only since I've moved in with you that I've gained al this weight."

That shut the doctor up for a minute, but it stil didn't dissuade him from trying to guess how much I'd put on. He eyebal ed me. "I'd say it's thirty, maybe forty pounds. In just a few months. Do you pay attention to how much you're eating?"