No matter how friendly the people of Aberdeen were to her, no matter how grateful for healing their sick children, she stil must have sensed an undercurrent of danger best remedied by the twin conventions of marriage and motherhood. After al , spinsters have always been a social problem al up and down history, and spinsters with spel s are even more unappealing.

I have it easy in some ways. No one's ever real y expected much of anything out of me- certainly not snagging a husband or children of my own. My size makes me speak slowly and move slowly, and it's also paradoxical y enabled me to slip through cracks no one in Aberdeen would ever think possible. Like testing out Tabitha's mixtures. Or kil ing off Prissy Sparrow right under Robert Morgan's pointy nose.

Based on what the doctor had told me about my own condition, I thought the chances were pretty good that I might one day require the same grace I was about to extend to Prissy. It gave me comfort to know that if Robert Morgan's medicines didn't work, and if I couldn't find cures in the quilt, I stil would have a more comfortable option than the smoking end of a pistol or the long drop of the train trestle outside of town. But the real reason I took so much time poring over the scattered wings and vines of the quilt almost pains me to admit now. Much as I of the quilt almost pains me to admit now. Much as I would like to think so, my intentions weren't total y altruistic. In fact, they were the absolute opposite.

They arose from pure, unadulterated revenge.

I knew Priscil a Sparrow was sick and aging, and I knew she'd gotten down on her knees in front of me to beg, but I can't lie. There was a tiny part of me that thril ed to see those things. It was as if the child inside of me were standing with arms akimbo, bottom lip stuck out, sulking. I was glad that the woman who'd first labeled me a giant, and had stolen the one thing left belonging to my mother, and had never given me a drop of praise, was il . I was happy to watch her die heartbroken and in solitude.

In fact, I was happy to see that even dying wasn't working out for Miss Sparrow. Finally, I thought, she's getting a taste of what it's like to have your body betray you.

Wel , that lasted al of about a week. The problem was that I couldn't reconcile the ferocious Miss Sparrow of the past with the turbaned lady propped on her bony knees in front of me. If I were better at holding on to a grudge, I'm sure I could have managed to pin down her ghost, but, as it tends to do, the present won out, and I let my school memories dissolve like tarnish in a vinegar bath.

Release, the wings on the quilt seemed to urge, the edges of them so faint that they shifted when I tried to trace them. Release. And so, on a Sat.u.r.day in early summer, I found myself scouring roadsides, empty fields, fence lines, and even the weedy thickets of the town green. Any neglected spot where deadly plants might happen to grow, al the way out to the fence of the cemetery.

It was the kind of day that asked you to take off your shoes and go creek walking or wriggle your toes in the gra.s.s, not a day for col ecting the ingredients like these. I had made a list. Oleander and nightshade. Foxglove, and thorn apple, and devil's trumpet. Nettles for sting and bite. Al the herbs that Marcus had warned me against. Al the ones I'd used on Sentinel-and more. That night, it took me four hours to cook them into a kind of sludge. I made some of my own improvements, adding peppermint to ease the bitterness, and chamomile to make the drink gentle, and then some sugar to make what I was about to do go down a little sweeter. I let the mixture cool and then strained the liquid into three smal jars, capping them tight and setting them on the table. How much would it take to do Prissy in? I wondered. A spoonful? An entire cup? The whole jar? When it came to questions of dosage, I was beginning to realize, Tabitha's quilt was more a blueprint than a handbook. It didn't have al the answers.

In the morning, I woke early and made sure Bobbie and the doctor were stil sleeping before I stole back down to the kitchen and fetched a basket from the pantry. I wrapped one of the jars in a clean tea towel and laid it inside the basket, then I sat down and wrote a quick note. This is what you've been waiting for, I wrote. Drink it all at once. Don't hesitate. G.o.d bless. I shoved the note into an envelope and tied it to the basket handle with red ribbon. There were two jars left. I put them in the pantry, where the liquid shimmered and glowed with an unsettling light. Two jars left for me just in case the doctor's worst-case scenario came true. Or maybe not just in case. Maybe for when it did.

Priscil a's newspaper-folded into thirds like the doctor's-was sitting on her stoop when I arrived, along with a bottle of milk. I glanced up and down the sidewalk, but al I could see were ticking sprinklers, her neighbor's newspaper stuck in his hedge, and a calico cat. I nudged the basket up against her door, then turned and walked away.

On the way back to the doctor's, I imagined Prissy tearing open the envelope, reading my note, and then tossing it away. Then I pictured her uncapping the jar and inhaling the gra.s.sy concoction before leaning her head back and pouring it straight down her gul et. Summer would fizz along the back of her tongue, I hoped-fresh hay, and the nip of lemonade, and the smoky blare of fireworks. A time when everything in the world was youthful and plump and ful of lazy grace. Maybe the faces of her students-every one of them, right from the beginning-would swirl before her eyes, rising up to meet her. I like to think so. I like to think I was even marching at the front of them, leading the show, my stocky legs scissoring, my hair flying, my hands clapping out the joyous overdue music of the seraphs.

Chapter Twenty-one.

After Prissy's death, I fel into a kind of limbo where it seemed time went on without me, like a river bending its way around a mountain. For one thing, I stopped growing. I don't know if it was the doctor's pil s or maybe the cures from the quilt, but something halted my increases so that for the first time in my existence, I knew the suffocating equilibrium of absolute stil ness. A series of winters came and went in Aberdeen, snows piling deep and then melting away again, the lilac hedges on the side of the house creeping higher and higher until Marcus arrived to hack them back, but through it al , I was just a bored observer, my viewpoint perfectly fixed, the world around me so distant and smal , I felt as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope al the time.

"What's the matter with you?" Marcus asked as I was hanging out the washing one afternoon. We had al the modern conveniences, but I loved the way the sunshine made the sheets smel , so I used the chance of good weather to air the so I used the chance of good weather to air the household linens. I couldn't remember the last time I'd done it.

"What do you mean?" I mumbled, my mouth ful of pegs.

Marcus reached up gently and removed them, then held his hand open so I could pluck them from his palm, one by one. "This is the first time I've seen you outside in weeks this year. You mope around the kitchen al day, but you barely cook anything anymore. You've gotten pasty as a ghost.

You're avoiding Amelia's and my company, and Bobbie says you can go whole days without even speaking. I think he misses you."

I.

missed him, too. A ful -blown adolescent now, he was like a leaky bucket getting emptier by the day, the soul dribbling out of him in a steady stream. Over the past few years, his voice had cracked and deepened, and he had sprouted wisps of hair under his arms and in his groin, but I was pretty sure the normal path of his development had ended there.

The truth was, Bobbie was more like a teenage girl than a teenage boy, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. He spent hours in the bathroom tweezing and grooming, relishing the sting of each and every pluck, and I knew he kept a stash of stolen makeup hidden under a loose floorboard in his room. On rainy afternoons, when his father had appointments in the clinic, Bobbie would sweep an arc of Tangerine Dream over his bottom lip before anointing his eyelids with the glittery mystery of Midnight Blue. Holding a mirror so close to his face that his breath fogged the gla.s.s, he would watch as his real self emerged-the wil owy one with sooty eyelashes. The one whose hips swung like a delicate bel . The one he kept trapped in a fairy-tale tower, awaiting a handsome prince.

"Am I as glamorous as Princess Bugaboo?" he'd ask, peeking his head around my door and fluttering his eyelashes with the efficiency of a harem vixen. The first time I caught him painted up, I have to confess, I was just the tiniest bit revolted. Not shocked. Not outraged or even embarra.s.sed, just a little repulsed-the way I would have been if I'd come across weevils frolicking in the flour bin.

"What have you got on your gob?" I cried, my reflection rearing up behind his in the bathroom mirror like a mountain hogging the sky. My own hair was threaded with gray, I saw, and there was no definition left in my face anymore. My cheeks melted into my neck, which rol ed and spil ed onto the b.u.t.ts of my shoulders, which rounded into my arms and wrists. My breath scuttled around inside me like a ragged animal trapped in a cage.

Bobbie cringed. "Don't be mad, Aunt Truly. Please. I think I'm supposed to look like this."

I was about to make him wash it off, but I looked again and saw that he was right. He did look better-more alive. I reached out and cupped his chin. "It's okay," I said, gazing into his adorned eyes.

"Let's just keep this quiet, though. I don't think your dad needs to know. It'l be our little secret."

And it was, until Robert Morgan came stomping in from work early one afternoon and ruined everything. Panicked, Bobbie tried to smudge the blush off his cheeks, but when he descended the front steps, he saw his father gaping at him.

"What the hel is on your face?" Robert Morgan demanded, and Bobbie, with a quick wit I didn't know he possessed, told him it was pink highlighter.

"I fel asleep on my books and smeared ink on my face," he said, which made no sense but seemed to satisfy his father.

"Go and wash it off," Robert Morgan ordered, and then added, "And why don't you use blue ink, like a normal boy?"

"Hinkleman's was out of blue," Bobbie mumbled, slinking back upstairs, sweat slicking him like spring rain. He stepped into the bathroom and washed his face, then picked up one of the rough towels, rubbing his eyelids and lips raw, rubbing that side of him out of existence.

I know how that feels, I wanted to tel him, but lately if I tried to talk to him, tapping on his door gently or luring him into the kitchen with cookies, he always rebuffed me, saying he had too much homework or that he just wasn't in the mood.

"It's not like you're my mom," he sneered once, grabbing a fistful of the fudge I'd set out on the kitchen table. I sucked in my breath as if I'd been slapped.

"I'm the closest thing you've got left," I snapped, and then it was Bobbie's turn to look snapped, and then it was Bobbie's turn to look stunned. "Wait, I'm sorry," I cal ed after him as he stormed out of the room. I'd never before spoken harshly to him, but it was too late. The damage was done. After that, he grew even more distant and sulky, avoiding eye contact with me at dinner, giving one-word answers to his father's questions about his day.

"What's going on with him?" Robert Morgan wanted to know. "Does he talk to you? Is he on drugs?" His face clouded.

I looked up, startled. Was Bobbie? I didn't think so-at least not on a regular basis. But what could I tel Robert Morgan about Bobbie's particular brand of heartache? That his son was more comfortable in lipstick than jeans? That he wasn't growing out of his pretty stage? And why should I have to say anything at al , I wondered, when the truth was right in front of al our eyes?

Marcus saw it, as he saw al facts. "The boy's just different," he said, shrugging, when I tracked him down by the lilacs to ask him his opinion. "It's hard in a town like this, the size of a cricket wing. Anything the least bit out of the ordinary seems about five times worse than it real y is."

Amen to that, I thought.

He squinted. "You know, in Vietnam, they had these bars in the cities, where the boys dressed up like girls and danced and sang and everything." I tried to picture Marcus in a place like that, his fist unscarred and curled around a dirty bottle of whiskey, but I couldn't. His eyes were too peaceful these days, and the strongest thing he ever touched was hot tea. He shrugged. "After a while, the fel as kind of forgot who was who and just enjoyed the show."

I twirled a leaf. "So what are you suggesting?"

Marcus smiled. "Enjoy the show, Truly.

Don't try to direct it." His hand brushed mine, and I blushed and jerked backward a few inches. He ignored my reaction, his gaze focused on the middle distance. "Say, what would you think about putting in a proper garden out here? I've been studying some old designs from the nineteenth century that would real y complement the house. You and the doctor could have your own vegetables."

I looked around at the stretch of lawn, hedges, and the borders of perennials. As long as I could remember, these things had always been the same. Every spring, daffodils and irises shot up in alternating bands, and every summer, primroses lazed along the back fence.

"I don't know," I said. "The doctor won't even let me change my brand of shoe polish. And these were al his mother's plants."

Marcus's face darkened. "I suppose you're right. It's just that, wel , d.a.m.n it, I real y want to do a little something more than clip other people's boxwoods."

Suddenly, I could see how important building a garden was to him, how maybe he actual y wanted to put down some roots rather than just dig at them. I wondered if he ever got frustrated knowing al the fancy Latin names for the bushes around him, not to mention the complicated biology of photosynthesis, but in the end being just a kind of janitor for other people's yards. "Why don't you plant yourself a garden at the cemetery?" I suggested.

"There's acres of s.p.a.ce out that way."

Marcus shook his head. "Munic.i.p.al land.

It's not al owed. Besides"-he cast an eye across the gra.s.s, avoiding my gaze-"I also sort of wanted to do it for you."

I looked down at my hands-swol en, mottled, the fingers clumped like sausages. Hands no man in his right mind, even Marcus, could ever love. "Thanks," I choked, "but you're probably better off trying someone else's yard." I sidled another few inches away. It was almost noon. Time to see the doctor for another injection. Two sets of pil s and one needle a day were apparently al that was keeping me from floating away like a hot-air bal oon. "I have to get back inside now. The doctor needs to see me for something."

Marcus looked as though he wanted to say something else, to add a thought, but I didn't give him the chance. Frankly, I didn't want to hear it.

At that precise moment, I didn't think I had any more room inside me for the weight of anyone else's secrets.

During Bobbie's last year of high school, he final y made a friend. Salvatore was a year or two older than Bobbie but was struggling to graduate. He lived in Hansen but started coming home with Bobbie in the afternoons, and where Bobbie was fair and flighty, Salvatore was al lean muscle and bulk, sleek as a bul and about as proud. Right away, I didn't like him.

"He refused to shake hands when he met me. He doesn't eat any of the food I fix for you boys, and his eyes are shifty," I complained to Bobbie. "He looks nervous al the time, like he's just stolen something, or he's thinking about it."

Bobbie sneered. "Salvatore's never stolen anything in his life. You just don't like him because you know how much I like him."

I wanted to argue with Bobbie, but he had a point. You couldn't watch them together and not see it. When they sat at the table, their feet always got to touching underneath it, and when Salvatore walked through the back door to go home, it was with Bobbie's hand nestled in the smal of his back.

"What are you going to do if your father sees?" I asked Bobbie, and he frowned.

"He won't."

"But what if he does?"

The attic fixed al that. During a freak autumn hailstorm, Bobbie and Salvatore went looking for a place to smoke a joint. Bobbie's room was out. I was barricaded in my room down the hal , watching TV, and he didn't want to risk it. The rest of the house was out for obvious reasons, and Bobbie was just about to suggest they give it up when Salvatore asked, "Don't you, like, have an attic in this place, man?"

When he and Bobbie emerged into the peaked room, he lit the joint, sucked in a plume of sweet smoke, and surveyed the jumble of wooden steamer trunks, pyramids of boxes, garbage sacks, and a pile of what looked to be gardening implements. "Very cool," he declared. "I bet some of this s.h.i.t is valuable, man. You should try to sel it."

But Bobbie had no interest in making a profit. Instead, he was concentrating on the lace edge of a parasol peeking from underneath a rol of carpet. He took the joint from his friend's hands and lifted it to his lips, inhaling with a glee that far exceeded the thril of pot. He picked up the parasol and spun it over his head.

"Beautiful," Salvatore said grinning. Then he leaned forward and kissed Bobbie. Shocked, Bobbie dropped the parasol, then quickly leaned in for another kiss, his mouth broken open like an egg, everything inside him oozing out. Next to him, the smoke rose and broke apart, turning to wisps that were fragile as cobwebs.

After that, every afternoon I heard Bobbie and Salvatore sneaking up to the attic, where they would lose themselves in a world of chiffon and satin, velvet, and fur. Tucked away in trunk after trunk, folded into frail squares of tissue paper, and buried under camphor were flounced petticoats and plunging tea gowns, plumed satin hats, and corsets with ribbons so slippery, they kissed Bobbie's skin like a mermaid's scales.

Occasional y, Bobbie unfolded a soldier's greatcoat, triumphant with military braid, or one of his great-grandfather's shooting jackets, but these he merely set aside, dropping them as if they were yesterday's newspapers. Bustles and ruffles were what he was after. Slips and stockings.

Garments that flirted and flipped when he moved.

Clothes that unmade the man.

By the time winter came, his fingers had become adept at handling the tiny eyelet hooks of petticoats, the minuscule b.u.t.tons of tea gloves, and he knew the difference between organza and tul e, sateen and watered silk. He learned how to sit wearing a bustle, how to bend over and tip a silver teapot while encased in whalebone. He learned that women's clothes, far from being frivolous confections for the male eye, were actual y work to wear.

It wasn't hard to see. The evidence was written al over him. I watched as he began moving in a new way, conscious of his hips and the backs of his knees as he poured himself coffee in the morning, so careful of his shoulders as he carried the cup across the room. Something in the way he tilted his chin before drinking reminded me of Serena Jane, and I wondered if things would have been different if Bobbie real y had been born a girl.

Maybe Robert Morgan would have been nicer to him. Maybe his standards would have been lower for him. Maybe his standards would have been lower for a female child. But things were what they were. Any way I looked at it, there was no getting around the problem of the annoying truth Bobbie carried between his thighs-the ugly, unwanted root that kept him planted in Aberdeen and which I knew would only reseed and replicate if he didn't do something about it.

Chapter Twenty-two.

Winter in Aberdeen is a terrible season. Stinging.

Biting. So cold, it stuns the truth right out of people's veins. The winter Bobbie final y left his father's house was worse than most. The ground was frosted up so hard, it rang like stone, and everybody in Aberdeen pul ed in deep and close. No one went out, and if they did, no one spoke in pa.s.sing. No one lingered over the counter in Hinkleman's-no one even waved across the street from the safety of windows.

Up and down Conifer Street, al you could see were drawn sets of drapes and chimneys puffing like steam engines.

In the very worst of the cold, Marcus chose to argue his case with Robert Morgan about planting his vegetable garden in the spring. Robert Morgan received him, as always, in the kitchen, while I brewed up coffee and tried to hide how pleased I was by Marcus's visit. It had been a long few months, and even Amelia hadn't made it out from the farm for weeks. Anyone's company was welcome. I peered over Marcus's shoulder as he welcome. I peered over Marcus's shoulder as he unrol ed the set of plans he'd drawn. "Nothing too delicate, like lettuce, and nothing too exotic, either,"

he was saying. "But some strawberries might be a nice touch. Or how about some j.a.panese cuc.u.mbers?"

Robert Morgan accepted the cup of coffee I handed him and shook his head.

"Vegetables attract pests. They're unsightly. And anyway, the last thing Truly needs is any more food around her. She's already plump as a watermelon.

Right?" He winked at Marcus, and I blushed. Marcus looked away, embarra.s.sed, but the doctor continued, oblivious, then asked the same question I had. "If you want to grow a garden, why don't you just do it out at the cemetery?"

Marcus frowned. "Munic.i.p.al land. It's not al owed."

Robert Morgan rubbed his spindly hands together. "Wel , Marcus, I don't know what to tel you.

I'm happy with the work you do on the flower beds, but I'm not ready for any changes at the present moment. Maybe one day you'l find a little plot of your own, but until then"-he clapped Marcus on the back -"I guess you're just stuck doing my bidding." He stretched his lips back over his teeth, his version of smiling.

Marcus was quiet as a church mouse. If you didn't know him wel , you might think the insult had gone over his head, but I could see from the way he twisted his scrol of plans back up that he was angry. I opened my mouth to try to defend him, but Marcus shot me a warning glance and shook his head just the smal est bit, so I just sloshed more coffee in my cup. Maybe if Robert Morgan had shut up then and there, too, things would have been fine, but deep inside, Robert Morgan was stil the boy who would poke a sleeping dog with a stick, stil the boy who would throw stones at a bee's nest just to see them swarm. He leaned al the way in to Marcus and spoke so softly that if I hadn't been standing right there at the stove, I never would have believed it.

"Who's the smart one now?" he whispered, then patted Marcus on the shoulder as if he were a child, rol ed up his newspaper, and shuffled out to his office.

I turned the burner off under the pot of water I was boiling and turned around. My first impulse was to fol ow the doctor out and pound him, but then I saw Marcus's flushed face, and I wanted to stroke it instead. "Don't let him start on you," I said.

"You know he's always been mean as a snake."

Marcus shook his head. "Why do you put up with him, Truly? How do you stand it?"

I wiped my hands on the dishcloth.

Marcus knew nothing about my medical condition, and neither did Amelia. I had made a point of keeping that news to myself, along with everything I'd learned about Tabitha's quilt. I looked at Marcus now and was tempted to tel him everything, but I knew he'd be horrified if I confessed what I'd done for Priscil a, and I didn't think I could live with his condemnation. Instead, I fibbed a little.

"Easy," I said. "For Bobbie. Can you imagine what would happen to him if I weren't here?"

Marcus shook his head again. "A boy like that, with a father like Robert Morgan. I guess the only thing those two have in common is their blood type."

"No, not even that. Bobbie is O positive, like me and his mother. I know that because I personal y held him down for st.i.tches and a blood test when he sliced his arm open that time he was fixing the fence in the garden with you."