THAT AFTERNOON, WHEN CLARE returned to the glass house, half a dozen pale pink tulips lay on the mossy flagstone.
They had been yanked out near the root, not neatly clipped. Their broken stems were white and fleshy. A few of the petals bore the telltale creases of careless handling. Clare glanced at the nearest garden, just beyond the glade. A whole corner of it had been denuded, giving the planting a lopsided effect, like a preening bird with a missing tail feather.
Clare knelt over the flowers on the stone.
“Do you like them?” Jack asked.
His voice came from a few steps away, but a current ran over her skin when she heard it, like the strands of blue electricity that raced silently over the face of a glass globe she’d seen at an exhibition in Paris the previous summer. The globe had been fashioned with relief maps of the continents and oceans. The adults around her saw it as whimsy, but Clare’s mind had filled with the havoc that kind of lightning would wreak on the tiny world: mountains split, steeples smoking, ships splintered. The thought of a similar current playing over her own skin made her uneasy. But the flowers fading on the stone filled her with tenderness. Without water, they’d be nothing but dry grass in a few hours.
This, unlike the other feeling, she could do something about. She collected the pulpy stems into the crook of her arm, careful not to crush the blossoms.
“Do you?” Jack asked again, but his voice rose with satisfaction.
Clare stood with the tulips and scanned the yard. Along the fieldstone foundation that supported the white brick of the house, she saw the glint of a faucet and below it, black loops of rubber hose.
She started up the hill.
“Wait!” Jack exclaimed, startled. “Where are you going?”
“They need water,” Clare said.
Jack kept pace alongside her. “But you just got here,” he protested.
“Well, come with me,” Clare said, somewhat impatiently. She crested the hill and darted across the upper lawn to the lip of the garden. There, she felt a faint remorse over her sharp tone.
“They’re so pretty,” she explained. “They just shouldn’t go without water for long.”
Jack didn’t answer. She glanced around, halfexpecting to catch sight of some new prank: yards of ribbon streaming from the branches of the oak tree, a stand of daisies dancing under his invisible hand.
“Jack?” she asked.
Still nothing.
She glanced up at the windows of the house. Each of them reflected its own shard of the yard. Anybody might be inside, looking out. She didn’t have time to play whatever game Jack was up to now.
She darted around the corner to the wide door of Mack’s workshop. It stood ajar. Clare slipped in.
A few glass jars glinted temptingly on the shelves above Mack’s cluttered workbench, but they were filled with nails or sand or seeds, and Clare knew she couldn’t empty one of them without him noticing. But on the floor by the door was a promising jumble of buckets. One of those, she guessed, would be hard to miss.
When she turned the faucet on, the black hose twitched as if it had come alive. Warm water coughed out of the spout. One-handed, still cradling the tulips in her other arm, Clare twisted the end of the hose into the bucket she’d commandeered. Water rose against the silver walls. When it neared the top, she twisted the faucet off. Then she hurried down the hill.
Annoyed by whatever prank he’d just tried to play, Clare stalked into the glass house in silence. If Jack wanted to disappear like that, he could think what to say next.
And the torn white ends of the tulip stems still needed to be cut if the blooms were going to last. She set the pail down on a rug and began to investigate the buffet.
The first drawer she pulled open revealed a collection of mismatched tapers wrapped in crushed tissue. As she pushed the paper aside, the drawer above it stuttered open of its own accord. She started, then slapped it back into place.
It stuttered open again. “What are you looking for?” Jack asked.
“A knife,” Clare said.
The haunted drawer rattled shut. “What for?” A hint of excitement had crept into Jack’s voice, as if he welcomed the possibility of stripping branches or fending off bandits, or anything else a boy might do with a knife.
“The flowers,” Clare told him. “I need to cut the stems.”
“We don’t have an actual knife,” Jack admitted. “But there’s a letter opener under the buffet.”
The buffet was made of dark mahogany with a low arch, only about two inches high, between its solid feet. Clare got to her knees, but hesitated to reach in to the darkness. “What’s it doing there?”
“I wanted it for a sword, but it was too heavy to hold,” Jack said. “And then I couldn’t lift it after it fell.”
Something skittered in the shadows. Clare jerked back.
“It’s okay,” Jack said. Another skitter, and the small face of a bird emerged from under the buffet. The bird’s head was made from translucent white stone, with a tiny red gem for an eye. “There,” Jack said.
Clare picked up the letter opener. The bird’s head curved into wings, gilded with gold and crusted with other tiny gems: blue, black, and green. Its figure formed the handle of a dull brass blade.
“Will it work?” Jack asked.
“Let’s see,” Clare said. She took a metal serving tray from the clutter on the buffet, pulled a stem from the bucket, laid it on the tray, and neatly sliced off the bruised end of the stalk. Instantly, she replaced it in the water.
“That works!” Jack crowed beside her. The discarded end of the stalk began to roll merrily on the metal tray in celebration.
Clare pulled another stem from the water. A few minutes later all the tulips were neatly trimmed, and Clare had disposed of the broken ends in the myrtle outside the door.
She settled down on the rug near the divan, beside the bucket of tulips, which she’d placed on the low table. Her anxiety for their survival quelled, she could finally take in how beautiful the blossoms were. No self-respecting florist would ever have delivered such a meager bouquet. But because there were so few blooms, each one seemed to have a life of its own: this one was pale enough to faint; that one’s petal had been forked by a blow.
“They were so heavy,” Jack said. “Do you like them?”
“Yes,” she answered. The softness of her own voice startled her. It was the voice she might have used to answer her father when he tucked her in at night. She hadn’t sounded like that since she was a little girl.
The realization she had dropped her guard turned her mind suspicious.
“Where did you go?” she asked. “When I went up to the house?”
“I was with you,” Jack said. But his voice turned up at the end, like a question.
Clare hated to be told something she knew wasn’t true. Adults did it to children all the time. But when children did it to each other, it had a special flavor of betrayal. If children didn’t tell each other the truth, how would any of them ever understand the world? With Jack, it was even worse. She couldn’t see his hands to tell if he was rich or poor, his clothes to guess if he came from Boston or New York, his face to see if he was interested or bored. She couldn’t know anything about him except what he told her. The thought that he could be making everything up, like an older kid telling a little one that chewing gum grew on trees, made her feel foolish, and furious.
“Where did I get the bucket?” she demanded.
“Mack’s bench,” Jack tried: another question.
Clare gave her head a single hard shake. “It was by the door,” she said, and drew her feet under her to get up.
“Wait,” Jack said.
Clare waited, her eyebrows raised. Now he was the one who sounded like a confused kid.
“I tried to come with you,” Jack said. “I couldn’t.”
The defeat in his voice gave Clare the uncomfortable feeling that somehow she was the bully, not him.
“Why not?” she asked.
The silence lasted so long that Clare glanced around the glass house, wondering if he’d disappeared again.
But when he spoke, his voice came from exactly where it had been, on the floor beside her. “I can see the big house from here,” he said quietly. “But when I try to get close, there’s only mist.”
“Mist?” Clare said.
“Like fog, before the sun burns it off,” Jack said. “Did you ever stand inside a bank while it rolls out to sea?”
Clare shook her head, no.
“It’s so bright, it hurts your eyes,” Jack said. “But you can’t see anything.”
Clare looked up to the house on the hill. Vines obscured the view and dust clouded the panes. But there was no sign of mist anywhere in the yard.
“I tried to go with you,” Jack went on. “But you disappeared, and I got lost in the mist.”
“It’s all around the big house?” Clare asked. Her imagination blanketed the red peaks and white brick in thick clouds.
“No,” Jack said. “It’s all around this one.”
The phantom fog in her mind rolled down the hill and curled around the glass house, blotting out the lawn, the oaks, the occasional gardens, the lilacs, and the forest beyond. Clare pulled her knees up. “Right up to the glass?” she asked, her voice low, as if to keep the fog from overhearing.
“You see the redbud tree?” Jack asked.
Clare nodded. The delicate trunk divided into slim, trailing branches near the foot of the hill, maybe twenty paces from the glass house.
“It starts there,” he said. “And just past the oak tree. And a ways into the forest.”
The landmarks he chose described a large, clumsy circle, perhaps fifty paces in diameter, around the glass house.
“It’s like a ring,” Clare said.
“That’s right,” Jack said, with a teacher’s pleasure at a quick student.
“But you don’t see it all the time.”
“Only if I go over there,” Jack said. “I don’t like to.”
“It’s always by the redbud tree?” Clare asked. “It never moves?”
“No,” Jack said. “It doesn’t.”
When Jack spoke next, his voice came from halfway across the glass house, drifting toward the door.
“But I can climb all the trees, as high as I want,” he said. “There’s no mist up there.”
Clare scrambled to her feet. By the time she followed him out into the glade, the vines that covered the sides of the house had already started to sag and twitch under Jack’s invisible weight. When he reached the top of the house, which crested just below the lowest branches of the young maples that surrounded it, glass rattled faintly and the topmost vines shivered. Then a single rose seemed to leap from the roof of the glass house into the branches of the maple tree.
The maple branches swayed, and sprang back into place. For a long moment, Clare lost track of Jack. Then, from the topmost branches of the tree, the tiny petals of the unlucky rose began to rain down into the glade.