TWELVE HOURS LATER I stood on the front porch. The door was closed, its chipped paint at once familiar and strange. The elms overhead were bare; the snow was deep and the woods were muffled and quiet. I’d crossed three states on a bus. The air was so clean and sharp that I felt I’d just emerged from a loud, dark tunnel.
There was a new housing development going up. I’d passed it on the way. It had happened before, but never on our side of the Hill. It meant that somebody had died; the houses themselves were protected by historical designation, but the grounds were up for grabs as soon as the dirt hit the coffin. The trees were already a little thinner in that direction. Soon, I thought, the cushion of thick growth that had protected us from the world would be gone. When new houses went up on the cleared lots, they’d be visible from the porch even in the summer, when the leaves were at their most dense.
I knocked.
I’d gotten off the bus in Harrisburg and caught another one to Carlisle. I’d hitched to the house from the bus station. I was tired and it was cold, but Jack’s leather jacket had kept me warm. When I buried my face in the sheepskin collar, I could smell the last year of my life: lilies, mostly; cigarette smoke; and underneath it all, the sweet, spicy scent of Jack’s cologne, and the close air in his room. The lack of him beat within me like a new heart.
His, plus mine, plus the other, made three.
I would think about that later, I decided.
The door opened.
A girl in thick glasses, her dark hair cut in a smooth, severe bob, stood in front of me. She was wearing a long shapeless skirt and a sweater that I recognized as my father’s. “Yes?” she said.
And then she whispered, “Josephine.”
“Margaret Revolt,” I said.
My father and I sat at opposite sides of the kitchen table. I’d already gone upstairs and retrieved my birth certificate from underneath my mattress, and it was safe in my pocket. The kitchen was smaller and dingier than I remembered. There was one patch of sunlight in the room that fell on a long, deep scratch in the floor. It seemed inconceivable that I had ever lived here.
“College was pointless anyway,” Margaret Revolt had told me. “The only reason I stayed as long as I did was so that I could keep taking Joseph’s classes.” She said that she was still learning, that my father was teaching her more than college ever could. Then she had lamely offered me orange juice and I had refused. Now she was hovering uncertainly in the background. It was easy for me to ignore her.
Raeburn’s shirt was clean and so was his hair, which looked as if it had been recently cut. He had new glasses and I thought he’d lost weight. He looked ten years younger than he had the last time I had seen him.
“Where’s your brother?” he finally said.
I shook my head.
Margaret started to speak and Raeburn quelled her with a look. “He abandoned you. I could have told you that would happen. You’re better off without him.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I meant, don’t ask me. I won’t tell you.”
Raeburn’s eyes gauged me for a moment. “Before she had children, your mother possessed the most brilliant mind I’d ever seen—until Margaret, of course.” He leaned in, close and conspiratorial. “I see her in you. I see her in both of you.”
Margaret Revolt moved uncomfortably in the background.
“It was you children who drove her over the edge,” he said.
“No.” My voice was clear and strong. “It wasn’t.”
Raeburn’s eyes shifted from me to the table, and back again. He said nothing.
“Are you staying?” Margaret said.
I looked at Raeburn and realized that I was utterly without fear of him. I was smiling. It felt like the first real smile in years. “Not here.”
My father barked out a short, contemptuous laugh. “Where will you go?”
“Anywhere I want.”
Raeburn took a drink from the glass of whiskey in front of him. He swirled the liquid around in his mouth. His eyes were wary.
“Something’s different,” he said. “What has your brother done to you?”
“It was me,” I said. “I did it. Not him.”