led them onto the golf course. Before, there had been only fenced yards and the playground. There had been buildings and the alley with its rotting smell and the empty factory where weeds curled from the concrete. Now there was this bright field of green. Dead leaves sent up their smoke and a bird sang “Cree-cree-clara?” again and again.
Susan knew her father had gotten all this for her. She felt flattered and afraid.
“Come on, Billy,” she called sternly. Billy was dreaming along, twenty feet behind, stirring up leaves with his sneakers.
“I'm coming,” he answered. Zoe had run ahead. Susan turned to see Billy shuffling his feet as leaf shadows made bright and dark shapes on him. His ravaged beauty got under her breastbone and squeezed her lungs, a sharp inner contraction. She sometimes imagined dragging her brother from a burning building, knocking the incipient fire out of his clothes and hair.
She would rescue him. They would escape into the woods together and live there, away from the big immaculate house her father had bought for her. There must be woods, somewhere.
“Come on” she said. Her shadow stood before her, serrated on the leafy ground.
“What's your hurry?” Billy said. “We're going for a walk, right? We're not late for anything.”
“I don't want Zoe to get lost,” she said. “She keeps running all over the place, I can't stop her.”
“She isn't lost,” he said. “She's right up there, climbing that tree.”
Susan turned and saw Zoe clinging to the lower branches of an enormous pine, working her way up. The colors of Zoe's clothes, her pale yellow shirt and indigo jeans, were cut into shapes by the pine needles.
Susan shouted, “Zoe. Stop that.”
“She doesn't have to stop,” Billy said. “She can climb a tree if she wants to.”
Susan stood between Billy and Zoe, and her sense of her own promising future drained away. She would always be young, always unheeded, always insistent on rules of behavior no one else seemed willing to bother about. The world should have been so simple. All everyone had to do was speak softly but clearly, avoid fights, walk neither too fast nor too slow.
“She'll fall,” Susan said, though she believed that Zoe was rising toward an accident, more endangered by the sky than the earth. “Zoe,” she called again. “Come down.”
She imagined herself catching Zoe in her arms.
“I can see the house,” Billy said. “Look. That patch of white over there. You see it?”
Susan started for the tree. “Zoe, I mean it,” she said.
“This is our home now,” Billy said, although Susan had gone too far to hear him. “We're rich. Well, we're semi-rich.”
Susan marched to the bottom of the tree and stood with her hands fisted on her hips. Standing on the level grass, squinting up into the canopy of pine needles with her shadow slanting behind her, she might have been a young handmaiden to a goddess of domestic exasperation. She wore a white windbreaker, pink pedal pushers, and anklets with little yarn balls sewn on at the heels to keep them from slipping down into her tennis shoes.
“Zoe,” she shouted. “Come down here this instant.”
Zoe was struggling to boost herself onto a forked branch nearly thirty feet above the ground. She didn't answer, which was as Susan expected. Susan sighed, and liked the sound she made. It was an adult sigh, with depths of intention. She'd lived in this neighborhood less than a month, and already knew of three boys whose eyes—brown, darker brown, and blue-green—sought the particulars of her life.
She imagined the boys stealing her from this new house, bringing her out here to the golf course. She would rule them, comfort them, make them behave.
“I mean it,” she called. She thought, briefly, of her voice winding out among the tree trunks, following its own thread. Maybe there was a boy out here right now, walking heartsick and lost among the trees and the sand traps.
Billy came and stood beside her. He had a smell, not strong but unmistakable, a combination of bleach and stale bread. Susan wondered if he kept himself clean.
“She's not gonna come down till she's ready,” he said. “You know that.”
“She's going to break her neck,” Susan said. “I promised I'd look out for her.”
“I'm gonna climb it, too,” Billy said. “I bet you can see the whole town from up there.”
“Billy, no. You stay right here.”
But he hoisted himself up onto the lowest branch, and then wriggled into the crotch of the tree. Susan watched his skinny butt