a spray of weeds shooting up through a jagged crack in the deck. The water, though, was warm and clear, reflecting the faded blue swirls stamped into the concrete below. “Could you imagine this place in the snow? Aunt Fae said once they didn’t leave the house for almost a month. We’d lose our minds.” They’d only been into town a handful of times. The road leading down the mountain was treacherous in good weather, the switchbacks sending Mom into a tizzy every June and August, cursing as the Buick rattled against the narrow gravelly shoulder.
Hannah tipped her face up to the sky. The sun beat down, hot and bright for the first time in a week. The castle was a glorious place to spend a summer. Until it rained for seven days straight. “I think I’d like it. It would be cozy.”
Julia’s face was turned away, her eyes closed, her voice whispery. “This place is a lot of things, but cozy isn’t one of them.”
That, at least, was the truth. It was magical. Beautiful. Eerie. Looming.
“Hannah, do you ever see anything here?”
“Anything like what?”
“I don’t know. This place isn’t . . .” Julia’s voice trailed off, her eyes staring at some distant point. “It isn’t what it used to be. I feel like I’ve started to feel something bad here.”
“I don’t care how bad it feels; it’s still better than Plymouth.” Hannah shook her head. Her sister was so dramatic. Sometimes Hannah thought Julia did it for attention, always talking about auras and energy, her voice floaty. Even back home, sometimes Julia would talk about spirits and seeing things, a vague reference with her hand waving. It made their mother impatient, even frustrated.
She thought of their house back in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, squat on the dusty road, two bedrooms, one bathroom, no air-conditioning. The roof that leaked, the sound of water dripping into hallway pots any night it rained. Mom driving the rattling Buick into Wilkes-Barre, where she worked at PJ Whelihan’s next to the mall. Wes asleep on the sofa, the stink of him as he exhaled. Like BO and cigarettes, which he wasn’t supposed to smoke anymore on account of his COPD. The way he swept all the butts into a coffee can, which he emptied into the toilet before Mom came in the door. She’d caught him once, and the fight had lasted long into the night. “If you lose your disability, we’re sunk. You know that, right?” Mom’s voice had been panicky. Her mother never panicked. She never yelled, screamed, slapped. Her voice was always measured, pleasant.
The girls had never known their real dad. He’d left Mom with a colicky infant and tantruming toddler and the long-held belief that when things got tough, people left, as well as the refrain of her childhood: It’s all just too much, Hannah. The lesson that lasted, long after Mom died: Don’t ask too much of anyone.
Wes was all they ever knew of a father. They lived in his house and had for as long as Hannah could remember. Hannah hated Wes, and sometimes she found herself wishing he’d drive himself drunk off a bridge. She tried to tell Julia once, who looked shocked by the confession. She wanted to ask her sister if Wes did to Julia what he did to Hannah. She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
The first time it had happened, he was drunk, smelling like beer and piss. Mom was working, and Julia had taken to locking her room at night, but Hannah only wondered why later. Before that night she thought it had been about privacy. Or maybe she’d been sneaking a boy in. After that night she wondered, Did it happen to Julia too?
She was asleep when she felt the bed move, his hand on her thigh and then higher. She woke up fast, like being doused with cold water, his fingertips icy on her bare skin. She felt frozen, unable to speak, hardly able to breathe.
He thinks I’m Mom, was her thought that first night. A drunken misstep. The wrong door, a stumbling, dreamlike delusion.
But then it happened again. And again. Sometimes months between, sometimes only days. She never knew when she’d hear the telltale creak of her old bedroom door, the one loose floorboard that clattered. She always smelled him before she opened her eyes.
Sometimes she never opened her eyes at all.
He never spoke to her. Never said her name. Just his hands, cold, on her thighs, her stomach. Later, when