peeled like mildewed wallpaper, finally lost (and never found) in the drafty dark basement where the girls held annual Hallowe’en seances. An intimidatingly large Moluccan cockatoo that escaped into the trees, terrorizing Kingdom Come’s previous owner and his garden-party guests by shrieking at them in Gaelic from the wisteria. Finches and fire weavers small enough to hold in your fist. A quartet of tiny goats, Haley’s favorites until the kinkajou.
The cockatoo started to smell worse and worse, until one day it flopped to the bottom of its wrought-iron cage and died. The finches escaped when Linette left the door to their bamboo cage open. The goats ran off into the woods surrounding Lake Muscanth. They were rumored to be living there still. But this summer Haley had come over every day to make certain the kinkajou had enough to eat, that Linette’s cats weren’t terrorizing it; that Aurora didn’t try to feed it crème de menthe as she had the capuchin monkey that had fleetingly resided in her room.
“I don’t know,” Linette said. She shut her eyes, balancing her mug on her stomach. A drop of tea spilled onto her cotton blouse, another faint petal among faded ink stains and the ghostly impression of eyes left by an abortive attempt at batik. “I think Mom knows the guy who lives there now, she doesn’t like him or something. I’ll ask my father next time.”
Haley prodded the hammock with the toe of her sneaker. “It’s almost my turn. Then we should go over there. It’ll die if it gets cold at night.”
Linette smiled without opening her eyes. “Nah. It’s still summer,” she said, and yawned.
Haley frowned. She moved her back up and down against the bole of the oak tree, scratching where a scab had formed after their outing to Mandrake Island to look for the goats. It was early August, nearing the end of their last summer before starting high school, the time Aurora had named “the summer before the dark.”
“My poor little girls,” Aurora had mourned a few months earlier. It had been only June then, the days still cool enough that the City’s wealthy fled each weekend to Kamensic Village to hide among the woods and wetlands in their Victorian follies. Aurora was perched with Haley and Linette on an ivied slope above the road, watching the southbound Sunday exodus of limousines and Porsches and Mercedes. “Soon you’ll be gone.”
“Jeez, Mom,” laughed Linette. A plume of ivy tethered her long hair back from her face. Aurora reached to tug it with one unsteady hand. The other clasped a plastic cup full of gin. “No one’s going anywhere, I’m going to Fox Lane,”—that was the public high school—“you heard what Dad said. Right, Haley?”
Haley had nodded and stroked the kinkajou sleeping in her lap. It never did anything but sleep, or open its golden eyes to half-wakefulness oh so briefly before finding another lap or cushion to curl into. It reminded her of Linette in that, her friend’s heavy lazy eyes always ready to shut, her legs quick to curl around pillows or hammock cushions or Haley’s own battle-scarred knees. “Right,” said Haley, and she had cupped her palm around the soft warm globe of the kinkajou’s head.
Now the hammock creaked noisily as Linette turned onto her stomach, dropping her mug into the long grass. Haley started, looked down to see her hands hollowed as though holding something. If the kinkajou died she’d never speak to Linette again. Her heart beat faster at the thought.
“I think we should go over. If you think it’s there. And—” Haley grabbed the ropes restraining the hammock, yanked them back and forth so that Linette shrieked, her hair caught between hempen braids—“it’s—my—turn—now.”
They snuck out that night. The sky had turned pale green, the same shade as the crystal globe wherein three ivory-bellied frogs floated, atop a crippled table. To keep the table from falling Haley had propped a broom handle beneath it for a fourth leg—although she hated the frogs, bloated things with prescient yellow eyes. Some nights when she slept over they broke her sleep with their song, high-pitched trilling that disturbed neither Linette snoring in the other bed nor Aurora drinking broodingly in her tiny shed-roofed wing of the cottage. It was uncanny, almost frightening sometimes, how nothing ever disturbed them: not dying pets nor utilities cut off for lack of payment nor unexpected visits from Aurora’s small circle of friends, People from the Factory Days she called them. Rejuvenated junkies