her about, took off her clothes, turned the faucet on full strength, then, bracing herself for the cold, blasted off the papery bits caught in her hair.
Once she toweled off and dressed again, she walked back through the yard to the old stone wall. She was too late for the sunset—there wasn’t much left now except a purple-edged cloud. A cloud like that back in the Rockies would mean a thunderstorm—and soon, but here the air seemed too soft to support anything that flashy. To the south toward the village arced a pinkish seam that may have come from streetlights, but back the other way, toward the neighboring house and Canada, there were no lights showing whatsoever.
She fixed hot dogs and corn muffins for dinner. The electricity worked now, but she found a kerosene lantern in the pantry and it felt more appropriate to use that. She busied herself upstairs arranging her clothes on the bedroom floor in some semblance of order, then slid the mattress farther away from the window so the moonlight wouldn’t wake her again. The layout of the rooms upstairs was even simpler than downstairs—two bedrooms and a small bathroom grouped around the lopsided craziness of the hall.
She took the lamp, explored the bedroom next to hers, and immediately came upon another of the house’s secrets. There was a closet in the middle of the wall, and when she opened it, stuck in the lamp, she could see it ran the entire length of the house. She wasn’t sure, the light wasn’t quite strong enough, but it seemed to end in a small, Alice-in-Wonderland-type hole. Where could it lead? It would open out from the house, not back into the hall. Was there a shed there? Had there once been an attached barn? Why would anyone use a closet to exit the house? Her opening the door must have disturbed the air flow, because a soft panting sound started up at the tunnel’s far end. “Be still!” she commanded, in her best teacher’s voice, and immediately the sound stopped.
As tired as she was, the core knot of restlessness had its way with her—she woke up at midnight just as she had the first night. Once again, she went out onto the balcony over the porch. Again the shutter began flapping, but she expected that now, it was probably caused by her weight on the planks. With less mist, the moonlight was purer, and the house threw out shadows so fang-like and vicious they looked make-believe.
The house enjoyed its distortions, but there was one that was genuine. Little motes of chartreuse danced up and down over the lawn, none of them managing to make it higher than the porch, but startling her all the same. Fireflies—it was late in the season for them—and they seemed bigger than the ones at home and many degrees brighter.
She had an impulse to duck, watching them. It was odd, they were nowhere near her head, but she felt that she must immediately duck. One summer when Cassie was seven, the fireflies had been unusually thick, and they brought her outside to show her how to capture them in a jar. Cassie didn’t want to do this—she already hated any kind of cruelty to animals, even though they promised to immediately release them. Instead, she ran inside to her room, came back out again holding something hidden behind her back. When she had their attention, she brought it out, her tremendous surprise.
A lite stick, a chemical lite stick she had been given on Halloween and had kept hidden in her bedroom ever since. She shook it back and forth now the way the instructions said, and when the light started glowing it was exactly the same chartreuse color as the fireflies. She held it out to them and waved it back and forth like she was conducting their dance, laughing in joy.
The memory of Cassie’s lite stick came back to Vera so vividly it was almost staggering—again, she felt thankful for the railing. But it was cold and she felt more than dizziness centered in her stomach, so she wanted to lean over and clutch herself, clutch herself hard. She felt tears forming close to the surface ready to come spilling out—useless tears, sentimental tears, tears that weren’t deep enough to help. She didn’t let herself bend to them— she made the hard little grimace that was enough to hold them in. Later she could cry. Later when the tears came deeper.