1. The Books

Charlotte didn't approve of her little sister. "She's too lazy to play with," she told her mother. "She screams too much. And you should have called her Emily, not Lily."

"I named her after my mother," Charlotte's mother replied. "Your grandma."

"Well, Grandma Lily's mom should have called her Emily too. Or at least Anne."

Charlotte was ten years old and had already read most of her mother's books. There was no place in the apartment for a bookshelf, so Charlotte's mother kept her books in the closet, stacked against the wall behind her shoes and dresses. In one of those books, Charlotte had seen a picture of a stone idol in a forest, its huge eyes and pointed tongue half hidden among bright leaves, and she often thought of it as she sat on the floor of the closet with a book in her lap, the soft fabric of a dress brushing the top of her head as she turned the pages. I am in my secret temple, she thought. My eyes are as big and round as the moon.

Charlotte had been six when her sister came into the world. Lily was born very small, even for a little sister. The day Charlotte's mother had marked with a big blue star on the calendar was in June, but it was April when a sudden spell of fever and light-headedness sent her to the doctor's office, and while she was in the waiting room, her stomach began to cramp. Charlotte spent that night with her best friend Katie, who lived two floors below in the same old building, and the next day Katie's parents took Charlotte to the hospital. Her mother was lying in a small bed in a big room, looking very tired. Her cheek felt cold and damp when Charlotte kissed it.

"Charlotte, honey," her mother said, "you have a little sister. Her name is Lily."

"You said I was going to have a little brother like Katie," Charlotte said.

"That's what he . . . that's what I thought. But sometimes your thoughts go one way and real life goes a different way, so you have a sister instead. You and Katie can compare notes." Charlotte's mother laughed, but it sounded more like a moan.

The matter of brothers and sisters wasn't the only thing on Charlotte's mind. A question had occurred to her while she was having breakfast with Katie's family that morning, and she decided to ask it now. "How can I have a sister if I don't have a daddy?"

"You do have a daddy," her mother said. "Your daddy lives in heaven, remember?"

"I mean a real daddy."

Her mother closed her eyes before she answered. "You have a daddy, and Lily has a daddy, but they're not the same daddy. Sometimes that happens, and it's okay. I'll explain it when you're a little older."

"Is Lily's daddy going to come and live with us?" Charlotte asked.

"No, he's not." Her mother closed her eyes again, and the nurse said she needed to rest and that Charlotte could come back later.

On the way back to the room where Katie's parents were waiting, the nurse took Charlotte through a pair of swinging doors and down a long hallway to a window. The nurse picked Charlotte up and let her peer through the window, where she saw what looked like a pile of red and white rags lying in a glass box. When the pile moved, Charlotte realized what she'd thought was a red rag was really a tiny face, all wrinkled and rough, its eyes and mouth shut tight.

"That's your baby sister," the nurse said.

Four years later, Lily was still smaller and weaker than she should have been, in Charlotte's opinion. She couldn't walk more than a few steps without getting tired, and she often screamed or cried without warning. She seemed to get bored with every game that Charlotte tried to play with her, but she found endless amusement in stealing Charlotte's toys and books and hiding them under the couch. She rarely talked, and she never cooperated when Charlotte tried to cast her in a play or act out scenes from her favorite cartoons. She wouldn't even let Charlotte call her Emily or Anne. Whenever Charlotte said "Good morning, Emily" or "How do you do, Anne," her sister's face turned bright red and she shouted "Lily! Lily! Lily!" until their mother ran over, picked up the howling child, and said in her weary voice, "Charlotte, don't tease your sister." If their mother was at work or sleeping too deeply for the racket to wake her, Lily would keep shrieking and crying until she collapsed on the floor in a twitching, whimpering heap.

One day, Charlotte emerged from the closet with a book in her hand and saw that, while she'd been reading, Lily had come into the bedroom and lain down on Charlotte's side of their bed. Lily's mouth and hands were covered with grape jelly, and there was jelly on Charlotte's half of the blanket, jelly smeared on her white pillow. Lily's eyes were closed, sticky hands folded on her stomach, her chest rising and falling in a calm oscillation.

Charlotte stood next to the bed and looked down at her sister. I hate you, she thought. I wish you would die.

Lily's eyes opened. "Charlotte?"

Charlotte scowled. "What is it?"

Lily opened her mouth, narrowed her eyes, wrinkled her forehead. She looked like she was trying to remember something she'd forgotten a long time ago. At last she said, "Why do you call me Emily and Anne?"

Charlotte blinked. "Do you really want to know?"

"Yes. Will you tell me?"

Charlotte thought for a moment, then nodded. "All right."

She sat on the edge of the bed and told the story of the three sisters she'd read about in one of their mother's books. She told Lily how the sisters had lived all alone in a little house in a graveyard surrounded by a wasteland, how they'd played games among the graves and on the bare hills, how they'd made up stories to tell each other on stormy nights in the little house, and all the while the dead people in the graveyard were crumbling apart, tiny pieces of them slithering down through the ground and into the water the sisters drank. As the years passed, the sisters drank up so many bits of dead people that they felt more akin to the dead than the living and the little house didn't seem like home anymore, so the sisters died and went to be with their real family down in the graves, but first they wrote out their stories in books and sent them into the living world beyond the wasteland. People read the books and loved them so much that the sisters became very famous, even though they were dead.

Lily smiled. "I like that story. I will write it in a book."

Almost every day after that, Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed and told stories while Lily listened, hands folded on her stomach, eyes big and bright in her small, thin face. Sometimes Charlotte would lie down next to Lily, put her arms around her, and whisper into her ear for hours on end. She told the stories of the books she read, the cartoons she watched, the plays she wrote in her head. She told about her dad in heaven playing pranks on the angels, about her dad's blue shirt and black mustache that she could just barely remember, about her mother's aunt, who was the tallest person Charlotte had ever seen. She told how the people in books and TV shows sometimes got bored and wandered out into the empty places between stories, where they met other wanderers and fought them to the death in valiant yet terrible battles that made the stars shake with fright.

Lily lay still through it all, listening and blinking her big eyes, silent except for an occasional murmur as if some delicious taste had filled her mouth.

Charlotte found a sheet of paper under her pillow one day. It was covered with rows of crayon swirls that branched and intersected, growing over the page like layers of rainbow vines. That evening she found another sheet in the closet, folded between two of her mother's books, and a third the next morning, its multicolored corner peeking out from under the bathroom rug. When she showed one of the pages to Lily, her sister nodded and said, "That's my book of stories."

"That's not writing," Charlotte said. "That's just scribble."

"If you can't read it, I can teach you," Lily said. Charlotte laughed and made the page into an airplane that flew across the apartment, landed on the side table and knocked over one of their mother's pill bottles. The rattle woke their mother from her nap on the couch, and for a moment it looked like she was going to be angry, but then she grinned and sent the airplane soaring back to land at the sisters' feet.

The summer after Lily turned six, things changed. Their mother seemed anxious and sad, but Charlotte didn't know why. The gloom in the air wormed its way into Charlotte's stories, whose heroes more and more often found themselves lost in the trackless between-spaces, frantically searching for a path through the emptiness while vast shapes lumbered and wheezed among shivering stars. The scrawls on Lily's pages grew wilder, more knotted than ever.

One stormy evening, after Lily had gone to bed, their mother asked Charlotte to sit on the couch with her so she could explain a hard decision she'd made. "Lily is going to stay with her father's family for a while," she said. "She can't start school with the other children this fall, because she's too sick. I can't teach her myself, and I can't afford to have someone else do it. Lily's grandfather sent me a message saying he'll take care of her school, but she has to stay in his house. He'll take care of everything, but she has to go away. I know how much you love her, and my heart is breaking, but it's the best thing for her. She has to go to school. She's so smart, just like you. She can't let that go to waste. She has to go."

Charlotte rubbed her hand against the rough fabric of the couch. "Is Lily's dad going to be there?"

Her mother shook her head. "Her father passed away."

"Is he in heaven with my dad?"

"No," her mother said. Tears crawled down her cheeks. Charlotte scooted closer, and her mother wrapped her arms around Charlotte and held her tight. When her mother finally let go, Charlotte went into the bedroom to lie down next to her sister.

At the end of August, a man and a woman came in a big silver car to collect Lily. The woman stayed down with the car, but the man, a very friendly fellow with bright green eyes and a bright red smile, stood in the hallway chatting with Charlotte's mother while Lily finished gathering her things. Charlotte watched as Lily walked all around the apartment taking sheets of paper out of various hiding places, folding them in half, putting them in her purple backpack.

When everything was ready, the friendly man pretended not to believe there was only one backpack and one small suitcase. "That can't be all," he said, green eyes twinkling above his red smile. "How did you fit your crown and carriage in there, little princess?"

"I have everything I need," Lily said, serious as ever.

The friendly man put Lily's bags in the trunk of the big silver car while the woman smiled from the passenger seat. Lily climbed into the back, the man gave a playful bow, and they drove away.

That night, Charlotte slept with her mother in the big bed. When she woke up and saw the empty little bed she and Lily had shared on the other side of the room, she felt dizzy and terrified, as if her spirit had flown from her body in the night and her body had run away to chase after it, leaving Charlotte herself nowhere at all.

Please come back, she thought. I'm sorry.

Charlotte spent all day feeling sick and hollow, sure she'd never talk to her sister again, but when the phone rang that evening, it was Lily. She said her grandfather's house was pretty but too big and the drive there was very long and boring, just a twisting road with grass and hills all around, no houses or mountains or anything. Then another voice came over the phone, a flat, hoarse voice that sounded very old and tired yet very firm, the voice of someone who'd spent a long time being obeyed. "Please put your mother on the line," the voice said.

As the voice wheezed through the receiver, Charlotte tried to guess what it was saying from the way her mother's face changed, an anxious frown giving way to a hopeful smile, an angry glare, finally a look of blank resignation.

"Thank you, sir," Charlotte's mother said. "That's very kind of you."

Charlotte and Lily talked on the phone every afternoon. Charlotte mostly talked about her friends at school and their little dramas, but at the end of the call she'd always tell a quick story about Emilanne, their imaginary third sister, who lived in a forest and had adventures with a skeleton fox named Huguenot. Lily talked about what she was learning, mainly penmanship and astronomy. She almost never mentioned her grandfather, and about his house, she said only that it was big and quiet and far away from everything. It seemed like all she did there was learn. Nothing very exciting was happening to either of the sisters, so they started talking every other day, then every week.

When it was almost winter, Charlotte's mother told her that Lily wouldn't be coming home for the holidays. "Her grandfather wants her to stay there until next summer. He says the trip would be too much of a disruption in her lessons."

"Why does he get to decide?" Charlotte said. "Does Lily want to stay?"

Her mother sighed. "He says if she comes home now, he won't let her come back for more school, and then Lily won't get a good education and her life will be ruined. He's been very kind to us. I can't make him angry."

"It doesn't sound to me like he's being very kind."

"There are different ways of being kind," her mother said. "Just like there are different ways of being cruel. When you're older, you'll understand."

But then it was summer, and Lily's grandfather still wouldn't let her come home. "He says I'm learning too much to stop now," Lily said. "He says I'm heading for a big future."

After Charlotte's mother hung up the phone, she went into the bedroom and screamed into her pillow, and for the next few days she seemed excited and nervous, like she was about to drive to the big house herself and take Lily back. But then one day Charlotte came home from hanging out with Katie and found her mother asleep on the couch, and at dinner time she was still asleep and didn't wake up when Charlotte shook her arm, so Charlotte called 911. An ambulance came and took her mother to the hospital, the same hospital where Lily was born, and Charlotte sat with Katie's parents in the same waiting room. After a while, a nurse took Charlotte to the cafeteria and bought her an ice cream, and the nurse told Charlotte that her mother had died from taking too much medicine.

"We found this in her pocket," the nurse said. "It's for you."

It was a piece of paper folded in quarters. Charlotte unfolded it. Forgive forgive forgive, it read.

Charlotte was afraid that she would have to go live with her mother's aunt or some other relative she'd never even met, but Katie's parents said she could live with them, at least for a while. Charlotte was grateful for that, and she tried to show it.

It was strange living in the new apartment. She slept in the living room on a bed that folded into a couch during the day. Lying there at night, she sometimes heard footsteps from the apartment overhead. She imagined it was herself up there, looking for something.

In her dreams, she saw Lily's backpack spilling out pages covered with loops and tangles that shuddered on the paper like they were trying to become words. She saw the friendly man, his green eyes round and huge, driving Lily along an endless spiral through a wasteland covered with graves. She saw an old man with no face take a bucket of water from a well and pour it all down Lily's throat. The water squirmed and writhed.

Again the sisters talked on the phone every day. The first calls were long and open-hearted, but soon they became shorter, more routine. Lily was learning all kinds of things, but she couldn't explain most of them to Charlotte, because in order to explain one thing, she would have to explain another, and in order to explain that, she would have to explain the first, and they would go around and around in circles. Charlotte told Lily about her own schoolwork, which seemed pathetically simple in comparison, about her friends and their triumphs and heartbreaks, which didn't seem to interest Lily at all. Charlotte got the sense that Lily never saw anyone but her grandfather and a few servants who occasionally flitted through the big house in the middle of nowhere. What exactly the servants did was another thing Charlotte could never understand.

"Don't you have any friends, Lily?" Charlotte said.

"My friends are in the stars and in the alphabet," Lily said.

Every day, then every other day, then every week, every month. Years, years, years.

~~~

2. The Sisters

Charlotte awoke to find that Lily had left a message on her phone overnight. "I just finished your book," Lily said. "I started it this afternoon and read it straight through. To be honest, a couple of the things you wrote bothered me. I'd love to talk to you about it. Give me a call today if you have a little time."

Charlotte gave herself until the coffee finished brewing to decide what to do. Her calls with Lily followed a clear, unwavering pattern, and midnight voicemails had no place in it. The sisters talked on the first Saturday of every month, brisk chats that skimmed the surface of things. Charlotte made Lily laugh with stories about the hospital where she worked, mini-farces starring tyrannical doctors, clueless patients, scheming fellow nurses. Lily had given up trying to explain what sort of job she did for her grandfather—"Just think of me as the Empress of Libraries" was her last exasperated word on the topic—but Charlotte loved to hear about the frequent business trips that took her sister from one end of the earth to the other.

At the end of last weekend's call, Lily had mentioned she'd picked up a copy of Charlotte's book. Charlotte supposed they might talk about it next month, or the month after that, or possibly never. Certainly not less than a week later, in an impromptu harangue about how she'd gotten it all wrong and upset the one person in the world who truly cared about her. Charlotte felt ambushed, bewildered, as if some dreadful judge had summoned her to answer for a crime she'd committed in a nightmare. She took a deep breath, told herself to stop catastrophizing, but the water trembled and spilled as she poured it into the coffee maker.

Charlotte's book had been published two months earlier. Though the reviews were few and mixed, it had briefly flourished on TikTok, to Charlotte's delight and horror. The book told her family's story in a series of loosely connected vignettes that began with her grandparents and ended with herself, weaving together sorrow and love, desolation and hope, terrible suffering and stubborn joy. A Tangle of Threads was the title.

On its own terms, Charlotte thought, the book was a success. She'd done her research, tracked down and interviewed as many relatives as she could, and though the experience left her with a vivid sympathy for her mother's decision to cut those hapless, faintly ridiculous people out of her life, Charlotte thought she'd managed to give everyone in the book their due and to show how most of them, most of the time, did what they thought was right. Judging from the emails her publisher passed along, readers admired her determination to temper even her harshest judgments with understanding and mercy.

What troubled her about the book was the emptiness haunting its edges, the silence beneath the words. It wasn't entirely Charlotte's fault that so much of Lily's story was missing. Lily herself had been too busy for interviews, and her grandfather was out of the question. As for her sister's long-dead father, all Charlotte had managed to glean was that Lily's grandfather had forbidden his name from ever being spoken. It was easy to let readers assume Charlotte's father was also Lily's, to show glimpses of their mother's depression without detailing the circumstances, to hint that a family friend adopted Lily after the tragedy just as Katie's parents adopted Charlotte. A note at the beginning of the book stated certain details had been changed or withheld, and one of the book's constant themes was that stories, like memories, are always selective and partial. Charlotte felt she'd covered her bases, or her tracks.

Still, she knew her real reason for leaving that part of the story untold. It would have destroyed the book's pattern, its weave. In the final chapter, she'd written what she considered a secret apology to herself, to Lily, to their mother: "I have imagined myself as teasing out threads from a knotted mass, pulling them straight, finding their beginnings and ends, weaving them into a new design. An ancient writer observed that a mosaic artist can piece together, out of the same pile of fragments, a portrait of an empress, a picture of a dog, or simply a jumbled mess. The materials are ready to hand; all the craft is in the arrangement. I've tried to make a fabric that hangs together. But in order to do that, I freely admit, I've had to choose carefully. I am working, not with fragments of cold ceramic, but with threads of life—and some of them are threads of fire, which I could not hold." But in her own copy of the book, in the margin next to that passage, she'd added a note in red ink: "Apology not accepted. You should have let it burn."

The coffee maker sputtered out its last few drops. No point delaying the inevitable. Charlotte poured herself a cup and called Lily.

"There were two things that bothered me," Lily said. "First, what you wrote about how you used to call me Emily and Anne, and how I didn't like it. You said you didn't know why it made me so angry. Is that true? Did you really not know?"

"I still don't know," Charlotte said. "I mean, you were just three or four. I thought it was just one of those quirky kid things."

"Hm." Lily paused. Rustling static on the connection mixed with the pounding of Charlotte's heart. "Second, the chapter about how Mama died. You wrote so beautifully about how you felt, but you didn't say anything about how I felt."

Charlotte swallowed, her mouth dry and bitter. "I didn't know how you felt."

"What you thought I felt, then. Didn't you think I felt something?"

"I couldn't . . . I couldn't remember how I thought you felt. It was so long ago. I didn't think I could say anything about it." You're babbling, Charlotte told herself as anxiety surged in her chest, but she couldn't stop. "I didn't know how you felt about anything. I couldn't even guess. You wouldn't tell me, you wouldn't talk to me about it, you were too busy. So I couldn't say. I couldn't say anything about how you felt because you wouldn't tell me, and I didn't know, and I was alone, and I didn't know, and I couldn't help it, and I couldn't say. I was alone. You left me alone." She clapped a hand over her mouth to silence herself.

"I was alone too," Lily said.

Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Another pause, another crackle of static, like a hundred pens scribbling. "I'm going to come visit you. I'll call you back in five minutes." The line went dead.

Stunned, Charlotte set her phone on the counter. It made a pair with her untouched cup of coffee, two black eyes staring up from the pale laminate as her thoughts whirled. She couldn't have said at what point in the wasteland of years she'd finally despaired of ever seeing her sister again, but now the thought of Lily returning to her life, not a ghostly voice on the phone but her own flesh and blood, filled Charlotte with a strange, awful dread. When hope starts to revive, it feels like fear, she thought and tried to believe it, but in her mind, she saw wasted hands tracing spirals in rancid water and a feeble, shrunken figure crawling through emptiness, its moon-bright eyes looming closer, closer.

Pull yourself together, she told herself. Breathe. She picked up her coffee and made herself drink it slowly, inhaling deeply between sips. By the time Lily called back, Charlotte was almost calm.

"It's settled," Lily said. "I'll be there at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, and I'll stay for a week."

"What? You mean here, in my apartment? It's a studio. I only have one bed. And I have a shift tomorrow. I start at seven."

"Do you have a couch?"

"Yes . . ."

"I'll sleep on the couch. Can you change your shift, or call in sick, just for one day?"

"I guess . . ."

"Then we're set. Don't worry. We'll figure everything out." The line went dead again.

The next morning, while the coffee brewed, Charlotte sat on the couch and stared at the door. When the intercom chimed at exactly nine o'clock, she flinched as if she'd been stung and ran to buzz the visitor in.

Charlotte waited for a long time without hearing a knock. When she opened the door and looked out, there was nothing on the landing but silence. She went to the railing, leaned over, peered down into the stairwell. At that moment, feet shuffled on the steps, and around the corner of the stairway appeared a pair of figures, an old man and an old woman, carrying between them what looked like a purple bag. Then the thing shifted, and Charlotte realized it was a young woman in a purple dress, seated on the pair's linked forearms.

"Lily," Charlotte said.

"Charlotte," Lily said. There was sweat on her forehead and dark circles under her eyes, but when she saw Charlotte, her smile made her face seem to glow.

The old pair set Lily down in front of Charlotte's door. The woman beamed at the two of them with a wide, beautiful smile. The man stepped forward to shake Charlotte's hand, and she yelped with surprise when she recognized the same friendly fellow who'd come to the apartment so long ago and taken Lily away. He was gray-haired and wrinkled now, but Charlotte would have known his green eyes and red smile anywhere.

"I'm sorry," she said, her yelp still echoing in the stairwell. "It's just . . . I never thought I'd see you again."

"I'm flattered you remember me at all," said the friendly man.

"It's so nice to see the two of you back together," said the smiling woman. Her white hair was coiled in a crown braid, her dark eyes aglitter.

Lily told Charlotte she'd tried to climb the stairs herself but could only make it halfway. Luckily, her driver and assistant were there to help her. "A new skill for your resumes," she teased the pair. "Human throne."

"All part of the job, ma'am," the friendly man said with a wink. "Point A to point B, horizontal or vertical."

Charlotte put her arm around Lily and helped her into the apartment. While the friendly man and the smiling woman went down to fetch the luggage, Charlotte poured a cup of coffee for herself and a cup for Lily. The sisters sat together on the couch.

"Here I am," said Lily.

"Here you are," said Charlotte. She made a sweeping gesture. "Welcome to my humble abode."

"I've seen humbler. Though I'm surprised to find a viral sensation living in a one-room apartment."

"Posts don't pay the bills, I'm afraid. Not quitting my day job anytime soon."

Charlotte sipped her coffee, looking at Lily over the rim of her cup. Lily was still very short and thin. Her feet dangled above the floor, and her wrists were like the stems of wineglasses. She hadn't fully recovered from her exhaustion on the stairs; beads of sweat still clung to her forehead, and her breathing was labored and ragged. But she sat with her back and neck perfectly straight, and the look in her eyes and the set of her jaw told Charlotte her sister was used to giving orders and being obeyed.

When the friendly man and the smiling woman returned, the woman had a large suitcase in each hand, and the man had an impish grin and one hand hidden behind his back. The woman set the suitcases down and gave the man a significant nod. He brought his hand out from behind his back with a flourish. "Ta-da!"

Dangling by its straps from the friendly man's hand was Lily's purple backpack, the one she'd taken to her grandfather's house. The man handed it to Lily, who unzipped the main compartment and held it open for Charlotte to see that the backpack was crammed with folded sheets of paper. Charlotte slid a page from the compartment, unfolded it, marveled.

A sprawl of multicolored ink covered the sheet, a luxuriant growth of swirls, curves, loops, spirals, splotches. Black lines wove among the tangle like trails through a dense forest. As Charlotte traced the dark paths with her eyes, the chaos seemed to shiver on the verge of resolving into some infinitely complex design, but the lines always doubled back on themselves or broke off in dead ends at the edge of the page.

"Oh my God, Lily," Charlotte murmured. "Your book."

"Part of my job now, believe it or not," said Lily. "It's a system I came up with. Each little twist and curl has a meaning. Way more convenient than letters and words, once you get used to it."

"If you say so."

The friendly man handed Charlotte a card from the hotel where he and the smiling woman would be staying. "Two separate rooms, of course," he said, winking at Lily. "You be sure to mention that to your grandfather, ma'am. Two separate rooms."

"They're staying in town all week?" Charlotte said after the pair had left.

"Grandfather can spare them," Lily said.

"Is he paying for their hotel? This isn't a business trip, is it?"

"Oh, he can afford it, believe me. If it was the two nicest rooms in the nicest hotel in the world, he could afford it. You should see some of the places I've stayed."

"Yeesh." Newly self-conscious, Charlotte looked around her apartment, scanning the meager furniture, the shabby carpet, the secondhand books stacked precariously against the walls. "Are you sure you want to sleep on the couch?"

"I'm absolutely sure," Lily said, leaning her head on Charlotte's shoulder.

For the rest of the day, the sisters stayed in the apartment and talked. Charlotte told Lily how her coworkers teased her with mock TikTok dances in the break room, and how her latest girlfriend broke up with her in the middle of a picnic lunch that Charlotte had prepared. After more travel stories, Lily tried once again to explain what her work entailed. "I keep records, and I reconcile them," she said. She spread a page from her backpack on her lap, traced a finger across it as she spoke. "Each record goes through six stages. Transcription, authentication, attestation, confirmation, verification, reconciliation. And a million things can go wrong at each stage, and then you've got to track down the problem, figure out what happened, and fix it. And then you start all over."

"Sounds intense," said Charlotte.

"Honestly, when things are running smoothly, it's the most boring job in the world. But if one little discrepancy creeps in, things can get real interesting, real fast."

When it was time for dinner, Lily stayed in the apartment—"Stairs," she said, grimacing—but Charlotte went out for a walk around the neighborhood and returned with enough takeout for three meals.

"How much was it?" Lily said.

"Don't worry about it," Charlotte said.

"Oh, for crying out loud, let me pay for things."

"Not on your life."

Charlotte would normally have had the next day off, but she'd taken a shift that evening in exchange for the one she was supposed to work the day Lily arrived. Climbing the stairs at midnight, she felt exhausted but happy, knowing her sister was in the apartment, waiting for her. Thinking of her fears from two days earlier—those dripping hands, that crawling revenant—she could only chuckle at her own foolishness.

Lily was sitting on the couch with a cup in her hands. "Good evening," Charlotte said in the voice of Alfred Hitchcock as she dropped her keys on the shelf next to the door.

"Welcome home," said Lily. "I made you some tea." She pointed at the shelf. Charlotte hadn't noticed the second cup sitting there, right next to where she'd set her keys, but there it was.

"How was work?" Lily said.

"Same as ever," Charlotte said, settling next to Lily on the couch. "You've heard enough of my silly work stories, I'm sure you can imagine my day."

"Do you like working, Charlotte?"

"Well, I like my coworkers. Most of them. I like helping people."

"But do you like working?"

Charlotte took a tiny sip from her steaming cup. Floral, with an earthy undertone. "It beats starving."

"If you didn't have to work, what would you do?"

"I would sit around all day and talk with my sister, of course."

"Would you write another book?"

"Sure, if I thought of something else to write about."

"I bet you have some ideas."

"I guess." Anxiety tickled Charlotte's stomach as she took another sip.

"If you could write a book about my father's family, would you?" Lily looked into Charlotte's eyes and sat up even straighter than usual.

"Not if you didn't want me to," Charlotte said. A drop of tea burned the back of her hand. She set the cup down on the side table, tucked her hands under her elbows to stop them from shaking.

Lily raised her own full cup to her mouth and drank it all. Her thin cheeks swelled and collapsed as she drank mouthful after scalding mouthful, her wide eyes shining, staring. Charlotte's whole body began to shiver. Her teeth chattered.

Lily set her empty cup on the floor, reached out and took Charlotte by the shoulders. "You don't need to be afraid of me," she said.

"I am, though," said Charlotte.

"Why?"

"I don't want you to be angry with me."

"And I don't want you to be afraid of me."

"Okay." Charlotte took a deep breath, another and another, until she stopped trembling.

Lily leaned forward, craned her neck up and kissed Charlotte on the forehead. "You don't have to work anymore," Lily said. "And I don't have to go back."

"What do you mean?" Charlotte said.

Lily shook her head. "I don't want to go back to that house." She shuddered, looking very small. Charlotte remembered her lying on their bed with her face covered in jelly, and sitting with a crayon in each hand drawing swirls and spirals on a blank sheet of paper, and climbing into the back seat of a big silver car, about to be taken away.

"I don't want you to leave," Charlotte said.

"Then I'm staying," Lily said.

The next morning, Charlotte got up early and called the hospital to say she wasn't coming in, but her supervisor didn't recognize her voice and said there was no one named Charlotte on the team. "Enjoy your day off, whoever you are," the supervisor said and hung up.

Lily was curled up on the couch, wrapped in a thick purple blanket. She stuck her head out from under the blanket with a bleary smile. "What did I tell you?"

They had four days before the friendly man and the smiling woman would come back to collect Lily. Charlotte was nervous about their return, but Lily told her not to worry. "They do what I tell them," she said.

"What about your grandfather?" Charlotte said.

"I can handle him."

They spent the days talking, catching up on things that had gone unspoken during their Saturday phone calls. Charlotte told Lily what living with Katie's family had really been like, how they'd been kind and generous but always kept a certain distance from her, as if she'd been touched, through no fault of her own, by some unspeakable infection. All through her life, she told Lily, in school and at work, with friends and lovers, she'd always felt invisibly marked, cut off from the world even as she moved through it. She told Lily that at least once a year, she thought she saw their mother on the street, and it was all she could do not to fall on her knees and beg whoever it was, whatever passing stranger, not to go away.

Lily tried to tell Charlotte about life in her grandfather's house, but she couldn't quite describe it. Days and years in the house seemed to bleed into each other, just as the long hallways intersected and diverged, doubled back on themselves. Lily couldn't even say exactly how many stories the house had, let alone how many rooms. When she tried to list the people who lived there, she always lost count. "It's just grandfather and me. No, my driver's there, too, but that's it. No, there's my assistant, and her assistant, and her driver, and his assistant. And there's grandfather. And there's me."

Lily's grandfather himself proved just as difficult to discuss. He was very old, that much was certain, and he ran the house. But he didn't really run it, the others mostly ran it for him. He had men and women working for him in every corner of the earth, but no, he did it all himself. No, Lily did most of it for him. No, the men and women working for him did it, and the old man rubber-stamped their decisions, and Lily wrote everything down in her records. No, no.

"What about your father?" Charlotte said.

"We don't talk about him," Lily said. "He stopped."

"He stopped doing what?"

"He stopped . . ." Lily opened her mouth, narrowed her eyes, wrinkled her forehead. She looked like she was trying to remember something she had forgotten a long time ago. At last she said, "He stopped what he was doing."

"Do you know what happened with him and Mom?"

"He told her . . ." Lily wrinkled her forehead again. Sweat pearled under her eyes. "He gave her his word. Then he tried to take it back, but it didn't work. He stopped."

"How did he die?"

"He . . ." Lily's eyelids fluttered and her breath caught in her throat. She began to gag.

"No, no," Charlotte said. She put her arms around Lily and patted her shoulder. "It's okay. Don't worry about it."

Lily lay down on the couch, and Charlotte brought her a glass of water. After she drank a few mouthfuls, her breath steadied, and she could keep her eyes open again.

"I'm sorry," Charlotte said.

"It's fine," Lily said. "But we don't talk about him. He betrayed Mama, and he betrayed Grandfather, and he betrayed himself. His own word turned against him. That's all there is to say."

Charlotte sat on the floor and put her head on the couch next to Lily's. "And he paid for what he did to her?" she said.

"With everything he had."

Charlotte looked into Lily's eyes. "But not enough."

"Not nearly," Lily said.

The day before the friendly man and the smiling woman were due to fetch Lily, Charlotte thought of something her sister had said, something that made her nervous. "You said your father gave his word," she said. "And he tried to take it back, but he couldn't."

Lily looked up from the couch, where she'd been reading one of Charlotte's secondhand books. "That's right. His word turned against him, spiraled back and caught him, and he stopped."

"Before you came here, did you tell your grandfather you'd go back after a week? Did you give your word too?"

Lily shook her head. "It's different." But she didn't say how. Charlotte still felt nervous.

The next morning, the intercom's chime made Charlotte jump to her feet in fright, but Lily walked calmly across the apartment to buzz the old pair in. When they arrived at Charlotte's door, Lily simply told them to go back without her. They dutifully turned and started back down the stairs.

Charlotte couldn't believe it had been so easy. She went out onto the landing, looked down into the stairwell to watch the pair leave. The smiling woman was already out of sight, but the friendly man was still descending, whistling a jaunty tune. Just before he disappeared around the corner of the stairs, he looked up at Charlotte and grinned, his green eyes sparkling. He gave a sly wink. "See you soon, princess," he said.

A terrible storm battered the city the next day. Wind lashed the streets, and lightning shattered the sky. Trees were uprooted in the parks; rain flooded the gutters. When night fell, a freezing gale blew the clouds away, and the city glittered in the moonlight under a sheath of ice.

Inside the apartment, the sisters sat and talked. Lily seemed more carefree than ever, and Charlotte felt strangely calm. Whatever's happening, let it happen, she thought.

There was no wind the next day, none at all. No leaf stirred, no curtain or awning moved. Dropped bits of paper fell to the street and lay where they landed. The air felt sticky, curdled, rotten.

Inside the apartment, the sisters sat and talked. Whatever's happening, let it happen.

The next day, the sun didn't rise. In the morning, the sky brightened and the stars disappeared, but there was no sunlight, only a diffuse glow that seemed to come from everywhere at once, casting no shadows.

Inside the apartment, the sisters sat and talked.

The next day, there was no right or left, or forward or backward, or up or down. People started walking, ran into the wall behind them, fell down and hit their heads on the ceiling. People turned around and found themselves staring into their own faces.

Inside the apartment, Charlotte went to the window, looked down at the street that now led nowhere. "What's happening out there?" she said.

"My word is turning," Lily said.

"How bad is it?"

Lily shrugged. "Could be worse."

The next day, there were no numbers. Nothing added up to anything. People looking at clocks found it made no difference where the hands were pointing. People trying to give directions found there was no way to get anywhere, realized they were in the middle of a pathless void. People trying to remember birthdays found no one had ever been born and no one had ever died, there had never been any life or death, there was nothing but blankness and emptiness all around, and they sat down and wept in streets that twisted back on themselves in inextricable knots, or endlessly fled from the empty places to which they endlessly returned.

Charlotte stood at the window and looked at her reflection floating in the darkness. "It's getting worse," she said.

"Things are stopping," said Lily. "I guess Grandfather is more upset than I thought."

The next day, there was nothing.

Charlotte stood at the window and looked out into nothing. "This is bad," she said. Pulling Lily's purple backpack out from under the couch, she unfolded a handful of pages on the floor. The sheets were as white and blank as the moon.

Lily sighed. "Fine," she said, slinging her backpack over her shoulders. "Let's go."

Charlotte opened the door of her apartment, and the sisters stepped out into a hallway, ornately tiled and impossibly long. Lamps blazed along the walls, pale light glinting on marble and gold as Charlotte and Lily walked for what felt like an eternity. The hallway twisted and turned, divided into branches that stretched away in a hundred directions, but Lily always knew which path to take.

Charlotte heard a clatter of footsteps on the tiles ahead, faint but growing louder. She thought it might be the echo of the sisters' own steps turning back to meet them, but then a pair of figures appeared around a distant turning, a woman in a blue dress and a man in a green suit. The pair looked much younger than the last time Charlotte had seen them, their faces smooth and sleek. The pale light gleamed on the woman's beautiful smile, glimmered in the man's emerald eyes.

"Fashionably late as usual," the friendly man said with a wink. "Come on, the old man's waiting."

The four of them walked on and on, the pair flanking the sisters, until the hallway came to a dead end in a circular chamber hung with crimson cloth. In the center of the circle stood a four-poster bed, curtains drawn close and rippling to the rhythm of a sound that filled the room. Charlotte wasn't sure if the sound was one person's hoarse wheezing, a crowd of people whispering to each other, or a draft sighing through some hidden fissure. Torches flickered around the chamber, their flames waving back and forth in the moving air.

The friendly man and the smiling woman approached the curtained bed. The friendly man glanced back at the sisters, beckoned.

Charlotte and Lily stood in the mouth of the chamber. Lily turned to Charlotte and shrugged. "No point delaying the inevitable," she said.

Charlotte gazed down at her sister. Lily was so small, so thin. She was panting and sweating from the exertion of walking so far, her face so pale and weary.

Charlotte shook her head. "He told our mother you could come back, but he didn't let you come back. He kept you."

Lily nodded. "I stayed here for a long time."

Charlotte turned around, started back the way they'd come. Lily followed, and when she couldn't walk anymore, Charlotte picked her up and carried her. She was so light, a bag of sticks and feathers.

When the corridor divided, Charlotte tried to remember the right path, but eventually they came to another dead end. The hallway terminated in a vast library where shelves crammed with books of all shapes and sizes stretched up to a high, vaulted ceiling. On the far side of the space, a fire burning in a marble fireplace warmed a row of red leather armchairs. Charlotte carried Lily across the room, and they rested in the chairs nearest the fire.

Charlotte gestured at the endless rows of shelves. "I didn't know there were so many books in the world."

"I had to read every one of them," said Lily. "So boring."

"Come on, there must have been a few good ones."

"Maybe a couple. But I liked your book better."

Footsteps echoed among the shelves. The friendly man and the smiling woman were approaching, but the man was no longer friendly and the woman was no longer smiling. The pair looked stern and serious. Water dripped from their fingertips, leaving a trail of cloudy pools on the floor.

"This nonsense has gone on long enough, princess," said the man.

Lily stood. "Exactly," she said. She opened her backpack and dumped its contents on the tiles in front of the fireplace. The sheets were covered with rows of swirls that branched and intersected, growing over the pages like layers of rainbow vines.

When Lily kicked the stack of pages into the fireplace, the fire roared upward and outward so quickly that Charlotte thought the air itself had ignited, that space and time were in flames. The man and the woman shielded their eyes with their hands and backed away, but Charlotte and Lily stood in the middle of the blaze, their arms around each other, Charlotte leaning her head on Lily's shoulder as if she were whispering in her sister's ear. The fire spread out through the library, through the house, through the graveyard and the wasteland and the emptiness, past the end and back to the beginning.

~~~

2. The Sisters

Charlotte awoke to find that Lily had left a message on her phone overnight. "I just finished your book," Lily said. "I started it this afternoon and read it straight through. I thought it was wonderful. I'd love to talk to you about it. Give me a call today if you have a little time."

Charlotte gave herself until the coffee finished brewing to decide what to do. She'd discovered long ago that if you gave yourself too much time to think about something, you'd just go on thinking about it. But this decision was harder than she expected. She'd told herself that of course Lily would read the book, and of course she would want to talk about it. But telling yourself something and having it actually happen are two different things; that, too, she'd discovered long ago.

Charlotte's book had been published two months earlier. Though sales were as modest as Charlotte expected, it received a handful of very positive reviews, which surprised her. She'd feared, or hoped, that the book would be of no interest to anyone but herself. It was the narrative of her mother's life and death, as far as she'd been able to piece it together, told in as much detail as she could manage. She'd set out to be merciless in her depictions and to spare no one, not even her mother, least of all herself. A Bequest of Curses was the title.

On its own terms, Charlotte thought, the book was a failure. What she'd been most desperate to learn from her investigations was the thing most conspicuously missing from the result: the story of Lily's father. All her attempts to fill in that gap had failed, and though she'd tried to weave the thread of her own futile search into the fabric of her mother's doomed existence in a way that would, she hoped, provide at least a thematic resolution, what she'd really wanted to find were the facts of the matter, and those had proven almost completely elusive. None of her mother's friends could tell her anything. Two old coworkers vaguely remembered that a handsome, well-dressed man had come into the shop a few times and asked for her mother, and that once her mother found out she was pregnant the man never came back again, but that was all. Charlotte's own memories were even more useless. As a six-year-old, she'd simply accepted her mother's statement that she was going to have another baby (a boy, she distinctly remembered her mother telling her, to be born on a particular day in June), and all she'd learned later was that her sister's father was dead and her mother didn't remember him fondly. Lily's grandfather had brusquely refused to talk to Charlotte about his son or anything else.

In the book's final chapter, she'd tried to squeeze some significance, or at least sympathy, out of this yawning hole in the middle of her story. "In ancient books," she wrote, "we read of curses bequeathed and inherited, generations chained together by links of damnation. And we read of curses that reveal themselves in contradictions, like diseases that cause both fever and chills, or the love that, so the poets say, both freezes and burns. The curse of Oedipus was both wisdom and ignorance—the wisdom that enabled him to solve the sphinx's riddle, and the ignorance that hid the true, terrible meaning of that solution, so that it was left to blind Tiresias to reveal, against his own will, the secret of the secret. 'How terrible it is to have wisdom,' Sophocles has Tiresias say, 'when it does not benefit those who have it. I knew this well, but let it slip from my mind.' And yet, even if wisdom brings no benefit, how terrible not to have it! Perhaps that also slipped from the prophet's memory. If I have inherited my mother's curse, this is part of it—not to know enough about my sister's father even to be able to imagine him in hell."

Terribly overwritten, Charlotte thought as she wrote those words. Pompous, ridiculous. But she was past her deadline and couldn't think of a better ending. At least her readers would have something to laugh at.

The coffee maker sputtered out its last few drops. No point delaying the inevitable. Charlotte poured herself a cup and called Lily.

The sisters hadn't talked since the beginning of the year. Charlotte had been too overwhelmed to call, first from the stress of finishing the book, then from her worries over what Lily would think about it, and if Charlotte didn't call, Lily certainly wouldn't. As Charlotte had moved from one stage of life to another, from high school to college to work, Lily had continued along the same circuitous path, traveling deeper and deeper into regions that, to Charlotte, remained shadowy and unmapped. Four years ago, around the time Lily turned twenty, she told Charlotte she'd learned everything there was to learn in her grandfather's house, and her reports since then had been even vaguer and more confusing than before. Charlotte never got the sense that her own total incomprehension ever bothered or frustrated her sister. Lily seemed to take it for granted that Charlotte would never understand what she was talking about, any more than if she'd been explaining cosmology to a kitten.

They hadn't spoken about their mother in years. Charlotte resisted every urge to mention her, wanting to keep her conversations with Lily as light as possible, pleasant oases in a stressful life. She'd complain to her sister about annoying girlfriends or irritations at work, but she always took pains to make her troubles sound trivial, like plot twists in the second act of a farce. Meanwhile, Lily had seemed so fixated on her abstruse investigations that Charlotte sometimes wondered, a little resentfully, if her sister ever thought about their mother at all.

"Of course I think about her," Lily said. "I think about her every day."

"I'm sure you do," Charlotte said. "I'm sorry for putting it that way. It's just that . . . you know how sometimes you can tell someone is thinking about something, or bothered by something, even if they don't say anything about it?"

"I do know that," Lily said.

"I never got that sense from you. It just felt like, there was the surface of what we were talking about, and underneath that . . . I don't know. I guess I just can't ever tell what you're thinking anymore."

"Hm." Lily paused. Rustling static on the connection, a hundred pens scribbling. "Come visit me."

The shock of the suggestion made Charlotte flinch. She couldn't believe she'd heard right. Ever since the friendly man had driven off with Lily in his silver car, Lily's grandfather's house had seemed as remote and forbidding as a planet in another galaxy. "What did you say?"

"Come visit me," Lily said. "I'll send my driver to pick you up at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. You'll be here by sundown."

"Is that . . . allowed? Will your grandfather let me in?"

"My grandfather's dead," Lily said. "This is my house now."

In a trance of amazement, Charlotte packed her suitcase, filled a backpack with books, called the hospital to say there'd been a family emergency and she'd have to miss a few days' work. Up early the next morning, perched anxiously on the edge of the couch, she thought of that other morning, of herself and Lily and their mother waiting for an emissary from the house Lily said was now hers. She thought of Lily's book of crayon swirls and wondered if any pages had been left behind in that little apartment, if some indecipherable scrap still lay hidden in a crack in the wall, beneath the floorboards, vaporized in the air.

No, she thought, Lily would have remembered them all.

The intercom chimed at exactly nine o'clock. Charlotte buzzed the visitor in, and when the knock came and she looked through the peephole, she yelped with surprise to see the same friendly fellow who'd come to the apartment so long ago and taken Lily away. He was gray-haired and wrinkled now, but Charlotte would have known his green eyes and red smile anywhere.

"I can't believe it," she said. "I never thought I'd see you again."

"I'm flattered you remember me at all," he said, nodding his thanks for the cup of coffee she handed him.

The friendly man insisted on carrying her suitcase down the stairs, though he finally relented and let her wear the backpack. She taped the spare key to the bottom of the mat and followed the man down to what looked like the same silver car he'd taken Lily away in. Charlotte climbed into the back seat and they drove out of the city, the friendly man seeming to know exactly which way to go to catch every green light and avoid every snarl of traffic.

As the city's tangle gave way to wide streets lined with parks and ranch houses, Charlotte began to be afraid. Before, she'd been too stunned by the turn of events to question it, as if some implacable force had commandeered her life and she could only obey, puppeteered by fate. Now, she began to feel ambushed, bewildered. Lily's words echoed in her mind, sounding less like an invitation than a summons from some dreadful judge. She looked at the suburban neighborhoods passing by and wondered if she could survive a jump from the car, if it came to that.

"Apologies for the boring ride, ma'am," the friendly man said. His eyes sparkled in the rearview mirror like patches of wet moss. "I used to be quite the conversationalist, but I guess my throat's gone rusty."

Charlotte dug her fingers into the leather of the car seat. "It's fine. I was just lost in my own thoughts."

"Driving your sister around for all these years has got me accustomed to silence, I suppose. Not one for chitchat, is she? I've ferried her all across creation without hearing a peep." The friendly man chuckled. "Now, her grandfather, that old codger could chew your ear off from one end of the earth to the other."

"I was sorry to hear he passed." That wasn't true at all, but it felt like the right thing to say.

"C'est la vie," the friendly man said.

The parks and houses had faded from the roadside. A vacant expanse of grass stretched to the horizon, its monotonous flatness broken only by a few spindly trees standing in pools of their own shadow. The sun was directly overhead, and Charlotte couldn't decide if the three hours of driving had felt like ten minutes or ten thousand years. You'll be here by sundown, Lily had said. Would they arrive at Lily's house in the blink of an eye, or would Charlotte spend the rest of eternity in the back seat of the silver car, endlessly traveling toward a destination that never got any closer?

Low hills began to intrude on the landscape. The trees became shorter, spikier, the grass sparse and scraggly. Feeling herself hurtling toward the center of a mystery, Charlotte leaned forward to peer into the distance, where the empty road merged with the horizon. Something stirred at the edge of her mind, a half-formed thought like an itch behind her eyes.

A pair of figures came into view ahead, pale shapes flanking the road. Charlotte squinted, and the approaching figures resolved into two white obelisks pointing up from the earth. From the patchy grass around the obelisks rose arched stones, broken pillars, heaps of bare earth. A graveyard.

As the silver car sped between the obelisks, the thought Charlotte had been struggling to formulate burst into her consciousness. With a jolt, she realized she'd been given an almost miraculous opportunity, one she'd nearly squandered. For the first and perhaps the last time, she was in the presence of someone who might be able to help her solve the riddle that had tortured her for so long. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath.

"Excuse me," she said. "Did you know Lily's father?"

Green eyes glittered in the rearview. "I used to know him. Something on your mind?"

"It's just . . ." She looked aside, embarrassed. Rows of crumbling monuments swung past the window. "It's just that I wrote a book."

"Oh, of course! Your sister mentioned how much she enjoyed it. Quite a compliment, coming from someone who's read as much as her."

"I'd wanted to write about our mother and Lily's father, but no one could tell me anything, and I never found out what happened to him. It seemed like he fell off the face of the earth."

An emerald eye winked. "Something like that."

"Well, I was hoping you could tell me a little about him. Not for the book, of course. It's too late for that. Just for me."

"I wish I could help you, princess. But like I said, I used to know him. Past tense."

Charlotte sat in confused silence. After a moment, the friendly man cleared his throat and said, "I don't know if this will be any comfort, but the one thing I can tell you is that what happened to him is what he deserved. He got everything he had coming."

When the sun had nearly sunk to the horizon, the car turned aside from the road, onto a dirt path that curled among the graves. Ahead, Charlotte saw a small, cozy-looking house on a slight rise. Lamplight glowed in all the windows.

"See how welcome you are!" the friendly man said. "Your sister's got everything lit up for you."

The car pulled up at the bottom of the rise. Before Charlotte could get out of the back seat, the friendly man had snatched her suitcase and backpack from the trunk, scurried up the slope and into the house. When Charlotte reached the open door, a sleek-faced, smiling woman in a blue dress beckoned her inside. "We're all so happy to welcome you," the woman said.

Inside, the house was very snug and quiet. The smiling woman led Charlotte down a dim, low-ceilinged hallway to the bedroom where the friendly man had put her luggage. On a stand beside the narrow bed, pale flowers in a vase diffused a heavy aroma that made Charlotte yawn.

"Would you like to rest, dear?" the smiling woman said. "You've traveled so far, you must be dead on your feet. Or would you like something to eat? A glass of water? Anything you want, just let us know. This is your house, too, after all."

"I'd just like to see my sister, if that's all right."

"Of course. I'm sure she's down in the library, as usual." The smiling woman led Charlotte further along the dim, low hallway to a door that opened on a corkscrew of descending steps. Warm, moist air rose from the darkness where the steps curved. "No doubt she'll be hard at work on her records, but I'm sure she'll set them aside for your sake, dear."

As Charlotte spiraled down, the dread she'd felt in the car seemed to surge and fade with the turns of the stairway, first rising to a height of terror that almost made her spin around and run back up the steps, out of the house, into the emptiness, then dwindling to a dreamlike calm. Whatever will happen has already happened, she thought. No escaping it. Torches flickered on the stone walls, their flames waving back and forth in the moving air.

At the bottom of the spiral, Charlotte found herself in a vast, gloomy chamber. The air was hot and damp, and a musty odor breathed from the rows of shelves that vanished into the shadows on either side. The shelves were crammed with books bound in red leather, all the volumes exactly the same size, whorls of dust and mold marking their spines instead of titles or authors' names. Water dripped from the high, vaulted ceiling into cloudy pools on the floor.

Charlotte heard a distant crackle, saw a pinpoint of light glimmering at the end of the long, narrow aisle between the shelves. As she walked along the aisle, the pinpoint swelled to a fire blazing in a marble fireplace, throwing orange and yellow spangles over a row of armchairs bound in the same red leather as the books.

A figure rose from the chair nearest the fire. Charlotte's heart twisted in her chest.

Lily was still very short and thin. She had a tired, quiet look, as if any exertion would wear her out as quickly now as when she was a little child. But as she waited for Charlotte to approach, she stood with the poised equilibrium of total self-possession, and her eyes shone with a firmness and determination that put Charlotte in mind less of anything human than of a river carving a canyon in the earth, or a star wheeling its planets through the void. Bright ripples of firelight ran over her purple dress, as if the fabric were made of wine.

"Charlotte," Lily said.

"Lily."

After a moment standing face-to-face with her sister, Charlotte realized she felt nothing, neither joy nor fear, not even a desire to touch Lily's hand to make sure she was really there. She'd come to the core of things, the secret temple in the forest of the world, where calm and stillness reigned. Whatever would happen had already happened.

"Let's sit," Lily said. "I'm a little tired." She sank back into her chair, and Charlotte sat beside her.

"This really is all yours now," Charlotte said.

"Yes," Lily said, looking satisfied yet slightly embarrassed, as if she didn't want her big sister to think she was putting on airs.

Charlotte gestured at the endless rows of shelves. "I didn't know there were so many books in the world."

Lily smiled. "There aren't."

The fire snapped and rumbled. Charlotte cleared her throat. "I just wanted to say, I'm sorry I was so mean to you when we were little. I'm sorry I kept calling you Emily and Anne, even though I knew you hated it."

"It's all right," said Lily. "It didn't really matter." She turned her face toward the fire. "I'm sorry too."

"For what?"

"For . . ." Lily spread her hands.

"No, no," Charlotte said. She reached out to Lily, gripped her thin wrist, squeezed. "It wasn't your fault."

Lily's eyes widened, flashed. "Wasn't it?"

Charlotte returned her sister's stare. "I asked the driver about your father. He said he got what was coming to him."

"Yes," said Lily.

"What happened?"

"Do you really want to know?"

Charlotte nodded.

"One moment." Lily stood, went to the nearest shelf, ran her finger along the spines.

While Lily searched, Charlotte glanced around the open area in front of the fireplace. On one side, a carafe sat on a low table, white bits swirling in the liquid like snow. On the other, a small desk bore a scattering of pens, a pair of binoculars, a compass and protractor. Something small and purple lay in the shadows under the desk.

Lily set an open book on Charlotte's lap. "Look here," she said, pointing.

A sprawl of multicolored ink covered the page, a luxuriant growth of swirls, curves, loops, spirals, splotches. As Charlotte looked at the place where Lily pointed, she saw the chaos tremble, saw the lines squirm and twist, and suddenly there came to her an idea of such desolation, such degradation and misery, that for a moment she wished she hadn't looked, but then again she was glad she had.

"It's terrible," she said, smiling. "You wrote this?"

"In a moment of inspiration, I suppose." Lily went to put the book back on the shelf. "My grandfather always said my father was suffering the consequences of his actions, but I prefer to think he's suffering their preconditions. It's all the same, I suppose. What he did arose from what he was, and what he was arose from what he did. The wheel turns and turns."

"And your grandfather? What happened to him?"

Lily shuffled slowly back from the shelf, breathing heavily as if the short walk had exhausted her. She went to the low table beside the fireplace, poured a glass from the carafe, drank the cloudy liquid. "There was a fire," she said. "But mostly, he was very, very old. Couldn't keep it together. I guess he did his best. Really, though, he was just like my father. He gave his word, and he didn't keep it. And he got what was coming to him, like my father did. Like everyone does. If it wasn't coming to you, you wouldn't get it."

Charlotte frowned, shook her head. "What about our mother?"

Lily sighed as she slumped into her chair. White fragments quivered on her wet lips. "You're the one who lived through all that. I had to read about it." Her head lolled drunkenly. "Excuse me, I'm feeling a little…" Her eyelids fell, and she began to snore.

Charlotte sat quietly for a long time, not wanting to disturb her sister. Lily seemed so weary all of a sudden, so drained and hollow. A rancid miasma blew from her half-open mouth, as if all her teeth had rotted in an instant. Charlotte thought of the endless shelves of books her sister had written, of the friendly man and the smiling woman going about their mysterious business upstairs, of the graveyard and the wasteland and the dead people crumbling to pieces all around. It all seemed too dreadful to contemplate, an awful burden for Lily to bear.

Rising from her chair, careful not to make a sound, Charlotte went to the desk strewn with implements. Curious, she rummaged through drawers cluttered with star charts, abecedaries, manuals of calligraphy. Pedantry, drudgery. She leaned down to reach into the darkness under the desk. Rough cloth brushed her fingers. She pulled.

Lily's backpack slid out from the shadows. The main compartment was empty, but in the front pocket Charlotte found a battered paperback. She set the book on the desktop, looked down at her own name in small letters on the cover, A Bequest of Curses in larger letters above it. Both name and title were outlined against a picture of her mother smiling awkwardly, sitting with Charlotte on one knee and Lily on the other. When Charlotte picked the book up, it fell open to the end, the stupid part about wisdom and ignorance that she'd written at the last minute, after the last minute, desperate and racing to get the thing over with.

A piece of paper folded in quarters dropped from between the pages. Charlotte picked up the makeshift bookmark, unfolded it. It was a crude drawing of a house, red door and blue windows, smoke spiraling above the triangular roof. The house was surrounded by rings of arched stones, broken pillars, heaps of bare earth, and beyond the outermost ring lay a sky full of stars. Three stick figures stood beneath the house; Charlotte couldn't tell if they were in the front yard or underground. Scrawled above the roof, like the name of the house or the title of its story, were the words THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE BY CHARLOTTE AS TOLD TO LILY.

Folding the picture back into quarters, Charlotte closed the pages around it, put the paperback down. Turning, she found Lily still asleep, her pale face slack and spent. Charlotte remembered her sister lying on their bed with her face covered in jelly, and sitting with a crayon in each hand drawing swirls and spirals on a blank sheet of paper, and climbing into the back seat of a big silver car, about to be taken away. She leaned down and kissed Lily's forehead.

Charlotte went to the nearest shelf, ran her finger along the row of volumes. Though they were all the same size, with the same red leather binding, the fresh smudges of Lily's hands on the moldy spine made it easy to find the one Charlotte was looking for. Flipping through the pages in front of the fireplace, she marveled at the landscapes of ink her sister had crafted, how each page seemed to shiver on the verge of resolving into some infinitely complex design. But when she thought of what that design might be, she shuddered and closed the book.

Charlotte gazed over at the red armchair where her sister rested. Lily smiled in her sleep, murmuring as if some delicious taste had filled her mouth. White flecks of mortality still clung to her lips. Behind those dark-ringed lids, Charlotte thought, lay eyes as big and round and terrible as the moon.

Charlotte looked down at the book in her hands. The whole world, she thought, the whole world, and threw the book into the fireplace.

~~~

3. The Books

The friendly man and the smiling woman stood among the monuments at the bottom of the rise, peering up at the burned-out shell of the house. They glanced at each other, and for a moment the friendly man looked angry, and the smiling woman looked sad. Then they were themselves again. They scampered up the slope and entered the house, the smiling woman making sure to test the doorknob for heat with the back of her hand before turning it. They put wet handkerchiefs over their noses and walked down the hallway, its low ceiling now blackened with smoke, past the bedroom where the narrow bed's embers gleamed and the vase's fragments glistened amid ashes of pale flowers, through the door that hung crazily on half-melted hinges, down the spiraling stairs. Descending to the library, they squinted through curls of fetid steam at the smoldering piles of books and picked their way between collapsed shelves to the still-glowing fireplace, where the desk and its implements lay in shambles and broken glass littered the floor and the leather coverings of the armchairs had burst and split. They stood in the wreckage and gazed down at the masses of charred and crumpled pages heaped in front of the fireplace like drifts of rotting leaves in an ancient forest or dark earth mounded atop freshly filled graves. The friendly man chuckled and the smiling woman sighed as they knelt among the glittering shards and pools of cloudy liquid to rummage through the heaps, spidery fingers rustling in caverns of paper as they searched and sifted. From time to time, among the sullied ruins and crumbling trash, they found an unburnt page and pulled it from the chaos, bright as a scrap of bone unearthed from ashes, precious as a shred of understanding gleaned from a tattered old book.