Interim Summer 2015

The summer Wilhelmina was thirteen, she woke morning after morning from the same dream. It was a dream that everything in life was just as it should be—school, her parents, Delia, Bee, Julie, summers with the aunts—except that there was something important that she didn't know. Something she was missing, and whatever it was, it was always just a few steps ahead of her, out of her reach.

Then, when she awoke, it was hard to shake the dream off. Because something did feel wrong to Wilhelmina. Some worry nagged her at unpredictable moments, and she couldn't figure out what it was. She'd assumed it was a Massachusetts feeling, something about school, maybe, where things had been changing, social factions emerging all around her, and social expectations. Or maybe it was something about the trials of living with Delia, who was a five-year-old agent of chaos. Or maybe something to do with her mother's irritating therapy gaze. She'd thought she would leave it behind when she went to the aunts for the summer. But it was in Pennsylvania too.

It was hard to describe. It was like the world around her had shrunk in some places, or slowed down in others, and her size was wrong, her speed was wrong, everything took forever, and she was so impatient. But impatient for what? Wilhelmina didn't know what she was waiting for. Every morning a bright red cardinal flew into the aunts' yard, perched itself on the frame of the basement window three floors directly down from Wilhelmina's bedroom, and jabbed at its own reflection in the glass, hard. Pound, pound, pound, over and over; most days, Wilhelmina woke to the noise. Frankie said male cardinals were aggressive, that he was defending his territory from the other male cardinal he thought he saw in the glass. If Frankie said that, then Wilhelmina knew it was true, but it wasn't what she saw. Wilhelmina saw her own relentless but pointless impatience. The cardinal was trying to pound through to a different feeling he would never reach. When she heard his pounding, she felt better, like something was scratching her itch. Until the noise became annoying. Then she would fantasize about dropping a flagstone out her bedroom window.

She didn't always feel like this. She felt it the least when she was with Bee, Julie, or Frankie. She felt it the most with Delia and her mother, and more and more at school. Her father, Aunt Margaret, and Esther had mixed results, and solitude was likewise variable. Whenever Wilhelmina had an outing with the aunts, no matter whether it was fun or not, it always seemed to last too long and she would bolt for her bedroom the moment her feet hit the driveway. But then she would hear voices below. She would sense her aunts moving to and fro and she would want to know what they were talking about, what they were doing. She would find a book and bring it downstairs so she could sit somewhere, pretending to herself that she was reading. Really she just wanted the aunts around her.

Esther and Aunt Margaret worked from home now. Wilhelmina had expected this to be a big change from all her years of spending time alone with Frankie during the day, but it wasn't. Esther and Aunt Margaret mostly kept to themselves during business hours, occupying different parts of the house from Frankie and Wilhelmina, leaving Frankie to herself when she was gardening, and of course, spending a significant chunk of time in the carriage house. Then, in the late afternoon, the aunts would come together again, noticing each other, talking, laughing, planning as usual, with no fuss or comment, as if this was their natural rhythm. It was like three people could occupy the same space, yet, by mutual agreement, exist on slightly different dimensions. It fascinated Wilhelmina. It also made her wonder if that was what was wrong with her: she was stuck in a dimension half a step removed from the one in which she was meant to be.

Esther and Aunt Margaret's clients were interesting. Through her high bedroom windows, Wilhelmina spied on them as they stepped out of their cars and walked to the carriage house, wondering what they did in their lives when they weren't here getting advice from Esther and Aunt Margaret. Advice on what, exactly? She thought that they were a bit out of the ordinary when it came to style. A disproportionate number of them had hair dyed non-hair colors, like shades of purple, pink, and blue. A disproportionate number of them wore clothing that was noticeably and deliberately…different from what other people wore. Stranger? Funkier, maybe? Like they shopped in very specific stores that weren't at the mall? Wilhelmina wasn't sure of the right words for the styles she saw, because it was new to her, to notice how people adorned their bodies. To notice bodies. Wilhelmina had become ever so slightly obsessed with bodies and their adornments, actually. Her own body had changed, and though her parents and aunts talked about how beautiful she was, casually, as if it was a given, and though on one level she chose to believe them—not her parents necessarily, but she believed Frankie, and she also mostly trusted Esther on this topic—Wilhelmina was of course acutely aware of the message out in the world that beauty meant thin bodies. That health and strength also meant thin bodies, even though Wilhelmina could swim longer and farther than anyone she knew, even Aunt Margaret. Even though her newer, rounder body with thicker arms and legs was a stronger body. Even though her big, sturdy feet made sense now, supporting such a body. And she had breasts now too, and a butt that stuck out, and she was still rather short. She was shaped like Aunt Margaret, which she hadn't been expecting. It wasn't necessarily horrible; Aunt Margaret was quite pretty—Wilhelmina could see it for herself, and Frankie and Esther were always saying so—but it brought with it all kinds of realizations about how Aunt Margaret adorned her body in a manner that was fine for Aunt Margaret, with long, flowing skirts and shirts and scarves in blues and greens and with long, flowing hair—she was Aunt Margaret, which was fine, whatever, but Wilhelmina was someone else. She wanted to look like something else. Like herself. So—what did that mean?

The summer Wilhelmina was thirteen, she made a study of how other people adorned their bodies. She noticed that when women had very short, dark hair, she almost always liked it. She noticed that when women wore above-the-knee dresses, both loose ones and dresses that fit their bodies closely, she liked the fit, on all kinds of bodies, even if she didn't like a particular dress, which she often didn't, because she was picky. Wilhelmina liked solid colors more than patterns, but only particular hues, the ones that rang a clear, joyful bell inside her. When she liked a pattern, it was for the same inexplicable reason: she just did. When the aunts' clients stepped out of their cars, sometimes they set her ringing like the bell above a shop door, and other times, she became analytical but indifferent.

There was a woman who had a body similar to Wilhelmina's, short and fat—Wilhelmina was practicing using the word "fat" as a descriptive term free of judgment, which was hard, since most other people used it as a slur, but the aunts didn't, nor did her parents—it was a neutral word for all of them, and so, with a certain measure of belligerence, she was testing it out. Julie and Bee were testing it out in solidarity with her, or anyway, they were trying to. Sometimes they cringed a little when they said it, or shot her worried expressions, because they didn't want to hurt her feelings, which, if Wilhelmina was being honest with herself, made it worse, but she could feel their solidarity in their hearts. Which meant something. Anyway, there was a woman shaped like Wilhelmina who wore summery shirts in patterns Wilhelmina consistently liked. The shirts looked handmade. They were always sleeveless, and fitted to her torso perfectly, with backs composed entirely of delicate straps that exposed the gray-and-black wings tattooed on her shoulders. She wore these shirts with tight jeans, and Wilhelmina found it incredibly sexy. She imagined her own back tattooed with giant wings and wasn't sure if that was right, but it was certainly right for this woman.

There was a man whose short hair was sculpted into an angular wedge above his head, regular brown hair on one side but with a wide streak of reddish purple on the other. He wore big brown boots and tight dark jeans and Wilhelmina thought his legs, thick and muscular, and his thick torso, and the chest giving shape to his T-shirt, were incredibly sexy too. She wished Bee were here to see that man when he had an appointment with the aunts. Bee wanted to color his own hair. He had colored his hair, actually, last year at Christmas. Hot pink. His father had shaved his head afterward. Anyway, Wilhelmina called Bee to tell him about the man's hair, though she didn't tell him about the man's overall je ne sais quoi, because she couldn't figure out how to say it without it sounding like all she meant was her own lust. She did feel lust, sure, but that was separate—completely—from the thing about the man that she wanted to share with Bee. It was something about a feeling some people had. It was powerful, like magic. She sensed it the moment they stepped out of their cars, the people who'd figured out exactly who they were.

When Wilhelmina talked to Julie on the phone, she didn't bother trying to go into details because—Wilhelmina was inexpressibly excited about this—Julie would get to see it for herself, because Julie was coming. The Dunstables were driving to visit her father's family in North Carolina and they were going to stay a night with the aunts en route. Just a night, but they promised to arrive as early as they reasonably could and stay as late as possible the next day, so that Wilhelmina and Julie could have some time together.

For almost twenty-four hours that summer, Wilhelmina was completely happy. She showed Julie around Frankie's many gardens. She took her swimming at the lake, and pointed out the faraway beach where she found the blue stones. She pulled Esther's tía Rosa's sketchbooks down from the glass-fronted bookcase in the sitting room—Tía Rosa had died and left Esther her sketchbooks—and showed Julie pages and pages of delicate drawings of plants, animals, and sometimes objects, labeled in Spanish, with descriptors and dates. "Esther says she kept records of all the spirits she met in the world," said Wilhelmina.

"Wow," said Julie, who always got things, without Wilhelmina needing to explain. "I can feel their spirits coming through the pictures."

She brought Julie on a walk down the sidewalkless road as cars careened by—"We walk facing traffic," she instructed importantly—past the Dornblazers' cows and the Watchulonises' apple trees, and introduced her to every neighbor they saw. "This is my best friend Julie," she said to Mrs. Watchulonis, then to Mr. Ransom, then to Mrs. Storz and her four children. She showed Julie the old, teeny cemetery with mossy, fallen-over stones from the 1700s.

When they got home again, she asked Frankie to pull Julie a tarot card, because Julie had always been interested in Frankie's tarot cards, more interested than Wilhelmina herself.

"Would you like that, dear?" Frankie asked Julie.

"Oh yes, please," said Julie.

At the kitchen table, Frankie patted the chair beside her for Julie to sit down, then began shuffling her cards. It was the deck Frankie used most often ever since she'd given Wilhelmina her old deck. It was the same style of deck, with the same pictures, but the cards were brighter and crisper, less softened with age.

Once the cards were shuffled, Frankie set the deck on the table and asked Julie to cut it. When Julie did, Frankie turned the topmost card over.

"Ah," she said, handing it to Julie. "The Three of Wands."

The card showed a person from behind, wearing flowing clothing of many colors, standing on high ground, looking out at ships sailing across a bay.

"What does it mean?" said Julie almost reverently, tracing the three wands in the picture with her finger. Two were stuck in the ground like pillars, or like a door the person had just stepped through. The third was in the person's hand, held like a walking stick.

"This is the card of an adventurer," said Frankie, "and a card of ambition. You see that beautiful, broad view over the water, and all those ships heading who knows where? It's about setting off into the world, on a literal or a metaphorical adventure. It's also a good-fortune card—things will go well for you in your ventures—and you see that colorful outfit? It's a card for a nonconformist."

"Wow," said Julie. "I love it. It feels just right for me." Julie had a cell phone; it was new, and an object of great envy for Wilhelmina. She took about twelve photos of her tarot card before she gave it back to Frankie.

That night, they slept in sleeping bags on Wilhelmina's floor because it was more fair than one of them having the bed. Then, in the morning, they woke to the Pound! Pound! Pound! of the cardinal on the windowglass far below.

"What the hell?" said Julie, pushing herself up blurrily, her bonnet slipping off, a sleepy but incredulous expression on her face. As Wilhelmina explained, Julie cried out, "Every morning?" with such indignation that suddenly the cardinal was hilarious. They both started laughing. Somewhere far away in the house, Tina, Julie's two-year-old sister, began howling. Julie pulled her sleeping bag over her face and said, "It's amazing to be two floors away from Teeny."

"I wish you could stay longer," Wilhelmina said.

"Me too," said Julie. "I can't believe you have, like, the whole top floor of this house to yourself."

"Let's spy," said Wilhelmina.

That morning, the man with the red-purple streak in his hair had an appointment with the aunts. Kneeling on Wilhelmina's bed, they watched him climb out of his car. Wilhelmina was so glad he'd arrived. She wanted Julie to see all the most fascinating clients.

"I like his style," Wilhelmina said, not knowing how to explain to Julie what she meant, or why he mattered. Hoping Julie would just get it, now that she saw him herself.

"Everyone really is white here," said Julie musingly, peering at the man as he disappeared into the carriage house.

"What?" said Wilhelmina, because it wasn't at all what she'd wanted Julie to understand about the man. "No, they're not. Esther isn't white!"

The expression that Julie turned to Wilhelmina contained so much startled hurt that Wilhelmina heard her own words again, and was ashamed.

"I didn't mean literally everyone," said Julie. "You don't need to correct me, Wil."

"You're right," said Wilhelmina. "I'm so sorry, Julie. I don't know why I said that."

"Esther was even the one who said it first," said Julie, a tear, to Wilhelmina's horror, making a track down her face. "That's why I said it, because I was going to tell you what Esther said. Because it was really sweet, actually. She said that it might be different from what I was used to here, and she just wanted to acknowledge it. She said everyone is really kind, but I could always come talk to her, about anything. I mean, it was unnecessary, Wil," said Julie, with a mild glare at the window glass. Julie wasn't looking at Wilhelmina. "I don't need to hang out with, like, your great-aunt. But it was nice. I felt like she was trying to look out for me."

Julie had put the slightest emphasis on the word "she" in that sentence. Esther, unlike Wilhelmina, had been trying to look out for Julie.

"Oh my god, Julie," said Wilhelmina. "I'm so sorry. I should be looking out for you!"

"I mean, it's okay," said Julie, as another tear dripped down her face.

"It's not okay," said Wilhelmina, her voice growing squeakier and squeakier as she understood that she'd made Julie cry multiple tears. "It's just, I think that guy is really hot! I'm trying to figure out my style!" Her voice was disappearing into the stratosphere; Julie began to stare at her with her mouth forming an O. "So I was being completely self-absorbed! I should've listened to you, Julie, and not been racist!"

"Oh my god, Wil," said Julie. "Take a breath."

"Sorry," said Wilhelmina, trying to get ahold of her voice. "Forget about that guy, he doesn't matter. Can I tell you what I wish I'd said, instead of what I did say?"

The girls were still kneeling beside each other on the bed, propped in the window. Julie had gone rigid when Wilhelmina had first spoken, but now she was feeling more regular again to Wilhelmina, like maybe she'd decided she didn't need to brace herself. She sniffled once, and nodded.

Wilhelmina took a breath. "You're right," she said. "It's like a sea of white people here. I know that matters. Next time I'm going to be more supportive."

Julie watched Wilhelmina's face for a moment. Then she said, "Thanks."

"Of course, Julie. Are you okay?"

"Mostly," said Julie. "I think you surprised me, more than anything else. I expected you to just get it. Like, you of all people. You're my person, you know? I didn't think it would be a thing."

Through her shame, Wilhelmina was having a realization. "I think maybe I didn't want it to be true," she said. "This place matters so much to me, you know? I didn't want it to be anything bad, or anything that might hurt you."

"But denying it's true hurts me more," said Julie.

"Yeah," said Wilhelmina, who could see this too.

"Hey," said Julie, bumping her shoulder against Wilhelmina's. The contact felt like it was made of generosity and grace.

"Hey," said Wilhelmina.

"Are you going to tell me about this hot guy?"

When Julie's family left, Wilhelmina wasn't sure how she felt, about anything. She wandered the house and the yard, trying to find the place where she would never hurt someone she loved with her own carelessness. She took a solitary walk to the cemetery, where, with a small burst of dismay, it occurred to her to wonder what Julie had thought, looking at the graves of white people from the 1700s, when slavery had been legal.

She swam a lot. Sometimes the lake felt too small. Sometimes when she reached the faraway beach, the breeze was too cold, the pebbles were too sharp on her feet, and she couldn't find any blue stones. She wore a garnet-colored two-piece bathing suit that covered her torso and had shorts that reached partway down her thighs, because she liked it. It was comfortable, she liked how it looked on her, and she liked that it was a fuck-you to the pressure women felt to be nearly naked on beaches. But she worried sometimes that people who saw her in it thought she was trying to cover her body, because she was ashamed, because she was fat. Wilhelmina felt pressure to be nearly naked and pressure to hide her body in shame. Pressures could be opposites. When they were opposites, how could you ever possibly make a clear statement of resistance? Were there modest bathing suits like hers that had the words Fuck You in big letters on the butt?

She asked Julie this over the phone, because she knew it was an easy question that would make Julie laugh. Wilhelmina didn't know for sure how to talk to Julie about what she was trying to do with her style, partly because she didn't know what she was trying to do. Wilhelmina didn't know anyone her age who had a body like hers. "I feel weird trying to explain it," she said.

"Hey," said Julie, who was eating something crunchy on the other end of the line. "We can have weird conversations. I found a makeup channel on YouTube I like. Want the link?"

"What do you mean, a makeup channel?"

"People teach you how to do different looks," she said. "There are hair and clothes channels too."

"There are?" said Wilhelmina, amazed.

"Of course there are!" said Julie. "I'll send you the link."

Often, when Wilhelmina swam, Aunt Margaret swam too. Aunt Margaret had an array of bathing suits in bright jewel tones, and you never knew which one to expect when she pulled her shirt off. Once, she started swimming in a magenta bathing suit, turned around, came back to shore, carried her bag into the bathhouse, and emerged in a jade-green bathing suit. "I couldn't figure out which one was right for today until I was swimming!" she announced as she dropped her bag back onto her beach chair, then ran into the water again.

After swimming, Wilhelmina always wanted to go straight home and sleep, or anyway, she thought she did. She wanted to be doing whatever she wasn't doing. But Aunt Margaret would drive out of the parking lot and turn in the wrong direction with no warning, because she "just needed to pop to the hardware store for a flapper for the downstairs toilet," or Esther needed a prescription picked up at the pharmacy, or a neighbor was home from a trip to Montréal and she wanted to welcome them back, or anything else on a long list of activities Wilhelmina badly wished not to be doing.

One day, Aunt Margaret turned the car in the correct direction and Wilhelmina breathed an internal sigh of relief. Then, three bends in the road later, Aunt Margaret slammed on the brakes and started driving the car backward.

"Aunt Margaret!" cried Wilhelmina. "What are you doing?"

"Did you see that sign for a pottery studio, dear?" said Aunt Margaret, still haphazardly backing up with her head craned around on her neck. "Don't you just love pottery studios?"

"I love not having car accidents!" said Wilhelmina.

"Oh, the nearest car is a half mile away, I promise," said Aunt Margaret, then turned the car down a narrow dirt road Wilhelmina had never particularly noticed before.

The road sloped downhill through a forest of birch trees. It was a relief to be driving forward. "How do we know how far away this place is?" said Wilhelmina.

"Oh, this road isn't too long," said Aunt Margaret soothingly. "It can't be far."

"How can there be a pottery studio you don't know about?"

Aunt Margaret shrugged. "New neighbors? Old neighbors with new hobbies?"

Wilhelmina clamped her mouth shut, preparing to hate the pottery studio. She had that grimy, sticky feeling that came from thick applications of sunscreen plus dressing in wrinkled clothing pulled out of a sandy bag while one's body was not entirely dry, and her long hair, gathered into a thick, dark knot, was dripping steadily, forming a wet patch on her back.

But as it happened, Wilhelmina didn't hate the pottery studio. First, because it turned out to be a small barn built of mossy gray stone, set back from the road and surrounded by shoulder-high corn that stretched out to the edges of the birch forest, which was charming. Second, because it was empty, with no hovering proprietor to whom Wilhelmina felt obliged to be pleasant. And third, because the pottery was of such unparalleled revoltingness that Wilhelmina was captivated. Someone—someone skilled—had made these pots on purpose. This mug, nicely shaped and well-balanced, but glazed the unique yellow-brown of diarrhea, and with seashell shards affixed to its outside that had been used as canvases for tiny paintings of coiled intestines, was someone's deliberate style.

"Dear me," said Aunt Margaret, picking up a viscera-colored bowl. A sculptured bloodshot eyeball stared up from its bottom. Aunt Margaret poked at the eyeball with an enchanted expression on her face. "What do you think, Wilhelmina?"

"Gross," said Wilhelmina.

"Yes," said Aunt Margaret, turning the bowl over to look at its price tag. Thirty-five dollars. "Where does one pay, do you suppose?"

"Honor system," said Wilhelmina, pointing to an open tin and a sign near the door. "But you're not buying that, are you?"

"No, I think not," said Aunt Margaret. "It's a hair too horrific for me. Though I would like to serve Esther soup in it and be around for her reaction when she uncovered the eyeball. What's extraordinary is that this is beautiful," she added, setting the bowl down and reaching past a series of nesting dolls. The nesting dolls were anatomically correct hearts, five of them, standing upright on squat legs of veins and arteries, glazed with a weird slickness that sent a little shudder crawling down Wilhelmina's back. She badly wanted to test whether they fit together, as nesting dolls should.

Aunt Margaret touched a finger to a little teapot behind the hearts. It was glazed a pale eggshell blue, speckled with brown at its base. The handle on its lid was sculpted into a delicate songbird.

Taking the teapot in both hands, Aunt Margaret tested the lid. Then she held the handle and pretended to pour. "It's light and perfect!" she said. "The handle is comfortable! Doesn't it look as if a being from another realm reached through the veils of hell to deposit it here, Wilhelmina?" She turned it over to check the price. Sixty dollars. "It's an investment," she said, "but I think this is why we came. We must buy it for Frankie. She'll be able to tell us what kind of bird this is on the handle."

"Okay," said Wilhelmina. "But I want to look at everything before we leave."

"Understood," said Aunt Margaret, setting the teapot back behind the hearts. She touched a stoppered jug shaped like a stomach, glazed a stomachy pink, that proclaimed on the outside in a beautiful serif font, Self-Portrait. "Is the self-portrait trapped inside the stomach, do you think?" she said. "Or is it the stomach itself? Did another stomach make this stomach?"

Wilhelmina was beginning to have feelings about this barn. Those five slimy hearts were her own bad dreams and bad decisions, crawling out of her body and lining themselves up on the table, giving her a break from herself. She wandered happily from piece to piece. While she was studying a group of tall pitchers also shaped like stomachs with lengthy esophagus spouts, another family entered the studio. Wilhelmina turned her back; she didn't want to talk to anyone; she didn't want to have to be nice.

"That's the one," said a boy's deep voice. "Viv? You have the money?"

"Wow," said a girl's voice. "Who's the artist?"

"Not that one," said the boy, his voice cracking on the word "that," becoming younger. "This one."

A moment later, they were gone, and Wilhelmina and Aunt Margaret were once more alone. Wilhelmina's shoulders relaxed.

"Hm," said Aunt Margaret, who'd rounded back to the entrance. "How interesting."

"What is it?" said Wilhelmina.

"They purchased our teapot," said Aunt Margaret. Then she pointed to the hearts, behind which gaped an empty space. "I was wrong," she said. "The teapot is not why we came."

Wilhelmina flashed with annoyance. In her mind, that teapot already belonged to Frankie, which meant that those people had stolen it. She crossed to the door with a few stompy strides and barged outside. In the narrow gravel drive, a car was turning around. On its back bumper, a sticker said, Jesus Would Use His Turn Signals. The driver had a ring of graying hair; a teenaged girl sat beside him. In the back seat was a boy who was lifting that beautiful eggshell-blue teapot up to the light. She saw long, skinny arms and a mess of dark hair. "Assholes!" she said under her breath as the car drove away. "Thieves."

"Did you find any other treasures, Wilhelmina?" asked Aunt Margaret from the doorway. "Anything it would pain you to leave behind?"

"Only Frankie's teapot, which they stole," said Wilhelmina.

"I'm tempted to commission a new one," said Aunt Margaret, in an unruffled tone that Wilhelmina found intensely aggravating. "Just to see what the artist creates."

"Can we go home now?" said Wilhelmina.

At home, Wilhelmina showered, then climbed up to her bedroom and lay on her bed for a while, hating the way her wet hair soaked her pillow. She and Julie had started sending each other links to hair-styling videos. Black-person hair and white-person hair, men's hair and women's, colored and bleached and extensions, whatever; it was making Wilhelmina even more impatient.

She wondered why she'd never tried short hair before. Then she understood, through some unexamined instinct, that it was because of Frankie. Frankie's hair was thin and wispy, but she'd used to have long hair. Wilhelmina remembered it from a long time ago. Silver and thick, wound into twisted braids that she wore like a crown around her head, like an empress. Like the Empress in the tarot, sitting in her garden, with her pomegranate dress and her crown of stars. Right? Hadn't she? Wilhelmina grew her hair long because Frankie was fine. Or something? It didn't make much sense, it was illogical really, and she was going to get her hair cut. Somewhere, soon. The next time one of the aunts' short-haired clients stepped out of their car, as long as it wasn't that hot guy, of course, Wilhelmina was going to learn where they got their hair cut, without humiliating herself. They would find her breezily loitering in the yard after their appointment and she would ask them casually, as if she couldn't care less, "Hey, where did you get your hair cut?" Or maybe she could pretend it was her job, a responsibility assigned to her by someone else, to conduct a survey about where people got their hair cut. Or she could blame Frankie. Hi. Excuse me. I'm sorry to bother you, but my aunt wants to know where you got your hair cut.

Hating all of these ideas, Wilhelmina went downstairs to look for Frankie.

She found her on the second floor, in her bedroom, lying on her bed, which was unusual for Frankie during the day. Frankie didn't go in to the doctor for chemo this summer; instead, she took daily pills. The medicine had side effects, but it wasn't as dramatic as the IV chemotherapy had been. She was awake, propped up slightly by pillows, shuffling her tarot cards in her lap.

"Frankie?" said Wilhelmina, standing in the doorway. "What are you doing?"

"Wilhelmina, love," said Frankie, turning to Wilhelmina with a radiant smile that made everything all right, because how could anything be wrong when there was someone in the world who was always so happy to see her? Frankie patted the mattress beside her. "Come in, join me," she said. "Are you okay? I want to hear all about you, dear."

"We were going to buy you a teapot," said Wilhelmina. "But someone else bought it before we could." She entered the room, then sat on the edge of Frankie's bed a bit shyly. Wilhelmina walked by the aunts' bedrooms every day, but she rarely entered them. It was strange to think of Frankie having an intimate space Wilhelmina hardly knew, where she spent a lot of time. It felt like a different house in here; the light was different, or the air.

Above the headboard of Frankie's bed were framed three prints that were different from each other, but also the same. One was a big print of the Temperance card from the tarot deck Frankie had given Wilhelmina, the angel with the funny triangle on his chest and the giant red-and-gray wings, pouring water from one golden goblet into another. Wilhelmina had that tarot card tucked into her mirror at home in Massachusetts. It was Frankie's favorite card, because it was about seeing the world clearly, both its harsh realities and its magic. The other two prints were also Temperance cards, but from different decks. One showed a person whose gender was unclear; Wilhelmina thought of him as a feminine man. He wore a tank top, jeans, boots, and makeup, and had glowing white wings on his back; that funny triangle was tattooed on his chest. In one hand he balanced the sun, and in the other hand, the moon. In the third Temperance card, the giant winged person was, in fact, a bird. A heron, dripping water—or crying salty tears?—onto a graceful orange flame at her feet.

Frankie shuffled her cards against her stomach.

"Will you pull me a card?" said Wilhelmina. She asked Frankie to do this for her from time to time, less because she cared about the cards, and more because it felt like touch. When Frankie pulled Wilhelmina a card and told her what it meant, it was like someone brushing her hair, or rubbing her back, or aiming a fan straight at her on a sweltering hot day.

"Of course," said Frankie, then began a rhythmic and repetitive series of shuffles that sounded lovely to Wilhelmina, like all her summers together. While Frankie shuffled, Wilhelmina peeked around the room. Frankie had hanging shelves on one wall that were crowded with figurines, mostly birds.

Once the cards were shuffled, Frankie set the deck on the bed between them and asked Wilhelmina to cut it. When Wilhelmina did, Frankie turned the topmost card over, then brought the card into her lap, where she could see it more clearly.

"The Moon," said Frankie.

"The Moon?" said Wilhelmina, glancing at the Temperance print above the bed, where the androgynous person held the moon in one hand, the sun in the other. "I don't think I've gotten the Moon before. Can I see it?"

The card Frankie passed to Wilhelmina was an odd one. A dog and a wolf stood on the shore above a lake, staring up at a sad-faced moon. Some sort of shellfish—a lobster? A crab?—climbed out of the water behind them, as if it was sneaking up on them.

It wasn't a very nice card. Everyone looked cold and unhappy. "Yikes," said Wilhelmina. "Why is there a lobster?"

"I think that's meant to be a crayfish," said Frankie, who was lying back with her eyes closed, smiling. "But it hardly matters. It's an interesting card, Wilhelmina. It comes up when we're in one of the darker parts of our journey. It's about fear, and bad dreams, and discomfort. It's about bumbling around in the dark, and not being able to tell what's real and what's an illusion."

"Oh," said Wilhelmina, cradling the card in her hands. Funny drops of fire were falling down from the sky into the lake. A winding path led to mountains in the distance. It was kind of an ugly card, honestly, random and disjointed.

"What do you do?" said Wilhelmina. "Like, if you're stuck in a place where everything just…feels wrong? And you can't figure out why, or how to fix it?"

"Mmm," said Frankie, a noise of deep appreciation, as if Wilhelmina had said something profound, rather than something ignorant, something that had come from a place that felt a little bit desperate. Scared. "I've felt that way many times."

"You have?"

"It's one of the great human feelings," said Frankie simply. "Discomfort. Uncertainty about what's going on, or what's going to happen. The sense that things around you are wrong. A lot of things around us are wrong, Wilhelmina. People make terrible decisions to get away from having to sit with how wrongness feels. They can't bear to be lost and afraid. They'll choose something bad for them, or bad for others, just to feel like they're in control of something. It's understandable, don't you think?"

Wilhelmina touched the dog on the card, then the wolf. She didn't touch the crayfish, because she didn't want to. It was her least favorite part of the card.

"But I think there's a lot of value in learning to bear being lost, Wilhelmina, love," said Frankie. "The discomfort won't actually kill you, you know. Sometimes it's just a feeling you need to feel. Different feelings will come, when they're ready. The sun rises in the morning, right? Maybe it'll bring some clarity. Maybe it'll show you a new beginning for your life. One of the best things to learn how to do is wait."