If you were to drive to my sister Violet’s house today, you would find yourself at a very different place from the one I encountered on my first trip. The road up the mountain has been paved, for one thing, to make it more accessible to the tourists who now support it. Back then if you were behind the wheel of anything other than a farm truck, you were as likely to wreck an axle or lose a tire to the ruts; not knowing, I’d driven the Jag that day.

This was long before cellulars and satellite directions became ubiquitous, so I only had a triple-A TripTik and my scrawled accounting of her verbal directions from our one phone call the week before: “Once you turn off the main road, you go a ways longer than you expect to go, and mine will be the second driveway you come to on the right.” Her voice so long after the last time I’d heard it was a cracked leather version of the one I remembered from our teens.

Not two minutes after I made the turn from the state highway, my left front tire blew in a pothole deep as a swimming pool. “Second driveway on the right” didn’t seem an unreasonable distance, even if paired with the affectedly folksy “go a ways longer than you expect to go,” so I abandoned the car on the grassy shoulder and resigned myself to walking. It was July and the day had been hot, but I’d gotten a late start out of Baltimore and it was nearly 4 p.m. by then. At least the trees provided shade from the angled sun.

Twenty minutes later, not a single car had passed, and I’d only reached the first driveway. I wore a thick layer of dust, affixed to me by my own sweat, and a thicker layer of annoyance: at her for not giving more specific directions and for not warning me about the road; at myself for the discomfort I’d brought upon myself between choosing the wrong car and choosing the wrong outfit. I’d worn my pink-peonied sundress and sling-backed wedges, despite having mostly given up heels by then, in order to make some kind of impression after forty-five years. I hadn’t walked barefoot since childhood, but I ditched the shoes after a few wobbly steps, figuring it was better to tear up my soft soles than break an ankle.

At least I was fit enough for the hike; daily swims and bi-weekly tennis and aerobics had kept me in what my doctor said was magnificent shape for my age. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” he’d said at my most recent checkup. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d soon be losing my motivation. I liked swimming well enough, but the other stuff I did just to keep my figure trim; I’d heard too many stories of women in television getting approached by their producers about losing a few pounds for the camera. Would I be as diligent after next month, when I retired from the anchor chair? I had no idea what I would do with my time afterward; like this road, which seemed to climb steeper with each step, I couldn’t see over the rise.

The heat and the vertical and the pebbles embedding themselves in my feet were excuses to take it slow, but they weren’t the reasons I was trudging toward my destination. If I’d thought I could make it to anywhere else, I might have turned around. Chickened out. On the other hand, I’d done the research to find my sister, and made that impossible first call, twisting the phone cord in both hands as I worked up the nerve; also impossibly, she’d extended an invitation for me to come to her home, only a couple of hours from mine. Had we only been a hundred miles from each other this entire time? If she was willing to see me, maybe this trek was part of my penance. It gave me time to think, anyway, about the things that had come between us, and what it might be like to have my sister back in my life.

By the time I made it up her driveway, past white-flowered shrubs and even showier, more colorful blooms in boxes, to stand in front of the small farmhouse, I’d argued out both sides sufficiently. I still wanted to make amends; I still thought it would be easier not to. Even after that walk I hesitated before ringing the bell. Took the time to put my shoes back on my filthy feet, and to fluff my short hair off my sweaty scalp. Would’ve turned heel, too, if she’d laughed at the sight of me when she opened the door, but she shaded her eyes with her hand, sized me up, and said, “Give me your keys. I’ll send the boy out for your car.”

Then she hugged me.

She and I had been estranged for over four decades by then, the thread of reconnection a delicate one. As children, Mother had told us in no uncertain terms that we were never to utter an off word to each other, and it was in that spirit that we had stopped talking altogether once we’d stacked our grievances high enough. There was more to it than that, of course, but that’s just to say she took me by surprise.

If I’d been expecting the embrace I might have sidestepped it, but the attack of affection came with no warning, and was brief enough that I didn’t have time to figure out what to do with my own arms. Except as she dropped the hug she grabbed my hands, and I not only didn’t know what to do with them; I no longer had any control. She held them and looked into my eyes, which meant I had no choice but to look at her as well.

I couldn’t say she looked the same. I had no clue what she’d done with these years, but she’d clearly spent them outside. Her face was lined, the hair peeking around her red bandana mostly gray stroked with brown. She wore a checkered work shirt and stained overalls; this when she knew I was coming.

And what did she see when she looked at me? I’d been well put together when I set out that morning. Deliberately so. My hair was short and tall and dyed at great expense to the exact shade of honey-blonde it had been when I was twenty. I’d had a little work done, and it was done well; nobody would guess I was older than her by a year. Not that it mattered.

She stepped inside and gestured for me to move ahead of her to the living room.

I hesitated. “Could I use the restroom?”

She pointed toward a door under the stairs, where I found one of those tiny half-baths put in when owners of one-bathroom houses realize they need a second.

My face in the mirror still wore vestiges of the morning’s makeup. I freshened my lipstick and listened as she called up to someone; the boy she’d mentioned, I presumed a son or grandson. What an odd thing to not know about your own sister. Footsteps on the stairs above me, and then the front door opened and closed again. I peed and then hiked my dress higher and used a few squares of toilet paper to swipe at the sweat pooled in the small of my back. There was a small, framed photograph of a sleeping dog above the towel ring, but when I stood and looked closer, I realized it was actually a picture of a sleeping-dog-shaped rock. The signature was Violet’s; I wouldn’t have said I’d be able to recognize her handwriting, but I did. Mrs. Hopper’s fourth grade penmanship lessons had stuck with both of us.

I wandered back toward the living room, pausing in the foyer to look at more photos. One showed a smiling family: Violet and a square-faced, barrel-chested man, each holding a young boy on a hip, with a third slightly older boy standing in between them; taken in the early sixties, maybe, judging by clothes and hair. Others showed the boys variously playing baseball, in scout uniforms, tripled up on a stoic pony. Then a time jump, and one more of three teenagers and the same man, all sitting in lawn chairs with sunglasses on. None of us as children, or our parents, but we hadn’t really been picture-takers.

The living room furniture was utilitarian, comfort over style, dating from a jumble of eras. It took me a moment to recognize what I should have recognized immediately: our parents’ bar cart with the leaded crystal decanters, and the sideboard where Mother kept the dishes—the only good pieces of furniture they’d owned during our childhood. The bar cart had flitted across my mind often over the years; whenever I found myself pouring a drink from a similar setup, I wondered at the fact that my parents had slept on a mattress on the floor, that we ate on a wonky-legged table Father had scavenged from a shuttered diner, that not one of us ever invited a friend into the house, but our parents fixed each other drinks from crystal like they were born to luxury.

I’d forgotten the sideboard entirely. I peeked to see if Mother’s chipped old dishes were in there, but it was crammed with Tupperware containers of what looked like hardware fittings. It made sense that Violet had their furniture; she’d been the one to handle everything to do with their modest estate, since they and I were still estranged when they passed.

I don’t even remember how I found out about Father’s funeral. That had been the only time we’d glimpsed each other in all these years, an occasion where I kept to the other side of the chapel from Violet and departed after the service and a fleeting hug for Mother. I was a mess that day in any case, feeling unwelcome, selfishly stuck in my own head wondering if my relationship with him would have been half as bad if John and I hadn’t eloped right after high school, and trying not to remember that his coldness to me long before had been part of the reason I’d run.

I found Violet in the kitchen. It was clean and cool, thanks to an unbalanced fan rattling overhead. The appliances were avocado green relics. On the Formica table was a yellow Fiestaware bowl filled with black raspberries.

“Sit,” she said, and I chose the chair closest to me.

“I’m glad you’re here, Speedy,” she said. “I need your help.”

“You need my help.” Everything I’d planned to say flew out the open window. I’d called her, not the other way around. I was the one who had decided I needed her enough to try to tear down the wall we’d built between us, and here she was pretending she had made the effort. And using my childhood nickname, as if we were still on childhood terms. Or maybe she was losing her memory?

“I was surprised when you called.” Not her memory, then. At least she acknowledged I got the credit for reaching out. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, and the silly things that came between us.”

“Silly things.”

“Are you going to keep repeating what I say? Silly things, yes. Do you want some water? Iced tea?”

She shook a few ice cubes loose from a plastic tray, then poured two tumblers of tea from a pitcher in the fridge. It was strong and lemony, unsweetened. I downed the drink and she poured me another, which I held against my forehead, eyes closed for a moment. When I opened them, she was watching me.

“So, what have you been up to?” She asked it straight-faced, like she was asking about the past weekend, not four decades, and I nearly spit out my tea. A second later, the corner of her mouth twitched, and her eyes crinkled, and the stranger in front of me, the one who was trying not to giggle, was no longer a stranger. I couldn’t help laughing myself, and then we were both laughing hard enough to bring tears to our eyes.

“Seriously, though,” she said when we’d both calmed down. “I want to know whatever you want to tell me. Catch me up.”

Time compressed and I extruded what I could. I assumed she didn’t know anything about my life; we hadn’t said much on the phone. “I’m an evening news anchor. I’ll be retiring from the big chair soon, though they’ve said I can still pitch pieces here and there. I’m looking forward to having more time for volunteer work and to a less rigid schedule.”

“Jesus, I get it, Murphy Brown.” She laughed again, a short bark that didn’t invite me in this time. “I’m not trying to recruit you to a charity board. Tell me something that isn’t on your resume. You don’t have to get too personal—I know we’re not there yet—but something? I don’t even know your last name.”

The underlying question, I assumed, was whether I was still Mrs. John Simmons, or how long I had not been so. Or maybe she did know, but she was fishing for information. In any case, I wasn’t ready to answer that one. “It’s Maxwell.” I hesitated, then added, “Maxwell was my second husband. I kept the name even after we divorced and I married again, because my career had already started, and it had a nice ring to it.”

“Veronica Maxwell. It does sound good, like a movie star. Fitting for someone named after Veronica Lake.”

“I was named after the flower, like you,” I corrected, though in the years when I’d claimed to be younger than my actual age, I’d often said that very thing.

“If you say so.” She stood and fetched two dessert plates from the drying rack, placing one in front of me, then scooped a handful of black raspberries from the bowl between us. “You have perfect timing, coming right when these are ripe. Picked ‘em this morning. I assume you still love berries?”

What a strange thing to have to ask. My first memories were of plucking blackberries and raspberries off the bushes that grew in the woods behind the house. “Don’t let the Malones see you,” our mother always warned before handing us the bucket; she’d jam or jar or bake into cobblers anything that made it back to her. Technically the land where we picked them was the Malones’—ours was too, we rented from them—and when our bellies and bucket were full and we’d grown bored of picking, we kept going because of that admonition: painting faces on the rocks and trees, naming them and pretending we were visitors to their magical domain, painting our own faces with berry juice and mud from the stream, Vi saying “Wait until I show you to Mother” and pulling me by the hand back toward the house.

I reached for the bowl.

“How about you?” I kept my tone light, allowing the question to refer to berries or marriage or however she wanted to interpret it. Did you find happiness despite what I did to you? I couldn’t ask that. I popped a berry in my mouth instead, rolling it across my tongue before biting down. It tasted like summer, like hot afternoons; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a black raspberry, let alone eaten one warm and ripe.

The front door opened and closed again and an expression of relief washed over my sister’s face.

“We’re in the kitchen,” she called.

My seat was beside the doorway and facing away from it, so I swiveled and craned my neck to see who had entered. A young man, maybe in his late teens or early twenties, chestnut hair past his narrow shoulders, with a wisp of mustache and goatee. He was tall and very thin, no bulk to him; my first impression, from that angle, was an awkward jumble of parts. He’d stopped at the room’s entrance, leaning on the frame.

“Shane, this is my sister—” she turned to me. “What do you want him to call you? Aunt Veronica is a mouthful, but I don’t expect you want anyone else calling you Speedy.”

“Nice to meet you, Shane.” I considered options. “You can call me Aunt Ronnie.”

Violet looked surprised. “Do you go by Ronnie these days? You hated that as a kid.”

“Then Ronnie Spector came along and I decided it wasn’t so bad.” I did a little girl-group shimmy in my chair. It helped relax me a little; I’d never been an aunt before.

“Nice to meet you, Aunt Ronnie,” Shane said politely. “I went to change your flat, but it looks like you damaged the wheel when the tire blew, so I can’t just put on the spare.”

“Can we get another in town?” My sister ate another berry, dropping the short stem onto the growing pile on her plate. I imagined if you lived off this road you’d be used to flats.

The boy shook his head. “There’s no way they’ll have the right one.”

“It’s an import,” I said, which sounded like a brag, but was meant as a sort of apology.

Shane continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “It’s too late, anyhow; the car’ll be fine on the road overnight. I brought your bags from the trunk.”

“You’re lucky there’s an exotic car shop about an hour from here, in Hagerstown,” Violet said. “They service all the fancy cars that drive up from DC for vacations and bottom out on our roads. We can go tomorrow; if they don’t have it they can order it, and Shane can install it with no problem.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry to ask another favor, but would one of you be willing to drive me to my hotel, in that case? It’s in Berkeley Springs.” Everything suddenly seemed very far.

“Nonsense,” said Violet. “Call and cancel. You’ll stay with us.”

Once she’d made that declaration, I had no other choice, though the awkwardness between us had not dissipated. I’d had in mind a slow re-acquaintance, three days in which to chat over coffee and then head back down the road to sleep at the inn, soak in the spas, work up to my apology. Instead, I would be beholden to my sister, who owed me nothing. Beholden in either case, since my refusal would have obligated them to the long drive into town, and any excuse I could manufacture seemed flimsy and transparent. Which was how I came to stay with them that night.

Shane carried my bags up the narrow staircase and halfway down the narrow hall, then paused and looked back.

“She can sleep in Bud’s room,” Violet said from behind me, answering his unasked question. Then, to me, “We don’t ever have guests.”

I thought that was an odd thing to say, having just made me her guest, but I understood when I followed Shane into the last room on the right. He deposited my luggage in front of the closet, then edged past me, crossed the hall to the room opposite, and closed that room’s door behind him.

I was staying in a boy’s room. It was a small space, dominated by a plain oak single bed covered neatly in a crocheted quilt, brown and orange and blue. A three-drawer dresser matched the bed, as did a two-shelf bookcase, with a children’s encyclopedia set and a few paperback novels, and a small desk with a chair. There was a record player on a milk crate in the corner, with speakers underneath and another milk crate of records beside it. On the walls, posters of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Grateful Dead. The surfaces were all clean; it didn’t carry that stale smell that so often permeates disused rooms.

“My middle boy, but he’s been gone the longest.” Violet had entered the room. She sat on the bed, extricating a teddy bear from beneath the pillow and holding it on her lap. I sat in the desk chair, a hard wooden thing. “1971. Car accident when he was still in high school. Funny kid. He was just getting into music in a big way, and anti-war politics; I think he would have ended up a hippie given a little more time.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. A nephew I’d never met, never would meet. Twin pangs of loss, one for my sister, one for myself.

“I hope you don’t feel weird sleeping in here? It’s not the shrine it looks like. We all came in here over the years to play loud records when we needed to be alone.”

She stood and put the teddy bear face-down on the dresser, saving me the trouble of kicking it out of bed. “Bathroom’s next door. I’ll leave clean towels in there if you want to rinse the road off you.”

That was a family phrase, from our father’s days making deliveries. Rinse the road off you. Weird to hear it again after all these years. I did in fact want that, but the long drive and finding the house had exhausted me. I leaned back onto the bed, intending only to close my eyes for a second, and fell into a deep sleep.

I dreamed I was walking the road again, this time with the sensation that I was being observed; something with lamp-bright eyes paced me from within the trees. Strangely, it wasn’t frightening. I felt more watched over than watched.

When I woke, the room was dark and I had no idea where I was. I had no recollection of Violet leaving; had I fallen asleep with her still in the room? I gathered myself back to myself and shuffled toward the hallway aided by the light escaping from under Shane’s door. A shower still sounded appealing, but the hall smelled like tomato sauce, and my watch read 9:30, which meant I had probably slept through dinner. I settled for a splash of water to the back of my neck and my eyelids.

Violet stood from the couch as I entered the living room, dropping a paperback on the cushion beside her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was rude of me.”

“Don’t worry about it. You must have been exhausted to drop off so quickly.” She beckoned for me to follow her into the kitchen, where she took a plate from the fridge and put it in the microwave. “It’s just freezer lasagna so don’t expect anything spectacular. I defrosted it this morning in case things went well enough that you wanted to stay for dinner.”

She didn’t actually say whether things had gone well enough or my car had forced her hospitality, but we were still talking, so that was something.

The lasagna was adequate. After I ate, she poured two amber snifters from one of Father’s decanters, and we adjourned to the screened back porch. There were no lights beyond the one we’d left behind in the kitchen, and my sister in the wooden rocker next to mine was reduced to sound in the darkness. Her voice was a little deeper than I remembered, but the cadences of her speech felt strangely like home. Without the prompt of her new older face, my mind painted our teenage selves into the chairs. Early teens, before our falling out, when we still completed each other’s thoughts.

We talked about no-matter things: our gardens, the fact that nobody drank brandy anymore, the ridiculous casting for the film version of House of the Spirits, which we’d both read and seen. I felt the brandy loosening my tongue, almost enough to ask what was on my mind. It took deliberate effort not to pry. When I’d tracked down her phone number, I’d resisted the urge to research her further; we had spent our entire adult lives apart, and it had felt unfair to give myself the advantage of knowing the path her life had taken. I wanted to hear it from her, wanted to know everything. We weren’t there yet, I didn’t think, so I did my best to keep to neutral topics.

“Look,” she said after the conversation had drifted to another light topic. I think I’d asked her whether their road got plowed in winter. “The short answer is I lost everyone. I don’t say that to be melodramatic, or invite pity, but you’re poking around the edges of a question I’d rather answer plainly. I lost everyone.”

“Everyone but Shane, you mean?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.” She hoisted herself from her chair. “It’s past midnight. If you’re staying on the porch a while, turn the lights off when you come upstairs.” She took my glass from my hand and stepped into the kitchen, then stuck her head out again. “It’s good to have you here. I know I’m a little prickly; I think I’ve gone feral. And I’m sorry if my hospitality isn’t what you’re used to.”

“No, thank you for letting me stay. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.” I do, I almost said. I was almost ready to say.

The sound of the kitchen faucet running drifted out to me, and the clink of plates being loaded into a dishwasher. The light from the small window above my head guttered, then came back on again, for me, I thought, like she’d turned it off out of habit and then remembered I was out here.

Now that my focus wasn’t on my sister, I let my attention wander. Beyond the screen porch, everything was in darkness, leaving me no guess at the shape of the land behind the house. It might have been fields or woods or water or a brick wall. An owl screeched in the distance, and then what I was pretty sure was tree frogs at a swinger party. That was the scope of my wildlife identification knowledge, nothing more than vestigial childhood memories. We’d only lived by the woods that one summer before moving to Durham, then Memphis, then Columbus.

Maybe that was why it stood out in my mind as formative and returned to me so clearly in this rural setting. In the woods we invented ourselves. We were explorers on a new planet, princesses of Mars, visitors to the faerie realm. We invented languages and games and told secrets just for the sake of having secrets to keep. Every experience there was an index experience, never replicated in the decades that followed.

Something rustled, nearer, turning my thoughts to the lamp-bright eyes from my dream, and just like that, I was done with nature for the night. Anyway, it was probably better to try to sleep again than to stay up for no reason.

Everything had been put away in the kitchen. I automatically turned to latch the back door, then realized we were in the country and maybe she didn’t bother, since she hadn’t told me to. This city mouse locked it anyway, then filled a new glass with water to bring to bed, turning out the kitchen light as I left, as instructed.

I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to switch off the light on the hall landing as well, so I left it on and went to take a quick shower, to finally rinse the road off me, as my sister had said. My hope had been that it would relax me, but I felt more awake than I had before. I put on my silk pajamas—at least I’d brought some—and dug in my handbag for the copy of The Shipping News that I was in the middle of reading. I couldn’t find it, and after a moment, had a flash memory of tossing the book onto the seat beside me when I reached for my wallet to pay for gas.

I gave up and browsed the bedroom’s lone bookshelf. Bud’s shelf; another flower name, like Violet and Veronica. His taste ran as might be expected, given that my sister said he was headed down a hippie path: Hesse, Kerouac, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nothing I felt like reading.

It occurred to me then that if I’d been at the inn, I would have hung my clothes hours before. Far too late to save them—I’d have to ask for an iron or resign myself to wrinkles—but I could at least minimize the damage. I opened the room’s small closet, but it was filled with shoeboxes and plastic tubs. A drawer, then.

Nothing in the room surprised me until I opened the dresser’s middle drawer: it was full of rocks. Hundreds of palm-sized gray rocks, the kind that probably loitered on the dusty access road putting holes in tires. The rocks in the top drawer were smaller, more varied in color, river-smoothed. The bottom drawer didn’t budge. I crouched and pulled harder, and it dislodged, dropping me onto my backside in front of yet another drawer of rocks. When I looked up, Shane stood in the doorway.

“Are you okay, Aunt Ronnie?” The title felt strange to my unaccustomed ears. I allowed him to help me to my feet; he was gentle, careful, his hands strong.

“Yes. I was looking for a place to put my clothes. You weren’t expecting me; it makes sense that the closet and drawers are full.” Full of rocks made less sense. “I can just drape them over the back of the chair. Sorry to bother; I hope I didn’t wake you.”

He didn’t answer, but he stepped in front of me to close the drawer I had opened, lifting to slide it back onto its track seemingly without effort, then left. His steps were light on the stairs, and it was only because I was listening that I heard a door open and close. I waited for the sound of a car starting, but there was none; maybe he was a smoker and only allowed to indulge outside.

Twenty minutes later, he hadn’t returned. He’d been wearing the same jeans and plain t-shirt I’d seen him in earlier, I realized, not bedclothes, so I probably hadn’t woken him. When I went to use the bathroom one last time before trying to sleep, I noticed he’d left his own door ajar. I nudged with my toe—call it a reporter’s natural curiosity—and the door swung open a little wider. The hall light illuminated a chaotic space: sculptor’s studio, craft workshop; it was hard to tell anything in the dark beyond an impression of towers of materials, strange shapes among the shadows.

I dreamed that we were children in the woods, Violet and I. I often dreamed of my sister, always as children, often in that one house with the wild patch and the stream behind it; we had only lived there briefly, but my first memories were all of that summer. We were still close then, close enough that even if we’d had our own beds we would have crept into each other’s to whisper late at night. Our shared bedroom in the apartment where we became teenagers was larger, and might have accommodated us well, if we hadn’t turned on one another.

In the dream, though, the one that recurred, we were still young enough to adore each other. We lay side by side on the stream’s bank and took turns outlining each other in mud and stones. She would say “I can’t believe I have a sister,” or “I’m glad I have a sister” or “Wait until I show you to Mother.” I would struggle to speak, in that sluggish way of dreams. By the time I found my tongue she would be halfway back to the house, leaving me to make my way on my own. I’d clear the bramble just as she and Mother appeared at the back door.

Usually it ended there, but that night it went on, as it did sometimes, particularly when I was wrestling with something in my life. I outstretched my arms, but their expressions turned from amazement to dismay as I stepped closer. They unmade me with their eyes, so that there was nothing left of me by the time I reached them.

Over the years, over no small amount of time spent in therapy, I came to believe it was a role reversal. I’d left Violet behind when I ran away with John, so in my dream, she left me behind. All those phrases she uttered, my own brain’s way of urging me to bridge the divide between us. I hadn’t had a specific reason to reach out now, only a vague feeling that the armor of my occupation—my successes—had given me courage to make the call, and that armor would lose its shine after my retirement. Not that armor should be needed for an apology; I’d just woken up one day feeling like if I didn’t do it now, I never would.

We headed down the mountain the next morning, Violet and I, in a small blue pickup truck of some older vintage. By coincidence, it perfectly matched the pants suit I’d chosen to wear, and my sister, in dungarees, work boots, and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, shot me an amused look. I’d expected her to send Shane on the errand, but he was nowhere to be found. She drove with both hands on the wheel, and with one foot on the gas and one on the brake, which made for a jerky ride from the get-go. Who had taught her to drive? Not our parents, not John; I’d learned from my second husband. I looked wistfully at my Jag as we passed it.

“Hot stuff!” Her truck drifted in my car’s direction as she eyeballed it, then overcorrected. “No wonder you had trouble.”

I bit my tongue to keep from telling her I had two other vehicles I could have chosen between, at least one more practical, had she warned me. Then again, maybe I deserved her mockery. It was a ridiculous extravagance, a status symbol, and I’d driven it here to make an impression, even knowing that our parents had never owned a new car in their lives. And what if I’d shown up in it and found Violet living in poverty? How would that have helped our relationship. It had been a stupid idea, born only of insecurity. Better to drop the subject; I searched instead for a neutral topic, so that we wouldn’t spend the hour fighting.

“How did you end up out here? It’s beautiful.” I added the second sentence in case the first sounded derogatory, since it wasn’t meant to be. I’d come in on a highway, but her route took us down the back roads, through thick woods, alongside a rocky river.

“My husband was an engineer for the sandstone mines. We lived in town for the first couple of years, but we used to go driving on his days off. There was this one Sunday where our meander took us out this way, and as we drove past, I got the strangest, most welcoming feeling. I told Mitch we were going to live here someday.” She smiled at the memory, without looking my way. “That was when he pulled into the driveway and handed me the key. He had already bought it for us.”

“No!”

“Honest truth! Of course, then I had to pretend to be cross for a while that he had made that big decision without involving me, but really, how could I be mad? It was perfect. That beautiful little house, and I haven’t even shown you the land yet. It got a little crowded when the three boys were teenagers, but they each got their own room, so we survived.”

We were both silent for a stretch of road. I got the impression she was chewing on the word “survived,” the same as I was.

She was the one brave enough to speak again, not me. “I told you about Bud and the accident. He was my middle son. Reed, my oldest, died two years later, in Vietnam. My husband passed in 1980; he was never sick a day in his life until a massive coronary took him out of the blue. After that, I was alone in the house for a while. My youngest, Oleander, he was smart enough to go to college, and young enough that he missed the draft, but all his friends in high school were the sons of miners, and they all went off to work in the mines, so that’s what he did too. He moved back home in 1982 when he got sick and stayed with me until he died five years later.”

“My god.” That was what she had meant when she said she lost everyone. “I didn’t know.”

“How would you? We weren’t talking.”

I looked out the window, at the undulating greenery. Apologize, I told myself. Now is the time. I didn’t.

I insisted on buying her lunch in town. “To say thank you for the hospitality,” I said, making sure it didn’t get added to our balance sheet. It was literally the least I could do.

The ice wasn’t fully broken, but some of it had melted. She offered questions about my job, the hours, whether I got to choose any of what I said on air. About my later two husbands (one divorced, one deceased, also of a heart attack, so we had that in common) though not about the first, of course. And I learned she’d been an art and health teacher in the county middle school, the latter part of which had embarrassed her sons to no end. I was hesitant to ask her anything at first, afraid I was bringing back bad memories, but she seemed to like talking about her boys and the time they’d had together, however short.

At the auto parts store, I gave the make and model of my car, and a young man of about Shane’s age carried the wheel and tire out to the truck for us.

“You’re sure you can put this on for yourself?” He eyed us with no small concern, and I knew what he saw.

Violet crossed her arms impatiently. “Son, I was working on cars before your daddy was in diapers.”

I was impressed, and once we were on the road again, I told her so.

She laughed. “Actually, I never did get around to learning how to change a tire, much less a wheel, but he didn’t need to know that. There’s a line between chivalrous and chauvinist, and I didn’t like the assumption, even if he was right. Anyway, Shane’ll take care of it; he’ll enjoy the chance to work on a car that fancy. He reads car repair manuals for fun.”

“Why didn’t you send him to get the tire? I mean, it was nice to chat with you, don’t get me wrong.”

“Shane doesn’t leave the mountain.” She said that in such a way that it didn’t invite further comment, as strange as it sounded. Maybe he was sick, or agoraphobic? Or she was overprotective after everything else that had happened? Those were the only reasons I could come up with. I still hadn’t asked whose son he was; she’d told him to call me aunt, but she’d only mentioned three sons, so I could only assume he belonged to one of them. There were other relationship options too, I supposed—a nephew on her husband’s side, or a student taken in, or an adoptee. She’d tell me when she was ready.

Violet turned the truck off the main road. “I hadn’t planned to come this way this week, but as long as we’re here we might as well combine trips. Do you mind if we make a quick stop?”

“Of course not.” I had no reason to oppose it, and no right either, given that the only reason she’d made this long drive was me.

Two more lefts, a route she clearly knew well, and then we passed through an open gate labelled “Municipal Dump.” A man leaned out of a trailer on blocks, shielded his eyes to size us up, then waved. My sister waved back without slowing. She weaved between a couple of large piles and brought the truck to a stop before turning in her seat to face me.

“You can come with if you want, but you’ll have to stand out of the way and promise you won’t touch anything. You aren’t dressed for this.”

What wasn’t I dressed for? I fought the urge to say she’d once again left me unaware of the dress code. “I’ll stay in the truck.”

“Suit yourself.” She leaned over me and opened the glove compartment, extricating a pair of rubber kitchen gloves, then hopped out, slamming the door behind her.

Walking away, she had pep in her step, as Mother used to say, an eagerness I hadn’t seen or noticed earlier. Eager for what? She stooped and picked something up from the edge of the trash heap, then held it aloft like a trophy, so that I could see it. A blue glass bottle, dusty but intact. I gave her a thumbs up, not knowing the proper response, and she returned the gesture. A moment later, she found a cardboard box, and placed her bottle inside.

She didn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular. More glass, a plastic doll, small things my eyes weren’t good enough to make out, all treated with the same jubilance, and then a covered pram that she wheeled over to hoist into the truck bed.

“Still okay?” She called through the open window. I nodded, and she returned to whatever she was doing, the bottles and baubles. It reminded me of the rocks in the dresser. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to be concerned, showing up after so long. Maybe I needed to appreciate that whatever she was doing seemed to be giving her joy, even if to my eyes she seemed an eccentric old woman sifting through trash to find trash.

Not long after, my late night and the day’s heat caught up with me and I drifted off. I dreamed we were on the stream bank, Violet and I, but instead of outlining each other in mud, she was kneeling above me, scooping mud and rocks away from my chest and stomach and face, as if I’d somehow been buried there. The expression on her face was one of delight, and I felt it too, for a moment.

I woke to the jostle of the unpaved access road. Nearly home; I couldn’t wait any longer. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” She asked like she didn’t know. She was going to make me say it. I needed to say it: that I had flirted with her high school boyfriend, John, for months. That I had set about luring him away from her just to see if he could be lured. That he had asked me to elope with him, and we had run, and I had left her alone with a father who never gave either of us the time of day and a mother who acted scared of us both. And worst of all, that John had proven to be exactly as undeserving of my love as he had of hers. That I had left him after less than a year. That I had blown up my relationship with her for nothing.

“If I had stayed with him,” I said. “If it had turned out we had true love and we were meant to be together, I think I might have found my way back to you. What I had done would have been justified if he and I were a perfect match. Somehow it made it worse that I took him and then I didn’t even keep him.”

Violet laughed. “Speedy, I realized pretty quickly that anyone capable of doing what he did wasn’t worth the heartache. You, on the other hand? What you did took me a little longer.”

She paused, and I waited for her to go on. “But then I met Mitchell, and I wouldn’t ever have met him if you hadn’t taken John out of the picture. I wouldn’t ever have had my boys.”

“So, you’ll forgive me?”

“I forgave you years and years and years ago. I tried to tell you at Father’s funeral, but I never managed to get near you. That’s when I understood that you still needed to forgive yourself, too. I think that’s what’s taken a little longer.”

A little longer. Decades. We turned into her driveway then, up past the pretty white flowers that I’d passed on foot the day before. It had been a much more pleasant drive than a walk, even in her bumpy truck, with her jerky driving, and even with the heavy conversation.

Shane was in the front yard dismantling a riding mower when we pulled up. Violet didn’t bother turning the truck off, and he jumped in the second we were out, making a wide circle around us in the dusty driveway before heading back down the road.

My sister started toward the house, then turned around, I think to see why I hadn’t followed automatically. “Come in. He’ll have your car taken care of in no time, but I’d love for you to stay another night. I still haven’t shown you what I’ve done out back. I can take you out there now. Say you’ll stay.”

It was easier to say yes this time. Less weight on the interaction. Less weight on me. “I can stay another night,” I said. “But I’m exhausted. Do you mind if I lie down again before you show me whatever you want to show me? I swear, I don’t usually nap this much, but I couldn’t sleep before I came out here, and now that I’m here I haven’t slept much either and—”

She cut me off with a wave. “I get it. Apologies are hard work, and so is working up to them. I didn’t sleep either, knowing you were coming. Go. It’ll keep.”

I followed her toward the door then, but she didn’t step into the house, and when I got close enough, she threw her arms around me. “I knew you were out there,” she murmured into my shoulder. I stiffened, then relaxed and hugged her back, maybe a little more naturally than the day before.

When we got inside, she tossed her purse behind the front door and headed for the kitchen. I went upstairs, where I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I awoke to darkness. My sister must have been right; apology was exhausting. Bud’s room faced the driveway, and I parted the curtains. My Jag was parked next to the truck, which either meant that the two of them had gone down the road to each drive one vehicle back, or that Shane had driven one up, and then walked down the hill for the other. Either way, it was another kindness when I was still struggling to accept that I was deserving of kindness from Violet.

My watch read 5:32, and after a disorienting moment, I realized it was 5 a.m., not p.m. My bladder was bursting and I was ravenous, not having eaten since lunch in town. Violet’s bedroom was closed—the lights were still on downstairs, so I figured she must still be up, or up already—but Shane’s door was ajar and his light on as I padded back from the bathroom.

I meant only to knock and thank him; I didn’t expect the door to swing wide. I didn’t expect him to be sitting in an office chair at a drafting table facing the window, eating rocks. Rocks like the smallest of those in the dresser drawers, the ones I’d thought looked like river stones. Drawing some kind of schematic with his right hand, concentrating, reaching out with his left to the pile beside him. His face reflected in the dark and drapeless window, chewing with great crunches that sounded like they would break teeth.

I must have made a sound, because he turned, then, and my eyes caught his. Surprised, not concerned.

“Brought your car. I’ll bet it drives nice on better roads.” There was dust at the corner of his mouth.

I managed a quiet thank you, and then, feeling the need to say more, added, “It’s fun to drive. You can take it out to the highway tomorrow if you’d like.”

He shook his head, and I remembered what Violet had said about how he didn’t leave the mountain. Didn’t? Or couldn’t? My memory failed me. I stood there a moment longer, long enough for it to become awkward, at least to me, and for him to return his attention to whatever he was drawing. He didn’t ask me to leave, so I took in the rest of the room, which I’d seen only in darkness while spying the other night: great piles of rocks and wood and scrap metal and wires, tool kits full of tiny parts, shelves and drawers full of more odds and ends. More of a workshop than a bedroom, especially since there was no bed. Only the desk and a wingback armchair were uncluttered, or uncluttered except for the pile of rocks. He took another bite, unruffled by my presence, and I fled down the stairs to the kitchen.

I took a glass from the shelf and filled it with water. Drained it and filled another and drank that one too.

“You were out cold!” Violet came in behind me. “I can’t ever sleep past dawn anymore.”

“Shane,” I said. “Your grandson?”

I was still hoping she’d say yes, he was Oleander’s, or even Reed’s. The math worked. Instead, she took the empty glass from my hand and put it in the sink. “I want to show you what I’ve done here. It’s better in the daylight, but we’ll get there before long.”

I followed her onto the porch where we had sat the night before, the darkness beyond the vestiges of kitchen light no longer all-encompassing. I could make out shapes in the blue-black, though my mind was still upstairs. Had he really been eating rocks? Had I just imagined it? How did one broach that subject?

“Put these on.” She handed me a pair of dirty white sneakers from a pile outside the door. My feet had always been the same size as hers—as kids we’d shared all our clothes and footwear—and these fit well enough, though it felt odd to put on shoes someone else had broken in. We stepped beyond the porch to what seemed to be a cement patio.

I forced my eyes to make out shapes. The back patio, like the majority of the house, appeared well-kept. A large umbrella on a single metal foot looked like it afforded daytime shade to a wrought-iron table with matching chairs. At the paved area’s borders, pansies and marigolds bloomed in tidy boxes, and beyond that, I made out a small garden patch surrounded by chicken wire. Beyond that? The character of the land changed, though I couldn’t quite tell what I was looking at. She walked confidently through the pre-dawn without a flashlight.

Violet took my hand and led me down a pebbled path. I concentrated on the loose footing until a building loomed in front of us, more of a change in the quality of darkness ahead than anything I actually saw. A creak of hinges, as she slid a barn door sideways. I got an impression of textured walls inside, then caught eye gleam from the corner opposite and swallowed a sound. She flipped a switch, and a dangling overhead bulb hummed to life.

I did scream, then. The walls had looked textured because every inch of them was covered with metal fixtures. I had felt like I was being watched, because every one of those fixtures had a face. An entire wall of frowning door knockers and disinterested outlets. A silent choir of doorplates with gaping keyhole mouths. Every single thing in the room was surprised to see me; I could say the same. This layered onto Shane’s rocks in my mind, questions on questions, strange on strange.

I’d long since trained myself out of swearing, but this was a special occasion. “What the hell is this, Vi?”

She grinned, and I realized I’d used her old nickname for the first time. “Welcome to Pareidollywood!”

“No, seriously.”

“Art? Parts? A little of both?”

The fright of the first moment was dissipating and leaving me more inclined to let the conversation play out her way. “Okay. Maybe the better question is ‘why?’”

“My youngest son, Oleander. Ollie. He moved back in with me when he got sick. That was, oh, 1981 or ’82. Not long after Mitch died.”

I nodded. She had told me that part earlier.

“Ollie collected things with faces. It was a joke at first. A friend gave him a coat hook that looked like a drunk octopus picking a fight.” She pointed at a section of wall dotted with coat hooks. “It made him laugh, at a time when not much did, and we both started trawling yard sales and antique stores. The dump, sometimes, like today. Hiking, bringing home pieces of wood or stones. Taking pictures of rock faces and clouds and knotholes in trees, then developing them to see if the essence was still there.”

“The essence?”

“The thing that made us look twice. The human aspect, or the animal aspect, or whatever we saw in it.” She examined my face closely. I think if she’d seen any sign of mockery she’d have stopped talking, and I carefully arranged my expression to convey more interest than concern, even if I was feeling both.

“When he died, I was all alone. You’ve been through that; you know. I went through everything you might expect, looking for motivation to move past and move on. I’d quit teaching to take care of him, then started up again—but anyway, after a while, I realized this was the thing I had left that got me up in the morning, so to speak. I felt close to Ollie when I found new faces for his collection, even if he wasn’t there to laugh at them with me anymore. And why stop with faces? Things that looked like other things, tree roots like lizards, rocks marbled like steak. Fingers, feet, bodies in wood. And when I couldn’t find faces, I made them. Arranged stones, wires, broken plates. Filled the upstairs, started in on the outbuildings, the yard.” Something in my expression must have upset her, because her tone changed. “It makes me happy, Speedy. Don’t think I’m a pack rat.”

I tried to appease her. “You don’t strike me as a pack rat. I’ve seen homes where people have—” I searched for a neutral word, “—collections that take over. Your house is full, not crowded, and you wouldn’t know about all this to look at your living space. This is an art project.”

She looked relieved, but still somehow hesitant, so I went on. “I mean it. Some of these things are beautiful. Or, better than beautiful. Interesting. I’ve always preferred interesting. Will you show me more?”

The sun was beginning to rise as we left the building. What spread out before me was pastureland, or at least land given over to tall grasses and wildflowers glowing in the early morning light. I saw among them violet and veronica, the two flowers I still remembered, the two we were named after.

My sister moved forward, on a path that was little more than trampled grasses, and again I followed, trying to keep up.

“Mind your step,” she called over her shoulder. I looked down, expecting roots or gopher holes. That wasn’t what I was meant to be minding; I saw now that the path’s edges were lined with, well, stuff. Toys, rocks, glass bottles, all settling into the soft ground around where we walked. The path dipped down and I realized her property was set onto a hill. We were coming to a circle of small outbuildings, beyond which was woods.

“How much land do you own?”

“Twenty-two acres. We only had the two, then the fella catty-corner to us died, and we managed to buy his back acreage off his kids since they didn’t have any use for uncleared land. Mitch didn’t want it to be turned into vacation homes. He liked our wild view; didn’t know he wouldn’t be around to enjoy it, of course.”

“I see.” I was still trying to figure out where my sister’s head was at. “And what’s your use for it?”

She showed me. The garden of glass. Trees made of wire. A driftwood safari. A gingham-blanketed picnic table with a full picnic spread, meats and fruit and bread and cheese, all made of rocks and wood. Half an old school bus, its seats filled with human figures made of metal scraps and car parts, leaning in as if whispering across the aisles. Where she hadn’t found faces, she’d made them.

“Oh, Vi,” I said, deliberately using her nickname this time.

It was incredible, really. It made me wonder if her talent had been wasted on her middle school students, and I almost vocalized that thought, then realized it might not be taken as a compliment, and bit my tongue. What did “wasted” mean, anyway, when nobody said she had wanted an artist’s life? Instead, I asked, “Did any of your students become artists?”

The question elicited a fleeting smile, and I knew I’d chosen the better question. “Two that I know of. One is a documentary photographer who’s won a couple of state grants. He comes back to see me sometimes, and talks to my classes if his visit to his parents coincides. The other is a potter with a studio in town.”

“Did your art classes include photography? I wouldn’t think a rural public middle school would have the money…”

“Oh, of course not. Nor ceramics. But I taught composition and perspective, and that’s half of photography, and we did clay and papier-mâché and color theory even if we didn’t have a pottery wheel. I’ll take a little credit.”

I found a better way to ask my question. “Were you doing your own art that whole time as well?”

“Not really. Not beyond whatever examples I did for the kids. Tutorial art. Say, is this an interview?”

“I just—”

She laughed. “I’m teasing you. It’s fine to ask questions. But no, all of this is Ollie’s inspiration. I’d never have thought to do anything like this if he hadn’t started me down this path.”

“But you did!” I couldn’t hold it back anymore. The thing that had crossed my mind eating berries in the kitchen the day before had been on my mind through this whole tour. “Don’t you remember? We used to make figures in the mud, and paint rocks with berry juice, and give them names and—” I stopped because she’d gone pale. “Are you alright?”

“You remember that?” she asked.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

She adjusted a wire branch that had come unwrapped from a metal tree twice my height. “What exactly do you remember?”

“What I said. The house we rented from the Malones. Picking raspberries. Lying on the bank, making figures out of mud.”

“You remember making figures out of mud?”

“Yes.” The next part felt less sure now, and I wasn’t sure what was my recurring dream and what was memory, or what was memory changed by its own recollection. “I remember following you back toward the house, and you saying, ‘I can’t believe I have a sister.’”

The wire branch was back on the tree, but she trailed her fingers along the lines of the sculpture, her eyes following. Anything but look at me. “Why would I say that, Speedy? Do you know?”

“Because you—because I—” I stopped. “Wait. Why would you say, ‘I can’t believe I have a sister’? You’ve always had a sister. I’m older than you, by one year. And you said ‘I can’t believe I have a sister. Wait until I show you to Mother.’ I’ve been thinking that part was a dream, not real, but you said that, and I got up from the muddy bank, and you took me by the hand and led me to the house.”

I looked down at my own soft hands, so different from my sister’s rough ones. My manicure was less than a week old—I always kept my nails impeccable for the camera—and at home I slept with them in moisturized gloves, but it didn’t hide the scar on my palm where I’d burned it on a pan just out of the oven, or the growing prominence of the veins. My veins, carrying my blood. Blood with a little too much cholesterol, according to my doctor, so it had to be real. The nurse who squashed my breasts into the mammogram machine never blinked, nor the gynecologist. And if I’d never taken a sick day, well, that had been a point of pride.

“I’ve had a whole life,” I said. “A career. I have friends. I had two bad husbands and one good one. I’ve been to five continents and twenty-seven countries and every state except Alaska. It was real.”

“It was real,” she said.

“I opened a hundred-year-old time capsule on air. I’ve interviewed Jane Goodall and Aretha Franklin. I’ve had great sex and terrible sex.”

“That was real too, I assume,” she said.

“Our father worked all hours. Our mother hid from us.”

“And that. They didn’t mean to be cruel. They were afraid of both of us.”

“We were friends and then later we were always angry at each other, and then I stole your boyfriend and eloped with him.”

“Yes. I know I was terrible to you back then. You had a right to be angry with me. I tried to control you, and I got angry when you wouldn’t let me, and I felt guilty about not liking you when we were supposed to be best friends. Teenage angst times all of the above.”

“And you made me?”

She nodded. “There were no kids around for miles when we lived behind the Malones. I was so lonely. I made figures out of clay and rocks and branches on the riverbank. Made up stories about them. Made up a sister, since I’d always wished I’d had one, older or younger. I liked the idea of older. And then, I don’t know…I don’t want to say I wished you into existence, but there you were, exactly what I’d always wanted. Who I’d always wanted. I took you back to the house, and Mother locked herself in the bedroom for three days. Father thought you were some abandoned kid I’d found, said it wasn’t his responsibility to feed you, but they both came around in their way, when they saw you didn’t have any place else to go.”

“I eat real food. Not rocks.” I’d almost forgotten about Shane, until she brought up eating.

“Speedy, love, of course you eat real food.”

“Why doesn’t Shane? You wished him too.” I said the second part as a declarative, not a question. I’d done investigative reporting, but this was intuition.

“I did wish him, and I don’t know why he eats rocks. Or why he doesn’t sleep. I was lonely again, and I wished as hard as I ever had. Maybe because I didn’t give him a plant name? Or maybe it’s a diminishing magic, and I’m too old to do it right, or I was only ever supposed to do it once, and then I wrecked my relationship with you—ssh, don’t say it was all your fault for running off with John; I know I was terrible to you too, in a thousand ways, when it turned out you weren’t someone I could control. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it again. Maybe I should have learned to live with loneliness, like everyone else does, or joined a club, or taken up travel. Anyway, the rock-eating? I suppose it’s just as well. When we had three teenage boys, the food costs nearly broke us. At least rocks are in unlimited supply.”

She didn’t seem to be joking, and I didn’t know why she’d joke about that when she had been so serious about everything else. I stroked the cool metal bark of the tree, thinking about what this garden would look like at different times of day, with sun filtering through the prismatic leaves, hitting the mirrored bark, bouncing in a hundred directions. “Why can’t he leave the mountain?”

“You’re still asking why questions, and I don’t have any why answers. He loses himself; I can’t explain. Forgets things, becomes less…substantial. He’s come to terms with it. He has the run of our land, and he keeps busy fixing things. He’s good with machines.”

We started walking again, into a glass-bottle cityscape that reached up to my waist. We were monsters walking down the cobbled streets. There was no way I had processed any of this, but some part of my mind seemed to accept it as if it was true. Still, something was nagging at me. “When I got here, you said you needed my help. You haven’t told me why.”

She sat on a flat-topped skyscraper, and I chose another two buildings down on the same side of a broad avenue. It felt surprisingly sturdy. “I said I don’t know how any of this works. If there are any rules. You’ve been able to go all over the world, to eat and drink and fool doctors—don’t try to deny the face lift—and Shane is stuck here. I assume you’ll both outlive me, or he will at least, and I assume that any attempt to leave money or land to him would result in people digging around into his lack of paper trail. I can’t even take him to get ID. It’s not as easy as it was when Father managed it for you.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. “How did he do it?”

“Bought a birth certificate off someone whose kid had died, and then moved us across the country. Between the war and the end of the Depression, it wasn’t such an odd thing back then for someone to say they’d adopted a cousin’s child. Nobody checked.”

“He did all that for me? He barely spoke to me, and when he did it was usually belittling.”

“I don’t think he thought he had a choice. You were there, and he had to deal with you. That didn’t mean he had to treat you well—I knew when you left that he was a large part of it.”

The wave of guilt that threated to overwhelm me washed back out to sea. I tried to refocus on her question. “So you need a birth certificate for Shane? I don’t know how to help with that, but I can try—”

“That isn’t it.” She shook her head and busied her hands again, wiping pollen from the rooftops. I wondered if the blue glass bottle she’d taken from the dump would wind up here. “I want you to promise to keep an eye on him. Not now, if you aren’t ready. Later, if anything happens to me. I don’t want him to get bored, or run out of things to work on, or get kicked off the land when I’m not here to protect him. The house is paid off, but not this back acreage, and I don’t want to have to get rid of any of this.”

She gestured with her hand, encompassing all of it: the miniature city, the glass garden, the stone labyrinth in the shape of a woman’s face, the fighting octopus coat hooks and the pram with the sagging smile. I could probably wander up here for years without ever seeing all of it.

I considered. I’d been struggling for ages with the question of what to do after I retired. The thing she was asking wasn’t so much. It wasn’t immediate. It seemed like a way to be useful some of the time. A request I could wrap my head around while processing the impossibilities she’d presented.

The money, though. I’d thought I’d saved enough to travel and still live comfortably for a couple of decades—but now who knew how long I’d live? What if it was longer than I’d planned for? Would it stretch to cover Shane? But that wasn’t what she was asking. What Shane needed was a way to make money without leaving the mountain.

An idea came to me. “How do you feel about other people seeing your art?”

“I’ve sold a couple of photos at a gallery in town.” Violet looked out over the hillside. Town was down there somewhere; maybe I’d make it to the spas on my next visit. “And a couple of watch-dogs made of junkyard finds. Shane makes the clock workings.”

“Perfect,” I said.

Which was how, in my final signoff from broadcast news (delayed an extra year), I told my audience to come visit me at West Virginia’s own Pareidollywood. I hoped the people who had trusted me to convey the news also trusted me to show them something else new and interesting. I’d spent the intervening year sending Shane books on how to manage tourist attractions, and he’d applied himself to that study with the same careful attitude I came to learn that he applied to everything. I sold my home and bought a small house in the historic downtown, not wanting to risk the newly repaired relationship between Vi and I by moving in with them. Shane was happy to have two more cars to work on; I sold the Jag.

We opened Pareidollywood, letting the world see my sister’s incredible back acreage and her bizarre artistic vision. Shane sells tickets and does maintenance, and Violet kept busy making new pieces for as long as she was able; Shane does that now, under her direction. It turns out I enjoy playing tour guide, and it scratches some of the same itch as on-air reporting.

None of it makes up for the forty years of each other’s lives we missed, but I think maybe our new relationship is stronger than the old one ever could have been. We still argue, of course, without venom, and we’ve come to appreciate how different we are from each other; neither of us has anything to prove to the other anymore. She tells me I’m surprisingly uptight for someone made of mud, and I tell her she’s a weird old woman who wanders around junkyards for fun, and she says, “it’s a living,” and we both laugh.

Our gift shop does brisk business in clockwork and drunk-coat-hook octopi and photographic prints, as does our online artisan market. Every once in a while, a museum asks to borrow or buy one of the bigger pieces, and we sometimes let them go. We keep careful tabs on all of them, just in case, even the ones that are simply beautiful and show no signs of life. Vi says she doesn’t need to wish on any of them anymore.

(Editors’ Note: “Signs of Life” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 59A.)