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Prologue
A Summer to Die

I don’t know what time it was when something woke me up. I wasn’t sure what it was, but something was happening that made me afraid; I had that feeling along the edge of my back, that cold feeling you get when things aren’t going right. And it wasn’t a dream. I sat up in bed and looked round in the dark, shaking off whatever was left of sleep, and the feeling was still there, that something was very wrong.

“Molly,” I whispered. Stupid to whisper, if you want to wake someone up.

But she answered, as if she were already awake. Her voice was strange. Frightened, and puzzled. “Meg,” she said. “Call Mum and Dad, quick.” I ran.

It was Molly who drew the line.

She did it with chalk – a fat piece of white chalk left over from when we lived in town, had pavements, and used to play hopscotch, back when we were both younger. That piece of chalk had been around for a long time. She fished it out of a little clay dish that I had made in last year’s pottery class, where it was lying with a piece of string and a few paper clips and a battery that we weren’t quite sure was dead.

She took the chalk and drew a line right on the carpet. Good thing it wasn’t a fuzzy carpet or it never would have worked; but it was an old, worn, leftover carpet from the dining room of our other house: very flat, and the chalk made a perfect white line across the blue – and then, while I watched in amazement (because it was unlike Molly, to be so angry), she kept right on drawing the line up the wall, across the wallpaper with its blue flowers. She stood on her desk and drew the line up to the ceiling, and then she went back to the other side of the room and stood on her bed and drew the line right up to the ceiling on that wall, too. Very neatly. Good thing it was Molly who drew it; if I had tried, it would have been a mess, a wavy line and off centre. But Molly is very neat.

Then she put the chalk back in the dish, sat down on her bed, and picked up her book. But before she started to read again, she looked over at me (I was still standing there amazed, not believing that she had drawn the line at all) and said, “There. Now be as much of a slob as you want, only keep your mess on your side. This side is mine.”

When we lived in town we had our own rooms, Molly and I. It didn’t really make us better friends, but it gave us a chance to ignore each other more.

Funny thing about sisters. Well, about us, anyway; Dad says it’s unacademic to generalize. Molly is prettier than I am, but I’m cleverer than Molly. I want with my whole being to be something someday; I like to think that someday, when I’m grown up, people everywhere will know who I am, because I will have accomplished something important – I don’t even know for sure yet what I want it to be, just that it will be something that makes people say my name, Meg Chalmers, with respect. When I told Molly that once, she said that what she wants is to have a different name when she grows up, to be Molly Something Else, to be Mrs Somebody, and to have her children, lots of them, call her “Mother”, with respect, and that’s all she cares about. She’s content, waiting for that; I’m restless, and so impatient. She’s sure, absolutely sure, that what she’s waiting for will happen, just the way she wants it to; and I’m so uncertain, so fearful my dreams will end up forgotten somewhere, someday, like a piece of string and a paper clip lying in a dish.

Being both determined and unsure at the same time is what makes me the way I am, I think: hasty, impetuous, sometimes angry over nothing, often miserable about everything. Being so well sorted out in her own goals, and so assured of everything happening the way she wants and expects it to, is what makes Molly the way she is: calm, easy-going, self-confident, downright smug.

Sometimes it seems as if, when our parents created us, it took them two tries, two daughters, to get all the qualities of one whole, well-put-together person. More often, though, when I think about it, I feel as if they got those qualities on their first try, and I represent the leftovers. That’s not a good way to feel about yourself, especially when you know, down in the part of you where the ambition is, where the dreams are, where the logic lies, that it’s not true.

The hardest part about living in the same room with someone is that it’s hard to keep anything hidden. I don’t mean the unmatched, dirty socks or the fourteen crumpled papers with tries at an unsuccessful poem on them, although those are the things that upset Molly, that made her draw the line. I mean the parts of yourself that are private: the tears you want to shed sometimes for no reason, the thoughts you want to think in a solitary place, the words you want to say aloud to hear how they sound, but only to yourself. It’s important to have a place to close a door on those things, the way I did in town.

The house in town is still there, and it’s still our house, but there are other people living in it now, which does something terrible to my stomach when I think about it too much. My room had red-and-white-checked wallpaper; there is a place in one corner, by a window, where I played three games of noughts and crosses on the wallpaper with a Magic Marker. Cats’ games, all of them. I played against myself, so it didn’t matter much, but it’s funny how you want to win anyway.

The university clock in its high brick tower was just across the street from the house; at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I could hear it strike each hour, the chimes coming clear and well defined as silhouettes from the ivied circle of the numbered face in the dark. That’s one of the things I miss most, living out here in the country, out here in the middle of nowhere. I like quiet. And it sure is quiet here. But there are times when I lie awake at night and all I can hear is Molly breathing in the bed next to mine; cars seldom go past on this road, and no clocks strike, nothing measures the moments. There is just this quiet, and it seems lonely.

The quiet is why we came. The university has given my dad just this year to finish his book. He worked on it for a while in the old house, shut in his study; but even though he was officially on leave from teaching, the students kept stopping by. “I just thought I’d drop in for a minute to see Dr Chalmers,” they’d say, standing on the porch, looking embarrassed. My mother would say, “Dr Chalmers can’t be disturbed,” and then my father’s voice would call from upstairs, “Let them in, Lydia, I want to stop for coffee anyway.”

So my mother would bring them in, and they would stay for hours, having coffee, talking to Dad, and then he would invite them for dinner, and Mother would add some noodles to the casserole, wash another head of lettuce for the salad, or quickly peel a few more carrots for the stew. We would take hours eating, because everyone talked so much, and my father would open a bottle of wine. Sometimes it would be late at night before they left. I would be in bed by then, listening to the clock chime across the street as they said goodbye on the porch, lingering to ask questions, to exhaust an argument, to laugh at another of my father’s anecdotes. Then I would hear my parents come upstairs to bed, and I would hear my father say, “Lydia, I am never going to finish this book.”

The title of the book is The Dialectic Synthesis of Irony. When Dad announced that, very proud of it, at dinner one night, Mum asked, “Can you say that three times fast?” Molly and I tried, and couldn’t, and it creased us up. Dad looked very stern, and said, “It is going to be a very important book”; Molly said, “What is?” and he tried to say the title again, couldn’t, and it creased him up, too.

He tried to explain to me once what the title means, but he gave up. Molly said she understood it very well. But Molly is full of bull sometimes.

It was at breakfast the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving that Mum and Dad told us we were leaving the house in town. I had figured that something was going on, because my mother had been on the phone all week, and my mother is not the type of woman who talks on the phone very much.

“We’ve found a house,” Mum said, pouring more coffee for herself and Dad, “out in the country so that your father can have some peace and quiet. It’s a lovely house, girls, built in 1840, with a big fireplace in the kitchen. It’s on a dirt road, and surrounded by one hundred and sixty acres of woods and fields. When summer comes we’ll be able to put in a vegetable garden—”

Summer. I guess Molly and I had been thinking the same thing, that she was talking about a month or so, maybe till after the Christmas holiday. But summer. It was only November. We sat there like idiots, with our mouths open. I had been born while we lived in the house in town, thirteen years before, and now they were talking about leaving it behind. I couldn’t think of anything to say, which is not unusual for me. But Molly always thinks of things to say.

“What about school?” she asked.

“You’ll go by bus, to the Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School. It’s a good school, and it’s only about a twenty-minute bus ride.”

“Can you say that three times fast?” asked Dad, grinning. “Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School?” We didn’t even try.

Consolidated school. I didn’t even know what that meant. To be honest, it sounded to me as if the school needed a laxative. Anyway, school wasn’t my main concern. I was thinking about my Thursday afternoon art class, which was just about to get into oils after umpteen weeks on watercolours, and my Saturday morning photography class, where my photograph of the clock tower at sunset had just been selected Best of the Week, beating the eight others in the class, which were all taken by boys.

But I didn’t even ask about my classes, about what would happen to them when we moved to the country. Because I knew.

“Dad,” groaned Molly. “I’ve just been made cheerleader.”

Boy, was that the wrong thing to say to my father. He’s proud of Molly, because she’s pretty and all that, even though he always seems somewhat surprised by her, that all of a sudden since she turned fifteen, she has boyfriends and stuff. Every now and then he looks at her and shakes his head in a kind of astonishment, and pride. But he has this thing about priorities, and when Molly said that, he set down his coffee cup very hard and looked at her with a frown.

“Cheerleading,” he said, “does not have top priority.”

And that was that. It was all decided, and there wasn’t anything to argue or fuss about. It was too busy a time, anyway. We almost skipped Thanksgiving, except that there were students who couldn’t go home for the holiday, and so five of them spent that Thursday with us, and Mum cooked a turkey. But most of the day we packed. The students helped to put books into boxes, and some of them helped Mum, packing dishes and kitchen things. I did all my packing alone that week. I cried when I fitted my new, unused box of oil paints – a present for my thirteenth birthday the month before – into a box, and I cried again when I packed my camera. But at least those things, the things I cared about most, were going with me. Molly had to give her blue-and-white cheerleading outfit to one of the substitute cheerleaders, a girl named Lisa Halstead, who pretended to be sad and sympathetic, but you could tell it was phony; she couldn’t wait to get home and try on that pleated skirt.

And all of that was only last month. It seems like a hundred years ago.

Strange, how the age of a house makes a difference. That shouldn’t surprise me, because certainly the age of a person makes a big difference, like with Molly and me. Molly is fifteen, which means that she puts on eyeshadow when Mum doesn’t catch her at it, and she spends hours in front of the mirror arranging her hair different ways; she stands sideways there, too, to see what her figure looks like, and she talks on the phone every evening to friends, mostly about boys. It took her about two days to make friends at the new school, two days after that to have boyfriends, and the next week she was chosen as a substitute cheerleader.