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Copyright ©2005 by Delia Sherman First published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2005

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The big thing about the new people moving into the old Pratt place at Number 400 was that they got away with it at all. Our neighborhood is big on historical integrity. The newest house on the block was built in 1910, and you can’t even change the paint-scheme on your house without recourse to preservation committee studies and zoning board hearings.

The old Pratt place had generated a tedious number of such hearings over the years—I’d even been to some of the more recent ones. Old Mrs. Pratt had let it go pretty much to seed, and when she passed away, there was trouble about clearing the title so it could be sold, and then it burned down.

Naturally a bunch of developers went after the land—a three-acre property in a professional neighborhood twenty minutes from downtown is something like a Holy Grail to developers. But their lawyers couldn’t get the title cleared either, and the end of it was that the old Pratt place never did get built on. By the time Geoff and I moved next door, the place was an empty lot. The neighborhood kids played Bad Guys and Good Guys there after school and the neighborhood cats preyed on its endless supply of mice and voles. I’m not talking eyesore, here; just a big shady plot of land overgrown with bamboo, rhododendrons, wildly rambling roses, and some nice old trees, most notably an immensely ancient copper beech big enough to dwarf any normal-sized house.

It certainly dwarfs ours.

Last spring all that changed overnight. Literally. When Geoff and I turned in, we lived next door to an empty lot. When we got up, we didn’t. I have to tell you, it came as quite a shock first thing on a Monday morning, and I wasn’t even the one who discovered it. Geoff was.

Geoff’s the designated keeper of the window because he insists on sleeping with it open and I hate getting up into a draft. Actually, I hate getting up, period. It’s a blessing, really, that Geoff can’t boil water without burning it, or I’d never be up before ten. As it is, I eke out every second of warm unconsciousness I can while Geoff shuffles across the floor and thunks down the sash and takes his shower. On that particular morning, his shuffle ended not with a thunk, but with a gasp.

“Holy shit,” he said.

I sat up in bed and groped for my robe. When we were in grad school, Geoff had quite a mouth on him, but fatherhood and two decades of college teaching have toned him down a lot. These days, he usually keeps his swearing for Supreme Court decisions and departmental politics.

“Get up, Evie. You gotta see this.”

So I got up and went to the window, and there it was, big as life and twice as natural, a real Victorian Homes centerfold, set back from the street and just the right size to balance the copper beech. Red tile roof, golden brown clapboards, miles of scarlet-and-gold gingerbread draped over dozens of eaves, balconies, and dormers. A witch’s hat tower, a wrap-around porch, and a massive carriage house. With a cupola on it. Nothing succeeds like excess, I always say.

“Holy shit.”

“Watch your mouth, Evie,” said Geoff automatically.

I like to think of myself as a fairly sensible woman. I don’t imagine things, I face facts, I hadn’t gotten hysterical when my fourteen-year-old daughter asked me about birth control. Surely there was some perfectly rational explanation for this phenomenon. All I had to do was think of it.

“It’s an hallucination,” I said. “Victorian houses don’t go up overnight. People do have hallucinations. We’re having an hallucination. Q.E.D.”

“It’s not a hallucination,” Geoff said.

Geoff teaches intellectual history at the University and tends to disagree, on principle, with everything everyone says. Someone says the sky is blue, he says it isn’t. And then he explains why. “This has none of the earmarks of a hallucination,” he went on. “We aren’t in a heightened emotional state, not expecting a miracle, not drugged, not part of a mob, not starving, not sense-deprived. Besides, there’s a clothesline in the yard with laundry hanging on it. Nobody hallucinates long underwear.”

I looked where he was pointing, and sure enough, a pair of scarlet long johns was kicking and waving from an umbrella-shaped drying-rack, along with a couple pairs of women’s panties, two oxford-cloth shirts hung up by their collars, and a gold-and-black print caftan. There was also what was arguably the most beautifully designed perennial bed I’d ever seen basking in the early morning sun. As I was squinting at the delphiniums, a side door opened and a woman came out with a wicker clothes basket propped on her hip. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, had fairish hair pulled back in a bushy tail, and struck me as being a little long in the tooth to be going barefoot and braless.

“Nice legs,” said Geoff.

I snapped down the window. “Pull the shades before you get in the shower,” I said. “It looks to me like our new neighbors get a nice, clear shot of our bathroom from their third floor.”

In our neighborhood, we pride ourselves on minding our own business and not each others’—live and let live, as long as you keep your dog, your kids, and your lawn under control. If you don’t, someone calls you or drops you a note, and if that doesn’t make you straighten up and fly right, well, you’re likely to get a call from the town council about that extension you neglected to get a variance for. Needless to say, the house at Number 400 fell way outside all our usual coping mechanisms. If some contractor had shown up at dawn with bulldozers and two-by-fours, I could have called the police or our councilwoman or someone and got an injunction. How do you get an injunction against a physical impossibility?

The first phone call came at about eight-thirty: Susan Morrison, whose back yard abuts the Pratt place.

“Reality check time,” said Susan. “Do we have new neighbors or do we not?”

“Looks like it to me,” I said.

Silence. Then she sighed. “Yeah. So. Can Kimmy sit for Jason Friday night?”

Typical. If you can’t deal with it, pretend it doesn’t exist, like when one couple down the street got the bright idea of turning their front lawn into a wildflower meadow. The trouble is, a Victorian mansion is a lot harder to ignore than even the wildest meadow. The phone rang all morning with hysterical calls from women who hadn’t spoken to us since Geoff’s brief tenure as president of the neighborhood association.

After several fruitless sessions of what’s-the-world-coming-to, I turned on the machine and went out to the garden to put in the beans. Planting them in May was pushing it, but I needed the therapy. For me, gardening’s the most soothing activity on Earth. When you plant a bean, you get a bean, not an azalea or a cabbage. When you see that bean covered with icky little orange things, you know they’re Mexican bean beetle larvae and go for the pyrethrum. Or you do if you’re paying attention. It always astonishes me how oblivious even the garden club ladies can be to a plant’s needs and preferences.

Sure, there are nasty surprises, like the winter that the mice ate all the Apricot Beauty tulip bulbs. But mostly you know where you are with a garden. If you put the work in, you’ll get satisfaction out, which is more than can be said of marriages or careers.

This time though, digging and raking and planting failed to work their usual magic. Every time I glanced up, there was Number 400, serene and comfortable, the shrubs established and the paint chipping just a little around the windows, exactly as if it had been there forever instead of less than twelve hours.

I’m not big on the inexplicable. Fantasy makes me nervous. In fact, fiction makes me nervous. I like facts and plenty of them. That’s why I wanted to be a botanist. I wanted to know everything there was to know about how plants worked, why azaleas like acid soil and peonies like wood ash and how you might be able to get them to grow next to each other. I even went to graduate school and took organic chemistry. Then I met Geoff, fell in love, and traded in my Ph.D. for an M-R-S, with a minor in Mommy. None of these events (except possibly falling in love with Geoff) fundamentally shook my allegiance to provable, palpable facts. The house next door was palpable, all right, but it shouldn’t have been. By the time Kim got home from school that afternoon, I had a headache from trying to figure out how it got to be there.

Kim is my daughter. She reads fantasy, likes animals a lot more than she likes people, and is a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because of Kim, we have two dogs (Spike and Willow), a cockatiel (Frodo), and a lop-eared Belgian rabbit (Big Bad), plus the overflow of semi-wild cats (Balin, Dwalin, Bifur, and Bombur) from the Pratt place, all of which she feeds and looks after with truly astonishing dedication.

Three-thirty on the nose, the screen door slammed and Kim careened into the kitchen with Spike and Willow bouncing ecstatically around her feet.

“Whaddya think of the new house, Mom? Who do you think lives there? Do they have pets?”

I laid out her after-school sliced apple and cheese and answered the question I could answer. “There’s at least one woman—she was hanging out laundry this morning. No sign of children or pets, but it’s early days yet.”

“Isn’t it just the coolest thing in the universe, Mom? Real magic, right next door. Just like Buffy.”

“Without the vampires, I hope. Kim, there’s no such thing as magic. There’s probably a perfectly simple explanation.”

“But, Mom!”

“But nothing. You need to call Mrs. Morrison. She wants to know if you can sit for Jason on Friday night. And Big Bad’s looking shaggy. He needs to be brushed.”

That was Monday.

Tuesday morning, our street looked like the Expressway at rush hour. It’s a miracle there wasn’t an accident. Everybody in town must have driven by, slowing down as they passed Number 400 and craning out the car window. Things quieted down in the middle of the day when everyone was at work, but come 4:30 or so, the joggers started and the walkers and more cars. About 6:00, the police pulled up in front of the house, at which point everyone stopped pretending to be nonchalant and held their breath. Two cops disappeared into the house, came out again a few minutes later, and left without talking to anybody. They were holding cookies and looking bewildered.

The traffic let up on Wednesday. Kim found a kitten (Hermione) in the wildflower garden and Geoff came home full of the latest in a series of personality conflicts with his department head, which gave everyone something other than Number 400 to talk about over dinner.

Thursday, Lucille Flint baked one of her coffee cakes and went over to do the Welcome Wagon thing.

Lucille’s our local Good Neighbor. Someone moves in, has a baby, marries, dies, and there’s Lucille, Johnny-on-the-spot with a coffee cake in her hands and the proper Hallmark sentiment on her lips. Lucille has the time for this kind of thing because she doesn’t have a regular job. All right, neither do I, but I write a gardener’s advice column for the local paper, so I’m not exactly idle. There’s the garden, too. Besides, I’m not the kind of person who likes sitting around in other people’s kitchens drinking watery instant and hearing the stories of their lives. Lucille is.

Anyway. Thursday morning, I researched the diseases of roses for my column. I’m lucky with roses. Mine never come down with black spot, and the Japanese beetles prefer Susan Morrison’s yard to mine. Weeds, however, are not so obliging. When I’d finished Googling “powdery mildew,” I went out to tackle the rosebed.

Usually, I don’t mind weeding. My mind wanders, my hands get dirty. I can almost feel my plants settling deeper into the soil as I root out the competition. But my rosebed is on the property line between us and the Pratt place. What if the house disappeared again, or someone came out and wanted to chat? I’m not big into chatting. On the other hand, there was shepherd’s purse in the rosebed, and shepherd’s purse can be a real wild Indian once you let it get established, so I gritted my teeth, grabbed my Cape Cod weeder, and got down to it.

Just as I was starting to relax, I heard footsteps passing on the walk and pushed the rose canes aside just in time to see Lucille Flint climbing the stone steps to Number 400. I watched her ring the doorbell, but I didn’t see who answered because I ducked down behind a bushy Gloire de Dijon. If Lucille doesn’t care who knows she’s a busybody, that’s her business.

After twenty-five minutes, I’d weeded and cultivated those roses to a fare-thee-well, and was backing out when I heard the screen door, followed by Lucille telling someone how lovely their home was, and thanks again for the scrumptious pie.

I caught her up under the copper beech.

“Evie dear, you’re all out of breath,” she said. “My, that’s a nasty tear in your shirt.”

“Come in, Lucille,” I said. “Have a cup of coffee.”

She followed me inside without comment, and accepted a cup of microwaved coffee and a slice of date-and-nut cake.

She took a bite, coughed a little, and grabbed for the coffee.

“It is pretty awful, isn’t it?” I said apologetically. “I baked it last week for some PTA thing at Kim’s school and forgot to take it.”

“Never mind. I’m full of cherry pie from next door.” She leaned over the stale cake and lowered her voice. “The cherries were fresh, Evie.”

My mouth dropped open. “Fresh cherries? In May? You’re kidding.”

Lucille nodded, satisfied at my reaction. “Nope. There was a bowl of them on the table, leaves and all. What’s more, there was corn on the draining-board. Fresh corn. In the husk. With the silk still on it.”

“No!”

“Yes.” Lucille sat back and took another sip of coffee. “Mind you, there could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. Ophelia’s a horticulturist, after all. Maybe she’s got greenhouses out back. Heaven knows there’s enough room for several.”

I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of corn growing in a greenhouse.”

“And I’ve never heard of a house appearing in an empty lot overnight,” Lucille said tartly. “About that, there’s nothing I can tell you. They’re not exactly forthcoming, if you know what I mean.”

I was impressed. I knew how hard it was to avoid answering Lucille’s questions, even about the most personal things. She just kind of picked at you, in the nicest possible way, until you unraveled. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t hang out with her much.

“So, who are they?”

“Rachel Abrams and Ophelia Canderel. I think they’re lesbians. They feel like family together, and you can take it from me, they’re not sisters.”

Fine. We’re a liberal suburb, we can cope with lesbians. “Children?”

Lucille shrugged. “I don’t know. There were drawings on the fridge, but no toys.”

“Inconclusive evidence,” I agreed. “What did you talk about?”

She made a face. “Pie crust. The Perkins’s wildflower meadow. They like it. Burney.” Burney was Lucille’s husband, an unpleasant old fart who disapproved of everything in the world except his equally unpleasant terrier, Homer. “Electricians. They want a fixture put up in the front hall. Then Rachel tried to tell me about her work in artificial intelligence, but I couldn’t understand a word she said.”

From where I was sitting, I had an excellent view of Number 400’s wisteria-covered carriage house with its double doors ajar on an awe-inspiring array of garden tackle. “Artificial intelligence must pay well,” I said.

Lucille shrugged. “There has to be family money somewhere. You ought to see the front hall, not to mention the kitchen. It looks like something out of a magazine.”

“What are they doing here?”

“That’s the forty-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?”

We drained the cold dregs of our coffee, contemplating the mystery of why a horticulturist and an artificial intelligence wonk would choose our quiet, tree-lined suburb to park their house in. It seemed a more solvable mystery than how they’d transported it there in the first place.

Lucille took off to make Burney his noontime franks and beans and I tried to get my column roughed out. But I couldn’t settle to my computer, not with that Victorian enigma sitting on the other side of my rose bed. Every once in a while, I’d see a shadow passing behind a window or hear a door bang. I gave up trying to make the disposal of diseased foliage interesting and went out to poke around in the garden. I was elbow-deep in the viburnum, pruning out deadwood, when I heard someone calling.

It was a woman, standing on the other side of my roses. She was big, solidly curved, and dressed in bright flowered overalls. Her hair was braided with shiny gold ribbon into dozens of tiny plaits tied off with little metal beads. Her skin was a deep matte brown, like antique mahogany. Despite the overalls, she was astonishingly beautiful.

I dropped the pruning shears. “Damn,” I said. “Sorry,” I said. “You surprised me.” I felt my cheeks heat. The woman smiled at me serenely and beckoned.

I don’t like new people and I don’t like being put on the spot, but I’ve got my pride. I picked up my pruning shears, untangled myself from the viburnum, and marched across the lawn to met my new neighbor.

She said her name was Ophelia Canderel, and she’d been admiring my garden. Would I like to see hers?

I certainly would.

If I’d met Ophelia at a party, I’d have been totally tongue-tied. She was beautiful, she was big, and frankly, there just aren’t enough people of color in our neighborhood for me to have gotten over my Liberal nervousness around them. This particular woman of color, however, spoke fluent Universal Gardener and her garden was a gardener’s garden, full of horticultural experiments and puzzles and stuff to talk about. Within about three minutes, she was asking my advice about the gnarly brown larvae infesting her bee balm, and I was filling her in on the peculiarities of our local microclimate. By the time we’d inspected every flower and shrub in the front yard, I was more comfortable with her than I was with the local garden club ladies. We were alike, Ophelia and I.

We were discussing the care and feeding of peonies in an acid soil when Ophelia said, “Would you like to see my shrubbery?”

Usually when I hear the word “shrubbery,” I think of a semi-formal arrangement of rhodies and azaleas, lilacs and viburnum, with a potentilla perhaps, or a butterfly bush for late summer color. The bed should be deep enough to give everything room to spread and there should be a statue in it, or maybe a sundial. Neat, but not anal—that’s what you should aim for in a shrubbery.

Ophelia sure had the not-anal part down pat. The shrubs didn’t merely spread, they rioted. And what with the trees and the orchids and the ferns and the vines, I couldn’t begin to judge the border’s depth. The hibiscus and the bamboo were okay, although I wouldn’t have risked them myself. But to plant bougainvillea and poinsettias, coconut palms and frangipani this far north was simply tempting fate. And the statue! I’d never seen anything remotely like it, not outside of a museum, anyway. No head to speak of, breasts like footballs, a belly like a watermelon, and a phallus like an overgrown zucchini, the whole thing weathered with the rains of a thousand years or more.

I glanced at Ophelia. “Impressive,” I said.

She turned a critical eye on it. “You don’t think it’s too much? Rachel says it is, but she’s a minimalist. This is my little bit of home, and I love it.”

“It’s a lot,” I admitted. Accuracy prompted me to add, “It suits you.”

I still didn’t understand how Ophelia had gotten a tropical rainforest to flourish in a temperate climate.

I was trying to find a nice way to ask her about it when she said, “You’re a real find, Evie. Rachel’s working, or I’d call her to come down. She really wants to meet you.”

“Next time,” I said, wondering what on Earth I’d find to talk about with a specialist on artificial intelligence. “Um. Does Rachel garden?”

Ophelia laughed. “No way—her talent is not for living things. But I made a garden for her. Would you like to see it?”

I was only dying to, although I couldn’t help wondering what kind of exotica I was letting myself in for. A desertscape? Tundra? Curiosity won. “Sure,” I said. “Lead on.”

We stopped on the way to visit the vegetable garden. It looked fairly ordinary, although the tomatoes were more August than May, and the beans more late June. I didn’t see any corn and I didn’t see any greenhouses. After a brief side-bar on insecticidal soaps, Ophelia led me behind the carriage house. The unmistakable sound of quacking fell on my ears.

“We aren’t zoned for ducks,” I said, startled.

“We are,” said Ophelia. “Now. How do you like Rachel’s garden?”

A prospect of brown reeds with a silvery river meandering through it stretched through where the Morrison’s back yard ought to be, all the way to a boundless expanse of ocean. In the marsh it was April, with a crisp salt wind blowing back from the water and ruffling the brown reeds and the white-flowering shad and the pale green unfurling sweetfern. Mallards splashed and dabbled along the meander. A solitary great egret stood among the reeds, the fringes of its white courting shawl blowing around one black and knobbly leg. As I watched, open-mouthed, the egret unfurled its other leg from its breast feathers, trod at the reeds, and lowered its golden bill to feed.

I got home late. Kim was in the basement with the animals, and the chicken I was planning to make for dinner was still in the freezer. Thanking heaven for modern technology, I defrosted the chicken in the microwave, chopped veggies, seasoned, mixed, and got the whole mess in the oven just as Geoff walked in the door. He wasn’t happy about eating forty-five minutes late, but he was mostly over it by bedtime.

That was Thursday.

Friday, I saw Ophelia and Rachel pulling out of their driveway in one of those old cars that has huge fenders and a running board. They returned after lunch, the back seat full of groceries. They and the groceries disappeared through the kitchen door, and there was no further sign of them until late afternoon, when Rachel opened one of the quarter-round windows in the attic and energetically shook the dust out of a small, patterned carpet.

On Saturday, the invitation came.

It stood out among the flyers, book orders, bills, and requests for money that usually came through our mail-slot, a five-by-eight silvery-blue envelope that smelled faintly of sandalwood. It was addressed to The Gordon Family in a precise italic hand.

I opened it and read:

Rachel Esther Abrams and Ophelia Desire Candarel

Request the Honor of your Presence

At the

Celebration of their Marriage.

Sunday, May 24 at 3 p.m.

There will be refreshments before and after the Ceremony.

I was still staring at it when the doorbell rang. It was Lucille, looking fit to burst, holding an invitation just like mine.

“Come in, Lucille. There’s plenty of coffee left.”

I don’t think I’d ever seen Lucille in such a state. You’d think someone had invited her to parade naked down Main Street at noon.

“Well, write and tell them you can’t come,” I said. “They’re just being neighborly, for Pete’s sake. It’s not like they can’t get married if you’re not there.”

“I know. It’s just…. It puts me in a funny position, that’s all. Burney’s a founding member of Normal Marriage for Normal People. He wouldn’t like it at all if he knew I’d been invited to a lesbian wedding.”

“So don’t tell him. If you want to go, just tell him the new neighbors have invited you to an open house on Sunday, and you know for a fact that we’re going to be there.”

Lucille smiled. Burney hated Geoff almost as much as Geoff hated Burney. “It’s a thought,” she said. “Are you going?”

“I don’t see why not. Who knows? I might learn something.”

The Sunday of the wedding, I took forever to dress. Kim thought it was funny, but Geoff threatened to bail if I didn’t quit fussing. “It’s a lesbian wedding, for pity’s sake. It’s going to be full of middle-aged dykes with ugly haircuts. Nobody’s going to care what you look like.”

“I care,” said Kim. “And I think that jacket is wicked cool.”

I’d bought the jacket at a little Indian store in the Square and not worn it since. When I got it away from the Square’s atmosphere of collegiate funk it looked, I don’t know, too Sixties, too artsy, too bright for a fortysomething suburban matron. It was basically purple, with teal blue and gold and fuchsia flowers all over it and brass buttons shaped like parrots. Shaking my head, I started to unfasten the parrots.

Geoff exploded. “I swear to God, Evie, if you change again, that’s it. It’s not like I want to go. I’ve got papers to correct; I don’t have time for this”—he glanced at Kim—“nonsense. Either we go or we stay. But we do it now.”

Kim touched my arm. “It’s you, Mom. Come on.”

So I came on, my jacket flashing neon in the sunlight. By the time we hit the sidewalk, I felt like a tropical floral display; I was ready to bolt home and hide under the bed.

“Great,” said Geoff. “Not a car in sight. If we’re the only ones here, I’m leaving.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” I said.

Beyond the copper beech, I saw a colorful crowd milling around as purposefully as bees, bearing chairs and flowers and ribbons. As we came closer, it became clear that Geoff couldn’t have been more wrong about the wedding guests. There wasn’t an ugly haircut in sight, although there were some pretty startling dye-jobs. The dress-code could best be described as eclectic, with a slight bias toward floating fabrics and rich, bright colors. My jacket felt right at home.

Geoff was muttering about not knowing anybody when Lucille appeared, looking festive in Laura Ashley chintz.

“Isn’t this fun?” she said, with every sign of sincerity. “I’ve never met such interesting people. And friendly! They make me feel right at home. Come over here and join the gang.”

She dragged us toward the long side-yard, which sloped down to a lavishly blooming double-flowering cherry underplanted with peonies. Which shouldn’t have been in bloom at the same time as the cherry, but I was getting used to the vagaries of Ophelia’s garden. A willowy young person in chartreuse lace claimed Lucille’s attention, and they went off together. The three of us stood in a slightly awkward knot at the edge of the crowd, which occasionally threw out a few guests who eddied around us briefly before retreating.

“How are those spells of yours, dear? Any better?” inquired a solicitous voice in my ear, and, “Oh!” when I jumped. “You’re not Elvira, are you? Sorry.”

Geoff’s grip was cutting off the circulation above my elbow. “This was not one of your better ideas, Evie. We’re surrounded by weirdoes. Did you see that guy in the skirt? I think we should take Kimmy home.”

A tall black man with a flattop and a diamond in his left ear appeared, pried Geoff’s hand from my arm, and shook it warmly. “Dr. Gordon? Ophelia told me to be looking out for you. I’ve read The Anarchists, you see, and I can’t tell you how much I admired it.”

Geoff actually blushed. Before the subject got too painful to talk about, he used to say that for a history of anarchism, his one book had had a remarkably elite readership: three members of the tenure review committee, two reviewers for scholarly journals, and his wife. “Thanks,” he said.

Geoff’s fan grinned, clearly delighted. “Maybe we can talk at the reception,” he said. “Right now, I need to find you a place to sit. They look like they’re just about ready to roll.”

It was a lovely wedding.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but I was mildly surprised to see a rabbi and a wedding canopy. Ophelia was an enormous rose in crimson draperies. Rachel was a calla lily in cream linen. Their heads were tastefully wreathed in oak and ivy leaves. There were the usual prayers and promises and tears; when the rabbi pronounced them married, they kissed and horns sounded a triumphant fanfare.

Kim poked me in the side. “Mom? Who’s playing those horns?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a recording.”

“I don’t think so,” Kim said. “I think it’s the tree. Isn’t this just about the coolest thing ever?”

We were on our feet again. The chairs had disappeared and people were dancing. A cheerful bearded man grabbed Kim’s hand to pull her into the line. Geoff grabbed her and pulled her back.

“Dad!” Kim wailed. “I want to dance!”

“I’ve got a pile of papers to correct before class tomorrow,” Geoff said. “And if I know you, there’s some homework you’ve put off until tonight. We have to go home now.”

“We can’t leave yet,” I objected. “We haven’t congratulated the brides.”

Geoff’s jaw tensed. “So go congratulate them,” he said. “Kim and I will wait for you here.”

Kim looked mutinous. I gave her the eye. This wasn’t the time or the place to object. Like Geoff, Kim had no inhibitions about airing the family linen in public, but I had enough for all three of us.

“Dr. Gordon. There you are.” The Anarchists fan popped up between us. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Come have a drink and let me tell you how brilliant you are.”

Geoff smiled modestly. “You’re being way too generous,” he said. “Did you read Peterson’s piece in The Review?”

“Asshole,” said the man dismissively. Geoff slapped him on the back, and a minute later, they were halfway to the house, laughing as if they’d known each other for years. Thank heaven for the male ego.

“Dance?” said Kim.

“Go for it,” I said. “I’m going to get some champagne and kiss the brides.”

The brides were nowhere to be found. The champagne, a young girl informed me, was in the kitchen. So I entered Number 400 for the first time, coming through the mudroom into a large, oak-paneled hall. To my left a staircase with an ornately carved oak banister rose to an art-glass window. Ahead was a semicircular fireplace with a carved bench on one side and a door that probably led to the kitchen on the other. Between me and the door was an assortment of brightly dressed strangers, talking and laughing.

I edged around them, passing two curtained doors and a bronze statue of Alice and the Red Queen. Puzzle fragments of conversation rose out of the general buzz:

“My pearls? Thank you, my dear, but you know they’re only stimulated.”

“And then it just went ‘poof’! A perfectly good frog, and it just went poof!”

“…and then Tallulah says to the bishop, she says, ‘Love your drag, darling, but your purse is on fire.’ Don’t you love it? ‘Your purse is on fire!’”

The kitchen itself was blessedly empty except for a stout gentleman in a tuxedo, and a striking woman in a peach silk pantsuit, who was tending an array of champagne bottles and a cut-glass bowl full of bright blue punch. Curious, I picked up a cup of punch and sniffed at it. The woman smiled up at me through a caterpillery fringe of false lashes.

“Pure witch’s brew,” she said in one of those Lauren Bacall come-hither voices I’ve always envied. “But what can you do? It’s the specialit de la maison.”

The tuxedoed man laughed. “Don’t mind Silver, Mrs. Gordon. He just likes to tease. Ophelia’s punch is wonderful.”

“Only if you like Ty-dee Bowl,” said Silver, tipping a sapphire stream into another cup. “You know, honey, you shouldn’t stand around with your mouth open like that. Think of the flies.”

Several guests entered in plenty of time to catch this exchange. Determined to preserve my cool, I took a gulp of the punch. It tasted fruity and made my mouth prickle, and then it hit my stomach like a firecracker. So much for cool. I choked and gasped.

“I tried to warn you,” Silver said. “You’d better switch to champagne.” Now I knew Silver was a man, I could see that his hands and wrists were big for the rest of her—him. I could feel my face burning with punch and mortification.

“No, thank you,” I said faintly. “Maybe some water?”

The stout man handed me a glass. I sipped gratefully. “You’re Ophelia and Rachel’s neighbor, aren’t you?” he said. “Lovely garden. You must be proud of that asparagus bed.”

“I was, until I saw Ophelia’s.”

“Ooh, listen to the green-eyed monster,” Silver cooed. “Don’t be jealous, honey. Ophelia’s the best. Nobody understands plants like Ophelia.”

“I’m not jealous,” I said with dignity. “I’m wistful. There’s a difference.”

Then, just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, Geoff appeared, looking stunningly unprofessorial, with one side of his shirt collar turned up and his dark hair flopped over his eyes.

“Hey, Evie. Who knew a couple of dykes would know how to throw a wedding?”

You’d think after sixteen years of living with Geoff, I’d know whether or not he was an alcoholic. But I don’t. He doesn’t go on binges, he doesn’t get drunk at every party we go to, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t drink on the sly. What I do know is that drinking doesn’t make him more fun to be around.

I took his arm. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I said brightly. “Too bad we have to leave.”

“Leave? Who said anything about leaving? We just got here.”

“Your papers,” I said. “Remember?”

“Screw my papers,” said Geoff and held out his empty cup to Silver. “This punch is dy-no-mite.”

“What about your students?”

“I’ll tell ‘em I didn’t feel like reading their stupid essays. That’ll fix their little red wagons. Boring as hell anyway. Fill ‘er up, beautiful,” he told Silver.

Silver considered him gravely. “Geoff, darling,” he said. “A little bird tells me that there’s an absolutely delicious argument going on in the smoking room. They’ll never forgive you if you don’t come play.”

Geoff favored Silver with a leer that made me wish I were somewhere else. “Only if you play too,” he said. “What’s it about?”

Silver waved a pink-tipped hand. “Something about theoretical versus practical anarchy. Right, Rodney?”

“I believe so,” said the stout gentleman agreeably.

A martial gleam rose in Geoff’s eye. “Let me at ‘em.”

Silver’s pale eyes turned to me, solemn and concerned. “You don’t mind, do you, honey?”

I shrugged. With luck, the smoking-room crowd would be drunk too, and nobody would remember who said what. I just hoped none of the anarchists had a violent temper.

“We’ll return him intact,” Silver said. “I promise.” And they were gone, Silver trailing fragrantly from Geoff’s arm.

While I was wondering whether I’d said that thing about the anarchists or only thought it, I felt a tap on my shoulder—the stout gentleman, Rodney.

“Mrs. Gordon, Rachel and Ophelia would like to see you and young Kimberly in the study. If you’ll please step this way?”

His manner had shifted from wedding guest to old-fashioned butler. Properly intimidated, I trailed him to the front hall. It was empty now, except for Lucille and the young person in chartreuse lace, who were huddled together on the bench by the fireplace. The young person was talking earnestly and Lucille was listening and nodding and sipping punch. Neither of them paid any attention to us or to the music coming from behind one of the curtained doors. I saw Kim at the foot of the stairs, examining the newel post.

It was well worth examining: a screaming griffin with every feather and every curl beautifully articulated and its head polished smooth and black as ebony. Rodney gave it a brief, seemingly unconscious caress as he started up the steps. When Kim followed suit, I thought I saw the carved eye blink.

I must have made a noise, because Rodney halted his slow ascent and gazed down at me, standing open-mouthed below. “Lovely piece of work, isn’t it? We call it the house guardian. A joke, of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed. “Cute.”

It seemed to me that the house had more rooms than it ought to. Through open doors, I glimpsed libraries, salons, parlors, bedrooms. We passed through a stone cloister where discouraged-looking ficuses in tubs shed their leaves on the cracked pavement and into a green-scummed pool. I don’t know what shocked me more: the cloister or the state of its plants. Maybe Ophelia’s green thumb didn’t extend to houseplants.

As far as I could tell, Kim took all this completely in stride. She bounded along like a dog in the woods, peeking in an open door here, pausing to look at a picture there, and pelting Rodney with questions I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, like “Are there kids here?”; “What about pets?”; “How many people live here, anyway?”

“It depends,” was Rodney’s unvarying answer. “Step this way, please.”

Our trek ended in a wall covered by a huge South American tapestry of three women making pots. Rodney pulled the tapestry aside, revealing an iron-banded oak door that would have done a medieval castle proud. “The study,” he said, and opened the door on a flight of ladder-like steps rising steeply into the shadows.

His voice and gesture reminded me irresistibly of one of those horror movies in which a laconic butler leads the hapless heroine to a forbidding door and invites her to step inside. I didn’t know which of three impulses was stronger: to laugh, to run, or, like the heroine, to forge on and see what happened next.

It’s some indication of the state I was in that Kim got by me and through the door before I could stop her.

I don’t like feeling helpless and I don’t like feeling pressured. I really don’t like being tricked, manipulated, and herded. Left to myself, I’d have turned around and taken my chances on finding my way out of the maze of corridors. But I wasn’t going to leave without my daughter, so I hitched up my wedding-appropriate long skirt and started up the steps.

The stairs were every bit as steep as they looked. I floundered up gracelessly, emerging into a huge space sparsely furnished with a beat-up rolltop desk, a wingback chair and a swan-neck rocker on a threadbare Oriental rug at one end, and some cluttered door-on-sawhorse tables on the other. Ophelia and Rachel, still dressed in their bridal finery, were sitting in the chair and the rocker respectively, holding steaming mugs and talking to Kim, who was incandescent with excitement.

“Oh, there you are,” said Ophelia as I stumbled up the last step. “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you,” I said stiffly. “Kim, I think it’s time to go home now.”

Kim protested, vigorously. Rachel cast Ophelia an unreadable look.

“It’ll be fine, love,” Ophelia said soothingly. “Mrs. Gordon’s upset, and who could blame her? Evie, I don’t believe you’ve actually met Rachel.”

Where I come from, social niceties trump everything. Without actually meaning to, I found I was shaking Rachel’s hand and congratulating her on her marriage. Close up, she was a handsome woman, with a decided nose, deep lines around her mouth, and the measuring gaze of a gardener examining an unfamiliar insect on her tomato leaves. I didn’t ask her to call me Evie.

Ophelia touched my hand. “Never mind,” she said soothingly. “Have some tea. You’ll feel better.”

Next thing I knew, I was sitting on a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before, eating a lemon cookie from a plate I didn’t see arrive, and drinking Lapsang Souchong from a cup that appeared when Ophelia reached for it. Just for the record, I didn’t feel better at all. I felt as if I’d taken a step that wasn’t there, or perhaps failed to take one that was: out of balance, out of place, out of control.

Kim, restless as a cat, was snooping around among the long tables.

“What’s with the flying fish?” she asked.

“They’re for Rachel’s new experiment,” said Ophelia. “She thinks she can bring the dead to life again.”

“You better let me tell it, Ophie,” Rachel said. “I don’t want Mrs. Gordon thinking I’m some kind of mad scientist.”

In fact, I wasn’t thinking at all, except that I was in way over my head.

“I’m working on animating extinct species,” Rachel said. “I’m particularly interested in dodos and passenger pigeons, but eventually, I’d like to work up to bison and maybe woolly mammoths.”

“Won’t that create ecological problems?” Kim objected. “I mean, they’re way big, and we don’t know much about their habits or what they ate or anything.”

There was a silence while Rachel and Ophelia traded family-joke smiles. “That’s why we need you,” Rachel said.

Kim looked as though she’d been given the pony she’d been agitating for since fourth grade. Her jaw dropped. Her eyes sparkled. And I lost it.

“Will somebody please tell me what the hell you’re talking about?” I said. “I’ve been patient. I followed your pal Rodney through more rooms than Versailles and I didn’t run screaming, and believe me when I tell you I wanted to. I’ve drunk your tea and listened to your so-called explanations, and I still don’t know what’s going on.”

Kim turned to me with a look of blank astonishment. “Come on, Mom. I can’t believe you don’t know that Ophelia and Rachel are witches. It’s perfectly obvious.”

“We prefer not to use the W word,” Rachel said. “Like most labels, it’s misleading and inaccurate. We’re just people with natural scientific ability who have been trained to ask the right questions.”

Ophelia nodded. “We learn to ask the things themselves. They always know. Do you see?”

“No,” I said. “All I see is a roomful of junk and a garden that doesn’t care what season it is.”

“Very well,” said Rachel, and rose from her chair. “If you’ll just come over here, Mrs. Gordon, I’ll try to clear everything up.”

At the table of the flying fish, Ophelia arranged us in a semi-circle, with Rachel in a teacherly position beside the exhibits. These seemed to be A) the fish; and B) one of those Japanese good-luck cats with one paw curled up by its ear and a bright enameled bib.

“As you know,” Rachel said, “my field is artificial intelligence. What that means, essentially, is that I can animate the inanimate. Observe.” She caressed the porcelain cat between its ears. For two breaths, nothing happened. Then the cat lowered its paw and stretched itself luxuriously. The light glinted off its bulging sides; its curly red mouth and wide painted eyes were expressionless.

“Sweet,” Kim breathed.

“It’s not really alive,” Rachel said, stroking the cat’s shiny back. “It’s still porcelain. If it jumps off the table, it’ll break.”

“Can I pet it?” Kim asked.

“No!” Rachel and I said in firm and perfect unison.

“Why not?”

“Because I’d like you to help me with an experiment.” Rachel looked me straight in the eye. “I’m not really comfortable with words,” she said. “I prefer demonstrations. What I’m going to do is hold Kim’s hand and touch the fish. That’s all.”

“And what happens then?” Kim asked eagerly.

Rachel smiled at her. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we? Are you okay with this, Mrs. Gordon?”

It sounded harmless enough, and Kim was already reaching for Rachel’s hand. “Go ahead,” I said.

Their hands met, palm to palm. Rachel closed her eyes. She frowned in concentration and the atmosphere tightened around us. I yawned to unblock my ears.

Rachel laid her free hand on one of the fish.

It twitched, head jerking galvanically; its wings fanned open and shut.

Kim gave a little grunt, which snapped my attention away from the fish. She was pale and sweating a little.

I started to go to her, but I couldn’t. Someone was holding me back.

“It’s okay, Evie,” Ophelia said soothingly. “Kim’s fine, really. Rachel knows what she’s doing.”

“Kim’s pale,” I said, calm as the eye of a storm. “She looks like she’s going to throw up. She’s not fine. Let me go to my daughter, Ophelia, or I swear you’ll regret it.”

“Believe me, it’s not safe for you to touch them right now. You have to trust us.”

My Great-Aunt Fanny I’ll trust you, I thought, and willed myself to relax in her grip. “Okay,” I said shakily. “I believe you. It’s just, I wish you’d warned me.”

“We wanted to tell you,” Ophelia said. “But we were afraid you wouldn’t believe us. We were afraid you would think we were a couple of nuts. You see, Kim has the potential to be an important zoologist—if she has the proper training. Rachel’s a wonderful teacher, and you can see for yourself how complementary their disciplines are. Working together, they….”

I don’t know what she thought Kim and Rachel could accomplish, because the second she was more interested in what she was saying than in holding onto me, I was out of her hands and pulling Kim away from the witch who, as far as I could tell, was draining her dry.

That was the plan, anyway.

As soon as I touched Kim, the room came alive.

It started with the flying fish leaping off the table and buzzing past us on Saran Wrap wings. The porcelain cat thumped down from the table and, far from breaking, twined itself around Kim’s ankles, purring hollowly. An iron plied itself over a pile of papers, smoothing out the creases. The teddy bear growled at it and ran to hide behind a toaster.

If that wasn’t enough, my jacket burst into bloom.

It’s kind of hard to describe what it’s like to wear a tropical forest. Damp, for one thing. Bright. Loud. Uncomfortable. Very, very uncomfortable. Overstimulating. There were flowers and parrots screeching (yes, the flowers, too—or maybe that was me). It seemed to go on for a long time, kind of like giving birth. At first, I was overwhelmed by the chaos of growth and sound, unsure whether I was the forest or the forest was me. Slowly I realized that it didn’t have to be a chaos, and that if I just pulled myself together, I could make sense of it. That flower went there, for instance, and the teal one went there. That parrot belonged on that vine and everything needed to be smaller and stiller and less extravagantly colored. Like that.

Gradually, the forest receded. I was still holding Kim, who promptly bent over and threw up on the floor.

“There,” I said hoarsely. “I told you she was going to be sick.”

Ophelia picked up Rachel and carried her back to her wingchair. “You be quiet, you,” she said over her shoulder. “Heaven knows what you’ve done to Rachel. I told you not to touch them.”

Ignoring my own nausea, I supported Kim over to the rocker and deposited her in it. “You might have told me why,” I snapped. “I don’t know why people can’t just explain things instead of making me guess. It’s not like I can read minds, you know. Now, are you going to conjure us up a glass of water, or do I have to go find the kitchen?”

Rachel had recovered herself enough to give a shaky laugh. “Hell, you could conjure it yourself, with a little practice. Ophie, darling, calm down. I’m fine.”

Ophelia stopped fussing over her wife long enough to snatch a glass of cool mint tea from the air and hand it to me. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, and she was scowling. “I told you she was going to be difficult. Of all the damn-fool, pig-headed….”

“Hush, love,” Rachel said. “There’s no harm done, and now we know just where we stand. I’d rather have a nice cup of tea than listen to you cursing out Mrs. Gordon for just trying to be a good mother.” She turned her head to look at me. “Very impressive, by the way. We knew you had to be like Ophie, because of the garden, but we didn’t know the half of it. You’ve got a kick like a mule, Mrs. Gordon.”

I must have been staring at her like one of the flying fish. Here I thought I’d half-killed her, and she was giving me a smile that looked perfectly genuine.

I smiled cautiously in return. “Thank you,” I said.

Kim pulled at the sleeve of my jacket. “Hey, Mom, that was awesome. I guess you’re a witch, huh?”

I wanted to deny it, but I couldn’t. The fact was that the pattern of flowers on my jacket was different and the colors were muted, the flowers more English garden than tropical paradise. There were only three buttons, and they were larks, not parrots. And I felt different. Clearer? More whole? I don’t know—different. Even though I didn’t know how the magic worked or how to control it, I couldn’t ignore the fact—the palpable, provable fact—that it was there.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.”

“Me, too,” my daughter said. “What’s Dad going to say?”

I thought for a minute. “Nothing, honey. Because we’re not going to tell him.”

We didn’t, either. And we’re not going to. There’s no useful purpose served by telling people truths they aren’t equipped to accept. Geoff’s pretty oblivious, anyway. It’s true that in the hungover aftermath of Ophelia’s blue punch, he announced that he thought the new neighbors might be a bad influence, but he couldn’t actually forbid Kim and me to hang out with them because it would look homophobic.

Kim’s over at Number 400 most Saturday afternoons, learning how to be a zoologist. She’s making good progress. There was an episode with zombie mice I don’t like to think about, and a crisis when the porcelain cat broke falling out of a tree. But she’s learning patience, control, and discipline, which are all excellent things for a girl of fourteen to learn. She and Rachel have reanimated a pair of passenger pigeons, but they haven’t had any luck in breeding them yet.

Lucille’s the biggest surprise. It turns out that all her nosy-parkerism was a case of ingrown witchiness. Now she’s studying with Silver, of all people, to be a psychologist. But that’s not the surprise. The surprise is that she left Burney and moved into Number 400, where she has a room draped with chintz and a gray cat named Jezebel and is as happy as a clam at high tide.

I’m over there a lot, too, learning to be a horticulturist. Ophelia says I’m a quick study, but I have to learn to trust my instincts. Who knew I had instincts? I thought I was just good at looking things up.

I’m working on my own garden now. I’m the only one who can find it without being invited in. It’s an English kind of garden, like the gardens in books I loved as a child. It has a stone wall with a low door in it, a little central lawn, and a perennial border full of foxgloves and Sweet William and Michelmas daisies. Veronica blooms in the cracks of the wall, and periwinkle carpets the beds where old-fashioned fragrant roses nod heavily to every passing breeze. There’s a small wilderness of rowan trees, and a neat shrubbery embracing a pond stocked with fish as bright as copper pennies. Among the dusty-smelling boxwood, I’ve put a statue of a woman holding a basket planted with stonecrop. She’s dressed in a jacket incised with flowers and vines and closed with three buttons shaped like parrots. The fourth button sits on her shoulder, clacking its beak companionably and preening its brazen feathers. I’m thinking of adding a duck pond next, or maybe a wilderness for Kim’s menagerie.

Witches don’t have to worry about zoning laws.

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