Chapter One

It was going to be a beautiful day.

Alice climbed onto her bedroom windowsill and sat down, wrapping her arms around her legs. Early morning mist hovered in mysterious levels over the lawn below. In the tree branches that inclined near her window, the low sun ignited little white signal fires that flashed at Alice from the velvety spaces between the leaves. It was dark still beneath the ragged hems of the firs at the side of the house, and a cool, musty smell rose from under the old rhododendron bushes, but across the front lawn, downy stripes of sunlight began to unfurl between the long shadows of the trees. Beyond the lawn, and then farther out beyond the low border of the stone wall, fields revealed in the growing light raced away to the wooded horizon.

On her windowsill, Alice waited, watching. The full energy of the day, like a parade assembling its drums and cymbals and marching players, lay just out of sight, gathering strength at the edge of the world. Any moment now, the day’s brimming cup would spill over the far treetops and flood the hour with light.

Today, the twenty-ninth day of May, was Alice’s tenth birthday. When she was younger, her brothers had told her that the annual Memorial Day parade in Grange, the creeping procession of fire engines and floats and flag bearers that Alice watched with shining eyes from atop her father’s shoulders, was held in celebration of her birthday, as if she were a princess whose subjects collected for her pleasure. Now she could not remember what it had felt like to believe this fiction, though she was assured she had believed it. She could only remember the uncomfortable dawning of her doubt: the gravity of the wh...