Chapter One

November 1978


Lily. That's my name. It has a certain implication: purity. I'm not sure I was ever pure. In fact, I railed against the tenets of purity: I lived with Ben for five years before I married him, only then because I was three months pregnant.

Marriage hasn't affected the fear. I hid even after Jaime was born. Slid under the bed with him held tightly to my chest. He snuffled, rooted for a breast. And I acquiesced, rolling a nipple between forefinger and thumb, remembering the tightly furled red buds of my mother's flowering quince. He grew frantic, sucking hard. He seemed to feel the rush of my fear, but he would sleep, finally. And I? Well, I felt safe. The wide floorboards against my back. Two-hundred-year-old pumpkin pine. Once the color of jack-o'-lanterns cracked open on wet October earth.

Jaime has just turned four and sometimes I still find solace under that bed. A spool bed. I lie on my side, head resting on my arm, looking out into the hall at the mahogany handrail and finely turned balusters that gleam like polished chestnuts. Through them I see the well of the hall papered in a floral print: thistles and mums, and coneflowers that look dramatically phallic.

It isn't the master bed. That is in the master bedroom on the second floor. Left front corner. Four windows. The old glass distorts the view, a wide lawn bordered on the east by a break of thirty-foot lilac trees and a lone spruce, and on the south and west by meadow.

I am in the third-floor guest bedroom. It is the Friday after Thanksgiving and Ben has left to take my mother back to Durham before heading on to visit his mother in Kittery. Jaime is along for the ride