Most of all, Kylie wishes that the man in their backyard would go away. He’s out there right now, as Antonia heads for the kitchen, humming, to fetch herself a snack. Kylie can see him from the window that allows a view of both the front and the side yards. Bad weather never affects him; if anything, he relishes black skies and wind. The rain doesn’t bother him in the least. It seems to go right through him, with each drop turning a luminous blue. His polished boots have just the slightest film of dirt. His white shirt looks starched and pressed. All the same, he’s been making a mess of things. Every time he breathes, horrible things come out of his mouth: Little green frogs. Drops of blood. Chocolates wrapped in pretty foil, but with poisonous centers that give off a foul odor each time he breaks one in half. He’s wrecking things just by snapping his fingers. He’s making things fall apart. Inside the walls, the pipes are rusting. The tile floor in the basement is turning to dust. The coils of the refrigerator have been twisted, and nothing will stay fresh; the eggs are spoiling inside their shells, the cheeses have all turned green.

This man in the garden has no aura of his own, but he often reaches to dip his hands into the purple-red shadow above him, then smears the aura of the lilacs all over himself. No one but Kylie can see him, but he’s still able to call all these women out of their houses. He’s the one who whispers to them late at night while they’re sleeping in their beds. Baby, he says, even to the ones who never thought they’d hear a man talk to them this way again. He gets inside a woman’s mind, and he stays there, until she finds herself crying on the sidewalk, crazy for the scent of lilacs, and even then he’s not going anywhere. At least not anytime soon. He’s definitely not through.

Kylie has been watching him ever since her birthday. She understands that no one else can see him, although the birds sense him and avoid the lilacs, and the squirrels stop dead in their tracks whenever they get too close. Bees, on the other hand, have no fear of him. They seem attracted to him; they hover near, and anyone who came too close to him would surely risk a sting, maybe even two. The man in the garden is easier to see on rainy days, or late at night, when he appears out of thin air like a star you’ve been staring at but only now see, right in the center of the sky. He doesn’t eat or sleep or drink, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things he wants. His wanting is so strong Kylie can feel it, like bands of electricity shaking up the air around him. Just recently, he has taken to staring back at her. She gets terrified whenever he does this. She gets cold right through her skin. He’s doing it more and more, staring and staring. It doesn’t matter where she is, behind the kitchen window or on the path to the back door. He can watch her twenty-four hours a day if he likes, since he never has to blink—not even for a second, not anymore.

Kylie has begun to set dishes of salt on the windowsills. She sprinkles rosemary outside all the doors. Still, he manages to get into the house when everyone’s asleep. Kylie stays up after everyone else is in bed, but she can’t stay awake forever, although it’s not for lack of trying. Often she falls asleep while she’s still dressed in her clothes, a book open beside her, the overhead light kept on, since her aunt Gillian, who’s still sharing her room, refuses to sleep in the dark and has lately insisted that the windows be closed tight as well, even on sweltering nights, to keep out the scent of those lilacs.

Some nights everyone in the house has a bad dream at the very same instant. Other nights they all sleep so deeply their alarm clocks can’t get them out of bed. Either way, Kylie always knows he’s been close by when she wakes to find that Gillian is crying in her sleep. She knows when she goes down the hall to the bathroom and sees that the toilet is clogged and when it’s flushed the body of a dead bird or a bat rises up in the water. There are slugs in the garden, and waterbugs in the cellar, and mice have begun to nest in a pair of Gillian’s high heels, the black patent leather ones she bought in L.A. Look into a mirror and the image starts to shift. Pass by a window and the glass will rattle. It’s the man in the garden who’s responsible when the morning begins with a curse muttered under someone’s breath, or a toe stubbed, or a favorite dress torn so methodically you’d think someone had sliced through the fabric with a pair of scissors or a hunting knife.

On this morning, the bad fortune rising from the garden is particularly nasty. Not only has Sally discovered the diamond earrings she was given on her wedding day tucked into Gillian’s jacket pocket, but Gillian found her paycheck from the Hamburger Shack torn into a thousand pieces, spread across the lace doily on the coffee table.