The bedroom is so dark that it takes Gillian a while to realize that the lump beneath the blankets is indeed a human life form. If there’s anything Gillian knows, it’s self-pity and despair. She can make that particular diagnosis in two seconds flat, since she’s been there herself about a thousand times, and she knows what the cure is, too. She ignores the girls’ protests and sends them to bed, then she goes to the kitchen and fixes a pitcher of margaritas. She takes the pitcher, along with two glasses dipped in coarse salt, out to the backyard and leaves it all beside the two lawn chairs set up near the little garden where the cucumbers are doing their best to grow.

This time when she goes to stand in Sally’s doorway, the jumble of blankets doesn’t fool her. There’s a person hiding in there.

“Get out of bed,” Gillian says.

Sally keeps her eyes shut. She’s drifting somewhere quiet and white. She wishes she could shut her ears as well, because she can hear Gillian approaching. Gillian pulls down the sheet and grabs Sally’s arm.

“Out,” she says.

Sally falls off the bed. She opens her eyes and blinks.

“Go away,” she tells her sister. “Don’t bother me.”

Gillian helps Sally to her feet and guides her out of the room and down the stairs. Leading Sally is like dragging a bundle of sticks; she doesn’t resist, but she’s dead weight. Gillian pushes the back door open, and once they’re outside, the rush of moist air slaps Sally in the face.

“Oh,” she says.

She really does feel weak and is relieved to sink into a lawn chair. She leans her head back and is about to close her eyes, but then she notices how many stars are visible tonight. A long time ago, they used to go up to the roof of the aunts’ house on summer nights. You could get out through the attic window, if you weren’t afraid of heights or easily scared by the little brown bats who came to feast on the clouds of mosquitoes drifting through the air. They both always made certain to wish on the first star, always the same wish, which of course they could never tell.

“Don’t worry,” Gillian says. “They’ll still need you after they’re all grown up.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I still need you.”

Sally looks at her sister, who’s pouring them both margaritas. “For what?”

“If you hadn’t been here for me when all that happened with Jimmy, I’d be in jail right now. I just wanted you to know that I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“That’s because he was heavy,” Sally says. “If you’d had a wheelbarrow, you wouldn’t have needed me.”

“I mean it,” Gillian insists. “I owe you forever.”

Gillian raises her glass in the direction of Jimmy’s grave. “Adios, baby,” Gillian says. She shivers and takes a sip of her drink.

“Good-bye and good riddance,” Sally tells the damp, humid air.

After being cooped up for so long, it’s good to be outside. It’s good to be here together on the lawn at this hour, when the crickets have begun their slow, late-summer call.

Gillian has salt on her fingers from her margarita. She has that beautiful smile on her face, and she seems younger tonight. Maybe the New York humidity is good for her skin, or maybe it’s the moonlight, but something about her seems brand new. “I never even believed in happiness. I didn’t think it existed. Now look at me. I’m ready to believe in just about anything.”

Sally wishes she could reach out and touch the moon and see whether it feels as cool as it looks. Lately, she’s been wondering if perhaps when the living become the dead they leave an empty space behind, a hollow that no one else can fill. She was lucky once, for a very brief time. Maybe she should just be grateful for that.

“Ben asked me to move in with him,” Gillian says. “I pretty much told him no.”

“Do it,” Sally tells her.

“Just like that?” Gillian says.

Sally nods with certainty.

“I might consider it,” Gillian admits. “For a while. As long as there are no commitments.”

“You’ll move in with him,” Sally assures her.

“You’re probably just saying all this because you want to get rid of me.”

“I wouldn’t be getting rid of you. You’d be three blocks away. If I wanted to get rid of you, I’d tell you to go back to Arizona.”

A circle of white moths has gathered around the porch light. Their wings are so heavy and damp the moths seem to be flying in slow motion. They’re as white as the moon, and when they fly off, suddenly, they leave a powdery white trail in the air.