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Yet Cross Hill, and the view from the hill of the surrounding countryside, were beautiful, or came, by degrees, to seem so.

When we weren’t expecting it. When we turned, suddenly, and our eyes saw—before we had time to think.

The mountains were beautiful emerging out of the mist at dawn. Sunsets were beautiful: the western sky beyond the ridge of mountains a vast cauldron of flame that consumed itself, deepening by slow degrees to night. In the distance, visible on clear days, the buildings and spires of Contracoeur like a toy city on the Black River. And Lake Noir, whose size seemed always to be changing, at its largest and most turbulent when the wind was strong, like a roughened mirror that has sucked all light into it and so appears, an impossibility in nature, sheerly black. Graeme lowered his eyes so he wouldn’t be tempted to gaze from his bedroom window; he preferred to think he hated Cross Hill, he wanted only to return home. (But were we home, now that their beautiful suburban house had been sold? Their possessions taken from them? Now that his few friends had forgotten him; no longer sent E-mail to him at all, even to speak of him as dead?) Stephen, resentful of being captive at Cross Hill, and preparing to make a break, had nonetheless come to enjoy working with his hands, at least outdoors in good weather; shrewdly he thought The other place is lost; this is home. He’d been popular and much-admired in the city, he hadn’t much doubt that he’d be popular and much-admired someday, somehow, in Contracoeur; once he became known.

So dreamlike in beauty! floating in iridescent moisture-laden air!—the view from Rosalind’s window looking west to Mount Moriah seemed to pull her eyes toward it; Rosalind couldn’t resist. Despite her embittered young heart she found herself thinking If only we belonged here! We could be happy.

5. The Bicycles

Many things, moved with us to Cross Hill, were unaccountably lost. For weeks we’d searched for our bicycles, for instance. And then one day we found them—or what remained of them. Incredulously staring into the debris-cluttered gloom of the carriage house, wondering what had happened to our bicycles. Our bicycles, that had been so shiny, so beautiful, so expensive. “God damn! I can’t believe this,” Stephen said. For Stephen’s world-class road bike had been the most prestigious of all.

Not that Stephen had been a serious cyclist, but he’d had to have the best. And our parents had indulged him, of course.

Stephen, Graeme, and Rosalind, fighting back tears of anger and hurt, managed, with difficulty, to extricate the five bicycles from one another and to roll them, or drag them, out into the light. What a surprise! What a shock! There was Stephen’s twenty-gear Italian road bike that had cost more than $800, there was Graeme’s eleven-gear American Eagle hybrid, there was Rosalind’s five-gear Peugeot touring bike that had once been a lovely cool silver-lime color, there were the twins’ child-sized matching Schwinns with fat mountain bike tires—all rusted, battered, covered in cobwebs and what appeared to be rodent droppings. You could not have distinguished the quality of Stephen’s bicycle from the others; you could not have distinguished little Neale’s once shiny-red Schwinn from little Ellen’s once robin’s-egg blue Schwinn. We started uncomprehendingly, as if our bicycles were a riddle we had to solve, yet could not.

Stephen whispered again, wiping his eyes, “I can’t believe this. It’s … wrong.”

Graeme, grown philosophical at Cross Hill, was the first to recover from the shock. He laughed, and thumped the dust-saturated seat of his African Eagle with a fist, and wiped cobwebs from the handlebars, saying, “It’s like time has passed. Years. This is what happens to material objects, in time.”

“In time?” Stephen asked. “But we’ve only been here for a few weeks.”

Rosalind ignored her contentious brothers. She’d felt the hurt of her bicycle’s deterioration as she might have felt her own. For this bicycle was hers … wasn’t it? She hadn’t ridden