History buffs always pointed out the three tilted chimneys of Cake House, each built in a different century, one red brick, one gray brick, one made out of stones. These same experts also made certain not to venture too near the Sparrows’ house, even when picnicking, despite the structure’s architectural appeal. It wasn’t just the NO TRESPASSING signs that persuaded them to keep their distance, nor was it the brambles in the woods. At Cake House, what looked inviting was often poisonous. Take a step, and you might live to regret it. Kick over a stone, and you could easily stumble over a garden snake or a wasps’ nest. Out-of-town guests were carefully instructed not to pick the flowers; the roses had thorns that were as sharp as glass and the hedges of laurel, with their pretty pink buds, were so toxic that honey from the blooms could poison a man in a matter of hours.
As for the calm, green waters of Hourglass Lake, where yellow Egyptian water lilies floated, several witnesses had reported that the catfish which swam in the shallows were so fierce they actually crawled onto the grass, chasing after rabbits that had wandered too close to shore. Even the most historically minded residents of Unity—the members of the memorial society, the board of the town council, the librarians who were in charge of the town’s artifacts and records—refused to venture very far down the dirt driveway, for there were snapping turtles dozing in the muddy ruts; there were yellow jackets that would sting for no reason. The wildest boys in town, the ones who would jump off the pier at the marsh or challenge each other to run through patches of stinging nettle, would not dare to charge through the reeds on a hot summer day nor dive into the lake where Rebecca Sparrow was drowned so many years ago, with a hundred black stones sewn into the seams of her clothes.
ON THE MORNING of her own thirteenth birthday, Jenny Sparrow had awoken to a chorus of peepers calling from the shallows of the lake. She was hardly responsible back then. Frankly, she was waiting for her life to begin. Right away, in the first hours of her birthday morning, she knew something irrevocable had happened, and that was perfectly fine. Jenny had no qualms about leaving childhood behind, for hers had been miserably lonely. She had spent many hours in her room, with her watercolors and her books, watching the clock, wasting time. She’d been anticipating this morning all her life, counting minutes as she fell asleep, Xing off days on her calendar. The other children in town envied her living in Cake House; they swore that Jenny Sparrow’s bedroom was larger than any of the classrooms at school. She was the only one among them who had her own boat and spent idle summer hours drifting across Hourglass Lake, in waters where the turtles would have surely bitten off anyone else’s fingers and toes. Her father called her Pearl, the children said, because she had been his treasure. Her mother, it was whispered, let her do as she pleased, especially after the father’s death, a sudden accident that was said to have left Elinor Sparrow reeling.
No one was keeping track of Jenny’s whereabouts, that much was certain; often, she was the last customer at the soda fountain in the old pharmacy on Main Street. From their bedroom windows, children in town often spied her walking home in the dark, past the old oak tree on the corner of Lockhart Avenue. There she was, un-tended and unafraid, at an hour when the other children were held back by pajamas and bedtimes and overprotective parents who wouldn’t have dreamed of letting them wander about on their own.
Those boys and girls who gazed at Jenny with envy had no idea that during the winter months, the bedrooms in Cake House were so cold Jenny could see her breath in the air, floating out of her mouth in icy crystals. The plumbing in the walls rattled, and sometimes gave up altogether, so that flushing was achieved only by pouring buckets of lake water into the commode. There were bees in the porch columns, birds’ nests in the chimneys, carpenter ants at work on the foundation and beams. The house had been cross-stitched together and was always unraveling, a quilt whose fabric was worn and frayed. Things broke, and kept breaking, and nothing was exactly what it seemed. Jenny, that free spirit the children in town spied running past their windows, was seriously afraid of the dark. She was prone to asthma attacks, nail-biting, stomachaches, migraines. She was regularly plagued by nightmares and, unlike the other children, when she cried out in the middle of the night, no one responded. No one ran down the hallway, with a cup of tea or a hand to hold until she could again fall asleep. No one even heard her call.
Jenny’s father had died the year she turned ten, and after that her mother had pulled further and further away, retreating behind her closed bedroom door, her garden gate, her armor of distance and discontent. Elinor Sparrow’s sorrow over the loss of her husband—a bad loss, a nasty loss, with unexpected surprises—turned from distraction to detachment. Soon enough she was estranged from anything that connected her to this world, Jenny included, Jenny especially, Jenny who would be best served if she learned to stand on her own two feet and take care of herself and not be bogged down with emotions, surely the safer way to navigate this world.