Mother is calling Asia to the kitchen. Asia hops down, graceful as a doe, and disappears. The fire whispers one last time. There’s a bright square on the flocked wallpaper where a picture once hung. Rosalie tries to remember which picture it was. Why was it removed? She feels slightly insulted at this implied criticism of Booth taste. Now she remembers it—a young girl feeding chickens. Horses watching with high interest from the pasture behind her. Maybe it wasn’t the sort of vista that pulls you inside. Maybe it didn’t have the colors and romance of the painting of Niagara Falls that Asia loves so much that she insisted on taking it to the farm and then insisted on bringing it back. Still, Girl with Chickens is a perfectly inoffensive picture. Rosalie will find it, wherever it is, and put it back where it belongs. It will be there to remind her that she’s not, in her heart, the city sort.

Because all this time, she’s also been thinking of Asia standing on the chair. When she was young, she, too, used to hoist up her skirts and climb. Not the furniture, that was never allowed, but trees all over the farm, the apple trees in the orchard, and most especially the cherry tree at the corner of the cabin. From there, holding on to one branch, feet on another, she’d look down on Mother and Ann hanging the laundry, Mary Ann and Elizabeth chasing each other around their legs. Henry and Nelson, down by the spring, poking sticks into anthills. June off in the distance, leading the cows to the dairy. She could see them all, but, and this was the best part, none of them saw her. None of them ever thought to look up into her secret, leafy, birdy world.

For whatever reason, her agoraphobia completely disappeared when Father died. These last years on the farm had made her long for the time before the deaths, for a girlhood in which she now felt she’d been practically a dryad, singing to the bees and the frogs and the water. Smoke rising from the cabins, the smell of pine and rain and musk. The rising trill of blackbirds, the rounded call of doves and owls. The forest in springtime. The forest in new snow. Meadows in the stars. Stars in the meadows.

All those pleasures were still there when they returned, but denied her by the endless chores that fell to adult women and the limits of her own body. She’d wasted the last of her girlhood, shut up in the dim room of the cabin, afraid of voices she should have welcomed.