No one is inside when I come home. I can sense it; the house has a quality of abandonment, the kind of feeling you get only in empty houses. It hollowly echoes my footsteps and my voice when I call out hello, only to hear my own self calling back and back and then silence.

Open the door, Sam, it seems to say.

I find them in the garden.

Mother is sitting in her favorite chair peeling a clementine while Elizabeth trots around, absurdly watering already-overgrown plants with a rusted watering can, despite the frequent rains we’ve had, the storms, the wetness that is always heavy in the air.

“Hello, dear, how was your day?” she says in a parody of wifely charm.

“It’s only just past noon,” I point out as a cloud creeps over the sun, dimming our world. Out in the swamp, the trees clothed in moss and hung with scarves of vines stand grotesque in the gray sealike light, and angry little black birds dart across the pale sky like the shadows of souls fleeing hell. They scream at each other, and I remember the naked bird on the kitchen table. We are like birds, I think, like birds in the swamp.

In a moment, the sun returns, and everything is different again.

“What on earth are you doing?” I ask.

“Lizzie’s watering the garden,” my mother intones, as if this is not obvious, as she continues to peel her clementine, discarding shards of orange skin.

She hasn’t gone near my filled-in holes, at least. From here I can see the mounds of overturned dirt beneath the red maple, fallen leaves already blowing over the grave.

“Someone’s got to take care of this place,” Elizabeth adds. “And, frankly, I’m getting bored sitting around all the time. Sitting around too much here can drive you crazy.”

Open the door. The echo is following me, in my mind. Maybe I am crazy. Open the door.

“Look,” says Agnes, and we all look.

The girls are playing again. Two little girls, bouncing a birdie on ancient tennis rackets that must have been rusting in the basement for years. The goal seems to be to keep the birdie in the air as long as possible. They laugh as it whips upward like a little rocket, bouncing and spinning, until it falls at Sam’s feet. She signs an apology, but little Lizzie grins wickedly.

“You are banished from the kingdom,” she says.

We watch, holding our breath. When we played at royalty in the old tower room, banishment meant climbing down, opening the basement door, and descending into the dungeon, there to stay for an hour in the dark. If you were lucky, the other wouldn’t close the door behind you, trapping you behind it. I skirted the rules as often as I could—anything to avoid opening the door on the black maw of the basement and stepping through it to the other side.

Elizabeth turns around first, ignoring the memory, taking the watering can to the other end of the yard to drown the weeds there, turning her back on the girls. I watch as little Sam, instead of heading inside for the basement, takes off running toward the swamp, getting tinier and tinier, banished, banished from the kingdom.