“Into a person,” Caroline explained. “Someone who can talk and play with me. Like the caterpillar turns into the brown thing. Like the brown thing turns into the moth. An experiment, like you said, so—the skin always opens there, right at the back of the neck. I thought if I opened Elaine’s wrapping, she might come out sooner.”

The noise Henrietta heard from the table was, she realized, Marion jabbing the points of the scissors into the wood. Hester, Henrietta thought. Where was Hester, where was Hester?

The Accident

THE ACCIDENT

DAPHNE SAW THE POSTER FOR THE AIR SHOW EARLY IN August 1922, a week before the county fair in her corner of Massa­chusetts and a few months after her seventy-fifth birthday. Her health had improved so enormously that to celebrate she’d bought a new Ford runabout and learned to drive it: what pleasure, now, to have the strength and energy to plan a route and manage the wheel! Sixteen miles in good weather was nothing to her, and the advertised stunts were alluring. Also she wanted to see the military surplus aeroplanes, which had been designed in the village where Henrietta lived—and most especially one of the aviators, who was Henrietta’s niece.

Caroline Cummings: a vibrant, troublesome, courageous little girl, or so Daphne remembered her. A girl who’d left home young, traveled widely, and since the war (did she have this right? She hadn’t seen Caroline in eight or nine years, but she paid attention to Henrietta’s stories) had made her living as a barnstormer. Once Daphne had believed that Henrietta would show that kind of daring. But these days she could not even lure Henrietta into sharing a vacation.