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their wretched, persistent wails.
    One day, arriving home from work, Webern’s father Raymond found Shirley slumped on the floor of the kitchen, her head resting on the open oven door. A greasy toothbrush dangled from her hand. Had she been out to hurt herself? Or to clean meatloaf drippings from the burner? After the paramedics resuscitated her, her answers flew out, frantic and contradictory, but in one general direction: she did not want to go home any more. So she went from the emergency room to a different kind of hospital—one with locked-up windows and plastic knives and a special machine that buzzed louder than any appliance, that crackled like lightning, that made all the hall lights dim.
    Back home in their crib, Willow and Billow began to babble to each other. Their mother was a strange, unloving woman, whose hands smelled of cleaning fluids; their father was a blunt, strong man whose false, hearty laugh sent them into fits of crying. So, whom could they trust? Only each other, only each other. Their babbles were a pledge of loyalty to each other and no one else.
    When their grandmother Bo-Bo flew in under the black bat wings of an umbrella, they vowed not to trust her, either. When she entered the room, grimly brandishing rattles or pacifiers, the twins fell silent; when she reached to pick them up, they lay stiffly in one another’s arms, not allowing her to pry them apart. Their grandmother wondered how her daughter-in-law would handle the stubborn, unreachable girls; but when the young Mrs. Bell returned, twitchy and shivering but with a determined smile, the old woman had no choice but to shake the rain from her umbrella and take again to the skies.
    Over the years, as Webern pieced together this story, inventing some parts, seeing glimpses of others in nightmares and in life, it became clear to him that his mother, despite her contrition and sack lunches, had never been able to penetrate the fortress the girls had built for themselves in those early days. They rejected every gift she gave. The twins had strung the backyard trees with imitation pearls; they had sunk an Easy Bake Oven in a ditch. And they had brought their wildness into her clean house. The crushed birds’ eggs and dead fireflies, the cardboard box caves and the necklaces of dog teeth scattered around the girls’ room all served one purpose for Willow and Billow: to shut their mother out. Webern had only realized later—too late—that inside those fortress walls, the girls were also plotting against him.

CHAPTER THREE
    What’s funny
    is the way they laugh.
    Maybe only I really see: you
    tightrope walk, they knock
    you down, you explode
    out of a cannon’s mouth,
    you ask for help, they punch
    you out, you tumble down
    some makeshift stairs.
    Sure, it’s all an act this time,
    but that doesn’t mean you
    don’t feel the cuts
    and scrapes from practicing—
    your backbone bent
    like an old man’s. Dummy,
    anyone should know
    you had to learn to fall.
    —September 13, 1962
    Nepenthe clicked her ballpoint pen , examined the last few words she’d written, and nodded with satisfaction. She tore the page out and folded it neatly, then dropped her notebook on the floor and sighed.
    “Why am I such a goddamn genius?” she asked her empty tent.
    Nepenthe lay in a blue-green inflatable kiddy pool, surrounded by ice cubes that floated in the water around her like tiny glaciers. Her hair hung in a limp, messy ponytail, and her grey skin glistened. She yawned and reached for a fashion magazine. Sandra Dee grinned up from the cover at her, an enormous sun hat encircling her head like a halo. Nepenthe snorted. She opened the magazine at random to a fall fashion spread, clicked her pen again, and began to draw scales on the exposed skin of all the models. After a moment, she spat a peach pit at the green canvas wall. It stuck.
    Nepenthe was gouging holes in an article titled “The Girls I Go For” when she heard a sound outside: a sort of