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refused to claim this power. Sometimes she wished they would, or at least drop a few hints.
    â€œI was willing to defer admission,” Vonnie reminded her father. This was accurate, as far as it went. She had offered to delay entering Northwestern, but not very wholeheartedly, and there was a risk that her parents would have to forfeit part of her tuition. Besides, now that Eliza was home, her parents were still keen on making distinctions between authentic issues, as they called them—her need to know that the house was locked at night, not so much as a window open, even on the fairest spring evenings—and rationalizations, or any attempt to use her past to unfair advantage.
    Yet it was Vonnie who was inclined to leverage her sister to garner attention. Oh, she didn’t tell her new college friends too much. But she hinted at a terrible tragedy, an unthinkable occurrence, one that had made the national news. She was perhaps too broad in her allusions. Over the years, as Vonnie’s various college friends visited, they were clearly surprised to meet a normal-seeming high school girl with all her limbs and no obvious disfigurement. At least one had believed that Eliza was a young flautist, who lost her arm after being pushed in front of a subway train.
    â€œRemember,” Eliza said to her mother now, “how Vonnie hated this house at first? Now she has a meltdown if you even suggest you might want to downsize.”
    â€œI think we’re still a few years away, knock wood.” Inez did just that, rapping her knuckles on a small, rustic table that held their glasses of tea mixed with lemonade. Known as Arnold Palmers to most of the world, half-and-half at the Korean carry-outs in Baltimore, this drink had always been called Sunshines in the Lerner household. At a makeshift campsite in West Virginia, Eliza-then-Elizabeth had shown Walter how to make them. First, how to prepare the tea itself, in a jar left in the sun, then how to make homemade lemonade, with nothing more than lemons, water, and sugar. Walter thought that all juice came in frozen cans of concentrate; the lemonade proved almost too genuine, too tart, for his taste. But he had liked it, mixed with tea. “What do you call this?” he’d asked Eliza, but she hadn’t wanted to tell him. “No name,” she’d said. “Just tea and lemonade.” “We should make up a name for it,” he’d said, “sell it by the roadside.” Like most of Walter’s plans, this was all talk.
    â€œWhere will you go when you do sell this house?” she asked her mother now.
    â€œDowntown D.C., I think, what they call the Penn Quarter neighborhood now.”
    â€œNot Baltimore?”
    Inez shook her head. “We’ve been gone too long. We have no real ties. Besides, in D.C., we could probably give up both cars, walk most places. Theater, restaurants. You know me, it’s all or nothing, city or country, nothing in between. If I can’t see deer destroying my garden, then I want to breathe big, heavenly gulps of carbon monoxide and rotting trash, know the neighborhood panhandlers by name. I’m Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert in Green Acres .”
    Eliza had to laugh at this image, her bohemian, unaffected mother as Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert. The children burst in, faces smeared with the residue from Rita’s, their favorite custard stand, whose neon letters promised ICE * CUSTARD * HAPPINESS . She couldn’t have felt any safer, even if the windows had been closed and locked.
    The windows were open . That’s what was different about the house tonight. She was happy for her mother, even if she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live that way.
    Â 
    ELIZA HEADED HOME ALONG the twisting country roads on which she had learned to drive twenty years earlier. Her driver’s ed teacher had been a horse-faced woman oddly intent on letting Eliza know she had been a popular girl