By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham

the macabre are not just threatening but—worse—uninteresting.

      Is it any wonder Matthew got out of there two days after he graduated from high school, and had sex with half the men in New York?

      No, don’t do that, it’s poisonous, it’s wrong, Milwaukee did not kill your brother.

      Rebecca said, “If you grew up here, you’d probably feel a little less romantic about it all.”

      “Then I want to feel romantic about it all for as long as I can. Mizzy told me the story of Abraham Lincoln, before dinner.”

      “He tells everybody the story of Abraham Lincoln.”

      “Which he seems to have mixed up with Superman and Johnny Appleseed.”

      “I know. He has to make a lot of it up as he goes along. We’re all gone, and Mom is a little, I don’t know. Over it. She loves him to death. But she could barely manage the maternal bit the first time around. When I was little, it was Rose and Julie who read me stories and helped me with my homework and stuff like that.”

      “Julie doesn’t like me, does she?”

      “What makes you say that?”

      “I don’t know. A feeling, I guess.”

      “She’s protective, is all. Which is funny. She’s the wild one.”

      “She is, huh?”

      “Oh, probably not so much anymore. But in high school …”

      “She was wild.”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “How wild?”

      “I don’t know. Regular wild. She had sex with different boys, that’s all.”

      “Tell me a story or two.”

      “Is this turning you on?”

      “A little.”

      “This is my sister we’re talking about.”

      “Just tell me one story.”

      “Men are such perverts.”

      “And you’re not?”

      “Okay, Charlie. One story.”

      “Charlie?”

      “I have no idea why I called you that.”

      “One story, come on.”

      She lay on her back with her head cradled in her hands, slim and tomboyish. They were in what the Taylors called the junk room, because it was the only room except Cyrus and Beverly’s that had a double bed. It had once been a guest room but, the Taylors having more use for junk than they did for guests, had long been devoted to storage, with the understanding that the occasional guest could always be installed there, with apologies. At the room’s far end, wan Virginia moonlight partly illuminated a shrouded sewing machine, three pairs of skis, a pile of cardboard cartons marked “Xmas,” and the Taylors’ collection of objects that would be repaired whenever someone had time: an improbably pink bureau missing its drawer pulls, a stack of ancient quilts, a chipped plaster St. Francis meant to stand on a lawn, a mounted marlin (where in the world would that have come from, and why would they want to keep it?), and, sitting on a high shelf, like an extinguished moon, a world globe that would light up just as soon as someone remembered to pick up the special bulb it required. There was more, considerably more, waiting like a troop of souls in purgatory, in the deeper dark beyond the window’s tentative beam.

      Some—many—would have found this room disheartening, would in fact have been unnerved by the Taylors’ whole house and the Taylors’ entire lives. Peter was enchanted. Here he was among people too busy (with students, with patients, with books) to keep it all in perfect running order; people who’d rather have lawn parties and game nights than clean the tile grout with a toothbrush (although the Taylors’ grout could, undeniably, have used at least minor attention). Here was the living opposite of his own childhood, all those frozen nights, dinner finished by six thirty and at least another four hours before anyone could reasonably go to bed.

      Here was Rebecca, lying next to him. Rebecca who inhabited this house as unthinkingly as a mermaid inhabits a sunken treasure ship.

      “Okay,” she said. “Let’s see … One night, when I was a sophomore …”

      “And Julie was a senior.”

      “Yeah. One night Mom and Dad were out, and I was off with Joe …”

      “Your boyfriend.”

      “Mm-hm. He and I had had a fight …”

      “Did you and Joe have sex?”

      She said, with mock indignity, “We were in love.”

      “So you did.”

      “Yes. Starting the summer after freshman year.”

      “Did you discuss it with your girlfriends before you slept with your boyfriend?”

      “Of course I did. Would you rather hear that story?”

      “Mm, no. Back to Julie.”

      “Okay. Julie thought she had the house to herself. I have no idea what Joe and I had fought about but it seemed huge at the time, I’d stormed off, I thought we were really and truly breaking up and that at sixteen I had already wasted the best years of my life on this moron. And I let myself in and right away, I heard this noise.”

      “What kind of noise?”

      “Like, this thumping. Coming from the garden room. Like somebody stomping his foot.”

      “Really?”

      “I wasn’t an idiot, I knew what sex sounded like, and if I’d thought I heard Julie having sex with some boy in the garden room, I’d have left her alone.”

      “But somebody was stomping a foot in there.”

      “I couldn’t tell what it was. I didn’t know Julie was even home. I think if I hadn’t just had this huge fight with Joe, I might have been scared. But I was so furious. I sort of thought, All right, if you’re an escaped lunatic and you’ve got an axe and you’re sitting in my house stomping your foot, you have no idea who you’re messing with.”

      “You investigated.”

      “I did.”

      “And found?”

      “Julie with Beau Baxter, who she’d been dating, and Beau’s best friend, Tom Reeves.”

      “What were they doing?”

      “They were having sex.”

      “All three of them?”

      “More like, the two boys with Julie.”

      “Details.”

      “Are you touching yourself?”

      “Maybe.”

      “This is so wrong.”

      “That’s part of what’s sexy about it.”

      “I feel like I’m betraying her.”

      “This is making me love Julie, if that makes any difference.”

      “If you put a move on my sister …”

      “Oh, for God’s sake. Just tell me what you saw when you walked into the room.”

      “This was a mistake.”

      “Okay. Tell me what the thumping was.”

      “Hm? Oh. Beau was kicking the floor.”

      “Why?”

      “He just was.”

      “Come on.”

      “Okay.