Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures

Chapter 1
CHERRY
Summer 1929

Elsa was the youngest Emerson by ten years: the blondest, happiest accident. It was John, Elsa's father, who was the most pleased by her company. His older daughters already wanted less to do with the Cherry County Playhouse, and it was nice to have Elsa skulking around backstage, her white-blond hair and tiny pink face always peeking out from behind the curtain. Elsa was a fixture, the theater's mascot, and the summer crowds loved her.

The Cherry County Playhouse, so named because of the cherries Door County produced, was housed in a converted barn on the Emerson property in Door County, Wisconsin's thumb. The barn was two hundred feet off the road, which had been renamed Cherry County Playhouse Road in honor of Elsa's parents' efforts and because there was no real reason not to. From May until September, tourists from Chicago and Milwaukee and sometimes even farther afield drove up and stayed in the small wooden rental cabins for the entire summer. After days spent on Lake Michigan or Green Bay, they would pile into the old barn and sit on wooden pews cushioned with calico pillows sewn by Mary, Elsa's mother. John directed and often starred, his booming baritone carrying into the surrounding trees, all the way to the road. The older girls, Hildy and Josephine, who had been such promising Ophelias and Juliets in their early teens, had instead taken jobs at the Tastee Custard Shack down the road and could most often be found handing over cones of frozen custard. Elsa was nine years old and happy to participate. She tore tickets, swept the stage of errant leaves and clods of dirt, and doted on the barn cat, who hated everyone, especially children.

The actors and crew members all moved onto the Emersons' land for the entire summer. The boys from fancy schools on the East Coast, the ones with drama programs and crew teams, and all the delicate young women moved into the main house; the men with sturdier constitutions slept in tents and cabins scattered around the property, which gave the whole place the feeling of a summer camp. Elsa loved cuddling up to the beautiful young women, who would do her makeup and brush her hair for hours on end, all for the low cost of listening to them talk about their sordid and endlessly complicated relationships with men back home.

Hildy, Elsa's second-oldest sister, was nineteen and had few interests outside of her own body. She would sometimes borrow her mother's sewing machine to make new dresses, but would give up halfway through and leave the fabric limping off to one side like a wounded animal. Hildy was given to the dramatic, despite having forsaken the theater.

"Mother, I could not possibly help you with the dishes. My headache is the size of Lake Michigan," Hildy said. It had previously been the size of the kitchen, the size of the house, and would soon be the size of the entire state of Wisconsin. Elsa sat underneath the long barn-wood table and watched Hildy waggle her knees back and forth.

"Excuse me," Mary said. "There is no room for talk like that in this house." Elsa could hear Mary's tired hands shift to her hips, where they would roam around, pressing into the sore spots with her wide, blunt thumbs. Mary woke at dawn and made breakfast for the entire cast and crew—that summer, it was twenty-seven people, all of whom would groan loudly if given the chance. The girls' mother ran a tight ship. Elsa often thought that her mother would have made an excellent homesteader, as she seemed happiest when conditions were tough and the going was hard.

Hildy rubbed her temples. She had always had headaches—all the Emerson women did, blackout, knock-down headaches that crowded the sides of their skulls and didn't let go for days. One of Elsa's chores was dampening a washcloth and placing it over her mother's and sisters' closed eyes, then tiptoeing out of the room. Elsa couldn't wait to be a woman, to feel things so deeply that she too needed a dark room and total silence. She'd asked her sister about the headaches once, when she could expect them to start, and had been laughed out of the room.

"Honestly, Mother, honestly." Hildy was the most beautiful of the three Emerson sisters, though Elsa was so young that she hardly counted. Josephine was the oldest and the most like their mother, with a wide, flat face that hardly ever registered any expression whatsoever. It was what their father called A Norwegian Face, which meant it had the look of a woman who had seen fifteen degrees below zero and still gone out to milk the cows. Josephine was inevitably going to marry a boy from one of the cherry farms down the road, and no one thought that they would be anything more or less than perfectly fine.

But Hildy was better than fine. Elsa loved to look at her sister, even when Hildy was having one of her episodes and her blond hair was wild and matted against one side of her head from all her flipflopping and thrashing in her sleep, and her pale pink skin had flushed and broken out into a crimson red. When she wanted to, Hildy could look like a movie star. It hadn't come from their mother—that was a fact—neither the raw good looks nor the knowledge of what to do with them. Hildy pored over all the magazines she could find, Nash's and Photoplay and Ladies' Companion, and practiced putting on the actresses' eyeliner in the mirror for hours every day until she got it right. When Hildy was feeling light, as she put it, and the headaches were gone, she wriggled through the house in castoff costumes, and Elsa thought she was as beautiful and lost as a landlocked mermaid.

The first play of the summer was an original, which the audience never liked as much as one it knew, but John thought the story was relevant and so said to hell with it. They would do A Midsummer Night's Dream in August like they always did, and that would satisfy the fogeys. The new play, Come Home, My Angel, was about a wounded soldier returning from war to find that his girlfriend had married his best friend. In the end, the soldier shot himself, but the couple was happy. It was dark, but sometimes people liked that. John had found exactly the right actor for the wounded soldier, a young man from Chicago who looked hurt all the time, but never without looking handsome. His name was Cliff, and he was a brooder. Hildy was in love with him the second he walked into the house. The feeling, if feelings could be judged by noises coming from Hildy's bedroom in the middle of the afternoon when no one else was around, was mutual.

The Tastee Custard Shack couldn't compete with Cliff's sturdy biceps, and so Hildy was once again home for the summer, running lines with the actors and helping her mother with the sewing. Elsa quickly won a new job as well—she became the messenger, and would deliver hastily handwritten notes to and from the young lovers, dashing between the barn and the house, running up and down the stairs. She was filled with urgency, and would sit, panting, once she arrived, her ragged breath proof of her dedication. Hildy would draw her close and set Elsa on her lap while she read the newest missive, sometimes reading bits out loud, but only if it was something she thought Elsa was old enough to hear. That meant that there were long pauses in between when Hildy just read to herself, sometimes covering her mouth with her fingers, or sticking a knuckle in between her teeth. During those sessions, Hildy hadn't forsaken the theater at all, only reduced her audience to one. The point was still the reaction, the tailoring of the performance to the crowd. Later on, it was clear to Elsa that Cliff had practiced this particular art before, but at the time, neither she nor Hildy could see it, and the girls were desperate in their hope that Hildy's own juvenile attempts at love on paper would match up.

"'. . . and then, at last, the sweet and creamy skin of your upper thighs . . .'" Hildy read aloud. Cliff was slowly working his way up her body, and Hildy stopped there. She lay on her stomach with her knees bent, her pointed toes waving back and forth with pleasure. Elsa sat in the small chair at the foot of the bed and tried to imagine Cliff without his shirt on. His hair was so dark that it was almost black, with curls the size of quarters. "Oh, my God, Else," Hildy said, and grabbed Elsa's wrist. "Oh, my God." Then Hildy flipped over onto her back and snapped her fingers for Elsa to bring her a new sheet of paper, on which she immediately began her response. Relationships with the cast and crew weren't forbidden—it had simply never been an issue. The girls had always been just that, girls—their parents seemed not to have noticed Hildy's swift ascension into womanhood. Though Josephine was older by a year, she had not transformed the way Hildy had, and seemed to still be plodding her way through life without a sudden influx of feminine hormones.

It was warm in Hildy's room with the door shut, and there were pockets of sweat behind Elsa's knees. Even so, Elsa loved summertime best of all. In the off-season, Door County emptied out and got so quiet that Elsa sometimes forgot that there were other people living in other houses, that the kids at school went home to other families. Everything was cold and tight. Her entire world got bigger in the summer—when the ground went from white to brown to green, when the birds started talking to one another at dawn, when the trees all around the house would sprout new leaves and flowers and just beg her, beg her to climb them. Elsa knew every inch of the land her parents owned, every rock and root. Hildy and Josephine were too old to have any interest in running around with her, too wrapped up in their own teenage lives, and so Elsa had to do it all herself. She counted butterfiies and fireflies and made bouquets for the weddings of her dolls. But when the actors arrived—that was the best of all. Even though Elsa loved her parents, her father in particular, she sometimes wondered when one of the actors would see her and rec-ognize her as his own, and she would be rescued. In her daydreams, there were never any brooms or washcloths; there was only the theater, with a full house, everyone clapping for her.

Cliff was living in the cabin, which was about fifty feet from the main house, on the other side of the barn. He had requested it, though John had offered him a room in the house. When pressed, which of course never took much pressing at all, Cliff said that he wanted to live as the character would live, apart from everyone else. He wanted to spend the summer in isolation. Elsa's father had built the cabin himself the previous summer, nailed together each wooden plank until the planks came together and were entire walls. Josephine had helped, her thin hair pulled back, her pale eyes squinting in the sun. Unlike Hildy, Josephine never worried about whacking her thumbnail with a hammer, or being out in the sun for too long; she just kept her head down and worked. The cabin was of a modest size—just one room, with a basin sink and no toilet—but it was private, and the door faced away from the house, into the woods, which meant that Cliff could come and go as he pleased.

Elsa was wary of Cliff. The first time she delivered one of Hildy's notes she knocked on the cabin's door and thrust the note toward him with her arm outstretched over her head, so that she didn't have to look him in the eye. Once he plucked the letter from her hand, she turned around and ran into the trees, as if she were a nymph or a sprite and could vanish into the leaves just by wishing it so. The sec-ond time, though, Cliff grabbed her by the wrist, not hard, but insistently, and made her come inside.

It was strange to be in the cabin when it was occupied. The place was the same, of course, all the knots in the planks in the same places they'd always been, the same view of the barn on one side and the trees on the other. But the whole cabin was different now that it was where Cliff lived. In just a matter of days, the room had taken on his smell. Elsa breathed it in, flaring her nostrils like a dog.

"Be careful," Cliff said. "If you keep doing that, your nose will stay that way." He winked. Elsa backed up until she hit the folding chair at the small dining table, and then tucked herself in against the wall. Cliff watched her, an amused look on his face. He was wearing a plain white undershirt, and Elsa could see the curly hair under his arms, bits of it snaking out from under like the climbing ivy that her father cut off the house every year. As though he could hear Elsa's thoughts, Cliff lifted his arms over his head and stretched from side to side. She knew he was testing her, seeing how long she could last. Elsa thought of the tabby cat who lived in the barn and how fast she ran out of there every night when the audience showed up.

The room smelled like dirt, like Elsa's undershirt after she'd been running around all day, like her father's coffee. Elsa crossed her arms on the table and squeezed her elbows. Cliff unfolded Hildy's most recent note, and paced back and forth while he read. Every so often he chuckled. When he was through, Cliff folded the note back up and slid it into his pocket.

"Your sister is a wild one," he said. "But I'm sure that's no news to you." He stroked his chin with his thumb and pointer finger. The room seemed small, smaller than usual, as if Cliff's body was too big for the space to hold, but Elsa knew that wasn't true. Her father was always taller than the actors, and he'd made sure that the cabin was big enough for him.

"Hildy likes you," Elsa said. "She told me." Her face burned. Hildy wasn't wild, not really. Elsa wanted to tell Cliff the truth about her sister, about how she'd sometimes lock herself in her room for days, how she would often cry for no reason, and her pretty face would crumple into something red and ugly. She shouldn't have told him anything—Hildy wouldn't have wanted her to. Elsa had just needed something to say, something to prove that she knew a fact that he didn't.

"Did she say that? I think she about more than likes me," Cliff said, coming closer. He leaned down, so that his face was only a few inches away from Elsa's. She could see the tiny beard hairs starting to push through his skin. There was a bump in the middle of his nose— he'd broken it once; Elsa had seen that kind of nose before. Had someone punched him? She felt her pulse begin to speed up inside her body, until all the blood was shuttlng back and forth and up and down and she could hardly keep her mouth closed. "Don't you think so?" Cliff straightened up and laughed. "I don't blame her, do you?" He looked back at Elsa, who had drawn her knees up to her chest, thereby turning herself into the smallest ball possible.

"Sure," Elsa said, not really understanding. She recognized the smell in the cabin—it wasn't her father's coffee Cliff smelled like, it was her father's beer. You couldn't get beer just anywhere, but in Wisconsin, the rules were looser. The deliveries came once a month, late at night, not that anyone was watching so much anymore. She loved that smell, slightly sour, like her mother's bread when it was rising, but it was different coming out of Cliff. Elsa let her legs down to the floor one at a time, and slid out from behind the table.

"Leaving already?" Cliff asked, and jerked back his head in laughter. The sound wasn't at all soft, like laughter should be, but hard, like a barking dog that knows no other way to get attention. Elsa tiptoed toward the door, in hopes that Cliff wouldn't follow, and he didn't, but instead let her go without moving an inch. She could hear him laughing as she ran back to the house.

The season always started on the first Thursday in June. Elsa accompanied her mother and Josephine to the grocery store and the old tavern that now served only lunch and dinner and the Lutheran church and the restaurants with the best fish boil to drop off flyers they'd made at the kitchen table. Everyone in town knew the Emersons. Mary had taught school before starting the playhouse with her husband, and so she was always patting some young person on the back of the neck, as roughly as a cat picking up a kitten by its scruff. This was why Hildy never went along on these trips; she found it so deeply mortifying to see their mother socialize. It was better when she was at home, behind the scenes. Hildy told Elsa this a thousand times: that their mother talked too much, which Elsa thought was strange, because their mother hardly ever talked at all. Elsa often felt like she and her sisters had two entirely different sets of parents. It was one of the things she wondered about, late at night, after everyone else was asleep. Josephine seemed not to notice, and just sat patiently in the truck, staring out at God knew what, while Elsa twirled around their mother's stiff body, holding on to one hand and then the other and dancing in place until everyone noticed and told her what a good dancer she was, and how beautiful.

Come Home, My Angel was up every weekend, four shows a week. The Door County Courier came on the first two nights, and wrote a review that heralded the "vision of John Emerson, Door County's preeminent theatrical director, for bringing Clifton Parr to roam the boards this summer. Parr delivers a masculine edge to his character's wounded body and pride. Ladies in the audience will swoon." Hildy ripped the review out of the paper before anyone else could see it, and read it to Elsa in the privacy of her bedroom. "They're damn right he'll make audiences swoon." She twisted her hair around her finger, a coquettish tic she'd picked up from Suzanne, the actress playing Cliff's former love. "They'd just better stay away after that," she said. "Or I don't know what I'll do." Suzanne was married to one of the other actors, a half-gimpy guy named Walter, otherwise Hildy wouldn't have spoken to her. After three long summers away from the theater, Hildy was once again in the audience every night, though Elsa knew it was that she wanted to make sure no one else got any fresh ideas about Cliff, and not about seeing the same thing over and over again. Josephine had covered her shifts at the Tastee Custard Shack and was gone until ten o'clock every night, which meant that it was only Mary and Elsa cleaning up after each show.

"It's going to be tonight," Hildy whispered to Elsa during the show one night. Cliff was off changing into his bloodstained costume. They could see him through the stage door, which wasn't a door to anywhere but the outside of the barn, where actors waited for their cues. Cliff pulled down his suspenders and lit up a cigarette. He was talking to Warren, one of the other actors, the man who played his rival. Offstage, in real life, the actor couldn't have held Cliff's cuff links. The inferiority was laughable—Warren was short, he was slight, he was blond like everybody else in Door County. How could anyone choose him over Cliff? That was why they got along. Elsa understood that much about human nature: No one in the theater liked to be around people who were better-looking than they were.

"What's going to be tonight? He dies every night, you know." Elsa had already seen Cliff shoot himself twice. After the big, loud pow, which always scared her, there were a few moments when the whole audience held their breath, wanting to make sure that even though Cliff was limping, collapsing, heaving, he was actually okay, and would stand up again in time for the curtain call. Elsa hated those few minutes, when no one was breathing, but only until those minutes had passed, and the audience erupted into applause, shattering the worried quiet. After that, that silent pause was her favorite part of the show. The theater was made for holding your breath, and for forgetting what was real and what was fake. It was better than the pictures, where everything was so far away and perfect.

"Not that, Else. Me and Cliff. It's really serious. You know about that stuff, right?" Hildegard got to be Hildy, but Elsa only got to be Else, as in Someone Else, a human afterthought. Hildy bit her fingernail. It wasn't like she could talk to their mother, or to Josephine, who would rather talk about the procreation of cows and cherry trees. She certainly couldn't talk to their father, who would lock her bedroom door and throw away the key. "I think tonight's going to be the night. Don't tell anybody, okay?" Hildy's blue eyes looked as wide as full moons. She was nervous.

"Okay," Elsa said. Hildy had had boyfriends before, boys from town, but next to Cliff they seemed like pictures from a magazine, easily ripped into pieces. Elsa didn't like the idea of Hildy alone in the cabin with Cliff, who seemed so strong that he might snap her in half by accident. By the barn entrance, their mother flickered the lights, and the audience got quiet again. Outside, in the dark, an owl gave a series of long hoots, as though it were the ringmaster announcing another round. After the show, Hildy told their mother that she had a headache and didn't want to be disturbed. Elsa watched as she went out the door of the barn and turned right instead of left, heading straight for the cabin, where she was going to do something that couldn't be undone, even if Elsa never told anyone. The truth would still be there, pulsing like a heartbeat. After her parents went to bed, Elsa sneaked back downstairs and sat by the window until Hildy came home, her teeth chattering and a wild look in her eye. She reminded Elsa of a spooked horse, one you couldn't touch behind the saddle without fear of being kicked in the gut. When Hildy saw her sister sitting in the dark, she tucked a hand behind her back.

"What is that?" Elsa asked.

"Shh, go to bed! What are you still doing up?" Hildy asked, though the look in her eye told Elsa that she knew the answer.

"What's behind your back?" Elsa scrambled out from behind the kitchen table and grabbed at Hildy's hands.

Perhaps thinking that a struggle would make more noise than a whispered explanation, Hildy handed the thing over. It was a ball of wadded-up fabric—her underwear, the faded blue rosettes the same as Elsa's. Elsa quickly handed them back, but not before seeing the bloodstains that Hildy would no doubt try to rinse out before their mother saw them.

"Did it hurt?" Elsa asked.

Hildy shook her head. The kitchen was completely dark except for the moonlight coming in through the windows. Elsa couldn't see the expression on her sister's face, but she knew enough not to trust her denial.

"Go to bed," Hildy said, her voice low and gravelly. She closed her eyes, despite the darkness, as though Elsa would be able to see inside Hildy's head if her eyes were open. Elsa understood: There were a lot of things Hildy would want her to ignore. Whatever had happened in Cliff's cabin, whatever had made her bleed. Hildy didn't want to find her sister waiting for her. She didn't want to stand in her parents' kitchen with no underwear on and a new place open inside her. She didn't want to feel different, to be different, to be something less than she was before. Elsa wouldn't sleep with a man for the first time for nearly a decade, but she would always remember the look on her sister's face that night. Hildy was only pretending to look outward, into the world. Inside, she could only think about her own body, and the change that had just occurred.

"Good night," Elsa said. "I'm glad you're home." She wanted to kiss her sister on the cheek, and to say something more, something better, but those words didn't come. Elsa and Hildy climbed the stairs together, both stepping on only the quiet planks, silent as ghosts.

It wasn't even July when things started to go wrong between Hildy and Cliff. At the breakfast table, Hildy was even crankier than usual, and Josephine had to go into town every morning to buy whatever the actors had finished the day before. John was so engrossed with the opening rehearsals for the next play that he didn't even notice until Mary pointed out Hildy's behavior.

"Hildegard," John said, his hands clasped together on the table. "Is there something going on? Would you rather be back at the Tastee Custard Shack with your sister?" Josephine's unblemished work record was the gold standard, the measuring stick for all three Emerson girls. Next to their sister, both Elsa and Hildy looked like layabouts.

Hildy stared at her father, hiccuped once, and let one low moan escape into her napkin. "It's Cliff," she said, and began to sob so vigorously that her shoulders rocked back and forth with a force that could power a steam engine. Their mother was so startled by Hildy's histrionics that she got up and walked out of the room, uncomfortable as she was with great showings of emotion. Elsa, her father, and Josephine all sat still for a moment, wondering what to do. In the end it was Josephine who stood up and hooked her heavy arm around Hildy's shoulder and made shushing noises until her sister's wailing subsided.

Cliff had been honest with Hildy from the start. Well, maybe not from the start, but after the flowery love notes had stopped and the actual visits had begun, first in his cabin and then in her bedroom, in the barn, on the stage, in the hayloft, in the still-freezing-cold waters of the bay, on the rocky beach, on the kitchen floor, and in any number of undisclosed locations, he'd started to see other women.

Cliff's conquests around the theater were legion; it was Suzanne, whose marriage was less solid than Hildy thought; it was Fay, who helped Mary with the costumes; it was Virginia, who played a teenage girl and had the flat chest to show for it. Elsa knew how proud her sister was of her breasts, two giant mounds that had appeared under her nightgown four summers ago. The only woman around under the age of thirty whom Cliff hadn't slept with was Josephine. They weren't even halfway through the season—John couldn't replace Cliff, though he said he'd like to be rid of the lug; they were stuck with him. Once Hildy stopped crying, which took an entire day, her headache came back, and she went straight to bed. Elsa was her meal delivery service, which meant that she got an earful at least three times a day.

"Have you seen him?" That was how Hilly would start, without even a hello or a thank-you, after Elsa had carried a tray piled high with sweet rolls and juice and cold cereal up the stairs.

There was only one window in Hildy's bedroom, and she kept the shade down, which meant that Hildy's summery skin, which had started to freckle and brown in spots, had once again returned to its natural state, the color of fresh milk. The skin under her eyes had darkened, though, to a mossy green, like a bruise. When prompted, Hildy counted her number of sleepless nights on both hands. Elsa wondered what she did in her room for so many hours, if not sleep.

Hildy piled up all the pillows on the bed, each one made of some fabric scraps and sewn and stuffed by their mother. They all sat behind her, so that when Hildy leaned back against the wall, she looked like the princess and the pea.

"No," Elsa said, and put the tray down on the floor next to Hildy's bed.

"Then I'm not hungry," she said, and began to examine the skin on her arms with great interest, as if each beauty mark might give her the answer. She scratched her forearm, and Elsa saw fat red lines where her nails had been.

"Okay," Elsa said. She sat down next to the tray and started picking at one of the rolls. "Of course I see him—there's nowhere else to go." She wished that it weren't true, that she could ignore Cliff all day and night, but the fact was that she liked the play, and the rest of the actors, and the way the grass smelled just offstage. It didn't seem fair that Hildy was asking her to choose.

Hildy reached down and snatched the roll out of Elsa's hands. She took a big bite and brown sugar clung to her lips. "Go on."

"That's all, Hildy! He dies every night. What else do you want me to say?" Elsa turned away from her sister and scanned the rest of the room, overflowing as it was with stockings and shoes and pieces of lace that Hildy was forever meaning to do something with. The room was a fort made of girlish things. Maybe it wasn't Hildy's fault that she was so dramatic—maybe it was that she'd always had this giant room to use as her stage. Elsa's bedroom had been a closet, and was big enough for only her small bed. John had taken the door off its hinges and replaced it with a heavy sheet that slid back and forth on wooden rings. Whenever Mary cooked anything smelly, bacon or stew or an unidentified roasted thing, it clung to that sheet for days, and to Elsa's pillowcase, and all her clothes. If Hildy or Josephine ever got married, she could have a proper room, with a door made out of wood.

Hildy unpeeled the outer layer of her sweet roll and stared at it. Her narrow wrist twisted back and forth, sending caramelized bits of sugar and dough onto her quilt. She was bored. "Oh, come on, Elsa, you must know more than that. You're not a baby."

In fact, Elsa had seen Cliff bend Virginia-the-pretend-teenager backward over her favorite tree stump, a ten-minute walk into the woods, and kneel down on the mossy ground in front of her and stick his face up her skirt. But she couldn't tell her sister that, not in a hundred years. "I think you should find another boyfriend."

"Sure, because they're so easy to find! Else, in case you haven't noticed, we live way out in the middle of nowhere, and the only interesting people who come here are people who then turn around and leave." Hildy's voice got higher and higher. "I really thought that he was the one who was going to get me out of here." She threw the piece of sweet roll she'd been playing with back toward the tray, and Elsa watched as it knocked over the glass and sent orange juice seeping out onto the floorboards. Hildy started to cry, but it wasn't until Elsa was on the other side of the door and halfway to the kitchen to get a rag to clean it up that she heard Hildy start to make even bigger, scarier noises, like she was being attacked from the inside out. When Elsa made it back up the stairs, Hildy was curled up like a cat and facing the wall. She didn't flinch when Elsa picked everything up and pulled the door shut behind her with a good, solid thunk.

It was news to Elsa that someone would want to get out of Door County. True, she'd never been anywhere else except for Green Bay and a few other small cities farther south in Wisconsin, but Elsa thought that Door County was the most beautiful place on earth. Whenever she read a book about a little girl, and they showed a picture of where she lived, Elsa thought, Wow, that looks just like home. The house her parents had built was the perfect size for a little girl, with rooms and hallways and closets and endless places to hide. There was a cellar full of jars of jam and summer tomatoes. There was an attic full of Hildy's and Josephine's old things, the clothes that Elsa hadn't grown into yet. There were the woods and the lake and the bay and the boat and the cherries! How could Hildy want to go somewhere else when there were so many cherries right here? Elsa thought Hildy must have made some mistake when she was thinking about leaving. Sure, Elsa liked to imagine the actors scooping her up like a caravan full of Gypsies and carrying her off into the night, but those daydreams always ended with her coming home the next morning, to her sisters, and the theater, and her father. It was all playing pretend—wasn't that what Hildy was doing too, when she had her headaches? Surely Hildy didn't want to stay away for good.

The play was doing well—some people came back two or three times. Without Hildy squeezing her hand every time Cliff was onstage, Elsa got to move around more. She watched from the last row, from the front row, from the grassy backstage. There was a crowd scene toward the end, where Cliff's character imagined the wedding he and Suzanne's character would have had. The actors all decided that there should be a flower girl added, just for Elsa. Wouldn't she like that, being onstage? After all, they said, to her and to John, Elsa knew every inch of that barn. She could toss paper flower petals out of a basket, easy. She could turn around and look at the audience and smile. Don't you think so, John?

Her father loved the idea so much that he made the cast reblock the scene the very next morning. Elsa put on her fanciest dress, navy blue cotton that was tight around her chest and then flared out to her knees, with a white sash around her middle—it had been Hildy's, a costume from years ago, no one could remember what play—and waited backstage for her time to go on. Suzanne was running her lines over and over, mumbling them under her breath. She did it every night, Elsa knew, talked through the entire show before she went out onstage. She was the most direct match for Cliff: similarly tall and dark haired—they could have been siblings. Elsa watched Suzanne's mouth, her red lips opening and closing with each silent syllable. There was power in pretend. That was what Hildy didn't understand—for Suzanne, getting into bed with Cliff was probably just another exercise, a way for her to better understand a woman who thought she'd been widowed by the war. How had she loved that man before he went away, when he was all bravery and hope? Suzanne didn't love Cliff. It wasn't a competition. Elsa would try to explain that to Hildy later.

John hustled backstage from his spot along the side of the theater, in the very last row, to give Elsa some words of advice. He crouched next to her and whispered, "Honey, you're going to be great. Break a leg." John kissed Elsa on the forehead, and then wiped off the moisture he'd left behind with his thumb.

"I just turn around and smile at the audience? Then throw my petals and walk to the back of the stage?" Elsa knew her part, but wanted to say it a few more times to make sure she had it right.

"That's exactly right, Else. Let me see your smile. Pretend I'm the entire audience." John sat back on one knee and held his arms open wide. It was dark, and Elsa could make out only parts of his face. She saw his eyes, little wet pools, and his teeth, tall and white.

Elsa closed her eyes and pictured a chapel with wooden pews and a high white ceiling. There was going to be a wedding, and she could smell dozens of roses. They were clustered at every aisle, and the bride—oh, the bride! She held half a dozen in her small, gloved hands. Elsa felt the patent-leather shoes pinching at her toes, the anxiety of being first into such a magical space. She opened her eyes and smiled at her father, who wasn't her father anymore but a chapel full of people who had come to this place for the blessed event.

That night, when the audience stood on their feet to clap at the end of the show, Elsa came out onstage with the rest of the actors and knew that she had done it. They were all clapping for her. The sound of the applause was the most beautiful song she had ever heard—no matter how many times she'd heard it before, it had never been like this. So loud! So happy! Even Josephine had stayed to watch the show, rather than clomp back to the house and wait for it to be over. The people were on their feet, and they were smiling at her. Elsa knew that she was the one who had invited them in. She couldn't wait to tell Hildy. Cliff and Suzanne walked forward for their bows, and after he turned to rejoin the rest of the cast, Cliff caught Elsa's eye and winked. A part of her stomach clenched, but once Cliff was back with the rest of the cast, and Elsa couldn't see him anymore, she was high again, as light and full of air as an escaped balloon vanishing over the treetops.

Hildy!" Elsa opened the door to her sister's room without knocking. It was just before breakfast, when the cast and crew were all still sleepy eyed and pleasantly quiet. Mary was out in town, running errands, and Josephine was at work, plugging cone after cone into the stream of soft, icy custard. Elsa couldn't wait to tell Hildy about her triumph, her conversion! It was that clear to Elsa that she now knew what she wanted to do. She was an actress. Elsa said the word to herself in the mirror—actress, actress, actress—just to see how it looked coming out of her mouth. It looked like gold.

The door swung open with a creak. Instead of moving quickly into the already dented wall, though, the door stopped short and swung back toward Elsa. She pushed it open again, until she saw that Hildy's bed was empty.

"Hildy?" she said. The room felt abandoned, which didn't make any sense. Elsa would have seen her sister if she'd left the room— Hildy would have made noise in the bathroom; she would have complained about not having strawberry jam, only blueberry. The door was hitting something before it was hitting the wall. A tiny sliver of Elsa's brain knew what she was going to find when she looked on the other side of the door, but the other part (the larger, more hopeful part) knew that that couldn't be true. She stepped around, putting each foot in front of the other slowly and carefully, as though the floor were covered with poisonous snakes and any step she took might be lethal. Elsa stared at the ground, which was why she saw the stool first, a rickety wooden one for household chores that their mother had long since abandoned. Then Elsa saw Hildy's toes poking out from her nightgown. Then she saw the rest of Hildy, all the way up to her neck, which was strapped to a crossbeam of the house with a leather belt of their father's. Hildy's eyes were open, and Elsa looked at them for what felt like several hours before letting out her first truly bloodcurdling scream, the kind of noise that could mean only that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Cliff was gone by dinner. He agreed that losing the rest of the summer's paycheck seemed fair, and hightailed it out of town before John and Mary could change their minds about involving the police. It was a family matter. Hildy's moods had always been as unpredictable as the undertow of the ocean, as deep and dark, but this was something else entirely. Elsa watched as her father and Josephine limped around the house, sometimes unable even to get out of bed. She herself tried to be good, as good as possible, as if behaving perfectly would change what had happened. She washed her own dishes and cleaned her room, did the laundry, swept the floor. Her mother didn't even seem to notice, offering only a small thank-you when Elsa made her breakfast in the morning, cracking an egg into a frying pan all by herself. Josephine wrote a sign that hung on the barn door, canceling two weeks of shows, maybe more. No one knew for sure when everything would be back up and running, so the actors and the crew all hung around, walking the grounds slowly with their heads pointed toward the grass, their hands clasped behind their backs. They were all playing at mourning. What else could they do? Get on a train and leave? There was nowhere else to go.

The house was quietest of all. Elsa often thought about an old, ramshackle place two farms over, a house no one had lived in for at least her entire life. It was probably noisier in there, what with the birds roosting in the bedrooms, the raccoons burrowing through the kitchen cabinets. As a family, the Emersons tried not to make a sound. Mary cleaned the dishes with a rag, and nestled them carefully in the drying rack so that the plates didn't knock against each other. Josephine concentrated on keeping her lips closed all day long, and succeeded at least three days in a row, communicating with only nods and shrugs and shakes of her head. John slept in the barn on the pile of pillows that were stacked in the corner. Elsa sometimes hid there during the day, letting the calico and burlap and tiny scraps of old sheets rub against her skin. She nestled her body in against the wooden floor and then pulled the pillows over her until she was buried in them up to her shoulders. She never wanted to let anything touch her neck ever again, for fear that she might strangle too, by accident. But no one said the word strangle, no one said the word suicide. John said accident and Mary said fine. It was sad enough already without adding that on top. How were people ever supposed to come back, to laugh? Years later, Josephine admitted that one of her first thoughts was, At least Hildy didn't do it in the barn, and then covered her face with her wide fingers.

The plays were put on hold for three weeks, until it was nearly August, the busiest time of the summer. The entire peninsula was crazily in bloom, with berries and pies and girls on bicycles, their short hair flapping behind them like miniature flags. Eventually Suzanne and her husband approached John about taking over, in the interim, until he was ready. Too afraid to feel the loss of the theater on top of the loss of his most beautiful daughter, John acquiesced, and A Midsummer Night's Dream began as scheduled. The Emersons sat at their kitchen table in silence and watched the people file into the barn. They heard the laughter and the other happy sounds swelling out of the barn's open windows. Josephine's face was as solid as stone, and she parted her lips only to insert a fork or a spoon. Elsa thought Josephine could probably kill a bear with her teeth with one hard snap, and she started to cry. Mary fixed her a drink, something warm to help her sleep. It coated her throat and that was enough— Elsa imagined the thick liquid formed an impenetrable barrier between her and the outside world. She became unbreakable, a human fortress. John was staring out the window at the barn and at the actors, in frilly new costumes, talking and laughing on the grass.

"People are going to ask you about your sister," John said, still looking out the window, but Elsa knew he was talking to her. She stayed quiet, waiting to hear the rest of the sentence. "And you're going to have two choices. You can either tell them the truth, which will make them uncomfortable and awkward, or you can pretend that everything is okay." He turned his face back toward Elsa for a moment, and then jerked his chin down to his chest, as if examining the bottom of his coffee cup. "People won't know how to react if you tell them the truth."

"Like in the play?" Elsa watched her father's hands, his large fingers clasped together around his mug.

"Just like in the play," he said. "You're an actress now." Despite it all, Elsa could swear that there was some pride in her father's voice. It was good for all of them to remember that there were actors in the world, people whose job it was to pretend. For Elsa, there was no other option after that moment—she saw her future as clearly as she saw the water of Green Bay. Even if she wasn't happy on the inside, the outside could be something else entirely. There was always another character to play.

No one ever moved into Hildy's room. Sometimes it was offered to one of the actors, a new recruit off the train who'd never been to Door County, and she would say yes, nodding at her unbelievable luck, but by dinnertime she would have heard the story and chosen to sleep in the cabin with three other girls. Elsa was seventeen and as tall as Josephine, who never did marry the cherry farmer. Instead Josephine moved into a small apartment in Fish Creek that she shared with a friend from school, a pretty nurse. She came home every weekend to help with the shows, and carried enormous vats of food for the actors. Josephine was as strong as their father, and never wore any perfume, so she smelled like him, too, musky and clean at the same time. It was the ninth summer since Hildy. That was what they said, since Hildy. Not since she died, or anything even more specific, and therefore worse. Just since.

That summer, Elsa was Gwen in The Royal Family, though she felt she could have played any of the parts equally well, and had memorized the entire thing from start to finish. The play was about a family of aging actors, each of whom was more narcissistic and self-obsessed than the last. Gwen was the family's ingenue, the starlet in training, and got lots of funny, screwball lines. Elsa's favorite was "Name me two seventeenth-century stockbrokers!" It always got a laugh.

The young man John cast as Perry, Gwen's hapless fiancé, was Gordon-from-Florida. He had a last name, but no one knew what it was. Florida was a funny place to be from, not that Elsa had ever been. She still hadn't left Wisconsin for longer than a one-day trip into Chicago, when her father was so nervous about her safety that he wouldn't leave her side, even waiting for her outside the ladies' room in the restaurant where they had lunch. All she knew about Florida was the boll weevil and the ocean. Gordon's parents grew oranges, which he found about as exciting as eating oranges, which he hadn't done since he was a child, thanks to overexposure. Gordon had run away at seventeen, the previous year. He still had a slight suntan, as though those seventeen years of beachy sunshine had soaked into his skin and would never fade, no matter how much he wanted them to. He saw the Cherry County Playhouse as a perfect halfway mark in between Florida and California. Gordon was planning on taking the bus to Los Angeles as soon as the summer was over, trying his hand at motion pictures.

They ran lines at the picnic table behind the barn. As a character, Perry was very stiff, but Gordon was doing a good job of making him likable—attractive, even. It was still cool out, and they both had sweaters on as well as sunglasses. That was what Elsa loved about Door County: Even on the prettiest days, you could never forget you were in Wisconsin. There was a clarity to the air that she was sure didn't exist in other states; it didn't seem possible. She had the feeling that Gordon-from-Florida had no idea where he was, and couldn't find it on a map even with a couple of flashing arrows.

"I think Perry's a dope," Gordon said.

"Why? Because he's a stockbroker?" Elsa picked at her lunch, cheese sandwiches Mary had made, with fat slices of brown bread and a swipe of mustard.

Gordon pulled his face to one side like Groucho Marx. "Because he doesn't know how lucky he is to have Gwen." He waggled an imaginary cigar, and shot his eyebrows up and down.

Elsa laughed. "Is that right," she said, without adding a questioning lilt to her voice. She knew it was right, just as she knew from the moment that Gordon-from-Florida walked into the Cherry County Playhouse that she would walk out with him at the end of the summer, walk all the way to California if she had to. John and Mary would fill their house with surrogate children: all of them alive, all of them equal. Girls and boys from Egg Harbor and Ephraim and Sturgeon Bay would arrange the pillows on the benches and pass out programs, and Elsa would be on the other side of the country. It wasn't that she was in love with Gordon-from-Florida, whose last name, she would have to learn, was Pitts. Instead, it was that Elsa looked at Gordon and saw a kind and perfectly normal face. Gordon looked like he could wind up a leading man, which made Elsa feel like she might be in love, after all—wasn't that how it happened? A girl, a boy, and a long bus ride? If it were a play, Elsa thought it would have a happy ending.

"I think Gwen knows just what she's got," Elsa said. She slipped off her shoe and found Gordon's foot under the table. She was playing the part of a love-struck girl. Elsa thought of Hildy and the way her body had undulated with pleasure at the sight of Cliff. Elsa wiggled on the bench. She would get better at it; she would practice.

Gordon drank his lemonade and stared at the table. His cheeks turned from tan to peach to nearly purple. He wasn't brawny like Cliff. Gordon was the opposite—small features on a small face, everything crammed together toward the middle. By the time he looked up at Elsa, his cheeks pulled wide into an unguarded smile, she knew that she would get exactly what she wanted, because he wanted it too.

They waited until the season was over—it was the end of August, and flowers spontaneously burst into blossom over and over again. Mary and Josephine made batches of fried chicken, and after the ceremony in the barn, everyone in town came to eat corn on the cob and to celebrate little Elsa Emerson becoming Elsa Pitts, riding off into the sunset on a cross-country bus. There wasn't any worry about Gordon turning out like Cliff, because Gordon was no Cliff, anyone could see that. Josephine pulled Elsa aside and enclosed her in a long, silent bear hug, her thick arms clasped at the elbows around Elsa's back. Neither of the girls cried, at least not after raising their faces from each other's shoulder and blinking into the sunlight. Mary gave Elsa and Gordon each a hard, quick squeeze and went back inside to start the dishes.

John drove the couple and their meager suitcases to the depot in Chicago, where they boarded a creaking bus and waved enthusiastically at him through the tinted windows. Elsa watched as her father hugged himself in the parking lot, the first time she'd seen him cry since Hildy, now nine years gone. On the bus, Elsa and Gordon settled into their seats. They kissed on the cheek and then stared straight ahead, both anxious to see the ocean and the mountains and all the stars in the sky, which would surely light their way.

An hour into their cross-country ride, Gordon was fast asleep with his head against the bus window. Elsa snuggled up next to him, but found his shoulder too pointy to rest against. A few rows in front of them, a mother and daughter were having a quiet discussion about the daughter's upcoming wedding. They were talking about flowers: peonies, zinnias, all showy, big blossoms. Elsa thought of her mother's face at the wedding, as clear and calm as if she'd been watching a bird hop around the yard through the kitchen window. For a split second, she had the urge to get off the bus while Gordon was asleep, to slip off in Minneapolis or Colorado or Wyoming and just vanish into the night. Who would miss her, really? Not Gordon, not her mother. Josephine smiled only at her roommate, the first in a series of plainly pretty women, this one with a long, dark braid down the middle of her back. But then Elsa thought of her father. She couldn't let him lose two daughters. Elsa was going to do great things in California— she was going to do enough for two whole lives. That grassy patch behind the barn was going to have a big, brass plaque one day: Elsa Emerson, movie star. Her father would stand next to it and point it out to tourists passing through. It would be almost like having her home. Elsa stayed in her seat. She balled up her jacket and wedged it under the back of her neck. Gordon was snoring slightly, not unpleasantly. Elsa watched his chest rise and fall for a few breaths, and then she turned back toward the front of the bus and closed her eyes. She didn't care about the mountains; they would still be there in fifty years, or a hundred. All Elsa cared about was arriving. She was going to step off the bus and into the waiting arms of the world.