Megan, Charley and Krista all looked at each other in total confusion.

“Legal complications? Hope,” Charley said patiently. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The will!” Hope nearly shouted. Her eyes were glassy, her cheeks rosy and her impatience a palpable thing. “I came back to settle my inheritance. And that’s all!”

Silence enveloped them, a silence heavy with confusion. Megan, Charley and Krista made eye contact, asking the nonverbal question over and over: Will? What will? But however Hope had concocted this in her mind—that this was a last call for the purpose of seeing a will—might remain forever unanswered. She’d been doing this for years, as a teenager and young woman, living a delusional life in which she was a fairy princess and not related to common folk.

Remembering that, Charley laughed. Meg joined in. Before long Krista was holding her sides in hysterics.

* * *

“As soon as they’re asleep tonight, I’m outta here,” Trude told her sister in a hushed voice. She sat on one of the two double beds in the loft and whispered to her older sister. “You can take me or I’ll go alone. Either way, I’m gone. They’re all nuts, Mom at the head of the pack.”

“We could give it a day or two,” Bobbi suggested. “We could see how it shakes out. Check out the place. Get a tan.”

“I can’t,” Trude insisted. “Dad said if she was acting crazy, we didn’t have to stay. She’s been crazy all the way here—making us promise to keep it a secret that she and Dad are divorced, making us promise to act like we have a perfect life or she doesn’t know what she’ll do, throwing away our jeans, making us have manicures and facials and... Shit! And this place is crazy as she is! She’s got a sister who’s like right outta jail! Jesus! I’m like... I’m all... She won’t take us to the airport so let’s take the car and go to the airport, park it, fly home, and Dad can handle her. She’s fuckin’ loony tunes, okay?”

“You let it get you too upset,” Bobbi said. Bobbi was also upset, but being the older sister and sixteen, she was able to maintain an appearance of calm. She could be the leader for her sister, take care of her in as much as Trude would allow it. Their therapist said they should work on accepting their mother as she was—and if she was crazy, accept her crazy. Without taking on her burdens.

Trude had been taking on her mother’s burdens and recriminations for a long time. That was one of the many reasons she couldn’t eat. She’d hoped if she could be more perfect, her mother would be less crazy. Although she could see the intellectual absurdity of such reasoning, even at her young age, emotionally she was still locked in that behavior pattern. Plus, she felt guilty about refusing to live with her. And Hope was no help. She played on that guilt and anxiety and just got crazier as the years went by.

“I let it get me too upset?” Trude argued. “Look, one of them is just out of prison, one of them looks like she just escaped a concentration camp and then there’s our mother, Hopeless. That Charley might be the only sane one in the group and I’m not real sure about her yet.” Tears came to Trude’s large blue eyes. “I feel like a fucking Barbie doll that she dressed up all the way from Philly to here. I feel stupid and nervous and like I might barf. Please, Bob. Take me home. Please.”

Bobbi put her arms around her little sister, so frail in her embrace. She was anorexic, another reality Hope wouldn’t address. “Leave everything packed for now,” she said. “Let’s go for a little walk outside, check out the lake, have some dinner, then we’ll do what we have to do. When have I ever let you down, huh?”

* * *

Bobbi and Trude sat at the end of the dock, sandals lined up perfectly straight behind them, and dangled their feet in the water. It was five thirty but the sun was a long time from going down. The clinking of dinner plates being placed around the table could be heard from the house; the smells of cooking wafted pleasantly on the breeze.

“It might not be so bad,” Bobbi said.

The creak and groan of the dock boards behind them told of a visitor and they turned to see Krista. “Hey,” she said, moving barefoot down the dock. She wore only some shorts and a Jockey T-shirt through which the pink of her nipples were visible. Both girls’ eyes grew wide at the sight. “Ah, I wanted to talk to you guys for a second, if it’s okay.”

They looked at each other, then back at her. Bobbi nodded.

Krista plunked down on the dock behind them, cross-legged. “Ah...I don’t know anything about talking to kids, okay? So don’t be surprised if I say all the wrong things. Your mom and me—well, we never did get along all that well. You two—it looks like you two are actually pretty close. Me and your mom, we just never were. Your mom and Charley were best friends when they were little, but about the time Charley was...well, sometime in high school, they started wanting different things. And going different ways.

“What I’m trying to say is—your mom had it all wrong about coming to the lake this summer. Megan wanted to open up the lake house one more time. She’s been fighting cancer for years, that’s why she’s so bald and skinny. From the chemotherapy. We haven’t been here together in twenty-seven years. The year Charley and Megan’s little sister Bunny drowned, that was the last time any of us were here. Our mothers pretty much demanded that no one come to the lake again, which was not a real honest and up-front way to deal with the grief, but...we come from a family that isn’t real honest. I wish that weren’t true...

“So, back to your mom. She seems to have some idea about a will, an inheritance, something like that. We don’t know anything about that. We’re all here because Megan wanted to spend the summer here. She just doesn’t have much fight left in her. She might get better or she might not. We’re here for her. And maybe a little bit for each other. To give each other a little moral support, something our family also hasn’t been known for. It’s hard, you know? Being estranged like this all these years, feeling like we have no family, feeling alone...

“But it’s nice to have one more chance, to get people together, to see what kind of family survived all the sadness. Me and your mom, shoot, we don’t understand each other. Never have. I always overreacted to everything, usually by doing something that got me into trouble, like getting drunk or getting in a fight. Your mom? Her way of dealing with crisis was to pretend it wasn’t there and invent some completely fictional scenario around herself. I remember once when our little sister, Beverly, was taken to the hospital and your mom—”

“There’s another sister?” Trude interrupted in a voice that was near panic. It was also the most she had said to anyone besides Bobbi in an entire afternoon. Three whole words.

Krista didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she contemplated these girls. She was inclined to dislike them. They were frilly, they were Hope’s and they were anything but friendly.

“You know what?” Krista said. “It’s good you’re here. Meg brought a million pictures, plus the albums of our families when we were growing up. I doubt your mom was able to give you a detailed biography of the family—she was always on another planet.” Trude’s gaze dropped to her lap as if in embarrassment. “Hey, that’s not the worst place to be! Look where I was!” When Trude’s gaze came up it was hostile. This wasn’t going to be easy, Krista realized. These girls might be as fucked-up as Hope.

Krista got to her feet. “We’ve got a million pictures. You want to know more about your mother’s family, there are plenty of people around to answer your questions truthfully. Also, your grandmother would love to see you.”

“We heard she’s in a nursing home now,” Bobbi said.

“No, she lives in Saint Paul. Your great-grandma Berkey is in a nursing home. She’s eighty-eight but still pretty feisty, considering.”

The girls looked at each other, confused.

“I’m talking about my mother,” Krista said. “Your mother’s mother, Josephine. Josephine Berkey Hempstead? That grandma?”

Bobbi was slow to reply but finally her voice came. Softly. “We...we don’t know too much about her. We only know about Grandma Berkey. The rich one.”

A punch in the gut could not have hurt Krista as much. But why should she be surprised? Hope pretended she had no sisters, since one was homicidal and the other had been suicidal. And Hope had long pretended she had no mother since Jo didn’t meet her expectations.

Well, it was going to be hard not to kill Hope, after all.

During dinner, Krista lost all hope that the summer would be restoring for Meg. It was horrid. Hope prattled on about every expensive trip she’d ever taken with her husband, her country club, her charities, their house on the Cape, her big house in Philly. By itself that kind of grandiose talk could drive a person insane but in addition to that the skinny girl didn’t eat and the heavier one hardly ever made eye contact with anyone. Charley and Meg made a few attempts to draw the girls out a little but it was futile—Hope cut them off and did their talking for them. By the time dinner was over Bobbi and Trude had not uttered a word and simply fled to their loft.

Krista took most of her belongings to Charley’s room, giving her room to Hope. There was no possible way she could share space with her sister.

When the lake house was finally darkened for sleep that night, the sounds came out. There was something about the heating/cooling system that connected all the rooms and brought out every sound. Charley and Krista both remembered that from their childhood. They slept together in the big king-size bed; they looked at each other several times, but never spoke. Hope, alone in Krista’s bedroom on the main floor, was still chattering and humming and laughing to herself. It was so eerie; it was like background music for a movie about a psychiatric hospital. Then came the heartbreaking over-noise of soft crying coming from the loft.

After about an hour of this noise, Megan came into the master bedroom carrying her pillow and dragging her quilt, like a small child fleeing to her parents’ bed. Without a word Charley moved over and held the blanket back for her to climb in. And there were the three of them, cuddled against the lunacy of the night. Just before they began to drift off to sleep, Krista made the only whispery comment. “And we’re the sanest ones we’ve got? Jesus Christ.”