After dinner, Chyna and Laura went for a walk in the moonlit vineyards, between the rows of low pruned vines that had not yet begun to sprout either leafy trailers or fruit. The cool air was redolent with the pleasant fecund smell of freshly plowed earth, and there was a sense of mystery in the dark fields that she found intriguing, enchanting—but at times disconcerting, as if they were among unseen presences, ancient spirits that were not all benign.
When they had strolled deep into the vines and then turned back toward the house, Chyna said, “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“Me too,” Laura said.
“More than that…” Chyna’s voice trailed away. She had been about to say, You’re the only friend I’ve ever had, but that made her seem so lame and, besides, was still an inadequate expression of what she felt for this girl. They were, indeed, in one sense sisters.
Laura linked arms with her and merely said, “I know.”
“When you have babies, I want them to call me Aunt Chyna.”
“Listen, Shepherd, don’t you think I should find a guy and get married before I start pumping out the babies?”
“Whoever he is, he better be the best husband in the world to you, or I promise I’ll cut his cojones off.”
“Do me a favor, okay?” Laura said. “Don’t tell him about this promise until after the wedding. Some guys might be put off by it.”
From elsewhere in the vineyards came a disquieting sound that stopped Chyna. A protracted creaking.
“It’s just the breeze working at a loose barn door, rusty hinges,” Laura said.
It sounded as if someone were opening a giant door in the wall of night itself and stepping in from another world.
*
Chyna Shepherd could not sleep comfortably in strange houses. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her mother had dragged her from one end of the country to the other, staying nowhere longer than a month or two. So many terrible things had happened to them in so many places that Chyna eventually learned to view each new house not as a new beginning, not with hope for stability and happiness, but with suspicion and quiet dread.
Now she was long rid of her troubled mother and free to stay only where she wished. These days, her life was almost as stable as that of a cloistered nun, as meticulously planned as any bomb squad’s procedures for disarming an explosive device, and without any of the turmoil on which her mother had thrived.
Nevertheless, this first night in the Templetons’ house, Chyna was reluctant to undress and go to bed. She sat in the darkness in a medallion-back armchair at one of the two windows in the guest room, gazing out at the moonlit vineyards, fields, and hills of the Napa Valley.
Laura was in another room, at the far end of the second-floor hall, no doubt sound asleep, at peace because this house was not at all strange to her.
From the guest-room window, the early-spring vineyards were barely visible. Vague geometric patterns.
Beyond the cultivated rows were gentle hills mantled in long dry grass, silver in the moonlight. An inconstant breeze stirred through the valley, and sometimes the wild grass seemed to roll like ocean waves across the slopes, softly a glimmer with lambent lunar light.
Above the hills was the Coast Range, and above those peaks were cascades of stars and a full white moon. Storm clouds coming across the mountains from the northwest would soon darken the night, taming the silver hills first to pewter and then to blackest iron.
When she heard the first scream, Chyna was gazing at the stars, drawn by their cold light as she had been since childhood, fascinated by the thought of distant worlds that might be barren and clean, free of pestilence. At first the muffled cry seemed to be only a memory, a fragment of a shrill argument from another strange house in the past, echoing across time. Often, as a child, eager to hide from her mother and her mother’s friends when they were drunk or high, she climbed onto porch roofs or into backyard trees, slipped through windows onto fire escapes, away to secret places far from the fray, where she could study the stars and where voices raised in argument or sexual excitement or shrill drug-induced giddiness came to her as though from out of a radio, from faraway places and people who had no connection whatsoever with her life.