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stairs, a freestanding iron
    staircase made for Clay by an old black ironmonger
    on James Island when the house was built, and whose
    designs now brought hundreds of thousands of dollars,
    and paused at the landing. The house is open on both
    the seaward and the landward sides, so that standing
    on the landing is like standing suspended in a great
    cage of glass. It always makes me dizzy, as if nothing
    lies between me and the close-pressing darkness of the
    old oaks and the shrouding oleanders in back, and the
    great, sucking, light-breathing, always-waiting sea in
    front. I shook my head and went quickly up to the
    second floor, where the bedrooms were. They are open
    to the sea, too, the best ones, but you can close it away
    with heavy curtains if you choose, and the others, at
    the back of the house, overlook the dark-canopied
    backyard and feel to me like sheltering caves. I have
    moved my daytime retreat there, in the back corner,
    away from the beach and sea, though I still sleep in
    the big master suite hung in the air over the lawn and
    sea, with Clay. But when he is away I sleep on the
    daybed in my den.
    Instead of turning to the right, toward our bedroom
    and mine and Clay’s dens, as I almost always did, I
    turned left and walked down the hall toward the chil-
    dren’s rooms. I think I had

    Low Country / 29
    known all day that I was going to do so. I did not
    hesitate, and I did not think. I walked past Carter’s
    closed door—closed because he had left it in such a
    disgraceful state when he left in September for his first
    year at graduate school at Yale that I had refused to
    go into it, and told Estelle not to touch it but to let
    him come back and find it just as he had left it—and
    stopped at the big ocean-facing room on the end, its
    door also closed. Kylie’s room.
    Unlike Carter, Kylie was neat to a fault; she hated
    it if anyone disturbed the strict order of her things, and
    had insisted from her earliest childhood that no one
    enter her closed room when she was not in it. I had
    always respected that; I felt somewhat the same way
    about my things, though long years of sharing a room
    with Clay had loosened my scruples about order a bit.
    He is not untidy, only abstracted. I think he does not
    notice either order or disorder. I could still hear small
    Kylie, frustrated nearly to tears in her attempt to ex-
    plain why she did not want me to come into her room
    when she was not in it: “But it’s mine ! It’s not yours!
    You have a room of your own. Why do you need to
    go in mine?”
    “What are you hiding in there, a pack of wolves?” I
    said. “Kevin Costner, maybe?”
    She had fallen in love with the movie Dances with
    Wolves , and was so besotted with wolves that she was
    planning to be a wildlife veterinarian

    30 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    when she grew up, and work with the wild wolf packs
    of the Far West. It was a mature and considered ambi-
    tion, and I would not have been at all surprised if she
    made it happen.
    “I’m not hiding anything,” she said, looking seriously
    at me, and I knew that she was not. Kylie hid nothing,
    ever. She was as open as air, as clear as water. Then
    she saw that I was teasing her, and she began to giggle,
    the silvery, silly giggle that, I am told, is very like mine,
    and then she laughed, the deep, froggy belly laugh that
    is mine also. In a moment we were both laughing,
    laughing until the tears rolled down our so-alike small,
    brown faces, laughing and laughing until Clay came
    in to see what was so funny, and said, grinning himself,
    “Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment to-
    night…Venable and Venable! Let’s give them a great
    big hand!”
    And we rolled over on our backs on the floor of her
    room, Kylie and I, in helpless laughter and simple joy,
    because it was true. We were Venable and Venable.
    We simply delighted each other. There was nothing
    in either of us that did not understand and admire the
    other. Even when she was a baby,