After Lucille and Ruth have a terrible fight, Lucille begins ignoring Ruth in earnest-they return to school in the fall and must face the principal to explain their truancy, and Lucille alludes to Ruth’s lack of stability and direction. As Lucille resists entering the world of Sylvie’s “dream,” she begins constructing false memories about their mother, whom she recalls as a jovial and doting “widow killed in an accident.” Sylvie offers friendship, kindness, and love in equal measure to both Ruth and Lucille, but Lucille increasingly longs to spend time with a group of girlfriends from school and join them in learning about makeup, sewing, cooking, and entertaining. Lucille grows frustrated with Sylvie’s embarrassing habits, which mark her as a transient through and through-she sleeps with her shoes under her pillows and often takes naps on public park benches. In the summer, Lucille begins asking Sylvie increasingly personal questions about her life and past-questions which Sylvie resists answering. Sylvie aids the girls in their truancy rather than scolding them, writing notes to their teachers explaining that they’re out sick with “the discomforts of female adolescence.” Despite Sylvie’s friendship, her eccentricities when it comes to housekeeping and her love of impractical, ephemeral clothes and objects soon alienate Lucille, and Ruth begins to sense that her sister longs to live in the world of “common” people. Ruth and Lucille, tempted by the beautiful spring weather, begin skipping school almost every day to spend their days down at the vast lake at the center of Fingerbone-the same lake which claimed their grandfather Edmund, years before their birth, in a terrible and legendary train accident, and the same lake into which their mother drove when she took her own life. They grow afraid that Sylvie will soon leave them, too, but in the weeks that follow her arrival, being forced to endure a severe flood together bonds the three of them close together.

Sylvie reminds Lucille and Ruth intensely of their mother, but she is perhaps even more mysterious and inscrutable. Despite having once been married, she seems loath to acknowledge that she ever had a husband or to answer questions about where her husband is. Sylvie is eccentric and odd, and has been living for years as a transient drifter. After their grandmother’s death, the girls enter the care of their anxious spinster great-aunts Lily and Nona, and then at last their mother’s sister, Sylvie, comes to Fingerbone to take up housekeeping and look after them. After Ruth and Lucille’s mother, Helen, commits suicide, the two sisters go to live in Fingerbone, Idaho, with their grandmother Sylvia Foster. The adult Ruth Stone looks back on her unrooted childhood.

Hidden by helen frost summary