LET ME TELL you about the last time I mistook Rachel for a city person.
Living in Nova Scotia had encouraged me to divide the human race into city people and country people, and since Rachel came from the future, and it was axiomatic to me that future meant huge population, higher and higher tech, progressive hyperurbanization, I thought of her as a city person. I assumed, for instance, her ignorance of woodstoves and outhouses and gardening, woodcraft and carpentry and such things. In my own time, they seemed already nearly obsolete.
I think I was often right. But not always. It turned out, for instance, that she knew more about gardening than I'll ever know.
But the day I took her to meet the Bents, I finally shook the City Mouse stereotype out of my subconscious.
On the way over, huddled under a blanket in Blue Meanie's truckbed with her, I tried to brief her about Mona and Truman Bent. I've learned to see, a little bit, since I got here, and I can now see that Mona is very beautiful. But when I first arrived, a city person, my notion of beauty was not mature enough to stretch to encompass Mona's missing teeth, or her fireplug figure. Similarly, it took me some time to realize that her strident voice could seem mellifluous to some ears. It took me longest of all to understand why the herd of ragamuffin kids she tyrannized so ruthlessly loved her so unreservedly. To be sure, she handed out hugs and kisses and treats liberally to those who earned them, and her weirdly beautiful smiles were not too expensive for a child to earn. But she also enforced a stern and unyielding discipline by lashing them with her harsh voice, once in a while by cracking them across the mouth with a horny hand—and once I saw her kick a little mongoloid boy square in the ass.
It was that particular episode that triggered understanding at last, brought me to realize that orphaned inbred diseased retarded rejected foster children who had been shuffled around for months and years by bad luck and bureaucracy before landing at the Bents' might require a special kind of loving, and that unsophisticated uneducated Mona might just know more about it than I did. Seeing her kick that kid had reminded me of something.
When I was a teenager I did a couple of weekends of volunteer work. They sent three of us to an orphanage in Far Rockaway; we were supposed to take groups of orphans on outings, to see the Hayden Planetarium and the Statue of Liberty and so forth. Boys, aged seven to twelve, from the mean streets—the toughest little sons of bitches I've ever met in my life. Orphaned by murder or overdose or suicide or the electric chair or Castro's revolution, they were the kind of inner-city gutter rats you patted down for shanks before leaving the grounds. We were dumbass future-liberals from Long Island. The first day, a nine-year-old with his leg in a cast to the hip, a kid with the kind of sweet, almost effeminate features that make grandmothers swoon, asked my friend Petey for a cigarette. Petey told him he was too young to smoke. The adorable little kid hauled off and broke Petey's shin with his cast. The other kids fell down laughing.
While the staff liaison was taking Petey off to the Infirmary, my only remaining partner Mike approached the kid with the cast. The boy put a hand into his pocket and left it there. Mike smiled at him, held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture, and with no windup at all kicked the kid in the balls so hard his cast banged back down on the floor. Mike took the kid's knife, turned to me and smiled and said, "The first step in training a mule is to get the mule's attention," and we had an uneventful visit to the Empire State Building that day. . . .
So when, years later, I saw Mona kick slack-jawed, almond-eyed Joey because he had deliberately hurt a smaller child, I swallowed my liberal instincts and watched to see how Joey took it. Like that sweet-faced thug with the cast, he acted not with anger or fear, but with something like respect, something oddly like satisfaction, relief, as though the essential order and correctness of the universe had been reaffirmed.
I tried to tell Rachel all of this and more, on her way to meet Mona and Truman for the first time, to prepare her, because I was thinking of Rachel as a city person and city people sometimes disapproved of Mona on first meeting. (It was usually three or four visits before people got enough sense of Truman to know whether they liked him or not.)
Rachel cut me off. "Sam, I must not allow your opinions to color my observations. I know you mean well, but please, let me form my own impressions." Exasperated, I agreed, and spent the rest of the trip worrying.
And of course, within ten seconds of the introduction, Mona and Rachel had established a rapport deeper and wider than I had managed in three years.
It wasn't anything they said. If I quoted you their dialogue it would bore you to tears. What happened was simply this: that in the moment their eyes met for the first time they knew each other. Recognition signals were exchanged, mutual respect was acknowledged, in some way I could dimly perceive but not even dimly understand. They forgot to pretend I was there.
I went out back and tried talking with Truman, which of course didn't work. Truman was a very pleasant man. He looked like Raymond Massey with three teeth missing. He never had any more or less than two days' growth of beard, and the beard was white even though his hair was brown. Truman didn't talk much. He hadn't learned how until he was fifteen. Mona had just plain bullied him into it. He never would learn to read, he simply wasn't equipped, but she wouldn't stop trying to teach him until one of them died. He was probably the nicest, most loving man I knew. Certainly the strongest: I once saw him carry a rock the size of a beer-fridge ten meters, his boots sinking ankle-deep in unturned soil. Like the kids, he worshipped Mona.
I found him splitting firewood. I got his spare axe and joined him, spent twenty minutes in "conversation" with him across the chopping block. As always I wondered if he appreciated the courtesy or dreaded the ordeal. Most of his vocabulary was "Guess so," and "I don't s'pose, naw."
If you are City-Folk, you may have the idea that Truman was stupid. Once I came upon him in the midst of a disassembled combine. It is so complicated a machine I despair of describing it; its very complexity stuns the eye. He was wearing it, slick with grease and sweat. It looked as though some hideous insect lifeform had him half swallowed. "Figure you can get that thing back together again, Truman?" I asked.
He blinked at me and thought about it. "A man made it," he said, and went back to work. And had it running before nightfall.
You may suffer from the delusion that you know what intelligence is. I don't. Illiterate Truman owned his own home, owned (and maintained) the one-ton truck with which he earned enough to feed and clothe and warm a whole brood of raggedy kids, owned a great deal of land and other shrewd investments. I had a liberal arts education, sophisticated musical skills and a glib tongue—and I owned a guitar and some books and records. Talking with him always made me feel like a moron.
In the background I could hear Mona and Rachel talking a mile a minute, two kindred souls.
I left after half an hour and they never noticed. Rachel was standing behind Mona, kneading her shoulders; they were deep in conversation, thick as thieves. I wandered up the road to Sunrise and ate soyburger and got into the argument about their garden, a waste of time if there ever was one.
In the end, my stock with Mona went up because I was the one who had introduced her to Rachel.
"Sam," Rachel said to me after we got home that night, "you are exasperated about something. What is it?"
I'd been thinking about that very thing. "I think I'm jealous."
She looked surprised. For her. "Really?"
"Yeah. Of you and Mona. You and Sunrise Hill, for that matter."
Now she looked surprised even for a human being. "I don't understand, Sam."
"I'm not sure I do either. I'm working this out as I speak." We were in the living room, sharing the warmth of the fire before I went upstairs to sleep. It really was turning out to be nice, having someone to keep the fire going all night long, sometimes, waking up to a warm house. Well, a less cold one. "It's just that . . . that . . . dammit, I'm a science fiction reader, all my life I've been training to meet a time-traveler, here you are, I meet you . . . and people who've never read anything seem to know you better than I do, in ways that I can see, but will never understand. It just isn't right. If anyone on this goddam Mountain ought to know you, ought to have rapport with you, it's me. Snaker's the only other sf fan for a hundred miles, except maybe Nazz. And there is something between you and Mona for Chrissake Bent that is deeper and stronger than anything I've managed to build with her in three years' acquaintance. Sometimes I think you have more in common with the superstitious anti-tech clowns at Sunrise Hill than you do with me. You spend as much time over there as you do here, and whenever they start running down science and reason and I argue with them, like tonight when you came in on the Garden Meeting, goddammit, you won't fucking back me up!" I was pacing around the living room now, gesturing with the cast-iron poker. "I thought we'd have something special in common and we don't really seem to; you and Mona shouldn't have anything in common, but you do anyway. And I don't even understand what it is. Why did you hit it off so quickly with her?"
Sprawled gracefully in my recliner chair, Rachel watched me pace and gesticulate with grave interest. "What I love in Mona is her need to love."
"What do you mean?"
"We talked about you a lot, Sam. She thinks you badly need someone to love. Do you think she is right?"
The question came from left field; I answered automatically and honestly. "I have never been in love. I have successfully faked it eight times since I was sixteen years old—half those times in order to secure a steady sex partner, and the other half because I felt a need to convince myself that I was capable of loving. I gave up doing it for either reason. Not soon enough. Not when I realized how much pain I was causing to innocent ladies; considerably after that. Considerably. To my certain knowledge, I have not loved anyone since my mother. I have been sexually fixated for brief periods. I've been jealous of a mate, like, stingy with a possession. But I've never felt that thunderbolt they talk of, that dizzy compulsion to be with someone else constantly and make them happy and tear down all the walls between us. There has never been anyone in my life that I would die for.
"If love is what Robert Heinlein said, the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another are essential to your own, then I have never loved. The welfare and happiness of another have often been relevant to my own . . . but never really essential. I'm still undecided whether I'm a monster, or everyone else is kidding themselves."
(Jesus, the last time I had spoken thoughts like this aloud to anyone had been . . . Finals Week, to Frank. Which reminded me of something, but I couldn't pin it down.)
I opened up the Ashley and made elaborate unnecessary adjustments to the logs inside, banging and clanking and swearing under my breath as much as possible. Rachel watched in silence until I had closed it up and reset the damper. The only place I had ever seen faces that expressionless, not even a wrinkle to show that an expression had ever been there, was in a—
"Sam? When was the last time you pretended to be in love?"
I waited, honestly curious to know whether or not I would tell her; heard my voice decide: "No. That I won't talk about."
"That bad?"
"Look." My face was warm. "Look. You have things you won't talk about, right? Questions I have that aren't just idle curiosity or being polite, questions that really matter to me that you won't answer, right? Well, this is one of those for me."
"I'm not being polite, Sam—"
"—damn right you're not—"
"—or idly curious. Are the cases parallel? Do you say that reality itself might crumble if you answered my question?"
"No. I mean I don't want to talk about it, and I won't."
Very softly she said, "You'll have to talk about Barbara some day to someone—"
"How do you know her name?" I roared, the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
"Because what your conscious mind refuses to touch, your unconscious cannot leave alone. You cry out her name at night sometimes. Sometimes you talk to her."
I did like hell talk in my sleep! And if I did, it wouldn't be to Barbara. I started to say so—
—and paused. How did I know? How long had it been since anyone but Rachel had stayed the night? Could she possibly be right?
But Barbara was dead. Asleep or awake, I didn't believe in ghosts, and calling out someone's name in my sleep was just too corny. I could not believe it of myself.
But how else would Rachel have known her name?
I thought of a way, and it wasn't just the back of my neck now, my whole scalp was crawling. Either I wasn't nearly as tightly wrapped as I thought—
—or Rachel was a telepath after all. . . .
"What did I say to her in my sleep?"
"I can't say. You mumble. Uh, you apologize to her a lot."
"What for?"
"I don't know."
I searched and searched that unreadable face of hers. How much did I trust Rachel, after all? I had never caught her in a lie.
It came to me that if she were a telepath, I never would . . .
—which suggested the thought that if she were a telepath, I was thinking thoughts that could get me killed. . . .
—which suggested that since I was still breathing, she was not a telepath . . .
—or she was a very clever one.
My head began to hurt. I looked away from her almond eyes and opened the Ashley's damper a quarter turn to inspire the fire. "Let's change the subject."
"All right. Why did you come to Nova Scotia?"
The damper spun in three complete circles, sending smoke puffing out from under the lid of the stove, and the heavy iron poker dropped to the floor with a crash. I used the time it took me to pick it up to think hard.
Suppose that Rachel was a telepath. Surely, then, she knew that the moment I became convinced of that, there would be a death struggle between us. Was she now trying to provoke it?
Suppose she was not a telepath. How, then, in the hell did she know that "Who is Barbara?" and "Why did you come to Nova Scotia?" were the same question? I refused to believe that I could have talked enough in my sleep for that.
Or could it be total coincidence, one of those improbable synchronistic ironies that happen to everyone at times? At various times I had heard her ask the same question of Ruby, Tommy, Nazz, Malachi and others. It was a logical question for a cultural anthropologist to ask an immigrant; only a matter of time until she'd gotten around to me.
It was just the timing that was so hard to swallow. It could easily be read as a refusal to change the subject. Malachi did that sometimes; he would "drop a subject" by approaching it from another direction. It was just the sort of thing Malachi would be doing now if he had a hint that I had a hangup called Barbara, if he ever suspected that my avowed reason for being here was a lie.
So there were only two ways to go. Make a break for the shotgun that hung over the back door, two rooms distant—and if I were right, die on the way. Or assume that Rachel was not privy to my secret thoughts, that her question was innocent, and give my avowed reason for being here.
It wasn't much of a choice.
"It wasn't much of a choice. I could go to a hot place where everyone shot at me, or a federal prison, or a cold place where everyone was friendly and decent. The day my draft board classified me 1-A, I crossed the border." I sat sideways on the couch facing her, head cradled on my forearm.
"You did not support the Viet Nam war."
"I never addressed the question. If people wanted to do that, they were welcome to. I just figured that if there was no person I loved enough to die for, then I certainly wasn't going to risk it for an abstraction. My father being a military man of rank, it became necessary to go somewhere far away. Here I am."
"You are a pacifist?"
"No, no, no. I am a coward. Cowards can't be pacifists. Pacifism involves a moral commitment, a willingness to die rather than use force. I'm not certain any such people exist. I am certain I'm not one of them."
"You could kill in self-defense?"
"And for no other reason I can think of."
"Would you kill for Snaker?"
I hesitated. "Maybe. If it was the only way to save his life, yeah, maybe. Ruby too, I guess. Hard to imagine."
"Would you die for them?"
"No, I'd like to think I would, but I wouldn't. Friends are nice, but I can live without them. I can't live without me." I changed position, lay with my feet toward Rachel, looking up at the ceiling beams.
"Do you think Snaker would die for you?"
That one took me by surprise. I had to think a minute. "Yeah," I said finally. "As his lights went out he'd be regretting it, calling himself a jerk—but if he didn't have too much time to think about it, he probably would. There's a lot of people and things he'd probably die for. Snaker can love, or can kid himself that he does, which comes down to the same thing."
"Do you wish that you could?"
"Look what it gets him and Ruby. He loves her, and she loves him and the commune. One day soon she's going to have to choose between them—and he's scared to death."
"But you envy him."
"Sometimes. I used to more than I do these days. I'm pretty used to who I am by now. Simple intelligent self-interest seems to be enough to make me a decent neighbour. That'll do.
"But you, Rachel, what you've done I will never understand. Coming all this way, exiling yourself to a drastically shortened lifetime among strangers in a primitive time—to go through so much in pursuit of abstract knowledge—what drives you? I just don't get it. Is it love, duty, fear, need, what? Is this a sacred kamikaze mission for you, or is it your punishment for horrid crimes? Or is it just that immortals stop fearing death?"
"Some of all of those," she said. "It's like your Barbara. I won't talk about it."
Which left me no comeback. The subject was dropped.
It kept going like that, as Rachel worked her way across the North Mountain, "interviewing people for her book": the people I had expected her to have the most trouble relating to were usually the ones with whom she established immediate empathy and mutual respect. Locals, as we hippies called native Nova Scotians, did not, as a rule, "take to" strangers quickly. Oh, they'd be friendly, more than polite—but they held back something, they didn't really fully accept you into the community until you'd survived your third winter without quitting and moving south, been around a few years and shown some stuff, demonstrated that your word was good and your skull occupied.
But Rachel was the rare newcomer who was taken nearly at once to the collective bosom of the locals. She shared something with them that my hippie friends and I did not, and I could not for the life of me pin down just what it was. The phenomenon was not always as strong and noticeable as it had been with Mona Bent, but it was pretty nearly universal. It was as though they looked deeply once into her eyes and saw all they needed to see; within minutes they would be allowing her to rub their necks, and chattering happily about The Old Days. And telling her the real inside story, too, as near as I could tell.
There were exceptions, like old Wendell Rafuse, of course.
How can I explain Wendell? East of Heartbreak Hotel lies the home of Phylippa Brown, whose husband inconsiderately died a decade ago and left her with two girls, Pris and Cam, and damn little else. When Phyl's oil furnace died a couple of winters ago, the next morning two true cords of cut split stacked firewood had magically appeared by her front door, without waking her or the girls. That same winter, Wendell Rafuse's furnace failed too, and he was a frail sixty-two—but Wendell was known to have cheated his brother out of a valuable piece of land, by misusing a power of attorney while the brother was in hospital. No wood appeared outside Wendell's door. He could afford a new furnace . . . but he burned up a lot of furniture in the three days it took to get it delivered and installed.
People like Wendell tended to decline to be interviewed by some kind of Chinese nigger woman who paid no fee.
But even some of that type accepted Rachel, perhaps because her cover identity offered the hope of seeing themselves in print some day, perhaps simply because they were lonely.
Most of the local people let her into their homes, gave her tea and cakes, answered her questions, talked about their lives, many of them accepted her offer of a massage—a great many as the word began to spread about how good she was at it. She did not ever repeat anything she had been told in confidence, however juicy; somehow the word spread about that too. Blakey Sabean said of her once approvingly that, "She don't smile just to dry her teeth."
It surprised me how quickly and easily the local folk, both Mountain and Valley (and good books have been written on the subtle but important differences between the two kinds of people) took Rachel into their homes and their hearts. What surprised me even more was how easily the hippies took her into their beds.
Not the fact itself. Rachel was an attractive female, with dark exotic good looks, and early Summer was the traditional time for the hippie folk to play Musical Beds if they were going to. What surprised me almost to the point of awe was how gracefully and painlessly she managed it.
Her experience with Snaker and Ruby and me seemed to be typical. She had the mystic ability to enter a home, have sex with everyone in it, open them to new ways of loving, and then exit painlessly, leaving behind relationships stronger than before.
We had had sexual superstars pass through in previous years, attempting to seduce anything that wore clothes and often succeeding. But usually when such carnal comets blazed over the Mountain, they burned what they touched. This one left no trail of wreckage, no clap, no crabs, no regrets. Most extraordinary. This was the woman I had thought untantric.
Part of it must have been her very straightforwardness. Anyone could see that there was no evil in Rachel, no guile. When she gave of herself it was not to rack up a score, not for reasons of power or manipulativeness or bargaining or mischief, but just for the joy of it. She was a noncombatant in the battle of the sexes, and she was temporary, as perhaps a more textured personality could not have been.
Here is the closest I can come to explaining it:
One winter I was on a Greyhound bus, returning to college after Christmas vacation. A blizzard descended; the bus driver was forced to leave the Thruway. We were stranded for a week, totally snowed in, miles from civilization, nearly five dozen of us in a single large room.
A bar. All expenses paid by Greyhound. . . .
All the passengers were students, returning to assorted midstate colleges and universities. The male-female ratio approached parity. We had four guitars, a sax, a flute, and eight people who could play the house piano. We had unlimited food and booze, and adequate drugs. I guess you could call what developed an orgy. It was a vacation from reality. All the rules were suspended. You could create a new self, without necessarily having to live up to it. Everyone slept with everyone, without jealousy or pain. There were no fights, not so much as an argument. Amazing music was played. When the big plows finally came by we all found our clothes and boarded the bus and went back to our lives, and I do not believe any of us so much as wrote to one another. We had not exchanged names let alone addresses.
Can you imagine that head-space, the dreamy accepting state of mind in which you have the vague conviction that this doesn't count, that you are comped and covered and exempt and it's safe to go on instinct?
Rachel was that condition on two legs. And they spread easily.
But not wantonly. Her judgment was fine. She did not, for instance, make a pass at Tommy, nor at the monks-in-training down at the Ashram, nor at any of the handful of other voluntary celibates among the hippies. She side-stepped around Malachi and Sally when they were having struggle in their relationship, presumably out of a sense that it would be a destabilizing intrusion—and yet she made it with Zack and Jill while they were squabbling, and they came out of it stronger. She got it on with bachelors of both sexes, and with couples married and unmarried, and with the three-marriage over on the South Mountain and the six-marriage over in Mount Hanley and the two gay men who lived together but weren't lovers down in Port Lorne (when she left they were lovers). She did it with George and Annie from Outram a week before Annie gave birth—and was there for the birth, cut the cord I'm told. Maybe they had planned to name the kid Rachel anyway.
Whether she had sex with any of the locals, I could not say for sure. Their grapevine worked differently from ours; they were more reticent about such things. But I'm inclined to think that she did not . . . or that she did so rarely and quite selectively. Most of the locals lived by a different moral code, which precluded "fooling around." Extreme sexual openness tended to open hippie doors, but it would have closed most local ones. There were, of course, exceptions and borderline cases, especially among some of the younger locals. All I can say for certain is that the scandal I constantly half expected never materialized. No one shot or cut anyone—or even punched anyone—over Rachel.
If none of this is ringing true for you, if your stereotype of country folk is that they are conservative, intolerant, stiffnecked and deeply suspicious of anyone or anything strange . . . well, you haven't been to the North Mountain, that's all.
Rachel was extremely good at drawing them out, scribbling copious notes in an impressive impenetrable shorthand which she admitted privately was fake. Folks didn't all bond with her as solidly as Mona had, there was something special about that relationship. But they all brought out their best china for her, if that conveys anything to you. I went along with her on her first half-dozen calls, realized by the third that I was superfluous, realized by the sixth that I was a hindrance and stopped coming along. She was launched.
She used Heartbreak Hotel as a home base. Two or three days a week she would be there to help me with whatever work I was doing. Two or three nights a week she was there for me to have sex with, and held me until I fell asleep. In between she popped in for unexpected and always pleasant intervals, then disappeared again. She would tell me where she was going if I asked. Other than that I kept in contact with her mostly by grapevine. Fairly close contact, that is to say. I always had the sense that I was her Special Friend. But I never had encouragement or opportunity to be more than that, to come to depend on her in any sense.
A few months went by.
Those months were the ones that connect Winter to Summer in Nova Scotia. (We don't get Spring.) That made them the most achingly beautiful time of the year—in a province which is never less than stunning—and the second busiest. (The busiest time is when Winter is coming on fast and you still don't have your firewood cut or your house banked.)
With the approach of Summer, people who've spent months marking time, caning chairs, battling cabin fever, all suddenly step outdoors, blink at the absence of snow, tear off their Stanfields and become whirlwinds of activity as they realize that they will have a maximum of four months' grace to lay up enough nuts to last through the next Winter. To compensate them for this, the world turns warm and fecund and friendly; almost overnight the North Mountain turns into the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and people's faces start to hurt from smiling so much.
Fair-weather friends began to drift back to Sunrise Hill from all around the planet to help get the crops into the ground, repair the ravages of the winter past and initiate new construction. That year's crop of Hippie transients began passing through, backpacked and headbanded and Earthshoed and fluted. Summer-resident property owners made their annual appearance from Halifax or the States, to take their Mountain homesteads down off the blocks and jumpstart them again. The stinking goddamned snowmobiles were silenced, and the equally grating but somehow more tolerable sounds of chainsaws and rototillers and tractors were heard in the land. Deer and rabbits and weasels and crows were somehow synthesized out of the defrosting bedrock of the Mountain and began to scamper around the landscape, which turned several hundred colors, nearly all of them called "green" in our poor grunting language. The Bay suddenly filled with vessels of every kind and type, small fishing and lobstering boats close-in (one popular model looked very much like a phonebooth in a bathtub), and big tankers and freighters farther out. Those people who earned their living by milking tourists began sacrificing to the gods in hopes of a good harvest, and calculating how badly they dared burn Americans on the exchange rate. Farmers and seeds began making intricate conditional promises to one another, both sides with fingers crossed behind their backs. A busy, happy time, full of square-dances and house-raisings, shared work and shared pleasure, new lovers and old friends, fresh food and fresh dope, fresh faces and fresh hope.
Some of this I shared with Rachel—but as the weeks went by and Winter wore itself out, she spent less and less time at Heartbreak Hotel, and more and more time at her work, talking to the people of Annapolis Valley, resident and transient, hippie and local, asking them about their lives and the way they lived them, about the choices they had made and the choices they wished they had, what it was like here when they were children and how it had changed, the things they were most proud of and the things they regretted. And massaging them as they talked.
On the morning of the day before the big Summer Solstice Celebration, I saw her for the first time in over a week. She'd gone to the South Mountain for a while, an area so upcountry and backwoods that it makes the North Mountain seem like suburbia. ( I met someone there once who claimed she had never in her life actually seen an electric light up close. I believed her.) We had breakfast together.
I remember the last time I saw Rachel in this life. I stood on the hard rock shore of the Bay of Fundy at low tide, spray at my back, rich shore smell in my nostrils, watching her walk toward me from my doorstep a hundred meters away, watching her cross the road, clamber down the four-meter hill, stride across fifty meters of scrubby marshland, pick her way with easy grace through the treacherous jumble of bleached driftwood that lines the shore, navigate the ankle-breaking rock of the shore itself without hesitation or awkwardness, walk right into my arms and into a kiss without ever having removed her eyes from mine from the moment she'd left the Hotel. "I have to go now, Sam," she said. "I promised Ted and Jayne and David I'd help them get the rest of their garden in the ground before it's too late."
"Sure, hon," I said. "Give them my best."
"I will. I'll come back tomorrow and help you carry things over to Louis's barn for the Solstice Feast."
"Thanks, Rachel. That'd be a help."
She let go of me, turned and retraced her steps to the road. The process was as beautiful to watch from behind as it had been from in front. "Sweet night," I called after her, and she nodded without turning. She turned right when she reached the road and started walking toward Parsons' Cove, in no hurry at all. When she was out of sight around the bend I turned back to the sea and returned to my thoughts.
And that was the day I had the thought that killed me.