THE MEANING OF ISOLATED OBJECTS

A Novel

By

Billie Hinton

2010

November Hill Press

Moncure, North Carolina

The Meaning of Isolated Objects is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2010 by Billie Hinton

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by November Hill Press, Moncure, North Carolina.

www.novemberhillpress.com

Book design by Billie Hinton

Cover image by Masson

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Carl Gustav Jung, Alchemical Studies, Vol. 15, p. 470

… entanglement… connections between separated particles that persist regardless of distance. These connections are instantaneous, operating “outside” the usual flow of time. They imply that at very deep levels, the separations that we see between ordinary, isolated objects are, in a sense, illusions created by our limited perceptions.

Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality

Part 1

isolated objects

Scott arrived in Kabul wearing loose pants, kurta shirt and chapan, and the pakol hat common to Afghanistan. He’d grown his hair and stopped shaving several days before traveling. He had passed for Afghani before, but mostly he aimed to be unremarkable, just another man on the street.

The room he chose was in a dirt-colored building that had holes blown in the outer walls, perfect for its narrow window that overlooked the watch site. It was empty except for the crumbling debris in the corners.

On the way to a nearby market he passed a woman wearing a shabby burqa. Her four children lay around her, sleeping in the dirt as she bent forward gathering money offered by passing men. Scott pulled a roll of bills from a pocket and tucked it discreetly next to one sleeping child’s shoulder.

He breathed in dust and smoke and walked on.

Further along, a boy minded a wall filled with clocks, all showing opposing times. Wasted time. He needed to get back to the room.

He arranged the rickety table and chair he’d bought at the market, and made the legs stable using duck tape.  His food within easy reach, he sat and adjusted the camera’s small tripod. Once the target showed up, the rest would be easy, but it was the waiting he didn’t relish. The sitting.

After awhile his cell phone vibrated. The connection was weak but the office put her through. Jess, the sister-in-law from hell, had used the number he’d given her for emergencies only, which meant something bad must have happened. He had the brief panicked thought: they finally decided to go after my daughter. He flashed back to his wife Lynnie’s last words. Take care of Wendell.

Jessie’s shrieking voice interrupted. When she hit the high notes she sounded just like Lynnie.

“Wendell is not at her apartment. I haven’t talked to her in three days.”

He managed to get out of her that this was not necessarily unusual before the connection cut out. He wasn’t sorry. Jess had a way of pissing him off. He didn’t need to sit there seething for hours on end while waiting on a Pakistani known for being unreliable.

In most ways Scott was not surprised about Wendell. She had his restless nature. He’d expected her to blaze up for years.

Jess had accused him of not caring. Of liking it that Wendell resembled him. “All that mystery stuff, the secrets. It’s your fault she’s done this. She’s acting just like you.”

Well, maybe she had something there.

When Lynnie had died, Jess wanted him home, taking care of Wendell. How many times had they been through that scenario over the years?

And how many times had he pissed her off, not doing it.

Jess didn’t understand his work. Had no idea the way he tracked his daughter using skills he’d been taught two decades earlier on the government’s payroll. Remote viewing. The ability to see things from afar. What he knew how to do allowed him to see his daughter from anywhere in the world. Trouble was, his daughter had it too. The gift, some would say, but he often thought of it as the curse.

He could keep tabs on Wendell. What worried him was that someone else might be doing the very same thing.

For the moment, he was waiting and watching, no way could he leave without the photos he’d been sent to take. One hand on a gun, comforted by its heft and balance. There was little other comfort to be found in Kabul. Pleasure had been banned for years on end. Music, cards, chess. Flying kites and keeping birds. Some of it was creeping back. Already he’d noticed men carrying birds in cages, like they’d missed the birdsong and would have it back, by god.

He sympathized. He knew the loss of beauty.

But still there were men doing bad things and that’s why he was here. Someone higher up decided a bad man had to die and sometimes Scott was the one who killed him. There was no way to take that home to Virginia.

He closed his eyes and breathed until an image came. A Welcome To Georgia sign. Wendell had crossed a number of state lines. Otherwise he sensed nothing amiss. She was safe, for the time being.

Lynnie had predicted this before she died. She’d nailed Wendell still inside the womb. He’d come home from two months OCONUS when Lynnie was pregnant and the first thing she’d said was they had to get a rowan tree for the baby.

“Why rowan?” he’d asked.

“It has protective powers.”

He hadn’t needed to ask why their baby might need them.

He remembered his hands on Lynnie’s belly. How her soft skin felt tight. He detected the flux of movement beneath the layers. Skin and muscle, amniotic sac filled with warm fluid.

Quickening. Kin to the verb quicken, kindle a fire. Wendell born with a head full of flaming red hair, just like her mother.

He watched out the window. Across a street that was mostly dirt and rubble dragged into piles to allow passage. He’d take two dozen digital photos of the man when he arrived and deliver them across the border in the next twenty-four hours.

Women in burqas passed. Even now, when it was said in the free world that they no longer had to wear them. He felt their eyes beneath the heavy cloth, sensed the women beneath, still not talking to men, not even shaking hands.

The window was small and the day long. He couldn’t read. All he could do was sit and watch, so Jessie’s phone call, annoying as hell, provided an opening to a memory. Lynnie, in that gown she’d worn when he came home from places just like this. Her body showed right through. The opposite of a burqa. Something to think on. Let the details come back. He didn’t control this as much as it did him.

That rowan trip. Twenty-seven years ago.

Lynnie sat up and lit an amber-colored candle. Her invitation to lovemaking. His relief. He had dreaded the thought of coming home to a pregnant wife and no sex. The next day they’d headed for the parkway and spent the week looking for the rowan seedling. Lynnie pregnant. A perfect peach, ripe and juicy. She looked sexier than ever.

Each night, in pine-paneled rooms with double beds and satin-edged wool blankets, Lynnie climbed on top of him, all hot and bothered from the day’s drive.  Afterward he sliced apples and bananas with his pocketknife and slipped the pieces into her mouth. Cheese, bread, rolls of deli meats sliced extra thin, cold water. He could never get it cold enough to suit her.

She fell asleep while he hummed songs he’d forgotten the words to and rubbed her feet. He studied her face as she slept, guilty at the ferocity of his desire. Sometimes coming home the roughness of those countries stayed with him, Afghanistan, dust and grit, wind and Kalashnikovs. All sensuality buried. He had to let it wear off, like a bad smell.

The next day he took the picture she’d clipped and found a seedling in the crevice of a huge rock outcropping. It was not a tree he’d ever noticed.

They’d planted it in the back yard. Lynnie tended it the same careful way she would have tended the baby. The way she went on about that little tree. In the end the deer got it, same deer she wouldn’t let him shoot.  He held her while she cried. She was close to the end by that time, emotional and easily moved to tears. But she would have cried about that tree pregnant or not.

Years back, Lynnie had asked just the one time. “Scott, will you quit the Company?”

He had paused to consider. A pretense, really, but he’d got lost in it. Dust storms in the afternoon, hair matted, mouth full of sand, sweat dried on his face. The cratered landscape, decades of war. She wanted him to give it up. Why wouldn’t he?

There were reasons. Lamb cooked on skewers. Green tea and sugared almonds. Simple meals shared by people who had little but gave anyway. Glimpses of human nature, primitive and often raw, a man who would share a meal with you and later sink a knife in your gut without a thought. The distance between the extremes made him whole somehow.

He’d turned to Lynnie and answered her question.

“Hell, no.”

She never asked again.

All these years later the pull to be in Afghanistan was still strong, the call of something wild and violent. The rough men. Brutality that burned. Secrets he heard and kept.

Wendell had some of that.

Charlottesville was not big enough for her. Just like it hadn’t been for him. What she was doing – a young woman leaving the safety of home – was normal. It was what she might find that worried him. Who might follow. But he’d seen her remotely, minutes earlier, and she’d been okay.

When she was young she cried when he left. He ignored the tears. At fourteen she flung her hair and screamed, “Leave, just go, like you always do.” In college she seemed not to care.

And suddenly she’d lit off like she used to when she was little. Playing hide and seek. That game always did her in. She wanted so badly to win but couldn’t stand not being found.

Scott’s life ran in two streams, there was never a confluence. Wendell. Work. Jess filled in through the years, accepted his lifestyle even though she hated it.

He worked for the government. Only a handful of people knew what he did, where he went. Wendell had never asked.

Truth was, he could fly out of Kabul tomorrow and go straight to her if he wanted to. That sketch he’d made the night before he left Culpeper. Working oil wells. He knew exactly where she was.

But Wendell didn’t think so and for the time being, that’s what she needed to believe.

Fanny’s chocolate brown eyes stared deep into mine. “Tell me what you dreamt, Miss Lynnie. I see the mark on you this mornin’.”

It was hard to sit down I was so excited, but she pulled me to the sofa and took my hand. Fanny believed in spirits and fortunes. She carried odd powders wrapped up in squares of brown paper in her pockets. “Charms for things, child, that’s all they is.”

In between cleaning up and taking care of the house, Fanny took care of me. She walked me to school in the mornings and met me halfway in the afternoons. It was Fanny who planted the rowan tree outside our front door. Fanny was a black woman and she was my best friend.

And now she saw the mark. Her older sister had the mark. An aunt had it too. Now I had it. According to Fanny, the mark came from a dream. “Not just any dream, no, one of them dreams that means something big. When you has one you get the mark.”

“Now, Miss Lynnie,” she said, pulling my hand and reminding me I was supposed to be telling the dream. “Hurry up before it slips away. Tell me what you saw. It’s rare a girl your age gets the mark. Eleven years old. That’s the youngest I heard of so far.”

I started talking. “I was on a ship. Not me like I am now. Me all grown up. My older self. I was on a journey, Fanny. Unknown destination.”

“Mm-hm. That sounds just like you, girl. Big plans and fancy talk. Right there in your dream. Keep goin’.”

“Well, the trip lasted a long time. Like I slept longer than just one night. It seemed like the trip took longer than it possibly could have, Fanny. How could I dream all that time just in one night?”

She stroked my hand with her fingers. “Hush, now, that’s just how dreams work. Dream time is different.”

“Anyway, I kept looking over the edge of the ship and all I saw was deep water. The ocean stretched on forever. I just stood there and watched. Finally one day I saw land. Then the ship got in close and I could see a harbor. Fanny, do you remember that time we went to Norfolk? That old dock thing we saw? It was a little like that.”

“Your mama took us that time.” Fanny looked away, like she was remembering. Her skin had little wrinkles beside each eye, and the whites were a little pink. Fanny sometimes said she was getting old, but she never acted like it. She did more work than anyone I knew.

“Go on, now. Finish the telling.”

“When the ship docked, I dragged a huge black trunk along the deck. I couldn’t wait to get to land. I don’t know why. I didn’t even really know where I was.”

“What was in the trunk?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t too heavy. I was able to drag it.”

“What did it look like near the dock?”

I stopped to remember. “It was a city. Not too big though. There were buildings and a lot of people. Busy. It seemed new. I don’t know. That part’s fuzzy now.”

“Where did you go?”

“I never got further than the dock. A man walked up, like he knew me. He said hello and took the handle of my trunk. He set it down and hugged me. Then it got clear. That was as far as the journey went. I had come to him.”

“And you knew this man.”

“Well, in the dream I did. It was like I knew him. But in real life I don’t. I just knew I had to tell him. I had to warn him.”

Fanny’s eyes got big. “Warn him? What about?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. That was what woke me up. In the dream I whispered something to him, but I don’t know what it was! How could I say something in my own dream and not know what it was I said?”

Fanny shook her head. “It’s one of those dreams that’s telling the future. You’ll know it when it happens. Whatever it is, you’ll know it then.”

“It was important.”

“Dreams always are, child. You don’t fret this one.” She touched my hair. “That mark means it’s something special. I don’t know what. But you just let it go for now. It’ll come when it comes. Now go get little Jessie, and let me get your breakfast ready.”

I went to the bathroom while Fanny made my eggs. In the mirror I looked like the same girl I had been the night before. Fanny said there was a mark, but I couldn’t see it. I looked and looked, but whatever she saw, it wasn’t there.

The next week Fanny’s sister Rebo came to town. “Rebo’s home and she’s going to look at your mark.” Fanny got my little sister Jessie tucked into her blue jacket. “Come on, I told your mama we’d be home before bedtime.”

It was Tuesday night, and Fanny always stayed late so my parents could go to dinner together. Instead of leaving right after she fed  us dinner, Fanny got to stay and help us get baths. She let Jessie and I stay in my bed together while she told stories. We loved it. But tonight we were going to meet Rebo.

“Is she at your house?” I asked.

“No, she’s with Mig. My other sister. You met her one time. She stays over near the woods behind the old store.”

Fanny didn’t drive, so we walked, with Jessie between us holding our hands.

Mig’s house was small, with a front porch that dipped on one side and two old rocking chairs. Fanny marched up the steps and opened the door, tapping me on the shoulder to get me to go in first. “Go on, it’s fine. She don’t care about us knocking.”

It was darker than I expected. Through the dimly lit front room, which had a sofa and some chairs, there was a doorway to the kitchen. Rebo and Mig were sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over something, under a bare light bulb.

“Mig, we’re coming in.” Fanny’s voice sounded different, like a young girl’s. I glanced at Jessie. Fanny was Rebo’s little sister. Just like Jess was mine. Rebo had silky scarves wrapped around her shoulders and neck, and dark red lipstick on her lips. The red looked wonderful against the deep brown of her skin. She reached out for me as soon as I got in the room.

“Come over here, girl.”

She didn’t even look at Fanny or Jessie. She took my face in her warm hands and then glanced over at Mig. “She’s got it.”

I looked at Fanny. She had taken Jessie around the red formica table and handed her a cookie from a plate.

Fanny winked and smiled. “It’s okay.”

Rebo took a little felt bag from her pocket and put it in my hand. “You been marked a seer, child. Now tell me about the dream.”

It was early evening, not quite dark out in the middle of summer. The bath was warm, heaped high with bubbles that smelled sweet, almost like candy, but when Wendell touched the tip of her tongue to the peaked mound of white in her hand, the taste was bitter.

Even at eleven years old, she still played with the tub toys her father had never thrown away. She reached over the edge into the plastic bin and pulled out the sailing ship. She had never chosen that one, but it had always been there.

As she set it free in the bubbly water, the dream from the night before came back. She had been much older, driving alone and then with a man. There was an armadillo dead by the side of the road. The man’s low voice had calmed her. She had kissed him. But the dream had been scary, and she shivered.

Her father was down the hall. The low murmur of TV and the creak in his recliner reminded her. He was close and she was safe.

Aunt Jessie always sat in the bathroom at her house and talked while Wendell bathed, just us girls, she said, mug of tea in her hands while she kept Wendell company. She lived mostly with Aunt Jessie because her father was gone so much.

But her father was home now, so she was at his house, lonely and cold, shivering on the blue mat with nothing to wrap up in. There were no towels in the bathroom closet.

“Dad, I need towels in here!”

He stopped outside the doorway and handed the towels in around the door frame. She wound the green one around her body like a dress. “Dad, I forgot to tell you the dream I had last night.”

He stepped into the door and waited while she wrapped her hair up turban-style like Aunt Jessie had taught her. Aunt Jessie made a game of this and held one end while Wendell twirled into the other.

She picked up her favorite purple comb to untangle her wet curls.  “There was this armadillo. I was in a car with a man.”

The comb got stuck and she tried to wrestle it out of the mass of hair. “Here, you try.” He took the comb and began to unravel it. Aunt Jessie was an expert and did it quickly, with no pain, but he didn’t know how, he had to do one tiny section at a time. “I had to tell him something. I think I had to warn him about something.”

Her father’s big hands fumbled with the comb and locks of hair, his breath blew in shorter bursts that smelled of whiskey and something she couldn’t name. The way he would taste was how she thought of it. He was combing faster, like he was in a hurry.

The TV still rambled in the living room. Through the wet coils of her hair his lips pursed and relaxed, closer as he reached to the back of her head, and she leaned in to kiss him, the way she had kissed the man in the dream, lips to lips, something powerful passing between.

He pushed her away. “Stop that.” His voice was hard and mean suddenly. “Listen to me, Wendell. You can’t go off with strange men. You never know what they might be looking for.”

He disappeared down the long, dark hall. She squeezed the tears back. He liked her to be brave. But this was too much. She gave in to the chill and ran toward the light near the back door.

He wasn’t there, and then she heard the gunshots out back. Aunt Jessie had told her to call if he ever got out the guns, but she didn’t. She listened, not knowing what it meant, whether he was shooting someone bad, or himself, or deer, or if, and this was the worst:

What if he’s shooting at nothing and pretending it’s me?

The next morning he woke her up early. “You want to take a trip?”

They went to Aunt Jessie’s house, and after negotiating the details, he sat on Wendell’s twin bed while she packed. As many books as she could fit: Nancy Drew, Jack London, Walter Farley. Some pants and shirts, her blue toothbrush. Aunt Jessie handed over a smaller bag as they walked out the door, one she’d filled with socks and underwear, pajamas, an extra pair of shoes. Toothpaste and hairbrush. Always a little treat, cookies or a chocolate bar.

Her father organized the two of them in his truck. The carefully folded maps he collected but never seemed to need. Snacks. Blank paper and colored pencils, the kind you peeled with a string instead of sharpened. She drew pictures while they drove, guesses at where they’d end up by nightfall. He used to check them when they arrived, shaking his head in wonder because she almost always got it right.

They rarely had a plan. He kept a tent and two sleeping bags in the space behind the seats. They stopped whenever either of them felt like it. He took the back roads.

“Are we lost?” She sat up hopefully, peering out at the passing landscape. Her drawing was a grid of lines, with circles. At the top of the page squiggly lines went up, a smoke signal. He laughed.

“Sorry, Wendell, I recognize this stretch. We’ll make a turn at the next crossroad, you pick.”

“Right,” she sang out, or “left.” He made the turn while she crossed her fingers it was someplace he didn’t know. She wanted desperately to see his eyes change from wariness to surprise, but he retained the same steady gaze.

They found a country store with two rocking chairs and a checkerboard in front of a wood stove. Cokes and potato chips and he beat her three times but she won the grand championship checker game, winner takes all. He emptied the change from his pockets into her cupped hands.

“Look what you did.” He pulled out the drawing she’d made and unfolded it. He pointed to the checkerboard and to the chimney of the woodstove. “You’re a natural.”

At the end of the day, they stopped to camp. He pitched the tent while she unrolled the sleeping bags. At dark, he lit the lantern and let her read until she fell asleep, something Aunt Jessie never did. She awakened in the night to the smell of him, wood smoke and bourbon and pine. She breathed it in as though inhaling medicine, and it was: assurance and safety, remedies for what hurt.

What hurt both of them was no secret, but she never spoke of it to her father. A few weeks earlier she had taken a different trip with Aunt Jessie. They’d driven to the little town where her mother had grown up.

Aunt Jessie had held her hand as they walked through the grey rectangle forest. In Wendell’s other hand was a basket of white tulips. The tender new grass beneath their feet was soft and spongy, birds chirped as the sun warmed her face. Aunt Jessie’s face was sad. Wendell squeezed her hand and they walked faster.

Each year they went to her mother’s resting place, their visit timed to coincide with spring, all things made new, said Aunt Jessie, as she told the story of Wendell’s mother growing lemon trees from seeds scavenged from the trash can when they were girls, watermelons from black seeds Aunt Jessie spit at her one July Fourth, poppies from tiny seeds Lynnie had collected at an aging neighbor’s abandoned flower bed.

We’re sad in February, Aunt Jessie told Wendell, but in April we celebrate the growing things. We rejoice in Lynnie’s memory.

Wendell placed the basket of tulips near the base of the stone marker. Aunt Jessie laid her hands flat against the cool granite, as though listening with her palms for some sign or message.

“There!” she exclaimed, as her hair and Wendell’s blew across their faces. “That’s Lynnie, sending kisses.”

Wendell peeped through the opening in the tent and watched her father outside, sitting by the fire, drinking from a small bottle. He needed to do something to remember her mother. All he did so far was try to forget her. She didn’t know how to tell him that, or if he’d listen if she did.

The next day they drove further, windows down, listening to the radio when they found a station. He wasn’t as talkative as he’d been the first day, and she spent most of her time sketching and watching the road curve ahead of them.

When the sun got low, they found a motel, rustic with tiny rooms and no TV, but when he pulled in and parked, her father changed his mind. “I don’t like this one, let’s head back to the city.”

They drove on past dark, until they got to lights and he drove to the fanciest hotel he could find. “This one’s better, what do you think?”

She nodded. He needed her to say yes and be happy. “It looks great, Dad.”

They checked in and went up to the room. “Let’s order room service. I’m starved.” Her father handed her the menu.

She knew this game. They had played it since she was little. “Can I get anything I want, Daddy?”

“Anything, Wendell-girl. The sky’s the limit.”

Rebo held my hand and turned it over. “Miss Lynnie, tell me your dream while I look at your lines.”

I told her about the ship and the man. The secret I had told him but couldn’t remember. I wanted her to tell me what it all meant, but she didn’t.

“Were there any smells in your dream?”

I was surprised at her question, but I did remember. The man had smelled like campfires and whiskey and pine needles. Rebo nodded.

“You remember that smell, girl. That’s how you’ll know him when you find him again.”

Rebo put some dried up leaves in a bowl and had me stir them around. When I was done she held the bowl up close to her eyes and squinted. “That looks like a crow to me.” She held it over to Mig, who said, “Or a raven.”

“Same thing,” Rebo said. “They’re both birds that see what isn’t yet there.”

“You watch out for crows,” she told me. “They’ll let you know when to pay attention.”

Fanny came around the table and handed me a cup of milk and a cookie. “This ain’t scaring you, is it?”

“No ma’am.” I wanted to tell her how much I wanted to hear more, but Mig interrupted.

Mig had a quiet voice and a shy look about her. She looked at me and then ducked her head. “Rebo, give her something for good luck. She needs a charm to carry.”

Rebo reached for a big cloth bag and began to dig around inside. She pulled out a little statue of a soldier. “Here he is. This one’ll keep you safe. You just keep that, now. And remember, you’re a seer. There’s signs anywhere a seer looks.”

All the way home I held the little soldier in my hand, squeezed tight. On the other side was Jessie, walking more slowly because she was getting tired. Fanny offered to let Jessie ride piggyback, but Jessie shook her head and kept walking. She always wanted to do whatever I did. And right then, I could tell she was mad she didn’t get a charm of her own to carry.

“Does Jessie need one too?” I held up the soldier and Fanny stopped.

“Well, now, is that what this is?” She walked over to the side of the road and squatted down, brushing through the grass with her fingers. “Here you go.” She walked over to Jessie and handed her a stone the size of a quarter. “This is special, Miss Jessie. It means you’re as solid as a rock. From the earth itself. It’s just for you.”

Jessie took the stone and put it in her pocket. She smiled and marched on ahead.

“That one worships the ground you walk on.” Fanny looked at me and shook her finger. “But that might get her in trouble one day. Now, don’t look so scary. I don’t mean nothing bad by that. Just she has to find her own way. Not follow yours.”

When we got home Fanny tucked us in together. Jessie was still smiling over her rock. I fell asleep with the soldier in my hand.

Eight years later I was walking along a sidewalk, struggling with an overstuffed book bag. When I started up the stone steps, I lost my balance and almost tipped backwards. I managed to get the book bag off my shoulder before it carried me down again.

“Need some help?”

I smelled something familiar, woodsmoke and whiskey and pine. When I looked up he was there, the familiar face. He put his arm around me and his breath touched my cheek.

“I know you.” He was laughing and I laughed too. Hearing his voice for the first time. It was like filling in a sketch.

“I’m Scott. And you’re –“

“Lynnie.”

That night he took me out to dinner, and I told him about the dream.

“So what is this secret you’re supposed to tell me?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

We laughed. All night long we laughed. When I got back to my room I wanted to call Jessie and tell her, but stopped. In a moment that seemed crazy and jealous, I fretted she might want Scott too.

I was a psychology major, studying Carl Jung, fascinated with dreams and symbols and synchronicity.  Doing a kind of therapy called sandplay, where the therapist had shelves of miniatures and rectangular trays of sand. I couldn’t get enough of doing the trays. It felt like I was looking for something in the sand.

The night Scott proposed, we were walking downtown. He told me he was in training in Williamsburg, that his work was secret and would take him away much of the time.

“Anyone I love will spend a lot of time waiting. I want you to know that.”

“Are you talking about someone in particular?” I asked.

He looked so serious. “I want you to be the one waiting.”

That was how he asked me to marry him. I had already been waiting, for years.

At the end of that semester, I decided not to continue at the university.

Looking back, I’m not sure why we made that choice. Scott needed to live in Culpeper because of work, but we could have figured that out.

He didn’t ask me to quit school. I wanted to be Scott’s wife. I wanted to have his children. And I chose the girlhood dream I had not quite reconstructed in the sand.

When I said goodbye the therapist gave me two things: a sailing ship, which was made of wood and had white sails that billowed, almost like an ocean breeze was coming through the window, and a blue notebook.

“Record your dreams,” she told me. “Write down the things you think about and everything you see and feel. Your dreams. You’ll learn as much doing that as being in here.”

Only a few days later, Scott had to go. I was the one who found the little house in Culpeper, and moved in without him, the wedding on hold until he got back.

Two days before she’d decided to leave Charlottesville, Wendell’s father had called early in the morning to say he was leaving the country again. You’d think she’d be used to it after twenty-six years, the sudden goodbyes on airport tarmacs, front porches, over the telephone. Now he did it on voicemail and it was so much easier that way. For him, at least.

As usual, she wondered where he was going. It had to be the Middle East, with all the chaos in that part of the world. It was unspoken after all these years that he worked for the CIA, and owned weapons the average deer hunter in Culpeper, Virginia didn’t. That he’d left so many times there was no tracking the number. His clothes smelled funny when he came home. She had catalogued those smells as a little girl, not knowing for sure where each belonged, but recognizing them and thinking, he’s been there again, the place that smelled of burnt almond. Or dust. Incense she had never found in a store. This was all she knew of what he did.

Her little kitchen was quiet, the white tulips like ghosts against the dark wood of the table. He was supposed to be sitting there, eating the dinner she’d invited him to share. She had the makings for lasagna, one of his favorites, and brandy. The tulips and coffee ice cream.

Her disappointment had bolted into action. Everything but the ice cream would endure the drive to his house in Culpeper. She would make him dinner in her mother’s kitchen and then, after she had filled his belly with carbohydrates and brandy, she would make him talk.

The radio kept her company on the familiar roads. She had driven the route from Charlottesville to Culpeper so many times she could have done it in her sleep. The rushing of air into the open car window whooshed and whispered, pushing her along. Encouraging her.

When she got to his house the familiar black bag was packed and waiting by the door.

He was in the living room asleep in his recliner. A bottle of Scotch was on the table, empty. The TV was on, hiss of video at the end of its loop, remote in his left hand. In his right, a pen held in the relaxed grip of someone exhausted or drunk or both. He had been working crossword puzzles. The most difficult ones.

A stack of catalogs was on the table by the Glenmorangie: Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, pages folded at the corners, items circled in black ink, an oak worktable, a beveled mirror oval like the keyhole in the door of an old house.

On the back of an envelope he had sketched a tiny car driving north, denoted by a capital N and an arrow pointing upward. A little face behind the wheel, coils of long hair streaming in the breeze of the open window. Little machines that looked like two-headed hammers striking the ground. She dismissed the drawings. He had always done them, and they reminded her of his near constant distraction. He could never do just one thing at a time. His mind was too busy.

She couldn’t bring herself to wake him; didn’t want him to know she had seen him that way, shopping for a dead woman, shopping for the daughter he had just stood up for dinner. The odd sketches he’d made. She wanted to forget the sight of him drunk in the chair, the weak man she never saw until moments like this. There had not been many of them.

Instead of making dinner, she backed quietly out of the room and left. He never even knew she was there.

Her name, Wendell, meant wanderer, and that’s what she was, although certain people in her life would have said what she was doing was running.

They were wrong.

She was looking for something.

Back in Charlottesville, she bypassed her apartment and headed to Tristan’s house. Tristan had been her best friend since college, as well as her sometime lover. He was already asleep and she unpacked the food into his kitchen, taking time to place each item in the correct cupboard. She thought about making tea and then thought about having a shot of vodka, but instead she climbed beneath his sheets and waited for the comfort he offered. Tristan was predictable. All she had to do was soak him in.

He stirred and opened his arm so she could get closer. She had never admitted to Tristan that she had dreamed about him when she was a girl. That his comfort had an edge to it. Something she didn’t understand.

But the comfort didn’t happen. She waited, forced herself to be still beside him when really what she wanted to do was wake him up and hear his voice. Hours passed, and his breathing in the night rubbed at her ears, the heaviness of the quilt made her want to throw it off. The light through the mini-blinds was too white, sharp in the dim room. She got up and pulled on the same clothes she had taken off only a few hours before.

Sitting outside on Tristan’s porch she heard spring peepers. Surely that couldn’t be, it was too early in the year. A walk through the neighborhood revealed still more: the tubular green heads of bulbs rose like arrows through the soil, a barely visible shimmer of green across lawns that hadn’t been there two days earlier.

Spring.

Wendell had met Tristan when she was a freshman at UV, in the computer lab, almost eight years earlier. Now she was in his kitchen, double-checking teaspoons and tablespoons of basil and garlic, wrestling slippery noodles into a dish.

“I thought you made lasagna for your dad last night.”

“He had to leave early. No big deal. You’re hungry, right?” She barely waited for his nod before continuing. “So, guess what, I turned down the site supervisor job for that new excavation.”

Tristan opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. Rubbed her shoulders while she layered cheese and sauce with the noodles.

“Maybe taking time off is good,” he said, and then, when she stepped over to the stove to stir the sauce, he moved with her and kept rubbing her shoulders. In only a few minutes the lasagna was in the oven. Tristan didn’t even like lasagna all that much, but he would eat it and enjoy it and in some way, make everything right.

She took her clothes off and pulled him to the bedroom, another way of making something right, so easy to do with Tristan. He didn’t resist. He was tall and dark and Welsh, and when things got to this point, when she needed to feel better about something, he was her source for solace.

More tender than usual, she dusted his body with her hair and fingers, gentle, like using brushes and trowels during a dig.

Making love was, in a way, like archeology. Seeking old things and rocks, the dust of the ages. Feelings experienced as children, love and security. Loss and grief. Making love was the unearthing of lost things.

Sometimes when they made love, he whispered, murmurings she couldn’t quite understand. Little prayers, or blessings. She only knew she felt safe. His mystery combined with familiarity in a way she hadn’t found anywhere else.

Back in the kitchen they ate lasagna naked by candlelight and finished it off with toffee Tristan pulled from the cupboard. He handed her the box first and leaned back in the chair like he was waiting for something.

The John Hedjuk passage she had printed out and taped on the refrigerator was still there, long enough ago it had become torn and stained.  She walked over and read it out loud.

“The landscape of Texas is sparse; objects take on a clarity and remoteness. There is a magic moment in the fall after weeks of intense dry heat when Blue Northern comes down across the northeast plains. Temperatures drop 50 degrees within minutes and the air becomes cool and crystal clear, the shadows deepen. It is also a time when you can run after armadillos. Now armadillos appear to be hard, but in fact they are soft and shed tears when you catch them by the tail, so you let them go.

There are a lot of things you let go of in Texas. You let go of old visions and old romances, you let go of city-states and northern broodings. But in letting go, other things and other moods are captured, such as the meaning of isolated objects, of void spaces.”

Tristan poured more wine and she took her glass back. “What is he talking about exactly, the meaning of isolated objects?”

“Connections. The mysterious things that pull us together.” He added as an afterthought, “and keep us apart.”

He was gliding slowly toward something she had made him promise never to do again. He had asked her two times to marry him, once when they were undergrads and again after graduation. She shouldn’t have come to his house so soon after leaving her father passed out in his chair. She shouldn’t have slept with Tristan.

“Don’t.” She looked at his face. He had a defiant expression, a stubborn look he didn’t often get with her.

“I swear, Tris, if you start up again I’ll go to Texas.”

“That would be running away, wouldn’t it? Something you say you never do.”

She tried making a joke.  “I’m not running, Tris, I’m transcending.”

He didn’t smile. “You have to choose. You can’t keep doing this with me if it doesn’t mean anything.”

Her clothes were still on the kitchen floor, where she’d shed them earlier. She put them back on.

“Don’t go.” He held out his hands, palms up, a gesture of truce, an apology.

She shook her head. “I need to get home.”

“That’s a choice. If you leave, that’s the decision.”

In her apartment she felt like she had gone under water. Everything seemed filmy and muted. No stark reality being spoken out loud, just quiet. She broke the peace by turning on her computer. The beep of Tristan’s IM.

I mean it Wendell. If you’re not saying yes, I’m letting go. I’m tired of hanging on.

She didn’t respond and in a few minutes he sent an email.

Maybe you should go, Wendell. Maybe that’s what’s best.”

Her father had once again extracted himself from her life with a simple phone call. And now Tristan had done it with an email.

She remembered the earlier part of the evening, Tristan inside her, his weight pressing her to the bed. She’d felt herself turn to air and melt up through him, off to some other place, seeking some other thing. Like smoke.

Gone.

In Mobile, Alabama she drank tequila with a cowboy, or maybe he was a mechanic. He sat on the barstool next to her and rested his boot on the bottom rung of her stool. He nodded at the bartender, without ever taking his eyes off her. Two more shot glasses appeared.

His hands were clean but the short squared-off nails were rimmed in something dark. He touched her on the arm and then stopped. “I’m sorry about the hands.”

They drank shots and danced. His dancing was one simple step, but he had rhythm and he angled his hips at hers and pulled her close. “Baby.”

The languid drawl of his voice blended perfectly with salt and lime and tequila, and later, a bare mattress on the floor in his dark apartment. “You’re so sweet,” he said and lay back on the bed. “What are you doing in Mobile, anyway?”

It was hard to say. Finding bits of moments that added up to something whole, but she couldn’t tell him this, that his accent, the bare apartment devoid of comfort, drew her to him, what she would take when she left.

“Just passing through,” she said. He didn’t seem to care that she would be gone the next day. He touched her breast and grinned, his teeth shining for a moment as he moved his head through a shimmer of light that passed through the window.

She let it all soak in. The rub of the rough mattress on her knees, the musty smell of a room that never had a window opened. It was only a place he came for sleep. And this. There was nothing alive in this room but him.

She slept maybe an hour.

How he looked in the pinched gray light of dawn. The way he found her with his hands before his eyes opened. She kissed him back to sleep so she could slip away. His face bristled with beard, a dark shadow along his jawbone.

On the road she felt gravel-eyed and empty. Exactly what she wanted. No weight of attachment. Nothing bearing down.

Next stop New Orleans, a renovated red-light district named Storyville. After a few hours sleep in the hotel, she woke up restless and wandered along the street, stopping for bourbon and ginger ale until she found someone interesting to follow. A dark-haired man caught on and played along. Furtive glances down different bars, tracking his linen jacket through the crowd on the street. She paused once inside a doorway to see what he would do when he realized she was no longer behind him. He simply waited, as if he knew she would come out and take up pursuit again.

In the last bar he turned and bought her a drink, left it sitting on the bar. She sipped the drink and watched him move effortlessly between tables until he reached the back wall, where he leaned, arms crossed, and waited. She followed his path and let him move her to the corner. They ended the game there, against the back wall in a dim corner of a club, kissing, not one word spoken between them. Smoky blues in the background, the soft shine of his white jacket like the moon in that dark space they made. The taste of bourbon and ginger mixed in with his kiss.

The next day she drove again. The Sabine River marked the Texas border, cypresses and Spanish moss, old farm to market roads she stumbled onto to get off the interstate. For several hours she tried to lose herself, rights and lefts at random, but the Sabine ran north to south and there was no way to forget that. Finally she gave in to it and crossed over.

Tristan called this running and maybe he was right. Beaumont, on to Houston, where she intended to find a real cowboy, or at least a Texan, but halfway in she changed her mind.

Twenty minutes fumbling with a ripped-up road map in the gasoline stench of an Exxon parking lot. Back to the highway.

Hands on the steering wheel, white knuckled in five lanes of traffic, praying to the open sky she wouldn’t miss the exit to Austin. Just west of Houston evening fell like a cloud. The huge refineries dazzled as the sun set, castles in the night, billowing puffs of white smoke into the air.

The little no-name motel she crashed in was shabby but cheap. Mobile, New Orleans, Beaumont, Houston, all of that washed clean in the shower. She slid into a fresh skirt and blouse, dashed out for dinner from the vending machine. Soda and a candy bar eaten while she paced the small distance from door to back wall in the motel room. The sound of rough pavement grinding endlessly beneath thin tires took hours to fade.

This was nothing like the road trips she’d taken as a child with her father. Their back road meanderings, the best memories she had.

In the morning she breathed the stale air in the car and pumped the gas pedal. 290 to Austin. Working oil wells that dipped and bobbed like birds pecking at the ground. When she hit the hill country she pulled over and got out. Sky that spanned a lifetime, more than one, green brushed blue someplace so close to the horizon it had to be an optical illusion.

Springtime, paler green than what she was used to, everything bleached a few shades lighter. But then the bluebells, decadent rolling fields of lapis, washed in sunlight, quivering with life.

A girl could get lost in a place like this.

A girl could lose things she no longer wanted to carry.

What she found first was a plain white rental house thirty minutes outside Austin, two bedrooms and a bath, avocado green kitchen. There was nothing else out here, just her sitting on the back steps watching for armadillos but seeing deer instead.

Thinking about a job, something gritty and real, where the pay was cash and no one knew anything but what she told them.

If she used cash her father couldn’t find her as easily, so she put all her money in a jar in the fridge and pretended she was an outlaw of sorts. To make the money last longer, she ate beans and rice with salsa and sour cream. Drank Shiner Bocks instead of imports.

At Wheatsville Co-op, in the produce section, a man followed her to the bulk bins and offered a pen to record the stock number off the organic brown rice label.

“Your red hair is something,” he said.

He wore expensive clothes one size too big, a haircut grown two weeks too long. Heavy and older and incredibly sexy, a man you could sink into, a man who could hold weight, good Scotch, a wild woman. She reached over and touched his arm.

“Watch out, girl.”  He trailed her to the parking lot. “What’s your name?”

“Wendell.”

“Give me your phone number.”

She got in her car. “I don’t have a phone.” Which was not a lie. She had a phone line, but not a phone. When she drove away he watched. His lips stretched into a slow, lazy smile.

Outside the library, shiny black grackles strutted circles on the sidewalk, blue and green in the sun, brazen but beautiful. Their call was intriguing, a series of rattles, squeaks, and whistles. She wondered what the different sounds meant. What each part said to the other birds.

Later, in the quiet of evening, the man’s words lingered, sweet and intense, like a promise. The memory of his voice interrupted the buzz of insects outside, one song interfering with the other.

The computer screen glimmered lavender blue in the dim living room. Dial-up was slow, but she had no other options; in the middle of nowhere Texas, high speed hadn’t happened yet. While the emails filtered in, so slowly she couldn’t stand to watch, she went out back with a Shiner Bock and studied the sunset. Three deer skittered across the back edge of the yard. Still no armadillo, but she remained hopeful. A raccoon had climbed a tree outside her bedroom window the night before and stared intently when she moved the curtain back. A masked bandit with glittering beady eyes.

Who are you, he could have been asking. Who did she want to be?

Her little house was quiet. No creaks, no shifting of timbers, simply shelter from what stretched beyond its walls. The driveway was long and curved slightly, a question mark.

No mail in the rusty old box on a post by the road. No television. Just music and her computer. All she needed.

Inside, the emails waited. She sorted by sender and scrolled down, scanned for the T’s.

Tristan didn’t even know she was gone. The way she’d left the apartment, taken so few things, even if he went by and used his key it would look like she’d just gone out for a while. He would assume she’d found some new guy to hang out with. She’d done it plenty of times before.

In his email Tristan did not address what had happened but wrote about the book he was reading (something to do with magic and time travel and mysticism), the movie he’d just seen (Memento on DVD) and what he had eaten for dinner (Thai food at their favorite restaurant, and he didn’t say it but she bet he took that new girl Kate in the Classics department), which made her jealous.

She was getting sick of beans and rice.

The note showed up in her mailbox the next day, sealed inside a dove gray business envelope. To the woman with green eyes was scrawled across the front.

She dangled it by each corner in turn, felt its weight, tested to see if anything slid around inside. Unlike her usual practice of ripping into mail the instant she got her hands on it, she let this mysterious missive sit on the kitchen table for the length of time it took to wash up the few dishes she’d used for dinner.

The anonymous letter was handwritten, blue fountain pen on gray paper. Multiple pages, folded in thirds. She grabbed a beer out of the fridge and went out to the back steps.

It told the story of a man suffering vertigo, the loss of balance in his life. Kismet, he said, had delivered her to him. He wrote of organic brown rice and girls who would not reveal telephone numbers, an entire paragraph centered on the color of her hair. How she had stirred his quiescent desire.

Of course it was from the man in the co-op. He had managed to track her down. Already.

She thought of her father, who hadn’t tracked her at all. Even given what he did for a living. He thought she didn’t know. Okay, so maybe she didn’t know all of it. Certain details she might never know. But CIA, covert ops, she knew that much.  Over the years, she’d dreamed of Afghani mountains, barren, the color of flesh, narrow gaps riven by stony roads. Her father driving away in a jeep while she called to him in the fierce wind.

Tristan had uncovered a few things online, freshman year, UV, when they’d just started being best friends. Tristan had come to Virginia straight from Wales.

A guy in their class called him a hacker, said the government tried to hire him but Tristan wasn’t interested. Instead, he read the classics in Greek and Latin while she studied archaeology. They spent hours sprawled across beds in their respective dorm rooms, drinking red wine out of chipped coffee mugs, discussing alchemy, quantum theory, standing stones, Carl Gustav Jung, and past lives.

They studied magic and transformation, dreamed of faraway places and analyzed her father’s work, about which they’d speculated wildly. It had always been her secret game, guessing where her father was, what he was doing. Inventing the life he’d refused to share. Tristan and Wendell closed their eyes and envisioned places and missions, told every detail, one to the other. By the end of that first year Tristan was better at it than she was, went on and on while she listened, greedy for facts, even if they were made up. He became necessary. The man from her girlhood dream.

Which was why she had to leave.

Sixth Street in Austin had more live music than she had ever seen in her life. She listened from dark doorways, headbanger, no thanks, cowboy vocals, not tonight. The twang of good guitar was what she was looking for. One shot of tequila at the bar and a Shiner Bock to settle in with until someone asked her to dance.

The man from the food co-op was there. She saw him first, from behind, and recognized his baggy, elegant clothing. He turned and walked over. Didn’t hesitate to take hold of her arm, looked her in the eye when they moved together to the music. Neither smiled. After a set of songs they were both sweaty and hot. Out on the sidewalk he used the edge of his shirt to wipe her face.

“I got the letter.”

He shook his head. “What?”

“The letter in my mailbox. I got it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He wasn’t drunk and so far had asked for nothing, but his eyes revealed more, a wanting and not having. He wrote a number down on a receipt from his pocket and gave it to her. Then walked half a block down the street before he turned and said good night.

The drive home was her goodbye, with the windows down and 10,000 Maniacs blasting. That beady-eyed raccoon was on the front porch when she pulled up.

She didn’t check email, skipped the shower. Sprawled on the bed with sweat dried to her skin, the taste of tequila and beer just beginning to go sour, and wondering who had written that amazing letter, fell asleep.

Her hair was damp with new sweat when she woke. The bed not the right way in the room. Tristan’s body missing when her hand crept through the maze of sheets to find him.

In this dream she had gone back for him. His apartment was empty, nothing but a flattened cardboard box on the bedroom floor. She went to the post office, no forwarding address. He had simply vanished.

The remainder of the dream was her looking, driving the city in careful squares, like a grid on an excavation site. Block by block, scanning for his car, his gait, his face. That he wasn’t to be found, that he might never be, was what woke her.

She pulled the sheet from its knot and stretched it up to her chin. Breathed, breathed, slow, slower.

He was still there. She felt him, as far away as he was, Virginia, all those state lines away. But if she could feel him, it was okay.

She got up and went to the front porch to sit and cool off some. It was so dark outside, and quiet. She heard a rustling off to the left and cursed. She’d meant to buy an extra flashlight for the front porch so she could watch for armadillos out here too.

A little while later she thought she heard the low whine of an engine somewhere down the road, but there were no headlights, and it faded as quickly as she’d thought she heard it. Maybe she’d find another letter in the mailbox. She considered walking out there but changed her mind. It could wait until morning.

She wished for the first time that she had a phone. She wanted to talk to Tristan and hear his voice. His lyrical accent, the way he said her name.

She missed him, and maybe that was good, but it wasn’t enough. They had never yet sorted out how to be together.

She made coffee and took it outside to drink while the sun came up. It wasn’t all about Tristan, this crazy trip. It also had to do with her father. It had to do with her life and what she might do next.

It was easy to set aside in the stillness of a morning in a new landscape.

It didn’t matter who had written the letter, or where her father was. It was of no consequence that Tristan had Kate in his bed, Kate who would never run away, but would stay there until Tristan realized what he had and make it permanent.

None of that mattered. She was finally alone.

Scott woke in the dark of another country thinking of his daughter. Tested the wind, got his bearings. Listened. Sighed.

He tracked her in his head from Charlottesville to Georgia. That was the last place he knew for sure she was. His mind kept going south and west. He felt sure she was in Texas. He stopped. Wendell could take care of herself.

Come morning he rode ninety miles in a jeep with a haji who’d as soon cut his throat as look at him, but he was the ride to the border.

Scott spoke Pashto and Dari like a native and the driver knew but pretended not to, grunted and gestured when the front tire blew and they pulled over to change it.

He kept one hand on the gun under his belt, felt with the other for the blade strapped to his boot.

The driver dropped the threadbare tire on the ground and kicked it, then looked back. His eyes were dark and his jaw tense. He shifted his eyes and then looked back to Scott, who didn’t even blink, ready to do whatever needed to be done. They said time itself slowed when you killed a man, and it was true.

Scott waited. Accounted. Blocked the images of acts this man had done to other men, women, young women no older than Wendell, girls even. The last man he’d killed had been raping a girl behind a bombed out house in a village. He had dragged him off her and made the girl run away so she wouldn’t see. Then found her and asked when her birthday was. How old she was.

The driver cut his eyes at Scott and looked away again. Scott squeezed the handle of the gun. Hand-to-hand combat, how to move and take advantage, compensate for the difference in ages. Something he’d never taught Wendell and maybe should have. How to kill a man if he made the wrong move.

His mind flashed back and forth. This present, Wendell’s present on the other side of the world. He could see what was around her, but couldn’t afford to lose sight of his own situation.

The driver finished changing the tire and they both climbed back in the jeep, wary. Scott scanned: driver, road ahead, driver, behind.

What would it have been like if Lynnie hadn’t died? Would Wendell have run off to Texas? Would Lynnie have gone after her or called Scott home? He hated that he didn’t know.

The year before Lynnie died, they had told him he met every criterion for the study: assignments successfully completed, well thought of by colleagues. Though considered a maverick, he was not a loose cannon. He was opinionated and creative.

He had been handpicked and carefully trained. Learned the protocols and worked his way up to the highest levels of remote viewing they’d seen. His gift was his ability to empty his mind. He created empty space for the images. He had no fear of the unknown.

After Wendell was born and Lynnie died, he’d thrown himself deep into the work. For several years that was all he cared about. The targets. What he could do with his mind. Just when he’d mastered the flow of time and was moving toward understanding how to alter future outcomes, they‘d shut him down.

That was when things got hairy. That was when he’d lost control.

He looked at the haji and then ahead to the ravaged road. The stony ground was marked with coarse grass. He could close his eyes right now and look at what this man had done, what he would likely do next. If he emptied his head, it would fill with images of whatever he focused on. It was too much sometimes. Having access to that much. Not always being able to turn it off once it got going.

He’d gone too far and seen too much. Made some things happen that no one knew how to explain. That was when they reassigned him. He had known he needed to pull back. He didn’t want to live his life seeing things inside his head. He wanted to live in the moment. He wanted to be surprised and delighted and shocked. He was careful now how he used it. What he let himself see.

He’d never talked to Lynnie about it. But she had known somehow. She sent him a letter once, one of many she sent when he was someplace just like this. He still had that letter, folded, soft with age, in his wallet. She wrote that she loved him. That she wished she knew where he was and what he was doing. She’d quoted Rumi.

Look at your eyes. They are small but they see enormous things.

Scott had taught Wendell how to navigate, with maps, a compass, the night sky. How to read terrain and find water. What she could eat to keep herself alive in the wild.

She had a pack he’d bought and stocked for her.  The essentials should she get lost or hurt. He wondered if she still had that pack. If she’d kept it stocked. He’d wanted to keep her in his sights, but he had also known she had to make her own way.

He had tried to give her the skills that he’d learned, honed her instincts so she would always know how to react if something came out of the shadows.

He felt confident she could hold her own in most bad situations. She knew enough to stay out of harm’s way. What worried him more were the other kind of situations. The ones where her heart was involved.

Lynnie used to lay him on his back, her hands flat against his chest.

I have you now, mister, your belly, your heart, all your tender places are exposed. He let her in that way and look what happened. There had to be a way to love a person without laying your gut open.

Wendell ran high speed, but underneath it all she was cautious, like a cat. He knew she’d been promiscuous, knew too that she’d made ties with Tristan. He sensed they were complicated ties, and that she kept Tristan at a distance in some ways. But Tristan had checked out. He’d said no to the government’s offer, and Scott saw the way he looked at Wendell. She was okay if she was with him. But now she’d taken off.

Travel safe, Wendell-girl, be steady. Don’t go too far out.

What else could he tell her? Lay her heart open, keep it closed up tight? Either way she’d suffer. Either way would hurt.

He had met Lynnie when she was in college. She had a face full of secrets. It took awhile to get her. She was shy, a long-legged, skittish thing with flaming hair.

She’d told him about a dream she’d had when she was a girl. He took her to the mountains and aimed her at the wide vista of rock and tree he loved best. She didn’t say a word. He remembered the collar of her blouse against the delicate skin of her neck.

He’d never doubted that Lynnie had come into his life for a reason.

When she died he was holding Wendell. The doctor had handed the crying infant to Scott so he could take care of Lynnie. It was supposed to be the moment when new parents locked eyes over the head of their just born child. They did, but there was no time to say what should have been said. She was there and in the quick occlusion of her eyes she was gone.

Nearing Khost the driver dodged bands of nomads on donkeys and camels, a herd of sheep, a jingle truck that reminded Scott of Wendell. She wore long earrings and bracelets that made noise when she moved her arms. His eyes were closed listening to the truck.  His right eye ached from pressing against the camera’s eyepiece all those hours. Worth it for the shots he’d got. The object of interest this trip was a Pakastani. He’d caught him full face, laughing. Got a shot of his hands, the way he carried himself, slight bend in the right shoulder. All the subtle angles that would make him easier to identify later. And when the time was right, when the order came down, someone would do what had to be done.

Scott’s finger had itched on the shutter. It should have been a trigger. Click, bastard, got you now. No sense putting off the inevitable.

The driver dropped him outside Chapman Airfield. He paid the man and delivered the camera’s memory stick wrapped in plastic and brown paper to the appointed man on foot. Got a ride back to post, which swarmed with ANA soldiers and SF guys, one he needed to see before going on to Peshawar. Spent the night in a bunk, lulled easy by all the American soldiers with guns.

Let his guard down and in came Lynnie. The night she died. It had been in her eyes that night, he’d seen it there. Something she’d needed to say. Something he needed to hear.

What he should have said to her: I’m sorry. There were other women after he and Lynnie got married. It was always when he was away, never the same woman more than once. His odd way of keeping Lynnie sacred. She was the only one he went back to.

Jessie suspected, but there was no way she could have known for sure. Impromptu indiscretions in other countries. Under cover, like everything in his life.

It started that way and remained so after Lynnie’s death. He still followed the same rule. Never more than once. Never anything that could get under his skin. Nothing he couldn’t give up.

There was a little place he went in Peshawar, to drink off everything. Another place that relieved it for half an hour, longer if he was lucky. He said he wouldn’t this trip, but that was before all the liquor didn’t work.

He asked the question he always did. When were you born? What month and day? The answers were satisfactory so they proceeded.

The woman’s liquid eyes cast down, out of fear or respect, but her hands were sure. What she did to his body was in no way reticent. He lay back and let her do her job. Make it disappear for as long as you can, babe, I need respite from my fucking mind. The endless reel of memories.

She undressed him. His boots landed with a thud on the hard floor.

Slow, he told her. Slow, baby. She nodded with a quick dart of her head.

Lynnie.

The woman’s hand was tight, then her mouth. He wanted more, but slow, things began to slip away. Yes baby that’s it baby. The long slide into nothing but what felt good right that moment. Scott beneath her silence, giving directions. In that small space he got what he wanted. No more, no less. It was all about him.

That she wouldn’t look him in the eye only made it easier.

Lynnie.

He pushed hard against the body beneath his. Her bones seemed tiny and insignificant. The dark woman, the real woman. Faster until he knew where he was again.

Some nights that much worked, but often he needed more. They lay in the light of two candles while he did nothing but look. She turned her head away. When he touched her, she squeezed her eyes shut tight. Made soft muted sounds that seemed like pleasure while he slid all over her. Hands. Tongue. Gentle. Rough. He forgot everything that came before. Devoured the present. That one woman.

She had no eyes and no soul. That was all he could take.

Back where he lived, at least for a week or so, he sprawled in the rickety chair on the ramshackle roof. Counted the stars and named them. Occupied the part of his brain that kept him safe from the other place, lower down, left side. The empty place he no longer referred to by name.

I unpacked the miniatures in the room I’d decided would be mine. For weeks the small collection sat on the floor and I stepped over them and around them. The little soldier, the crow, an armadillo, plus a few more. My blue notebook and favorite writing pen were on the windowsill. Stacked in the corner were the three boxes I had just bought, covered in blue, fuchsia, and green silk. I sorted various photographs and postcards, assorted memorabilia into the boxes, leaving one empty. For the new part of my life still to come.

The sound of Scott’s truck in the driveway surprised me. I ran out there, excited and then worried, what if he didn’t like the house?

But I was wrong. The first thing he said was, “Lynnie, it’s perfect.”

He walked from room to room smiling, until he found my study.

“What’s this?” He was brusque, not like he’d been only moments before.

“I’ll keep my miniatures in here, and have a desk, maybe.”

“Why do you need a desk?”

He seemed taller suddenly, and dark. His face had shadows in it.

“I don’t know, Scott. Do I have to have a reason?”

“You said you wanted to make a home here. Be here when I get back from work.”

He made it sound like his job was like every other man in Culpeper. Like he’d be home at five each day, ready for dinner and conversation. TV and lovemaking. When really he would be gone for weeks on end. Longer.

“I just want some space to have my own things. I don’t have to give up everything.”

Scott did this thing when he was set on something. I’d seen him do it when he first met me, an almost literal digging in with his heels, a set to his jaw. He expected to get his way.

“Not this time, Scott. I have to win at least this one.”

I walked out and left him standing there. I’d started a garden in the back yard and was working compost into the soil.

The truck engine started up in front. I started crying. Tears dripped in with the black crumbly earth. It seemed we each had made too many assumptions about the other. I had relied on the dream and Rebo’s assurance that I would know him when I found him. That I would know what it was he needed me to tell him.

But here we were and I still had no idea.

When he returned, I wiped my eyes and went in the house. He was cutting boards underneath the carport with no shirt on. His belted pants rested on his hips, a curve of muscle lengthened along his waist. I couldn’t stop looking at him. I had dreamed him and then married him.

I remember his skin in the afternoon sun, the way he turned as he worked the saw, his arms sanding the wood. There were so many times when he was gone in later years, when that memory kept me going.

Scott building shelves for my miniature collection.

The hill country outside the house in Austin, Texas was dotted with gnarled scrubby trees Wendell needed to learn names for, assorted cacti, and anthills. She poked a stick into the edge of crumbling sand and watched the ants tumble over one another in a rage, dark roiling mounds. Carefully isolated a single black ant and let it bite. The tiny sting, a surge of heat as the poison spread, skin touched with fire. Imagined an entire colony swarming and biting. You’d be burned out.

Someone had warned her about scorpions, and she lifted rocks until she found one, smaller than she expected, sand-colored and slow-moving, not as angry as the ants.

All she remembered from her earliest memory of her father was the back of him. Beyond his waving arm a small white plane swallowed him in its mysterious cavity and took him away. The plane pitched forward with a jerk and rolled along the ground. The black tarmac glistened in the afternoon sun as her little girl arms stretched toward his disappearing form. Aunt Jessie squeezed tight, rounded Wendell’s body into her warm curves.

As the sound of the engine faded she wiped the wet rush of tears onto Aunt Jessie’s dress, breathed in her lavender smell. Gave up trying to call him back and buried her face in the familiar shoulder.

She learned to anticipate his returns, the homecomings he called them, absence made right by perfection.

He never talked about his time away. “Why do you have to go again, Daddy?” Aunt Jessie looked at him and left the room. He sat silent, absentmindedly rubbing her shoulder or knee or the back of her head.

“I go when they send me, Wendell-girl.”

At twenty-three, she understood why he went. Nevertheless, she had spent the whole of her life making sure no one who mattered that much left her again.

When she was younger and he was gone, Aunt Jessie always got the boxes from the top shelf of the hall closet and spread them in a row in front of the fireplace. There were three, each covered in raw silk: cobalt blue, fuchsia, and moss. Each colored box meant something. Each held a different mood.

What was inside the boxes? All that was left of her mother, who she had been told died during childbirth, her birth, so that all her life February The Second had been strangely conflicted. Excitement and anticipation, but also sadness that ambushed her out of nowhere. Each time she celebrated the day of her own entrance into the world, she marked another anniversary of the day her mother had left it.

That she never knew her perhaps made it easier. Whenever her name was mentioned, Aunt Jessie got tears in her eyes and her father simply pretended he didn’t hear.

As on other days when Aunt Jessie brought out the boxes, she made tea in the cracked eggplant-colored teapot Wendell loved best. China oolong, in honor of her mother.

“It was her favorite,” Aunt Jessie said, and although they both preferred herbal teas they didn’t use them for the ritual of the boxes.

She put the tray with the cozy-covered teapot and two mugs on the floor beside them. There was a little bowl with dark chocolates. Her mother had loved them too.

Aunt Jessie took one chocolate, then Wendell took one. They popped them into their mouths at the same instant and waited while they warmed against their tongues. Sips of tea. They couldn’t open the first box until the chocolates had completely melted down. It took a minute. Aunt Jessie signaled with a nod when hers was done, and Wendell, with great care and ceremony, lifted the lid to the fuchsia box.

They always did that one first.

The box was filled with mementos of her mother’s youth: report cards, all A’s; a green leather diary that was only written in a few times; two blue ribbons she’d won in a horse show; a packet of letters from her pen pal, a girl who lived in Sweden; lots of birthday cards and postcards and movie stubs; and, Wendell’s favorite, a photo album.

The photos were very old. Aunt Jessie slid the tea tray away while they looked at them. There were pictures of her mother when she was a little girl: holding Aunt Jessie as a baby, riding a white pony, wearing a long green dress with a wrist corsage and standing with a dark-haired boy ugly only because he was not her father.

Aunt Jessie laughed when they got to the one with Wendell’s mother standing on her head, a big goofy grin on her upside-down face. Aunt Jessie turned to Wendell and touched her cheek. “You look a lot like her, Wendell. But her hair was redder than yours.”

She tried not to remind her father. He stared sometimes and looked away quickly, as though slapped. Like there was something in her face he couldn’t bear to see.

They put the things back in the box and replaced the lid very solemnly, because Aunt Jessie said it was a way to honor the memory of Wendell’s mother. She didn’t go further, but what she meant was, not like your father, who refuses to remember her one little bit.

Aunt Jessie was wrong about him not remembering, but she told Wendell not to tell about the boxes, so she didn’t.

The cobalt box had things in it from her mother’s college days. She had gone to the University of Virginia and wanted to be a psychologist, but then she met Wendell’s dad and married him before she graduated. Aunt Jessie seemed mad about that, like maybe he had done something he wasn’t supposed to. Like her mother would still be alive if she hadn’t met him.

Aunt Jessie didn’t exactly say those things out loud. But the way she handled the letters from Wendell’s father to her mother - “My dearest Lynnie,” some of them began. Aunt Jessie sniffed as Wendell read it out loud. The kind of sniff that meant “hmmph,” or something, and Wendell knew.

Even with Aunt Jessie making the little noises Wendell enjoyed the cobalt box. She loved reading what her father had written to her mother, the little names he’d invented for her, the way he told things about his training in Williamsburg. She wished she could read what her mother had written back, but he said one time he didn’t know what happened to those letters. He didn’t save things the way her mother had.

There wasn’t a photo album in the blue box, but there were loose pictures and postcards. She laid them out across the rug while Aunt Jessie fussed with the tea cozy. Her mother with a college roommate.  At the beach with a bunch of girls. Her mother and father, arm in arm, on a pier. Aunt Jessie looked away but Wendell smiled at that one. That’s the man she was supposed to be with, not the ugly high school boy in the fuchsia box.

She could tell they had loved one another by the way they held their bodies close, how big their smiles were. It made sense that they’d gotten married and had Wendell, even if the rest of it didn’t. That she had died. That he had never let her go.

She moved on to the postcards. One a sketch of something called hoodoos. Another an image of white sand with people standing on a hill. Her father had only printed her mother’s name and address and a big xo where the note should be, but her mother had written something on the hoodoo card. Important!!! Something happens here, some kind of magic.

Wendell always asked what that meant, and Aunt Jessie always said, “I have no idea, Wendell.”

Aunt Jessie was relieved when Wendell finished with the blue box. She moved it away quickly and they ate another chocolate.

The last box was Wendell’s favorite. She waited a moment before opening it. This one held the only things that tied her to her mother: the photographs of her, big and round with Wendell inside, connected by a pulsing cord.

In the photograph her mother smiled, hands on the ripe swell of abdomen, palms down, as though she was touching her baby. Wendell found some sense of peace with this photograph in hand. Floating inside her mother, a glimmer of light filtered through the fabric of her dress, the touch of her fingers and palms gently pressing, the rhythmic thump of her heartbeat. Zen. In sync.

There were wedding photos, postcards from Europe, where Wendell’s mother and father honeymooned, slips of paper with her handwriting, an elegant script that made the menial lists seem more important than they were.

Baby names. For the nursery. Things to do.

She was fascinated by these minutiae from the life of someone she had never known. She sat and pored through the contents of the box as though she had uncovered a chest full of treasure, every single time. By then it must have numbered in the hundreds.

It wasn’t too far back to the little house in the hill country of Texas. She knew already where she was, which direction was which, but it was ingrained in her to check. She stopped, removed the pack she’d carried as far back as she could remember, took out the trusted compass, double checked.

This is how you survive, Wendell-girl, food, fire, shelter, water, navigation, medicine.

She could survive. Her father had taught her all she needed to know in that regard. But she wanted more. She wanted to thrive and revel and transcend.

He flew from Kabul to DC, then drove to Williamsburg and debriefed before finally hitting the road to Culpeper. Reality happened in layers. First he was heading home to Lynnie, who always had something good simmering on the stove. A glass of Scotch, bed readied for lovemaking. He let himself float back to the past for a few miles. Her skin, the kisses. He still got hard thinking about it. Certain point he shook it off, moved on to the next layer.

Driving to get his daughter, exact same way he had all those years, wearing a fine film of dread at seeing Jessie’s accusing eyes in the half-hour it took to get Wendell packed up and out the door.

He was sunk deep in that memory and then it lifted. Wendell was grown up and gone. There was no one to hurry home to.

Just as soon be working as driving this dark road to nothing but an empty house. The echo of a little girl’s voice. The neatness of the house screamed: it wasn’t a home. There was no one there.

He did what he always did after being away. Walked the perimeter, dropped his duffel outside the bedroom door. Kept going to the end of the hall. Lynnie’s study. He’d cleared out her magazines and donated the stash of wool. But what she’d hung on the walls remained: a Monet print, two black and white photographs she had taken of him when they got married, a map of the state of Virginia, old and yellowed, the edges crumbling inside the frame.

The photos revealed a time in his life when he had been happiest. Early on in his training, dating Lynnie, a woman he had never thought to find. She had caught him smiling, with shining eyes and relaxed shoulders. He had been looking right at her. Now the younger happy Scott, still innocent of what life would bring, gazed into the eyes of his older self. That young man had no idea what was coming. Not a clue that he would be unfaithful to the woman he loved, would lose her, would get lost in work that existed only in the mind but took its toll physically nonetheless.

He pulled his eyes away from the photo and glanced around Lynnie’s room.

The chair she’d found at a flea market, table and lamp adjacent for reading. The long and narrow oak worktable marred by a crack he’d put there one night, angry and jealous over a neighbor man’s offer to mow the lawn while he was gone.

Her collection.  Figurines and miniatures. When he first met her she had maybe thirty items. They had argued over the room. He’d been jealous of the figures, back then he’d seen them as her longing for something unrelated to him. Then he’d taken over. Made it all about him. She made a rule, only one each trip.

The collection grew as he traveled. He built shelves from ceiling to floor on one wall. Lynnie kept them dusted and arranged. She used to walk in the room and pick one for the table by her easy chair. So I can see it on its own, she’d say. Different days she’d have different figures on her little table. Indicators of her thoughts and mood.

In earlier years he’d tried to read them, wanting to know everything in her head. Later the figures became accusatory and more about him than her. Nothing she had done. His own projections. He’d stopped looking.

After she died the cleaning was his job. The handling of each item, the dusting.  It was almost like cleaning his guns.

When Wendell was a toddler he had to lock the room to keep her out. Once she understood the words gentle and careful, he’d let her in. She’d grab one of the figures and sit with it clutched tight to her chest.

At some point the dusting became a comfort, the thing that settled him in. Infusions of Lynnie. His fingers slid over the small surfaces she had touched, and he felt calmed.

He was preparing himself to make a phone call he didn’t really want to make.

“Yes, sir, she’s fine.” Tristan paused, then spoke again. “We haven’t been in touch for several days, but I’m sure she’s okay.”

“Do you think I should go get her?”

“That’s between you and Wendell, sir.”

The boy’s voice was solid. Scott was glad to know Wendell had someone like him in love with her.

“I don’t suppose you could get her to marry you and settle down.” He said it and then regretted the words. No need to rub it in. She was on some fucking cross-country lark. They both knew it.

Tristan cleared his throat. “That’s what made her run off.”

Scott stripped down and lifted weights in the spare bedroom. Went for a run and took a shower. Ordered food in, sat on the front porch and waited for it with a beer in his hand. He kept seeing a brown-haired man on a motorcycle and resisted the urge to sketch the image. He had a bad feeling but blew it off.

Dinner was Thai noodles with a book at the kitchen table.

He resolved himself to the long night ahead. Opened the laptop and checked email. He typed a short one to Wendell.

Let’s take a drive out west, Wendell-girl. I’ve got some time.

He hit send and waited, then checked mail, as though she’d have read it and responded already. He checked about ten times in a row. His finger made circles on the track pad, the cursor spun like a dervish on the screen. Down to the tool bar, Safari, Internet Explorer, click. Scrolled down the bookmarks. Website. Forum. Chat room.

The way he occupied his mind on long lonely nights in Culpeper.

There was a woman he met up with sometimes, screen name of imurdestiny. She looked to be mid-thirties, safely out of the age range of daughters and dead wives. She did have red hair, but he forgave himself that detail. They went private fast and she typed what she was doing, what she would do to him were she with him.

With webcams and computer cameras and speakers, they could have carried it so much further. But he preferred his own images. He leaned back in his chair and read the words popping up in the box and then let his mind make the pictures. Then he emptied that out and traveled to where she was and watched her type. Her red hair was down on her shoulders and she was fully dressed, doing none of the things she was typing on the screen. It was that revelation that got him off.

Scott never knew what those miniatures really were. He assumed I just liked them, their smallness, the tiny details. Over the years he filled the shelves he had built. Every time he went away for work he came home with a new figurine. Each one was its own puzzle. What he had been thinking when he bought it, where he’d been, how long he’d been gone.

I doubt he ever knew it but the shelves, the pieces of wood he’d cut and sanded and stained and rubbed with beeswax, were what I loved best. I frequently stood in the study and ran my fingers along the wood, as if I could summon his touch, finding some way to be with him when he wasn’t home and I had no idea where he was or when he’d be back again.

Later, I used the figures as they accumulated, placing them on the small table by my chair as if the table were a tray full of sand. I made little scenes, and I wrote in my blue notebooks. In my own way I tried to make something of the time alone. Tried to make sense of his absence and our lives and how it had come to be that the man I dreamed up could be found and lost again in such a way that part of me never changed. I was still that little girl waiting for the dream to happen. Still trying to discover what message I was supposed to convey.

At Jessie’s insistence I took up gardening, seriously, continuing the hobby I’d loved as a girl. The flower beds became a new way to mark time. Planting and watching for seedlings to appear, then for plants to mature and bloom.

Easier than waiting for a husband to return.

And there was knitting, which I learned in a group in Culpeper.

There were six of us in the group. Two of the women were older, and willing to teach the rest of us, young married women needing something to do.

Melly and I became obsessed; we often took little trips in search of unusual yarns and needles. Melly was with me when I found the bamboo needles, which became my favorites, and she was my willing accomplice when I bought most of the yarn that’s in my stash.

I keep it in my study, in two big trunks. Skeins and skeins, in colors and textures that make me hold my breath with delight every time I open the lids and look.

Those trunks have become treasure chests to me. Something about having all that yarn makes me deeply happy and content. Melly said it like this: “Some people drink martinis, other people smoke cigarettes. We have our yarn stashes.”

Melly was my best friend in Culpeper. She never pushed me to talk about where Scott was, or why I didn’t know the details of his work. She met him, of course, and seemed to intuit why I was willing to stay home and wait. It made sense to her. I needed someone around me who understood that.

I loved my house. It was just big enough to be roomy, but small enough I could get it clean from one end to the other in a couple of hours.  Which left all my time for knitting and planting and tending my garden beds.

Nights with the windows open so the chill could find its way inside. Scott liked sleeping that way, the two of us made our own warmth beneath the blanket. When he was home I often stayed awake most of the night, watching him and writing in my notebook.

His face so soft in the moonlight. His shoulder makes the shape of a mountain, the shadow of a ridgeline on our bed. His beloved mountains. Why does he go so far away when he loves it here so much?

I was so in love with him it terrified me to ask. I didn’t think I could bear the answer.

Wendell sat on her back steps, reading the new letter that had appeared in her mailbox when she walked out to the road after dinner.

i have had dreams of you for many years now, but it is probably just as well that i wait 'till later to tell them. in all of them you have recognized me. not that that is accurate, or pertinent, or even important, but it is there, and that the dreams have even that much constancy (though there is much more than that) lends credence to this gnosis where you are concerned; that i know you, have known you ever. that we have shared a life, or a great deal of one, at some point.

Just as she got to the end, movement caught her eye. Slowly, carefully, she lifted her head. A nine-banded armadillo paused at the edge of the yard. She knew about armadillos, that they were not hard, as they appeared, but soft, and shed tears if you caught them by the tail. They ate beetles, grasshoppers, centipedes, and bore four genetically identical young, all the same sex. They crossed streams by walking along the bottom. She had longed to see one, and there it was. The little armored creature looked at her briefly and then trotted away, disappeared into the scrubby trees.

She took a drive with the radio turned off, windows open wide so the rush of air blew her hair around and around. Tristan wasn’t the man from her girlhood dream. It was the author of the letters. It only made sense that they were from the one man she’d met since arriving in Texas, but she couldn’t think of any valid reason he would have to lie about writing them.

It was possible there was someone else, perhaps someone was in the Co-op the day she met the other man, and watched, close enough to hear their conversation. She had been so full of thoughts about that man, that day. Anyone could easily have followed her home without notice.

She wondered if she should be scared, but in fact, she wasn’t. There was no sense of danger. Her father had taught her to listen to her gut, and right now her gut only felt intrigued. Not afraid.

The sun was hanging low in the sky, sunset, and she thought briefly of heading down to the Guadalupe riverfront to see the bats fly out from under the bridge. But then that idea got caught up in the crosswind of the front seat and blew right out the passenger window.

On the lonely road by the house, a little mound of something lay on the side. She pressed the brake and pulled over.

An armadillo, its head caved in, one narrow rivulet of blood.

The dream.

For some reason this made her cry.

At the house the laptop was warm and inviting, and her IM to Tristan went through with a little ping.

There have been two anonymous letters in my mailbox today. A man I met in the food co-op.

He IMed right back:

I’ve been by your apartment two days in a row, and your Aunt Jessie has called twice. Where are you?

She paused before typing the next response.

I’m taking a little break from C’ville. What do you think about the letters?

Tristan:

So the gist of this missive is that some guy has the hots for you, what else is new? And you’ve convinced yourself there’s a mystery, something to figure out. The only difference between this and a dozen other times is that you’re in some nameless fucking place and I’m in Charlottesville. Too far away to slide into your bed and make you forget the letter, too far away to make sure this guy, whoever he is, isn’t some pervert. Too far away to insert myself into this little picture. Which is probably why you’ve run off in the first place.

A funny feeling sat on her heart, like a little weight perched there, but she decided to ignore it.

Why are you so grumpy?

Tristan:

I’ve gone hard, Wendell. Not cold but hard. An experiment, my own test. Not unlike yours, the test of leaving, of absence. Mine is this: what happens if I don’t give you what you don’t know you need?

Tristan, come out here. Get in your car and drive. I miss you.

She stopped before typing the next line.

I need you.

His reply came back faster than she thought possible.

No.

Click. She pushed one button and the laptop screen went dark.

She decided to find out more about the man she’d met. She was already on her way to town: the phone number inked onto the wrinkled receipt, purse, cash. She was heading out to a pay phone. She was sure Tristan was emailing more lengthy lectures but she didn’t check, on purpose, because whatever he said would change her intentions in this moment and she was tired tired tired of Tristan’s effect on her intentions.

The man who answered the phone when she dialed the number laughed when she said she was the redhead from Wheatsville Co-op and Sixth Street. He told her his name was Grayson and that he owned an art gallery, which was the number he’d given her and yes, he was there, and perhaps she would like to come on by and go for a drink.

He met her at the door with the same slow lazy drawl from before. “I know a good place for margaritas.”

He locked up and they walked together to his car. He opened the door for her, and bent to tuck the hem of her skirt inside before closing it. He smiled when he started the car. “Listen,” he said. The sound of the engine was low and smooth. He pulled away from the curb.

“Where is this place?”

“By the riverfront, the Cedar Door, which does have one, as a matter of fact, and the best margaritas in town.”

The bar was small and lively, and Grayson found a table on the deck where it was quieter. “You like margaritas, right?”

He ordered them by the shaker and they came with glasses garnished with skewers of green olives.

“I’m glad you decided to call.”

He leaned back a little in his chair. Grayson had crinkly eyes when he smiled, and with his bulk, suddenly reminded her of a Buddha. He talked about his gallery, which specialized in Texan folk art, and about the hill country, which he loved. Every few minutes he took a drink and just before each sip, ran his tongue around the rim of the glass, licking the salt off.

“I got another anonymous letter in my mailbox. Go on and tell me it was you. They’re really poetic. I love them.”

“Wish I’d been the one to write them, then, but I didn’t.”

She watched his face when he said it, and then his hands. From the tone of his voice, to the nonverbal cues, everything fit. She didn’t think he was lying. She still wondered about the letters, but for the moment, Grayson was pretty intriguing himself.

Right after last call he reached across the table and tapped her arm.

“I’ll drive you home. You’ve had too many to drive.”

“You’ve had as many as me.”

“I have the advantage of some weight.”

They crossed the street to the riverfront before getting in his car. It was quiet and the water sloshed slowly along the banks. She wanted to kiss him, but they weren’t standing close enough. She would have to take a step, and that seemed too large a gesture.

“Let’s head on out.”

Once outside Austin, Grayson was, and there was no other word for it, motoring his big brown Jaguar down the road. The Texas night careened past. They had the windows open, Blondie cranked up loud. She had flirted outrageously all night long. It was time to back off a little. Still, she kept thinking of him without clothes, his fleshiness.

He made the turn with no prompt, navigated the long drive, and swung the car in a circle so he was pointed the right way out. “Wendell, it’s been my pleasure.” He held out his hand. “I’ll come get you tomorrow and take you back to your car.”

She watched from the front porch. His taillights flickered in and out of sight as he braked along the curve of the driveway.

She didn’t check email. She climbed in bed and thought of Grayson’s body. He was right to leave. If he’d stayed the whole thing would have been over by now.

Sometime in the middle of the night she awakened for no reason she could fathom, maybe in response to a noise, but by the time she realized she was sitting up and listening it was silent. After a few minutes listening to nothing, she got up and checked her email. There was nothing from Tristan.

It was warm in the house, so she opened the front door to see if there was a breeze, and ended up outside.

The stars were incredible from the front steps. Her father had taught her the constellations when she was little. She still remembered most of them. Sometimes when she got in just the right mood she did something she used to do when he was gone.

Closed her eyes, like this, breathed slow and deep, like this. Emptied her mind and then saw her father.

He was in a room with candles and shadows of sex on the wall. A chair someplace beneath the sky. And then he stood and began to walk.

The path he took was difficult; he had to climb mountains and cross rivers, find his way through forests and tromp through bogs, endure cold and rain and even snow, but none of it slowed him down or stopped him.

The whistle of a bullet that missed. He wiped the dust from his eyes and walked on.

It was a long process, it could take an hour or even two, but in the end she brought him home. He heard her calling him, inside his heart, and he came.

Breakfast was espresso with steamed soymilk and a Luna bar on her back steps. Tristan hadn’t emailed, still. She was pondering this incongruous fact when Grayson called her name from the front yard.

In the light of this day he wasn’t quite as appealing, but there was something about his L.L. Bean hiking shorts and checked shirt, the way he sat on the steps so his thigh touched hers and said no to her offer of coffee.

“You been to Enchanted Rock yet?”

Ten minutes, tops, and instead of going back to town to get her car, they were on the way to this rock in his. Grayson cut into a convenient store parking lot, slammed on brakes about three feet from the front door, and grinned. “Time to stock up.” He bought a cheap Styrofoam cooler and ice, sent her for water and soda and beer, while he walked the aisles grabbing assorted bags of chips, chocolate bars, cheese and crackers. Anything he saw and wanted, apparently.

He set everything within easy reach in the backseat and they climbed in front. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours. Grab me a Coke.”

She ate potato chips until her tongue hurt and then had some cheese. Grayson put on Norah Jones and swiped one hand through his hair. She reached over and cranked the volume.

When they got to the park he angled the Jaguar at the very end of the lot so no one could get too close. She walked ahead and he followed with water bottles stuffed into a navy pack buckled around his waist. The sun was bright and strong, mid-day. Her skin was already pinking up.

“I forgot sunscreen.”

He raised a finger and headed back to the car. “I keep some in the glove box.”

He came back with the sunscreen and she rubbed it on while they walked.

From the car driving in, Enchanted Rock had seemed one big pink mound rising from the earth. But as they approached on foot, it stretched into folds of solid pink, nothing but rock surface. Like walking on a pink planet. Grayson incanted. “Six hundred and some odd acres of pink granite. One of the largest batholiths in the United States.”

They walked past mesquite, which she had already looked up since arriving in Texas, and prickly pear. The bluebonnets. “What’s that?”

Grayson shaded his eyes and followed her gaze. “Agarita. And over there persimmon.”

She stopped to breathe. The heat from the granite made little waves in the sun. “Whoever named it was right, it is enchanted.”

“The Tonkawa Indians. They thought it was haunted. They saw ghost fires at the top. Heard strange moaning sounds late at night. It’s a sacred place. It’s church to me, coming here.”

They spent the day exploring. Grayson was all about comfort. They walked for an hour and a half, enjoying the view of Turkey Peak and a number of runners who seemed to be getting their workout going up and down the granite slope. They went back to the car for shade and refreshment before setting out again. She liked how he watched her. Several times he reached out when he thought she might lose her balance.

“Let me take you to dinner.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Somewhere sinfully expensive.”

She convinced him, easy enough to do, to stay until nightfall and sneak back in to be alone with the rock.

After the sun went down she undressed and lay flat on the granite, stretched long beneath the open night sky. Every part of her touched the rock. The heat seemed to rise through her bones as it left the granite. The cool of evening fell, but still the heat seeped slowly from below, deep in the earth and up through her. She brought her hands together beneath her chin and closed her eyes.

“What are you doing, Wendell?” Grayson leaned close, eyelids crinkled at the corners.

“Praying to the great granite god.”

Nothing but Grayson’s breath on her temple, no words. She was sure it was him. The man from her dreams.

“This is holy ground.”

I knew Scott loved me, it wasn’t that. It was that I wanted more of him than he could give. He always kept a part of himself separate. Held it back. His own fear, not so different from mine perhaps.

Where does he go when he’s not here? Where do you go, Scott? I dreamed last night that he was in a dust storm, trying to find his way home. His head was wrapped against the dust, his eyes covered by a fold of cloth.

Sometimes I get out the atlas and let my fingers roam until they stop of their own accord. Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan. These countries are slightly faded on the page where my fingers have rubbed across them so many times.  I don’t really know if I’m right about him being there. But I think so.

We got married in Williamsburg. Both our parents are gone, so it was just me and Scott, a few friends of his, and Jessie. We got married outdoors, in a little garden. It was beautiful and very quiet.

Scott took me to an inn in the mountains for our honeymoon. We walked and held hands. A train passed below and we stopped to listen. We ate dinner in the dining room; he asked for dessert to be brought to the private porch off our room. We sat side by side and he fed me the cake from his fork. I licked his finger, touched his face.

After awhile I went inside and changed into the white gown I’d bought. It was the fanciest thing I’d ever owned, and when he saw it he smiled. I felt brave wearing that gown, and bold. Scott liked how I shifted, not so shy.  We did things we hadn’t done before. There were no words between us. Just eyes and touches. I don’t know where it was we went together. Someplace that bound him to me in a physical way, a way he needed. It was important. It was something between us that mattered.

It was because of that night that the gown turned into a ritual for his homecomings. I hadn’t expected it to be so hard when he left and came home again, but it was. He seemed gruff sometimes when he first got home, and I felt shy again, shyer even than when we first met, because I didn’t know what it meant. The dark moods.

At some point I realized he just needed something to help him transition, and the white gown became that thing. When he saw it, each time he returned and we went to bed, he made a soft sound deep in his throat. It was the sound of desire and something else, something I still don’t know the name of.

We made love and he told me he’d missed me. He folded me into his smell, his safety. There was no fear with Scott. Some nights when he was gone I heard noises outside. I tried to write things in the notebooks when he was home; paragraphs that might comfort me later, in his absences. Notes about his strength, the hard shell of protection he cast.

Look at him, the muscle of his upper arm, the set of his jaw even while sleeping. The slightest creak of a tree limb in the wind and he raises his head, listening. Lynnie? Where are you? Here, I say, I’m right here. Come back to bed, babe. And he holds a hand out, lifts the blanket so I can crawl back in.

Tell me, I whispered. What? That you’ll always take care of me. Course I will. His voice in the room. The echo that lasts the nights until he comes home again.

When he was home we acted like we were on vacation. It wasn’t ever like what Melly described about her husband, going to work and coming home every day, with routine and assurance. She described it as monotony, something that she wished could change sometimes. She craved excitement and fun.

With Scott, we started all over every time he left and returned. I wore the white gown and it gave me courage. Which settled him in. Then we were all over each other, barely able to stop touching even long enough for one of us to go the bathroom. Like newlyweds, like we had just met and couldn’t get enough. And then he’d have to leave again and it would be terrible, like tearing part of myself away and hugging it goodbye.

And then getting used to being on my own again, for awhile.

“How do you stand it?” Jessie asked one night when she was staying with me. A sister weekend.

“I just do. I don’t really know how.”

Jessie had begged me not to marry him. She worried he wouldn’t be there for me, and now she reminds me that he isn’t, but what Jessie doesn’t know is that it is enough. The time he’s home is enough. Well, almost.

“Couldn’t you have finished college? You wanted to be a therapist. You wanted to do that sandplay thing.”

We were in the study and she took a little blue whale off the shelf and set it down on the table. “Your big wide ocean became a pond, Lynnie.”

I had to laugh at that. “But Jessie, I’m happy here.”

She didn’t believe me. And part of her was right. I wonder sometimes what it would be like to go back, get a graduate degree. Set up an office. There have been times I considered doing just that. But there have been more dreams. I don’t know where they come from. A rowan tree, and ravens.  An armadillo. A little girl crying.

Rebo would say I need to stay here and listen. She might say I was never meant to have my dream. That Jessie took it and made it hers.

Jessie’s about to graduate with a psychology degree. She wants to go to graduate school in a few years.

I watched the tulips today, pink and yellow in the back bed. They are so perfect. I planted those last fall when Scott was gone. The tulips are timepieces. Things I planted when he was gone that come into bloom when he’s home.

Every flower means something. Every tree. I’ve been reading about that, what the different ones mean, the symbols and stories. I planted an apple tree two weeks ago, thinking that by the time it bears fruit maybe Scott will be done with this job.

I asked him tonight, will you ever quit? And he got quiet. Thinking it over. Hell no, he said. I knew the answer before I asked, but it was a relief to finally hear him say it out loud.

Emails.

Aunt Jessie: Honey, you come home as soon as you can. We miss you here.

Wendell missed Aunt Jessie too, but wasn’t planning on going home anytime soon. She’d been waiting half her life to get out of Virginia, dying to be the one who left, the one adventuring, far enough away that no one interfered. A clean canvas.

Tristan: He’s home, he’s calling.

And of course Tris being who he was didn’t tell her father anything. She’d have liked more words from Tristan. He was seeing Kate, she could tell by everything he wasn’t saying. Kate was more his type, blond and willowy and quieter than Wendell. Kate let him be in charge and he loved that. She spoke the old languages, Greek, and he loved that too. She could hear Kate whispering to him while they made love. He connected with Kate, but only part-way, deeper in he was listening for his computer, which talked to him like a beloved assistant. Little pings and sing-song noises that told Tristan he had email, or updates, or whatever it was he was tracking these days.

So he was inside Kate, and moving, and beneath him Kate sensed the part that was not. She whispered in Greek and pulled him in. Kate knew how to stay with Tristan. Kate didn’t have any reason to run away.

Dad: Let’s take a drive out west, Wendell-girl. I’ve got some time.

She just bet he had time, home from wherever it was he’d been, the smell of god knows what in his luggage.

Now he knew how it felt, being left behind.

She had not intended to make that happen, but since it had, she enjoyed it a little. It was true she was angry with him. He had done so much leaving in her life. She knew the empty place that came from her mother. It was contained, in a way, bound by the permanence of death. The empty places that came from her father, though, were fluid. They shifted and moved. She never knew when the emptiness might take her over.

He had tried too hard when he’d come home. They had never enjoyed what she thought of as normal time. The kind of time she had with Aunt Jessie, the kind of time she saw when she spent nights with friends. Her father had either been gone or he had been totally, almost unnaturally, focused on her. There had been no in between.

She wanted him to come after her in Texas, but not quite yet. Truth was, she didn’t think he meant it, he was just calling her bluff and hoping she’d say no. The alternative was to invite him and make the plans and be disappointed when he called at the last minute to say he had to leave the country.

Let him wait, just this once.

There was also an odd email, one that had no subject line, and the sender’s address was a jumble of numbers and letters. Nothing that made sense. She opened the full header and it was incomprehensible. Tristan would know what it was, but he was joined with Kate, no longer listening to the pings of his computer.

She read the email. You looked lovely on that pink rock. There’s another mountain you need to climb. I’ll tell you about it when we meet.

The skin over her left cheekbone tingled when she read the words. She tapped the keyboard and checked email again.

Grayson: I miss you, my inamorata, why don’t you get a phone so we can talk in the evening? Say the word and I’ll bring dinner and a bottle of Scotch that will knock your socks off.

The voices were different. Grayson’s had a lighter tone. He seemed older, the whole Texas thing. The odd juxtaposition between the way he talked and wrote and what he did for a living. Art.

But there were questions. She didn’t really know much about him.

Where was he when he wasn’t with her?

There was so much to find out.

Just bring the Scotch, she typed. And of course, yourself.

Scott hadn’t seen Jess in six months. Had no idea how she knew he’d come home. She stood there on his front porch in a dress that looked so much like Lynnie it made him ache.

“Come on in.”

Her lips were pressed together tight. Her brown hair swung out and fell back on her shoulder when she snapped her head in his direction.

“What are you planning to do about Wendell?”

Same old harridan tone, accusing him of everything he’d ever done and more. All the anger she had that Lynnie died she saved for him. Jess must have been in her late forties, but she could have passed for thirty-something easy. Never married, no children. She worked part-time as a school psychologist and had a private practice on the side. Gave everything she had to Wendell. Who’d left both of them now and Jessie was mad as hell.

“She’s twenty-three years old, Jess, what do you want me to do, ground her?”

He looked at the collar of her dress, the way it lay against her neck. Waited for her to notice. His eyes moved to the book on the coffee table and back to hers, calculated how low to duck if she threw it at him. But when his eyes went back to hers, something was different.

Jess was lonely. Wendell was gone. Culpeper was dead. Hell, hadn’t he spent the night before in a chat room? Jess probably hadn’t had a date in years. She knew too much, all those therapy hours spent listening to the secrets of a small town. He should have been nicer.

“You doing okay, Jess?”

She got it suddenly, her face went red and she stood up. “You’re sitting there feeling sorry for me. Poor little Jessie, she doesn’t have a life. You are so arrogant, Scott.”

She sat back down.

He tried not to smile. He watched her tug at the dress, like she was trying to make it bigger. It showed off her breasts, not like Jess at all.

“I’m sorry I said that. I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s okay.”

She looked mad again.

“You want a soda?”

She tipped her head slightly. “What kind?”

“Coke. The regular kind.”

“Okay.”

He got two Cokes and put one on the coffee table in front of Jessie. She picked it up and they popped the tops at the same time.

“Let’s get back to Wendell.”

“Jess, there’s nothing we can do. She needs space.”

He waited for the comeback but there wasn’t one. Jess sipped her Coke and crossed her legs. He sat further back in the chair. There was something erotic about crossed legs. But this was Jess.

“I’m worried about her, Scott. She’s been restless lately. She isn’t talking to me the way she used to.”

He hadn’t wanted to piss her off. But he thought she needed to hear it. “Jess, maybe she’s just moving on with her life. Maybe you need to do the same.”

Jessie slammed the can on the table. She leaned forward. “What does that mean, Scott? Move on with my life like you have?” She looked around and shook her head. “All you do is avoid it. You come home just long enough to get a Lynnie fix and then you leave again.”

Scott stood up. “Hold on, Jess. You’re out of line.”

She stood up too, and pointed her finger at him. “Don’t take that tone with me. I’m not Lynnie. I don’t take that tone from anyone.”

“Maybe that’s why you can’t get laid.”

Jessie stepped around the coffee table and slapped him. The sting of the slap was a surprise. He wouldn’t have thought she’d hit so hard.

He meant to step back, but his hands went to her waist and they kissed. They could not get close enough, fast enough. Rough, teeth bumping together and her hands pulling at his hair.

He had pushed women away for less than this, for making him feel anything more than the pure sexual release that came from fucking without feeling. Mere exercise. A good workout.

But he didn’t push Jess away. He pulled her close and they kissed a second time. He waited for resistance but she clung on and then simply let go.

“You looked exactly like her in that dress.”

“She loved you more than you deserve.”

He pulled the box from the top of his hall closet and sat it down in the center of the bedroom floor. Circled it with hunger and disdain. What the box held were the few items of Lynnie’s clothing he’d kept when she died, dresses she’d pushed to one side in the closet because they were waiting to be dry-cleaned. The smell of her lingered in the fabric.

Some year back he folded them into a box he shoved to the back of the closet. Another year he moved them to the hallway, top shelf.

Bottom of that box there was a white gown Lynnie wore on their honeymoon and then on his first nights back from time away. There were smells and memories caught up in the folds of the gown that had driven him to do crazy things, a possession of sorts, and he opened the box and dug his fingers down to the bottom. He felt the soft slick folds.

He did something he hadn’t done in a long time. Got out the guns, the ammo, took it all out back and shot. Let ‘er rip, aiming at nothing, just firing for the pure hell of it. Killing off the bad old stuff that haunted him. Lynnie never minded, but Jess put her foot down after Wendell was born.

But it was okay, now there was no one to scare, no curious hands to get into anything. The gunshots rang loudly and echoed. He looked up to the same stars he always saw. The names he’d taught Wendell, how to orient to the wide night yonder. Maybe if he hadn’t taught her all that stuff she wouldn’t have gone to Texas.

He figured she was outside wherever she was, looking up at the night sky same as him. If he looked at the stars and let his vision go blurry he could feel her thoughts a little bit. Got a read on what she was thinking.

The tables were turned, old boy, she left you this time. He wished she were back in Virginia. But it was just him.

In the morning he looked out the back window, half expecting a scattering of corpses after last night’s sortie. And there was something – the yard was dotted with black, an unkindness of ravens, it was called, come to talk about something, the crazy man that stirred them up, the ghosts he shot to kill but missed in the middle of a bad night, oh-dark-thirty.

Scott went hunting this weekend and hid his dirty hunting clothes in the back of the closet. I can’t believe he thought I wouldn’t notice that. As soon as I opened the closet door I smelled the sweat and the musky scent of something – him, the deer. The sharp smell of gun smoke.

We had an argument. He says I can’t wash the clothes because it scares the deer away, the smell of detergent. The thought of Scott shooting a deer in the first place made me cry and then I got madder.

“Why do you have to shoot them anyway?”

He thought it was me being tender-hearted about animals, and I am, some, but it’s more than that. It’s what he does when he’s away that I’m really upset about.

He has moments when he sleeps when his face is peaceful and so still. But often he twitches and jerks and the slightest sound wakes him up. I wish he could sleep like a baby, without the burdens of what he does when he’s away. He never brings it home with words, but it comes out in other ways. I feel the heaviness.  The heartache from other countries.

Scott. This is what I really want to know. Have you killed men? Have you left women without husbands and children without fathers?

“Lynnie, come back to bed.”

When I go to him he’s not only awake but aroused, and even if I’m still mad, a little, it’s impossible not to respond when he touches me. It’s as if what I wrote in the notebook is in the air around us. He wants to erase it by making love. Cancel out the other by doing this. And it works. There’s magic in the tenderness of a body that I know has the power to crush me. By holding back, by being so very gentle, he makes a different song and I can’t help singing it.

It’s part of the dreams I’ve been having, the two of us merged, like we’re one body, like we’re no longer separate. And something happens in that space we make together.

There is a moment when we’re done when I feel something physical. A literal twinge inside. The image of his sperm and my egg and I know, or maybe it’s just hope, that I’m pregnant. The unanswered question. Have you ever killed a baby, Scott? But now he’s made one, in me, and somehow that makes everything better.

He left yesterday and so I am here alone waiting, counting days. Not the days until he comes home again, but the days until my period. Hoping. The possibility of a baby.

Jessie called today to tell me about her new job, and her plans to apply to grad school next year. It’s the first time I didn’t feel sad about not doing that myself. My secret.

Scott called tonight. He has a way of seeing things, a way of knowing. I wonder if it’s part of his work, but either way, it’s become who he is, how he makes his way in the world.

I answer the phone and he says, “There’s something you need to tell me.”

“I’m pregnant, we’re having a baby.” His voice seemed so distant on the phone. I wasn’t sure why. Sometimes the connection is bad, and we never talk for long. But this time it felt like he went someplace else, in his mind, when I told him.

This is the thing about Scott. This is what I think I know about him. He is so tough. But inside, there’s a soft place that he protects. He only opens up when he knows he’s safe, and even then it’s a quick thing. A flash. And then he closes again. I think sometimes the work he does is all about protecting his soft place.

I dreamed about him tonight and now I can’t go back to sleep. He was sleeping with a woman, different than he is with me. He was watching her, his eyes were so dark they glittered. He wanted her. I woke up crying. Part of me has known all along this happens when he’s away. Just write it down, make it real. He sleeps with other women. But he always comes home to you. I’m so torn. I feel hurt and angry, and at the same time I still love him. It doesn’t change that.

He has so many secrets.

He is home and I buried the dream away, put on the white gown, made love to him the way I always do. He brought me a miniature, like always, a little miniature clay pot. The empty vessel.  I think of it filling, as we make love, him filling me, the two of us filling the pot with our love, the baby filling my womb, the baby filling the emptiness between us.

The thought of the baby makes me smile, and I tell him, “Scott, she’s in there growing. Getting ready to be our little girl.”

He rolls over on his back and I run my hands over his belly, all exposed and not soft but hard with muscle. And yet it is exposed. He is a father. He will be a good father. When he’s home.

I have been up knitting for an hour and he’s finally asleep. I discovered that the soft clicking of the bamboo needles is like a lullaby for him. I feel a stirring deep inside, movement, a fluttering. She’s learning how to move. Or that’s how I imagine it.

I want her to be safe, and right now, inside me, she is, and Scott there on the bed. But what about when she’s born and he’s gone? I want her safe. There was something my grandmother used to say. The tree. Rowan. It has protective powers.

When I wake up the back yard is filled with crows. They are calling and marching, and I know it means something but I’m not sure what. In my study I counter it with figurines. The silver soldier, trees, the empty pot. I arrange them on the table by my chair and then I make a wall of rocks, mountains, a protective circle.

“What are you doing?”

Scott comes in and stands beside me. He takes my hands and pulls them to his face.

“There are crows in the yard.”

“I can make them leave if you want. I can shoot the gun in the air.”

“No.”

I’m crying and he hates that. But he uses his thumbs to wipe the tears dry. “Let’s go someplace. Let’s take a little trip.”

When she was young, Wendell pretended Aunt Jessie and her father were married. She invented the wedding in her head. Aunt Jessie wore an aquamarine dress that showed off her gorgeous hair. Her father said during the ceremony that although he would always love her mother, he promised to love Aunt Jessie just as much.

Then Wendell threw baskets of rose petals in a big circle around them and they all went off on a road trip that lasted almost forever. Finally Aunt Jessie got to go camping with them. When her father let her read by the light of the lantern, Aunt Jessie just smiled like she’d known it all along.

It was in high school she gave it up. Aunt Jessie never said anything mean about him, but her anger was clear when he came home and even more so when he went away again. That look she gave him, one big vertical crease in between her eyebrows.

She never got married. She took good care of Wendell. She was the school psychologist for the local schools so they came home together almost every afternoon. Aunt Jessie sat with her while she did homework, then they played. Aunt Jessie put music on and they danced, and later, danced to Wendell’s music with equal enthusiasm. They went for walks, planted flowers, read out loud to one another. The Brontë sisters, Lord of the Rings. And Jane Austen. Which made Wendell scream in frustration but Aunt Jessie loved Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.

Wendell’s memories of life with Aunt Jessie were easy and uncomplicated. There had been arguments, especially when Wendell was fifteen. That had been a tough year, when she discovered that boys and even men were very much within her ability to control and manipulate. Aunt Jessie had tried to intervene, Wendell had offered to stay at her father’s house, alone, because of course he was rarely there.

They had made a truce of sorts, and Aunt Jessie made efforts to update her ideas on things. She took Wendell and her friends to a rock concert and screamed and danced along with them. That was the thing about Aunt Jessie. She went with the flow.

Wendell suspected her aunt had never said a word to her father about that time. He would have said something. It had been a rough year with him, too. He began to notice what she wore and made comments. He seemed to know without one trace of doubt the first time she had sex. He had waited up and she saw it cross his face, from one side to the other, the knowledge that she had changed. She was no longer his little girl.

One night when she still was a little girl her father had sat in Aunt Jessie’s living room, waiting for her to pack a bag. His arrival had been a surprise. Aunt Jessie was mad he didn’t call. First thing he said was “hurry up and we’ll get pizza out on the way home.”

Wendell hovered in the doorway to the living room, knowing she should help with the packing, certain Aunt Jessie needed a hug, and possibly an apology as well, since the chicken pot pie she had made from scratch was sitting on the kitchen table getting cold right that minute.

If she went to help Aunt Jessie she would have to leave him sitting there, straight and formal, winking and shifting his eyes to the small package on the coffee table. He always brought something, little things like the ones in her mother’s study at home.

Aunt Jessie left the living room.

She heard her opening and closing drawers in the kitchen and meant to go help but he held out his arms and instead she went to him, climbed on his lap and let him wrap her up in his warm smell. She held on tight. Maybe this time he wouldn’t go away again.

Grayson appeared at the front door with a bottle of scotch and they sat out back and sipped in the dark. His breath was audible and then warm as he came close. The aroma of scotch and heat from his body, moist lips that found their way to hers like a secret thought come to fruition. He shuddered, a soft expression of greed, as her hands slipped from his shoulders downward. He pushed her gently away. He was making her wait and she wasn’t used to waiting.

“Easy, girl.”

It was only after he was gone she realized he was right.

But she got antsy when he left. Like now, she was tempted to go to Sixth Street. She could still catch the last set at any number of clubs, and maybe she’d run into the anonymous letter writer, but really, she’d had too much scotch to drive.

Still.

Online, no emails from Tristan, none from her dad, a new one from Aunt Jessie.

Honey, I miss you so much. I saw your dad and he’s missing you too. I’m just tired and I miss you and of course, I’m worried some. Tristan says you’re okay, he is such a nice young man. But you know that, don’t you? Be nice to him. They’re not all like that.

Aunt Jessie had been drinking white wine. Every once in a while she got frisky and had a third glass. Wendell was sure she’d written that email while listening to the Dixie Chicks and singing out loud.

By the next night she was dying to see Grayson again but couldn’t track him down. The gallery was closed, he wasn’t responding to email, and it was only about one minute earlier she’d realized she didn’t have his home phone number.

She sent three frantic and increasingly demanding emails and tossed back the rest of the scotch he’d left. Ten-thirty on a Thursday night, no email from Tristan, none from Grayson. She still thought he was behind the letters and the email she’d gotten. If she left to go somewhere he might come and then she’d miss him.

She was pacing, it was getting bad when she did that.

Sixth Street then. She spun the car’s tires in the dirt driveway, to hell with the men she already knew. She would go find a new one.

Grayson’s headlights swept into her eyes as he started the turn into the drive, then skidded to a stop when he saw her car. He got out and leaned against her Toyota, waited until she climbed onto the hood to sit beside him before he spoke.

“You were going downtown.” His voice sprawled with interest, not how Tristan would say it, accusingly, but like he was thinking of the possibilities, imagining outcomes.

“You didn’t answer my emails.” She nudged him with her foot. “And I don’t even have your number at home.”

For a moment he just stood quiet and then he turned his head. “I haven’t given it to you because you can’t call there.”

It didn’t even occur to her what he meant, until he reached over and touched her hand. She looked past him, then up to the sky. “Damn, Grayson. You’re married?”

He let that sit between them for a minute. She let it sit too, but then her curiosity got the better of her. “Do you love your wife?”

He laughed. “I wish it were as simple as that, whether I loved her or not.”

“It is that simple.”

“No, Wendell, it isn’t. You haven’t been there yet and you don’t know.”

The stars were strewn across the sky. It was a gorgeous night. “Look, Grayson, what are you doing here? It can’t be sex, we haven’t even done that.”

He snorted. “Darlin’, I can get as much of that as I want at home. Don’t assume my wife is a cold withholding bitch and I’m looking to be bedded down. That’s not it.” He paused. “Okay, well, it’s part of it. Not all.”

“What, then?” Grayson didn’t know this and she wasn’t going to tell him, but he was even sexier now that she knew.

“It’s waking up beside someone who no longer has the power to make you go weak in the knees. If I was twenty-five and we weren’t married, I’d say I was sorry and leave. But I’m not and we are, and not only that, she’s the mother of my children. What am I supposed to do?”

His voice dropped and his face sagged. Her heartbeat increased, the look on his face was so frightening. She didn’t ever want to feel the way he was feeling right that second.

“Do I make you weak in the knees?”

He lay her back on the hood of the car, ran his hands beneath her blouse, then to her skirt and up her thighs.

“Don’t stop. Just make me want you.”

And so he did. Grayson made her want him on the hood of the Toyota, stars blinking on velvet sky, and then he left.

The first thing she did was go inside and Google him. Buried in gallery pages she found exactly what he hadn’t given, his address and home phone number. Damn him, he would not make her want him and leave. He would not say she made him weak in the knees and then go home to his wife.

The pay phone receiver was slick and oily, as though rubbed with polish, or worse things she didn’t want to think about. When it rang she didn’t have the impulse to hang up; instead, she waited to hear her voice. She wanted to know what his wife sounded like.

“Hello?”

Her voice wasn’t twangy like Grayson’s. It was a sweet, hopeful voice, as though she had been waiting all her life for one phenomenal phone call and this might be it.

She repeated the greeting a second time, a third, then sat silent for a moment before hanging up. It surprised Wendell that in the space between her hellos she wanted to ask questions.

How did he act when he woke up in the morning? What did he say earlier that evening when he had come from Wendell’s? Did he seem guilty? Nonchalant?

But of course she said none of those things.

She had the address, She had the Yahoo directions that would take her to his doorstep. She did what he had no idea she would do - drove to his house in the middle of the night. First she passed it by slowly. It was a historic home, close to the street, a tiny lamp on the front porch alongside a chair, but he wasn’t in it. Down the street she turned around and parked across from his front door.

The Jaguar was still warm from Grayson’s return, the engine creaks were audible through the open windows of her car. There was a light upstairs, their bedroom, perhaps the wife’s questioning, hopeful look. Had he gone home to his wife for real, still warm with passion from kissing Wendell? She assumed his wife wanted his passion, hoped for it, but she didn’t imagine he fulfilled it. In her mind, he crawled into bed and wrestled with the smell of her that lingered on his hands.

Scott kept picking up the telephone and hitting the speed-dial for Jessie. Is Wendell there, was what he thought he’d say. I’m on my way to get her. Funny how his mind was screwing with him. Rationalizing the act.

Truth was he just wanted to hear Jessie’s voice.

He hit the one on the keypad and waited.

“Hello?”

The question in her voice made him consider hanging up, but he figured she might have caller ID by now and she’d know it was him.

“Jess.”

He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Why are you calling, Scott?”

“Just checking in.”  It occurred to him he could ask if she’d heard from Wendell.

“She’d call you if she called me.” Jess paused. “You know she keeps things even that way.”

“So you’re not mad about what happened.”

“It just happened. We both know- “

“Know what?”

“Nothing, Scott. I have to go now.”

He hung up. It was just as well. The rule. Never more than once. Nothing he couldn’t give up.

That evening he headed into town and drove past Jessie’s house. There she was, standing on her front porch. He didn’t even know how he got to that side of Culpeper. She stood there and glared so he drove on by.

Downtown to the library to find some reading material, anything that would pass the time. Nonfiction, fiction, he didn’t care. The liquor store, the grocery store. He found all kinds of reasons why he came to town. Let’s just forget that little detour he made down Jessie’s street. Let that go.

Last stop the video store. Three movies would get him through one more night of hell if the bourbon didn’t knock him out first.

A red-haired woman smiled over the DVD case she was holding, then bumped into him around the corner in the middle of new releases. “Can you recommend something?”  She pulled her hair forward over one shoulder and drew her fingers through it.

He held up the three he was holding. “I have a thing for old action films. You must be wanting something current.”

She smiled. “Oh, action sounds good to me.”

He resisted the impulse to invite her over. Small town gossip. Jess.

Except that’s one thing he could say for Jess, she never let her opinion of him slip in public. She had remained silent on that count all these years.

He slapped a twenty on the counter and grabbed the change and the bag. Was unlocking his truck when the woman came up behind him.

“Want some company?”

Gossip, worse than that, this red-haired chick calling and god forbid, stopping by whenever she got the notion. But hey, it was a long lonely night ahead.

What the hell. “Follow me,” he told her and got in his truck.

Didn’t check for a ring in the video store, didn’t matter much except here in Culpeper, where married was probably the safer of the alternatives. Not married and she’d be looking to get that way. On the other hand, married might mean her irate husband in his front yard, shotgun in hand.

What did it mean, anyway? Marriage.

For Lynnie and Scott it had been unspoken. They had never once discussed the rules of engagement. She wanted him only and that made him love her, but on his end he couldn’t last the separations. It was nothing to do with love, just a hunger he wouldn’t deny.

Goddamn it. The thought of Lynnie still cold-cocked him. The way they held on to one another. How much she mattered. Sometimes he wondered if it was that, the simple fact that he loved her so much, that made him want to leave. A religion that both saved him and pushed him to sin. Making love to Lynnie had been his form of prayer.

Halfway home he realized he didn’t want this woman in Lynnie’s house. He pulled over to tell her.

“How about we go to your place instead?”

“That won’t work. Motel?”

He shook his head no.

She pretended to glower but took out a pen and jotted her phone number on the back of a dry cleaning ticket. “In case you change your mind.”

He thought of her the rest of the way home. Those red lips, the soft skin beneath her breasts. The way she’d touch his rough places. But before he got to the best part, he was in his driveway. Faced off by the climbing rose Lynnie had planted and trained along the porch rail. It had taken over this year.

Two ham and cheese sandwiches on rye with mustard and horseradish, one dark Heineken. Stack of library books beside his chair. DVD cued up. Forgot to check email so he balanced the plate on the arm of the chair and headed to the study. Nothing, just a howdy from a guy he worked with. No I love you Daddy I am dying to go on a road trip with you. No word from his little girl at all.

Detour back to the kitchen for a glass and the bourbon.

Welcome to the real jungle. Stalked by nothing more potent than the wished for sound of his daughter’s voice. The rustle of Lynnie’s dress as she walked down the hall. Come on to bed, dear soul, she used to say.

He always went.

The next day he drove over to Charlottesville and knocked on Wendell’s apartment door. He could see she wasn’t there but had the impulse to knock anyway. He drove the familiar streets and cruised UV’s campus. The memories were all mixed up now. Scott young and looking for a way to prove himself. He had held Lynnie’s hand across restaurant tables and moved Wendell into her dorm as a freshman. You can go now, daddy, she’d said, way before he was ready to leave, but he did as she asked.

Some things he couldn’t sort out anymore, like that place with the plants in the window. Did he eat there with Lynnie or Wendell? Somehow youth and fatherhood had rolled together.

He didn’t ponder this much but he was a middle-aged man. His strength had peaked.  He was able to pull it out when he was balls to the wall, but the day was coming. He knew that.

He drove around Charlottesville pining over a woman who died so many years ago anyone would think he’d be done grieving.

Wendell was all he had left, and she was gone too, wouldn’t answer emails, wouldn’t settle down and let him have a life.

What kind of life have you given her?

That sarcastic voice would be Jess, pointing out that he expected everyone he loved to wait, let him go when he needed to and be there smiling when he returned. And up until a few days ago he’d have had his own sarcastic response, go to hell, Jess.

Now he thought of her body, how she felt pressed up next to him. Her eyes close. They’d had years to finesse the dynamic that kept them at odds and all it took to knock that askew was Wendell leaving.

He did not want this mess in his life. The thought of Jess in his head. What if they gave in to it? They’d pay, later. He’d pay when she turned him into someone he didn’t want to be. He could feel it starting up.

He wouldn’t sit back and wait for it. Even as the dark thoughts churned, he was on his way home to pack his truck and make a phone call or two. Get the hell out of this god-forsaken little town.

He’s off walking a trail to try and find a rowan seedling, so we can plant it in the back yard. Rebo said rowan trees protect. Our baby needs a rowan tree to grow with her and keep her safe.

He digs the hole and I plant the seedling. We water it and then sit together, holding hands. All I want is safety. For the baby, for Scott. For this little tree. I want the sense of many years ahead, time rolling forward. Scott with grey hair, relaxed and home, retired.

The little girl inside me moves, and I put his hand on my belly. “It’s not big enough in there for her. She needs a bigger place to be.”

“She’ll be running around out here soon enough.” Scott smiles. For a moment I see it through his eyes, the daughter, the wife, the grassy back yard. I see what it means to him, and how even when he’s gone, when he’s holding a gun and doing god knows what, this is what anchors him. This is what keeps him safe and brings him back.

Jessie clucks her tongue at me and shakes her head. “Have you thought what this will mean? You’ll raise this child alone, Lynnie. He won’t ever be there for you. Either of you.”

It’s hard keeping Jessie’s concern at bay, harder not letting her doubts color my own vision. But the fact is, she doesn’t understand. She sees it all from the outside.

“I made this choice, Jessie. I love him. Maybe one day he’ll stop and stay home. But for now, this is what I chose.”

“Have you ever asked him to quit?”

I don’t dare tell her that I did, the one time, and he said no. “I won’t ask him to quit what he does. He does it because he needs to, and I won’t get in the way of that.”

Jessie sighs and looks away.

“Tell me about you. Are you seeing anyone?”

“Not really.”

Jessie is only two years younger than me, but she has formed much of what she thinks about men based on my decisions. She sees what I chose and she hates it. On two levels, first that I found someone I love so much. And that he has turned out to be so different from what we both expected. Scott is not the Prince Charming we envisioned when we were girls. And yet I chose him anyway. Jessie has decided to do without.

Some nights when Scott’s away I lie in bed and close my eyes, as though he’s there with me. Not like I’m imagining him lying beside me, but like his energy has joined with mine, wrapped around my body like a blanket.

Sometimes we have conversations. I think something and he responds. I’ve never mentioned it to Jessie, or even Scott, for fear they’d both think I’m going a little crazy here. And also because I don’t want to lose this odd way of connection. If I can feel Scott with me, when he’s gone, even if I have no idea where he is or when he plans to return, I can get by. And maybe he feels it too.

Today I found a rocking chair in an antique store in town. I’d been looking for the right one. The wood is solid and strong. Already I am sitting in the chair, knitted throw over my knees, rocking this little girl to sleep. When she moves inside, I go to the chair and sing to her until she quiets.

There’s been a sense of urgency inside me this week, the very strong desire to nurture the baby, to find ways of reassuring her now, before she’s even born. I woke up just now dreaming of numbers, actual numbers counting down, and it scared me for no good reason.

I wish Scott were home. Even a telephone call would be a comfort.

I have baby clothes and diapers. Everything is ready. Scott called to say he’ll be here, he promised. Jessie met me for lunch today in Culpeper and we talked about names. Wendell. That’s her first name. And I suppose if I’m wrong about this and she turns out to be a he, the name would still work.

Today when I got home I took out the memory boxes and went through them. I arranged them in sequence. Started filling the empty one. Things to do with the baby. A few photos of me, big with her inside. Lists and some other things.

I dusted all the figurines yesterday, and checked on the white tulips I planted in the fall. There’s no way to know if they’re safe in that bed, but I keep standing there, looking for signs of moles and voles.

Scott will be angry about this part but I bought a lock box for his ammunition. No shooting in the back yard with the baby here. He does that when he’s upset, takes the guns and the ammunition out back and shoots over the trees. I have never known what purpose that serves for him, but it calms him. Only once was I concerned, and that was the last time he came home.

Jack Roland, from down the road, had stopped by and mowed the grass for me, and for some reason it sent Scott over the edge when he found out. That time, with the guns, we argued. I had the terrible thought that if Jack Roland happened to drive up Scott would turn and shoot him down.

Awake again in the wee hours writing in my blue notebook. This time the dream was about babies. Sisters. I don’t know if they were me and Jessie, or the baby Wendell and another baby girl I might have. One was a bit older than the other, and I was telling Scott to take care of them.

He was very upset. And then the dream shifted. He was with a woman. I couldn’t see her face. He was standing between us, holding his head in both hands, squeezing, like he had a headache. I told him it was okay. I forgave him.

I know there are other women. It’s okay. I don’t like it, but I know why he does it. Do you hear this, Scott? I understand why you’re doing it.

It was so quiet. Wendell had driven past Grayson’s house two times already and the Jaguar was there, parked for the evening so far as she could tell, while the lamplight through the front windows looked warm and inviting. His home. Wife and children. She kept saying that to herself, but it just made her mad.

There were no new emails except one about a job she didn’t want. A dig back in Virginia.

She took a beer from the fridge and got into a warm bath with bubbles and a candle. She let the silence sit with her. After awhile she got out and put on a T-shirt, padded down the hallway and started switching off lamps. It was then she saw the wash of headlights across the living room wall. Grayson had come to visit.

She peeled off the shirt again and let it drop to the floor as he walked in.

“They’ve all gone to her mother’s house in Houston.”

He kissed her across the room, one step at a time, and took his shirt off, his pants, both of them staring into the other’s eyes, intent on seizing this moment, this time.

Grayson had finally fallen asleep. She traced the edge of his hairline with one finger. He looked like a child, hair off his face, eyelids flickering, little jerks that revealed deep sleep, REM, dreaming of who knows what. She lifted his heavy hand, kissed his limp fingers in turn.

There was a scratching sound at the window. It was the masked bandit, but she didn’t need to look. She lay back and let the raccoon do his thing. Tumbled into sleep like Rip Van Winkle with Grayson beside her.

She didn’t sleep long. He was awake, watching her in the darkness. She felt his eyes more than she could see them.

“Grayson, have you done this before?”

He straddled her and fell forward, buried his face in her hair. “Once.”

“What was she like?”

“Bottle blond and skinny as hell. The kind of girl you wouldn’t like.”

“Why did you pick her?”

“Because she was there.”

She didn’t answer, but thought back to the day at the co-op, when he’d helped her at the bulk food bin. He had picked her the same way, because she was there, nothing more than that. And yet that habit, his penchant for picking women he could never commit to, hadn’t put Wendell off in the slightest.

His hopeful wife, the home and family he said he couldn’t leave. His wife had no idea who he was, the man he became with Wendell.  In her mind, he took back a shell when he went home to his wife. His real self stayed with her.

“Wendell.”

He whispered her name, stopped doing the thing that made her crazy. Pulled her body to his. All she felt then was comfort and safety, like Aunt Jessie and her father and the picture of her mother with her hand caressing through the skin of her abdomen, all rolled into one.

“Don’t go.”

“I’m not leaving, Wendell.” His whispered voice was soft and full of breath.

Grayson took her to Hippie Hollow, a surprise, he whispered loudly, as they parked and wrestled canvas bags and a cooler up the winding path, through the brush and over rocks. They crested the hill and walked down the rocky cliff toward the water where he picked a spot and spread the huge jewel-colored towels she’d brought, cobalt blue with lemon yellow, turquoise with deep orange. The bright colors seemed almost garish in that setting, soft putty colored rock that terraced down to the water. There were trees and shade. They had their own little cove.

Her gauze shirt fell in one easy motion and she unbuttoned her chino shorts and let them drop too. Her swimsuit was black against her pale skin.

Grayson watched and started to speak.

“Yes, I put on sunscreen, head to toe.”

In front of them motorboats trolled past, beyond the area marked off for swimmers.  Grayson opened the cooler and made gin and tonics in plastic cups.

“This is another one of my favorite places,” he said.

“Do you bring her here?”

He put down his cup.  “No. We have our routine. There are places we go. Not the places I’m showing you.”

They walked down the hill to the edge of the lake and lowered themselves into the water, waded out far enough to cool off.

Grayson left her in the water to make more drinks. He called down to her. “What should we do tonight? We don’t have to go hear music.”

She came out to get a towel. Grayson handed her the drink and after she took a sip, he pulled it back and set it aside.

“You’re so quiet today.” He kissed her shoulder. “Let’s go watch the bats after dinner. Have you seen them yet?”

“No. I heard about them though.”

After dinner they drove to the river downtown and parked, then walked along the edge to a bridge that spanned the banks. Grayson said a huge colony of bats lived beneath the bridge from spring until fall, when they went back to Mexico.

Near sunset they flew out in a cloud, a swirling magic carpet of black that whipped and moved like a single piece of fabric through the air.

Grayson held her hand until the bats disappeared.

Late in the night they got out of bed to sit together on the back steps. She was determined they would see an armadillo, but none had arrived.

“One could still come.” She sighed and leaned her head on Grayson’s shoulder.

“I’ve seen them before, you know.”

“Not this one. She’s special.”

Grayson pulled her even closer to him. “Tell me about your work. It must be interesting, finding things from the past.”

“I’ve been reading up on archaeology in Texas. Maybe I’ll find something here. I don’t know.”

“Is it exciting when you find something?”

“To me it is. It takes a long time though. Everything has to be done carefully and you keep notes and sketches on everything you do. It’s not like taking a shovel and digging until you hit something hard.”

He laughed. “No, I imagine it’s not like that.”

She woke in a sweat, middle of the night panic: where is he?

It wasn’t immediately clear which he she meant.

She wrapped around the body beside her like her limbs were a heavy blanket, weighted with fear, and determination that he would not leave. She felt the bulk of him and knew it was Grayson, not Tristan, and she decided. She would not let him go.

Something was chirping next to her. Grayson wasn’t there, and when she shifted in the bed she discovered his cell phone ringing. He’d left it on the pillow next to her.

“Sweet girl,” he said when she answered.

“You left without waking me up.”

“You were sleeping so soundly.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I’m still weak in the knees, darlin’, let me take you dancing this afternoon.”

“Tonight, after the sun sets.”

He sighed so loudly the exhalation of his breath passed through the telephone. The idea of his warm air in her ear made her want him.

“I can’t Wendell, they’re coming home tonight.”

She hated that he wouldn’t just walk out of there. Already, she wanted him to throw everything away for her. She wanted to matter more than they did. She slid her finger around the keypad and accidentally depressed the end button. Click. Grayson was gone.

That evening she pressed talk and then the seven digits that led directly to Grayson’s other life. His wife answered. The same hopeful voice. What was she hoping for? A sojourn from being tolerated? That he step up to the plate and end the farce of a marriage they had?  But she hung up.

Wendell sat up late into the night thinking of her father. In the vespertine quiet of her living room, the photograph sat on the end table, the two of them together, a year ago outside the house in Culpeper. He was taller, with tawny brown hair and gray eyes. A fine handsome face that looked hard but was really gentle when you knew him.

He was broad-shouldered and strong, and although his hairline receded ever so slightly and his forehead was creased, he looked younger than he was. His arms were around her shoulders. She leaned into him. The photo was a frozen moment of perfection, but it misstated the truth. Five minutes after the photo was taken he took off again, his secret life. She didn’t see him again for six months.

When she was sixteen her father was home and she had driven the ancient Honda Civic from Aunt Jessie’s to show off what she’d bought with the money he’d transferred to her account, sixteenth birthday, that he of course missed due to work.

First, he didn’t like the car, thought it was too small to be safe. Mumbled something about Volvos and crash tests. Then narrowed his eyes at her skirt, not even trying to disguise his contempt.

“Your ass is barely covered, Wendell. Exactly what kind of message are you trying to convey, wearing that thing?”

She started to ask what he was doing checking out her ass, but Josh, the boyfriend at the time, was coming over later and she didn’t want to start things up.

When she came home he had the guns out, and a bottle of Glenmorangie. She rolled her eyes. “Why are you drunk and cleaning guns? Aunt Jessie would freak.”

“She’s got nothing to say about what I do.”

He looked at her and exhaled, a long wisping sound that made her cringe beneath her clothing. Suddenly she felt every inch of her body, the pull of fabric in different places. His face was twisted and odd, and she pushed, because maybe then he’d fall apart or explode. Maybe in that aftermath something would finally be revealed.

“You want to hear about what girls and boys do on Saturday nights in the back seats of cars?”

He stood up with his gun and the bottle of Scotch and headed to the back yard, where she watched him fire round after round into the night sky.

The car was nearly silent as she pressed the pedal and careened softly along the sandy drive. On the road, the headlights flooded the potholes, small chasms made sinister by the darkness. The noise of the tires increased as she went faster. No music, just the rush of air and the whisper of her own voice. “Be there, please be home.”

Her father didn’t sleep much, if he was there he’d answer. She still had Grayson’s cell phone at the house, she could have called from there, but it was better her dad didn’t get that number. She urged the rings of the pay phone, one, two, three, prayed he picked up before the fourth, because that was when his voicemail would if he didn’t.

“This is Scott, leave a message.”

“Daddy, where are you? I love you.”

She tried his cell, which rang twice, then broke up and cut off.  He was not an easy man to get hold of.

She replaced the handset of the pay phone and turned back to the car. He would know by the area code where she was, and that was enough for now. She could call Aunt Jessie, too, since she’d given this much away, but Aunt Jessie would freak, no matter what Wendell said she’d know something was wrong. She would stand in the hall in her long flannel nightgown and pace until the phone cord pulled her back, one way and then the other, because Aunt Jessie had never bought a cordless phone. She would fret and worry and the emails would start.

There was one thing left to do. Wendell lay across the hood of her car, warm from the engine, and let the light of the stars speak. If she saw it in her mind, he’d come. He could find her. Her daddy could find her anywhere, anytime, any place. She closed her eyes and there he was, driving in his truck. Making his way across the miles, straight to her. He was on his way.

Back at home she found a note stuck inside the screen door. It was folded carefully into a small square, as notes had been in high school. She took it to the sofa and sat in the dark, opening it fold by fold. She smoothed it out on the coffee table, ironed it flat with the palm of one hand, and then switched on the lamp to read.

I know what you were doing on the car earlier. It’s called remote viewing. We need to breathe the same air.

That was all the note said, two brief sentences written with a dull soft pencil. She followed the curves and loops of the cursive script with her eyes, feeling a tiny lurch in her stomach as though she were riding a roller coaster.

In the bedroom, she crawled between the sheets and lay still, imagining the halcyon hush of air moving in and out of the mysterious man’s lungs. A metronome, marking time. A whispered lullaby to her restless thoughts.

She closed her eyes and imagined sleep. The mysterious man seemed to be there with her, waking her from sleep – not actual sleep, but the sleep of not knowing – with the air from his lungs, a soft and tiny wind that tousled her hair and cooled her forehead. The room was dark when she opened her eyes, but even so she saw his, blue with slivers of gray, long eyelashes, the smooth contour of his nose, which he lowered until it touched hers.

He pinned her, arms above her head. The way they touched was nothing she had felt before, real but not, a potent mix of knowing and not knowing. The sharp edge of his intention, a primitive thing, making her his own.

Shhh, he might have said if he’d actually been real, and there, and even though he was neither, she listened.

Scott drove down 77 with Van Morrison at close to full volume. To the mountains, expecting the usual protocol, images of Lynnie, but what came instead was Jess. Brown hair hanging in his face, and yes, she did look like Lynnie at first, but then she was nothing more than the woman who had just kissed him and fucked up all his rules. His cyclone fencing around the sore places.

He took an exit and got on the parkway. The first overlook, he pulled off and closed his eyes. His head was full. He thought about the seedling Lynnie planted before Wendell was born. Rowan. Protective powers. Maybe he’d find one now and take it to Wendell’s apartment to plant. Tell her the story. He wished he could tell her something profound. But he didn’t know what to say.

After Lynnie died he’d stopped going to the mountains. Hadn’t been since the one time years ago when he’d tried to take Wendell. They lasted a long and terrible night. There were mountain ranges overseas, but the landscape of other countries didn’t affect him the way these hills did. The terrain where he had formed as a young man.

When she had died, when he’d buried her, he didn’t cry. He held the infant Wendell in the crook of his arm, wrapped in a moss green blanket Lynnie knitted. Wendell was wearing a tiny hat Lynnie made, stitched with purple flowers. He endured the minister’s words. Listened impatiently to the prayer spoken in a halting voice. Had suffered the sympathetic glances from everyone who came. He had been too young and too proud to understand or even care how grief worked.

He refused himself the comfort of these mountains when she died. The one thing he knew would wring the sadness out. And his grief was still heavy. It seeped out little by little like the trickle of an underground spring.

The distant hills ahead reminded him of her. Made him think he smelled her beside him. He supposed this was what it meant to be haunted.

The road began to ascend and curved like a snake.

Exhaustion set in, even over top of the adrenaline, the sure sign of middle age, and fuck that, anyway.

He needed twenty minutes, just enough to keep him this side of sleep deprivation. He pulled over, shut off the part of his brain that stayed on high alert. He was like a machine, Had trained himself to be. Sleep came quickly.

He saw himself the strange way people do sometimes in dreams, from above, in the desert of a middle Eastern country, lying flat out in a tent. Mouth dry, eyes itchy, wishing like hell he had a shower and clean clothes. Three fingers of good scotch. In the tent, in the dream, he considered quitting the life, but he knew by the time he’d stayed home a few weeks the need would surface. He’d wait impatiently for the next call.

A mission, a puzzle. Something he could work to an end.

Inside the dream he was uneasy and tears stung his chapped, sandy face. He slid out of the tent and looked up to the sky. The stars were blurred. The panorama shifted with each blink.

When he woke, it felt like someone had died.

He was unnerved. Grabbed his cell phone. Wendell had called, area code 512, which he thought was Austin, Texas. So he was right about south and west. He hit redial and waited. There was no answer.

He centered his mind, like sand to a creek bottom after someone passed through. When the image came clear he was sure. She was fine. He was free to drive on.

His body was a collection of aches, pangs, odd gurglings he was used to ignoring. Left eyelid twitched like some kind of goddamn signal. He checked the rearview, side mirrors, scanned the road ahead. Got a take on the position of the sun. He did these things out of habit. These machinations were a comfort.

Breathed in what was blooming and that, finally, was what did it. The smell of mountain air in springtime hit hard. Then a wave from the top down, like water falling.

Without meaning to he ex-filled. Stopped the car, threw open the door, heaved his tired old body out.

Lynnie.

She was an enigma in certain ways. With Lynnie it had been like this: one week of hot can’t get enough of you Scott sex. He veered off the trail and leaned against a birch tree. Lynnie at the door with nothing on but the white gown. Climbing on top of him. Her soft mouth waking him in the middle of the night. The pull of her lips against his hardness, the wet of her saliva leaving trails up and down.

What followed the passion was a week of irritation and easy tears, when nothing he did was quite right. Every little thing made her cry. Those were the times he found her on the phone with Jess, shoulders rolled inward as though protecting a secret, whispering how he’d done this wrong or that wrong and hanging up when he came in the room. The time she told him to get out of the house after she found his stash of hunting clothes in the closet. He hadn’t washed it because the perfume of laundry detergent fucked with the deer. They smelled it a mile away. And then when he came home with roses in apology, she broke down and cried. He stood like a fool, looking at her. Looking at the ground. Moments like that he had no clue what she wanted or needed.

There was time she kept to herself, not out of anger but just her own singular way of being. Knitting in the chair by the living room window, bamboo needles whispering to one another. Placid little smiles as he passed by. Dinners left with notes that said she’d gone for a walk and would be home soon. Hugs upon return that bespoke secret rendezvous with nothing more than her own sweet self in the woods. Lynnie waving from the garden while he watched from the back porch. Seemingly subdued sex that was possibly the most intense of any they ever had, abbreviated by her silent leave-takings in the night to sit in the light of one candle and write in her blue notebook.

Times when she clung like a little girl, when she seemed to need them linked physically. Nights she talked for hours straight about anything and everything, details and musings he marveled at and remembered with pleasure while on long trips in other countries.

The word mystery had a lesser-known meaning: one’s occupation or profession, one’s calling. That’s what Lynnie was to him.

He picked up a fallen branch and hit the birch’s trunk hard. The force when it hit the trunk jolted him to the roots of his teeth. He stepped back and swung again. Harder, teeth set, until he cleaved the heavy branch in two.

The forest inhaled and exhaled, insects buzzed, and somewhere hidden deep in camouflage the likes of which he tried to emulate but never quite managed to such a perfect degree, the wildlife tracked circles around him. The crazy hurting bastard who had it in for that fifty-year old birch tree.

He headed back to the truck and drove on. Beside him the glimmer of the weeping rocks that hugged the curves. Mountains drew the truth out of him.

He put both windows down and focused. The truck responded to his coaxings, gas, brake, steering. Every loose joint in that machine made itself known, assorted creaks and engine chirps blended with the calls of birds.

There were no turnarounds.

Every time he drove through a tunnel he left a little of himself behind. The bad old stuff. He felt the loss of the tiny weight. The newfound lightness made him want to turn around and do it again.

End of the day he secured a campsite and pitched his tent. The ranger on duty when he went to buy firewood was a woman. She flirted when she took his money. He noted the muscle in her forearm. In a different country this would have led to something, but he said thank you and left.

On the way back, a grassy spot beneath a massive oak tree beckoned. He put the wood aside and sat. Took in the cooler air. In the evenings the mountains inhaled. The low-lying clouds crept in on the strength of the inhalation and lengthened into hollows. This reminded him of dreams. Wisdom he couldn’t touch.

To his left a waxing moon rose above the mountain. The three-quarter circle of white was pale and wispy, but gained depth as the sun set to his right. The sky to that side was pink and orange.

He took in these phenomena with more than the usual awe.

The past twenty-odd years he had taken on nothing, and nothing was what he’d ended up with.

He loved his daughter, but it was possible to love someone with all your heart while at the same time remaining distant. His chest tightened.

Lynnie had anchored him. Now she was telling him to let go.

The sun set as the waxing moon rose. A growing thing, not yet fully formed. Mysterious and luminous.

Something not yet his to have.

They all love me for the wrong reasons.

Jessie because of what I’ve given up. Scott because I wait for him, not asking for anything. I’ve never pushed him to be different, to make a deeper commitment.

This is wrong. They should love me because of what I DO, who I AM. I plan to change this, after the baby is born. I plan to DO THINGS.

The last month of the pregnancy is rough. My blood pressure is high. I’m swelling, retaining fluid, and they’ve put me on bed rest, pre-eclampsia they call it. Scott is home with me, thank god, and he sits with me for hours a day, going crazy because he’s not at work, but trying hard to mask that.

He is obsessed suddenly with making sketches. He has sealed envelopes all over the house. He makes sketches and then opens the envelopes. Something to do with work, he says, and I let it go because that’s what I do. With Scott I let things go. And now I’m too distracted by my body to really care about his job.

It’s impossible to get comfortable. Every part of me feels tight, skin stretched beyond its capacity. Everything feels pushed to the limit.

Scott has to take me in every week for tests, to monitor the blood pressure. This trip the doctor says it’s time. “We need to induce labor,” he says. “We need to get this baby out.”

Scott talks to him in the hallway and the doctor says my body can’t get well until the baby is born. That my baby, little Wendell, is almost toxic to me right now.

This feels like nonsense. She is not what’s making me sick. But I’m ready for her to be here. I’m ready to have her in my arms.

A young doctor breaks my water with something that looks eerily like a buttonhook. It’s barbaric, and I resist for several minutes while Scott talks me into it. “They need to do this, Lynnie. She’ll be fine. He won’t touch her with the instrument.”

All I can imagine is that thing poking into her space, her private, safe little place. What if he screws up and pokes her in the eye?

But he doesn’t. He does admit that he nicked her scalp and I get angry, but it could have been so much worse. Scott hurries him away from the bed.

The IV is a nightmare. The nurse can’t get the needle in a vein, I’m so swollen. She tries so many times I start to cry, and Scott tells her to find someone more experienced. “It’s going to be okay.” His voice is low and melodic, like he’s singing to me.

“How do you know so much about all this?” It has struck me that he understands what they’re doing, and he knows some of the language the doctors speak. I have the irrational idea suddenly that all along Scott has been a doctor, secretly, and I’ve just never known it.

“We learn some basic medic stuff for work.” It’s all he says, and of course I don’t ask for more.

Why don’t I ask for more? Why have I never asked him for more?

Just when I’m getting ready to, a new needle person walks in and gets it in, first try. I’m so relieved. My face is itchy from all the tears that have dried on my cheeks.

We are waiting now, they started a drip with the IV. Medicine that will make the contractions begin. She’s on her way.

When they start, I’m determined to manage the birth, to ease her out, but it doesn’t work. The contractions are terrible, and I can’t keep control. I fall apart in the middle of each one. The nurse shakes her head at Scott.

The doctor comes in and convinces me to do an epidural. I immediately start crying. “I can’t take another needle.” Scott rubs my arm with his fingers.

“It will be fine. I’ll talk you through it.”

One more contraction is all it takes to convince me. “Fine,” I say when it’s over. “Do the epidural.”

Scott holds my hand and it occurs to me how weak I am compared to him. He must have seen so many terrible things. I can’t make it through the birth of our baby without falling apart.

But then he pulls away, when I say the words. “This must be nothing compared to what you’ve done.” He looks alarmed, closes himself away for a minute. And I know he isn’t as strong as I give him credit for.

The thing is, and suddenly it is so clear, is that my job since marrying Scott, the real reason I couldn’t finish school and work, has been to be there for him, an anchor, the thing that brings him home. I don’t know science well but I’m the force that keeps him on his right path. He veers away but me being here has always brought him back. I keep him on his right path.

I need the blue notebook, this needs to go in the notebook.

They assure me that now the contractions will be totally manageable. “It won’t be long now,” the nurse says, and I feel like smacking her. She keeps looking at Scott and I’ve been watching to see if he looks back. But he doesn’t.

When the next contraction begins I almost smile. They have promised it will be easy now. But then it starts, and I realize something is terribly wrong. It’s like a wall of fire, literal flame, is rolling down my body, from head to toe, but slowly, painfully, as the contraction unfolds.

In between yelling and the nurse telling me to be quiet, Scott seems confused. He is shaken, things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to. It surprises me, that in between the contractions and the chaos of pain, there’s this space of clarity. This quiet, clear space, like what I think of as zen.

If I go, who will anchor him? He has to be here for the baby, because she will live through this. I feel that. She needs him to take care of her.

The doctor comes back, with yet another doctor, who says they’ve never seen anything like this before. They decide to remove the epidural. “You must be having some rare reaction to the drug we use.”

I don’t know. I just want her to be born. I want her home, where I can hold her. I don’t want to be in the hospital.

Scott takes my hand. He has little beads of sweat on his forehead. I want to wipe them off for him but I can’t reach that far.

Another contraction starts and this time the doctor helps. Scott’s eyes are wide, all I can think of is how much he sees. Too much. He has always seen more than one man can hold. And yet he goes looking for more.

When I look down there is a baby, but there is blood. So much blood. Too much blood.

If only I could talk to Scott. I can’t get the words out. Nothing comes out.

Grayson floated beside her, his belly rising above the water like Buddha’s might. His skin was smooth and the ends of his hair fanned out around his head in the cold, cold water.

She had discovered Barton Springs on her own, and Grayson agreed to meet there even though it was dangerous. People he knew could show up, he said, which made her feel lucky, like he was picking her over what might happen. He was risking something.

They bobbed happily next to one another, a little giddy after the break since their two days together. After a few minutes his hand found hers and braided fingers beneath the water’s surface while the sun warmed their faces. In the center of the pool, in full view of half of Austin, they pretended they were strangers who just happened to be floating side by side.

She kept looking at his body, which almost anyone would find laughable, because it wasn’t lean or muscled. It was in fact nothing spectacular.

But for some reason he was tantalizing and not-quite-hers, a man she had to lure from his domestic un-bliss, like handling explosives, dangerous and addictive.

They changed from bathing suits to dry clothing but remained damp underneath the cool cotton. She wore an aubergine T-shirt and a denim skirt. He was dressed in more L.L. Bean attire, terra cotta and stone, which suited his brown hair and warm russet skin. Sitting in Grayson’s car in the parking lot, both smitten with the thought of what came next. He caressed her fingers, licked the blue-green veins on her wrist.

“Would you kiss me, for god’s sake, and then take me to a hotel or something?”

He relaxed, his head fell back against the headrest. He was making her pursue him, after two hours of holding hands under the water.  Grayson was the kind of man who could kiss for hours without taking a breath or rushing to the next thing. He was in no hurry.

He tasted of pepper. She thought briefly of Cruella De Ville in 101 Dalmatians, a favorite childhood book. The sharp hot taste was good, something to flavor the foreplay, something to file away for later, the full-bodied Grayson and his peppery kiss.

In the hotel room he poured two glasses of scotch, the 20-year old Laphroaig they had stopped to buy on the way. That he took things so slow was part of what pulled her to him, the deliberate yet decadent way he moved, lazy smile, the ever-so-intricate way he played out his line.

He brought her the scotch and they sipped from a distance of about twelve inches, face to face.

“You are a sight for sore eyes.” He stepped back and took her in, head to toe. Before he could blink she set the glass down on the coffee table and peeled away her shirt. Grayson went soft around the edges, backed up and sat on the little sofa, waited.

“Not so fast, darlin’.”

She brought her hands around again, let the green lace bra stay put, lifted her arms and stretched tall like a tree so the muscles in her abdomen showed to full advantage. The waistband of her skirt slid down a little, below the navel. He took another sip from his glass and made one low sound.

Let loose, the skirt fell to the floor.

“Come over here, girl.”

When Grayson dropped her back at her car, she was tempted all over again by Barton Springs. Grabbed her still wet suit from the back of the passenger seat and headed to the dressing room to change.

The water was cool and deep; she went under straight as an arrow. When her feet touched the edge of rock near the bottom, she fixed them briefly and pushed off. Looking up, light through water, cleansed and made pure as she broke through, back to air and the warmth of the sun, back to the surface.

She treaded water slowly, eyes closed, until her legs got tired. Rolled into a back float, vulnerable to the water lapping and the occasional splash from the middle school boys playing nearby.

Rolled and swam, the strong, steady stroke her father had taught her many years ago. The two of them swimming mini-laps in the local pool where she’d learned. The moms in the chairs by the snack bar, all watching from behind their sunglasses, whispering and giggling when he did something silly. She knew even at that young age that women wanted him. Wendell loved walking past them on their way to his truck, her hand in his, sure that he was hers, that he would never go for women like that.

When her swimming got stronger he took her to lakes and they set goals, built endurance, tested themselves against increasing distance in waters of varying temperatures. He taught her water safety and rescue techniques. He dove beneath the murky surface and grabbed her ankles to make her scream and laugh, then held her close. She remembered the feel of his wet muscled skin.

An early September when she was 20, at the ocean off Duck, North Carolina. She was skipping two days of class at UV to spend time with her father before he left the country.

Her friend Pam had gone along and flirted with him shamelessly from the moment they arrived, telling Wendell on the sly how handsome he was.

Pam joined them in the cold waist-deep water and proceeded to splash him until he lured her further out and dove for her ankles. When he came up for air, face slick with salt water and then splitting into a big grin, Pam lunged at him. For a moment there was too much contact between them, her breasts crushed against his chest, his face inches away from hers. Something was happening, and neither of them did a thing to stop it.

Wendell struck out for deeper water and slid forward into a long lap, parallel to shore. He called out for her to wait and caught up to her in moments. The sun had been blinding when she glanced back toward his voice. He pulled alongside and then cut into her path. Suddenly she and her father were both treading water, facing off.

“Why’d you take off like that?”

She wasn’t sure he could tell she was crying; the salt water tears mixed with the ocean, the cure for anything, Isak Dinesen said, was salt water, sweat, tears, or the sea.

“You and Pam.”

“Pam’s a child.”

“She’s the same age as me.”

“You’re a child, too.”

“I’m a woman.”

As if for emphasis, the swell of the sea pushed them close. Her body grazed his, and almost imperceptibly, they both stiffened against the fickle sea that suddenly seemed determined to pull them apart.

It happened quickly, too powerful to be named, even in thought. They slipped into motion, side by side, swimming to the point of exhaustion, and they allowed the tide to wash them in to shore.

She dove down into the Texas spring, deep, came up slowly through the water. Blew bubbles that rose, her own breath captured inside, and once again, opened her eyes to the light above, the muted shimmer of sun, the feeling of being washed clean, of weightlessness. Whatever she needed to she had left below, on the craggy rock bottom of Barton Springs.

What she needed was a dig, from the beginning: the moving of stones and debris, the layers of earth, peeling away the years. The tiny gestures of hands held very still. Uncovering old things and dead things. No words, no feelings, no hearts involved.

She settled on the top step out back and did her usual scan for the armadillo. She had decided it was a she, and that sometime, whenever armadillos gave birth, she would have four identical babies close by and Wendell would watch as they paraded in armadillo formation through the back yard.

The armadillo didn’t come. It was too early still. The cup of Prince of Wales tea, Tristan’s personal favorite, steamed on the steps. If she hadn’t been out of vanilla soymilk, Wendell would have added that to it. Sacrilege, Tris would have announced. And she would have smirked while he drank his plain.

The tea was perfect. She let the screen door flap behind her, checked email. Nothing from her dad or Grayson. She had called Grayson three times in the past hour, with no success. He seemed to have disappeared.

One from Aunt Jessie.

Has your dad called? He was in town but now he seems to be gone and I need to ask him something. I can’t get him on his cell. How are you? When are you coming home? You are so vague in your notes, Wendell, I want a definite answer. J

Aunt Jessie loved the little emoticons and used them frequently. She’d stopped using all caps awhile back, after someone told her it was rude.

Aunt Jessie, I love you, and no, I haven’t heard from Daddy. I’m not sure when I’m coming back. It’s been so good getting out of Virginia, you should try it yourself.

Paused, sipped some tea.

Maybe you’d meet a nice man, someplace else. You should find one, you’re so beautiful. There just aren’t that many options in Culpeper.

Her father flashed into her thoughts, the way he’d always avoided the women in Culpeper when she was growing up. The men who called Aunt Jessie but she never accepted their invitations.

Have you ever listened to the Cowboy Junkies? I think you’d like them. Maybe an alternative to the Dixie Chicks. Hugs, Wendell

There was nothing to do, so she grabbed fifty dollars and headed to town in search of thrift store décor for her bedroom.

The junk shop on South Lamar yielded the first treasure: a magenta sheet set in softly worn cotton. A permanent fixture yard sale by the side of the road had a quilt she was sure was handmade, a rainbow of brightly colored squares in bold prints. The woman said fifty dollars when asked the price but quickly halved that, and with a few more words, came down to ten.

In a tiny shop on Sixth Street she found a Matisse print on foam board, ragged around the edges but perfect for the bedroom wall. The light through the window would bring it to life.

At the bakery next door she ordered coffee and a sticky bun and sat outside in the sun. Grayson’s gallery was not far away, but she pushed that thought out of her head and got a second coffee to go.

Last stop, the dollar store for a bright blue throw rug. She blew the last fifteen dollars on candles.

Back at home she made a burrito with beans and cheese and ate it standing in the bedroom. It took fifteen minutes to put the sheets and quilts on, hang the poster, and set the candles out. The late afternoon sun streamed through the window and illuminated Matisse just the way she’d imagined.

Down the hall, the old refrigerator creaked and shimmied as the ancient motor turned. Other than that it was quiet. There were no city sounds, nothing to bump up against when her mind went still.

All she wanted was the low crackle of Grayson’s tires on the long drive, the hum as he sang the remains of whatever song was on the radio when he switched the engine off.

The sound of his voice wrapping around her name.

When she checked email, there was nothing. His name, Grayson Ward, did not slide into her inbox as she’d come to expect, which surprised her. The lack of contact after making love. He was breathless when they parted, said he couldn’t bear the time until they met again. But there was nothing.

The phone at the gallery went straight to voicemail, so she dialed his home number, torn. Whose voice did she want to hear? His, full of lust, or hers, which by then had surely lost hope? She couldn’t imagine his wife still not knowing, she must have sensed his disloyalty.

When his wife answered, cheerful, the hello bursting forth like the chirp of a bird, it was startling. Why was she so happy? What had happened to make her that way?

The Jaguar was not in his driveway so Wendell glided by the house three times. In daylight she saw his wife’s car, a dove-gray SUV, big, with tinted windows, and imagined her packing it with children, a dog, lunches and books and canvas bags filled with toys. Her love for them. The family, what they added up to, all together. And yet Wendell still wanted Grayson.

The gallery was quiet when she walked in. A quiet ping in the back announced her arrival, and he came out. Loose brown slacks, shirt tucked in, hair mussed over the edge of the collar. He looked annoyed, then neutral.

“Are we alone?”

He nodded, and she walked past him through the door to the office. Contemporary furniture: black desk, leather chair, small sofa and ottoman. The room felt formal and cool, not at all like Grayson. She unbuttoned her shirt and slid out of the jeans.

“You haven’t called.”

“Christ, Wendell. Put your clothes on.”

His voice was crisp. Business-like. Maybe he wasn’t comfortable in the office, in the daytime.

“Get us a hotel room tonight.”

He shook his head. “Obligations at home.”

“Then here.”

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

“I wanted to see you.”

He kissed her, but not with pleasure. Now he just wanted to shut her up.

“Tell me what she’s like.”

“Let’s go get a drink.”

When they left the gallery he followed her to the Cedar Door, bought two margarita shakers, handed over his skewer of olives.

“Why are you staying with her?”

“I have to go in five minutes. Here’s a twenty for a cab. Don’t drive home.”

“What’s wrong, Grayson? Why are you acting this way?”

He let her kiss his fingers. Let her dip them one by one into her drink and suck them clean of salt and tequila. But then he left. He looked back before he walked out, one small glimpse that tried to answer her question, but it wasn’t enough.

One more shaker later she called his house. She didn’t accept his leaving, that he’d said no after so many days of saying yes.

His wife answered, not hopeful, not happy, this time she was crying. “Hello,” she said. Her voice broken and ragged.

Wendell hadn’t meant to do this. All she wanted was him. But something about his wife, her voice. Partly, Wendell wanted to know her. Be known by her.

“I’m sorry.” It came out low and melodic, almost sexy, not how she’d intended to sound at all.

“It’s her.” His wife shrieked at him. “Talk to her. She’s waiting.”

Wendell heard Grayson’s footsteps, intuited the change of hands, heard his breath. He hung up.

Late in the night, after the Cedar Door closed, she made the drive home. Slowly, keeping the car between the right lines on the road, windows down but no radio, because the songs were either too distracting or too sad.

She braked for a possum, came to a complete stop for a rabbit that froze in the outer edge of the headlights’ glare, too terrified to move the few inches away to the safety of darkness.

When she got home she went straight to her bed, lit the many candles, and stretched out in the heat of the evening. She was drunk, but awake, and after a few minutes she thought she heard measured footsteps on the porch, in the living room, down the hall.

She thought briefly it might be Grayson. Or the writer of the notes, the mysterious man. Maybe it was time to meet him.

She got up and blew out all the candles, leaving little clouds of smoke all over the room. She waited. But no one came.

It was time to find that rowan seedling for Wendell. Scott knew he would have to climb to get it. He couldn’t recall what it looked like.

He had lit out of Culpeper so fast he didn’t think to check. There was a book on Virginia trees at the house. Bottom corner, left-hand side in the den. Wendell had needed it for a school project one year. That damned leaf collection. Could they tape the leaves to white paper and use a hole punch and string to hold the pages together? Could they press the leaves between waxed paper and stick them in a report folder?

Hell, no, he had to call the man that owned the hardware store at home on a Sunday night and pay him extra to open up long enough to buy the stuff to build a display case.

“All the other kids will have them,” Jess had said, “and if you’d been here when you were supposed to be you would have had time to get this done before now.”

She was standing behind him in her kitchen while he got Wendell a drink of water from the sink. Wendell was crying over the display case she didn’t have.

“Jess, couldn’t you have taken care of this?” He had tried to be nice, but damn, he had just rolled into town from three months in a village where men’s heads were used as soccer balls and replaced with fresh ones without the bat of an eye. Buzkashi, they called it. A traditional Afghan game given a new spin by the Taliban.

“I got the book for her. I walked all over this town and took two Saturdays to drive to the country in search of leaves. We spent hours identifying and preparing them. And it was fun. But you’re here now, this is your piece to do.”

So he had made the call, got the supplies, built the case. Wendell watched and ate cookies Jess had sent home with her.

He was so pissed off at both of them that weekend. They neither cared nor appreciated him. His work. He couldn’t reconcile the importance of a display case for dead leaves with what he’d seen in Afghanistan.

Now suddenly this small thing seemed important. The seedling.

He wasn’t sure he could find it without that book.

He heaved a deep sigh like it was truly a pain in the ass, going back to Culpeper. But nevertheless, he turned the truck around and headed home.

It might not go the way he wanted.

He forced himself to stop by the house. Recovered the tree book and found the picture. Rowan, aka mountain ash, pinnate leaves with white flowers and scarlet berries. Stuffed it in the mess of junk in the front seat and backed out. Gunned it just to hear the engine roar. There was something off with the piston.

Her house was twenty minutes from his if he drove slow. He bounced his palm on the steering wheel. Popped the cassette in and right back out again. Goddamn it, he was acting like this mattered.

He missed the turn to Jessie’s and wheeled around in the road to go back. The truck reared up over the curb. There was no leaving now. She’d likely already heard him. Spotted him through the window.

What to say had not occurred to him. He walked the distance between truck and front door trying to summon the right words. She had snapdragons in pots along the steps, pink and yellow. He raised his hand to knock. She liked the doorbell better.

Her face when she opened the door was like a girl’s. It had been awhile since he’d seen Jess this flustered.

“Scott. Come on in.”

He’d expected her to make him sit on the front porch.

“How’ve you been?”

She didn’t answer right off.

“Fine. I heard from Wendell. She sent an email, not much but at least she’s okay.”

“I heard from her too, cell phone. She’s in Austin, Texas.”

“Texas? What in the world is she doing down there?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

She motioned him to the sofa. “I’ll get us something to drink.” She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine.

She had on sweatpants and a baggy blue T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She smoothed a runaway strand behind one ear.

“Jess.”

“I want to say something.”

She looked at him and started to speak. Her face was red.

“Jess.” He set the glass down and reached for her arm across the edge of the table. Pulled her to the sofa. She buried her face in his neck.

That’s how it started. Her breath against his skin. The shyness. All he’d meant to do was comfort her.

Neither of them said it out loud. Years of putting it off. She’d given enough of her life to Wendell. It’s your turn, Jess. He should have said it out loud but didn’t.

One minute they were kissing again, the next they pulled back, the distance measured in centimeters. Her eyelashes brushed his face and he moved slightly so his nose touched her forehead.

“I could fix you dinner later.” She slid away from him.

When he got back to Jessie’s she let him in and hurried to the kitchen. He followed. “Can I do anything?”

Her hands were in a bowl rubbing olive oil on meat.

“Could you get me a hairband off my dresser?”

He’d never seen her bedroom. It wasn’t what he expected. Plain sheets and a wool blanket. A recliner with a reading lamp. He looked on the dresser and found a small pile of elastic bands, brown and black and gold. He picked up one of the gold ones and took it to the kitchen.

“You went away earlier this week.”

“I took a drive up to the mountains.”

“Alone?”

“Solo trip.” He could have said more. He needed a goddamn guidebook what to do. He let more out. “I was looking for a rowan seedling for Wendell.”

Jess shook her head. “That was sweet, but she doesn’t need the tree. She needs you to talk to her. About Lynnie.”

She looked down when she said it. Her way of backing off something she knew would put up a wall.

His cell phone rang and he took it in the living room. Business call. Jess was still working on dinner while he talked. He heard the radio going, NPR, and layered back of that the whap of a wooden spoon against a bowl. Then the sound of a good knife slicing vegetables on a cutting board. Her voice singing a line or two from some song.

“Scott?”

He finished the call. In the kitchen she spooned something good-tasting into his mouth.

“The marinade for the steak.” She handed over a glass of Scotch. Neat, the way he liked. Single malt. He was sure she bought it for him.

They laughed at something on the radio while she simmered vegetables. Handed him the platter of steaks and sent him out to the deck to grill them. No instructions, no hovering, just him and the grill.

The huff of gas and flame. The sizzle of meat. He saw her through the window. Her hair fell forward and she waved and smiled.

After dinner she looked at him funny and he realized she meant for him to go home.

Neither of them knew how to say goodbye. He stood by her front door like an idiot while she fiddled with a flower in the vase by the door.

“You want to get lunch tomorrow? One?”

She nodded and he left.

It felt good to drive the truck. Stones playing, windows down. The slight whine in the left rear axle muffled his favorite guitar riff.

The house was lonely. He grabbed a beer and the TV remote. Nothing on, so he checked email. No word from Wendell. Several from work. One from a woman he shouldn’t have given his email address to. He deleted it and then got pissed off. He’d deleted it because of Jess.

He clicked over to Firefox, then eBay. Typed in hunting knives. Found a good one, stainless steel blade, hand-carved hardwood handle, leather case. Fancy. Clicked the Buy It Now button. For some reason this made him feel better. He typed in something else. Collectibles. Antique compass in rosewood box. Pewter and wood photo album. Full of photographs of a woman that reminded him of Lynnie. Or Jess. Or both. Gettysburg Hotchkiss shell.

Before he knew it he’d Bought It Now to the tune of eighteen hundred bucks. And discovered that not only could you buy gear on eBay, you could buy the goddamned animals, Texas Hill Country Hunt Trip, $4000. Bison, deer, boar, anything you wanted. Guaranteed kill. Discounted taxidermy.

Why was it the models for the hunting gear were always women? Holsters strapped to bare thighs, lipsticked mouths slightly open. Legs spread, damn. He clicked over to the chat room he’d sworn off and then closed the laptop.

Like a coyote circling, he wandered the empty house. Walked out and got the mail. Bills, catalogs. Grabbed another beer and flipped through William-Sonoma while he finished off an entire package of salami. Another belatedly addressed catalog for Lynnie. How the hell did he get her name off mailing lists of catalogs that didn’t even exist when she was alive? Fucking pots and pans. He almost tossed the catalog, but then the Wüsthof knife set caught his eye. Jess would love that. He folded back the page and then threw the catalog across the room.

This was what had happened when he met Lynnie. She got in his head and he couldn’t get her out again.

Three a.m. and he was wide awake. Not unusual. He woke every hour anyway to do his routine auditory scan. Ice maker dumping ice. Hoot owl in the side yard. When he couldn’t get back to sleep he read and watched movies. Sometimes cleaned hunting gear, which almost never got used any more, but he liked it ready anyway.

He watched the first ten minutes of Blackhawk Down and did the most difficult crossword puzzle in the book. Logged in to the board and buzzed it up with the guys. Lifted weights. He was still wired. Outside, the night air smelled good. A run might settle him.

He jogged down the middle of the road. There was no one out, except maybe the paper carrier. He’d hear the truck a mile away. His left knee ached a little but it was worse without the exercise.

It was dark when he stopped to wipe the sweat out of his eyes with his T-shirt. He took a breath and started running again.

If he timed it right he’d see the sun rise behind the roof just as he got home.

Jess was all dressed up when he got to her house. She had her hair pulled back again. The soft angles of her cheekbones were more exposed.

He’d never stood by the front door like this. He put his hands in his pockets and waited for her to direct him to sit down.

She had her purse and they just hovered there together.

He was close enough to notice the fine thin lines at the outer corners of her eyes. Her bottom lip had a vertical crack in the center. She hadn’t covered it with lipstick, but pulled a tin of something clear from the purse and put it on with her index finger. It smelled of mint and made him want to lick her lips.

She lingered in the doorway and held back a little. He’d forgotten this part. You had to keep starting all over again when you were at the beginning. You lost ground in the absences. If she was this shy in so short a time, what would it be like when he was gone six months?

He spoke. “I didn’t sleep last night.”

Her eyes cut off to the side. “Me either.”

He slid a hand down her arm. She relaxed a little and asked, “Are you hungry?”

Not really. What he wanted was to figure this out. What it was they were doing. But he nodded and they walked out to the truck.

She laughed when she opened the door. “Scott! You cleaned it out.”

He shrugged but liked that she noticed.

They had lunch in the overpriced restaurant in town. The one with linen napkins and too much silverware. Then stopped by the library and checked out books on her card. She touched his hand when they walked to the ice cream shop. Offered her cone to him and wiped a smudge of chocolate off his chin.

Back in the truck, she asked if they could stop by the grocery store. “I need a few things for dinner,” she said.

He followed her along the store aisles. He wished he was pushing the cart. She looked back at him once and smiled. “Should I get more ice cream?”

“Maybe we’ve had enough for today.”

He put her bags in the back of the truck.

“Jessie!”

A woman’s voice from a few cars down caught them before they could get in and pull away. Jess looked at him with a warning. Be nice.

“Ellen, hi.”

The woman looked older than Jess but he suspected it was someone she’d known for years. They hugged briefly and he held out his hand to Ellen.

“Ellen, you remember Scott.”

Ellen’s eyes got big and her mouth opened a little. Then she drew her face back together. “Oh my god – I haven’t seen you in years. Maybe not since the funeral.” She stopped suddenly and shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

But she didn’t seem sorry – her face seemed almost eager for a response. He started to speak but Jess put her hand on his back, where Ellen couldn’t see.

“Ellen is the guidance counselor at the school.” Jess kept going. “She knew Wendell, of course, and now we’re in book club together.”

“And how is Wendell?”

Scott and Jessie both responded at the same moment. “Wendell is fine.”

Ellen’s eyebrows shot up and she stepped back.

“I see.” Ellen continued. “I saw Joni Hathaway’s son’s car outside your office last week. It’s about time that boy got some therapy.”

Scott thought he could see something riling up in Jess. She had that look, he knew it well. She was about to say something sharp. He cut her off.

“Well, we should get going, Ellen. Nice to see you again.”

He got in the truck and cranked it, hoping the engine noise would make further talk difficult. Jessie waved her hand to Ellen and got in.

“Book club is going to be very interesting this week.” Jess sighed and he pulled out of the parking lot. He hadn’t realized the extent of Jessie’s position here. Therapist in a small town. Everyone in everyone else’s business.

“Have you ever wanted to live someplace bigger?”

She laughed. “Only about once a week.”

At the corner he turned left like he would to go home, then realized his mistake. He circled the block to turn around, but before he could get back to the main road, she undid her seat belt and slid over to kiss him.

Whispered, “Let’s find someplace to park.”

“You want to go parking?”

“May as well. They’ll all be talking about us anyway.”

“Good thing we didn’t buy ice cream at the store.”

He knew exactly where to go. When they got there he cut the engine but left the radio on. She slid closer on the seat. It took him about ten seconds to get out from behind the steering wheel and Jess to slide into his lap. They remained somewhat controlled for about thirty more seconds.

You thought you’d left youth behind and then something happened to trigger the boy in you, or the girl. Otherwise, why would either one of them want to make out in the cramped front seat of his truck when they both had comfortable well-sized beds to go home to?

In his head time had rolled backward, to a lazy summer afternoon with this woman, rewound to a girl, and they had no place else to go. Not even the cover of darkness, because it was still light out and would be for hours. In their youthful haste they couldn’t wait that long, so there they were, parked on a dirt road so far back in the woods there was no chance of interruption. Only his desire and hers. How far they’d decide to go before one of them, likely her, stopped.

Of course this was no longer applicable, the stopping part. There would be no consequence, except maybe the gossip of a few bored women, but in his dream they should stop and they would. It was the not knowing who or when or where that made him so hot.

He pulled back.

She rubbed her lips and asked, “Would you have stopped if we were in high school?”

“I don’t know, Jess. Back then I had hormones raging and I didn’t have a bum knee that hurts like hell right now from being cramped up in this truck.”

She kissed him. “Stay at my place tonight.”

They stripped down in her living room. Jess, in a moment’s return to shyness, pulled his arm and looked toward the hallway. She was giving him back his youth. He picked her up and carried her down the hall.

She was heavier than he expected. He hadn’t borne a woman’s weight this way in many years. Jessie’s arms fit around his neck and the crook of her knees rested perfectly on his forearm. She smelled good. It was a good weight to carry.

The kind of women he’d been with either walked ahead of him or behind. Mostly they just did it where they were. Against the sink in a dirty bathroom, on top of crumpled clothing on a cot behind a thin gauze curtain. In the back seat of a government issued vehicle.

There was a moment he thought she was going to curl up in the blanket and hide, but she opened her arms to him.

They didn’t speak, which was just as well since he had no words. He had to go slow. With Jess it was different. This was not the mindless fucking he had done all these years. He had to mean it. She would know the difference.

They sought out one another’s warm places: the hollows that lay on either side of Jess’s belly, his chest, where she nuzzled and pressed her soft face.

She raised her head and looked at him. In the silence she bloomed from the inside out. This was not a motion he could see, exactly, nothing a camera could capture on film. But its force pulled him closer.

To Jess it seemed to come easily. She unfolded but he felt split open. He resisted. She touched her fingers to his lips. Rose beneath him and said his name. “Scott.”

“You can have me.”

Jess slid her mouth along the skin behind his ear.

“Scott,” she whispered, “we should have done this years ago.”

Each time he awoke through the night he listened for trouble and heard Jess breathing softly beside him. Her body in the bed was neither clingy nor distant. She was simply there. The sounds of her house were different than his. A car passed by and then near dawn the toilet ran for ten seconds and stopped. Needed adjusting. Maybe he’d do it in the morning.

The last hour he passed lying awake next to her. This very thing made her different. Her body relaxed beneath the sheets, hand tucked under the edge of the pillow.  He considered what he’d say when she opened her eyes. If there was a way to leave without waking her he’d be tempted to do it. Not to get away from her so much as to avoid the awkwardness he expected.

She stirred and her eyes opened, clear and alert right off. She smiled and reached for him. Her hand on his shoulder. “Let’s drive someplace today. Charlottesville, or maybe Norfolk. Find some place good to eat.”

“I need to stay close to home today.”

“Why? You’re off, right?”

She pulled the sheet up over both of them.

“You know I’m never really off with this job.”

She sighed. “At least you’re not leaving the country. That would be worse. How about tonight, then, here. I’ll fix something special for dinner.”

He pulled the sheet down. She was waiting for an answer.

“I need to get to Williamsburg.”

He dismissed the fact that he’d just lied to her. He was not expected at work. In fact, he did have some time off. But suddenly he was thinking of leaving the country.

He knew she wouldn’t ask. Everyone in his life was used to not asking. He had a built-in excuse to live this way. Leave when he wanted. Stay gone as long as he wanted. No questions asked.

Her face slackened. She seemed sad, and then resigned. “Lynnie lived with this all those years. And then Wendell.” She whipped the sheet off and stood up. She didn’t say it but he knew what she meant. And now me.

He watched her get clothes from her closet and put them on. He remained naked on the bed while she did this, so she could be dressed first. He didn’t want to leave her naked. This too made things different.

When she’d tucked the t-shirt into her pants and pulled the brush through her hair, he stood up and got his own clothes.

She waited for him and when he slid his shoes on, she walked down the hall to the living room. He couldn’t think of a good reason to sit down, but he didn’t want to leave either. For a moment they both stood and it wasn’t as awkward as he’d expected.

She spoke first. “Bye, Scott.”

He watched her closely to see if she might be moving toward him. He’d been trained to watch body movements, even subtle ones. He knew exactly what to look for. But her body was still. No muscle tense, no slight tilt in his direction.

He wanted a clue that she wanted to touch him. Without one he wouldn’t go to her to say goodbye.

He met her eyes and then walked out. Closed the door behind him easy, backed out the driveway in his truck and accelerated slowly. He drove to his house without once going over the speed limit. Walked to his back door like it was any other day and let himself in.

When he got inside and closed the door, the doorknob hit the wall so hard it left a round dent a quarter-inch deep. He drove back toward Jessie’s house two times, but turned around before he got there. The whole mess had gone to hell.

There are things I need to say before I go.

In my mind I was walking to the rowan tree with its berries and ravens, I had almost reached it, but then I remembered. I have to go back.

To Scott, holding my hand in this hospital room crowded with doctor and nurses, to the little girl, Wendell, who tried so hard to be born. She was connected by the umbilical cord, pumping, our blood mixing and swirling, and then she wasn’t.

My head is swirling with images. Ravens and crows, trees, mountains.

I see an armadillo and motorcycles.

Sisters. Scott and Jessie.

I see little girls.

The doctor lifted her from between my legs and handed her to Scott. She has red hair, a brilliant flame in the dimming room. She breathed on her own, and cried.

Your name is Wendell. I love you. Don’t get stuck. Look hard for what you need to know. Dig deep.

The doctors and nurses are talking, but not to me.

Look, Scott, what we made together. Look what we did.

He’s holding her, and there are more people wearing white coats. They’re circling and scurrying but they don’t see me. Scott doesn’t see me.

My name is Lynnie. You are my husband. You’re holding our daughter Wendell.

“We don’t have much time.”

My name is Lynnie. Listen, Scott. Pay attention. Look at me.

Those things I need to say.

The touch of his hand is slipping, the lights fading, the faces of the nurses and the doctor now distant even though they are still standing exactly where they have been all along.

He doesn’t know what to do. He won’t be there for her. He needs an anchor.

A lamp shines across the room to my left, and its tiny island of warm light is my anchor. A small comfort as I get ready to say goodbye.

Scott finally comes close when I pull on his hand. His eyes are wider than usual. His heart too, wider open than usual.

Take care of her. You have to protect our daughter.

My mind is so full: ravens and the white gown, guns and armadillos. Eyes. Scott’s eyes, what he sees. What he doesn’t see. What he has done.

He tries to speak and I know what it is he wants to confess. He can’t get it out. He isn’t ready to tell.

There are two, Scott. Two sisters. You have to take care of them. You have to keep them safe.

Is this what I was supposed to tell him? What if I got it all wrong?

The air goes out of me slowly. That’s what he needs to know. He can figure it out.

You can, Scott. I know it.

The beeping of the machines slows and the numbers on one monitor ratchet down, three digits and then two, blinking yellow, blinking like fireflies in a room that fades to black. Scott holds my hand and then I leave my body. I become the firefly, blinking, blinking.

I slip away quietly. Before they know it, I am gone.

Part 2

the bisti badlands

hoodoo: bad luck; one that brings bad luck; a column of eccentrically shaped rock, produced by differential weathering; bewitch, bring bad luck to.

Out behind her house there was a cave, nearly obscured by brush. She had sensed the space behind it, as though the empty cavity held more energy than the living things outside. The opening was small that enough she had to bend down to get through, but once inside she stood upright. It smelled like dirt and bat guano. Based on what she’d read about the area, it was probably a site where primitive people had lived, transient as they’d exhausted the supply of plants and animals and moved on.

The cave was cool and she sat down and counted slowly, a way to get still. It didn’t work. Her thoughts continued to careen wildly: Grayson’s attention in the beginning; things he had said to her, come over here girl. The anonymous notes which seemed to have stopped. The emptiness of her email inbox. Even Aunt Jessie was silent.

A stasis was happening. She had the image of many arrows stopping their motion mid-air, hovering as if for direction.

It was the state of mind she’d never been willing to experience for long. Out here in the Texas hill country, the drive from the house to town was just long enough to deter her taking it. Loneliness seemed at the moment like a separate presence, a companion she’d avoided but suddenly bumped into. She sat with it inside the cave. It was a good time to cry, and a good place, but she didn’t. Her eyes remained dry and after a few moments, a new thought arrived.

Dig deep.

Her tools were in the house, so she got them, along with several bottles of water, and returned to the cave to open a small test pit. According to the books in the library, the area was promising for artifacts, but the test pit revealed nothing.  The cave was quiet though, and peaceful. Then an image flashed, almost like a map in her head. Outside the cave, a fire, people clustered nearby, working.

She laid out the boundaries for an open area excavation in the clearing. Looking for relics of what used to be. The wooden handles of the tools felt good in her hands, worn smooth from previous digs.

The meticulous process of preparing the earth and beginning to scale away the layers had always calmed her. While generally impatient and tending to recklessness, the work had always been different. It allowed one place to slow down. She sometimes thought of it as a religion, the act of digging more a prayer than anything else.

There could be surprises but she expected to find projectile points, scrapers, choppers, flakes, animal bones, and snail shells.

She funneled her energy, the agitation she’d felt earlier, into the precise movements of removing a layer of earth. Peeling the years away. If only it worked like that with life, She could peel back to the day of her birth and change a few things. Have her mother live and have her father happy. It was hard to imagine.

Artifacts in this area would be made from chipped stone, pottery, antler, bone, and shell. She hoped to uncover something from the Paleo-Indian period, 9200 BC. The distinctive Clovis fluted point commonly used in hunting mammoths. That would be an exciting find.

Which made her think again of Grayson. Something he’d written in an email when they first met. After she’d written him a dozen in one day and apologized for the deluge.

God, Wendell – I never get enough of you. Deluge me.

His words were like something she wanted to fold up and tuck into her pocket for later.

Near the end of the day she stopped and walked back to the house.

The soft shimmy of the refrigerator kept her company while she cleaned the kitchen, some sort of misplaced penance, restoring normalcy. Wiping the counter was a lull into not feeling like she was waiting for something.

The refrigerator hummed and jerked, enough, it seemed to say, so she stopped and sat with her laptop at the table. Checked email, but there was nothing new. She read the last messages from each of them, Aunt Jessie, her father, Tristan. Grayson. The mysterious writer of missives. Grayson’s was the hardest because it was likely the last one he’d write. He hadn’t known that when he wrote it. The words he’d written didn’t match what had happened since. If she were braver she’d delete it and forget, but she closed the email and moved it to a folder titled Lost.

She got a beer from the fridge and clicked over to Ebay, where she had no intention of shopping but instead opened her favorite seller list and put the cursor on one name. Mtnman7. He was all about secrets but he had no idea that what he bought online in the middle of the night revealed something to anyone in the world who cared to look. His late night shopping sprees when he’d had too much to drink and couldn’t sleep.

She’d been tracking him that way for over a year.

Since she’d come to Texas he’d bought a hunting knife, an old compass, an antique photo album of pictures that looked oddly like Aunt Jessie, some kind of gun shell from an old war. The most recent purchase was a painting titled Two Sisters. It was dreamlike and haunting, two young women who resembled one another but one wore a sexy black dress and heels and the other one had on a shapeless thing that looked like a sack. The backdrop was a mountain vista. The sisters held hands but their eyes were empty, as if the camera had stolen their souls. The painting was unlike anything he’d bought before, and it made her think of the stories Aunt Jessie told of growing up with her mother. Once when Wendell was young she’d insisted for about a year that she too had a sister. She lived someplace else, Wendell had insisted, and made up things about her, made Aunt Jessie set an extra place at the table in case the sister came for a visit.

Her father came home during that time and when he picked her up commented that it was odd Aunt Jessie had set a place for him. “It’s for her sister,” she’d answered, and his face went funny.

“You know, daddy. She lives where you go when you leave, but someday you’ll find her and bring her home.”

He had been motionless, not like him. Aunt Jessie tried to explain. “It’s an invisible friend, Scott.” She motioned with her eyes.

“Don’t go along with that stuff, Jess.” His voice rose and she left the room.

He took the plate and put it in the sink. “Let’s go, Wendell.”

When she came back days later Aunt Jessie took her face in her hands. “It’s okay to have a pretend sister, Wendell.”

“I don’t anymore. She died.”

Wendell took two beers and retreated to the back porch, dark, a little muggy still. Something scurried across the yard and she reached for the flashlight beneath the bottom step. Aimed, pressed the rubbery circle with her thumb. And there she was. The armadillo.

She froze, blinded in the bright beam, then turned and hustled away, out of the circle of light, back to her safe warm place. Which Wendell trusted was out there somewhere, along the edge of the dark summer evening.

Early in the morning she returned to the cave and resumed her work. Just past noon the edge of the trowel scraped something hard. It took awhile to get around the perimeter, carefully so nothing would be destroyed. You never knew when you found something what it might be. An hour later it came loose from the earth. A tool or instrument made of antler, perhaps used to pry things from stuck places. She finished excavating and brought it to the house. Washed and polished, the grain and color of the tool was lovely, rich and striated. The thought of prying stuck things loose made her sad.

She walked out to the car. Her ragged road map was folded in the glove box and she took it inside and spread it across the kitchen table beside the antler.

Texas had seemed so perfect when she was in Charlottesville aching to get away. Her eyes tracked west again across the map. Pecos, Roswell, Albuquerque. She traced a line with a red marker. The map was a reminder. She was free to go.

Grayson was stuck with the wife, Jolene, who had him by the balls with a divorce attorney waiting in the wings. He’d never said that exactly, but Wendell suspected she’d threatened him and he’d given in the way men sometimes did to women.

She thought of the few times growing up when her father let the different parts of his life intersect.

She remembered one time very specifically. Him standing by the corner of Angelina’s house after the wallpaper hanging party, half hidden in the shadow of the big oak tree, wearing green fatigues and no shirt.

Wendell had been by the campfire with the kids, listening to a man play guitar and watching her daddy out of the corner of her eye. She got caught up in the song and the man’s voice wrapping itself around the words. He looks like a hippie on a Honda to me. He reared back a little on the stool when he sang that line. Across the campfire, his fingers plucked the strings of the guitar, licked by the flames that danced up between them.

Someone thrust a stick with a dripping marshmallow into her hand, and she tested it with a finger before eating it. Suddenly she remembered to look for her father. He was still by the corner of the house, but now there was a woman with him, running her hands over his chest. Wendell was mesmerized by his hands, cast white in the moonlight that cut in across that pitched corner. She couldn’t look away as they dipped lower and disappeared inside his pants.

She screamed. Her very sophisticated friend Angelina had told her before what this meant, what women did to men with their hands and their mouths.

He came running, he thought she’d got burnt by the fire. She told him she wanted to go home. The woman’s voice. You’re spoiling that child rotten, Scott. Next thing you know she’ll be nothing but a teenage brat telling you what to do.

All Wendell had to say was one thing: I want Aunt Jessie. He packed her into his car and swore everything was all right, that they could do anything she wanted.

He bought her mint chocolate chip ice cream on the way home and they ate it right from the carton with two spoons. She watched the late movie on the sofa while he rubbed her feet. He sat up with her all night. He would have done anything to appease her. Anything so she wouldn’t tell Aunt Jessie.

Wendell grabbed the antler and walked out to the front porch. On the right side of the bottom step there was a depression in the earth, and she started digging there with the tool, searching for nothing. She simply craved the feel of something in her hand displacing something else.

In the dark she could have been anywhere, Virginia or Texas, New Mexico or another country. She could have been six or twenty or older. Anything could have happened. Tristan could have come by, or a stranger. Her father could have come home, or Aunt Jessie.

The one possibility she didn’t indulge was what happened.

A motorcycle, recognizable because of its single headlight and slight whine, came down the main road and stopped by the mailbox. The anonymous letter writer. She stood up and waited.

From the other direction, headlights, then the soft purr of an expensive engine. The motorcycle pealed off like a bullet, and the car turned in. Grayson pulled up in the driveway and climbed out of his car.

“She’s taken the kids to Galveston, to our beach house. I promised her things would be sorted out when she gets back.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea, Wendell. All I know is she left and I came here.”

He pulled her to the bedroom and kissed her. They chased something together, not pleasure but something else. He wanted it and so did she, but they didn’t find anything. How could they, when it had no name either of them could summon. Instead they lay together, her hand on his chest. He fell asleep first.

It should never have been called making love, this thing people did. What it was, was seeking. Everyone seeking something they couldn’t find.

She didn’t know why he’d come to her again, but she was selfish and she let him stay.

Grayson woke first and while she made coffee he found the map on the table. “What’s this?”

“I’m thinking of going west.”

He took the mug of coffee from the counter and drank. “Let’s take a road trip then.”

Out in the middle of west Texas there was nothing but highway and rock. Hole in the wall gas stations stretched so far apart she wondered if they would make it from one to the next. Nowhere to stop and get a room, so they pulled off the side of the road for a break.

Grayson dragged two sleeping bags out of his trunk and spread them on dry grass, illuminated by the car’s headlights. Once he got them set up, she flipped the lights off. It was so dark she couldn’t see to walk.

“Over here.” His voice arrowed through the night, led her stumbling in his direction as though hit and wounded. She fell across his feet.

“The sky, Wendell, look.”

The sky was all there was, studded with glittering stars, more than she had ever seen in one sky at one time. The air itself seemed devoid of motion, as if all the atoms had paused in an effort to let the celestial vision shine.

“I feel almost like a cowboy out here.”

“Desperado.” He laughed and the tone of his voice dropped low on the last syllables.

She wet her hair with water and painted his face with the fine chill of night. “Are you sorting anything out?”

He put his hand over her mouth and pulled her down beside him again. “Just look at the sky, Wendell.”

The next day they made it to the very edge of Texas, Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Pine Springs. While Grayson paid for a campsite, she scanned the park service brochure. The five highest peaks in Texas.

El Capitan, a massive limestone formation, had been an ocean reef some 250 million years earlier. Amazing and difficult to envision in this heat. Swimming in cool salt water would have been heaven right then.

Grayson returned, permit in hand, and tugged her along by the arm while she read.

“There were hunter-gatherers here 10,000 years ago, we might see pictographs.”

“Good. Let’s pitch the tent.”

“And god, listen to this. Over 11,000 stars, the Milky Way. That’s how many we saw, Grayson, all those stars.”

“Yeah.”

She had dropped behind him and treaded sharply on his heel.

“Damn, Wendell.”

“Sorry.” She did it again.

He spun around. “What is it?”

“The stars.”

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I haven’t forgotten. That sky, your hair. It was incredible. But I’m hot and tired. I just want to get the tent set up and lie down in some shade.”

She walked past him. “46,850 acres of protected wilderness, untrammeled by man. Can we go there tomorrow? I want to walk where no man has walked before.”

He snorted. “You’re confusing this with Star Trek. Someone sometime has walked every inch of this planet.”

He needed sleep. She needed a break from him. They pitched the tent without another word. She spread the sleeping bags inside, parked the cooler close by the bags, stacked a couple of paperbacks next to it. That should keep him happy.

He flopped down and covered his eyes with the back of one forearm. She pinned her hair back with a clip and wiped her face with the hem of her T-shirt dipped in the melted ice in the cooler.

He fell asleep quickly. She had a sudden desire to call her father. Grayson’s phone was in the bottom of the pack but when she powered it up there was no signal. But she’d seen a pay phone outside the ranger’s office, so she grabbed her wallet and zipped Grayson inside the tent where his breathing rose and fell again, each time ending with a snort.

The pay phone was in use, a young blond woman with a child who tugged hard at his mother’s cropped pants while she rubbed his curly head. Wendell sat cross-legged on the rough cement and waited, far enough away that the woman didn’t feel rushed. Wendell was in no hurry to get back to Grayson snoring in the tent. At least by the phone she could watch people come and go.

Through the window of the ranger’s office she saw a man gesturing and talking. He had dark hair cut very short and a tattoo on one arm. His gestures were odd, and seemed to mean something more than was apparent. She found herself engrossed in a conversation she couldn’t hear. When he came out he saw her looking and walked over.

“Hey.” He dropped down next to her and shook her hand. Up close his eyes were astonishing, pale blue to the extreme, wolf-like. It felt for a moment like the sidewalk had dropped out from beneath her body. She put her hands flat on the cement and anchored herself by looking at the tattoo that wound around his arm, a raven carrying a small branch lined with leaves and red berries.

“You like the tat?”

“It’s unusual.” She wanted to touch it, had to put her hands behind her back to keep from rubbing them on this stranger’s arm.

“Staying here tonight?”

She wished she were alone, but back in the tent was Grayson. The married man. The father of small children.

“Yes, with a friend. How about you?”

“With a buddy, Keller. We’re here for a few days, then heading to VLA.”

“VLA?”

“Very Large Array. It’s a radio astronomy lab. Did you see the movie Contact a few years ago?”

“The one with Jodie Foster? Those big dishes.”

“That’s it.”

“You’re interested in UFOs?”

“That’s not what they really do with the dishes. Creative license for the sake of the movie. They actually study quasars and pulsars, supernovas, black holes, that kind of thing.”

“So what are you doing there?”

“Sightseeing, mostly. It’s a neat place. A buddy did some work there last year and since I’m here killing time, I’m checking it out.”

He stood up, dusted off the back of his shorts. His muscled legs were smooth, almost hairless. “Come have a beer later, bring your friend.” He winked and smiled, tipped his head toward the pay phone, which was now free, but she no longer wanted to talk to her father.

She felt weird suddenly, a little dizzy but mostly her left cheek was tingling and it was as though she were no longer solid in her body. She sat for a while longer, breathing, pushing her hands flat to the sidewalk so hard the cement left its pattern on her palms. And then it seemed to pass.

When she got back to the campsite Grayson was awake.

“Where were you?”

“I went to the ranger station to call my dad on the pay phone. There’s no signal out here.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You seemed tired.”

They ate protein bars instead of dinner and watched the sun set. She brushed her teeth behind the tent, spit white foam on the ground, covered it using the toe of her shoe. Inside the tent Grayson was still, eyes open to the night, waiting.

She expected him to touch her but he didn’t.

“This guy invited us to go have a beer at his campsite. He’s going to VLA.”

“Let’s not.”

Grayson opened his arms and she allowed him to fold her in. He smelled of sweat but the scent was subtle and not overbearing. They were both weary of driving and he was weary of camping, already.

“A shower would be amazing right now.” His voice was right in her ear.

“Do you want to do anything?”

“I’m exhausted, girl. I can’t reciprocate.”

They seemed to have left their urgency back in Austin.

In the night she woke to the sound of banshees screaming in the distance, like a prelude to a massacre. Yips and shrieks that gave her goosebumps. It must have been coyotes though, since no one else was rousing and running away. After awhile they died down and a low whistle sounded right outside the tent. It happened again and then stopped.

Grayson stirred in his sleep and put his arm over hers. She burrowed closer to him and he wrapped his leg around her. “Jolene.” His voice seemed tender, not at all the way she’d thought he’d sound, speaking to his wife in bed.

“Grayson, wake up.”

“What.”

“You’re saying her name.”

“What?”

“Jolene’s name. You said it in your sleep.”

“Sorry.”

“Why did you say it?”

“We’ve been married fifteen years, Wendell. I can’t make that go away. Go back to sleep.”

Grayson woke her up early. “Let’s get out of here and go to a hotel. My back is killing me.”

She hadn’t been averse to that idea until he said it, but suddenly she didn’t want to go to a hotel, she wanted to stay and camp, not give in to his aching back. She wanted to do something different with him, not what he’d do with his wife.

“Let’s give it another night.”

He walked a few steps and turned back. “I’m going to the bathroom. For god’s sake, please think about a hotel.”

She had wanted to go hiking and come back to a campfire with beer and dinner and muted wild sex in the tent. So far though, it hadn’t been like that. It had been protein bars and tepid water, no light after the sun went down, and coyotes howling while Grayson talked to his wife in his sleep.

She sat at the picnic table and peeled a banana. The same low whistle from the night before sounded close by.

“Hey.”

It was the guy from the pay phone, Tag. He had coffee in a tin mug.

“I’d kill for coffee.”

“Have mine.” He pushed the cup across the table.

“Thanks.”

“Where’s your friend?”

“He went to the bathroom.”

“You didn’t come by for a beer last night.”

“He wanted to stay in.”

Tag’s eyebrows went up and for some reason it made her laugh.

“Your boyfriend?”

She laughed harder. “He’s married and he dumped me and now his wife has taken the kids to Galveston while he sorts me out. I have no idea what he is. Someone I wanted pretty bad about twenty-four hours ago.”

“We’re heading out this morning. VLA. You could ride along.”

The airline confirmed a seat to Afghanistan. He got to the airport with minutes to spare and boarded just in time for take-off. As soon as he was seated and the plane left the terminal he felt relief. Jess would never know this wasn’t work. He had some time to think things through.

His repertoire for ways to deal with this kind of thing was limited. The only way he knew to make the ache stop over the one he cared about was to find one he didn’t. They were everywhere, for the taking. Like that woman across the aisle who kept running her hand through her long blond hair and glancing over at him.

This was the down side. The only way to keep Jess out was to keep going for the quick empty fucks. He had done it for years and he guessed he could do it again.

He’d used frequent flier miles to upgrade to first class. He was offered beverages and took a Scotch, stretched his legs, closed his eyes. Escape.

The way she’d looked sleeping. Her assumption that they would share dinner. That he would not leave so soon. She gave him credit he didn’t deserve.

Something said to him years ago.

The true cost of anything is what we must give up in order to have it.

He emptied his head and went to where Wendell was. She was waiting for something, he didn’t know what. He felt concern but not danger. He tried to go to Jessie’s house but it didn’t work. Never had, but he had wondered if their recent closeness might have changed that.

He didn’t know how she would react to this part of him. How he lived so much inside his head. Navigated relationships by leaving. Kept the exits clear and open at all times.

He got off the plane in Kabul and navigated the ramshackle airport, which was crowded and chaotic as always. He rented a small truck and drove toward the hotel he favored. Its outside still bore scars, but the rooms were clean and comfortable.

The more severely damaged buildings he passed might never be repaired. The ruins weren’t abandoned. People still used them, lived in rubble.

The filthy Kabul River flowed, and he smelled the rotting meat hanging in shop stalls through the truck’s open window. The traffic was hideous, pedestrians, bicycles, cars. Buses and trucks and donkey carts. He blew his horn like everyone else. There were no real rules of the road here.

He was relieved to get to the hotel room. Twin beds, a night table and lamp.  Shortly after he got inside the city was taken hostage by a dust storm. He was glad not to be driving in it.

When he got still on the bed and closed his eyes he saw it again. The man on the motorcycle. Wendell. He waited, hoping it would go further, but his own hope shut it down. That’s how it worked with remote viewing. You couldn’t do it with a busy head.

Sometime later it rained and lightning streaked the sky. He took this to be a sign of something and slept well with that thought beneath his pillow.

He woke with his mind as muddy as the roads outside. The snow-covered mountains in the distance calmed him and he breathed in the Afghan air. The drive ahead would be an endless journey over bad roads. His destination a village just beyond Jalalabad.

Not far outside Kabul the mountain pass followed the river, and he clicked automatically into high alert. The road a few miles further became treacherous. It hugged the mountain with no guard rails, no walls between his vehicle and the river a thousand feet below.

His mind cleared and the real reason he was there began to surface.

He shook it off and focused ahead. Just like at home in the Virginia mountains, only here there was dust and danger. The surge of adrenaline, his drug of choice.

Once the adrenaline kicked in he could let go a little. Breathed in and out, resolved himself to the rough ride. Not like his truck back home. This piece of junk with its assortment of rattles and whines could break down at any moment. He couldn’t track the noises it made. Didn’t have the music he loved. Jess had played music for him, a woman singing, Celtic, maybe.

He smelled something that jerked him back to why he was here. Couldn’t ID the scent, but it set off a chain of thoughts that led to his mantra, that one time thing. If he adhered to that where would he be now, with Jess?

He’d lied to himself. The rule about one time, nothing he couldn’t give up. That was bullshit. It had been three times, long ago, back in Kabul.

A young woman he’d met while Lynnie was pregnant and he was many months working. Out of touch. Needing touch. He fell for the woman through the screen of a blue burqa. Eyes he’d mostly imagined seeing. She was not a whore. The first time in a dirt-floored room she’d cried and he’d allowed himself to pretend it meant something. The second time he’d nearly been killed two hours before and they had talked through the night in whispers. He had told all his secrets in a language she didn’t understand. The third time he’d ripped the condom and neglected to put on a new one.

Looking back, he had no true sense of what he’d been thinking, why he’d not gone to a whore instead. There would have been no complications. Or if there were, they’d have been taken care of.

She hid the pregnancy beneath the burqa. Nine months later he’d buried Lynnie and left his newborn daughter with his sister-in-law. Jess. He went back to find the Afghani woman. He’d feared it would repeat, that she would die in childbirth like Lynnie had and he’d have to take the child home with him. What would he have done with two infants?

He’d been ashamed at his thought - if the Afghani woman and the child both died it would be easier.

Now he realized he had killed them off in his head, those years ago. Not the guilt but the connection. Made the images, the way he stayed in touch with Wendell, impossible.

The rough lurch of the truck over rocks forced his attention back to the present and the battered road. He was letting his mind wander. The river turned from brown to aqua as he descended the pass on the other side. The landscape here was unlike that in Kabul. Well-tended fields were reminiscent of the Mediterranean. People worked the crops. It was almost normal.

As he drove through tiny villages he smelled marijuana being smoked. He went faster toward Jalalabad.

Driving from Kabul to J-bad, you descended a mile in elevation. The descent was not the stereotypical downward journey but instead a lowering into a more fertile place. J-bad was green, with trees and intact buildings. He had sent the woman here for that reason. The child. He wanted them to know trees and flora. He wanted them to have something approximating what Wendell had in Virginia.

Imagined himself traveling back and forth between the two families, two women taking care of his two girls. The lush mountains of Virginia. The barren mountains of Afghanistan. Places he knew the taste of, the feel of dirt and grit.

In Afghanistan when a birth was imminent men with guns gathered outside to fire bursts of gunshot. Five or seven for a girl. Fourteen or more for a boy.

When his second child was born, no shots were fired because it was both a sin and a secret.

He had paid for the woman’s new life in a village where her indiscretion would be easier to conceal. Where there would be no retribution. After she’d gone with the baby he took his gun and fired it seven times.

He had seen the girl once, when she was four years old. The meeting had been easy to arrange through his contacts. He was simply a visitor in the small room behind the tiny home’s rubble, invited for tea and bread. They sat in a circle around a brightly colored cloth. Her eyes had been curious but she recoiled when he reached for her. He didn’t know why and couldn’t bring himself to consider the reasons. He had looked for something of himself in her face but saw nothing he recognized. It wasn’t difficult to leave a child who wouldn’t come close, who looked nothing like him.

Her mother had married and aged more than he would have thought possible in that few years’ time. She lifted her head scarf once before he left. He imagined he saw tears but it was probably the smoky room. Her teeth were brown and broken. He had no memory of how she’d looked as the younger woman she had been, could find no part of himself that recalled a desire for her, or affection. There were no photographs. It had all been so easily erased.

Since then he’d tracked the girl’s age in his head. Tried to stay clear of women as young as she would be, though it was hard in Afghanistan. They all looked so much older than they were. He had a nightmare of finding her in a whorehouse. That he’d paid her for sex without knowing.

He drove faster, pushed the truck harder than he should in his haste to get somewhere. To find something and bend it to his will. A happier ending.

His mind wandered back to the little girl Wendell. Standing by the pools at the edge of the river in autumn. Red and gold leaves were plastered to the gray river stones. They looked painted beneath the rippling water. Wendell’s copper hair had braided itself into coils at the nape of her neck and the rest of it floated out on the water’s clear surface as she leaned to grab a floating leaf.

She had knelt there for half an hour patiently waiting for a crayfish to come out from beneath a rock.

Looking back he didn’t know who had been the parent, him or Wendell. When he’d returned from Afghanistan after seeing his daughter something had changed. He had lost something. The knowledge that he was a father bore forward like bad weather. He had responsibilities. He had relied on Wendell to keep him straight. He hadn’t given much in return.

But at least she knew safety. It made him sick now to think of the other one who hadn’t.

He followed the graveled road, hyper-vigilant. To a certain degree he felt at home in this country but a bullet was a bullet. Ambushes were common and often fatal.

The village where he’d seen the girl last was still some distance away. He thought back to that time. She had been dark and feral compared to Wendell, yet not as full of fire by any means. What he remembered most was the fact that she wouldn’t look him in the eye. He knew this country and its atrocities. Tortured himself as he drove with the thought of why a man reaching out to her caused such a reaction.

When he found the place he’d last seen her he asked questions in Pashtun, and was told by a man with a broken tooth that the family had been killed in a skirmish some years back. Another man, who answered in English, recalled the daughter and shook his head when asked what he knew. She had fought, he remembered, and the men had done things to her before she died.

“What did they do?” Scott lowered his voice and kept it measured.

The man looked down and mumbled.

A younger man disagreed in staccato Pashtun, saying he thought the father had been killed fighting for his family, but the mother and daughter escaped. He might know where they could be found. He rubbed the palm of his hand.

Scott knew this story was likely fabricated out of need. Not greed, because what did the young man have that more could equal too much?

He watched the younger man pull at his beard and noted the way his eyes shifted when he spoke. He was lying, and yet Scott wanted to believe him. Wanted to peel bills off a roll and hand them over, to be led across this desperate landscape toward the hope of something.

He accepted tea and sat with the men awhile before he drove away.

Outside the village he stopped and walked some distance from the truck, into the dusty ground by the roadside. He knelt and took up some of the earth in his hand. When she was killed, they would have closed her eyes and placed a clean sheet over her body.

The women in the village would have washed the body and wrapped it in a shroud. He thought it was called a kafan but wasn’t sure. The prayers were said by the iman, and the men in the village carried the body for burial, on her right side, facing Mecca. There were no grave markers, no flowers. Simply prayers to Allah.

He didn’t know how to remember her. The grief he felt was not specific, he hadn’t known her. And yet his chest ached and he felt what he assumed was loss, a weight that represented what he had done and then not done.

He let the dust and rock fall from his hand. Stood and waited for his knee to unlock, then walked back to the truck. As he drove back toward Kabul, he remembered something someone had told him once, here in this country, about the dead.

Muhammad said there were three things that benefited a person after death: charity given during one’s lifetime, knowledge given that helped others, and a righteous child to pray for the deceased.

He didn’t know about the charity, and wondered about the knowledge he’d gained and given, details that led to death and destruction, in the name of a higher good, often so convoluted it resembled the ridiculous.

He had one child left. He didn’t know if she was righteous, or if she would pray for him when he died.

From the back of Tag’s motorcycle the world flew by. Wendell knew next to nothing about this blue-eyed man, except for the little bit he’d shared by the pay phone. And that her left cheek tingled often when he was near.

Her arms spanned the wide berth of his shoulders, as though measuring him against a past. It seemed she had known him, that they were bound by some remote familiarity. When they moved forward on the bike, she instinctively held tight. He smelled of soap and air. Ahead of them, on another bike, his friend Keller rode serpentines between yellow lines.

As the morning sun warmed her shoulders she thought back to the campground: Grayson returning from the bathhouse to find her gone. His eyes roaming the perimeter of the campsite, noting the missing items. Wendell, her sleeping bag, her pack. She felt his sigh, the long easy exhalation of breath that marked his exasperation. And, she suspected, his relief.

Tag stopped for gas and checked in with Keller, “better known as Killer.” She looked immediately to his hands, as if they might reveal the accuracy of his nickname. He saw her looking and held them up, fingers spread, and grinned.

The bathroom was a tiny shack attached to the rear of the gas station. It tilted as though nailed together by a child, and streaks of white proved to be the sun sneaking through slender cracks in the walls. The little space was lit with a single transparent bulb, not more than forty watts when she pulled the chain.

It wasn’t filthy but it was hot and smelled bad so she didn’t linger. When she opened the door to leave, Keller and Tag were at the corner, talking. For some reason she eased the door closed again and listened.

“Does she know who you are? Can she do what he did?”

“I don’t know yet.” Tag’s voice faded as they stepped back toward the front of the building. She stood, tensed, trying to think. After a minute, the streaks of light went black, and someone knocked on the door.

“You want anything from inside?” Tag opened the door, silhouetted in the blinding sun, and ran the side of his hand down her cheek and neck, all the way down to the tips of her fingers. As if he were erasing her suspicion. Transforming it into intrigue.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay, then. Time to ride.”

Roswell was a murky black and white photograph next to the three-dimensional technicolor Tag, whose face was rosy from the sun. His pale blue eyes seemed out of place against the sable bristled hair. In his rust-colored T-shirt and indigo jeans it was hard to look past him. She kept waiting for him to reveal that he knew her, but he remained elusive.

They had been in Roswell for an hour and so far what that entailed was Wendell walking in Tag’s wide wake. Keller took off as soon as they pulled into town, one hand trailing behind as he kicked the bike into gear and sped away.

First they went to a car wash and rinsed the road dust off Tag’s motorcycle. Gassed it up. Then ate in a café Tag chose without her input. He talked of superficial things, the heat, the texture of the strawberry milkshake he’d ordered, that they made good time from Pine Springs. All the while he managed to evade her questions. She watched while he chewed his burrito, his eyes met hers squarely but there was nothing more she could decipher.

They spent the afternoon exploring. She rubbed his shoulders while they stood in line at the alien museum, leaned against him in the dark while they watched the museum video. Undid two buttons on her blouse and gave him a glimpse of the lacy thing beneath. All she got was a nod.

A light dinner and three margaritas each and as they left the bar he asked, “Motel or tent?”

She was thinking motel but shrugged. She wanted him to choose, as if in the succession of choices she might discover a pattern and meaning. He got her pack and his and headed across the street to the mom and pop joint they’d walked past several times that day. Maybe his reserve was nothing more than shyness, or nonchalance. There was nothing to do but follow him and see.

In the dark, unclothed, Tag’s body became a map she had traveled before. They touched without bumping, no tangled limbs. He paused. She was close to tears without knowing why. He buried his face in her neck and hair. The tenderness between them was terrifying.

With unspoken agreement, they took a different path. Quick and hard, exhausting sex. When they were done, they rolled away from one another and fell asleep.

He woke her in the night with the soft kneading of shoulders and his mouth pressing against her neck. In the fog of early morning, their bodies still tired, he returned to a slow and tender exploration, what Tristan had once called archaeological sex. A familiar fan of desire spread from one area of her body to another, a rolling band of warmth that drew her out to full length, lazy cat stretch, like being stroked.

She was with him and then she floated off to some other place, the top of a mountain. Tag was there waiting. And then he beckoned.

On the top of the mountain inside her waking dream, he kissed the tears on the corners of her eyes. She responded to the offering of a little piece of his heart.

In the dusty, dry heat on that imagined mountain, they experimented with hearts and lovemaking. Buoyed by the safety of knowing they wouldn’t lose themselves to the other, ministered to the empty places they shared.

There were no words, just the soft touch of his mouth to her skin, her fingers to his. Holding and moving and the whisper of long unmet needs. She wasn’t sure whose. He stayed close, neither left nor pulled away. For an hour or so she remained wide open that way, all soft and exposed and maybe for the first time, not afraid.

His breathing remained steady as she expertly crawled out of bed without shifting the mattress. Her clothes were in one neat pile by the door. She pulled the T-shirt over her head.

“You have to get up pretty early in the morning to sneak out on me.” He sounded amused. “Come back.”

She popped her head out to look at him.  In the light of a new day he seemed transformed. Or maybe it was her. The feeling from the dream was still strong. He came a little closer.

“Let’s see if we can track Keller down.”

On the motorcycle, she wrapped her arms around him and forgot to notice if he leaned into her or away. The sun was bright and he went fast. This time they each knew more than nothing about the other.

They coasted slowly through parking lots for an hour and then stopped at a café for eggs and coffee. Keller seemed to have disappeared. Tag pulled two dog-eared paperbacks from the saddlebag on the bike and handed one to her. A Cormac McCarthy novel he had obviously read many times. They sat at a table in the shade and turned pages across from one another, sipping iced coffee and keeping an eye out for Keller.

When she looked up one time Tag was staring. He didn’t smile or change his expression. It seemed impossible to read him so she returned to the book.

Later in the day he ordered lunch. She had begun to take an odd comfort in not making minor decisions, like what to eat or do, when to stop or how long to stay. He picked up his book again. She took a pen from her bag and made tiny sketches on napkins. When they left he slid them into his pocket when he thought she wasn’t looking.

It was near dusk when they drove outside the city limits and unrolled sleeping bags alongside the bike. Once again she was stargazing but there was no painting of faces with her hair.

“Kairos. You know what that is?”

She stretched. “God time. As opposed to clock time.”

“Good way to put it.”

“It feels like that out here. No time at all.”

“Time is a construct we invented and measure. Stop measuring and it disappears.”

“It’s like that riding on the back of your bike. Everything else falls away.”

“You’ve left a lot behind.” Tag touched her arm. “Are you looking for something out here?”

“I don’t know. Mostly I’m terrified I won’t find it.”

He pulled her hand to his mouth and touched his lips to her palm. “You make damned sure you don’t let that happen.”

All the angles of Tag’s face were flattened in the near absence of light. She wondered what he wanted. Who he really was. It felt like one of them should clarify this, the unspoken question.

He broke the silence. “It’s the great dark set alight.” He gestured toward the sky. “It was in the Le Guin book I read today. The great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars.”

He handed over a can of soda and then his pocketknife when the tab broke. Passed his flask, noted with raised brows that she didn’t wince at the slow burn of the Scotch.

“Smoky,” she said. He made a low sound of approval.

“The sky’s like the future all laid out before us.” She thought of traveling to a time when she had come to herself in some new potency, an ascent that lifted her above entanglements, up to the high plains of the spirit, where she might look down. A magnificent spectator. She thought she’d read that someplace.

Tag shifted and the nylon fabric of his sleeping bag squeaked. “Funny you say that. When I look at the stars I see the past. The light that’s already been. I see history when I look up there.”

What he said was true. She’d just never thought of it that way.

In the morning he woke her before sunrise. “We’ll catch K in Socorro. Let’s ride.”

VLA was a Stonehenge of towering white dishes set in a wide expanse of flat land. The hiss of steam, the low grind of the motors as the dishes turned. What did they listen for, those gigantic ears? Answers to unspoken questions, the things they all wanted to know but didn’t have words to ask.

He led her along the path between the dishes. It had rained and a black snake sidled through the rippling silver puddle ahead. There was nothing but the rush of wind past her ears. A constant whir of air, white noise.

Beneath the furthest dish, he stopped.

They kissed while the wind pushed past, a solid stream of air that split apart to let them touch. It was nothing that would last, nothing that would change the course of history or make headlines or garner any notice whatsoever in the big wide world. But in their little piece of it, for a minute, they heard everything.

Inside the main building, they watched the movie about the Very Large Array in a tiny auditorium with wide carpeted benches for seats. In the lobby after, she pushed a five-dollar bill through a plexiglass slot and picked out three post cards showing the dishes in different seasons. Arrayed differently in each shot, listening for different things.

Tag’s friend took him aside for a moment and then gave them a tour. Lots of computers, the whir of hard drives and data being stored. He explained his research, what he was hoping to find via the dishes.

“You’re welcome to take a room for the night,” he offered, but Tag said no.

“Would it be okay if we pitched a tent out of the way someplace?”

“Sure. Take a shower here if you like, in the morning.”

They walked what felt like every inch of the property looking for a spot for the tent. By dinnertime both their stomachs were growling.

“We could drive on to Socorro and eat there.”

“No, I want to stay.”

He handed her an apple and a power bar. They had bottles of water from his friend. They read until dark. She listened for the sound of his pages turning and waited for the moments when his leg gently pushed against hers. They put their books down at the same time, listened together to the dishes shift to their next setting.

“Who are you?” She couldn’t wait any longer. She needed to know.

“The man who found the woman with green eyes,” he said. “The one who stirred my quiescent desire.”

She felt again like the ground had fallen away, the odd lurch of one’s stomach on a roller coaster ride. He had been in Austin that whole time. “So you followed me and Grayson to the campground?”

“No.” He touched her left cheek in the exact spot where it was tingling. “I knew that’s where you were going so I got there first and waited.”

In the morning he climbed on the bike and lifted his arms so she could thread hers through. They passed rolling grassy hills dotted with dark green trees. Cattle guards and ant mounds like miniature volcanoes placed equidistant along the roadside.

On the horizon, tweed-colored mountains stretched and bent, fabric folding in on itself. She let something go as they passed, nothing she would miss or regret, some small burden she’d carried for a long time. As if in answer, he revved the engine, increased speed. Their bodies tilted together in one incredible forward motion.

They drove through Socorro and kept going, unwilling to let go of wind and speed and light. The mountains leading into Magdalena were soft and wrinkled like giant Shar-Pei puppies. The white clouds overhead cast huge shadows across the earth. There was no one else, just her and Tag and the bike, hurtling toward an unknown destination.

All along the side of the road yellow squash lay like huge lemons dropped by giants. She thought of lemons, yellow, the lemon yellow bedroom she’d had in junior high, when Aunt Jessie tried to counter her adolescent angst with a new coat of paint. It didn’t work. Well, perhaps it did, she didn’t know. Either that or she grew out of it.

Out on the road, free of old constraints, it felt like she could see some things with a bolus of truth. But she didn’t know if it would persist, the newfound insight. Some things were tied to the moment in which they were revealed.

Back toward Socorro, the landscape changed. Red rock rose from the hills, pink in the distance. Nothing was what it seemed to be. What she saw from afar was different up close. Things that looked soft could have sharp edges.

Stateside, Scott made the decision to find Wendell. He sensed she was traveling again, and was able to track her by the emails she’d sent. Charlottesville through North Carolina, down to Mobile and New Orleans. He drove into Texas and crossed the Sabine River. Stopped for a night outside Houston and had a mechanic go over the truck, change the oil, check the transmission.

In Austin he found her little rental house. Wendell’s car was there but not Wendell. Through the windows he saw the plain furnishings. The colorful touches left by his daughter. There was a photo of him and Wendell on the table in the living room. He walked down the front steps and then around back. He sensed nothing amiss but the house was definitely isolated.

He wondered if something bad had happened. He hadn’t seen anything coming, but maybe he’d missed it. Or it could be a simpler explanation. Maybe he hadn’t done enough to make up for Lynnie being gone. For his own absence over the years.

It was his biggest fear. It rubbed him almost constantly, to the point he had to ignore it or he’d have gone crazy. All the things he had done wrong. The flat out selfishness.

Wendell would be furious if he didn’t respect her privacy. He drove back into town to a restaurant the hotel clerk recommended and had TexMex and a margarita. His mind kept ruminating the possibilities. He didn’t trust the remote viewing with this. The stakes suddenly felt too high.

He drove back out to the house and let himself in. All it took was a simple strip of metal easily kept in a pocket. Anyone could have done it. He dreaded the walk from the front door down the hallway to a bedroom he had never seen. The worst crimes were always committed in bedrooms.

There was nothing to indicate any problem. All the lights were off, no food had been left out, the trash cans were empty. Bathroom devoid of toothbrushes and other basic necessities. It appeared she had simply gone on a trip with someone. There were tire tracks outside that didn’t match her Toyota. He was relieved they weren’t motorcycle tracks.

A map lay folded on the arm of the sofa. When he opened it up, there was a big red line. Austin to Pine Springs to Roswell to Albuquerque.

Bingo. He drove back to town, checked out of his hotel, and filled the rental car’s tank with gas. He drove west.

He imagined himself an animal tracking its young. Rolled down the windows in the car and let the air in, smelled the dust of west Texas, followed the trail of his daughter, her scent. He let his visions lead the way.

The park ranger in Pine Springs remembered a redhead.

“She came with some older guy in a Jag. They stayed, oh, two nights or so and then she left with a guy on a bike. Motorcycle. There were two guys, cowboys blowing time before some training gig at Whizmer.”

The muscle in his chest tightened at the words motorcycle and training and Whizmer.

He had an ID for times just like this. He opened his wallet and slid it out so the park ranger could see.

“She checked in with the older guy, name of Grayson Ward, from Austin. The biker checked in as Tag – can’t read the last name. Bike plate was North Carolina.”

“Thanks. Appreciate the info.”

Outside he made a call from the pay phone. Tech gal with the right clearance. Time to find out who this motorcycle man was.

The wait was hell. He felt like he might explode.

He headed to Roswell and the first Mexican joint he saw he stopped, looking for some green chiles and beer with Tequila shots. A big-haired woman across the room had her eye on him, and once he made solid eye contact it took her less than thirty seconds to get to his table.

Three shots of Tequila later she was looking better and he was thinking she might be just the thing to clear his head. He watched the little piece of silver fabric masquerading as her shirt. It was a few sizes too small and her breasts bulged out the top. He ran his hand through his hair. Wiped his mouth with the back of that same hand.

He excused himself to the bathroom. Through a fake stone archway, left, men’s room. She followed.

He stood on the Mexican-tiled floor and watched her lock the door. She kneeled in front of him, hands hooked around the backs of his thighs. The rings she wore on every finger sparkled, fool’s gold. Not in any sense the real thing.

When she finished he pulled his pants up and washed his hands at the grimy sink. She smiled from behind him. Her face reflected in the mirror. “You’re coming home with me, right?”

He’d sobered up. “Sorry, babe. I have to go cruise some parking lots.”

He asked at motels -- someone named Tag, bike with North Carolina plates, traveling with a redhead and possibly another biker. They’d been there a few days earlier, a woman told him. She didn’t know more.

He drove out of town and parked on the side of the road. An hour of sleep then he’d drive on. He got out for a minute and looked at the sky. Where light and darkness met. He’d spent most of his life in the shadows. More at ease under cover. Seeking light from outside sources.

There were two times he’d felt the glow of his own light, that two women saw him the way he saw the sky.  Lynnie had, and the Afghan woman, whose name he had never known. It seemed now that any light he found came from women. It belonged to them.

He had fooled himself that any light had ever emanated from him. Reflected light was what it was. Had always been.

He remembered the gypsum sand at Whizmer, the x-shaped tracks of roadrunners marking it. It had been a test target during his remote viewing training. RV in the desert. He remembered his excitement when he’d nailed the target. Like an alcoholic taking that first drink, the rush had been too good, too fast. It had mattered far too much.

In the beginning they loved that about him. He had a gift, they said, and sung his praises up the ladder. But anything that burned that hot had the capacity to melt down, and when he got too far out they shut him down. Quick.

Plenty of people would think him paranoid at the thought that his own government, his own employer, would kill him. And most days he didn’t think it true himself. But he knew too much. There had been times when operators had simply disappeared.

The job was high risk. Always had been. He knew it, they all knew it. So for the most part he accepted that. But he watched his back. Always had.

He was sure they watched too, but that didn’t bother him so much. He went on and did his job.  Kept the skills he’d learned under wraps. He couldn’t stop the perceptions that came. Sometimes he wanted to.

He looked out at the dry and lovely landscape of New Mexico and thought of other lands. The sere and foreboding places he’d walked and lain and hidden. Words spoken in other languages, secrets bought and sold. He had known excitement but more often had spent long hours waiting. The tedious ferreting out of information. The bought and paid for sylphs who made him forget where he was and then later made him remember what he’d left behind.

Life was simpler now. Or had been until Wendell left the safety net he’d created in Virginia.

Jess was the center of that net. He thought of her, the tremble in her voice after they made love. The way she had bloomed beneath him, different than when she bloomed from above.

He did not want to miss her this much.

He envied her the cleanness of her conscience. The ease with which she lay sleeping after sex, no need to scan for unseen enemies. No fear. He had misremembered his childhood most of his adult life. Thought to himself, I used to trust, but it wasn’t true. He’d been wakened more nights than not by the angry voice of his father and the smack of his father’s hand against his mother’s face. Her muted pain only made apparent in the light of day. There was nothing he could do. In some twisted way she had held him accountable for his father’s anger.

The bruises all formed in the same places, one on top of the other, so that to press on one triggered the pain in all.

He heard helicopters some nights. The drone of engines, the blur of rotors. Smelled the turbine fuel washing out of a helicopter engine. The big birds and little birds he’d trained in. Transport, delivery, rescue. Safety, danger, mixed messages.

He smelled the odor of blood rotting in the sun. Gun oil.

One day all that would fade. He would wake up and find himself immune to the whim of a floor creaking or a twig snapping beneath the hoof of a deer. Wouldn’t have to favor the bad old places or pull back from the ministrations of the ones who loved him.

He wanted to sleep in peace.

For now he lay with eyes pasted open to the heavens, one ear cocked while he massaged his creaky knee.

He thought of Wendell and the other one.

I love you, little girls.

Outside Carrizozo he pulled into a dusty parking lot and heaved his sweating body out of the car. He grunted when his knee creaked and stopped alongside the car to stretch out the locked joint.

A shower would have been good. But it wouldn’t have lasted in the heat.

He walked to the door of the restaurant and gave it an extra shove to let a man behind him pass through. He chose a table and ordered coffee and whatever pie was most recently baked. The waitress smiled.

“For breakfast?”

“Can’t help myself. I need the sugar and the caffeine.”

“Hon, you find yourself in need of extra sugar, just let me know.”  The waitress winked.

He found himself staring at her breasts, wondering where she’d take him if he asked for a hookup. Looking for Wendell had become his mission and the women were part of that routine. He shook it off.

He’d read something about the differences between women and men, biologically. Men making seed by the millions and spending them just that carelessly. Women only got one at a time and their body centered itself around the process of protecting that single egg.

He had seen Lynnie cry over the loss of one egg when she was trying to get pregnant with Wendell. Couldn’t see this chick crying over that though.

She put the coffee down and he got a whiff of her perfume.

“Here’s the pie. Cherry, just for you.”

He nodded but didn’t look up.

When she walked away, he tried to trace it back. The first one he’d fucked after marrying Lynnie. He couldn’t remember. The first year he’d sworn not to do it again but it had kept on, a spiral of betrayals.  He wondered how far back it went. What it might lead back to if he knew how to do that.

He left the restaurant satisfied with the meal. Time to navigate. His head full of spirals and sex. The sour taste of cherry pie.

He pulled off at the Valley of Fires because it made him think of Wendell. Her red hair cast against this soft and muted landscape. The brilliant blue sky. It would have been a place she’d want to stop.

There were no bikers and no Wendell. He checked out the lava flow that had formed over a thousand years ago. It had grown over with grass and small bushes and the black roped lava formations rose up out of a green landscape.

The flow stretched several miles wide and some twenty miles in length. He told a woman he met on the path that she shouldn’t let her children walk out across the formation itself. It didn’t look it but there were sharp edges. Not his business but he hated to see them cut up if they fell.

In the truck he checked the map and noted that he was coming to a tiny town called Bingham, which made him smile. There was a buddy of his by the same name. He had done a little bit of everything in his time, high speed, under cover, in your face. They had spent time together one summer after Lynnie died, in the name of training, the kind that wasn’t much more than hanging out with the fellas.

He was raw and Bingham saw through his bluster.

“I’m sorry about your wife, man. Must be rough.”

“Yeah.”

That was the way they talked, sitting out in the woods around a fire, two of their cadre talking ammo, two more walking off dinner. He and Bingham sipped whiskey and talked women.

Bingham tossed a wad of paper in the fire. “How’s your little girl?”

“With her aunt. She’s fine. Screams her head off if you don’t change her diaper fast enough. Redhead.”

Bingham smiled. “I know a redhead. I can imagine.”

“Someone special?”

“She’s special all right. Just not mine to have.”

They all pretended to be big bad men, but around the fire, late in the evenings, bone tired and wishing for something they didn’t exactly know how to put to words, they were nothing more than boys nursing broken hearts via scraped knuckles, banged-up knees, cracked feet. Nothing was said outright. They edged up to it and slipped it in quiet-like, bits of vulnerability sandwiched between tough things.

“You see that girl checking us in yesterday?”

“The one with the skirt?”

“Damn.”

“Right.”

Few minutes of crackling fire, soft wind high up in the trees, a pine cone hit the ground, cushioned by the carpet of fallen needles lying beneath.

“You know what they say. All’s fair in love and war.”

Bingham laughed that time, low, not a ha-ha chuckle but a sardonic one. “Not when it’s your best bud in love with her.”

“She in love with him?”

“For now.”

“You love her?”

“She’s a bird with a broken wing. I’d like to be there when she flies again.”

“If she inspires that kind of talk, go after her, man. Life’s too short.”

They had both gone silent, stared like hypnotized fools into the fire. Let the awkward moment slip and fade. Bingham passed the whiskey. His only response.

Not long after that Scott would have told him different. Run like hell. If you think you love her, man, get the hell out of dodge. She’ll break his heart and yours too.

Knowing Bingham though, he waited, ever the patient man, and got her in the end. Scott hoped so, anyway.

The town Bingham turned out to have two houses and a rock shop. He thought of stopping but drove on. He wanted to get to Socorro.

Outside town he pulled off and leaned his head back in the truck. He had a sense of Wendell in Socorro. He wanted to find her but not reveal himself right away. He’d watch first and see what was going on.

He drove in and scanned the parking lot of the first place he saw to stay. No bikes. He pulled in and got a room. It was good to get a shower and clean sheets. AC.

He wished he had a rib-eye and a beer but there was no room service and he didn’t want to risk going out. He ate what he’d brought in the cooler. Drank soda from the machine.

Channel-surfed until he found a good movie. Paris, Texas.

When his cell phone rang he checked the number and answered. “Clear.”

“He’s working something. RV. Had access to all your files.”

Scott thanked her and snapped the phone shut. Closed his eyes and let the TV ramble on.

A flash of greenish-yellow light hovered on the motel room window, blinking an unknown message in Morse code. A firefly, the familiar slender black insect with orange markings and an almost unnatural light emanating from its belly. She had caught a million of them growing up in Virginia, Her childhood friend Angelina used to pinch the lights off and stick them to her skin, glowing beads in the night. Lightning bug rings, she called them.

All Wendell ever did was let them sit on her finger. What are you saying? Her chest was warm inside, as though someone was cradling her heart.

Illumination.

She moved across the bed to where Tag slept like a rock, heavy and unmoving, flat on his back. Vulnerable, perhaps, to talking in his sleep. Letting something slip. Beneath the sheet, tucked in a nest of fur, he was soft and malleable. She took him in her mouth, massaged with one hand. He lengthened and grew firm and then hard. There was nothing mysterious, no secrets, just her body manipulating his. He moaned a little and shifted but didn’t wake. He would if she continued, and she did.

“God, Wendell,” he groaned, and she stopped. “Keep going.”

He wanted pleasure and she needed answers.

For the moment, she had power.

In all the relationships she had known with men, it was reduced to nothing more than that, a game of power and pleasure and the trading back and forth of who played what role. The problem was it ended all too quickly. Love made it different. Insert love and you got the mystery, the alchemy. A too potent loyalty, devotion, the sort of worship that assumed frightening proportions if you submitted to it.

She had watched people submit to love. Her father, Tristan, various girlfriends. She had seen them do crazy things, witnessed pain when their love was returned only to be taken away by events they were powerless to stop, Death, or a move across country. She had sat with girlfriends whose love was encouraged, only to be rejected. She had seen the look in Tristan’s eyes when she herself said no.

She preferred power, but without the trappings, it was a short-lived shallow thing. All there was to do was recreate it over and over again.

“Tag, there’s a firefly on the window.”  Something about the firefly was almost overwhelming.

He shoved his face into her neck. “No way, babe, they don’t have fireflies in New Mexico.”

They hadn’t spoken of what it was Tag wanted from her. She felt like she was living inside a game of cards, where only one was played at a time, and there was no way to rush the game, no way to see who came out ahead in the end.

In the little town of Socorro there was nothing much to do. They had come too close and what she already knew about herself, she discovered in Tag as well. He resumed his earlier distance.

They drove out past Magdalena to Bosque del Apache to see the birds, they went to Sonic and watched the teenagers preen for one another. Tag enjoyed the brazen behavior of a dark-haired girl who wore cut-offs so short the flesh of her rounded ass was exposed. She flirted with him, shameless in her eagerness to pull his attention away from Wendell, to attract someone past the hormone-driven desperation of the boys her own age.

The quiet boy two tables away, unlike his pals, did not grab or tease or otherwise express what was without question lurking inside. He seethed with it, but kept it disguised. Of all the boys he was the one who had indulged the ache. Shoved his innocence aside. None of the girls knew it yet, but he was the one to watch out for if they wanted to keep theirs. Or not.

Wendell and Tag took to holding hands when they walked. After two days in Socorro the mystical sex metamorphosed into simple touches, glances – her hair across his shoulder, his foot against her calf. The smallest of things became erotic, charged with the reek of sadness and loss.

She had given up on loving him, not anxiously or urgently, but simply, in the way in which two people who disavow love mark time, counting down the days until they say goodbye.

Late afternoon in the lobby of the little motel, taking advantage of the free coffee and tourist brochure rack, she learned that Socorro was the Spanish word for succor. Aid, assistance, military reinforcements, a place of shelter and refuge.

Tag and Keller came around the corner outside, visible through the wall of windows. Their shoulders bent inward as they talked, intent and focused, just like her father.

Like my father.

That was it. The missing piece in all this, what she hadn’t even thought to consider. They were CIA, or some funky branch of Army, special ops. For all she knew, her fucking father had sent them to find her and keep tabs until he got there himself.

She slammed down the brochures on the table and cursed out loud.

They didn’t see her in the office, and once they had time to get up the stairs and out of sight, she walked out the lobby door and down the driveway in the opposite direction. Thank god she had her bag. There were a few items up in the room, but she had what she needed.

The side street she’d cut onto was quieter than the main road, but she wanted to get downtown before Tag and Keller started looking. There wasn’t much going on traffic-wise, but hopefully she could get a ride. Someone heading west, or anywhere. It didn’t matter. She just wanted to get away.

Ahead on the corner she spotted a church, and a side door was unlocked. She ducked inside and sat on the wooden bench for a moment to figure out what to do next. Someone walked by but she bowed her head and they disappeared.

She wished she hadn’t left her cell phone back home in Virginia.

By the front entrance there was a schedule. If she was willing to stick around until 6, she could hear the Mass of Anticipation. Which actually sounded intriguing, but she hoped to be well out of town by then.

She remembered that further down the street there was a bar, a likely stop for tourists who might be heading out of town after a meal. A good place to strike up a conversation and maybe get a ride.

She sat at the bar and ordered a beer. Glanced around to see if there were likely candidates. If it were earlier in the day she’d have a better shot. She thought back over everything Tag had said since she’d met him. There had been no clues, nothing specific to corroborate her suspicions. If they were true, it had started up in Austin, and he’d watched her not out of interest but per orders, maybe a favor being repaid to her father.

The most salient piece of evidence was her gut feeling. Seeing the two of them, Tag and Keller, when they’d been away from her and didn’t know she was watching, she’d seen it. The way they walked. Their communication. Her father was the same way with a few of his friends, men he worked with but that was all she ever knew.

The beer was cold and she decided to order something next time the bartender came by. She leaned on the bar and flagged him.

“Hey, we were looking for you.” Tag took her arm from behind and when she saw his face, the grin, she wondered if she had overblown things. His face was so familiar. She wanted him close by. He and Keller took barstools and ordered beers and burgers, and she said yes when the bartender asked if she wanted one too. No harm in a meal. Maybe she’d get more information.

“We’re heading to Whizmer day after tomorrow,” Keller announced, then explained. Whizmer was short for White Sands Missile Range.

“I knew it. You’re military.”

“Not the way you think.”  Tag interrupted. “I’ll explain more later.”

So now he was letting her in on things. She wondered at the timing.

They turned the conversation to White Sands. Keller said it had archaeological sites. Tag talked about a cavern and a huge gypsum dune field. She couldn’t tell if their chatter was an invitation or just small talk. They finished one another’s sentences, shorthand that carried a subtext she wasn’t privy to.

An hour and several more beers apiece later, they all walked back to the hotel and sprawled on one of the king beds in the room she’d shared with Tag. Paris, Texas was on some movie channel. Wendell was simultaneously reading the White Sands literature Keller had fished out of a bag.

“There’s a sacred mountain in White Sands?”  She remembered the dream she’d had when she’d first slept with him.

“Salinas.” Tag rolled onto his side and looked at her instead of the TV screen. “The Apaches haven’t gotten in there for years. It’s a big deal to them.”

“Why not?”

“Military says no.”

“But you can go up there.”

“If I want to, sure.”

Keller got up to go to his room. “You got this covered, T?”

“Yeah.” Tag turned back to her. “You’ll come along, right?”

“What are you doing at White Sands?”

He didn’t even blink. “Training.”

“Training is what you say when you don’t want anyone to know what it is you’re really doing. My father said that all the time.”

Tag didn’t look away and his face didn’t change at all. “So you’re a military brat, huh?”

“Not the way you think.”

“Then you’ll be right at home at White Sands. Come on. I can show you the mountain. I studied Apache rituals. Vision quests, that kind of thing.”

He couldn’t possibly know about the dream she’d had. That mountain, the feeling she had up there, with him.

He pulled her closer. “The mountains are the focus of their prayers. They form the intentions, let their language shape the intent, speak the words into the air. The mountains catch the prayers and then release them through the cloud cover. Rain, life-giving water.” He paused. “It’s powerful stuff.”

“I just have one question.”

“Shoot.”

“Did my father send you to find me?”

“Are you on the run?”

“Let’s just say I’m taking a break from a few things.”

“Baby, you don’t want to be found, I’ll make sure you’re so far under the radar no one will find you. Really.”

The last day before Whizmer Keller wanted to go hiking. Tag wanted to look at birds. She refused to be the deciding vote.

They ended up doing both. She walked ahead of them on the boardwalk at Bosque del Apache. Interconnecting canals cut through meadows of tall grass that swayed in the evening breeze. It was quiet. Her mind cascaded forward. One of them came up behind her and without seeing which she knew it was Tag. All her chemicals fired faster when he got close.

The afternoon advanced into early evening. They stood in a line, three abreast, looking for something unusual. It was the wrong time of year though, there weren’t many birds. Tag said it was phenomenal in November, that the sandhill cranes mated for life and flew in pairs, male and female side by side.

“They take off together, each mated pair. If one of them takes off without the other by mistake, they circle back. The one on the ground waits.” He looked at her when he told this and she looked away.

Keller watched, face unmoving, as though he knew already how it ended.

At the motel she sat outside the room, on the balcony, imagining the cranes, two paired in flight. The one left behind. The one who waited.

Tag came out; he didn’t do anything until she started to cry. His motions were small, nearly invisible. He squatted in front of her and placed his fingers on her thighs.

“You’re not running away from your father. What you really want is for him to come after you. Am I right?”

“In a way.”

“I bet we can make that happen. In fact, it’s already happening.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ll tell you more when we get to White Sands. I swear.”

He led her into the room and put his arms around her. After all the distance, the idea that they were counting down time to an ending, it felt like he was back. That some new decision had been made.

As easy as that. When Keller and Tag loaded their bags for White Sands, Tag put hers on top of his. They said goodbye to Socorro.

Scott sensed Wendell leaving town. The air was suddenly bereft around him. He found the hotel she’d stayed in, other side of Socorro from where he was. The clerk remembered them well. Two men on bikes, seemed to know their way around. Men left for one night, the young woman stayed behind. Seemed fine. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing rowdy. No idea where they went.

He sat by the brochure rack and sipped a cup of coffee while he figured what to do next. A pamphlet had been opened and left on the table. He picked it up. Wendell’s handwriting.

Socorro = succor, military (ha!) reinforcements, a place of shelter, refuge.

Below that she had sketched a mountaintop, two stick figures standing side by side. At the base of the mountain she’d drawn in a bike.

Off near the edge of the brochure, blocked by the columns of text, there was a missile pointing straight up.

Whizmer.

They’d finally done it. Decided to go after his daughter. God help him, he’d kick their asses all over New Mexico if they did anything to her. His thoughts went haywire for a moment. He slowed his breathing, closed his eyes. Hoped for a clue.

The first place his mind went was back in time. Wendell had been in college, a freshman, maybe. Somehow she’d been at the house in Culpeper when he was out of the country, and this younger guy, new in the company, had asked Scott if he could crash there for a week.

Roger Ray. Blond brute of a man, cocky as hell. He’d let it slip to the wrong guy that he’d balled Scott’s daughter every which way he wanted to, in Scott’s house, with Scott’s implied consent.

Roger suddenly got assigned to one-on-one covert training with Scott, middle of fucking nowhere in the Sandhills of North Carolina. Showed up with his tail between his legs, ready to get his horny ass kicked. Which Scott did, after making him tell every detail of the night in question.

Worst part was near the end, when he’d lost enough blood to get a little too careless with his tongue. “I swear to God I didn’t hurt her. Matter of fact, sir, I think she enjoyed it.”

Just about killed him then. Drove Roger fucking Ray to the ranch himself, let two medics sew him up.

Then went and puked his guts out at the thought of that asshat with Wendell. Never breathed a word to her that he knew. Never would.

This was not what he wanted. Bad memories informing the present. He needed a read on what was happening now. What these guys were thinking. He suddenly imagined they were like him, old enough to be her father. Jaded cynical men who would use her up and spit out the remains.

They were on the way to White Sands, he knew that much. He thought maybe he’d head there fast. See if he couldn’t beat them there.

He found nothing at White Sands. No one would tell him if someone named Tag was there, and he aroused too much suspicion to be found loitering anywhere nearby. He couldn’t risk anyone looking him up. They wouldn’t find anything if they did, which would arouse even more suspicion. He’d dealt with this before. The army and the agency scrabbling over turf. He had no authority here.

He used up two days playing at being a tourist. Took the tours, went to the museum. Ate at the restaurants. He drove through the housing on site as much as he could without drawing attention. There was no sign of her.

He sat in his motel room and tried to get behind the scenes. Best he could tell she wasn’t there. Maybe they hadn’t come straight to White Sands. He couldn’t get an image, couldn’t get any intel on where she might be. His head was foggy.

It was possible he needed distance, physical distance, to get clear again. It was counterintuitive, but he’d experienced this before. The distance helped him tune out the noise. There was a lot of noise here, most of it his own feelings and perceptions about this place. He had to get away, but not so far he couldn’t get back quick if he needed to.

He considered Las Cruces, and if that wasn’t far enough he could drive on down to El Paso. But when he looked at the map he’d brought from her house in Austin, he couldn’t reconcile driving the shorter distance south. His eye kept traveling north.

Her red line had ended in Albuquerque so that’s where he went. For some reason he felt she would end up there, or call him.

It was half a day’s drive. He actually drove southwest briefly to get to Highway 25, and as he went through Las Cruces, Truth or Consequences, and back through Socorro, pulled over to see if anything came to him. He got images like a slide show, and she didn’t seem upset. Instead she seemed giddy and he wondered if this were worse. It could be she was falling in love, which would make her vulnerable.

The fleeting images weren’t enough to go on, though. He kept driving and found a small motel in Albuquerque, where he could lay low until the next thing came. He checked in and took a nap, then went out to get some air.

He suddenly felt he was channeling Wendell. His mind filled with thoughts he felt were hers, or would be if she were with him. He drove west of the city and tried to follow a path she might take. He tried to put his trust in something outside himself.

The Petroglyph National Monument was on the west mesa of Albuquerque, where he walked in the harsh sun, and squinted at ancient handprints carved onto the shiny chunks of black basalt that jutted from the earth. The spaces between were filled with brushy green plants and bright yellow flowers, sage and yucca.

There were simplistic but elegant birds drawn on rock, a sharply angled snake, a deer-like creature with a spear run through its mid-section. He wanted to assign meaning to what he saw, but perhaps there was none to attribute. Maybe all there was to see was the hot day, bright with light and primitive images. Archetypes. A direct line to the unconscious.

He did not need to name the thing for its power to be true.

She seemed to be speaking to him, via signs and symbols.

On his way back to the parking lot, a rattlesnake coiled in the sun, in what looked to be a nest formed of a hollow in the sand, backed with dried grass and the rise of pocked stone behind it.

A muted scuffle revealed a roadrunner, smaller than he remembered, there and then gone.

He had no urge to follow. He was content to have seen it crossing his path. This lesson he would not belabor. Like so much air and light, it floated through his mind. What he needed to take from it was there already.

So many times he made things harder than they really were.

In the car her presence seemed to fade. He suddenly felt silly and wondered if he had a fever.

He had been in the sun too long without a hat, which was foolish.

Back in the hotel room he dreamed he was released, a coin tossed, an arrow shot randomly forward. He had no idea where he was headed.

In the morning he went to the gym hoping to keep busy for an hour. He spent thirty minutes on the treadmill and watched CNN on the TV hanging from the ceiling. Five minutes caught him up on world events, at least from the perspective of the American media.

There was so much more going on. Some of it centered around him, but more of it had to do with Wendell.

Sweat poured down the sides of his face. He needed to wear himself out. Needed to fill some time.

What it would be like to retire. What the hell would he do all day? Get up at dawn and that would be sleeping in for him, go for an hour run, breakfast. Throw in weight training, read the paper, check email. Finish all that and it would be, what, eight a.m. or so?

One long fucking day after another to fill and not enough to fill them with. Okay, add in a drive up to Skyline and a hike. Add in lunch. There’d still be hours and hours of nothing to do.

Funny thing was, that’s most of what he did on the job, wait. He didn’t think he could handle waiting for nothing at all.

He had no idea what had brought this on. He wasn’t going to retire. It had popped into his head like some freaking idea planted there by a woman, and yes, that’s exactly what it was. The demon seed that Jess planted. Threw at him, more like.

If anything he’d go private, sweet contract deal, more money, better gear, all that. But to go from what he’d done for twenty-five years to nothing? No way. No how.

Weights. Sauna. Shower. Back to the room. He could sit and dwell on how much he missed Jessie. Could think about her sweet face and soft body and jack off.  The fact was, when it came down to it, what she intended was to change who he was. That wasn’t going to happen.

They weren’t suited. Lynnie had handled it. Lynnie had never once asked him to stop. She’d given up college, psychology. Jess had taken Lynnie’s dream and run with it. Then Lynnie’s daughter. Now him.

And that’s what Jess would be fighting the rest of her life: trying not to get lost in Lynnie’s shadow.

Down the street there was a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint. He got some lunch and ate at the rickety table crusted with old food just to stay out of the hotel. The food was good, the beer cold, and there were no women to distract him. He could have been in Mexico. On the clock. He could have been doing his job. Low drag.

He had waited for governments, for friends, for a turn with women he paid to service him. He guessed it was high time he did some waiting for his daughter.

He walked through this city as he had so many others. Let the rhythm of its inhabitants beat gently at his heels. He soaked in what there was: light, shadow, color. The shrill city sounds, the low but steady drumbeat of nature, voices of people on the street.

He did what he always did, yielded over to blending instead of standing out, allowed for the slow and easy slide toward invisibility that was crucial to his work. Invisible but present, ears cocked, lines of communication open to the ones who needed to know. He didn’t know any other way to be. He had lived it for so many years.

The idea of joining a community the way a father or a husband would had become alien to him. He wouldn’t know how to act in such a role. He’d never had to learn.

A woman noticed him in a coffee shop and shot him the look. It surprised him that he didn’t return it. His desire for that kind of union seemed to be fading. He didn’t know what that meant. What it might mean when he went back to work. Some of what made the long assignments bearable were the couplings. If he no longer wanted those punctuations, what would it be like? What would take the place of that kind of gratification?

He was thinking too much.

He turned in the rental car for a truck. Once again he needed to get outside the city. A day trip, no destination, just somewhere less inhabited than Albuquerque, off the beaten path where he could be alone.

He didn’t look at maps. Didn’t read the names of places. He simply drove until he saw a good place to stop. He watched the sun set and then circled back to the motel.

They rode east on 380 but then Tag decided to turn around and take the interstate south. “I liked the quieter way,” Wendell grumbled, but Tag lifted his chin toward the road.

“There’s more to see down 25,” he countered. “We can make a few stops, take our time.”

Lunch in Truth or Consequences made all three of them laugh and began a banter that, fueled by margaritas and tequila shots, went downhill fast.

“Let’s play.” Tag slammed his glass down on the table.

“Play what?”

“The game. Truth or consequences.”

They were all on the edge of drunk, still coherent, but itching for trouble. They shared a streak of something, not quite meanness, but close. A desire to cut so close to the quick with truth they risked something big.

She tossed a dull nickel that spun and fell with a clink muted by the unfinished wood of the table’s top. Tag got to ask the first question. He glanced at Keller, then looked back to her. “So, Wendell.”

His eyes were searing in the changing light, the vivid glaze of late afternoon sun through a restaurant window.

“Are you falling in love with me?”

She wouldn’t answer that question and he knew it. He didn’t smile, simply waited for her response. Eyes glued to one another, they sat with the sour taste of lime in their mouths.

It was a test. She didn’t know what he was doing or why, but it had something to do with the mountain. He wanted to get her alone on top of that mountain. His eyes were steady, which pissed her off. He was too measured. Something was wrong.

Or not. She couldn’t get a good read. One minute it felt wrong and the next, right. Right in that yes, she was falling in love with him. Damn it.

“Consequences.”

The consequence of not telling the truth. She waited.

“Spend the night with Keller.” Tag’s face revealed no emotion. He was testing not only her but his friend. Himself.

He thought she would back down, that she’d confess. That, yes, she was falling in love with him. Couldn’t possibly sleep with his best friend. But Tag didn’t know her stubborn streak. The way she dug her heels in when pushed up against a wall.

And Keller was no rescuer. Tag had made the bed and depending on her call, Keller would be more than happy to lie in it. She could guess what he’d want to do, the exact way he’d want to do it.

“Okay.” Her hand slid across the table to Keller’s. “We’ll see you in the morning.”

The ride was different on Keller’s bike. Her arms didn’t wrap as far around, and he went faster. They rode on to the next town, Las Cruces, and Keller pulled into a little motel right outside town.

“You hungry?”

“Not yet.”

He unlocked the door to the room and stood aside so she could go in first. “Why didn’t you just tell the truth?” He stretched out on the bed.

“To prove that I didn’t have to.”

“Come over here, then.”

Keller reminded her of Roger Ray, some guy who had known her dad when she was in high school. He came by one weekend when her dad was gone and she was supposed to be spending the weekend with a friend, but didn’t. Some plan they’d cooked up that fell through, and she’d felt like being alone, so she stayed at her dad’s house instead of going home to Aunt Jessie’s.

Like Keller, Roger had been bulky and slightly crude. He’d asked if she had a boyfriend and she said no. Things went on from there. Got a little out of hand. Roger Ray had not been brutal, but he’d had a huge appetite. When he left she knew more about what that kind of man liked.

Back then, she had thought of herself as putting something over on her father, but of course he’d never known about that weekend.

Keller was into watching. He talked it out, half commentary, half telling her what to do next. She did everything he asked without emotion, just the determination to prove something to Tag, who wasn’t even there to see it.

And yet she felt his presence.

They had exhausted all possibilities by three a.m. She left Keller’s huge body asleep, his face shadowed with beard, the source of her stinging face. She walked out to the pool and sat in the dark. The chill in the night air crept forward and took hold in all her sore places. Her chest felt like it was caving in. As though she’d gone hollow.

Tag slipped through the gate to the pool area, illuminated briefly by a beam of light from beyond the wall. He approached slowly, hands low and palms up. He crouched at her feet and winced. “I smell him,” he said. “You did it.”

He put his head on her lap. She had won this round.

In the coffee shop at dawn, a local sitting at the barstool beside her told a story of Lozen, an Apache woman who rode as a warrior, first with her brother and later with Geronimo himself. His wrinkled hands fingered the salt and pepper shakers.

“She fell in love with a Confederate soldier, a deserter, sheltered by the Apache.” The withered older man had dark hair gone silver in streaks, eyes that seemed too wet as he continued. “She fell in love with him but he left her, went for the gold further west. Most say he broke her heart. She gave her life to her people. Lozen had powers, ways to sense where the enemy was, healing ways.”

He left off there and looked at her one last time, then spun slowly on the stool and walked out the door.

Wendell had goose bumps on her arms.

Tag’s shoulder bumped hers. “He was trying to give you your destiny.”

She must have looked terrified because Tag put his hand on her arm and added, “Of course, you don’t have to accept.”

The ride to White Sands went quickly because they only stopped for gas. Her arms were sore from gripping Tag’s waist, and her eyes and throat, even with the helmet, were parched.

Tag had to check in and get the key to the house he’d be living in while he was there. She gathered pamphlets and informational brochures while she waited, wondering how long she’d even be there. After what happened with Keller she kept expecting Tag to seize on that when he needed a reason to end things, that he had laid a trap which would grab her later, when she’d forgotten all about it.

The house was small but nicely furnished with everything they might need: furniture, linens, towels, dishes. High speed internet, even. What it didn’t have was what she needed most. The details of a life, items that might reveal something about the man who lived there. How he’d found her and why he’d brought her here. What any of it meant.

But what she got was standard military issue. Anonymous furnishings that any Army wife might be familiar with as she moved with her husband around from base to base.

They took turns with the shower and she was asleep before Tag got back from the grocery store.

In the morning he had an early meeting, and woke her to say goodbye.

“I’ll be gone most of the day.” He pulled a shirt on and ran a hand back over his hair. “You can walk into town and find something to do, right?”

“Sure.”

“As soon as I can, we’ll go to Salinas.”

“That’s fine. See you later.”

He was all business, already, now that he was on post with meetings and soldiers running around everywhere.

The stack of brochures was still on the table where she’d left them. She sat down at the table with the brochures, coffee, and a muffin.

The first one was about the white sand dunes themselves. The ripples in the photograph were intriguing; apparently it took a wind of 17 mph to create them, bouncing the grains of sand until they reached an angle of 34 degrees. Then gravity kicked in, and slid an avalanche of sand down the slip face, moving the dune forward. Saltation, it was called.

Her smaller pack had room for money, water, an apple, a power bar, and the map of the post. The White Sands Missile Range Museum was her first stop. She learned more about the place: that the white sands were pure gypsum and unlike quartz-based sand, didn’t get hot in the sun, so you could walk on it barefoot in the middle of the summer. That the Fat Man, a 13-pound plutonium bomb, had been exploded at Trinity Site on July 16th, 1945. The explosion turned the sand into green glass called trinitite, shattered windows for 120 miles, and rattled the ground for 250.

The entire post was 2.2 million acres and White Sands was an alternate landing site for the space shuttle.

The Missile Park, next to the museum, had a path that wound through missiles pointed at the sky, with plaques detailing the types and what they were used for.

It was odd, the Missile Park. Like the missiles were rides or climbing structures, but in fact they were real. Actual missiles used for blowing things up.

Someone in the museum recommended a restaurant on post, The Frontier House, so she set out to find that next. The special of the day was spaghetti with meat sauce, and she found a table and settled in with the remaining brochures.

The woman at the museum had said she could get a tour, a better one if Tag set it up, to Trinity Site, the dunes, a few more places. And of course there was Salinas Peak, with Tag, as soon as he managed a day off.

Walking back to the house in the afternoon, the thing most noticeable about White Sands was the bright blue sky and the Organ mountain range circling the town, brown and rugged. On the street ahead two little girls rode bicycles with training wheels while their mothers followed on foot, talking. They both smiled as she passed.

“Did you just move in?” The darker-haired one spoke, but both of them waited for her answer.

“Yes, but I’m not here to stay that long, it’s just temporary.”

“Come over for coffee sometime. We’re just across the street. I’m Jill and this is Sara.”

“Wendell. It’s nice to meet you.”

“So what’s your husband here for?”

Wendell had no idea what to say. The idea of Tag, of a husband, was so foreign, but then, behind that, intriguing. “He’s doing a special project.”

“Oh, he must be with that psych ops thing that just started.”

She just smiled back at them. Psych ops. Interesting.

“Well, here I am. Thanks for the coffee invite. I’ll come by sometime.”

They waved and walked to the other side of the street. When she got to the front door a special delivery envelope was propped at the bottom. Once inside she didn’t hesitate. She opened it, expecting some sort of psychological top secret memos, but there were only drawings. Dozens of them. Each page had a date written at the top, all during the year she was born, 1977, and beneath that the number 27.

Each sketch had an 8x10 photo attached with a paper clip. The first sketch was a series of lines and circles, and the attached photo a simple Tinker Toy construction.

The sketch matched the photo almost perfectly in its lines and planes.

The rest of the sketches were similar, each captured the essence of the objects and their placement in the photographs. The sketches reminded her of the sketches her father had doodled on scraps of paper, the backsides of envelopes. He had done it all her life, and sometimes she did it too. Completely intrigued, she stuffed the papers back into the envelope and stuck the flap back the way it was.

Tossed it casually onto the little table by the front door.

And waited for Tag.

He got home around four p.m. and ignored the envelope. “What did you do today?” He seemed a little distracted, but sat beside her on the sofa.

“Went into town. Checked out the museum and the missile park. Ate lunch. Walked around. They said you can arrange a tour for me, something more behind the scenes than the regular one.”

“Huh. I’ll ask tomorrow and see how that works.”

He leaned back and rubbed his eyes.

“Are you tired?”

“Not too much. You want to go somewhere for dinner?”

What she really wanted was to know what he’d been doing all day. What the sketches meant and why they’d been sent to him. Maybe getting him out of the house would help. They might run into someone at dinner, who might ask a question or say something to offer a clue.

“Let’s go out. We don’t have much here anyway. Tomorrow I’ll go to the grocery store.”

As they were walking out the door, he stopped for a moment and kissed her, like maybe he’d forgiven her for sleeping with Keller. And possibly, forgiven himself for his part in that.

He took a different route than she had earlier that day, so she got to see more of the community. There was a little bar and grill that seemed like a good place to run into people he was working with, and inside, she looked around hopefully, wondering if someone would call out his name.

No one did. But she was hungry, and it was nice just sitting there in the dimly lit room, the smell of chili strong as they sipped beer and listened to music.

“Tell me about your work.”  The direct approach might work best with him.

“It’s a special project. Pretty boring.”

“Oh, come on. You wouldn’t be here if it were boring.”

He laughed. “You’d be surprised.”

The chili arrived in thick blue bowls with a bottle of Tabasco on the side, and new, cold bottles of beer. A Dave Matthews’ song was playing, and the warm light across Tag’s face made everything seem okay again.

“Tag!”

A man walked up to the table and Tag motioned him to sit down. “Mack. This is Wendell.”

Mack motioned to the waitress that he’d like what they were having. He was older than Tag, and friendly. Could be he’d talk more than Tag did about work.

“I was just asking Tag about the project.”

Tag kept eating and didn’t make eye contact with her or Mack.

“Has to do with tracking missiles,” Mack said. “We’re working on a special application to some tracking device mechanics. Engineering, sort of.”

He paused and then rambled on. She didn’t even listen because what was more interesting was Tag’s face. As soon as Mack started talking, Tag looked up, and for a split second had been totally surprised at what Mack was saying. Which meant it wasn’t true. Not a word of it.

When they got back home, she asked him point blank. “You’re not an engineer. What are you really working on?”

“Stuff I can’t talk about. You know the drill.”

Of course she knew. There had been years of secrets with her father, questions not asked and answers never offered. She had asked Aunt Jessie, who told her what he did was special and important, but private. Aunt Jessie had used the word private, which had always seemed strange to Wendell, as if her father’s job centered around his own body, some intimate work he did only for himself.

It had become an issue of pride with Wendell that she never asked directly. A pretense that she understood, was mature enough to know the rules. What developed over the years between the three of them was a wall. Distance that added to the things they already didn’t know about the other.

All she’d had growing up were the flashes of places, some details, that she never quite trusted, but eventually had trusted because they seemed so real. Much like the vision she’d had with Tag on the mountain.

Tag was sitting beside her on the sofa, leaning back, arms folded up behind his head. His body was in the most casual of positions but his eyes were focused and intent. He watched her.

“I grew up not knowing what he did, where he went. I hated it.”

Tag nodded. “I know.”

“So why am I here living that all over again?”

His lips turned up in a half-smile. “You know the expression. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  Maybe that’s what you should do.”

She shifted on the sofa. “I’m an archaeologist. Not some kind of secret agent.”

“Maybe there’s more than one kind of excavation.”

She had been looking at his arms but looked to his eyes. They were wide and clear, unblinking.

“Just think about it, Wendell. The possibilities.”

That night in the hotel room Scott got very drunk and looked at Wendell’s things, the laptop bag and books he’d taken from the little house outside Austin, thinking he could go into her emails if he ended up not finding her.

It had been awhile since he’d had charge of her gear. Years back, hauling diapers and sippy cups and little plastic containers of snacks pressed into his hands by Jess, as though he would forget to feed his own child. As though he would actually let her go hungry.

Outfits and toys, stuffed bears, blocks, later on a doll that had its own gear. Books, always books. Jess would go through it all when he took Wendell back, making sure nothing critical had been left behind.

Things were shifting in his mind and in the room. What Wendell had got herself into, the company, and what might be happening behind closed doors. His feelings for Jessie, something he’d never seen coming. He was relieved, he realized. He hadn’t been sure it was still possible. Being taken by surprise.

He wanted to call Jess, but he couldn’t tell her anything yet. She would worry. She might even hang up. All he wanted was to hear her voice.

But here he was. In a hotel room waiting on bigger things.

Bigger things than he could name. Nebulous things, but he tried to trust it was all happening the way it needed to. That in the slant and tilt of the bed when he opened his eyes and closed them again, there were no hearts broken, no wounds that wouldn’t heal.

For now, he drank and he waited for his daughter. Rode the turning of the earth and marked time in increments marked by shots of whiskey.

When he woke up he felt instantly that he’d made a mistake leaving White Sands. The mountain. He kept seeing a mountain. She shouldn’t be there alone. But even worse, she wasn’t.

He closed his eyes. He was following Wendell and this man, up a dusty path. He felt Wendell’s excitement and her worry. He felt a pulse, separate from his own, and knew it was her heart beating. Faster than it should have been.

His arms tingled and the skin on the left side of his face. She was opening up to the man, letting him in her thoughts, letting him tell her what to do. Scott wanted to turn away but he couldn’t leave yet. He needed to know what the man wanted her to do.

There was something different about his daughter. He felt a shift, almost as if the bed itself had tilted beneath him. He grabbed the edge of the bed with one hand. She was merging with the man. They were putting their energies together.

Scott opened his eyes. This was some of what he’d done all those years back, gone too far, and he feared she was going there too. Being led there by this man, whoever he was, lured in by the connection she felt. Scott knew the power of this kind of connection. The appeal of merging with someone and how easy it was to get lost in that.

He sent messages to Wendell. Warnings to stay in her body, images of anchors and grounding via the rock of the mountain, the earth itself. He imagined her centered and still, impervious to outside influence.

When he opened his eyes, he felt dizzy and disoriented. It had been years since he’d felt this kind of pressure to view. The need to get an answer, with no hope of feedback. It was the thing that burned most of them out, back in the unit. Now it was personal and vital and yet the government was still involved. It was coming at him from both sides.

He stood up and walked slowly to the bathroom. A splash of cold water sometimes helped, and feeling his feet on the ground.  Outside the motel, he walked along the edge of the street, noting the steel gray of the asphalt, the almost painful glare of the sun, and the soft green of foliage that blurred and softened in his sight.

Everything seemed more intense after a hard viewing session. There was a sheen to things that felt unreal. He was too open. He breathed himself shut. Forced himself to assume she would be okay.

Tag and Wendell got up before dawn as planned so they could go to Salinas early.

On the mountain, the air was dry and the earth was barren. She kept thinking of Virginia, lush and green.

Tag set the pace on the trail. “Make sure you drink water. You dehydrate fast out here.”

He watched as she took a long sip and wiped her mouth. Something notched up between them. She lost track of time as they walked. He was ahead of her, and her focus shifted to what she wanted to say to the mountain. The exact words she would offer.

Tag slowed until she caught up to him. “The Apaches were matriarchal. In some tribes the woman just went to the man’s tent she wanted to marry and after she stayed a few nights he accepted her by eating the food she cooked for him.”

Wendell turned away, not able to look at him.

“That wasn’t a proposal.”

They walked on. Along the way her legs grew heavy. She kept thinking about anchors, her feet weighted, securing themselves with each step, connecting more deeply to the earth. Her father’s protection wrapped around her like a cloak. She wondered where he was. What he was saying to her.

When they reached the summit, Tag stopped and motioned to the ground. “Before we start I need to ask you something. Did you have a dream back in Socorro?”

So he did know. “Yes.”

“Was it this?”

Tears came to her eyes. He nodded and closed his. She watched the rise and fall of his chest and leaned forward when his face tilted slowly to the sky.

She felt the heaviness again but shook it off. This was something she wanted to do. She had waited for the opportunity to set her life straight. She would not shut it down. She ignored the images and eventually they faded.

Tag opened and she followed, unfolded everything in her head and heart, a map that spanned more distance than she’d imagined. It took time to get quiet and empty her head, and she was hot, but eventually the heat of the sun became nothing more than her own skin, as though she had become the sun itself, and the earth beneath was her base. Her body rose from the ground like a deeply-rooted tree. Tag was another tree; they shared the same plot of soil, perhaps competed for water, but to the detriment of neither. They had enough of what they needed. Existed in harmony with everything that surrounded them.

There was comfort in being rooted this deeply.

Tag said the primitive Apache had been a nomad, a wandering soul, following the path with courage and endurance. And cunning, he said. They had cunning.

In the landscape of her empty mind she walked a new path. Everything fell behind, the questions and the confusion. She walked forward in the world. Watched from a different perspective, from the outside in instead of the other way around.

This was her intent: that her journey was right, that she was brave and true. No longer lacking, not defined by what she had lost. She had everything she needed.

She said it all out loud, in a soft voice that didn’t make itself known to Tag. She felt it happen. The mountain, the sacred mountain, caught the words and held them.

Tag touched her knee finally and they started the long walk back to the jeep.

This time it was difficult keeping her feet on the earth. She felt weightless and exposed, naked and quivering in the light. Like she might float away.

She was baked through from the sun, worn from the walk, but energized. He waited while she drank more water, and then handed her a blank pad and a pencil from the back seat. “I’m taking you to a special place. I want you to draw where we’re going.”

The sketches. It all had to do with the sketches. But there was more than that. “Why do you want me to draw where we’re going?”

“To see if you can.”

And then it hit her. Keller’s question outside the bathroom: do you think she can do what he did?

The envelope full of sketches, all dated the year she was born. They must have been her father’s.

“He drew them. He knew how to find things and he drew them. And you want to know if I can do it too.”

“It’s called remote viewing.  There were studies. A unit that trained and ran ops. It was big stuff. Your dad was the best. But after you were born he lost his edge. They moved him back to the field. Ever since I got involved in this work I’ve had dreams about you. Then I found out you’re his daughter. We need to know if you can do what he did. We know more now. There’s so much we can do with this technology.”

Tag’s face was insistent but calm. He’d gotten her out here in the middle of nowhere so she couldn’t run away. She had to listen.

“You realize that my mother died when I was born. So him losing his edge – what he really lost was his heart.”

“I know. But it’s not him we want. It’s you.”

“And what if I don’t want this?”

He reached over. Laid his hand on her arm. “Come on. You’re a natural.” He pulled the napkins out of his pocket and dropped them on the seat. “You do it all the time anyway. Just try it for real, now.”

There was no reason she could think of to refuse. He would take her where he wanted to, and what happened after that could go a dozen different ways.

All she could hear inside her head was what her father said when she was little.

I go where they send me, Wendell-girl.

The drawing took about five minutes, and when she was done, Tag eased the jeep into gear. Twenty minutes later he pulled off the road and cut the engine. There was a rickety old shack, a pile of rocks, and three barrels lined up off to the side. Every one of those features was perfectly outlined in the sketch she’d just made.

“You have it.” He lifted her face from the sketch. “Remember what the old guy said to you in the diner? About Lozen’s abilities to see the enemy? That’s you, Wendell. You’re the warrior with sight. Think what we could do with that.”

“I need to think about all this. Take me back now.”

As he drove, she realized that it was him. He was the one from her dream. Part of her journey. What she had spoken to the mountain. Was this her answer, already? She looked at Tag’s face and his hands on the steering wheel. They shared something, an inner rhythm. She was in love with him, but she didn’t yet know what he felt for her.

Later in the evening he handed over a manila envelope that was sealed and asked her to sketch whatever came to mind. She made sketches that even she could tell were intricate designs for missiles. What she didn’t know was who was doing the designing. Or where. She ended up with nearly perfect blueprints. Tag took them and whistled.

Now she knew why she was at White Sands. And what it was they wanted.

Scott wasn’t sure whether to get in the car and drive back to Whizmer or stay put and let Wendell call when she needed him. He didn’t want to get hauled off by whoever was in charge out there. Which they might do if they found him hanging around.

He thought back to the year after Lynnie died. The work he’d done. His RV work had been threaded with images from his own past with Lynnie, from his future with Wendell. Half the time he hadn’t known what year he was in when he was given the target data and started the process.

He had been close to something big though, and they had known it.

When they shut him down, he went back to the field. A few people knew about the training, most didn’t. They’d kept an eye on his work though. Every few months someone accessed his files. He suspected they were tracking him to see if he was more successful than the average spook. He was.

What they might not have known was that he couldn’t stop the remote viewing. It had insinuated itself into his way of being. Since that year, there had only been two things he couldn’t access that way. The daughter in A-stan and Jessie. For whatever reason, it didn’t work with them.

He had always suspected it worked with Wendell because she’d developed her own skills unknowingly, a way to stay connected to him when he was away. He hadn’t discouraged it. Had in fact taught her a few things on the sly, subtly, so she wouldn’t know he was even teaching.

It had come to this. They wanted her now. Not the father, old and used up, but the daughter. Young and impressionable. Pissed off and ready to rebel against her daddy. They’d waited for this. It was no accident. When she took off from Virginia, they made their move.

And if he went in there and got caught, he’d be no good to her if she needed him. This was the kind of thing that would have no trail. Nothing Jess could follow or sort through. He’d seen it happen. He’d made it happen, with his own daughter in Afghanistan.

When he called Jessie, he kept everything out of his voice. “I’m out here with her. She’s fine.” He waited while Jess asked questions and fussed at him for not calling sooner. “I’ll check in every other day.” He hung up.

What he had nearly done was alter the future. He remembered lying on the couch in the viewing room, soundproofed and darkened. When they gave him the target along with instructions to look at what was happening not in that moment, but two weeks hence.

It had to do with a device that was being placed somewhere by a man, and Scott was to see where he put it.

He did the usual protocol, reporting exactly what he saw. But then he did something completely new. He shifted the image by telling the man to leave, that he was in danger. And then, three days later, the man, oblivious to any part of the protocol or even the existence of the study, listened and went someplace else. Scott had shifted the future. He’d influenced the target to throw the device away, into a river.

They never told Scott for sure what happened, but suddenly his assignments had changed. He was asked to interfere in future events. And he began to get caught up in that idea. If he could affect the future, might he be able to affect the past? Keep Lynnie alive, shift things completely? But then she’d come to him, while he was working, and told him to stop. She wanted him to leave things alone.

The voice in his head had seemed so real.

It’s not bad that you see things, Scott, but it isn’t okay to change them. You don’t have the right to do that. You can’t see the whole picture yet. How everything you do affects something else.

He had never revealed Lynnie’s words to anyone, but afterwards he’d balked at doing what was asked. Every time he was given a site to view, he saw what he needed to, but he also saw Lynnie. She stood in the darkened room with him and he had smelled her and wanted her. His focus shifted to what might be possible. How to have his dead wife back again.

When his boss saw what it was doing to him, he mentioned Wendell. What was best for her. His removal from the unit had been good-intentioned, he didn’t doubt that now. Back then he had been bitter and confused. He suspected only a few people knew the details of those final studies. One of them he knew to be dead from a brain tumor. Scott had asked at the time if there were side effects, if doing that kind of work affected the brain. They had said no, and he’d come to think the ability to remote view had always been in him, triggered by the training and the work he’d done. Couldn’t stop doing. He now knew differently. He too had a brain tumor. And now he was on the clock again. He had to find Wendell before they got her too deep in the work. And before the tumor began to affect his ability to carry out this last, most important, job.

They stood in the kitchen. Tag filled a plain tall glass and drank half, then passed the water to her. They had gotten quiet and she felt the opening, a way back to their intimate way of being.

He led her to the bathroom and held the shower curtain aside as she stepped in. The faucet handle jammed and he fixed it. Water sprayed across her face. Water falling like rain, if it would only rain, the real thing, but thus far it hadn’t done so. Tag waited outside the plastic curtain while she washed clean of sweat and other things. Fear and doubt.

When he got in with her they stood, taking turns beneath the spray, as if they needed to be wet, caught the solace of falling water, even if it was from a showerhead.

She wasn’t sure if it was the sun, maybe they had sunstroke or maybe it was the mountain’s magic, but what happened next was nothing she had known. They spoke without words. His skin pressed against hers. They knew every single thing, but without language. No telling involved.

The tips of his fingers fit themselves to hers and the world tilted. They moved in slow motion, to go fast would have been too much.

There was sex between fingers, the backs of hands, the tracing of delicate and tender flesh. Sometimes one of them asked the other to stop, it was so intense.

When they moved to the bedroom, dry finally, the air around them expanded. The center of the universe became the center of her orgasm.  They were mountains, apart and then together, fitting perfectly.

When it ended, hours later, she was illuminated and drained, dizzy with the rush of energy, a power line buried beneath the earth, coursing with electricity.

“Where did you come from?” she whispered and he whispered back: “The same place as you.”

Tag woke her with just the sound of his breath. Neither of them moved. There was no distance between them.

She wanted to ask questions, the things that lovers knew of one another: his full name, his birthday, the name of the first dog he’d owned as a boy. What music moved him, the kind of pie he hungered for in the middle of a sleepless night. Details that meant nothing and everything, facts like stitches in a tapestry, some small part of the bigger image.

A magical, delicate connection that could not be severed by any of the usual things: time, distance, circumstance. Absence.

After he left for work, she moved through the day dazed with wonder and then confusion. Everything she saw, from the army wives across the street having coffee in lawn chairs to the dull green of military vehicles lumbering by, was stunning and beautiful. But edged with doubt and laced through with a vague sense of mistrust.

She didn’t know what came next. She knew he was waiting for her, that unknown people were waiting on her to make a decision. She also felt her father, waiting someplace else. His hope that she made a different choice than he had made.

Tag arrived home at the usual time. They ate dinner together, did the dishes. She washed, he dried. They put them away, navigating the small kitchen with ease, his body turning in sync with hers so that there were no collisions. They seemed to move perfectly together.

Everything seemed more potent: the warm soapy water, the handing over of a clean plate, a glass, the easy way they worked together. No talk, except in the new dialect discovered between bodies, the graze of a hip, the slide of an elbow. A look, the blue of his eyes, the curve of his mouth. Simple gestures.

They walked the neighborhood until close to dark. Back at the house they lay in bed with windows open, pressed close beneath the sheet.

“I feel your heart beating.”

“Me too.”

She resisted the urge to grab hold of him, sex for comfort, in some desperate attempt to make things different than what they were.

She had made sketches of missiles. He had to turn them over to the people he worked for. She had put the sketches away, and because of their intimate, private connection, he was waiting. She knew they were nearing the moment when he’d have to ask. And that he wouldn’t accept no as an answer.

Worse, once they saw the sketches, they would demand more.

When Wendell got up, Tag was quiet, and then he sat down at the dining room table with a pencil and paper. She thought he was making a sketch, but he was writing what turned out to be meticulous directions.

He handed the page to her and she read. “Why are you giving me this?”

“It’s a special place,” he said. “Where you can find me if you ever need anything.”

It sounded like he was saying goodbye, but he didn’t. He simply kissed her and said he had to get to the office. But she knew. It was a chance he was offering. To leave, with the sketches, if she wanted to take them.

He had shown her the mountain, he had shown her what she knew how to do. Told her how that skill might be an asset, and who wanted to pay her for it. But now he was leaving the final decision up to her. Or at least that’s what he wanted her to believe.

“I want to try it.”

Tag had come home from work and was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling a peach. He turned and smiled.

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.” Wendell accepted half the peach and they ate side by side, leaning over the edge of the sink so the juice wouldn’t get all over the floor.

After dinner he took her to the place she’d be learning. The viewing rooms were dim and comfortable, and she sat back in the chair he’d offered and closed her eyes. “So this is where you come every day.”

“Most of the time. For now.”

“Can we try something?”

He handed her a pad and pen, and brought in a target sealed in an envelope. “This one was for tomorrow, but give it a shot now.”

He left her and she closed her eyes. After a few minutes she began to sketch, but was distracted by images that were so potent and real she couldn’t really draw them. She switched to making notes, jotting down words and phrases that described what she was seeing.

It was a hospital room. She couldn’t see the faces on the people, but there was a woman in a bed, a man close by, a doctor, two nurses. She became overwhelmed by the sadness, the man seemed to be almost melting with grief.

There was a lamp and the woman in the bed was looking at the light. Then she became the light, and there was a baby. The man cried.

Wendell realized her own face was wet. She dropped the pen and wiped the tears off with the back of her hand. She pushed the pad to the floor.

It had been her own birth. The death of her mother.

She got up and left the viewing room. Tag was sitting in a small area set up with chairs and a sofa. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t believe you did that to me.”

“What?”

She kept walking, headed for the door that led to the parking lot outside. He followed. When she didn’t stop, he took her arm and spun her around.

“What happened?”

“It was my mother’s hospital room, the day she had me. The day she died. How could you give that to me? What are you trying to do?”

Tag looked shocked. “Come back with me, let me see what’s in the envelope. That wasn’t the target, Wendell. We would never have given you that as a target.”

She wanted to believe him. She followed him back to the room. He ripped the envelope open. The target photo was a building with a red cross on front.

“It appears to be a hospital, but there’s no way it was where you were born. Sit down a minute.”

She sat and he looked at the photo again, and at what she’d written down.

“I think what happened is you saw the target in your head but for some reason you went to a different hospital.”

She shook her head. “Is that normal? Is that supposed to happen?”

“Not really, but it can. Until you get better control. Let’s get out of here and relax. Tomorrow will be better. We’ll go more slowly.”

During the night she dreamed the scene again. She woke up crying. Tag wasn’t there. She took her bag, packed the sketches, and left.

Scott’s cell phone rang. It was Wendell. For once he was waiting for her call. He was exactly where she needed him to be.

When she knocked on the door of his hotel room he opened it instantly. She looked terrible. Her face was blotchy and her hair a mess. Eyes weary and swollen from crying.

They sat apart, one on each bed. His fingers wound tight on the wood bed frame. The sharp intake of his breath as Wendell cried, the sound of a woman who had lost control.

He asked her again to tell him what had happened. She repeated the story while crying. It sounded like she had done a session that went wrong, she had been in the hospital room when Lynnie died.

His anger nearly overcame him, that they had put so little structure on her first formal session.  He watched her cry and felt his own control slipping.

He heard the roar of Blackhawks in the air, where the hell was he anyway. When he looked at the woman on the bed he thought it was Lynnie. He thought she had been in his bed with someone else.

Her perfect pale skin, the red hair fanned out over the edge of the mattress. Her face contorted. He was so confused.

The room blocked itself out in his mind: window, door, the bag that he recalled did not have his gun in it. Why didn’t he have his guns? Slow, like sourwood honey sliding along a spoon, it came to him. He had come looking for Wendell. This wasn’t his bedroom. This wasn’t their house. That woman was not Lynnie.

He let out his breath, but his eyes remained riveted to the bed. The woman lying there was, and it came as a jolt, his daughter. Wendell looked up at him. “I just want to forget all of it.”

His heart cracked in pieces.

He wished he could make it all go away.

For the first time in years he shared a hotel room with his daughter. Wendell had cried when he asked her to get another room, threw a shoe at his face when he persisted. He gave in. Maybe she was right. Maybe if they carried on as if nothing had happened, the earth would tilt back the right way.

Her stuff was piled on the floor by the closet. His eyes fell to her pack, the one he had bought and outfitted for her all those years ago, her sleeping bag, some ragged paperbacks Tag had loaned her. She had stacked them in an orderly pile, off by themselves.

She sprawled sideways across her bed, perusing the room service menu. He wondered if she would say it and she did.

“Can I get anything I want, Daddy?”

His turn to answer: “Anything, Wendell-girl, the sky’s the limit.”

In the late night of New Mexico, her father slept in the bed adjacent to hers. She seemed to be full of holes. Her mother, Tag, the ragged one left by the drunk man across the room. He had gone out and gotten a bottle of bourbon after dinner. She had considered saying something but held back. It had been a rough night for both of them.

He smelled like he always had, but for the first time, she named the scent. He smelled like whiskey and men.

She threw the covers off and stalked quietly to the door. Other than Tag, her father was the one man she couldn’t sneak out on. His voice cut through the blackness. “Don’t go.”

She knew how upset he was over what had happened at White Sands. He was angry that they had sought her out, that she had fallen in love with Tag. That there was still something holding her.

The path to the place she’d avoided for so long with her father cut through grief and sharp, unspeakable sadness. Like a tide that had caught them both up. She wanted to follow it, look for some shore of safety, a resolution. But the grief was what bound them. It was so much easier not to go.

They each cried in the darkness of the motel room. She listened as he turned away from her in the double bed a few feet away. She wished he would turn back.

Sometime in the night he asked. “What do we do now?”

She went downstairs and slept in a chair in the lobby, and dreamed that in order to find herself, she had to fend off the crow, Corvus, a bird known to reveal secrets.

For a moment in her hand-colored dream, there were two Wendell’s facing one another, hands extended. And then the two women merged, a slow and numinous combining of elements. Alchemy.

She also dreamed of her mother, who gave Wendell her heart, tiny and warm and beating inside a white flower the size of a fist. Wendell accepted it with great tenderness and trepidation.

Her mother’s hair blew back from her face, held aloft by a soft breeze that came out of nowhere. She did a little dance around Wendell and the dream ended.

They didn’t want to stay in Albuquerque. Just like when she was young, they packed the rental car and set forth. She had no colored pencils and no sketches to make, but in other ways it was like old times.

Ahead, khaki hills sprawled, dotted with dark green bushes and creosote. The distant hills seemed singed with black, as though burnt from above by a passing torch that dipped too low and lingered too long.

Her father talked about the columnar formations, lava and basalt. The car windows were down and she leaned her head out for a moment. The rush of air blew full in her face.

“You look more like her every time I see you.”

They were back in painful territory. It cut deep, unspoken and unnamed, but she recognized the ache, the shape of feelings that had no names, just angles and sharp edges. She didn’t know how to talk to him. Nor how to answer him or describe what she had missed or what she had known.

She reached over and squeezed his forearm, hard corded muscle, skin leathery from years of sun exposure. Kept her hand there for a long time. Neither of them spoke.

Santa Fe was adobe and statues and galleries, flowers by the sides of every street, brown-eyed susans, or maybe some kind of sunflowers. They found a place that suited them to spend the night.

Wendell wanted to walk and see the shops. Although Scott just about hated the thought of an entire day squeezing past people in narrow aisles and gazing at paintings of the outdoors when they could be seeing the real thing with their own eyes, he did it.

The looking seemed even more pointless when she didn’t buy anything, but Wendell had never been extravagant that way. She didn’t need or want much stuff in her life. She had always liked her living space free of clutter.  Empty air “to breathe in,” he recalled her saying once.

She seemed dressed for Santa Fe: black cowboy boots dusted with pale, dry earth, short skirt, bare legs. A turquoise blouse that opened at her neck. She walked ahead of him. Lifted her sunglasses rimmed with tiny beads to look at something hanging on the wall of the shop they were in. Her hair was twisted into a knot tied up with ribbon, and strands of hair had come undone and coiled across her forehead and down the back of her neck. When she turned her head quickly the long sparkly earrings swung through the air like tiny pendulums. It took his breath away.

He followed her up and down the streets, in and out of shops, and held her purse when she asked. She let him pay for coffee, but not for the bracelet she bought, silver filigree with amethyst wrapped in every few centimeters. She untied the tiny tag and handed him the bracelet, extended her bare wrist and waited while he hooked.

He watched men turn to stare when she breezed by. In some odd way it made him proud that she seemed not to notice, or care.

It was getting dark when they realized they were starved. Down past the hotel a little house on a hill above the sidewalk had been converted into a pizza joint. There were wood tables on the porch. They both spoke at the same time. “Let’s eat here.”

After they ordered, a longhaired man in a fringed leather jacket set up to play. The guitar was a thing of beauty, the tobacco-brown color of autumn leaves. The strings shone in the dim light. He recognized the first song before Wendell did. He used to sing it to her when she was little.

wild horses   couldn’t drag me away

There had been no dragging. He’d been running. From the one thing that would have healed him, had he only allowed it.

There was no need to say any of this out loud. It was remarkable how many things could be expressed with a glance, or the holding of hands. Which is what they were doing.

Her hand was no longer tiny and swallowed up by his. It was a woman’s hand, soft and capable. Her grip was strong. Her fingers wrapped easily around his.

After dinner they sat by the pool outside the motel. The water was too cold for swimming so it was empty of guests. Nice with the light coming up from underwater.

They’d spent enough time together to talk about what had happened. “You need to fill me in,” was how he broached it to her.

She twisted a piece of her hair around her finger until it formed a tight coil. “His name was Tag. He was at the campground in Texas. I went there with Grayson.” She stopped. “That’s too long a story, the whole Grayson thing, but anyway, I left with Tag and we went to Roswell. When we stopped for gas I overheard his friend say something about me looking exactly like he’d described. And he asked if I could do what you did.”

Scott inhaled and then let the breath out slowly.

“I had a dream about Tag. More like a vision. He knew what it was. It was like he’d been there. Almost like he caused me to have the dream so I’d go with him to White Sands. He had your sketches, from 1977. He knew all about you. He said they want me, that I can do what you did.”

“Did you do anything other than the hospital room?”

“I drew missiles. New technology. I have them in the room.”

“They might come after those.”

The air was chilly and he noticed she was shivering. He took off his jacket and handed it over to her.

The light from the pool hit her eyes when she leaned over to take the jacket.

“We’ll keep moving. See how this plays out.” He leaned forward. “You’re okay, though. Nothing more than what you just told me.”

“I never even met any of the other people. It was personal, with Tag. Not really related to the remote viewing.  Well, it sort of was related. In a way.”

He knew what she meant. The way he’d gotten inside her dream. That feeling of connection. It was hard to shake. “It might continue.” He didn’t want her to be surprised. If Tag kept it up, she’d feel it.

“It already is. I can feel him thinking about me. I can feel his body around mine. The outline of his body. His energy. Does that even make sense? It’s hard to describe.”

He knew exactly. “I get it. I felt it.” He paused. Maybe this wasn’t the right time. He didn’t know. “I feel you sometimes. Calling me home.”

He hoped she wouldn’t start crying.

“I know, Daddy. I feel you too.”

She paused and then continued. “The thing in the hospital room? The worst part was how sad you were.”

He shifted in the chair and looked away.

“You have to let that go, all that sadness.”

“I’m working on it, Wendell.”

That was as much as he could say.

The landscape shifted north out of Santa Fe. To the left stood a strangely isolated object, not a mountain, not stone the way she was used to seeing it in Virginia. It looked like clay on a potter’s wheel that had been left in a hurry and forgotten.

The distant mountains were pink dotted with green. Like the flesh-colored crayon in the big box that had the sharpener on the back.

They stopped at Bandelier for lunch. The picnic tables were scattered by a stream, and on the other side, what remained of an ancient Pueblo village. They ate beneath the watchful eyes of tassel-eared squirrels, then walked a path bordered by cottonwoods, shielded their faces as they looked ahead to the flat, vertical canyon walls, punched with holes, black against the pale orange stone.

Ladders climbed high to the cave dwellings, which were carved into the sides of the hills, smooth-walled, with the original fire pits and petroglyphs.  Spirals and birds, which made her smile. Labyrinthine flight, among other things.

She was particularly intrigued with the kivas, underground chambers used for ceremonies and councils. She crouched for a moment and closed her eyes. Filled in the bones of the place inside her head. For the first time her father did it too. It reminded her of their swims together, matching strokes. His images mixed with hers, men and women descending steps that led to the sacred spaces, the fire, the smell of some herb burning, the sounds of their chanting. Her eyes watered from the fragrant smoke, the image was so real. The vibrations of voices, a chorus of hums and shrieks.

She watched for a moment from her father’s eyes. Her skin tingled. It was much like it had been with Tag, on the mountain. The sensation of being in one skin.

It shifted then, and she saw her mother, but young, Wendell’s own age. She turned and whirled away, then looked back. She was flirting with her husband. Wendell felt the response, the desire. She was still seeing through her father’s eyes.

He was standing right behind her, close enough that she could ask. “What things did she love to do?”

“Gardening. Knitting was a close second. She made everything radiate. She cast a far-flung glow.”

Wendell felt it, finally. Understood some of what her mother had been to him. The song that contained his broken heart.

In Los Alamos they searched together through the shelves of a used bookstore. The books were dusty and some smelled of mildew.

He held up an oversized volume, black and white photographs of stone formations just like the one they’d seen driving. Hoodoos, natural rock piles of fantastical shape, formed over millions of years, constantly changing.

“I remember these,” she said. “In the blue box.”

“What blue box?”

“The ones from my mom. Aunt Jessie has them, up in her closet. We used to look through them all the time. The blue box had all the letters and cards from you.”

“I didn’t know she kept those.”

“Well, she did. And one of the postcards had these hoodoo things on it. You sent it to my mom and she wrote something on the back. Something about the hoodoos being where magic happened.”

She paged through the book. “Listen to these captions. A tenuously perched hoodoo. A strangely isolated hoodoo. A very mature hoodoo that is ready to collapse. A fallen hoodoo.”

He looked thoughtful but remained quiet. She wondered if the driving and the circumstances would elicit more images from his life. The part she knew nothing about. The reason they had been driven to this journey alone together, what the hoodoos had to say to them. Which walls would fall first.

“We have to go to Bisti.” She imagined the shapes of the hoodoos, not exactly like those in the book, because they had eroded further, and changed.

“It’s a good place to spend some time. There’s nothing out there. We’ll be off the grid for awhile.”

He reminded her that they needed to call Aunt Jessie before they got out of cell signal range. She answered on the third ring.

“Wendell? God, it is so good to hear your voice. And Scott’s with you? Oh honey, that’s perfect. Finally. You get him all to yourself again. Some quality time.”

Her father shook his head no when she held the phone out to him. “I love you, Aunt Jessie. We’ll call when we get back to civilization.”

The directions led them two miles down a gravel road. To a rustic parking lot circled with stones and a small sign. Bisti Wilderness Area.

The landscape was not ghostlike as in the book. The hoodoos themselves were gray and white, the ground black crumbling rock interspersed with dark pink-orange soil. Chunks of amber-colored fossilized wood.

They walked side by side. Wendell had pulled her hair back beneath her hat and marched ahead.

Except for the slight crunch of their hiking boots and the whistling of the wind, they walked in silence. The sun wasn’t yet full strength.

The hoodoos were regal and eerie.

“They have spirits, Daddy,” Wendell whispered.

They continued walking for several hours. Made their own captions: twin hoodoos, cone hoodoo, slanted hoodoo, ridged hoodoo, hoodoo arch, beak-like hoodoo, hoodoo with a helmet.

When midday hit, they stopped to make shade with a tent and piece of silver tarp. Several pale orange lizards scurried out of the way. A spider-like black beetle toddled along the cracked ground.

From the tent’s front there was a hoodoo view, and off to the side, scrubby low bushes. They sat in the shade of the tarp. A lone tumbleweed blew by, small but potent monument to wind and solitude. Forward motion.

Wendell was intrigued by the cow prints and patties, random markers so dry and well preserved they could have been there for decades. There was no way to know.

He told how he had gone home from the hospital with her a baby in his arms and rocked her in the chair Lynnie had bought in an antique store, one she had tested and tried and considered for weeks before deciding it was the right one.

That Wendell had cried but stopped when he sang. That he’d dropped three bottles of formula on the kitchen floor and broke them. He had to call Jess to come hold her while he fixed more. Jess had offered to stay the night but he’d refused, determined to take care of things himself.

He didn’t think it necessary to tell Wendell how he had cursed and stomped and acted like a fool on the back porch when she finally let him put her down in the crib. He had only lost it that first night. Then promised himself never to do it again.

It would have been dangerous to indulge bad behavior and he hadn’t. Not that particular one, anyway.

They talked for a long time and drank water to stay hydrated. Wendell passed him the bag of trail mix. He took a handful and gave it back.

After awhile she told the story of her earliest memory. Him leaving. She wanted to know where he had gone.

He remembered, but did not want to tell her. He had been in a darkened room, remote viewing for the government, spending every other moment in some strange dream space with his dead wife, who he had not been able to give up. The years he spent working the field in Afghanistan he had done his job and tried his best to lose Lynnie. Attempted to bury her, but nothing had really worked.

One daughter he had hidden away and forgotten, the other he gave to his sister-in-law and pretended that connecting through the ethers was enough.

He didn’t want to think of her tears. He was ashamed to think it but when he had been home, he’d been glad to go away again, relieved to be off duty to the little girl he loved but barely trusted himself to care for.

That he’d rather have been shot at than stay with her seemed sick now, and shameful. He didn’t say that either. Maybe he should have. But surely there were some things better left unspoken.

She hadn’t known he’d felt so guilty about leaving.

Across from her, he looked into the distance. In the shifting light all the lines in his face showed. The way his shoulders sagged made her want to rub the strength back into those tired muscles.  She thought she saw something, a darkness in front of his face, like a shadow, but it couldn’t be, not in that sun. Perhaps a preview of what would be in fifteen or twenty years. The older man he would become.

They waited out the heat while evening fell around them like a cloak. The hoodoos sang, a low and bewitching hum. In some other incarnation she could have transcribed their music. As it was, all she did was listen, let it slip into her.

He listened too.

“Hear them?” she whispered. He nodded.

He was drinking again, although not as much since whatever he drank he’d had to pack out to the camp. He seemed to require the fortification of whiskey.

“There’s something else I need to say.” His voice was halting and unsure. He waited a moment before continuing. “I had another daughter. She was born a few months after you. She lived in Afghanistan. I saw her twice, when she was born and again when she was four. I went back a third time recently but she was no longer there. I was told she was killed in a skirmish.”

She didn’t know what to say, and walked off from the campsite to be alone. She didn’t go far, but enough that she didn’t have to look at him, or feel him looking at her. She felt a mixture of things. Betrayal and anger, confusion and jealousy. But mostly she felt reluctance at hearing more. It was like opening a wound and having things leak out. When it got dark she sighed and went back to the tent.

He sat in slanted moonlight, one half of him swathed in a pale white glow, the other in shadow. She began to comb through her hair with tentative fingers, over and over again until she got up the nerve to ask.

“Why couldn’t you track her the way you did me?”

“I don’t know. I never got images the way I do with you. It was like the channel was blocked with her.”

He turned away for a while and kept drinking. The air seemed frozen and her fingers continued combing through her hair, which had gotten knotted by the wind. It was as though her arm had been wound up and operated on its own.

She felt dizzy, but the vertigo was inside her head, not physical. She glanced at her father. The way she saw him had changed, like she was seeing him from some other perspective. She saw him suddenly as a man, not a father.

When he turned back, his look was different.

His forearm, tight with muscle, rested on one knee. The grind of his teeth, jaw set so hard, but then he opened his mouth and it stopped.

She didn’t know if he even realized how he was looking at her.

Years back they had found the abandoned house while hiking the mountains of Tennessee, on an old logging road that curved up and around to the top of a ridge. She saw it first and ran ahead to claim it. The front door was half obscured with vines but unlocked.

In the front room a single chair was draped in a dusty sheet. Boxes were piled in one corner, decaying, spilling over with wrinkled clothing and crumbling books.

The kitchen must have gotten the morning sun, but in the afternoon, when they had stumbled onto it, there was only enough light to make the old white porcelain sink luminous in the shadows. The cabinet doors beneath stood open, drawers pulled out, as if someone had been looking for something and forgot to close them back.

On the sink’s edge a single spoon and coffee cup were the only inhabitants in the room.

She wanted to know who lived there, Even at that young age she had wanted to preserve every tableau, use them as pieces to puzzle out the hidden story. The secrets of a forgotten place.

That night, inside the abandoned house, she woke to find her father’s sleeping bag empty. She kicked her way out of her own bag, grabbed the flashlight, slipped on sandals and followed the circle of light down the narrow hallway, toward the flicker at the end, a candle, she thought. She had expected to find him there reading.

Her mouth formed the shape of the word she was about to say. Daddy. But she stopped when she saw him, naked in candlelight, dappled with shadow and the yellow flicker of flame.

“Lynnie.” His voice, husky and full, a throaty timbre that pushed her back.

He was on top of something, silky white fabric, a dress, it looked like. From where she stood his body was elongated, buttocks taut with muscle as he moved his hips.

What he was doing was both unthinkable and fascinating. She knew she should go back to the sleeping bags. She shouldn’t have watched such a private moment. The way he’d moved was beautiful and scary.

“Lynnie, be still. Don’t go.” He pushed harder against the fabric, spread the dress beneath his hands as though he held her there.

“Come back, Lynnie. Goddamn it, come back and stay.”

Suddenly she had seen her too. Lynnie, her mother, the ghost woman he had conjured. Her face, familiar and yet distorted, eyes beneath his, burning as hot as the flame of the candle.

There was nothing she could have offered him back then, little girl that she was, nothing to match the spirit sex her mother gave. Now Wendell was a woman, full of her own powers to haunt and possess. It seemed she had arrived finally, to a destination. Like she was completing a circle.

She slipped back and forth beneath her Wendell self and the energy she knew was her mother’s. It was her mother who took off the clothing, revealing breasts and length of naked body, the long hair. The full portrait, nothing hidden.

When she shifted back to Wendell in her mind, she reached for the clothing and then stopped. She had always wanted a bond with her father that could never be broken, some concrete thing she could do to prevent his leaving and give her some of what she needed, solace for the leave-takings, his and her own.

He went to his duffel, looked back at her while one hand searched the bag. Her arms stippled, gooseflesh, curiosity and fear sliding over her like a shiver. What he might pull from that dark cavity.

It was white, diaphanous, for a moment she thought he had conjured an apparition, the pale shimmer that linked his hand with the bag.

It cascaded from his hands as he walked toward her. She took a step back.

It was the gown.

She considered the act, putting flesh to a ghost, the absent father, anchoring him deep inside her body. Her mother’s body.

Her mother’s gown, such a light fabric, nearly weightless, and soft. Wendell slipped her arms through the sleeves, it flowed around her like the breath of a lover. He was wide-eyed in the moonlight, and stepped sideways, back to shadow.

“Lynnie.”

His voice pierced the space between them, thick with something, syrup, some tincture both deadly and sweet. They were diving too deep.

She was Lynnie again, not the mother but the wife, not like being possessed, but intentional, a role she chose to take, an offering.

What he needed to let her go.

The moon cast a bewitching light. Lynnie stood before him with shining eyes, wearing the white gown, standing on dusty earth. She had come to him as her younger self, before she had been pregnant with Wendell. She seemed like Wendell, somehow. Then he thought it was Wendell.

His mind reeled, but he remained motionless. Unable to look away. Nor could he speak. The words hovered – stop this, no – but remained wispy and elusive, smoke in the air around him.

She stepped closer and he saw the fine hairs at the top of her left thigh glisten in the moonlight.

He turned away.

“I don’t want you to leave.”

It was Lynnie’s voice and when he turned back she had transformed. Lynnie, but in today’s world. Lynnie standing before him with something fierce in her eyes.

His wife.

His daughter.

He was confused. His daughter was shot dead in the war.

The woman before him reached with one finger and freed her breasts, the lacy thing that held them sprang back against her arms.

He had gone hard, a man’s response to a woman.

She spoke. “What would it take to make you stay?”

He had left them too many times. He couldn’t recall why.

“Lynnie.”

There was a fine and tenuous arrow of need that, if indulged, would take him down. To someplace raw and primitive. That deep well where fear mixed with desire. He had been there before, with that white gown, and he realized he should never have unpacked it after his night with Jess.

He felt stuck in loss and grief. Lynnie made a noise. The almost imperceptible click of saliva in a delicate throat narrowing in confusion.

It was this small sound that woke him up. Brought him to the present. To reality. It was not Lynnie standing there. It was his daughter. He wanted to hug her, tell her she was safe.

But he didn’t, because desire was a strange and mysterious thing, more so when infused with love and loss. He recognized her now. She was a daughter who looked too much like the woman he had grieved and forsaken. His cock was too easily triggered to hardness.

His flaws revealed in bold relief.

He realized that on some level he had stayed away over the years to avoid this exact scene. As much as Wendell resembled her mother, as much as he had been haunted by Lynnie and bent reality via the remote viewing – he had dreaded just such a scene.

He collected Wendell’s clothing and placed it in her hands. Touched her wet cheek with the ball of his thumb and stepped away. He looked down so she could dress in privacy, but never turned his back to her. She needed to forget the image of his back. The sight of him leaving.

There had been enough of that.

They got up and stretched. Walked without sound, the way he had taught her when she was little. Washed clean by Bisti, like church, or zen. He had taught her to find peace in nature.

It settled her. It had saved her.

As they walked, he angled his body toward hers. She didn’t remember him doing that before, at least not since she had grown up. She wanted to name it, longed in some deep part of herself to underline it, but she was afraid to. The naming of something so subtle, so precious. She feared she might change it, or lose its power.

Behind them the gown burned to nothing in the fire.

They waited for the moon to rise, the stars to appear. They waited together for the night sky.

Later in the evening they each climbed into their respective sleeping bags but neither slept. They had come to Bisti to leave the images behind, the power of that kind of connection, but rammed headlong into the most potent one of all.

“I’m sorry this trip has been--” His voice started out at normal volume but faltered near the end.

She wasn’t sure how to respond. “It’s okay.” She felt numb still but in some way relieved. A pressure she had always thought of as being normal was now released. “I wish things could have been different,” she said. “From way back. Maybe now they will be.”

Bisti was the perfect place to let things go. The isolation and the emptiness, the hoodoos standing guard. They got up before dawn and hiked for two hours. The wind rushed constantly, soft and steady, white noise.

Mostly they walked single file. He led the way first and then she walked ahead, toward nothing really, but it felt like they had a destination. She supposed they did. Some sense of understanding or acceptance. Away from awkwardness and intensity.

She figured at some point they would talk again.

In the late afternoon it started feeling like one of his trips, the waiting, the solitude, the landscape.

“Is this like Afghanistan?”

He was sitting, leaning back on his pack, legs stretched out straight. Every now and then he bent one knee or the other, relieving it from the pressure of a fixed position. He was watching the vista of nothingness, alert to the possibility of something, but easy with the empty territory before him.

“There’s some similarity. It’s more rugged there. This feels lunar.”

He was right. Bisti was like being on another planet. It made her nervous to think that when they left, the complications would be there waiting. She didn’t know if there was a way to bring the peace they’d made back with them.

When the moon rose he started to talk. For an hour or so, he told about waking up as a boy and listening to his father hit his mother. How she began to hate him, her son. He continued on to the time he met Wendell’s mother, how he fell for her so hard it terrified him. He confessed his infidelities, said his biggest fear was that Lynnie would find out and leave him, but something terrible inside had kept him doing it, as though he were drawn to make the worst thing happen.

He said he had seen things he couldn’t get out of his head, sounds and smells that tormented him, things he had done while working that repeated like bad video. Some of those things were familiar. She and Tristan had stumbled onto truth in their making up of details. They had gotten an amazing amount of things right.

He apologized for making the fuss about her invisible beloved sister all those years ago. She was real, after all.

He seemed to be done talking finally but then resumed. There was one more thing. He had slept with Aunt Jessie before coming to New Mexico. He had found something real. And run away from that too.

Wendell listened to his unburdening without comment. She figured he needed to say these things, and what she needed to do was let him. It wasn’t about what she thought. It was more that he was willing to take responsibility, to trust her.

At the end of his telling, he sighed. It mixed with the wind and then they slept.

Part 3

things you let go of

They’d decided to drive north. Wendell had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. He welcomed the quiet. Nothing but the rental car swallowing pavement and the fields of cultivated crops outside Farmington. He needed a few miles of nothing.

What he intended was to take his time. Head back toward Albuquerque, maybe take Wendell back to Texas. He didn’t know what she planned to do at that point. Whether she’d stay in Austin, or go back to Virginia. She hadn’t said a word about her plans. He hadn’t asked.

He also hadn’t said anything more about the government. He suspected she would hear from them again, another shot at getting her involved in the RV work. He didn’t want her sucked into that vortex, especially after what had happened in her first formal session. He knew the drill. The increasing focus on images and sensations in other places, other times. Mixing with the present. Where real life was happening.

It was too hard to balance the shifts between. He’d failed at that. She might too. Not to mention the danger. Where they might decide to use her, and how.

He didn’t know what would happen if they managed to get her back into the viewing room. The work was appealing, there was no question about it. Mysterious and full of intrigue. And there was Tag. She’d fallen for him fast and hard. What if he put the pressure on? What if she signed on just to be near him?

But she’d left White Sands. That was something. She had a bad feeling about it and she left.

Wendell groaned and woke up. She rubbed her eyes in circles with the palms of her hands.

“You okay?”

She groaned again. “I had a dream, it was so intense.”

“What about?”

“Tag was following us, trying to catch up. He kept saying something but I couldn’t understand the words. I could see him but I couldn’t hear him.” She turned around in the seat and looked at the road behind them.

“Do you think he could be coming after us?”

Scott cleared his throat. More likely he was remote viewing and she was picking up on that. “Not likely. They’ll have him working on whatever it is he’s doing. Not chasing after you.”

She was quiet for a few miles. Scott wanted to pull over and see what came to him but he didn’t want to stop moving. “Can you drive for a while? I need a break.”

He pulled over and they switched places. Once Wendell got back on the road and he’d assured himself there was no one behind them, he closed his eyes. It didn’t take long. Tag was in a room, sitting comfortably in a chair. He was tracking Wendell. Scott could see Tag’s thoughts, the images he was making.

He came back to the car when he realized Wendell was talking to him. “Daddy, something weird is happening. It’s like Tag is in me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I’m looking out of his eyes, like he’s superimposed onto me. His energy, his soul. Something.”

“Block it. Don’t let him.”

She started crying. “It was like this before, on the mountain. Not as strong. I want him like this. It’s incredible. It’s like we merge.”

“Wendell, you can’t let him do this.”

She didn’t respond. He’d lost her, at least for the moment. This was what he’d hoped wouldn’t happen. If Tag kept this up and Wendell didn’t pull away, Scott might lose her completely.

She was driving but not really there. Tag’s body, his spirit, was in hers, or on top of it somehow. When she moved her arm she could see the outline of his just outside it. It was weird and scary but also amazing. She felt him. She was him, like they had moved into the same body. His energy and hers.

Her father was saying she should push Tag out, but why would she? She missed him. She loved seeing the world through Tag’s eyes. It lasted about ten minutes and then faded.

“It stopped.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“It wasn’t bad. I was connected. I didn’t like how that one session went, but I liked Tag. You understand that, right?”

He looked alarmed and then his face changed.

“Sure I do. Let’s keep going. I could use a shower and a good meal.”

Driving back through Farmington they crossed the Animas River, and heading north to Aztec the river paralleled the road most of the way.

She smiled.  “Aunt Jessie would love this.”

“What?”

“The Animas River. We came all this way just to get in touch with our anima.”

“And what might that be?”

If Tristan had been in the car he’d have a complete and perfect explanation. But Wendell had learned the shorthand from Jessie. “The anima is the unconscious, the inner feminine. For women, it’s the animus, their unconscious masculine.”

“And why would Jess love it?”

“It’s what she does. It’s her passion. Her clients, the sandtrays. Jung. Synchronicity. The unconscious. I never thought about it but it’s probably all connected to remote viewing.”

Her father cleared his throat. “It was your mother’s passion too. Until she met me. She gave it all up.”

“Not really. She has that awesome collection. Aunt Jessie would love to have that collection.”

Scott’s voice rose. “No. Lynnie’s collection stays where it is.”

“I didn’t mean you should give it to her.”

He paused. “I’ve read about the collective unconscious. Not so much the anima.”

“Supposedly the man’s anima comes partly from his early interactions with women, and influences how he deals with all the women who come later in his life. And for women, the same with the animus and men. I can’t remember how all this plays out, but exploring one’s anima is a big deal.”

“Seems like it would have to be. Speaking of animas, have you talked to Tristan lately?”

Normally she would have called him a hundred times by then, but after the emails in Austin everything had changed. If he were with there, he’d offer ten great minutes of anima talk. Then they’d drive on and he’d manage to piss her off, or vice versa.

“I don’t think so. We’re taking a break from one another.”

“Did he ask you to marry him?”

“God, daddy.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. Are you satisfied? More than once.”

“I wonder why you keep saying no?”

She had no idea why she’d even mentioned it. The anima, Jung, her mother’s collection. Tristan. It was all important, she got that. But she sure didn’t want to talk about it right then.

Aztec was big enough to have motel chains with internet access, which they needed for research. They got rooms side by side, showered, and set up in her dad’s room to go online. He let her check email first, and she expected at least an email from Tristan but there wasn’t one.  Made her wonder what he was up to.

It was the time of year when summer would be coming to an end in the Virginia hills. You wouldn’t know it yet unless you lived there and recognized the signs, but each year they unfolded, subtle and real. The blue of the sky deepened, the angle of the sun shifted. Afternoons confided a golden glow that hadn’t been there two weeks hence.

She missed it but couldn’t imagine being back there yet.

Tristan, writing code and teaching the classics. Having lunches with Kate, dinners with Kate, long walks holding hands with Kate. At night they lay together and no one bothered to wash up in the bathroom after they made love.

Kate was water, soothing Tristan.

Wendell dreamed that night of water: puddles, ponds, ripples on lakes, pools beneath waterfalls. She was a rock in a stream, a statue content with its interior life, like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz. Which didn’t fit because the Tin Man wasn’t content at all but screaming for release from his rusted torpor. He needed oil and feared water, which was what locked him up to begin with.

When she woke, her father sat upright on his bed, across from her, newspaper in hand, folded in quarters to the column he read without comment. They had become easier with one another, still careful but more honest.

She didn’t know how to talk about what had happened at Bisti, the moments when she had been naked in front of him, and that his body responded to that. Already when she remembered it she felt hazy and confused. It had been terrifying. Her mother’s energy, his calling out for his wife. And Wendell’s own frightening desire to connect with him in a way that mattered.

He sensed her watching and glanced over, lay the paper on his lap. Tears stung her eyes and she held them back.

“Don’t,” he said, and she clenched her fists tight. “There’s no shame in what we struggle with, Wendell-girl. Let it go.”

She looked to the wall and swallowed. “All these years Tristan has loved me and I put him off. Now he has Kate. And I fell in love with Tag and now he’s gone. That whole thing at Bisti. Maybe I can’t have the normal kind of love.”

His face shifted and changed like a sand dune in the wind, all the same things she felt crossed the surface of his skin, as if he were mirroring her emotions: love, loss, joy, ecstasy, pain. And finally, grief and resignation.

“You can have it, Wendell. I promise.”

“How do you know that? What if Tag was right. What if I really am like you?”

She didn’t know where the words came from. They erupted like dark and sinister wolves running up and out of her anger, the deep cave of fury that opened because Tag had cracked the most scary place in her and it had taken her to some awful place with her own father. She wanted to blame someone. It had to do with love and loss and not knowing.

Her father was stunned and hurt across the room, then his face pulled together again. “Wendell, this is the truth and you need to hear it. Your mother has been dead for twenty-three years. She was the light of my life and I miss her every day. You know all too well the terrible path my grief took. And remote viewing added to that. Complicated what was already a mess. We went through a rough place together, out there with that white gown. But there’s more than that. There are good things. Look at what happened with me and Jess, that’s something.”

“But you fucked her and left, didn’t you? You refused to give it up. Your work. You took off to Afghanistan the moment you felt something for Aunt Jessie. Why can’t you give it up?”

“Baby, if you start giving up your self for the one you love, all they end up with is a fragment of who you were. Not who they fell in love with, not the person they wanted. It doesn’t work. If you had married Tristan when you didn’t want to, what kind of life would that be? If you had stayed and handed over those sketches for Tag’s sake, you wouldn’t love him for it and he wouldn’t love himself. You’d ruin what there was between you.”

“I wasn’t talking about Tag.”

“I think maybe you were talking about me and Tag.”

He paused and came across the room, took her chin in his hand and looked her in the eye. “I have fucked up just about everything thing there is to fuck up when it comes to relationships. But I know this one thing, Wendell. If you expect someone to give up what he loves, he probably will, for you. And then he’ll hate himself for it. I didn’t give up what I loved doing, not for your mother, not for you. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. That I don’t love you. We do the best we know how to do at the time. That’s all I can say. You have to sort this out for yourself. You have to pick the path that feels right. To you.”

She let his words sit inside her head. Swirled them around with all the other words. It was all so confusing.

“You never told me you loved my mother. Or that you missed her.”

There were tears glistening in his eyes.

“I should have. Most of my life up to now has been spent being haunted. By guilt and grief that I never acknowledged. I fucked up, Wendell. I left when I should have stayed. And I’m sorry.”

“She never asked for more, did she?”

He looked surprised. “No. And I wish like hell she had. Now. Back then I was oblivious. Tell the people you love what you want, Wendell. Don’t give anyone the excuse of not knowing what it is you want. Ask for what you want and give as much as you can.”

“Tristan gives it without being asked. Why couldn’t Tag?”

“Let it go, little girl.” His voice was soft and tender. “You’ll never hurt as much from giving as you will from holding back. I promise you that. There’s so much more than what we think we know.”

His words made circles around the room. Like snowflakes in a mid-winter blizzard, like kite tails in a spring wind, like something glittery and potent in the summer sunshine. Like autumn leaves twirling and falling into a crystal clear stream, brilliant oranges, lush yellows, crimson. She saw them for what they were: wisdom and fancy and sky and magic, proof of flight, proof of freedom from earth’s gravity. Trust in the wind, trust in something she could not see.

Lying in bed it happened again. Tag’s energy seemed to be inside her own, and her entire body sizzled. His thoughts and hers tangled in a bizarre conversation.

Come back.

No.

I miss you.

You come here then.

You know I can’t.

Why not? Quit the military. Come have a normal life with me.

You call what you’re doing normal?

It went on and on. She rolled back and forth across the bed, trying to make it stop, but it didn’t.

I’m not leaving.

Let me rest.

The next moment everything calmed down. His energy enveloped hers, warm and soft. As though he was hugging her with his thoughts. Like nothing she’d ever felt before.

Okay, then. Sleep.

Aztec turned out to be an okay place to lay low. The ruins were mysterious and lovely, and the din of the past took over for a few hours as she and her father walked and stopped and walked again.

She hadn’t told him about the night before. When she woke up things were normal. Almost as if the cosmic conversation had never happened. But it had. She still felt the vestiges of that tingle of energy, the surreal calm of Tag’s energy hug.

The kiva at the ruins was large and intense. She wondered what would come if she merged her mind with her father again and recorded everything that passed through. He looked at her.

“That’s the downside of this. You can get so caught up in it everything around you starts to fade. The real stuff.”

They didn’t have time to go further with the conversation. Her father turned to the trail and she followed his gaze to see two men approaching. They were dressed in casual hiking attire, but still it was obvious. They weren’t hikers. They worked for the government.

He saw them coming before he turned his head.

First thing he thought was they were not CIA. Not U.S. Army. They were rogues. He figured they wanted the sketches, but he also knew they wanted to talk to Wendell. Like a slow motion slideshow, his thoughts flashed. Back them off, send her ahead. What she had, the sketches, would be enough for now.

They remained casual until they began to approach the kiva.

“When they get closer, I’m going to take my gun out. You go around them and head back toward the parking lot. Get in the car and lock it. Wait for me if you can.”

He slipped the keys to her and stood up.

When he pulled the gun they stopped. Wendell skirted them and walked, just as he’d told her to.

“We just want to talk to her.”

Scott shook his head. “No. You go back to whoever’s running this show and tell him this: Stay away from her. I mean it. Now take a seat and enjoy the ambiance.”

He left the men sitting. They weren’t going to do anything crazy, this wasn’t a TV movie. What worried him was Tag. He’d let Wendell leave with the sketches. He was the link. He’d hooked up with Wendell. That was their trump card. That was how they’d get to her.

This was the hardest part. As long as Tag was there they had a line to Wendell. It all depended on Tag’s true motives. If he loved her he wouldn’t use the line. If he didn’t – well, there were ways to deal with that. One way in particular.

What he had to do was get Wendell back to the woods of Virginia where the rhythm of the season was familiar. Where the endless circle of seasons marked time. He thought it would soothe the intensity she was feeling. Ground both of them.

“Think of this,” he told her when he got to the parking lot and climbed into the car.

“Winter back home, the first snowfall of the season. A full moon by evening, walking the path along the woods behind the house.”

For a moment he thought she was too old for this game. They’d played it many times when she was a child, him distracting her from what she didn’t need to think about, something she couldn’t control, something she had taken up to bend to her will. But she turned from the steering wheel to look at him. Her long hair and bright eyes, the curve of lips and flash of teeth that said she was wavering.  Letting go of this thing with Tag, following Scott back through time to a winter night long ago.

“Our boots crunching footprints in the perfect whiteness,” she said. He waited for her to continue. “The moonlight in long fingers through the barren trees. The delicate filigreed shadows of branches across the blanket of white.”

“Deer prints and rabbit prints and you tracking what went where and when.”

He remembered these things as though they were a few hours ago. Wendell bare-headed because she wanted to hear the rustlings of deer and night creatures while they walked. Hoping she wouldn’t catch cold and him the wrath of Jess for taking her out so late.

The night air, Scott, and her without a hat, and no gloves either, I bet.

Jess was right, no gloves. Wendell hated anything between her fingers and the earth, her ears and the night sounds. She was like him that way. She wanted to soak it all in unfiltered.

“I miss home. I didn’t think I would but I do.”

She was soft and exposed and vulnerable. If he could he would have transported her bodily backward in time, to the woods and the snow, back to a time when the only thing she wanted was him there with her looking for creatures and stars by the light of the full winter moon. And if he could do it, if they could travel back to that violet night and precious year, he would never leave her again. He would make a different choice. And she would grow up to pick a man like Tristan instead of one like Tag.

She drove south through the night to appease her father.  “Just stay off the main roads,” he said right before he closed his eyes and fell asleep. So that’s what she was doing. He woke when she stopped for gas and checked the map.

“I’ll take it from here. Your turn for some shut-eye.”

When she woke it was daylight and they were pulling in to a parking lot.

“Where are we?”

“Animas, New Mexico.”

“But we left that part of the state.”

“That was northwest. This is southwest. Animas Mountains. Not far from the Mexican border.”

He must have wanted easy access out of the U.S. if he’d brought them so close to the border. But there was something else. Animas. She didn’t know why she hadn’t realized it before. The book Tag had given her in New Mexico, the Cormac McCarthy novel. In the first paragraph there was mention of the Animas Mountains.

Everything pulled together and stretched apart again. On one level they were running from Tag. And on another, the entire trip felt predestined, as though he had input the coordinates and she was following them. Which was crazy. She was losing it.

And if she told her father, instead of smiling and saying sky’s the limit what she’d hear instead was this: shut him out. Don’t let him in.

They camped for close to a week near the border of Mexico. She expected trouble, imagined it a number of different ways. Men walking up and taking her away. Tag showing up and forcing her to choose between him and her father. Various Hollywood endings, with appropriate plot twists and action.

But it was quiet. Her father drove close enough to town to make one phone call and they returned to the campsite. He turned the car off and they sat while he explained.

“They did a lot of experimenting back when I was there. I got pretty far out, and I did some things that seemed impossible. I haven’t tried to do those things again. It could have been a fluke. But I got in deep. I went a little crazy. They put me back in the field.

They know what I can do. The unit Tag is working in didn’t authorize the stuff he did, tracking you, getting you on post at White Sands. I suspect he’s working for someone else, outside the U.S. They’re watching him now. He’ll back off.”

She wanted details, but he shook his head.

“You know plenty. We need to burn those sketches. I told them we had no interest in the sketches.”

“But what if they’re important.” She didn’t think he understood. “Someone is building missiles, advanced designs. Maybe the sketches could stop them.”

He sighed. “You have to make your own decision about this. If you want to work for the government and get involved in saving the world that way that’s your business. But it’s not all about that. Egos and personalities get involved, and what they think they know. Worse, it gets tied up in personal stuff that has nothing to do with the job but drives it anyway. You and Tag made some kind of connection. You don’t think they’ll expect you to use that against him if he’s working for two governments?”

She blinked back tears. She thought Tag had let her keep the sketches because he was giving her the choice. Now she realized he had been waiting to pass them on to someone else. Or have her do it. “There has to be a way to keep things separate. Balanced.”

Her father sighed. “You can pull that off up to a point, but you’re already long past that with Tag. The thing is, we’re all connected. Everything is connected. And you and I and Tag, we don’t have special abilities so much as we’ve opened to what’s possible. We’re not special. Everyone is special. Anyone who wants to can learn to do what we do. The thing is, the world’s not ready for this, en masse. Not ready to admit that most of what we do and think and believe is flat out wrong. There’s so much more than what we know.”

“But won’t studying it and using it help?”

“Not the way they’re doing it. Not in my opinion.”

“Well, maybe Tag will leave too.”

Her father shrugged. “Maybe he will. But that’s his decision to make. Meanwhile, you have to take care of yourself.”

Just before dark she walked out a little ways from the campsite and sat down. She relaxed her body and opened her mind, the same way she’d done on the mountain. She invited Tag to join her.

He was there quickly, almost before she asked him to be. It was an argument of energies, conducted in the ethers, and if she had doubted how powerful the energies were, she no longer did.

She felt his intensity, his absolute desire for both her and the job he did. His appeal was potent and strong, and pulled at her physically, from the inside out. When she said no, and he knew she meant it, his energy sucked back, away from her, and it was that moment that was the worst. The withdrawal of his self, it felt like, the absence of literal energy from hers. It was the worst thing she’d ever felt in her life.

She suspected she had experienced it when her mother died, but didn’t have access to the full memory. That had to be what had pulled her back to the scene in the hospital room.

Tag did not say goodbye to her nor did he say anything was over. He simply vanished from her consciousness. She tried over the next two days to get him to come back, even if it were to argue. He had withdrawn completely. She began to understand why her father had been so distant during her childhood. She felt removed from the world.

She had experienced bliss. And now she was alone.

Wendell took Scott out on the town in Austin, Texas. They had drinks at the Cedar Door and listened to music on Sixth Street. They swam in the springs and walked along the Guadalupe River. She dragged him to Tex Mex restaurants and bars that served margaritas with olives. A day trip to a place called Enchanted Rock. She enjoyed knowing more than he did about a place. After all the years of him driving, she took the wheel and spun him around town, down desolate hill country roads, to funky little shops where they bought things for Jess and shipped them to Virginia.

He saw Jess opening the set of Tex Mex spices and salsas and imagined her smile. Knew with certainty she would find a recipe. The hand-painted clock she would put by her bed, on the nightstand that she kept just so.

The charm bracelet was pure folly: a cowboy boot, a chili pepper, a guitar, a heart with an arrow, an armadillo. He didn’t even know if Jess wore bracelets, but he wanted to give her one anyway.

The last night Wendell pulled him to the back porch steps and handed him a beer.

“Wait, daddy, just sit very still and wait.”

Not hard to do, out beneath the night sky, creaky knees stretched out long, the sweet smell of his daughter wafting through the air. The lingering heat of the day tempered by cold beer. Something skittered in the yard. Wendell’s slender fingers squeezed his arm. Then, inside a circle of light made and aimed by Wendell, an armadillo waddled slowly. The light panned back and revealed four tiny armadillos moving with their mother.

“I knew I’d see them before I left.” Wendell’s whispered words broke a little and he touched her cheek.

“They cry, daddy. I read that if you catch them by the tail they shed tears.”

Her tears slid between his fingers and mixed with his own when he wiped his eyes. This was something. He wasn’t sure of the right word. A healing, maybe, or simple hope. Making space for something new.

They watched the little creatures retreat to the darkness of the brush. Wendell clicked the flashlight off and they sat.  Not one thing weighed between them.

It was agreed that she would leave Austin first, in the Toyota. Her father would close up the little house and follow her back to Virginia in the rental.

There was something she had to do before they left. Her excavation site had to be put back the way it was. She had never dug deep enough to find the objects, isolated by seasons and years and weather and geology. She wished she had time to find them, return them to their original context, together.

The layers of earth she had uncovered went back almost as they had been. She sprinkled grass seed purchased from the local hardware on top and watered it, then covered it with a scattering of half-composted leaves. By spring it would look as if no one had ever touched it. No evidence of the excavation. The isolated objects remained undisturbed.

In Culpeper, Virginia she unloaded the car without speaking. Her old room looked comfortable and familiar. The sunlight passed through the windows the way it always had. So much had changed, but the play of light across her walls remained the same.

Half a day later her father arrived and unloaded the rental. He said she could stay as long as she liked. She called her landlord in Charlottesville and gave up her apartment there. She didn’t want to go back to the way things had been.

Down the hall she found her father in her mother’s old den. He sat on the floor with a cloth in one hand and one of Lynnie’s tiny objects in the other.

“I always do this when I come home after being away,” he explained. “There’s another cloth in that top drawer if you want to help.”

He had never shared this with her before. He’d always closed the door. As a girl, she’d had no idea what he did in there, alone, on his returns from trips. She had assumed it was private, something related to his job.

Together they wiped away the dust accumulated since the journey west. He told where he’d gotten some of the miniatures, which ones had been her mother’s favorites. That the one Wendell had loved most as a child was the little silver soldier.

She held it in her hand, cool metal that warmed as she squeezed it tightly in her palm.

Her father’s favorite was the piece of polished amethyst he’d gotten right there in Virginia, at a roadside gemstone mining stand. She knew that amethyst was a healing stone, and a symbol for mystical pursuits. She supposed that was perfect for him.

Her new favorite was a little statue of a woman sitting, body twisted as she reached for the sky, her head turned upward.

She was still and rooted to the earth. But one arm rose. She reveled. She transcended.

Aunt Jessie stood on her front porch, arms crossed tight while she tried not to cry. “Wendell, thank god you’re home.” Jess skipped down the steps to wrap her arms around Wendell, still smelling of lavender, still soft and warm and full of love.

Most of her life she had taken Aunt Jessie for granted. She missed her mother. She ached from the hole she left. What she had never really done was take the time to appreciate what she had. Aunt Jessie had devoted her life to Wendell. Who had never once said thank you.

“Aunt Jessie.” Wendell’s voice broke. It was not hard to say the words. “Thank you for being so good to me. Thank you for loving me so much.”

She cried in Wendell’s hair. “Let’s have tea and dark chocolate. I’ll get the boxes.”

Wendell followed her inside and watched while she started the tea. She held up the box of China Oolong and Wendell shook her head no. “Let’s do red zinger today.” They broke the chocolate into squares.

When Aunt Jessie headed to the hallway, she stopped her. “Wait, Aunt Jessie. Can you show me your box?”

She was surprised, then she smiled. Wiped at the corner of her eye. “I do have one,” she said, and grinned. “I did have a life, you know.”

They stretched across Jessie’s bed, photos strewn between. They didn’t do the tea and chocolate ceremony quite the same way as usual. They gulped the tea and gobbled the squares, giggled over baby pictures of Wendell in the kitchen sink with her hair pointed up with soap. Belted out hard laughter over old love notes Aunt Jessie had saved from high school.

“He told me you two got together after I left.”

Aunt Jessie breathed in hard. “I have to be honest with you. I’m mad at him. I won’t tolerate what Lynnie did. And he won’t give it up, stubborn as he is.” She stopped. “There, now I’ve gone and blurted that out. I shouldn’t talk that way to you.”

There was no way she could ever tell Aunt Jessie what had happened. All Aunt Jessie saw was his job; she didn’t know the worst of it. Her father might not even realize this yet, but Wendell did. He needed Aunt Jessie. Her light would heal them all.

“He’s different, Aunt Jessie. A lot has happened. Give him a chance.”

She didn’t commit herself. “We’ll see.”

At least she didn’t say no.

Wendell dreamed she was at Tristan’s house, her feet firmly planted in front of the footprints embedded in his hardwood floor, prints still there from before she left.

Kate was standing in her old footprints.

Kate was strong but skittish as a trickling stream that danced across rock and carved tiny, hidden paths through mountain laurel. Wendell was fire, blazing, burning, though tempered now, the steady flame of an eternal light.

Tristan said he wanted fire and water to make peace, no sizzle or hiss, nothing dramatic. Deepest forest, shelter for a large and weathered rock that rested beneath a small and laughing waterfall that sang it to sleep, the clearing lit by a warm and steady fire, fed by air and contained by the pit in the earth beneath. All four elements co-existing peacefully. As they should be.

In the dream she said hello to Kate and walked past her down the hallway to Tristan’s bedroom. Tristan walked Kate to the front door and said goodbye. He came to the closet outside his bedroom and unpacked Wendell’s things from boxes.

When she finally went to see Tristan, they stood awkward in his living room, both raw with love and loss and not knowing.

“I’m seeing Kate,” he said, and Wendell said at nearly the same moment, “I know.”

“Do you want a beer?”

She nodded and he brought two from the kitchen. She tried to find the same level of comfort she usually had with him. It was Tristan, after all, not some stranger. But he seemed different, and she had left him instead of giving him an answer.

“What happened out there?”

She didn’t know where to start. How much to tell and how much to leave out. “I found out a lot of things about my father. The work he did when I was born. That I can do it too. There was someone who followed me, who wanted me to work for the government.” She paused. “He and I had this intense thing, but it’s over now.”

She stayed until they’d finished all the beer. Tristan loved hearing about the little town called Anima, and the Animus Mountains. He nodded when she told him the dreams she’d had, and the way she and Tag had connected.

“I’ve read about that kind of communication,” he said.

He wanted to talk about Jung but she stopped him. “Tristan. Don’t try to analyze this. Just listen.”

He reached over and touched her shoulder. Without meaning to, he pushed past the awkwardness, back to the familiar. They kissed, and undressed. She wanted to feel safe, but it wasn’t the same way of being together they’d had before.

He had feelings for Kate, and felt guilty about sleeping with Wendell. She felt his resentment, that she had made him want her again, that he could not say no.

He could see she loved Tag and missed him, and Tristan’s roughness was his way of expressing anger. She sorted these things through in her head, while they made love on the sofa.

They said things they shouldn’t have said. Held nothing back.

“She’s anorexic.”

“You’ll never hear from him again.”

“I let him leave first.”

“She whispers to me in Greek.”

Nothing stopped them. They went as far as there was to go, loving one another, hurting one another. In a strange and terrible way it comforted them both.

There was something Scott had changed his mind about, and he thought on it a moment, but just one. It was too easy to fall back to old habits and he didn’t want to do that right now.

He got in the truck and drove, not all the way to the mountains, but far enough to whet his appetite for autumn. Noted the change in color, the falling away of leaves and other things, the chill that crept in on the night air. Sweaters in bottom bureau drawers.

He was ready for this change. He thought he might have been ready for a while but there was no way to know until right that second.

The truck whined as he turned it around and headed back to Culpeper. It too needed attention. Certain things had been ignored far too long.

He was sitting on Jessie’s front porch when she drove up. She got out and shaded her eyes. Looked at him like she couldn’t believe what she saw. Walked up the cobblestone path and stopped on the bottom step. Her hair blew a little in the soft Virginia wind.

“What are you doing, Scott?”

“Sitting on your front porch.”

She flung her hair back with two fingers. “I know, but why?”

“You’ve waited for me to get home a thousand times. More. I figure it was time I did the waiting.”

“Today. But what about next week, or next month, when you leave again?”

This woman did not mince words. She wouldn’t let him get by with one centimeter of bullshit. Which was, of course, what he loved about her.

“I’m not leaving any more.”

She swayed to her right and put her foot up to the next step to steady herself. He fancied that’s how much he’d stunned her with his news, but it was just a wayward honeybee, fooled by the warmth of an autumn afternoon, buzzing around her legs. She stepped back to her left to avoid it.

“Okay then.”

She unlocked her door and went inside. There was no telling what he would have to suffer for her forgiveness. There would likely be more words spoken than he cared to hear, ranging from things that had gone down twenty-odd years ago all the way to right this minute. Hell, things he hadn’t even done yet.

He wasn’t sure what he was in for inside his own head. He had never stayed in Virginia more than a few weeks at the time. He had never lived with the prospect of no escape. There had always been another job, a dangerous trip. An anonymous woman.

And that was just the work side of it. What would happen when they went to buy groceries and Jess insisted on pushing the cart, then sent him to the video store to get a movie while she shopped? Would he say no to the scarlet woman who invited him to bed?

These were not questions he could answer. He’d have to take them one day at a time. The fact was, he had to take them one day at a time. That was all he had left.

He went into Jessie’s living room and sat down on the sofa. She brought glasses of iced tea in and surveyed him from what felt like a hundred miles.

“Exactly what are you saying to me?”

“I’m retiring. Staying put.”

“That’s kind of hard to believe.”

“I know it is. But a lot has happened. It’s time I was here.”

She looked hard at him, like she was searching for truth. Any clue that he was putting her on. She seemed to find nothing, and her face softened. He noted the way her mouth dropped as her jaw relaxed.

She put her iced tea on the coffee table and slid over beside him. She kissed him. He pulled back. “Jess, there’s something else.”

She looked alarmed, and there was nothing he could say to reassure her.

“It’s a medical thing. It’s pretty serious.”

She tried not to, he could see the effort, but she started crying. “Have you told Wendell?”

He didn’t want to think about that, but he had to, and part of his telling Jess was that he knew she’d make him do the right things. She would be the rock for Wendell, like she always had been.

“Not yet.”

She took his hand to her lips and kissed, and he held her. For a moment he could feel the pulse in her neck and it reminded him of the ticking of a clock.

The tires of the Toyota spun in the gravel outside Tristan’s window. She got out and let herself in his front door, slid quietly along the hallway, and opened his bedroom door with a click and creak.

In the dark, her clothes made the soft sound of fabric falling to the floor. She climbed into his bed. Sometimes this meant she missed him. Sometimes it meant he missed her.

“Say you want me,” she whispered. He tangled his hands in her hair, kissed her, placed his face against her neck.

For the most part, she spent her nights with Tristan. Mornings she left early and read Tag’s notes from the early days in Austin. She wanted desperately to know the details of his life. Sometimes when she and Tristan made love, she thought of Tag. Often she felt his energy between them in the bed, a forbidding force that pushed at her and sometimes provoked her to shift to the edge of the mattress, apart from Tristan but not at all alone.

And yet Tag wasn’t there. Not in the real way. It was Tristan who remained.

She ran into Kate on campus one day and walked with her to Kate’s office. Kate smiled and then her eyes swam with tears. “I love Tristan. I don’t know what else to say.”

Wendell watched her cry. The light from the window behind Kate’s desk was white and washed out everything in the room. It seemed colorless, transparent. “I love him too,” she said to Kate, and left before she cried her own tears.

The nights she went to Tristan’s her father was at Aunt Jessie’s. They had both abandoned the house, their space, for other rooms and other lives.

On the way to Tristan’s she stopped at Aunt Jessie’s for dinner. Her father stood at the kitchen sink, wearing his tan T-shirt and army green fatigues. He turned holding a glass of water, took a sip and offered one to her.

It reminded her of Tag.

She ran down the hall to her old room, yellow like sunshine, yellow like hope. Only now she had neither. She just wanted Tag.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Aunt Jessie came in, bent to her knees by the bed, just like always.

“I miss him so much.”

Aunt Jessie held her, sweet scent of lavender, soft shoulders, silky hair. Only now, she rubbed her shoulders, hard, and then got up. She walked to the bedroom door, opened it, and yelled, “Bastards! All of you are bastards!”

She came back. “I’m sorry, honey, but I couldn’t help myself.”

They had all coupled differently than expected. Tristan gave up the blond girl for Wendell. Wendell had fallen for the guy who taught her how not to leave first, and then he disappeared. Scott gave his heart to Jess, the woman who had raised his daughter in Lynnie’s absence. And his own.

Each coupling had its complexities.

Tristan didn’t give up the blond girl completely, because he knew in his heart Wendell wasn’t really his. He still wanted her to be, but he knew. Scott knew.

Even though Tag wasn’t present, he was with Wendell almost all the time. Scott saw the signs. The slightly dazed look she had when she came in for breakfast. The way she rubbed her arms sometimes, it was obvious she was feeling that characteristic tingle. He suspected Tag’s presence was strongest at night, because Wendell began to look ragged and tired around the eyes.

And Jess. She was a saint, mostly. She kept his secret and nursed him through the headaches, which were becoming more and more frequent. She loved him.

There was no way to know if any of them would make it, if they would stay in love or the complications would kill their passion. No way to know if any of them would leave in anger or fear. They had lain themselves open to the whim of love and loss. There might be happy endings. There might not be.

In the meantime they lived and loved and hurt and healed. That’s all he knew to say. That was everything he had learned.

He did something only a father would do. He found out where Tag was and called him on the phone. “I’m not looking for details about what the hell you’re doing or who you’re doing it for. Just tell me what you want from her.”

“I love her,” he said. “But you and I both know how it would play out.” He waited for Scott to respond.

Scott cleared his throat. “I fucked it up in my day. Nothing I can tell you but it’s a delicate balance between what they want and what you have to give. But any woman who wants less than what pulls you up in a knot isn’t worth having, in the end.”

“She’s worth having. It’s what my life would do to her that’s the question.”

“Then you need to get ahold of yourself.” Scott’s voice deepened. “Leave her alone. You know what I mean.”

He listened for Tag’s breathing, which quickened just a little.

“I think you of all people know how much easier that is to say than do, sir.”

Scott hung up.

She took a new job. Site supervisor four days a week on a small dig at the edge of the Shenandoahs. She woke up early and worked all day. They were racing with winter, trying to get the excavation done before snowfall. She arrived at home nights with dirt-encrusted fingernails and just enough energy to eat dinner and fall into bed.

She talked to Tristan the way she always had, shared the interesting bits of her days. He read aloud to her and she made love to him before falling asleep, ministered to his desire to a degree she never had before, wanting in some odd way to please him.

She didn’t know what it meant. It wasn’t how love was supposed to work, but it did, in its way.

Days off she spent hiking with her father, who still left her in the dust distance-wise, but said he reckoned one day that would change. The scale would shift, his age would bow to her youth, and he would be okay with it when it happened. She didn’t believe him. He was softer and happy, but he kept his edge. Once a week he made dinner for her and Aunt Jessie. Nothing fancy, but they ate it up and asked for seconds.

Even now they could neither one get enough of him.

It was nearing Christmas when he told her about the tumor. He drove her to the mountains, a certain place he loved, and after they’d stood for awhile and watched the light stream through the valley, noted the bare black branches of trees against the winter sky, he said it quietly, inside his head.

She heard it but pretended she didn’t, and then he said it out loud.

“I have a brain tumor.”

She didn’t look at him and she thought he too was still looking straight ahead. She felt tears on her face, tickling in the cold. And she thought of armadillos, how they cry if you catch them by the tail.

Christmas came more quickly than any of them expected. It was the first Christmas for the three of them, not counting the ones split up and portioned off. Wendell with Jess Christmas Eve, with him Christmas Day, or vice versa, depending on the year and the whim of the government.

This year he was free and clear. There was truth between them. They planned the menu, when to open gifts, how to decorate the tree. Wendell wanted all white lights and Jess voted multi-colored. They expected him to cast the deciding vote and wisely he abstained.

The women rolled their eyes and laughed and headed out the front door to go shopping, recalling the year the whole tree fell over. How they had tried to string popcorn but ate it all instead. Various and sundry memories that didn’t include him.

There was a time he would have resented their closeness and let it get under his skin. Today he felt grateful and glad they had one another. That they would have one another when he was gone. Relieved Wendell had memories that made her laugh instead of cry.

While they were out he left Jessie’s house and spent the afternoon at his place. Got in the mail, cleaned a few spoiled items out of the fridge, and began the room to room check he always did.

He had not planned to go into Lynnie’s study. He left the door closed. A commotion in the back yard got his attention. He quietly picked up his 9 millimeter on the way out.

It was the crows. They were on the grass and in the trees, cawing over and over again. He stood there and then aimed the gun straight up. He shot seven times for Wendell and then seven times for his unnamed daughter. A single shot for her mother. Another for Lynnie. The crows flew at the first shot, and the silence in between each bullet was louder than the crows had been.

He let his mind go where it wanted. He let down his guard.

What came to him was Lynnie, sitting in the near-dark in her chair by their bed, writing by candlelight. He stayed there for awhile, standing on the grass, holding a gun, watching his dead wife write. Periodically she looked up at him. Her face was tense, her eyes soft with love.

And then she closed the notebook and put it away, on a low shelf inside the wardrobe that still sat in their bedroom. The notebook was blue. He glimpsed the color when she put it on the shelf.

The blue notebooks.

He had never thought about them since she died. Never seen them. Never looked for them. He stood for a minute more and then walked in the house.

The sun was low and came through the window in the kitchen making a row of shadows across the floor. He stepped over them on his way past. In the hallway he noted his footsteps, the sound of his shoes on the wood floor. He stopped outside her study and opened the door. The low sun threw a beam across the room. Dust motes spun across and disappeared.

In the bedroom he sat down in the chair she used to sit in. He realized she had watched him sleep when he’d been home. When he’d been away, she’d watched an empty bed. He wondered what that felt like to her. What it might feel like not knowing where someone was. Well, he knew now, after Wendell’s trip. He knew some part of it, anyway.

He sighed and reached over to the wardrobe. When he opened the lower door he saw them. Blue notebooks, lined up like targets on a range.

He pulled out the first one and leaned back in the chair. Opened it. Her handwriting filled the pages. His eyes filled. He waited until they cleared and then began to read.

When it got dark he got up to turn a lamp on. He read through every notebook, front to back. He learned everything there was to know about Lynnie. What she had thought and felt and dreamed. Her life had been simple but full. His comings and goings were as sharp as knives in the narrative. They had never got beyond being newlyweds. They’d never had the chance, with him coming and going so much.

Since she’d died, he had imagined their marriage as something tightly knit and strong. He’d held it out as an ideal, never to be marred by attempting to repeat it with another woman. And yet what he’d had with Lynnie had not been all that much, truth be told. They’d shared a bond and a connection he couldn’t explain. But she had traveled a path separate from his. The paths paralleled, and they intersected many brief times. But the weave was not tight. It was loose and weak. If she hadn’t died it would have pulled apart to nothing.

In the last notebook he learned the things she had known about him. His addiction to sex, which she named squarely on one line of her notebook. Her choice to forgive it. The things she wanted him to know. That his daughters needed him. That he had to take responsibility for both of them.

She had been wise and he had been stupid. And still she’d given up one dream, the big one, to honor a dream she’d had as a girl. She’d given her adult life to teach him something about himself. And now she was gone. When he closed the last notebook he felt numb. He had loved her but he had never deserved her.

But he had done what she wanted him to do, in the end.

The thing that tore at him was Jess. Lynnie had been jealous near the end, upset that Jess had taken her dream and lived it out, college, psychology. What was missing in the notebook was that Jess ended up with Wendell. And now Scott himself.

He felt like they had all betrayed Lynnie. But in betraying her they had done what she hoped. They had made things right between them.

He didn’t know how to settle that part. He didn’t know if he had time left to settle it. Sometimes things just had to be left undone. On his way out he went to his computer.  Paid a visit to Ebay and browsed until he found the precise thing he was looking for. A miniature cabinet with drawers for each day in December, counting down to Christmas. He clicked Buy It Now and sat back in his chair. He would fill the drawers with trinkets and notes for Wendell and Jess.

If something happened to him before Christmas, his gift would do the giving for him, each little drawer offering something in his name.

The night before Tristan left for Wales for the holidays, Wendell finally told him the details of the Bisti trip. She could only say it in the darkness of his bed in the middle of the night.

She expected rejection and horror, that Tristan would recoil in disgust at what had passed between her father and her. She pulled away when she said it, found her own separate space in the bed and curled up there as she got to the end.

“I wanted him, Tristan. There was part of me that wanted that piece of him, as though it might make up for everything else.”

“It’s like what Jung said, Wendell, the idea of the opposites, containing and enduring. Untangling the unspeakable to allow for something new.”

She allowed Tristan to touch her. She unfolded beneath his hands.

“This is what you do for me, Tris.”

“What?”

“Let me be who I am.”

She dreamed she went with Tristan to Wales, the two of them brandishing swords that rang out and glittered with light as they parried, equal in their match. He cut pieces of her out, and she did the same for him: dark pieces of themselves that laid on the earth and shriveled underfoot.

She cut Kate away from his heart and he did the same with Tag. It took both Tristan’s hands when it came to her father, the piece of him that had to be removed.  She staggered when the blade hit and wept, then turned to gold. Tristan’s sword was bent but not broken, and he let it fall with a clatter to the ground.

She decided to take a trip alone to the North Carolina mountains in early January. To think some things through, was what she said to her father and Aunt Jessie and Tristan. But secretly Tag had come to her in his way and told her to go to the tree.

Tristan took her to dinner the night before she left, Thai, and they ate without mention of her trip. His corded neck, the angle of his jaw as he chewed made her hesitate. Perhaps she should not go.

She took a huge forkful of his Pad Thai and slid her plate over so he could share hers as well. They both reached forward at the same time, forks clashed with a metallic ring, the sound of swordplay.

They had stopped fighting over men and women. He accepted her grief over Tag and she assumed he still saw Kate, that they shared intimate lunches between classes, closed the door to Tristan’s office and gave themselves to one another, urgent and then tender, in the warm dust-filled air of academia, afternoon sunlight swimming with passionate utterances whispered in Greek and Latin.

Tristan had told Wendell it wasn’t true. “She isn’t like us,” he’d said. “She requires more loyalty than you or I.”

Her father reviewed her route on the map she’d spread across Aunt Jessie’s kitchen table. Aunt Jessie was by the stove, tasting the white bean soup she had pampered in its big pot all day long.

“Take the scenic route instead,” he suggested, and Wendell sighed. His route took her through the Virginia mountains, along Skyline Drive to the Parkway. She needed the brutality of the interstate, the traffic, the changing of lanes and ugliness of roadside gas stations to temper the emotion already building inside her chest.

Where he would have her go would be a quiet drive, cold and white, sky segmented by bare black branches and evergreens cloaked in low cloud cover. She felt sure she would cry the entire way.

She followed the directions to the tree, precise, in Tag’s handwriting.

Begin the loop – turn south down hyatt lane (the second gravel road that cuts south through the fields). As soon as the trees on your right end, you will see a pullout for parking on your left, by an opening in the fence. Park there and go back across the road (west) to where the trees end (you’ll have to go back up the road a few yards to where a little path cuts up into the woodline). On the edge of the forest, about 25 yards or so from the road, there is an oak with a single massive limb that extends way out into the meadow. That’s the spot. That’s where you can always find me.

His energy pulsed as she traced her finger over each word. When she looked up before the final turn onto the gravel lane, the sky was brilliant blue and cold, marked with a huge white X. The rune of partnership. Of wishes fulfilled.

She wanted to see Tag, felt him in her bones and muscle. She let the thought float up, like on the mountain, an intention.

When she pulled to the side of the gravel road and got out, the wind whipped up around her. The sun had been out moments before, sky clear and cold, but suddenly it was cloudy and she felt the sharp sting of cold rain on her cheeks.

Finally the mountain was raining down her intentions.

She walked with the slip of paper protected inside her jacket, so the ink wouldn’t run, and traced the path Tag had laid out for her, into the woodline and then to the massive oak. She misjudged the distances at first, but when she stopped thinking in terms of yards and simply opened her eyes, the limb was there.

She stood beneath it and let the empty branches shelter her as they would from the cold rain. She looked up at the limb overhead and glimpsed something white. She couldn’t quite reach it but using a stick managed to knock it to the ground. It was a small ziplock bag holding a note.

And it was from Tag.

More directions, to a cabin.

I’m there right now. Waiting for you.

She had no way of knowing when he’d written the note or left it. He had put no date. But she folded it back into the bag, put the directions to the tree in with it, and walked back to her car.

Before she left the gravel lane the sun had come back, and as she drove out, a rainbow appeared on her left, so close she felt she could reach out and touch it.

She carried her duffel up the steps to the cabin door, past the neat stack of split wood, inside to where someone had laid and lit a fire, the smell of wood smoke and warm air like an embrace as she entered.

She had never been afraid about being alone, or about meeting a man. The possibility that Tag was there, or not, the isolation of the cabin, all melded into a sort of terror in the pit of her stomach.

She waited.

The crunch of tires, the muffled slam of a car door, the steady thud of feet on steps. She was reading on the bed, but dashed to the bathroom window to sneak a glimpse. Whoever it was had already passed by. She ran to the sofa and then stopped, expecting someone to come through the doorway.

But no one did. Instead, someone knocked softly, one, two, three.

When she opened the door, he embraced her immediately, held her safe while she breathed him in. Even if this was all there was, it was enough.

She had always wanted more and made do with less, but never dared admit that. With Tag it was the way of things, her heart on the table, no secrets or pretenses.

He led her to the sofa, where they sat and looked and he breathed for her while she soaked his spirit in.

For months she had wanted to demand things of him, ask questions, gain clarity, destroy ambivalence. But with him inches away, there was nothing that needed saying.

She realized before he spoke that it was the last time she would see him. He didn’t say it, nothing foreshadowed it. She just knew, deep in her bones and cells, that he wouldn’t let himself choose her. That he would blame it on the world, on circumstance, on the government, but he was lying to himself. It was in him, the need to do without. And maybe it was in her as well, the need to be beholden.

The second night, while she was lying in his arms, he shifted into some other incarnation of human, borne somehow from the same air and light and energy as her. They fed one another -- shined and glowed and tingled with life and love and knowledge. It seemed like forever and then it seemed like only one instant had passed since he’d walked in.

She cried in the muted light of dawn while his pale blue eyes stared into hers. “I do love you, Wendell,” he said. “Don’t ever not know that.”

Arms and legs and skin came gently undone as he rose to dress in the oblong square of sunlight that passed through the bedroom window. The way he tugged at the waistband of his pants, the backs of his elbows, the elegant way he turned to her. One brief but potent gaze.

Later that morning they stood on the front porch of the little cabin in the woods. He held her and then he kissed her. When he pulled away he was lit from behind by the morning sun. His warmth belied the morning’s winter chill.

“I found it,” he said, and then he left. Quietly, ghostlike, not even a rustle of fabric accompanied him.

He turned one time and tapped his wristwatch with a finger. She watched as his truck wheeled around in the loose gravel drive.  She watched until the truck went up the hill and disappeared.

She stood there until the telephone in the cabin rang. She tried to ignore it, but it kept ringing, on and on.

When she answered it she felt a moment of dread. It was apparent in the silence before Aunt Jessie said the words.

“He died this morning, sweetie. It was quick, he didn’t suffer.”

After they hung up, she wondered if her father had done it on purpose, to save them all the pain of a prolonged departure. It might also be true that Aunt Jessie had helped him.

She turned to the counter to make the last pot of coffee. There was a black notebook on the table. A Moleskine that at first she thought was hers. The elastic band had been left unbound, the pages were swollen and curled when it fell open in her hands.

Tag’s handwriting was precise, the occasional swirl of an extravagant hand curtailed by the smallness of the page. His words concise but elegant, the descriptions of his days back to the previous year. She stood in the kitchen and read from beginning to end almost without breathing. She was so hungry for what he saw and thought and lived.

She learned some things: that he loved strawberries and sunsets, that he had a brother, that he went months without sex and made someone up, a fantastical woman who came to him nights and moved his heart. That he mourned the loss of her when he decided to let her go.

He wrote of landscape and love. He wrote of a dream: that one day he would find what he was looking for.

She remembered what Aunt Jessie had said when she told her about Tag, the notes he’d written, his body when they were riding the motorcycle across the mesas. Aunt Jessie had tilted her head slightly. Her hair fell forward and she brushed it back. “He writes beautifully, doesn’t he? Demand more, Wendell. Don’t let a man you love get by with pretty words. Demand that he act just that same way.”

But Wendell did not have him, and could make no demands. She didn’t know what to make of Aunt Jessie’s wisdom, which she knew had come from living her life watching a sister grieve a man who was never there, and then a daughter who did the same. Aunt Jessie made the demand and it had worked for her, but the circumstances were different. Her man was dead, and he had made amends. He found something real before he died.

She tried to think of Tag as a gift, something she had been given that wasn’t a permanent thing, but meant to be used up, and remembered. She knew she would have dreams of him, that he would come to her in that one way they both knew.

While she had him in her arms he was hers that way, and in the dream times he was hers another way. Neither one was better or worse than the other. Both ways had meaning. Both ways counted.

After the trip, she went straight to Tristan’s. He was waiting in the living room, pacing with a beer in one hand.

In the shadowy afternoon light of his room, she climbed beneath the quilt on his bed and beckoned for him to come too. Inside her warm den, there was darkness and the smell of her breath and his. Citrus and mint and dark beer.

His lips slid sideways across hers. Her thick leggings, cotton turtleneck, and woolen socks were barriers against his skin, but he pulled her in close and held her until she twisted out of the clothing beneath the blankets, deep inside their warm cave, and tugged at his until they, too, slid into the mass of fabric at their feet.

She was soft and everywhere, under him, on top of him, beside him; their limbs tangled and came undone again. All over him and then gone, the feeling even when he was in her and his weight held her down, that she would turn to air and melt up through him, and off someplace, like smoke.

There was wet against his chest, the warm damp of her tears. “I’m sorry, Tris. This is all I have to give right now.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “But I won’t stop asking for the rest.”

She had a dream that she was walking toward an isolated stone that rose tall from the earth. In the dream Tristan translated.

Isolated derives from the French isolé, the Italian isolato, from the Latin insula, which means island. Isolation means being alone. Being separated from someone. It also means, in alchemy, the separation of a chemical substance in its pure state.

You’re in your purest form, he said.

Her.

In the dream she stood, rooted deep and sure as a myriad of men turned and spun around her. She changed with each man’s circle: wild woman, hellcat, wanderer, woman with tears, woman with smiles, the little girl Wendell.

Her angle of vision got wider. She saw then that she was but one of many, one in a huge circle of stones that extended further than her eye could see. She panicked and then relaxed. There was nothing she could do, in the dream. Nothing but enjoy the dance. Take solace in being, for that moment, the center of someone’s gaze.

In the dream she asked Tristan what it meant.

“It’s nothing all that mysterious,” he said. “If you allow it to happen, it will. What has been base and elemental can turn to gold.”

Sometimes when she was lonely she took out Tag’s Moleskine and read.

I love autumn best. Fall is the Beginning. Fall is the New Year. Rebirth, fresh hope, the smooth tobacco-hazel of a fallen oak leaf. Windy bare-bones trees topping a ridgeline and switching at the moon. I used to think, when I was younger, that I took this view out of sheer contrariness, loving autumn more than spring. But now I know that I love autumn best simply because it is in me to love her best. And it is autumn’s way to take me in her arms and hold me the way spring never could.

Tag left her words, lines and lines of words, the curve and swirl of blue fountain pen on creamy white pages.

Before he died Scott had a dream about his daughters. They cried in Jessie’s arms while he boarded a plane, en route to someplace dangerous and far away. On his mind already was what he’d do in between the danger, the spice of some anonymous woman that would temper the loneliness and the fear.

And then he looked back, across the tarmac, and saw what was real and true. His daughters, there were two of them. The gleam of red hair and black, their teary eyes shiny in the sun. And Jess, a young and lovely woman who took care of them both.

The danger was not in other countries. It was inside his own closed heart. He got off the plane and walked back to them, took them into his arms. He grabbed hold of Jessie’s hand and drove them home, the treasures in his life. He saw it all. He missed nothing.

Wendell dreamed of Tag, his silvery blue eyes, the curve of muscle and bone. He was laid out flat, partially excavated, someone she uncovered slowly with brushes and the tips of her fingers.

He shone like a jewel and waited patiently as she worked. His thoughts and hers twisted and combined into one single thought. They became part of one another in some odd way she could not describe outside the dream. There were moments when she thought she was uncovering her self.

Up in the blue sky two jet contrails formed a perfect X that stretched so far and wide she had to lean her head back to take it all in. The rune of partnership, Tristan whispered. Balance and harmony.

She didn’t know, in the dream, if she would ever truly unearth Tag, his meaning, what purpose he had brought to her life. She asked it out loud: “who are you?”

Words he didn’t speak appeared in her head like little beads of light. There was no way to translate, not even for herself. She returned to the brushes, tips of fingers dusted with powdered earth, clearing away the layers one by one, painstaking, meticulous work.

She learned patience. She learned to wait. She learned to believe she would find what she was looking for.