EYES

The problem is that Gail has suffered terrible migraines since puberty, so when the headaches become more frequent and more severe, neither she nor Jeremy takes adequate notice for some months. Emotional stress often triggers the migraines, and both of them suspect that Jacob Goldmann’s suicide is what has triggered this most recent series of headaches. Finally, though, when Jeremy has to leave a symposium at the college, weaving with the reflected pain of her headaches, to find her vomiting endlessly in the downstairs bathroom, blinded by the pain, they see the doctor. He sends them to a specialist, Dr. Singh, who immediately schedules Gail for CAT scans and MRI studies.

Gail is nonplussed. It’s like Jacob’s tests.…

No, sends Jeremy, holding her hand there in Dr. Singh’s office, these are studying structures … like X rays … Jacob’s scans were for the wavefront actions.

The tests are on a Friday and Singh will not get back to them until Monday. They each see the darkest possibilities hidden behind the doctor’s smooth reassurances. On Saturday, as if the tests themselves were the remedy, Gail’s headaches are gone. Jeremy suggests that they take the weekend off, drop all the work around the farm, and go to the beach. It is the week before Thanksgiving, but the sky is blue and the weather warm, a second Indian summer deep into what is usually their drabbest season in eastern Pennsylvania.

Barnegat Light is all but deserted. Terns and sea gulls wheel and scream above the long stretch of sand below the lighthouse while Gail and Jeremy set their blankets amid the dunes and cavort like newlyweds, chasing each along the sliding edge of the Atlantic, playing tag and tickling—using any excuse to touch the other in their spray-wet suits—and finally coming back to drop goose-bumped and exhausted on the blankets to watch the sun set behind the dunes and weathered houses to the west.

A cold wind comes up with the dying of the light and Jeremy pulls the less-tattered of the two blankets over them, wrapping them both in a warm nest as the dune grasses and narrow fences reflect the rich russets and golds of the autumn light. The white lighthouse glows in indescribable shades of pink and fading lavender during the two minutes of perfect sunset, its glass and lamps prisming the orb of the sun across the beach like a spotlight of pure gold.

Darkness comes with the breathtaking suddenness of a curtain slamming down. There is no one else on the beach and only a few of the beach houses are lighted. The sea wind rattles dry grasses above them and stirs the dunes with a sound like an infant sighing.

Jeremy pulls the blanket higher around them and slips Gail’s wet one-piece suit down from her shoulders, then lower, her breasts rising free from the clinging material and Jeremy feeling the goose bumps there, as hard as her nipples, and then he tugs the suit down over the curve of her hips, off her legs, past her small feet, and then frees himself from his trunks.

Gail opens her arms and shifts her legs, pulling him above her, and suddenly the cold wind and rising darkness are distant things, forgotten in the sudden warmth of their joining and mindtouch. Bremen moves slowly, infinitely slowly, feeling her sharing his thoughts and sensations—and then only his sensations—as they seem to ride the growing breeze and rising surf noise toward some quickly receding core of things.

They come together and then stay together, finding each other in the returning slide of external senses and small touchings, then in mindtouch structured by language once again after their wordless swirl of feelings beyond language.

This is why I want to live, sends Gail, her mindtouch small and vulnerable.

Jeremy feels anger and the vertigo of fear rise in him almost as strongly as the passion had moments before. You’ll live. You’ll live.

You promise? sends Gail, her mental voice light. But Jeremy sees the fear-of-the-dark-under-the-bed beneath the lightness.

I promise, sends Jeremy. I swear. He pulls her closer, trying to stay inside, but feeling the slow withdrawal that he has no control over. He hugs her so tightly that she gasps. I swear, Gail, he sends. I promise. I promise you.

She sets cool hands on his shoulders above her, cusps her face to the salt-tinged hollow of his neck, and sighs, almost drifting off to sleep.

After a moment Jeremy shifts only slightly, lying on his right hip and side so that he can hold her without wakening her. Around them the wind blowing in from the unseen ocean has become late-autumn cold, the stars burning almost without twinkling in winter clarity, but Jeremy pulls the blanket tighter and hugs Gail more firmly to him, keeping them both warm with the heat of his body and the intensity of his will.

I promise, he sends to his sleeping love. I promise you.

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