The witching hour

Six

HE STOOD IN the shower ten full minutes, but he was still drunk as hell. Then he cut himself twice with the razor. Nothing major, just a clear indication that he had to play it very careful with this lady who was coming here, this doctor, this mysterious someone who’d pulled him out of the sea.

Aunt Viv helped him with the shirt. He took another quick swallow of the coffee. Tasted awful to him, though it was good coffee, he’d brewed it himself. A beer was what he wanted. Not to have a beer right now was like not breathing. But it was just too great a risk.

“But what are you going to do in New Orleans?” Aunt Viv asked plaintively. Her small blue eyes looked watery, sore. She straightened the lapels of his khaki jacket with her thin, gnarled hands. “Are you sure you don’t need a heavier coat?”

“Aunt Viv, it’s New Orleans in August.” He kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m doing great.”

“Michael, I don’t understand why … ”

“Aunt Viv, I am going to call you when I get there, I swear. And you’ve got the number of the Pontchartrain if you want to call and leave a message before that.”

He had asked for that very suite she had had years ago, when he’d been an eleven-year-old boy and he and his mother had gone to see her-that big suite over St. Charles Avenue with the baby grand piano in it. Yes, they knew the suite he wanted. And yes, he could have it. And yes, the baby grand piano was still there.

Then the airline had confirmed him in first class, with an aisle seat, at six A.M. No problem. Just one thing after another falling into place.

And all of it thanks to Dr. Morris, and this mysterious Dr. Mayfair, who was on her way now.

He’d been furious when he first heard she was a doctor. “So that’s why the secrecy,” he’d said to Morris. “We don’t disturb other doctors, do we? We don’t give out their home numbers. You know this ought to be a matter of public record, I ought to-”

But Morris had silenced him quickly enough.

“Michael, the lady is driving over to pick you up. She knows you’re drunk and she knows you’re crazy. Yet she is taking you home with her to Tiburon, and she’s going to let you crawl around on her boat.”

“All right,” he’d said. “I’m grateful, you know I am.”

“Then get out of bed, take a shower and shave.”

Done! And now nothing was going to stop him from making this journey, that’s why he was leaving the lady’s house in Tiburon and going straight to the airport where he’d doze in a plastic chair, if he had to, till the plane for New Orleans left.

“But Michael, what is the reason for all this?” Aunt Viv persisted. “That is what I simply cannot understand.” She seemed to float against the light from the hallway, a tiny woman in sagging blue silk, her gray hair nothing but wisps now in spite of the neat curls and the pins in it, insubstantial as that spun glass they would put on the Christmas trees in the old days, what they had called angel hair.

“I won’t stay long, I promise,” he said tenderly. But a sense of foreboding caught him suddenly. He had the distinct awareness-that free-floating telepathy-that he was never going to live in this house again. No, couldn’t be accurate. Just the alcohol simmering inside him, making him crazy, and months of pure isolation-why, that was enough to drive anyone insane. He kissed her on her soft cheek.

“I have to check my suitcase,” he said. He took another swallow of coffee. He was getting better. He polished his horn-rimmed glasses carefully, put them back on, and checked for the extra pair in his jacket pocket.

“I packed everything,” Aunt Viv said, with a little shake of her head. She stood beside him over the open suitcase, one gnarled finger pointing to the neatly folded garments. “Your lightweight suits, both of them, your shaving kit. It’s all there. Oh, and your raincoat. Don’t forget your raincoat, Michael. It’s always raining in New Orleans.”

“Got it, Aunt Viv, don’t worry.” He closed the suitcase and snapped the locks. Didn’t bother to tell her the raincoat had been ruined because he drowned in it. The famous Burberry had been made for the wartime trenches, perhaps, but not for drowning. Wool lining a total loss.

He ran his comb through his hair, hating the feel of his gloves. He didn’t look drunk, unless of course he was too drunk to see it. He looked at the coffee. Drink the rest of it, you idiot. This woman is making a house call just to humor a crackpot. The least you can do is not fall down your own front steps.

“Was that the doorbell?” He picked up the suitcase. Yes, ready, quite ready to leave here.

And then that foreboding again. What was it, a premonition? He looked at the room-the striped wallpaper, the gleaming woodwork that he had so patiently stripped and then painted, the small fireplace in which he had laid the Spanish tiles himself. He was never going to enjoy any of it again. He would never again lie in that brass bed. Or look out through the pongee curtains on the distant phantom lights of downtown.

He felt a leaden sadness, as if he were in mourning. In fact, it was the very same sadness he had felt after the deaths of those he loved.

Aunt Viv hurried down the hallway, ankles painfully swollen, hand wandering, then catching the button of the intercom and holding it fast.

“May I help you, please.”

“This is Dr. Rowan Mayfair. I’m here to see Michael Curry?”

God, it was happening. He was rising from the dead again. “I’ll be right there,” he said.

“Don’t come all the way down with me, Aunt Viv.” Once again he kissed her. If only he could shake this foreboding. What would become of her if something happened to him? “I’ll be back soon, I promise you.” Impulsively he held her tight to him for a long moment before letting her go.

Then he was rushing down the two flights, whistling a little, so good it felt to be moving, to be on his way. He almost opened the door without checking for reporters; then he stopped and peered through a small round faceted crystal set in the middle of the rectangle of stained glass.

A tall gazelle of a woman stood at the foot of the stairway, her profile to him, as she looked off down the street. She had long blue-jean legs and wavy blond pageboy hair blowing softly against the hollow of her cheek.

Young and fresh she looked, and effortlessly seductive in a tightly fitted and tapering navy blue peacoat, the collar of her cable-knit sweater rolled at the neck.

Nobody had to tell him she was Dr. Mayfair. And a sudden warmth rose in his loins and coursed through him, causing his face to burn. He would have found her alluring and interesting to look at, no matter where or when he saw her. But to know she was the one overpowered him. He was thankful she wasn’t looking up at the door and would not see his shadow perhaps against the glass.

This is the woman who brought me back, he thought, quite literally, vaguely thrilled by the warmth building, by the raw feeling of submissiveness mingling in him with an almost brutal desire to touch, to know, perhaps to possess. The mechanics of the rescue had been described to him numerous times-mouth-to-mouth, alternating with heart massage. He thought of her hands on him now, of her mouth on his mouth. It seemed brutal suddenly that after such intimacy they had been separated for so long. He felt resentment again. But that didn’t matter now.

Even in her profile he could see dimly the face he remembered, a face of taut skin and subtle prettiness, with deep-set, faintly luminous gray eyes. And how beguiling her posture seemed, so frankly casual and downright masculine-the way she leaned on the banister, with one foot on the bottom step.

The feeling of helplessness in him grew oddly and surprisingly sharper, and just as strong came the inevitable drive to conquer. No time to analyze it, and frankly he didn’t want to. He knew that he was happy suddenly, happy for the first time since the accident.

The searing wind of the sea came back to him, the lights flashing in his face. Coast Guard men coming down the ladder like angels from fog heaven. No, don’t let them take me! And her voice next to him. “You’re going to be all right.”

Yes, go out. Talk to her. This is the closest you’ll ever get to that moment; this is your chance. And how delicious to be so physically drawn to her, so laid bare by her presence. It was as if an invisible hand were unzipping his pants.

Quickly he glanced up and down the street. No one about but a lone man in a doorway-the man in fact at whom Dr. Mayfair was staring rather fixedly-and surely that could not possibly be a reporter, not that white-haired old fellow in the three-piece tweed, gripping his umbrella as if it were a walking stick.

Yet it was odd the way Dr. Mayfair continued to stare at the man, and the way that the man was staring back at her. Both figures were motionless, as if this were perfectly normal when of course it was not.

Something Aunt Viv had said hours ago came back to Michael, something about an Englishman come all the way from London to see him. And that man certainly looked like an Englishman, a very unfortunate one who had made a long journey in vain.

Michael turned the knob. The Englishman made no move to pounce, though he stared at Michael now as intently as ever he’d stared at Dr. Mayfair. Michael stepped out and shut the door.

Then he forgot all about the Englishman. Because Dr. Mayfair turned and a lovely smile illuminated her face. In a flash he recognized the beautifully drawn ash-blond eyebrows and the thick dark lashes that made her eyes seem all the more brilliantly gray.

“Mr. Curry,” she said, in a deep, husky, and perfectly gorgeous voice. “So we meet again,” She stretched out her long right hand to greet him as he came down the steps towards her. And it seemed perfectly natural the way that she scanned him from head to toe.

“Dr. Mayfair, thank you for coming,” he said, squeezing her hand, then letting it go instantly, ashamed of his gloves. “You’ve resuscitated me again. I was dying up there in that room.”

“I know,” she said. “And you brought this suitcase because we’re going to fall in love and you’re going to live with me from now on?”

He laughed. The huskiness of her voice was a trait he adored in women, all too rare, and always magical. And he did not remember that little aspect of it from the deck of the boat.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry, Dr. Mayfair,” he said. “I mean I … but I have to get to the airport afterwards. I have to make a six A.M. plane to New Orleans. I have to do that. I figured I’d take a cab from there, I mean wherever we’re going and, because if I come back here-”

And there it was again; never live in this house again. He looked up at the high bay windows, at the gingerbread millwork, so carefully restored. It didn’t seem to be his house now, this narrow, forlorn structure, its windows full of the dull gleam of the colorless night.

He felt vague for a moment as though he were losing the thread of things. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He had lost the thread. He could have sworn he was in New Orleans just now. He was dizzy. He had been in the midst of something, and there had been a great lovely intensity. And now there was only the dampness here, the thick overhanging sky, and the strong knowledge that all the years of waiting were finished, that something for which he’d been prepared was about to begin.

He realized he was looking at Dr. Mayfair. She was almost as tall as he was, and she was gazing at him steadily, in a wholly unself-conscious way. She was looking at him as if she enjoyed it, found him handsome or interesting, or maybe even both. He smiled, because he liked looking at her too, suddenly, and he was so glad, more glad than he dared tell her, that she had come.

She took his arm.

“Come on, Mr. Curry,” she said. She turned long enough to throw a slow and slightly hard glance at the distant Englishman, and then she tugged Michael after her uphill to the door of a dark green Jaguar sedan. She unlocked the door, and taking the suitcase from Michael before he could think to stop her, she heaved it in the backseat.

“Get in,” she said. Then she shut the door.

Caramel leather. Beautiful old-fashioned wooden dashboard. He glanced over his shoulder. The Englishman was still watching.

“That’s strange,” he said.

She had the key in the ignition before her door was closed.

“What’s strange? You know him?”

“No, but I think he came here to see me … I think he’s an Englishman … and he never even moved when I came out.”

This startled her. She looked puzzled, but it didn’t stop her from lurching out of the parking place and into a near impossible U-turn, before she drove past the Englishman with another pointed glance.

Again, Michael felt the passion stirring. There was a tremendous habitual forcefulness in the way she drove. He liked the sight of her long hands on the gear shift and the little leather-clad wheel. The double-breasted coat hugged her tightly and a deep bang of yellow hair had fallen over her right eye.

“I could swear I’ve seen that man before,” she said half under her breath.

He laughed, not at what she’d just said but at the way she was driving as she made a lightning-speed right turn and plummeted down Castro Street through the blowing fog.

It felt like a roller-coaster ride to him. He buckled up his seat belt because he was going to go through the windshield if he didn’t and then realized as she roared through the first stop sign that he was getting sick.

“Are you sure you want to go to New Orleans, Mr. Curry?” she asked. “You don’t look like you feel up to it. What time is your plane?”

“I have to go to New Orleans,” he said. “I have to go home. I’m sorry, I know I don’t make sense. You know it’s just these feelings, they come at random. They take possession. I thought it was all the hands, but it isn’t. You heard about my hands, Dr. Mayfair? I’m wrecked, I tell you, absolutely wrecked. Look, I want you to do something for me. There’s a liquor store up here, on the left, just past Eighteenth Street, would you please stop?”

“Mr. Curry … ”

“Dr. Mayfair, I’m going to get sick all over your gorgeous car.”

She pulled in across from the liquor store. Castro Street was swarming with the usual Friday night crowds, rather cheerful with so many lighted barroom doorways open to the mist.

“You are sick, aren’t you?” she asked. She laid her hand on his shoulder, heavily and quietly. Did she feel the raw ripple of sensation passing through him? “If you’re drunk they won’t let you on the plane.”

“Tall cans,” he said, “Miller’s. One six-pack. I’ll space it out. Please?”

“And I’m supposed to go in there and get this poison for you?” She laughed, but it was gentle, not mean. Her deep voice had a nappy velvet feel to it. And her eyes were large and perfectly gray now in the neon light, just like the water out there.

But he was about to die.

“No, of course you’re not going to go in there,” he said, “I am. I don’t know what I’m thinking.” He looked at his leather gloves. “I’ve been hiding from people, my Aunt Viv’s been doing things for me. I’m sorry.”

“Miller’s, six tall cans,” she said, opening her door.

“Well, twelve.”

“Twelve?”

“Dr. Mayfair, it’s only eleven-thirty, the plane doesn’t leave till six.” He fished in his pocket for his money clip.

She waved that away and strode across the street, dodging a taxi gracefully and then disappearing into the store.

God, the nerve of me to ask her to do this, he thought, defeated. We’re off to a dreadful beginning, but that wasn’t entirely true. She was being too nice to him, he hadn’t destroyed it all yet. And he could taste the beer already. And his stomach wasn’t going to quiet down for anything else.

The thudding music from the nearby barrooms sounded too loud suddenly, and the colors of the street too vivid. The young passersby seemed to come much too close to the car. And this is what you get for three and half months of isolation, he was thinking. You’re like a guy out of a jail cell.

Why, he didn’t even know what today was, except it was Friday because his plane was Saturday, six A.M. He wondered if he could smoke in this car.

As soon as she put the sack in his lap, he opened it.

“That’s a fifty-dollar ticket, Mr. Curry,” she said, pulling out. “Having an open can of beer in a car.”

“Yeah, well, if you get one, I’ll pay it.” He must have drunk half the can on the first swallow. And now for a moment, he was all right.

She crossed the broad six-way intersection at Market, made an illegal left turn on Seventeenth Street, and zoomed uphill.

“And the beer blunts things, is that it?” she asked.

“No, nothing blunts it.” he said. “It’s coming at me from everywhere.”

“Is it coming at you from me?”

“Well, no. But I want to be with you, you see.” He took another drink, hand out to brace himself against the dash as she made the downhill turn towards the Haight. “I’m not a complainer by nature, Dr. Mayfair,” he said. “It’s just that since the accident I’ve been living my life without any protective skin on me. I can’t concentrate. I can’t even read or sleep.”

“I understand, Mr. Curry. When I get you home, you can go on the boat, do what you want. But I’d really like it if you’d let me fix you some food.”

“It won’t do any good, Dr. Mayfair. Let me ask you something, how dead was I when you picked me up?”

“Completely clinically dead, Mr. Curry. No detectable vital signs. Without intervention, irreversible biological death would have soon set in. You didn’t get my letter, did you?”

“You wrote me a letter?”

“I should have come to the hospital,” she said.

She drove the car like a race driver, he thought, playing out each gear until the engine was screaming before she shifted to the next.

“But I didn’t say anything to you, you told that to Dr. Morris … ”

“You said a name, a word, something, you just murmured it. I couldn’t hear syllables. I heard an L sound-”

– An L sound … A great hush drowned out the rest of her words. He was falling. He knew on the one hand that he was in the car, that she was speaking to him, and that they had crossed Lincoln Avenue and were burrowing through Golden Gate Park towards Park Presidio Drive, but he wasn’t really there. He was on the edge of a dream space where the word beginning with L meant something crucial, and something extremely complex and familiar. A throng of beings surrounded him, pressing close to him and ready to speak. The doorway …

He shook his head. Focus. But it was already disintegrating. He felt panic.

When she braked for the stop light at Geary Street, he was flung back against the leather seat.

“You don’t operate on people’s brains the way you drive this car, do you?” he asked. His face was hot all over.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” she said. She started out from the light a little more slowly.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I seem full of apologies, I’ve been apologizing to people since it happened. There’s nothing wrong with your driving. It’s me. I used to be … ordinary before that accident. I mean, just one of those happy people, you know … ”

Was she nodding?

She appeared distracted when he looked at her, drawn into her own thoughts. She slowed as they approached the tollgate. The fog hung so heavily over the bridge that the traffic seemed to disappear into it.

“You want to talk to me?” she asked, eyes on the traffic vanishing ahead of them. She pulled a dollar bill out of her coat and gave it to the tollgate keeper. “You want to tell me what’s been going on?”

He sighed. That seemed an impossible task. But the worst aspect of it was, if he started he wouldn’t stop. “The hands, you know, I see things when I touch things, but the visions … ”

“Tell me about the visions.”

“I know what you think. You’re a neurologist. You’re thinking it’s temporal lobe difficulty, some crap like that.”

“No, that’s not what I think,” she said.

She was driving faster. The great ugly shape of a truck appeared ahead, its taillights like beacons. She fell into place safely behind it, pushing to fifty-five, to keep up.

He downed the rest of the beer in three quick swallows, shoved the can in the sack, and then took off his glove. They were off the bridge, and magically the fog had disappeared, as so often happened. The clear bright sky astonished him. The dark hills rose like shoulders nudging them as they climbed the Waldo Grade.

He looked down at his hand. It seemed unappealingly moist and wrinkled. When he rubbed his fingers together, a sensation passed through him which was vaguely pleasant.

They were cruising now at sixty miles an hour. He reached for Dr. Mayfair’s hand, which rested on the gear-shift knob, long pale fingers relaxed.

She didn’t move to resist him. She glanced at him, then back at the traffic ahead as they entered the tunnel. He lifted her hand off the knob and pressed his thumb into her naked palm.

A soft whispering sound enveloped him, and his vision blurred. It was as if her body had disintegrated and then surrounded him, a whirling cloud of particles. Rowan. He was afraid for a minute that they were going off the road. But she wasn’t the one feeling this, he was, he was feeling her moist warm hand, and this throbbing heartbeat coming through it and this sense of the being at the core of this great airy presence that had enveloped him and was caressing him all over, like falling snow. The erotic arousal was so intense that he could do nothing to curb it.

Then in an obliterating flash he was in a kitchen, a dazzling modern affair with shining gadgets and appliances, and a man lay dying on the floor. Argument, screaming; but that was something that had happened moments before. These intervals of time were sliding over one another, crashing into each other. There was no up or down; no right or left. Michael was in the very middle of it. Rowan, with her stethoscope, knelt beside the dying man. Hate you. She closed her eyes, pulled the stethoscope out of her ears. Couldn’t believe her luck that he was dying.

Then everything stopped. The traffic was slowing. She’d pulled her hand loose from Michael, and shifted with a hard, efficient motion.

It felt like skating on ice to him, the way they traveled along, turning right and right again, but it didn’t matter. It was an illusion that they were in danger, and now the facts came, the things he always knew about these visions, the things that were simply there in his mind now, as if they’d always been, like his address, and his phone number, and the date of his birth.

It had been her adoptive father, and she had despised him, because she feared she was like him-decisive, fundamentally unkind and uncaring. And her life had been founded upon not being like him, but being like her adoptive mother, an easygoing, sentimental creature with a great sense of style, a woman loved by all and respected by no one.

“So what did you see?” she asked. Her face was wondrously smooth in the wash of the passing lights.

“Don’t you know?” he said. “God, I wish this power would go away. I wish I had never felt it. I don’t want to know these things about people.”

“Tell me what did you see?”

“He died on the floor. You were glad. He didn’t divorce her. She never knew he was planning to do it. He was six feet two inches tall, born in San Rafael, California, and this was his car.” Now where did all that come from? And he could have gone on; he had known from the very first night that he could go on, if he was only willing to do it. “That’s what I saw. Does it matter to you? Do you want me to talk about it? Why did you want me to see it, that’s what I should be asking you. What good is it that I know it was your kitchen, and that when you got back from the hospital where they took him and coded him which was plain stupid because he was dead on arrival, that you sat down and ate the food he’d cooked before he’d died.”

Silence, then:

“I was hungry,” she whispered.

He shook himself all over. He cracked open a fresh beer. The delicious malty aroma filled the car.

“And now you don’t like me very much, do you?” he asked.

She didn’t respond. She was just staring at the traffic.

He was dazed by the headlights looming at him. Thank God they were turning off the main highway onto the narrow road that led into Tiburon.

“I like you a lot,” she answered finally. Voice low, purring, husky.

“I’m glad,” he said. “I was really afraid … I’m just glad. I don’t know why I said all those things … ”

“I asked you what you saw,” she said simply.

He laughed, taking a deep drink of the beer.

“We’re almost home,” she said. “Would you slow down on the beer? It’s a doctor asking.”

He took another deep drink. Again the kitchen, the smell of roast in the oven, the open red wine, the two glasses.

… it seems brutal but there is absolutely no reason for me to subject myself to her dying, and if you choose to stay around and watch a woman die of cancer, well, then you have to ask why you want to subject yourself to that kind of thing, why you love that sort of suffering, what’s wrong with you that …

Don’t hand me that crap, not me!

Something more to it, much more. And all you have to do to see it is to keep thinking about it. Gave you everything you ever wanted, Rowan. You know you were always the thing holding us together. I would have left a long time ago if it wasn’t for you. Did Ellie ever tell you that? She lied to me. She said she could have children. She knew it was a lie. I would have packed it in if it hadn’t been for you.

They made a right turn, west, he figured, into a dark wooded street that climbed a hill and then descended. Flash of the great clear dark sky again, full of distant uninteresting stars, and across the black midnight bay, the great lovely spectacle of Sausalito tumbling down the hills to its crowded little harbor. She didn’t have to tell him they were almost there.

“Let me ask you something, Dr. Mayfair.”

“Yes?”

“Are you … are you afraid of hurting me?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“I just got the strangest idea, that you were trying … just now when I held your hand … you were trying to throw me a warning.”

She didn’t answer. He knew he’d shaken her with the statement.

They drove down and onto the shoreline street. Small lawns, pitched roofs barely visible above high fences, Monterey cypress trees cruelly twisted by the relentless western winds. An enclave of millionaire dwellings. He almost never saw such wonderful modern houses.

He could smell the water even more keenly than he had on the Golden Gate.

She pulled into a paved drive, and killed the motor. The lights flooded a great double redwood gate. Then went out. Of the house beyond, he could see nothing but darkness against a paler sky.

“I want something from you,” she said. She sat there quietly staring forward. Her hair swung down to veil her profile as she bowed her head.

“Well, I owe you one,” he answered without hesitation. He took another deep foamy drink of the beer. “What do you want?” he asked. “That I go in there and I lay my hands on the kitchen floor and tell you what happened when he died, what actually killed him?”

Another jolt. Silence in the dark cockpit of the car. He found himself sharply aware of her nearness, of the sweet clean fragrance of her skin. She turned to face him. The street lamp threw its light in yellow patches through the branches of the tree. First he thought her eyes were lowered, almost closed. Then he realized they were open and looking at him.

“Yes, that’s what I want,” she said. “That is the sort of thing I want.”

“That’s fine,” he answered. “Bad luck for it to happen during an argument like that. You must have blamed yourself.”

Her knee grazed his. Chills again.

“What makes you think so?”

“You can’t bear the thought of hurting anyone,” he said.

“That’s naive.”

“I may be crazy, Doctor”-he laughed-“but naive I ain’t. The Currys never raised any naive children.” He drank the rest of the can of beer in a long swallow. He found himself staring at the pale line of the light on her chin, her soft curling hair. Her lower lip looked full and soft and delicious to kiss …

“Then it’s something else,” she said. “Call it innocence if you like.”

He scoffed at that without answering. If only she knew what was in his mind just now as he looked at her mouth, her sweet full mouth.

“And the answer to that question is yes,” she said. She got out of the car.

He opened the door and stood up. “What the hell question is that?” he asked. He blushed.

She pulled his suitcase out of the back. “Oh, you know,” she said.

“I do not!”

She shrugged as she started towards the gate. “You wanted to know if I would go to bed with you. The answer’s yes, as I just told you.”

He caught up with her as she went through the gate. A broad cement path led to the black teakwood double doors.

“Well, I wonder why the hell we even bother to talk,” he said. He took the suitcase from her as she fumbled for the key.

She looked a little confused again. She gestured for him to go inside. As she took the sack of beer from him, he scarcely noticed.

The house was infinitely more beautiful than he had imagined. Countless old houses he’d known and explored. But this sort of house, this carefully crafted modern masterpiece, was something unfamiliar to him.

What he saw now was a great expanse of broad plank floor, flowing from dining room to living room to game room without division. Glass walls opened on a broad apron of wooden decking to the south and to the west and to the north, a deep roofless porch softly illuminated from above by an occasional dim floodlamp. Beyond, the bay was simply black and invisible. And the small twinkling lights of Sausalito to the west were delicate and intimate compared to the distant splendid southern view of the crowded and violently colored skyline of San Francisco.

The fog was only a thin slash of mist now against the brilliance of the night, thinning and vanishing even as he gazed at it.

He might have looked at the view forever, but the house struck him as similarly miraculous. Letting out a long sigh, he ran his hand along the tongue and groove wall, admiring the same fine inlay of the lofty ceiling beyond its heavy beams which rose steeply to a central point. All wood, beautifully grained wood, pegged and fitted and polished and preserved exquisitely. Wood framed the massive glass doors. Wood furnishings stood here and there, with dim flashes of glass or leather, chair and table legs reflected in the sheen of the floor.

In the eastern corner of the house stood the kitchen he had seen in the early flashing vision-a large alcove of dark wooden cabinets and countertops, and shining copper pots strung from overhead hooks. A kitchen to be looked at as well as worked in. Only a deep stone fireplace, with a high broad hearth-the kind of hearth you could sit on-separated this kitchen from the other rooms.

“I didn’t think you’d like it,” she said.

“Oh, but it’s wonderful.” He sighed. “It’s made like a ship. I’ve never seen a new house so finely made.”

“Can you feel it moving? It’s made to move, with the water.”

He walked slowly across the thick carpet of the living room. And only then saw a curving iron stairs behind the fireplace. A soft amber light fell from an open doorway above. He thought of bedrooms at once, of rooms as open as these, of lying in the dark with her and the glimmer of city lights. His face grew hot again.

He glanced at her. Had she caught this thought, the way she claimed to have caught his earlier question? Hell, any woman could have picked up on that.

She stood in the kitchen before an open refrigerator door, and for the first time in the clear white light he really saw her face. Her skin had almost an Asian smoothness, only it was too purely blond to be Asian. The skin was so tight that it made two dimples in her cheeks now when she smiled at him.

He moved towards her, keenly aware of her physical presence again, of the way the light was glancing off her hands, and the glamorous way her hair moved. When women wear their hair that way, so full and short, just sweeping the collar as it sways, it becomes a vital part of every gesture, he figured. You think of them and you think of their pretty hair.

But as she shut the refrigerator door, as the clear white light went out, he realized that through the northern glass wall of the house, far to his left and very near the front door, he could see a mammoth white cabin cruiser at anchor. A weak floodlamp illuminated its immense prow, its numerous portholes, and the dark windows of its wheelhouse.

It seemed monstrously large, an altogether impossible thing-like a whale beached on the site-grotesquely close to the soft furnishings and scattered rugs that surrounded him. A near panic rose in him. A curious dread, as though he had known a terror on the night of his rescue that was part of what he’d forgotten.

Nothing to do but go to it. Nothing to do but lay his hands on the deck. He found himself moving towards the glass doors; then he stopped, confused, and watched as she pulled backed the latch and slid the heavy glass door open.

A gust of cold salty wind struck him. He heard the creaking of the huge boat; and the weak lunar light of the flood seemed grim and distinctly unpleasant to him. Seaworthy, they had said. He could believe it when he looked at this craft. Explorers had crossed the oceans of the world in boats much smaller than that. Again, it appeared grotesque to him, frighteningly out of scale.

He stepped out on the pier, his collar blowing against his cheek, and moved towards the edge. The water was perfectly black down below, and he could smell it, smell the dank odor of inevitable dead things of the sea.

Far across the bay he could just glimpse the Sausalito lights, but the penetrating cold came between him and anything picturesque just now, and he realized that all he so hated in this western clime was coalesced in this moment. Never the rugged winter, nor the burning summer; only this eternal chill, this eternal inhospitable harshness.

He was so glad that he would soon be home, so glad that the August heat would be there waiting for him, like a warm blanket. Garden District streets, trees swaying in a warm and inoffensive wind-

But this was the boat, and this was the moment. Now to get on this thing with its portholes and its slippery-looking decks, rocking gently now against the black rubber tires nailed to the long side of the pier. He didn’t like it very much, that was for certain. And he was damned glad he had on his gloves.

His life on boats had been limited exclusively to large ones-old river ferries in his boyhood, and the big powerful tourist cruisers that carried hundreds back and forth across San Francisco Bay. When he looked at a boat like this all he thought about was the possibility of falling off.

He moved down the side of the thing until he had reached the back, behind the big hulking wheelhouse, and then he grabbed hold of the railing, leapt up on the side-startled for an instant by the fact that the boat dipped under his weight-and swung himself over as fast as possible onto the back deck.

She came right behind him.

He hated this, the ground moving under him! Christ, how could people stand boats! But the craft seemed stable enough now. The rails around him were high enough to give a feeling of safety. There was even a little shelter from the wind.

He peered for a moment through the glass door of the wheelhouse. Glimmer of dials, gadgets. Might as well have been the cockpit of a jet plane. Maybe a stairs in there to the cabins below deck.

Well, that was of no concern to him. It was the deck itself that mattered, for he had been out here when he was rescued.

The wind off the water was a roar in his ears. He turned and looked at her. Her face was perfectly dark against the distant lights. She took her hand out of the pocket of her coat and pointed to the boards right before her.

“Right here,” she said.

“When I opened my eyes? When I breathed for the first time?”

She nodded.

He knelt down. The movement of the boat felt slow now and subtle, the only sound a faint creaking that seemed to come from no specific place. He took off his gloves, stuffed them into his pockets, and flexed his hands.

Then he laid them on the boards. Cold; wet. The flash came as always out of nowhere, severing him from the now. But it wasn’t his rescue he saw, only bits and snatches of other people in the very midst of conversation and movement, Dr. Mayfair, then the hated dead man again, and with them a pretty older woman, much loved, a woman named Ellie-but this layer gave way to another, and another, and the voices were noise.

He fell forward on his knees. He was getting dizzy, but he refused to stop touching the boards. He was groping like a blind man. “For Michael,” he said. “For Michael!”

And suddenly his anger over all the misery of the long wasted summer rose in him. “For Michael!” he said, while inwardly he pushed the power, he demanded that it sharpen and focus and reach for the images he wanted.

“God, give me the moment when I first breathed,” he whispered. But it was like shuffling through volumes to find one simple line. Graham, Ellie, voices rising and crashing against each other. He refused to find words in his head for what he saw; he rejected it. “Give me the moment.” He lay out flat with the roughened deck under his cheek.

Quite suddenly the moment seemed to burst around him, as if the wood beneath him had caught flame. Colder than this, a more violent wind. The boat was tossing. She was bending over him; and he saw himself lying there, a dead man with a white wet face; she was pounding on his chest. “Wake up, damn you, wake up!”

His eyes opened. Yes, what I saw, her, Rowan, yes. I’m alive, I’m here! Rowan, many things … The pain in his chest had been unbearable. He could not even feel life in his hands and legs. Was that his hand, going up, grabbing her hand?

Must explain, the whole thing before …

Before what? He tried to cling to it, go deeper into it. Before what? But there was nothing there but her pale oval face the way he’d seen it that night, hair squashed beneath the watch cap.

Suddenly, in the now, he was pounding his fist on the deck.

“Give me your hand,” he shouted.

She knelt down beside him. “Think, think of what happened at that moment when I first breathed.”

But he knew already that was no good. He only saw what she saw. Himself, a dead man coming to life. A dead wet thing tossing on the deck under the blows she repeatedly applied to his chest, and then the silver slit between his lids as he opened his eyes.

For a long time he lay still, his breath coming unevenly. He knew he was miserably cold again, though nothing as cold as that terrible night, and that she was standing there, patiently waiting. He would have cried, but he was just too tired for that, too defeated. It was as if the images slammed him around when they came. He wanted just stillness. His hands were rolled into fists. He wasn’t moving.

But there was something there, something he’d discovered, some little thing he hadn’t known. It was about her, that in those first few seconds he’d known who she was, he’d known about her. He’d known her name was Rowan.

But how could such a conclusion be trusted? God, his soul ached from the effort. He lay defeated, angry, feeling foolish and yet belligerent. He would have cried maybe if she hadn’t been there.

“Try it again,” she said now.

“It’s no good, it’s another language. I don’t know how to use it.”

“Try,” she said.

And he did. But he got nothing this time but the others. Flashes of sunny days, rushes of Ellie and then Graham, and others, lots of others, rays of light that would have taken him in this direction or that, the wheelhouse door banging in the wind, a tall man coming up from below, no shirt on, and Rowan. Yes, Rowan, Rowan, Rowan, Rowan there with every figure he had seen, always Rowan, and sometimes a happy Rowan. Nobody had ever been on this boat that Rowan wasn’t there, too.

He rose to his knees, more confused by the second effort than the first. The knowledge of having known her on that night was only an illusion, a thin layer of her profound impression on this boat, merely mingling with the other layers through which he’d reached. Knew her maybe because he held her hand, knew her maybe because before he’d been brought back he’d known how it would be done. He would never know for sure.

But the point was he didn’t know her now, and he still couldn’t remember! And she was just a very patient and understanding woman, and he ought to thank her and go.

He sat up. “Damn it all,” he whispered. He pulled on his gloves. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose and then he pulled his collar up against the wind, but what good did that do with a khaki jacket?

“Come on inside,” she said. She took his hand as if he were a little child. It was surprising to him how much he appreciated it. Once they were over the side of the damned wobbly slippery boat and he stood on the pier, he felt better.

“Thanks, Doctor,” he said. “It was worth a try, and you let me try, and for that, I can’t say thanks enough.”

She slipped her arm around him. Her face was very close to his face. “Maybe it will work another time.” Sense of knowing her, that below deck was a little cabin in which she often slept with his picture pasted to the mirror. Was he blushing again?

“Come inside,” she said again, tugging him along.

The shelter of the house felt good. But he was too sad and tired now to think much about it. He wanted to rest. But he didn’t dare. Have to get to the airport, he thought, have to gather up the suitcase and get out there, then sleep in a plastic chair. This had been one road to discovery and now it was cut, and so he was going to take the other road as fast as he could.

Glancing back at the boat, he thought that he wanted to tell them again that he hadn’t discarded the purpose, it was just that he couldn’t remember. He didn’t even know if the doorway was a literal doorway. And the number, there had been a number, hadn’t there? A very significant number. He leaned against the glass door, pressed his head to the glass.

“I don’t want you to go,” she whispered.

“No, I don’t want to go either,” he said, “but I have to. You see, they really do expect something of me. And they told me what it was, and I have to do what I can, and I know that going back is part of it.”

Silence.

“It was good of you to bring me here.”

Silence.

“Maybe … ”

“Maybe what?” He turned around.

She stood with her back to the lights again. She’d taken off her coat, and she looked angular and graceful in the huge cable-knit sweater, and all long legs, magnificent cheekbones, and fine narrow wrists.

“Could it be that you were supposed to forget?” she asked. That had never occurred to him. For a moment, he didn’t answer.

“Do you believe me about the visions?” he asked. “I mean, did you read what they said in the papers? It was true, that part. I mean the papers made me sound stupid, crazy. But the point is there was so much to it, so much, and … ”

He wished he could see her face just a little better.

“I believe you,” she said simply. She paused, then went on. “It’s always frightening, a close call, a seeming chance thing that makes a large impact. We like to believe it was meant … ”

“It was meant!”

“I was going to say that in this case the call was very close, because it was almost dark when I saw you out there. Five minutes later I might not have seen you at all, couldn’t possibly have seen you.”

“You’re casting around for explanations, and that’s very gracious of you, I really appreciate it, I do. But you see, what I do remember, the impression I mean, it’s so strong that nothing like that is necessary to explain it. They were there, Dr. Mayfair. And … ”

“What is it?”

He shook his head. “Just one of those frissons, those crazy moments when it’s as if I do remember, but then it’s gone. I got it out there on the deck, too. The knowledge that, yes, when I opened my eyes I did know what had happened … and then it was gone … ”

“The word you spoke, the murmur … ”

“I didn’t catch it. I didn’t see myself speak a word. But I’ll tell you something. I think I knew your name out there. I knew who you were.”

Silence.

“But I’m not sure.” He turned around, bewildered. What was he doing? Where was his suitcase, and he really did have to go, only he was so tired, and he didn’t want to.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said again.

“You mean it? I could stay for a while?” He looked at her, at the dark shadow of her long lean figure against the distant faintly illuminated glass. “Oh, I wish I’d met you before this,” he said. “I wish I … I like … I mean, it’s so stupid, but you’re very … ”

He moved forward, the better to see her. Her eyes became visible, seeming very large and long for deep-set eyes, and her mouth so generous and soft. But a strange illusion occurred as he drew closer. Her face in the soft glow from beyond the walls appeared perfectly menacing and malicious. Surely it was a mistake. He wasn’t making out any true expression. The figure facing him seemed to have lowered her head, to be peering up at him from beneath the fringe of her straight blond hair, in an attitude of consummate hatred.

He stopped. It had to be a mistake. Yet she stood there, quite still, either unaware of the dread he felt now, or uncaring.

Then she started towards him, moving into the dim light from the northern doorway.

How pretty and sad she looked! How could he have ever made such an error? She was about to cry. In fact, it was simply awful to see the sadness in her face, to see the sudden silent hunger and spill of emotion.

“What is it?” he whispered. He opened his arms. And at once, she pressed herself gently against him. Her breasts were large and soft against his chest. He hugged her close, enfolding her, and ran his gloved fingers up through her hair. “What is it?” he whispered again, but it wasn’t really a question. It was more a little reassuring caress of words. He could feel her heart beating, her breath catching. He himself was shaking. The protective feeling aroused in him was hot, alchemizing quickly into passion.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.” And now she was silently crying. She looked up, and then opening her mouth, she moved very gently into kissing him. It was as if she didn’t want to do it against his will; she gave him all the time in the world to draw back. And of course he hadn’t the slightest intention of doing so.

He was engulfed at once as he’d been in the car when he touched her hand, but this time it was her soft, voluptuous, and all too solid flesh that embraced him. He kissed her over and over, feeding on her neck, her cheeks, her eyes. With his gloved fingers he stroked her cheek, felt her smooth skin beneath the heavy woolen sweater. God, if only he could take off the gloves, but if he took off the gloves, he’d be lost, and all passion would evaporate in that confusion. He was desperate to cling to this, desperate; and she already mistakenly believed, she was already foolishly afraid …

“Yes, yes, I do,” he said, “how could you think I didn’t want to, that I wouldn’t … how could you believe that? Hold me, Rowan, hold me tighter. I’m here now. I’m with you, yes.”

Crying, she collapsed in his arms. Her hand ripped at his belt, at the zipper of his pants, but these were clumsy, unsuccessful gestures. A soft cry came out of her. Pure pain. He couldn’t endure it.

He kissed her again, kissed her neck as her head fell back. Then he picked her up and gently carried her across the room and up the iron stairs, walking slowly round curve after curve, and then into a large and dark southern bedroom. They tumbled down into the low bed. He kissed her again, smoothing her hair back, loving the feel of her even through the gloves, looking down at her closed eyes, her helpless half-open lips. As he pulled at the sweater, she struggled to help, and finally ripped it over her head, her hair beautifully tousled by it.

When he saw her breasts through the thin covering of nylon, he kissed them through the cloth, deliberately teasing himself, his tongue touching the dark circle of the nipple before he forced the cloth away. What did it feel like, the black leather touching her skin, caressing her nipples? He lifted her breasts, kissing the hot curve of them underneath-he loved this particular juicy crevice-then he sucked the nipples hard, one after the other, rubbing and gathering the flesh feverishly with the palm of his hand.

She was twisting under him, her body moving helplessly it seemed, her lips grazing his unevenly shaven chin, then all soft and sweet over his mouth, her hands slipping into his shirt and feeling his chest as if she loved the flatness of it.

She pinched his nipples as he suckled hers. He was so hard he was going to spill. He stopped, rose on his hands, and tried to catch his breath, then sank down next to her. He knew she was pulling off her jeans. He brought her close, feeling the smooth flesh of her back, then moving down to the curve of her soft clutchable and kneadable little bottom.

No waiting now, he couldn’t. In a rage of impatience he took off his glasses and shoved them on the bedside table. Now she would be a lush soft blur to him, but all the physical details he’d seen were ever present in his mind. He was on top of her. Her hand moved against his crotch, unzipped his pants, and brought out his sex, roughly, slapping it as if to test its hardness-a little gesture that almost brought him over the edge. He felt the prickly curling thatch of pubic hair, the heated inner lips, and finally the tight pulsing sheath itself as he entered.

Maybe he cried out. He didn’t know. She rose on the pillow, her mouth on his mouth, her arms pulling him closer to her, her pelvis clamped against him.

“Ride me hard,” she whispered. It was like the slap-a sharp goad that sent his pent-up fury to the boiling point. Her fragile form, her tender bruisable flesh-it only incited him. No imagined rape he had ever committed in his secret unaccountable dream soul had ever been more brutal.

Her hips slammed against his; and dimly he saw the red flush in her face and naked breasts as she moaned. Driving into her again and again, he saw her arms flung out, limp, just before he closed his eyes and exploded inside her.

Finally, exhausted, they tumbled apart into the soft flannel sheets. Her hot limbs were tangled under his outstretched arm, his face buried in her fragrant hair. She snuggled close. She drew the loose neglected sheet over them both; she turned towards him and nuzzled into his neck.

Let the plane wait, let his purpose wait. Let the pain go and the agitation. In any other time and place, he would have found her irresistible. But now she was more than that, more than succulent, and hot and full of mystery and seemingly perfect fire. She was something divine, and he needed it so it saddened him.

Her tender silky arm slid up around his neck as he gathered her to himself. He could hear her heart beating against him.

Long moments later, swinging perilously close to deep sleep, he sat up with a start, and groggily stripped off his hot clothes. Then he lay naked with her, except for the gloves, his limbs against her limbs, breathing her warmth and hearing her soft drowsy sigh like a kiss, as he fell to dreaming beside her.

“Rowan,” he whispered. Yes, knew all about her, knew her.

They were downstairs. They said, Wake, Michael, come down. They had lighted a great fire in the fireplace. Or was it simply a fire around them, like a forest blazing? He thought he heard the sound of drums. Michael. Faint dream or memory of the Comus parade that long-ago winter night, of the bands beating the fierce, dreadful cadence while the flambeaux flickered on the branches of the oak trees. They were there, downstairs, all he had to do was wake up and go down. But for the first time in all these weeks since they’d left him, he didn’t want to see them, he didn’t want to remember.

He sat up, staring at the pale milky morning sky. He was sweating, and his heart was pounding.

Stillness; too early for the sun. He picked up his glasses and put them on.

There was no one in this house, no drums, no smell of fire. No one at all, except the two of them, but she was no longer in the bed at his side. He could hear the rafters and the pilings singing, but it was only the water making them sing. Then came a deep vibrant sound, more a tremor than a noise at all, and he knew it was the big cruiser rocking in its mooring. That ghastly leviathan saying I am here.

He sat for a moment, staring dully at the Spartan furnishings. All well made of the same beautiful fine grain wood he had seen downstairs. Someone lived here who loved fine wood, who loved things put together perfectly. Everything quite low in this room-the bed, the desk, the scattered chairs. Nothing to interrupt the view from the windows that rose all the way to the ceiling.

But he was smelling a fire. Yes, and when he listened carefully he could hear it. And a robe had been set out for him, a nice thick white terry-cloth robe, just the kind he loved.

He put on the robe and went down the stairs in search of her.

The fire was blazing, on that account he’d been right. But no horde of dream beings hovered around it. She sat alone, legs crossed, on the deep stone hearth, in a robe of her own, her thin limbs almost lost in its folds, and again she was shaking and crying.

“I’m sorry, Michael. I’m so sorry,” she whispered in that deep velvety voice. Her face was streaked and weary.

“Now, honey, why would you say a thing like that?” he asked. He sat beside her, enfolding her in his arms. “Rowan, what in the world are you sorry for?”

In a rush her words came, spilling so fast he could scarcely follow-that she had placed this immense demand upon him, that she had wanted so to be with him, that the last few months had been the worst of her life, and that her loneliness had been almost unbearable.

Again and again he kissed her cheek.

“I like being with you,” he said. “I want to be here. I don’t want be anyplace in the world … ”

He stopped, he thought of the New Orleans plane. Well, that could wait. And awkwardly he tried to explained that he’d been trapped in the house on Liberty Street.

“I didn’t come because I knew this would happen,” she said, “and you were right, I wanted to know, I wanted you to touch my hand with your hands, to touch the kitchen floor, there, where he died, I wanted … you see, I’m not what I appear to be … ”

“I know what you are,” he said. “A very strong person for whom any admission of need is a terrible thing.”

Silence. She nodded. “If only that were all of it,” she said. Tears overflowing.

“Talk to me, tell me the story,” he said.

She slipped out of his arms and stood up. She walked barefoot back and forth across the floor, oblivious apparently to its coldness. Again, it came so fast, so many long delicate phrases pouring out with such speed, he strained to listen. To separate the meaning from the beguiling beauty of her voice.

She’d been adopted when she was a day old, she’d been taken away from her home, and did he know that was New Orleans? She’d told him that in the letter he’d never received. And yes, he ought to know that because when he’d wakened, he grabbed her hand and held onto it, as if he didn’t want to let her go. And maybe then some mingled crazy idea had come through, some sudden intensity connected to that place. But the thing was, she’d never really been there! Never seen it. Didn’t even know her mother’s full name.

Did he know there was a paper in the safe, over there, behind the picture there, by the door, a letter she’d signed saying she’d never go back to New Orleans, never seek to find out anything about her family, her real parents? Cut off, ripped out of it, the past cut away like the umbilical cord and no way that she could recapture what had been thrown away. But she’d been thinking about that of late, that awful black gulf and the fact that they were gone, Ellie and Graham, and the paper in the safe, and Ellie had died making her repeat her promise, over and over.

They’d taken her out of New Orleans to Los Angeles on a six o’clock plane the very day she was born. Why, for years she’d been told she was born in Los Angeles. That’s what her birth certificate said, one of those phony jobs they concoct for adopted children. Ellie and Graham had told her a thousand times about the little apartment in West Hollywood, and how happy they had been when they brought her home.

But that wasn’t the point, the point was they were gone, dead, and with them their whole story, wiped out with a speed and totality that utterly terrified her. And Ellie in such pain. Nobody should have to suffer like that. And theirs had been the great modern life, just great, though it was a selfish, materialistic world, she had to admit. No tie to anyone-family or friend-ever interrupted their self-centered pursuit of pleasure. And at the bedside, no one but Rowan as Ellie lay screaming for the morphine.

He was nodding, how well he understood. Hadn’t his own life become the same thing? A sudden flash of New Orleans struck him, screen door closing, cousins around the kitchen table, red beans and rice, and talk, talk, talk …

“I tell you I almost killed her,” Rowan said, “I almost ended it. I couldn’t … I couldn’t … Nobody could lie to me about it. I know when people are lying. It’s not that I can read minds, it’s more subtle. It’s as if people are talking out loud in black-and-white words on a page, and I’m seeing what they say in colored pictures. I get their thoughts some times, little bits of information. And anyway, I’m a doctor, they didn’t try, and I had full access to the information. It was Ellie that was always lying, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. And I knew her feelings, always. I had since I was a little girl. And there was this other thing, this talent for knowing, I call it the diagnostic sense but it’s more than that, I laid my hands on her and even when she was in remission, I knew. It’s in there, it’s coming back. She’s got six months at most. And then to come home after it was all over-to this house, this house with every conceivable gadget and convenience and luxury that one could possibly … ”

“I know,” he said softly. “All the toys we have, all the money.”

“Yes, and what is this without them now, a shell? I don’t belong here! And if I don’t belong, nobody does, and I look around me … and I’m scared, I tell you. I’m scared. No, wait, don’t comfort me. You don’t know. I couldn’t prevent Ellie’s death, that I can accept, but I caused Graham’s death. I killed him.”

“No, but you didn’t do that,” he said. “You’re a doctor and you know … ”

“Michael, you are like an angel sent to me. But listen to what I’m telling you. You have a power in your hands, you know it’s real. I know it’s real. On the drive over you demonstrated that power. Well, I have a power in me that’s equally strong. I killed him. I killed two people before that-a stranger, and a little girl years ago, a little girl on a playground. I’ve read the autopsy reports. I can kill, I tell you! I’m a doctor today because I am trying to deny that power, I have built my life upon compensation for that evil!”

She took a deep breath. She ran her fingers back through her hair. She looked waifish and lost in the big loose robe, cinched tight at the waist, a Ganymede with the soft tumbled pageboy hair. He started to go to her. She gestured for him to stay where he was.

“There’s so much. You know I made this fantasy of telling you, you of all people … ”

“I’m here, I’m listening,” he said. “I want you to tell me … ” How could he put into words that she fascinated him and utterly absorbed him, and how remarkable that was after all these weeks of frenzy and craziness.

She talked in a low voice now of how it had gone with her, of how she had always been in love with science, science was poetry to her. She never thought she’d be a surgeon. It was research that fascinated her, the incredible, almost fantastical advances in neurological science. She wanted to spend her life in the laboratory where she thought the real opportunity for heroism existed; and she had a natural genius for it, take that on faith. She did.

But then had come that awful experience, that terrible Christmas Eve. She had been about to go to the Keplinger Institute to work full-time on methods of intervention in the brain that did not involve surgery-the use of lasers, the gamma knife, miracles she could scarcely describe to the layman. After all, she had never had any easy time with human beings. Didn’t she belong in a laboratory?

And take it from her the latest developments were full of the miraculous, but then her mentor, never mind his name-and he was dead now anyway, he’d died of a series of little strokes shortly after that, ironically enough, and all the surgeons in the world hadn’t been able to clip and suture those deadly ruptures … but she hadn’t even found out about that until later. To get back to the story, he had taken her up into the Institute in San Francisco on Christmas Eve because that was the one night of all nights when no one would be there, and he was breaking the rules to show her what they were working on, and it was live fetal research.

“I saw it in the incubator, this little fetus. Do you know what he called it? He called it the abortus. Oh, I hate to tell you this because I know how you feel about Little Chris, I know … ”

She didn’t notice his shock. He had never told her about Little Chris, never told anyone about that pet name, but she seemed quite completely unaware of this, and he sat there silent, just listening to her talk, thinking vaguely of all those films he’d seen with these recurrent and awful fetal images, but he wasn’t about to interrupt her. He wanted her to go on.

“And this thing had been sustained, alive,” she said, “from a four-month abortion, and you know he was developing means of live support for even younger fetuses. He was talking of breeding embryos in test tubes and never returning them to the womb at all, but all of this to harvest organs. You should have heard his arguments, that the fetus was playing a vital role in the human life chain, could you believe it, and I’ll tell you the horrible part, the really horrible part, it was that it was utterly fascinating, and I loved it. I saw the potential uses he was describing. I knew it would be possible someday to create new and undamaged brains for coma victims. Oh, God, you know all the things that could be done, the things that I, given my talent, could have done!”

He nodded. “I can see it,” he said softly. “I can see the horror of it and I can see the lure.”

“Yes, precisely,” she responded. “And do you believe me when I tell you I could have had a great career in research, I could have been one of those names in the books. I was born for it, you might say. When I discovered neurology, when I reached it, you might say, after all the preparation, it was like I’d reached the summit of a mountain, and it was home, it was where I belonged.”

The sun was rising. It fell on the floorboards where she stood but she appeared not to see it. She was crying again, softly, the tears just flowing as she wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand.

She explained how she had run from that laboratory, she had run from research altogether, and all that might have been achieved there, she had run from her ruthless lust for power over the little fetal cells with their amazing plasticity. Did he understand how they could be used for transplants wholly unlike other transplants, that they continued to develop, that they did not trigger the usual immune responses of the host, that they were a field of such dazzling promise. “That’s what it was, you could see no end to what could be done. And imagine the extent of the raw material, a little nation of nonpersons by the millions. Of course there are laws against it. Do you know what he said? ‘There are laws against it because everybody knows it’s going on.’ ”

“Not surprising,” he whispered. “Not surprising at all.”

“I had killed only two people at that point in my life. But I knew, inside, that I had done it. Because you see it’s connected to my very character, my capacity to choose to do something, and my refusal to accept defeat. Call it temper in its crudest form. Call it fury at its most dramatic. And in research can you imagine how I could have used that capacity to choose and do and to resist authority, to follow my lights on some totally amoral and even disastrous course? It’s not mere will; it’s too hot to be called will.”

“Determination,” he said.

She nodded. “Now a surgeon is an interventionist; he or she is very determined. You go in with the knife and you say, I’m going to chop out half your brain and you’re going to be better, and who would have the nerve to do something like that but someone very determined, someone extremely inner-directed, someone very strong.”

“Thank God for it,” he said.

“Perhaps.” She smiled bitterly. “But a surgeon’s confidence is nothing compared to what could have been brought out of me in the laboratory. And I want to tell you something else, too, something I think you can understand on account of your hands and the visions, something I would never tell another doctor, because it would be no use.

“When I operate I envision what I’m doing. I mean I hold in my mind a thorough multidimensional image of the effects of my actions. My mind thinks in terms of such detailed pictures. When you were dead on the deck of the boat and I breathed into your mouth, I envisioned your lungs, your heart, the air moving into your lungs. And when I killed the man in the Jeep, when I killed the little girl, I first imagined them punished, I imagined them spitting blood. I didn’t have the knowledge then to imagine it any more perfectly than that, but it was the same process, the same thing.”

“But they could have been natural deaths, Rowan.”

She shook her head. “I did it, Michael. And with the same power guiding me I operate. And with the same power guiding me I saved you.”

He said nothing, he was only waiting for her to go on. The last thing he wanted to do was argue with her. God, she was the only person in the world it seemed who really listened to him. And she didn’t need anyone to argue with her right now. Yet he wasn’t at all sure that she was right.

“No one knows these things,” she said. “I’ve stood in this empty house and cried and talked aloud to no one. Ellie was my closest friend in all the world, but I couldn’t have told her. And what have I done? I’ve tried through surgery to find salvation. I have chosen the most brutal and direct means of intervention. But all the successful operations of the world cannot hide from me what I am capable of. I killed Graham.

“You know, I think that at that moment, when Graham and I were there together, I think … I think I actually remembered Mary Jane on the playground, and I think I actually remembered the man in the Jeep, and I believe, I believe I actually intended to use the power, but all I can remember is that I saw the artery. I saw it burst. But you know, I think I deliberately killed him. I wanted him to die so he couldn’t hurt Ellie. I made him die.”

She paused as if she wasn’t sure of what she’d just said, or as if she’d just realized that it was true. She looked off over the water. It was blue now, in the sunlight, and filled with dazzling light. Countless sails had appeared on the surface. And the whole house was pervaded by the vistas surrounding it, the dark olive hills sprinkled with white buildings, and to Michael, it made her seem all the more alone, lost.

“When I read about the power in your hands,” she said, “I knew it was real. I understood. I knew what you were going through. There are these secret things that set us apart. Don’t expect other people to believe, though in your case they’ve seen. In my case no one must ever see, because it must never happen again … ”

“Is that what you’re afraid of, it will happen again?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at him. “I think of those deaths and the guilt is so terrible, I don’t have a purpose or an idea or a plan. It stands between me and life. And yet I live, I live better than anybody I know.” She laughed softly, bitterly. “Every day I go into surgery. My life is exciting. But it isn’t what it could have been … ” Her tears were flowing again; she was looking at him, but seemingly through him. The sunlight was falling full on her, on her yellow hair.

He wanted so to hold her. Her suffering was excruciating to him. He could scarcely stand to see her gray eyes so red and full of tears, and the very tautness of her face made it terrible when the lines of anguish suddenly sharpened and flashed and the tears flowed, and then the face went smooth, as if with shock, again.

“I wanted to tell you these things.” she said. She was confused, uncertain. Her voice broke. “I wanted … to be with you and tell you. I guess I felt that because I had saved your life, maybe somehow … ”

This time nothing could have stopped him from going to her. He got up slowly, and took her in his arms. He held her, kissing her silky neck and her tear-stained cheeks, kissing her tears. “You felt right,” he said. He drew back, and he pulled off his gloves, impatiently and tossed them aside. He looked at his hands for a moment, and then he looked at her.

There was a look of vague wonder in her eyes, the tears shimmering in the light from the fire. Then he placed his hands on her head, feeling of her hair, and of her cheeks, and he whispered: “Rowan.” He willed all the random crazy images to stop; he willed himself just to see her now, through his hands, and there rose again that lovely engulfing sense of her that had come and gone so swiftly in the car, of her surrounding him, and in a sudden violent hum, like the throb of electricity through his veins, he knew her, he knew the honesty of her life, and the intensity of it, and he knew her goodness, her undeniable goodness. The tumbling, shifting images didn’t matter. They were true to the whole that he perceived, and it was the whole, and the courage of the whole, that mattered.

He slid his hands into her robe, touching her small, thin body, so hot, so delicious to his naked fingers. He lowered his head and kissed the tops of her breasts. Orphan, alone one, afraid but so strong, so very relentlessly strong. “Rowan,” he whispered again. “Let this matter now.”

He felt her sigh, and give in, like a broken stem against his chest, and in the mounting heat, all the pain left her.

He lay on the rug, his left arm bent to cradle his head, his right hand idly holding a cigarette over the ashtray, a steaming cup of coffee at his side. It must have been nine o’clock by now. He’d called the airline. They could put him on the noon plane.

But when he thought of leaving her he was filled with anxiety. He liked her. He liked her more than most people he’d ever known in his life, and more to the point perhaps, he was enchanted by her, by her obvious intelligence and her near morbid vulnerability, which continued to bring out in him an exquisite sense of protectiveness, which he enjoyed almost to the point of shame.

They had talked for hours after the second lovemaking.

They talked quietly, without urgency or peaks of emotion, about their lives. She’d told him about growing up in Tiburon, taking out the boat almost every day of her life, what it had been like attending the good schools. She’d talked more about her life in medicine, her early love of research, and dreams of Frankenstein-like discoveries, in a more controlled and detailed way. Then had come the discovery of her talent in the Operating Room. No doubt she was an incredibly good surgeon. She felt no need to brag about it; she simply described it, the excitement of it, the immediate gratification, the near desperation since the death of her parents to be always operating, always walking the wards, always at work. On some days she had actually operated until she could not stand upright any longer. It was as if her mind and her hands and her eyes weren’t part of the rest of her.

He had told her briefly, and a little self-deprecatingly, about his own world, answering her questions, warmed by her seeming interest. “Working class,” he had said. How curious she had been. What was it like back there in the South? He’d talked about the big families, the big funerals, the narrow little shotgun house with its linoleum floors, the four o’clocks in the postage stamp of a garden. Had it seemed quaint to her? Maybe it did to him too now, though it hurt to think of it, because he wanted to go home so badly. “It isn’t just them, and the visions and all. I want to go back there, I want to walk on Annunciation Street too … ”

“Is that the name of the street where you grew up? That’s so beautiful.”

He didn’t tell her about the weeds in the gutters, the men sitting on the steps with their cans of beer, the smell of boiled cabbage that never went away, the riverfront trains rattling the windows.

Talking about his life here had been a little easier-explaining about Elizabeth and Judith, and the abortion that had destroyed his life with Judith; explaining about the last few years, and their curious emptiness, and the feeling of waiting for something, though he did not know what it was. He told about houses and how he loved them; about the kinds that existed in San Francisco, the big Queen Annes and the Italianates, the bed-and-breakfast hotel he had wanted so badly to do on Union Street, and then he had slipped into talking about the houses he really loved, the houses back there in New Orleans. He understood about ghosts in houses, because houses were more than habitats, and it was no wonder they could steal your soul.

It was an easy exchange, deepening their knowledge of each other, and amplifying the intimacy they’d already felt. He had liked what she said about going out to sea; about being alone on the bridge with the coffee in her hand, the wind howling past the wheelhouse. He didn’t like it, but he liked to hear her tell about it. He liked the look in her gray eyes; he liked the simplicity of her easy, languid gestures.

He had even gone into his crazy talk about the movies, and the recurrent images of vengeful babies and children, and the way he felt when he perceived such themes-as though everything around him was talking to him. Maybe one step from the madhouse, but he wondered if some of the people in the madhouse were there because they took the patterns they perceived too literally? What did she think? And death, well, he had a lot of thoughts about death, but first and foremost, this thought had recently struck him, even before the accident, that the death of another person is perhaps the only genuine supernatural event we ever experience.

“I’m not talking about doctors now. I’m talking about ordinary people in the modern world. What I’m saying is, when you look down at that body, and you realize all the life has gone out of it, and you can scream at it, and slap it around, and try to sit it up, and do every trick in the book to it, but it’s dead, absolutely unequivocally dead … ”

“I know what you’re saying.”

“And you have to remember, for most of us we see that maybe once or twice in twenty years. Maybe never. Why, California in this day and age is a whole civilization of people who never witness a death. They never even see a dead body! Why, they think when they hear somebody’s dead that he forgot to eat his health foods, or hadn’t been jogging the way he should have been … ”

She had laughed softly under her breath. “Every goddamned death’s a murder. Why you do you think they come after us doctors with their lawyers?”

“Exactly, but it’s deeper even than that. They don’t believe they’re going to die! And when somebody else dies, it’s behind closed doors, and the coffin’s closed, if the poor slob had the bad taste to even want a coffin and a funeral, which of course he shouldn’t have wanted. Better a memorial service in some toney place with sushi and white wine and people refusing to even say out loud why they are there! Why, I have been to California memorial services where nobody even mentioned the dead guy! But if you really see it … and you’re not a doctor, or a nurse, or an undertaker … well, it’s a first-class supernatural event, and just probably the only supernatural event you ever get to see.”

“Well, let me tell you about one other supernatural event,” she’d said, smiling. “It’s when you’ve got one of those dead bodies lying on the deck of your boat, and you’re slapping it around and talking to it, and suddenly the eyes do open, and the guy’s alive.”

She had smiled so beautifully at him then. He had started kissing her, and that was how that particular segment of the conversation had come to an end. But the point was, he hadn’t lost her with his crazy rambling. She had never once tuned out on him.

Why did this other thing have to be happening? Why did this feel like stolen time?

Now he lay on the rug, thinking how much he liked her and how much her sadness and her aloneness disturbed him, and how much he didn’t want to leave her, and that nevertheless, he had to go.

His head was remarkably clear. He had not been this long without a drink all summer. And he rather liked the feeling of thinking clearly. She had just refilled the coffee for him, and it tasted good. But he’d put back on the gloves, because he was getting all those random stupid images off everything-Graham, Ellie, and men, lots of different men, handsome men, and all Rowan’s men, that was abundantly clear. He wished it wasn’t.

The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. He could hear her working in the kitchen. He figured he ought to get up and help her no matter what she’d said, but she’d been pretty convincing on the subject: “I like to cook, it’s like surgery. Stay exactly where you are.”

He was thinking that she was the first thing in all these weeks that really mattered to him, that took his mind off the accident and off himself. And it was such a relief to be thinking of someone other than himself. In fact, when he considered it with this new clarity, he realized he’d been able to concentrate well since he’d been here, concentrate on their conversation and their lovemaking and their knowing of each other; and that was something altogether new, because in all these weeks, his lack of concentration-his inability to read more than a page of a book, or follow more than a few moments of a film-had left him continuously agitated. It had been as bad as the lack of sleep.

He realized that he had never had his knowledge of a human being commence at such a pitch, and plunge so deep so fast. It was like what was supposed to happen with sex, but seldom if ever did. He had entirely lost sight of the fact that she was the woman who’d rescued him; that is, a strong sense of her character had obliterated that vague impersonal excitement he’d felt on first meeting her, and now he was making mad fantasies about her in his head.

How could he continue to know her and maybe even get to love her, and have her, and do this other thing he had to do? And he still had to do this other thing. He still had to go home and he had to determine the purpose.

As for her having been born down south, it had nothing to do with it. His head was full of too many images from his past, and the sense of destiny that united these images was too strong for it to have come from some random reminder of his home through her. Besides, on the deck of the boat last night, he’d caught nothing of that. Knowing her, yes, that was there, but even that was suspect, he still believed, because there was no profound recognition, no “Ah yes,” when she told him her story. Only positive fascination. Nothing scientific about this power of his; might be physical, yes, and measurable finally, and even controllable through some numbing drug, but it wasn’t scientific. It was more like art or music.

But the point was, he had to leave, and he didn’t want to. And it made him sad suddenly, sad and almost desperate, as if they were somehow doomed, he and she.

All these weeks, if only he could have seen her, been with her. And the oddest thought occurred to him. If only that awful accident hadn’t happened, and he had found her in some simple ordinary place, and they had begun to talk. But she was part and parcel of what had happened, her strangeness and her strength were part of it. All alone out there in that big awful cruiser right at the moment when darkness fell. Who the hell else would have been there? Who the hell else could have gotten him out of the water? Why, he could easily believe what she said about determination, about her powers.

When she’d been describing the rescue to him in more detail, she had said a strange thing. She had said that a person loses consciousness almost immediately in very cold water. Yet she had been pitched right into it, and she hadn’t lost consciousness. She had said only, “I don’t know how I reached the ladder, I honestly don’t.”

“Do you think it was that power?” he asked.

She had reflected for a moment. Then she had said, “Yes, and no. I mean maybe it was just luck.”

“Well, it was luck for me, all right,” he’d responded, and he had felt an extraordinary sense of well-being when he said it, and he wasn’t so sure why.

Maybe she knew because she said, “We’re frightened of what makes us different.” And he had agreed.

“But lots of people have these powers,” she said. “We don’t know what they are, or how to measure them; but surely they are part of what goes on between human beings. I see it in the hospital. There are doctors who know things, and they can’t tell you how. There are nurses who are the same way. I imagine there are lawyers who know infallibly when someone is guilty; or that the jury is going to vote for or against; and they can’t tell you how they know.

“The fact is, for all we learn about ourselves, for all we codify and classify and define, the mysteries remain immense. Take the research into genetics. So much is inherited by a human being-shyness is inherited, the liking for a particular brand of soap may be inherited, the liking for particular given names. But what else is inherited? What invisible powers come down to you? That’s why it’s so frustrating to me that I don’t really know my family. I don’t know the first thing about them. Ellie was a third cousin once removed or something like that. Why, hell, that’s hardly a cousin … ”

Yes, he had agreed with all that. He talked a little about his father and his grandfather, and how he was more like them than he cared to admit. “But you have to believe you can change your heredity,” he said. “You have to believe that you can work magic on the ingredients. If you can’t there’s no hope.”

“Of course you can,” she’d replied. “You’ve done it, haven’t you? I want to believe I’ve done it. This may sound insane, but I believe that we ought to … ”

“Tell me … ”

“We ought to aim to be perfect,” she said quietly. “I mean, why not?”

He had laughed but not in ridicule. He had thought of something one of his friends once said to him. The friend had been listening to Michael rattle on one night about history, and how nobody understood it or where we were headed because we didn’t know history, and the friend had said, “You are a peculiar talker, Michael,” explaining that the phrase was from Orpheus Descending, a Tennessee Williams play. He had treasured the compliment. He hoped she would too.

“You’re a peculiar talker, Rowan,” he had said, and he had explained it as his friend explained it to him.

That had made her laugh, really break up. “Maybe that’s why I’m so quiet,” she said. “I don’t even want to get started. I think you’ve said it. I’m a peculiar talker and that’s why I don’t talk at all.”

He took a drag off the cigarette now, thinking it all over. It would be lovely to stay with her. If only the feeling would leave him, that he had to go home.

“Put another log on the fire,” she said, interrupting his reverie. “Breakfast is ready.”

She laid it out on the dining table near the windows. Scrambled eggs, yogurt, fresh sliced oranges sparkling in the sun, bacon and sausage, and hot muffins just out of the oven.

She poured the coffee and the orange juice for them both. And for five minutes solid, without a word, he just ate. He had never been so hungry. For a long moment he stared at the coffee. No, he didn’t want a beer, and he wasn’t going to drink one. He drank the coffee, and she refilled the cup.

“That was simply wonderful,” he said.

“Stick around,” she said, “and I’ll cook you dinner, and breakfast tomorrow morning too.”

He couldn’t answer. He studied her for a moment, trying not to see just loveliness and the object of his considerable desire, but what she looked like. A true blonde, he thought, smooth all over, with almost no down on her face or her arms. And lovely dark ashen eyebrows, and dark eyelashes which made her eyes seem all the more gray. A face like a nun, she had, actually. Not a touch of makeup on it, and her long full mouth had a virginal look to it somehow, like the mouths of little girls before they’ve worn lipstick. He wished he could just sit here with her forever …

“But you are going to leave anyway,” she said.

He nodded. “Have to,” he said.

She was thoughtful. “What about the visions?” she asked.

“Do you want to talk about them?”

He hesitated. “Every time I try to describe them, it ends in frustration,” he explained, “and also, well, it turns people off.”

“It won’t turn me off,” she said. She seemed quite composed now, her arms folded, her hair prettily mussed, the coffee steaming in front of her. She was more like the resolute and forceful woman he’d first met last night.

He believed what she said. Nevertheless, he had seen the look of incredulity and then indifference in so many faces. He sat back in the chair, staring out for a moment. Every sailing ship in the world was on the bay. And he could see the gulls flying over the harbor of Sausalito like tiny bits of paper.

“I know the whole experience took a long time,” he said, “that time itself was impossible to factor into it.” He glanced at her. “You know what I mean,” he said. “Like in the old days when people would be lured by the Little People. You know, they’d go off and spend one day with the Little People, but when they came back to their villages they discovered they’d been gone for fifty years.”

She laughed under her breath. “Is that an Irish story?”

“Yeah, from an old Irish nun, I heard that one,” he said. “She used to tell us the damnedest things. She used to tell us there were witches in the Garden District in New Orleans, and that they’d get us if we went walking in those streets … ” And think how dark those streets were, how darkly beautiful, like the lines from “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Darkling I listen … ” “I’m sorry,” he said, “my mind wandered.”

She waited.

“There were many people in the visions,” he said, “but what I remember most distinctly is a dark-haired woman. I can’t see this woman now, but I know that she was as familiar to me as someone I’d known all my life. I knew her name, everything about her. And I know now that I knew about you. I knew your name. But I don’t know if that was in the middle of it, or just at the end, you know, before I was rescued, when maybe I knew somehow that the boat was coming and you were there.” Yes, that was a real puzzle, he thought.

“Go on.”

“I think I could have come back and lived even if I had refused to do what they wanted me to do. But I wanted the mission, so to speak, I wanted to fulfill the purpose. And it seemed … it seemed that everything they wanted of me, everything they revealed, well, it was all connected with my past life, who I’d been. It was all-encompassing. Do you follow me?”

“There was a reason they chose you.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. I was the one for this, because of who I was. Now, make no mistake. I know this is nuthouse talk again; I’m so damned good at it. This is the talk of schizophrenics who hear voices telling them to save the world, I’m aware of that. There’s an old saying about me among my friends.”

“What is it?”

He adjusted his glasses and flashed his best smile at her. “Michael isn’t as stupid as he looks.”

She laughed in the loveliest way. “You don’t look stupid,” she said. “You just look too good to be true.” She tapped the ash off her cigarette. “You know how good-looking you are. I don’t have to tell you. What else can you recall?”

He hesitated, positively electrified by that last compliment. Wasn’t it time to go to bed again? No, it wasn’t. It was almost time to catch a plane.

“Something about a doorway,” he said, “I could swear it. But again, I can’t see these things now. It’s getting thinner all the time. But I know there was a number involved in it. And there was a jewel. A beautiful jewel. I can’t even call this recollection now. It’s more like faith. But I believe all those things were mixed up with it. And then it’s all mixed up with going home, with this sense of having to do something tremendously important, and New Orleans is part of it, and this street where I used to walk when I was a kid.”

“A street?”

“First Street. It’s a beautiful stretch, from Magazine Street, near where I grew up, to St. Charles Avenue, about five blocks or so, and it’s an old old part of town they call the Garden District.”

“Where the witches live,” she said.

“Oh, yes, right, the witches of the Garden District,” he said, smiling. “At least according to Sister Bridget Marie.”

“Is it a gloomy witchy place, this neighborhood?” she asked.

“No, not really,” he said. “But it is like a dark bit of forest in the middle of the city. Big trees, trees you wouldn’t believe. There’s nothing comparable to it here. Maybe nowhere in America. And the houses are town houses, you know, close to the sidewalks, but they’re so large, and they’re not attached, they have gardens around them. And there’s this one house, this house I used to pass all the time, a really high narrow house. I used to stop and look at it, at the iron railings. There’s a rose pattern in the railings. Well, I keep seeing it now-since the accident-and I keep thinking I have to go back, you know, it’s so urgent. Like even now I’m sitting here, but I feel guilty that I’m not on the plane.”

A shadow passed over her face. “I want you to stay here for a while,” she said. Lovely deep grosgrain voice. “But it isn’t just that I want it. You’re not in good shape. You need to rest, really rest without the booze.”

“You’re right, but I can’t do it, Rowan. I can’t explain this tension I feel. I’ll feel it till I get home.”

“That’s another thing, Michael. Why is that home? You don’t know anyone back there.”

“Oh, it’s home, honey, it is. I know.” He laughed. “I’ve been in exile for too long. I knew it even before the accident. The morning before, it was the funniest thing, I woke up and I was thinking about home. I was thinking about this time we all drove to the Gulf Coast, and it was warm at sundown, positively warm … ”

“Can you stay off the booze when you leave here?”

He sighed. He deliberately flashed her one of his best smiles-the kind that had always worked in the past-and he winked at her. “Want to hear Irish bullshit, lady, or the truth?”

“Michael … ” It wasn’t just disapproval in her voice, it was disappointment.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Everything you’re saying is right. Look, you don’t know what you’ve done for me, just getting me out the front door, just listening to me. I want to do what you’re telling me to do … ”

“Tell me more about this house,” she said.

He was thoughtful again, before beginning. “It was the Greek Revival style-do you know what that is? – but it was different. It had porches on the front and on the sides, real New Orleans porches. It’s hard to describe a house like that to someone who’s never been in New Orleans. Have you ever seen pictures-?”

She shook her head. “It was a subject Ellie couldn’t talk about,” she said.

“That sounds unfair, Rowan.”

She shrugged.

“No, but really.”

“Ellie wanted to believe I was her own daughter. If I asked about my biological parents, she thought I was unhappy, that she hadn’t loved me enough. Useless to try to get those ideas out of her head.” She drank a little of the coffee. “Before her last trip to the hospital she burned everything in her desk. I saw her doing it. She burned it all in that fireplace. Photographs, letters, all sorts of things. I didn’t realize it was everything. Or maybe I just didn’t think about it, one way or the other. She knew she wasn’t coming back.” She stopped for a minute, then poured a little more coffee in her cup and in Michael’s cup.

“Then after she died, I couldn’t even find an address for her people down there. Her lawyer didn’t have a scrap of information. She’d told him she didn’t want anyone down there to be contacted. All her money went to me. Yet she used to visit the people in New Orleans. She used to call them on the phone. I could never quite figure it all out.”

“That’s too sad, Rowan.”

“But we’ve talked enough about me. About this house again. What is it that makes you remember it now?”

“Oh, houses there aren’t like the houses here,” he said. “Each house has a personality, a character. And this one, well, it’s somber and massive, and sort of splendidly dark. It’s built right on the corner, part of it touching the sidewalk of the side street. God knows I loved that house. There was a man who lived there, a man right out of a Dickens novel, I swear it, tall and sort of consummately gentlemanly, if you know what I mean. I used to see him in the garden … ” He hesitated; something coming so close to him, something so crucial-

“What’s the matter?”

“Just that feeling again, that it’s all got to do with him and that house.” He shuddered as if he were cold, but he wasn’t. “I can’t figure it out,” he said. “But I know the man has something to do with it. I don’t think they did mean for me to forget, the people I saw in the visions. I think they meant for me to act fast, because something’s going to happen.”

“What could that something be?” she asked gently.

“Something in that house,” he said.

“Why would they want you to go back to that house?” she asked. Again, the question was gentle, not challenging.

“Because I have a power to do something there; I have a power to affect something.” He looked down at his hands, so sinister in the black gloves. “Again, it was like everything fitted together. Imagine the whole world made up of tiny fragments-and suddenly a great many of those tiny fragments are lights and you see a … a … ”

“Pattern?”

“Yeah, exactly, a pattern. Well, my life has been part of a greater pattern.” He drank another swallow of the coffee. “What do you think? Am I insane?”

She shook her head. “It sounds too special for that.”

“Special?”

“I mean specific.”

He gave a little startled laugh. No one in all these weeks had said anything like that to him.

She crushed out the cigarette.

“Have you thought about that house often, in the past few years?”

“Almost never,” he said. “I never forgot it, but I never thought about it much either. Oh, now and then, I suppose whenever I thought about the Garden District, I’d think about it. You could say it was a haunting place.”

“But the obsession didn’t begin until the visions.”

“Definitely,” he said. “There are other memories of home, but the memory of the house is the most intense.”

“Yet when you think of the visions, you don’t remember speaking of the house … ”

“Nothing so clear as that. Although … ” There it was again, the feeling. But he feared the power of suggestion suddenly. It seemed all the misery of the last few months was coming back. Yet it felt good to be believed by her, to be listening to her. And he liked her easy air of command, the first characteristic of her he had noticed the night before.

She was looking at him, looking just as if she was listening still though he had ceased to speak. He thought about these strange vagrant powers, how utterly they confused things, rather than clarifying them.

“So what’s wrong with me?” he asked. “I mean as a doctor, as a brain doctor, what do you think? What should I do? Why do I keep seeing that house and that man? Why do I feel I ought to be there now?”

She sank into thought, silent, motionless, her gray eyes large and fixed on some point beyond the glass, her long, slender arms again folded. Then she said:

“Well, you should go back there, there’s no doubt of that. You aren’t going to rest easy till you do. Go look for the house. Who knows? Maybe it’s not there. Or you won’t have any special feeling when you see it. In any case, you should look. There may be some psychological explanation for this idée fixe, as they call it, but I don’t think so. I suspect you saw something all right, you went somewhere. We know many people do that, at least they claim they did when they come back. But you might be putting the wrong interpretation on it.”

“I don’t have much to go on,” he admitted. “That’s true.”

“Do you think they caused the accident?”

“God, I never really thought of that.”

“You didn’t?”

“I mean I thought, well, the accident happened, and they were there, and suddenly the opportunity was there. That would be awful, to think they caused it to happen. That would change things, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know. What bothers me is this. If they are powerful, whatever they are, if they could tell you something important with regard to a purpose, if they could keep you alive out there when you should have died, if they could work a rescue into it, well, then why couldn’t they have caused the accident, and why couldn’t they be causing your memory loss now?”

He was speechless.

“You really never thought of that?”

“It’s an awful thought,” he whispered. She started to speak again, but he asked her with a little polite gesture to wait. He was trying to find the words for what he wanted to say. “My concept of them is different,” be said. “I’ve trusted that they exist in another realm; and that means spiritually as well as physically. That they are … ”

“Higher beings?”

“Yes. And that they could only come to me, know of me, care about me, when I was close to them, between life and death. It was mystical, that’s what I’m trying to say. But I wish I could find another word for it. It was a communication that happened only because I was physically dead.”

She waited.

“What I mean is, they’re another species of being. They couldn’t make a man fall off a rock and drown in the sea. Because if they could do such things in the material world, well, why on earth would they need me?”

“I see your point,” she said. “Nevertheless … ”

“What?”

“You’re assuming they’re higher beings. You speak of them as if they’re good. You’re assuming that you ought to do what they want of you.”

Again, he was speechless.

“Look, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said.

“No, I think you do,” he answered. “And you’re right. I have assumed all that. But Rowan, you see, it’s a matter of impression. I awoke with the impression that they were good, that I’d come back with the confirmation of their goodness, and that the purpose was something I’d agreed to do. And I haven’t questioned those assumptions. And what you’re saying is, maybe I should.”

“I could be wrong. And maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But you know what I’ve been telling you about surgeons. We go in there swinging, and not with a fist, but with a knife.”

He laughed. “You don’t know how much it means to me just to talk about it, just to think about it out loud.” But then he stopped smiling. Because it was very disturbing to be talking about it like this, and she knew that.

“And there’s another thing,” she said.

“Which is?”

“Every time you talk about the power in your hands, you say it’s not important. You say the visions are what’s important. But why aren’t they connected? Why don’t you believe that the people in the visions gave you the power in your hands?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve thought of that. My friends have even suggested that. But it doesn’t feel right. It feels like the power is a distraction. I mean people around me here want me to use the power, and if I were to start doing that, I wouldn’t go back.”

“I see. And when you see this house, you’ll touch it with your hands?”

He thought for a long moment. He had to admit he had not imagined such a thing. He had imagined a more immediate and wonderful clarification of things. “Yeah, I guess I will. I’ll touch the gate if I can. I’ll go up the steps and I’ll touch the door.”

Why did that frighten him? Seeing the house meant something wonderful, but touching things … He shook his head, and folded his arms as he sat back in the chair. Touch the gate. Touch the door. Of course they might have given him the power, but why did he think that they hadn’t? Especially if it was all of a piece …

She was quiet, obviously puzzled, maybe even worried. He watched her for a long moment, thinking how much he hated to leave.

“Don’t go so soon, Michael,” she said suddenly.

“Rowan, let me ask you something,” he said. “This paper you signed, this pledge never to go to New Orleans. Do you believe in that sort of thing, I mean, the validity of this promise to Ellie, to a person who’s dead?”

“Of course I do,” she answered dully, almost sadly. “You believe in that sort of thing, too.”

“I do?”

“I mean you’re an honorable person. You’re what we call, with great significance, a nice guy.”

“OK. I hope I am. And I put my question wrong. I mean, what about your desire to see the place where you were born? But I’m lying to you now, you know, because what I want to say is, is there any chance you’ll come back there with me? And I guess a nice guy doesn’t tell lies.”

Silence.

“I know that sounds presumptuous,” he said. “I know there’ve been quite a few men in this house, I mean I’m not the light of your life, I … ”

“Stop it. I could fall in love with you and you know it.”

“Well, then listen to what I’m saying, because it is about two living people. And maybe I’ve already … well, I … what I mean is, if you want to go back there, if you need to go back just to see for yourself where you were born and who your parents were … Well, why the hell don’t you come with me?” He sighed and sat back, shoving his hands in his pants pockets. “I suppose that would be an awfully big step, wouldn’t it? And all this is selfish of me. I just want you to come. Some nice guy.”

She was staring off again, frozen, then her mouth stiffened. And he realized she was again about to cry. “I’d like to go,” she said. The tears were rising.

“God, Rowan, I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no right to ask.”

The tears won out. She continued to look out towards the water, as if that were the only way to hold the line for the moment. But she was crying, and he could see the subtle movement of her throat as she swallowed, and the tightening in her shoulders. The thought flashed through him that this was the most alone person he’d ever known. California was full of them, but she was really isolated, and in a purely unselfish way, he was afraid for her, afraid to leave her in this house.

“Look, Rowan, I really am sorry. I can’t do this to you,” he said. “It’s between you and Ellie. When you get ready to go, you’ll go. And for now, I have to do it for totally different reasons. I’ve got to get out of here, and I hate like hell to go.”

The tears had begun to spill down her cheeks again.

“Rowan … ”

“Michael,” she whispered. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m the one who’s fallen in your arms. Now, stop worrying about me.”

“No, don’t say it.” He started to get up, because he wanted to hug her again, but she wouldn’t allow it. She reached for his hand across the table and held it.

Gently he spoke to her: “If you don’t think I loved it, holding you, wiping your tears, well then you’re not using your powers, Rowan. Or you just don’t understand a man like me.”

She shivered, arms tight across her chest, her bangs falling down in her eyes. She looked so forlorn he wanted to gather her to himself and kiss her again.

“What are you afraid of, really?” he asked.

When she answered, she spoke in a whisper, so low that he could scarcely hear. “That I’m bad, Michael, a bad person, a person who could really do harm. A person with a terrible potential for evil. That is what all my powers, such as they are, tell me about me.”

“Rowan, it wasn’t a sin to be a better person than Ellie or Graham. And it isn’t a sin to hate them for your loneliness, for rearing you in a state of isolation from every blood tie you might have.”

“I know all that, Michael.” She smiled, a warm sweet smile full of gratitude and quiet acceptance, but she did not trust the things he’d said. She felt that he had failed to see something crucial about her, and he knew it. She felt that he had failed, just as he failed on the deck of the boat. She looked out at the deep blue water and then back at him.

“Rowan, no matter what happens in New Orleans, you and I are going to see each other again, and soon. I could swear to you now on a stack of Bibles that I’ll be back here, but in truth, I don’t think I ever will. I knew when I left Liberty Street I wasn’t ever going to live there again. But we’re going to meet somewhere, Rowan. If you can’t set foot in New Orleans, then you pick the place, and you say the word, and I’ll come.”

Take that, you bastards out there, he thought looking at the water, and up at the dirty blue California sky, you creatures whoever you are that did this to me, and won’t come back to guide me. I’ll go to New Orleans, I’ll follow where you lead. But there is something here between me and this woman, and that belongs to me.

She wanted to drive him to the airport, but he insisted on taking a cab. It was just too long a drive for her, and she was tired, he knew it. She needed her sleep.

He showered and shaved. He hadn’t had a drink now in almost twelve hours. Truly amazing.

When he came down he found her sitting with her legs folded, on the hearth again, looking very pretty in white wool pants and another one of those great swallowing cable-knit sweaters that made her look all the more long-wristed and long-legged and delicate as a deer. She smelled faintly of some perfume he used to know the name of, and which he still loved.

He kissed her cheek, and then held her for a long moment. Eighteen years, maybe more than that, separated him in age from her and he felt it painfully, felt it when he let his lips again graze her firm, plump cheek.

He gave her a slip of paper on which he’d written down the name of the Pontchartrain Hotel and the number. “How can I reach you at the hospital, or is that not the right thing to do?”

“No, I want you to do that. I pick up my messages all day, at intervals.” She went to the kitchen counter and wrote out the numbers on the telephone pad, tore off the page, and put it in his hand. “Just raise hell if they give you any trouble. Tell them I’m expecting your call. And I’ll tell them.”

“Gotcha.”

She stood back a pace from him, slipping her hands in her pockets, and she lowered her head slightly as she looked at him. “Don’t get drunk again, Michael,” she said.

“Yes, Doctor.” He laughed. “And I could stand right here and tell you I was going to take the pledge, honey, but somehow or other the minute that stewardess … ”

“Michael, don’t drink on the plane and don’t drink when you get there. You’re going to be bombarded with memories. You’re going miles away from anybody you know.”

He shook his head. “You’re right, Doc,” he said. “I’ll be careful. I’ll be all right.”

He went to his suitcase, took out his Sony Walkman from the zipper pocket, and checked that he had remembered to bring a book for the plane.

“Vivaldi,” he said, slipping the Walkman with its tiny earphones into his jacket pocket. “And my Dickens. I go nuts when I fly without them. It’s better than Valium and vodka, I swear.”

She smiled at him, the most exquisite smile, and then she laughed. “Vivaldi and Dickens,” she whispered. “Imagine that.”

He shrugged. “We all have our weaknesses,” he said. “God, why am I leaving like this?” he asked. “Am I crazy?”

“If you don’t call me this evening … ”

“I’ll call you, sooner and more often than you could possibly expect.”

“The taxi’s there,” she said.

He had heard the horn, too.

He took her in his arms, kissing her, crushing her to him. And for one moment, he almost couldn’t pull away. He thought of what she’d said again, about them causing the accident, causing the amnesia, and a dark chill went through him, something like real fear. What if he forgot about them, forever, what if he just stayed here with her? It seemed a possibility, a last chance of sorts, it really did.

“I think I love you, Rowan Mayfair,” he whispered.

“Yes, Michael Curry,” she said, “I think something like that might be happening on both sides right now.”

She gave him another of her soft, radiant smiles, and he saw in her eyes all the strength he’d found so seductive in these last few hours, and all the tenderness and sadness, too.

All the way to the airport, he listened to Vivaldi with his eyes closed. But it didn’t help. He thought of New Orleans, and then he thought of her; and back and forth the pendulum swung. It was a simple thing she’d said, but how it jarred him. It seemed all these weeks he’d clung to the idea of a magnificent pattern and a purpose that served some higher value, but when she’d asked a few simple and logical questions, his faith had fallen apart.

Well, he didn’t believe the accident had been caused by anyone. The wave had simply knocked him off the rock. And then he’d gone somewhere, a stratum others have visited, and there he’d found these beings, and they had found him. But they couldn’t do things to people to hurt them, to manipulate them as if they were puppets on strings!

Then what about the rescue, buddy? What about her coming, alone in that boat, just before dark to that very spot in the sea?

God, he was going crazy again already. All he could think about was being with her again, or getting a good slug of bourbon with ice.

Only when he was waiting for the plane to board did something occur to him, something he had not given the slightest thought to before.

He’d lain with her three times in the last few hours, and he had not taken the usual precautions against conception. He had not even thought about the prophylactics he always carried in his wallet. He had not asked her about the matter, either. And to think, in all these years, this was the first time he had let such a thing slip by.

Well, she was a doctor, for the love of heaven. Surely she had the matter covered. But maybe he should call her about it now. It wouldn’t hurt to hear her voice. He closed the copy of David Copperfield and started looking for a phone.

Then he saw that man again, that Englishman with the white hair and the tweed suit. Only a few rows away he sat, with his briefcase and his umbrella, a folded newspaper in his hand.

Oh, no, Michael thought dismally, as he took his seat again. All I need now is to run into him.

The call came for boarding. Michael watched anxiously as the Englishman rose, collected his things, and moved to the gate.

But moments later, the old gentleman didn’t even glance up when Michael passed him and took a seat by the window in the rear of first class. The old fellow had had his briefcase open already, and he’d been writing, very rapidly it seemed, in a large leather-bound book.

Michael ordered his bourbon with an ice-cold beer chaser before the plane took off. By the time they reached Dallas for a forty-minute stopover, he was on his sixth beer and his seventh chapter of David Copperfield, and he didn’t even remember anymore that the Englishman was there.