MERCEDES HAD SPENT THE DAYS of her childhood leaning on the fender of her older brother’s 1965 Chevrolet, watching Antonio work under the hood. Antonio was seven years her senior. He had quit high school when she was still in elementary school. When she was in junior high, he had moved out of the family home to share an apartment with two friends, coming home for dinners on Sundays just to keep their mother happy.
Antonio had worked at the corner gas station, pumping gas, fixing cars, tinkering with his own Chevy low rider. After school Mercedes had hung out at the station, watching her brother work. On Sunday afternoons she had helped him wax his car, smearing white paste over the already satiny finish, then rubbing and polishing until she could see her face in the shiny black paint.
A line of grease was permanently embedded beneath each of Antonio’s fingernails. On his left wrist was a tattoo that said “Maryann.” In his freshman year of high school, Antonio had given himself the tattoo with a needle and the ink from a ball-point pen. The girl, a blonde who was trying out for the cheerleading squad, had broken up with him anyway.
Mercedes’ dad hadn’t liked her hanging around at the gas station. But then, her dad hadn’t liked the boys she dated (tough guys with bad reputations) or the clothes she wore (faded jeans with oversized shirts) or her music, her friends, her constant swearing. So she had hung out at the gas station and told her parents that she was studying at the library.
Sometimes Mercedes had helped her brother with repairs: after years of watching him work, she was quick and knowledgeable. Her small hands could squeeze into spaces where his could not. Her ability to diagnose a car’s ailments bordered on the miraculous: she would tilt her head to one side, listen to an engine rattle or wheeze or grind, and then give a repair estimate accurate to the dollar. She had planned to go to work with Antonio at the gas station when she finished high school, and to save her money for a Chevy lowrider of her own. But things didn’t work out that way.
Her mother had been the first in the family to sicken with the Plague. Then her father. Mercedes had taken care of her parents, bringing food and water, draping cold washcloths over their foreheads, buying over-the-counter remedies that promised to relieve the aches and pains of fever. The hospital emergency room sent her home with nothing. The newspapers were filled with articles on the Plague: they offered warnings, but no hope.
Though she had never had much faith in God or in the Catholic church, she prayed as she took care of her parents, pleading with the Virgin Mary to help her, asking Jesus to make her mother and father well. Late one morning, after a sleepless night, she fell asleep in the armchair by her parents’ bed. When she woke in the afternoon, both her mother and her father were quiet, lying still and lifeless beneath a thin blanket. Her mother’s head was cushioned on her father’s arm.
She went to the gas station to tell Antonio and found him slumped in the back seat of his car. His forehead felt hot and dry. When she woke him, he did not seem to recognize her.
She took the car keys from his pocket and drove him to her family’s home. There, she nursed him, even when she fell sick herself. But all the tea and orange juice and cold remedies and prayers made no difference. He died, just as so many died. She stood at his bedside, looking down at him. His hands were pale, except for the rim of dark grease beneath each nail. The tattoo was dark against his skin.
Wearing her brother’s old high school letter jacket, she left her family’s home. Though sick with fever, she was overcome with an angry restlessness that made her run through the empty city, screaming in a dry hoarse voice. She carried the tire iron from her brother’s car, and she used it to break store windows, reveling in the sound of shattering glass.
On the corner of Valencia and 19th, a group of looters saw her and ran toward her, but she swung the tire iron with great authority and raved in a high feverish voice about the Virgin Mary and the blood of Jesus Christ. They ran, from fear of the fever rather than the tire iron, but she never knew that.
She walked down Valencia Street, smashing the windshields of cars and trucks, until she could walk no farther. Then she found a bed in the back of a furniture store, wandering in through a door that had been broken by other vandals. She collapsed on the bed and slept for a long time.
She woke up thirsty but still alive. She got a drink from the water cooler in the manager’s office, and then started walking with no destination in mind. The sunlight made her blink, and she had to pick her way around the shards of broken glass that littered the sidewalk. Now and then, she passed a body: a middle-aged man collapsed behind the wheel of a car; an old lady curled in a doorway; a teen-ager—perhaps one of the looters who had threatened her—sprawled in the display window of a jewelry store, among the gems and broken glass.
Antonio walked beside her and talked to her. He was very pale. She could see bits of broken glass on the sidewalk sparkling through his feet. He was dead.
“Aren’t you going to talk to me?” he asked her. “Can’t talk to you,” she said. “You’re dead.”
A burning cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth; his hands were stuffed deep in his pockets. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.
After a moment, she asked, “What’s it like, being dead?”
He shrugged and took another drag on his cigarette. “I don’t have to worry about smoking too much,” he said.
“I want to die,” she told him.
“Ah, muchacha, you don’t want to do that.”
“Tony, I do. I want to die. Ma’s dead, Dad’s dead, you’re dead. I want to die too.” She ran her hands back through her hair. He shook his head angrily. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. That’s stupid.”
“You sound just like Dad,” she said. He turned away from her and she immediately regretted her words, remembering Tony’s arguments with their father. “Hey, I’m sorry. Tony, wait! I didn’t mean it.”
He stopped and waited for her. “Maybe Dad was right sometimes,” he said. She had trouble reading his expression; his face was growing more transparent. “Did you ever think of that?”
“Why should I keep on living?” she asked him.
“You got to have a reason?” he asked. He shrugged again. “You can do anything now. Live anywhere. Take whatever you want.”
“I don’t care about that.”
A shadow of a grin crossed his face: he never stayed angry long. “But you got to have a reason? All right then, stay alive so you can take care of my car. I leave it to you. You’re responsible for it. OK?”
“Tony, that’s stupid,” she said. “Why should I…”
She was talking to herself. She was two blocks from her home, standing in the middle of the street. She walked home, but did not enter. She took Tony’s car and drove around the city, looking for a nice place to live.
That was a long time ago. On the day that Jax got her name, Mercedes squatted in the Union Square garden, picking the last of the tomatoes from the straggling vines. She looked up and saw Antonio standing on the nearest path. She sat back on her heels and stared at him. In the years immediately following the Plague, he had appeared every few weeks, stopping in to chat with her. But she had not seen him for several years.
He was smoking a cigarette and staring off into the distance. He still wore the same tattered denim jacket, the same greasestained jeans. “Hey, muchacha,” he said.
“I’m not a little girl anymore, Tony,” she told him. “I’m older than you are now.”
“Maybe so. But I’m still your big brother.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “Came to warn you,” he said.
“About what?”
“An army’s coming,” he said. “You’d better get ready.” “That’s what the stranger said.”
“You listen to that stranger, muchacha. She knows what she’s talking about.”
“Get ready how?” she asked.
He left the cigarette dangling from his mouth and spread his hands, as if there were no words to describe the necessary preparations. “That’s up to you. I’m just telling you that trouble’s coming. After that, it’s up to you.” Tony dropped his cigarette on the ground and crushed it with his foot. And then he was gone, leaving a scent of cigarette smoke that filled her with a longing for days past.
Danny-boy courted Jax cautiously, like a man trying to catch a butterfly without injuring it. Or possibly more like a man trying to catch a wasp without being stung. Either way, he was careful; he went slowly.
He watched her surreptitiously, haunted by the wariness that he saw in her eyes. Sometimes, while she slept, he crept into the bedroom and sat by her bed. In sleep, her face relaxed. Her raggedly cut hair curled on her cheeks; her expression was grave and earnest. Her hands, clutching the blanket that covered her, were so small. At odd moments during the day—while fishing for surfperch, setting a rabbit snare, searching a hardware store for blue paint—he found himself thinking about her hands: so small, yet callused by hard work and rough living.
Each evening, he made dinner, and they sat together on the roof and watched the sunset. She did not talk much. She answered questions if he asked them, but her answers were short and matter-of-fact, tossed off quickly.
“What did you do today?” he asked. “Walked,” she said.
“Where did you go?”
She jerked her head to the west but said nothing more.
He offered to show her around the city, and she declined, shaking her head quickly. He let a day go by, then suggested again that he might show her around. Her eyes grew cautious and she seemed to draw into herself, like a cat crouching to spring or flee. He did not make the suggestion a third time.
She did not make small talk, and she seemed quite comfortable with silence. He would begin talking to fill the silence and would find himself rambling on, telling her of his life, his plans, his dreams. Her silence drew him in, an emptiness waiting to be filled. He told her about Emerald; he told her what he remembered of his parents; he told her about growing up in the city.
He brought her gifts: a bouquet of exotic blossoms picked in the ruins of the greenhouse in Golden Gate Park, a paper Chinese parasol painted with herons in flight, a wind-up plastic gorilla that spat out sparks as it walked. She accepted each present politely, but she seemed puzzled, as if she did not know what to make of him.
During the day he left her alone, retreating to his work on the Golden Gate Bridge. On a foggy afternoon a few weeks after Jax had arrived in San Francisco, he was at the bridge, waiting for Mercedes and Snake.
The fog was coming in. To the west, he could see a bank of white mist, rolling slowly toward the city. The first tendrils drifted lazily past the cables of the bridge. Looking eastward, he could see Alcatraz Island and the buildings of downtown, but he knew that the fog would hide them in just a few hours. Somewhere beneath the bridge, a sea lion bayed.
He strolled along the bridge, admiring the work that had been done so far. Danny-boy had made no effort to dictate the style of each artist’s section. He provided the materials and assigned a space. After that, it was up to the artist.
Some of the artists preferred the broad surfaces offered by the enormous support cables and the bases of the towers. Others welcomed the creative challenge offered by the guard rail with its minimal surface area.
One of Danny-boy’s favorite pieces was a reclining nude, painted on the thin bars that supported the guard rail. Her toes were at the toll plaza; her head about 100 feet down the bridge. From most positions, the dark blue marks on the pale blue background looked like random lines that did not connect. But if you stood in just the right spot, the connections suddenly became clear; your eye filled in the gaps between the support bars, and the blue nude appeared.
Danny-boy smiled as he passed a section of railing marked with footprints. A dancer had painted the railing turquoise blue, dipped his feet in navy paint, then strolled along the top, leaving his bare footprints along a fifty-foot stretch.
Danny-boy stared across the bridge toward the hills of Marin, aware of the impossible grandeur of the task he had set himself. After a year of work, only the railing was nearly done. The base of each tower was blue, but the rest of both towers and most of the cables were still their original orange. Before Jax’s arrival, the interminable nature of the project hadn’t bothered him. But recently, he had started worrying. Suppose Fourstar and his army arrived before he finished the bridge? He had not anticipated such an interruption, and he saw no way to finish up quickly.
Danny-boy heard the distant roar of Snake’s motorcycle and strolled back toward the toll plaza. As always, Snake made a dramatic entrance, speeding through the toll gate and skidding through a 360-degree turn before he screeched to a halt. He shut off his engine and swung off the bike. “Yo, Danny-boy,” he called. “How goes it?” His leathers creaked faintly as he walked toward Danny-boy.
“Not bad.” Danny-boy waved a hand at the tower nearest them. “So take a look. You still willing to tackle it?”
Snake looked up at the tower, its top now hidden by the drifting fog. “Sure, man. I’ve got a dozen guys lined up to help me. One of ’em used to be a rock climber. We got ropes and we’ve been practicing. I’m a smooth man on a wall these days. Been thinking about changing my name from Snake to Spider, I’m that good.”
Danny-boy grinned at Snake’s bravado. “All right then, what else will you need?”
Together they strolled toward the tower where Danny-boy stored his equipment. Snake worked exclusively in spray paint, which limited his selection of colors. But after some haggling, they chose three shades of blue that Danny-boy had in abundance. They were heading back to the toll plaza when Snake asked the question that Danny-boy had known was inevitable. “So, who did you con into doing the other tower?”
Danny-boy took a deep breath. “Who else has the balls?”
Snake kept walking, shaking his head. “Don’t know anyone, offhand. I …” Then he stopped and stared at Danny-boy. “You don’t mean you’re going to have Mercedes and her cholos doing it.”
Danny-boy nodded. “Sure do.”
“Oh, man, you’re crazy. They’ll ruin it. You can’t be serious.” There had been, over the years, a number of territorial disputes between the Neo-Mayanists that Mercedes headed and the other graffiti artists in the city. Mercedes had once, for religious reasons, painted over one of Snake’s murals. When called to task at Town Council, she had apologized for painting over Snake’s work, but claimed that it was necessary. The wall on which she had painted was located at the exact geographic center of the city, a spot of considerable religious significance. The new painting was of prime importance to her group. She had been admonished by the Council, but no disciplinary action had been taken. And Snake held a grudge.
“I’m serious,” Danny-boy said. He had known the Snake would react badly, but he saw no way around it. “I’m sure they’ll do a fine job.”
“Forget it,” Snake said. “No way we can cooperate with them.” They had reached the toll plaza and Snake’s motorcycle. “That’s too bad,” Danny-boy said. “I figured that tower would be a prime location for your work. Every trader coming into town will see it.”
“Don’t try to flatter me, man. I know you can’t do the bridge without us.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Danny-boy said softly. “I could have Mercedes do both towers.”
Snake turned away and walked to the railing. Danny-boy followed, saying nothing.
“You’d do that,” Snake said at last.
Danny-boy looked down at the waves crashing against Fort Point. “I wouldn’t want to. But I guess I would.” Snake shook his head in disgust.
“You could think of this as a trial run. If Fourstar invades the city, you may want to work with Mercedes to keep him out.”
“You’re just full of comfort, aren’t you?” Snake spat over the railing and then turned to face Danny-boy. “Maybe I can work it out. I’ll talk to the others.”
“Fine.” Danny-boy knew that the others would follow Snake’s lead.
“You’re making a mistake, but I guess you’ll find that out when it’s done.”
“Maybe so.”
Snake roared away just as Mercedes arrived on horseback. He accelerated past her, making her horse shy, and sped off without looking back.
“Still an asshole,” she said to Danny-boy as she dismounted.
“Yeah, but he’ll do a good job on the tower.”
She shook her head and tied her horse to the toll gate. Together they strolled toward the nearest tower. Mercedes glanced around her.
“It’ll be great when it’s done,” she said. “But I wonder, will you have time to finish it before Fourstar arrives?”
Danny-boy stared at her in surprise. “What makes you so sure he’s coming. At the meeting the other night, you didn’t seem convinced.”
“Changed my mind,” Mercedes said. “Decided that maybe we can trust this stranger after all.”
“Of course we can.” Danny-boy defended Jax immediately.
“Ah,” Mercedes said, grinning at him. “Is that how it is?” “What do you mean?” He felt his face growing hot, and he looked away.
She put her arm around his shoulder affectionately. “Are you in love with this little wild woman?”
He said nothing, but his face burned.
“Ah, Danny-boy, your ears give you away. They’re red as the sunset. You might as well talk.”
He kept his face turned away. “I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being in love, chico. But if you’re in love, why aren’t you happy? Come on—tell me about it.” She led him to the base of the tower. They sat cross-legged on the cement sidewalk with their backs to the metal tower. “Now talk,” she said.
He told her his problems. He could not tell how Jax felt about him. He brought her presents, but he didn’t know if she liked them. He woke in the middle of the night and tiptoed into the bedroom to check on her, afraid she had left without warning. Mercedes listened patiently.
“You’re afraid she’ll leave, so you’re trying to keep her,” Mercedes said at last. “You’d like to lock her up, so you could be sure she wouldn’t go.”
Danny-boy protested weakly. “That’s silly,” he said. “I don’t want to lock her up. I just don’t want her to get hurt, wandering around by herself. It’s easy to get lost.” But his words carried no conviction. Just the night before, he had caught himself wishing she had broken a leg rather than her collarbone. Then she would have to stay put.
Mercedes nodded in satisfaction. “Exactly,” she said. “She might not come back.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s what you meant.” Mercedes patted his leg gently. “Face it. The only way to deal with her is to let her go.”
Danny-boy shook his head. “How can I let her go? I don’t even have her.”
“Help her go where she wants to go, then. Give her what she needs.”
The next day, Danny-boy gave her a bicycle: a sturdy blue tenspeed from a bike shop on Haight Street. Jax was out when he wheeled it home. He spent the better part of the afternoon giving it an overhaul: repacking the wheel bearings, checking the brakes, adjusting the gear-shifting mechanism, replacing the tires. Jax came home as he was finishing. As usual, one of the monkeys was following her. When Jezebel barked at the monkey, it sprang to the roof of a nearby car and then ignored the dog.
“This is for you,” Danny-boy said. “With this you can get around town faster. You can go wherever you want.” He felt sick at heart.
She looked uneasy. “I can walk all over town,” she said.
Her reluctance confused him. Having started this project, he was determined to carry it through. “Riding a bike is faster than walking. You can get from one end of town to the other in just a couple of hours.”
She looked at the bicycle and wet her lips, but did not say anything.
“I’ll adjust the seat to your height, and it’ll be ready to ride.”
She hesitated, looking fierce.
“What’s wrong?” he said sharply. He was torn and confused about this, and she wasn’t helping.
“I don’t know how to ride it,” she said at last.
He could tell that she hated admitting that she couldn’t ride. Her back was stiff and her hand rested lightly on her knife. “I’ll teach you,” he said softly. “It’s not hard. Come on. Sit on the seat and let me adjust the height.”
Danny-boy held the bicycle upright while she straddled it reluctantly. Her feet did not quite touch the pedals. He had her get off, then he lowered the seat. “Come on. You can try it out.”
He showed her how to hold the handlebars and wheel the bicycle as she walked. Wheeling his own bicycle alongside her, he led her to a stretch of street that was relatively free of potholes and debris. A faded brown Toyota sedan had been abandoned in the middle of the block, but otherwise there were no obstacles. The monkey followed, found a new perch on a low wall that had once surrounded a planter box, and began searching for edible shoots in the tall grasses that had taken root in the planter.
Danny-boy demonstrated first, straddling his bicycle and gliding effortlessly down the slight slope. He made a wide turn and pedaled back. “It’s easy,” he said, and held her bicycle upright as she mounted. “I’ve got it set in fourth gear to start with. Just leave the gear shift alone for now. Sit on the seat and put your feet on the pedals. I’ll hold you up.”
She reluctantly took her feet from the ground and placed them on the pedals.
“All you have to do is balance,” he said. “If you want to pedal, you could try that, but go easy.”
He gave her a push and ran alongside, steadying her by holding on to the back of the seat. Behind them, the monkey shrieked and chattered. Jezebel barked furiously, running alongside them. Jax pumped a few times and the bicycle outpaced Danny-boy, forcing him to let go of the seat.
For a moment, Jax maintained a straight course—a beautiful smooth glide that was as straight as an arrow and as elegant as an aria. Her hands were on the handlebars; the wind whipped her hair back. As he ran alongside, Danny-boy could see that she was grinning wildly, an elated expression that he had never seen on her face before.
Then her front wheel hit a pothole, the bicycle swerved, and she crashed, at full tilt, into the back of the Toyota.
Danny-boy ran to her. “Are you all right? Maybe you’d better not try this yet. Maybe …”
Her left elbow was bleeding where she had scraped it on the pavement, but she grinned at him and untangled herself from the bicycle. “It’s like flying,” she said. “Why didn’t you say it was like flying?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s like the hawk—the way he catches the wind and soars.” She waved a hand in the air, demonstrating. “You didn’t tell me.”
For a moment, he couldn’t say anything. She had never said so many words in a row before. She had never smiled at him the way she was smiling now.
“I want to try again,” she said.
Again and again he launched her. Each time she went farther before crashing. He shouted advice that always came a little too late to help: “Straighten up now!” “Don’t pump so hard!” “Lean the other way—no, the OTHER way!”
Sometimes she managed to veer around the Toyota. But then she would be unable to recover from the turn and she would lean farther and farther until she finally fell. Each time she fell, she received another scrape or bruise, but she would not give up. “Maybe we should rest,” Danny-boy suggested. She shook her head stubbornly and they continued.
At last, late in the day, she successfully avoided the Toyota and kept on riding. The bicycle wobbled when she pumped the pedals, but she recovered, straightening out before she overbalanced, then picking up speed.
Jezebel, who had grown bored with watching, ran after her, and Danny-boy leapt on his own bicycle to follow. He met her five blocks farther on, walking her bicycle up a hill and limping just a little.
“I hit a hole in the road,” she said. She was still grinning.
“Your shoulder OK?”
“Fine.” She looked up the hill and glanced at his face. “Let’s keep going, OK?”
“OK. As long as you’re not tired.”
Her grin faded a little. “I’m not tired.”
He walked beside her in silence for a time. “Pretty soon you’ll be riding all over the city,” he said at last. “I can show you the best routes. If you’re clever, you can avoid the worst hills.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Why are you teaching me how to ride?”
He shrugged, feeling uncomfortable and avoiding her eyes. He could not answer; he had no answer. “Why not?” There was a long silence. He felt her slipping away from him, and he tried to draw her back. “Mercedes suggested I do it.”
“Teach me to ride a bicycle?”
“Let you go,” he said. “With this, you can leave whenever you want. I won’t try to keep you here.”
She watched him for a moment. And then looked away. “Let’s ride. Come on.” She pushed off awkwardly, but managed to keep her balance. Danny-boy stayed behind her for the first block, then pulled alongside. They had reached the top of a hill, and she was looking down the long straight street that lay before them.
“Oh, let’s go,” she said breathlessly and started down the hill.
An exhilarated whoop of joy drifted back to Danny-boy, and he followed. Jezebel brought up the rear, racing after him.
Jax led the way through the Richmond District. From there, the street sloped downward slightly. She kept pedaling, calling back every now and then to urge him to follow. He shouted back, pointing out landmarks as they passed them: Golden Gate Park, the University of San Francisco, Saint Monica’s church.
As she crossed 48th Avenue she slowed down, then stopped abruptly, standing astride her bicycle. He pulled up even with her and stopped. Ahead, he could see the waves crashing on Ocean Beach.
“What’s wrong? he said. “Why’d you stop?”
“What is that?” When she looked at him, her eyes were enormous. “That water. I can’t see the other shore.”
“It’s the ocean,” he said. “The other side is hundreds of miles away.
She stared at him. “Hundreds of miles?” She shook her head in disbelief.
“It is,” he insisted. “Books told me about it. Come on.” Taking the lead, he rode to the end of the street. Fine white sand had drifted over the Great Highway, the road that ran alongside the beach. At the edge of the sand, Danny-boy got off his bicycle and walked it to the seawall. When he looked back she was following, still staring at the horizon.
He leaned his bike against the cement wall, then sat on the wall to take off his tennis shoes. “Take off your shoes,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll get sand in them.” He swung his legs over the wall and jumped down onto the beach. He ran toward the breaking waves, stopping only when an incoming wave swept up the beach to lap around his ankles. Jezebel splashed in the surf beside him, snapping at the wave and barking at the taste of salt. The water was cold and the retreating wave sucked at the sand beneath his feet. He looked back.
Jax stood at the edge of the wet sand. When a wave washed up, she took a step back.
“Taste it,” he said, cupping some water with his hand and touching it to his lips. When a wave returned, she followed his lead and sputtered at the taste.
“Poison,” she said.
“It’s just salt.”
She shook her head, venturing no closer. He left the water to stand beside her. She was quiet and tense, but it was a different sort of tension than he’d seen in her before. She was awed by the ocean. She had forgotten to be wary of him; she was fascinated by the distant horizon, straining her eyes to see a faraway shore.
“It goes on and on,” Danny-boy told her softly. “Mario once sailed his boat straight out for a whole day. He says he didn’t see anything but water and more water.” She didn’t respond. “Come on. Let’s walk along the beach.”
He took her hand and she did not resist, following obediently. The tide was coming in, and each wave lapped a little higher on the sand.
“Look there.” Ahead of them, someone had built an elaborate castle in the sand. Seaweed banners flew from crenellated towers. A wide wall of sand linked the towers, dividing the castle’s courtyard from the rest of the beach.
Jax squatted in the sand to examine the miniature city more closely. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Tiny soldiers woven of dune grass stood guard on the battlements beside a driftwood cannon. An incoming wave washed through the moat, passing beneath a driftwood bridge.
Danny-boy watched her study the castle. The setting sun painted half her face with red light; the other half was in shadow. Her hands clasped each other loosely. “The waves will destroy it,” she said.
Danny-boy sat on the sand beside her. “You sound sad.”
She shook her head, an automatic and meaningless denial. “It’s beautiful. Why build anything so beautiful just so it can be destroyed? If we hadn’t come here, no one would ever have seen it.”
“Sometimes you make things that won’t last just for the pleasure of making them,” Danny-boy said. He watched a wave take a bite out of the castle wall. “You do it for yourself, not for anyone else. When you make something beautiful, you change. You put something of yourself into the thing you make. You’re a different person when you’re done.” Another wave washed up against the castle wall, nibbling a little bit away.
“Is that why you’re painting the bridge?”
“That’s part of it, I guess.”
“What’s the other part?”
“While you change yourself, you change the world. Make it more your own.”
They sat in silence as the waves undermined the tower nearest the sea. When it toppled, Jax stood. “I don’t want to watch the rest.”
He walked beside her as they headed back. They had almost reached the bicycles when she stopped, staring past him. Her eyes were fixed on the sunset. “The sun,” she said in a choked voice.
The red disc was flattening and changing shape as it neared the horizon line.
“It’s OK,” he said. “It does that here.”
“It’s sinking into the water,” she said, and there was a note of panic in her voice.
“It happens like that every night,” he said. “It’s OK.” He touched her shoulder to reassure her and felt her trembling. “It’s OK,” he repeated. “Believe me. I’ve seen it before.”
Then he put his arms around her, surprised even as he did it that she let him. He stroked her hair gently and kept talking in a soothing voice, trying not to break the spell. “Books says that the sun is really millions of miles away. He says that it really isn’t anywhere near the ocean. It just looks that way. Don’t worry.”
She seemed so small, now that he held her in his arms. Her shoulders felt so thin and frail. He could feel her heart beating, hear the whisper of her breath past his face. Her eyes reflected the sunset.
“You’ve seen this before,” she asked, still watching the sun. “Many times.”
She relaxed just a little; he could feel the tension in her shoulders ease. When the sun dipped below the horizon, she looked at his face. She hesitated, just for a moment. He fought the urge to hold her more tightly. She lifted one hand and tentatively touched his cheek, an uncertain movement that was checked almost before it was complete. Then she pulled away from him.
“We’d better ride home,” she said. “It’s a long way.”
All the way home, he kept remembering the warmth of her body against his.