What woke me was a soft scratching noise at the front door. I sensed it more than heard it; all my senses were sharp and open, even before my eyes were. I got up blindly and pulled on the red-and-black checked shirt. It fell to my knees, and made a fairly proper robe. By the time I got to the door my feet were freezing, and I was awake enough to realize that I hoped my caller was T.C.
But it was Curtis who stood there, framed in fog, panting happily and wearing a red bandanna around his neck. I usually hate that when it is done to dogs at home, but up here the bandanna seemed as apt and proper as if a mountain man wore it; a useful object, utilitarian. There was a note rolled and thrust into it.
“Come in, Curtis. Carpe diem,” I said, and he came inside and sat down in front of me and looked up, waiting. I took the note and scratched his ears and he went over and flopped down in front of the cold fireplace. A log fire was laid, and I touched a match to it before I unrolled the note. Curtis sighed in contentment and stretched out full-length before the snapping flames.
“It was the least I could do,” I told him, and read the note.
“I’ll pick you up at nine,” it said. “We’ll be gone most of the day, so bring a warm shirt and a poncho. There’s one hanging behind the kitchen door. Tell Curtis he can stay till I get there. Hope you slept well.”
Instead of a signature he had drawn one of those detestable smiley faces, only this one wore an unmistakable leer. I laughed aloud, a backwash of last night’s glee flooding me.
“There’s absolutely nothing as irresistible as wit,” I told Curtis. “Even if it’s the dumbass kind that puts bandannas on dogs and draws smiley faces. See that you remember that, dog. Stay funny and cute and you’ll have lady dogs falling all over you.”
Curtis thumped his tail without opening his eyes, and I went to dress warmly and get the poncho from behind the kitchen door.
Just past ten we were on the Golden Gate Bridge rattling toward Marin County and Point Reyes, where T.C. wanted to start my earthquake tour. At that time of morning the traffic was light and the fog lay out at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, piled up like whipped cream. Below us the steel-blue water heaved and rolled, and a brisk wind played the bridge like an instrument, making it sway slightly, but palpably. T.C. had unsnapped the plastic side curtains of the Jeep and the wind and cold blue air poured in on us, and I held fast to the bottom of my seat. I had thought the mountains and the red-woods would seem inimical to humans, but somehow it was here, on this consummate iron-red handwork of man, hung between two great and beautiful human habitats, that I felt the animus. I felt light-headed and uneasy, as if, should I let go, the wind would take me and eddy me out and down like a feather into that cold sea, or toss me so high into sunshot nothingness that I would never come back.
“No wonder so many people jump,” I said, shutting my eyes to it for a moment. “It makes you feel like it’s going to get you anyway, so why put it off?”
“I’ve always thought people jump because it’s such a San Francisco kind of thing to do,” T.C. said. “Eccentric and showy and probably very beautiful all the way down. Nothing mundane about it. No dull overdoses. No tacky guns. Laid back, kind of, but effective.”
“Why do I get the feeling you don’t like San Francisco a whole lot?”
“I don’t not like it, exactly,” he said slowly, looking over at the spectacular headlands where Sausalito and, beyond it, Tiburon lay gleaming in the sun like toy villages flung down by a giant’s child. He wore a faded red anorak this morning, mottled with what looked to be bleach spots and ripped on one pocket. The red was wonderful with the dark skin and the beard and hair, I thought; the latter so recently washed that it still had damp comb tracks in it. I even liked the bleach spots and the tear; anything newer or better cared for would have seemed effete. I liked everything about T. C. Bridgewater this morning. Somehow he seemed to own the bridge and the wind and the vast emptiness as surely and comfortably as he owned the old Jeep. I wished suddenly that he would stop the Jeep in the middle of the bridge and kiss me again. The thought was so clear and shapely and so alien to me that I felt myself redden and hastily sought out things about him to dislike.
He’s as self-absorbed as a child, I thought, and if you put him down anywhere else but those mountains he’d be as clumsy and ludicrous as an aborigine in Paris. I can just see him at the Driving Club.
It didn’t work, of course; I could see him at the Driving Club. After all, he had been more surely born to that world than either Pom or I. And the self-absorption fit him like an animal’s unconscious sense of itself.
“Shit,” I said under my breath, and moved closer to the door of the Jeep.
“But?” I said aloud.
“But it just seems…I don’t know. Extraneous. Like a stage set, or a perfect architect’s model. I know people live and work here, and get married and have children and are happy and sad and die and all that, but I can’t seem to picture it. It’s a tinker-toy town.”
“Don’t let Tony Bennett hear you say that.”
“Are you kidding? That poor son of a bitch probably hates San Francisco like he does the IRS. Probably goes back-stage and throws up every time he has to sing that song.”
I laughed and he looked over at me and squeezed my hand and said, “You look nice this morning,” and we bowled off the bridge and into Martin county, my hand tingling.
“It’s probably some of the most gorgeous countryside I’ll ever see,” I said chattily, as he cut over to Highway 1 toward Muir Beach and the Golden Gate Recreational Area. “I wonder why I don’t feel about it like I do the redwoods? You’re right about the city; somehow it doesn’t have much to do with the way I feel about this part of the country. I mean, I’d love to spend some time in it, and I know I’d like a lot of the people, but somehow I just want to get back into the wild stuff.”
I knew that I was babbling. I knew that he knew it. I took a deep breath.
“T.C.,” I said, “I think you’d better kiss me one more time and get it over with so I can stop waiting to see if you’re going to do it. I’m not behaving at all like myself.”
He laughed aloud and drew me to him with one arm and kissed me long and hard, without stopping the Jeep or even swerving it. When he let me go my mouth felt warm and numb, and I could feel my whole body melt into relaxation. The silly, stilted tension went out of the morning. Another sort entirely crept in.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re very welcome,” he said. “I was going to do that, but I thought I’d wait till we were standing on firm ground, so if you slapped me I wouldn’t wreck us. If you like it I could stop now and do it some more—”
“Drive, fool,” I said. “I’m not even going to ask how you can do that at fifty miles an hour and not even swerve.”
“First thing you learn on the Delta. Whatever you’re going to do, you learn to do it in a car, because that’s where we spend half our lives. I didn’t know how to kiss a woman standing still till I got to college.”
“I can imagine it was a considerable handicap,” I said. I did not want to dwell on whom he kissed in college, or how, and so I changed the subject.
“If you’re going to show me earthquake country, shouldn’t you start in San Francisco?” I said. “Laura said there was still a lot of damage down around the marina, and where that bridge collapsed.”
“I will if you really want to see it,” he said. “But I’ve never thought that that stuff really belonged to the earthquake. I mean, it had more to do with people and where and how they build their structure than it did with anything the earthquake did. See, the Loma Prieta hit way up in the Santa Cruzes; only it happened so deep down that there’s nothing much to see up there except some sheared-off redwoods. It’s the deepest earthquake ever recorded in this part of the country. The shock waves traveled out from the epicenter and took out whatever they hit while they were still active. There are three kinds, the compressional waves that make the first big thump when the quake hits; we call them P waves because they’re the primary ones. The second one is the S wave, and it comes in a rolling, side-to-side motion; it’s the secondary wave. It’s called a shear wave, too. The last is the surface wave. It travels slower, along the surface of the earth, and it’s the largest. It finishes up what the first two don’t get. In the Loma Prieta, there wasn’t anything much in the way of human habitation, relatively speaking, until the waves got to Santa Cruz and then San Francisco. If there hadn’t been cities there, nobody much would have noticed the quake. Do you see what I mean? The quake is its own entity. It’s not San Francisco’s quake or L.A.’s. Damage in a city is arbitrary, because if there was no city there wouldn’t be the damage.…I don’t think I’m making much sense. But see, it’s like, the land under the marina is fill. It was literally filled with dirt and stuff to create usable land. Lots of the debris Loma Prieta uncovered turned out to be debris from the big one in 1906. That kind of land is porous and when the waves hit it, it acts just like gelatin. It’s like…we did that, not the quake. The city did itself in, so to speak. A quake is a wild thing, and it’s born in elemental wildness, in the crust of the very earth. What sits on that crust is us, not it. It’s not a popular point of view, as you might imagine. I’ll take you by the worst of it when we come back, if you still want to see it.”
I thought of the awful images from the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, of the fires in the night and the collapsed buildings, like folded accordions, and the terrible flattened bridge. I thought of dry land turning to rolling Jell-O, of the terror that must engender.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I want to see what a quake can do to a city. But I can see why it’s not a popular point of view. Lord, T.C., you sound like you’re in love with them—the earthquakes. Like you’re rooting for them, somehow.”
He looked briefly at me, and then back at the road and the heaving sea beside it.
“I guess I am,” he said. “I know there’s something in an earthquake that speaks to me like nothing else ever has. Maybe it’s not that I’m in love with them, exactly; it’s just that I need to know what all that is about.”
“And you don’t yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
“You weren’t in the Loma Prieta, then?”
“No, I was back home at my son’s first big-time football game. I missed the Northridge, too. I was up in the mountains when that hit. I’ve never been in one, not a big one.”
We drove in silence for a while, and then I said, “T.C.?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you camped up there waiting to be in an earth-quake?”
“Yeah. I guess that’s about it.”
“And you think that’s where the next big one will be? Even when everybody’s saying that the…what, the seismic gap there was filled by the Loma Prieta?”
“That’s what I think, Merritt.”
“Why?”
He sighed a long, soft sigh, and said, “Because I can feel it coming. I can feel a big quake waiting to happen right through the soles of my feet. I can feel it getting stronger. I felt it the first time I went up there, when I was in Berkeley that time. That quake down in that earth talks to me like a giant that’s been buried alive. I know I’m not wrong about that. What I don’t know is when. Nobody knows that, not with any precision. But I know that it isn’t going to be long.”
I felt the hair prickle along the back of my neck.
“You said you’d get us out before it happened—”
“It’s not going to be that soon. I really would know that. None of my instruments indicate that. Neither do the bottoms of my feet. I’d get you out, Merritt.”
I sat looking at the empty sea and the cliffs. I felt something bleak inside me, like grief, an old, deep, tidal pull. I realized that I had been talking to him, responding to him, as if he made perfect sense. But the clear, cool top part of my mind told me that he didn’t; that what he spoke was not science or even casual knowledge, but obsession. Maybe more than that.
“T.C., I don’t think I can bear it if you turn out to be crazy,” I said in a low voice, meaning it, and he laughed so hard that he had to slow the Jeep.
“What you need more than anything in your life is to make out with a crazy man,” he said, when he finally stopped laughing. “You have not lived until you’ve been loved by a loony. I can promise you that, should you accept the advances I am most certainly going to make before this day is over, you will never forget the experience. I will growl; I will froth; I will snuffle. I will roar. It will ruin you for suits and the Junior League for the rest of your life.”
Once again I laughed, unwillingly but helplessly. T. C. Bridgewater simply delighted me. The laugher was healing. I did not think a truly mad man could be a funny one. If he had an earthquake madness in him, well, I was unlikely to be dis-accommodated by that. The rest of him was as whole and strong and as open as the earth and air of his mountains. That part drew me to it as if he had a powerful magnet deep in the center of him, and I a core of warm iron.
“Growling is okay,” I said. “Froth is definitely out. Snuffling—maybe. Roaring—I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”
His face grew serious in that mild, interested way that it sometimes did.
“Who is this talking?” he said.
“I don’t know her,” I said. “She just followed me out here. Should I keep her?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you should definitely do that,” he said slowly and softly, and the warm ore in my middle gave a leap.
“You’d better tell me some more about earthquakes, and be quick about it,” I said. “Why do y’all have them out here, and we don’t at home?”
“You do have them back home. There’ve been really destructive ones in Charleston and Missouri. There’s an active fault under New York City. There are faults all over the place that we don’t know about and won’t till they blow; Northridge was on a fault nobody knew was there. But California is the meeting place for two of the tectonic plates that make up the crust of the earth. There are seven major ones and some other, smaller ones. The ones that give California all the trouble are the Pacific plate, that’s mainly under the Pacific Ocean, and the North American. That one underlies the earth out here. They kind of slide past each other, with the Pacific going northwest, and the North American vice versa, and where they bump together is the San Andreas Fault. The San Andreas is a transform fault—the plates don’t destroy old material or create new. The places where the boundaries spread apart underwater and let new molten mantle rock rise are called spreading centers, and the big ocean trenches where the cold, dense oceanic plates are forced underneath the continental plates are called subduction centers. Most of the seismic activity in the world occurs within narrow areas along those plate boundaries. There’s a phenomenal amount of activity in a line that runs along the western coast of North and South America, up across the Aleutian Islands, and down through the waters off Asia. It fetches up off New Zealand. It’s called the Ring of Fire, because there’s so much earthquake and volcano activity going on. There’s nothing near to that off the East Coast. The nearest subduction center is way, way out to sea. Y’all just have to make do with hurricanes and tornadoes.”
“So there’s earthquake activity going on all the time, but maybe not strong enough to feel it?” I said, hating the thought. It was like suddenly finding that you had been standing on a nest of squirming small snakes all along, but never noticed until a big one bit you.
“About ten thousand a day, in California alone,” he said proudly. “Only the most sophisticated equipment can pick up most of them. You start feeling them about two point seven or three. They’re using a network of receivers now, for instance, that pick up signals from the army’s Global Positioning System satellites and tell you where and how much the earth is moving within a fraction of an inch—and it’s moving all the time. Over the ages most of the earth has moved around dramatically. You ought to read John McPhee’s Assembling California, to see how California, and the whole earth for that matter, is made up of chunks of rock that were carried from somewhere else by earthquake action. That’s over a period of millions of years, of course. Or read Kenneth Brown’s Cycles of Rock and Water at the Pacific Edge. Fascinating; really fascinating. Somewhere in one of them is the statement that the top of Mount Everest is made from marine sandstone. That just plain fries the roots of my hair.”
I looked at him. His face was rapt and his eyes were farfocused, as if they could actually see the gargantuan, millennial creep of the earth; see the ancient spasms that flung up coastal mountains and corrugated deserts, that moved future continents and countries around like building blocks. Through his dark, blind eyes I too could see, for just a moment, that vast old cyclopean tumbling. It made my breath shallow and thin and the space around my heart cold.
“It makes me feel like throwing up,” I said. “If I thought about it I’d be so dizzy I couldn’t walk upright on the earth again.”
“Ah, well,” he said. “You don’t have to love it. You just have to see why I do. That’s important to me, that you see that.”
“I see that it’s important to you,” I said. “You’ll just have to make do with that. Have you ever thought about teaching this stuff, or becoming a seismologist or a geologist or something? With your…passion for it, I think you’d make a wonderful teacher—”
“I don’t want to do anything about earthquakes,” he said. “I don’t want to teach people about them. I just want to know about them.”
“But when you do that—when you know—what then? What will you have?”
We were heading up the Olema Valley. On either side of us sharp-boned mountains rose abruptly, a thousand feet or more. The fog that had held off so far was drifting along the road, and he slowed the Jeep to accommodate it.
“What I’ll have,” he said, turning again to look at it, “is a real sense of them, and if I’m lucky, a sense of where I fit in with them. A context. If I’m very, very lucky, maybe I’ll know what it is they’re saying to me. That would be worth anything. Why does there have to be a ‘then what’? There’s not going to be an end to the knowing about them; there’s no ‘then what’ on the horizon, because there’s not going to be a then, in the sense that I ever know enough about them. Does that disappoint you?”
“No, it doesn’t. Knowledge for its own sake—it’s a very pure concept. I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being, sometimes,” I said, but deep down a small part of me was disappointed, and I knew that he knew it. I suppose I thought that once he satisfied his passion for them, he would take his knowledge of earthquakes and do something with it to benefit mankind. Predict, warn, mitigate…
I looked at him helplessly.
“It’s just that all I’ve ever known about, really, is helping,” I said. “I don’t know how to let go and just…be. I’m sorry. I know that disappoints you. I think I could learn.…”
He reached over and pushed the blown hair off my face, very gently.
“I think you can, too. That’s why we’re up here. You don’t disappoint me, Merritt. There’s a joy to being with you for me. Watching you up here is like watching a kid learn to play for the first time in its life. One thing we’re going to teach you is how to play. I don’t give a shit whether you learn to love earthquakes or not. It’s enough that I do.”
Tears stung my eyes. When had play left my life? When Crisscross and I had stopped our weekend jaunts together? When Glynn had grown past babyhood?
When had Pom and I stopped playing? Had we ever really done it?
“I play,” I said, trying for lightness. “I swim with the Rattus ratti, remember?”
“Oh, Merritt,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said fiercely, blinking hard. “Don’t or I’ll cry, and I just goddamned well do not want to do that.”
“Well, we’ll start with Forrest, maybe,” he said, accommodating me. “Y’all can gambol in the glades, play a little Nerf ball, maybe take a shower together. See what happens. Work right on up from there to some serious playing.”
“Speaking of Forrest, where has he been?” I said. “I miss his bright eyes and sweet smile.”
“Forrest takes off sometimes,” T.C. said. “I don’t know if there’s a great sadness in him, or if he’s got a lady friend somewhere, or what. I used to think it meant an earthquake was on the way. Animals, especially cats and rats, will leave an area where one is about to hit, or so the saying goes. But he’s done it the whole time he’s been with me, and it hasn’t meant a quake yet. I thought when I found him he’d make a great canary—you know, an early warning system—but he’s a dud at that.”
“Where did you find him?”
“Curtis brought him to me, in his mouth, like he was holding an egg,” he said. “Something killed his mama, apparently; he was just getting hair on him. Not the most attractive time in a rat’s life. But Curtis was so proud of him that I just had to take him in. I fed him with an eyedropper and made him a nest out of my old socks. I think it was my socks he bonded with. Curtis has been jealous ever since. I named him Forrest because he looked so much like my father when he started to go bald. His name was Bedford Forrest, after…well, you know. Curtis I named after my cousin in Jackson, because he never could resist a good-looking woman, and neither can my Curtis. I like to keep the names in the family.”
“Why did you leave Curtis at home?”
“Curtis once came damned close to taking a header off Point Reyes after a cormorant, and that’s a four-hundred-foot drop straight into the Pacific. I had to tackle him and practically sit on him. He knows he’s supposed to retrieve, but he doesn’t have an ounce of sense about where to do it. Just like Cousin Curtis again. Look at those ridges over there, Merritt. See how they knock the whole landscape off-kilter? That’s from past quakes. They call them shutter ridges. There are creeks here that are less than half a mile apart, but they run in opposite directions. The quakes have done that, too. And there are about fifty small ponds in this valley that have absolutely no reason to be up here because of the low rainfall, but here they are. They sit on the tops of those ridges; you can see one or two from here. Sag ponds. All from the fault.”
“Are we close to the fault here?”
“I’ll show you in about five minutes,” T.C. said.
A few minutes later he stopped the Jeep. Just ahead of us in the road was a strip of darker asphalt, as if workmen had patched the place where a pipe of some sort had gone through it. T.C. swung down and held out a hand to me, and I scrambled out behind him. The wind had picked up here and was blowing sheets of fog out toward Tomales Bay.
“Step over the patch with one foot,” T.C. said, and I did. “No, leave the other one where it is. Now. You’re straddling the top of the San Andreas fault. Half of you is on the North American continent, and the other half is off the continent entirely, on the Pacific plate.”
Instinctively I pulled my errant foot back onto the continent. He laughed. “You’re right to be careful,” he said. “In a few million years that half of you could be in Alaska, and the other half would still be here.”
“It’s not much of a fault, is it?” I said. “I guess I expected a huge fissure with smoke pouring out of it or something. But you’d never know it was down there if it weren’t for that patch.”
“I’d know,” he said, studying the earth where, deep below, the great snake slept. “It’s like a monster organ playing down in the earth to me. It always surprises me when nobody else hears it.”
I looked at him nervously.
“Metaphorically speaking, of course,” he said, and took my arm and guided me back to the Jeep.
“The fault hasn’t moved here since the 1906 quake,” T.C. said. “The folks who know think it’s due. Earthquakes sometimes come in pairs, and some of the hoohaws think that Loma Prieta might be the first of a pair up here. Which means, I guess, that the fault right here could go anytime. But I don’t think so.”
“The soles of your feet are telling you it won’t be here?” I said lightly.
“No. They’re not telling me anything. Nothing but the singing I hear everywhere along a fault. It’s in the mountains further south that my feet and the earthquake get together.”
“What does that feel like?” I said seriously. I wanted to know. At that moment I cast my lot with T.C.’s obsession, or whatever it was.
“Like electricity, I guess,” he said. “It runs right up your legs to the middle of you; sometimes it makes your arms and hands weak. It’s like…sex in reverse. If you take my meaning.”
“I take it,” I said, and felt myself redden. This is perfect, just perfect, I thought furiously. I have been with him a little over a day and already I have cried twice and blushed about forty times. The only thing left is to swoon or get the vapors. I’m glad Glynn can’t see me.
The thought of Glynn whipped my face like cold, wind-driven water. I sat up straighter and smoothed my hair with both hands. What in the name of God did I think I was doing? Bouncing along in a Jeep at the edge of the world with a madman who had already announced that he was going to take me to bed and howl like a wolf when he did it; batting my eyes and talking half-dirty to the same madman and loving every minute of it; asking him to kiss me, for God’s sake. I am somebody’s mother. She is not at all far away from me now.
I am somebody’s wife. And he is more than a world away.
“You’re allowed second thoughts about all this, you know,” T.C. said, seeming to catch my thought. “Even third and fourths. All you have to do is call time out and things can stop right here. I would never frighten or hurt you.”
“Then I guess…time-out,” I said. I felt flat and depleted, oddly bereft, and on top of it all was a cold, seeping guilt, a stain. It seemed to reach across the continent from the house by the river to this rutted, alien road in a stunted forest of pine, live oak, and madrone: the very burrow of the snake. I missed the delight and silliness of the morning and the night before like you miss warmth and food, like you miss light in sudden darkness. The shame I felt was a very poor substitute, but it was a strong one.
“What’s the matter?” he said sympathetically. “Flashback? Little blast from the past?”
“How did you know?” I said dully.
“I used to get ’em, too. Right in the middle of something transcendent—and I don’t mean sex; I haven’t really had any of the transcendent kind out here—I’d feel this cold, wet tentacle reaching out from home, reminding me that I was a sorry, self-indulgent hound who had run off and left his responsibilities and didn’t deserve to feel so damned good. Mostly it happened out of the redwoods. What we need to do is get you back up there.”
“No, I want to see all this,” I said dutifully, though I didn’t. I just wanted to snatch up my daughter and my sister and get on a plane home, where, even if things weren’t so great, they were my things. Total unfamiliarity is only exhilarating for so long. After that it becomes like a dreadful amnesia of all the senses.
I looked over at T.C. He gave me back a half-smile, waiting.
“So how did you handle it?” I said, for obviously he had settled the flashback problem long before.
“Decided I didn’t want to be a sorry, guilty hound any longer. I wanted to be the new guy, the one who felt fresh joy and aliveness every morning, who went to sleep smiling, hardly able to wait for the next day. I wasn’t going back, anyway; I knew that. Why keep the old sad sack around? It’s like any policy; it gets very real after you practice it for a while.”
“Carpe diem, huh?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was the only valid way to live. For me, anyway. Probably for you, too, if the last day or two have been any example. You’ve bloomed like a flower. You know that’s true.”
“And while I’ve been blooming like a flower my husband has been back home working his fanny off for the sick and the poor, and my daughter’s been seduced by a Jacuzzi-brained film director to do a porno flick—”
“Would any of that have changed if you’d sat around up here racked with guilt and hating the redwoods? How would it have changed? Look, Merritt, the lady you are back home is the one who deals with that stuff, and better than anybody involved deserves, as far as I’m concerned. The one who’s out here…she’s the one I’m getting to know and coming to care about a whole, whole lot. That was then, as the kids put it so inelegantly. This is now. This is here. The Merritt Fowler I kissed last night and hope to kiss again very soon is not the one who plays altar to her husband’s saint and puts diapers on his mother and worries herself sick about an anorectic teenager. The one I kissed last night and hope to kiss again soon loves my woods and my dog and looks like a gypsy and laughs like a loon and eats like a longshoreman, and kisses me back like it feels fantastic. That’s not to say the first one isn’t valuable. It’s just that the second one is so much more—complete. I think. Am I wrong?”
“No…”
“Then stop worrying about it. Enjoy the day and the Point and whatever you feel like enjoying. If it’s not me, that’s okay. The time-out still stands till you call it off.”
The cold tentacle from home let go its grip abruptly and well-being flooded back. I did not have to take this any further than I wanted to. He was right. There was an enormous lot to savor about this day, to taste and explore and wriggle my toes in. It did not have to include touching him again unless I wanted to. I did not know yet whether I did or not. If I did…well, there was a lot of day left.
“Next thing I know you’ll be handing me an apple and telling me to take a bite; what could it hurt?” I said.
“No. Next thing you know you’ll be standing at the edge of the earth looking off it and, if I’m not wrong, seeing something you’ll never forget. And the next thing after that is lunch. I brought it with me. I know just the place for it.”
“And…after that?”
I could not seem to stop flirting with him. Was that the name for it? Whatever you called it, it was something that came from a part of me I had not known I had. I could not recall flirting with anyone in my life. Pom and I had been beyond that from the beginning, beyond the giddiness of discovery and into the urgent business of assuaging need almost before we knew each other. I wondered suddenly if I had ever known much more than the feel of his body and the shape of his need. I wondered if he had known more of me than the shape of my body and my ability to fill his gaps.
But it has sustained us, I said to myself. Many, many marriages have run on thinner fuel than that. It has fulfilled us. It has been what we both needed.
But not anymore.
The thought was as clear as if someone had spoken it aloud to me. And I knew it was true. If I went on with this day as it had started out, if I went on with this man, then an entirely different sustenance would be required. Forever after I would need other things.
Then find them. Go home and renegotiate. Redefine. Or simply stay here, the voice said. Isn’t that what’s at the bottom of all this? The thought that you might just stay? Or the thought that you might not?
We had been walking as I had been listening to the voice. Now we were back at the Jeep. T.C. opened my door and handed me up into the front seat.
“Anything after lunch is then instead of now and will be dealt with when we come to it,” he said. “And you’ll call the shots. Are you flirting with me, Miss Scarlett?”
And again I laughed, because he had so accurately read me.
“Why Captain Butler,” I drawled, “I do believe that I am.”
We drove out of the forest and onto a vast, undulating prairie. Yellow, red, and purple wildflowers blew in the steadily increasing wind like the pennants of miniature armies. The wind increased, gusting so that it rocked the Jeep and moaned around the plastic side curtains. Soon we parked and headed down a cypress-bordered footpath. The fog flew before us, revealing wind-battered dairies and huddling herds and not much else. Near the tip of the cape the wind was so strong that we struggled to walk against it. I would have fallen before it if T.C. had not kept an arm around me. the fresh, cold air was heavy with droplets, whether from the vanishing fog or spray I did not know. But I tasted salt and knew that they were born of the sea. When we broke through the cypress windbreak that guarded the path out to the tip of the cape, it was to meet the sun as it finally vanquished the fog and lit what looked like the entire western sea to sparkling foil blue. I felt the breath go out of my lungs in a gasp.
There was virtually no limit to the tossing water, or the sky that swept down to meet it, or the rushing blue air around it, or the sun riding overhead. There was land behind us and beneath our feet, but everywhere else we were drowned in a world of water and space. Steps led tortuously down to a lighthouse that rode a ledge below us, seeming to be borne up by the hollow boom of the surf far, far below. Gulls and cormorants wheeled and banked in the thermals over the water, and far down the cliff two specks soared.
“Eagles,” T.C. said. “There’s a nest not far down the coast, in a dead tree. I don’t know why those guys always hang out over open water here; they couldn’t dive into that stuff down there, and there are no fish in heavy surf, anyway. I’ve always thought they were playing. There are about a million nesting seabirds in the cliffs, too, and a colony of sea lions down there. When the wind’s right you can hear all of it; it’s bedlam. Like a tenement. Want to walk down to the lighthouse?”
“No,” I said, leaning back against him, letting the wind pound me, letting it pour past my face like a tide. “No. I want to stay here. Oh, T.C. It’s a glorious place, isn’t it? But somehow you feel you shouldn’t make yourself at home here. It’s like a church; it’s not a place to just hang out in.”
“You couldn’t, anyway,” he said. “There’s usually fog, and the wind today is as mild as I’ve felt it. A bad one would blow you over, literally. Look, Merritt. Straight out, about three hundred yards offshore. See those black shapes? There are four of them, right there where I’m pointing.”
I could not see anything in the dazzle of light off the water, and then I could. As I found the shapes and tracked them, twin spouts rose from the sea.
“Whales!” I cried. “Oh, my God, T.C.! They are, aren’t they? I’ve never seen them.”
I felt him nod. His chin rested on the top of my head; he stood behind me, literally holding me up against the wind. I did not want to move.
“Grays. They’re on their way back to the Bering Sea way up north, from Baja. They go down there every winter to breed and calve in the lagoons, where it’s shallow and warm. The entire population of the Pacific Gray whales does it, sixteen thousand strong. They start heading back in the spring; the whole trip is six thousand miles, and will take them three months. For some reason there’s always four or six off Point Reyes into June; I’ve seen them several times before. Usually it’s mothers with calves, like those out there. See how there are two large ones and two small? The mothers only have one calf at a time, and they suckle them like humans do. They hug the shore all the way down and back, to avoid the killer whales, and the mothers will close ranks around the calves if they spot a pod of killers, like a wagon train circling. I’ve seen them do it. It makes you want to cry, somehow. Brave, classy broads, aren’t they?”
I stood in the circle of T.C.’s arms in the tearing wind and thought about the great mothers and their calves, braving all this, braving everything, to take their children home.…
The wind dried tears on my face as they came, and I did not think that he saw them. But his arms tightened around me, and he said into my hair, “I thought you’d like them.”
“So brave,” I whispered. “Such good mothers. Never losing sight of what’s important. They make me feel ashamed of the kind of mother I’ve been—”
“Yeah, well, they’re a lot less complicated than us, remember that. They don’t have the hard choices to make. Classy broads, but strictly limited. Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing to apologize for in the mothering department. I should have known they’d make you cry, though.”
“It doesn’t take much, does it?” I said. “I always seem to be weeping up here. I don’t cry much back home.”
“I’m not criticizing you. I’d hate it if you didn’t. The first time I saw them I stood out here by myself and bawled like a baby.”
Suddenly I wanted to be done with wind and tumult and water and the dangers that swam in all of them. I wanted quiet, and the sun falling in shafts through the great trees as in a cathedral, and the smell of sun-warmed pine and madrone. I wanted to hear nothing but the breath of the great silence.
“I want to go home,” I said. “Can we eat lunch there as well as where you’d planned?”
“I’d planned it for around there,” T.C. said, and we walked back to the Jeep hand in hand, saying nothing.
We sat locked in our separate thoughts until we were back across the Golden Gate Bridge and through the city and heading back up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was a comfortable silence. I steeped in the peace of the warm, sun-filled Jeep after the great shouting wind and cold of Point Reyes, listening to the soft jazz T.C. found on the old radio and, below that, the hum of the big, battered wheels on asphalt. We did not go back down Highway 1; it was as if we had both had our fill of the bellowing sea. Instead, we took 280 down the spine of the mountains, and cut over to Skyline Drive, and entered the domain of the redwoods as gratefully as if we had gained a fortress after a battle. Without meaning to I fell asleep against the window and only woke, neck cramped and mouth tasting of old salt, when I felt the motion of the Jeep stop.
“Are we there?” I said thickly.
“We’re here. Or where I wanted to eat lunch, anyway. You hungry?”
“Starved. How long have I been sleeping?”
“A while. We’re a good bit south of home, in a place called Mount Madonna County Park.”
“What, they gave her her own mountain and park? Not bad for a material girl.”
“I think they meant the other one, the one with the halo,” he said. “Grab the wine and I’ll take the basket. We’re going to walk a little way.”
We climbed into a thinning forest of redwoods and presently came upon a flight of stairs that led up into nowhere. Beyond the last stair I could see the slumped, vine-tangled shape of ruins, and a fallen chimney. A house. Here in this sunny glade among the whispering giants, its bones softened by shrouding ferns and baby evergreens and the wild white heaps of rhododendron and laurel, a house had sheltered someone and then watched them go, and fallen to the wilderness. The little pink flowers I had noticed around the base of the lodge’s redwoods teemed around the steps and at the base of these great trees, and the undergrowth was dense with what T.C. said were elderberry and thimbleberry bushes. It was very quiet; the voice of the silence only murmured. The sun fell in straight, near-palpable shafts. The smell of sun-warmed evergreen was hypnotic. There was a peculiar enchantment about the stairs and the ruins, as if something very old and elemental had made it appear for us, and could make it disappear in an instant if it wished.
“I’d never have left it,” I said, aware that I was nearly whispering. “I wonder who did.”
“Henry Miller,” T.C. said, putting the basket down on the steps and plopping down beside it. “You know, the writer. Or at least, I think he’s the one. It’s a summerhouse or was. I know that he had a place around Big Sur, and a lot of the artists and writers of his time hung out there with him. I’ve always thought this was where he came to get away from all those egos and all that talk.”
I thought of the great minds and names that must have clustered around Miller, and most probably followed him up here into the redwoods. I could almost see candles and Japanese lanterns on a stone terrace, and a great fire of madrone in a stone fireplace, and hear the atonal skittering of music yet unknown in the East, and the tinkle of ice in glasses, and late-day laughter, and voices raised in argument and dalliance far into the cold, still nights.
“I wonder why he left it? I wonder who let it go like this?”
“Who knows? From what I know of writers’ egos, they can’t survive long in a vacuum. He probably went back down to Big Sur where the faithful could worship and adore him.”
“You don’t like Miller?”
“Not especially. I think he really is a dirty writer. Consciously dirty, in a way the other so-called dirty writers never were. D. H. Lawrence was never dirty to me, but the old woman who lay down in the Tottenham Road and pulled up her skirt and masturbated bothers me. It’s like the sound of one hand clapping: self-aggrandizing instead of transcendent.”
“You don’t hold with masturbation either?”
“Au contraire. It’s the opiate of the solitary. I just don’t hold with it in the middle of the road. Me and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I loved the naturalness of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but Tropic of Cancer seemed awfully self-absorbed to me.”
“I should have known you’d go for the lady and the gamekeeper,” T.C. grinned. “Do any similarities to present circumstances present themselves? I’ve been practicing a Northumbrian accent, but so far it has eluded me—”
“Yeah, right,” I said, grinning at him drowsily. The sun and quiet were doing their work and I was powerfully, indolently sleepy as well as hungry. “Nevertheless, I love it that this was Henry Miller’s hidey hole. I like him better for knowing he needed one. Are you going to open that basket or should I just wrest it from you?”
We sat on the sun-warmed steps until the shafts of light leaned to the west and the warmth began to steal out of the air. He had made sandwiches of a delicious, chewy focaccia bread and crab and avocado, and brought grapes and chèvre that he said was made in a valley near the Big Basin. We ate them and drank the cool white wine and presently there was nothing left of any of it. I could barely hold my heavy eyes open.
“Okay. We’ve had lunch and it is now now,” T.C. said. “I await your pleasure.”
He sat opposite me, his long legs sprawled down the stairs, the leaning sun glinting off the mended glasses. He had not touched me since Point Reyes and did not move to do so now. I knew that he would honor my time-out. It made me feel safe and comfortable with him, sun-and food-stunned, boneless and caught fast in this moment. That there was a tight, fine wire of tension between us, somewhere far down, did not bother me. I had time to explore that or not, all the time in the world.
“I have to sleep,” I said. “Later…later I’ll make dinner for you, if you’ll let me; I got some stuff in Palo Alto yesterday, and it doesn’t seem like Laura’s going to come back anytime soon to eat it. Just let me go home and take a nap and then we’ll have a long dinner and then it will be now again, and who knows about that? But I need a bath, and I ought to call Glynn, and I really have got to sleep. Will you come to dinner?”
“I don’t go down there,” he said. “Not much; only when I have to. But I’ll take you up on dinner if you’ll cook it at my place. I’ve got the essentials for that. I’ll play my blues for you, and if you’re really respectful and ask me nicely I’ll show you some of my equipment. Earthquake equipment, I mean; get that look of panic off your face.”
“That was not panic. That was awe and wonderment. Okay for dinner, if you’ll come help me tote the stuff up to your place. It’s the makings for a kind of bouillabaisse.”
“Done,” he said, and reached down to me and pulled me up, and we walked back to the Jeep, brushing the dust and grit of Henry Miller’s staircase off our rumps.
When he came to help me carry the food up, it was just past six, and I had slept hard and showered and felt cool and clean and preternaturally clear-headed. The golden haze of the past twenty-four hours was gone.
“I need to tell you now that I’ve decided that the time-out has got to be permanent,” I said, not looking at him beside me on the path. He said nothing, merely grunted amiably, and shifted the Styrofoam cooler in his arms. Behind us Curtis capered and nosed wetly at the backs of our knees, puppyish in his relief that his person had, after all, come back.
“I mean, I thought about it hard, and it isn’t fair to you or me,” I went on, as if he had argued with me. “And it would be terribly unfair to Glynn, and to Pom, too. He’s done nothing but good for people all his life; I can’t just…lie out here in bed with you while he’s down at the clinic until all hours, or slogging through another boring dinner to try to get some more funds—”
“I can see your point,” T.C. said affably.
“I mean, think about Glynn,” I continued, as if he had not spoken. “She needs a mother, not a…an—”
“Don’t do that, Merritt,” he said rather sharply. “Don’t call yourself names, don’t categorize yourself. You were going to say adulteress, weren’t you? I’m not going to listen to that. Maybe, just maybe Glynn needs to know what a full, whole, real woman is; maybe she needs to know what joy is; but that’s neither here nor there. If you say time-out, time-out it will be. I’m not going to argue with you. It’s enough that you want to. And I know that you do, even if you don’t.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to,” I said rather sullenly. “I couldn’t say that after the way I’ve behaved, could I?”
“If you’re determined to be Hester Prynne I can’t stop you,” he said with what sounded close to laughter under his voice. “But you haven’t even earned your A yet, so why don’t you let up on yourself? Speaking of Glynn, she called while you were asleep. I almost forgot.”
“What did she say? Is anything wrong?”
“Absolutely nothing, unless you consider a trip to the mall for a movie and some shopping a calamity. I myself would. Relax. Her friend’s father is taking them. She’s having a great time. She said cool four separate times. There was much giggling and squealing in the background. I gather she isn’t starving; her mouth was definitely full of something.”
“Did she…did she ask about Laura? Or about me, what I was doing?”
“Nope. She was fully as concerned about her elders as any sixteen-year-old on her way to the mall would be. She did, however, ask about Curtis.”
I let my breath out in a long, slow sigh.
“It sounds okay,” I said. “I should be glad she’s having such a good time. But I feel guilty, too; I’ve hardly thought about her in twenty-four hours—”
“For shame. What a terrible mother you are. You’re right to deny yourself the pleasures of the flesh. But I draw the line at mortifying it. If we can’t screw, at least we can eat. Are you a good cook?”
I didn’t answer. I was aware, suddenly, of how prim and presumptuous my little speech had sounded.
“T.C., listen, I’m sorry if I sounded like the church lady,” I said. “I can be awfully stuffy sometimes. It’s just that when I woke up from my nap I needed some…context or something, needed to know where I fit, and where I fit is back there. If you think that means that I don’t want to, you know, do that with you, you’re wrong. I want that very much, but I’m not going to do it. I’ll try not to be all over you for the rest of the night. And yeah, I am a good cook. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
He stopped on the trail and turned, and traced the line of my mouth with his free hand, looking serious and sleepy-eyed. My mouth flamed with heat, and I swallowed hard and turned my head away.
“I understand,” he said softly. “It’s okay. The pull of home is one of the strongest in the world. E.T., phone home. Shit. I almost forgot about this, too. A guy called you this morning before I came to pick you up, but I don’t know who it was. I was downstairs, and the machine got it. The storm last night fried the machine again, so all I could make out was ‘just tell her I called.’”
“What kind of voice? What kind of accent?” I said, more sharply than I meant.
“Couldn’t tell for the static. I’m sorry. I really did forget. You can call when we get up to the tower. It would be your husband, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably. I ought to check in; you know, I told you his mother has been very ill.”
“You don’t have to justify calling your husband to me, baby,” he said gently.
I loved him in that moment, tenderly and without tension.
“Your wife is a damned fool, T.C.,” I said, and this time he did not answer me.
When we reached the tower, he carried the cooler up for me and then whistled to Curtis.
“You need to be left alone now,” he said at the door. “And I need to check the equipment. I think we’ll eat outside; it’s going to be a terrific night. Probably cold later on, with so little wind. The stars will be phenomenal. I’ll make us a fire then, and play you some Earl Hooker. I’ve got one of the very few albums he ever made. Slide guitar; there’s nothing like it. I’ve been trying to learn it, but I can’t even come close. Go on, Merritt, and tend to your business. You’re as jumpy as a flea on a griddle. Pity to waste good bouillabaisse on a nervous woman.”
I smiled at him, my heart hammering with confusion and a kind of gathering anticipation, as though some interior engine had revved up a notch, moving me closer to an inevitable conclusion that I could not name.
“I won’t be long,” I said. “Mommee has probably burnt down the clinic. Fix me a drink and I’ll be right down.”
He and Curtis left, and I approached the telephone and sat down on the edge of his bed, looking at it. I knew, without knowing how, that this call would forever after divide time for me, but I did not know how that might happen. I did not want to pick up the receiver, to dial the house on the river—my house; why could I not think of it as that?—and wait for the fragile lines between it and this tower to solidify, to reshape reality.
“I could just forget it,” I said to myself. “If T.C. had, I’d never know about this call. I don’t strictly have to do this; if it had been an emergency he would have called back.”
But I did have to do it, and so I pulled the phone toward me and looked out over the sweep of trees undulating away toward the sea, their tops going pink in the darkening sky now, and dialed my house, and sat back to wait, stretching my legs out before me on the bed.
The phone rang and rang, with the hollowness that always means no one is at the other end. I looked at my watch; after nine now, back home. Was he at the clinic this late? Out with the African team and their charismatic leader? Despite my nervousness, the burring phone annoyed me; I had been primed for this connection. I started to hang up, and then the phone was lifted, and a voice said, “The Doctor is in,” and laughed.
It was a rich, low voice with, somehow, the dark of loamy earth and the scent of sunny grass in it: a woman’s voice. I knew who it was, even though I knew also that I had never heard her speak when she was at the clinic before, much less seen her. I did not move or breathe. I could not seem to think of any words. I could not hang up, either.
“Terry?” she said finally, “I’m sorry we’re running late. Pom’s in the shower now. You all go on and we’ll meet you in twenty minutes max.”
I said nothing. I still did not breathe.
“Is that you, Ter?” she said, and very slowly and gently I put the receiver back in its cradle. For a long while I simply sat there on T.C. Bridge water’s bed, watching the pink fade from the sky and the silhouettes of the redwoods darken against it, their needles like brush strokes of India ink. I thought how easy it would be simply to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket and slide into sleep. To sleep, and sleep, and speel.
When I finally stood up, it was just a few minutes before full dark. The tender shaving of a new moon, almost transparent, rode above the trees and a great star bloomed above it, the first I could see. My ears rang and I could feel my pulse beating in my throat and wrists, but there was a tickle of senseless laughter at the corners of my mouth, too, and down deep and low in my stomach, the slow heating of the iron core. I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my hair. I could see no mirror in the room, but my hair felt wild, and my cheeks, when I laid my cold hands on them, flamed as if with fever. I was suddenly conscious of the vast loneliness around me, of the amplitude of space and the relentless coming on of unbroken night, and felt a flutter of the cold, old fear I had felt on the bridge this morning. Had it really only been this morning? Suddenly I wanted light and sound and the smell and touch of T.C., just those things and nothing else. I ran down the long, steep steps in one swoop, without seeming to touch the railing. My entire body was light with the fear. It was only when I reached the boards of the veranda that I realized that I still clutched the blanket, trailing it after me.
He was drowsing on the sofa, covered with a pile of blankets and a sleeping Curtis, one hand laid against his bearded cheek, one brushing the floor beside him. He had good hands, long and brown and strong. Warm hands. I wanted to feel them on me as I wanted air to breathe. I stood, trying to get my breath, looking at him. He woke as though he felt the look. Curtis lifted his head, too.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I didn’t talk to him. A woman answered. I know who she is. It was probably nothing. I couldn’t say a word; finally I just hung up. I feel like such a fool…”
I slowed and stopped.
He said nothing, only lay propped on one elbow, looking steadily at me.
“I want to rescind the time-out, T.C.,” I said. “Can I do that?”
After a long moment, he said, “This is my cue to tell you that I don’t take advantage of ladies whose husbands have just shit on them. But I can’t do that, because I’ll take you any way I can get you and be grateful for whatever changed your mind. I’m not going to have one iota of regret afterward, but if you think you are, you’d better tell me now.”
“No regrets,” I said. “I mean that, T.C. No regrets.”
“Then,” he said, sitting up and holding out his arms to me, “come here to me. Come here and let me love you. It’s time somebody did it right.”
And, shivering and beginning, without knowing it, to cry, I let the blanket fall to the deck and went into his arms.
Much, much later we lay in his bed upstairs with the stove throwing dancing red shadows around the room and only the incredible silver starlight pouring down on us from the skylight, a cold, old radiance. We had not eaten the bouillabaisse; I had not, after all, cooked it. We had not listened to Earl Hooker. He had not shown me his earthquake equipment.
There is a popular song: “I want a man with a slow hand.” Lying in the crook of his arm, letting my breathing slow, finally, to normal, I thought of that song and felt my body flush all over at the words. A slow hand. Yes. T.C. Bridgewater had, among other things, a slow hand. Our coming together had been as soft and slow and without urgency as the warm, deliberate ripples in a tide pool. Only at the last had the urgency come crashing in, a scalding, red-black tide from the open sea that took me down with it, far, far down, so that I could only hear the sounds I was making, and that he was, as if from the bottom of an ocean. When I swam at last to the surface, he was laughing. I began to laugh, too. In all the times that I had made love with Pom, I could never remember laughing. Pom’s love was like Pom: intense, focused, very, very direct. T.C.’s was utterly different, and like T.C. himself. Indolent. Inventive. Teasing to the point of near madness.
Slow.
I loved it. My whole body glowed with it, as if I had been scrubbed all over inside and out with hot water and warm oil. I laughed in it, cried out in it, opened all of myself to take it and give it back; tasted it on my tongue and breathed it in as deeply as if it had been pure oxygen. As soon as it was ended I begged for more and got it. By the time we had stumbled upstairs into the bed, I was so sated with it that I could not lift my head from his arm.
“Don’t open the skylight,” I said to T.C. when we had managed to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket. “I’ll go right out it on a breath of cold air.”
“No more?” he said, running the tips of his fingers from my breasts down my stomach and into the warm pit of me.
“Please, sir, can I have some more?” I said, moving slowly against his fingers.
He rolled over me and held himself above me, looking down. His hair fell into his eyes, and his teeth flashed in the black beard. Starlight poured down over his head and shoulders, melted silver ore.
“If you want a repeat performance, you have to assure me you do C.P.R.,” he said.
“I do anything,” I said, reaching up to pull him down. “Anything at all. You cannot conceive of anything I don’t do.”
Deep into the night we lay on our backs and watched the stars through the skylight. They burned with such chill brilliance that they seemed to pulse slowly against the black velvet sky. I have never again seen stars like those. They were, in that moment, fully as alive and sentient as we were.
“What am I looking at?” I said. “What are the stars out here?”
“It’s kind of hard to tell, with just a slice of sky showing. Let’s see. Arcturus, going down. See, the orange one? Vega was the first one you saw at nightfall. Deneb just overhead. It’s almost impossible to tell about the constellations from here. If we were outside you could probably see Perseus over in the northeast, but Pegasus is too far southeast, and the Dipper has gone down by now. You’d see them at home, though. And you’d still see the Summer Triangle. Maybe you can see a little of that here. Back home you could see the rising of the Boat and what they call the wet constellations, water carrier, fishes, and southern fish. They mean fall’s coming. We can’t see them out here yet.”
“Same stars, then. But different sky.”
“Right,” he said drowsily. “You know, I think that the most awful, the loneliest thing in the world, would be to see different stars in a different sky. There’d be nothing of what you knew then. Total alienation, total newness. I wonder if the human spirit could stand it long. The bravest people in the world have always seemed to me the ones who sailed out so far that they were following different stars in a different sky. Like the ancient the Bora Borans did, when they sailed all that hideous long way across the ocean in outriggers, guided by a strange star they knew only from their folklore and the old songs. God, think of it—different stars in a different sky. It makes my blood run cold. This is better; this you can bear. The same stars in a different sky, I mean.”
I turned my face into his neck, hiding there, shutting out the presence of that different sky.
“Be my same stars, T.C.,” I whispered, salt in my eyes and throat. “Be my same stars, because I have most surely come a terrible long way under a different sky.”
“I will,” he said back, into my tangled hair. I felt his tongue touch my eyelids, and knew that he tasted the salt.
“I will, always.”