The Illumination_ A Novel Part 8

For some reason she could not work up any anger toward him, or even any distrust. He was so obviously harmless-and not harmless in the thin-veneer way of countless serial killer movies, but truly harmless. He wore the fixed expression of a child caught filling the saltshaker with sugar. If only she weren't so exhausted.

"I'm sick." She said it once for herself and a second time for him. "I'm sick, John. And your attention is flattering, and if things were different, I would be happy to get a drink with you somewhere, but every minute I'm not holed away in my hotel room, alone alone, is hard for me. Do you understand?"

He grinned. "You remembered my name."

"Bye, John."

"Look, how about some coffee? There's a coffee shop right downstairs. And then you can go back to your hotel and get some sleep and maybe tomorrow you'll feel better than you do today."

Make me better tomorrow than I am today. Make me better next week than I've been this one.

She was the type of person who never read her horoscope, never saved the slips from her fortune cookies, and yet there were times when she was all too willing to be guided by coincidence and intimation, those fleeting signals that flagged the air like torches and suggested the universe had lit a trail for her. Which was why, she supposed, she agreed to have a cup of coffee-one cup-with him. She ordered a small vanilla latte, iced, so that she could conduct it to the corner of her lip with a straw. Did she want something to eat? A scone?

"G.o.d no."

She missed the days of dining out with her friends and lovers, indulging her appet.i.te for lobster or curry, pad Thai or seasoned French fries, before she knew how much would be taken from her, and how quickly. Occasionally, in the stillness of a taxi or an airplane, she would catalog the pleasures she had lost. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Strong mint toothpaste. Any food with hard edges or sharp corners that could pierce or abrade the inside of her mouth: potato chips, croutons, crunchy peanut b.u.t.ter. Any food that was more than infinitesimally, protozoically protozoically, spicy or tangy or salty or acidic: pesto or Worcesters.h.i.+re sauce, wasabi or anchovies, tomato juice or movie-theater popcorn. Certain pamphlets and magazines whose paper carried a caustic wafting chemical scent she could taste as she turned the pages. Perfume. Incense. Library books. Long hours of easy conversation. The ability to lick an envelope without worrying that the glue had irritated her mouth. The knowledge that if she heard a song she liked, she could sing along to it in all her dreadful jubilant tunelessness. The faith that if she bit her tongue, she would soon feel better rather than worse. The coltish rising feeling of s.e.x or masturbation, and the way, as it gripped her, she no longer stood between herself and her senses. The problem was that the more aroused she grew, the dryer her mouth became, so that she could never reach culmination without experiencing that awful germinating sensation she felt before an ulcer erupted, like a weed spreading just under her skin. She no longer knew when she was being sensible, when overcautious. She was tired, very tired, and she hurt. Writing about it did not make it better.

She and John Catau took an empty table in the center of the shop and sat across from each other sipping their drinks. While he spoke, she covered her mouth with her palm, trying to usher the coffee past her lips without visibly wincing. He was offering another one of his meandering narratives, about a rock concert where the crowd was "so raucous" that it spilled out onto the sidewalk and he had traded jackets with the guitarist. Every so often she would punctuate the story with an mm-hmm mm-hmm or a or a right right, thinking Make me better, Take me home Make me better, Take me home, while he nodded and stroked the stubble on his chin. He must have been talking for nearly fifteen minutes when he made a remark that caused him to laugh, a quiet little two-beat arrangement, as if he were exhaling once through each nostril. "You know, like in 'Sunset Studies,'" he continued. "Remember, that bit you wrote about the door hinges flapping loose from the house like b.u.t.terflies?"

"Where would you have seen 'Sunset Studies'?"

"The Lifted Brow began archiving its old issues online." began archiving its old issues online."

"Hmm." A group of teenagers in crowlike black clothing had stationed themselves by the graphic novels, their faces irradiated with patches of cruel red acne. "This place"-she gestured at the stiltlike columns, the vista of windows-"it reminds me of a bead shop I used to visit in college. Not that I had any interest in beads. I went because it reminded me of this art gallery where my friends and I spent all our time in high school. Freestanding counters everywhere. Polished white pine floors. It made me feel like I was reliving my past."

"Mm-hmm. Very esque-ish."

"What?"

"Esque-ish. It's a word me and Coop came up with. First esque esque and then and then ish ish. Something that reminds you of something that reminds you of something."

"That's good. I like that."

"Yeah? You think it will catch on?"

"John, how old are you?"

"I'm twenty-three. And a half."

She made the mistake of smiling. One of her teeth snagged her lip, and there it was, that unsparing light, a spasm of pain that spread across her mouth as if a metal barb had punched through the skin, tugging it outward so that a living pink tent rose up from the tissue.

"Jesus H.," said John Catau. "I absolutely did not realize. I'm so sorry."

She waited until she was sure she could speak. "It's okay. I app-I app app-I thank you for your concern."

"Will you show it to me? Your ulcer?"

"No. No. John. G.o.d No. John. G.o.d. It's not pretty. You don't want to see it."

But the look he gave her was full of such humble curiosity, with his eyes lingering on her mouth and his hair dangling over his creased forehead, that she placed her fingers on either side of the sore and slowly everted her lip for him. He inhaled sharply. In the s.p.a.ce of that breath, between one second and the next, he understood. She didn't have to tell him, didn't have to explain or apologize. She didn't have to combat the impression that she was undergoing some kind of joke ailment, like a hangnail or an ingrown hair, the kind of thing that could be remedied with tweezers or a topical cream. A canker sore, yes. I had one of those myself a few years back A canker sore, yes. I had one of those myself a few years back, people liked to say. Grin and bear it, that's my motto Grin and bear it, that's my motto, and they would clap her shoulder and wait for her to chuckle along with them at the human body and all its darling haplessness. And now here was this boy, this ridiculous boy, and he seemed to know everything about her. Make me better Make me better. His fingertips and the base of his palm were resting lightly on the table, creating a shadowy little hidden cove, and she found herself resisting the impulse to slide her hand into it.

"I'm so sorry," he said a second time. "That's terrible. Terrible. You really don't want to be here at all, do you?" And then, before she could answer, he added, "You know, I read that there are more nerve endings on the lips and the tongue than anywhere else in the body. Were you aware of that? Genitals included. Which means that your mouth is the most sensitive place you've got when it comes to things like hot and cold and pleasure and pain."

"Mm-hmm. I know."

"Okay. I'm going to drive you back to your hotel now."

"No. Please. It's not far. I can walk."

"Right," he said, "I understand," and she believed he did somehow. "Nina? How long before you're better, do you think?"

"I wish I knew. Not tomorrow. Two days, I hope."

"Two days." He made it sound like a fact he was memorizing for a quiz. "Listen, this bruise on my arm, on my biceps?" He notched the contusion with his thumbnail. "I got it from punching myself after your Bellingham reading. I kept saying, 'Catau, you're going to ask this woman to dinner.' I was mad at myself for chickening out. That's all. I was just embarra.s.sed to tell you before."

And then his hand was on top of hers, and he was saying goodbye, and she felt that old carnal tightening in her knees, that flush of heat in her chest, and suddenly, in her imagination, she was sinking into bed with him and his caresses were covering her body in babyskin. How long had it been since she was well enough to unb.u.t.ton someone's s.h.i.+rt and dot his stomach with kisses? And did she have have to be well enough? Maybe she to be well enough? Maybe she was was sick and despondent, broken into a thousand pieces by an illness that would not go away, but so what? Couldn't she pretend she was whole for just one night? How much of yourself could you manufacture out of the fragments and the spare parts? sick and despondent, broken into a thousand pieces by an illness that would not go away, but so what? Couldn't she pretend she was whole for just one night? How much of yourself could you manufacture out of the fragments and the spare parts?

In her hotel room, she cried and then set her clothing out for the next day, turned her blanket down, and called Wallace. For half an hour, she lay in bed debriding her mouth with hydrogen peroxide, letting the watery chlorine taste spread down her tongue and into her throat as she wondered what had happened.

She switched on the TV. A sitcom was starting, the image sharp and true on the plasma screen. She tried to pay attention to the story rather than the play of shapes and colors, but it was nothing special, a show like every other, where all the people were a.s.sembled from light, and their problems made them lovable, and their smallest gestures set off waves of swirling photons.

There was a woman, not quite old but not quite young, whose fiance had died unexpectedly. It was barely a month into their engagement and the two of them were attending a chamber music concert when he began coughing into his sleeve and excused himself from his seat. Because they had quarreled earlier over the cost of the wedding, she did not worry about him when he failed to return. Instead, with exasperation, she thought, What could possibly be keeping him?, little realizing that what was keeping him was death.

When she went to the foyer to look for him, she found a ring of ushers cl.u.s.tered around his body as if he were a spill for which no one wanted to accept responsibility. She would never forget the sight of his tongue pressed to his teeth, struggling to form some word he had just missed his chance of saying.

More than a year had gone by since then, a terrible year of ill health, sleeplessness, and rainy days that layered themselves over her like blankets. Who was she? Who had she become? Her skin was paler than it used to be, her hair grayer. Recently she had noticed creases lingering around her eyes in the morning, and also across her forehead, as if she had spent the night squinting into a harsh light. The lines did not go away when she rubbed them, vanis.h.i.+ng only gradually as the hours wore on, and she could foresee a time when the mask of age that grief had placed over her face would simply be her face. She missed her fiance terribly. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was only a beautiful story she had told herself, so quickly had she fallen in love with him and so quickly had he left her. It was hard to believe that that man who refused to b.u.t.ton his collar, whose kisses began so shyly and ended so fervidly, who never once looked at her as if she were foolish or tiresome or even ordinary, was the same man she had found splayed across the theater's staircase like an animal pinned to a board.

Frequently she had the feeling that he was standing just behind her, his breath tickling her ear like it used to when he came prowling over to seize her waist while she was cooking. All the same she did not speak to him.

Instead, like everyone, she acc.u.mulated letters that would never be answered. I don't understand how this can be my life I don't understand how this can be my life, she wrote, and What am I going to do? What am I going to do? and occasionally, late at night, when she could not sleep, something longer such as and occasionally, late at night, when she could not sleep, something longer such as Do you know what it feels like? Shall I describe it for you? It feels like the two of us got on a boat together, and the deck tossed me into the water, and you went sailing away without me. Thrown overboard-that's how it feels. So I want you to tell me, because I really need to know, why did I spend my whole life waiting to fall in love with just the right person if you were just going to leave and it would all be for nothing? Do you know what it feels like? Shall I describe it for you? It feels like the two of us got on a boat together, and the deck tossed me into the water, and you went sailing away without me. Thrown overboard-that's how it feels. So I want you to tell me, because I really need to know, why did I spend my whole life waiting to fall in love with just the right person if you were just going to leave and it would all be for nothing?

That first summer, immediately after he died, she had barely been able to pick up a pen, but by the time the earth split open a year later, she had ama.s.sed three heavy baskets of letters. One afternoon, she went to the parched field where the fair sat in the autumn and the soccer team practiced in the spring and dropped them into the deepest opening she could find. The ground swallowed them as neatly as a pay phone accepting coins, except for the last page, which continued to show through the dirt until gravity gave it a tug and it slipped out of sight. That was where her heart was, she thought, cradled underground with the roots and the bones.

As she stood in the dust listening to the insects buzz, she dashed off one last note and let it go: Are you even out there? Are you even out there?

The next morning, she received her answer.

The streets seemed to quiver and spark in the rain, and water cascaded from the roofs of the old Victorians, and the gray ash of the sky made the inside of the bookstore appear l.u.s.trous and unfamiliar, saturated with color, like a movie theater where the film has snapped and the seats have been engulfed in light, and in the bathroom, where Nina went to disinfect her mouth with Listerine, the walls were covered with photos of third-tier pop stars in unflattering poses, bizarre headlines clipped from tabloid newspapers, and when she stepped back into the store, she saw that the Newbery displays had been taken down and replaced with chairs and a microphone, and to the seven people who had braved the San Francisco weather to hear her read, she presented "A Fable for the Living," coaxing each syllable carefully past her open sore, which was even worse than it had been in Portland. Every time someone entered the building, she could hear the storm drumming and resonating on Haight Street. Then the door swung shut, and the noise softened to a rustle, and once again they were all sealed together in their bright and cozy den. She kept waiting for John Catau to come slouching out from behind the survival guides, wearing a sly look of guilty satisfaction, as if by following her across three states he had allowed her to defeat him in some subtle contest of expectations, but it soon became obvious that he was not there. She was not prepared to feel so disappointed.

Though the audience was small, the weather must have put them at their ease, because they posed an uncommon number of questions: "Do you go into an office every day? A coffee shop? Or do you write from home?"

"I have a spare room with a desk and a computer. That's where I do most of my work. Except the revisions-those I finish by hand, usually at the kitchen table."

"Are there any words you feel you overuse?"

"Strange, great, little-I heard an interview with an editor who was asked about her pet peeves, and she named those three words, I suppose because of the way they adjust a phrase's rhythm without actually changing its meaning. And soul soul probably. probably. Terrible Terrible. And also lambent lambent, but I love that one."

"Do you read your work out loud when you're writing?"

"No. Never. The truth is I'm embarra.s.sed by the sound my voice makes in an empty room, that grand p.r.o.nouncement effect. And there's something else"-and it hurts, it hurts-"which is that, in my experience, and this might sound completely absurd, but stories have a certain power the first time they're read out loud, don't they? An energy, or an honesty. The way the words cut through the air. And it seems a shame to squander that power when there's no one else around to hear it."

"This isn't a question. I just want to say that I enjoy listening to you read, the care you take with your p.r.o.nunciation. Have you ever considered reading your own audiobooks?"

"Thanks, and no, but n.o.body ever suggested I should until now."

"If Twin Souls Twin Souls were made into a movie, who would you cast as Mary Ruth?" were made into a movie, who would you cast as Mary Ruth?"

"I get people wondering that all the time, but I never know how to answer. Why, did you have someone in mind?"

In a theatrical, almost moony moony, tone of voice, the girl who had asked the question said, "I think Julia Krukowski Krukowski would be would be perfect, perfect," which made the friend sitting next to her stifle a smile. Nina nodded as if at the essential rightness of the idea, though she had never heard of Julie Krikowski. She suspected the name might be invented-if not, in fact, the girl's own. More and more, though, she found that she was required to take the stardom of certain people on faith. The world presented an endless sequence of celebrities replacing celebrities replacing celebrities, like cheap wooden nesting dolls, each bearing a tinier and less persuasive likeness than the one that had come before. It exhausted her.

"My son says it would make a good anime film. So are there any more-" She felt an itch in her sinuses and turned her head. A sneeze tore at her lips with a startling photographic flash. She gasped and closed her eyes, waiting for the pangs of light to subside, for the blood to stop beating in her jaw. Make me better Make me better. Maybe if she never ate or drank or spoke or laughed or smiled or kissed anyone ever again-maybe then she would be all right. "Are there any more questions?"

The audience took pity on her. She thanked everyone for coming, signed a few books, and phoned for a taxi. Before she left, the manager gave her one of the trading cards he had printed to publicize the event, number 1,972 in the series, with her photo on the front and a description of the book on the back: "In The Age of Girls and Boys The Age of Girls and Boys, Nina Poggione has crafted an elegant collection of love stories and fantasies, unique, lyrical, and haunting. Whether in the award-winning 'Small Bitter Seeds,' with its gifted physician struggling to retain his practice after losing his voice to cancer, or in the daring t.i.tle story, in which the children of a world sinking into infertility attempt to transcend the circ.u.mstances of their lives, she evokes the souls of her characters with compa.s.sion and an exquisite clarity."

She relied on the cabdriver to find her hotel, a narrow brick and stone structure, latticed with balconies, that she recognized from her Twin Souls Twin Souls tour the instant she saw the waxed wooden floor that stretched across the lobby in a sunburst of multiple browns. She had gone directly from the airport to the bookstore, so she had to check in at the front desk before she could ride the elevator to the third floor, unlock her room, and open her night-stand. It held a phone book and a Gideon's Bible, but was otherwise empty. Two years before, in the same hotel-though not, surely, the same suite-she was searching for a stationery pad in her bedside drawer when she discovered a journal someone had left behind. The cloth had been razed from the cover, revealing a kidney-shaped patch of gray board, and a buckle ran through the first thirty pages or so, as if they had been dipped in water. It was filled with handwritten love notes, she discovered, page after page of them, tour the instant she saw the waxed wooden floor that stretched across the lobby in a sunburst of multiple browns. She had gone directly from the airport to the bookstore, so she had to check in at the front desk before she could ride the elevator to the third floor, unlock her room, and open her night-stand. It held a phone book and a Gideon's Bible, but was otherwise empty. Two years before, in the same hotel-though not, surely, the same suite-she was searching for a stationery pad in her bedside drawer when she discovered a journal someone had left behind. The cloth had been razed from the cover, revealing a kidney-shaped patch of gray board, and a buckle ran through the first thirty pages or so, as if they had been dipped in water. It was filled with handwritten love notes, she discovered, page after page of them, I love this I love thises and I love that I love thats stacked tight as bricks against one another. I love the "bloop" sound you make whenever you drop something. I love remembering the evening we sat on the roof at your parents' and watched the sunset reflecting off the windows of that old church. I love your silver chimneysweep charm, the one you wear around your neck for good luck I love the "bloop" sound you make whenever you drop something. I love remembering the evening we sat on the roof at your parents' and watched the sunset reflecting off the windows of that old church. I love your silver chimneysweep charm, the one you wear around your neck for good luck. That night, she lay in bed and read the whole thing. Slowly a pair of personalities emerged from the sentences, taking on ma.s.s and texture. The man's name was Jason, the woman's Patricia, and at first Nina felt like a spy, eavesdropping as he turned the most quotidian details of their life into endearments, but after a while she might have been their closest friend, sitting between them as he cupped his hand to Nina's ear and whispered all the beautiful things he wished her to relay to his wife. Maybe the words weren't meant for Nina, but they were wonderful all the same, if not I love you I love you then at least then at least Somebody loves somebody Somebody loves somebody.

The next morning, before she left, she asked the concierge if there was a Jason Williford registered at the hotel. He tapped on his keyboard. "No, I'm sorry, ma'am."

"A Patricia?"

"No. No Patricia Williford either. Perhaps they've already departed?"

"Maybe so. Could you find out for me?"

"No Jason or Patricia Williford for the last...six months, at least. I'm sorry."

So she kept the journal, taking it home with her, and one day, when she was running a fever from the cl.u.s.ter of sores under her tongue, five or six of them scattered along the midline, and the s.h.i.+ning vitric crater of an ulcer on her hard palate, she took a Stanley knife and excised a page from the book. Immediately, she felt ashamed. What was she thinking? Why had she done it? Rather than tape the page back in place, though, she folded it in quarters so that she could carry it in her pocketbook.

And now, as she did every so often, she took it out and read it: I love watching you sit at your desk, the sun striking you through the philodendron leaves. I love that game where you draw a picture on my back with your finger and I try to guess what it is. I love those blue jeans with the sunflowers on the pockets, the ones that hug the curves of your waist. I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns. I love the joke you told at Eli and Abbey's wedding reception. I love how easily you cry when you're happy. I love your question marks that look like backwards s' s's, your periods that look like bird's beaks. I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning picking the ChapStick from your lips. I love how you laugh with your mouth open wide, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarra.s.sed it makes you when you do. I love to think of you as that bored little girl designing adventures for herself, riding your sleeping bag down the staircase, or taking a running leap along the hallway and trying to flip the light switch in midair, or walking from your bedroom to the far side of the kitchen without stepping in the sunlight, or else you would die. I love how your eyes grow wet whenever you talk about your grandfather. I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail. I love planning vacations with you. I love how good you are to me when I'm not feeling well. I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited or even heard of, that you use when you're trying to sound Italian. I love the bull story. I love helping you shave that tricky spot behind your knees. I love the way your hair fritzes out in all directions when you work up a sweat. I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine. I love that perfect little cl.u.s.ter of moles on your wrist. I love the yellow tights you wear when you're feeling-how you say?-sparky. I love every- picking the ChapStick from your lips. I love how you laugh with your mouth open wide, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarra.s.sed it makes you when you do. I love to think of you as that bored little girl designing adventures for herself, riding your sleeping bag down the staircase, or taking a running leap along the hallway and trying to flip the light switch in midair, or walking from your bedroom to the far side of the kitchen without stepping in the sunlight, or else you would die. I love how your eyes grow wet whenever you talk about your grandfather. I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail. I love planning vacations with you. I love how good you are to me when I'm not feeling well. I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited or even heard of, that you use when you're trying to sound Italian. I love the bull story. I love helping you shave that tricky spot behind your knees. I love the way your hair fritzes out in all directions when you work up a sweat. I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine. I love that perfect little cl.u.s.ter of moles on your wrist. I love the yellow tights you wear when you're feeling-how you say?-sparky. I love every- There the page ended.

She had not yet shut her curtains, and when a bright light swept across the window, she saw a million raindrops speckling the gla.s.s, a column of white beads tilting through them with a minute quiver as the drops along the border vacillated and were swallowed into the center.

Her phone buzzed. She read her home number on the display. It was Wallace, calling to ask if he could have some friends over for Cities in Dust, the role-playing game he moderated. "Do you mind? Tomorrow's Friday, so there's no school afterward. We'll order a pizza, and everyone'll probably spend the night. It'll be me and Conrad and Nathan and a few others."

"Are any of these 'few others' girls? You know you can't have Camarie spend the night if I'm not around."

"But Camarie is our Forged One!"

"Forged One or no, I'm not comfortable with it. Tell me, has Camarie asked her parents what they they think about your great coed, unsupervised role-playing extravaganza?" think about your great coed, unsupervised role-playing extravaganza?"

He changed tacks. "Camarie is only twelve, you know, Mom. I wouldn't do do anything with her. It would break the Creep Equation." This was the lesson his algebra teacher had used the first day of eighth grade to demonstrate the practical value of higher math: you took your age, divided it by two, and added seven, "and that's your dating boundary," Wallace had explained to her, hunched over a cherry Danish at the kitchen table. "Any younger than that, and it's creepy. I'm fourteen, which means I can only date someone my own age, since fourteen divided by two is seven, plus seven is fourteen." anything with her. It would break the Creep Equation." This was the lesson his algebra teacher had used the first day of eighth grade to demonstrate the practical value of higher math: you took your age, divided it by two, and added seven, "and that's your dating boundary," Wallace had explained to her, hunched over a cherry Danish at the kitchen table. "Any younger than that, and it's creepy. I'm fourteen, which means I can only date someone my own age, since fourteen divided by two is seven, plus seven is fourteen."

She had overheard enough heedless mid-game snack-break conversations to know how he and his friends really interpreted the equation. And that's your f.u.c.king boundary. Which means I can only f.u.c.k someone my own age And that's your f.u.c.king boundary. Which means I can only f.u.c.k someone my own age. She also knew that, like most eighth-graders-or at least the science fiction kids, the British comedy kids-they were all talk, all roostering, their lasciviousness just another role-playing game, a way of trying on their manhood and simultaneously mocking it.

She cleared her throat. "Be that as it may."

She managed to lay a stress on the last word without making her discomfort audible. Or so she thought. But after four years, Wallace could derive her condition from her voice with some authority. "Your lip?" he asked.

"Mm-hmm. It's at that hurts-to-talk stage."

"Would you like to talk about it?"

"Ha ha."

"All right, listen, no Camarie. But everybody else is geah? Hey, there's another call coming in. I'm gonna take it, Mom, okay? See you Sunday."

"Sunday. Be good."

She returned her phone to her purse, then lay back and gazed at the window, waiting for another car to breast the hill, its headlights taking just the right angle to send a field of stars Big Banging over the gla.s.s.

37 2 = 18, or thereabouts, and 18 + 7 = 25, so a certain overzealous someone who had punctuated her dreams last night by kissing her neck, disquietingly, like a lover, was too creepy for her by one year.

And a half.

A bit of tissue had come loose from between her molars. She tried to dislodge it with her tongue, and a p.r.i.c.kle of light appeared where she had sc.r.a.ped the papillae. d.a.m.n. d.a.m.n d.a.m.n d.a.m.n d.a.m.n. d.a.m.n d.a.m.n d.a.m.n. It was yet another tiny injury, almost too small to notice, and yet she worried that, like so many others, it would rupture and lose all shape, growing more and more indistinct as the pain took hold. She brought her travel kit to the bathroom, prepared a capful of hydrogen peroxide, and tipped it into her mouth. She had to be so careful with herself. And here was the question: Was it worth what it cost?

Her house was built like all the others, with its roof projecting over the front door to keep it from opening directly into the rain, and it was her pleasure upon waking in the morning to step out onto the porch and take stock of the day. This particular morning arrived hot and bright, with the sky that oddly whitened blue it became when there was no moisture in the air. She was surprised to find a fissure interrupting her lawn. She kept the gra.s.s carefully trimmed and watered, and she was sure she would have seen the rift if it had been there the day before. It ran as straight as a line on a map. She traced it with her eyes, following it across her neighbor's yard and a few others before it vanished into the woods at the end of the block, and then back again until it dead-ended at her front steps.

But that was not the strange part. No, the strange part was the sheet of paper that was protruding from it. She picked it up and unfolded it.

Of course I am, it read.

The handwriting was familiar to her, with its walking-stick r r and its and its o o's that didn't quite close at the top. But it took her a moment to figure out where she recognized it from.

She spent the next few hours twisting her engagement ring around and around her knuckle. A potato chip bag was dipping and spinning in the middle of the road, and she watched it ride the breeze until a boy rode by and flattened it beneath his bicycle.

Finally, on a blank sheet of paper, she wrote, If you are who I believe you are, tell me something only you would know about me If you are who I believe you are, tell me something only you would know about me.

She was unaccountably nervous. She knelt on the porch, closing her eyes as she slipped the note into the fissure. Something deep within the ground seemed to wrest it from her fingers like a fish plucking a cricket from a hook.

For the rest of the day, every time she went outside, she expected to see a flash of white paper waiting for her in the gra.s.s. But it was not until the next morning that she found one: I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns.

She stared closely at the breach in her lawn. If she followed it on foot, she calculated, she would eventually reach the scorched field where she had gone to deposit her letters.

On a fresh sheet of paper, she replied, Everyone we know has seen me in that coat. It doesn't prove a thing Everyone we know has seen me in that coat. It doesn't prove a thing.

Early that afternoon, an answer arrived: I love how you laugh with your mouth wide open, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarra.s.sed it makes you when you do I love how you laugh with your mouth wide open, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarra.s.sed it makes you when you do.

She wrote, Well, yes, that's definitely me Well, yes, that's definitely me.

I love the joke you told at Zach and Christina's wedding reception.

She wrote, If this is a trick...this had better not be a trick. Is it? If this is a trick...this had better not be a trick. Is it?

I love how easily you cry when you're happy.

So the correspondence went on, hour after hour and day after day, pus.h.i.+ng across the distance of the soil. All his letters were love letters, delivered while she was sleeping or mopping the kitchen, weeding the garden or out buying milk. When she held them up to the sunlight, the faded marks of earlier messages emerged through the stationery: Bailey had two kittens last week, and I named the first one Bowtie, and the second one Mike! I hope you're better now, I truly do, because I am, I tell you, I am. I think there's something terribly wrong with me Bailey had two kittens last week, and I named the first one Bowtie, and the second one Mike! I hope you're better now, I truly do, because I am, I tell you, I am. I think there's something terribly wrong with me. They came in a variety of hands and were often hard to decipher. She presumed he had salvaged the pages from under the ground, a few dozen among the many hundreds of thousands that had rained down over the generations of the dead.