 
### Each and All

### by

### John Kuti

Smashwords Edition

* * * * *

Published on Smashwords by:

John Kuti

Copyright 2013 by John Kuti

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### To Jamie Brown who showed me how to live.

### Chapter 1

Nearly a century before, a group of ordinary men stood with their children before a big brick schoolhouse they had helped to build. A simple black and white photo was then struck. The dark suits and the sombre faces in the photo told that life was struggle and life was a cold hard road. There was an exception in the one man who stood grinning in his best suit, his hand firmly on the shoulder of his four-year old son.

George Marshall looked at the old photo in the glass cabinet, standing in the same high school in the picture. He couldn't know that the grinning man was the Grandfather of his best friend Eugene van Fleet, and he didn't realize the boy in the photo would become the fierce middle-aged man he had known so long ago. He paid no more attention to the old photo than to the rest of the memorabilia: the trophies, the pennants, the little Red Ensign flags and the faded year books opened to pages and pages of black robed graduating classes. People die, photos fade and time is the hidden, irregular pulse of life.

Waves of laughter rolled down the halls as George Marshall stood looking at the images of young faces, lost places and memory.

A century of graduates, a wake for a century of what had been, awake for the thrivers and survivors gathering in the dried blood black brick old school that had been reopened to receive them before its impending demolition.

The huge suburban high school in Toronto where George now taught drama had few souvenirs. A few brass trophies and a shiny brass honour role were all the traditions they could muster. The dusty past had given way to a tenuous, anxious, perpetual present. People were now too mobile, too alone for tradition. Looking in the souvenir case was like looking at an extinct kind of human being.

George never liked feeling old. George never liked feeling mortal. He certainly didn't like the thought that he was half as old as the musty old school that had once held his youth.

George walked down the hall past the rooms he remembered so well, noticing the Bristol board dates thumb tacked to each door indicating where each half-decade of graduates was supposed to gather. It was a room to a decade from 1920 until the 1960s. Then each half-decade of the sixties needed three rooms each, to house the generation of children that exploded after the Second World War. The decade of the '70s was back to single rooms because that was when the new high school was built, leaving the old school to the problem children, the challenged children, the not so beautiful losers of the city.

Feeling ill at ease and strangely nervous, George found one of the rooms where his graduating class was supposed to gather. Unexpectedly, it was dead quiet. The door was closed. He went inside.

He remembered the room. He remembered the three years of Latin classes and the small bull of a man who taught them pedantically, distractedly and most times with an undertone of rage that left everyone slightly breathless with an unknown, expectant fear. He remembered the face and the tense posture but, for the life of him, he couldn't remember the man's name. There was the desk at the back of the room where he had sat beside Eugene for all three years. Those were the years George's life had begun. This room had seen him shed his shyness. His confidence and his wit and intelligence had grown full with his long hair, a confidence that had made him the enemy of the nameless teacher he had learned so subtly to provoke. He became the class rebel, and this tense room was where he had learned to perform. Now the room was empty, the big generation somewhere else. Someone had written in big chalk letters; ROOM TOO FULL---GONE TO CAFETERIA!

Above the notice someone had begun a survey of the class. George read the headings and smiled. Empty echoes. Someone had turned the blackboard into a horizontal chart with columns for everything you would ever want to know about somebody you knew thirty years before.

Name; Married to (list... with dates); Higher Education (list... degrees); Occupation (list... with salaries);

Children (names, ages) ; Current Sex Life (times a month); Necessary Medications (legal and not); Necessary Vices ( list...Be honest); Sold-out (yes or no).

There was only one name, one person who had dared to write down the particulars of their life for everyone to see, and George's heart felt the distant splash of desire at the memory of the girl who had carried the name so languidly into the room. Three rows over and two seats down. She had been so beautiful. George remembered his memory of her body and remembered his vague memory of his own. And she was here, thirty years older. She was here, his best friend's old great love who he had screwed just that once.

He read what she'd written in each of the columns. Name: Laura Burdans; Married: Bill Porter, 1973-1976--- Ian McCall, 1980-Present; Higher Education (B.A. Waterloo; M.A. York;) Occupation (publicist-$62,000); Children (Amanda, 16) Sex Life (varies wildly) ; Necessary Medications (fine wine, fine wine, fine wine, great Scotch);Necessary Vices (Vanity and communication devices); Sold-out (Absolutely!!!!)

George had no idea why he wanted to come to the last reunion of his old school, but now he was glad he had come. His nervousness was gone; he would go looking for Laura.

First, he went up to the blackboard and wrote the particulars of his own life: his name; his three marriages to women he called the three queens of indulgence, in "years that were just a blur" ; his children he called ingrate one, two and three; his occupation he described as Haberdasher to the Stars, his income unseemly; his sex life he also described as wonderfully unseemly; his medications and vices he replied to with a capitalized Yes; he said he had sold-out, but had waited for his price.

Then George decided he'd have to be Haberdasher to the Stars for the rest of the evening because the thing that he hated most about what he had become was what he had become: a half hearted high school teacher. His indulgently expensive clothes and his style had let him sell strangers the idea that he dressed the rich and famous and earned obscene amounts of money doing it. He loved putting people on. What better strangers than those who had known him when. It was Showtime.

George found Laura in the hall outside the gym. Some girls become women the way a colt fills the form of a thoroughbred, becoming sleek power, grace and self-assurance. The fresh beauty of her youth had become the ripe beauty of style. She looked up and gathered his eyes and smiled. She remembered and George's heart flushed knowing it. He went straight to her and put out his hand and she took it softly.

"Aren't you gorgeous!" he said and meant it.

"You cleaned up pretty well yourself." she replied. "I see you still have the pony tail."

"And I see you're still the best blond in a bottle."

"It's funny, but I don't remember your hair being that colour." she said, and the two women Laura had been talking to laughed. It was true. The other women remembered him and now he remembered them vaguely. With Laura they had been part of the social elite in their class . He and Eugene used to call them the debutantes. Now the debutantes were impressed with him and he could see it. The clothes had made the man, the man they would have never guessed he would become. He ignored their eyes and purposely focused his grin on Laura, leaving them with the same feeling he was sure they remembered only too well.

"It's so great to see you." he said to Laura.

"And you too." she replied .

"I'm surprised you came to this." he said.

"Really, why's that? she asked him, and he told her that he always thought she would become as big city girl and leave behind the small town dust of her youth.

"And I somehow never thought that you would become a big city boy. That's what you are, aren't you?"

"A big city boy, that's me."

They took in each other like art appraisers, looking for surgery to account for the fact they both looked ten years younger than they were; in shape and in style. Her hair was no longer long and flowing as it had been in her youth but was cut hard at her jaw line by someone who did it as well as hair could be cut. Her clothes spoke of money but also had the crisp professional air of someone who earned it herself. Her big eyes and full lips were made up perfectly and her skin still had the soft translucence of youth. Time had not been as hard on Laura as it had on either of her other two friends, a fact that was lost on no one. Reluctantly, everyone eventually had to resign themselves to life's inexorable entropy; flesh fell, time passed and dreams died in the cold light of day in and day out.

Laura introduced the women to George. Do you remember Joanne Page, Sally Connolly?"

"Of course I remember. Don't you look great?"

"So what do you do now, Laura?" he asked.

"I used to be a talent agent, but now I specialize in more neurotically refined big egos, I'm a book publicist. I work with authors." Her mellow voice made the cold words warm even though, like all the others, she was almost shouting to be heard over the noise of all the people in the school hallway.

"Authors are better than actors?" asked Sally.

"Marginally." Laura replied.

The blast of a thousand voices rolling over old rock tunes poured from the cafeteria and the gymnasium doors on the other side of the hall.

"You have to come and meet my husband. He's holding a table in the cafeteria. We should get back." Sally said to Joanne. "There's just too many moving bodies. I can hardly hear myself speak." That she had barely spoken at all did not seem to matter.

George looked at Laura for a signal, almost like they had coupled. "We'll join you in a little while." Laura said to her friends as they left. Then she asked George if he knew whether Eugene had come to the reunion.

"Gene, didn't you hear, he's dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. He's still on that farm and has about fourteen adopted children, can you believe it?"

"Oh my God." Laura said and looked into George's eyes for some explanation.

He told her that it was true, that Eugene was dying. He still saw Gene often and had planned to go to the farm that night after the reunion. He said he had to be careful because he wasn't allowed to stay if he showed up with even the subtlest sign of inebriation. His wife was very very fierce with him.

A wife, fourteen children, and an incurable disease were all images that crushed the memory Laura had of the blonde boy she had known, the boy with the powerful body and the flow-blu porcelain eyes, and the Mercedes Benz with the Gull Wing doors. It was all so 'Movie of the Week.'

"Let's go. I need to dance." she said as she took George's hand.

As they pushed their way through the bodies in the wide gym doors, George could feel the power in the grip of her soft hand. Inside the gym there was an amazing mixture of generations and reformed remnants of old cliques. The only thing missing was youth. Almost everyone in the room was at pushing forty and fifty and sixty. The sixties hard rock turned to ballads. The first one was, 'Tonight.'

Great banners and long streamers of white and red crepe were may-poled from the ceiling of the big gymnasium. Below a big crepe ball at the apex of the streamers hung a banner that said, "Our Century." And so it was.

And there they were, in suits and dresses, the generations turning colour in a seasonal reverse where drab russet and gray suits and earth tone dresses on the older people slowly brightened until there was the brilliant display of red and yellow and gold of the baby boom generation. Wool became satin; satin became polyester; polyester became cotton then silk. George and Laura were silk.

George didn't have to shout quite so loud when he asked Laura if she remembered West Side Story. She had been Maria; he had been one of the Jets in the high school production of their senior year. It had been at the cast party where they had both got so drunk. George could barely remember the details of his lost virginity. They had had a fuzzy one night history that he had never shared with Eugene. It was the one secret that he kept from his friend forever. Laura knew why George was asking. It was a memory Laura had no interest in reviving.

"And no one wants a fellow with a social disease." George sang very loudly, and got a few strange glances from the crowd. She led him onto the dance floor and he was surprised and thrilled at how close she danced.

Dancing close, they spoke past each other as they tried to make small talk. George asked about her husband; he had noticed her ring. She told him her husband's name and that he was a lawyer. When he asked how marriage was, she told him it was like the girl with the curl.

"So is it very good or horrid right now?" he asked.

"It's not that good, but I don't want to talk." she replied and they danced until the next song and then they danced again. Halfway through it she asked George to tell her about Eugene. He stopped dancing and stood away from her.

"Do you really want to stay here?" he asked, "Maybe we should go for a walk so we can talk." Laura wasn't sure. She wanted to know more. But she didn't want to talk; she only wanted to listen. For some reason, with George, the idea of talking about her own life made her stomach turn.

"Maybe later." she said and pulled into George and they danced.

At one table people were calling out names and other people were shouting back what they knew about the person whose name had been called. As they listened to the names being called, both George and Laura realized that it was their own graduating class sitting at the table by the edge of the dance floor. George danced her closer so they could listen to the gossip of thirty years, in the voices that had changed so little in bodies they could barely recognize. Their class was a table of wet, heavy peonies fading on thick fleshy stems.

"Molly Berman." someone shouted, and voices replied that she married Peter Abbot, that she lived in Grand Bend, that she had three children and did catering. More names followed with children and husbands and occupations and diseases and divorces. In a pause, while people were searching for more names of absent classmates, George shouted from the dance floor Laura's maiden name, Laura Burdans.

"Laura Burdans married an artist." someone shouted, "No she married a vet." "I know for a fact she's married to a lawyer who works for the mob."

People laughed as Laura shouted from the dance floor, "He's never had anything to do with the mob. He mostly defends hookers and junkies."

The whole table had turned its attention to the dance floor and people screamed when they recognized Laura and then George.

"George Marshall. It's George Marshall." someone shouted as George and Laura stopped dancing and walked up to the table ringed with their old classmates.

"So what are you two doing together?" someone asked pointedly.

"Oh, we're not together." said Laura.

"I promised the lady I could score her some really fine weed." replied George.

"You have some for me?" came a voice from the crowd.

"I didn't just fall off the turnip truck; I know a narc when I see one." George shot back and everyone roared because that was exactly who he was talking to.

"You're under arrest in the name of her majesty the Queen" said the middle-aged man in the cheap blue suit.

"O.K., I want to know who did the life experience chart on the blackboard in the old Latin class?" George got blank stares from the entire group and so he explained about the columns on the blackboard listing names, occupations, salaries, medications and vices and if and whether they had sold out. He got more blanks stares. "Well, I was thinking what a poorly done survey it was." George continued, "Just think of the categories that were missed: the nature of one's blended families; the range of alternate therapies and self-help groups; a list of support groups and twelve step programs; and most important of all a list of the failed dietary and exercise regimes. These are the experiences that are really important to know after thirty years of acquired wisdom." People just looked at him. He was pleased with himself and went on. "Let's start with blended families. Is a child who wasn't yours until you married its mother and adopted that child, still yours when the mother divorces you? The answer is, yes you still pay,"

"You're still a trouble maker." said the mounted policeman in the cheap blue suit.

"Pay no attention. Pay George no mind." said Laura, and as ever, everyone was glad to give their attention to her. A couple of the women took over the conversation, making a big fuss over Laura, telling her how wonderful she looked, asking about her work, her children, and her husband and her home. There were no empty chairs, so they had to make do by taking her hand and pulling her close so they could fuss over her. She let them. She liked it.

While the women held Laura, the Mountie began to interrogate George. It felt good to lie to the cops. 'I sell suits to movie stars, officer,'' I make more money than should legally be allowed, officer.' Yes I am looking good, and what's even better you are definitely not.'

The Mountie got up from where he was sitting and joined George. He did not like asking questions from an inferior position.

"So Marshall, you actually remember my name?" the Mountie asked.

"Of course, you're Bill Schiff our star half back."

"That's me, the star halfback. So, how much does a suit like that cost?"

"About three grand; Brioni. You should think about it. A great suit is a sure fire way to a fast promotion." George tried to sound as serious and salesman-like as he could.

"A fast way to an internal investigation." the Mountie replied.

"That explains your suit." George needled, "Does Disney still own the rights on the red suit?"

"No, I think we got that back."

The jocks and the freaks still couldn't stand one another. George felt good that the freaks had won. At least that's what he thought.

"So what kind of car do you drive?" the Mountie asked, changing the subject.

"A 72 Porsche T 90. It's absolutely mint, black cherry maroon. It gets more valuable every year while everyone else shovels their money in the doors of banks and car companies."

George explained how Eugene and his kids restored old classic cars and, for a hundred dollars a year, they would service it so that no part ever failed, no rust ever settled. And they guaranteed to buy the car back for whatever you paid to have it restored.

"That's a good deal for him if they only appreciate." said the Mountie sceptically.

"Nobody's ever brought one back. Just think of it, never lose a dime on a car and still have absolute reliability." George boasted.

"Maybe I'll give him a call."

"Sure, but there's usually a long waiting list." George added.

One of the men sitting at the table spoke up over the noise and the music and said he thought that George taught high school in Toronto.

"I volunteer in one of the drama departments..." George began but was interrupted by a loud speakered voice announcing that the non-cardiac challenged dance gala was about to begin. The booming voice introduced two frail looking old people who walked to the centre of the stage. The taped music began and the two fragile looking old folks exploded gently into the varsity drag. She wore a silk flapper dress covered in fringes and he wore grey slacks, a red striped shirt and a cardigan sweater with a big W on its breast.

Thin bodies came alive with an amazing energy, the strut, the kick, the slide had such freedom and exuberance. The dance was off the ground filling a space for yards around, on the ground, in the air. The money rush of the twenties had created white children who had discovered their bodies could move and that they were free to move them any way they chose. Dancing independently, the same steps side-by-side: Step-kick; step-kick; step- kick. Freedom-license; freedom-license; freedom- license. Black bottom, Oh mister! In a minute they were done, and the two old folks left the stage gasping and laughing and holding hands like children.

Then it was the Great Depression and dances from when freedom lost its license. The elegance of imagination, the perfection of Rogers and Astaire saw four couples in tails and taffeta gowns glide around the stage; 'the way we danced till three, no ,no , they can't take that away from me,' Dreams of elegance and luxury, lost and found, flowed in the music and more imperfectly through the bodies of the dancers on stage. The blackest clouds should have a silver lining, or so everyone had hoped. The steps had the perfect order, elegance and control that life had lost after the roar of the twenties. Gentle lifts came from the touch of a silk-gloved hand. The dancer's hair was frozen in perfect, permanent waves. The way the world could only be imagined turned and swirled on polished shoes and high heeled pumps. People held on, mostly.

The dancers ended the medley of Cole Porter and Gershwin. Their proper flushed faces, as they took bows at the front of stage, seemed to say that there really was something that no one could ever take away.

Then on-came the fourties, Jump and jive! Laura came over to stand beside George to watch the energy explode on the stage. Gray haired senior citizens bounced to the beat of the big band sound.

Over the music the announcer shouted, "It's Benny Goodman and his band and, 'Let's Dance.'

The big band, the big war, women work but men still lead; Bobby socks and screams all over the floor. Drums! Krupa! Rich! Uptown Saturday night! White children with black rhythm. The class system kicked to smithereens. The working-class and black jazz grabbed culture and never let it go. Country kid's dreams of sophistication and luxury became city kid's dreams of fun; general issue, off the line, mass produced, kick up your heels fun. Spike Jones was spelled with an S and he really did know what was happening. People let go, almost completely.

Full skirts and wide serge pants, leather shoes shone, and the old folks flew, 78 revolutions to the minute, their hard black records all there was to face the world's great horror. These were the people that saved freedom. They did what they had to and all they got for it was fun. It was their only legacy that was never really lost. They danced and danced and when it was over they really did look like they had won the war. They came off the floor as a group and it was obvious these people were still friends.

They say for every boy and girl there's ....a white sport coat and a pink carnation.

The '50s slowed from 78 to 45 to 33 and a third rpm. Snooky Lanson , Teresa Brewer and the Singing Rage , Miss Patty Page. The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy had become a Doggie in the Window, and everyone was interested in its price. The fight for freedom became the thermonuclear threat to all that's good and holy. Where soldiers would once get ready to die; now children learned to crawl under their desks anticipating the day that the whole world would fry. It made for rather subdued times. It made people nervous about standing out and being different, so white people took back their music from the dark forces and bodies moved once again in measured steps, in 4 /4 time. Remember the Tennessee Waltz.

The dancers on the stage wore penny loafers, crinolines and sports jackets that pressed close, and held on hard. There was a lot to be afraid of: the red menace; pinkos and pink slips too, everything but pink carnations. They danced like someone was going to tap them on the shoulder. And when the music stopped, they came off the dance floor, quietly, quickly and still absolutely in control of their breathing.

Boom! Boom! Boom! The dance floor filled with a sea of bodies. Everybody split and it was the Wa Watusi . Jungle music! Black rules!!! Everybody let go and nobody touched. The bodies, and the energy of the bodies jammed together, took over as they took over everything. Middle-class city kids imagined they were poor and black and free just to be. Black people sang their songs for them, and taught them how to dance. Elvis shook his ass right up on stage. Freedom's just another word; head out on the highway. It's whatever comes your way. Amplified, all base -no trouble, the backbeat pounded once more in the old school gymnasium the way George and Laura remembered. And it was bye bye Miss American High.

And as they always did, the other generations in the room just watched the explosion of raw emotion, the flashing, jerking, electro-shock thrashing of middle-aged people who were dressed in feathers and blue jeans and tie- dyed bandanas. Just give me a head with a hair! And when they came off the stage it was absolutely obvious there was no way to stay forever young.

Then came disco! Hot sex, cool clothes and cooler attitudes. Style vanquished substance. Yippies became Yuppies and everyone learned that you had to strut your stuff. People danced together alone, they danced to be seen and admired, they danced because that was the time they were reaqlly alive. Hot bodies and cool times, looking for Mr. Goodbar. Fun was all that was left. It was diva time, no time to stop. Stayin ali i i i i ive! The dancers on the stage were the youngest people in the room and when they came off the stage they weren't very winded, they still carried the lovely flexibility of youth; they still carried the attitude and posture of their expensive, sexually expressive style.

Then it was over. Every generation had danced what they were. Every generation had stayed what they were.

George and Laura applauded with everyone else. When the noise died down and the music had yet to begin again, Laura asked George what this generation's dances would be.

"Slam dances, I suppose." he replied and they felt a sad uneasiness at the thought.

Dragged back to their classmates, it would only be an hour of small talk before the old stories became harder to recall and the fun and the laughter were forced from other times.

It was Laura who finally excused herself from the group, saying she had a long drive back to Toronto.

"You mean you're not going to hang around and trash some classrooms?" George asked. "Just think, this is the last night for the old school. Wouldn't it feel good to do a little payback?"

"Maybe you can walk me to my car?" she asked George, and that was how the two of them left together to a table of suspicious minds.

Inside his Porsche in the school parking lot, George looked at Laura and smiled. The silence of the warm September night enclosed them like an afterglow, a distant glow of streetlights, soft lights.

"Can I tempt you with an 88 Margeaux?" he asked pulling a bottle from the back of the Porsche.

"You once could have had me for less." she replied.

"It's funny a how great wine can affect a woman's libido." He was serious. "It's funny how little there is worth remembering from those times." he added, reflecting on their reunion with their classmates still in the gym.

"You can blow through thirty years of memories in an hour." she agreed.

"We're so much more interesting than those people." he said, pompously, self mockingly.

"So much more." she agreed.

"Let's go parking." he said mischievously.

She had no idea that he was serious. "Let's just drive for a while." she replied and got in his car.

He handed her the wine bottle and the corkscrew, turned the key and the Porsche echoed with its throaty voice.

In a few minutes they were sailing along empty country roads, fast and faster through the turns, the roar of the engine and the wind noise soothing their silence. Laura held the open bottle in her lap as they curved along the high escarpment looking out over the moonlight flooding the black fields and the shiny water of the incredibly long, beautiful freshwater bay. Silence. Laura had forgotten how empty the countryside was. She had forgotten the long drives, the summer beaches, the sweet air and nowhere to go, nowhere to be.

George loved driving the back roads because he could go fast and not worry about the police or the fact that his license was still under suspension. First-gear, it's all right. He was wishing Laura would pour him a drink. He was wishing the buzz he had when he had walked in the school was still there. He liked to drink and drive because he could do it so well that no one would ever suspect. He loved having finally recovered the recklessness of youth. In fact he was more reckless now than he was when he was young. He liked that.

Laura asked George if he was married, she hadn't noticed a ring.

"Three wives in twelve years taught me that marriage was beyond my pay grade. Three kids taught me the folly of mandatory procreation. But I'm finally free of support payments. I'm finally free of everyone's grudging expectations. I assume you've been far more successful at mating and breeding."

"I think I learned my lesson from my first divorce. I have a daughter and until last year she was great. Now it's like she invented rebellion, the day- glow hair, the attitude and the anger, and staying out to party until dawn. We're trying to out wait her."

"Somebody should tell you children are going to grow up and think you're scum. So what kind of lawyering does your husband do?" he asked, as he pushed the Porsche through a lovely tight bend.

"He's a lawyer. Nothing special, he does mostly low-end criminal stuff. He's good with Amanda. My work is usually so hectic and unpredictable; he's the one who's had to take up most of the slack." Talking about her life in small talk wasn't one of her favourite things. "So middle-aged and single is better?" she asked.

"Anything is better than serial marriage. I've been on my own since forty, and it's been a lot more interesting than anything that had to do with being a husband and Daddy. How old is your daughter?" he asked. He really wanted a drink. He kept looking over at the open wine bottle breathing in Laura's lap.

"She's sixteen going on terribly two." she replied, caustically.

The old Porsche sang down through the gears when George found an old road through some woods and turned the car slowly through tall juniper trees. Near the edge of the escarpment he turned off the engine and they looked out over the white and yellow and amber lights of houses and clusters of houses spaced far apart in the shimmering blackness.

George reached behind him and pulled two crystal glasses from the wicker box behind the seat where he had gotten the wine.

"So if I tell you about Gene, it won't it spoil the mood?" he asked. "Did Gene ever bring you here?"

"Yes. Did he tell you about this place?" she asked.

"Ya, he did." His voice fell. "He's pretty bad. He still has movement in his arms but he can't speak at all. He has this 50,000 dollar computer that reads his eye movements on an alphabet chart that prints to a screen or to a voice synthesizer that lets him speak like Stephen Hawking.

"Like Stephen Hawking? Does he look like Stephen Hawking?" she asked.

"No, he looks more like a waxy Fred Astaire. There's been a fair bit of wasting, although the family exercises him every day." George took the wine bottle and poured the dark shining liquid into the glass. The moonlight shone into it. The moonlight lit their faces and shone in their eyes. Laura drank quickly and the dry, mellow, deep richness of the wine struck her sweetly with one of the few pleasures that she completely understood.

"This is wonderful." she said, "Tell me about his wife.. and his children. He really has fourteen children? My God!" Her curiosity and sorrow caught in her chest like a corkscrew to her heart, like a feeling she just couldn't get down. And the feeling didn't change as she listened to George describe the circumstances of her old boyfriend's life. His wife was small, dark and had a blazing smile that got her almost anything she wanted. She was a combination of earth mother and capitalist dynamo. She was the driving force behind their lumber business, their antique business, their antique reproduction business, their car restoration business, the farm and the yearly camp that brought a dozen foster families to live and work together every summer.

"The second kid they adopted, Tranh, who's now almost forty, I guess, turned out to be a Wall Street Wizard. He started buying stocks in the early seventies and now the family has so much money it's disgusting. Every one of the kids is a multi-millionaire."

"On that old farm?! It's hard to believe." Laura remembered the farm and the huge brick house and the obvious lack of money. "What's his wife's name?"

"Sharon. Sherry baby. I don't think I've ever been her favorite person. It's funny because I like her, I really like her. She's still pretty good-looking for a farm wife. She has these big eyes that just lock on to you. She knows what she wants and there aren't many people who can resist her. She loves Gene like a she wolf, its fierce."

"Really. And they had fourteen children. Fourteen?"

"Actually it was sixteen but two of the kids died, one from an accident, the other because he had a lot of health problems from the time they adopted him. They adopted the kids over twenty-five years, and they were mostly rejects in the system. Most of them are grown but there are still a bunch living at home. It was interesting that they chose to adopt kids, and only older kids between five and ten, kids that would've probably never had a family if they hadn't been for them."

"Saint Eugene."

"Who would've guessed it?"

"When I knew him, all he ever cared about was that Gull Wing car. When I first started to date him, that's about all I cared about too." she said, amazed at what she had been hearing .

"Although he did have a pretty sweet body."

"I guess you would know." he teased.

"It was a long time ago."

"So how did it compare to mine?" he said with a smirk.

"What are you talking about?" She snapped her head to look at him.

"You took my virginity. The cast party for Westside story; you can't tell me that you don't remember?"

"Yes I can." She started to laugh. "I was such as slut. But I thought I was a more discrete slut."

"Thanks."

"You were Gene's best friend. We really did it?"

"I'm glad it was so memorable." She laughed at his feigned hurt feelings and then he laughed too. The chest ache inside her got bigger. "So how are they dealing with his dying? It must be a nightmare."

"Not really, I guess denial is the cornerstone of life's shitpile. They act like it's the same old Gene"

They both finished their glasses of wine and George refilled them to the brim.

"You obviously aren't a fanatic about drinking and driving."

"I'd have to quit my job, if I was." she replied.

"You should come and see Eugene. He'd love to see you."

Laura's eyes rolled back in her head at the thought. "I'd be sick." And the very thought of it moved the chest lump down into her gut.

"When I told him that I was going to the reunion he asked me to look for you." He could see she was getting very uncomfortable.

"There's no point to it. It's out of the question."

"Right." He let the silence of the evening fall between them and it was then that he realized he still wanted her. He was back at high school but with all he had learned since, so he knew he could make it more than memorable. She was fifty years old and in this place where she used to make out with Gene, he guessed she was starting to remember her teenage heat.

"I don't really sell suits for a living." he confessed. "I teach drama in high school in Rosedale."

"It must pay pretty well, fine threads, fine wine, classic car." She was intrigued at his style and amazed that he ended up being one of the enemy. "As I recall, you hated teachers."

"It pays well enough, once your child support payments are done. I still hate teachers. But it's what failed actors end up doing."

"You were an actor. I should have guessed. Why did I never hear about you?"

"Probably because I was a failed actor in L.A. Just think, you could have been my agent."

"That would have been good." she sighed and focused on her wine. "I don't really want to share life stories. I'd like to finish my wine and get back. I do have a long drive."

"So what made you give up your old slutty ways? I suppose that at your age it's counterproductive."

"What do you mean counterproductive? It's just difficult, tacky. It's hard enough to keep a relationship going without that kind of a distraction, not to mention the time. There's never any time."

"Once a woman passes a certain age men are pretty nervous about what comes in the package with sex. Young women have the real power to blind side a man because men think that sex is just sex when you're young, just like it was for them. One of the things I do is give a little course to certain exceptional young women to teach them how to have power over men."

"And the fee for this course would be?"

"Just the joy in the teaching." he said, his eyes sparkling .

"And this joyful teaching includes some sexual contact? These wouldn't be your students I'm hoping."

"No, that would be stupid. I've never given the course to anyone before they graduate. It's usually the summer following, and it's all very consensual, usually the girls come with a reference from a previous graduate. I insist that the first month of the course is nothing but talk."

"Well that should teach them what men are like." she teased.

"I'm sure you figured it all out in your twenties, but it would have saved you a whole lot of grief and got you a whole lot further in life if you'd had my course when you graduated from high school."

"What is it that someone like you could have taught me all those many many years ago, to save me such grief and offer me such opportunity?" She was almost angry. George was almost sure then that he had her.

"When woman are young they don't realize that power over men comes with understanding how much men are dependent on their imaginations. A man thinks of sex through his whole life about once every thirty seconds. And when you think of how little real sexual content there is in life, it means that a woman who understands how to manipulate imaginary sexual content can pretty much control any man. It's not what you do that inspires a man's imagination, it's what you might do, and more to the point, it's what you just might want him to do. What I offer a young woman is the power to inflame a man's imagination until it's white hot. Every man wants a beautiful woman's approval. Every man wants a beautiful woman to tell him what to do. Surely you know that as well as anyone."

Now she was intrigued. Men were not supposed to know those kind of secrets.

She took the last of the wine and filled her glass. She asked him to describe this so-called course. He was more than glad to do that.

"There are three great powers in the world: money, guns and imagination. Imagination is by far the most powerful. It can get people to do things money and guns can't begin to do. And those who control people's imaginations will eventually control the money and the guns anyway. Some men are born knowing the power of the imagination, but they are the rare exception. It usually takes a woman to know what to do with it. It takes a woman to know what to ask a man to do. The few women who know it are the ones who control the world."

With the wine and the atmosphere, she wasn't really sure that he wasn't right. What she was sure of was the effect of what he was saying would have on an ambitious, beautiful young woman, as she had been once, long ago

"You should write a book, like The Rules. If you can do this as a course, you'd have a best-seller for sure."

"And I could trot out a whole lot of powerful, well placed, beautiful graduates to take on the talk-show circuit, to give short glowing references"

"That would be a problem, if you had a sense of honor. That would make you the exception among writers. But I want to know more about the particulars of this course. Just what do you do for them and what do they do for you?" she asked seriously.

"If we open another bottle of wine." he said and reached into the wicker basket. He uncorked the wine and set it to breathe beside them. "Just like you, my ladies all first thought that what I was after was just getting in their pants, like every other man. They learned it was inevitably true but what was different with me was that I was not only offering to give them power, I was insisting that they be willing to take it and use it and understand it or there would really be no point to the sex."

"The line of the century." Laura said as she poured herself another glass of wine.

"It's only a line if it's bullshit. I really don't think I'd be boasting, if I said I never had an unsatisfied student. In fact most of the sex I get outside of the course is with woman who come back to see me. And I know it is not for the sex that they really come back, it's because power is lonely. Powerful women are usually quite lonely, wouldn't you say?"

"So tell me the specifics of this course." She wanted to know.

"Mostly, the course is just talk. The first thing I ask a woman is which two phrases can control any man. I don't think even you know the answer to that." He could see that she had no idea of an answer. He could see she was waiting for his. "The two phrases are: I really think you can do that, and I really hoped you would do better than that." Laura stared at him, her condescension and skepticism fallen from her eyes. He went on. "A man's imagination has two poles: pleasing a woman and disappointing a woman. Those two poles are the carrot and the stick any woman can use to draw and to drive a man's imagination. And a woman who can drive a man's imagination can make a man go anywhere and do anything she chooses. In this world, that is real power, in some cases, absolute power. The most interesting thing about a man's sexual imagination is that it's not the sex, stupid; it's about wanting to have someone wanting the sex. What could happen is far more exciting than what does. That's what men think about when they think about sex all those innumerable times in the day. A woman who knows that can do anything she wants with a man. The first lesson in the course is learning many ways to say' I think what you're doing is making me excited', the second lesson is learning many ways to say' I hoped you could do it better than that.'"

"It's insidious. You're betraying your gender, you realize? So what's the next lesson?"

George sipped his wine and fixed his seat so it reclined and he was more comfortable. Laura had to sit up and turn to look at him as he talked.

"As I said, the first month is mostly just talking. I teach a woman to explore her imagination, and what's more important, to learn to express it out loud. Most people are uncomfortable with expressing themselves sexually. But what they're even more uncomfortable doing is asking someone else to express themselves sexually. First we learn to imagine what we want, then we learn how to ask for it. Do you still know how to imagine?" he asked Laura.

"Sure I do. Go on."

"Then you must know how to ask for what you imagine?" he pursued.

"Let's leave me out of this. I thought you'd give a better description of this course than that."

"You're a natural. Your husband must live at your feet." he teased.

"Right. Just where he belongs."

"From the imagining we move to watching. We explore videos. I let them come to my apartment when I'm not there and look through my collection of real fine porn. They have to watch and remember, and when I come home they have to tell what they saw and how they would change it, and what they would imagine they would like to do. It's really just an improvisational acting course. An example, what would you want to be wearing and how would you like it done if you were to ask me to undress you. Think about the timing, the order, if and how you'd like to be touched. Think of your eyes and your body. Think of your breathing and how it would rise and fall. "

"You're Svengali! This is almost hypnotic. At least when you have had enough wine." She wanted to break his rhythm. She could feel the rise in the sexual energy enclosed in the little sports car.

"You have no time for an imagination. Admit it!" George demanded. "This is the first time that you talked about sex and felt anything for a very long time. Why don't you lie back and I'll fire your imagination with only one single question." He let her think about it and then went on," And I won't move or touch you. " He reached around her and she let him fold back the car seat so that she was looking up through the back window at the white explosion of stars.

"So what's the one question?" she asked softly.

"I want you to silently imagine what you'd have me do in this situation if we were just actors and you were directing your own script?"

He was looking down into her lily still eyes and he bent down and kissed her, just as she expected he would. She let him. She liked it. Her mouth turned to mercury, to geranium petals. Desire to nipples, desire, fluttering desire. He sat back and looked at her.

"When was the last time you remember a great kiss?" he asked, gently.

"You know how to hurt and excite at the same time, don't you?"

"It's my life." He moved to kiss her again and she held him off gently. Softly his voice followed his fingers." Then close your eyes and imagine. Imagine what you would want to have happen. Imagine what you'd want me to do. Imagine the feelings. Imagine the details. Anything possible, anything you'd like. It's your own sweet silent secret." He sat back in his chair and gave her the time and the silence to let herself go.

She knew that he wanted to connect her imagination to his reality. She knew she could make this real. Yes or no. Do or don't. Go home or go on. It was like being young again. The silence stretched through the sky: the constellation of lust; the constellation of trust; the constellations of youth and middle-age; the constellation of novelty; and the great black hole of betrayal.

"Stop thinking. Imagine. It's not anything you even have to do or say." The wine and the starlight and his voice let her relax, and after a moment, a long awkward moment, she did imagine. A seam of light opened above her. She saw a shooting star that night and remembered him. The silence in the erotic tension reached into her diaphragm, changed her breathing, she loved the idea of directing. Finally, after five long minutes she could actually feel her heart pounding. She'd played out the scene in her mind. Do it. Do it. Do it! She'd choose only one small part of it. She'd do it. She sat up and leaned forward and kissed George's temple and spoke in a whisper.

"I only want to feel the tip your tongue." She reached for the door handle and got out of the car. He saw her body lay back and cover the window that followed the gentle curve that was the back of the Porsche. He felt her weight settle back and depress the springs of the under carriage. He decided to let her wait. George had learned from acting that timing was everything, and the big secret of timing was knowing just how long to let people wait. For her it would be long enough to absorb the juniper smell and the starlight but not long enough so she started to wonder what he was doing.

He opened the light aluminum door of the Porsche and walked back to where she had leaned back over the curved back of the car. Her blond hair was flooded with moonlight on the black cherry darkness of the gleaming paint. Her eyes were closed, her expensive sandals dug into the ground at her heels. He kneeled down and reached up under her skirt and pushed her onto the roof, his hands tight on her long lovely thighs. The white shot silk skirt flowed over her legs as the license plate on the back of the car appeared between then, 'Yours to Discover'. She imagined the view through the window beneath her. She was a great director.

Her silk underwear came down her legs and he left them dangling from one foot. Timing, waiting. She was waiting for more. Only the tip of his tongue. More.

It was then that he touched her most sensitive gear. Now more.

She felt his breath and then the wet touch and then her legs rose into the stars. Like Hoar Frost dissolving, her thoughts and her flesh melted to his touch. Slowly, delicately, patiently, cool became hot which then became wet and wetter. And more!

It was like years melting away. It was like tears falling on his tongue. Where she had been young and lovely, it was young and lovely again. More!

And true to his word and her direction, it was only the tip of his tongue. And when she couldn't help it, her voice rose into her throat in a soft moan that rose in the silence, rose in her breathing, rose in her blood, wet heavy petals fluttering in the cool night air.

And then he pulled away and waited. He was so good. It was so good. It had been so long! Only the tip! Please, more!

Once again, with perfect timing, the tip of his tongue and the pearl in the oil met with a long static charge. And her voice rose slowly and slowly and she was dissolved, and out of the pool of her deep diaphragm everything exploded and she screamed and she screamed where finally no one could hear, musky and husky and low.

More! And more! And more!

Move over Molly Bloom!

Her legs fell out of the stars and George let her skirt fall back down her legs and left her lying there, draped down the roof of the car. He left her alone so she would remember. He left her alone so she'd have to come to him. He had walked to the edge of the cliff and waited, knowing she would eventually be dealing with the reality of finding and pulling on her drawers. He was surprised at how long it took her to join him. He was actually about to go back to the car where there was a flask of single malt Scotch he was really starting to need.

He cut off any qualifying remarks she might make by making them for her. "I know this probably wasn't a good idea. I know this probably won't happen again. I know that was very nice but, I know we should probably be going. Is there anything else that I left out?"

"Not a thing. Except it was a little better than nice." He took her hand when she said it, and in a way, that was even better than better than nice

"We could make this a habit." he said after a moment.

"In another thirty years, we should be so lucky." And she took back her hand and walked to the car. There was a click and the little soft boom of the door closing, and George stayed for a minute while they let each other wait. He wanted a drink.

She'd put back her seat until it was fully reclined and she was staring through the back window at the stars. George found his flask in the wicker basket and the taste of the Scotch was mellow and strong and real.

It was past midnight when they slid out onto the black empty roads. A strange distance and intimacy lay between them as Laura watched the stars through the back window, a touch of guilt with the lovely mix of fine wine and sexual release. She watched him drinking from a small silver flask and was amazed to be where she was. She thought that her wild days were long behind her, but she couldn't help but admit to herself that he gave her a rush, a quiet rush like the wind sliding over them outside.

Both of them felt it, even though neither could express it, that they weren't yet finished with each other. Unconsciously, what they felt was the worst thing about middle-age, the fact that no one any longer was really interested in knowing who you are. They thought they were interested. They mistook the novelty and the physical intensity and the drama of connecting for the personal interest that used to come with all that.

"Do you like phone sex?" he asked.

"I don't plan on seeing you again. It makes me nervous that you're thinking of calling." She didn't like having to deal with romantic possibilities. She wanted to have the moment and then let it go.

"Of course. Busy lady. We really don't have anything in common except exceptional imaginations. I only asked because it just seemed like such a waste, imagination wise." Sex had its doors and sex had its windows. They had walked through a door and looked back out a window. It took a long time to find the latches and locks to keep someone out once they had come inside.

"So do you ever go out with women your own age?" she asked, changing the subject.

"No, but you're probably the exception that would prove the rule. Aside from the obvious reasons, I usually prefer young women. The difference between young and mature women is that even the most perceptive young woman has no real sense of perspective. Most men get tired of being seen in perspective. With you, I find it a refreshing change. Besides, I'd like to think that this time you'll remember me."

"I'll remember you. And I'm sure you'll remember me." The wine had really loosened her tongue. "You know who you are? You're the wizard of Oz. Behind all the special effects: the car, the cologne, the clothes and the wine is just a guy selling snake oil." His ego was the dead bolt she meant to throw in the door.

"I thought it was you that makes her living flogging people to the public?"

She ignored his cut. "You won't forget tonight and you won't see me again because a man never forgets a woman who knows how to call his bluff. And a man never knows what to do when she's done it. What do you think, Georgie?" And from the moment on, whenever they were alone she always called him Georgie.

"I think it's you that's bluffing." He was chuckling. He wanted to look condescending and superior. He did. "Should I give Eugene you're regards?" he asked, "I'm staying there tonight." She was annoyed at his laugh.

"I'd rather you didn't. What would be the point?"

"To send a greeting to an old dying boyfriend." and he said it with none of the acid that was in the words.

When they turned into the parking lot of the old high school, Laura's car was all-alone in the darkness. George pulled up beside the driver's door and shut off the Porsche. Silence. She sat up and looked at him. A handshake was foolish; a kiss just wasn't going to happen.

"I'll let you put up the seat, if it's all right?" she said softly.

He didn't answer her question. "Remember it's not what happened, it's what could have happened." he said, "Good night."

"Good night Georgie." She opened the door and slid her long legs out and she rose and left him there, the door gently slamming behind her.

George watched Laura get in her four year old black BMW, bring it to life and spray gravel as she tore quickly away.

### Chapter 2

'It's not the sex,' she knew only too well. It wasn't the details of her minor adultery that she thought about. Like he said, it was the sexual tension that came out of her imagination, images of what could have gone on in ' the abbreviated version of 'The Course' that still glowed in her loins. In her imagination he had put her in the position of a young, beautiful woman wanting to learn how to please, wanting to learn how to ask for it as well, wanting to learn power over men. Long ago she had learned to use the power of her beauty, learned to indulge in its benefits. And it was true that the erotic tension of possibility was something few men could resist. It's not what happens; it's what could happen that counts.

The reunion took Laura back to places she remembered that gave time meaning in her life: the hallways, the classrooms, the smells and the colors that were so alive, so much a part of the unconscious reality of her youth. It was especially true of the parking spot where she and Eugene had sat on the wide door ledge under the open Gull Wing door and talked and kissed and touched each other as they looked out over the starlit bay perpetually steeped in the gin smell of Juniper. It was not what had happened, but what could have happened that came back to her with such mixed feelings. The men you leave mean as much as the men you choose. Memory was a two sided gaff that had hooked hard into her heart; regret on one side, relief on the other, a gaff slashing still water for small, tiny, tender fishes to fry. Eugene had been small fry, a farm boy with an inexplicably exotic car.

She wondered what would have happened if she had spent the last year of high school with George instead of Eugene. But he had given no indication then of the exciting imagination he now obviously possessed. She had remembered Eugene with a soft nostalgia, now she remembered George with serious interest, and still unconscious intent. She remembered he was the first to grow long hair; the first one to talk back to teachers like it was his right to do. He was the first one who didn't act like she was sexually terrifying. She remembered the cast party. She was amazed at how many of the details she could recall, because she had been very drunk that night. She was amazed to learn, after all of these years, that she had taken George's virginity.

Having done this much, would there be more? 'Should there be, do I want there to be even more? More of what? More of what could have happened.' All those years later, the same questions remained. The thrill of life was in the strike and the battle: one man, one woman; people and things escaped or were landed, it was always a battle, the story of a woman and a fish. "Will he call me?" "Should I call back?" "What is it he wants?" "What is it I want from him?" Questions of youth still applied. The gaff of her memory was something she could feel inside her as she drove the two and half hours home. Wine, sex, starlight and memory ran before her on the dark highway as she pressed harder on the accelerator. Her heart pounded when she crested a hill and saw the blazing, flashing red lights of a police cruiser that had pulled over a speeding car that had been ahead of her. She slowed down and the gaff of memory cut closer reaching ahead in time for her husband Ian and her daughter Amanda.

Her husband, Ian, was pleasantly, maddeningly predictable, so ready to work so hard to please her and to please his daughter. He pleased them constantly without satisfying either one of their needs. She thought of his familiar touch in the dark, his hand always reaching first for her thigh. Marriage was forgetting to remember what once was its fire. Marriage was constraint made flesh.

Her daughter was ears in the darkness, ears she had come to fear she was offending or worse. She couldn't remember the last time she had let herself go and screamed unconstrained, soft moans rising to shattering gasps. Amanda the climax killer. Sex used to be the one thing she and Ian could count on.

'Ian, my husband, Amanda my daughter, I can see where they're sleeping deep in the city.' And then she remembered what she would find in the morning: suppressed anger and cool civility, the fingernails of unwanted attention raking everyone's skin. Always her asking... 'We're the only ones on this island, are we going agree on some rules?' 'Who's in charge here, her or us?'

'Why are you always the good guy?' 'Why does she always have a problem with me and never you?' A family was one of those choices in life that demanded more and more attention that resulted in less and less control

The thought of the hard mousse in Amanda's venal red hair hit Laura like the glare of on-coming headlights that made her tighten her grip on the steering wheel. Sixteen and sexually active; like mother, like daughter. With permission came prevention and her absolute insistence that she see her daughter swallow her contraceptive pill every morning at breakfast. There would be no unwanted pregnancies; like mother like daughter no more. Misty watercolor memories of cold middle class reality.

She pulled her mind away from her life and the image was once again George. Imagining phone sex, imagining what she would want to imagine him doing, imagining that she wanted him to give her 'The Course'. What was 'The Course'? What would be its course? Maybe phone sex would be just auditing the course, no grade, no credit. It really wouldn't count.

"God he was sexy." she moaned out loud, remembering the curled tongue in the moonlight, she could still feel how it had touched her. The embers of middle-aged desire dropped like a lit cigarette in her lap. She almost felt like she had to reach for it. 'It's not about the sex, Right.'

The empty lanes multiplied, express and collector lanes wove themselves among tall thin towers of light. When she made her exit she was amazed that she felt so young and alive. She knew it wouldn't be many minutes before she would crawl in beside her sleeping husband and wonder if her daughter had come home.

Would he call or wouldn't he? That was the question. She expected he would. But then again, she had slammed the bolt of his ego pretty hard. He had young, beautiful girls. Would she, would he compare? Then with the big wind slam of a transport passing, a terrible question hit her, what if it was all just an act? What if George was having her on, an actor's improvisation meant to get him laid? It didn't matter. She was home, the condo by the lake overlooking an island, and the coloured lights of a perpetual fall.

The underground parking door ratcheted regularly as it opened in front of her.

The whump of the car door closing echoed emptily in the half-light, the only sounds were her sandals walking on cement and her keys jingling in her hands. Her hand pulled open a big steel door and it closed with the big breathless gasp of a sleeping giant. She quickly reached the elevator and rattling cables ran while she stood helplessly waiting for what was to come.

Her door key...... her impeccable home, her door opened and closed with simple hard clicks, like two ticks of a clock.

Amanda was in the big sunken living room sofa wearing only a long cotton nightshirt that said, No Roots. She wore headphones for the CD walk man that lay on her stomach, her legs quivering to the music in her head.

Mother and daughter locked eyes at last and Laura's heart jumped because of her guilt, because she was worried that what she was feeling, what she had been doing would actually show. Pure role reversal. Laura forced a smile as Amanda stared back at her and talked over the music in her head.

"This is late, even for you." said Amanda, ignoring her mother's smile.

"You're not the only one that can pull in past four." she replied.

For a mother and a teenage daughter, life was always a weigh-in where both tried to gain some psychic advantage for the brawl that was scheduled to come only too soon.

"I've been home three hours." Amanda replied. "So where have you been?"

Laura didn't want to talk. "I saw a bunch of old people at my high school reunion. Now I just want to go to bed." she said flatly and went down the hall to her en-suite bathroom.

The feel of cold water that had made her face bare clung in her hands as she walked into the bedroom where Ian slept.

Sleeping so still, he seemed to be hardly breathing at all as she looked as him there, a soft middle-aged man with a sharp widow's peak. It's not what happened. It's what could have happened. Ian. He didn't move as she slid in beside him where she tried to sleep with her new secrets, her memories and the embers of desire that had fallen into her lap. Imagination wasn't funny. But it certainly was interesting.

Morning was always late on Sunday. Amanda slept late after Saturday parties. Laura always caught up on sleep that she usually needed from the middle of the week. Ian was the only one alive.

He jogged early, showered, made great coffee and sprawled with a big stack of newspapers. Finally, near eleven Laura came out of the kitchen cuddling a coffee, wearing a big terry cloth bathrobe and looking like she needed more sleep. That was the way she usually looked on Sunday. Ian looked up at Laura and saw by her face that he should keep his distance and keep small talk to a minimum. Warning! Don't expect me to react or to respond with anything but need to know. He knew he should at least ask about the reunion in a general way, not to press, not to expect details quite yet.

"So was the reunion good for you?" he asked.

The unintended double meaning slipped down Laura's throat like a piece of ice that had appeared unexpectedly in her coffee.

"It was kind of good. Middle-aged and old isn't pretty."

"You were the exception that proved the rule." Ian replied cheerfully.

Laura didn't reply to the compliment and she didn't know why she did it, but after a slow sip of coffee, she told Ian about Eugene and his dying and his many adopted children and his fierce capitalist wife and that they were all worth millions and that Eugene still had the beautiful Mercedes Gull Wing Coupe.

"A Gull Wing Coupe, my God!"

Laura was shocked that the only thing he reacted to in her long movie of the week trailer was the car.

Amanda came in carrying a coffee. She was dressed in the same long nightshirt and barely looked at her parents as she slid into a big leather armchair, picked up a remote and selected some music to play. Mercifully for her parents, neither the song nor the volume was unendurable. Ian looked between his dour faced ladies and wondered how long before the first finger nails began sliding over slate.

"So did you see any old boyfriend's at this high school reunion?" Amanda asked her mother, adding that she couldn't imagine her mother ever being young. The single fingernail didn't faze Laura.

"The only old boyfriend I remember is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease." Laura replied.

"Bummer. What did you say to him?" Was he like in a chair like Stephen Hawking?"

"No, I just heard it from one of his friends. He wasn't there."

"Well, that was a break." Amanda seemed seriously relieved for her mother. The idea that Eugene would be there in a chair had never occurred to her. She doubled her daughter's relief.

"So I wanted to talk to you two about what we eat and don't eat around here." Amanda began, "Seeing as we eat out and order in so much, I want to pass on dinner from now on. I want to get my own food from now on, if it's O.K.?"

"You've never even scrambled an egg, how do you plan to do this?" Laura replied.

"I plan to eat salads and eat stuff that doesn't come in a Styrofoam box." she shot back.

Laura decided she wasn't going to go for the bait. "Suit yourself; you could probably afford to lose a little weight." She rolled her eyes when she saw her daughter had taken her seriously. "You must be pushing a size four at least."

Ian cut in quickly before the flash powder hit the stored munitions. "You have to promise me that you'll take your vitamin supplements and you'll make an effort to eat regularly."

"Do I have to sign a contract, or what? So, I can do it?"

"So when don't you do whatever you want?" her mother asked wistfully.

"Like most of the time." Amanda shot back.

"It only feels like that because we worry about you." said Ian, "You wouldn't want us not to worry about you? That would mean we didn't care what happened in your life."

"You can worry all you want; I just don't want you living my life."

"Honey, we just don't have the time." added Laura

"Right." And they all were uncomfortable with the fact that what Laura had said was too true.

That Sunday afternoon was typical for the McCalls. Ian went to boomer basketball at the YMCA, Amanda cocooned in her room with her phone and her stereo and her computer chat room. That Sunday Laura called her friend and sometimes analyst, Ann Marie, to confirm their bimonthly walk in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery.

She had met Ann Marie George more than sixteen years before, when they were both in prenatal classes. Ann Marie had been ten years older than Laura, having her first baby at forty- four.

Time had accelerated more for Ann Marie than Laura. Having a sixteen your old was a lot harder at sixty than fifty. Her professional role as a psychologist was often reversed with Laura as she had raised a child that had been far more difficult than Amanda, at least until the last year. A native woman, a single mother, a doctor of psychology, a wild, funny lady, she had bonded with the golden white woman Laura as they had huffed and puffed in simulated labor all those many years before. They were both sure then that they would be lousy mothers. Until the last year only Ann Marie was sure it was true.

Once every two months, unless there was an emotional crisis, they met to complain and commiserate about motherhood, men and work. Ann Marie called the two of them, The Power Sisters. The imaginary badges that they awarded one another were worn secretly on their sleeves, only they could see them; only they appreciated what it took to earn them. The gross male personal habit endurance badge was awarded with great regularity. The perfect crushing one-liner badge was also quite common. Far less common was the drop dead gorgeous badge that was awarded only for formal occasions where the competition really mattered. But the most common award was the incomparable suffering motherhood badge. Ann Marie had demanded her due almost every time the two of them met since her daughter Megan was four.

Ann Marie had called their walks Cemetery therapy, the only place a body could feel truly alive. Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto was famous for its famous dead folk. It was also big and quiet and lovely in the rain and the snow and the sun, among the trees and the flowers and head stones carved with the hard-edged ironies of life.

It was especially beautiful that day as the trees were flushed with the first brilliant colors of fall. The two friends embraced and, as always, they looked into each other's eyes for the tell- tale signs of anxiety and stress. It was the way they decided who got to talk first. But this week Ann Marie saw an unusual spark in Laura's liquid blue eyes.

"So what have you been up to? You've got secrets, I can tell."

Laura was amazed and less than pleased that it showed.

"I had Bill Clinton sex. Only I was the Commander in Chief." Laura confessed with a grin.

"With who? Where? What's going on?" Ann Marie was shocked and excited and strangely pleased that her adulterously challenged friend finally had some dirt to sift. It was Ann Marie who had had the long series of lovers of various durations and levels of commitment. All right or all wrong, bitter and sweet or both, filled with high hope and unavoidable destiny, she had shared her relationships and her feelings about them with Laura as she had with no other friend. Now the roles were reversed and it was she who would get to watch the clash of possibility with inevitable heartache. A friend is never a friend more than when they are confessing a weakness.

Laura confessed, in detail.

When the confession was done they had walked for half an hour and Laura was secretly satisfied that the story she had to tell was easily as exciting as anything Ann Marie had ever shared with her. 'The Course', the moon light, the sexual control of a willing man with such an exciting imagination was almost as exciting to tell about as it was to experience.

"I can't believe this is you. I can understand it, but I'm still impressed."

Laura did not know how to take the compliment, if that's what it was. "What makes you think that I couldn't cheat?" she asked.

"Nothing except the fact that you haven't. With all your opportunities, this must have been special."

"It was exciting, but I wouldn't call it special. He's a failed actor for God's sake."

"There is that." Ann Marie agreed.

Then they talked about guilt and how hard it was to muster. They both agreed that some situations involved special circumstances where codes of behavior were hard to enforce or even remember. Ann Marie loved special circumstances. Adultery depended on special circumstances.

Laura told her friend everything that had happened but nothing of what had gone through her mind as she lay in the car and then above it, indulging her imagination, like Molly Bloom, in a way she hadn't done since before her first marriage.

Ann Marie's final pronouncement was that she always thought Laura was immune to her hormones and even to the inevitable curiosity that came from meeting countless interesting men.

"I was curious, but yellow." Laura replied.

"No longer yellow, but still curious I'll bet?" Ann Marie teased.

"Still curious, but a very pale yellow." she replied. Laura always imagined herself as being racked by indecision and doubt even though she covered it impeccably.

"Do you ever think of old lovers, things that you did, things that you could have done, but didn't?" Laura asked.

"Rarely, it's hard enough living in present relationships without trying to replay old dead ones. Besides, if you start thinking about old lovers, it's dangerous. It's just too easy to pick up a phone. So was it a onetime thing or are you going to see him again?" From what Laura had said, Ann Marie knew that regardless of what her friend was about to say to her, she was almost certain there would be a lot more to tell.

"He didn't even ask for my number." Laura said, dismissing the possibility.

"You're not that hard to find. If he wants to find you, he will."

Laura didn't reply and wondered whether she hoped or feared that her friend was right.

They walked slowly through the aged crimson oaks, the blazing red burning bushes and the butter yellow sugar maples. One maple shed a leaf that drifted by Laura's face so she had to only reach out to take it from the air. She did. It was kid- leather soft. In a day it would be dry and brittle and stay for a long time on the dashboard of her car.

"Just don't forget," Ann Marie said to her friend, "When someone tells you it's not about the sex, it's about the sex."

"It really isn't about the sex." Laura insisted, but she was less and less sure of that the more she talked.

Red and black granite monuments all around them had names and dates cut with absolute perfection, cold perfect monoliths that marked the end of all relationships, all the worrying and all the possibilities that even the most extraordinary people could imagine. The friends parted with a hug that was closer and longer than usual. Laura felt like she was being sent off to school: the school for scandal, the school of hard knocks, where she wondered if she would be taking, 'The Course'.

Sunday night was quiet with Amanda still in her room with her salad and bagel and her phone network from school. Laura and Ian ate at the local Italian restaurant where they stoked up on red wine and carbohydrates, gearing up for work the following day. Ian listened attentively as Laura went through her checklists of things to do and people to see that were the highlights of the following day: who was hard, who was easy; who was accessible and who was not. People who were hard to reach were bad people, people who were difficult were worse. Ian helped her in this way every week, letting her organize her mind and settle her preliminary anxieties.

Egos needed stroking, writers and agents needed mothering attention that sometimes made her daughter seem to be the essence of accommodation and good cheer. The phone, the fax, the email you give and the email you get, her life was like her daughter's in more ways than she would ever imagine or admit. When Ian saw her starting to rise through the gears of work anxiety, he deftly changed the subject to the high school reunion.

She told a completely different version of the previous night than she had that afternoon with her friend. Even the drive in the moonlight was best edited out; even though she knew she could have told him that part without raising any suspicion. It was only a few years after they married when they were so busy and so over their initial emotional territorial skirmishes that being faithful became second-nature, trust became the cord on the pot roast, the tie that binds.

Laura talked about the evening and the people she met before George had come along. She gave an ironic analysis of old friends like Jo Anne and Sally and casual acquaintances that had been gathered at the table in the gym. She described the generations dancing, focusing on the way people had dressed and the way bodies faded and shrank after first swelling and getting soft. Swollen from their own self-indulgence, careless of style and fashion, being at the center of such a mass of ordinary people was not something she could describe as pleasant. She had always insisted that Ian stay in shape just as she had always expected it of herself. Then she told as much as she knew about Eugene because she knew that Ian would be interested in people with such an unusual lifestyle, unusual in that it seemed to have led to wealth where it was so unlikely to expect it. Rural and rich and sixteen children did not add up at all. Ian seemed to really regret the fact that he was unlikely to ever learn more about Eugene's family.

"I can't even stand' disease of the week' movies, much less one that has an old boyfriend actually dying in it."

"I can see how you feel." Ian replied and then added, "They'd have to be rich if they had to buy clothes and send that many kids to college. The thing that I find most curious is that you say they bring a half a dozen foster families to live with them in the summer. How do they feed everybody? Where does everyone sleep? Aren't you intrigued?"

"I'm more intrigued by how anyone ever has a sense of privacy with all those people running around." Laura replied. Then she changed the subject to their usual discussion that deconstructed Amanda's mood swings.

Until Amanda was a teenager, Ian, and to a lesser degree, Laura had managed to give her quality time: trips to museums and galleries, rock concerts and plays and even the occasional Blue Jay baseball game. All that stopped in the last year because of Amanda's rebellion and the influence of friends that were even less than working-class. Her friends and the parents of her friends were the kind of people that Ian often ended up defending on charges of domestic abuse, drunk driving or worse. Living in the bowels of the big city carried the serious risk of infection and parasites. Their daughter seemed to have no fear of any of the identifiable social diseases typical of the underclass. They were afraid for her much of the time.

The Amanda report for the week was good and with every good report came some tenuous hope that they were getting over the rebellion that could and would ruin her life if it went on too long. This week was hopeful. She had been in before midnight every night of the week. She had generally replied when spoken to. When Ian reported that he had actually seen her smile, they raised a toast to their good fortune and finished the last of the wine. At home their good fortune was short-lived because Amanda had gone out on Sunday night without leaving a note, without having asked for permission to go.

In bed it was Laura who reached for Ian and surprised him when she enthusiastically led him through a rather operatic release. Then they both slept like babies.

Work was wild that week for Laura. Even early mornings when she was usually fresh from her work out and shower, Laura found email messages piled up in her computer. Her work was basically negotiating favors: either convincing someone you are doing a favor for them; or convincing someone that you'd be ever grateful for a favor you are asking them to do for you. To the messages that sounded angry or upset she immediately called back personally to soothe anxieties or ruffled feathers. Such feelings could harden into anger and make it more certain that what Laura was wanting to get off the ground would be much more difficult to fly.

Usually lunch was the shmooze of the day and if she could arrange it, it was in her favorite pub The Big Bull where publicity types and CBC people gathered to see and be seen, to smile and be smiled at, to touch base or make a connection, to pick up the buzz that would turn to honey. The working Laura knew how to work a room with the best of them: she could pump information and spread interesting gossip; she could keep track of relationships and social occasions and figure out how they connected to her best advantage. The Canadian art scene had evolved from a tight high school clique to a burgeoning network that was fed by new corporate money. Her book tours and author promotions were a tiny corner of what was going on. She stayed connected to as much as she could because it made doing her job so much easier.

Tuesday lunch was personal and professional; the personal that was the political that eventually buttered her bread. It was her weekly lunch with her friend David Orser who was a senior editor at the biggest publishing house in town. They had known each other when neither of them was connected to anything. The looked out for each other and gave each other the best hard-nosed opinions they could muster. They were friends who connected almost entirely through the way they made a living. They gossiped and joked and caught up on current times and circumstances. She called him David Orser and he called her Babe, which he told her he meant on a whole lot of levels. The latest one was a movie about a talking pig. They had agreed that their lunches would be a demilitarized zone where they turned off pagers and cell phones and ate salads and appetizers and drank dry Russian vodka martinis because it was only once a week.

Sometimes lunch went on for almost two hours, the two them enjoying the fact that they trusted each other so much that no defensive positioning was required. Their friendship was sweet like the little white onion sitting at the bottom of the funnel shaped cocktail glass. And this Tuesday was more than a two-hour lunch, the turning bubbles of gossip had risen in her blood and when the kicker at the bottom of the fourth glass hit her she started to vent on her life: no time, no energy, not enough sex, not enough fun, and an out of control daughter who played her like a big bass drum.

"You know the worst thing of all, the thing that really sucks is that the future is either absolutely unpredictable or is going to be absolutely and crushingly the same." She never slurred. She was proud of that. Only David Orser got to hear this kind of talk. Only David Orser understood.

"You are personally and professionally just too soft." he replied sympathetically.

"Take that back!" She raised her voice in mock indignation and outrage, then sat back and gave David Orser a smile that came from the blue depth of her eyes. He smiled back. And then he did it. He asked her to do him a favor, just like anyone else. She was helpless to say no and they both knew it, and it left a sad little pang in her heart to hear him finally asking. The unspoken rule had always been not to ask for work favours.

"Anthony Holtz has his collected works coming out in a month. If I begged and begged and promised to never ask you for anything again as long I live, would you do his publicity and book tour? Nobody in the office will do it. He makes everybody cry, including me. Please! I'll never ask for anything ever again."

Anthony Holtz was the aging bad boy poet of Canadian letters, a drunk and a womanizer with a vicious tongue that friends and lovers and strangers all knew to fear.

"Can't I slay the Minotaur instead? You're just not serious." Then she saw and knew that he was absolutely serious. "My God, he even makes interviewers cry. Do they still call him Anthony Adverse?"

"It won't be so bad. He's been on the wagon for nearly a year. He's given up smoking. I talked to him this morning and it was almost, I swear, almost a pleasant exchange. If there's anyone who can handle him, it's you. Please, because you love me so."

He always knew how to hit her mothering buttons, and if she somehow survived the experience, people would know about it. And if Anthony Holtz had any of his old madness inside him she would also be talked about extensively. She took the job.

Laura thought that writers were often emotionally arrested teenagers: they needed the same bribes and threats and stroking to get through the brittle eggshell of their egos. It worked about as well and as often as it did with a petulant teenager. And, like teens, they also understood greed and gossip.

Even with a four martini buzz on, Laura was able to mentally put together a difficult-poet action plan: people to talk to, institutions to phone, anyone she could think of who might have some interest or use in attaching themselves to the shadow of a great old poet. After lunch, when the Stoly buzz was finally fading, she picked up the phone and called Anthony Holtz.

She introduced herself and talked about their new relationship and reminded him of the few times they had met at parties. She was pleased and surprised that he remembered her, but less than thrilled when he described her as another media whore.

"Isn't it fun? Unlike some old media whores, I've never sold my sex life to the public and called it high art." she shot back, reminding him of his kiss and tell poems.

"I'm sure your sex life is tedious modern banality like most pretty girls." he replied, coldly.

"I thought that by the time someone was your age they would have stopped obsessing about sex. Maybe we should decide to pass on the insults and think about the fact that I'm the one that's going to decide whether your collected works sell a few hundred copies or many, many thousands. Does greed still motivate you, Anthony?"

"It does." he replied.

"Then we will get along just fine. I understand that we can count on you being sober. That's the last tough question, but I have to hear it from you."

"That isn't a problem. One day you may wake-up to find the pleasures of life's indulgences are no longer as attractive as the life despoiled by those very indulgences."

"Regrets, we've had a few?"

"I like you. We'll work well together." Anthony pronounced, and hung up the phone without a goodbye.

When they met the next day he behaved as if she had already passed an important test. He was gracious and warm and considerate of her thoughts and feelings as she described her initial ideas to get publicity and attention for his book.

He tossed his flowing white hair almost like a schoolgirl, one of his many practiced dramatic gestures. His hands conducted moments and memories, his eyes and smiles punctuating his best lines. After all the years and the endless procession of women, he couldn't help himself; he was flirting with Laura. She let him. She did it back. She asked him to read her one of his' hot little lyrics'. And he was thrilled to do so. She asked for one of her favorites and she could see from his reaction that she had made a good choice. He read her the poem about tropical flowers and their various strategies for pollination and, as he was reading, Laura realized it was a dense, delicious version of 'The Course' seducing a woman by putting her in touch with her sexual power.

"And so I touch my firm sweating finger to the back of your languid epiphytic throat."

His eyes shone as he looked at her while he spoke the last line and she smiled back at him as she told him how much she loved that. Then she decided to ask him about his ex- wife's forthcoming autobiography. She asked him if there were any surprises she should know about. She told him that the buzz on the street was that it went on about how his sexual prowess was the greatest creation of his imagination. She said it because it was true, and because it was where he lived. Laura figured that his ex-wife's book would do half her work for her. She wanted to know how much he could build up a catfight between them before he got too apoplectic.

He seemed delighted at the idea of a catfight with one of his ex-wives, so Laura pulled out the galley proofs of his ex-wife's book from her briefcase and gave it to him. When he saw what it was, he was truly impressed, because he had tried very hard to get even a small peek at them himself.

"Well, let's see if she knows how to write." was his comment as he dove into the book like it was a breaker rolling onto a beach.

She left him to his reading as she excused herself, and smiled as he distractedly waved goodbye.

As the week went by, Laura started booking the media appearances that she thought would best serve Anthony's book launch. There was a new radio interview show called Hot Times that was getting quite a big audience and, what was even more important, some water cooler buzz about some of the things that people had said on the show. It was hosted by a twenty-eight year old woman with a sweet child-like voice she used to ask relentless, rude personal questions of guests who should have known better than to be there. She ate actors for breakfast and more actors kept coming to try her. Her interviews were emotional gunfights and she was too fast for anyone who had tried her so far.

Laura would book Anthony because she knew his chances were better than good that he would make it memorable. A pompous, womanizing, old drunken poet would make the gonzo radio gunslinger salivate. Laura anonymously sent along a few of the best pieces of Anthony's ex-wife's book as a teaser and waited for the call.

The week had a lovely flow: people behaved; people replied; they said yes a lot more than they usually did; and the number of imagined and real disasters from people needing absolutely total and immediate attention were few and far between. Even Amanda was there for dinner all week. Even Laura managed to be home three days before seven. Take-out came in or Ian improvised a respectable dinner they shared together like real people. Amanda's diet was finding exceptions based on how good the food looked and whether dessert was tempting. Ba Ba au Rum. That week life was like the girl with the curl, that week was very, very good.

On Friday before she left work she checked her email messages and saw one titled 'An unquenchable thirst'. It was George Marshall. He had found her. It described the feeling of thirst that comes after exhilarating exercise. Only the imagination could quench certain thirsts. Only he was offering libations. But he had resigned himself to the deserts of young flesh, and he left her with only one question, one challenge: 'What would you do to make your husband go absolutely wild with desire?' His last comment was that it was probably a question she hadn't asked herself in a long, long time. He said he would appreciate a report on her progress, if she desired to give it. Against her better judgment she put his return address into her address book. She thought about George's insidious challenge. He wanted to have vicarious sex with her. He wanted her to have sex with her own husband for his private pleasure. It was just too delicious. She decided to seduce her own husband, slowly, deliciously, in her imagination, in real time, and she decided she was going to share it all with George. It was like a secret three way affair.

Of course George was right; the thought of inspiring desire in her husband was a question she hadn't asked herself since before Amanda was born. She didn't feel guilty, but she did feel intrigued by the challenge. George was a hot little pistol. But then again, so was she, and perhaps was still.

The ride home was a montage of sexy little gestures playing through her imagination, images mostly taken from the movies: fingers on chess pieces; fruit between pressed lips; transparent blouses and slowly crossed and uncrossed legs. She was amazed how soon she ran out of personal or celluloid memories. She would have to improvise and the thought of it gave her a rush. George asked the best questions. She would seduce Ian/George. Her husband would be her surrogate lover. She was having fun just thinking about it, and he'd never know what hit him.

She decided on the rules of the game to inflame Ian. She decided it included everything except body contact, because the imagination really worked best as a non-contact sport.

First came the change in her wardrobe at home: comfy became silky; silky became sheer and everything a whole lot smaller and shorter. There was a delicate balance she tried to find between obviously asking for it and making it obvious she was definitely a desirable woman. Ian noticed, and so did Amanda when she occasionally drifted between rooms. Ian's appreciative looks were contrasted with Amanda's scowls.

"Aren't you cold?" Amanda had asked sarcastically.

"No colder than you are." her mother replied.

When she brought home the rented video of Nine and a Half Weeks she watched her husband squirm slowly beside her as they watched the video in the living room, Amanda slyly drifting in and out of the room in search of more wholesome food. When the movie was over and they went to bed the sexual tension was as thick as a Crème Brule. She kissed Ian sweetly and said she understood his feelings but she had been turned off by how the movie had shown a woman manipulated so heartlessly. She was of course lying through her teeth! He disagreed. He passionately disagreed. He gave the best arguments for the defense of hot manipulative sex that he could muster, but the judge ruled his motion out of order. The defense of hot sex had to rest, before it even had a chance to present its case. She was playing him like a Marlin.

Every day Laura would report to George the fun she was having teasing someone who was just not used in it. The fatigue and headaches that were usually the reasons Laura didn't feel sexy, were now just an excuse to build the thirst in Ian, and truth be told, she was feeling almost as frisky as her husband. It wasn't easy to control a bonfire of certain sexual vanities. It was fun. It was illicit. It was sexy and original like sin.

George's email replies to Laura's reports were wonderfully erotic, leading her imagination in touching a nerve, expanding a performance or setting a lovely little scene. He told her of a game of his invention called, 'Tell me what to do', in which she was to ask her lover to do something that was particularly sensual that must not lead to sex. The other name for the game was 'Peel Me a Grape'. She had Ian peeling fruit and feeding her ice cream and massaging her feet, and he couldn't believe the new Laura. The best one was when she asked him to brush her hair a hundred times as her mother had done when she was a girl. Poor Ian. After two weeks, she finally put both of them out of their misery on a Saturday night when Amanda wasn't home.

And the sex was perfectly wonderful. Like old times.

Laura didn't realize that George knew that words and language were the idiom in which her imagination was most comfortable. She didn't realize that to her sex was a soliloquy and George had turned her computer monitor into a spotlight where she could step forward and really shine. He knew that she wasn't interested in what his imagination contained. She was interested in knowing the potential of her own. She was surprised but delighted that, especially in print, she was such an accomplished performer. In a way her email correspondence with George made her feel almost young again. Her description of the strip tease she had done for Ian the night they finally made love was amazing in descriptive detail and sensual rhythm. Laura knew the language of love.

The day that George finally phoned her directly was almost perfectly timed. Everything was very, very good and George and his little cyber messages had definitely made it better. The reality of his real voice was erotically explosive, compared to the ten point Times Roman of her dreams. It was funny. A fifty year old verbal gymnast like her could be tongue tied at hearing a voice that made her feel, for want of a better word, shy, because it was a voice that knew for certain she was an honest to god, sensual Diva.

'Did he want to see her? Was he calling because he suspected she really wanted to see him.' She had thought about it. She had definitely thought about it.

It was like she had been an operative in a sexual spy novel in which her own life had been the cover: she had secrets she couldn't reveal; a handler known only to her, an invisible George Smiley of sex.

He made no apology for phoning, asking how her day was going, and they could both feel the sexual tension as she told him about her day's appointments and how she was desperate for some really exciting launch for Anthony Holtz's collected works. When it seemed like he was going to close off without any mention of an invitation to get together, or any mention of how much or how deeply she had revealed herself to him, she got mad. Their emails had had a tremendous intimacy.

"So you called just ask how my day was going?" she spat

"I called to see if that's all you wanted to say." he replied, calmly. "Obviously it's not."

"Obviously!"

She was almost shouting. The fox was in the hen house and reality was confronting what imagination and desire had flushed out. She felt cornered, and when she felt cornered she attacked. He stepped aside from its force like a graceful Torero masterfully moving the big red silk cape of language.

"Tell me what you want?" he asked gently. "Do you want to know what I want?"

"God, yes! God no!" she groaned and then fell into absolute silence.

He didn't reply. He didn't fill the petrified air. He let the tension build until she thought she couldn't stand it and she was going to hang up the way Anthony Holtz had first done with her. Frustration had a seam of anger that his voice touched like a finger at the back of her languid throat.

"Come to dinner next Tuesday evening. I'll prepare a lovely table with crystal and China and I'll spread you among them and thrill you until they shatter." Then he hung up the phone without waiting for her reply.

"Thanks for calling."

Her heart was pounding and she was breathing hard when she said that to the dead receiver. She put down the phone and it rang immediately and she let it ring for a moment while she gathered her breath and her emotions. When she picked up the phone, it was Ian with the second worst call a parent ever gets.

### Chapter 3

Ian was at the police station. Breathlessly, he told Laura that Amanda had been in a fight and seriously injured another girl. The girl was in a coma and Amanda was under arrest for assault. She got quiet and cold as she asked Ian to go on. He understood her shock, so he talked to her like a good lawyer, explaining how Amanda had been part of a group of girls who, it seemed, had repeatedly picked on the victim of the assault. It seemed Amanda had not been the leader of the group but had participated in taunting and may have been a part of some hair pulling. The girl who was the victim of the hazing had struck out and accidentally hit Amanda in the face, it was alleged. Amanda then punched her and the girl went down, cracking her head on the sidewalk. Amanda would be charged with aggravated assault. It was serious, but he hoped he could see her and arrange for bail, but it would be difficult at that time of the day.

"I'm coming. Where do I meet you? I don't care! Don't tell me not to come."

He gave her directions and she got up and rushed off to what she thought would be the worst nightmare of her life. She had no idea of what was to come. The rest of the day was a cascade of fear and rage, humiliation and guilt.

Ian was waiting inside the police station doors. Laura realized how badly she was shaking when she tried to get money from her wallet to pay the parking lot attendant. A five and a twenty dollar bill had fallen to the ground and as they blew away she lost hold of her other bills and she ended up desperately groveling to save whatever she could. She ended up with only a single twenty-dollar bill as she watched all her money blowing in the wind and the traffic on the street.

It was with white dust on her knees and dirty brown hands that she met her husband, the rage and frustration in her eyes so intense he was actually frightened. He knew instantly that he was caught, that he would be the thin membrane separating the feelings of his wife and his daughter, feelings that would explode on contact. He saw her dirty hands and asked what happened.

"Nothing, I dropped some money. How bad is this?" she demanded.

"Pretty bad. I talked to the detectives that are working the case and they're not too sympathetic. If the girl lives, the charge will be aggravated assault. If she doesn't, it will be manslaughter."

"If she lives? Manslaughter? This was a catfight. My God!"

"It happened outside the school and there's a security tape of the incident the police already have in their possession. I'm trying to get to see it.

"How could she? She's a bitch, but she's never been violent. She wears Save the Seals T-shirts for God sake."

"That was a long time ago." Ian pointed out.

"Thank God you're a lawyer. How much is this going to cost? Can her parents sue us?"

"First things first; there is a long way to go before we have to deal with anything like that." he reassured her.

"But it's coming." she insisted.

"There is no way to tell what's coming. We have to take this one step at a time. We'll get through this."

"Sure, but how? Where is she? Can we see her? This is all about me. This is all about punishing me. We give her everything. We ask for nothing. This is all about proving to me that I failed as a mother."

"It's not. It's a stupid thing that got out of hand. We have to be cool. I've seen these kinds of things do more damage to families than they do to victims. She needs our support, surely you can see that?"

"I can see that our daughter might go to jail. I can see we can be sued and financially wiped out. How much liability insurance do we have? Does it cover shit like this?" Her organizational mind was starting to be engaged. Life was logistics for Laura and the things that she knew would have to be rescheduled and moved were horrible.

"I don't know. We'll have to figure it out." But he did know and did not want to tell her that they had no personal liability insurance for criminal actions committed by their daughter. He was as scared as she was, but knew that he couldn't show it to either her or Amanda.

The hard sound of footsteps on the terrazzo floor echoed past them as they went looking to find their daughter, the sound of the footsteps muffled in the pulse of the blood beating inside Laura's temple. Ian noticed something he'd never seen before in all the times he had walked down that hall: people were smiling; the faces of the people were no different than in any other public building. People went about their business while some walked on as their world was completely imploding. Life could alter irrevocably, explosively while other people had a nice day.

Amanda's fight had happened over lunch hour and detectives had started interviewing the participants only after witness statements had been obtained. When they were getting ready to interview Amanda, they had called Ian out of court. Amanda had waited. Ian had waited. And now Laura waited too.

After an hour standing in a public hallway, Laura picked up her cell phone and started making calls. Ian was surprised and glad she had something to do other than feed her fear and anger. She called to cancel appointments for Monday and to apologize for having to cancel out on a corporate party the next day. She called Anthony Holtz and told him that she would be unavailable that weekend. He was enraged. It seemed that a comment he'd made to a reporter about his ex-wife's new book, 'that was by the way, flying off the book stands,' seemed to have enraged her. He had merely said that she was a lousy mother, a lousy bed partner, and what was worse, a lousy writer. When she read his comment, she came to his house and put a copy of her book through his window. He thought this was all right, a good bit of theater. Even though the cat had fled, a ficus was damaged and very precious personal property had been destroyed, it would've been all right if only he had not rushed out of his front door in his bath robe to confront what he thought was a vandal, and not come face-to-face with his cursing ex-wife and a photographer who had taken his picture for the next day's papers. Old poets in open bathrobes aren't a pretty sight. This was humiliation, beyond the beyond. This was war. Laura told him that she had serious personal problems to deal with right then and wasn't interested in any minor assault to his dignity.

"Minor!" he screamed and slammed down his phone. Laura went to the washroom and washed the money grubbing dirt from the parking lot off her hands.

Ian waited and thought about his daughter. Secretly he liked her wild hair and clothes, her electric intelligence and free spirit. He knew everyone outgrew rebellion, especially if they were bright and had opportunities to make something of their lives. There weren't many middle-class rebels past twenty. By then they had realized that the goodies in life were just too tempting. It was easy to rebel in a half a million-dollar condominium when Mommy and Daddy were paying the bills.

What had happened was almost worse than a car wreck. If a person survived something like that, their life might barely alter its course. But this was something else again. If the girl died, his daughter might actually go to prison. A wrongful death lawsuit could actually wipe them out. They would never know it, but he was infinitely more terrified than his wife or his daughter. They never knew what it took for him to seem calm and controlled and sympathetic and understanding and brave.

Finally, a detective came to get Ian because they were about to question Amanda, and he had indicated that he would be acting as her attorney. That meant Laura had to stay where she was and imagine what would be happening to her daughter. At least she knew that Ian would give her a full report, and in a way she was almost glad to be left behind because she didn't know what she would've said or done when she saw her daughter. She had no idea whether it was rage or sorrow or the muffled groan of heartache that would've come out of her mouth. Laura stood there paralyzed. Her heart and head felt the G forces of pure adulterated fear. She had absolutely and completely lost control of her life in the instant it took for a soft skull to crack on a pavement. She had to do something. Something.

She called Amanda's school, not expecting that anyone would be there so late on a Friday but it was only the second ring when the phone was answered and she found herself talking to the vice principal. The conversation that followed dropped her through a pit of outrage that opened under her like a gallows' trap door.

The first thing he told her after she introduced herself was that Amanda had become a part of a rather unsavory group.

"Unsavory. What's unsavory?" she demanded.

"Well, I can't really say." he replied, and sounded very condescending.

"Why not? I'm Amanda's mother. I have a right to know what goes on at her school."

"I'm not sure you have the right to know anything. Parental rights, if I'm not mistaken, have to do with what goes on at home."

"So what can you tell me, about what happened today?" Laura was furious.

"There are a number of implications when an act of violence occurs on school property which means that I'm not at liberty to either discuss or make statements about any act which may have occurred."

"That's right; we're going to sue your ass because our daughter injured another student."

"Even though you are being ironic, I'm still not at liberty to say anything further."

"Well maybe you can tell me this, has she been in any trouble like this before, hazing other students I mean?"

"She has. But I don't feel that, considering the circumstances, I should talk about that either. A certain teacher did put her on a waiting list for a guidance interview."

"Why was that?" Laura insisted.

"You'd have to ask the teacher, although I doubt she would be permitted to talk to you before she talked to our legal counsel."

"Are you a school or a liability claims department?"

"It seems we are both." he snapped back.

"When I picked up this phone I did not want to sue you. I wanted to tell you that I was sorry my daughter hurt one of her classmates. I felt very guilty and responsible for what she had done. Now I definitely want to sue your ass and I think your attitude has had a big part in making my daughter such a bitch."

He hung up. "He hung up on me." She said to no one but herself. She had to take deep breaths as she started pacing back and forth in the hallway like an experimental rat in a cage. Finally when she realized that people were staring at her she stopped and leaned back against the concrete wall and stared out into space. It was shock. It hit hard and deep making her feel numb and cold and quiet. From boiling rage to icy calm she rode the sine wave of panic, losing all sense of her body. That was the way Ian found her, leaning against the wall looking wide-eyed and almost casual. He began to tell her about the interview then saw that she wasn't following what he said.

"Aren't you interested in this?" he asked as he searched her face for a reaction.

She put her arms around him and held him and started to cry. He hadn't seen Laura cry in many, many years.

"She has to stay tonight." he told her, "I think we might be able to get her home tomorrow. Let's just go home." He held her stiff body until it sagged under the tears, then he put his arm around her waist and led her out of the police station.

They left her car in the parking lot and Ian drove them home in his Lexus. She sat beside him silently all way home, her tears running nonstop. Ian let her cry. He was seriously shaken by her tears.

At home, he made her a double Scotch after she threw herself into the big brown calfskin sofa. She drank half the drink before she spoke.

"Okay. What happened?" she asked, softly.

"It looks pretty bad. They showed us the tape. Amanda was with six other girls who were pushing the victim and pulling her hair."

"What was Amanda doing?" Laura asked impatiently.

"She was doing most of the talking. She was in the girls face. There's no sound on the tape, so there was no way to tell what she was saying. The girl was just flailing and hit Amanda accidentally. Amanda punched her right in the face like she'd taken boxing lessons all her life. The girl dropped like a stone. She hit her head pretty hard. There was a lot of blood. Everyone ran except Amanda. She just stood there looking at the girl bleeding until a crowd started forming and then she just walked away."

"Do you know name of the girl who was hurt?"

"Stacy Peak. She was top of her class."

Sometimes there is a numb silence that happens between parents when they are considering everything and anything they may have done to create a child who has come to desperate trouble. The liquid goodness of love that hardens into cold responsibility may have unseen cracks that can swallow a life completely. That was the way they felt when they fell asleep deep in the morning with just their little fingers crossing.

Before Ian had come to bed he called the hospital for the third time to ask about the condition of the girl with the fractured skull. It was only after the third call that they told him anything. She had brain swelling. They would keep her in a coma. They would know more in a few days. When he asked about the parents, the nurse on duty asked if he wanted to speak to the father of the girl. His insides turned to lead as he said that he would. When the father came to the phone, it was Ian's turn to cry. He was not sure if the man could tell that as he told him how sorry he was for what had happened. It was awkward and horrible to apologize for his daughter's brutal behavior, but he did it the best he could. He told him that Amanda had never hurt anyone before in her life. He asked him to believe that she couldn't have meant it. The father had listened quietly as Ian spoke. But when he said that Amanda couldn't have meant it, the father replied that he found that hard to believe because his daughter's nose was completely shattered, that Amanda had bullied his daughter for a year and made her life into a very public hell. Ian just kept saying he was sorry, so sorry. He didn't tell Laura that he talked to the father until the next day.

"Oh, Jesus!" she had groaned and went back to sipping her coffee.

It was nearly noon the next day before Amanda was charged with aggravated assault and released to her father's custody.

Before they went in for the hearing, Ian heard the whole story for the first time. Between her tears of defiance and fear and self-pity there was little remorse he could see for what she had done, and it was that which he knew he had to find within her, if he was going to save her from the worst personal and public penalties.

"I want you think about that girl lying in intensive care, her face swollen black, her head shattered from where she fell." he said softly.

"I know. I know. Why are you saying that? Don't you think I feel bad enough?" she demanded.

He told her the truth. "No, I don't think you feel bad enough. And unless you and everyone else can see how badly you feel, people will think you deserve a far more severe punishment. The legal system is the only place that compassion is self-serving. You're going to have to grow up really fast now. You are going to have to learn that responsibility sometimes hurts."

"So what do you want me to do? I can't change anything. Am I supposed to go around crying about how sorry I am all the time?" She looked like she was going to cry again.

"You can't change what happened. But you can change what you're going to do about it. You can reach out to her family. You can express your sorrow to the detectives and to the crown prosecutor. And you can stop making any, and I mean any excuses for yourself."

"But I have some. It wasn't all my fault." Amanda pleaded.

"It was absolutely all your fault. The sooner you decide that's the truth, the sooner this will start to be over." he insisted

"But there are excuses. I didn't mean to hurt her. She hit me. I just snapped. "

"That'll be obvious, if it's true. But you are not the one to say it, I am. And there are two sides to me being your lawyer. I'm going to look like a father making excuses for a child I couldn't control, so you will have to help me by appearing to be a client that understands and accepts responsibility for her actions."

"But that's not fair."

"How's that? Every time you think that, just think about what that little girl in intensive care would think was fair. Think about what her parents would think was fair. What if it was her that socked you and your mother and I were the ones waiting to see if you were going to live or die?"

She started to blubber and Ian's heart heaved in time with her gasping sobs, and then he pulled her to him and held her closer than he had for many years.

"I really am sorry." she sobbed

"I know you are. I know you are." he reassured her.

Outside the hearing room Laura had talked to Anthony Holtz on her cell phone. He was being petulant, angry, seething with the desire for vengeance for his public humiliation, which somehow Laura was supposed to provide. He wanted his hand held like a little boy as his fierce publicist Mama marched down and throttled his mean ex-wife.

To distract him, Laura suggested that he plan one big nasty reply, something legal or something public. But he had to promise to warn her before he did anything. It was then she suggested he rent the video of War of the Roses and see how two people who really hated each other dealt with divorce. "Love, pah!" he shouted. She thought a mission would distract him; she thought he'd sublimate his rage. She didn't think that what she was doing was setting him on course that would make him, and to a lesser degree her, famous. On a hunch that he might do something, she called a young photographer friend and told him about Anthony and said he might be worth staking out. He thanked her and did as she asked because Laura had done him some favors before that had turned out to make him some money. He had no idea that when he followed Anthony that afternoon as he set out on his errands of rage that he would take a picture that day that would end up on the front page of more newspapers than any other picture he would ever take in his life.

Laura then shut off her cell phone and it was a hard thing to do because she was the spider in the sticky web of life waiting for the tug and the struggle that said it was ready or unwilling to pay.

While she waited for Ian and Amanda for what seemed like hours, she wrapped her arms around herself, arms crossed to protect her from the heart blows to come. When Ian came through the door with Amanda, she almost didn't recognize who they were, they looked so normal, so much like anyone else, so much an alienated part of her being.

The gel that had held Amanda's fine hair flat like a helmet had been washed out with hand soap from a dispenser by a bathroom sink. The hair dye he brought with him was the colour he remembered his daughter having until the last year of her life. Without protest, he bent her head over the sink and felt his daughter's lovely skull through cheap plastic gloves. He helped her dry her hair with paper towels and when they were done with the practical intimacy, her hair showed the simple, expensive cut and style that framed her face so she looked like a pixie child. She looked nervous and sweet. Laura got a hot foot, stepping in the small puddle of love that dissolved out of the icy anger of her heart when she looked at her daughter's hair.

'I should never have been a mother.' she thought to herself. 'It wasn't fair.'

When mother and daughter looked in each other's eyes they were both uncomfortable and afraid of what the other was seeing. They were both afraid that what each would see was the absence of love in the other. They were both sure they saw it. They were both sure they had done things that could never be forgiven.

Amanda was a quick study. "I'm sorry I hurt that girl." she said to her mother and looked like she meant it.

"I know." Laura said, coldly. "Let's just go home." They turned and left, Ian holding his daughter's hand.

In the Lexus, no one knew what to say or how to say it. No one knew how to be normal. All the things each of them felt, all the things that could always go unspoken, all the things they could never express were massed behind the crack in the dam that came from a young girl's head hitting pavement.

Sometimes a simple question can be a dam buster. Amanda asked her mother, "So, did you listen to my phone messages, or what?"

"I never thought of it, but I suppose we should have. There are probably incriminating statements from your low- life friends. That's what you people do when you swarm innocent victims, call each other up and brag about how tough and how cool you were."

Ian realized that Laura was probably right. There might be evidence on the computer or the answering machine. It would be the first thing he checked when they got home. But he would almost forget to do that because of the flash flood that roared through the Lexus exploding over them like a wall of water hitting a trailer park.

"This hasn't been easy for me." Amanda pleaded.

"You? I suppose you are the victim in all this, the innocent party? The rest of us are supposed to give you a big hug and say,' poor baby'. You may have killed someone and we're supposed to be there for you. When are you there for us?" Laura was furious.

"Be there for me? That would be a change. Just think of this as giving me some quality time, if you can fit it in your schedule." Amanda shot back.

"You made it clear that you prefer your low-life friends. Are they there you for you now, or are they talking about how cool it is that you may have killed someone and you may be going to jail?"

"Don't keep saying that. Why are you being so cruel?"

"You both have to stop now." Ian interrupted, "Trust me; this is the stuff that breaks families apart. I've seen it too many times." He was begging them both to stop.

"So what are we supposed to do, just sit here and say that's fine dear, torment anyone you like dear, ruin your life and ours dear?" Laura glared at her daughter.

"Fuck you Laura!" Amanda spat.

"I couldn't do it anywhere near as well as you do, dear."

"Stop it! Now! "Ian screamed and his women stopped for a breath. Three beats of silence and many more heartbeats fell before Amanda turned away and glared out of the window. Laura's cell phone buzzed the second she turned it on, then did it again, and again. Amanda snorted her contempt at the arrival of her rival but said nothing, mostly for her father's sake. For the moment, Laura ignored the phone and told her daughter her snort was noticed. "You're so good at laying on yuppie guilt, Amanda. That may justify you being an asshole, but it doesn't come close to justifying what you did. Hello." She answered the phone and it was amazing that her voice was back in control. It was Brian her photographer friend following Anthony Holtz. Laura listened and almost forgot her rage because of what she was hearing.

He had followed the poet to his former home in Rosedale where his ex-wife still lived. Anthony had first gone to a graphic design studio and had a photo of his wife blown up and made into a life sized cut-out. He had then stopped at a grocery store and then a garden center before proceeding to his former home. There he had gone to a huge ornate fountain splashing water in cascading layers over a cement gargoyle into a big central pool full of his ex-wife's prized Koi. First he poured huge boxes of cheap soap flakes and a bag of horse manure into the fountain. Then he rammed the life size cutout of his ex-wife directly onto one of the four cherubs peeing into the fountain so that it looked like the tiny male genitalia were coming out of his wife's crotch. Anthony had then stood back and watched the fountain starting to froth and foam with the black manure and the soap flakes as it recycled the water over and over again. When the foam was billowing over the sides of the fountain he walked to the front door and hurled her book through the front window. In only a few moments she had come screaming outside. 'Just returning your book.' he had shouted at her and started to laugh when she saw the fountain and then started to scream and panic. She had rushed into the house and come back out with a bucket and fishnet running to the fountain where she started groping around with a net for her prized carp.

The famous photo the young photographer took was of Anthony standing beside his wife as he howled with laughter as she was bent over with her head buried in the soap suds looking like one of those painted folk art cut outs some people put in their flower beds. And the best touch of all was the peeing foam board cut-out of his ex-wife dressed in sado-masochistic studs, chains and leather. She was even holding a bullwhip. Brian couldn't stop laughing, telling the story for the first time.

"Is that police sirens I can hear?"

"The police are here. So is every newspaper and TV station. Anthony must have called them just before he arrived." Brian explained.

"We'll be there in ten minutes. What's the address? Keep taking pictures." Laura ordered.

The only thing that Laura had said during the phone call was about the police sirens and so both Ian and Amanda were relieved when she told them what was going on. She told Ian the address in Rosedale and he asked her, "If you show up there won't everyone think this was a big setup you engineered?"

"They'll think it regardless, but you're right, I'd rather not be there answering questions. This should be Anthony's moment in the sun. She chuckled then returned to the moment as she heard Amanda crying. "Let's go home." she said softly.

She called Brian and told him to just keep on taking pictures and that she wasn't going to come. In a way everyone was disappointed by her decision: Ian because this was something that might deflect the anger and pain everyone was feeling; Amanda because she was missing her mother looking like a complete fool; and Laura because she was missing the greatest media event she thought she could have never even imagined.

At home, they took their respective positions: Ian in the kitchen making some food; Laura on the phone trying to keep track of developments at the fountain; Amanda in her room on her bed playing back a full tape of messages.

Ian had brought Amanda tea with lemon, just the way she liked it in her tall porcelain mug. She smiled wanly as he put it on her bedside table, making it clear with her eyes that the fast talking breathless voice on the phone was important for her to hear.

"Try not to make your mom angry. You have to try to be strong." he whispered. She rolled her eyes and saw for the first time the fear that was showing in his. He was caught in the middle between two implacable opponents who fought with a growing vicious desperation, the weaker and the more vulnerable they felt. He was the permeable membrane that he wished could keep separate the weaknesses of the two women he loved, but would let pass the love and the tenderness neither Laura nor Amanda could bring themselves to express.

In the living room, Ian handed Laura a big glass of red wine. He sipped his own as he listened to the update on the Anthony Holtz fiasco in all its slap stick details.

The ex-wife had set her two Rottweilers on the media and everyone had scattered for their lives as they tried to take pictures of each other and shout questions at Anthony who had managed to climb the big fountain gargoyle from where his ex-wife was trying to dislodge him with the big cut-out of herself resplendent with whips and chains. Anthony had just laughed until she clipped him and he lost his balance and fell down and broke his arm as she continued to flail him with the life size cut out of herself. That was the money shot! It just got better and better...media wise.

Before the ambulance came and the dogs were put away, Anthony had crawled to the protection of a television satellite truck while his wife bailed out the fountain and found the flopping fish which she then deposited in a brass bucket filled with water she brought from the house. The beautiful brilliant shining fish continued to flop out of the pail onto the grass as the ex-wife begged for people to help her. Nobody helped. Everybody laughed. "These fish are irreplaceable." she screamed. "If they die, you die, Anthony," she would occasionally scream toward the ambulance at the top of her lungs.

The next day the local newspapers all carried her comments and his explanation of his actions and behavior. "I was just returning her book, and just thought she could use some more soap flakes and horse shit so she could start working on a sequel." The comment was a cut line for the picture in the morning tabloid paper, the picture that would become so famous: the soap suds billowing under the gargoyle, the old poet warding off the blow with his ex-wife's S and M image. Next to that picture was the one of his ex-wife in a short skirt with her butt showing as she bent over into a mountain of soap suds beside a peeing cut-out of herself looking like the cruel mistress of soapy domains. I was media gold; screwing up as cultural event.

It was funny but, as Laura told the story with little relish, neither she nor Ian laughed. In bed early that night, after an un-thawed, oily pizza, Laura had finally turned off the phone so it would be answered by her service. She hadn't wanted to do that, but Ian insisted she would need her sleep. Before the long hours when sleep would come, they had talked and then fought and then mildly hated one another. Like many of their fights, it started out by trying to decide how things would have to change in their lives.

"We're raising a time bomb." Laura had begun, "She's going to explode her life, I don't want her to blow up ours. If we somehow get through this, what are we going to do?"

"I've already started looking for a good therapist." he replied.

"Great! My best friend is a therapist and her daughter makes Amanda looked like a Mousekateer. We have to do something. Isn't there a strict private school at least? Responsibility rehab?"

Ian was outraged. "Right! A nice exclusive private school full of teenage screw ups and lost causes. You just want to shift our problem to somebody else."

"Why not? We obviously can't solve it. Or maybe we should just let her quit school like she keeps threatening. Let's kick her out and let her live on the street and sell her ass for somebody who will truly love and appreciate her." She was getting angry.

"What you really mean, is let's just find a nice way to give up on her. If she leaves this house, I go with her." He was now both hurt and angry.

"So what's your idea, cut off her phone privileges, cut her allowance? I'm sick of cutting her slack." Her voice was rising.

Ian's voice rose with hers, "Part of this is our fault. If she has to change, so do we."

Then Laura started shouting, "No! No! No more yuppie guilt. No matter what we do, it's never enough. It's always our fault. I'm not going to martyr my life for a spoiled, self-indulgent bitch, just because you spoiled her."

"Well, we've given her good basic training in self-indulgence." he shot back and that was what sent Laura over the top.

"You mean that I'm the spoiled self-indulgent bitch that taught her all the ropes."

"She's your daughter. She's your responsibility. She's like she is because of us."

"Even if you're right, I don't care. I'm sick of feeling guilty. I'm sick of being afraid of hurting her tender little psyche. I'm sick of you defending her. And I'm sick of you blaming me. Maybe you two should just find a place together and you and your precious can finally make each other happy."

The rage in her brown eyes was electric and he could see that what she was saying was more than the rhetoric of anger. She was resentful and angry at him for being closer to her daughter than she was. She couldn't stop herself. "It's always my fault, my choices that make her so screwed up: my not being home; my not baking cookies and teaching her ways to make a man happy in the kitchen. It's my not doing this! My not doing that! My not being there for her, whatever the fuck that means! Well fuck you and your daughter Electra!"

These were words that he was so shocked to hear, so shocked to imagine were unsaid inside his wife, so much a betrayal of his feelings for both Laura and Amanda that the rage inside him imploded like a television tube struck with a hammer. Inside all the images of rage was emptiness. Inside all the things that looked so real was a vacuum. Inside all the images he believed to be true was the difficult course of ordinary love. Now those images dissolved leaving him facing a hard woman who saw his love for his daughter as incestuous, self-indulgent and sick. His most vulnerable button was his daughter. She had pulled its connection out by its umbilical cord.

"Maybe we will have to look for a place. Maybe we are done. But first we have to get through this crisis." he said coldly.

She knew that he meant the crisis of the girl in the coma and Amanda's legal problems. But she knew for the first time there was a greater crisis. It was always her who threatened a divorce when they fought. This time it was him. This time he said it with a calm voice like the voice he used when he was making a closing argument. She was so angry and hurt she didn't care. When he said he was going to sleep and he turned his back to her, she lay calmly back on her pillow. They didn't sleep for a long time. They knew that Amanda had heard most of what they had said. They knew it while they were talking, even though they couldn't stop themselves. Ian was sick at the thought. Laura was almost glad.

As she lay there unsleeping, Laura went through the crimes she had committed that Ian would be preparing as charges. Her late parties, her trendy friends, her unending attachment to communication devices, time for staying fit with no time for her daughter, teaching her daughter nothing but style and grammar while insisting that her daughter know how to be responsible and mature, these were just some of the charges she was sure that Ian was preparing for discovery. The trial she was sure she would now have to endure was coming. She had no idea that he would once again be called on to be her greatest defender. Before they fell into a final cold silence they crossed another line, a final accusation and admission. "I tried a fuck of a lot harder to be a good parent than you have. "Ian said to the night stand.

"Well, you get a big fucking A. Maybe you'd have done a lot better if I hadn't been here." she replied with a dead voice.

"I probably would." He had the same dead voice.

Too far. Too far from shore. It seemed there would be no saving themselves from this.

"So it's all been a big lie. Perjury."

Before Ian fell asleep half an hour later he lay there and hated her for saying that most of all.

Sunday morning and she was gone before he got up. Before she left, she walked in on Amanda and threw the little red book of bourgeois alienation on her bed. "It's Catcher in the Rye, the cri de Coeur of despoiled youth. You may be fucked up, but you'll be glad to know you're not alone. I'm so sorry we gave you everything but the meaning of life. How selfish of us." she said coldly and turned and walked away. Amanda looked truly heartbroken when her mother left her there.

Ian didn't know and Laura didn't tell him that she was going to treat the day like a workday. She worked out at the fitness club, showered and went to her office. It was too early for calls on a Sunday so she sat looking at the morning papers that all had the picture of Anthony and his ex-wife by the fountain. She read the articles and let her mind climb and fall between the joy and excitement of what work would be like that week and the fear and the horror of what was sleeping at home.

Ian had taken the whole day to try to talk to Amanda, to work out a plan, to try to reach her and shore up her spirit. He didn't know and did not want to ask what she'd heard through the wall the night before. He had gotten permission from the father to call and ask about the injured girl's condition, and both he and Amanda were almost giddy with relief when he was told the girl was conscious and speaking. They both began to put their fingernails deeper into the hope that the worst wasn't going to happen. Their one flare up happened when he asked Amanda not to speak on the phone or reply to any email messages that came from any of her friends who had been at the scene of the fight.

"If you talk to them and it's recorded, if you write to them and it stays in their computer, what you say can be subpoenaed, so I don't want you talking about what happened or justifying yourself to anyone." he insisted. He took her cell and laptop.

She pleaded with him saying that she would not talk about the incident, but he was adamant that she couldn't help but do so when that would be all her friends would want to talk about. That was how Amanda was sentenced to solitary confinement. Like most people, especially people her age, she couldn't stand it for very long. Ian asked her what she thought would be the hardest thing for her to deal with while she was getting through this time.

"I don't want a go back to school." she said, "Everybody will be looking at me. They'll all be talking about me. It'll just feel so gross."

He didn't understand that what she was saying was that she was like an injured animal and the pack at school would smell blood and attack at the first sign of pain or weakness. She didn't know or want to tell him that. He had no way to imagine what she feared would be too real.

"But I'll have to talk to my friends. They'll make me talk about what happened. You just told me not to talk about it." she pleaded.

"And you shouldn't. But no matter what you say, unless it's recorded, it will be their imperfect recollections against yours.

Try as he did, he couldn't get her to agree that she had to go back to school. He decided to let her have a couple of days in her room where he believed she would get bored and the incident would begin to be forgotten at school.

The purest pain he inflicted on her came after he talked to Stacy Peak's father. Ian had asked if it was all right if he and Amanda came to the hospital to visit with Stacy so Amanda could apologize. When he told Amanda where they were going, she looked like he had shoved a harpoon through her stomach; she had literally bent over from the blow. He would not relent.

They had to go through elevators and hallways and through one huge swinging door after another until they came to the intensive care waiting room. There were bad prints of bad art on the walls and there were hard armchairs entirely filled with anxious looking people. Ian and Mr. Peak locked eyes the second they entered. The mother's eyes froze Amanda beside her dad.

Introductions were horrible. The look Mr. And Mrs. Peak gave Amanda hit them both like battery acid. Just into their forties, they looked much older, obviously working-class people. Ian had made Amanda dress in a skirt and a blouse, which were probably things she would've never worn again in her life. They were things her mother had bought her. She looked like the girl she was, or had been.

Amanda apologized and the words came out of her throat so soft and quiet and dry that Ian was very disappointed they could barely be heard. She didn't cry when Mr. Peak told her it was a brutal thing she had done. Then Mrs. Peak, in a cold angry voice, described to both of them the terror her daughter had suffered from the beginning of the year when Amanda and her friends had decided to attack her daughter like a pack of dogs.

"I know we did that. I'm very ashamed." she said in a stronger voice. "I don't know how I could do such a thing to someone who never hurt me at all. I'm really so sorry." She sounded sincere. She had to be sincere. Ian was almost proud of her.

"All right then, let's go see Stacy." said Mr. Peak. Amanda's eyes grew wide in terror.

More sets of huge swinging doors between long hallways brought them to intensive care where father and daughter went in anticipating a tsunami wave of revulsion and heart pounding regret. That was exactly what they met in the big white bed, coming from a tiny girl with a blue and red face and a pure white bandage holding her reconstructed nose. The frightened blue eyes that looked up at them broke everyone's heart: her parents once more, Ian's and Amanda's for the first and most heart wrenching time. It was like clubbing a seal pup. Stacy looked like a child.

"I'm really sorry." Amanda began through her tears, "I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have hurt you. I'm really sorry." Her tears trickled down her face but she spoiled it for everyone when she said, "Why did we have to come here?"

"Because you hurt Stacy so much; it's only fair she sees that what you've done is hurting you too." Ian said firmly.

"I know. I'm sorry." Amanda turned and threw herself into Ian's arms and cried like a baby. She had a heart she couldn't deny.

"It's okay." came Stacy's dry voice from the bed, sounding pinched and weak and nasal, and Ian was so moved that he nearly broke.

"We just came so Amanda could tell you how sorry she was for hurting you. Maybe we should go now and let you rest." he said to Stacy.

Then Stacy said the most heartbreaking thing Amanda could ever have imagined.

"I always really liked you. Why couldn't you like me just a little?"

What Amanda said in reply was almost as sad and as tragic. "But I did like you. I still like you. I wanted others to like me more." she said, and then begged her father to go. Both of them left with their heads spinning with the sick reality of what good people could do to others. Amanda felt so ashamed, yet Ian couldn't help but feel an overwhelming love for his daughter. They each left unspoken what the other one most longed to hear.

Laura came home at eight o'clock that night and Ian knew that this time it would be hard to heal the hurt that had come from what had been said before dawn. This time he did not know how to back down, did not know how to apologize, did not know how to reassure her of his love. His heart no longer had the buoyancy to hold them up while they struggled back to shore. He did not know how to lift her up again where she belonged. He could see that her heart was treading water. He was terrified of what he'd do this time when she tired.

D.I.V.O.R.C.E., somebody may be going away. Either of them, both of them, neither of them, who would be living in this place when all things were said and done; leaving behind all the things that could never be unsaid, all the things that could never be undone.

As Laura sat with a drink, Ian told her about the day, about his talk with Amanda and about their trip to the hospital. He hadn't called her with the good news that Stacy had regained consciousness and her parents were willing to let Amanda come and apologize. Good will was essential if there were going to get through the liability that hung over them from Amanda's act. Laura listened and the relief she felt did not show. The only thing she said when Ian stopped talking was that Amanda had to go back to school. He agreed, but said it would probably be better if she had a couple of days to get herself together and prepare herself for her friend's reaction. "God knows, but they may treat her like some kind of hero. She's been in jail and that seems to be cool to a twisted adolescent consciousness. We shall overcome. I know a good therapist who says she'll talk with Amanda."

"No one wants a fellow with a social disease." Laura sang softly, almost to herself. "I'm going to bed. I'm feeling about half past dead." she said and left the room. It was one of her favourite lines. As she passed Amanda's room she heard her daughter's voice. She was on the phone her father had returned. She was laughing. She didn't think there was anything her daughter could do to make her feel worse than she did. That laugh did it.

Tuesday night Laura decided on dinner at George's apartment. She had found him in the phone book. The finding was simple, the going was hard, but she knew she wanted to see him. She knew she wanted to feel something that didn't make her feel so helpless. Any imaginary port in a storm that was just too too real.

The media storm that followed Anthony's fountain performance was a matter of holding back a tidal wave of people wanting her attention. It was like a Chinese dinner of media options. She would take two from television, three from the press, and one from the radio column, Hot Times. The rest was dealing with party invitations. People wanting Anthony to appear and make them Hip and In and so Over the Top Now. Any other week in would have felt like falling into a bed of cold hard cash.

At home she was helpless because she was just the same old wet blanket. She dressed knowing she would make love with George. She would ride his body back to dry land. As hard as it was to make the final decision, once she made it she followed through with a cool determined élan.

The small, modern bachelor apartment was filled with modern art. Everything was abstract, nothing representational, everything looking vainly for its pure form. She liked it. He had kissed her sweetly on the cheek as she entered and saw the polished Walnut table set with two places at its opposite ends, set with fine china and crystal glasses just as he said he would do. It gave her a flutter that she greeted like the first butterflies of spring. Wonderfully, he said absolutely nothing as he led her into the kitchen where he was cooking. He opened pot lids and opened the oven to show her the things that were cooking, filling the room with the smell of exotic spices.

"I'm just going to make a salad." he told her, and then she stopped him and slowly unbuttoned his soft cotton shirt, pulled it from his jeans and slipped it off his shoulders as she looked him in the eyes. When his hands came up to touch her, she shook her head and they fell back to his sides. He was smiling a self satisfied smile.

"I'll watch while you make the salad." she said and watched him begin, walking around the kitchen naked to the waist. He moved between the refrigerator and a cutting board preparing the ingredients of the salad, and when he was almost finished chopping pieces of red pimento, she walked up behind him and reached around his waist, undid his belt and button and zipper and slowly slid his designer jeans down his legs. When they were bunched at his feet she simply told him to 'lift' and she took off his Italian loafers then took away his jeans and draped them over an empty chair. The rest of the salad was put together while he walked around in his socks and fresh tight underwear that were obviously starting to strain.

"So how was your day?" he asked with a grin, obviously loving every moment of dinner preparations.

"At work, it went well."

"That's good."

Then while he was shaking the dressing in a lovely crystal bottle, she walked straight up to him and knelt down in front of him then reached and slowly pulled down his underwear to reveal his obvious rampant excitement. Wishing and hoping, she looked like she was getting ready to actually pray, her eyes to heaven. She stood up and walked back to the end of the counter and let him continue, naked, except for his socks, watching him ladling food into fine serving bowls. When he went to the oven and opened the door and the sweet smell of the rack of lamb fell into the kitchen, she followed him and pressed herself into his back and reached around and touched him and he groaned as if her hand had been filled with hot coals.

For a long delicious half a minute she wouldn't let him move. Then she let go of him and he turned around sweating and naked and looked at her standing there dressed and cool and lovely. Then he kissed her and they melted into each other's arms, the hot dry blast of the air from the stove falling around them. Heat waves shimmered through their bodies and swirled around in their heads as they kissed more and more voraciously. Then she let him go and took his hand and led him to the polished Walnut table. She sat in the center of the table where the serving dishes were meant to be placed between the two place settings of china and crystal and linen. She pulled her shirt waist dress over her long legs as she looked him straight in the eye and he moved between her legs. She lay back and her only word was, "Now."

He reached under her and pulled off her panties and pushed her dress up further and she lifted her legs and in an instant he was inside her. Neither of them could have lasted long because of the power of anticipation, thoughts of technique and patience and performance exploding in pure desire. During sex Laura often let her mind roam free among images and feelings real and remembered, seen and imagined in free associations of desire. Not this time. They made love fast and deep without even a word, and when they came it was only a heartbeat that separated them, filling the apartment with ecstatic groans. Laura's arms lashed out to her sides and just as he said, the crystal and china shattered as it flew to the floor.

When they descended from their orgasms and looked at one another, it was with amazement and appreciation as he stood over her sweating, her silken legs brushing his arms as they came down, and then they separated and she sat up and pulled him to her, her fingers reaching into the hair at the back of his neck. She kissed him sweetly and whispered, "Young girls just don't know how to live. It takes a woman to know how it's done."

"Truly." he gasped, then she pushed him back and he watched her get off the table and walk to the door where she turned around and said, "I've got to go. I just came for appetizers." She opened the door and was gone as he stood there naked and grinning and amazingly he could feel the pulse of desire rekindle in his groin. "Now, that's how it's done." he said out loud. "Bravo!" And he began to wildly applaud her even in her absence, her panties still in one of his hands. As she walked away from his door and heard the muffled applause, it was the first time in four days that she had smiled. That night, George, as he did too often, sat home alone and drank until he slept. That night he did it with a fluttering heart.

The fear, the anger, the loss and desperation Ian felt as he'd gone through the two days after his visit to Stacy Peak with Amanda gave him a feeling of emotional vertigo, the breathless feeling of reaching out for someone, losing touch and falling and falling and falling backward. For the first time in his marriage he felt it was actually falling apart. He knew the fall was one step away. He wasn't sure if and how he would survive when he finally hit the ground.

Tuesday evening when Laura came through the door, the look in her eyes was like a hand reaching out to save him. The secret process of rationalization and forgiveness and illicit sex had somehow transformed her, the hate he'd seen, the contempt that he'd felt directed so powerfully toward him was gone. Pulled back from the abyss, she looked in his eyes and smiled. She wouldn't leave him. He felt it. He could never leave her. Now, he knew that too. And when she touched him, they flowed together like fabric in the wind and he felt free and breathlessly happy.

Laura saw his relief. Then she too knew she would stay. The irony of having come from betraying him a brief hour before made it all feel so bittersweet. As she held him in her arms, she also knew that her affair with George wasn't over. He was the release of her romantic imagination. He was her release from the prison of expectations. It was something so strong she felt she just couldn't let slip away so soon.

"Leave Amanda to me." Ian said to her. She nodded and smiled and it was just what she hoped he would say.

After a few days Ian got Amanda to go back to school. Rock music and boredom and phone friends and not talking about her case did what persuasion would not do. At first, even pointing out that if she was not in school, it would make it more likely she would serve time in jail hadn't broken her resolve. She had learned in the last year to spin her own reality. She had become an expert at deflection and denial. The truth was that somebody always cleaned up her spilled milk, all she had to do was a wait or cry, or both.

After she went back to school, Ian tried talking to her about the cold reactions of teachers, and the cruel remarks of her friends and she had given him enough to satisfy him that she was surviving all right. The real feelings, the deep feelings that Amanda felt she had saved for her best friend Kara Kovak, the bad influence, the bad seed of quick anger, the white trash talk tendency to whip herself over the least rejection she received. As she often said, Kara took no shit from anyone because she kept getting it dumped on her all the time. Amanda reassured her, Amanda stuck by her, Amanda accepted her for what she was.

Now that it was Amanda's turn to be in big trouble, Kara was there for her. Kara knew how to turn pain and fear into anger and defiance. As the next weeks went by, the two of them became closer than ever. Kara gave Amanda advanced lessons in how to say what her parents wanted to hear. The practiced teen aged lie would cut her slack. It would get her the freedom to do and to be what she really wanted. That neither of them knew what they really wanted somehow never became an issue. Life's potential was no more than personal license. Life's potential was a blank slate of self-indulgence.

Laura saw George once, the week following their appetizer. The next week it was three times. Very quickly, the passionate inventions of illicit, imaginative sex had given way to technique and patience and performance. Their imaginations had connected like explosive charges, but their bodies responded with a timing and touch that still didn't quite work like the well-oiled machine they had imagined. Everything was performance for George and Laura thought it was probably just that that she liked most about their coupling. And the fact that she was an adulteress and betraying her sweet Ian didn't seem to bother her nearly as much as the realization that George was a drunk. He drank before, during and after every meeting she ever had with him. Very quickly she realized she would be facing a lot more than performance anxiety when the day would come when she would have to break off their affair.

She quickly dismissed his interest in showing her and letting her experience 'The Course'. She told him that she was there for the sex and the interesting distraction from her life that she could count on him to provide. When she said it, it was the first time he looked truly hurt.

After they had sex they would lie in his bed and talk, mostly about Amanda.

George knew the lines between the generations. All his relationships were with immature adults just like himself. The only difference between teacher and student was he had the maturity and intelligence to know how to use power. Laura was intrigued that he knew how to have power over young people, young women, when she had so little power or influence on her own daughter. Her own experience and knowledge seemed to be worth nothing. She did not understand why being a mother should make that so.

That was why Laura got George to talk about the young women who had taken his course, many of whom still came back for one night stands and stolen weekends from unsuspecting mates. What he told her made her realize the loneliness that existed in modern marriage, the bittersweet loneliness that existed in being gifted or beautiful or bright. She realized the need that George satisfied was that he could take that lonely reality and make it into a brief, exciting, romantic, imaginative connection. George was the Harlequin romance of bright, gifted women. Laura was amazed that they could lie together for hours talking about his other women. She was also amazed at her own interest in Eugene Van Fleet's wife.

Under the waxy odor of Eugene's own dying was the image of his wife, the capitalist dynamo, the big spider in the big web of family. What intrigued Laura was that she had done all this with such an unambitious husband and so many troubled, once or twice disposable children. Sharon Molloy Van Fleet. The name often went through her mind during the few quiet moments of her days.

She had learned that on the farm of the Van Fleets had home schooled their children and now were doing the same with some of their grandchildren. They had invented a curriculum based mostly on music and history. George talked about the big schoolroom that looked like a coffee house, which served, on Saturday nights, just that very purpose. Everyone sang. Everyone performed. Sharon's Newfoundland roots had become the basis of an educational system. When Laura learned that all of the adult children, except one, had advanced university degrees she was amazed and even more curious.

It seemed that one of the activities the children did at school was learning about the furniture and glass and pottery that existed in the local areas that they were studying. It made them all mini-appraisers who could walk into any flea market with a hundred dollars and come out with a whole lot more. By the time the Van Fleet children reached puberty they were all expert antique pickers.

The picking of antiques had led to the furniture restoration business, which lead to the antique shop the eldest son had run in Toronto for years. Laura knew the shop. Laura even knew Eugene's charming gay son, Wayne. She had been in the shop many times.

George explained how the school curriculum somehow always came back to music. It was the glue and the potion that seemed to make everything come alive. It was the glue that had apparently bound disposable children into a real family. George loved the idea that performance could be the foundation of life. "For the Van Fleets, money doesn't talk, it sings." he said with obvious admiration.

The more Laura heard, the more impossible it seemed, and it all seemed to have the same source in Sharon Van Fleet. For one of the few times in her life she felt strangely inadequate and second rate. When she thought about what Sharon had done, she felt curious and anxious and most strangely of all, somehow actually afraid.

When George had suggested that they drive up to meet Sharon and see Eugene, it was only her fear and anxiety that had won out over her growing curiosity. It was even harder for her to reject the idea when George told her about how a half a dozen foster families came to the farm every summer and lived in log cabins and learned to work hard in their cooperative, working alongside the whole Van Fleet family. When George told how they would swim and sing and ride horses and play together, Laura was almost envious of those foster families.

"For four months the foster families live there for free: no food bills, no clothing bills, no gas bills, everything is supplied for a few hours of work every day for which they are well paid. At the end of the summer all the families go home with a winters supply of canning and preserves that comes out of the garden they helped work. Sharon says that it's families that need fostering not children."

'It was certainly true for her.' Laura thought. "If it only was that easy." she said.

"I'm telling you that you and Sharon would connect. Besides, she's probably better at dealing with troubled children than anyone I've ever seen. If you think you need some advice about Amanda, she's really the one you should see." George pressed.

"That conversation wouldn't be much fun." she replied, but when she thought about it, she realized that what he said was a very serious reason to actually meet her.

Without telling her parents, Amanda stopped going to school once more, and when Ian found out when the vice principal called him at work, he was absolutely enraged and frustrated and desperate. She had chosen her street friends over her family and school. It was like talking to her through her headphones while she sat listening to music and shutting out reality.

That night when Laura found out that Amanda hadn't been going to school, she had a hissing, screaming, apoplectic fit, storming into her daughters room to confront her with eye- popping 'I'm nots and you're nots and if you think I'm going tos. Don't think that you're going to... As long as you live in this house you will do exactly.... It's over! I'm not going to put up with this shit anymore! Things are going to change around here!'

Instead of Amanda's usual response to her mother's tirades: the 'as if you really careds; the you can't make me do anythings; the I don't give a shit what you think; you're not so perfect! I'll just go and live with my friends!' Laura was confronted with the dead stare of impassive indifference. It was finally recognizing that which made Laura realize how bad things had finally become.

Amanda had refused to see the therapist who had told Ian that she was probably suffering from depression. When he objected that she had been eating well, that she had been polite and even smiled recently, the therapist said she was in denial about what she had done. Ian didn't like the distant diagnosis. She didn't look depressed. When he confronted Amanda she didn't look guilty or upset that he had found out she cut school. She had calmly told him that she couldn't understand why she would be going to school when her future was something she could no longer imagine. He didn't know what to say to that. It seemed almost suicidal in its implication.

"You haven't thought about hurting yourself?" he had asked softly.

"No, of course not. You really think I'm crazy or sick." Amanda said with some obvious nervous anxiety.

Her father tried to describe for her the possibilities for her future life. She would find work that would be a passion. She would find a partner who would give her life meaning. She would have children that were beautiful and loved.

"Daddy, you're such an incurable romantic. Show me who has that."

"Me and your mother." he replied in all seriousness.

"I thought Cleopatra was the queen of denial."

It hurt him deeply to hear that his daughter could so calmly deny the love that existed in their little family. It hurt even more to realize that what she said was partly true. He was a romantic and neither his work nor his wife nor his daughter had given him the meaning he had hoped for in life. The imaginary structures he had created for Amanda to inspire her hopes for the future were nothing more than stick figures standing outside a house with a green tree and a big yellow sun.

"You can't stay in your room for the rest of your life. You have to make some choices, eventually."

"Emily Dickinson stayed in her room her whole life and look what she left the world." she said and her eyes carried an unspoken challenge to the way he and Laura were living their life.

"Emily Dickinson stayed in her room, they say, because of a broken heart."

"It's as good reason as any." she replied, "But if everyone with a broken heart stayed in their rooms, there wouldn't be anybody on the street. I just don't see any point in going to school anymore."

"But how would you make a living?" he pleaded.

"Who knows? Who cares?"

"I care. Your mother cares." he insisted.

"I told to you that you were a romantic."

That was the way they left it. She was too smart to know how stupid she was being. Ian was helpless to know how to give his daughter some hope or belief in the possibilities of her future. And it scared him to realize that those were questions he no longer asked himself.

Amanda then began to stay out very late with her friend Kara. A lot of the world didn't sleep, or wouldn't sleep looking for the endless party where fun might just possibly lead to some real and serious emotional connection. Imagination wasn't funny. Young people found the stardust of hope at parties where they were intoxicated by depressants or stimulants or hard music that was so loud it was actually possible to feel it was part of you. Heartbeat might just come from back beat, you never knew.

Laura decided to tell Ian about George. Her curiosity about Sharon and her serious desire to get some help in dealing with Amanda made her decide at last she wanted to go with George to visit the farm. Naturally, she didn't tell Ian about the affair, just a sanitized version of her seeing George that was technically true, where omissions weren't denials, where deception was done to be kind.

"He called me. We had lunch. He told me about Eugene's wife and how she was able to do miracles with kids that had serious emotional problems. Raising sixteen, or is it fourteen disposable kids certainly gives her a lot more experienced and expertise than anyone I can think of. I want to go to see her to see if she has some ideas about what we can do with Amanda." she explained.

She could see he was intrigued, because he was perhaps even more desperate than she was to find something to give Amanda's life meaning. She declined his offer to go along with her because she thought it would be better if it was just two mothers talking. "Besides, I'm going to have to see Eugene. I don't know what that's going to be like. Me, George, Eugene; somehow I'll feel better if I'm just dealing with those old connections. I don't want to have to introduce you and make small talk with somebody who is going to talk back through a computer. I don't think this is going to be very much fun."

"Then by all means go. I've run out of ideas. Last night she came home after five in the morning and I think she was wrecked."

Laura thought of looking into Eugene's eyes once more, the only eyes she had ever seen truly stuck with love; indelible, unrelenting, so unbearably hopeful and sad. He knew she knew he was out of her league. Yet still, without saying it to herself, she both hoped and feared he might somehow still love her. He had once told her that love doesn't rust. She would see.

### Chapter 4

That Saturday Laura and George drove to the farm in his Porsche. The last leaves of fall hung in warm pockets in the woods, yellow islands in the bare emptiness of the end of the year. White clouds gathered on the horizon and rose unnoticed in perpetual change and design. The cut farm fields passed like countless summers as they swept along the country roads remembering the half remembered turns in life

Running the gray roads, running into the sun, they were running blindly into a strange almost desperate destiny. No matter how often it's traveled, no road is ever familiar, no road is the one a person expects, no road ends in the place it's expected to go. That Saturday morning the autumn road had its own lovely, almost addictive high. Laura and George were running together on the road that ran from the city to the country, the road they had left far behind.

Laura was shocked when she saw the farm again for the first time in more than thirty years. The enormous brick farmhouse that had sat among seven old lonely walnut trees was now swallowed in its own extensions: the two-story peaked spine of the house was extended back and doubled its original length; two single story arms came off the body of the house at right angles; and enormous log out-buildings had sprung up in the fields all around the house.

"I can't believe this is the same place." Laura said, almost breathlessly.

"Gene calls it the compound."

"Where did all these walls come from?" Laura asked about the long serpentine walls that ran along the long lane way leading to the compound, snaking in long flowing curves to take in the house and the log out buildings and garden areas. The walls made a most powerful impression. The walls were made of gray limestone that seemed to have weathered in their own intricate curves, almost like the convolutions of dissected human brains.

When George explained the source of the walls and then explained the lovely gazebo surrounding the most distant walnut tree, she knew she was in a place where people lived with such intensity and high expectations that she was sure she wouldn't belong. She was almost tempted to ask George to turn around.

He had quickly explained how Gene and Sharon had built the walls together over the last twenty years. They owned a rock quarry on one of their wood lots and Gene would bring a truckload of limestone for them to work on together. A half an hour a day, they had worked together building the walls. It was their time to work together, their time to connect without speaking.

"It's all very symbolic, the walls and all." Laura had pointed out.

When she pointed out the huge beautiful gazebo surrounding the single walnut tree, George explained that it was the Van Fleet church.

"Gene and Sharon decided they wanted to give their children a sense of their own history and traditions and that religion should be a part of that, but they had Protestants and Catholics, a Buddhist, a Jew and a Native child so that it was hard to decide how to make a religious service they all could share. They came up with one based on the Quaker model. Service is every Sunday just before lunch. They take turns preparing the service. The person leading that week says the opening prayer then there is a song that they've chosen to begin the half-hour when anyone can express any spiritual feeling or story that they want to share, then there's another song and the last ten minutes is in silent prayer. There is one last song and it's over. No one is allowed to talk about anything that happened in the service. The opening prayer is really quite nice. 'It is possible to respect all living things. It is possible to be thankful for life's deepest sorrows.' Isn't that great?"

As they got closer to the house Laura saw that the gardens around the house were tucked around huge boulders, glacial travelers that Eugene had brought using the crane on the big lumber truck. Where the dry lawn had once been, small, flat limestone pebbles lay all around the traveler stones so the landscaping looked almost oriental.

The farm was one surprise after another. When they pulled into the parking lot it was into a huge enclosed paddock surrounded by a ten foot deep wall of cedars. Two long log buildings backed onto the cedars. On one side was a ten car garage. Opposite was its twin, which included the working garage, where repairs and restoration were done. Because it was Saturday, the day they were run, there was a classic, restored automobile sitting in front of each of the doors of the parking garage. Each wooden door of the garage was painted one of the colors of the famous automobile marques: Ferrari red, British Racing Green, Bugatti Blue, Mercedes Silver and Alpha Romeo yellow. The cars had just finished their Saturday run and the smell of oil and hot engines hung in the cool afternoon air. From inside the working garage came the deep rip of an engine being revved violently as it was being tuned.

Laura could see through the open working garage doors how busy it was; young men and women in blue jeans and coveralls focused on their work. She was surprised that nearly half the people working in the garage seemed to be young women and girls.

The row of beautiful cars gleaming in front of their doors was breathtaking. Laura was looking at close to two million dollars' worth of cars and it looked it.

"These are the kid's cars." George explained, "When each of the kids was fourteen, Gene helped them find a classic car that they liked that needed restoring, and they worked together to restore the car to mint condition. Eugene always said that none of his kids would ever work for a bank or a car company. He always said was that a car was the best thing ever invented to connect two human beings."

"Not a wall?" Laura replied, sarcastically.

"No. And don't ask any of the kids about their cars unless you want to hear more about an Allard or a Bristol or a Porsche Speedster then you never wanted to know."

Laura walked to the beautiful silver Gull Wing Mercedes she had ridden in so many times. The two pieces of wicker luggage that lay under the back window were just as they were all those many years ago. The grand touring car had lived up to its name. It made her heart flutter to see the shining, beautiful jewel box of her youth. It was so much more beautiful than she remembered it being, the silver shoulders and curves of its body, the masculine presence and power, the feminine grace and fluidity.

When they walked out of the cedar paddock Laura felt strangely light headed and displaced.

When they passed the puffing steam engine that had been hidden by the cedars it was just one more unexpected surprise. The huge old iron horse puffed white steam into the sky, the auger from its hopper car groaned as it delivered wood chips to its fire box, wood chips recycled from the Van Fleet lumber mill. George explained that the old steam engine supplied the heat and the electricity for all the buildings through underground pipes and cables. "If there was ever a nuclear Holocaust, nobody here would probably even notice." George said with obvious admiration.

"But it's enormous. Where did it come from? How did they get it here?" she asked incredulously.

"Now that's a story." he replied.

George looked up and she followed his eyes to the woman who was now approaching them from the house. Laura knew it was Sharon, the woman she couldn't stop thinking about for weeks.

Her short dark hair was flecked with gray, her powerful stride fluid and graceful. She looked almost Spanish in features, and in fact that was her background: her genes had come from the wrecked Armada off County Cork that emigrated to Cape Race in Newfoundland then to the farm where they had set such massive roots in orphaned children. Her high flat face was lit with the most irresistible smile and her eyes shone with an unquenchable liquid fire, the warmth of that fire almost palpable on the cool autumn day. Those eyes were absolutely locked on Laura. Sharon came to Laura with her hand out and when she took Laura's soft hand in both of hers, Laura felt literally overwhelmed. "I'm Sharon, Gene's wife. Welcome."

'Does everyone get this kind of reception?' she thought to herself, yet simply said, "Hello, I have been looking forward to meeting you."

"I always wondered when this day would happen." Sharon replied. Her comment shocked and surprised Laura completely; not if but when. 'It's almost as if she thinks my being here was inevitable.' she thought to herself, and if it hadn't been for the eyes and the smile she was facing, she would have immediately asked what she meant.

It took Laura a moment after Sharon had gathered them in a line and they were walking abreast together towards the house, before Laura did turn to her and asked what she had meant.

"Why did you think this day would eventually come? Why would you think that I would ever come here?"

"I wasn't sure that we'd meet here at the farm, but there is in notebook with your name on it that Eugene has kept all these years that I was one day to deliver to you. He always kept a notebook for every person he loved. We'll all see them when he dies. "

She was stunned. Laura had no interest or curiosity in any notebook of old memories. She had come, afraid that she was going to be in over her head, now she was heaved in the deep end and sinking fast, her mind spinning, the surface of reality already seemingly far overhead. Sharon settled her and George on the huge enclosed porch furnished with heavy, white, comfortable wicker chairs.

"There's coffee on. How do you take it?" she asked Laura.

"Just black." she replied

"Like George." Sharon excused herself and was back in a few moments while Laura interrogated George about what he knew about the notebook.

"Everybody's a journal fanatic around here. See that little building covered in rose bushs? That's a little small town bank vault Gene brought home years and years ago. Everybody keeps journals and keepsakes and personal treasures in the vault. I guess there's a journal for you. Are you surprised?"

"Why? Why would he have kept a journal about me? Why would he want to give it to me after he dies? How could he imagine I'd want it?"

Sharon came back and sat opposite Laura so she could look in her eyes as they spoke.

Laura wondered if she had read the old journal. She wondered how much she knew.

"Tell me about this book with my name upon it." Laura tried to sound casual and conversational, but she was sure her anxiety was starting to show.

"As long as we've been together Eugene has kept journals. A few months ago he asked me to retrieve them along with the instructions of what he would like to have happen on his death. There are journals for his parents and for me and for all his children and there is one there for you. It has your current address and what I assume are all your previous addresses. It's clear he hasn't forgotten you.

When George called and said you were coming and I told Eugene, he asked if I would have any problem with treating you with the same concern we would show any member of the family. I told him that I would try, for his sake, if you wished it, but I would know better after I met you. You're not family."

"Absolutely not! I certainly wouldn't ask you or expect you to treat me like a member of your family. I think it is unreasonable that he would ask you to do that."

"It may seem so to most people, but every one of our children was a stranger when they came through our front door so; for us, being family isn't so much a matter of blood."

This was the last thing Laura expected to encounter. The fear, the anxiety was all over her face. Sharon saw it and reached over and touched her hand.

"I know it's hard to trust a stranger who is offering to take you into their life. You are no stranger to Eugene. You're no stranger to me. We're not asking you to respond in any way you don't wish to do. There are no expectations here."

"That's not the way it feels to me." Laura replied sharply.

It was in that moment that Laura knew what she was facing. The warmth, the unrelenting sincerity, the smile, the shining lovely brown eyes made her feel like a wan little piece of white bread indeed. She knew, in that moment that she was facing the most powerful woman she'd ever faced in her life. Where Laura could hold any room, this woman seemed to be able to take hold of a heart. She felt Sharon's lay hands on her life and she didn't like it one little bit.

Then Sharon asked Laura about her daughter. "I understand her name is Amanda?"

Her mind spinning back to a simpler reality, Laura remembered the reason she had come. Her enormous concerns for her daughter had spun away in the force of the few minutes and the few things that had happened since Sharon first took her hand when they met.

"Tell me about Amanda. Tell me what you like about her?"

Almost against her better judgment, Laura explained the anger and rebellion her daughter had shown in the past year. She explained the shock of discovering that she was a part of a bullying gang of girls, and how she was always bright and compassionate and gifted in anything she tried.

"How much time do you spend working together? Do you share any common interests?"

"We're different generations. We don't share common interests." Laura said nervously.

"Please don't think that I'm about to blame you as a parent." Sharon said, anticipating Laura's thoughts. "It's not easy in a city sharing work or even play. It's no longer necessary, so what's the point of making work and artificial play? But the reality is that it's only in work and play that people form the simple bonds that remind them of how deeply they are connected. You want to feel connected to your daughter. She wants to feel deeply connected to you, even if she's doing everything she can to make you think the opposite. And when she hurts you, sometimes you can't help wanting to hurt her back."

"That's true. We don't like each other very much right now." Laura admitted.

"Well, maybe you have to start by both admitting that's true. With my kids, when they hated us, I'd ask them to make a list of things they'd like us to change about how we did things or how we treated them. Then I'd ask if it wouldn't be fair to look at a list of things we would like to see them change about the way they treated us. Kids all think that life should be fair. It's their biggest weakness. Being a parent is mostly teaching your kids that sometimes you, and sometimes them, and a lot of times life, just isn't fair. It's not a lesson anyone takes gladly."

"That's true. It's a lousy lesson to have to give someone you love." Laura replied.

"It is. But in the end everyone is grateful to learn it. Everyone wants to learn that heartache is mostly nobody's fault. But let's talk more later, right now, let's go see Eugene. He's waiting to see you. And if you like, after lunch, George can take you on the grand tour."

Sharon got up and it was decided. Laura knew that this would be the price she would have to pay for meeting Sharon and playing out the small faint hope that she could actually help with Amanda. Sharon's hand in Laura's calmed her fear as they walked into the house.

Inside the house the soft white walls were covered with paintings done by the children at various stages of life. Between them original antique pine furniture gave the rooms the deep golden glow of the wood. Each antique piece carried a small hand lettered card that told the history of the piece and its owners, written in a fine calligraphic hand. History was the family passion. When Laura entered the enormous renovated dining room and saw the long glowing Walnut table that seated twenty-four people, she realized how pervasive and deep that passion for history went.

Unlike the rest of the house where home-made paintings and sculptures and folk art were scattered everywhere on walls and floors and windowsills, the dining room was dominated by its two opposing long walls.

One wall bore the most interesting carved Walnut bas- relief of what looked like a Banyan tree. Individual trunks of many trees rose to connect into one inter-connected crown.

These were the family trees of each of the sixteen children surrounding Eugene's and Sharon's family trees in the center. On the trunk of each tree was a brass box in which were kept white cards that told their family histories, the stories that traced the ancestors of each of the children and both of their adopted parents. The carving was fine and exquisite, showing the deep, blood-black luster of the polished wood. It also showed the symbolic importance and the actual respect for the individual past of each person in the family.

Laura asked about the lovely carved wall sculpture and listened to Sharon explain how Eugene had begun to search out the stories of their children's past and would on birthdays, put what he learned in the boxes that bore each of their names. Genealogy was one of his passions, and it soon became the passion of almost all of the children as well.

"Our kids all came here feeling absolutely rootless. Those boxes now contain deeper roots than the oldest line of settlers in the county." she explained, proudly.

"I can see that. It must be wonderful for them." Laura replied.

"The best things are the actual stories in those boxes. They are truly inspiring. There's more courage and tragedy and hard work and hope in those boxes then in all the history books that have been written. When kids know the trials and suffering their parents and grandparents and even great-great grandparents overcame, it makes them put their own disappointments in perspective."

Laura nodded in agreement and then asked about the opposite wall that had long rows of post card size photos of the Van Fleet family at work and at play.

"Every week one of the children is assigned the particular job of being the photo journalist of the week. They have no other chores. They get to go where they want, take as many pictures as they want, of whatever they decide is interesting. At the end of the week two pictures are chosen to go up on wall, one that's the personal choice of the photojournalist and one selected by a vote from all the other members of the family. Sometimes picking that picture is harder than picking a new Pope.It's a whole lot cheaper now with digital cameras

It was a montage of time and love, snapshots that gave it attention and detail.

"They take photo albums seriously around here." said George, "A little too seriously, if you ask me."

Sharon ignored the remark and led them on through the dining room into the huge sun room where Eugene lay in his double hospital bed, surrounded by technical apparatus: his respirator, his electric wheelchair, and his computer and monitor. The technical devices warding off death sat amid an explosion of life and flowers. Citrus trees sat among ferns and flowers. Dendrobium and cymbidium and ageratum orchids hung in waxy splendor from grapevine planters and from latticed benches. They were on the floor and on tables everywhere. The odor was almost cloyingly sweet in its power. It was funeral home succor to Laura. Eugene's twelve year old daughter Martha was sitting on the bed beside her father. She looked up and smiled as the visitors entered with her mother through the patio doors separating the sun room from the rest of the house. The slate floor gleamed in colors of amber and green and rust and black.

Eugene lay at the end of the room, sitting up in his big adjustable bed. His head was in a brace so a laser could read his eye movements which the computer turned into the standard alphabet of speech. A number of chairs sat by the bed for visitors, in one of which sat Eugene's thirty year old daughter Sarah. Her eyes turned to the visitors as well.

Then for the first time in over thirty years, Laura looked into Eugene's blue eyes and he looked into hers. She stepped nervously to the foot of the bed. She stared through him, through the years, through the terrible change that had happened to him.'We're did he go?' she thought.' No look of love, and her heart lost its balance for an instant.

"Hello, Gene." she gasped. Her heart pounded and her hands were sweating. She tried to smile and failed. He did look like a wasted Fred Astaire. She knew he could not speak but saw his arm slowly lift as if to greet her.

A single tear formed in Eugene's right eye, filled full and fell slowly down his cheek. That tear hung on and slid down every heart in the room. It hung suspended on Laura's like hot lead and she thought for a second she was going to faint.

Sharon saved her by reaching down to her side and taking her wet hand.

"Eugene uses a computer to speak. His eye movements on an alphabet chart are moved to the computer monitor."

Laura looked up at the computer monitor beside Eugene's bed and saw the words.

"What joy!"

And when her eyes came back to his and they rejoined after his message, she could tell it was true, and she had to use every fiber of her being to keep herself from crying.

"Your place, your family, it's a dream." Laura said to him.

His eyes turned away from her as he typed and she read, "No, it's real."

"It's hard-core reality, sometimes." Sharon added. "When I told him you were coming, he prepared a little message for you to read." And she handed Laura a single piece of white paper that had some words she could not absorb. At the bottom of the words were four questions. 'Tell me about your life? Tell me about your daughter? Tell me about your husband? And finally, tell me about you?'

Expectations, commitments, the unexpected demands of their meeting almost overwhelmed her as she stood at the death bed of this man she had loved so tenuously as a boy, while she stood holding the hand of his formidable middle aged wife. Sharon felt in Laura's hand the overwhelming emotional impact that seeing Eugene was having.

"Let's leave Gene to rest. We'll have a quick house tour before lunch. We can have another visit later, if you like." she said, and Eugene looked into her eyes and they shared an unspoken message that no one else in the room could understand.

Gene's children got up and started to move him as the others left, the curiosity and apprehension over what they had seen written all over each of their faces. It was obvious they had not the slightest idea who Laura was. It was obvious they were both dying to know the story behind this stranger who could move their father to tears.

Sharon comforted Laura again. "The first time is hard."

"It must break your heart, every day."

"It's not how he is. It's how he will be that's hard." Sharon said softly.

The house tour let Laura recover her emotional balance. Her mind tried to reconcile old innocent emotions with the new painful experiences that were somehow connected to her heart. Who she had been was gone. What he was was wasting away. The meaning of his life was all around her. And the meaning of death was something she could feel like a hand on her shoulder. She was so glad to look into new rooms and see different people doing so many different things.

In the huge modern kitchen a half a dozen people were preparing lunch for the family. Laura noticed Eugene's mother, now eighty years old, deliberately cleaning a counter while a small, blond child beside her watched her carefully. Sharon said she would not try to make introductions because there were just too many people between family and friends and people who worked in the farm.

Finally George, who had been following so quietly spoke as they poked their heads into the big family room with all the big armchairs and sofas, with the big television and the many stereo turntables and tuners and headphones and the enormous collection of tapes and vinyl and CDs. In the family room, it was possible to be a part of the group or be absolutely alone.

The coffee house was always the biggest surprise to new visitors to the farmhouse. Nobody expects to walk through a room in a farmhouse and find an enormous stage covered with musical instruments standing in front of dozens of restaurant tables. The coffee house got its name from the way that it looked. The fact that it also served as the classroom for the children of the family was anything but obvious. Sharon had to tell Laura about its dual purpose. This was the place the family learned. This was the place they spent most of their time having fun. On Saturday nights it was filled to overflowing with friends and guests and family in an East coast Ceilidh of music and dance when the grand piano, the guitars and drums, the wood winds and strings of all kinds would rise to practiced lips and hands.

There were at least a dozen people in the room working on an arrangement of a song. Some played and sang. Some sang and clapped time from the audience. Everyone was too focused to even pay attention when Sharon passed through with her guests. The one thing that everyone on the farm was used to seeing was strange faces. Light poured in from the windows on a long wall of the room. On the opposite log wall stretched a framed twenty-four foot run of white painted wall board. In big letters in the top center was painted the words: SONG LINES: FEEL! MAKE! KEEP! Underneath the big letters written in countless hands and many colors of ink were song lines people had written as favorites, favorites to save and share in a place where they would be seen, appreciated and compared with all the other great lines that had come from songs that had found a place in some particular heart.

'And I feel the very mentioned of you. Like the kicker in Julip or two.' was printed beside,' Well, you hesitate by one, and you hesitate by two, Angels in heaven singing hesitation blues.'

George took Laura to see the song lines close up and she read out loud,

"But a fat and healthy working class

Is the thing that I most fear

So I reach my hand for the water tap,

And I water the worker's beer."

Then Laura found one she truly loved and said so, before she read it out loud.

"Putting on the agony, putting on the style,

That's what all the young folks are doing, all the while.

And as I look around me, I'm very apt to smile,

To see so many people putting on the style."

She chuckled to herself at the old folk lyric then realized with a shock that it was written in Eugene's own careful hand.

They finished the tour by going outside and coming in the back of the laundry room. The big dryers were already finished the morning laundry and it had been hung by size in its place in the biggest walk-in closet Laura had ever seen.

"We get all our work clothes second-hand. They go up on these racks until they're too worn to wear. Anybody can wear anything in this room. Personal clothes are kept and cared for by those who buy them." Sharon explained.

"I suppose it's the only way you can afford to dress so many children. Amanda cost a fortune until this last year when she moved into retro grunge."

"We are retro grunge here most of the time." Sharon sympathized.

"No, this isn't retro grunge. There isn't anything anywhere nearly worn enough. "Laura replied regretfully.

They passed through the kitchen once more and great bowls of food had been prepared and were steaming on the central working table, ready to be delivered to the dining room table where the family ate, or delivered to the coffee house were everyone else gathered for lunch.

When they came back into the dining room the enormous black walnut table had been covered with one long cotton tablecloth. Seventeen places had been set for the family, children and grandchildren and two special guests.

Eugene was already at the head of the table having been moved into his big wheelchair. Those near him were taking turns telling him about the things that had happened that day. Sharon seated Laura and George beside her at the other end of the table. It was only a moment before every place that had been set had someone waiting. The food had been delivered and everyone was quickly ready to eat.

Sharon said the Grace that came before every meal. "Let us give thanks for each moment of life. Let us respect all created things."

Everyone said amen and waited in silence for Sharon to speak.

"You all know George. Today we get to welcome a dear high school friend of your father's, Laura McCall.

If she had been introduced as someone just raised from the dead or someone just visiting from another planet or a time traveler from the twenty eighthth century, the effect of the introduction could not have been more profound. Casual faces were struck with shock and disbelief. Some mouths actually fell open. Laura's heart sank in fear and surprise at the power of this focused, unexpected, intense attention.

Martha, the twelve year old who was sitting opposite Laura, spoke into the shocked silence of the room.

"Is your middle name Lee?" she asked, softly.

"No, it's Anne." Laura replied in confusion. "Why do you ask?"

"Because you look just like Arthur described her." Everyone stared in mutual agreement. Was this Laura Lee?

Sharon suddenly understood what was happening and laughed for a moment before she saved Laura's racing heart from actually running away with her. She explained to Laura that for the last two decades Eugene had been reading letters from two sixteen year olds named Arthur and Laura Lee. These were letters exchanged more than thirty five years ago.

"Martha, tell Laura about Arthur and Laura Lee."

Straight haired, serious Martha with her straight bangs and big eyes then told the story of the shoe box of blue air mail letters that Eugene would get out every month or so for all those years. For as long as the children could remember he would read one letter and its reply.

"Laura Lee and Arthur were both sixteen years old when she was sent to France to go to school. The year before, they had found three cases of old wine in a dry well on Haystack Island that had been left there by rumrunners during prohibition. Because Arthur's father was an alcoholic, they took the three cases of wine and buried them under an old stone fence on her parent's farm. They pretended to discover them there. The wine turned out to be worth hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Sharon had to stop the story and tell everyone to begin to eat. "That's a first-time that's ever happened." she said with a laugh. "Lucy's the family expert on Arthur and Laura Lee. Lucy why don't go on."

A twenty year old girl with two side braids continued, explaining that Arthur and Laura Lee had fallen in love two years before they had found the wine and Laura Lee had been sent away to school in France to separate her from Arthur who was now too poor to love her.

"From the time they were fourteen years old they both had the same dreams when they slept. They would see the same dream from different points of view, but it was always about the same dream, even though their experiences would be different. They found the wine because of one of their dreams. Laura Lee had dreamt about the rumrunners hiding liquor on Haystack Island. Arthur dreamed about where they put it in the old well behind some old lose stones about six feet down."

"The wine was Chateaux Lafitte, 1928." added Tranh, the quiet elder son before Lucy went on.

"As they got older their dreams got more wonderful. In their dreams they got to travel through time and space and visit the real lives and become part of the dreams of incredibly interesting people, some of them were even famous like Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson. The interesting thing was that when they visited those people, they were all about their own age. Their letters to each other were about the lives and feelings of the people in their dreams. They got to hunt polar bear with an orphaned Inuit boy. They got to sit in church invisible to everyone but Emily Dickinson, when she refused to be counted among those who wanted to be saved. They got to know what it's like to see someone walk into a gas chamber, and to see their parents die. Sometimes they were happy dreams, but most of the time they just made you want to cry. Arthur and Laura Lee could talk to these people when they fell asleep and were dreaming. Sometimes they could even appear, like invisible friends when these people were awake and really needed them. Arthur and Laura Lee helped the people they visited through some of the very worst times in their lives. The best letters, I think, are the ones about first love. Everybody in our family loves Arthur and Laura Lee like they were own brother and sister."

Laura looked around the table and she could tell that it was most profoundly true.

Sharon, seeing how little people were eating, decided to intervene suggesting that one of the children who remembered one of the stories about Arthur and Laura Lee might share it with Laura after dessert. Tom, her eighteen year old son, a long, beautiful native American boy with a lovely flowing head of dark hair offered to do that.

"My father says that he was asked by Arthur to keep their letters so no one would find out they existed." Tom said to explain why they were in Eugene's possession. "We always asked what happened to them when they grew up but he would never ever say."

Tranh pointed out that there was considerable debate within the family about the authenticity of the letters. "They appear to be old air mail letters. The handwriting is different and they even have envelopes that might authenticate them, although I'm sure my dad could have faked those if he had wanted to do it. Still, no one ever gets to examine them closely. Dad keeps them in the vault in the shoebox, until he decides it's time to read us another. We miss them." he said sadly.

They all looked at Eugene whose eyes were dancing among those of his children. When they came to Laura, he fixed her with a stare that wrapped around her heart like fingers.

"They sound like wonderful letters." Laura said into his eyes, "You should publish them. There's a huge juvenile market out there."

She had not intended to sound crass, but that's the way it was taken by almost all the children.

"I don't think you're really Laura Lee." said Martha, softly.

"No, I'm certainly not. I've never shared a dream with anyone." Then suddenly she remembered that that wasn't completely true. Her eyes flashed to Eugene and she knew he had never forgotten.

Everyone saw the sudden look of intensity pass between them and wondered about it, then Laura quickly caught her balance and changed the subject completely.

"Tell me, who's this week's photojournalist?" she asked.

"I am." said Ryan, a slim boy about eleven or twelve who held up an expensive Minolta automatic camera. "I know it's against the rules, but can I take a picture while we're eating?" he asked his mother. Sharon looked up at Eugene and every one of the children was completely shocked when she agreed that it was all right. Ryan pointed the camera straight at Laura and the shutter fell with a resounding click.

After that Sharon apologized to the children for not introducing each one of them to Laura. Starting with Tranh beside her, she went around the table introducing them all. She introduced them using their full names. The Van Fleet children always introduced themselves with their birth names included. The names came faster than Laura could remember them. Ambrose Bryant Van Fleet, Sara Cimek Van Fleet, Lucy Doan Van Fleet, were all adults lived away from the farm. Tranh and Ambrose and Sarah all had their children at the table with them. The younger members of the family still living at home began with Tom, a tall handsome native boy with long flowing black hair. The rest of the children ranged in age from sixteen to eight years old. Trudy Rammela Van Fleet, Mary Cusak Van Fleet and Martha Cushman Van Fleet were all teenagers. Ryan Reed Van Fleet, Amber Wellman Van Fleet, and David Roy Van Fleet were all just children. David sat beside Eugene's mother Rose, who fed him as if he was an infant. They were the only ones who did not acknowledge Laura's introduction.

Although David looked like a perfectly angelic child with a halo of curly blond hair, he was obviously developmentally handicapped. He had no apparent language aside from grunts. Laura saw that his grandmother was also suffering from some age related deficits. Her mind had apparently suffered a lot more than her body in her eighty some years.

Two dead children and Christa Hudson in the psychiatric hospital and two more children who rarely came home made up the rest of the family.

After the introductions, the children all talked and asked questions. George was obviously a favorite, his teasing remarks directed at the younger children made them laugh and giggle. But the children were obviously well practiced at asking questions. It was the younger ones who pumped Laura about her relationship with their father. 'Was she his girlfriend? Has she ever been to Haystack Island? Had she ever written their father any letters? Had she ever been to France? Why had she never been to visit before?' Laura answered each of the questions briefly. It was obvious that they expected more from her.

"I'm not Laura Lee." she finally protested.

The thing that surprised Laura the most about the conversation was that no one cut in, or interrupted or tried to dominate the conversation in any way. It was as if there was an invisible, honorable house speaker recognizing each one in their turn. Finally Laura had to ask.

"How is it none of you ever interrupts one another? At my house there are only three of us and we sometimes have to rise through two octaves to be heard."

"It's the wooden spoon." Sharon explained, indicating a large wooden spoon in a brass vase in the center of the table. "If people start interrupting one another we use the wooden spoon as a talking stick. You can only speak after putting up your hand and waiting for the person who is talking and has the talking stick to give it to you."

"We hate it." said Amber.

"It's a lot quicker, and a lot easier to learn to be considerate and polite." Sharon added. "All I have to do is threaten the wooden spoon and harmony instantly returns."

Laura heard the pride in Sharon's voice. She did not know that this was one of the first practical solutions she had devised many years ago when faced with so many new parental challenges.

"Could I borrow your stalking stick for a few years? Laura asked, "It doesn't seem that you need it any longer, and I could sure use it at home."

After dessert of fresh apple crumble Tom asked if he should begin one of the stories of Arthur and Laura Lee. The children looked anxiously at Laura and were obviously pleased when she said that she would love to hear one of the stories.

"This is this story of Petsuliack the Inuit orphan boy." he began, "This is from Arthur's letter dated July 9, 1959. Petsuliack was ten years old in 1909. He traveled with his people and his mother and father and younger brother and sister all of his life. They knew great hardship and great abundance. Petsuliack grew strong and happy until a terrible sickness came into his family and one after another his sister then his brother then his father and mother died from a terrible fever.The shaman tried to pray and call on spirits to help his parents recover, but it was no use.

As they died Arthur came to Petsuliack in his dreams and tried to comfort him in his terrible fear. And when at last his mother was dying, Arthur was by his side when she passed, and comforted him as best he could. Petsuliack did not know there were white people in the world. He was sure that Arthur in his dream was a spirit sent to him. He begged Arthur to save his mother and Arthur told him there was nothing he could do. For a ten-year old boy to see his sister and brother and father and mother buried under cold stones was a heartbreaking thing.

"What's to become of me now?" he had asked Arthur through his tears as he lay on his dead mother's still breast."

Arthur did not know, so he could not say. They were silent and sad together, but being with a powerless spirit like Arthur was somehow still comforting to the boy.

Then Petsuliack was an orphan and the people who had been so good to him all his life now treated him like one of the dogs. He had to sleep with the dogs. He was fed scraps with the dogs. He had to make his own clothes out of skins others threw away or fox's that he managed to snare when the women hunted. He had to sew his own clothes and it was poorly done because his mother had not taught him because he was a boy.

But even though he suffered greatly and had to sleep alone with the dogs in the entrance of the ice houses that were built in the winter, the worst pain was being thrust out from among the people, the worst pain was going from being loved by everyone to being treated as if he was worthless.

The table was absolutely silent because this was an experience each of the children at the table knew only too well. They all knew what it was like to be treated worse than a dog.

Tom continued, "The rest of the story comes from Laura lee's letter dated July 9, 1959. Finally when Petsuliack was twelve years old he boldly walked in to the ice house of the medicine man and told him that it was a heartless people who could so cruelly punish a boy for losing his parents. Surely the loss of his parents and brother and sister were as much the fault of the medicine man as it was his own. He had nursed his family the best that he could and failed, but so had the medicine man. The medicine man explained to him that he was not being punished.

"As you know, there are times when there is no food for long periods. You have seen people and children starve to death because there was no game, no hunt that succeeded. If a family had taken you in when your parents died, one day they would have to decide whether to give food to their own children or to share it with you. It is heartbreaking not to have food for your children because you love them. It would be also heartbreaking to deny food to a child you have grown to love. No one will let you into their heart because everyone knows that one day theirs would be broken when they might have to break yours.

"And so the people break my heart every day. This is a heartless people. It would be kinder to kill me and have done. I have even thought of doing it to spare the people the trouble it would obviously be."

"The healer then told him that his suffering and trials may have been for greater purpose. Because he has suffered so much he has become very strong and resourceful. Because he has no family of his own he would one-day be free to attempt a great feat for the people that no one else would dare. He told them he had something no one else among the people had. He had the freedom to act on his own."

The looks on the faces of the children were almost the same as a first-time they heard the story from Eugene as he read the letters in the strange handwriting. Faces were opened to the bottom of their hearts.

Tom told how the time came when a storm blew for over a month and there was no game and no food for weeks on end and people began to starve. Girl children and infants died first because they received the smallest portion. The dogs were still fed before children because without them the people were completely lost. Petsuliack still slept with them and he was terribly cut and torn when small bits of food were thrown to them and they fought for the smallest scrap."

"That was when Laura Lee came to him in dreams and told him to have courage, told him she had seen his suffering and that even though the storm ranged, she knew that if he followed her that somehow things would turn out all right. And because it was like a dream, the boy walked into the storm until he was finally so cold and so lost he was sure he was about to die. Then he felt Laura Lee's warm hand in his and saw her in the flesh as she led him to the shelter of a snow bank and when he was about to lay down in its lea, his nose smelled the oily smell and he looked closely and saw that the snow bank was a great sleeping white Bear. His only tool, his only weapon was a short bone knife he carried for skinning and cutting meat."

"His frozen hand found his knife and before he could think twice about his danger, he raised the knife over his head and plunged it down. The polar bear's brown eye opened to receive the full force of his blow. Petsuliack received the full force of the bear's forearm as it rose up and lashed out at his destroyer. Petsuliack was thrown far away and it was fortunate because the great bear was lashing out wildly, and then suddenly it just collapsed in a heap like a puppet whose strings were cut with a knife."

"Laura Lee in her dream saw the boy crawl to the bear and climb under its body until he was warm enough to take his knife and cut through to the liver and eat. He then cut the fur from the Bear's hind leg and wrapped it around himself, and carrying the bear's liver, went back to the people. The storm passed when he stuck the bear and as he returned to the people he left a trail of blood in the snow the people followed to find the Bear's carcass, and that was how the people were saved."

"After that Petsuliack became a great hunter and married and had children and was a kind father and husband because he understood what it meant to love unselfishly, far better than any of the people could even imagine. And when the day came when there was an orphan child among the people he apologized for breaking tradition but took the child into his own family and always said the orphan child was no different than one of his own."

The dinner table had the same silence as when Sharon had introduced Laura. Tears fell down the cheeks of Ryan and Mary and even Tom who had finished the story.

"Everybody loves that story." Sharon said.

"I can understand why." Laura replied, "It's wonderful. I wish could hear some of the others."

"You'll have to rely on people's memories. Eugene refuses to let anyone touch the letters."

It was then obvious that lunch was over. Sharon got up from the table and all the children followed quickly, some clearing dishes and leftovers, some saying goodbye to Laura with some obvious regret before they went back to their duties.

George asked Laura if she would like to see the farm, and when she agreed, Sharon stopped Tom and asked him to saddle two horses for them.

"Prince and Atta-boy are still in their stalls." he said, "I'll have them ready in a few minutes. It was nice meeting you." he said to Laura and shook her hand firmly.

By the time they got to the barn, two horses were saddled and tethered to iron rings by a water trough. The big old red barn still smelled of sweet hay and horses. When she and Eugene had been young and rolled in the hayloft there had only been two horses to hear them, and one dog to dance in excitement. Now there were more than half a dozen horses in the pasture and two old, big dog's that would follow them where ever they went.

Laura on Atta-boy and George on Prince, they set out on the wide road that had once been just a trail to the lake half a mile away. Autumn aster sweet meadow air felt cold on her face where the still warm sun tried to touch it.

They rode abreast and the horses seemed to know exactly where they should go. Near the lake, the dirt road turned into the valley of big sand dunes that were almost the colour of flesh, the shimmering blue water appearing through them as they rode was vibrantly pure and deep. It was all as she remembered until they turned into the little village of log cabins built among the dunes. Each had a stone chimney and a porch and an outhouse nearby. It was almost like they were transported in time back to an early settler's village, the quiet and the peace of the absent people had almost the same peace as Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, Laura thought to herself.

George stopped Prince in the center of the little community and Atta-boy, unasked, came to stop to beside him. George went on to explain that these were the summer cabins that the foster families used. It was here they learned to get back to the most basic way of life. It was here they found, over two summers, a village that would raise the consciousness of everyone: children and parents and neighbors.

"Each cabin has a well and a hand pump and a little wood stove for heat and cooking breakfast."

Laura could see a circular pallet of dry wood beside each cabin, each one under a year-round cover of thatched rushes.

"There's a sleeping loft in each of the cabins with a good mattress wrapped in plastic. I'll bet you've never done it on plastic." he said suggestively.

"Complete with spiders and mice and chipmunk turds." she pointed out.

The long sand dunes stretched beside them as they rode out onto the beach, stretched beside them with the languid curves of a beautiful sleeping woman. Haystack Island lay still, a quarter of a mile from shore. Barely a hundred acres, it was still big enough to dwarf the Paleolithic mound at its flat center that had given it its name. She and Eugene had swum to the Island many times one long hot summer ago. They would lay on the beach on the other side and watch the lake boats on the horizon, and except for the lack of palm trees, it was as private and beautiful to them as any South sea Island. To run lithe and naked through the crystal clear waves, to touch warm skin and sand, to touch breast to breast, to say absolutely nothing for hours, had been lost memories for Laura until that moment when they turned on to the beach. The memories, at best, seemed to be inappropriate, with far more of the back taste of bitterness than the sweet thing she would have expected them to be.

They rode slowly for another ten minutes as the horses picked a trail that climbed back into a field. They could see in the distance the five acre forest of walnut and white pine trees enclosed on all sides by a ten foot deep hedge of tall cedars. Laura could barely remember anything except the bare forest floor and how the trees were trimmed so high that the straight trunks were like cathedral columns. Then she remembered that in autumn, green walnuts would fall from each of the great trees and would lay in a circle beneath each one. She knew the circles were there once again.

George reminded her about what lay behind the cedars and she said she remembered but wanted to head back instead. Both horses seemed surprised to be turned back toward the farm and in a few minutes they could see all the buildings from the rise on which lay the farm's old settler's Cemetery.

It was the family McFee that lay beneath the old limestone weathered grave stones, the names and dates beginning early in the nineteenth century, one baby, then another, lost and remembered with a weathered inscription, a father by a mother by one child after another. Surviving children married and brought spouses to lay beside them with their children. And near the end of that century the Van Fleets began to take their places behind and beneath better limestone and deeper inscriptions.

There were four recent additions to the cemetery: Eugene's father Frank, 1901-1968; Gene and Sharon's son Casey, 1976-1980; their daughter Molly, 1982-1989 rested beneath new polished red granite tombstones. The one addition Laura did not notice was the huge traveler granite boulder that Eugene had dropped at the beginning of a new row where his two children lay. It was to be beneath this stone that he and Sharon would consider eternity.

They passed through the Cemetery in the slow gait of the horses, Laura's anxiety about what she had found on the farm and what she had brought to it still unresolved.

Tom was waiting for her and George at the barn and when she gave him the reins, she saw some of the young children who had been playing at the barn as they waited for her return and they were staring at her like she was an apparition that had truly risen from the dead. It didn't matter, she felt calm and clear and saturated with silence, like trees that had shed their final leaves.

They sat again on the porch with Sharon and talked mostly about Amanda. Particular problems and incidents seemed to be quickly left behind for more abstract considerations such as the difficulty of being a parent and a child with so few common concerns and problems to share.

"Children are not much different than dogs heartbroken when they are left in a kennel. The one question I always asked myself with my kids was what could I do that would make them feel like we were a pack setting out on a hunt."

"That's not so easy in the city." Laura replied, "Maybe we can do picnics or I can get her out of bed and the two of us can go to my morning workout session together. I doubt if she'd want to do anything with either of us right now."

"In my experience, children aren't very good when they have too many choices. If you want your kid to feel like a part of a pack, you have to be prepared to be the leader of the pack."

"That's true. We've always tried to give Amanda choices. We thought that would give her a positive self-image and improve her self-esteem. It seems like it's done just the opposite."

"All kids need rules. Independence is learning how to adapt your own needs to those rules. I tell my kids that rules are like foundations, you can build what you want on top of them but you can't build where they don't go, unless you lay new ones."

Laura liked the analogy and said she would try to think about rules that would mean something to Amanda.

"Or you!" Sharon interjected.

Laura said they should probably be going back to Toronto and Sharon told her how glad she was that she had come. As usual she didn't feel she had been very much help but she hoped she would return and bring Amanda and Ian.

"This place does things to people." she said, "If you can get her to come, I'd be surprised if it didn't have some effect. Think about it. I really hope you will come back with her."

Laura said she would think about it. And then, unasked, Sharon led them back into the house to say goodbye to Eugene.

He was in the coffee house, watching the kids getting ready for that night's gathering. He reached up his hand and Laura took it in both of hers and they looked into each other's eyes and said nothing. Finally the silence had to be broken and she said goodbye. Her heart felt as thin and waxy as his hand in hers. She didn't think she would ever see him again.

All of the Van Fleet children in the coffee house quietly followed Laura and George and their mother out to the parking lot. It seemed difficult for them, when they realized that she was leaving. Before they got into George's Porsche, Sharon asked if Amanda had an email address because she would like to write and introduce herself, and almost reluctantly Laura gave it to her. Then Sharon pressed a piece of paper into her hand with her email address and their phone number.

"You can call me whenever you want to talk."

Laura thanked her and said that she just might do that.

The hug Sharon offered George and then Laura was not only impossible to refuse but it also seemed like second nature, like she was family, like this first goodbye meant there would be many others to come. It wasn't a hug Laura was used to receiving. The little group of children obviously wanted to say goodbye and they took her hand as they said it, and the looks on their faces were really quite touching.

"Will we see you again?" asked Martha, shyly.

"I don't know. I hope so." Laura replied and she felt badly because she wasn't really sure she wasn't lying to the child.

On the drive back to Toronto she was mostly quiet. She told George she liked him so much better when he didn't talk or drink.

"I hate to admit it, but I'm afraid of that woman. You held your own pretty well." he replied.

As she had done the first night she had been in George's Porsche, she put back the seat so that she could lie still and watch the clouds that had filled the clear blue sky. She could not help feel, and she didn't want to admit that Sharon had made a bond inside her that would be very difficult to shake.

She thought about Arthur and Laura Lee and if the letters were real and she doubted that it was true because it had to be just too great a coincidence. She tried to remember the details of the dream from thirty odd years before, and started to get really nervous, and as she was thinking about the dream, she somehow fell fast asleep.

She woke to the street traffic and when they got to George's apartment and he asked her to come up she said, "Why not."

Her blood pressure rose as they rode up in the elevator and just inside his door as he was hanging up his jacket he turned and saw the pure fire in her eyes. He was shocked. She walked up to him and grabbed the open neck of his crepe shirt and ripped the front of it out and away, the ticks of the buttons were thick around them as he gasped in surprise. He groaned when she kneeled before him and he felt her fingers open his belt and then his jeans and then rip them down to his ankles in one sudden violent jerk that took his underwear with them. Half hard only for seconds, her skill and passion had him moaning and rolling his eyes at sensations shocking his nerves, then big bundles of nerves, and then his whole body preparing to explode in absolute ecstasy. She stopped. He groaned.

"Lie down." she said in her huskiest voice, and he did that and then she stood up and stripped over him.

For some reason nothing had felt like this between them before, George's eyes wide and dilated as she lowered her desire down to him and into her, taking it full and fast and furiously. He reached for her body and her swollen hard breasts as she set the pace and began to stretch desire through to a pounding gallop with their breathing roaring behind them. Born to run, fast and faster and faster. Born to be wild. It was.

And when it was over and she was bent over in his arms, he told her that she was absolutely beautiful and meant it completely, unequivocally, absolutely.

"Say that you're beautiful." he whispered into her hair, "Say it!"

She waited for an instant and then threw her head back and glared in his eyes and said it.

"I am beautiful. I never get to say it." And the glare in her eyes ended when she told him, "You know me just too damn well."

Up, up and away. She got up and dressed and left him lying there grinning and about as happy as he'd ever been in his life. He didn't even mind when she seemed to dismiss everything with her cool goodbye. "Thanks for this." she had said before walking out the door.

### Chapter 5

When Laura got home Ian was watching sports on television. She was feeling energized from the adrenaline rush of what happened at the door of George's apartment, but most especially because of the incredible potential energy that infused every corner of the farm. The helpless feeling that nothing would change was almost like a fading backbeat of anxiety and doubt. She thought about being the she-wolf, the leader of the pack that Sharon clearly was for her family, and wondered if she could do that for her little family as well.

"So how was it?" Ian asked about her day on the farm. "It was incredible. It's like a capitalist commune. I've never seen more people doing more things and getting richer and richer by the minute. When you pull into the parking lot there must be a million dollars' worth of cars just sitting there, and those are just the ones that belong to the kids.

Ian's eyes lit up as she talked, but she was on the hunt. "Is she home?" She asked, breaking off the story. Ian nodded that she was, and Laura went straight to Amanda's room. It took three knocks before she got an anguished sounding, "What?" Laura went right through the door. Amanda looked like she had been sleeping even though it was just late afternoon. She stared at Laura with some apprehension, seeing the energy her mother brought into the room.

"Your father and I are going to dinner and we'd like you to come with us." Laura said while Amanda looked extremely apprehensive about the request.

"Why? You want to take me somewhere where I can't make a scene. What's happened? I want to know. You don't have to take me to a restaurant."

"Don't be so paranoid. I just went to visit the family of my dying high school boyfriend and it's a story I really want you and your father to hear together. Don't think of this as quality time; just think of this as having dinner with your parents when they might actually have something interesting to say. Please?" It was the please that did it. Amanda looked absolutely confused. She didn't move or reply.

"If we're going to get through this as a family we have to start by just spending some time together. I know you don't trust me, and I sure as hell don't trust you, but maybe we can leave that behind for just one meal. Let's start with one meal. Please."

Amanda did not know how to respond. This new tactic was too simple and too difficult to figure out without more information. And almost against her better judgment she got up and followed her mother out of the room.

In the car on the way to the restaurant, Amanda sat in the back seat and said nothing as her mother talked, until just before they arrived.

"So what did you say about what a screwed up daughter you have?" she finally asked quietly.

"It's true, I went there for advice from someone with a lot of experience in dealing with broken children, not that you are anywhere near as broken as her children when they were adopted. I realized that it isn't advice that we need, we need to do what they do every day; we need to connect with each other. You must miss it, like we do." Laura said, and she didn't sound sarcastic at all. And against all odds, and everyone's pessimistic expectation, dinner was absolutely delightful as Laura described her day's experience at the farm, and the description of it brought out what the farm did to most people, it brought out the heady perfume of pure possibility.

Amanda and her father sat there enthralled as the story poured from Laura: the beautiful cars, the carved walnut family tree, the art and the art studio she had seen, the furniture factory, the coffeehouse classroom, the steam engine, the foster family cabins, the horses, the sand dunes, the wall of lyrics and the beach. Ian was most taken with the idea of restoring cars to their original pristine beauty and how each child has helped restore their own car with their father.

"I know you wouldn't want to get dirty working on an old car," he said to Amanda, "But when you get your first car, maybe we could find one that you liked and have them restore it for you? And it will be a wonderful investment for your future as well."

"I don't want an old car." Amanda replied with some obvious contempt for the idea.

"It's true that none of your girlfriends will probably be very impressed with a beautiful restored classic car, and you'd probably get tired of having every boy you know come up to you wanting to ride in it and drive it. You'd probably just hate the idea of having every boy think you are so cool." Laura added.

"Boys like old cars?" Amanda asked incredulously.

"Not quite as much as sex." Ian added, and Amanda's eyes grew wide in surprise.

Ian's other interest was in the cabins the foster families used in the summer. Again Amanda could not believe that people would choose to go and live without running water and indoor toilets.

"You're not thinking that we should go up there and be one of those foster families?"

Laura reassured Amanda that neither she nor her father had time to do that, no matter how screwed up they were. "In a way, it's probably too bad. Ann Marie and Megan could probably use that kind of time together." No one touched the unspoken implication that Laura didn't think that they could use that kind of time together. No one wanted to admit it because none of them was prepared to do it.

Amanda was most interested in the coffeehouse and the family room with its huge collection of records, tapes and CDs.

"It would be so cool to have your own club in your own house where people could come and play music and sing. Wow!"

Amanda made her mother describe the coffeehouse in detail, the stage and the instruments and who was there doing what. She loved when her mother told her about the huge song line collection on the wall of the coffeehouse. She started thinking out loud about lines she would choose. This prompted both her parents to do the same and each of them let dancing rays of delight flare out of the tiny seams that old songs opened in their hearts. Sweet feelings flowed through the dinner, and when Laura and Ian toasted their daughter, it was done with an absolute lack of irony. Amanda just looked embarrassed.

At home, Amanda didn't go straight to her room that she usually did. He threw herself the big leather armchair and spent some time searching particular CDs for certain lines she liked. It was also obvious that she was there because she wanted to listen to what Laura had to say about the farm. She literally could not stop talking about it. For Ian, she did a far more detailed description of Sharon making her sound both fascinating and formidable. Then she told the story of Arthur and Laura Lee and how everyone in the family had mistaken her for the imaginary girl in the letters. Ian was intrigued but could not understand force and the meaning of such letters to adopted children. Laura told how some of the adult children had cried listening to Tom tell the story.

"Can you remember the story?" Amanda asked her mother.

"I couldn't do it justice." she replied, "I wish you could have heard it. Tom is such an interesting boy. I have never heard such power in a quiet voice. I think he is about your age, Amanda. He has long black hair that should be in a hair conditioner commercial. He is very hot."

Amanda was clearly interested in this news and was frustrated by having missed an experience that sounded too good to be true, that made a family sound like it could be extraordinary and miraculously happy.

"So why are you telling me all that? We're not going to visit, are we?" Amanda asked pointedly.

"Sharon did invite us to come, but I don't know. There's something about that place that makes me really nervous. I can't tell you what it is because I've never been made to feel more welcome anywhere in my life. Maybe that's just it. Would you really want to go Amanda?"

"I guess not, but that coffeehouse night sounds like fun. Maybe we could just go and listen to music."

"Let's see what happens next week." Ian said, his voice betraying his own enthusiasm for the idea. Then Laura remembered the single sheet of paper Sharon had pressed in her hand, that she could not bear to read at the time. She took it out of her purse, and read it through silently until Amanda asked her what it was. She read the words aloud for her husband and daughter.

Dear Laura,

When Sharon told me you are coming to the farm I was so delighted and terrified. I was delighted you'd see what our old farm had become, and my beautiful family. I was frightened you'd see me and be appalled at what my disease has done. Pure vanity.

Long ago it was you and my grandfather and my gullwing coupe that taught me how to live. You made me want to be more than I was. My Mercedes taught me that the best things in life can be preserved and restored, that the past is the only real foundation for the future. The walnut trees my grandfather planted for unborn generations have made everything possible. We have harvested his faith in the future. One tree bought me my old beautiful car, and that car brought you into my life. And it was you who made me realize that I truly wanted to aspire; like lovers, like parents, like sunflowers.

That's the lesson I've tried to pass on to my own children. That's why you'll always be welcome here with true love and gratitude. Eugene

Laura chose not to read the four questions he had hoped she would answer.

"Wow!" Ian said, "That's quite a letter."

"I'll say." Amanda added, looking at her mother who looked very vulnerable indeed.

Ian asked about the walnut trees and she told him the story of how Eugene's grandfather had planted a walnut forests sometime in the last quarter of the ninteenth century when he was just a young man. Eugene had taken her riding to show her the century forest all those years ago and she still remembered the Cathedral of walnut and White Pine trees towering above the old cedar windbreaks. He told her each walnut tree was worth more than $30,000, and each member of the family could choose one tree, when they were sixteen years old and spend the money just as they wished. He and his brother were the first to do it. His brother bought himself a law degree; he had bought himself a 1959 Mercedes-Benz Gull Wing Coupe.

"And it appears that forest is mostly untouched." she added.

"How could they leave all that money?" Amanda interjected, "They could all be millionaires."

Here was a story Amanda could relate to: money growing on trees, a hot boy with long flowing hair, fast cars, fun and songs lines to share. And the most intriguing thing of all that it sounded like her mother might've been the romantic inspiration for it all. 'I'll bet he still loves her.' she thought, and she was not alone.

Laura announced she was going to bed, at which point Amanda got up and said good night and thanked them for the evening, and everyone smiled, and it was all very weird.

When Amanda was back in her room she looked at the wall opposite her bed and saw the collage of magazine photos of beautiful boys and men, of beautiful young girls and women in suggestive and dramatic poses. It only took her a second to decide they had to come down. She would make her own wall of song lyrics, saving the great lines that touched her heart. No one knew that Amanda loved to sing. It was where she was herself in the many long hours that her parents weren't home. She would perform all over the condominium, stretching her voice as she accompanied her favorite singers, the silver bud vase that she used as a microphone prop long ago discolored from the sweat of her hands. When she was almost finished pulling down they magazine photos from her wall, the telephone on her bed rang. It surprised her because of the fact that only her friend Kara continued to call since she had stopped going to school. That was who she assumed it was. The voice on the other end of the line was absolutely unfamiliar but when the woman introduced herself as Sharon Van Fleet, her heart fluttered away from her like a free autumn leaf, like a page from Vogue that slid through her fingers. Sharon asked Amanda if her mother had mentioned her visit to the farm.

"She hasn't stopped talking about it." Amanda replied, "I can give you my mom's phone number if you like."

Then Sharon told her that it wasn't Laura that she was interested in talking to, it was her. This made Amanda very nervous.

"Why would you want to talk to me?"

"Because we all really like your mother, and I thought it might be nice to invite you and your father to visit sometime." A band began playing behind Sharon's voice and Amanda realized he was calling from the coffeehouse. All the voices she had heard in the background now also made sense. The music almost drowned out Sharon's voice and she had to shout so Amanda could hear her.

"I knew that you'd probably be the most reluctant to visit, so we decided to put on a little concert so that you would feel a little more welcome and comfortable if you decided to come to visit us. I'm going to leave the phone open here on the table and you can talk to whoever comes along. And if you open your computer e-mail you'll see that were sending a picture every few minutes so that you can see what's happening here. We sing like this every Saturday night. I hope you won't feel that were being too pushy. I hope you don't mind were having a concert in your honor."

"No, I don't mind." Amanda was blown away. She walked over to her computer and opened the inbox and there were already three pictures waiting for her to see. Sharon said goodbye and gave the phone to her daughter Mary.

Mary was talking a mile a minute as Amanda sat down in front of her computer dragging the long extension cord attached to the phone and feeling very nervous and somehow manipulated in a way she didn't quite understand. When the music stopped, she finally was able to make sense of what Mary was saying. She was asking about what kind of music Amanda like best, and when Amanda told her some of the bands she liked, she was shocked to realize that Mary didn't know any of them.

"Don't you watch, 'MTV'?" Amanda asked and was surprised when Mary told that she didn't watch television all that much, that everyone on the farm liked making music more than they liked watching it on television. In the background Amanda heard a voice say her name and dedicate the next song to her. The voice from the stage told people that Mary was talking to Amanda on the phone and if people wanted to say hello to the guest of honor, she was going to be there on the phone listening.

"This is a big night for us." said the distant voice, "It's the first live broadcast from the coffeehouse. Say hello to Amanda everybody." The whole crowd shouted, "Hello, Amanda"

The announcement made Amanda even more nervous but she was secretly delighted with the whole thing. She talked to Mary and then started to worry that no one else would want to talk to her. She shouldn't have worried. A phone to a teenager was an irresistible thing as long as there was another teenager waiting for a connection at the other end of the line.

The next song began and Mary passed the phone to another teenager who went on to describe the coffeehouse and who was there on what is going on. The music Amanda could hear was unlike anything she knew. The digital photos that came every few minutes downloaded from the coffeehouse showed her the table and the person that had the phone talking to her. She was shocked at the number of people up on the stage. For a while it was hard to try to carry on a conversation with a stranger while trying to see details in a downloaded picture, but soon Amanda got used to watching the moment to moment changes in the room so far away. She started to ask questions about what she was seeing, and it was a strange and wonderful kind of conversation where she could ask about people in the picture who would move and were no longer where she was directing her phone partner to look.

Amanda didn't realize how much she missed her peer connections, and it was exciting and wonderful to reconnect over a phone to a succession of people who were obviously near her age. They talked about music and school and Amanda quickly learned that none of the children who lived on the farm went to a traditional school. The school was in the coffeehouse. There were two older sisters who were the teachers, and they only went to school from eight in the morning until noon. Amanda was more than a little jealous.

The first time Amanda saw Tom he was standing alone on the stage with an Irish harp. He sang a song in Gaelic, a lovely ballad he sang in a beautiful baritone voice. All the young girls who weren't dancing were standing by the stage, and he was clearly the center of their attention. The picture that Amanda was looking at on the computer screen showed all the female heads from behind. The next photo had hardly changed from the first, and by the time the next photo appeared the song was over and Tom had left the stage. Her mother was right, he certainly looked hot. It was well past midnight and Amanda's arm was aching from holding the phone to her ear when, as she was waiting for the next picture to download, the receiver was passed once more and a soft male voice said, "Hello, this is Tom Van Fleet."

Boy-girl vibrations set up inside Amanda and slowed time considerably as she tried to think of what to say to him. She told him she could see him in the photos on her computer, but could not tell how tall he was. "A little over six feet, I think. My ancestors were aboriginal people."

"I know. That's so cool. My mom's best friend is one too. So what other instruments do you play?"

"I play fiddle, guitar, bass, piano and sometimes a concert harp."

"You don't mean those big gold ones?"

"Just like Harpo Marx." he replied.

"Who's he?" she asked.

"One of the Marx Brothers; don't you know who they are?"

Amanda had no idea who the Marx brothers were. She was sure they must've been musicians and so she said one of the dumbest things that she ever said in her life.

"I don't really know many classical musicians." she answered.

"Tomorrow you should go to the video store and find the old classic section and rent a movie called Duck Soup." Tom replied. "Harpo Marx is in that movie. My dad used to say that life was like Harpo Marx's trench coat. It's amazing the things that can come out of it."

Amanda did not like feeling dumb or unsophisticated. Like her mother, when she was nervous she went on the attack.

"So why haven't you asked me what I look like?" she pressed him.

"I would guess you're probably average looking like most people, like me."

"You are not average and neither am I."

The silence that followed her statement absolutely shook her confidence. Did he think she was vain? Did he think she was flattering him? Did he think she was just an immature idiot? The silence remained. She didn't know what to say, and when her mouth opened and she spoke, what came out was more immature idiocy.

"Well, everyone thinks I'm really pretty and really smart and I almost killed a girl this week."

Tom said nothing. She instantly realized how stupid she sounded and just about wanted to die. Finally when he spoke in his slow gentle voice, what he said cut like a knife.

"I'm sorry that you almost killed a girl. You must be sick at heart."

Then it was Amanda's turn to be silent. She didn't know what to say to him. He had not reacted to what she had said as any other boy she knew would have responded. His response was sadness and compassion and it hit the wellspring of her own. She fought back her own tears.

"I'm really sorry I did it. I wish I could take it back. You must think I'm terrible."

"I don't think you're terrible. I think you made a bad mistake. I think you must be very sorry. You probably need to heal yourself and I think you should try to help the person you hurt try to heal as well."

"But I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to stop hurting myself or hurting other people." Amanda started to cry as silently as she could.

"You know everything you need to know. You know how to cry when you're sorry. You know how to tell someone what's in your heart. I think you have all the tools you need."

"How would you know that?" she asked, softly.

"Listening to someone's heart is like listening to someone sing. You can tell the feelings they have inside without knowing anything more about them."

"That's so beautiful. I've never told anybody in my whole life that I want to sing, that I love to sing, that it's the only time I feel like I can be myself."

"Then you should come to visit us. We sing all the time. We could do a song together."

If there was anything in the world he could've said to her to completely melt her heart that was it.

"That would be great." she sighed, and couldn't help smiling as she looked at the new photo of Tom sitting talking to her on the phone. He told her that he had to go now because he was going to sing another song. He said that he hoped that she would come to visit and she said that she hoped so too, and it was more than hope. It was the beginning of love's longing.

When he was gone and the phone was passed, she got to talk to someone who was obviously another admirer of Tom. The voice on the other end wanted to know everything that he had said, and when Amanda told her that he offered to sing a song with her, it was obvious the girl was completely jealous. "Most of the girls around here would kill to sing with Tom."

"Really." Amanda played dumb. "He really is a very good singer. I can understand." Then the girl told Amanda that they had to stop talking because Tom was going to sing, and over the phone line she heard his distant voice singing, 'When I Fall in Love', and the simple ballad left Amanda sitting silently, her heart pounding, her head spinning, trying to deny the positively stupid and absolutely crazy, not a chance that it could be real, feeling that she had fallen in love. It was just past one o'clock when Sharon came back on the phone and asked Amanda how she'd enjoyed her concert. Amanda told her it was wonderful and thanked her with true sincerity. Sharon renewed her invitation for Amanda to visit her family. "You'd like the farm; there's lots to see and lots to do."

"I'm sure I'd love to meet your family." she said, "I'm so sorry your husband has that terrible disease."

Sharon thanked her for saying that and Amanda felt different and better and almost mature. As Tom was speaking, she had been watching in the background as people gathered around Eugene's wheelchair. It broke her heart to think of her own father like that. After Sharon hung up the phone and the computer images stopped coming, Amanda lay down on her bed with her sore, sore arm and felt like her heart was going to explode, and for once the secret feeling felt like it was why she was alive. Bubbles in her blood, bubbles in her brain: she was a glass and Tom was champagne.

Lying on her bed, she almost gasped in shock when the phone rang. It was Kara screaming at her, absolutely livid because she'd been stood up. Amanda was supposed to have sneaked out after her parents were asleep to join Kara on Yonge Street.

"So who have you been talking to for the past six million fucking hours?" Kara demanded.

"I was listening to a concert that was dedicated to me." she replied, smugly.

"What concert? On the phone? Are you wired, or what?"

"Absolutely." Then Amanda told Kara that she was really tired and just wanted to go to sleep, and hung up the phone on her still furious friend. She did not want Kara to ridicule her or Tom or the farm, which she was absolutely sure was what would have happened if Amanda had tried to describe the last few hours.

As usual, Amanda did not fall asleep until past four in the morning. That night it was the pure excitement of memory that kept her from sleep. She googled Eugene Van Fleet and it took her to the farm's website and a list of all the e-mail addresses of the children. Amanda has spent a long time trying to find Tom in the photos she'd been sent from the coffeehouse to see if there was some hint of a relationship with another girl. For her, that was the biggest question of all. No matter how she parsed it, there was going to be no way for her to find out unless she went to the farm. She had the terrifying thought that she might actually ask him.

She quickly realized that she could legitimately send him an e-mail to thank him for his consideration and the things he had said to her that touched her heart, and how much she liked his last song. It took her about five minutes to figure out how to say all that, but how to ask the big terrible question was so hard she finally fell asleep without having resolved any words. When she woke up, she was strangely alert. She realized this is been the first Saturday night in far too many that she hadn't been stoned in one way or another. The nervous excitement of an unfinished question remained.

Ian was shocked when he got up for his early-morning jog and found Amanda looking through his old vinyl records. She saw his surprise but ignored it.

"You know a song called 'When I Fall in Love'?" she asked.

Ian went to the huge music collection starts in to search through the CDs and quickly pulled out one of Sam Cooke singing live and handed it to Amanda.

"Brilliant!" she shrieked. "Can I play it?"

"Sure."

Amanda listened to the particular cut of her special song as Ian went to get himself a glass of orange juice. He was shocked at the focus and intensity in her face as she listened to the song. When it was over she replayed it again and asked who Sam Cooke was. Ian told her the story of how Sam Cooke started as a gospel singer and switched to rock 'n roll, and how he was shot and killed in a motel when he was with an underage girl. "It was rock 'n roll's first great scandal," he explained.

Amanda listened attentively and then, out of the blue, asked him where she could rent a copy of Duck Soup.

She was disappointed when he said he didn't know exactly, but assumed it would be in one of the bigger video stores.

"Do you think you could drive me?" she asked, girlishly.

"Sure. Why do you have such a sudden yen to watch The Marx Brothers?"

"Somebody told me Duck Soup is quite good."

"It's classic. I'll take you when I come back from my jog. Why don't you get yourself some breakfast?"

When Ian came back an hour later, Amanda was still listening to Sam Cooke.

"He's incredible." she said, "Why doesn't anybody ever play his records?"

"They probably do on Golden Oldies."

"Such a crime! So, can we go and look for Duck Soup?"

"There is a line I never thought I would hear from my daughter. Sure, let's go."

Ian tried to get Amanda to talk about her strange morning behavior and it didn't take much. She knew Kara would ridicule her, if she tried to talk about the coffeehouse concert. There was no one else on earth who would possibly be interested in hearing about the most exciting evening of her life. Her father was the one who ended up listening to it all pour out, except her deep, personal reaction to Tom and what he had said to her.

Ian struggled in the tidal wave of words, amazed at Sharon's ingenuity, amazed at the absolute power that could reach out from so far away and in one evening give his daughter a sense of excitement that he hadn't seen in her since she was twelve years old. Amanda kept talking, only pausing when Ian was paying for the videocassette. She had made him rent all the Marx Brothers movies. That was when Ian realized the emotional impact the farm would have on them all.

Back in the car, Amanda was suddenly quiet, sitting holding an arm load of tapes. She told her father about Tom and how he had invited her to sing with him. She told him Tom played the harp just like Harpo Marx. Amanda was quiet once more until she said, "You know how they fix up old cars at the farm. Do you think that when I get a car, I could pick an old one they could fix up, like you said?"

"It might take a year to restore an old car. I can't imagine why you would need a car unless you're going away to school, and that would mean you'd have to bring your marks back up to what they used to be." he answered seriously. He was gingerly sliding out onto the thin ice of the future. He was shocked when she took her hand and went with him.

"But how would I pick an old car?" she asked, tacitly agreeing to his terms.

"That shouldn't be too hard." He stopped at their local convenience store and told her to wait and came back with the national auto trader for classic cars. He handed it to her and said, "Maybe you can get Tom to help you choose?" Her eyes flared at the thought. She blushed.

She started leafing through the auto trader the way she had opened Christmas gifts when she was a little girl. Ian's heart sank to see it. Cupids bow sang, and his arrows had already flown. Ian could see where they were stuck in his daughter's heart. Suddenly the meaningless future seemed to connect to a farm neither one of them had ever seen.

When Laura woke up and came into the living room, it was to find Amanda and Ian rolling on the couch with laughter watching the Marx Brothers. She could see the tears that had been running down her daughter's face. She sat in the armchair and watched the two of them as much as she watched the television, but soon she was laughing as they were. There was something about the Marx Brothers, the way they confronted power, privilege and pomposity with pure absurd anarchy that was somehow liberating. There was no sanity clause.

Laura had no idea how all this it come to pass, assuming it had to do with their previous night's dinner. She could not imagine how the world could change for someone overnight. Even if she had known, she couldn't imagine that anyone could fall in love with a stranger on the phone. There was no end to the wonders of the morning. As the movie was rewinding, Amanda was back immersed in her car magazine, leafing through it with serious intensity. Curiouser and curiouser. How quickly things could change. She could hardly wait to ask Ian to explain what was going on.

When Amanda's phone rang she nearly flew out of the room, and when she picked up the receiver it was Kara's voice. "Fuck you bitch!" she screamed and slammed down the phone.

"Thanks for calling." Amanda said to the dead line.

Two things happened that afternoon that were part of Amanda's amazing transformation. The first thing was absolutely obvious to everyone; she washed the gel out of her hair, the gel that had gone back the day after she came home from jail. That morning she had looked at herself in the mirror as she had countless other times, and where once she had seen the hideous transformation of a beautiful child into an imperfect, distorted, underdeveloped woman, she now looked at what she hoped was the beginnings of feminine beauty. She secretly wanted to be beautiful. She was glad that she had her mother's genes. She remembered the picture of her mother when she was sixteen and imagined that she might approach such beauty. Under the gel, in the soft hair and translucent skin was her own beauty. And unlike every other moment in front of her mirror over the past year, it was a beauty she did not want to flaunt or deny but accept as a gift that might please others or one other in particular.

The other thing that happened that afternoon was done in private. Alone in her room, Amanda got the phone number of the hospital and called Stacy Peak. It took every ounce of courage inside her, but she dialed the number, and when Stacy's father answered she told him who was. Before he passed the phone, Amanda told him that she realized how badly she had hurt Stacy, how terrible it must've been for them to face the possibility that their daughter might even die. Without knowing where the words were coming from, Amanda told Stacy's father that she realized that she had to change and become a better person, and she had to do whatever she could to help Stacy heal as well. The bile in Stacy's father's voice vanished as he told her there wasn't anything she could have said that would've made him feel more comfortable giving Stacy the phone. When Stacy came on the phone, it was a voice filled with fear and apprehension.

"I'm so sorry. I treated you like some kind of freak. It was because I didn't want anyone to turn on me." Amanda began.

The conversation that followed this was probably the first adult conversation either of them had ever had with a peer. They talked about the way they were and the way they appeared. They talked about who decided what was accepted and what was rejected. They talked about who set the rules of conformity. They talked about who enforced those rules. They talked about who were the real rebels struggled to understand the forces controlling their lives. And most of all they tried to understand why they were so helpless.

Both of them were absolutely amazed that they shared a common view of life as outsiders. They talked about why everyone's opinion mattered so much and why their own opinions mattered so little. They talked about having nothing in life that was really their own. Then Stacy said something just before they hung up that would never leave Amanda.

"The only thing I have ever been able to do in my life is get good grades. You are so lucky. You could always do anything. You were always so popular. I could never understand why you wanted to throw that all away and hang out with a whole bunch of losers."

"I guess it's just hard to grow up when you feel so alone." Amanda replied.

"I know. I know. Maybe when I come back to school, we could have lunch?"

"Sure, let's do lunch." Amanda said breezily, but both of them knew the incredible courage doing that would require of each of them.

Encouraged, inspired, feeling almost brave, Amanda sat down at her computer and composed her first e-mail message to Tom.

'Dear Tom,

I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the concert last night on the phone. Please thank your mother for me. I bet it was her idea. I also want to tell you how much I enjoyed talking to you. You don't talk like most guys. It made me really think about what you said. It made a serious difference. I called the girl I hurt today, and I think we both feel a lot better. We are going to do lunch.

I watched Duck Soup this morning and feel really dumb not knowing who The Marx Brothers were. They are so great. I never saw my father laugh so much in my life. I don't think I laughed so much either. I think your father is right; life is like Harpo's trench coat. It sure is crazy sometimes.

My dad also has a copy of Sam Cooke singing, 'When I Fall in Love'. It didn't sound to me like he really believed the words. I thought that when you sang them, you really meant it. So when you fall in love, what is it you are looking for? I guess like most girls I spend a lot of time thinking about that. I don't know what the answer is, but none of the guys I've ever met is even close. How about you?

I have been thinking about what we could sing, if we ever really meet. It's fun to think about. You must get to think about stuff like that all the time. You're so lucky. Well, I better go. It would be really nice if we could ever sing together and maybe even be friends. Thanks again. Amanda'

Amanda read the message over and over and was sure she was sounding very aggressive or needy, or stupid, or pathetic, or just sooooo immature. But the longer she tried to edit her message, the more hopeless it seemed. There was nothing she wanted to take out. There wasn't any more she dared put in. It was a perfect letter. It was a pathetic letter. She had no idea what she would do. She thought about what he would be doing when he would read her letter, and if he would show it to anyone. Feeling so brave when she began, she felt absolutely terrified when she finished. This letter might change the whole course of her life. It might also do absolutely nothing. And she was absolutely right.

Early in the afternoon while Laura was trying to catch up on her own phone messages, the phone had rung in her hand, and it was her friend Ann Marie. She wanted to go for an emergency walk in Mount Pleasant Cemetery because her daughter Megan was spinning out of control, even more than usual. Laura listened to her friend talk about her daughter's new boyfriend who was ten years older than Megan and seemed to be even more into the drug culture than the rest of her daughter's friends. It'd only been by chance that Ann Marie had met him. She was walking down Queen Street when she saw her daughter being groped by the new boyfriend at one of the bus stops. She had grabbed him by the back of his shirt and stood him up while both he and Megan screamed obscenities at her. He told her to go fuck herself. Megan had supported him in this view, in her own obscene hysterical way.

"So, how was your day?" Ann Marie asked dejectedly.

Laura commiserated as well as she could, then gave Ann Marie a brief description of her visit to the farm and her impressions of Sharon, and told her about the apparent miracle that it happened in the last day with Amanda. She had completely shed her emery board surface. She was going back to school. She watched Marx Brothers movies with her father. She was reading car magazines. She had washed the grease out of her hair. Ann Marie was impressed.

"There's only one thing that can do all that overnight...a man." Laura said, and Ann Marie agreed with her.

The more Laura told her friend about the farm and her impressions of the children, the more envious they admitted to being.

"Hell, does she take in boarders? We should ship them both up there and pick them up when they become human beings." Ann Marie suggested, half-jokingly.

Laura replied that they actually did take in families in crisis, but it had to be the whole family and only for the summer.

"Well, I guess that's not going to work." She then wanted to know the real dirt and asked about Laura's affair with George.

"It's intense. I'm amazed how he can make me forget everything: my job, my daughter, my husband, how tired I am, and all the damn resentments I can't even remember." She did not mention that he even made her forget the hole that life had gnawed inside her. Then Laura told her friend about the hot scene inside the door of George's apartment the day before. Ann Marie listened and responded with great admiration and then Laura asked her friend what had made her do it, and why it had been so overwhelmingly and overpoweringly intense and satisfy. Guilt was starting to melt the edges of her heart.

"I felt like a man. After I had the greediest orgasm of my life, I couldn't wait to get out of there. You should have seen him lying there, looking up at me with those puppy dog eyes. I keep thinking I had better end this soon. He's so emotionally homeless." Laura confessed.

Laura also told her friend how George had got her to scream that she was beautiful when she finished coming. She didn't understand why doing that should have cut into her so deeply and why it would leave a scar she would be afraid to even touch for a very long time.

When they talked about Laura's visit to the farm and her impressions of Sharon, Ann Marie said that it made her very nervous. She thought Sharon sounded like a very controlling person. When Laura told her that Sharon's sincerity and warmth seemed genuine, but rather enveloping, Ann Marie said that a sense of detachment and space was absolutely necessary in relationships for people to maintain their individual identities.

"It's true. She swallows you up. That place swallows you up. I don't really understand how her kids deal with it. The thing I can't explain is why it felt so good."

"Sometimes a change is as good as a rest. She certainly sounds different." Ann Marie replied.

As usual, both friends felt better after their conversation. Laura went back to her work and Ann Marie went home from her office where she found a letter from her daughter Megan saying she was moving to Vancouver with her new boyfriend. She had taken her clothes and her mother's debit card that she used to clean out her mother's checking account. She said that Ann Marie owed her that much for what she had done to her that day on the street.

That night Laura had to listen to a long anguished heartbroken call that carried all the guilt and terror and desperation that a parent could possibly feel for having done nothing but try to protect her daughter from a tragic mistake.

"I'm helpless. I'm terrified and alone for the first time in my whole life; no man, no child, no future, and I don't really think I have any hope of one. I'm a sixty-year-old psychological disaster. How could she treat me this way? How could she do this to me?"

It was all about Ann Marie. Even she knew it. She couldn't help it and so she hung up the phone before she could blurt out her most horrible, humiliating secret. She had suspected for weeks that her daughter had been shooting heroin. She had hung up without being able to admit to her friend that she was terrified that it was only a matter of time before life would completely destroy her poor little family of two. Family life was a freeze and thaw cycle of love and pain.

It was already dark when Amanda finally pushed the button that said, send. Her fate flew through cyberspace, and what was done could not be undone. Only a sixteen-year-old girl can know absolutely the hope of a perfect beginning. She didn't want to leave her room until she got some kind of answer. She almost ran when she went to the kitchen to get herself something to eat. She was starving. Her anxiety was eating right through her other more insatiable hunger.

She listened to music and wrote down special lyrics. She looked at car magazines and picked a number of cars that she really liked. She liked the old MGA, and the E type Jaguar. At first she thought she wanted something small and sleek, something romantic, a convertible sports car. She finally decided she would ask Tom's opinion of a Volvo P1800. She had always thought Volvos were the ultimate suburban sedan. The picture of the old sports car showed it definitely had character. It was tough. Then she decided a sports car was just too immature. She started looking at old sedans and completely fell in love with a 77, swept back Buick Riviera. It was style and substance. It was her gullwing coupe. She blushed when she imagined her own children in the back seat.

At eight o'clock, she had mail. It was Tom! It was the first big fall of love's great roller coaster.

She read the words voraciously. It was a nice, polite and sincere reply. He enjoyed talking to her too. 'Great'! He was glad she was able to talk to the girl that she had hurt. 'Me too!' 'So what did you talk about?' he had asked. 'My God, he wants me to write back again.' She was ecstatic. Then the absolutely greatest spectacular thing was when he said that he had never been in love, and so he hoped that when he sang that song, it somehow came across. 'It came! 'It came!'

Then came the answer to the biggest question of all, what he was looking for in love. 'I'm looking for someone strong.' he had written.

Amanda's heart hit the bottom of the first big fun ride drop. 'Is that all?' she thought, that's not so much to expect, I suppose. And I guess that lets me out. She felt like she was going to cry.

She wasn't strong. She didn't even know how to pretend to be strong. The only person she knew that was even occasionally strong was her father. The one thing she held onto was Tom saying that he was looking forward to doing a song with her, especially because it would be the first time that she sang for an audience. 'My God, I'll have to be in front of people. I'll probably shrivel up and die, and I'd be standing beside the one person who would totally see it.' Her heart was ready to explode all over again.

Amanda fell asleep still hearing the roller coaster wheels that had been clattering under her heart all night long. Strong, strong; He wants someone strong. Strong, strong; He wants someone strong. Why did it have to be that?

Amanda was quiet over breakfast. As usual, Laura was long gone. Ian was busy getting ready for his work day. He and Amanda shared a fast breakfast before he watched her eat her birth control pill and throw together her backpack. Breakfast and the few minutes it took to drive Amanda to school were the only regular times Ian really shared with his daughter. It wasn't quality time. Usually Ian was starting to focus on work and she was usually just too wrecked to speak.

This day was different because she was up and ready before Ian had knocked on her door. It looked like the same old routine, but they both knew something had changed. The most obvious change was then Amanda no longer dressed to impress. She was dressed simply in jeans and a sweatshirt which, for her in the past year, was like being dressed in a full-length ball gown. Ian knew better than to comment on the change.

When they were pulling out into morning traffic, Ian was totally taken off guard by her unusual question.

"Dad, what makes some people strong?"

As surprised as he was by the question, he was more shocked to discover that he really had no answer to give her. But he knew he had to try the best that he could.

"Heredity and environment, I would guess." he replied.

"That's no answer. Where does it come from?" She was obviously very serious about this question.

"It comes from experience, I suppose."

"Everybody has experience. Most people are just like mush. I feel like mush."

"You probably won't feel like that when you get older." Ian replied ingenuously, "Everybody feels like that at your age."

"No. Some people my age are strong." Then came the razor edged cut of her question's deeper implications. "You and mom are so smart and so successful, and sometimes you're just as weak as I am. I don't understand how I'm supposed to learn to be strong, when neither of you know how to do it very much."

"I'm sorry you don't think your mother and I are very strong."

Amanda cut him off. "I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. I just want to know how I am supposed to learn how to be a strong person."

"I guess you have to ask someone that you think is strong."

"That's what I've been thinking too. But that's a pretty scary thing to do. It's almost like confessing that you're weak."

By the time they arrived at Amanda's school, Ian asked her if it would be all right if he gave the question some more thought. She agreed, but without much enthusiasm.

Amanda's preoccupation with her question helped her get through the day. Everybody saw the change in her clothes and her hair. They teased her for wimping out, for being deprogrammed, for giving into her parents. 'You look so straight. Maybe you'll want to be on the dance committee next? Maybe somebody will nominate you for prom Queen.' She didn't care. What she heard were weak little comments from weak little people. When teachers saw her change of clothes and appearance they treated her like she had almost come back from the dead, giving her big phony smiles and hellos. She was appalled at how shallow they were. She felt like little Ms. Holden Caulfield being swallowed up in a sea of phoniness. All she could think about was what she could possibly say to Tom. She knew she wanted to write back to him. She knew that whatever she wrote was going to have to be the truth. She decided that no matter how long it took, she wasn't going to write to them until she could do that, and even more importantly, until she had some vague idea of what it meant to be strong. Her decision took time, and more importantly, it took some considerable strength. Amanda was appalled at the thought that she almost never saw people being strong. Everybody got through stressful days, one day at a time. Everybody was ready to criticize everything. Nobody was ready to stand up and say what was really important.

Her father had been strong at the police station, even with her, which definitely had been a change. She assumed he must be strong at work. She assumed that her mother was too. But almost anywhere else, they were phony and critical, and just about as strong as mush. She lived in a world of weaklings and whiners. She was just as bad as anyone else, and most of the time, a whole lot worse. Usually around noon, Kara, who had quit school, would phone her and they would decide where to meet. Kara was surprised and shocked that Amanda had gone back to school and that her phone call had found her there. She was even more shocked and angry when Amanda refused to cut class to meet her on the street.

"So, you're going to cut the only friend you have in the world. You're going to dump me because you've got in a little trouble. What a fucking baby!"

"You're right. I am a baby. And I am fucking sick of it, aren't you?"

"You calling me a baby? I could kick your teeth in." Kara screamed.

"That would be very grown-up. Listen, I'll call you." Amanda again hung up the phone on her cursing friend.

Pointless friends; pointless studies; pointless teachers; pointless parents; what was the fucking point? All she wanted was to be pointed in the right direction. She had absolutely no sense of direction; she couldn't even tell which way the wind was blowing. She had always ignored the fact that there was a wind of change that blew through everyone's life. Everyone was looking for a happening life and had no idea what was happening to them. What's up? What's happening? Zip. Zip Nada!

At the end of Ian's day, he had made an appointment to visit the Peaks at their home. He knew they had engaged a civil attorney because he had received a call telling them that there would be a civil lawsuit arising from Stacy's injuries. He had expected as much.

Ian had succeeded in arranging his first meeting with the family and their attorney at their home where he felt they would be more comfortable and personally willing to compromise, to resist the unconscious pressure to litigate that a formal law office might give to a meeting.

When Ian entered the modest little home, it was like finding a little bit of England. The cultural roots that defined the little family were lined up on shelves all over the living room; pictures of Queen and country, pictures of the war effort, all of Stacy's grandparents in the drab World War II uniforms of soldiers and nurses. The Union Jack, the Blue Boy and Pinky looked down over little porcelain tourist treasures from Blackpool, Chester, Stratford, Cardiff, Bristol, and more.

The Peak's lawyer was young and nervous as he explained their position. Although Stacy did not seem to exhibit any permanent physical damage at the present time, there was no way to know what long-term effects such a serious injury could have. The pain and suffering that both Stacy and her family had endured could also not be discounted. Ian cut him off. He told them that he completely accepted that Amanda was liable for injuring Stacy. He said it was difficult in a case like theirs to determine financial liability. He expected and understood that there would be little sympathy for Amanda for what she had done, but rather than risk costly litigation for both families where one or both could be seriously disappointed and financially burdened, he proposed to make the family an offer that recognized Amanda's responsibility and might offer them some financial benefit.

"If anything good is to come of this, I hope it will be that both Stacy and Amanda's lives might be changed for the better. I believe Amanda has learned an important lesson. I think what has happened has changed her. Knowing what a good student Stacy is, and how expensive a university degree can be, our family has decided that perhaps the best way we can compensate Stacy for her terrible experience is to help her with her University education." Ian explained, and then continued,

"I don't know if Amanda will ever go to university, as we have always hoped. Aside from our small retirement savings plans, the only money we have is $30,000 in Amanda's educational savings account. I'm proposing to make that available to Stacy to pay for her University degree, if she goes to school in Canada. We can't afford an Ivy League school, even for our own daughter. I won't call my offer generous because there is no way to measure your suffering. What I will say is that I hope you consider such an offer, because it really tries to make the best resolution of a terrible situation."

The young lawyer protested the Stacy would be much better served with a much higher lump sum payment so she would not be deprived of the benefit of the interested accrued from that kind of settlement, a settlement that seemed seriously inadequate.

Ian was about to argue the merits of his offer, but was cut off by Mr. Peek who told Ian and his own lawyer that the offer was acceptable as far as his family was concerned, that he felt the spirit in which it was offered was much more important to them than the money. Then he surprised Ian by telling him about the conversation Amanda had had with Stacy, and how Stacy had almost insisted that they drop any kind of legal action that all.

"I believe your daughter has changed for the better, and it's difficult for me to admit, but I believe this incident has made my own daughter much stronger and more confident as a person. It isn't often that a tragedy leads to a better life, but I believe that's what's happened here. Please tell your daughter that we all admire her sense of responsibility and the strength she has shown in reaching out to Stacy."

Ian had no idea that Amanda had called Stacy, and certainly no idea what she had said, but he was as proud of her as he had ever been in his life. This was unlike a parent's pride at a dance recital. This kind of pride was never forgotten or lost because it showed such mature strength.

It was over in one sense, and begun in another, because Stacy and her education would become a proud extension of their lives over the next few years. She would become, over those years, as close to being a sister to Amanda as anyone she would ever know. Mrs. Peak presented each of them with a small glass of sherry to mark the occasion, and the young lawyer looked like he was still confused and nervous about whether he had won or lost.

At first Amanda thought that strength was knowing what you wanted and doing what it took to get it. But junkies knew what they wanted and would do anything to get it. Everyone seemed to know what they wanted, except her. Everyone seemed to be able to get what they wanted, except her. Her old self-pity was hard to shake, but it didn't take even an instant for her to realize the truth was that she always got what she wanted. What she never got was a reason for wanting the things that she did. She was life's insatiable consumer, just like everyone else.

It took her three days to write a reply to Tom's last message. It went on for five printed pages, explaining to him everything that she had been thinking, how difficult it was for her to come up with a definition of personal strength. Everyone knew it when they saw it, but saw it so infrequently that it was difficult to understand the source. She confessed to him that she felt just as weak as everyone that she seemed to know, but the one thing that was different about her was that when he said that she could become a better person, she knew in her heart that it was true.

'Maybe strength comes out of courage. Maybe all I'm missing is guts.' She had written and meant it. She read the message to herself a dozen times before she finally sent it. Strangely, what she feared most was not his reaction to what she had said, but rather that she hadn't explained it as well as she had wanted to do.

'It's funny how you're saying that you wanted someone strong made me see my life in a completely different way. It's funny how one short talk can change so many things.' was how she had closed, and then added a PS, 'It's funny and sad, but you almost feel like my best friend, even though we haven't even met. Really funny and really sad.'

Before she went to sleep at three, she had read and reread his ten page reply that came just before midnight. Her heart felt like a glass jar jammed full of violets, so many beautiful feelings jammed into such a little space. Her long descriptions of her day and her thoughts were answered with serious reflection and respect. He told her he had shared many of her feelings in the first years after he had come to the farm, but since then he had come to believe that strength was learned from watching strong people, from learning to respect other's feelings, even those that were so hard to express. 'Both my parents are strong; some of my brothers and sisters are too. My life changed when I saw what they did with their strength. They make good things happen, and I know we can too. You can never have the power to do anything in life until you want to be responsible for it.' Those were the words Amanda knew she would never forget as long as she lived.

And that was it for her. That was the answer. Everybody, including and especially her, seemed to want to avoid responsibility, to deny it, to deflect it, to rationalize a way around it, to simply not have to bother. Fear, insecurity, laziness, self-indulgence, and pure, unadulterated self-centered selfishness were all weaknesses that made people run and hide from responsibilities. Life was sad. Life was a bust. That's how everybody seemed to live. That was how she had lived.

Everything missing in her life was because she didn't want to be responsible for any part of it. No wonder her life was so pathetic. No wonder she was so pathetic. But holding Tom's letter and his simple, beautiful answer made her feel anything but pathetic. She felt respected and understood, and although she didn't dare even admit the word into her mind, for the first time in her life, she actually felt that she was loved. Her last thought before sleep was an echo of her mother's voice saying that 'things were going to change around here'.

And change they did. The confident, civil, smiling, neat, engaging human being that was the new Amanda was greeted with both shock and delight by both Ian and Laura. She picked up her clothes and her dirty dishes and anticipated and asked permission to do things. She did her homework without being asked. The chrysalis had opened and the ugly little worm turned into a beautiful butterfly right before their eyes.

Ian had told Amanda what a difference her call to Stacy Peak had made. When he told Amanda that they would be using her educational fund to send Stacy to University, he was shocked when she said that it would be a much better way to spend the money than to use it on her. If she wanted to go to college, she could get student loans and work in the summers. "Stacy has such a tremendous mind, I think it's great we can help her." she said, seriously.

This was not his daughter. Benevolent aliens had infected her mind. He loved it. He wanted to know how one came to be among those chosen for the change. In the few hours when Laura and Amanda crossed paths, Laura was just as impressed with the change in her daughter. She didn't know and was afraid to ask what made the sudden transformation possible. She knew Eugene's boy Tom had something to do with it, because Amanda would ask questions about him whenever she could think of a way to bring him into the conversation. She wanted to know about every minute Laura had been in Tom's presence. She wanted her mother to remember everything he had said. Laura knew that somehow, Amanda had developed a crush on this boy; what she didn't know and didn't want to know was how a schoolgirl's crush could do what she and Ian could never accomplish with their daughter. She and Ian called it Amanda's epiphany and the recognition of it came with a certain measure of envy.

At the end of the week from heaven, the three of them were once again having dinner at the little local Italian restaurant where the change in their lives had begun six days before. Amanda completed her week's delightful devastation by apologizing to them for how terrible she had been the last year.

"I was lost. I'm back. I don't think you'll ever lose me again." she said, simply.

Ian couldn't help it, he cried. Amanda looked like she was going to cry too, but the skeptical look on her mother's face stopped her cold. Laura knew this transformation wouldn't last. It was a boy crush transformation that the entropy of love would soon degrade. She would enjoy it while it lasted, like her own little secret affair. For better or worse, she believed that life was lived in the moment, but that belief was about to change in the most horrific ways imaginable.

### Chapter 6

For Laura the week had been wonderful at work, except for George's persistent phone calls and computer e-mail messages. Anne-Marie had also called her repeatedly wanting comfort and advice and reassurance about her crisis with her missing daughter. She didn't have either the time or the energy or the ability to deal with George or Anne-Marie's needs.

For a publicist, there are one or two times in a career when all the rules are reversed. Instead of being the relentless, implacable pursuer, one became the relentlessly, implacably pursued. Offers! Offers! Offers! Pick me! Pick me! Pick me! Everyone wanted Anthony Holtz. Everyone wanted Laura's attention.

She had gathered the 185 pictures of Anthony and his wife at the fountain, the funniest of which had made papers worldwide. She had some blown up and framed for her office wall, and she liked to look at them while she talked on the phone. Her favorite newspaper cutline was from a British newspaper that said simply, Divorce, Canadian Style under the picture of Anthony warding off a blow from his wife's life-size cut-out. Various lawsuits were afoot, and video crews and flashy female interviewers were coming and going from Anthony's house carrying Laura's permission slip to enter and speak to the suddenly interesting, famous old poet. Anthony, of course, was loving it!

He had a poet's ability to distill his wife's personality into cruel little cut lines, and take incidents from their marriage and make them into juicy stories and sound-bites that were so much more interesting to everyone than the dense, complicated verse that had made his reputation.

"This fountain incident with my wife was better than sex with her. At least I got her attention." he said with a great echoing laugh. "Why does everyone want to know how the goldfish are doing?" he would reply to the one constantly repeated question. "Goldfish are used to sucking up crap. It's time my ex-wife got a taste of it."

The war escalated daily. Their grown children were dragged in and prodded in interviews like tender newts that had lost the cool shelter of the great rock of anonymity. The children did not react well. The war had started to get truly ugly.

When Laura touched base with Naomi Oliver, the voice of the Hot Times radio program, Laura was sure this was going to be a very interesting opportunity. When she had asked if Naomi knew anything about Anthony's work, she cut her off immediately.

"I have absolutely no interest in what people do. I'm only interested in who they are. Let's face it, the only reason I'm interested in a greasy old poet is because he's made an international fool of himself."

"Never underestimate an old fool, Naomi." Laura replied, honestly.

"Please! He's a has-been poet, for God's sake. This is going to be fun."

Naomi made no pretense about her condescending attitude. She believed that condescension had made her what she was, and she was right.

Laura hung up the phone and was looking forward to the next evening's radio tete et tete. The one pleasant diversion she allowed herself that week was her regular lunch with her friend David Orser. She had heard from him often that week about how Anthony's collected works were flying off the bookstore shelves.

"Everyone is being reminded of what a wicked old man he really is." David pointed out gleefully. Then he got very serious. "Do you think it's possible that you might want to leave your present job and work full-time for us? Aren't you tired of contract work? It would involve a substantial raise."

"Suddenly I have offers. It's funny how one insane picture could make and remake two careers. I'm talking to other people. I don't want to make any decisions while I'm riding this wave." she told him, honestly.

Then she brought up something that she had been thinking about whenever she had a spare moment's time. She gave him a brief background on the farm and Eugene's fatal disease and all the adopted children, the cars and the money and the unbelievably fascinating movie of the week story of the Van Fleet family. Then she told him about the letters between Arthur and Laura Lee. She pitched David on the incredible potential for a youth market book that explored the emotional range and experiences of famous and ordinary people when they were young. She told him how profoundly the stories had affected the Van fleet children, and how powerfully she was affected by the one story she had heard.

"I don't know if I can get permission to use them. I don't know if Eugene would think they were just too personal and private, but my instinct tells me that there is a tremendous bestseller in those letters. I want to know if I'd have your support if I explored the idea."

"I'd always go with your instincts, the problem is that letters between two teenagers is just a little too archaic a form. Modern teens aren't interested in reading letters. It's so Pamela and Shamala. At best, you'd have to turn them into short stories and, except for Canada, you know how short stories sell. They don't." he replied, unenthusiastically.

"You're probably right, but something tells me that those letters may just change my life."

"You think I'm wrong?" he replied.

"I guess I do. If I get my hands on them, will you at least look at a few?" she asked. It was her turn to ask for a favor, and he knew he could not refuse.

The four martini, two our lunch was a thing of the past as far as Laura was concerned. David Orser understood when her cell phone rang and she had to go, leaving her half eaten lunch.

Such was success. Laura was having the time of her life, she thought.

Laura didn't know, and couldn't possibly a guess that the great fountain picture was just the beginning of Anthony mania. Soon to come would be the incident that would make Anthony more than famous, it would make him another fifteen min. legend. And it would destroy the career of one rude young, pseudo-intellectual radio gunslinger.

The next night Laura accompanied Anthony to the live radio interview program Hot Times. They were like gunfighters walking down the long echoing hallway of the radio studio after Naomi Oliver had picked them up from her receptionist. Naomi was wearing painted on jeans and a hunter green silk blouse that showed off her high, trembling centers of attention. Anthony noticed. Everyone noticed. They were meant to notice.

Laura had extended her hand when they met, but Naomi had refused to take it.

"Hands really are the dirtiest things, you know. Take no offense." she said coldly.

"None taken." Laura replied, just as coldly.

"Good. Come with."

"Delighted." said Anthony, rubbing his hands together.

Naomi had purposefully forgotten to even recognize Anthony's presence at the receptionist's desk, an obvious snub she made worse by apologizing much too effusively in response to his remark. Anthony looked anything but angry. His eyes kept drifting to Naomi's assets as they walked abreast.

They set up in the little studio, Laura and the technician in the control room, Anthony and Naomi, miked and seated on two soft leather office chairs.

The program was live and so there was some little tension as they counted down the last minute to air. Naomi ignored Anthony completely until she got her cue.

Naomi began the program by reading a scripted introduction of Anthony. It dripped with condescension about his age and his decades-old poetry prizes. Then she described Anthony's water fountain adventure for her listeners, portraying him and his ex-wife as two fading lights trying to rekindle some spark of interest in a culture that had passed them by.

"And it worked, didn't it Anthony?" she challenged him.

"Like a dream." he replied, simply.

"So you admit the whole thing was staged."

"No more than your attitude on this program." he replied brightly. "I never miss your program, myself. It's the absolutely perfect place for people who are so desperate for attention that they will trot themselves out like idiots to be insulted and humiliated by woman who's never done anything in her life, but put people down. I'm so glad you asked me to come."

Naomi's eyes got bigger. She knew she wasn't dealing with some actor. She decided to sweeten the atmosphere.

"And I'm glad you're here too. I love old poets. So, Anthony, tell me a secret. I'm told that people your age no longer feel they have to worry about keeping secrets."

"That's exactly so. And I do have a secret, and strangely enough, it's about you."

Naomi looked nervous, but took the bait. "We've never even met, how could you have a secret about me?"

"Because old poets sometimes have old friends who happen to run old radio networks. My secret, Naomi is that you are about to be fired. Your days are numbered. Unlike your breasts, you are being downsized." Anthony said with unrestrained glee. Naomi's face looked like it had been hit by an invisible pie. Shock dribbled off of her chin.

"That isn't true." she said with a sickly laugh.

"Time will tell, if it is or it isn't. Why would I lie?"

"This is the only interesting program on this whole godforsaken network. I've got better ratings than any of those fat old," She stopped herself before naming names.

Anthony appeared to be reassuring her when he said, "Naomi, it's only radio. The entire audience of the entire day is smaller than the audience at a Newfoundland ballet. You're wasting yourself in the backwoods."

"Well, not for long. Enough about me." She was clearly frustrated and angry. She went back to her prepared questions, but with much less enthusiasm.

"I believe your fountain escapade really was a fraud. I understand the picture of your ex-wife in whips and leathers is from an outfit for a costume ball. Don't you think that's rather ingenuous?"

"It would be perhaps if the costume ball had not been entitled, Come As You Really Are. I don't know why she was so upset, she has already made her own public confession of her true peccadilloes. Truth be told, she likes to give spankings, and I think they are just great theater. You should hear me squeal." This wasn't going well for Naomi.

"I'm told you write a lot about sex. Did you write about it as much when you were younger and more sexually active, or is that all in the past?"

"With every beat of a man's heart, he produces a thousand sperm, and this implies a certain need, a certain urgency. Pressure. You have to think of it this way; each woman who favored me with her attention has been bathed in tens of millions of my own little happy wigglers. And they still keep coming. What's a body to do?"

Laura rolled her eyes at the pun. Naomi didn't get it. She was barely listening. She was planning what she would say and how she would attack her boss the moment the interview was over. No one fired Naomi Oliver! She would finish off this nasty old man and raise proper hell.

Naomi's questions were meant to be ego prods to make her victims say something they wouldn't have said if they hadn't felt vulnerable. None of her prods seemed to be working. This old poet knew himself for the egotistical old fool that he was. Irascibility was the only real indulgence he had since he gave up the hard life addictions. Naomi wouldn't give up. Everyone famous had an overly inflated ego. Everyone famous was absolutely terrified of pins. With Anthony, she was having to run through her questions looking for a much longer, sharper instrument.

Canadian poets have always been regarded as really second and third rate. Where do you think you stand among Canadian poets?"

Anthony looked definitely annoyed at the question.

"Dear heart, poetry can't be measured like cuts of beef. There are no governmental standards for grade A, AA or prime cuts of poetry."

"Isn't that what people say who never made the grade?" she pressed.

"We could talk about poetic standards, I suppose, but you'd have to have some slight idea of what a poem is." She was getting to him at last, it appeared.

"We don't want to hear some tired old definition of poetry, do we?"

"Your breasts are poetry, Naomi, if they're real." he replied, "Is that a tired enough old definition for you?"

"They are real, and they are spectacular, but I think you're trying to change the subject."

"Not at all." he interjected, "If it would not embarrass you, I think I can speak about your breasts and make you and your audience feel and understand poetry as they have never done before." Naomi had been trying to take back control of the interview, but Anthony forged ahead.

"I'm absolutely serious. A poem, has form; a poem has structure; it has rhythm and movement that follow a particular pace, a sway, a timing, like your breasts move when you walk, like your breasts move when you turn, their firmness, their fluidity changing with every motion, every emotion you feel. When you are naked in your bath and you look at yourself, or when your breasts tighten before your lover's gaze, they respond to your body's language of movement. Being aware of poetry is like being aware of how your breasts move and change and react in the perfect symmetry of stimulus and response. But I guess you think they are just tits. And they are spectacular."

"You really are a dirty old man." Naomi replied, but her nipples had gotten obviously erect under her silk blouse. She was the only one who hadn't yet noticed.

"I don't think we should talk about my breasts anymore. I really don't get it."

"Of course you do. Look, your nipples are hard." he replied.

"You shut up!" she screamed, realizing what he said was true. Anthony gently went in for the kill, his voice growing soft and husky as he spoke.

"And like your breasts, a poem is a private thing, a profoundly private thing that you can unveil so even a stranger can see and feel the most beautiful part of your mind and heart and body. Reading a poem is like reading a body. You make the reader your lover. A poem can take your breath away, just like a great lover. A poem is sensuality. A poem is intimacy. A poem is like your nipples erect."

"I see." Naomi said breathlessly.

"And what a poet does is what you would do if you unbuttoned your beautiful green silk blouse."

Naomi realized what he was saying. "Don't screw with me Anthony."

His gentle voice reassured her. "I'm absolutely serious. Don't you want to know what it feels like to create the sensual intimacy of a poem, to reveal your private , oh so personal beauty? I know you are afraid. That's part of what a poet faces when she comes to the moment of sharing her most intimate beauty. I know you are afraid to do this."

"I'm not afraid. What do I have to be afraid of. I've been to St. tropez for God's sake lots of nude beaches. This is stupid."

"But this is different. This is self-revelation. This is about how beautiful you are, the beauty you hide under fine silk. If you want to understand intimacy of a poem, the self-revelation of the poet, you must have the courage to simply begin, one button at a time, to reveal yourself, to show us your private loveliness."

His soothing voice stroked Naomi. His eyes now focused on her breast. Her breathing was becoming faster, her nipples obviously harder.

"I'm not going to open my blouse." she insisted, but her breathing was now loud enough to be heard on air. Anthony had gotten her into it. She was a shameless exhibitionist having to confront exhibiting yourself without shame. The excitement, the challenge, her secret personal pride made her feel excruciatingly sexy. Anthony went on.

"Feel how your breasts are rising and falling. Poetry, like desire, takes over your body. There are only four of us here. It isn't modesty you feel, it's the fact that this is about so much more than your breasts. This is about the courage to let someone else openly see how beautiful you are really are. Start with one button; it's the first phrase of your poem."

Suddenly the radio silence was deafening. Dead air and tension in the two little rooms grew and grew, through long, drawn out seconds, and then Laura was shocked when Naomi's fingers went to the top button of her blouse and opened it. It was like hypnosis.

"One button is open, a poem is begun." whispered Anthony. And for Naomi, and for the audience, Anthony described the delicacy of her fingers on the shining pearl buttons, moving to the next one, and the next as her beautiful young skin appeared, her breasts rising and falling with an increasing pace. And then her fingers gently moved the fabric of the moment, and then she paused and stared into dead space, hanging onto a delicate precipice.

"This is what it feels like to create something beautiful, show us your breasts, Naomi." Anthony asked her.

As if she was helpless to resist, Naomi's eyes closed and she pulled open her blouse to show her high beautiful breasts, trembling excitedly, her breath now coming fast enough to be heard distinctly on the microphone that still hung on her open lapel. She sat there transfixed, as he described her breasts, their shape, the translucent whiteness, her nipples 'like red engorged wild raspberries'. He described how beautiful she was and she could feel the excitement growing in her body from finally letting someone see her like this. "This is what poetry feels like Naomi; overwhelming, sensual, so real and terrifyingly erotic. Put your hands there." he told her and she did as she was told, gently, tenderly.

"Oh, yes!" And when Naomi spoke those words, it seemed to let everything go inside her. Over the airwaves her audience listen to her ragged breath, and then everyone in the room was absolutely shocked when she repeated her "Oh, yes." as her hands cupped her breasts and her fingers touched her nipples. It hissed out of her and then her body and her lungs took control of her and she groaned and gurgled and gasped trying to fight back the force of her orgasm. Her head flew back and then her eyes flew open, and then her head snapped down and she glared at Anthony. She covered herself in an instant. She was seething in shock and range.

"And you've never felt anything like that in your life, have you?" Anthony asked her softly, breaking the excruciating tension in the room. "That's poetry, Naomi."

This was too much. This was suddenly a nightmare. Secretly, she knew this was one of those rare electric media moments, but it had gone much too far. She looked in his eyes and she knew what he had done to her. This time, the humiliation was hers alone.

She screamed and dove at Anthony like a psychopath. His chair fell over backwards and they both crashed to the carpeted floor.

"Now you're a real poet." Anthony's voice came from under Naomi's body and screams. The female technician was finally able to gather herself and cut off the broadcast. Laura stood there grinning like a Cheshire cat as the poor technician ran into the studio and tried to pull Naomi off Anthony. It did not help that he was laughing like he was being tickled to death. Finally, with Laura's help, Anthony was extricated from the fire-breathing, obscenity-spitting Naomi. As they stumbled down the echoing hall leading to the elevator, both Laura and Anthony could barely walk for laughing.

Back in the little control booth, the bare breasted Naomi had to physically force the poor technician into opening her microphone again. At first she tried to explain what had happened by describing it is just a comedy skit, a bit of performance art to challenge her more sedate listeners. Finally realizing the stage of her undress, she fumbled with the buttons of her blouse, as she tried to explain what had happened. Her fingers weren't working, she was shaking so badly, and the frustration of her inability to button her blouse finally made her give up with a scream. Then she remembered what Anthony said about her losing her job, knew it was now inevitable, and she snapped completely. She went on an obscenity filled tirade about the way she had been treated, the second-rate people she had to work with, the lack of respect and support she received, the absolutely pathetic salary she was forced to accept because of her so-called fucking lack of experience. That was when the technician decided that her own job was also at stake, and cut off Naomi's self-destructive explosion.

Outside in the limousine, Laura and Anthony were replaying the moment. Finally, Laura couldn't help herself, and slid over beside Anthony and kissed him soundly on the cheek. As they rode through the busy streets, Anthony whispered to Laura that she would have to turn her head unless she wanted to assist him in satisfying a rather are insistent need.

"This is like a double Viagra." he said, and proceeded to unzip his trousers. When Laura realized what he was about to do, she turned quickly away and stared out the window.

"This isn't something that should wait." he said to the back of Laura's head.

Laura said nothing, and she wondered how and to whom she would tell this part of the night's story. As she waited patiently, nervously, she replayed the scene in the radio booth, remembering his soft, husky voice and Naomi's beautiful breasts heaving as she came.

She turned and looked at Anthony, his long white hair, his hand moving in his lap in the half light of the street light through the dark tinted windows. When he felt her soft hand touch his and then move it away, his eyes opened to see her lovely blonde head of hair falling to his lap. The touch of her lips was excruciatingly sweet.

"Pure poetry." he sighed, and for the first time in his long erotic life, he felt the delectable tugging of supressed laughter. It was delicious, wickedly wild and wet. When their eyes finally met, she looked absolutely lascivious and they both smiled and burst out laughing once more.

"You're a sexy old fart." she said, then paused and considered what she had done. "And I'm a completely certifiable slut."

"Ain't it great!" he chuckled.

"I don't think so." she said, seriously. "This was just one time, an impetuosity."

"How will you ever keep up your standing as a certifiable slut?"

"That's my secret." she replied, "And speaking of secrets, is Naomi really going to be fired?"

"I haven't the foggiest. It's about time the press got a taste of someone telling them boldfaced lies about themselves."

"You're absolutely wicked." she said with some obvious admiration.

By the end of the following day, there was another media feeding frenzy. Naomi's gurgling orgasm was the talk at every water cooler on the continent. A morning shock jock in New York City had played Anthony's entire lesson on breasts and poetry, and when it came time for Naomi's orgasm, the control room turned up the volume so that her muffled moan echoed shatteringly in a million cars making their way to work. The shock jock added to the world's inexhaustible erotic lexicon, the immortal phrase, 'Hey baby, show us your poems.' Unlike the infamous photo that had made Anthony famous which left nothing to the imagination, the replayed interview left everything to the imagination, which made it the stuff of legend.

Ian never loved Laura as much us as when she was happy, when her heart soared because the world was a successful meshing of desire and accomplishment. Laura was happy when work was going well. When she was frustrated at work, she was not much fun.

With Amanda once again on the back burner of her attention needs, and the nuclear explosion of opportunity that came with Anthony's media performances, Laura was as happy as Ian had ever seen her. She was the fulcrum that moved the great boulder of Anthony Holtz' fame, and its momentum was almost terrifying.

Yes and no were things she now said to others, not things she had to expect to hear. 'What was it you said that you wanted? I'll see, and get back to you. Got-a go. Sorry, I'm running behind.'

When George showed up at her office, she was surprised and annoyed to see him there. His attempt at charm quickly collapsed into bitter complaints that she was ignoring him. He wanted to know where he stood. When his voice started to rise, she thought it best to get him out of the building. They sat in his car and argued for the first time. She told him about her time constraints. She told him he was frightening her with his sudden obsessive behavior. The car reeked of liquor and he was obviously losing control as he screamed at her about how she was ignoring the potential in their relationship; how she was ignoring and denying the potential in her own imagination that she could never satisfy without him. George had clearly lost control. Laura was enraged.

"You sound like an adolescent." she told him coldly. "I'm not sure I ever want to see you again. I certainly don't, if you're going to behave like this. You should go home now, or back to work, or just go wherever you can think about it. If you can't chill out, this is over. I'm done."

Laura quickly popped the door of the Porsche and was out and gone while George shouted after her to come back. The irony was that success made Laura's libido rise exponentially, and if George had played his cards right, she would've been prepared for a quick little nooner.

It was Ian who benefited from how her new hectic success hit her libido's preamp, so when he came home with the news that he had plea bargained Amanda's assault charge into six months' probation, it resulted in a long night of erotic pleasure that they hadn't experienced in years.

Strangely, it wasn't George that Laura thought about in the small embers of afterglow, but rather it was the incident in the limousine with Anthony. She felt absolutely wicked and Ian was the one who was unknowingly rewarded because of it. The Anthony incident had been impulsive but real, while George felt more and more like an exotic wilderness tour of a place she knew she would never want to stay long. She lay with Ian, like spoons, as easy and as comfortable as two bedside books, resting against one another. She was a big bad erotic novel, 'Going up-Going down'; he was a book on personal relationships, 'Becoming the New Man of the House'.

For Ian, change was not long and slow like seasons turning, but was like the turning of the day from dawn to dusk and back once again. Anger and sorrow and impermanence gave way to happiness, love and commitment, which darkened once more to life's unavoidable pain. The sun, the moon and the stars rose in the eyes of the two women he loved. For Ian, life was like weather he could never foretell, but was always desperate to anticipate. The balance never held for long. Change happened. It was good. It was bad. And like the weather, it was always in control. But, as he lay holding his beautiful wife, Ian was basking in what felt like the most spectacular evening of an Indian summer in a life.

### Chapter 7

For Amanda, life was suspended animation, everything moved while everything just hung there like a line of icicles. The idea of wanting responsibility was new and exciting. The reality that there were so few responsibilities for her to assume stunned her. The week before she had felt inundated by endless demands; now she felt there was nothing for her to do. What she lived for; what she thought about all day was the nightly e-mail message she would get from Tom, and the e-mail message she would compose and send to him very late before she slept. He liked her more than a little. She tried not to sound like she was overwhelmed by the way he understood her, how he kept saying she was just fine, and how she was starting to believe it. Both of them would soon use their messages to tell about the simple ordinary events of their days. Her days seemed so pedestrian and boring. His days seemed so rich and interesting and filled with responsibility. After the first week, they both began to talk about when Amanda would come to visit the farm. For some reason, even though Tom had his own car, a 1958 red turtle back Volvo, when they spoke of finally meeting, it was always understood that Amanda would come to the farm.

She was delighted and terrified at the thought. What would he think of her? Would he think she was pretty? Would he like her body? Would he be disappointed in who she was?

Her repeated hints to her parents about how nice it would be to visit the farm were greeted without any apparent serious interest. As usual, Laura was too busy. As usual, Amanda and Ian had to wait for her to fit them into her life. Ian was more than keen to go, but he knew he had to feign a certain lack of interest because of Laura's obvious tight schedule.

Amanda had seen her friend Kara a few times after school. It took some doing, but Amanda finally got her to stop taking it also personally. She assured her friend she still wanted her to be a part of her life. She assured her that the change in her wardrobe and hair didn't mean she expected her to change hers.

"You just look so straight. No matter where we go, one of us is going to look like a freak." Kara complained.

"That's okay. I'm tired of the teenage style police." Kara didn't like it one bit. She tried to grill her friend about the dramatic transformation in her behavior and attitude, and came to accept that it all came down to it being Amanda's reaction to some boy. She knew that everyone fell hard eventually and made fools of themselves. It was a lesson every woman had to learn to prepare herself for when a man would put the boots to your heart. And if you were lucky that would be the only damage done.

The story that Amanda told her about the farm gave Kara the creeps. It seemed like a voluntary boot camp. Except for the Saturday night coffeehouse, it didn't seem to be any fun at all. It was nothing but work and responsibility. And when Amanda told her that the only time when anyone drank liquor was wine with dinner, she didn't believe it. She was sure everyone drank. She had never known anyone who didn't.

Amanda told her that most of Tom's family came from a background of alcohol or drug abuse so everyone accepted the rule without complaint, according to Tom.

"Right. So why don't we all go straight. I hope you're not telling me I have to get hammered all by myself."

If I get caught stoned or drinking while I'm on probation, I go straight to jail." Amanda replied.

"Who says you are going to get caught?"

"I'm not going to risk it." Amanda insisted.

"Suit yourself. You'll see. Straight people always end up fucking you over, big-time."

Amanda said nothing and when she thought about Kara, she realized she really wanted to help her crawl out of the pit of her own loneliness and anger. She had just crawled out of her own pit and had no idea of how to even begin to reach a hand down to her friend. The easy responsibilities in life seemed few and far between, the hard ones to seemed to be impossible. It made Amanda feel helpless and ineffectual.

Weeks after she had first been to the farm, Laura phone Sharon and asked her if it would be all right if her family came to visit that Saturday and stayed for a little bit of the coffeehouse festivities because Amanda was frantic about coming. Sharon was both delighted and enthusiastic about having them come. She told Laura that her son Tom was especially anxious to meet Amanda. It seemed they had struck up an Internet friendship, and when Laura told Sharon that Amanda was reading car magazines to select a car for them to restore, they knew they were dealing with something big.

Laura called Ian and he called Amanda at school with the news. Her heart hit the ground like a stone. She would have less than two days to get ready and cursed her mother for giving her only two days to prepare. She also cursed her mother for giving her so much time to suffer and wait. She cursed herself most of all for being so nervous and scared.

She had been continually agonizing about whether she should send her picture to Tom. Should she prepare him for what she looked like. But what picture to send? The ones she had from the past year made her look like a freak. The ones she had from before made her look like a child. The last picture she had of herself looking normal was when she was fourteen years old and she had certainly changed considerably in the two years since. She had decided a new picture was mandatory but was desperate about what she would do to create it. She then had what she thought was a great idea.

For an hour after school she went looking for one of those photo booths where she could put in a dollar and get a series of passport size pictures. The trouble was they only seemed to exist in television commercials. She thought of going to one of the photo studio she found in the Yellow Pages but was too embarrassed to do it. She didn't want a phony portrait anyway.

Finally, she went to a camera shop and bought a used Polaroid camera and some film and went outside of the streets and asked a stranger to take her picture leaning against the side of the building. Those were the pictures Tom received that night. He wrote back immediately telling her he had no idea she would be so pretty. That lifted her off the ground so far she would not come down until she felt his hand in hers the next day. His hand in hers; there are connections that are sometimes word perfect, even when they are unspoken.

Amanda had no idea what would happen when she met Tom. The long drive in the Lexus was quiet and endless. The quit try her parents made at small talk met with little response from Amanda. She tried to be polite but quickly fell into nervous anticipatory silence.

"You look nice." Laura said to Amanda and meant it. It seemed that everyone got dressed up for the coffeehouse in Saturday's so it took Amanda most of the previous day to decide what she would wear. Instead of replying to her mother's comments with the role of the eyes, and a comment such as, 'I look nice compared to what?' she simply thanked her mother and went back to her nervous silence.

Amanda hoped she looked better than nice. She wanted to look sexy without looking too flashy. She wanted to make an impression and still look casual. She wanted to look like her mother without wearing her mother's clothes. The day before had been so hard because she had tried every permutation in combination of the clothes she had her closet. She even called her friend Kara to come over to help her decide. Her friend almost gagged at every option she was presented and when she pulled out a joint and started to light it, Amanda just about had a fit.

"Are you crazy, my parents know what weed smells like. They smell dope in my room I'll be grounded for a month."

"Then you're so on your own. I gotta go. Call me when you come back from wherever you are." Kara left Amanda with her poor little middle-class problem, 'Oh, what am I going to wear!' She ended up looking much like Naomi Oliver in a soft silk blouse and a pair of tight jeans that showed off the long lithe curves of her youth.

Riding quietly in the back seat of the Lexus, it was amazing to Amanda that her reflexive defensive, sarcastic comments to longer seemed to even come to her mind. Even to Amanda, it seemed as if she had somehow received an attitude transplant. It made her realize how hurt, angry and disappointed she had been in her parents, and even more so in herself. As Ian and Laura talked in the front seat, Amanda thought about change and what a mysterious, unexpected and miraculous thing it was. For her, it seemed to happen almost instantaneously. The same thing had happened when she had first met her friend Kara. But her knowing Tom had changed her a hundred times more. It made her nervous to think of her enormous impressionability and made her strangely apprehensive about changes the future might bring.

Laura had her own fears to deal with. Her biggest apprehension of the day was about the four unanswered questions that had come from Eugene's computer. The very thought of telling him the story of her life was unnerving and intimidating, and ultimately intrusive. She knew, because it was Eugene, thatt he was expecting a serious reply, a personal narrative she had never even given to herself. She always tried to live in the present, her thoughts about the past almost entirely related to how they affected the present moment. Telling about her life, her husband, her daughter and herself was something she wanted to avoid. His request was romantic and impractical. What was she to do? What was there to tell? They were typical urban middle-class people; too busy, too stressed, too spoiled, smart and self-centered. They had won life's lottery in so many ways and were hoping to have fun, fun, fun, until daddy took the T-bird away. To hear Eugene or Sharon answer those questions might have been interesting, but to Laura her answers would have seemed sad or vain or both. They were interesting people trying to live interesting lives but somehow lacking the passion and originality to really pull it off. By the time they got to the farm, Laura had decided that no matter how Eugene would feel about it, the best thing to do was leave his questions unanswered. For Laura, returning to the farm was like coming to class with an uncompleted assignment. When they were young she was able to insist that their feelings remain vague and implied. She didn't want to feel that she had to change that just because it was thirty years later and he happened to be dying.

Ian carried the conversation in the car. His fear and apprehension was similar to what Laura had felt the first time she approached the farm. He was both nervous and excited about facing the force of Sharon's personality, a force that could reach out to his troubled daughter and change her life in a few days. Ian always saw himself as the foundation of his family because he was the one who did the maintenance and repair that was necessary to keep volatile emotions from eating away at the rational structure of his family's life. Where he felt like an expert in minor repairs and renovations, he felt he was on the way to meet a great master builder.

Ian was certain Eugene had once loved his wife, and if the story about the journal he had kept for her was true, he might still love her in the way only a first love can survive. If he hadn't been dying and if he hadn't been married to someone like Sharon, he might have felt more uncomfortable about the visit. But both he and Laura had come from failed marriages and married each other after the young ideal of a true and accessible heart had disappeared in a number of short-term relationships and bed partners. It made feeling pangs of jealousy rather like the memory of childhood's innocence.

When they turned into the laneway of the farm, both Ian and Amanda were struck by the sheer scale it. The endless serpentine stone walls, the huge cross of the farmhouse itself, the size of the log out buildings, the enormous cedar-enclosed parking lot and garages were impossible to imagine beforehand. Amanda loved the huge lichen covered stones that Eugene had brought the farm and placed like sentinels along the lane way. Ian thought he was prepared when he drove into the parking lot and saw the two dozen gleaming classic cars were they sat each Saturday morning after their weekly runs. When he saw them lined up before their garage doors, he was aghast. They were like lacquered jewels gleaming in the autumn sun.

When they got out of the Lexus, both Amanda and Laura could see that Ian would have been happy to spend the rest of the day just hanging around the garages watching the process involved in the restoration of a half a dozen classic cars.

Amanda had expected Tom to be in the garage working, because he told her that was where he spent a good deal of his time. But there were only a few people working because it was the hour when everyone on the farm gathered for the midday meal. Ian dragged his ladies into the garage and Amanda's heart began to slowly rev higher and higher as she realized that this was where Tom had spent many hours and days, and was the place he said he was happiest. It was a guy thing she couldn't have imagined until she saw the cars sitting in the long row outside. Old steel frames and panels and great lumps of engine could come together in such dynamic beauty.

Ian made Laura walked the long row of the classic cars that belonged to the children while Amanda stayed with the one she knew to be Tom's 544 Hump back Volvo. Ian couldn't help himself, he lifted for door of the Gull Wing Coupe and sat inside and Laura smiled at the pure pleasure on his face. Reluctantly she opened the passenger door and got in to satisfy Ian's pleadings. Both doors came down and Laura was back where she had once belonged: a different love, a different life, a different body mind and heart. Eugene was right, she thought, polished steel could really last. She had missed his point entirely. When they got out of the Mercedes, Amanda had disappeared. Laura only saw her sitting like a statue in the passenger seat of Tom's Volvo. She went to the door and opened it and saw her daughter's forced smile through the heart pounding fear she was experiencing. Her own heart started beat in time to Amanda's.

"We had better go up to the house." Laura said softly, "I'll bet he can't wait to see you "

"I know, that's what scares me."

"I know." said Laura and reached out her hand and helped Amanda from the car.

The dogs on the porch greeted them as they came up to the house. The barking brought Sharon and Tom, and after a moment, amid the moving dogs there were hugs and kisses passed between the adults. When the adults had greeted, Tom reached his hand for Amanda's and they looked into each other's eyes trying to remember how to breathe and speak at the same time. The touch of his hand actually settled her, the look in his eyes made her want to cry. They were strangers who knew each other by heart. So beautiful, so deep and shining and real, and just an ordinary moment saying hello.

"Hi, I'm glad you're here." Tom said simply.

"Me too."

Tom wouldn't let go of her hand and her heart sank from knowing it and knowing how brave he was to do it in front of his mother and her own parents. He held her hand as he lead Amanda into the house, their parents following close behind.

They found Eugene sitting in his big wheelchair at the dinner table, his daughters Nancy and Mary still talking to him as others cleared the table after lunch. The whole family was waiting to rise from their meal when their mother returned.

When Tom and Sharon came in with the McCalls, the same star struck hush fell on the room as it had when Laura had joined them weeks before. This time all the attention was on Amanda as Tom introduced his brothers and sisters. Sharon told her family that they could be excused and everyone rose and gathered around Tom and Amanda. For the first time since they had touched, Tom let go of Amanda's hand. The cool touch of air made her realize her hand was sweating.

It was then that Eugene and Amanda locked eyes. She went to him and reached out to take his hand in hers and smiled, even though she felt shock of holding a hand moving inexorably from life to lifelessness. She fought back tears because she did not know how Tom could stand to feel the enormous presence of death so close to someone he loved. She blurted out that he was Tom's greatest hero, and his eyes shone with the inexorable lightness of life. Sharon shooed away the flock of children and led her guests into the sun room where Tom put his father back into bed from his wheelchair. The visitors were all shocked to see that it looked like lifting a child. Quickly Sharon adjusted Eugene's head so he could see his alphabet chart and almost immediately the computer screen came alive. The letters began to form one at a time as the letters spelled Amanda is so beautiful! She blushed scarlet between a in the u of beautiful.

"I know." said Laura.

"Ian, my home is yours." Eugene said.

"Thanks, but I don't think I could afford the overhead."

Eugene laughed weakly and Laura was stunned to hear the weakened version of the same laugh she remembered from thirty years before.

Sharon asserted herself again and said they would leave Laura for a quick visit with Eugene while she gave Ian and Amanda a quick tour of the house. Ian said he was anxious to do that, and it was obvious that Amanda could hardly wait for Tom to lead her through his exotic domain.

In the dining room, Sharon explained the polished walnut family tree filling one wall.

"Everyone in the family has a box on the family tree where we keep the stories of our ancestral past. We are crazy for genealogical research around here. Our big family of orphans probably knows more about their relatives than you can even imagine."

Amanda saw the box with Tom's name and wondered what stories it might contain. She was more than a little uncomfortable to realize that she knew almost nothing about her own grandparents. The long wall opposite the family tree contained the photo collage the children had created over the years. It was not just the changing bodies and faces of the children that was so captivating, but the range of activities and interests shown in the photographs. Laura almost had to drag Ian away from the wall to proceed with the tour.

The music room with the long high wall of recorded music was the one that took hold Amanda as she walked slowly past rack after rack of vinyl records, tapes and CDs, she couldn't believe that so much music could exist in one house. Her father had always been the music collector in the family, but his collection was a bookcase compared to a library. Tom followed her as she brushed her fingers over the recorded music.

"My mom's the music collector in the family." Tom explained, "Since the Internet, the music collection has expanded alot."

"It's true. It's my one real addiction. For me, finding a great song or great performance is like finding a piece of your own heart you never knew you had lost, a piece of your heart that you now have to share." Sharon added.

"Maybe we can come back here later and listen to records?" Tom said to Amanda.

"That would be so great." she replied. Sharon had to call them from the door to get them to proceed with the tour.

As usual, people were singing in the coffeehouse. They were working on Joni Mitchell songs for that Saturday night. Amanda stood in front of the stage and felt the exciting presence and power that lay dormant in all the musical instruments in front of her. The pictures from her computer did not prepare her for the scale or the electric presence the room conveyed. Ian couldn't help himself and walked to the big white wall covered with hand written lyrics.

Like most people, first-time visitors found it difficult to pull themselves away from the wall of lyrics. Amanda picked a pen from the Walnut ledge that ran the length of the wall and wrote,' and too many kisses seem to cool in the warmth of the sun.' Tom smiled at Amanda and pointed to lyrics he had written on the wall, 'Build me a boat that will carry two, and both shall row, my love and I'

Amanda's heart rose up on the crest of the wave that little boat had raised. She wanted to scream, she was so happy.

Tom asked if it would be all right if he took Amanda for a ride around the farm. His mother said that would be fine, but made Amanda promise to give her some time alone so they could talk before dinner. Amanda promised, but wondered anxiously what Sharon wanted to say to her alone. Tom told Amanda that she would need something warm to wear on the ride, so she should follow him, so she could find something to borrow. His confidence and quiet authority were even sexier than his body.

He led her to a giant walk-in closet where she was wide-eyed, seeing all the clothes hanging on long racks. Tom led her quickly to the place where she would find a sweater in her size. She picked out a soft green one, and when she lifted her arms to put it on over her head, she hoped Tom was watching the stretch of her body. When their eyes connected, she knew he had been watching. How it was that ordinary oxygen dissolved into the properties of helium she could did not know, because when she spoke, her voice came out of her half an octave higher than normal.

"Whose clothes are these?" she asked.

"Everybody's, nobody's, anybody who wants to wear anything in here can do that. They're all from second hand stores." he explained. "These are just work clothes. Everybody keeps their good stuff in their own room and you have to wash them yourself when they gets dirty, so nobody wears their own good stuff very often. The stuff in here just gets done in the regular laundry."

Tom took Amanda to find a jacket and she picked one with wide sleeves and a high collar made of corduroy, and when she put it on and saw herself in the mirror nearby, she felt pretty and lucky and special and almost breathless with the sudden realization she was alone with Tom. He seemed to realize it too. He stood there for a second and she wanted very much to take his hand and turn him to her, slip into his arms and look up into his eyes and wait for his kiss. She only stood there feeling time move in the slow motions of desire. The next thing Amanda said shocked them both.

"My mother makes me take birth control pills every day."

"Really." Tom replied, and Amanda could not tell if the shocked look in his face was because he was disgusted with her or her mother. She started to cry. His eyes looked so distant. It hit her like a slap. She pulled herself together.

"I guess we better go." Tom said.

"I guess." Amanda replied, and he led her out of the house and down the path to the barn.

Sharon and Ian found Laura sitting on the front porch in one of the big white wicker chairs. One of the children had already set coffee, tea and cakes on a tray in front of her. There were cups and mugs for Ian, Sharon, Tom and Amanda. Sharon sat across from the McCalls as Laura explained that she had been shown out of the sunroom where they had left her because it was Eugene's time to rest.

"I'm sorry. Gene would never ask anyone to leave, so we have a pretty strict schedule for visiting time and rest time. The kids can sometimes be pretty protective."

"It's hard to get used to talking to a television monitor. I'm so used to looking into people's eyes when they talk. And I'm not used to having someone look so deeply into my eyes when it's my turn to say something." Laura said.

"I know what you are saying. The most amazing thing is that as his body has weakened and faded, his eyes seemed to get more vibrant and alive." Sharon replied.

"I think you're right. He always had spectacular eyes, like Paul Newman." Laura agreed.

"Like Rosemary flowers." Sharon added, "The one small dignity of Lou Gehrig's disease is that it doesn't touch the eyes or the sphincters. But I guess that's more than you need to know."

Ian interrupted and said how grateful they were for having changed Amanda's life.

"I don't know how you did it. But in the last weeks, she has become a mature, responsible adult. It's hard to believe that the delightful human being that we have brought to your house was an emotional disaster a few weeks ago. It seems she has a crush on your boy Tom, so we are grateful to him as well."

"I keep thinking this must be a dream. I'm going to wake up to this spitting, snarling alley cat we've had for her daughter for the past year. Then every morning I wake up to the smiling, polite helpful, insightful little angel. I just can't believe it's true." Laura added sincerely.

"I'm so glad. It almost never happens like that. Usually, people have to get really unhappy with being unhappy. Usually, trust and self-confidence only come with very clear rules and lots and lots of praise and reassurance. The hardest thing for a troubled child to do is to believe that you love them, even when they do things you don't like. Being loved and feeling loved can be like opposite sides of a coin. They think they have to be perfect to deserve to be loved. They think we have to be perfect before our love for them can be trusted. In our house, most of the times, I set the rules and Eugene did the praise and reassurance. It's good cop, bad cop around here most of the time."

"It's like that in our house too. My problem is that I'm not there enough to enforce the rules." Laura replied, "Ian's good at giving praise, he's not so good at being the bad guy."

"Men have a hero thing most women don't." Sharon replied.

Then came a piercing scream of a whistle so close and strident that it literally lifted Ian and Laura right out of their chairs. It was such a shock, such a surprise, that it was almost hard for them to recover their breath.

"What was that?" Ian gasped.

Sharon was laughing as she explained that she knew exactly what had happened. Tom was obviously showing Amanda, the steam engine that supplied all the heat and power to the farm and told her to pull on the rope that ran the steam whistle.

"It's one of the jokes the kids play on the visitors. I hope Amanda didn't pee her pants. It's been known to happen."

Ian was laughing, imagining the situation. Laura felt sorry for Amanda.

"Why do men think it's so funny to scare women have to death?" Laura asked Sharon.

"So ladies never forget they are going to need a brave, strong man someday." Ian explained.

"I don't know." Sharon added, "When Eugene and I used to go for rides in his Mercedes, he would sometimes go into a corner so fast I thought we were both going to die. He thought it was hysterical. The only way I got him to stop doing that was by telling him I'd never ride with him again if he did it one more time. I really don't know why men behave like boys."

"Because boys just want to have fun." Ian interjected.

Sharon was absolutely right about the steam whistle. Amanda was finally recovering from the shock of the steam whistle's blast. She had thrown herself against Tom, her two fists striking his chest as he put his arms around her and said he was sorry, even though he couldn't keep from laughing. The distance in his eyes had vanished and her heart was still whirling like maple keys in the wind. Back on their horses, Tom led the way through the Cedar hedges surrounding the automobile garages. Always another surprise. They were suddenly in a very old beautiful orchard: apple and cherry and pear trees in wide long rows, the sweet smell of rotting windfall apples drifting around them. The bigger surprise was the fact that there were nine very different tree houses built into the centres of some of the very old trees, each one completely different in structure and design and decoration. As they rode down the line of trees, Tom explained to her that these were the tree houses his brothers and sisters had built for their personal sanctuaries. No one was allowed to enter them unless they were invited. Mostly people were never invited because the sanctuary spots were often the place where the children would go for the private hour of solitary reflection that happened every weekday from four until five.

"I don't understand." Amanda inquired, "Everyone has to go and be alone for an hour every day? Why?"

"Because there are so many people here, it's hard to get time to yourself. It was my mom's idea. When we each came here, the first thing we got to do was build a sanctuary place with my mom and dad. It's so we have a place to go when we felt hurt or angry, or just want to be by ourselves. You can always go to your sanctuary spot anytime of the day, no matter what's happening. My brother Tranh built his as a secret underground bunker in the side of the dirt ramp going to the second floor of the barn. We tease him that it's his Viet Cong heritage. That one there is my sister Christa's, the one with the sign that says 'Love Abides'. She's been in a psychiatric facility for the last year."

Amanda realized that under the idyllic surface there was deep unresolved pain and terror in this family of so many adopted children.

"Which one of these is yours?" she asked.

"It's this one." he said. They stopped beside a huge old Apple tree supporting a small room made of vertical birch bark planks. It had only one opening, a little door that could only be reached by climbing up through the branches. She wished he would ask her to climb up and see the room where he spent an hour alone every day. It was so different to the luxury condominium where she spent so much time alone. But alone was alone, and yet his seemed like private luxury rather than the abandonment that she usually felt. She told him that her time alone was painful, and he said that it was understandable. He suggested that she might want to find a place that was just her own outside her condo, a place where her deepest feelings were safe.

"That's not so easy in a big city." she replied.

Tom didn't say anything, with barely a gesture his horse understood his intent and moved along the orchard row. Amanda's horse followed alongside. They headed across the field to a little cemetery on a rise overlooking the farm.

Sharon, Laura and Ian finished their coffee and Laura brought up the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee.

"I asked Eugene how he might feel if I looked at Arthur and Laura Lee's letters with the idea of publishing them. He said I should ask you and his daughter Sarah's advice."

Sharon's demeanor changed instantly. She was suddenly reluctant and defensive about the idea of exploiting what was a personal treasure for her family.

"I'll talk to Eugene. You should talk to Sarah. She has almost a perfect memory of every letter Eugene read to the children. He keeps them in the vault, and so no one has seen them since he lost his voice. Everyone depends on Sarah to keep Arthur and Laura Lee alive. Sarah doesn't live at home anymore, but she'll be here for Saturday night coffeehouse tonight."

For the first time, Laura and Sharon truly locked eyes. Both of them knew it was a test. Both of them felt their own deepest vulnerability. They would not lock eyes like that again for a very long time.

Tom and Amanda rode slowly side-by-side through the family Cemetery. He said that he loved the idea that everyone he cared about would one day be laid to rest around him. It made Amanda very sad to think about mortality, about his mortality in such real terms. Would this be where she would be laid to rest, or would there be another beside him, another woman who had born him his children.

"Even my birth mother will have a place here if she wishes it." he explained, "Since her time in residential school, she has lost all connection with her people."

"They're your people too." Amanda added.

"I wish." He seemed suddenly uncomfortable and changed the subject. "I like to keep all the graves clean."

Purple clover and Queen Anne's lace grew all-around the Cemetery, but each grave was groomed and covered with the heart-shaped leaves of spring violets.

From the Cemetery they rode across the fields and approached the deep cedar hedge surrounding the century-old Walnut Forest. The horses knew the way and found the road angled into the forest, and when they broke through the intense intoxicating smell of the Cedars, Amanda almost gasped with what she saw. Countless high straight walnut trees mixed with enormous white pines were trimmed so high that they looked like cathedral spires. The crown of every tree seems suspended from the sky. Below, the Walnut leaves were turning sepia brown under countless green walnuts scattered in one perfect circle after another. Butterscotch coloured pine needles covered the forest floor, and the only other living things Amanda could see were the ferns and mosses that had claimed their own places in the woods.

The horses knew they should stop when they entered the forest. They also knew when it was time to move on to the big black pearl of a pool at the center of the forest. The absolute stillness, the strange, sweet, acidic masculine smell of walnuts made the place seem almost mystical.

Tom slipped out of his saddle and helped Amanda down to the ground when the horses, Jack and Diane, began to shift and silently complain that they were bored.

"This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my life." Amanda said softly.

If there was ever a moment for a first kiss, this was the moment. They had both been waiting, and they both felt the effortless desire in their arms as they gathered one another, two bodies; one embrace. Then their eyes met, then closed, and they felt the heart pounding force and absolute delicacy of their first kiss. In the perfect cathedral of trees, in the perfect unrepeatable perfection of the moment, they each absorbed how their bodies fit together in a way they would never feel with another human being.

Plop! A frog turned the still reflection of the forest and their kiss into shimmering energy, Emily Carr in true life.

When they broke their breathtaking kiss, Tom held Amanda's face in his hands and said absolutely nothing. His eyes said everything.

"I'm going to be strong." she whispered.

"I know." he replied. And to Tom she looked so truly beautiful in every way that it was an image he pressed into his heart that it would never fade for as long as he lived.

When they got back to the farm they found their parents sitting in the wicker chairs on the front porch, the wood smell and warmth of the fireplace stripping their bodies of the cool autumn air.

"How was your ride?" Laura asked Amanda, and the soft look in her mother's eyes, and the liquid long peeling of the silent bell in her chest overwhelmed Amanda and she shocked herself and everyone else as she fell into her mother's lap and held her close and cried. She didn't just cry, she sobbed.

Laura was so shocked she didn't know what to say as Amanda whispered in her ear, "Mama, it so beautiful here." Laura relaxed and held her daughter close. Amanda hadn't called her Mama since she was ten years old, and so it was Laura's turn to struggle against tears while everyone felt close and tender in the liquid silence of the room. Finally Amanda recovered and threw her head back and looked at Tom and said, "This is so uncool."

"I think it's absolutely cool." Tom replied, and he was looking at her with a force that only his mother knew and remembered.

Sharon asked Tom to sit down and Amanda got out of her mother's lap and went to sit in the chair beside him, suddenly feeling quite embarrassed at being the very center of the strange kind of attention she had created. So many feelings were tumbling in her father's heart that he had almost forgotten his usual assumed responsibility to lead the conversation.

"Tell me what you saw." he said to Amanda.

Talking let her recover her emotions as she told the story of the last hour. Both of her parents were very interested in the tree houses and the idea of having an hour of private time just to reflect on the day.

"That's a luxury I can't even imagine" said Ian.

Laura agreed and said the idea made her realize how little control she had in her life. There simply were no spare hours in the day.

"I didn't think you ever liked being alone." Ian said to his wife.

"I know. But an hour day, just for myself, sounds absolutely decadent." she replied.

"I don't think time for yourself should be optional." Sharon said with her usual finality.

Both Ian and Laura said nothing in response. Amanda was thinking that if her parents started taking time alone, that would leave her with even less. She didn't understand why three little lives in the city could be so absolutely complicated, difficult and lonely.

By the time the sun set it was in waves of amber and pink flowing into rivers of maroon. the McCalls looked at one another and felt like they had been sitting on that porch for most of their lives. It was Sharon who finally broke up the gathering as she stood up and took Amanda's hand.

"You promised me a few minutes alone, let's go see if anybody needs anything in the kitchen." she said, and Amanda took her hand and dutifully followed her out of the room leaving Tom alone with Laura and Ian.

Amanda was surprised that were only two people in the kitchen. Martha was there with Ryan gathering different homemade relishes and condiments on big trays.

"Saturday night is always burgers and french fries at the coffeehouse." Sharon explained to Amanda. "Two people at each table are responsible to keep all the others fed and happy."

"That's great. I wish I could help, but I really don't know how to cook anything, even burgers and fries." Amanda confessed.

Sharon was surprised but said nothing.

"Do we need anything?" Sharon asked her two children.

"We'll need another peck of potatoes." said Martha. "We were just going to get them."

"Amanda and I will do that." said Sharon and the two children looked strangely at Amanda. They didn't usually get intercepted in the chores.

Sharon lead the way out of the kitchen through the kitchen side door where Amanda saw the rock garden cascading back for thirty yards. She did not think to ask about the beautiful Cedar door cut into the big mound of earth and stones at the end of the garden. Sharon effortlessly pulled back the root cellar door and Amanda was surprised to see that it was six inches thick. Sharon touched a switch and a dull light filled the room and Amanda could see all the fruit and root vegetables stored on shelves and floor pallets as far as she could see. She followed Sharon inside until they came to bushels and bushels of dark potatoes.

"This place is amazing." exclaimed Amanda, the odor of the earth, the root vegetables, apples and pears mixed together in an almost erotic smell. Sharon pulled out a half bushel of potatoes and sat down on one of the small benches in the cave.

"Sit for a minute." Sharon said to Amanda, indicating that she should sit down beside her. Amanda was nervous about what was coming.

"Your parents say that you've changed a great deal in the last few weeks. They think you're finally happy with your life." Sharon began. "Is it true?"

"No. I'm not happy with my life. I don't really have a life of my own, but I know I'm still young. Tom has made me realize what I have to do to make that happen. I don't know if you can believe this, but you have the most wonderful son in the world. He's so strong and gentle and wise." And then she said the thing she thought she would never have said in one million years, to Tom or anyone else.

"I don't know what's going to happen, but I love Tom. You'll think I'm insane because we just met, but I know my heart."

"I absolutely believe you." Sharon said gently, "I just want you to be careful with your heart and his. One thing young people never believe is that they are the ones who really have the luxury of time. Falling in love sometimes happens in such a hurry, and life is very long."

"If you're talking about sex, I'm on the pill. I really don't need to be, but my mother is paranoid that I'm going to get pregnant and need an abortion like she did." Amanda explained.

"That's not what I was talking about. I know Tom, and now I know you as well, and I know I don't have to worry about sex. What I meant was that you have time to create the conditions of your life. Your heart is the foundation on which you can choose to build anything. All I wanted to say to you is you should never forget to look for the things that will always be true to your heart."

"But I don't know the things that are true to my heart."

"No one does, but you can ask it. If you let your heart say what it wants to say and not just what you want to hear, it will keep you true to yourself. That's it. That's all the wisdom there is in this old girl. No, that's not completely true. Let's go back to the coffeehouse, and I'll to show you the greatest power that exists on earth." Sharon said and got up and reached down for the basket of potatoes. Amanda took the other wire handle and they carried it back to the kitchen. Sharon then led the way to the coffeehouse with Amanda nervously anticipating what this world shattering power might be.

In the coffeehouse, almost a dozen people gathered around the stage singing when Sharon interrupted them. "Excuse me." Sharon said, and everyone stopped what they were doing and waited for her to speak. "Who here remembers, 'This Little Light of Mine' Can we do it as a singing round? Susan you start, please."

Susan, a little girl of about seven and the youngest one in the room began to sing in a sweet, high child's voice,

"This little light of mine, I'm going to that it shine

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

This little item mine, I'm going to let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Then the next voice joined Susan singing, and the next and next followed as the room filled with the growing chorus and it was quite beautiful to hear. All these people were obviously used to sing together. But Amanda didn't get the point until Sharon began singing, leaving her silently alone as everyone sang. She felt more and more uncomfortable as she knew it would soon be her turn to join in or not. She had no choice, she had to sing. She knew she wanted to sing, and so when it was time for her to come in, she sang in public for the very first time in her life. And it felt quite wonderful. Sharon was right, the enormous force of the voices filling the room was amazingly powerful, and irresistibly beautiful. As if on cue, they all stopped together leaving Amanda beginning the last new round alone. "This Little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine." She sang the first solo in her life. When people clapped she was quite taken aback.

"You have a wonderful voice." said Sharon and obviously meant it. Amanda wished that Tom had been there to hear her sing.

Sharon thanked the group and said to Amanda that they should be getting back to her parents. As they walked Sharon told Amanda the secret of the greatest power on earth.

"When everyone sang, you could feel the song forming inside, needing you to join in, couldn't you? That's what a song does. It asks you to share your feelings with someone else. A song makes people join their feelings together, and when people do that, there is no end to the beautiful things that can be created. There is also no end to the terrible things that can come out of the human heart when people open themselves up to the worst power inside them. There are songs of love and songs of war. The only real question in anyone's life is what kind of song you want to sing. And no matter what kind of voice you have, life is rarely a solo. When it came your turn, it was impossible for you not to join the others because they opened their hearts to you. That's the greatest power on earth, the power people have when they open their hearts together. And that's the best thing I know in this world."

Amanda was stunned. She saw Sharon's passion and certainty and understood it with a clarity that made her feel as if she had actually faced the greatest power in the world. 'This little light of mine.' Amanda then knew with an absolute certainty that it was going to shine, and it was going to join the light from the hearts of countless people she had never even met. She knew an absolute certain joy in the possibilities of her future, and she knew the sad realization of what her past had been. Until the last weeks, she had shared nothing of her heart.

Later, Laura and Ian waited in the coffeehouse at a table close to the stage. Sharon went to get Eugene when the room was almost full. Sarah came in with her husband and two children, and Laura waved to her and asked if she would like to share their table. Sarah was obviously delighted.

Tom and Amanda had been in the family room with two headsets listening to the music Tom had chosen for Amanda to hear. Voices she had never heard before her life singing songs she never knew existed was a revelation to her. She loved his taste in music; King Pleasure singing jazz lyrics in a voice that moved with the tenor fluidity of a saxophone. 'There I go. There I go. There I go. Pretty baby, you are the soul that snaps my control.' Etta James, Fred Neal, Jim Kweskin and the Riders of the Purple Sage. Tom was like her own personal DJ picking one cut after another so she could get a flavor of the music she was hearing. For two hours they had sat as she marveled to herself that her heart could swell to such an incredible size just listening to other people sing. If there were purely happy beings on the planet in those two hours, Amanda was surely one of them. It was hard to imagine, but the night would only get better.

There was a big crowd gathered in the coffeehouse when they brought Eugene in his wheelchair and put him near the stage and the table where Sharon, Laura, and Ian, were sitting. Sarah came in with her family and Sharon called her to come sit with them. She put Sarah across from Laura and Sarah introduced her family. A moment of greeting and then Laura asked Sarah how it was the she remembered the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee so perfectly.

"Most of us older kids remember the stories pretty well because we heard them the most. The reason everyone thinks I know the stories so well is because I like to tell them. I teach the younger kids here in the farm, so they see me the most. I'm just one that gets asked most often, and so I'm the one everyone thinks is the expert on Arthur and Laura Lee."

"Your father and mother seem somewhat anxious about letting me see the letters. I really think they would make a wonderful book. It's such an original idea, but I don't know if I should you even be asking. Maybe you can tell me if I'm barging into places that I don't belong."

"I really don't know. No one except my dad has ever touched those letters. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I told you the stories. Maybe you can come up for a Sunday visit to our house and I can tell you stories all day long." Sarah replied.

Sarah's children all seemed delighted by the idea, asking if it would be all right for them to listen to the stories too, and Sarah said they could listen until their bums turned blue. They squealed with laughter.

Tom and Amanda joined them and soon more than two hundred regular guests and family were starting in on burgers and fries that seemed to suddenly appear from nowhere.

There was a blackboard over Eugene's head with a list of the songs and the people that would be singing. Individuals and groups could put themselves on the evening playbill if they were prepared and wanted to sing. A good part of the week was spent in discussing who would be singing and the songs that would be chosen. There is an unwritten protocol that no one could sing more than two song solo. The rest was all first come, first-served.

It was Ian who was reading the playbill for the night and turned Amanda's attention to it. When she looked about halfway down the list she saw that it said Tom and Amanda,' When I Fall in Love'. Amanda had to scrape her heart and her stomach from the floor. Her eyes flashed to Tom, who just smiled.

"How could you do this to me?" she asked, breathlessly.

"You said you wanted to sing a song together. It's the only one I was sure we both knew." he replied, "I'm sure you can do it."

"She has a tremendous voice." added Sharon.

"Really?" Laura asked in surprise.

"I guess we'll see." Amanda replied and continued to try to gather up her vital organs from where they had been scattered.

Ian couldn't wait. It was more than romantic. It was all such a surprise. If a fortune teller a month before had told him how he would be spending this day, he would not have believed it was possible. He wouldn't have believed such experiences and such feelings would be part of the life of his little family. Tom and Amanda were elected cooks for the night for their table, and they did a wonderful job keeping the whole table fed. Tom cooked, Amanda served.

Sharon's grown son Rosie and his family joined them, and the table was suddenly full. Rosie's wife Connie seemed to the one person Laura met on the farm who seemed to be ill at ease.

It was East Coast, West Coast, New York, California and Yorkville, Toronto with a Joni Mitchell medley.

It was the longest and shortest day of Amanda's life. So much had happened that she'd remember for a lifetime, and it all went by so fast. It was over, like a song. She couldn't tell if time was crawling or running away with her as one song after another was played and Tom came and went joining different groups. When finally it was almost time, she felt that she was about to panic.

"Do we take turns singing? Do you want to start? When do I know when to come in?" she pleaded with Tom.

"It's easy. I'll start and you can join whenever you feel ready."

"What if I never feel ready? I'll look like an idiot." she insisted.

"You might. Or maybe you'll just look like a great prop. They do that kind of thing in musicals all the time. Relax. This is supposed to be fun." What he said helped her. She knew he would take care of her. He would never let her look like a fool.

And then it was time and the two of them were on stage, and he went to the grand piano and sat down and she sat beside him and the whole room, went silent. Teenage girls, green with jealousy, gathered around the stage as they always did when Tom sang solo. He began to play and sing and he sang the first lines alone before he turned to look at Amanda. She joined him, and they sang together, and by the time they got to the phrase about moonlight kisses seeming to cool in the warmth of the sun, it was like they had been singing together forever. Amanda's nervousness had completely vanished. She fell into the feeling of the song, and she meant its words totally and absolutely, and as completely as she had ever meant any words in her life.

Both Laura and Ian were shocked at the pure, high, beautiful voice that came out of their daughter. She had range and depth, feeling and poise. And if the girls around the stage were jealous before they began, there was no gauge to measure the depth of it as the last chord faded in the room. No dishes rattled. All conversation had stopped. Virtually everyone in the room knew that this was a special, beautiful moment.

When the applause began, Amanda jumped like a startled bird. As they went back to their seats, Amanda was more than in love; Amanda was proud of herself. She was in love. She didn't care who saw it. She was so happy she wasn't even afraid Tom would see and know. Still, there was something that made her reluctant to finally look into his eyes again. She heard his voice say that she was spectacular, and she felt his hand in hers and she looked at the light in her own father's eyes, and Amanda literally shone. For some reason, Amanda thought of her friend Kara who would have just puked at what was to her such a beautiful a moment in life. 'When I fall in love. What horseshit.'

The rest of the night was pure fun. The only other heart-wrenching moment happened when everyone listened to Tom sing Fred Neil's, 'The Dolphin,'. It was a beautiful song. She was glad Eugene had stayed to hear Tom sing that song before Sharon announced that he had to leave and rest. Everyone at the table said goodbye into his beautiful eyes, and to Amanda, the look seemed almost as happy as she felt.

Sometime past midnight, after all the songs on the blackboard had been played, and people were taking part in an impromptu jam session, Sharon dragged the McCalls up onto the stage to join in a raucous rendition of Yellow Submarine. In the audience or on the stage, everyone sang in the coffeehouse. It'd been much more comfortable singing from their table, but there was something about being on stage that was different, and when Ian wrapped his arms around his two loves, he felt a kind of power he had never known in his life.

Finally, around one o'clock, Laura put on her black hat and said they had to be going because she had an early meeting the next day. Reluctantly, they all got up and Tom and Sharon walked the McCalls to their car. The big parking lot still held many cars so it took some time to find the Lexus.

Before they got into the car, everyone traded hugs and kisses. The last kiss between Tom and Amanda was simple and sweet. It was the way they held each other that showed their heart's true connection. It was like they knew with a simple certainty that they belonged in each other's arms.

Amanda wanted to tell them all that this was the most wonderful day of her life, but she knew that saying it would have spoiled it somehow. She wanted her last memory of Tom on this day to be of his body in her arms, her body in his. The last look they shared was the perfect punctuation for the day, a look that is only possible in the first moments of the first true love of one's life.

As the Lexus drove out of the laneway, Ian said the most perfect thing.

"So, Amanda, happy at last?"

He and Laura laughed together as Amanda sat blushing in the back seat.

### Chapter 8

Love is a drug. It's a drug that behaves very differently in different people.

For George it was an addictive depressant like heroin that began with such a powerful rush that he would always feel the need to chase it's elusive, incredible high. The rush pushed away all doubt and pain, and the dull depression that followed it made all the anxieties of responsible life irrelevant.

For Amanda, love was a gentle hallucinogen that changed her perceptions, changed her physiology, changed her psychology, changed the very nature of reality. It made the ordinary, extraordinary, it made space and time feel like it flowed directly through her body like a still, powerful river towards the man she loved.

For Laura love was the deep end of the pool where staying afloat always became harder and harder and always took more and more effort to survive. George's incessant phone calls continued, his email messages multiplied, each one sounding angrier and more desperate than the last. He was acting like a love struck adolescent. His cool detachment and smooth charm were dissolving before Laura's eyes.

For Amanda and Laura, who were now both in the deep end of the pool, their feelings and reactions were the same only in the tremendous anxiety about what they had begun and what it was about to become. Each was expecting a broken heart. Amanda, for the first time in her life, was terrified it would be her's. Laura, for the last time in her life, expected it would be someone else's. Both were terrified of the aftermath.

As always, Laura ignored or ran from the big emotional issues in her life, even as she went back to work on Anthony's big book launch. The event had to be held in a large meeting room in one of the big hotels because of the mass of reporters suddenly eager to share drinks and crudites with an irascible old poet. Laura had cleverly arranged that the centerpiece on each table contained two fighting Man of War tropical fish separated by a plastic barrier. It was a perfect little visual reminder about the nature of marriage and divorce, and the natures of Anthony and his ex-wife. It was also a metaphor for the press and celebrity, which Anthony noticed and pointed out to Laura. She was amused. The press was there to take as many little bites out of Anthony as they could. They would continue to take bites out of him and any moving and vulnerable celebrity until the poor celebrity was obviously thrashing about in the lasts throws of public interest. The only difference between a celebrity and a gold fish was that the celebrity got great eulogies of praise on the way to being flushed down the toilet.

Laura enjoyed being with Anthony because he was an old fish that knew how to fight. He understood fame and celebrity because he understood that the media was just an unpaid, fickle entourage who believed they were somebody because they could confront people who really were someone, people who had really done something.

The first thing that went wrong with the book launch was that the gathered media types could not resist removing the plastic separator between the fighting man-of-war fish. Suddenly every table's interest was in an actual fight to the death. Everyone lost interest in Anthony and his book, so Laura had to wait impatiently until one of the fish in each bowl was dead.

When she looked up and saw George among the crowd of people standing at the back of the room her mind reeled in rage and shock. Smooth and cool, as ever, he seemed to be introducing himself to people. His eyes never looked for hers, he seemed content to mingle and talk with the people he met.

That he'd come into her world unwanted, unasked, and so unexpectedly made her want to fly to the end of the room and rip off his face, but the constraint of her secret, illicit affair left her standing there trying to find his eyes, building a looked that would kill. He never so much as glanced her way. And finally just as he had appeared, he was gone. Laura was appalled that the excitement of Anthony's book launch had been so completely contaminated by the sudden appearance of her lover. She could barely contain her anger and outrage but she did it, only Anthony saw the dark fire in her eyes burning behind the musical voice and the lovely practiced smile.

After the reporters were gone and after she had shared drinks with Anthony in the hotel bar where she had come close to confessing her problem concerning George, she was more than a little drunk. She was again shocked when she found George sitting casually on the hood of her BMW in the hotel parking lot. He was carrying a huge bouquet of yellow roses. His body said cool and smooth and casual like always, but his eyes told the truth; he was nervous, he was afraid. He was facing the rejection he knew was coming. He knew he was getting to his last desperate chances. It was obvious to him and to her that his desire ran too deep, a desire that had gone from ecstasy to torment; characters improvising a scene had become people sinking in the heartache of reality.

Seeing him there, seeing the adolescent terror in his eyes, stopped her rage like an emotional air bag. In the cold city wind of the late autumn day, George suddenly started to shiver under her gaze.

"Don't ever, don't you ever show up again in my life, come into my life without being asked." she said coldly. "You understand me? Do you absolutely understand me?

George slid down the hood of the car. "I'm sorry. I knew you'd be angry, but I tried everything to get you to respond . What is it that you want me to do?" And then he said it, the worst thing of all. "I'm in love with you. I'm sorry"

"You should be. Please! You're not love with me. And even if you were, I'm not in love with you."

There it was; the bottom-line. He hung his head like James Dean and when he raised his eyes to look at her she could see that he had stepped into his role.

"I know that. And I know you are not in love with your husband. I knew you never loved Eugene all those years ago. I don't think you ever let yourself love anyone. I know that because you and I are just the same."

"Maybe. But I'm fifty years old. I have a life. As the lady says, 'What's love got to do with it?' You may be the only middle-aged man in North America who wants to give up a series of hot little affairs with impressionable young girls for a middle-aged woman who sees through his bullshit. Georgie, you've got to let this go. We have no past. We have no future. We had an exciting little present and it might have gone on for a while, but all these hearts and flowers have ruined it. You've got to be a big boy and go get drunk and cry in your single malt Scotch and get over it. It's over."

"All right, but before I go I want you to think about something."

He stood up and came towards her and stopped when he saw his approach made her nervous. He paused and seemed to be about to turn away when he looked back at her and gave the speech he'd been preparing for weeks. He knew it would all one day come down to this speech. He would have to take her to an emotional precipice where her reactions were no longer completely within her control. His performance would have to take her to a place where she would actually have to reach into the resources of her heart to respond. He would have to reach the place in her heart where she was no longer safe. He would have to make her reach a personal reality that only actors know. This was the audition of his life. He would have to convince her that this was the audition of hers.

"The one thing an actor knows in life is a real response. The one thing I know about you, when we're together, is that your responses are real. You can deny it to me. You can deny it to yourself. I know and you know that when we're together you're closer to being who you are, and what you are, than you have ever been in your life. I know the cool, detached Laura is all a performance. I thought, in grade eleven, that I was the first one to cop an attitude toward life, but you were way ahead of me, the girl who was above it all. It's still your attitude. I like it. I liked it then. I like it now. But it's attitude."

"The one thing an actor knows is a great performer. And only a great performer knows the real depth of human feelings. When I'm with you it's like being with Brando or Streep. All my life I've been waiting for someone who could go further, go deeper, someone who could go deeper than the lines. Do you have any idea how magical, how powerful, how beautiful it is to find someone who can bring more out of a scene than you ever imagined was there. Imagine what it's like to meet someone who can actually top you, take a moment and make it so intense and spectacular it leaves your heart pounding with excitement and pure unadulterated admiration. You are a magical woman. You could have been anything. You could be anything. And the only thing stopping you is you don't have the guts. Every time we talked, every time we made love, every time you felt the emotional intensity of our connection you got up and ran."

"Maybe you're right. That's exactly what I want to do right now. I want to leave this right here, right now, for now and forever. I want this over."

He was getting to her. She walked around the car to the driver's door and he cut her off, the big bouquet between them.

"No. This time you don't run away. This time I direct the scene."

She stood back in shock and she could see the intensity in his face, could see he was not going to back down. At best, she was at least going to have to hear him out. If she walked away, she knew he would follow. If she ran this time, she knew he would catch her, eventually. In the cold wind, she felt small and chilled and alone.

"You know what I'm saying is true. If you can tell me honestly, with absolute sincerity that what you have experienced with me has not been the most intense experience of your life, I'll walk away." he continued passionately.

"It hasn't." Laura replied in a small cold voice.

"You're lying. You know you're lying. I know you're lying. I can see it in your eyes. I can hear it in your voice. You have to cop a better attitude than that to end this. Come back to my place with me right now and make love with me and you won't be able to deny what you feel any more. For the first time in my life I love someone. I love you. I love you. And for the first time in your life I think you've met someone that you can love too. Past the attitude, the cool, lovely Laura could actually love someone. I'm not like Eugene who you could waive away like a puppy. I'm not going anywhere until I hear the real Laura tell me she couldn't love me. Come with me, right now, we'll make love and it'll be better, more intense, more beautiful then it's ever been, more intense than you've ever known. Come with me right now, you know there's a part of you that finally wants to love someone, wants to let go of her heart, to give it completely. Come with me. Come with me." George reached out his hand for hers and she gave it to him and it felt like a cold dead bird. He had reached the hidden wellspring of her self-doubt and fear. He had shaken her. His persistence and passion had thrust her into herself as no one had ever done. Love was a drug and she was feeling its incredible force pulling her down. She had to kick hard to get back to the surface.

"Next."

"What did you say?" he replied.

"Next. What's next? I've got a life. I like my life. I just can't trust love. I just can't believe in passion like some kid. I can't come with you."

She took back her hand.

"But you want to."

"Maybe when we were seventeen. Maybe the first time I could have done it, maybe then I could have loved you. Georgie, we're just not kids anymore. Please let me go. I have to go home to my husband and my daughter."

"No, you actually should come home to me."

"You drink way too much." she said softly.

"So do you." he said, as he stepped out of the way and opened the car door so she could get in.

"Come home with me." he asked again.

"I can't. I can't. Please let go of the door?"

He held it for a long second while they looked into each other's eyes. They faced the undeniable truth only two great actors ever know.

When she drove away he stood there alone in the parking lot lights, the flowers in his hands a deserving tribute for the bravura performance of his life. He had gotten to her. It wasn't over. Two things that hardly ever change is the process of falling in love and the repercussions of having a lover. Mother and daughter were going through the classic patterns of the two kinds of love.

Sometimes, in love, the better it gets the worse it feels. That's how it was for Amanda. It was all too perfect: everything he did, everything he was, everything she felt was just as she imagined love would be. The only tiny residual doubt, the doubt all women feel in love, was whether she was beautiful enough to keep him. Tom was, like the farm, too good to be true, her mother's attitude and her own experience with boys at school and on the street said the dark side was not hard to find. Until then, only her father was an example to her that there might be such exceptions. Now there was Tom, and now there was even his paralyzed father to whom Amanda felt such a strong, lovely, unexplainable bond. There was a marriage to admire. At least that's how it looked to Amanda.

The first great question of love is whether it is returned. In her first email message to Tom after the weekend, Amanda had not dared raise the question. She did it by implication by describing her own reactions to everything she had been shown on the most beautiful Saturday of her life. She told him what it felt like to sing beside him. She told him what it felt like to ride beside him through the beautiful fields and the Walnut Wood. She even dared to tell him how it felt to feel their first kiss, how it felt like the first real, breathless kiss of her life.

The first great question of love was answered in absolutely unambiguous terms when the first thing that appeared on Amanda's computer screen in his reply were the words, 'I think I'm falling in love with you.' Amanda almost fell off her chair. All the rest of the words were shared reflections of the same feelings Amanda had described to him. So unlike a boy, so unlike a man, Tom, at least when he wrote them down, was absolutely comfortable, absolutely at ease in expressing his thoughts and feelings, even the deepest and most tender ones.

The better it got the worse it felt. She had to believe him. If she believed him, the consequences, the risks, the enormous reality of it was terrifying. The very fact that he could so easily, so completely, so openly express his love for her instantly created expectations that she must do the same, and in an equal measure, and it was terrifying. Unlike Tom, who had years of experience writing his own personal journal, Amanda had years of keeping her deepest feelings unspoken, words she had never even heard spoken aloud.

Her reaction was simply to say how glad she was that he felt that way about her. She told him his words had blown her away. She confessed her total fear, and then she confessed the joy she felt at the memory of his face and his touch and his voice. It would take time and courage and surviving the greatest horror of her life before she would say the simple words that ran in her head and her heart so constantly. For now, she contented herself with satisfying the second great question that came with in falling in love, 'When will I see you again?'

Surprisingly, the answer to that question had not come as easily as she had hoped. For her, it was simply a matter of Tom getting in his old red car and coming to see her. For him, it was simply a matter of her getting on a bus or getting on the train and coming to the farm every weekend. 'I can't stand the city. It stinks. It's noisy. There's absolutely nothing interesting to do or see.' he wrote.

Amanda carried on an email argument with Tom above the virtues of the city but he was absolutely stubborn and adamant about his feelings. "Why would you want me to come there, when you can be here where there's so much to do and so many great people. Where can we go in Toronto and just get up and sing together? You know this is where you want to be."

He was right of course, but getting him to come to her territory would make her feel she still had some control, and she thought that getting permission to go there wouldn't be easy. She sensed that taking that first step alone onto the farm would be submitting herself to its incredible power. Like her mother, she felt the power of the farm and, like her mother, it made her strangely uncomfortable and afraid.

This wasn't like deferring to a boy about the choice of a movie, this was like giving in to a man who was asking her to become a part of his life. The worst part was that it was just what she wanted, because she loved the farm, she loved Tom, but this was so big and so fast that she felt very young and absolutely unprepared.

To add to Amanda's anxiety were the things that Tom wrote to her about his dreams and plans for the future. It seemed that Tom had decided that when he was twenty one he would take the money that had accumulated as his part in the family business and go to British Columbia and purchase land for his ancestor's people and build a native version of the farm to help sustain the people he never knew, the people that were the source of his own blood.

Amanda read Tom's words again and again trying to imagine the awesome implications of such ambitions. He would want a woman with equal ambitions, the same ambitions. He would want a woman like his mother.

The worst part was that she loved him for the great scope of his dream. It was a dream so much beyond anything she could imagine, anything she had imagined, that it again left her feeling very small and inadequate.

When she questioned the practical aspects of Tom's dream, she was shocked to discover that there were many millions of dollars at his personal disposal. It seemed that his brother Tranh had made them very rich indeed. This wasn't just a dream, and that only made it worse. Amanda's only dream was to feel his touch and perhaps to sing together when they were alone.

It was hard for her to maintain the lightness of her new young love. Tom had taken her soaring heart so high she was, even in her ecstasy, suffering from an excruciating vertigo that came with looking down and seeing life's tremendous possibilities and their unavoidable responsibilities. When she asked how Tom had decided upon this ambition for his life, he told her the story written on the white card held in the brass box under the great crown of the family tree. It was the story of his great-great grandfather hunting the gray whale with a harpoon tipped with a clam shell. It told of his great-great grandfather jumping into the water with the dying whale to sew up it's lips with a bone needle and Cedar twine so it wouldn't fill up with water and sink and be lost. 'My grandfather died of small pox given to his people on blankets given as presents by white men wanting their land. I wanted to do something to honor my great-great grandfather and people with such courage.' he had written.

What was a girl to say to that?

She told him how she admired his courage and wished she had had traditions among her own people that were not just greed and exploitation.

'Me too.' he wrote, 'But then I wouldn't be in the position to go back and help my people. I wouldn't live on this farm, I wouldn't have my brothers and sisters, I wouldn't have my parents, and I never would've met you.'

The better if felt, the worse it was. She just wanted to be a teenager in love.

And like every other teenager in love, the thing she ached to do, almost more than anything, was tell someone everything, every single thing, the best things and the worse things about it. She wanted to describe every moment, every thought, every feeling. She wanted to describe every inch of Tom, every movement, every gesture, every word and thought he shared with her. And like almost every other teenager in love, nobody cared!

She tried talking to Kara who made fun of the very idea that Amanda could be with a farm boy with millions of dollars and sang like an angel and had a body like a statue and was wise and sweet and tender and generous and brave and, wonder of wonder of wonders, loved her, Amanda McCall, ordinary, boring, screwed up Amanda McCall. It was the love story of love stories and nobody cared. Nobody even believed her.

She even called Stacy Peak and she did at least listen, and she did at least believe, and she was so positively green with envy and self pity that it made her sound so sad, almost like she was about to cry. The one person who understood, understood only too well. What Amanda could not possibly know was that most of the best, most of the most beautiful, most of the most intense feelings most people ever feel almost always ended up with no one prepared to hear them.

By Friday she decided that she had no choice, she wanted to be with him no matter where it led. Her parent's approval was shockingly easy to get. Sharon called and spoke to Ian and told him there was a guest room and that Amanda would be safe and under the vigilant eyes of both her and many nosey brothers and sisters. Her parents seemed to have no problem with her having a serious boyfriend. If they had known, as she did, how serious he was they might not have been so easy and accommodating. But, they didn't know and so Friday, after school, Amanda was alone on the train to the farm.

As Amanda was quietly riding the train to love, her mother was lying underneath George Marshall in an almost brutal and violent sexual coupling. All week he had simply sent her one email message a day of only one simple sentence that stated emphatically,'You will come to me!' And finally out of fear and tension and growing anxiety that was almost sexual in intensity she finally called him and agreed to meet him at his place that Friday evening.

When she walked into the room she faced a George she never seen before.

"Your drunk. I'm leaving." she said, disgustedly.

"You're not going anywhere." he spat back. He had primed his passion all week. He was going to push her. He was going to push her violently.

And this time he was more than drunk, this time he was trembling like a volcano before it exploded. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the bedroom. She struggled, she cursed and screamed but his rage and power moved her as if she was a suit on a hangar. When he let her go, he told her she had thirty seconds to strip or he'd rip her clothes from her body and she could see that he absolutely meant what he said. Breathless with fear, for the first time in her life, she felt helpless and overwhelmed by a man. That was just his intention. She knew it was his intention. Her heart pounded with fear and what she hoped to god wasn't sexual anticipation. When she was naked he pushed her back on the bed and stripped over her. She tried to curl away but when he reached for her she couldn't resist him. Then he took her. She had never been taken, except in distant dreams. He was convinced she needed to be taken. It was the only way to touch her real feelings and desires he thought. And the worst thing of all for Laura was that in some part of her she was not sure that he wasn't right. He wasn't. Reality proved the real horror of fantasy. Surrendering control, surrendering power was surrendering her most basic self-respect. With his body pounding into hers, she felt so small and so foolish and so helpless and pathetic and weak and degraded. And she took his body, his rage into her. She didn't fight, she didn't resist because this was where she had gotten herself. This was what she had done to herself.

All week she had thought about what George had said to her in the parking lot. It made her think about the emotional need inside her that would never ever give in to love's power. Giving in to love's power for her was like giving into George as he all but raped her throbbing limp body.

Where George was sure he was finally making her his, Laura lay there and was sure she could never be his, she could never belong to this man or any man, belong to any man as love asked a woman to belong. George knew her better than any man had ever known her. He knew her strengths and weaknesses. He knew how to crush the one with the other. He made her feel so good. He made her feel so small. That was when she knew she could never see him again. That was when she knew it was really over.

Surprisingly, her steel resolve came out with a flood of tears. George didn't care. He came inside her and collapsed beside her and at last, still crying silently, Laura crawled from his bed and picked up her clothes and put them on as he rolled over and smiled at her like a Cheshire cat who had swallowed a great gorgeous canary. He just didn't get it. He thought he had made her his. What he had done was lose her forever.

She realized later that she should have walked away without saying anything.

"I don't ever want to see you again." she said, coldly.

Her words hit George like a slap in the face. He was out of the bed in an instant and caught her in the hallway as she ran for the door. He grabbed her by the throat and started to squeeze and Laura would have screamed except no sound came because no sound could come from her throat because he was squeezing so hard. Then, like a rag doll, he slammed her head against the wall through the big abstract painting hanging there, and sky rockets exploded in Laura's eyes, and the blood and the strength in her whole body seemed to flow out of her into a shallow pool beneath her feet . He let her go, and she held her throat and gasped for breath as his hard cold blooded voice hit her like the back of his hand.

"That is never going to happen. You will see me. You will be my woman! You will! You may never have the guts to choose love. You may never have the balls to give it up to anyone. But I know, and you know that you will give it when you have no choice but to give it, and you have no choice but to give it now. If you have a choice, you do nothing but run, nothing but hide from yourself and what you are capable of feeling. I love you enough to know I can't give you a choice. You will love me, because you must love me. Do you understand me? You will love me!"

"You're terrifying me." she said, meekly.

"Good. We understand each other. There's no going back now. You have to end your other life or I will end it for you. Do you understand me?"

Laura was shaking. She could see he meant it. Somehow, in this thing he called love, she had unleashed a black, obsessive insanity that was more real than anything she had ever confronted in her life.

"Please, my husband, my daughter, I can't hurt them. Please don't hurt them." she pleaded.

"This has gone too far for that, and it's going to go a whole lot further. There are no more choices here. One thing I've learned from loving you is there are no choices. You're spending the night here. Now get back in the bedroom and get off your clothes."

And trembling like a schoolgirl, Laura did just as she was told.

What followed was the longest, saddest night of sex Laura could ever imagine there being. She was broken and terrified and helpless to resist what had become of her exciting affair.

Past midnight, while Amanda was singing her first sweet solo,' Over the Rainbow,' Laura lay still in the bed beside George where he had just fallen asleep, his hand resting on her still throbbing throat.

For the first time she noticed the big bouquet of dying yellow roses in the vase beside the bed. It was just how she felt.

Performance. What if it was all just a performance? The more she thought about it, the more it seemed possible that this was all just an enormous improvisation to push her to the limit of her acting ability. It certainly was the way he had lived his life. It certainly fit with everything that he had ever said to her. The thought that he could cold bloodedly savage her, assault her, so completely terrified her that it made her want to kill him. Part of her wanted to believe everything that was happening was all performance. Then it would be over. He would take his bows and laugh at her humiliation at not realizing it was all just a game.

But, even though she wanly wished that was the only humiliation left to her, she didn't believe it. The look in his eyes and the touch of his hand were too real, too intense, too powerful to be just performance. That he was really in love with her made it something that seemed would be impossible to escape without having her life torn to pieces. Performance. If it was all only, just a matter of performance. If all the world was only a stage. Wondering how she could slide from under his grasp, move from the bed without waking him, gather her clothes without him hearing her, and leave the room and dress and make her escape, she was paralyzed, terrified of taking the risk.

Replaying their affair, remembering its excitement, wondering why it became such an obsession for him and remained just a diversion for her, there were no answers. They were too much alike, and yet it all had turned out so differently for each of them. A man's power, a woman's power, the way a man performed, the way a woman felt, the way a woman performed, the way a man felt were always in such a perpetual, insoluble imbalance that to Laura the battle of the sexes was more like the thrashing of a set of scales where a man and a woman could only jump up and down trying to swing the balance in their favor.

Confronted with the violent potential that had awakened in this man, Laura was afraid even to move, much less jump up and down. Violence! That was the one power a woman still, after all of history, had no effective means to resist. She lay there and knew that as long as he was prepared to hurt her physically, trying to escape would be like rolling a stone up a desperate, slippery slope. Even more terrifying than the physical force and intensity of his sexual energy were the quiet words spoken into her hair telling her how she had opened his heart completely, how he couldn't imagine living without her, how they were perfect together, how he could never let her go. And most terrifying of all, was when he whispered softly, 'You belong to me.'

Unforgettable. Irresistible. Without you, I'm nothing. There's no one for me, but you.

Only you ! The enduring words of love, so soft, so tender.

Early in the morning, long after George's hand had slipped from her throat Laura finally got the courage to slide off of her side of the bed and slowly and silently find her clothes where they had been left, her heart pounding as she was ready to instantly tell him that she was only going to the bathroom. But George didn't wake and Laura dressed by the front door as she had imagined herself doing, but without the shaking hands, and the more clothes she put on, and the closer she got to escaping, the more frightened she became. The explosive pain and shock when he had slammed her head into the wall rang in her ears as she bent over to put on her shoes, and the click of the door opening echoed inside her, and the tiny click of the door lock finding its place as she closed the door when she was outside and free was like a starter pistol going off beside her head. She ran to the elevator, terrified that she would hear the click of the door opening again, terrified he would somehow still get to her before the elevator arrived, so that when she heard the elevator arrive at long last, her heart was pounding and her breath was gasping from her throat and she looked back down the hall and saw nothing.

When she crawled into her bed beside Ian, as she often did in the early hours of the morning, she felt like a terrified kitten crawling under rumpled bed clothes. She put her arms around him and curled herself to his body and held him and felt her arms trembling as he slept. Then she felt the pain between her legs.

From the moment Laura woke up in the morning, she could feel the pool of fear beneath her feet, thick and cold and exhausting. The first thing she did was make an emergency call to her friend Ann Marie and they walked in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in a very cold blustery afternoon and Ann Marie, whose practice as a professional and as a person included a long list of experiences with male violence, was sure and direct in her advice to her friend

"The first thing you have to do is take away his power over you. You have to tell Ian. If George's determined to hurt you, that's the first place he'll go. You've got to get there ahead of him. Ian will take it a whole lot better from you than from some strange man who will say God knows what."

"I suppose that's true," Laura replied, " I keep thinking this may all just be an act, part of his course in the power of love, and sex, and imagination. I'm just really not sure what's going on in his mind."

"He hit you. He raped you. Once a man finds that either of those things get him what he wants, it'll only get worse. Trust me. I've seen this too many times before to think your lover's an exception. The next thing you've got to do is start documenting everything he does, every phone call, every email, get yourself a video camera and carry it with you and use it whenever he approaches you. Then we have to make it clear that you will use the courts. You'll do everything to make his life just as miserable as he's trying to make yours."

Rather than reassure her, Ann Marie's advice only succeeded in deepening the pool of fear that Laura waded through on the bare sidewalk. Like most women in her position, she didn't want to believe it was as bad as it appeared. She believed love had the power to calm the rage of a violent man who said he loved her. She believed that love was the way to regain control because love was the reason she had lost control. It took a fire to stop a fire.

When Ann Marie couldn't give her an answer that wasn't going to shake her life to it's foundations, Laura retreated into herself and the long moment of silence was enough to let Ann Marie remember her own heartache and begin to pour out the nightmare of loss, anxiety and terror that had come from the fact that her daughter Megan was no longer calling her, even for money. She had called the Vancouver police and they had been no help. She had called a detective agency and found out that Megan was living with her boyfriend in a rundown apartment.

The detective agency confirmed the she was selling her body. And worse than anything was the fact that the detective approached her on the street and offered to trade heroin for sex and Megan had accepted the offer. The detective told her that he had changed his mind because she looked under age, but the worst truth was confirmed.

Ann Marie had her own sorry Movie of the Week. Middle-class mother faces battle to save her under age daughter from heroin addiction and prostitution.

The only thought that Laura had was that Megan might just be lucky like Amanda and find some nice boy to turn her life around. Of course she couldn't say such a thing to her friend because teenaged hookers on smack did not tend to meet many nice boys.

The one thing Ann Marie did say before they parted was that she remembered Laura telling her that Sharon had run a battered women's shelter before she married Eugene.

"She probably knows George better than you do. Why don't you call her and ask her for some advice. It couldn't hurt.

Laura knew the force of Sharon's personality and being reminded of her experience with violent men, the knowledge had the feel of a slack lifeline that she suddenly found in her hands, a line that might just pull tight and save her. It would be a humiliating and difficult phone call to make, but a lot less humiliating and difficult than telling Ian she put them all at risk for the sake of a stupid little affair.

Sunday night Amanda joined Ian and Laura at their Italian restaurant when she got back from her weekend at the farm.

Ian had no idea that his two lovely women were edgy and nervous because they were both covering any trace of the enormous emotions and the enormous consequences they feared were coming, coming from their being unable to resist the power of those emotions.

Amanda talked about all the things she did at the farm that weekend. She told about singing,' Send in the Clowns,' and how well it was received.

"What made you choose to sing that?" Ian asked, "a hip and happening girl like you?"

"They aren't exactly into Gangstra rap at the farm you know."

She didn't tell about the ovation she got or about how she and Tom had curled up together in a big leather chair in the music room and listened to Edith Piaff and Joe Williams and Carmen McCrae and so many others she never heard of who put their heart and soul into the words of a lyric and into the silences that fell between syllables and words and phrases. It was Tom who pointed out to her what his mother had pointed out to him, that the music was as much in the rhythm of the silence as in the rhythm of the actual words and notes. When there was the occasional song that Amanda knew, Tom would sometimes sing, and with his eyes pass a chorus to her and she would sing, and it was beautiful, truly, actually beautiful. When Sharon came from checking on Eugene at four in the morning and found them kissing, Amanda got up and left Tom and let Sharon show her the way to the guest room that she didn't need any help finding. Amanda learned what it was like to walk on a pine floor and not hear the sound of her own feet, not feel the movement of her own legs, only feel the sweet pulse of desire flooding through her veins.

And although she tried not to talk about Tom to her parents lest they see the love that was boiling out of her heart, she couldn't help herself. She started to tell them the stories she had read standing under the Walnut family tree, with Tom beside her saying nothing.

She told her parents how disease and alcohol had devastated Tom's native people. She told how the government in the 1970s had made them choose between staying on their land and keeping their children. As they were no longer willing to support a school on the ancestral lands, the government would take the children away to residential school. That was how most of the people in the tribe came to live on a few terrible acres beside a pulp mill. Tom's mother had become a prostitute because of the new conditions and her alcoholism and the sudden complete poverty they had to live with.

Both of Amanda's parents were shocked that such things went on so recently.

Amanda told her parents that Tom was conceived while Tom's mother was a prostitute. It was impossible for him to ever know who his father was. Tom was taken away from his mother by children services and he never knew who she was until Eugene found her.

"Now she's back with her people and Tom supports her. The kids on the farm also have to give ten percent of their personal yearly earnings to some charity. Tom sends his people nearly a ten thousand dollars a year. A big part of it goes to an incentive program that gives anyone that stays clean of drugs and alcohol a share in the check Tom sends every month. "If you could hear some of the stories Tom's mother told about her life and her parents and grandparents, it would break your heart. You can't believe how soft our lives have been because we are white. No, really, it would make you sick if I told you some of the stories."

Amanda was shocked at her mother's reply.

"You mean Tom, and every one of the kids make a a hundred thousand dollars a year. What do they do with it?"

"Most of them seem to give a lot of it away. Tom is the only one that sticks to the ten percent minimum for charities. He's got some kind of plan for his future that's going to take a whole lot of money."

"Amanda, how does it feel to be going out with a multi-millionaire?" Ian teased, "Where it is all that money coming from?"

"Most of it comes from the stock market. All the family businesses are kind of just to have something to do, I think." Amanda replied

"I think it must go a little deeper than just having something to do." he replied seriously.

"Really. I guess that's pretty obvious." she admitted.

Laura sat watching the obvious look of love in her daughter's eyes and thought of the look of love she had seen in George's eyes, the look that seemed almost intense enough to kill. Laura thought about how fate was indulging Amanda's innocence and inexperience with one blessing after another, and the same fate that made her the main instrument that brought Tom and the farm into Amanda's life was turning on her with a vengeance so undeservedly brutal that it just didn't seem fair. She realized that the stories about Tom's mother's life as a prostitute and an alcoholic made her problems with her intense little lover seem very insignificant indeed. But the terror she felt was so great, and the breakup of her family would be so real and painful that the degree of suffering somehow just couldn't be compared. The one strange thing about her reaction to Amanda telling about Tom's mother was that it somehow seemed to soothe any shame she had felt about what she had done. It wasn't guilt she was suffering as much the fear that she was about to lose the only two emotional reference points she had in life. Without them, emotionally, she would be nothing. The realization shook her and made her drink too much and too fast. And unlike most times when she drank too much and too fast, this time it made her a much better listener. She watched and listened to Ian and Amanda and felt that she was almost eavesdropping on a lovely conversation between a father and daughter who obviously loved one another and were completely comfortable with that.

If they divorced who would have custody? She knew the terrible answer to that. She knew that when she would have her visitation days with Amanda that they would go to a place like the one they were in, but it would never ever possibly be like it was when they were all together. Losing Ian would mean she would probably be losing Amanda. Losing Amanda would mean the she would be completely, utterly alone. It was the first time in her life that she actually thought that it would be possible to kill someone. In her mind, in that moment, the thing George was preparing to do was worth killing over.

The next days George stopped sending email messages. He started making a nightly phone call in which he told her she had six more days to leave her husband, then five days, then four. When it came to day three, Laura screamed into the phone that she had told Ian everything. The only reply was the click of the receiver and the dial tone buzzing. She called Sharon.

Even though it was embarrassing and humiliating, Laura poured out the story of her affair with George and described in detail what it had come to as she described every moment of the last Friday night when he had terrorized her. She felt ridiculous and desperate, but Sharon was the only person she could think of who might be able to somehow influence Eugene's old friend.

She was not surprised to learn that Sharon had guessed about her affair with George. What did surprise her was the advice she got. Sharon was obviously trying to control the anger she felt because of what Laura had told her.

"It's okay. Like most bullies, they're only brave with people who they think are weak. They are only brave when there are no consequences for them. You get him up here this weekend and I've got two big old boys who will take him outside and make him think he's a bit player in some bad Biker movie. They'll pick him up by that perfect little pony tail and seriously convince him that they will pin his nuts to his sleeve if you ever even see him on the same street again."

Laura was shocked. She had no idea her problem could bring out such anger and cold bloodedness in Sharon. But, for the first time in days there was a thought, a course of action that actually made her feel better.

"But what if Amanda is there?" Laura asked nervously.

"Tom went to South Dakota to pick up an El Camino with Rosie and they may be stuck there for a week because of the big snow storm that's supposed to hit us tomorrow. I think he already called Amanda to tell her he probably wouldn't be back before late Saturday." Sharon explained.

Suddenly, Laura understood Amanda's long face for the past days. It was fate, on Laura's side for once. Now all she had to do was work with it and deliver George to Sharon's goons. She loved the very thought of it. Ruthlessly planning something with Sharon that was potentially violent and certainly illegal made her feel close to the woman for the first time since they had met. She took comfort knowing that under the righteousness was a calculating operator just like herself. For the first-time since her ordeal, she felt the slimy, cold pool of fear draining away from her feet. She also realized, with some excitement, that Sharon had probably used her two big old boys to do something like this before. She called George.

She was surprised at how normal he sounded. She lied and told him that she'd told Ian everything and that she was very disappointed that he had forgiven her and understood how her affair could have happened. She told George that she was very anxious and confused about her feelings for him. She said that she decided that she wanted to see him again but it would have to be somewhere where she felt safe. She suggested they go to visit Eugene that Saturday afternoon but George didn't seem very enthusiastic about the idea.

"Can't we just find a little Inn somewhere?" he asked.

"No, I want to be somewhere I can get back on my own, if you decide you're going to toss me around again. You realize you could have fractured my skull?"

"I didn't push you that hard. But you do need to be pushed. You understand that, don't you?"

"I understand that we have feelings for each other that we have to work out."

"You have feelings for me that you have to accept."

"Maybe you're right, but I don't want to talk about that now."

And so George reluctantly agreed to go to the farm with her on Saturday afternoon.

Friday night, from a little motel room off a cold interstate highway, Tom called Amanda after a long day of following the big snowstorm, the snowstorm that had buried Prince Edward County and the farm the night before.

Amanda was thrilled to hear his voice but was sorely disappointed when she realized that he was saying that he would be back at the farm sometime late the next afternoon. She could have seen him for least one day, now it would be too late, it would seem too desperate to ask if she could come. They talked about the things they did that week as if they had been talking to one another all of their lives, and as always Tom's week seemed to be fascinating and exciting. His description of fighting through the snowstorm dragging a trailer carrying an old truck sounded quite scary.

Tom told her that he wanted to find some of the Plains Indians so he could get to know those people, but the storm had not left them enough time. When Amanda said that he would be able to go back sometime, Tom shocked her by saying he didn't imagine he would have the time. He was coming into his money when he was twenty-one and by then he wanted to be married and ready to move out West and begin his new life.

Married! This was the man who said he was in love with her. Married! Married to whom? This was the boy who fell in love forever. By implication that made her the married lady moving West with her man. That made her the teenage girl listening to an implicit proposal of marriage. She didn't want to believe this was happening. So fast! So sure of himself! They had spent exactly three days of their lives together. She was just a girl. She wished he could be just a boy. He continued to absolutely take her breath away with his speed and confidence and self-assurance. The question echoing in her mind, the question she was terrified to ask was, 'And it wouldn't be me who you would be thinking you're married to when you start this new life?' Her senses were spinning and she couldn't think of anything to say. Strangely, the image that flashed into her mind was the memory of their first kiss in the Walnut Wood.

More to change the subject than anything, Amanda asked him what would happen to the Walnut Wood.

"When my mom and dad both die, each of the kids will get their share of the trees that are standing. I don't know what the others are going to do, but I'm going to have mine felled."

Amanda was shocked. The Walnut Wood was the most beautiful place she'd ever been in her life and she told him she was shocked that he would even consider destroying such a beautiful, almost sacred place. "I think it's disgusting." she said.

The tone in Tom's voice suddenly changed. She could tell he was angry. And unlike most people when they get angry his voice got quieter, and slower and deeper.

"White people rape my ancestors land, and I want to take the gift of my father and his father and his father, and use that gift of the land to help my own people, and you think it's disgusting. It's true that the trees are beautiful, but so are people who need the money that will come from those trees."

"That's just what lumber companies say when they cut down beautiful old trees." Amanda replied, seriously.

"You think I'm like some heartless lumber Company? I could tell you things that they have done."

Amanda couldn't back down. " You're not heartless, but the trees will be dead and gone just the same."

"When I took you for a ride in my dad's Gull Wing Coupe, you realize one of those beautiful trees died so my dad could have that car. You think that was disgusting?"

"No. But I think it's still sad."

"It is sad. But that's life. In life beautiful things die so other things can prosper. At least that makes some kind of sense." It was Tom who could remember what it looked like to see a great old beautiful tree lying dead on the ground, buds still breaking for weeks with the insistent force of life still coming from the great fuse of its trunk.

Amanda instantly realized that the senseless death that he was talking about was his own father's. She did not know the nerve she'd touched inside him because of the number of times he thought about what it would mean to take those old trees out of the forest, destroy a forest that was really almost a monument to his father's family. Yet his practical nature and the depth of his heart could not bear to think that those trees should not give their lives to the benefit of so many people. He thought he would never be able to speak about those feelings to anyone. He did not expect that he would speak about them to even Amanda. But he did say them because Amanda had somehow read his heart when she said to him, "Losing your father will be like cutting down those trees, won't it?"

Tom agreed with her." But my dad dying is just a total waste." And then he told her how he felt. He told her how horrible and painful his decision was going to be. No one in the family had ever had the heart to take more than a single tree. He did not know whether he had the heart to take what was going to be his." I keep thinking that I'm really just behaving like any white man, taking what he wants."

So tender and romantic, Tom was also determined and unsentimental about the future. Caught between two cultures, caught between two sides of his own nature, there was no way to describe that conflict. And Amanda felt that conflict. She understood what he was feeling because she had stood in the magical forest beside the black pool and felt the strange silent force of feeling she, herself, might be a part of something that saw generations pass and might see generations to come. Amanda loved the Walnut Wood. She had no idea what it was, and she never could have explained the awe and majesty of what had been her first real spiritual experience.

When Amanda tried to console him by saying it would be a long time before he would have to make that decision, he agreed that time was a great comfort, but not much. For Amanda time was not a comfort, time was suddenly something that felt like it accelerated like Eugene's Gull Wing Coupe.

They said goodbye feeling very close indeed. Neither of them slept very much that night.

That Saturday began without a sky, fine snow drifting out of the grey city air. The wind from the last of the big snowstorm was gone and the air had warmed, so the worst seemed to be over. George picked Laura up at her office and when she got in the car she was pleased to see that he didn't look like he had been drinking. Then she remembered that he was so afraid of Sharon's reaction to alcohol. It made her smile thinking about the reaction that was waiting for George at the farm this time. George took her smile as a good sign.

Surprisingly, George looked nervous. She wondered whether he was nervous because of what she might say or do or if he was nervous because he actually felt guilty for what he had done. What she didn't imagine was the George was nervous because he was sitting next to her. The courage he had found in a bottle of single malt Scotch wasn't available. He loved her. He wanted her. The rest of his life was being decided in her reactions. And he knew he would never have her unless he could break her need to have absolute control over every relationship. Like most men who only saw relationships in terms of power, he believed he would have to break her like a nervous colt.

Laura was surprised that for the first hours of the drive George only made small talk as they drove the highway in the spray of dirty slush. He was telling her about things he had read in the paper and about his week as a high school teacher. Laura barely knew how to reply to what he was saying. He smelled like mouthwash and the smell of it was almost worse than the constant smell of liquor on his breath. Silence fell between them when he ran out the things to say. He was trying to make her comfortable. But the silence that fell between them was not like the silence that falls between old lovers, it was the silence of anticipation and fear and emotional vertigo, like suddenly looking down from a high, precarious place. Finally, when they turned off the highway into the white country fields, the snow turned to sleet and the ice built up in piles beneath the hammering strokes of the black windshield wipers and with it Laura's growing anxiety about the weather went up another gear. And just when she thought that George would have to concentrate even more intently on driving, he suddenly began to rant about how she had wasted her life and all her potential. She told him to slow down. He didn't and her heart started to pound. George saw the look of fear in her face and it shook him. He attacked.

"I can't believe your imagination hasn't died of atrophy living your boring little middle class life. If you were with me you would experience feelings you've been afraid to feel all your life. I never thought I would ever meet anyone who could make me feel the way you do. I know what you are capable of feeling because you and I are two of a kind."

"You don't know me, Georgie." She was trying to hold back her fear as sleet sprayed the windscreen. "You have some method actor's fantasy about who I am, what all this is about. It isn't real." she said with serious finality. She was so afraid, it took her breath away.

"I know who you are. I know who you're afraid of becoming. I also know you need to be pushed. I'm the only person you've ever known in your life capable of pushing you until you finally do it, finally open up and feel what you're capable of feeling." he shouted.

This time it wasn't tender words and rough treatment. This time he was trying to act cool as always and let his words grab her by throat and slam her head into the hard reality of her life. She decided it was best to just sit and listen, but she couldn't help herself, she was so angry. Suddenly, it rose over her fear, words like wipers pushing it down to one side.

"What do you know about life? Life isn't romance. Life isn't love. Love is a luxury. It's a great suit, it's single malt Scotch, it's a little red Porsche. Life is doing what has to get done. Don't tell me about love. And you know nothing about life. You're a high school teacher for God's sake."

She barely heard his reply because he was driving faster as he talked and the slush turned to freezing rain that slowly started to constrict the visible area of the windshield. The wipers struggled to keep the windshield clear and the wiper fluid barely helped because it came in such a meager spray. Laura was getting more and more frightened. She begged him to slow down.

And finally George did just as she asked, and Laura felt a great relief that he did it as they broke the crest of a little rise and the wheel turned to a touch, and fate turned inexorably with it and the car slid on a patch of black ice and began a long, slow, skater's death-spiral that would tear apart Laura's life in a single guillotined second. George gasped and tried to catch the slide as the wheel turned uselessly in his hands, and he screamed at what he saw through the windshield ice, and Laura screamed when she felt the heavy thump beside her as her whole world exploded. Breathless shock struck with the searing impact and the screaming of metal grinding on metal, the blast of snow and wind exploding over them with the white glass of the windshield, showering them in a gut wrenching dizziness that made everything seem to go silent, even as the chrome handle bar of the bicycle hooked into the post of the windshield was heaving, screaming, the bicycle thrashing like an injured animal beside the car, right beside Laura. The bicycle groaned like it was dying, and then there was something like pain and cold and warm wetness as there was another explosion as the bicycle was crushed into a snow bank as the car came to rest in an absolute stunned cemetery stillness.

Laura couldn't take her eyes off of the still chrome bicycle hand brake in front of her. The rain pouring over her face washed away the blood she didn't notice was pouring from where she was cut by the glass of the side window the bicycle had exploded beside her.

"We hit someone!" Laura screamed through the breath that was heaving up out of her lungs. George was staring at the chrome handle bar.

"It wasn't my fault. It was a patch of ice." he gasped.

Laura's heart was screaming like an engine with a jammed throttle, an engine about to explode from its own power, screaming in the wind, crying in the rain, screaming in the silence of the uncontrollable agony of what they had done.

Laura tried to open her door but it was held fast by the bicycle and the snow bank in the ditch. She told George to get out and he didn't move, he just turned and looked at her and his eyes were so wide and so focused that it looked completely surreal and terrifying.

"George get out! We hit someone! " she screamed.

He didn't move.

"Open the door! Get out! Get out! George you've got to get out. We hit someone!"

He just stared at her and Laura exploded in anger and started to slap him and hit him until finally he just grabbed hold of both of her wrists and held them in a searing, painful grip until she finally calmed down and he said, "We have to talk."

"Talk! You're insane. There's some child lying back there on the road. Don't you understand we hit someone?"

"I don't have a driver's license." he said, calmly.

"You what?" she shouted, "You what?! I don't care about that now, we have to help! We have to help!"

George loosened his grip and then let her go and then he slowly got out of the Porsche and stood aside as Laura crawled over his seat and crawled into the snow at the side of the road and got up as he stood aside and watched her run, watched her break through the ice over the soft snow below, and watched her fall and get up and leave blood every place that she touched, every step that she took. With her lungs almost exploding, she struggled and strained the long way back, and the wind made her breathless as she saw the broken body in the ditch and she fell and almost had to crawl the last few yards before she finally got to the boy who was lying so still in the snow.

'Please live!' she begged him silently, and she lifted his head and saw the face of a young boy, his acne medicine dissolving in the rain, and then she saw his leg, and the way it was bent at right angles to his body, and the bone protruding, and she saw the blood pouring out of his mouth and his ears, and she lifted his head up, and she screamed out loud, "Oh my God! No!"

And she felt him breathing, and she saw his blue eyes open and he said to her, softly "Tell....... Tell..." and then his eyes closed and he lost consciousness or died, as Laura's heart burst out of her throat as she screamed, "George!.... George! You have to help me!"

Then she saw George get back in the car and for a horrible instant she thought he was going to drive away. She screamed his name as loud as she had ever screamed in her life and she hated him with a black burning intensity like she had never known she was ever capable of feeling for anyone. She got up and struggled to take off her coat and when she finally did it and wrapped it around the boy, she fell back exhausted as packed bits of snow dissolved in the rain on her face, in her hair, sliding in red rivulets of blood trickling from her fingers into the snow. Behind her, a red Osier dogwood grew out of the snow with it's long slim red branches like veins the color of blood, and it looked almost like the earth was cut open so it's own living flesh would shine before them, mocking their hideous human mortality. As the blood fell and flowed all around Laura, bare red branches thickened in the freezing rain.

Then she felt the pain in the glass embedded in her flesh. She laid back into the dogwood and felt the throbbing, searing slivers of glass and then she held up her hand and saw it was red with blood and she wondered if George would just wait until she died.

She heard the old brown pickup truck stop on the road and it seemed only an instant before two young faces looked down at her, two ordinary faces that would be etched forever in her mind, every detail, every contour of their faces seemed so strangely beautiful. They were not handsome, they were beautiful. They were talking, one went to the broken boy and left the other lifting her up and talking to her and she would never remember what he said or what she replied as she looked over at the broken boy and saw the young man rise up over him like an Angel, and for a second when she saw it, she thought he was rising into the air, and then she felt hands around her, arms hold her and lift her and help her and her legs vanished as she walked with them back to the pickup truck. Time was compressed and time disappeared as Laura was beginning to go into deep shock. She felt the lightness of her body as they walked through the heavy snow and for an instant she thought that she too was about to rise into the air and fly.

The warmth inside the cab of the pickup was like the blast of an oven and she laid back and the beautiful young man tried to hold her still as the pain of the glass stabbed into her again and again whenever she moved.

Then she saw George standing by the open door of the truck talking to the beautiful young men telling them that he had used Laura's cell phone to call for an ambulance. Then she heard him say the most hideous words she ever heard in her life.

"It wasn't her fault. She wasn't used to driving my car. When she hit the patch of ice she just couldn't recover." He looked in at her and said directly to her face, "I should never have let you drive."

He sounded so calm, so detached, so diabolically self-serving that she didn't believe it, but she hated him almost absolutely. This was the man who said he loved her. He had been true to his word, he had made her feel things she hadn't even imagined she was capable of feeling.

"You fucking son of a bitch. My fucking hero!" Her rage broke through the shock. "I wasn't driving. He was driving. He doesn't have a license." she said to the young man who smiled at her and said it was okay and she asked him if he believed her as he tried to wipe some of the blood from her face with his scarf. The touch of it only made her scream in pain.

The ambulance came and they worked quickly for what seem like an eternity while Laura was lying inside the ambulance for a very long time drifting on painkillers. As they had pulled the biggest pieces of glass from her neck and face and bandaged her cuts, time dragged like cold steel on pavement and then vanished the way a sheet of snow could turn in the wind and disappear.

A policeman came into the ambulance and asked her things and she replied and he looked so young, so worried.

Laura's heart broke when they loaded the stretcher and she saw the white body strapped under blankets. His face was covered. He was just a little rise, like a drift of snow. She could feel every pounding beat of her heart and every missing one of his as she lay there and time was forever until the ambulance moved and she felt a hand holding hers.

In the hospital they stripped away her clothes and stitched the big cut on her neck that would have killed her if it had been an inch to the side. Her ability to remember faces became perfect and she remembered one face after another and hardly anything of what happened. She would never remember the words they said. She would never remember the things they did. She would remember eyes and the shape of lips and jaws and the subtlety of expression in every different moment of life. Ordinary life!

It was late in the afternoon when Ian saw the sky clear as he drove as fast as he dared the two hours of an instant that it took to reach the hospital.

Sharon and Tom were waiting there with George. Ian's confusion and terror at how Laura came be in a hospital hours from home was something he'd already dealt with in the car. She had lied to him about where she was going that day. When he looked at the man standing with Sharon and Tom, he knew. The look in George's eyes made him almost completely certain.

Sharon hugged Ian and Tom asked where Amanda was.

"I don't know. I called everyone I could think of."

The emergency waiting room was a pit of anxiety and boredom in a great circle of industrial chairs. There were no seats available and so they stood while Sharon explained the extent of Laura's injuries. She told Ian that Laura would recover completely, that her injuries were painful but would heal. There might be some scars. She told him that Laura was sedated and asleep and they were just moving her to a hospital room. She also said that a boy on a bicycle had been killed.

"Oh, no! Oh my God!"

George finally spoke up and introduced himself. "I'm George Marshall. I was with your wife when she had the accident. I should never have let her drive. The sleet had turned to freezing rain."

"What did you say?" Ian suddenly interjected.

"I said I should never have let her drive."

Ian interjected again, "And you said the sleet had turned to freezing rain. You're lying. Laura would never drive in bad weather. She would never even drive her own car in bad weather. It was you who was driving."

Everyone looked at George in shock. The look on his face told everything.

"I don't know why you want to blame my wife for an accident. I assume you're her lover. I assume you are a piece of shit and I'd like you to get out of my sight this minute."

"You know I'm her lover. But, if you want me to give you some space, I can understand that."

"You understand." Ian said contemptuously.

George told Sharon that he would go and wait in the coffee shop. Sharon told him that that was a good idea.

When he was gone the first thing Sharon said to Ian was that Laura was bringing George to the farm because she had asked her to help in breaking off her affair with him.

"He was frightening her. I thought I could help her. I'm so sorry."

"What do you mean he was frightening her?"

"That isn't important right now. I'll deal with George. Tom is going to drive him back to Toronto. You and I are going to stay here until she's awake.

"Mr. McCall, when I'm in Toronto is there any way that I could wait for Amanda at your house? Maybe she's come home. I've been trying to call from here at the hospital but there's only the answering machine with your message saying to call the farm."

"Of course. I'd want you to wait for her. I'd really appreciated it and, if it's not too much trouble, maybe you could drive her back here to the hospital and we could find a motel nearby."

"You'll stay at the farm. It's only a half an hour away." Sharon interjected.

"You'll need the keys to the front door and the apartment. And you should take my cell phone." Ian said as he gathered the things for Tom and told him how much he appreciated what he was doing. "And you'll need directions." And he took out a pen and drew a little map on the back of one of his business cards in his fine, minuscule hand. Tom looked at Sharon and he saw that, as always in crisis, she was the one who could look so calm and serene.

Before Tom left to get George in the coffee shop, the look in Tom's eyes made Ian almost nauseous. It was the look of pity.

In the half-hour before they came to tell them they could see Laura, Ian and Sharon sat in the coffee shop and he felt so lost, so bruised, so stupidly innocent of Laura's betrayal that he didn't know what to say as Sharon told him everything she knew about what had happened. He had asked her to tell him what she knew and, as she talked, her compassion and care and obvious respect and affection for Laura made him actually start to feel that they would somehow get through it. Deep inside, he was heart-broken and bruised so deeply that it would be painful for a long time, every time he felt his heart respond to his wife. They had made a point of not defining what marriage meant to either of them and if there had been infidelity when they had first been married he might have been able to more easily adjust to the idea and the reality of it. But, after all the years, he thought that his marriage had actually defined itself. After all the years, new definitions were very hard to take.

He wasn't angry. He didn't feel sorry for himself. More than anything, he felt like it was partly his own doing, partly his own fault. Holding a beautiful wife was something he hardly imagined he would ever be able to do. That he had held Laura to himself for all those years was more than he had ever expected when they married.

Sharon talked and Ian listened and he felt a sad satisfaction for what he had. He also felt grateful that Sharon was the one to tell him. Like every good lawyer, he wanted to be prepared. He hated surprises, and Laura's betrayal had been the surprise of his life. Its bitter taste was new and would linger, and he would try as hard as he could to cover the taste with other feelings.

"Who was the boy who died?" Ian finally asked when Sharon seemed to have finished talking.

"I don't know. I'll find out for you, if you like."

"That would be good. That son of a bitch wants to blame this on her. That'll cure her of any romantic illusions about her trendy little lover. She won't even drive in the rain. She pulls off the highway. That son of a bitch."

When they finally got to see Laura, she looked so frail and bruised and battered, her blond hair matted where someone had washed out the blood and it had dried in heavy tangles. Cuts were stitched with blood. Her face was very swollen. Her eyes were open. They looked desperate and afraid.

Ian took her hand and bent down and kissed her.

"You've never looked lovelier." he said to lighten the mood.

"The real me." she replied in a horse little voice.

"This must be tearing you up." he said, softly. It was the best he could do. He hoped it was what she needed to hear.

"You know?" she said into his eyes. It wasn't what he had meant. He had intended to comfort her feelings about the dead boy.

Then he knew the rest of it was written on his face. He didn't have to say anything. From the moment he spoke to her he knew she could see that he knew everything.

"Sharon will tell you anything you want to know about George except that I'm so sorry I hurt you. Please don't break up our family." she said in her sore little voice.

"Not even if you were dating the Buffalo Bills." he said, and squeezed her hand.

"Now he tells me." She tried to force a smile. She told him she didn't deserve him and he told her that it was true, but that life wasn't always fair. Laura then asked them not to leave but said she felt she had to sleep. She couldn't force her eyes to stay open any more. She slept for hours and when she woke near midnight Sharon and Ian were still sitting in the visitor's chairs beside her bed. She asked the time and said she hoped they could stay just a little longer. She didn't want to talk, but she wanted them to be there with her. Laura couldn't stand to be alone with herself that night. And so that was the way Ian and Laura would spend the next hour, silently winnowing their hearts between the heavy threads of love and marriage, betrayal and responsibility, looking to see what held and what fell through the spaces between.

In Toronto, that day, Amanda had been going through the nostalgia of her heart's old rebellions. Her feelings for Tom had left her feeling overwhelmed and very much alone, so when Kara had called her that afternoon she was glad to hear from her, and so they had gone out shopping with Amanda's money as they had done so many times before. Amanda was almost relieved to be back where there were virtually no expectations except having a cynical attitude.

That was the hardest part for her to revive. Kara was a little high on an ecstasy buzz and after they ate and they had caught up on gossip about the street people they both knew, it didn't take too much to talk Amanda into dropping a little pill and getting on a little buzz of her own.

The big news was that Kara had scored an invitation to a very select Rave at the warehouse loft of a very fierce modern artist and musician who went by the name of Freaky Deaky.

It took some time and a whole lot of laughing in strange little Raver boutiques, trying on clothes and finding two very aggressive, very cool outfits, before Amanda and her little ecstasy buzz made her agree to go to the Rave that night. They looked like baby faced time traveling hookers or what a teenage boy might imagine a time traveling teenage hooker might look like.

Kara teased Amanda about her description of coffee night at the farm , "Where we're going, I don't think anyone is gonna be singing Kum by Ah."

"They're not folkies, they sing every kind of music." Amanda said defensively.

"Except new or good."

"It's great music."

"It's Mama and Daddy's music. It sucks. No man is worth having to put up with a whole shit pile of bad music."

Near midnight, when they both felt happy and tired and stopped for fries and a drink, Kara slipped another pill into Amanda's mouth, and as she had done so many times before, she swallowed.

They stopped at Kara's place and shared a joint with her mother and her boyfriend who looked at all young girls as if they were walking pornography. When he was really stoned he would start to tell the girls how fine he thought their bodies were; their best points, their real potential. Kara would just laugh hysterically and Amanda would feel her skin start to crawl.

When they finally got to the Rave and floated out of the cab, they could hear the huge amplified base shaking the old brick warehouse. There was a huge crowd of people on the street and when they finally found the door they were surprised that there were two skinheads with bare chests standing there in thirty degree weather checking names.

Amanda thought that their night was over until Kara went to one of the skinheads in a pair of Everlast boxing trunks that seemed, with high top black running shoes, to be the standard uniform. Amanda was shocked when Kara waved to her and she pushed through the crowd and they floated up the stairs to the second floor of the warehouse where all the music was pounding.

"I told you this is real exclusive shit." Kara said proudly to Amanda on the stairs.

At the top of the stairs they were met by two more skin heads.

"Down this." one of them said to Kara and produced a pill from his hand and placed it in Kara's mouth and she swallowed it without a thought. When he said the same thing to Amanda and she told him no thanks, that she had her own buzz going, he refused to accept her answer.

"Nobody gets in without a little taste."

"Come on! Come on! We're almost in." Kara pleaded. The footsteps coming up the stairs behind them pushed Amanda over the edge and she took the pill and swallowed it.

It would be a few minutes before the powerful little combination of MDMA., and LSD would hit them.

Inside the door it was an explosion of bodies moving and dancing and milling about like some great fermenting pool of synthetic smells and sweat and clothes and make up.

Up! Up ! Down! Down! The base pounded. The base pounded. Up! Down! Up! Down! Base pounding! Base pounding! Scream! Treble! Scream! Treble ! Inside the body. Outside the body. Inside the mind. Outside the mind. Just feel! Feel! Feel!...... Then don't!

The room smelled foul. It was an enormous room with an old, worn, oil covered hardwood floor. High windows stood behind the steel four foot wide cat walk that completely surrounded the room. All the light in the room came from banks of Florescent fixtures hung high enough to make everything on the cat walks visible.

In one end was the band: drums, guitars, an electric organ. All the players were bare to the waist skin heads in the boxer trunks and black shoes. Each one also wore a latex mask of Edward Munck's, the Scream, which was how band members were distinguished from the other head shaved minions. Two sets of amplifiers pointed down into the pit from both sides. At the end opposite the band was Freaky Deaky with his hand-held remote microphone.

Freaky Deaky was also bare to the waist and wore the Scream mask as well, but the difference between him and his crew was that he wore bare feet and had tattoos covering half the exposed area of his body. His body was his best performance. He obviously had spent many, many hours pumping weights, sculpting his body so that his stocky trunk and arms looked like heavy faded white roots. His square flat head and the horrific rubber image in which his big lips moved, made him an imposing presence, solid, stolid, hard. If he had frozen in place, he would have looked like a strange old, brooding lichen covered rock ready to roll down and crush anyone in his path. He also looked much older than his skin headed followers.

As he spewed out his rage and invective at the crowd, he rocked forward and back as if he was in severe abdominal pain. He spat out an electric inexhaustible stream of words over the music. It was Rap, but it wasn't like the Rap that came out of black experience with the repetitive rhyme and the internal rhythms that carried the meaning in it, carried the feeling in it, as everyone knew it, as everyone construed with in the drawl of a last word or phrase that led you consider it, that let you reconsider the way it should be said, the song of the head when it was still attached to the heart, the Plantation call still there coming from behind a high, invisible wall.

Freaky Deaky's rap came from machines and from technocratic jargon and intellectual posturing and sped out in his mouth in an automatic fire like a machine pistol. " Dreck ...ka- ka ... dreck ...co -ax.... co -ax. Coaxial ..... maxial..... spacial is palatial .. democracy is hypocrisy... abandoned idealism drowning in rivers of pompous shit. And you are nothing but unwiped assholes and I am the enema that's going to come blowing out your nose... I'll show you. I'll blow you. Co-ax co-ax You are all wet rubbers left by your fathers in your mother's little trendy purse. You'll never know the trouble I've seen. You'll never know the trouble I've been. Co-ax Life is! Life is shit! Get over it! I am what I am what I am what I am. Get it! You will get shit! I am the one who will give it to you." Co-ax co-ax. The words came out so fast that it was almost impossible to understand them. It didn't matter, only phrases mattered, disconnected phrases that carried all the meaning that was possible or even necessary to his art

He was a strange hypnotic force that stalked back and forth along the iron cat walk, rocking like a psychotic, glaring down into the crowd, picking out people with his cold little eyes and then attacking them with the amplified power of his voice like a killer whale striking a seal from below where the base beat was throbbing. The people in the milling sea of bodies knew when he was looking at them and talking about them and taking them apart, ridiculing the way they looked and dressed and moved. And every one of them, even in their drug haze and the big rush of mellow waves and hallucinogenic distortions in their heads, stopped and stared and took the abuse like calves in a slaughter house Shute watched a sledge hammer blow coming at them.

Amanda and Kara moved up closer to where Freaky Deaky was working the room. It wasn't long before the drugs hit them and they started to dance with each other, Kara getting wilder and wilder as if her body was somehow connected instantly to the electricity and the ear splitting decibels of the heavy baritone voice pounding in everyone's brain.

Amanda felt her whole body rise and fill with the seething power of the room. It was so intense and so impersonal at the same time that it was easy to float on the big wave like the bodies that occasionally went surfing on hands over the heads of the people. The Mosh pit seemed to be on the edge of exploding, some had completely shed their clothes and, as they slammed into one another, it looked like a big pack of pit bulls barely constrained by invisible leads.

Amanda and Kara danced until the sweat poured off their bodies and saturated their clothes. Surrender and go. Amanda danced. Do what you wanna wanna do. She danced. She danced: arms, hips and legs crashing together in the bumper pool of freedom and, as she danced and danced and forgot everything about everything, she almost felt that she began to shine inside. When she and Kara finally went to look for something to drink, she felt the energy of the room in every step she took, every move she made. It was intoxicating in ways that the drugs only made better.

Finally they found the source of the aluminum beer cans littered everywhere on the floor. Amanda paid the ten dollars for the two cans of beer and watched Kara swallow it straight away. Then she went, stuck her face in the ice water and drank from the huge plastic tub of water that most people seemed to be ignoring.

It wasn't an instant before Amanda lost sight of Kara and when she went looking for her she couldn't help but see the people were suddenly trying vainly to stay away from the cat walk where Freaky Deaky had work himself into an absolute arm waving frenzy, rocking back and forth, leaning over the railing, pointing to various people and screaming, "You, Asshole! Rauss! Rauss!"

"Out! Out!" And his barefaced minions would come and drag or escort the person to the door. Amanda was stunned and sickened to see what he was doing. He swore and cursed at the people as he chose them, as he directed his henchmen to the next victim.

Excluded! Banished! Rejected! Uncool ! The look on the people's faces as they were thrown out of the room was a study in shock and humiliation.

Amanda had a moment of panic wondering if Kara had already been thrown out of the room. One after another people were chosen and banished. 'Why does anyone come here? Amanda wondered to herself as she searched the sea of bodies for her friend.

She was left almost alone as everyone in the crowd reeled back. The music pounded. Freaky Deaky screamed and then at last when he broke his banishments with one of his songs, all the people went go back to dancing like sheep would go back to grazing after a dozen members of the flock had been culled.

"Bubbles of self awareness floating in a void.... Vails of obscurity and the sheer impossibility of objectively .... Bureaucratic atrocities on the canvas of blood...mega cartels of information flowing, the ink jets of becoming in the third person singular...the kinship of madness and art...living in the state of siege, controlled and victimized by unseen powers...paranoia awaking from a dream about meaning....Voyeuristic survivors of boring class histories, we can Iive only in the shallows, earth maps and mirrors, displacements of personality and self-effacing anonymity swallowed in the self-indulgence of idle subjectivity. It's the machine that is really the art. There is only addiction. Chaos is the only order." Dreck...ka-ka ...Dreck....Co-ax. Co-ax

He was no longer speaking to the crowd. His arms thrust up like Moses receiving the word of God, the personal invective and the personal interest in the crowd below had seemed to disappear in his transcendent revelation, and the screaming mask on his face contorted as he spoke and his fleshy lips pronounced the pseudo-intellectual rant that inspired him. And it did have a powerful effect on the crowd. Everyone stopped dancing. Only the music accompanied him as he shared his vision with all those beneath him that had apparently completely vanished from his awareness. Amanda could not help but be trans-fixed by his incomprehensible babbling. But, even in her drug hazed mind, she knew he was just a fool.

Then the vision was over and he returned to the main task of savaging the un-hip and the uncool." Out! Out! Rauss! Rauss!"

As the crowd thinned down Amanda hoped she would be able to see Kara and her fear grew greater and greater that she had somehow missed her friend being thrown out of the room. The dancing resumed as Amanda looked for Kara and more and more people were rousted. Amanda's heart was beating faster and the drugs were hitting more powerfully as she tried to search the room in some systematic way, but it felt just like she was always only getting back to where she began, seeing faces she recognized again and again, feeling bodies push her over and over, feeling the music pounding up through the floor. Time was a moment and time was eternity looking for someone she couldn't find. Space was a footstep and space was infinity as she tried to remember just where she'd been. Hallucinations started to weave into her emotions and she started to become very frightened indeed. This was going to be her last bad trip. 'Rauss! Rauss! Rauss!'

Finally just to calm herself she found a place by a wall and watched the northern lights dissolving over her eyes, watched the cartoon characters dancing with the people. She was leaning against one of the eight foot square paintings that she now could see were hung all around the room. For some reason, they made her want to throw up. The room started to dissolve and change, as time slipped and slid sideways and her rational brain tried to adjust. Finally her legs were tired and her mouth felt like congealed spit as she stood there stoned and just waited for the real world to return.

When the crowd was finally down to a few dozen people Amanda looked over to where the big tub of water sat alone, and she would never know why she did it, but she went to it and plunged her head into the water again and left it under, holding her breath, waiting for the colors to fade inside her. The underwater music was like a great, sick heart. When she came up gasping for air she was shocked to realize that suddenly she felt almost completely straight. She could think. She could see. She could choose. She could act.

And when she saw poor Kara sitting by the doorway by the black shoes of one of the goons she went over to where her friend sat completely wasted. Amanda tried to help Kara to her feet but it took a moment before Kara finally understood what her friend wanted her to do, and when she finally did get up and Amanda told the two doorway attendants that they were going, the goons told her she wasn't going anywhere. Nobody left the room until the boss said they could go.

Suddenly enraged that they were imprisoned, Amanda told them to go fuck themselves.

Then the great, amplified voice of the great Oz spoke and said, "That one, out! Rauss!"

One of the guards pointed to Amanda and he shook his head and the lackies understood and one of them took Kara from Amanda while the other pulled her away from her friend. Amanda started to curse and scream at them and suddenly Kara was gone as Amanda tried to push past the guard and follow her friend down the stairs. But he was too big, too strong.

When she realized she could not get through the guard she also realized the only way to get out the door would be to have the monster act evict her, and so she strode intently to where he presided over the room from the high cat walk and screamed up at him to let her go.

"Let me out of here! Pick me! Kick me out, you big asshole."

Her voice was almost drowned out in the music but he saw her and looked down and for the first time that night his rubber lips formed into an unmistakable smile. He started to taunt her, asking her if she had to go home to her mommy and daddy. He watched her, laughing as she screamed up at him, but he stopped dead when she called him fat boy.

"Cut! Cut!" he screamed, and the band stopped playing immediately, and a deafening silence filled the room, and it was so enormous and empty that the dozen dancers and the dozen half- bare skin heads seemed to suddenly disappear into the empty cavern of the room. Freaky Deaky suddenly had the cold deliberate movements of someone very intense and focused and very determined.

What she said seemed to have set off something inside him and he made a gesture to two followers below and they came and grabbed her, but instead of being hustled to the door as she had expected, Amanda was dragged to the center of the room from where she watched as Freaky Deaky slowly come down from the cat walk on a steel chain fall, holding on to its hook with one hand, letting one of his lackies let down the chain where it gathered and rattled on the floor.

Amanda watched as he approached her with a steady, slow, almost graceful gait. He looked at the crowd that was gathering and no one spoke, every person's eyes he looked into turned away, afraid of his attention, afraid that they would not get to see.

Amanda noticed that it was mostly males left in the room. She heard strange sounds behind her as the crowd gathered around her and he stopped in front of her and his whispered voice echoed in the room. "No emotion." he whispered.

Of course the emotion in the room was absolutely electric and Amanda's bravado collapsed in a quiet voice and she pleaded with him, "Please, just let me go."

His whispered voice replied, "No subject. No object."

"Just let me go." Amanda begged him, her heart racing with the drugs and the absolute terror of the silence and the absolute fear that came from looking into his dead little eyes. And then she knew he would hurt her. It was like swallowing vomit.

His voice whispered again, "No symbol. No image."

"What are you talking about?" Amanda gasped.

"No form, no design, no light, no space, no time." he said as she came up to within inches of her face. "I am an artist." he said to her. "You are a poor pathetic middle-class monstrosity. I have given you a night to remember. Now I'm going to give you a night neither of us will ever forget because you will be my instrument. You are only a brush that's discarded after the act of creation.

"You're no artist. You even have to hide behind the mask of someone who really was an artist." Terror had sobered Amanda almost completely. She didn't know what he was about to do, but she knew by the look in his eyes that it would mean her complete humiliation. That was his idea of art.

"What do you know about art, you oozing little zit? Who do you think you are, calling me fat? Look at this body." He preened like a wrestler for her and for the rest of the crowd and then turned back and grabbed her by the throat. "No pleasure, no beauty."

He nodded and Amanda was turned around to face an eight foot square piece of white canvas lying before her on the floor. The crowd had surrounded the canvas and gallons of paint were open and waiting and with another nod the paint cans were handed from one spectator to another, each one throwing a splash of paint down onto the canvas. When all the spectators had participated and the canvas was covered and shining wet in the sick florescent light and Amanda believed she was going to have to get down and grovel for her freedom, Freaky Deaky whispered into her ear from behind, "Strip or be stripped."

It was then Amanda realized the horror. It was then Amanda realized what the paintings were that hung all around the room.

"Noooooooo!" she screamed. "Please don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me." she begged.

"Strip or be stripped." he repeated.

"I can't. Please don't do this. Please don't do this."

"I'll count to three and if you haven't started stripping we will do it for you."

"You son of a bitch, my father's a lawyer. If you rape me, you'll spend the next twenty years in jail. You'll regret this." She tried to sound anything but desperate and terrified. When he chuckled into her ear and said, "Oh, really.", and it sent a cold shudder right through her body.

"One." He stopped whispering. "Two." The crowd joined him in counting.

"No! Please God, noooo!" Amanda began to sob and cry uncontrollably.

"Three." That was when Amanda, hearing the crowd counting, realized they'd all seen this before. She started to thrash and struggle trying to break free of the hands holding her wrists, but they only held her tighter, and suddenly other bodies approached and hands began to tear at her clothes and she began to scream and scream and scream and the screams echoed in the room, and the eyes in the faces of the people all around looked so terrible and ugly and surreal that Amanda threw up right into the middle of the canvas and the paint, and then she felt her panties pulled down her legs and she was naked, still held hard by the wrists, and when she started to kick, hands grabbed her legs and ankles and she was lowered down slowly, so slowly, wriggling like a worm on a hook, and all the faces stared at her body and she began to speak to the people watching, begging them to help her, and all there was was the wide eyed stare of drugs and seared minds waiting, and then she felt the paint, cold and sticking beneath her and felt herself spread-eagled in the ultimate humiliation, and when she knew it would happen, she suddenly became clear headed and what came up out of her was pure unadulterated rage and hatred. The crying stopped completely. Her searing lungs calmed their heaving.

"Is this the only way you can get a piece of ass, fat boy?" she said, as she raised her head and glared at him. "You're not in artist. You're a fat, sick geek." she shouted.

"I am not fat!" he screamed at top of his lungs and the shock in the silence that followed his scream seemed to terrify everyone in the room. Then he did it again. "I am not fat."

Then he seemed to recover himself and stared down at Amanda. "It's not my emotions that are supposed to be left on the canvas. Do not say I am fat again. If you do, it will be your blood mixing with the paint you feel between your legs."

When he started to pull down his silk fighter's trunks Amanda laid back and closed her eyes and for the first time since she was a very little girl, she prayed to a merciful God to please spare her this pain. Then she realized that he was speaking to her. Then she realized he was asking her a question.

"Is it a fuck or a rape?"

When she didn't reply, he shouted the question at her. "A fuck or a rape?"

"Amanda opened her eyes and glared at him. "What the fuck are you talking about, this is rape! Are you people going to just stand by and let him do this? What kind of people are you?

"If your hands and legs are free, it's a fuck. If they are held, it's rape." he explained patiently. "It would be better for you if you fuck me."

"You sick bastard. I'd like to kill you." Then she saw he was stroking himself and he was erect and it was about to happen, and she started to cry once more when she suddenly thought about Tom, and it nearly broke her heart. Thinking about Tom was almost like having him see what was happening. She hoped she would live. She hoped she would survive. She hoped he would never ever know what happened.

"Raped or fucked?" Then he did the counting to three with the crowd and when she only started to thrash he said, "Raped it is." And then he moved toward her, his enormous tattooed bulk looming over her, and she cried and she cried as he knelt between her legs to gasps from the audience. He loved gasps from the audience. When he pressed himself down into her like a thick slug on a flower, she could feel his weight crushing her body and feel him begin to explore her unpainted torso with his mouth and then go lower and feel his hands moving over her body, covered in paint, slick and wet, and she thrashed harder trying to heave him up away from her and she swore at him as she never swore in her life, calling him every kind of filthy name she could think of, names coming through her tears and heaving lungs, and he kept moving, sometimes sliding up over her and he would look in her eyes and listen to her screaming filthy names at him and he would smile. He loved it.

"Would you like me to kiss you?" he said when her breath finally ran out and she stopped screaming at him. Then he mashed his mouth down on hers as she felt him slide wet with paint into her body and she started to shiver like she was freezing in a snow bank, and it was a horror she never knew or imagined she could feel, and it went on for an eternity, and far in the distance she could hear him groaning and moaning and then he screamed in the silence. When it was over and he pulled up and away from her, she felt hands lift her up and she was back on her feet standing at the end of the canvas and he was behind her and heard his voice within her as his lips touched her ear once more. "What do you think of your painting? "he asked softly. He stepped away from her and hands stretched her arms out, and buckets that had been filled from the big water tub hit her like a scourge, cold, cold, and the pain ran down her body with the paint and they stuck her with more cold water and mercifully she passed out and she never knew the rest of the horror.

She woke up shivering, lying beside a big blue dumpster in an alley in a snow bank stained with the paint from her body. She felt nothing. They had put her torn clothes back on her body and where the paint had dried in the cold air it was stuck to her skin and it cracked and tore at her as she struggled to her feet and fell through the snow to the street.

In the street lights a few cars passed and she heard footsteps and felt someone gather her and hold her and comfort her and pull a big fur coat around her. It was a woman's clothes, a woman's hair she felt touching her but the hands around her, holding her were the hands of a man.

Amanda pulled away violently. The hands gathered her back in.

"It's okay. It's okay. I'll take you someplace safe. We'll call the police." The man's strange voice said soothingly.

"Please, no. Please, no." Amanda begged the person holding her, and the voice comforted her and she let herself be comforted.

"Can we call your parents? Do you know your phone number?"

"Please." was all Amanda could say.

It was then Amanda realized that the man holding her was dressed as a woman. It didn't matter. She let herself be turned and led down the street, a strong arm supporting her, holding her until they got to a phone booth at a closed gas station and the stranger finally got Amanda to repeat her phone number until it was understandable. When Tom answered, the stranger told him that he was holding a girl who had been somehow attacked and hurt. The stranger told Tom that she seemed to be just covered in paint but not broken or bleeding. The stranger told their location and then put the phone to Amanda's ear as Tom had insisted and when Amanda heard his voice instead of her father's, as she expected, she swooned in shock and confusion. When she realized it was really him, she started to cry and just say his name over and over, "Tommy.... Tommy.... my Tommy..... Ohhhhh."

The stranger took back the phone. Tom asked if their location was near Queen Street and Church and the stranger said it was quite near, and Tommy told the stranger he would call his brother who lived close by and he would be there in just a few minutes.

"Nervously, the stranger asked Tommy's brother's name and when he told him the stranger screamed, "It's not. What a small world. We'll wait right here."

When the stranger hung up the phone, Amanda could see the man dressed as a woman was shivering almost uncontrollably. She tried to give back the long fur coat but he pulled it tight around Amanda and looked into her eyes and then he began to cry. Paint flaking away from her skin, paint dripping down her legs the big man pulled her into his arms and held her close for a few minutes until a perfect old black Mercedes pulled up and Tom's brother Wayne and his lover Charles tore out of the car and took Amanda from the arms of the transvestite prostitute. It was then that Wayne recognized the stranger who had helped Amanda.

"Hello, Crystal. Are you O.K.?" Wayne asked the stranger.

"I'm okay. Could I just come with you and warm up. Maybe I could try to get some of the paint out of my coat."

Wayne and Charles rode in the front seat and the prostitute sat in the back seat with Amanda, Amanda's head was down, resting in the man's lap, and she felt the sheen of the dress under her cheek and felt the power of the man's leg muscles underneath it.

"Where are we going?" Amanda whispered.

The prostitute repeated her question and it was then that Wayne introduced himself.

"We're going to my place nearby. I'm Tommy's brother Wayne. Tommy will be here as soon as he can." he replied to the unheard question.

"Not Tom. I want my mom." she said, in a barely audible voice.

There is a level of heart break everyone can imagine and another level so far below it that the abyss a person has to fall through to reach it seems to distort all space and time. It seemed to Amanda that it would be that way forever.

Above the big antique store was Wayne's apartment. It was warm and simple like the Arts and Crafts oak furniture that filled it.

Wayne sat Amanda in a big love-seat, sat beside her where she sat in the fur coat she was reluctant to surrender at the door. Gently, he talked to her about what had happened. He made statements and asked her just to shake her head yes or no in reply. He wanted to know if she wanted to go to the hospital. No. He wanted to know if she knew the people who did this. No. He wanted to know if she wanted them to call the police. No. He wanted to know if she had been raped. Yes. He wanted to know if she wanted to take a shower. Yes.

Then Wayne spoke to Charles. "You're closest to her in size. Could you find her something to wear, a sweatshirt, those jeans you don't fit any more, a pair of wool socks."

Charles, who seemed absolutely horrified by everything that was happening, took the orders almost like a slap in the face until he realized Wayne wanted him to help. But, when he realized what he was being asked to do, he went quickly away to his task.

"You're going to need someone to help you in the shower. Would you like one of us to help, or would you like to wait for Tom?" Wayne asked gently but firmly.

"Oh, no! Not Tommy. Not Tommy." She looked up into the long thin face of the stranger who found her in the street, and when their eyes met he knew she was asking him again for help.

"Come on sweet cream. We'll get you cleaned up. You know of course I'm beyond any prurient interest in your gender." Amanda got up and shed the coat and reached out her hand to the prostitute who told her that his name was Crystal. Charles came back into the room just as Amanda had shed the coat and he gasped when he saw the tattered clothes hanging from her body, the congealed paint everywhere her flesh appeared.

Wayne told Crystal the way to the bathroom and Charles handed him the clothes he had found as they passed him. "Oh, you poor baby." Charles said and he reached out to touch Amanda's head gently as she passed.

It was over half an hour and Amanda and Crystal were still in the shower, the hot water having turned tepid and then cold. Crystal had scrubbed Amanda from head to foot, standing outside the shower in her slinky silk dress feeling it would be too inappropriate to get naked and look totally like a man. The shower splashed him and made his clothes and makeup a total dripping disaster. Amanda stood and let herself be washed like a puppy and finally when the paint had all gone down the drain, she stepped out on to a sodden floor, standing among wet bath towels, feeling herself being dried in the heaviest, soft terrycloth she ever felt in her life. It was the first overwhelmingly delicious feeling of pleasure she had felt since her ordeal had begun.

Tom was waiting in the living room with Wayne and Charles when he saw Amanda. She was dressed in the big sweatshirt that simply said Queens. She wore stone washed baggy jeans rolled up in thick heavy cuffs over heavy wool socks. Tom's heart, racing with heartache, collided with the overwhelming force of her simple beauty. Amanda looked in his eyes and it was like a deer in headlights. She froze the instant she saw him. When he walked to her and took her in his arms she felt absolutely rigid.

"Are you okay?" he whispered into her ear. Her heart lurched to hear a man's voice whispering so close to her head. She lunged back and pulled away from him.

"How could you be here? How could you be here?" she asked looking terrified and confused.

"It's a long story. Your mom was in a car accident. She got some cuts but she's going to be okay. I came to Toronto because your dad is with her at the hospital and wanted me to bring you there. Wayne told me you were raped."

Her lip started to shake and her eyes still looked frozen and terrified. It was her eyes that made Tom first feel hate in his life. It was her trembling mouth that made him feel a pure white searing rage.

The phone rang and Wayne answered it and it was Ian calling back, wanting to talk to Tom or Amanda.

Tom had called the farm after he hung up the phone at the McCall's apartment. He'd talked to Sharon and told her that Amanda had been hurt, that she was being taken to Wayne's apartment. Sharon had called while Amanda was in the shower and Wayne had explained to her what he found and what he knew. Sharon was horrified.

It was 4:30 in the morning when she woke Ian with the horror of what has happened to his daughter. His eyes filled with tears like a child's as she told him of the rape and her refusal to go to the police or the hospital.

When the heart breaks it breaks in levels. That night Ian found out how much deeper a level at which his heart could break. What Laura had done seemed to be little more than a pang compared to the grief in which he dressed.

That was the heartbreak Ian took to Laura in the hospital as he woke her from a sound sleep, and Ian was shocked as Laura wailed for her daughter, even as she got out of bed and dressed and brushed aside the angry night nurses who insisted she couldn't leave before she was formally discharged. Finally she took one of the night nurses by the shoulders and shook her and said, "My baby's been raped. Don't you understand that?"

And before security could be called, before anything else could be done to stop them, Ian and Laura were out into the cold of the night, into the car and away in the speed of terror.

It was amazing to both of them how fast the hours flew as Laura was almost rigid with fear as Ian drove as fast as he dared push the car. It piled onto the terror of what had happened to her and what had happened to her daughter, and by the time they got to Toronto Laura thought she knew just how much her mind and heart and body could bear in one day.

At Wayne's apartment they were told Amanda had been given some Valium and was asleep in Wayne's guest bed. When they opened the door to the bedroom and Ian and Laura looked in at their daughter, Tom sitting on the floor beside her holding her hand as she slept, Laura knew the heart could never exhaust its potentials of pain. She stood stone frozen in the borrowed clothes Sharon had thrust at Ian as he had left the farm, her swollen face covered in lines of dried blood, her sore eyes staring at the lovely, innocent, unblemished face of the beautiful daughter to whom she had given life, for all that it was worth.

### Chapter 9

The next week was the first time since Amanda was two years old that her family spent a week together in the place that they lived. Without much discussion, it was arranged that Tom would stay at their condo until Amanda was over the shock of her ordeal. Ian took a week's vacation and Laura had to stay home while she recovered from her own injuries.

When Amanda had first seen her mother when she woke up, the look of shock in Amanda's eyes was so powerful that it scared everyone in the room. She had got out of Wayne's guest bed and walked to her mother and touched her sore, cut face. She had forgotten that Tom had told her that her mother had been in an accident and it almost seemed she connected her mothers injuries to what had happened to her.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Amanda said to her mother as she touched her swollen face.

"You have nothing to be sorry for. You have to lie down and sleep."

Laura then led Amanda back to the bed, and it was late in the afternoon when Tom brought Amanda something to eat. She had woken up looking numb and confused. She had again forgotten what happened to her mother. She seemed to have forgotten everything that had happened to her. She didn't know where she was or how she had come to be there. She couldn't understand why Tom was bringing her lunch in a strange place. She couldn't understand why he was saying that her parents were in the other room waiting to see her. She couldn't understand, and she didn't know how to explain to him she didn't understand. She had gone through the looking glass of reality. She was there, but only as a flat reflection.

She was back in her own bed that evening when Laura came into the room and handed her a little pill and told her to swallow it. She did that, thinking it was another tranquillizer. Laura didn't tell her or anyone else that it was a morning after contraceptive pill, just to be absolutely safe.

Tom stayed in Amanda's room almost every minute of the time he was there. He slept in a sleeping bag beside her bed. He ate with her, encouraging her to eat when she barely wanted to look at food. The boy who knew how to write such long, eloquent letters didn't seem to know what to say to her. She didn't care. She didn't seem to want to talk at all. She didn't seem to want to talk to Ian or Laura when they came in and sat beside her on her bed. She was falling into a deep depression and the tranquilizer pills she had been prescribed didn't seem to be stopping her descent.

Ian spent a good deal of time talking to people who had significant experience with others who had been traumatized by violence. There didn't seem to be a satisfying answer that would spare Amanda the pain that was slowly dissolving her life. Ian had seen it all before in courtrooms and jail cells and even sitting across from him in his office. He had seen what violence could do. He came to understand how violence would touch every person who touched the person who had endured it. It was the other way violence spread out like blood from a wound.

It was from Kara that Ian had received the crude outlines of the evening in which Amanda had been raped. After some serious persuasion, Kara told him where it had occurred. She had told him the circumstances inside the Rave. She told him the name, Freaky Deaky.

After a call to a police detective he knew quite well, Ian understood that it would be almost impossible to prosecute such a crime. His rage and helplessness came at each other from opposite directions and made him feel almost sick to his stomach.

When Wayne called to ask after Amanda the day after she had gone home, Ian poured out his frustration and anger. The one thing he didn't expect was that Wayne would have already taken up Amanda's cause. Wayne had a serious plan of action. He, in fact, had far more information about the Rave and Freaky Deaky than Ian could imagine anyone could have compiled in one short day.

Wayne wanted Ian to come and talk to him. He wanted to make the son of a bitch pay.

Wayne had learned Amanda wasn't the first one to the raped like Amanda. He had learned details from contacts on the street that made it clear that there would certainly be other rapes unless Freaky Deaky was stopped. Ian was frightened but excited that there was even the faint possibility that there was something that could be done, some small hope for some kind of justice.

The meeting Ian had with Wayne and Charles gave him more hope than he ever believed might be possible. There was no guarantee. There was no way to know how their actions would finally play out, but they would close in on the sick degenerate. They would search for his weaknesses. He would know he was being pursued. Ian could see they were actually going to reach into his sick, impregnable life.

Ian approved the 500 posters that would go out onto the street. He approved the reward for the Internet campaign to find witnesses and testimony. He approved the campaign to find out everything they could, both personal and financial, about the psychopath who had raped Amanda. He approved the Rat Out A Rat Web site that would be advertised everywhere Freaky Deaky had ever been.

"You find a person's weakness when you find out what they care about." Wayne told Ian. Ian knew only to well how true and how deep that went." You find what to do with that weakness when you find out whose opinion matters to them."

Within two days, Charles, with his Internet wizardry, had found out that Freaky Deaky's real name was Alan Marle, and where he had grown-up, and the property he owned, and his parent's address. From his high school year book, they found out that he was the class fat boy, the butt of many jokes and put downs. Even in the yearbook class photo he was described as the one most likely to be Jabba the Hutt. Charles found addresses for more than half of Marle's classmates and contacted them.

Ian, who also remembered being the butt of jokes in high school, had no sympathy. He believed psychopaths were born not made. He approved the 10,000 dollar reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction for any rape he may have committed. The Rat Out A Rat Web Site had many, many hits seeking the twenty dollar bill that came with any decent information about his behavior and background. The Web Site became a bulletin board for old stories and new ones about Marle as a pathetic, long time loser with a tidy little inheritance. It amazed Ian how quickly E-mail could retrieve such personal information. Wayne and Charles knew what they were doing. They had done it before. The way to destroy someone in modern society was to make them totally uncool. The more uncool Marle appeared, the more vulnerable he became. New posters went out every day with the juiciest stories. Ian was impressed and glad to participate, and his own idea of serving Marle with a civil lawsuit just added to the pressure they were putting on him.

Marle's face was on posters that seemed to be everywhere he went. They accused him of rape, described him as a fat boy loser; offered big money to rat him out. All this made Marle decidedly nervous and absolutely enraged. The looks on the faces of people on the street, and even on the faces of his own cowering minions, absolutely unnerved him. He thought that he was invulnerable to prosecution because he made sure the witnesses and the victim were all high on drugs. He made sure that all the people present during the rape were more than passive participants. He made sure that everyone he touched was absolutely terrified of what he might do. A bully relies on absolute terror because a crack in the armor was always eventually fatal. The fact that someone seemed to have no fear of him, the fact that his only response was to throw tantrums, shook loose his power. Having succeeded so many times with absolutely no consequences to his actions, he was shocked to find himself suddenly living in a search light of attention, attention he couldn't control or manipulate.

It took less than a week before the disgusting smoking gun was produced. Having compiled lists of people who had been at Marle's Raves and Rapes, they were stunned when four videotapes arrived in Wayne's mailbox depicting four separate assaults. It seemed that Marle had a video camera record his works in progress. His painted works of art were not enough of a trophy to satisfy his twisted ego. And so with the videos, faces could be attached to witnesses, victims could be identified and tracked down. One of the videotapes actually showed Amanda's rape and humiliation. Wayne and Charles forced themselves to watch it, as they had the others, to take digital images of witnesses to put on the Web Site so that names could be discovered and turned over to the police. Ian couldn't bring himself to watch any of it.

It was less than two weeks after Amanda's rape that Ian turned over an absolutely airtight case for prosecution. Marle would not escape. The information age and his own sick vanity had sealed his fate. The need to record himself and keep a trophy of his works of art gave him his self- produced fifteen minutes of infamy. His black star had flared and was done.

He was arrested the same day that the police received the evidence, and it wasn't a week until he pleaded guilty to the rapes and to four counts of forcible confinement. His lackies and minions were also arrested and charged and would spend years in prison for their part in the crimes. Only the depraved spectators got off without suffering any real consequences, as was often the way with modern life.

Ian couldn't believe it. A case that could never be prosecuted had been made absolutely iron clad because of Wayne and Charles and the Internet.

It turned out that Wayne had done this kind of thing before, defending gay men and women who had been brutalized or victimized in some way. Wayne and Charles called themselves the Queer Agents of Karma.

"If I had you working for me in my practice, I'd be the most famous criminal lawyer in the country." Ian said to them, and he wasn't exactly sure that it wouldn't have been the case.

Ian was shocked to find out that some of the things the Queer Agents did were quite illegal.

"I used to have quite a problem with heroin," Wayne explained, "When I got straight I realized that sometimes a junkie just needs somebody to get them through a particularly bad time. Sometimes a junkie will do almost anything for a score. They know that if they come here they probably won't have to do absolutely anything to get it."

"You give junkies heroin?" Ian asked incredulously.

"Sometimes. Sometimes it's the best thing to do."

"How do you tell when that's so?"

"You have to have been a junkie. You have to still feel the razor's edge under your own feet."

The only time that Tom left the McCall's condominium was when he went with Ian to the funeral of the boy who had died in the accident. Ian was not surprised that George was not there. He was glad of it. He didn't want to have to consider that George had any humanity in his heart. He believed he would never be able to feel any compassion for the man who had made him a cuckold.

The funeral was small and sad and held the pure particular breathless tragedy that only parents who bury children know. Ian told the parents who he was, and when he said he felt for their tremendous loss they had no idea how close that was to being actually true.

It was on the ride back to Toronto that Ian told Tom his own overwhelming feelings. Tom, like his mother, seemed to be able to lift tragedy into his arms without seeming to be overwhelmed by its cold, dead weight. Tom listened to a father's fear and anger and then he listened to a husband's heartache and shame. The only thing that Tom said after Ian's long monologue was that the way that he got through pain was remembering the prayer his mother had invented for their Sunday service, 'It is possible to respect all living things. It is possible to be thankful for every experience in life.'

"Well, that's beyond me." Ian replied.

"Me too. But it helps to believe it's possible." Tom added, and Ian understood the incredible strength of the boy sitting next him who had never for a moment found a way to unburden his own heart of its deepest aching. To feel respect for George Marshall and Alan Marle and to feel gratitude for what they had done seemed impossible to Ian, yet Tom did seem to actually project the faith that nothing was absolutely impossible. It was Tom's pure faith that soothed Ian's pain at last.

In the two weeks it took to bring Marle to Justice, Amanda was fighting for her soul. Her dreams and memories washed over every waking moment she experienced. Her feelings for Tom seemed to be frozen like frost patterns on a black, transparent heart. He became like a big living plush toy moving around her room, quietly waiting for her to choose the time when she would speak.

If she had stayed in her room forever, she wasn't sure that he just wouldn't have stayed there too, bringing her food, playing her music, singing her songs, sleeping on the floor beside her, sitting for hours saying absolutely nothing. By the end of the first day in her room she was completely comfortable with his presence and silently anxious whenever he left the room, even for a moment.

Laura and Ian would often come into Amanda's room and try to talk to her and she would try to respond as well as she could, but it was obvious the shock of what she had endured was not going away.

When Wayne described the tapes to Ian and he realized just what she had endured and he told Laura what he had learned, they were both terrified that Amanda might have had her mind and heart permanently broken. Life broke everyone. What she had endured could break anyone absolutely. They were both terrified that a psychopath might have taken their daughter from them forever, leaving behind only the soft, beautiful body he had defiled.

It was a nightmare for Laura. Her own accident and her torn up face made it virtually impossible for her to work. Without work there was a hole in her life so enormous she almost felt on the edge of absolute oblivion. Strangely, it was her love for Amanda that kept her sane because when she went into her daughter's room and held her daughter's hand and looked in her daughter's eyes, she could still feel the vague contours of her own heart.

In a strange way it was Amanda's nightmare that kept Laura from being completely overwhelmed by her own. It was from a strange and sad perspective, but her love for her daughter was real and warm and undeniable. Amanda would never know it, but the touch of her hand was the thing that would save her mother from a complete emotional collapse. The one thing Laura did that scared everyone was when she cut her blond hair almost back to her skull. It would grow out in the auburn color it was when she was twelve. When Ian asked her about what she had done, all she told him was that it was important. When strangers saw her they thought she either had cancer or worse, had regressed to some '90's Sinead O'Connor retro look. When Amanda saw what Laura had done to herself her eyes misted over as she turned her head away. She understood self-abuse. She understood feeling completely helpless. She thought that Laura had finally come to the world of negative attention children know so well.

As her face healed and Ian brought news that the monster who had brutalized Amanda would pay, in some measure, for what he had done to her, Laura slowly walked away from the abyss. At Ian's suggestion, she even got out the Christmas decorations and did up their home with all the beautiful lights and decorations gathered over so many years. Christmas decor was the McCall family's only tradition. When Laura was finished, she felt better than she had since their nightmare began. Even Amanda left her room for the first time to come out and see the decorations. She even told Tom the history of some of the things hanging on the branches of the fragrant balsam tree.

Ann Marie had come to see Amanda to see if she could offer her any professional help as a psychologist. Ann Marie knew well enough not to push a patient just after a trauma and so she only stayed a little while on her first visits. It was after the Christmas decorations went up and she was visiting with Amanda alone in her room that she began to tell Amanda about her own worries about her daughter Megan. It was Amanda's compassion that finally broke the cold grip of horror that held her heart. It was to Ann Marie that Amanda finally told the story of what happened to her. It was Ann Marie who heard the horror in the details and the memories and Amanda's own guilt and shame. It poured out and out and Ann Marie had never heard anything more brutal or agonizing in her life. As the words and images poured, and the tears began to run and run from Amanda's big eyes, Ann Marie's own heart filled up with a projected terror of what might lay in wait in her own daughter's future.

It was after Amanda had let the flash flood of emotions sweep over Ann Marie that Amanda slept through the night for the first time, and it was after that when she started to have the song, Bridge over Troubled Water, run through her head over and over.

When she woke up the third day after the song had embedded itself in her mind and saw every word of it written in black magic marker on the wall she had cleared for favorite song lyrics, she was absolutely stunned. Tom had written them there while she slept.

"Why did you write that song up there?" she asked him, expectantly.

"Because I'm on your side. I just wanted you to know that. You're my silver girl." he whispered."

"I've been hearing that song in my head for days."

Tom started to sing it softly, almost like he was speaking, the same song he sang softly night after night while she was sleeping. Amanda barely remembered any of the words while the song had rolled around in her head, but hearing them now in Tom's beautiful voice touched her deeply. He was there when pain was all around. He was there when she was feeling really unimaginably small. It was clear he intended to dry her tears, to dry them all. She listened to him sing as she followed the words on the wall and it was then she knew that she would survive. When he was finished singing, she opened her arms and he came to her and, for the first time since the terrible night, they held each other and she kissed him and it was his tears that she dried.

Within a day Amanda left her bed, dressed for the day and re-entered the life of her family, the family that was suddenly so completely and ubiquitously there. For the first time, in years, they all sat down together for meals, they sat together and watched television, they read quietly and listened to music and actually talked to one another. Tom stayed for two days after Amanda came back to the world. They spent time in her room talking about everything except her assault. Of course, the other thing that had changed between them was their approach to their own sexual attraction for each other. Amanda loved to have Tom hold her like spoons, fully dressed, but a kiss was different, for both of them it was like kissing a soft, tender, new, white scar. The only time Amanda's parents would bring up the subject of her assault was when Ian would report on the success they are having tracking down Marle. Amanda never said anything about what Wayne and Ian were doing.

It was from Tom that the family learned the story of Wayne's heroin addiction and how it had nearly destroyed his life. Wayne always felt like a city boy and left the farm when he was 2twenty one to start the antique business in Toronto. That was before the family made antique reproductions or had made a science out of picking antiques from old century farms. It was an overdose that almost killed him that made the family realize the problem. Eugene and Sharon had been shocked that they had not even suspected his addiction. That Wayne was gay had never been an issue for them. He made clear his sexual orientation from the time he reached puberty. The addiction was the secret.

When Wayne refused to go into rehabilitation, Eugene left the farm for the first time in his life and moved in with his son and paid for the heroin, worked in the antique store and cruised gay bars and, for two years, became a part of Wayne's life. He only went home two days a week when Sharon would take his place with her son. They quickly stopped telling Wayne to stop taking drugs. They only insisted that the drugs be from a reliable source. Eugene even learned how to do the testing procedures to make sure Wayne would not overdose. Because the family was far from wealthy in those days, Eugene even had one of the old Walnut trees felled to pay for the heroin Wayne needed. Eugene's absolute love and non-judgmental commitment finally mattered more to Wayne than the addictive rush of his drugs. He gave up drugs because Eugene loved him so much, and because he finally couldn't bear that he was the reason that his other brothers and sisters were going without a father. Taking down the old Walnut tree to pay for his addiction was also something Wayne found hard to let go.

Hearing the story made Ian and Laura feel very poor and inferior as parents. Laura remembered wanting to send Amanda away to boarding school as she listened to the story and the memory almost made her sick to her stomach.

It was when Tom was leaving that they realized the depth and persistence of Amanda's emotional injury. It was when she was going to go with Tom down to his car and say goodbye as he was leaving that it struck home. When she went out of the door of the condominium and began to walk down the hall to the elevator she suddenly started to breathe faster and faster, and then she began to cry, and before they reached the elevator she had turned, running as if she was being pursued by a living nightmare. She ran to her room and they found her lying in her bed in the fetal position, hyperventilating. When she finally calmed down and she could speak, she tried to tell them of the unimaginable terror of leaving the safety of her home. She was absolutely adamant and certain that she would never be able to go out into the world again.

"I can't go out there. I can't." she pleaded.

Everyone felt they had to indulge her fear. They assumed she only needed time, that she still was in shock, but Amanda had no doubts about the force of the terror that she felt walking down the familiar hall. She knew when she was beyond her depth. The terror in the hall was monumental, overpowering, even when she compared it to her feelings lying in the paint as she was being raped.

It took the rest of the day before Amanda convinced Tom that he had to go home. He could come to see her on the weekends, but she didn't want to even consider the idea that he would be staying any longer. It was guilt and shame. She was weak. She would always be weak, it seemed. She was afraid that he was thinking that he would have to be as brave and as dedicated as his father had been with Wayne. She knew him only too well. That was exactly what he was thinking. Love had no limits, held nothing back. He believed he should be willing to offer his life for her. That was why the long drive back to the farm was so hard for Tom. All his plans, all his dreams would be destroyed, if he stood by the girl that he loved. If he didn't, what was he?

In two weeks of healing, the stitches had come out of Laura's cuts and her face bore the white scars that she would carry for the rest of her life, the scars she would soon stop trying to cover with make-up. She went back to work, but something had contorted inside her like a spring pulled beyond its ability to extend. The purpose and pleasure of her actions had lost their meaning, even for the single moments and events that were once all that she had expected of life. Her heart had become a sieve that didn't seem to be able to hold any satisfaction in any moment, in any place, in any company. Strangely, it was only going home to Ian and Amanda the made her heart feel like it hadn't been turned to salt.

Seeing Tom with Amanda when he came back to see her became one of the sweetest pleasures that she had ever known. To see her daughter so loved, so cherished, and to see her daughter accept it so easily, so naturally was beyond anything she'd ever seen or imagined. They made her look at Ian as she had never looked at him before. As Tom brought his simple unconditional love to Amanda, she could see, for the first time perhaps, that Ian had been doing the same thing to both of them for as long as they had been together. The pain of her betrayal of him became a bitter after taste to every warm thought she had of him, but she never spoke of it because the pain that Amanda was enduring was so much greater and more important to them all. Her feelings were like a fresh turned furrow that froze hard in the cold of winter. The only time she and Ian had talked about George and her adultery was when they were lying in bed on another long night when they couldn't sleep. She told him softly she was so sorry that she had hurt him. "Me too." was all he replied.

There was nothing else to be said. There was nothing else to be done. Nothing they did to each other, no pain either would ask or inflict on the other would ever obscure the reality that without one another and Amanda they would be absolutely alone and desolate. They were no great heroic and beautiful family, but they were a family, and it was in its worst moments that they discovered how absolute and undeniable that was.

George continued to be a problem. His repeated phone calls and messages were easy to block and Ian quickly took over the task of answering the phone and the messages. He saw George pleading with Laura to forgive him, explaining that he was absolutely desperate when he tried to blame the accident on her. He had no license or insurance because of previous drunk driving convictions and so he felt he had no choice but to do what he had done.

It seemed the police did not believe his story. If it had not been for Laura's blood on the passenger seat there would have been no way to prove that she had not in fact been driving. He was being charged with driving without a license or insurance. The irony was that the one time George did cause someone injury and have an accident was one of the few times that he drove without being over the limit for intoxication. There would be a trial and Laura would have to testify. He again begged her to say that she was driving, to save him from possible jail time.

Ian was disgusted at George's self-centered bathos. He simply copied the incriminating messages and sent them to the police.

Amanda learned about her mother's affair a few days after Tom went home to the farm for the first time since her attack. She had been sitting on the balcony that looked down into the condominium courtyard, the balcony being the one place that Laura could actually exit the walls of her home without going into an absolute panic. She did not recognize the man looking up at her and was shocked when he started to scream her mother's name, echoing against the hard black walls of brick. He was obviously drunk and just kept screaming her mother's name over and over. "Laura!... Laura!" Finally, when Ian heard the sound through the glass and saw Amanda staring over the balcony railing, he came outside and saw George in his staggering, drunken stupidity. He was so far gone that Ian could not even feel any anger towards him. All he felt was a cold pity. When George saw Ian, he stopped shouting.

"Stanley Kowalski, I presume." Ian said, mockingly.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, but I would like speak to Laura, please." George said in a pathetic, drunken voice.

"Go home. Do it now or I'll have the police arrest you." Ian said coldly.

"Who is he?" Amanda asked her father.

The look in his eyes when he turned to her told Amanda everything that she had to know. The pathetic man below was her mother's lover. What George said then as she looked down at him proved it.

"I love her. I honestly love her. I can't help it. I can't help it." he said and then fell down onto the ground and laid back and said Laura's name once more and seemed to pass out.

"He's her lover, isn't he?" Amanda demanded to know.

"No. It doesn't matter." Ian said, evading and admitting the truth at the same time.

It was then that Laura came out onto the balcony and saw what Ian and Amanda were looking at below. When she looked over the balcony she thought that she was going to throw up seeing George lying there looking so pathetic. The look in Amanda's eyes told Laura that her daughter had learned the truth, and for the first time Laura felt totally ashamed.

"I could kill him." Laura said and sounded as if she meant it.

"Where does he live?" Ian asked Laura, "I'll take him home."

Laura told Ian an address.

"This won't happen again." he said as he left them.

He left Laura and Amanda standing silently dealing with shame and disgust.

"Did your father tell you who he was?" Laura asked.

"He didn't have to. What does he see in you?" Amanda asked her mother.

"I don't know. He's got some middle aged fantasy."

"Not him. I can see what he would see in you. What does daddy see in you?"

"I don't know." Laura replied and meant every word of it.

The strange thing was that Amanda didn't seem to be angry. It was sadness and pity for her father's pain that she was feeling. That was why she just stood there beside her mother and waited until Ian came into the court yard and grabbed George by the back of the collar of his leather coat and unceremoniously dragged him away like a heavy, black sack of garbage. George woke up and started to struggle, but his flailing arms and legs could catch hold of nothing. He started to beg Ian to stop and, when they came to the swimming pool that was still undrained after the summer season, Ian dragged George to the edge and let him fall into the water through the crust of ice. George struggled and screamed at the shock of the cold and Ian had to hold on tight with both hands to the leather coat. When he hauled George out the water after a few seconds, George was absolutely sober and shivering in the cold.

"Get up!" Ian told him, and George did as he was told. When it looked like he was going to say something, Ian told him to shut up and listen. He told him his affair with Laura was over. He told him she was not going to save him. She would testify as to his pathetic behavior. "Furthermore I'm prepared to have the ambulance drivers and police officers at the accident scene taped so they can testify to exactly what you did while that boy lay dying in the snow." Ian explained, forcefully.

"And do you know what I'll do with that tape?" he continued," I'll tell you. I'll send it to every member of your staff at school, to every member of your school board. I'll even send it to your students so you'll have to face that every day. I'll send it to every bar that you drink in. And I'm even going to send it to your dear old Mom in Perry Sound. Do you understand me?"

George understood. George understood Ian meant to do exactly as he said.

"And if that doesn't get you out of our lives forever, Laura will sue you for slander for saying she was at the wheel of your car. And win or loose that suit will cost you so much money the only place you'll ever be able to shop again is Goodwill Industries."

Ian had learned George's weaknesses.

"Now I'm going to drive you home and you will never come back here. You will never call or communicate with my wife again. Is that right?"

George finally nodded his head and followed Ian silently to his car.

Ian had learned well the tactics Wayne used so effectively. Everyone had someone before whom they might be shamed. George had lots to be ashamed of, and it had not taken Ian long to find out who those people might be.

It worked. That was the last time that George Marshall ever reached out to Laura directly. From that moment on, his effect would merely be in the old harmonic echoes of Laura's growing sadness.

The twenty minute drive to George's apartment seemed to last forever for both Ian and George. The winner and the loser had nothing to say to one another.

More than anything, Ian felt ashamed that his wife had chosen to betray him for someone so transparent and pathetically needy. George felt ashamed that he lost to someone so obviously lacking in style and sophistication. For him, knowing he was beaten, the only thing left was creating a last line that might pass to her second-hand.

When Ian pulled up in front of George's building he did the most bizarre thing. He offered Ian his hand to shake. Against everything he was feeling and all common sense, Ian took George's hand and shook it like they were concluding some minor business agreement.

"She could have been anything." George said to Ian as he took back his hand. Ian had nothing he could say to that as he watched George open the car door and get out, finally gone from their lives.

It was what happened, not what could have happened, that George would live with forever. He never changed. He never understood that his own motivation was something he would never find in a scene again. That was why he would miss Laura almost constantly. He would make many women listen to his unrequited longing and it destroyed his power over them.

Laura had gone back to work but she was experiencing her own kind of agoraphobia; she just didn't like seeing people anymore. She spent as much of the day as she could in her office avoiding phone calls and commitments. She became the opposite, and her days became the opposite of everything she had ever done before in her life. When she no longer had the priorities of seeing and being seen, shmoozing and shining, her work life became little more than being an appointment secretary. It was a job she quickly came to loathe.

When Anthony Holtz walked through the door of her office she felt guilty and nervous and afraid. Her heart started to beat fast as she got up and hugged him. He sat down in the big modern office chair and Laura retreated behind her desk from where she apologized for not being as accessible as he deserved her to be. He had absolutely no idea of what she had been through, except that she had been in a car accident.

"I like your scars." he said and she could see that he was being sincere.

"All poets love scars." she replied, "It's their stock in trade."

"Giving them and getting them; that pretty well sums us up." he agreed.

With a poet's ability to compress life into one impossible question, he asked her what she would do now that it had all stopped being fun. The question shook her. That was exactly it. It had all stopped being fun. She didn't know or want to explain to him the circumstances that had changed her so much, but his question had gone to the very root of her problem and it almost took her breath away.

"This is all I know how to do." she said to him, honestly.

"Life is a balance between people and things. If one fails you, go to the other. If they both fail you, start over. Is that where you are?"

"You do cut to the chase, the bottom line. I suppose that's where am. But there is no way to start over. You can't just cut your losses when that's all you have. Sometimes you have to live with your losses forever. I don't know what to do."

She sounded so desperate and feeble that Anthony thought she might cry, but Laura was far past crying for herself. She had shed more tears in the past two months than she had in her whole life. There were buckets of tears; her life was pickled in brine. Then Laura told Anthony the short truth that poets love.

"I failed myself. I failed the people I love. The only thing I never seem to fail at is work and now that's just not important. What do I do Anthony?"

"You're just a modern woman. Wake-up and smell the My Sin."

"That's a hideous thing to say." and she meant it. She did not want to believe for an instant that the pit she stood in might be crowded.

"Life is a high school, sweetheart. You get to choose one or two teachers; you get to choose your clique. That's it."

"No wonder nobody reads poetry anymore. You poets are just too damn succinct and depressing." she replied. "So I get a Life Sucks T-shirt and some medication and follow my bliss?" she said mockingly.

"That's one way. Starting over doesn't mean self-destruction or walking away or throwing in the towel. Starting over may be simply learning to pay attention in class."

"What's that supposed mean?"

She honestly didn't know what he was talking about.

"If the big things in your life fail you, maybe you had better start learning to be satisfied with little things. Nobody deserves to be loved. People love you just the same. You're no different. No matter how empty you feel, if you start to pay attention and look at the details in your life, you may find there are exquisite little Persian miniatures lying around in your life that are absolutely priceless. You don't have any idea what I'm talking about do you?"

She shook her head in agreement.

"Get out of this business, dear heart. There are no Persian miniatures here. You're wasting your life on big impressive things that have no shelf life."

Laura stared into Anthony's eyes with a deep affection and sadness. The look was like poetry, the way she sometimes felt after a poem that cut the heart between love's ecstasy and its loss. The look in his eyes was like a Persian miniature.

Ten minutes later Laura was unemployed.

That same day there was a breakthrough with Amanda. Ann Marie had started to come every day to work with her but was having no success in dealing with Amanda's agoraphobia until she noticed that she would often look at her digital watch while they were talking. At first Ann Marie thought the Amanda was just bored with listening to her talk. But even when the talk moved away from Amanda's own problems to Ann Marie's problem with her daughter Megan, the same behavior continued, even though Amanda was obviously very interested and concerned about Megan's dangerous life style.

When Ann Marie asked Amanda why she looked at her watch so often, Amanda confessed the she wasn't even aware that she was doing it, she certainly wasn't going anywhere.

"Let's try something." Ann Marie suggested, "Focus your attention on your watch, don't look up; don't think of anything except the seconds passing, just focus on the numbers that's all, and give me your hand."

Amanda did as she was requested and for two minutes and twenty three seconds they stood beside Amanda's bed until Ann Marie began to lead her out of her room. Amanda knew exactly where they were going and when they arrived at the front door she expected her tears to return, but somehow the numbers passing on her wrist, counting the inexorable flow of time seemed to insulate her from the fear she expected. Even when Ann Marie opened the front door, there was no rush of panic, and so they walked the fourteen seconds down the hall to the elevator and turned around and walked twelve seconds back without so much as a gasp of breath from Amanda. Somehow time was safe where space was not. In time she felt invulnerable where space only held unimaginable terror.

At the apartment door Amanda looked up from the watch into her mother's friend's face and couldn't believe what she had done. "I don't get it. Why wasn't I afraid?"

"Maybe because you were focused on something other than where you were."

"But I knew where I was. I wasn't that focused."

"Whatever it is, it seems to help. Let's try again. You think you can do it without me holding your hand?"

"I don't know." Amanda looked back at the face on her watch and did what she never thought she would be able to do again, she walked to the elevator and back in twenty seconds of simple, mild anxiety. She threw herself into Ann Marie's arms and hugged her. She was truly grateful. But then the terrible question hit home,

"What will happen if I stopped looking at my watch?"

"Let's see. This time when you go to the elevator and turn around, look up and just keep counting the seconds in your mind. Does that make you anxious?"

"I don't think so. If I can see my watch in my mind, it should be just like looking at it on my wrist. Here goes nothing." With somewhat more anxiety, Amanda walked to the elevator counting the seconds in her mind as she watched them pass in liquid crystals, and when she got to the elevator, she took a deep breath and looked up from her watch and counted the seconds one after another. She stood there at the elevator for thirty seven seconds before the elevator door opened behind her and her mother stepped out, shocked to see her daughter standing in front of her.

"Oh my God." Laura gasped.

Hearing her mother's voice behind her broke Amanda's concentration and the sequence of seconds was broken and suddenly she started to breathe very fast and Ann Marie saw it and shouted to her to look at her watch. When she did that, she was suddenly saved.

Laura got off the elevator and Amanda greeted her as she stared intently at her wrist. Once the rhythm of time was again comfortably flowing through her mind, Amanda was able to look up again as she walked with her mother the fifteen seconds it took to get to their door. It was Laura's turn to receive the joyful body of her daughter into her arms. Ann Marie looked at them with envy.

By the time Tom came that weekend, Amanda and her watch were able to go out on the street, the first time holding Ann Marie's hand, and then go shopping with her mother holding hers as she had so many years ago when she was a little girl, all the while the image of seconds passing, gliding over the montage of everyday life. Her greatest success was sitting alone in the condominium foyer for an hour waiting for Tom to arrive. Although they talked every day on the phone, she kept secret her triumph so she could see the look in his eyes when he saw her standing strong and alone. She was not disappointed. He was so intent as he was buzzed through the door that he did not see her. When she whispered his name and he turned and saw her, his whole body looked like a Roman candle of joy had exploded through his eyes. She ran to his arms and he swung her around and he felt her lips on his cheek and his heart soared in the squeal of her laughter. When he put her down and her breath returned to normal and she looked into his eyes, the crystalline seconds she imposed over life were gone, and for the first time since that night, she crawled out of the cold pool of fear. She didn't tell Tom that he was sharing the greatest moment of triumph in her life, all he knew was the depth and passion in her still, blue eyes and the soft force of her embrace and the petal softness of her lips as she kissed him as she had done in what seemed a lifetime before. Her strength made him breathless. When she broke their kiss and stood in front of him and looked in his eyes she put his hand on her chest and it was pounding like it was ready to burst. The joy he felt, feeling his fingers all but enclosing her heart, was so intense that his eyes lost the ability to hold their focus and it was in that love's blindness that he took his hand away from her heart and placed her own on his chest and she could feel his heart slamming against it like a hard ball hitting hard leather. That was the moment that both of them knew the strength of their feeling for each other was indivisible and would last in whatever way that forever would allow them.

"Let's go for a walk." Amanda finally said to him when the sweet pleasure she was feeling started to throb inside her. She tried to contain the enormity and power of the love that she had barely been able to feel moving while she was in the frozen grip of the horror that she had endured. Both of them would always remember that moment and the long seam of pain running through perfect joy.

In the week before Christmas, Laura and Amanda were alone together for the first time since Amanda was a baby. Unlike their usual routine when they were at home, Amanda in her room, Laura in her office, they actually spent time together in the same rooms. It was strange for both of them to have Laura reading and Amanda listening intently to music in the living room. After the first day together, Laura was surprised when Amanda asked her if she could help while her mother made dinner, and both of them were pleasantly surprised that they could work together and enjoy the task at hand. When Ian came home that evening and they all sat down to dinner, he could see the pride in his daughter's face as he complemented Laura on the food.

When Laura explained that almost all of the dinner had been prepared by Amanda, he was delighted. Usually it was Ian who came home early from work and put together a quick meal for whoever was there. To come home to dinner like a traditional father was a pleasure he never expected to experience, but he didn't think it was appropriate to say so because of the terrible circumstances that brought it to be. The best thing was the unimaginable sweetness of sitting at a dinner table with his family at peace with one another, so many breaking waves of pain having lifted them to a calm, gentle shore.

The next morning as Laura was going out to her early morning aerobics class, she asked Amanda if she wanted to come along and was completely surprised that she eagerly leaped up to join her. It was only a moment before she came back with a pair of cut off jeans, a tank top and a pair of runners.

At the health club, Amanda quickly found out that her mother was in much better shape than she was as she tried to keep up, but Laura taught her to pace herself, to slow down and just stretch in rhythm when her breathing started to rip at her lungs. Watching her daughter's lithe young woman's body moving in front of her was bittersweet for Laura. She looked so lovely but it seemed so strange to see her there, a part of her own middle-class world. After the exercise and shower, Laura asked Amanda if they should treat themselves to a massage.

"Is it a man or women?" Amanda asked, nervously.

Laura realized that it wasn't shyness but fear that made Amanda ask the question. The thought of a strange man's hands touching her daughter even gave Laura a chill.

"We can ask for a masseuse. It wouldn't be a man."

She lied and told Amanda she preferred a masseuse herself.

After the massage, Amanda asked her mother if she could have her hair cut and styled for Christmas. Of course Laura was delighted, and when her hair was cut and dried, they were thrilled. She didn't look like a girl. She looked like a woman, a beautiful woman.

"You're stunning," Laura said honestly.

"Thanks for the genes." Amanda replied, self-consciously.

Late in the morning, mother and daughter walked out onto the street glowing, warm and as light as feather down throws.

They stopped at a grocery store on the way home after Amanda said she wanted to cook dinner again that night, and the simple pleasure of following a shopping cart being pushed by her teenage daughter filled Laura's heart.

Where she had expected to crash after the shock of quitting her job and having no place to go and nothing to do, Laura was completely amazed that instead of being bored and uncomfortable she and Amanda were neither. All the repressed anger and resentment that had grown between them for years seemed to have vanished like morning mist. Laura could not understand that Amanda seemed to have even forgiven her for betraying Ian. She expected her daughter's cold wrath to hit her like a breaker, but Amanda didn't say or do anything to exploit the shame or guilt she was feeling.

The worst thing about the week was the excruciatingly difficult task all women face during holidays, what to buy for their men. For Amanda it felt almost crucial to her to find something for Tom that represented the love and gratitude she felt for all he had done for her, and also for what he was as a person. When she told Laura this was what she would like her Christmas present to do, Laura laughed out loud at the impossibility of finding such a thing.

"What a coincidence, that's exactly what I'm looking to find for your father." Laura said teasingly, but Amanda didn't take it as a joke.

"Well, I'm glad."

For the first time in their lives both of them had serious shopping to do. It was agonizingly difficult and it was the closest the two of them had ever felt in their lives.

Laura was also charged with finding presents for Amanda because her birthday fell on the day of Christmas Eve. The thousand dollars in cash in a card was something she and Ian agreed would never happened again. So, as they shopped for their men, Laura was secretly looking for something that would tell Amanda how much she and Ian loved her, and how proud they were of her strength and courage.

That simple presents could mean so much had never crossed either of their minds before. The difficulty of expressing love and gratitude had never hit them with such force because they had never before felt the need to express the depth of the emotions they were feeling.

It was the day before Amanda's birthday that Laura thought of the perfect present for Amanda to give to Tom, a compact disc of Amanda singing her favorite songs.

"Oh my God, that would be perfect, that would be so perfect!" Amanda shrieked. "But how would I do it?"

"If you can pick the songs, I know a little jazz group, a piano, drums and guitar. I know this studio where we can get it done, if we are really, really lucky." Laura explained matter-of- factly. For the first time in her life her daughter was truly impressed by her mother's connections.

That afternoon was, once again, one of the most wonderful experiences the two them had ever shared. Just like a professional, Amanda sang with the little trio and laid down a dozen songs that Amanda knew by heart, songs she learned since she had met Tom. When I Fall In Love was the first cut and Bridge Over Troubled Water was the last, and even the band was impressed at Amanda's power and range. When she sang Running on Empty by Jackson Browne, the lyrics cut through Laura like a knife. 'Running on empty, running blind/ running into the sun/because I'm running behind', had pretty much been Laura's life. I'm running behind, in fact, had been one of Laura's most common expressions. Laura knew that Amanda had included the song for her, to remind her of whom she had been. She took the cut of intended irony as well as she could as Amanda and the little band rocked out the rhythm of the road. She had been running on empty for so long that it took her life collapsing before Laura realized it was inevitable that she was going to spin out or stall completely. The boy was dead from her spin, the rest of her life had stalled. When Amanda sang the song 'Laura' it was not the misty memory of an old forgotten lover, it became the song of a daughter singing to her mother, remembering footsteps down a hall, remembering a laugh floating on a summer night. Laura knew Amanda was singing about her childhood. When Amanda got to the last lines of the song and sang of the familiar eyes and the very first kiss she received in her life, a kiss she couldn't quite recall, Laura remembered the first time she looked into Amanda's eyes and kissed her baby's red face and her heart fell with the deep, poignant weight of their love for one another that had begun seventeen years ago to that day. And when Amanda sang the last line of the song Laura felt a seam of heart ache throb inside her.' That was Laura. But she's only a dream'. Amanda sang the last line looking through the glass window into the control room, holding on to her mother's eyes. Laura didn't miss the heart- rending irony of the change of tense. It felt like the person that she had been had become a walking dream from the moment George's car struck the young boy. The change of tense said that she hadn't really changed.

On the way home from the studio they didn't speak for a long time until finally Laura asked Amanda if she might want to give her father a copy of her CD.

Amanda was delighted with the idea, then had second thoughts that it would make her gift to Tom less special, but she resolved her own doubts when she realized that Tom would think better of her for including her father in her gift. Laura then told Amanda that she could probably get a record company executive to listen to her CD if she wanted her to do that.

"You really have a spectacular talent." her mother said, honestly.

Amanda was proud and touched that her mother thought that she was talented but also felt the thought of traveling and being somebody who depended on people's attention and approval was horrible.

"I love singing. But I never want to be a singer."

"I can't say that I'm not relieved. It's a terrible life. You might end up with someone like me making all your decisions. Again."

"Good point." Amanda said laughing.

It was Amanda who suggested the present that Laura would purchase for Ian's Christmas gift. The suggestion came as a question.

"Why don't you and Dad wear wedding rings?"

Laura gave the response she used for so many years. "It was feminist fervor. I thought a woman needed a wedding ring as much as a fish needed a bell on her bicycle." Amanda had never heard the line before and obviously didn't understand.

"Maybe it's time. You don't think that he would find it too ironic? "Laura added doubtfully.

"You mean because you were sleeping with someone else?"

"Yes. That's just what I mean."

"Daddy is too sweet to think like that."

"You're probably right."

"You could put an inscription inside." Amanda added.

"But what would I say?" Laura liked the idea of the rings but felt panicked and overwhelmed by the idea of turning her feelings into a few sentimental words. She tried to pass the task to Amanda who instantly refused.

"They should be your feelings, not mine."

Laura said she would think about it on the way to the jewelry store, but when they got to the best little jewelry store Laura knew, she still wasn't able to find a few words to sum up a marriage, her marriage.

What made matters even more difficult was the fact that she didn't really like any of the rings she saw on the trays that were presented to her. It was always hard for her to compromise her sense of taste and style, and to do it with her wedding ring seemed almost a sacrilege. Amanda could see her mother's discomfort and reluctance to make a choice. She could also see the salesperson getting nervous that she wasn't closing the sale. Finally when the saleswoman asked Laura her image of a wedding ring and Laura told her, "Simple, wide and flat." The light went on and the saleswoman led her to a display case of estate jewelry and Laura saw the exact pair of rings that she had in mind, 'simple, wide and flat.'

"I'll take those." Laura said decisively. As the saleswoman handed them to her to inspect and Laura passed them to Amanda, they were both actually excited.

Looking carefully, Amanda pointed out that there weren't any inscriptions inside and there was a great deal of room to say anything her mother chose to say.

When the saleswoman said that it would be unlikely they could do an inscription that day, Laura was shocked when Amanda said that they would just have to go somewhere else.

After a few minutes, the saleswoman returned with the news the inscriptions could be done, but they would have to come back later in the day. Then came the big decision.

"What would you like the inscriptions to say?" the saleswoman asked, matter-of-factly.

"My Ian. Your Laura. "Laura replied simply.

"That's it?" Amanda said, trying to hide her disappointment. "Maybe you could add a forever or something?"

"No. 'My Ian, so true.' 'My Laura, in truth.' How's that?" Laura asked Amanda, and the look in their eyes had the warmth and intimacy of old friends.

While they were waiting for the bill and the credit card check, Laura saw Amanda's Christmas present lying in the case that had held her rings. It was a lovely gold necklace of large single links holding a pendent of a beautiful Phoenix rising from blue lapis lazuli flames. Amanda was surprised when her mother left her to speak to the saleswoman who had gone to the back of the store, telling Amanda she was going to check that the punctuation was right.

When they came back at the end of the day, the saleswoman discretely slipped the little wrapped jewel box that held the Phoenix into Laura's hand.

The day of Christmas Eve was going to be so different for the McCalls. Ian had usually prepared a dinner for Amanda before he and Laura would go to a Christmas Eve party, leaving Amanda either alone or with a sitter when she was young. Finding a sitter had always been one of the most difficult problems of the Christmas holidays. Before they went out, they would give Amanda her present. The thousand dollars she got in the past two years, always seemed to be received with significant enthusiasm so the guilt they felt at leaving her was more than assuaged. This year was going to be radically different with all three of them home and staying in for the night. Tom was invited and was coming for dinner and Amanda had insisted that they prepare a traditional dinner so the three them were geared up to produce a Turkey and all the trimmings.

Amanda could hardly sleep because she was so excited at the thought of having so much love actually gathered in the walls of her home. She thought about the feeble traditions that her family had to show their feelings for each other, and remembered the wall of photographs in the dining room at the farm and envied all the pictures of all the birthdays and all the Christmases. And then she had a tremendous idea that barely let her sleep for the rest of the night.

When Laura got up the next morning and came out to the kitchen for coffee, she was seized by her daughter, who was trembling in the excitement of her wonderful idea.

"I've got the greatest idea for a present for Dad. What is it he loves more than anything in the world?" Amanda asked breathlessly.

"That would be you." Laura replied honestly.

"And that would also be you." Amanda added, and her mother didn't want to disagree.

"I want to make this pedestal all covered with pictures of just me and just you and just me and you. What do you think? If we got your good camera we could go out until noon and go to the one-hour developing and bring everything back here and I could do all the gluing in my room."

"But we're supposed to help your father cook dinner." Laura protested, but when Amanda insisted they could do that in the afternoon, Laura didn't dare spoil her daughter's fun. That was why all Ian saw of them that morning was when they were going out the door loaded down with the tripod and camera equipment.

Finding the pedestal was easy. Laura told Amanda she would never have had the nerve to make fun of the fact that Ian put them both on pedestals.

"You like it up there?" Laura asked, and was surprised at the answer.

"Of course I do, just like you."

"I do. It's true."

With the pedestal in the back of the BMW, Laura let Amanda lead her through the agenda of her imagination. The first stop was Allen Gardens and all the flowers and orchids and big leaved palms that made Christmas into a jungle. Passing the camera between them, posing and preening and using the tripod so they could use the remote on the camera to capture both of them mugging shamelessly before the little black box was infectiously delightful. They were doing the one thing that would truly delight and touch Ian, they were actually enjoying being together, being foolish together, being affectionate with one another, unashamedly loving each other.

When they moved to the street amid the bustle of bodies doing last-minute shopping and set up the tripod so it separated the stream of people on the street, Amanda took a photo of both of them they would treasurer forever. Amanda was singing Born to Be Wild as they were doing exaggerated modern dance steps around one another as the remote control froze images of their comic grace. Amanda suddenly put her arm around her mother and kissed her squarely on the cheek as hard as she could press her lips. The camera captured the delight and shock on Laura's face with Amanda's nose and lips mashed into it.

The sign wave of life had been so compressed and extreme for the McCalls. They had gone from the best moments and feelings to the worst moments and feelings they could imagine, and there they were so far above the line of mediocrity, relishing every moment, delighting in every experience, savoring the beauty of every ordinary instant they shared with one another. If someone had told any of them a week before that this would be the most wonderful Christmas of their lives, not one of the McCalls could have conceived that it would have been possible. But it was more than possible. It was a living, breathing undeniably beautiful fact of life.

While they waited the hour for the films to develop, they sat in a busy coffee shop and talked like old friends. One ordinary moment in life could be better and better than the ordinary moments that came before. Amanda asked her mother why she had quit her job.

"Because it wasn't fun anymore. Maybe because fun was all it was ever going to be. Maybe it's because I spoiled everything else in my life so that I could do my job well. Maybe because I got tired of feeding a whole lot of insatiable egos, especially my own."

"Wow!.....Wow!" Laura's confession left Amanda with nothing to say. That was the moment she understood how desperate her mother must be feeling. She had always sacrificed family for work and now she was sacrificing work for her family. Outside of work, Amanda couldn't imagine her mother's future, and she realized Laura probably couldn't either. It scared her.

Finally she thought of telling her mother her own feelings about her future. She told her mother that she hated the idea of going back to school because she just knew how different she was, how she could never again see her school or her friends as being anything really important to her. "Every moment of life should feel precious. I'm just going to be putting in time. I think that me and Tom will eventually get married. Tom is a serious, committed person and I think he's made me into somebody like that too. I don't want you to be scared that we're going to run away and get married. We haven't even really talked about getting married, but I know that we love each other and I'll never find a better man in this world than Tom. It's just that I can see where I'm going in life and it's probably going to be with Tom. This last week I feel like a woman." Amanda saw the deadly serious look of fear in her mother's eyes.

"But today, it's your seventeenth birthday. There's so much time." Laura said anxiously.

"I know that. I'm not in a hurry to make some dream come true. I can just see where the path begins."

"I should be upset. I should be upset by what you're saying, but you're right to think you are a woman now. I have to respect that. What you've been through has earned you that. I'm sorry you're just going to have to put in time at school."

"That's okay. It's only another year after this one. I wish that school was like it was on the farm. That would be incredible. That would be a real education."

"You're probably right, but that's just home school for their own family." Laura said sympathetically. She was almost sorry that the Van Fleet's didn't run a private school. It would've been a school she could have sent Amanda without a sliver of guilt.

The smell of the Christmas turkey cooking filled every room as Amanda worked on her present for her father in her room. When she emerged and included it under the tree, it was wrapped in great mounds of tissue paper and wide ribbon running diagonally so it looked like a lumpy barber pole. It was the only large present under the tree. It looked like they were having the sparest of Christmases when it was absolutely the opposite.

Making salads and baking a cake for the first time in her life was nerve racking fun for Amanda. When Tom arrived at half past five, everything was ready except the icing on the cake. He watched as Amanda learned to do it. She even balanced the slightly lopsided cake with the thick chocolate icing. He was happy and impressed.

The rest of Christmas Eve was almost like it was for young children, it was the opposite of twilight, it was the thick half light that touched everything just before the sun rose in the morning with the soft colors that slowly gathered the world for the day. Christmas Eve was like a new morning and they all felt it. The Christmas Carols they played for the first time in years were lovely. Tom and Amanda sang 'Oh Holy Night' with Nat King Cole and, after the horror that they all survived, their souls did feel their worth.

Ann Marie had come about a half an hour after Tom and rather than feel uncomfortable and outside of the family gathering, she felt safe and included and treasured for what she'd done to help Amanda get through a nightmare.

Ian offered Tom a drink when they all left the kitchen after admiring the dinner preparations, but he told them that the Van Fleets only drank with meals and so he would wait for dinner. Ian was going to offer Amanda a drink, but he saw the look in her eyes that said she would have preferred that he didn't put the question to her.

She had a special agenda that couldn't wait. The presents under the tree had grown with the ones that Ann Marie and Tom had brought.

"I can't stand it. When do we do presents?" Amanda asked, excitedly.

"I don't see why we can't do them now." Ian replied. "Why don't you be Santa, Amanda."

"Great." she replied and went to the tree.

Ann Marie opened the first present and it was a beautiful Hermes scarf Amanda and her mother had picked when they were shopping together.

Ann Marie asked that her presents be next and Ian opened the present for him and Laura and made a big fuss over the wonderful bottle of French champagne. Then Amanda opened the gift that Ann Marie had brought for her and she screamed when she saw the beautiful gold digital watch, and when she read the inscription on the back she was truly touched. 'For Amanda, hold on to every second. Love Ann Marie'. Amanda kissed her and hugged her.

Ian suggested that she and Tom exchange presents but Amanda asked if it would be alright if they waited until the end, because it was complicated. She suggested that he open her present to him from her and her mother, and she brought the heavy pedestal and sat it in front of him where he worked at getting the ribbons and tissue away from each other. As he worked, he kept making ridiculous guesses about what he would find, like an outboard motor or a lifetime supply of ties or underwear. When he saw what it was his eyes lit up the way they never had for a present.

"A pedestal for my girls, from my girls, how appropriate. Look at these pictures. Where did you do this?"

Amanda explained their morning mission and her last-minute inspiration.

"There's not much room on top of this. You may have to fight to take turns." he teased.

"I think we're tired of that." said Laura, "Been there, done that."

Everyone laughed as Ian sat the pedestal in the middle of the coffee table for them all to admire. It took some time before everyone stopped looking at the photos and commenting and laughing.

"Now it's my turn." Ian said, "Here's something for you and your mother to share" He handed Amanda an envelope. Amanda opened the envelope and found a child's Christmas card that opened with a pop up pony. Inside was a gift certificate to a riding stable north of the city.

"I thought it might give you time to do some of that awful female bonding, talking about hormones and diets and what men are really like." Ian said mischievously.

"That's the last thing we'd want to talk about. But what a lovely idea." Laura replied.

She took Ian's hand and kissed him and Amanda came and sat in his lap and gave him a smooch before she went back to the tree for more presents. It was then that she saw the little box with the card and her name. Ian suggested that she open it next and when she did and it was the beautiful gold Phoenix she seemed delighted. When she showed it to Tom and he fastened the clasp at the back of her neck, he said the idea of the Phoenix was perfect. Amanda asked him why it was called a Phoenix. Tom explained the myth of the bird that was reborn from its own ashes and, as the idea sank into her mind, Amanda realized that she was like the Phoenix. Only a little while before, she had been nothing but cold ashes. She kissed her mother and her father and whispered a thank you. "It's the best present I ever had."

Amanda couldn't stand it. She had to know what was inside the six foot long tube Tom had brought for her. She guessed it was a painting. She was wrong.

"Seeing as it's all about me, maybe I can open this one now." she asked as she examined the long tube.

Laura said she was dying to see what it was. Ian said it looked like curtain rods.

Amanda read the handmade card that said simply, 'So strong and so beautiful. My love, Tom.'

Ann Marie asked if Amanda would be embarrassed to read the card out loud and, when she read it, she realized the two meanings that could be found in the words. It said she was so strong and beautiful. It could also mean that his love was so strong and beautiful. The instant she realized the second meaning she blushed. Then she opened the present from the one end, sliding a long carved wooden object out into her hands. It was a long harpoon carved from Walnut, with many gray whales with their long fluke's trailing up the length of the shaft. At the end a beautiful purple clamshell was lashed as the tip. Amanda explained that Tom's ancestors had hunted whales with such a harpoon.

"I've been working on it for a long time." Tom explained, "It's a whaling harpoon. Even though it's not the same wood, and it's not carved in the same tradition, it's my own symbol of courage. I made it for my father because I never thought I would ever know anyone who had more courage than he has shown until......"

Amanda cut him off. "Don't." She couldn't bear to have him say the words. She ran to him, still holding the harpoon, and put her arms around him and kissed him and fought back the tears.

Everyone was misty watching. When Amanda pulled away she was absolutely speechless, staring into Tom's beautiful eyes.

"There's a present there for your mom." Tom said to Amanda and everyone was surprised when Amanda went to the tree and picked up the present Tom had indicated. He explained that it was from his father. Amanda gave her mother the present and when she opened it, Tom gasped when he saw what it was. Laura opened the old shoebox and inside were all the blue tissue air mail letters of Arthur and Laura Lee. Even Ann Marie realized what they were from Laura's description of them. Everyone in the room was struck in stunned silence.

"I can't accept these. They belong to your family."

Tom couldn't say anything. He was staring at Laura's hands touching the letters. The only hands that he had ever seen touch them before were his father's. It was then that Tom realized how much his father had loved her, perhaps still loved her. It felt like it did when he had once fallen on the handle bar of his bicycle. He was shocked, and a part of him was absolutely outraged. He had to force himself to be gracious.

"If my dad wanted you to have those letters, then that's where they belong." Tom's mind reeled with the implications of what had just happened. Did his mother know? Did his brothers and sisters know? How would they find out? If they didn't know, should he tell them? Inside the box Laura found a computer generated letter from Eugene saying they were hers, and she should use the letters just as she saw fit, but that he would appreciate it if she returned a copy of then to Sharon, sometime after his death. Laura told Tom his father's instructions and said she would be more than willing to do that, but I'm the one who should have the copies. "These belong with your family." Laura said softly.

To say Tom was relieved would have been an enormous understatement. Laura put the box on the table in front of her and said that she would still have to talk to Sharon and Eugene about what she would do with them. At least Tom's questions were answered. He felt a great rush of relief.

Laura asked Amanda, who was standing in shock staring at the letters, to get Laura's own present for Ian. Amanda went and got the little box from the bough of the tree and Ian read the card. It said, ' I hope it's not too little or too late,' Ian refused to read the card when Ann Marie asked. When he opened the box and saw the two gold bands he looked very much the same way that Tom had looked when he saw the shoebox of letters. He was perfectly stunned in surprise.

"Read the inscriptions." Amanda told him excitedly.

He read them to himself and then read them to everyone, and for the first time in her life Laura knew what it was like to have a room full of people touched by something she did that was warm and loving and tender. When Ian kissed her and told her it was the second best present he had ever received in his life and that she had given him the first one as well, Laura said that he was absolutely right.

"I'm sorry it was so long between them." she said, and she looked up and saw Amanda crying and looked over and saw her friend crying and looked and saw Tom crying and she said to Ian that his were the only dry eyes in the house and he really wasn't getting into the spirit of the moment.

"I was just thinking that my pedestal came a close third on my list of great presents."

Laura took the ring and put it on his finger and then he took hers and slid it in place on her hand and they kissed again and both of them remembered the kiss when they had married in the registry office. This one was beautiful. It had been a long time coming.

Laura snuggled under Ian's arm and asked Amanda if she hadn't forgotten Tom's present. She would never have believed it was possible, but that was exactly what had happened. Amanda squealed from the realization and took the little package from the tree and gave it to Tom as she squeezed into the seat beside him. He opened the card and read out loud,' To Tom, my Walnut Wood.' All my love, Amanda.

Tom opened the gift and saw the handmade cover for the CD and saw the list of songs and he thanked her and kissed her and told everyone that they were some of his favorites. He hadn't realized the voice that would be singing them was Amanda's as she snatched it from his hands and put it on the CD player. Laura was the only one who knew or realized what they were about to hear as Amanda's voice came on and filled the room and everyone erupted in delight and surprise.

For the next half-hour they all sat and listened to Amanda's beautiful voice. When they got to where Amanda sang' Laura', her mother watched and was quietly self-conscious as everyone listened to the lyrics, listened to a daughter sing to her beautiful, distant mother. Sometimes, in dreams, Laura knew she could be beautiful and almost feel that it was real.

Finally, as the last lines of Bridge of over Troubled Waters faded with the last chords of the piano, everyone burst out in spontaneous applause. Ian asked delicately whether he might have a copy, and when Amanda told him that she thought that Tom wouldn't mind sharing his present Tom heartily agreed. Ann Marie said that she would love one too and Tom volunteered that such a thing could be arranged as his family had a CD burner.

Ann Marie said that Amanda had an incredible gift that she should share. "You have to send that CD to a record company." she urged.

Ian agreed and said that Amanda was as good as any professional singer. He asked about when and how she had done the CD, and then Amanda sat up and told the whole exciting story.

Finally when the story was over and Ann Marie asked to hear the CD again, Ian said that there was one little thing left to do.

"Today is someone's 17th birthday and there's just a little something we have to do yet." Ian explained. Tom said he was outraged that Amanda didn't tell him it was her birthday. When she said it wasn't important, he told her she was dead wrong.

Ian got up and went to the mantle of the fireplace and took an envelope from under a black raku bowl and gave the card to Amanda.

Somehow the thousand dollars that she expected would be inside the card felt strangely out of place. After all the perfect presents, the cash that she used to just love seemed to be so impersonal. She thanked her father and mother and opened the card and it was another pop up pony. She read the card that said she was the bravest, most beautiful, most intelligent, most perceptive, most understanding, most sensitive, most tender, most precious, most talented, most under-appreciated daughter in the world. Ian's sense of fun and irony made everyone laugh. It also made Ann Marie's heart ache in envy.

Then Amanda read the P.S. on the card telling her to look in the drawer of the hall table. There was no thousands dollars in the card, and as Amanda went to the table, she was both nervous and curious about what she would find. Inside the table was a wrapped birthday present that she brought back into the living room. When she opened it, she lifted out a chrome and leather bridle for a horse. Ian then did his game show announcer voice telling Amanda that the bridle was for her brand new pony. "Amanda your birthday present is a brand new pony!"

Amanda was stunned. "A pony? You bought me a pony."

"It's not exactly a pony. Your mother and I thought you might like to pick out a horse that would be your own when you went riding together." Ian explained.

"Get out!" My own horse! Tommy, I get to have my own horse!" She kissed her mother and threw herself once more into her father's lap telling them that this was the best Christmas she could've ever imagined.

"God, how do you go shopping for a horse?" she asked as she extricated herself from her father's lap.

"Tom tells me there's a place called Studs Are Us." Ian said, and Tom heatedly denied ever saying such a thing.

By the time they finally sat down to eat, everything had to be re-heated in the microwave oven. The roast turkey and raisin stuffing, the honey glazed yams, the scalloped potatoes, the cranberry sauce and the asparagus in vinaigrette. It was all there, the holiday feast the McCalls had never prepared for themselves, for their little family of three. To Tom it was all only too familiar, and it was from some considerable experience that he praised each dish. Amanda was proud and happy.

"I never knew that cooking could make so many dirty dishes." she said, "The kitchen in a restaurant at the end of the night must have a mountain of dishes to wash."

Tom offered to do them with Amanda and Laura said it wouldn't be necessary because the dishwasher would make quick work of them all.

"My mom won't let us have a dishwasher because she says that only washing and drying dishes makes people appreciate how hard the people who made the food had to work."

"Your mother sounds like she has high expectations of all of you." Ann Marie replied.

"She always says the best thing she could give her children was to learn to love working hard." Tom replied, and it was obvious from his tone that he believed that she had passed the gift to him.

Every other person at the dining table felt ashamed and guilty. That was a gift neither Amanda or Megan or their parents had even imagined as a gift. It was Tom's comment that made Ann Marie say how much she missed her daughter and how she wished that Megan was there to share the most beautiful Christmas that she ever remembered in her life.

"I was going to talk to you about this later." Ian said to Ann Marie, "I've talked to Tom's brother Wayne about Megan and he said he had some very close friends in Vancouver, and that he might make some inquiries about her. He says that he has a friend who has had some success intervening with young runaway boys. I was going to ask if you might think it was all right if Wayne asked his friend to help."

"All right! Of course it would be all right. I've tried myself to contact agencies out there but there was absolutely no one who would pay any attention to me. If I only had some idea that she was all right."

Everyone could see the look of fear suddenly give way to the sound of hope.

Ann Marie told them all everything she knew from the detective agency and said that she planned to go to Vancouver in a last desperate attempt to get her daughter to come home.

"The worst thing is the knowledge, as a professional, that I'm the very last person for whom she will leave the street. The mother-daughter ways of rage is usually impossible to overcome without something or someone coming between them." Ann Marie explained sadly.

"Wayne agrees with you. He said his friend has had some success doing just that. At least it would be good if he can get her to communicate with you again."

"That would be an absolutely tremendous start. Then I'd have some hope. I could hear her voice again. I'm scared to death that I will never hear her voice again." she replied.

So the joy spread as Ann Marie pumped Ian and Tom for everything they knew about Wayne's friend, and what he did, and how he intervened, and how much success he had. The fact that it was runaway boys working in the sex trade made no difference to her exploding hope.

After dinner, Amanda insisted that she clear the table because everyone had been so wonderful and generous to her and made her realize how important and beautiful her little family, was underneath it all. The underneath it all stung a little bit, but Laura and Ian were just too happy to let it get in the way of their happiness. They knew Amanda wasn't trying to hurt them when she said it.

Tom helped Amanda clear the dishes and stack them in the dishwasher and when they came back in the living room Ann Marie was still going on about the idea of rescuing Megan.

"You know what I would like to do now?" Amanda said enthusiastically, "I'd like to go out and sing Christmas carols on the street."

No one seemed to be enthusiastic at all.

"We might recover a little of the money we spent on Christmas presents this year." said Ian.

"It's hard to sing in front of high-rise buildings." Laura said, "Why don't we just sing here, with each other?"

"We could sing on the balcony." Amanda added and she led them all out into the cold night air where they gathered at the rail and Amanda led them in song. They sang Christmas carols together into the courtyard of the condominium and, after they had been singing for about twenty minutes, they noticed that people had come out onto their own balconies and were listening to them, and then some of the people actually joined them, and Laura and Ian were proud as Amanda's voice rose over everyone's and made the singing so sweet. Ann Marie between Ian and Laura, Laura holding Amanda's hand on the other side of Tom, they sang together until they had to go in from the cold. Applause, like a playing card pinned to bicycle spokes, exploded in the echoing courtyard when they stopped.

It was about ten thirty when the phone rang and Laura answered, and it was Sharon calling to wish each of them a Merry Christmas. When she spoke to Amanda she asked her if she might be able to convince her parents to join them for Christmas the next morning. Amanda exploded in joy at the idea because she had been hoping that Tom would ask her to come to the farm for Christmas. Strangely, the idea of her parents coming along with them somehow made it even better. Her family was starting to feel like it had an extended family and Sharon made it clear that that was exactly what she felt too.

It didn't take Amanda but a moment and her pleading beautiful eyes to convince her parents that they were invited to come and would really be welcome. Then Amanda was very bold.

"Our friend Ann Marie is here. Do you think it would be all right if she came with us. I'm sure that you would love to meet her." Amanda asked gently. She listened to Sharon's reply and then told Ann Marie that Sharon wanted to talk to her.

Her protesting gestures gave way at last as Amanda held out the phone as Sharon waited. She took the phone and felt the force of Sharon's personality for the first time. Sharon told her how Tom had described Amanda's gratitude and appreciation for how she had helped her. She explained how terrified and helpless Tom had been. Sharon told Ann Marie how much she admired her professional skill and she would be very disappointed if she didn't get to meet her. She told her that Christmas day on the farm was a sea of bodies but she would very much like to spend some time with her. She asked Ann Marie to do it as a favor to her and Amanda. She said that Tom would also feel that her coming to the farm was a very small way of showing his gratitude for what she had done for Amanda.

The rest of the night was as warm as a summer sun rising high above the horizon. It flooded each of their bodies as they sat and talked and listened once more to Amanda singing on the CD.

When they finally went to bed, Ann Marie to the pullout studio couch in Laura's office, Tom to the bed Amanda made for him on the living room sofa, because his place on the sleeping bag beside Amanda's bed hadn't been appropriate since she had come back from the abyss.

In their beds Laura and Ian cuddled and kissed and sweetly and quietly made love.

Amanda could barely sleep the whole night. She was aching, feeling her heart was too small to hold all the feelings inside it.

Ann Marie had a short little cry thinking about where Megan was that moment, but hope was far stronger than pain and she started to dream of what it would be like when she saw her daughter again.

Tom lay awake on the couch and thought about what it would be like to go to Amanda's room and crawl into bed with her and touch her and he wondered how she would respond. From the moment in the foyer of her condominium when he felt their hearts married like ropes, the sexual longing inside him just grew stronger and stronger with every moment. The sweet shock of seeing her with her hair cut like a woman, her face proud like a woman was an indelible, pure desire.

In the morning Amanda and Tom were already up when the others came from their sleep. Amanda had watched Tom prepare breakfast and she was amazed at how fast and efficient he was in the kitchen. Before everyone got up, he had touched her neck while she was scrambling eggs and she had turned around and he saw, for the first time since the terrible night, a mist of desire clouding her eyes. When they kissed, it was warm, wet flower petals giving, and the press of their long, lovely bodies, soft and hard, burning into their minds.

It was Amanda pressing that made everyone get through breakfast very quickly, and she made it clear she hoped everyone would shower and dress, post haste, because she didn't want to miss anything at the farm. It was an agonizing hour and half before they were all in cars and on the way out of the city, Amanda in Tom's red Volvo, Ian and Laura and Ann Marie in the quiet Lexus.

Before Tom and Amanda had headed out of town she had asked him to drive by her friend Kara's house. Amanda had a hand written gift certificate for a hundred dollars to their favorite boutique Tu Cool Bi Half.

Since the terrible night Kara had been very cold to Amanda. The Christmas present was to be a peace offering.

It only made Kara's cold resentment of her friend worse.

She took the card but didn't open it.

"You caused me a lot of hassles since you got raped. People think I was a rat. I'm not a rat. You and me are from different worlds. I don't need you and your rich farmer boyfriend."

Amanda was stunned.

"You don't know a friend when you see one." Tom said to Kara.

Kara told him she knew a red skin when she saw one.

Amanda felt the same rage she did when Stacey Peak had accidentally slapped her face.

"I feel sorry for you. You make your own life suck, just like I did." Amanda told her, then took Tom's hand and led him back to the car.

"Merry Christmas, you dumb cunt." Kara shouted from her door.

### Chapter 10

That Christmas at the farm was like a blown glass decoration rolling unsteadily between the opposite edges of a table, between joy and sadness, celebration and loss. It was almost certainly the last holiday that the Van Fleet family would share with their father. The simple traditions and decorations, the food and the presents and the music were all informed with the clear light of finality. Death had its hand on everyone's shoulder, taking each member of the family aside as they reached for a husband, a father and a grandfather that they loved. For some, the hand of death moved their heart's balance to joy and celebration, for others the balance moved to the weight of sadness and loss.

Christmas morning was the great gathering. Son Jonas, the Christian monk, had come days early from the West, but all the other grown members of the Van Fleet family came late on Christmas morning, having had their own family's Christmas with their own children and their own particular traditions. Lucy had gone very early in the morning to pick up Christa at the private psychiatric hospital and everyone was relieved that she was in a calm place between the ecstasy and anguish they had all come to fear. Some of the birth parents of the Van Fleet children came on Christmas day, responding to the invitation they received for every family holiday gathering. Usually it was only on Christmas that birth parents came to the farm, yet even that wasn't a common occurrence, and there was an underlying tension and sadness that came with them that no gracious welcome ever seemed to relieve. The great farm and the enormous happy mixed family seemed to overwhelm the small birth families that came to visit. It seemed difficult for them because they were lifted and carried away by the momentum of the family traditions and celebrations. It was also difficult to face the fact that they seemed to have actually done their children an incredible favor by giving them up, Eugene and Sharon had done so much better by their children than they could have possibly hoped to do. At least that seemed to be the common, unspoken feeling.

Muffins and milk and tea and coffee were the traditional light morning breakfast before the gathering in the coffee house where presents were exchanged. The Van Fleets had, in fact, almost completely removed the commercial aspect of Christmas gifts. Presents were exchanged only between Eugene and Sharon and they with each of their children. The only exception was the gifts that were exchanged between a child and his or her ally, the brother or sister who was their assigned defender. At Christmas, all gifts between allies had to be personal creations, something made with the hand and the heart and the mind, a painting, a sculpture, a story, a song or a poem. One of the best parts of Christmas presents was making or creating something on the farm in secret, a surprise where it was so difficult to keep secrets and surprises.

Where Christmas was kept almost pure of commercial considerations, birthdays were permitted to be an unlimited excuse to shower the birthday boy or girl, man or woman with presents. Birthdays were meant to remind a person how glad everyone was they been born. Christmas and birthdays bore different kinds of gratitude.

Tom and Amanda arrived before her parents and Ann Marie, even though they set out somewhat later because of their visit to Amanda's friend Kara. Laura had insisted that Ian drive below every speed limit, because she was still very anxious riding in a car.

The McCalls pulled into the parking lot at the farm and they were immediately uncomfortable with the fact that they had come bearing no presents. Except for highway gift shops, nothing was open on Christmas day. They would arrive with empty hands. The only parcel in the car was the box of letters that Ian had packed in case Eugene had had second thoughts about his gift to Laura. Carrying them back to the farm had in fact been the first thing that made Laura realize how excited she was at the idea of doing a book of short stories from them. She realized that giving back something that had been hers for only one day felt as if she would be giving back a part of herself.

The McCalls were met and welcomed at the front door by Tom and Amanda who were waiting for them in the big wicker chairs by the front porch fireplace. It was strange to be greeted with kisses and hugs by their own daughter and her boyfriend.

Tom led them into the house and through to the coffee house where the family was gathering. The farm was transformed by the smells and colors and shapes of Christmas celebration. There were huge butter bowls piled high with fruit, Cedar boughs draped and decorated, big baskets of pine cones decked with ribbons, and an eight foot high balsam tree shining under tinsel and lights and antique blown glass decorations on the coffee house stage.

It was all bathed in the smell of food for the Christmas feast. Strangely, Christmas morning was one of the few times no one was singing or playing music on the stage. Eugene and Sharon were sitting at the head of the table near the stage where the tables had all been pushed together in a long line to serve for the holiday.

Eugene and Sharon seemed to be like magnets that would pull children and grandchildren from near and far for brief moments and longer talks. Hands full of muffins and drinks, eyes full of delight and mischief and joy, everyone dressed in pressed holiday clothes, the Van Fleet family moved in the convective currents of simple family pleasure.

As usual, the McCalls made their unexpected, unintended entrance. It was the hair. Laura's beautiful blond hair was brown stubble; Amanda's was cut chestnut perfection. Amanda walked into the room like a new woman. Laura saw faces staring at her as if she were a strange kind of refugee. Every eye turned, every conversation stopped. Even the children in the currents of excitement were slowed and silenced. Laura was carrying the shoebox containing the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee and everyone was stunned to see it.

Everyone knew all about the terrible things the McCalls had endured: the car accident, Amanda's rape, even Laura's affair with their uncle George. They were like romantic characters from a soap opera that was only too agonizingly real. Seeing them walk into the room made the reality immediate and strangely discomforting.

Sharon rose from where she was sitting the instant she saw the McCalls enter the room and went to them and greeted them with hugs and kisses. She held Amanda so close and so long that Laura realized she had probably never held her own daughter with the same simple intense affection she saw coming from a woman who had known her daughter for only a few short weeks. Sharon greeted Ann Marie warmly and told again how they would take some time alone and talk. Ann Marie said she would enjoy that and told Sharon the news that her son Wayne was going to help contact her daughter runaway to the cold streets of Vancouver. Sharon pointed to where Wayne was sitting with Charles, and Ann Marie couldn't help herself, she excused herself and went to Wayne, floating on the swift currents of hope.

Sharon led the others to the head of the table where they greeted Eugene and were introduced to their daughter Christa sitting quietly holding her father's hand, staring at it with a strange Mona Lisa smile. She didn't get up. Christa only said hello, but there was a stillness in her whole being that made her seem both beautiful and unapproachable. Looking into Christa's eyes was like looking into the cut crystal of Eugene's. Her fair skin and hair reminded Laura of Eugene as he had been when she had known him so long ago. Looking in Christa's eyes, Laura searched for the common ground only two women who have been stunningly beautiful can know. She found none.

Laura's touched Eugene's shoulder and felt his eyes reach into her as they always had done and she thanked him for the shoebox of letters.

"I'm so touched that you trust me to read them. We have to talk about them later." Laura said, sounding nervous and tentative.

Sharon insisted that the McCalls sit with them and told Tom to save Ann Marie a seat beside him. Sharon saw the intention in Eugene's eyes and asked Amanda if she would like to sit across from Eugene. Amanda looked into his eyes and realized for the first time that a complete stranger could look at her with love. It was an undeniable look of love. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind. He didn't even look into her mother's eyes the way he looked into hers. Amanda went around the table without speaking and bent down and kissed Eugene on the temple and whispered into his ear, "Merry Christmas." When she went back to her seat and looked across the table she saw that Christa's eyes were running with tears. No one paid them any attention.

Then came the small talk between guests and hosts. It was strange only in the fact that Eugene's eyes were included in everyone's conversation. As each person spoke, their eyes invariably found Eugene's. They were the magnets that no one could resist. When Amanda told the story of the wedding rings her parents had exchanged after all these years and she took her mother's hand and held it in the air, it was Eugene's eyes each one of the McCalls sought in reaction. Only Amanda realized what his widened eyes reflected. With great effort, Eugene lifted his arm to show the wedding ring on his own hand.

Again it was Amanda who understood his intention.

"I think he's saying that wedding rings are great." Amanda said into the silence. Eugene's eyes blinked once. Sharon told the McCalls that one blink meant yes.

The other Van Fleet children kept coming up to the McCalls and wishing them a happy holiday. Wayne returned Ann Marie to her seat and the younger Van Fleet girls kept coming up to Amanda and telling her how they loved her hair. There was also the look of nervous fear in each of their eyes seeing someone they knew who had been brutally raped looking so unaffected and lovely. They were also nervous and afraid looking at Laura, the middle-aged mother looking like she'd come from a trendy concentration camp. When they wished Laura merry Christmas, it was easy to hear the nervousness they were feeling in the younger children's voices. The romantic character of Laura Lee that they had identified with her became an even deeper identification because of the mystery of her missing hair.

Then came the presents. Until that year the Christmas gifting tradition of the Van Fleets was always the same. Two by two each child and ally would go to the front of the stage. Sharon would retrieve each child's present from under the tree as the children retrieved their presents for their parents. Until that year Sharon and Eugene would open each child's present for them and there was always a great fuss because each child was allowed to spend up to a thousand dollars on their parent's gifts. Because Eugene and Sharon also had the same spending limit, the presents the children opened were also truly impressive. Very early on, Sharon and Eugene had agreed that they would make Christmas the time to indulge their children and let their children indulge them in pure material excess. Young children loved the grand material expression of their feelings for and from their parents. The hardest part was finding a suitable expensive gift. After the video cameras and the digital wonders had run out, it took far more thought to buy a big present than a little personal one.

That year was different because Eugene was paralyzed. Nothing expensive seemed appropriate. Everything seemed poignant and ironic. That was why the children asked to change the tradition and pool their resources to make Eugene his Christmas gift.

A huge television and a digital recorder were wheeled into the center of the stage and Tom explained that he and his younger brothers and sisters had produced a movie, a little travel documentary. Tom started the show and everyone became silent watching the television monitor.

What followed was made exactly in the style of a travel documentary in which a narrator led the viewer around the significant sites of some exotic location, the voice-over explaining the meaning and significance of the things the camera displayed. The exotic location was the farm. Each child took turns being the narrator of the travelogue, and what made the tour so fascinating and personal was each child led the camera to places where incidents had occurred that meant something personal to that child. At one spot Eugene had taught a son to ride a bicycle, at another spot he had bandaged a hand. Here had been the site of the terrible water pistol war. There was the place that a daughter first had the courage to put her hand in his. Here birthday fireworks burst in the sky. Here was the seat of the beautiful Mercedes where they would sit quietly while their father drove them swiftly through a quiet, dark, starry, starry night. Every one of the children would bring the camera to view the empty seat of the Mercedes under the opened Gull Wing door.

One after another the children led the camera to places that held memories that held a place in their heart that would last forever. One after another, the children simply described ordinary acts and incidents that bound a father and a child forever. There were few great dramatic incidents, the deepest memories of time seemed so ordinary, but listening to them described in a child's unbroken voice, one after another, made the tour of invisible moments heartrendingly beautiful. There were tears running everywhere.

When Tom, as the last of the younger children on the video watched himself in an empty field describe how it felt the first time his father let him put down the big plow into the soil behind the tractor, and how he felt the heavy pull through his whole body, everyone was absolutely silent with their own memories of invisible time in visible places. And when Tom's voice coming from the television speaker said that the feeling in his body of pulling a plow through the earth was the way he felt when his father hugged him, it was one of those common experiences each of his children recognized as the perfect metaphor for their father's life. The last child in the tour was the youngest child David who was unable to speak or communicate, and so his brothers and sisters had led him around the farm and told their own memories of what they had seen, watching David and his father together. Listening to each child described Eugene with the son who could not speak or respond was, in a way, like describing how they had been when they first had come to the farm. Each child had known the fear and doubt that they could love or be loved. Each child had come to the farm like David in a way, and their descriptions of seeing him with Eugene were even more poignant than their own personal memories of how he had been with them. The irony was that the young boy who would never be able to communicate with the world would come to have more in common with his father than any of them. It became more and more obvious in each memory each child described. Unlike everyone else who always tried to talk to David, Eugene had invariably spent his time with his son following wherever David led, crawling through flower beds, pouring fruit from baskets and bushels, milling about with the two big old dogs, walking aimlessly from one place to another. Watching the invisible Eugene with his invisible son David, made almost everyone realize how much they missed seeing their father move independently through space and time. His words had been special luxuries he offered. Seeing him move was a simple sustenance they had all taken for granted and almost completely forgotten.

When the movie was over and the television was a black screen, all the adults in the room got up to applaud the younger children. There were blushes and giggles as Tom went to the stage and turned off the television set and asked his younger brothers and sisters to come up on stage to receive the appreciation of the rest of the family. Tears were pouring from their parents eyes.

After the tour of invisible memories, all the other gifts were anticlimactic. The books, the rare vinyl records, the clothing, the jewelry and the pieces of art that came to Sharon and Eugene from her their children, and even the ones that were exchanged between each child and their ally seemed to have a dull luster compared to the shining video.

Amanda watched with pride as Tom exchanged presents with his ally, his sister Lucy. She gave him a drawing she had made of Tom with his arms around the necks of two beautiful Wolves. He had given her what seemed to be a dull little necklace made of black beads. It was only when he closed the clasp at the back of her neck and she smelled the roses all around her that she realized what a special gift it was.

"The beads are made of ground up rose petals." Tom explained, "The smell should last a lifetime."

Lucy kissed Tom and thanked him, and wherever she went the smell of roses traveled with her. When they came off the stage, all of Tom's young sisters wanted to know how to make a necklace for themselves. Secretly, Amanda hoped that Tom would someday make a rose petal necklace for her.

After all the gifts were opened, except for two small parcels lying in the branches of the Christmas tree, Sharon asked Tom to retrieve them for her. They were the presents she and Eugene would exchange.

She opened his present for him from her first, and when she held it up for the family to see there were some gasps when they saw it was a Day timer. Then, as she took it and held it in front of Eugene's eyes and began to turn the pages, she explained that each day was marked with a memory, something she had written down from the same day in the previous year. Each day began with a memory of hers that she wanted to share with him that had come while he had lost his ability to speak. She read the example from the last New Years Eve.

"When the clock struck midnight everyone screamed Happy New Year and you tried so hard not to look tired, then all your children got in a long line and kissed you and said Happy New Year and it was absolutely quiet except when each of them spoke to you. You whispered, Happy New Year. "Sharon read from the book and every one of his children remembered the last New Year's Eve, and remembered that it was one of the last times Eugene was able to speak intelligibly.

Sharon kissed Eugene and then with his eyes he indicated that she should open her own gift. Only Wayne and his father knew what was in the parcel. Sharon was surprised that, as she was opening it, Wayne had passed along a magnifying glass for her to use.

"It must be a diamond if I'm going to need a magnifying glass." Sharon said, just before she opened the small jewelry box and saw the necklace inside. Hanging on a beautiful gold chain was a walnut miniature pendent about an inch in a half square representing the big family tree in the dining room. The trunks that represented each member of the family were perfectly reproduced. The brass mailboxes with each of their names that held the stories of their family's generations were there in miniature. From where he sat, Wayne explained that she needed to look through the magnifying glass, and with it she saw each of the names on the little brass plates, and she saw each of the branches with the minutely carved names of each and all of their ancestors. She could see the veins in each leaf on the tree just the way it was in the enormous one in their home. Wayne explained what his mother was seeing through the magnifying glass and explained how it was made by one of the greatest craftsmen in China from a piece of walnut from their own forest, and it had taken a year to complete.

Sharon sat for a long moment looking at her present and she was fighting back tears when she said it was the most beautiful gift she'd ever seen and passed it with the magnifying glass to Christa who was sitting beside her.

"There has never been a more beautiful gift in this world." Sharon said, as she kissed Eugene on his unmoving lips.

Almost no one spoke as the necklace passed from hand to hand around the table until everyone had touched it and looked at it through the magnifying glass. Everyone watched each person's reaction as they looked for their own names and histories. When it finally came back to Sharon, she turned her head so that Christa could close the clasp of the necklace at the back of her neck. From that day onward, every time Sharon sat down for a meal with her children she would put on her last perfect Christmas gift from her husband.

Ann Marie whispered to Laura, "These people make me feel like I totally screwed up my life."

"I think everyone that comes here must feel like that." Laura whispered into her friend's ear. "Too perfect is too perfect."

Ann Marie looked across the table into Christa's eyes and had no idea that the stare she was facing was actually a Lithium haze.

After the presents, the Christmas feast was served. Unlike the rest of the year when the younger children served the adults, at Christmas all the younger children and grandchildren sat and the adults set the table and brought the food and cleared the dishes and washed them and dried them and put them away. Sharon and Eugene and guests were the only adults not expected to participate in preparing and serving and clearing the feast.

The McCall's were stunned when Wayne and Charles brought in the thirty-five pound turkey.

"It's the size of a Volkswagen." Ian exclaimed.

Wayne carved with an electric knife as one enormous serving bowl after another found its place on the table. Christmas was the ultimate potluck dinner. It was the only time the grown children ever brought food to the farm.

Ian couldn't help saying how impressed he was with each of the Van Fleet family Christmas traditions. Every event and every relationship seemed to be considered and precious.

"You should write a book about the practical side of family relationships." said Ian, enthusiastically to Sharon.

Both Laura and Ann Marie heartily agreed.

"Maybe I should. But the practical side of family relationships means that I don't really have a lot of free time to write books. Besides every family is different." Sharon replied.

"And you'd have to go on a book tour." Amanda added, and Sharon rolled her eyes back in her head at the very thought.

Laura was surprised as how different the Van Fleet family was at their holiday table. The biggest difference seemed to come from the way Jonas, still dressed in his Trappist monk's robes, dominated the conversation with stories everyone seemed to be longing to hear because he was such a master of comic description and timing.

Everyone was roaring with laughter as they ate while Jonas described the Trappist version of Charades, acting out the syllables of Guiuseppe Roncalli or the seven deadly sins.

"Watching Brother Paul do lust is worth the price of admission." Jonas said, then proceeded to describe in detail his fellow brother's attempt to be suggestive without being suggestive as the other monks wrote their guesses on slate boards.

"For a long time, all he would do was point in the general direction of various people's naughty bits. After the finger gestures for shame-shame didn't work, brother Paul laid down on the floor and started to thrash about, and after some guesses involving various types of possession by the holy spirit, he got fed up and did the most wonderful impression of someone having sex. Marcel Marseux would have been proud. By this time everyone was laughing so hard and guessing such ridiculous things like thigh master and slinky toy, poor brother Paul looked like he was going to have a heart attack."

Coming from a young man in religious habit only made the story funnier. Only the Van Fleet Van family would have a Trappist monk who was a raconteur.

Even with the entertaining conversation, the second enormous turkey dinner in less than a day had the poor McCall family feeling heavy and sleepy and overwhelmed with the luxury of taste and the mass quantities of food. When conversation finally broke into smaller isolated pockets around the table, Ann Marie excitedly told about her talking with Wayne about his friend who would try to find her daughter Megan.

"When I asked Wayne how his friend made contact with a runaway child on the streets, Wayne said his friend used the one thing no teenager could resist, shopping. His friend tells them honestly that he works for an organization that tries to help young boys get off the streets and asks his new contact to help him find a present to lift the spirits of the latest boy he is trying to help. He uses one child to help the other, and it's in the compassion and concern for another person with the same problems that both eventually get the strength to try to get their lives together. What Wayne's friend then does is help them re-established contract with their parents, if that's possible. He becomes the intermediary asking the runaway child if it's all right if he drop their parents a little note every day telling them that their child is all right. Alright! Can you imagine? He also encourages a parent to respond every day, telling about their own thoughts and activities. He's the only way the child and the parent can talk to one another, and Wayne tells me that after a while they can't help wanting to communicate directly. He lets them do it on paper at first and then finally when they're ready, by phone. My God, I don't know how I'll stand the waiting. The program is absolutely ingenious. Wayne says I'm going to have to wait until his friend finds Megan and he's ready to start communicating with me. I can't believe that all I have to do is sit and do nothing and then just write little notes about my day and somehow she'll come back to me. But I can see it. I can really see how it can work.

Even Ann Marie, who had expected to be enduring the worst Christmas of her life was filled with the tingling nervousness of life's possibility.

Then, after the feast, Eugene was taken back to his bed so that he could rest. The adult children cleared the table and did the dishes while the children talked and played and some visited with their birth parents. Tom and Amanda offered to give Ann Marie the quick tour of the farm and Ian asked if it would be all right if he joined them. Laura said that she would prefer to let her dinner settle and so stayed sipping wine with Sharon. When there were alone, Sharon asked Laura about her hair.

"It was like tearing your clothes in grief at a funeral. With all the horror that we'd been through the vanity involved in dealing with my hair was just more than I could stand. The feeling of my hair coming away in my hands with every slice of the scissors was what life felt like."

"Did you throw it away? They make wigs for people in chemotherapy out of hair people donate." Sharon responded.

"I knew that. I should have her remembered. It went out in the trash, I'm afraid."

"That's all right. You had your heart ripped to shreds. How are you doing? It's hard to believe, but Amanda looks wonderful."

"It's Tom. He's truly a beautiful boy." Laura replied. "It's hard to believe anyone that young can be so strong."

"He's our Puritan boy. He only believes in ideals. These days, it's really quite lovely."

Laura then told Sharon that she had to talk to her about the box of letters Eugene had sent to her for Christmas.

"I don't know whether Tom told you but I have quit my job and until those letters, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with myself. I talked to a publisher a while back because I thought it was such a wonderful idea to turn them into a book, and I hoped that Eugene and you might consider having them published, but my publisher friend said the idea of letters was too Victorian, people didn't communicate that way anymore. In the car today, thinking about those letters and Arthur and Laura Lee, I started to think that maybe each pair of letters would make a beautiful short story. After their first dreams and their separation, maybe they never knew their dreams continued. There would be no letters. Arthur and Laura Lee never knew about each other's dreams, only the narrator and the reader would know about their incredible connection." Laura explained.

"I don't understand. It's very different than what the letters are, maybe it would be even more poignant in a way if two people could be so connected and not even realize it. You should talk to Eugene. If I know my husband, he'd do almost anything you asked. I was always sorry the only writing that he ever did were those letters. It would be nice to see the best part of his imagination survive him. You should talk to him. Why don't you and Amanda consider staying for the week? It's her school holiday. You could spend some time with Eugene and maybe he could help you to turn those letters into stories. I think it would be wonderful if he had a last purpose to make him feel like he wasn't completely in the last infantile stage of his disease."

"It's very tempting. I've always been able to write, I just never had anything to say, no story to tell. I've only been good with words. I had no idea that Eugene had the imagination he does, he always seemed like such a practical, sensible person." Laura replied.

"He's one of those strange people that really thinks about everything that he says. He's also the best listener I've ever known. He's one of the few people who seems to value every word people say to one another. The kids always listen to everything he says. He certainly is proof that words connect people."

"It depends on what you're connecting, I suppose." Laura replied, "That's what I spent my working life doing, using words to connect people. But he wasn't connecting dreams and money. City life is a cell phone. It would be great to connect something to something that mattered for once in my life."

"Talk to Ian. Talk to Amanda. You're certainly welcome here as long as you wish to stay."

Laura didn't know why Sharon was so reluctant to talk about the letters, but she ignored it.

"I don't understand it." Laura continued. "I don't know why I just can't say yes, and stay. It's like I can feel the enormous vacuum of the city pulling me back. I'll talk to Ian." Laura's eyes were alive with nervous excitement. Sharon could see them dancing with interest, almost frantic with the idea of a decision that might make her life mean something, something she could be proud of having done.

Outside, Tom and Amanda had began the tour by getting Ann Marie to climb up into the steam engine where it was Ann Marie's turn to jump a foot in the air when Ian pulled on the steam whistle cord.

The scream was like a celluloid memory ripped from the soundtrack of Dr. Zivago. The sound of steam screaming in steel felt like the release Ann Marie had felt since the night before, and since she had talked to Wayne, since she had let herself release the feeling of love she had for her daughter, the daughter she had been unconsciously preparing to mourn.

When Tom opened up the family vault underneath dense rambler roses, Ann Marie was absolutely taken with the idea of having a private place to keep psychic treasures, a place that was safe and strong and impregnable.

"You have any idea how wonderful and therapeutic an idea this is?" she asked, "I'm going to suggest to my patients that they find a strong box of some kind to keep their own journals and the private and precious things from their lives. This is wonderful!"

Tom agreed that he loved the idea of bringing things to his own safety deposit boxes. He also said he liked the idea that the rest of his family had their most precious possessions stored all around his own. He did not mention that the vault always felt, to him, like a living crypt where living memories of living people rested in solemn silence.

Amanda was taking the tour with new eyes. The places she had seen as a guest and a visitor suddenly seemed to have become extensions of her own life. Somehow her bond with Tom made the things and the places she saw feel like things that belonged to her, like shadows of things in her own room. There was a strange feeling of possession and being possessed, a strange feeling of belonging where she was a stranger. It was as if time and space had become something that existed in the connection she felt in the distance between her soft hand and his.

The breathless feeling for Amanda, as she toured the buildings on the farm, was that she was helplessly aware that she might be looking at her future. Would this be her life? Would she belong here? Would she belong with him? Or would they actually create another copy of the farm among people she didn't know, people that didn't even know they were coming, people of a race that might see her as an outsider. In a strange way Amanda, walking with her hand in her boyfriend's hand, was kicking the tires of her future.

Ann Marie didn't say very much as she walked beside Ian, following Tom and Amanda as they led them through the garages and the art studio and the furniture shop. Christmas was one of the very few times that any of those places were still. Ann Marie's mind took in the impressive things that she saw, but her feelings were back in the farmhouse anticipating a chance to talk once more with Wayne, to finger the irregular outlines of hope.

When they were walking back to the farmhouse, Ann Marie said just what Ian was thinking as they watched Tom and Amanda in big coats walking ahead of them.

"Those two look like they've been together for their whole lives."

"I know. It's terrifying." Ian replied, and he truly was frightened and awed by what was so obviously set so deep and so hard. Yet looking at them, they seemed to be not much more than children. Both Ian and Ann Marie had learned that the impression was completely false.

In the coffee house, the long table was cleared except for the big platters of baked goods that had already been seriously plundered. After the big meal, everyone but the young Van Fleet children were mellow and content and moving on to the coffeehouse. Already the younger children were near the stage listening to Martha playing her guitar and singing. It would be after dark before the adults would join in the music. Holidays were the time for the family to gather and talk and touch and understand how things could stay the same as life went through its inevitable changes.

Before long, Laura noticed little David in his fresh dress slacks, sweater, shirt and tie hovering nearby. As soon as he had been released from where he was sitting at the table, he had drifted straight to Laura. It wasn't like he was staring at her. It was more like he was watching her in fascination from the corner of his eyes. Sharon of course noticed that David had actually focused his attention on one person for a significant length of time for perhaps the first time that she could recall. Usually his attention span was very short. He was always in motion. His interests moved over the places and things of the world with only a fleeting caress. In the little spaces of his conscious attention and reaction, he was rarely happy or exuberant, rarely frustrated or angry. He was more like an infant that looked like a boy, an infant boy who could move his big empty eyes with infinite curiosity, without any apparent understanding.

When David finally moved to the space beside Laura and stood looking at her with his baby blue eyes, Sharon was quite amazed. She said nothing as she ran her fingers through her son's golden curls. Finally David's stare sank into Laura's conscious awareness and she looked at him and said hello.

"Ike... ife." David said in his guttural way.

"David, this is Laura. Laura." Sharon said to him. And her mouth almost fell open when she heard him reply, "Or. Ore."

Sharon praised him and repeated Laura's name three times. "This is Laura. Laura. Laura."

And in almost the same cadence he repeated his attempts at her name, "Or. Ore... Oar."

Sharon swept him into her arms and hugged him and kissed him, much to the surprise of everyone except her own family.

"That's the first time that David has ever used language. That was the first word he's ever spoken." Sharon raised her voice and got the attention of the whole room and told them what had happened. The room went surprisingly silent.

"Or. Ore. " David said and everyone clapped and the beautiful boy's face reacted as little to the applause as it had to the silence. David squirmed from his mother's grasp and took his place on the floor beside Laura's chair, looking at her steadily.

"The only words, the only sounds David has ever consistently made was the one he said to you just before he said your name. Sometimes the younger children call him Like Life because that's the way it sounds. Ike.. ife." Sharon continued explaining.

"Ooooar." said David, drawing out the simple word. His mother praised him again and repeated Laura's name over and over until Laura finally couldn't help it and ran the back of her fingers over his lily soft cheek.

From that moment on, David became Laura's tenuous shadow. He didn't follow her so much as gravitate to her as if he could not resist the implacable gravity of her pull. It would be a long time before it stopped making her vaguely uncomfortable.

It was after the excitement with David that Tom took Amanda around the room and introduced her to all the people she still hadn't met. She was delighted and embarrassed when he told everyone about her Christmas present to him. Some of the children soon came up to Tom and asked him if they could listen to Amanda's CD. They were delighted when he told them it was in his winter coat pocket and so they ran off to fetch it and take it to the music room. For the younger children, Amanda was almost a star, a romantic ideal they could touch, someone who knew love and tragedy and rebellion and beauty. For them, she was truly the daughter of Laura Lee. It would be later that evening, when everyone was gathered around the stage, that Tom would play the piano, and Rosie would play the drums and Sara would play her guitar and Amanda would sing a song from her own CD. Laura and Ian were silently awed and proud of her. Tom was worse. He was in love and his eyes pushed the stars out of a deep invisible sky.

It was later in the afternoon when Laura had Ian alone for a moment that she told him about Sharon's invitation for her to stay and work on a book of short stories that might come from the letters Eugene had given her. She told him how she imagined the structure of the stories. She told him how it would be a lovely monument to Eugene. She told him it might have a wonderful potential. What she didn't say was that she really had nothing else to do with her life. He knew and she knew that she was trying to sell him the idea. It was only when she realized that she was selling it that she knew how much she really wanted to do it. As nervous as it made her, she couldn't resist the feeling that the book actually might give her life some real meaning.

Ian had never discouraged Laura in anything she had ever chosen to do. It was ironic that the first time that he would do so would be over something she felt was so vital.

"A book takes so long. How long would you stay? When would I see you?" he asked after the long pause that came after she had finished talking. "What about Amanda? The connection you two have made in the last weeks is so good. We both need you at home. We both want you at home."

Laura was obviously disappointed. She knew he was absolutely right. She had no right to separate herself from her family when it finally seemed to have really found itself.

"You're right. I'll work on it at home."

Ian was completely torn in half. He knew the atmosphere of the farm would give her the strength to risk rejection and failure. He knew how hard it would be for her to work quietly alone every day. Laura had always needed the stimulation of other people. She had always hated being alone. As always, when Ian faced hard decisions, he tried to find a reasonable compromise. He always wanted both sides to win. He didn't like to face the fact that what that usually meant was that both sides had to agree to a loss, to something less than they had hoped for. The thing Ian hated most in life was being the cause of anyone's disappointment.

"Maybe you could come up on weekends with Amanda when she comes to see Tom?" he offered.

"It's a thought." Laura said half-heartedly. "I'm not sure how she would feel about that, and I'm really not sure how she'd feel if I was here even more than that. It's probably a lousy idea."

That was how they left it and Ian was surprised that, under his relief and appreciation of Laura's loyalty to himself and her daughter, there was the undeniable guilt that perhaps he was denying her the possibility of creating something truly beautiful. In a way he felt he was denying both his wife and Eugene a small, sweet sliver of immortality. He was sorry that he didn't want to let his wife come to work with this man who was dying, who so obviously loved her. He wished he could tell her how he felt, but he just didn't dare.

Ian was relieved when Tranh came up to the two of them to introduce his wife and wish them a merry Christmas. Suddenly, small talk felt lovely to both the McCalls. Decisions and disappointments were never their strong suit.

Tranh's wife Elaine said that Christmas day was very hard for her husband because he usually went to bed after four in the morning. They were surprised to learn that Tranh was an amateur astronomer who spent almost every dark night searching for comets and asteroids. He joked about saving the world someday, and when he said that only a small percentage of the earth crossing asteroids were recorded, he did give them some pause.

"An asteroid big enough to cause catastrophic climatic change happens once every million years or so. So we're long overdue." Tranh said seriously. "If a comet hit, it would even be worse. A comet is moving so fast that it would cross Canada in about a second and a half. And, if it hit, well, you can imagine."

Both Tranh and his wife seemed to be curious about Ian and Laura. As Ian questioned Tranh about his telescopes and found out that they took up the upper half of the house they had built to house it, it was obvious that, as Ian talked, both he and his wife were trying to make some kind of assessment of the McCalls. Tranh and Elaine quickly replied with questions about Ian's work, but they discretely avoided asking Laura about hers. The family grapevine had spread Tom's information very quickly. The security of small talk quickly made both couples comfortable with each other and so it was then that Ian asked the question everyone always wanted to ask Tranh.

"I understand you're also a stock market genius." Ian said after he finished describing the type of cases that he usually worked in his practice.

"The last ten years it's been like shooting fish in a barrel for anyone, I suppose." Tranh replied.

"Does it take a lot of time and research." Laura asked.

"Not really. I have only held eighteen stocks, most of them, for many years." he replied.

"Eighteen! How did you ever choose those eighteen?" Ian asked, incredulously.

"Toys, technology and fun. When I came to this country I couldn't believe that all anyone cared about, all anyone wanted was to have toys and fun. I bought stock in companies that made the biggest toys and the most fun. Mercedes, Lexus, Sony, Disney, Apple Computers, IBM, and I also bought stock in companies that made the toys work, Microsoft, Intel, G.E. Toys, tech and fun."

"It can't be that simple?" Ian said with a look of absolute wonder on his face.

"The annual return has been in the high thirties. Things have flattened out a little because everyone now sees the primary importance of toys and fun in this world. I've actually been thinking of changing my portfolio to focus on pills and trucks, or just cash out like Elaine wants. She thinks the stock are now just about greed." Tranh replied.

Ian and Laura were fascinated by the idea that getting rich, disgustingly rich could be based on such a ridiculously simple principle.

"Why pills and trucks?" Ian asked, ignoring Tranh's cautionary remark.

Medicine and instant markets are the two next great opportunities. No matter what happens in genetic research, somebody's got to make pills from the findings. And the more connected the world becomes with on-time inventories and far-flung warehouses, somebody's going to have to deliver the goods. Pills and trucks.

"My question is," said Elaine, "How much money is enough? I have been hoping that Tranh would cash in before all this greed makes everyone sorry. Our children and our grandchildren will always be secure. There's something about sitting home and doing nothing and getting rich that makes me very uncomfortable."

"You're in the distinct minority" Laura replied. "But the question is a good one, how much money is enough?"

"Money is opportunity." Tranh replied. "It is strange that in North America where most of the world's money resides, so few people appreciate that. Live in a poor country like Vietnam for a while and it will teach you to respect the opportunities that come with money."

"Toys, tech and fun, what would we do without them?" Laura added.

"To me, you have too much money when you no longer appreciate what you buy with it." said Tranh. "My problem with toys and fun is that they often become like a room that you don't use or a garage full of junk. It isn't surprising to me that so many people find a materialistic life unsatisfying. Subconsciously, I think people feel they're wasting their life's opportunities."

"But toys and fun have produced most of the wealth the rest of the world envies. Maybe they should get on the bandwagon." Ian said mischievously.

"Maybe you're right. Industry and infrastructure aren't very exciting." Tranh replied.

"The way it looks to me, the world has already gotten on the bandwagon." Elaine interjected.

"I know something about bandwagons." Laura added, "And I think you're exactly right."

She knew everything about bandwagons except how to get off. But there she was at the side of the road wondering where she would go and what she would do without her toys, searching for something that was more than just fun. She was consciously aware she was wasting her life's opportunities. She had almost infinite choices, yet a shoebox of fictional letters seemed to be her one chance in life. But Ian was right. She should do right by her family, the people who loved her.

The conversation turned when Jonas joined them. He too wanted to take the measure of the McCalls, because it was only in the past few days that he even knew they existed. Yet since he had arrived home, it seemed that all anyone wanted to talk about was the McCall family. It was romance and drama and mystery and tragedy cascading from his younger brothers and sisters. When he had heard that morning that his father had given Laura the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee, it had stunned Jonas completely. That a stranger should be given the most precious icons of his childhood was beyond understanding, if one didn't understand the overwhelming power of love. Jonas understood it. He had been stunned because he had no idea that he shared that knowledge with his father.

Completely candid in everything but his own personal emotions, Jonas went the right to the core of the question.

"Why would my father give you Arthur and Laura Lee's letters? Those letters are the myths every one of us carries in our subconscious." he said, seriously.

Laura was taken aback almost as if she was being accused of deliberately taking them away from the Van Fleet family. Coming from a man in a monk's habit, it was almost intimidating.

"I mentioned once or twice that I'd love to help to see them published, but I never asked or imagined Eugene would give them to me. If they've made so powerful an impression on everyone in your family, perhaps it would be wonderful if you could all share them with the world. I've been thinking that the way to make them a little more accessible is by changing them into short stories, but I would only do that with your father's permission and help. It may come to nothing, but I think it might be a wonderful thing to try to do." Laura replied

Jonas was satisfied with her answer. He smiled and his eyes warmed and for a moment the caress she felt from them had the same softness as David's cheek had felt under the back of her fingers.

It was odd, but in that inexplicable moment, of all the wonderful Van Fleet children, with Jonas, Laura felt like she had a friend, an ally, someone who would understand her best intentions, even when she wasn't aware of them herself. It was what made Jonas a wonderful priest. Like father, like son.

The rest of the afternoon, the McCalls watched the younger children moving constantly among the siblings they didn't see everyday. There were so many things to report, changes to be recognized, things to be praised, things coming out of memory for display. It was show and tell and tell and tell. Christmas was the best day of the year for such giving and receiving, and for feeling their reciprocal natures.

Later in the afternoon, Amanda asked Tom why none of the children spent very much time with their sister Christa. Christa seemed to be on a very short leash attached to her mother.

"Everybody's kind of afraid of Christa. You never know if what you say is going to make her breakdown crying. Lately it's been better because of the drugs she's taking. She used to tell these terrible stories about people being tortured or abused or dying of terrible diseases. She would stand there and cry and cry like you were supposed to do something to help her stop it. At least she stopped taking off her clothes."

"Wow. She looks so quiet and gentle. She's so incredibly beautiful." Amanda replied.

"The family beauty. You want to go and talk to her?" Tom asked gently.

"Not unless you do." she answered, and it was obvious that what Tom had told her had made her decidedly nervous.

"I don't think she'll do anything. Maybe we'll go over later." he said.

It was the first time that Amanda had ever seen anything but absolute courage in Tom. That was what made her nervous. If he was afraid, there was something to fear.

For Ian, the rest of the afternoon was rather strange because everyone in the Van Fleet family seemed to think that he and Laura and Amanda somehow were fascinating characters, but it was he who found them to be unique and exciting human beings. Even the younger children were like no other children he had ever met. They were an odd mixture of lightness and enthusiasm, talent and confidence. The adults all seemed to carry a level of contentment in their eyes and in their movements that was very strange to a city person. These were really just simple farm folks, but above the simplicity were absolutely extraordinary lives. It ws actually their simplicity that made them extraordinary.

Ian wanted to know who was responsible for the grand vision of the farm. He wanted to know what part Sharon had in the creation of such an amazing environment, and he wanted to know what part of it belonged to Eugene. He wanted to know what he could never know from direct observation, the character and the personality of the man locked in the prison of his body. As it happened, he did have an occasion to ask the person who probably knew best. It was before Eugene had returned from his long afternoon nap that he found himself for a few moments sitting with Sharon and her quiet daughter Christa.

"So who was responsible for all the different businesses that you have here at the farm?" Ian asked Sharon.

"The lumber and wood business came because Eugene has an addiction for property. When we were younger we'd spend whatever free time we had tripping over tracts of land that were for sale. He loved forests, probably because of the one his grandfather planted. He started buying land so we could have the forest or to have land to plant more walnut trees for the children. It was just a small step to managing the forest and taking out lumber and firewood, and before long we saw that we could do much better if we milled the timber ourselves. Then, when Tranh finally started making us all rich, Eugene just couldn't resist more land." she explained. When she saw that Ian's eyes were asking her to continue, she went on and explained that the car restoration business had come first, as it was Eugene's great love.

"The antique reproduction business came because of Wayne's antique store in Toronto. The foster families that come in the summer were my idea. They make really good money here and work together as a family. That's really my baby."

Christa spoke for the first time. "What our family does is give people that live in cities the things they miss out of life. We give them the smell of firewood. We remind them that ordinary people have histories. We give them classic cars that remind them of when they were young. My dad once said that our family lives on the nostalgia that city people have for a past they don't remember. I never forgot that." Christa added, and Ian could tell that Sharon had never heard this from her daughter before.

"That's true, in a way." she agreed.

As Ian thought about it, he realized that that was what made the farm so strange and so wonderful, the past was everywhere, the place was like an immovable foundation that just grew and grew. He could feel the generations in which they were embedded and he could feel the generations that would rise above them.

"Tell me about Eugene. He seems like a man of insatiable interests. I admire his ambition and confidence. Was he always like that?" Ian asked, and for the first time he could see a real interest in the moment focus in Christa's eyes. Her father was a subject powerful enough to make her swim up through the mist of her drugs. Christa cut off her mother, who was about to speak.

"My dad thinks that if somebody else has proved something is possible, it's possible to do again. 'If somebody's done it before, why can't you?' he would always ask us. My favorite thing about my dad was not the things that came from working hard. My favorite thing was when he brought home the vault and gave us all safety deposit boxes to keep the things we really treasure, the things that were private and precious. We'd see him taking his journals out to the vault and bringing in Arthur and Laura Lee's letters, and it made us all want to have secret precious stuff of our own. I loved that he was such a pack rat. I loved that he would stop at farms and buy huge old boulders from farmers and bring them home on the lumber truck."

"Was he always so intense?" Ian prodded.

"That's the funny thing, the older he got the more intense he became." Sharon added. "When we were first married he seemed so laid-back. The only thing he really loved was old cars. When we first met, I was the one with the ambition. I was the one pushing him to make his car restoration business something bigger. It was my idea for lifetime maintenance. It was my idea to advertise. Little did I know what this place would become after the kids arrived. I wonder what he thinks of the person he was before all this. I wonder what he thinks about the person your wife knew."

There it was. That was the question. Ian would have loved to know the answer to that as well. He would also have loved to know the answer to what Laura felt about what Eugene had become. Ian wondered if Laura had been a very different person when she was a girl, before she had work and responsibilities and status. He was imagining the innocence of first love and feeling an upside down envy at what must have been between two such extraordinary human beings, before anyone knew, before even they could have known what they might be. The foundations of the human heart are mostly buried in the seasons and floods of experience, and like a long-standing house, the foundations are usually examined only when they have been put under enormous stress or when fractures appear in the rooms above.

When Ian saw Laura returning to the table and again felt the small shock of what she had done to her hair, he wondered about the foundations of her life. Who was the girl who could become the woman that life had broken. He wondered if the damage went as deep as the person she was when she had long ago first come to the farm. After Laura joined them, Sharon asked her if she would like to come with her when she went to see if Eugene was ready to return to the celebration.

"I could leave you alone together for little while so you can talk to him about your thoughts about doing a book of short stories from his letters." Sharon said.

It was obvious to everyone that Laura was undecided about how to respond to Sharon's suggestion. No one could have guessed that her reluctance came from being nervous about being left alone with Eugene. Even more than Sharon, Laura was afraid that she would not be able to stand up to the power and the force of Eugene's presence.

"Go." Ian said enthusiastically, "He'd be delighted to know that you're excited about doing something with his letters. Go."

"Right now?" Laura asked.

"Sure. This is probably the best time." Sharon added and got up from her chair and led Laura away.

Eugene was already awake looking almost inanimate on his propped up bed. Sharon took his hand as she most often did when she was beside him and started to rub his skin, letting him feel the strong simple touch of someone who loved him.

"Laura wants to tell you about an idea she has to make a book of short stories from Arthur and Laura Lee's letters. Are you feeling up to it?" His eyes blinked once.

"Come and sit beside him on the bed. It's the best way to see the monitor when he's talking." Sharon continued, "I always pretend that it's like talking to someone while you're watching a movie. If you like, we can bring you some popcorn." she added, jokingly.

Laura crossed to where she could sit down on the empty space beside Eugene on the big bed. It was a strange feeling to be sitting beside him looking at a television monitor. It was like the tiniest interactive Cineplex theater. It was strange to talk and not look in Eugene's eyes.

She thanked him again for the gift of the wonderful letters and told sincerely how it was the most beautiful present she had ever received in her life. Words started forming on the screen and they told her so much more than she expected from his reply. He told her that he hoped that those letters would remind her of when she was young, when she was like her own daughter.

"I can't wait to read them." she answered, "There is something so fundamental about who we are when we're young, and I'm guessing by your relationship with your children, that you're one of the few adults who understands that. I certainly don't."

The words on the screen slowly said to her, 'There Is a Door to Innocence Most People Forget Is There.'

"I don't think it's likely that I'll ever find the way back to that. I'm not even sure if I ever had one." she replied.

You're Looking At It, the television said and Laura was confused about what he meant.

"Do you mean you or those letters?" Laura asked, and it was strange that she actually felt afraid, as if she was standing at the door through which might become the person she had once been.

Both.

The single word on the screen looked as simple and bare as a doorknob.

"This isn't about me." Laura replied, " This is about a chance that the two of us can create something beautiful that might really last."

Our Baby.

"Yes. In a way I suppose that's true." Then Laura realized the profound and perfect irony of what they were doing. She remembered again the dream they had shared. The dream they had shared when they were in high school, the same dream, the same circumstances, the same details of a dream in which she walked down a street knowing that she was carrying a child, his child. It was he who had first told her about his dream, seeing her walk down her street knowing she was pregnant. It was she who had pressed him for every detail to find their congruence, and it was only then that she told him simply that she had had the same identical dream. They took it as a warning but the two identical dreams became reality a month later as Laura walked down the street in her dream deciding what to do about her unwanted pregnancy. She had never told Eugene that dreams sometimes came true. She had never told him that she had conceived his child. Eugene would never know that he might have been the birth father of at least one beautiful child of his own, another invisible movement of a simple twist of fate.

It all came back to Laura and her mouth was dry with fear. The two dreams said there really was a particular destiny. The logical conclusion was that destiny had led her once more to share Eugene's bed in this sad way. The enormous implications of the thought made her body feel hard and infinitesimal, like a stone being pushed by some monumental cold glacier of fate. If there had been no dreams that they had shared, there probably would have never been the letters, and if there had been no letters she wouldn't be sitting where she was. Laura sat there silently frightened and stunned by her own thoughts. Once again the things that she knew were things she could never tell Eugene. This baby they would deliver together if they completed the book of short stories would come to term perhaps only if he survived long enough to help her through its gestation. It was Eugene whose labored breathing would be the background for whatever they would create together.

Letters appeared on the screen as Eugene continued to speak to Laura, but her eyes were glazed and unable to see or understand. Out of her fear and the feeling of the enormous weight of destiny pushing her came the feeling that the book they might create might be important to their lives.

If the fates could take decades to bring her to the place and the circumstances of her present life, perhaps that place and those circumstances might have a meaning far beyond anything she would ever be able to understand.

When she thought of the implications of destiny, it tore into her heart like a nail. Her affair with George, the death of the boy, the rape of her daughter were then all necessary events to bring her to where she sat so quietly. That fate could be so cruel and brutal made existence drip with the bitter terrible bile of horror. That fate could connect two people separated for decades, insisting on a purpose neither could ever appreciate or understand, was overwhelming. The question became far more than the matter of creating a book. The question became why was she there beside Eugene, and ultimately why was she there at all. She wanted to know if it was her own desire or the force of destiny that made her recognize that she was breathing hard, made her realize how much she wanted to do the book with Eugene. When Laura came back to herself and finally read the words on the television monitor, it was as if Eugene had been reading her thoughts.

Perhaps This Book Is Meant To Be. Why Don't You Stay For a Week Or So And We Could Try The First Story Together.

"I can't tell you how much I wish I could do that." Laura replied, "But I can't leave Ian and Amanda. If I stay for a week and the first story works, how many weeks will I have to stay before we're done?"

Bring Amanda With You. She Could Go to School Here.

Lying there paralyzed, Eugene still thought anything was possible, anyone could do anything that was possible. Laura turned from the television screen and looked into Eugene's eyes. She saw the clear and simple confidence and optimism that just accepted or ignored adultery and dead boys and rapes. It was then she understood why Eugene understood young people so well. In the face of the most obvious evidence, he still believed in romantic ideals and possibilities. She would need him to help her understand the beautiful irrationality of youth. She would need him because it was something that she had never known. The look in his eyes and the look in hers was very much like the one they had shared the moment when he had once asked her to marry him. There was the same pregnant pause and virtually the same answer. She wondered if he had any sense of how ironic it all was.

"I can't. I just can't do that." Laura said to him.

You Don't Have to Decide This Minute. Eugene replied.

"You really want to do this? I feel terrible that I'll be disappointing you."

Then Don't.

"You're the hardest person to say no to that I've ever known. The best I can do is the old easy answer that I'll seriously think about it."

Back in the coffeehouse sometime later, Eugene was in his chair beside Laura watching everyone connect and reconnect, and the eyes that seemed to watch his family's simple activities with such obvious fascination could not help drifting back again and again to look at Laura. In his chair, Eugene had no way to communicate except with his eyes and occasional hand gestures. Both Ian and Amanda noticed that there had been some kind of change in Laura. There was a quiet focus, a stillness, a sense of heavy calm that seemed to have fallen over her like a mist. Both Ian and Amanda could sense the gathering darkness.

The adults prepared leftover turkey sandwiches, and more great platters of finger food appeared on the long table. The younger children sometimes gathered on the stage to sing a song or two, but the music of Christmas was simple and random songs happening spontaneously when one or more of the young children was bored with conversation. It was early in the evening when the music became more serious and organized. Unlike most Saturday night coffee house singing, the Christmas concert was very low-key and quiet, songs were usually ballads accompanied by one or two instruments. The songs were invariably one person singing alone.

Amanda sang a Beatles song she said was for her mother and father, John Lennon's In My Life. There were places to remember, people gone and not forgotten, forever, not for better. It was clear when Amanda sang the song that it was meant for someone so much older than she was. It was also unclear if she was really singing to her mother and father or to Tom. In her young life it was a fascinating ambiguous question. Who was it that she loved more?

When the older children began to take their turns on the stage after Amanda had sung, Sharon suggested that the McCalls and Ann Marie stay the night.

"All the cabins by the Lake are cleaned and made up with fresh linen. The wood stoves are all burning so they are toasty and warm. They are there for anyone who wants to stay over.

Ian was obviously having such a good time that he truly wanted to stay but he felt uncomfortable saying it. It was Eugene's eyes asking Laura the same silent question that decided the answer.

"I think it would be lovely to stay." said Laura, "But I think it should be up to Ann Marie."

"I'd love to do that but Wayne and Charles already have offered to drive me home to Toronto tonight. I really would like to spend some more time talking to Wayne, and the long drive would be the perfect time. So there's no need for you to leave because of me. Stay."

Amanda squealed with delight when Laura spoke for her family and said that they would be delighted to stay the night.

Birth parents and their children said their tenuous goodbyes, and it wasn't very much longer before the grown children had to take Eugene and Sharon's grandchildren home to bed. Hugs and kisses and goodbyes made successive little swarms around Eugene and Sharon, and soon the high fine voices of small children were gone again from the room. Shortly after the young children left, Lucy came for Christa to drive her back to the psychiatric hospital in Kingston. It was obvious how difficult it was for Sharon to embrace and release her troubled daughter. The sweet and gentle kiss Christa left on her father's cheek was tenderness itself, so much emotion suddenly real and surprising after Christa's flat demeanor from the rest of the day. It was with some relief that Amanda realized that Christa was leaving before Tom had a chance to take her to talk to his sister.

After Wayne and Charles had sung the only duet of the evening, they came to say goodbye to Wayne's parents and the McCalls and gather Ann Marie for the trip back to Toronto.

"We'll walk you to the car." Ian said warmly.

He wouldn't listen to any protests to the contrary and so when Laura got up, Amanda did not know whether she was included, but decided from her own heart that her she wanted to walk with Ann Marie to say a more intimate goodbye.

When they all stepped out of the house, Ann Marie stopped still, looking stunned in surprise, frozen in space and time looking up at the clear country sky blazing with white stars and constellations. It was all so enormous and beautiful.

"My God." was all Ann Marie said, and everyone stopped and looked up. All the city folk stood stunned for a moment under the blanket of stars that they never saw where they lived. They faced the black gallery of the universe and it's distant suns and felt small and lovely and close, together.

At the car, there were embraces among people who had done life and death battle with and for one another, and under the cold sky each one of them felt stronger and more alive than they ever imagined they could feel that Christmas day.

An hour later, Eugene was ready to be taken to bed. Laura said goodnight and kissed him almost exactly as Christa had done. She told him she was still thinking about his request. His eyes had blinked once.

Tom was waiting at the door in his red Volvo and drove the McCalls to the little cluster of cabins by the lake. When he turned off the motor and they got out into the absolute stillness and the smells of pine and cold sand, their family seemed very tiny indeed coming from the enormous hearth they had just shared.

Tom led them into the cabin, and the coal oil lantern burning there filled the room with a warm wonderful glow shimmering on every object inside the gray walls of log. He pointed out the loft where the mattresses were made up and showed them the cupboard for water and tea and coffee, and the other cupboard where the dishes were clean and ready for their use. He showed them their towels and nightshirts. He showed them the big iron kettle warming on the trivet on the stove and the basin and washstand nearby. It was obvious Tom had done this many, many times before. Ian teased him by saying that he was so thorough and gracious that he should seriously consider a career in the hospitality industry.

Amanda walked Tom back to his car after he had said goodnight to her parents. It had been the first time he embraced both Ian and Laura with unselfconscious depth of feeling. He had kissed Laura's cheek and let his body convey his respect and affection. Outside, by the car, the embrace and the kiss of the young lovers under the star dust of love made both of their hearts race along side one another, made their memories trace the feel of their lips and store it in the vault of life's meaning. Long and tender and sweet and soft, their kiss in the darkness was so strange. When it broke at last, Amanda had to say the perfect truth.

"This is the second time you have given me the most beautiful day of my life."

"There'll be a whole lot more I hope." he said, and obviously meant it. And she believed him.

When Amanda returned to the cabin, her parents had already put on their night shirts and had crawled up to the loft and were cuddling under the soft goose down duvet. She quickly undressed and followed them up the ladder to the single bed that was made up and turned down and ready for her.

"This is just like the Walton's." Ian said in the soft shadows.

"Goodnight Amanda Sue." Laura said in a nasal southern accent.

"Goodnight Mom. Goodnight dad." she replied and seeing the shadowy lump that was her parents touched her so deeply that she tried to make sure to remember all the details of that moment.

They were all absolutely wide awake and so Ian led the voices in the darkness, talking about the grown-up Van Fleet children and the impressions they each had of them. They compared notes about Jonas and Christa, Tranh's wife Elaine and Rosie's wife Connie. They all agreed that Connie was the only member of the family who was difficult to talk to. She seemed to carry a barely concealed anger that didn't seem to come from anything that was apparent. They talked and talked and it was sometime in the second hour that Laura mentioned that Eugene had asked if she and Amanda wanted to stay the week while she worked with Eugene on the first story of Arthur and Laura Lee.

Amanda sat bolt upright. "Oh my God! You mean we're staying the whole week?" The excitement and delight exploded in her voice.

"I told him I'd have to talk to both of you. I told him I'd think about it seriously." her mother answered.

"Please! Oh please! It would be so fantastic! It'll be forever before Tom and I have the chance to spend another week together. Oh, please! You have to do it! You can't tell me we've been invited to stay and then say we can't."

Ian felt like the boy left out of the game. He could hear in Laura's voice, and of course in his daughter's response; that they really wanted to stay. With all the time that he had taken from work, it wouldn't be possible that he'd be included. He'd have to go home to the empty condominium and learn once more what it was like to be lonely. The feeling in the pit of his stomach in that moment made him realize how hard it would be.

"Of course you both have to stay. You'll get an absolutely wonderful start on your book." he said to Laura." And Amanda, you won't have another chance to get to know Tom's family as you will this week."

"Couldn't you stay too?" Amanda asked him, suddenly realizing that he would be leaving without them.

Ian told her he couldn't afford to take another week away from work. He almost insisted that they should stay. "I'll just have the boys over for poker and sports and wild women every night. I'll never get another chance like this again." he said. The joke wasn't funny at all.

"I guess we're staying." Laura said and Amanda screamed as she tore herself from under her covers and flew across the loft and fell onto her parents and hugged them, one under each arm. Her parent's arms came from under the duvet and the three heads of the McCall family were close, and cool, and dark, and uncompromisingly happy.

Amanda even kissed her parents cheeks, one and then the other, and said thank you to each one of them before she crawled away and went back to her bed. Ian and Laura lay their savoring the memory of their daughter's embrace, both of them remembering the little girl who used to crawl into bed with them in the middle of the night. They said goodnight once more and finally they were warm and quiet in the pure stillness of the log cabin. And strangely, in only a few minutes they were all fast asleep.

As she would many times, for decades to come, Amanda awoke in the middle of the night screaming from the recurrent nightmare of her rape. Almost convulsing in terror, it took five minutes of Laura holding her daughter close to her body before she calmed down. Laura said nothing, holding close and quiet to her own agony. Ian said nothing as he lay awake for the rest of the night feeling so far, so far away. Laura stroked Amanda's soft hair for long quiet moments and when she finally asked Amanda if she was okay, Amanda whispered, "Could you please stay?" Laura answered by crawling under the covers with her daughter and laid there holding Amanda's hand and smelling her hair beside her on the same pillow until they both finally slept.

In the morning they all slept very late and when they got up they were starving because their stomachs were aching from having been stretched by the masses of food they had eaten the previous day. Ian tried to ask Amanda about her nightmare but all she said was, "You know."

The cabin was filled in a radiant heat that came from the wood stove, the radiant heat that made every object feel warm and soft to the touch. They all stayed in bare feet and night shirts as Ian filled the copper kettle and started it boiling on the stove. Ian loved replenishing the fire with the split dry logs from the log carrier by the door and he reminded them of the time when Amanda was seven years old and he had talked them into taking a week's vacation in a little cabin near Great Slave Lake. It had taken all of his powers of persuasion to get Laura to agree, but finally he had prevailed because he insisted that Amanda should see nature in its absolute unspoiled abundance when it would make an impression on her that would last for the rest of her life. It had been an unmitigated disaster. They had all got sick from the water. They were trapped indoors by billions of insatiable black flies. The solitary confinement they endured for that week had been in a cabin very much like the one in which they now stayed.

"That's when I knew that you'd never have a career in the hospitality business." Laura said, teasing Ian.

"What do you mean? I promised you a vacation you'd never forget for the rest of your life. Amanda, did we ever have a more memorable vacation?"

"I thought it was fun. We never played Barbie dolls together after that."

"I suppose it's too late now." he answered.

"They're all in my closet at home. If you want to bring them when you come to get us next week, we could see."

Ian's heart sank from being reminded that he would soon be leaving his family behind.

In the cupboard, with the tea and the coffee, Amanda found a big tin box filled with fresh muffins, and so they sat in the reproduction arrow backed chairs and ate muffins quickly, and drank the fresh coffee that filled the room with its unmistakable sweet acid smell.

It was almost noon before they had dressed and walked up to the farmhouse. Jonas was sitting on the front porch with Tom and Sharon enjoying the wood fire. Everyone looked tired from the intense emotions and activities of the previous day. More coffee, more muffins and desserts leftover from the previous day served as an impromptu lunch. The day after holidays everybody was responsible to feed themselves. All the sensible dietary rules that applied the rest of the year were suspended. Everyone was allowed to go into the kitchen whenever they were hungry and eat absolutely anything.

The old dogs got up to make their greetings and Amanda went and sat beside Tom as her parents pulled up wicker chairs and poured themselves another coffee.

Sharon told Amanda that the younger children had been playing her CD all morning in the music room and it was definitely the biggest hit to ever appear at the farm.

"You'll be having to sign autographs soon." Ian teased her.

"You'll have to go everywhere with your belly button showing." Jonas added.

Amanda was obviously embarrassed.

"Amanda, you shouldn't be embarrassed, you have a perfectly lovely little naval." her mother said, joining in with the teasing.

Amanda didn't know what to say or how to respond so she asked Tom to help her. He didn't. He just laughed good-heartedly.

Sharon told the McCalls the rules about everyone finding their own food the day after a holiday and encouraged them not to be shy about going into the kitchen and helping themselves to anything that took their fancy. Ian rubbed his hands together in exaggerated delight.

Laura then announced the decision they had made the night before, that she and Amanda would be pleased to stay the week and accept the Van Fleet's generous hospitality. Amanda couldn't restrain a squeal and Tom punched the air with a long sibilant "Yesssss". Sharon said the whole Van Fleet family would be delighted to hear it, especially Eugene.

Jonas also said he was delighted to hear it because he would be staying until a few days past New Years and they would get a chance to get to know one another. Laura was secretly pleased that he thought so. She had an undeniable sense of contentment and self-confidence when she looked into Jonas's eyes.

Over coffee and wood smoke smells, Ian, in his gentlest cross-examination technique, found out a little more about Jonas's background. He had gone to university in Rome at the Canadian Vatican College. He had written a book just after he was ordained a priest while he was working at the Vatican newspaper, a book that got him into a great deal of trouble.

"It was called the Papal Bias. It was about the misconceptions that people have about the Papacy, and also the biases that Popes have had about their role as head of the Church. Even the Pope was mad at me. He invited me to dinner. We had a big fight. He said some things. I said some things. I ended up with a parish in Newfoundland. It was supposed to be my penance for excessive pride. It was the best thing that ever happened in my life except for coming to live here."

Ian tried to get Jonas to elaborate, but he said that it was a very long story and he tried not to tell it because he felt tempted to anger when he told it.

"How did you get from a parish in Newfoundland to a Trappist monastery out West?" Laura asked.

"That too is a long story, involving even more of the seven deadly sins. But I've always been interested in the Trappists simply because they worshiped without words. Words have always been my best thing. When I became a priest I imagined that I would become a Jesuit scholar. I always loved the history of ideas. I never imagined that I would have a calling to parish service, but I loved it, and the more I loved it, the more it seemed to me that words were only really effective when you spoke them to people who knew you and understood who you were. It completely shook my faith in written scholarship. It ultimately shook my faith in ideas. The written word is very much over rated, I think." Jonas explained seriously.

"But, why would you give up speaking and join the Trappists?" Ian pressed.

"Another long story. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end it's just words. Life can even be so much richer without them." Jonas replied cryptically.

"What do you mean?" Laura asked. Her imagination was running with the bare bones of Jonas' personal history.

"Sometimes simple conversations can make you realize you love someone more than you ever dare to say."

"You fell in love with someone." Amanda interjected.

"I did."

"Joining an order that doesn't speak is a kind of penance then?" Laura asked gently.

"Partly. Mostly I hope it's meant to serve to make me realize what lies beneath the words and beneath the ideas and beneath the feelings that connect human beings to one another, and ultimately to God." Jonas replied, sounding almost sad.

Laura then told Jonas that she still had hope for the written word, for ideas and feelings to connect people who had never even met one another.

"The letters of Arthur and Laura Lee. They are just written words and ideas. You said yourself they are the most powerful icons of your whole family's subconscious." she pointed out.

"That they are. But you have to understand that their greatest power may be in the fact that the words in those letters were spoken aloud by our father. It was sitting listening to him read them to us that was as powerful as the stories they contained. I don't mean to discourage you. I think you and Dad could create something truly beautiful that would touch many, many people, but I think, for my family, nothing could come close to meaning as much as hearing his voice say the words in those letters."

"It's an interesting idea." Ian interjected, "The only thing really left of oral tradition is music."

"Rap music. I hate it! "Laura added.

"That's because it's so angry. Just imagine when Rap stops being angry. Young people will speak and listen in poetry. Won't that be something?" Jonas replied, earnestly.

Amanda flashed back violently to the night and the man in the scream mask of latex and the power of his words cutting into the crowd of dancing people. She shuddered and said nothing. Tom saw the look in Amanda's eyes and asked her if she wanted to go for a walk and her eyes thanked him as she held out her hand as she got up to go. It was the signal for Ian to confess his hunger and he offered to bring snacks from the kitchen.

"That would be great." said Laura, "I'd love something. I'll trust you."

Ian left for the kitchen and then it was Jonas's turn to reach into Laura's past. For him the idea of the past seemed to be different than it was to most people, he didn't seen interested in incidents but rather the circumstances of her past life.

"Were you and my dad once in love?"

He went right to the point.

"The way teenagers are, I guess. You know." she replied nervously. Sharon's eyes got wide and very interested at the new direction of the conversation.

"What were you like? Why were you attracted to my dad?" Jonas pursued.

"Well, it was entirely superficial. He was gorgeous. He had that incredible car. I was just your typical empty headed teenager, I'm afraid."

"Now why would you want me to believe that?" Jonas pressed. "The first-time you were alone with my father all that would have meant very little. What did you two talk about?"

"That was so long ago. How could I possibly remember?"

"What did you do on dates?" Jonas continued," If you remember the incidents, you remember the way you were. Did my dad talk about cars?"

"Jonas, maybe Laura isn't comfortable talking about all that." Sharon interjected. Laura looked uncomfortable but it was also obvious that Sharon was completely comfortable with the questions. She was being considerate of Laura's feelings. It was Sharon's look of calm that settled Laura's anxieties.

"Your father talked about his childhood more than anybody I've ever known. He made me talk about mine. It seemed easy for him, even though he had a much more difficult time with his parents than I did. His mother and father were pretty angry people, if I recall. I had different problems, different expectations. We talked about that a lot. We did do a lot of car stuff, races in Shannonville, long drives on back roads in the Mercedes. What is it you want me to tell you?" Laura finally asked.

"I'm interested in your roots. And I suppose my dad's roots, and I guess by implication my own." he replied, with complete directness.

Laura almost never thought about her own roots. She had never understood why Eugene had been so interested in his childhood and hers. It seemed that he passed his fascination on to his son and all those many years later she was again finding it difficult to understand the point of it all and so she asked him.

"I don't understand the fascination with the past you all seem to have. All a person's roots do is decide the place you begin. There are thousands of things that can grow out of those roots. Even trees of the same species don't end up much alike." Laura replied.

"I used to think that was true. I used to believe in choices. Now I believe that the only people with real choices are the coaches who can see both teams on the field, the ones who can see the whole game being played. The players are too involved in every play. Single trees never know what it means to be a forest, and understanding a forest means you have to know that every tree is bound to its roots."

"That's too many mixed metaphors for me." Laura replied.

"Describe how you're different than you were then?"

"I have shorter hair." she replied, and that said everything she wanted to say.

He took her seriously. Sharon did too.

"I can see why my dad was attracted to you." Jonas replied. Sharon was beginning to see it too.

The day Christmas fell that year was perfect. The day after Christmas was a Saturday and so Ian would have that whole day and Sunday and the boxing day Monday before he had to go back to Toronto. He spent most of those days sitting just as he was by the fire. Sharon would leave occasionally to tend to tasks and to Eugene.

Ian and Jonas got to know each other quite well and would move from the fire to long walks out along the unfrozen dark lake. It was hard to feel alone on the farm and before the weekend was over, Ian felt he belonged there, like an old shoe in a closet.

Before they slept each night, the McCalls would have their Walton moments, talking in the shadows about the people and the day gone by. Laura was interested in Jonas, and in a way she envied the time that Ian had to spend with him. She was interested in the stories that Ian brought about Jonas's life in the Newfoundland out-port. She was interested in the little theater that he and his best friend from the Vatican college had built, the best friend who had followed him there to create the little theater for the local people. When he left to join the Trappists, he had left the theater and his friend behind with the woman the friend had married, the woman that was the apex of the twin secret triangles that involved Jonas, the woman, the friend and Jonas's implacable God. In leaving, he had hoped to break at least one of the triangles. There were love stories everywhere on the farm; difficult, unfulfilled, intense little love stories.

Amanda also had information to share. It seemed that Rosie's wife Connie was the one person who truly resented the farm. She had reluctantly agreed to let her children come to school there and she saw her life as an ongoing battle to try to keep her children from being swallowed up by the farm the way she believed it had swallowed her husband and everyone else who had ever come there.

"Tom says that she calls the farm the good Jonestown. She thinks Sharon is like some kind of cult leader. She doesn't seem very controlling to me." Amanda said sounding troubled by such an idea.

"She's hard to resist." Laura replied, "It is interesting. I'd like to talk to Connie sometime."

Ian defended Sharon. "She knows what she believes. She lives by what she believes. People who don't may feel they are being controlled because of that. With all the kids and all that goes on at this place, somebody has to be in charge. It doesn't sound like Eugene was the in-charge kind of guy."

"The Eugene I remember certainly wasn't. But Sharon said that she and Eugene used to fight a lot. That's certainly not the Eugene I remember. He got his way by just being so earnest. She's certainly his match in that."

Laura spent most of that weekend by herself in the cabin reading the blue onion skin letters, falling into the lives of famous and ordinary people when they were young and innocent, when even those who were facing death seemed to be absolutely free of any real sense of mortality. Laura remembered the time between ten and twenty and realized how long those years had seemed to last. As she read, that was the impression that slowly came back to her from own youth. Every decade since had seemed to accelerate, and the unconscious sense of fatality compressed the moments and events of her life like the fast forward motion of a videocassette recorder. By the time she was through the letters late Sunday night, she had remembered what it was like when she and Eugene had been young. She also had the first powerful realization that he was going to die, and it could come at any time. It was Eugene's mortality that compressed time for Laura. When she finished the letters she felt a sense of urgency she had never felt before in her life. That was how she was different than when she was young. Then urgency was a matter of need and impatience. It was more visceral, sensual, sexual. middle-aged urgency was something else again. This was something new.

Tom and Amanda spent every moment of the weekend together until he left her each night on the steps of the cabin where she slept with her parents. She helped him with his regular chores and they listened to music and were dragged into the coffee house by the younger children so Amanda could sing songs from her CD.

Sunday night after dinner, Ian managed to talk Laura into going for a walk along the beach. In a big borrowed Pea coat and woolen mittens, Laura was already warmed by the long walk from the farmhouse to the beach, when Ian took her hand in his. He had no idea how powerfully the gesture made her flash back to her youth. Another hand, another moment, another kind of distance. Flecks of star light scratched the surface of the big lake as it scratched the surface of her heart as she walked without speaking, having come so very far to feel the sand once again giving away beneath her feet. They walked slowly to the old black Willow that had fallen forward into the water and Ian only had to give Laura a slight lift and she was sitting securely on the deep ribbed bark of the horizontal trunk. He sat down beside her and they looked at the beautiful shoreline, listened to the wavelets gently slapping the shore as if they were keeping time for the music that lay in the silence. It had been many, many years since they had such a moment to themselves where their lives had given them a measure of peace that they could see and feel with their eyes. It had been a very long time.

Monday morning Amanda went to school with all the Van Fleet children. Two days was the longest holiday they were ever allowed away from school. Winter and summer, school was every weekday between eight and twelve o'clock.

That month they were reconstructing the life of a woman named Leona Gilmour who had lived in Halifax at the turn-of-the-century. The sepia photo was of a woman in her mid thirties surrounded by her seven children. The photo was taken outside a store with big windows and a sign above that said Leona's Fabrics and Millinery.

Amanda worked with Tom and Martha who were trying to reconstruct the inside of the store, the fabrics and patterns, the prices, the fixtures and the findings. Very quickly, Amanda learned that her task involved a need she always had completely taken for granted, the need to have suitable clothes. Clothing was now a matter of style whose only cost came in dollars and a few impulsive moments of time. She was learning how clothes were made from fabric. Amanda loved opening up the old tissue paper patterns and she was absolutely amazed that all the lines on all the pieces could come together as a dress.

The four-hour class went by before she had even become comfortably familiar with all the things that Tom and Sarah had collected. Somehow a school project at the farm seemed to be more than just another make-work project that was irrelevant to anything in real-life. The faces in the picture, the look of the store made it somehow real. And there was something about the farm that made Amanda feel a personal connection to those people and that time. During lunch, Amanda bent her father and mother's ears about Leona Gilmour and her store. She told her mother about dress maker patterns and wanted to know if it was still possible to buy such things.

"I don't know. I suppose so. I don't know who would bother." her mother replied.

"I think it's so neat that clothes are just like a big jig saw puzzle. Mom, did you ever know how to sew?" Amanda asked, excitedly.

"I'm afraid my mother always used a seamstress. I think I once learned how to do a hem in home economics class in high school." Laura replied.

"What's home economics?"

Ian burst out laughing. "It's where nice girls learned the hem and muffin business." Ian teased. "It was the girls version of Shop."

"What's Shop?" Amanda asked, understanding her question was also going to be seen to be funny.

"Shop was where boys were first introduced to big tools." Jonas interjected and the whole table exploded in laughter.

After dinner on that Boxing Day Monday, Ian got ready for the drive back to Toronto. The clothes that he borrowed from the great walk-in closet, he brought back to the laundry room with those Amanda and Laura had worn the day before. He went to the car wearing the same clothes he had worn on Christmas day and it felt strange and incongruous to be in dress slacks and jacket.

It was only Laura and Amanda who walked him to the car. He had whispered to them that he was going and didn't want to make a fuss. The only goodbye he made was to Sharon and he held her like his dearest friend.

In the cold, in big coats, the little McCall family hugged and kissed and separated once more. He told both his ladies to enjoy their week and told them he loved them and his body felt stiff and nervous as his women let him go.

That night Laura went to Eugene's bed. She came with pages and pages of notes she had made in a big spiral notebook Tom had given to her. Tom had also lent her his laptop computer so that she could begin to transcribe each pair of letters into their own individual files.

And every day after that Laura would come to Eugene just before ten and they would work on the first story for an hour or more, until Laura could see that Eugene was too tired to go on. The only exceptions to their daily meetings came on weekend nights. Saturday night Eugene would join the coffee house gathering. Sunday night Sharon, as she had every Sunday night since he had moved to the bed in the sunroom, would come to sleep fitfully beside her husband in his big elevated bed.

But that Monday, the first time that Laura had come to talk to Eugene about the book, she got right to the point. "I'm going to make a digital copy of everything I'm doing so you can look at it on your own computer if you want to." Laura began, "There are forty one stories and that's just way too many, so the first really hard thing will be to pick ten or twelve stories to make up a book. I thought that was going to be relatively easy. It's not. I have a suggestion. I'll make a list of all the stories and if you can pick a dozen or so, and I'll do the same and we can see how much we agree. The first story of course has to be about how Arthur and Laura Lee fell in love and had the same dreams and were separated after they found the wine treasure. And the most important thing is a story to finish the book that brings Arthur and Laura Lee back together. I hope you'll agree to try to do that."

Laura waited for his reply. It came in one word. Sure.

Laura went on to explain that she would have the entire list of stories transcribed by the next day but she wanted to read him the list from her notes to refresh his memory. The computer screen told her that he knew them by heart.

Laura talked excitedly for almost an hour before she stopped to ask Eugene if he had any questions or had anything he wanted to say about what she had said about her intentions and approach to the book.

"Sounds Good. Can't Wait!" he said.

Laura read the words and for the first time she gave him her beautiful smile in return for his invisible one. His eyes locked still in response.

The strange and lovely thing that happened later that night occurred after Amanda came home to the cabin where her mother was already snuggled away in bed. Amanda said hello and was quiet as she undressed and put on her nightshirt and came up to the loft to bed. She had crawled over to her mother and Laura smiled into the serious eyes of her daughter before Amanda leaned down and kissed her.

"Would it be too weird if I crawled in and slept beside you? I'm really scared of the dreams." Amanda said softly.

"Of course you can. After what you've been through, it isn't weird at all."

Amanda crawled in to the space where her father usually slept, and Laura felt her daughters hand reach up from under the covers and stroke the soft hair on her skull. Laura reached until she found Amanda's hand and held it to a place under her breast.

"I loved holding your hand last night." Laura whispered, and her small voice in the wood loft was as clear as the ring of a Symphony triangle.

The next day Laura knew that her task of choosing a dozen stories from the forty one pairs of letters was going to be one of the most difficult tasks she would have. From her master list she could remind herself of each of the stories and the subjects they dealt with them, so basic and powerful as they portrayed the almost powerless people who were the protagonists in the stories. The one she was absolutely certain would be included was the story of Emily Dickinson and the day she refused to stand up in church to ask to be included among those who would be saved. The moral force of society and friends and family that fell upon her was complete and unanimously hostile. The young girl of sixteen who already spoke with angels in her garden made her act so much more powerful than an act of teenage rebellion. Remaining in her place in her pew was standing up to a God who would pick and choose among people Emily must have been insisting should be valued as equals.

Having to put herself in the place of someone of such absolute and pure principal would have been impossible for Laura if she did not have the guidance and sympathy of Arthur and Laura Lee as they met and comforted Emily. Laura knew that if she was going to do justice to the story, she would have to have a sense of ideal righteousness that didn't exist any longer as either a part of religion or culture or friends or family or her own nature.

One after another, Laura thought about the themes in each of the letters and realized how completely Eugene had fashioned a handbook that dealt with every difficult social and moral question that a young person would face as they got older in life.

A boy knowing he would go to his death in a Nazi crematorium faced the absolute question of pure evil and absolute injustice. Other stories dealt with abandonment. Others dealt with handicaps, mental and physical and emotional. There was John Merrick, the elephant man, as well as a boy who was institutionalized for being retarded, even though he was only the victim of the sensory deprivation that came from the physical isolation he had suffered at the hands of his parents. Other stories dealt with life and death decisions, the choice of risking one's own life for a loved one or a stranger or a dog. There were stories about misunderstanding and disrespect, and a number of stories about young people with the most beautiful natures, being treated worse than dirt.

About half of the stories dealt with the dark side of life. The other half dealt with the best feelings that might exist in the human spirit. They dealt with love and generosity and compassion and determination. These Laura saw as the up-lifting stories, the ones where tragedy did not prevail. There was Einstein as a sullen boy, and Mark Twain, and Joseph Fell, a fourteen year old boy who worked in an infirmary hospital in 1800 in Philadelphia tending to the victims of yellow fever, and a girl whose mother worked in a dance hall in the Yukon gold rush who became rich by learning how to make miners laugh so hard that they would reward her with gold that had just come out of the ground. These were some of the stories she would have to cull or keep.

The last group of stories Laura saw as a sub category of those stories that dealt with the best aspects of the human heart. These were the six love stories. Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. The fear, the desire, the feelings kept secret, the feelings finally told, hope and misunderstanding and jealousy and heartbreak and love at first sight that could absolutely alter a person's life forever, these were the themes that Laura also had to choose among.

It was then, in a flash, that Laura realized the one thing that was common to all the stories was that each character was almost completely helpless. The pain they suffered and rose above, the satisfaction and accomplishment they achieved, they had felt and done while they were virtually alone. The only help any of them had come from their dreams and their invisible friends Arthur and Laura Lee. And when she remembered her own youth and thought of her own daughter, Laura realized that helplessness was something they had both known only too well. No one had been there for her in a way that would have mattered. She had not been there for Amanda. It was a bitter thing to realize that feeling helpless was so common to so many young people. How ironic it was that it had only been since they both had become connected to the farm, when they had both undergone the most horrible, helpless tragedy of their lives that help had come to them in such a powerful way from Ann Marie and the whole Van Fleet family.

Even the constant background music of the farm had invaded Laura's consciousness. She kept hearing Neil Young's song, Helpless Helpless Helpless playing in her head as she went through the days and walked up to the farmhouse for meals and showers and her meetings with Eugene.

By the time she had gone to see Eugene on the first Tuesday night, she had only been able to choose four stories that she was absolutely certain she wanted to include. He had not been as successful as she had, having chosen only three stories that he was sure he wanted. The only one in common with Laura's list was his story of Emily Dickinson. Choosing the parts of life to leave out of the book seemed almost impossible to do. They were both embarrassed to admit they had not been able to do it.

In Toronto, Ian was haunted by the emptiness of his home. The brief hours his family had used to touch and pass in a day were enough to fill the rooms with their common presence. It wasn't the quality time he missed, it was the ordinary times of coming and going and passing one another on paths of differing purpose. Their beautiful condominium was where every road began and ended, and it didn't matter so much that they rarely traveled the same path together. What Ian also realized was that the common road they had traveled in the last few weeks was the first one that they had traveled together that went very far, and it had taken them deep into the heart where they had shared the most bitter and beautiful experiences they had ever known in their lives. Ian felt, sadly, that he was back on his own solitary path while Laura and Amanda continued together on the one that went down deep into the heart. His own heart felt as lonely as it ever been. Making dinners alone, listening to music alone, watching television alone, he thought constantly of Laura and Amanda together. They had become and were becoming a part of the farm and he was stuck in the city.

On the farm, Laura and Amanda rarely saw one another, except for meals, and when they slept close, and rose together in the morning. They both knew they were on paths deep into themselves that would lead to who they would become, and they both knew that they traveled two different crossed roads that were called Tom and Eugene. Amanda knew her heart would become more and more inextricably bound to the path she was choosing, but Laura had no idea of where she was going or what was happening to her every day.

Laura usually missed lunch, intent as she was on her work. When she was too emotionally or intellectually tired from working, she would refill the wood stove and replenish the wood carrier from the big stack of split logs against the wall of the porch. Getting ice clear water from the hand pump outside was simple heavy work she came to enjoy. Leaning into the pump handle and seeing the bright water finally heave into her white porcelain jug was like pumping something cold and fluid out of her own depth. Going to the outhouse was also an experience that made the basic facts of life just a little too immediate and real. The peat smell, the wood textures, the pink Styrofoam seats that she blessed for being there in the cold, cold morning gave life just a little too much clarity for Laura's taste. But the contrast between the most simple basic work and human function, with the most sophisticated and difficult challenge of her life, made both seem almost sensuously alive. Laura had never known work to exist in her diaphragm like big moths banging into the source of her breath. Seeing and smelling the birch wood burning in the stove, seeing the ash and the embers, feeling the radiant heat in her clothes somehow gave her calm reassurance and comfort as she watched the letters transcribed from her hands and eyes and the blue air mail letters to the laptop computer screen.

As hard as Laura worked, Amanda was even working harder. It was the hardest she had ever worked in her life. Between Christmas and New Years the Van Fleet family had to get ready for the second biggest party of the year that came on New Year's Eve. Nearly two hundred people would greet the New Year in the coffee house. Friends and foster families and personal connections everyone had accumulated over the years were invited to celebrate the New Year with the Van Fleets.

The decorations went quickly, but the mass quantities of food and beverages that had to be prepared meant everyone, including Amanda worked very hard in the enormous kitchen preparing to feed so many people.

Amanda loved it. The excitement of the holiday built with the frenzy of work and preparation. It was like a giant living collage made of fruit and flour and vegetables and meat arranged on serving dishes of all kinds. The smells of cooking in the farmhouse from the day before had barely faded before the new smells began to permeate the rooms. The huge plastic crates of cut-up chicken that would be breaded and fried the day of New Year's Eve seemed to Amanda like a soft wet mountain of pale flesh and skin. Tom explained to her that the meat came from a local farm that raised fryers. It was the only time they ate meat they hadn't raised themselves. Tom said he remembered the last time they had used their own chickens and how the death and cleaning of those chickens had made both Christa and Wayne and Lucy become vegetarians.

"Christa cried for two days and wouldn't come out of her bedroom. It was after that she started to do strange things and cry all the time." Tom told her as they carried a bushel of potatoes from the root cellar.

"I can see how it would be hard to kill an animal you know. But I think killing is part of everybody's nature. There isn't anything that doesn't kill." Amanda replied and she realized that she wouldn't have felt that way a few weeks before. She didn't know if her heart had hardened or if it was just more comfortable with the hard reality of life. By the time four o clock quiet hour came that day, Amanda could barely calm down from the excitement, and when everyone including Tom disappeared to their own private place, Amanda was left feeling very lost and alone indeed.

Everyone left her with barely a word. Tom suggested she spend the day finding a private place for herself where she could spend the hour alone. It was clear by his tone that he wasn't prepared to even consider letting her join him in his tree house. Almost immediately, she thought of the place where she had felt safest and most protected on the farm and knew it was the place she would want to spend an hour in silence by herself.

The week between Christmas and New Years that Ian had to work, was actually only two and a half days long. Like almost everyone else, he left the office early on the day of New Year's Eve and was on the road by three o'clock crawling through the congestion of the superhighways congealed with people just like him, leaving early, going home or away.

Every night he had talked to Laura on her cell phone and it only made him feel more lonely and sick at heart. But the excitement of seeing them and joining them on the farm was balanced by the sad knowledge that he was going there to bring them home. Ian had never known such enormous mixed feelings in his life. Having his wife and daughter come home was a deep and selfish desire, and he knew that only they could break the crushing loneliness that had filled his home. Yet bringing them back from the farm and all that it offered them was like denying them the best part of life.

He began to fantasize about quitting his job and asking for work on the farm. He imagined himself working in the sawmill or as a car mechanic or doing antique furniture reproductions, and it seemed so much more wonderful than the law, but he knew he had virtually no experience or aptitude with his hands. He remembered the humiliation he suffered from his peers in high school shop classes.

And he knew Laura's stay on the farm was only temporary at best. It was Eugene and the book and nothing else that made her want to be there. Quitting his job was absurd. She'd come home as soon as the book was done or Eugene succumbed to his disease. He faced the realization that his little family would soon be together, one-way or another, back in the city where they belonged. It made him feel better and worse. As soon as he was released from Toronto traffic, he pressed down on the accelerator and didn't care whether he got a fat ticket or not. He missed his family so much he had to turn up the volume of the CD player playing his own daughter's voice on the CD copy Tom had made for him before he had left the farm.

Everyone was already sitting down to dinner when Ian arrived. He actually had to let himself in because no one answered when he knocked on the porch door. Seeing his wife and daughter sitting at the big table made his heart flip in a sentimental vertigo that caught in his throat. He kissed the top of their heads and touched their shoulders as he made his greetings and Sharon asked that a plate be brought for him.

The cold salmon and wonderful vegetables salads were an unexpected delight, and as Amanda went on about her week, Ian felt like a lost boy who had been found. After dinner, the whole family went to the coffeehouse where, as they did at the end of each month, the adults and babies watched as the younger children of the family gave the hour and a half long presentation for that month; Leona Gilmore, her life and times.

First came her history and what they had discovered of it. Her husband dead in the mines, the shop that was left to her by her widowed aunt. Somehow Leona's children and their children's children were tracked down and described. The Depression, it seemed, had moved almost all of the Gilmours to Ontario. It was strange to think that some of Leona's great great-grandchildren might be people they passed on the street.

Then came the details of daily life for someone in Leona's class and circumstance. The house she lived in, the furniture, the clothes and the dishes were described or shown by picture or example. Recipes were collected and described, as were the sources and varieties of the food they ate.

Then came the economics of life for Leona. Her budget for clothes and food and taxes and heat as well as the economics of a little fabric shop that supplied every cent she had was explored and quickly described in a chart.

Then it was Tom and Martha and Amanda describing the store and the quality and variety of the goods Leona would have sold. The prices and the findings and the kind of displays a person might expect to be in such a store were all described concisely.

A day in the life that would have been so unremarkable when it was lived was fascinating to see recreated in the invisible complexities of time and culture. It was obvious that the children had the system of re-creating life down pat and the McCalls were amazed at the anthropological detail.

Finally, as it was with every presentation, the description of the Gilmour's church and religion moved quickly to examples of hymns. These lead immediately to the popular songs the family would have known and sung. The children picked up their instruments and played and sang examples of the hymns, and then played examples of the ordinary music of that particular time.

The family's applause at the end of the presentation was gratifying for the children who had made it, especially Amanda who, like her parents, had no idea what to expect when she began. At the end of the presentation, it was hard not to feel that the woman in the picture who had died before almost everyone in the room had been born, had somehow become a part of their lives. Laura thought to herself, but she didn't dare say, she wished Amanda could stay and go to this little school. The look on her daughters face singing songs a century old was a look she had never seen on her face in her early lessons in the piano and the ballet.

When Ian asked Tom how they did such a tremendous job of research, he told him that since the Internet the family had become regular visitors to virtually every historical archive in the world.

"It used to take a whole lot longer to find out about somebody's life." he said, seriously.

After the dinner was the mad house of getting ready for the New Year's Eve dance. Each of the McCalls was shocked to learn that it was to be in semi-formal dress.

Ian had not even considered bringing a suit. Laura's evening dresses were all at home. The last formal dress Amanda owned was from the junior prom and would never have even fit her.

As always, the great walk-in closet was the answer to their dilemma. There was a fine wool pin striped suit in Ian's size that he actually quite liked. His ladies had a much more difficult problem. Going through the formal dresses, most of which had come from secondhand stores where they had been left by many brief bridesmaids were not really to either of their tastes.

But it was only for one night, and so they chose dresses neither of them would have been caught dead wearing in Toronto. They both went with simplicity, and so Laura in magenta and Amanda in teal really did look quite lovely after they had done their makeup and found shoes to match. Laura in her close cropped hair looked strange and lovely but Ian thought his ladies would more than hold their own. What none of them knew was that being the only formal dance of the year, the financial resources at the Van Fleet's disposal made the fashion display that evening as spectacular as a Hollywood premiere. The city ladies looked like hicks.

The band arrived from Montreal and set up on the stage. The little big band came every year with strings and brass and woodwinds and drums and a singer with a great whiskey voice. New Years Eve was the only Van Fleet party where not one of them lifted a finger or a voice in song.

Christa was there from the psychiatric hospital and came wearing the same dress she had shed the previous year standing outside in the rock garden that grew over the root cellar. The dress was cut down the middle and up on the side nearly to the hip and was made of gold sequins and was about the sexiest, most spectacular dress Laura or Amanda had ever seen in the flesh, and flesh was the operative word. Beautiful Christa looked almost surreal in the gold shimmer hanging over her translucent skin. For the McCalls, as it was for everyone else, it was hard to just stop staring at her. Laura remembered when she was young and could do the same thing to a room.

Wayne and Charles had joined the McCalls at their table and they were both thrilled to hear that Wayne's friend had managed to establish contact with Ann Marie's daughter and that Megan was coming to see him every day to give advice and to talk with the boy they were trying to get to leave the street. Ann Marie was most thrilled when she got the email message from Wayne's friend telling her that her daughter wanted him to say that she missed her mother and hoped her holiday wasn't too sad. Ann Marie had written back a long, long reply telling about Amanda's rape and how Ann Marie had helped her come back to the world, telling about her own wonderful Christmas Eve and day with the McCalls and the Van Fleets, telling how much she wished that Megan could have been there to share it with her.

Wayne had invited Ann Marie to come back to the farm for New Year's Eve but she declined because she said that she wanted to be near her computer, just in case there was another secondhand message from her daughter. The one thing that she had not included in her first long letter was what she wanted to say most of all to her daughter. She wanted to tell her that her life was completely empty without her. She didn't dare say that for a very long time.

The New Year's music, as usual, went through the generations and during one slow song Tom shocked Amanda by asking her if she knew how to fox trot.

Although it sounded complicated and she worried about humiliating herself, brave girl that she was, she simply told him, "No, I don't really know how to do any slow dances, but I'll try."

"It's easy." he said, as he took her into his arms and, as the two them looked down at their feet, Tom counted time and showed her the steps as he began very slowly, and then slowly let her follow, again and again, and then he began to move faster and faster, and in a few short minutes Amanda was dancing like a debutante. At least that's how it felt to her. Soon she wasn't looking, and before long she wasn't even thinking, as Tom led her around the dance floor.

"You make me feel like a princess." she whispered into his ear.

"You make me feel like a natural man." Tom replied in a funny, affected baritone growl and smiled and looked in her eyes and as always, when he did that, when he held hers in his, it would wring her heart like a sponge.

People began to arrive and soon the coffee house was bursting with people and food and great bowls of sangria and cases and cases of near beer on ice.

Seeing his daughter dancing like a sophisticated woman made Ian wanted to take her in his arms himself, and so when Amanda and Tom came back to their table, he took her right back to the dance floor.

"I'm starting to feel like a wall flower." Laura said to Tom and so he reached out his hand and the problem was solved as he led her to the dance floor and they joined the movement and color and texture of the dance.

"You make me feel so young." Laura said to Tom as she followed him with the skill she had learned when she had dragged Ian to ballroom dancing lessons years ago.

"Why is that?" Tom asked.

"It's not that often that middle-aged ladies have a young partner who really knows how to dance."

"We all learned to dance in our school. You should see the Van Fleets do the Charleston."

"I'll bet that's something." Laura replied, "I have never really thanked you for everything you've done for Amanda." she continued, "It's interesting that you'd be attracted to such a city girl and that she'd fit in so well here at the farm."

"She's so great." was Tom's succinct reply.

Laura wouldn't let him get off so easy. She was interested in the city mouse/ country mouse clash of cultures that had produced such friction in her and Eugene and seemed to reproducing nothing like it in her daughter and his son.

"Why do you think Amanda fits in so well here at the farm?" Laura asked.

"Maybe because she's such a curious person. Maybe it's because everybody likes her." Tom replied, then added, "Maybe because she likes sharing it with me."

"Young love." Laura agreed, but it sounded more condescending than she had intended.

"Jonas told me that my dad once said that no matter how young people are, love is always old."

"I guess your father really believes that." Laura answered.

"I think it's true."

"Most young people do."

"My dad believes it."

"Does your mom?" Laura asked, and Tom had to think about it for a while before he said that he didn't really know.

The woman singer with the band came to the end of Stardust and the music faded and Tom walked Laura back to her chair and waited quietly for a moment until Ian and Amanda joined them.

David, in his new suit and his perfect halo of golden Harpo Marx hair was, as usual shadowing Laura. He had watched her intently from the side of the dance floor as big bodies brushed past him and blocked his view. As Laura had gone back to the table with Tom, she stopped and offered David her hand and with a simple nonchalance he gave it to her and followed her back to the table where he was happy standing beside her, his hand held in her lap where she sat.

At about ten o'clock Sharon announced that everyone should get their coats and move outside for the fireworks display. And it took nearly half an hour before everyone was bundled outside by the pasture, and Tranh and his helpers began the fireworks display that accompanied Beethoven's fifth Symphony.

It had taken Tranh most of the day placing the skyrockets with the number sequences that they would follow. Timing was everything, especially among the clusters that he wanted exploding together. The consideration and planning that went in to his choices about the types and patterns of the skyrockets he wanted to go with the music was something he worked on for months. Seeing him move like a dancer, his arms conducting his two helpers with their torches moving between the skyrockets was a show in itself.

Against the stars of the universe and the deaf master's music, yellow chrysanthemum constellations collided with spiral galaxies of blue. Suns exploding in perfect breathless red patterns and hot yellow tinsel falling back from the black night brought silent gasps from the children who no longer had any trouble staying awake. Eugene and Sharon watched from behind a glass patio door feeling the muffled music from the other side of the pane.

Tom held Amanda in his arms in front of him, smelling the perfume she had borrowed from his sister Lucy while Ian stood beside Laura holding her hand in its soft mohair glove.

Thousands of dollars reached up and fell back from the darkness, the whump of ignitions followed by screams of acceleration, followed by explosions of color and texture and intensity that lasted less than a breath. The primary colors of explosive delight fell with the burning showers that died in the silence of the space where they fell.

The distant fire of the universe behind the great flares of what human joy could be were connected briefly in the black of the night.

By the time the first movement of the fifth Symphony was done everyone was saturated and overwhelmed by the spectacular display they had seen and felt. Young love, true love filled with such emotion. Tom kissed the crown of Amanda's soft, beautiful hair. And it was over. Ten minutes before midnight the bandleader asked everyone to open the bottles of Champagne chilling in the middle of their tables. Before long the room was laughing in the tremendous cross fire of corks and reports and white foam hastily gathered in plastic glasses, and when the glasses were all charged, Sharon proposed the toast.

"Thank you all so much for coming and sharing our New Year's Eve. Last week I asked Gene how the last year had been for him and he told me it was the hardest and happiest year of his life. I think our whole family and some of its new adopted members have experienced the incredible depth of the human heart this last year. When I thought about the happiness I've felt myself, I realized that it had no real beginning or end. Our ability to feel happiness in our own special way is always with us and I believe it can last as long as consciousness survives. That's why this year I would like to propose that the New Years toast be to happiness, without beginning or end. To happiness without beginning or end."

To happiness without beginning or end, all but one of the voices in the room echoed as everyone raised their champagne glass and sipped from it and then countless plastic glasses ticking and touching spattered around the room. It was then that Sharon surprised everyone by asking Amanda to come to the stage and sing Auld Lange Syne when the New Year arrived.

Amanda was stunned and surprised and desperate because she could barely remember any of the words and her terrified eyes found Tom's and she told him under her breath why she couldn't do it.

"I'll write them out for you. It's okay." he said and quickly went to a cupboard and took a pen and a piece of paper and quickly wrote down the words to the song as everyone waited. Tom came back and handed them to Amanda and walked her to the stage with barely a minute to spare. Everyone watched the big clock on the wall and when it got to ten seconds from midnight everyone started to countdown; ten, nine, eight, seven, six, and the band started to play and it was ...five, four, three, two, one. Happy New Year! The voices exploded in the room and people hugged and kissed and Tom kissed Amanda and the band leader motioned to her and she quickly began to sing Auld Lange Syne.

Lest old acquaintance be forgot, in days of Auld Lange Syne

We'll raise a cup of kindness yet to those days of Auld Lange Syne.

For Auld Lange Syne my dear, for Auld Lange Syne,

We'll raise a cup of kindness yet, to those days of Auld Lange Syne.

Amanda sang and led the whole room and her heart felt like the white foam that had fallen from the necks of the champagne bottles as she stood beside Tom who held her by the waist, and everyone sang from their full throated hearts, everyone except for Eugene, of course, and when Amanda saw him and realized he was the only one who wasn't singing, tears started to pour from her eyes as he gave her the look that he seemed to save only for her. She couldn't help it; she had to turn away.

Tom took her in his arms again and they kissed once more. He kissed her cheek and tasted the salt of the last of her tears and had no idea of why she was crying. Tom then took her hand and Amanda could see that all of the Van Fleet children and grandchildren were lining up to wish Eugene Happy New Year. One by one they filed up to him and Tom insisted that Amanda join the line with him as all his other family members had done, and following Tom, she bent and kissed Eugene and told him, "Happy new year Mr. Van Fleet. I love you." The last three words caught in her throat, but the last thing she wanted to do again was cry so she forced a smile onto her face and she left him there to greet the next member of his family.

After the immediate family, in a less organized way, virtually everyone in the room made their way to wish Eugene a Happy New Year. Amanda was pleased that Ian had taken Laura's hand and was one of the first ones to approach Eugene. In the music and the loud conversation it was impossible to understand what her parents said as she watched as Ian spoke to Eugene for a moment, as he held his weak hand, and Amanda didn't know that as Laura bent down and kissed Eugene she whispered to him, "My partner."

Later, when Ian was dancing with Laura, he told her he loved Sharon's New Years toast.

"If we hadn't been through what we've been through, I don't know if I would have ever experienced the happiness I've felt in the last month. I've never seen Amanda so transcendentally happy, after what she's been through and the nightmares she must have. How about you?"

"I just can't trust happiness. I'm really excited about the book. I'm thrilled that Amanda is still whole and she's grown-up so fast, so beautifully." Laura replied

"How is it you can't trust that happiness?" he asked, seriously.

"Maybe it's only going to take a little time." she answered.

"What's to trust? If Sharon's right and the things that make us happy are always a part of us and won't every change, what's to trust?" he pressed her.

"I think she's wrong. You've been unhappy. I've been unhappy. Amanda's been unhappy. Where did all the happiness go then? The best things in life pass away. You could have spent the last month visiting your wife and daughter in a psychiatric ward. I don't know how Sharon can deny the most obvious evidence of what life can do to you. Just look at Eugene for God's sake."

Ian had no answer to what mortality did to happiness, but it was obvious to him that both Sharon and Eugene had understood or come to terms with mortality and loss in a way that neither he or Laura could really understand.

"Let's just dance." Laura said with a sigh and she pressed her head next to her husband's and they moved with the slow silent grace of their bodies.

New Year's Day, Ian woke up early and went down and re-charged the stove and got dressed and made himself a coffee and sat on the old sofa and listened to the wind begin to howl outside. He looked at the still life of Laura's work on the Arborite kitchen table: the open air mail letters, the coal oil light, the shoe box, the coffee mugs and the laptop computer. In the beautiful glow of the lamp, the lines so angular and smooth on the fake red and gray marble surface, was a fascinating composition in the boxes of time.

The longer he sat, the more restless Ian felt. Everyone except him had found some purpose on the farm, and he felt more anxious than jealous, because his had always been the role of the organizer who maintained the busy mechanism of his family's life. For the first time his role was forgotten. Aside from going to work and bringing home the paycheck, he had no real function in his family's new temporary little home. Quietly, he put on his coat and gloves and opened and re-latched the big wood door and left the cabin and walked out to the farmhouse, hoping people were awake and there might be something he might be able to help in doing.

It was six o'clock in the morning and people were already in the kitchen preparing breakfast for the regular seven o'clock deadline.

Ian had come through the door without knocking as he always would after that weekend and when he came in to the dining room he looked through the sliding glass doors to where Eugene lay in his bed. Sharon was there, already dressed and ready for the day, doing the physical therapy that was necessary to keep Eugene's muscles from wasting anymore than his disease demanded.

Sharon didn't see him and so he made his way to the kitchen where he offered his services and he was amazed how he was quickly drafted to try his hand at his own variation on masses of fried hash brown potatoes that would go with the Canadian bacon that was being sliced and prepared for frying on the huge commercial stove.

Ian was surprised when Amanda arrived in time for breakfast and it was so different for him serving her as part of a large family gathering. There was something about a large gathering in the morning that made a person feel they were a part of something much bigger than their own life. The members of a family were like pegs holding down a tarpaulin against the winds of the day. Ian felt his family was like three little tent pegs, there was always a corner of life that seemed to be flapping violently, wanting to be free. After breakfast Ian and Amanda both helped with cleaning up after the New Year's Eve party. There were dishes to be done and bags of paper plates and plastic glasses needing to be gathered.

Laura came from the cabin at noon for her first meal of the day and when she came through the door her coat was caked in a soft layer of delicate wet snow. She had come with the wind at her back and when she turned around she was like an all-white silhouette. After lunch the family gathered on the front porch by the fire and Amanda watched the big cement bird feeder that served as a birdbath in the summer. She was fascinated by the delicate contention and aggression of the beautiful little creatures. The fox sparrows, the juncos muscled their away among half a dozen mourning doves whose wings snapped and flashed the color of iridescent blue. A pair of Blue Jays soared in to take sunflower seeds back to the branches of the Walnut tree nearby. To Amanda, watching the fox sparrows with the little black hearts on their chests was like watching the children of a family clamoring over a great picnic feast.

The steady wind and the snowstorm had quickly buried the farm in wet heavy clots of snow, the cedars and the rose canes already bending under their weight. Watching the big tumbling flakes of snow was like watching a dazzling meteor storm blaze past the windows. Everyone seemed warm and content, enjoying the storm outside.

Laura had to be dressed in a bigger coat and a balaclava and big boots before she was allowed to make her way back to the cabin and her work. As she pushed her way into the wind and felt the repeated hits of the spit of the white flakes on her face, she stared through eye holes, and breathed hard through the mouth opening of the white balaclava covering her head and she felt the surge of panic she had felt struggling through the wind to the dead boy in the snow. If she had passed the tendrils of a red osier dogwood, it would have completely unhinged her heart. For Laura white snow would forever be spattered with blood. The snow soaked fields were cold and heavy inside her, and the throat of the wind would forever scream when she stopped and remembered hoarrrr...whorrrrr ...horrorrrr. The only place she was at peace with winter was on the everchanging shore where the three traveller stones made a Zen garden in white ice.

By the next day the farm was buried in wind and white and the red Massey Harris tractor with the big snow blower had to make runs every few hours to keep the lane ways and buildings of the farm open and accessible.

The McCalls had retired early to their cabin and listened to the snow slide off the steel roof falling with a whomp in front of the porch, so that in the morning they would have to cut a doorway through it into the white floating world.

They had all spent the hours before they went up to the sleeping loft, drinking tea and reading the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee, and it was then that both Ian and Amanda understood how beautiful they were. Amanda especially would sit with her feet curled under her and wipe away tears as she read the most private thoughts of the loved and lost and lonely and the real and imaginary connection she had to people who had once lived in the world or only in Eugene's imagination.

When they were under the covers, the McCall family had no gossip, no thoughts or words to share that night. They lay awake in the warm throat of the cabin listening to the winter in fury. Ian wasn't sure of it, but he thought that perhaps if Amanda had not been an arms length away, that he and Laura might have made love tenderly and quietly, that night. When he thought about the fact that they would soon be back in their own beds in the city, he felt strange pangs for a loss that would come with regaining their own lives.

He would lose Amanda most weekends to Tom before he lost her forever. He would lose Laura for weekends until her book was finished or Eugene was dead. What he gained was what he was losing. What he wanted was just out of his grasp and slipping slowly away. He kissed the nape of Laura's neck and she made a gentle moan that brought her back from the roads they would soon travel when they went back to this city, back past the place where a hand-painted marker of love and remembrance was nailed on a fence post nearest to the spot where the soul of a son and a brother had suddenly left the earth.

By Sunday morning, the storm had come and apparently gone. From the end of the cleared lane way, the county roads had been plowed and connected again to the highway that led back to Toronto. Laura insisted they leave early Sunday after breakfast, because she wanted to be sure they would have the light of the day when they could make their way slowly by the longer route that wouldn't take them past the place Laura dreaded so much.

The Lexus was dug out of its deep crusts of snow and the frost on the inside of the windshield was running and dissolving and disappearing in the fan of hot defroster air as the back window opened to the heater elements embedded in the glass. By the time the car was ready for travel the whole Van Fleet family, except for Eugene, had gathered around it to say goodbye to the McCalls.

The McCalls had never had such a send-off, they had never left feeling and seeing such sadness as they went. Ian watched Amanda being hugged and kissed over and over and watched Laura, in her turn, touched and held as he himself felt one body after another embrace him warmly. He had steeled himself for separation and withdrawal but he wasn't prepared for the looks on the faces of the two women he loved. Amanda's last embrace was with Tom. Laura's last embrace was one that she initiated when she bent down to the ground and lifted David into her arms and kissed his soft white cheek.

Ian knew he was only postponing his loss. He was taking his family away from where they needed to be to heal from what they had suffered and realizing that, he realized that it was the one thing about leaving that neither Laura nor Amanda probably consciously understood.

Ian went back to Sharon and hugged her once more and asked her softly if Amanda could stay and join the school with her own children. Sharon's eyes looked back into his to try to understand the source of his question as she told him that of course Amanda could stay. Ian whispered thank you and quickly went to the car and got in the driver's door and slid down the powered window and pressed the automatic door locks that slammed shut with the sound of a hard, hard decision. When Laura came to the passenger door and found that it was locked, she tapped on the window and Ian's finger on the power button slid down its window and he told her, "I'm sorry. You and Amanda are just going to have to stay here. I need to have some space. It's not about you. It's me. I need some space."

Laura bent down and looked in the window.

"What are you talking about? You hate space. Why are you doing this? Quit kidding around" she said and sounded completely confused.

By that time Amanda was at the driver's window and when she asked her father what was going on, he told her that he decided that it was time that she made her way in the world and he was going to withdraw her from school the next day. "You have to stay here and learn some kind of productive behavior." he said mischievously as Amanda just stood there stunned.

"You're joking. It's not funny, if you're joking. It's really not funny." Amanda said.

"I'm not joking. This is where you need to be for now. Sharon said you'd be welcome to join their home school. This is where you need to be for now."

The look that he shared with his daughter was unlike any he would share with her in his life. She not only understood his gift to her, she could see in his eyes the loss he was feeling in the same gift.

"I really want to come home with you." she whispered to him.

"I'm glad. But can you honestly tell me this isn't where you feel you belong, right now?" Ian replied softly.

Amanda said nothing as she tried to gather the spinning vortex of her heart and what finally came from her throat was just a simple, "Thank you."

"Shouldn't we have talked about this." Laura said across the roof of the car to Amanda.

Ian answered from inside the car. "It's decided. You're staying. Now be a good girl and write a great book."

Ian shouted goodbye to everyone and slid up the windows of the car like two transparent walls that enclosed him in the emptiness of the car, and when he backed away and then moved forward out of the paddock and down the lane, everyone was waving and he could hear Amanda's voice shouting something he couldn't make out.

### Chapter 11

Wayne and Charles left just past noon as the wind rose and the snow drove itself into the white silhouettes already on every vertical surface of the farm. By the time they got to Toronto the roads were crawling lines of steel social insects on single clotted lanes. The big storm got bigger and by the morning the great city was struggling to keep it's automotive blood cells moving in it's perpendicular veins. The brutal wind stayed steady, and windows and windshields stayed or turned opaque white. But unlike most winter storms that came and went with the speed of their intensity, this storm came to stay. Every day the wind closed the open roads again and every day it drifted in the cars and houses that were forced to stop and wait. By the following weekend the interminable storm had paralyzed the biggest city in the country so that the mayor was forced to ask the Army to come in to deliver essential services. 'Toronto The Wimp!', headlines read in other cities and towns that were used to the digging themselves from the deepest paralysis of winter.

There was something about watching Toronto, the good and superior, trying to struggle to its feet in its heavy diaper of snow that the rest of the country seem to find truly enjoyable. There was some serious gloating from other towns and cities that kept themselves moving in the seemingly unending storm.

At the farm it was business as usual except that the lane ways the snow blower kept open sank beneath white cliffs of heavy snow. For Laura, walking the long lane to the cabin through the wall of the wind was like walking a long roaring tube of white as the snow, piled windward, blew back over the path like a wind whipped linen sheet. In the grave-deep snow, in her big boots and balaclava the walk to the farmhouse she made twice a day was the only time she was forced to face the feelings inside her that were so much like the storm. She ate only twice a day for the two weeks the storm raged. To her, it was fitting that she and her daughter were the only ones who would have to walk through what everyone called the snow storm of the century. She felt it was fitting and ironic that she endured it in the little warm cabin, and on the long, cold path, and watched it rage outside as she sat every evening beside Eugene where he lay in the sun room full of blooming moth orchids.

It took almost the whole two weeks that the storm raged before Laura and Eugene agreed on twelve stories for the book. Eugene had fought very hard for the story of Petsuliack, the Inuit orphan boy who had slain the polar bear. Laura's point was that few people could relate to being an orphan, that the emotions in such complete and total rejection were unlikely to be ones to which most readers could relate. Eugene disagreed, saying that he believed it was common in this world of busy parents for young children to feel abandoned and rejected by everyone. 'Everyone is an orphan, one way or another.' he had written.

It was a sore point for Laura, but she stuck to her guns, pointing out that there was another story about a latch key child who became obsessed with cows that was not as dramatic but was funny and touching and made the point much better.

"Every kid gets obsessed with something. It's the transitional object that lets them let go of their parents." Laura had pointed out. She thought that she had been Eugene's.

Eugene replied that he hadn't thought of that. He thought the cows were just something powerful and gentle at the same time, something that would make a great obsession for a city boy.

After they talked about it for some time, Eugene teased Laura by saying that cows were more than transitional objects, they were the true Buddhists of the animal kingdom, peaceful vegetarian monks who harmed no one and meditated all day long. They were the only creatures that accepted every moment of life, he pointed out.

"Except the moment of death." Laura had replied. "I just really like it that a child could end up by getting in such trouble because he loved cows. And I liked how funny it was when Arthur and Laura Lee were defending cows and the right to love them."

Finally, Eugene relented because the other dark stories they had chosen were so heart rending that the story of the Inuit boy might be just too much to bear.

Amanda moved into the routine on the farm as if she had lived there her whole life. Her relationship with Tom seemed to be like that too. The strange thing about their simple familiarity with one another was that they behaved like they were an old married couple when, in fact, they were anything but that. Where there should have been the passion of discovery and novelty, it was as if there was a deep, light comforter of down separating them. The intensity of the connection they had felt kissing on Christmas Eve was gone. For Tom it was as if sexual passion was in the very next room, but the door to it had been closed. No matter what he did, it seemed that the handle to that door just spun in place, unable to move its latch

"Are you okay?." he asked a couple of times when they were kissing and he could feel the door handle spin.

"Sure. Sorry." she had replied and didn't know how to face her feelings or tell him that it wasn't her desire she feared, it was his. She was afraid of the force of sexuality in a man, even the gentle, tender man who loved her. The way her mother was afraid of a snow storm, she was afraid of sex. She told herself it would only take time. She reminded herself of how she felt when she and Tom had kissed on Christmas Eve. She reminded herself of how deep the bone bruise to her soul had been. It didn't matter. She couldn't face it. She shut the door to Tom's desire and she, ironically, faced hers in bed beside her mother.

For Ian, buried for two weeks in the city was a strange solitary confinement broken by his calls to Laura's cell phone every day. For the first week he hadn't even been able to get to work. The courts were closed and so there would have been little for him to do but prepare the few cases that he had waiting. As the storm got worse and the city succumbed to paralysis, he thought every day about somehow getting to the railway station and taking a train back to the farm. At first he couldn't have done it if he had tried, because all the secondary roads were completely snow bound and impassable, and by the end of the second week when his street was finally opened, his office did too, and so he had to make his way downtown to see if there was anything he should be doing.

Talking once a day to Laura had the same strange paralysis of familiarity that only old married couples know, but it was worse for the real distance. He had nothing to report about his day, no news from work, no reports about Amanda, nothing but the weather, the overpowering weather. Like a teenager whose whole life was in the responses of someone on the other end of a phone line, Ian tried to drag out the conversation, tried to get Laura to talk about her day, her work, her reports about Amanda, even her news about her view of the weather. The one thing Ian had that made him feel a little less than perfectly alone was the phone. And it was disconcerting for him to realize that the only people he really wanted to talk to that weren't on the farm were Wayne and Ann Marie.

Wayne's antique business was closed, so his days were long and boring. Ann Marie's patients were unable to reach her, so her days were long and quiet. The whole city, in fact, was as quiet as its deep, frozen parks. Unlike his talks with Laura, Wayne and Ann Marie would gladly spend hours on the phone with Ian. Ann Marie was the emotional apex of the triangle the two men supported as she rode the sine wave of emotions as Wayne's friend wrote his daily email about Megan and she composed her own constrained reply.

The storm was all she could think to write about without getting emotional and appealing to her daughter to come home. The replies she received every day reporting Megan's concern for her mother, trapped and alone, was the only emotional response reported in reply.

Ian, Wayne and Ann Marie, three professional listeners, looked forward to the long, long telephone calls they shared every day. Over the phone, dealing with the overwhelming problem of Ann Marie's runaway daughter, they each, inevitably, had to describe their own personal histories and the heartache they had known in losing someone they loved, and how that made them feel so lost.

For the first week, Ian had Amanda to talk about, her rebellion and transformation in the previous year when she rejected everything and everyone who thought well of her. He could describe to Ann Marie his own helpless feeling, and understand and sympathize with her about how much worse it must be, knowing Megan was completely out of her control and, even worse, might be in terrible danger.

Wayne was able to talk to Ian and then to Ann Marie about his own past, when he was the lost and lonely rebel, when he moved from one foster home to another where he couldn't understand that there was a difference between those who treated him well and those who treated him like dirt, or worse. It was Wayne who was able to make them realize that a developing child sometimes has no real sense of internal references, no real standards by which to judge either themselves or others. Living in the moment and in its anxiety and tension, a feeling of helpless frustration and anger was inescapable without the perspective of experience. And for some children, it took a long time to believe what their own experiences taught.

"When you're innocent and unhappy, it's impossible to appreciate your own good feelings. It's impossible to believe that your own worst feelings will ever stop tormenting you. Growing up in my teens on the farm, with about the best parents anybody could ever ask for, didn't help to make me believe my best feelings meant any more than my worst ones. It was my dad buying me heroin and spending money they really needed that finally made me come to terms with believing in something that lasted more than a moment." Wayne had explained to Ian.

Ian had then passed Wayne's comments on to Ann Marie and they talked for a long time about what they could have done as parents that might have somehow helped their children the way Eugene had helped Wayne. It was a long anxious talk where they finally expressed their personal guilt to someone else as they tried to face the fact that they both believed that they should have done so much more as parents than they had done. But they were thwarted in coming to some better hindsight about what they might have done with their daughters because it had seemed to be the typical teenage rebellion, and so the pain they had experienced was just too typical and easy to dismiss as growing pains. Until the very last moment when Amanda was raped and Megan ran away, there was no great life or death crisis where they would have to intervene and prove to their daughters how much they loved them. There was just no framework for urban parents and children to share any common concerns.

The first week, while Toronto was buried in the snow, Amanda was surprised that she started getting daily email messages from Megan in Vancouver on Tom's computer, at his email address.

It seemed that Megan knew about Amanda's rape from her mother's email, and Wayne's friend had told her how Amanda was now living at the farm with Laura. Wayne's friend had prevailed upon her sense of compassion to send Amanda some messages of support. Wayne had supplied Tom's email address and so Megan, with compassion as an excuse, reached out to help someone from her past. That it would ease her own aching loneliness was something she couldn't and wouldn't admit. Megan soon saw herself as a strong center of support for a lost boy in Vancouver and a poor traumatized old acquaintance from her past. She didn't realize that she was being put in that position so that she would feel that the strength she had to offer someone else might be enough to make her realize that she had the same strength to offer herself.

Amanda didn't know what to make of the messages she suddenly started getting out of nowhere from Megan. In trying to comfort Amanda, Megan seemed to think the best thing to do was describe all the misery and all the terrible things that she had seen and overcome since she had come to Vancouver. Without shame or self-consciousness, she described in detail what she had to do when turning tricks on the street. It was like boys boasting about how drunk and sick they were one day after another and how they were strong enough to do it all over again. Megan's descriptions didn't deal with her own sad behavior, but with rather the disgusting, pathetic behavior of the people she sexually serviced. Morality seemed, to Megan's way of thinking, to be nothing more than secondhand values that she had long outgrown. She had the undeniable strength to survive the streets, and that was a strength to be proud of having, the only strength that really mattered at all.

Amanda couldn't believe what she was reading and certainly didn't know how to respond without sounding negative and judgmental, which she knew was something Megan wouldn't accept for a minute. She didn't want to sound like a hectoring parent and so she limited her responses to worrying about Megan's safety. She told her she didn't want to describe the horror she knew could strike without warning, but Megan should be afraid.

Amanda was shocked when Megan's reply began with the description of what she knew about the details of Amanda's rape. Those details were ones she had only shared with Ann Marie and she was shocked that Ann Marie would have described them in such detail to her daughter. Megan said that she could understand being frightened because Amanda had gone through this and this and this, and as Amanda read the words on the screen that described with such cold, ordinary, inadequate words some of the things that she had suffered, it made her furious. And Megan's final question to her made her almost nauseous.

"So how fucked up are you?"

That was the question. That was the question Amanda didn't want to answer or even face. The answer to that question might just destroy her life. She felt a doorknob turning in her hand, turning and turning. The doorknob was Megan's terrible, insensitive question.

Despite her anger, Amanda knew something about the psychopaths that lived on the street and so she thought the best way she might help Megan was to describe the one sick monster who had ripped her soul to shred's. It was the hardest thing that Amanda had ever had to write. Putting down on paper a description of the psychopath's mind and body that she would feel touching her life for as long as she lived was like letting him touch her again with her own permission. Bringing on the memory of his eyes and his hands and his overpowering rage was to feel them all again. Trying to get someone to believe such people existed, and convey the enormity of the danger was beyond Amanda's or anyone's ability. The one sentence that she wrote that she felt was some small measure of a warning of the enormity of the danger, was when she simply said, "If you can imagine looking in someone's eyes and it makes your whole body feel like the dry heaves, then you can start to imagine what he was like."

"I meet creeps like that every day." Megan had replied, and it made Amanda's eyes roll back in their sockets at the irrational absurdity of what she was reading. My creeps are bigger than your creeps. Life is shit. Get used to the smell. Amanda didn't know what to do or what to say.

Tom was no help. Megan was describing the life Tom's own mother had lived, the life in which he was born. He was even more angry than Amanda at how easily Megan had accepted her own degradation, and realizing that it was the same degradation his own mother had once accepted made him silent and, for once, apparently helpless. He had no suggestions about what to say or do to make Megan realize what she was doing to herself.

After a week of email messages Amanda finally told Laura about her communication with Megan and how angry and frustrated it made her feel. Laura told her she knew how she felt and suggested that Amanda might still be the best one to help Megan because she certainly understood rebellion. "What was it that meeting Tom did for you? How did he change your life when we couldn't." Laura asked pointedly.

"I don't know what it was he did. He was just there, all of him, just there." Amanda replied.

And the unspoken message was that she and Ian had not been there. Of course, there was more than a little truth to the implied accusation.

"Maybe you can just be there for Megan." Laura answered, and Amanda knew she wasn't going to be able to do that. Like mother, like daughter. That was all they said, but Amanda spent a long time thinking about the first time Tom touched her life over a phone line just a few months before. Amanda would never know or be able to explain the sense of completion that she experienced in those few minutes. There was a drive to completion and the sense of it when it happened that was as powerful a binding force as anything on earth, yet how or why one person felt completed in another was absolutely impossible to understand or define. Remembering that first night talking to Tom was still like diamond dust drifted over her heart.

Amanda intuitively knew that Megan was aching for some kind of personal context, and the ache for it grew exponentially with its need. Megan needed something or someone desperately, even as she tried to convince herself that she needed nothing and no one. Amanda fell asleep feeling frustrated and helpless. She hated facing her old pain once again, secondhand.

When Laura mentioned to Ian the next day that Megan had been sending email messages to Amanda for the past week, he was very excited, and when he realized that Laura had actually gotten very little information from Amanda about those messages he quickly ended his daily call with Laura and phoned up to the farm to get Amanda on the phone to get a fuller report. The report was not encouraging; except for the fact that Megan, thankfully enough, was still able to stay off heroin, mainly because her boyfriend had no interest in sharing anything with Megan, especially his most precious commodity.

Tom was more upset by the email messages Amanda was receiving than she was. His natural compassion was reinforced by the identification he felt with a girl who was the same age as his mother when he was born, probably on the same streets Megan walked. He knew a great deal about aboriginal social problems and one thing that outraged him most was that ninety percent of the child prostitutes in Canada were aboriginal children. It was as if the sickest part of white society would not rest until it had destroyed the last, most precious, native resource, the last hope of cultural survival, the children of the aboriginal nations. That he was a product of that degenerate exploitation made it harder not easier to accept. If it had not been for the Van Fleet family and the incredible luck of his adoption, he assumed he would have shared with Megan the horror of worthlessness.

Tom could barely sleep from his anxiety over what to do, what advice to give Amanda about what she should say when you replied to Megan. Tom being Tom, with Amanda's glad permission, composed the next reply. It would come from him. It could only come from him because of what he intended to say. He introduced himself with his typical directness.

"You don't know that I exist, but I am Amanda's boyfriend Tom Van Fleet. I am eighteen years old and I was born in Vancouver. I am an aboriginal, like you. My mother was a prostitute, just like you. I love and respect my birth mother, and so I hope you won't feel I'm judging you or putting your down for what you're doing with your life, but I have to tell you I'm very, very angry at what my mother was forced to do and for what you feel you have been forced to do. I don't believe any child would choose to sell their body if they had another way to live."

"Because Amanda was so worried about your safety on the streets she let me read your messages to her and I have been sick with worrying about you because of the things you describe and how you seem to have accepted such things as your world. I am not angry with you. I am angry and outraged at anyone who would come and offer you money to buy your body and your heart and your soul. I known you don't feel it's so bad right now. I know you feel you're doing it for love. But anyone who loves you would fight to protect you. I've never even seen you but as a part of my people who is being ruined by the sick part of the white race, I want to fight for you, but I don't know how."

You are living the story of our whole people. They take away every hope and opportunity and treat us as inferior and primitive and then they force us to accept our own ruin while they take advantage of our own desperation. All white society offers the children of our nations is a bottle or a bag of gasoline or a life of exploitation or becoming white on the inside like you and me.

I know you grew up like me in a middle-class family and have had all the opportunities of being like an all-white child. But you know and I know we're aboriginal peoples and we should be proud not ashamed of who we are. I am angry for what you suffer and understand it because, like you, even having parents who love you doesn't take away who you are. Like me, you're lost from your own people the way your own people are lost from themselves."

I have found myself, and my connection to our people, in my heart. I hope you will look for yourself and your people inside your own. When your heart breaks, it breaks at the end of a long line of broken hearts. I ask you to remember who you are on a whole lot of levels. I ask you to remember that you are never alone unless you believe it."

"Be careful. Be proud. Be angry! Be who you are."

Tom signed his message your distant brother Tom.

It was three days before Megan replied and the message came addressed directly to Tom.

Tom's message had shaken Megan as nothing she had ever experienced before. It completely shook up her frame of reference. It made her see herself in ways she had never conceived or imagined. She, of course, was always conscious that she was a native person with the same skin and features as her own mother, and she had known the difference that made while she was growing up. But her culture was completely white; her mother had grown up from infancy with the white family who had adopted her. She was white on the inside, just like her mother. And, in the years her mother had grown up, the idea of connecting an adopted child with their native culture didn't really exist. An adopted child became a part of their parent's culture. To do anything else was thought to be alienating a child from their new life, risking the child's connection to a parent. Megan was not really sure that she wanted to think of herself as an aboriginal person. She didn't know even how to begin to do such a thing, if she wanted.

But the tone of Tom's message and the things that he said to her, for the first time in her life, made her wonder if it was something she should want for herself the way Tom obviously wanted his cultural connection for himself. No one had ever spoken to Megan the way Tom had done in his message. The obvious concern and worry and identification he felt with her and her situation touched her deeply. That he feared for her without judging her was something very new. That he was an eighteen year old boy gave him a power and authority no one else would have had. When Tom opened his heart, it was hard not to respond.

Answering Tom, it was impossible for her to posture and rationalize. For the first time in her life, Megan gave someone a serious and honest response. It had taken her three days to get ready but when she sat down to make her reply she couldn't help it, Tom had opened her heart so that was what she let speak for her.

The first thing she did was to make him promise not to show her reply to Amanda, or her own mother, or anyone else in the world. Making the request didn't even require his answer because she immediately went on to tell him her deepest fears and feelings.

"I don't know who I am so I don't know how to tell you what's going on and why am doing what I'm doing. I see all kinds of other kids out here who are way younger than me and they don't have a chance. They are so not going to make it. At least I've got a place to stay and somebody who's supposed to love me. I think he really does, but he loves junk way, way more. My mom wants me to be like her and go to college and be a white girl, but I'm not. I can't be like that. I don't belong any place. I don't belong on some reservation. I don't belong with people who look like me. I hate white men touching me and getting inside me. I don't belong any place and I don't belong with anyone. You're the only person I've ever known who knows what I'm saying. You're the only person who's ever said anything to me that made any sense."

"I have nothing to be proud of. I don't know what it means to be myself but I will try to take care of myself for you."

She signed her message; Yours, Megan.

Tom wrote back immediately and from that moment, like Amanda's, he held the key to Megan's future. When he told Amanda that Megan had replied to his message and she asked him to keep it private, Amanda suspected that the power that Tom had to touch another person's heart had reached across the continent, and it made her anxious, if not actually afraid. Yet she didn't dare object.

In the three days before Megan replied to Tom's message the phone lines were busy with Megan's name as the center of many conversations between the farm and Toronto. Ian quickly phoned and debriefed Amanda about her previous week's messages and how it came to be that Megan was writing to her at the farm. Ian then passed what he learned from Amanda to the Ann Marie and they had a very long conversation about what to do with the information she had received, and whether she should mention it in her own daily communication that was being passed to Megan. She also wanted much more detail about the things Megan had said to Amanda and so she phoned, and Amanda had to undergo a second intensive debriefing about a girl she hardly knew.

After the flurry of phone calls from Toronto in which both Ian and Ann Marie pressed Amanda very hard to follow Tom's message to Megan with her own, the hopes and expectations very far away in the city grabbed Tom and Amanda with its fierce, anxious insistence.

Amanda finally agreed to write Megan again herself, but received no reply and would receive no reply ever again because Megan had unilaterally decided she would only correspond with Tom. After the first three-day pause following Tom's first message they wrote to each other every day, sometimes twice in a day.

The situation was difficult for everyone but Megan. Tom, having promised Megan the discretion of his silence, was unable to report anything that Megan communicated to him. This made everyone extremely frustrated and anxious: Ann Marie and Ian far away and hopeful and Amanda so close and so nervous and reluctant to even begin to question Tom about what was going on in the exchanged messages.

The only thing that Tom said when Ann Marie phoned and asked him what he was saying to her daughter was that he was just encouraging her to be angry. It was not what Ann Marie wanted to hear because the daughter that she knew so well seemed to have untapped reservoirs of anger that she already had difficulty controlling. Tom apologized to Ann Marie for not being able to explain more fully what he intended to do to reach Megan or what she had said in reply because he had to respect and honor the sense of confidentiality her daughter had asked him to promise her. As a psychologist, Ann Marie would have understood if it had been another psychologist saying what Tom said but, from an eighteen-year-old boy, it was just too frustrating and difficult to accept. Even though she had betrayed her own professional standards by talking to Megan about Amanda, she had to fight her own anger as he adamantly refused to tell her anything about what Megan said to him. That Ann Marie wrote her own message every day to her daughter that said virtually nothing about what she was feeling and what little she knew about Megan's communications with Tom only made it worse.

What Tom was encouraging Megan to do came from what he had gone through when he came to the farm to live. After he finally learned to trust the Van Fleets, to trust that they would value and respect him, he still could not shake off the pain he felt inside from having lived all his life as a throw away child. Before he moved to the farm, when his frustrations and his pain overwhelmed him, he would almost always strike out, and he would punch whoever was at hand. The very first time he did it after he came to the farm, Sharon had talked to him alone and made it perfectly clear that anger was perfectly permissible at the farm but violence was absolutely forbidden. If he wanted to physically strike anyone, if he did actually strike anyone again, the other members of the family would stand beside who ever he struck, and he would be expected to strike each of them as well. It was a reverse kind of gauntlet that none of the children ever did more than once. After Sharon explained to Tom that the whole family would actually line up in front of him and he would have to go down the row striking each, one after another, even after his anger was satisfied. Tom was appalled. Just the thought of doing such as thing was horrible and humiliating.

"You hit one member of your family, you hit all the others." she had added, "Anyone who hits you, hits each of us as well."

"So how am I supposed to get angry?" Tom had asked Sharon all those years ago and she told him simply that he could do it any way he wanted except with physical violence. Every one of his brothers and sisters had seen and suffered physical violence, which would not be allowed to happen at the farm. She had suggested to him that the best thing to do with anger was to figure out how much of it someone deserved and how much of it was just his own doing.

And that was just what he did. He understood he had a right to be angry. He also learned he had a right to be a lot angrier than he was, but the anger wasn't something his new family deserved from him. After he understood and respected his own anger, he was able to stop being its victim. He had been a victim in many ways. He learned that he would not do that to himself. In telling his own story to Megan he was trying to get her to understand the same thing.

Deep in the big snow it was all about secret letters, old ones and new ones, the new ones passed in an instant across the continent, the old ones that had passed across an imaginary ocean and two worlds of time.

After the evening meal Laura usually spent two hours on the porch by the fire, getting ready for her hour's appointment with Eugene. She either finished her days work on the first story of Arthur and Laura Lee falling in love or she sat thinking about it and what she would say to Eugene and what she would ask him about what she planned for her next day's work.

The porch was usually for adults. Laura was often sat with Sharon and Jonas who sat some distance away and talked quietly while Laura worked on her laptop. Of course it was impossible for her not to overhear the conversation, and when she would pause and listen to something they were saying, she was usually intrigued by the way Jonas would respond to his mother. Jonas had the manner of a natural confessor and Laura at secondhand listened to bits and pieces of a mother telling her son her fear, her doubts and her questions about the enormity and the meaning and the consequences that would flow from Eugene's death.

The real unspoken reason that Jonas had chosen not to fight his way to an airport was because he discovered that his mother needed him, as he never imagined she would. To him, as she was to all her other children, she was the Rocky Mountains, the majestic spine of their family. The thought of her feeling weak and frightened was almost inconceivable. Jonas stayed to listen to his mother's private heartache. He also insisted that he take over some of the therapeutic duty with Eugene so that Sharon was finally forced to take some time to herself to rest her body and her heart. Her hands moving on her husband's wasting body every day, moving to relieve his pain and discomfort was a slow and subtle pain that transferred into her own flesh. Touching him was losing him and she could feel it in her hands and it gave her dreams of terror she would never describe to anyone.

Unlike his mother, who was so familiar with his father's body, the massage and exercise Jonas gave to Eugene was a contact he had never known or even imagined. A boy never imagines his own father's body helpless under his hands. Feeling the limp flesh under the translucent skin should have been heartbreakingly sad, but Jonas was more than surprised to find that the touch produced a tenderness inside him, a sense of contact and connection with who his father really was. He was surprised that it wasn't just in Eugene's attentive eyes that his father still survived. The touch he had never known, the flesh that was once so strong and agile was there in his hands.

Jonas also knew that these memories of his father would probably be the last ones he would have of him, and so they made every touch more real, more tangible and more precious than he could ever have imagined them being. Occasionally tears would well in his eyes as he felt his father's limbs as he moved them. Occasionally his eyes flowed with tears because of the joy he felt in his love, and sometimes he would just let them flow and wash away toward the great waterfall of anguish ahead, the loss that would come only too soon.

Laura, because she was re-creating an imaginary world within an imaginary world, began to see the real world change as only imaginary worlds could do. The moments of the day that had passed without notice suddenly became clear and in focus the way the long lens of a camera could make invisible things at a distance suddenly appear out of nowhere.

The thought first struck her when she was walking from the cabin to the farm. It was the first day of bright of sun, and she was surprised that all the shadows that fell on the dark side of the pristine white world were of a pastel, cobalt blue. She thought that shadows had color only in impressionist paintings. Before the week was out, she was even more surprised when the sun made all the shadows as black as bark.

After that she started to see gestures in people and in the tone of their language that carried its intent in very little content. Small talk could say so much. As she listened to Sharon and Jonas talk about Eugene's condition and his daily responses and needs, she began to see the way shared ordinary observations unconsciously connected mother and son in a way that could not be spoken.

Laura began to live more and more in the dreams and realities of her own invisible friends, Arthur and Laura Lee; and the more real they became, and the more she could see them and feel them inside her, the more real and strangely distant her own life appeared. Her own life just didn't compare. Her dreams had never soared through centuries and its best hearts and minds, real and imagined. The more real Arthur and Laura Lee became to her, the more she envied Eugene's secret, invisible mind.

When she came to him each evening she spent most of the time talking, partly because of the limitation of his replies, but mostly because the story she was writing was something she knew only Eugene could completely understand and appreciate. She had so much to tell him and so many unspoken questions. She wondered if his children had taken the stories to heart the way she had. She wondered what the stories meant to him. She wondered how he had the time for his imagination to create two young lovers who time traveled through a century's consciousness. The more she read and the more she wrote, the more questions she discovered, and it was the questions not the answers to them that somehow seemed to put a new exhilaration into her life. Arthur and Laura Lee were taking her to places she never been before and yet they existed and thrived within the distant familiarity of her thoughts and feelings for Eugene. Turning blue letters to words and voices, holding them in her hands, made them so real she couldn't imagine that anyone would be touched the way she was.

The more she worked, the more she loved what she was doing. Working alone for the first time in her life, she came to understand that she was reaching herself through an invisible veil of silence, a silence that was creative and warm, and took her in, and gave her shelter from the storm outside and in.

It was not long before the story of the two imaginary young people falling in love with all the time in the world, exploring the first summer of soaring hearts, raised the memory of her own first summer at the farm with Eugene. The lyrical touch and anticipation of desire that they had known before the cold realities of their differences came into focus was like Laura Lee's and Arthur's. It was a time when love was simpler and so much better for it.

As people, Arthur and Laura Lee were almost mirror reflections of herself and Eugene all those years ago. Arthur and Laura Lee were ordinary, in the extreme; in the way they looked, in the way they reacted to the world, in everything except their dreams.

Laura had been the golden girl with the beauty and intelligence and all the expectations middle-class people made of those things. Her grades and her beauty were her destiny and she accepted it the way she accepted what she saw in the mirror. But her gifts only brought about higher expectations and unavoidable envy and it made it difficult for her, especially because of her own need to be a part of something where people could recognize who she was, even if she could not. She had an extrovert's needs, and an extrovert's fears that she could never show to anyone.

Eugene had been just the opposite. His looks and even his exotic car were things he never seemed to consider as making him attractive or special. Until her, Eugene had seemed reluctant to engage in high school society, especially when it came to the opposite sex. It made him a challenge for more than just her, and when she finally got him to ask her out, it was almost like pulling teeth. She was shocked to discover the first time they were alone that he had thought about her every day for years.

Arthur and Laura Lee lived in a world even simpler than the one Laura and Eugene had known. They were two farm children who had known each other all their lives, who had fallen love on the yellow school bus coming and going from two farmhouse doors. The first sentence of the first story Laura wrote said it all, 'No one thought that Arthur and Laura Lee were anything special.' Laura felt the delicious excitement of knowing that, with her words, she would soon prove everyone so incredibly wrong.

Writing and rewriting, editing the previous days work on the story as she sat beside Eugene and they looked at the words on his computer screen, was an irony that escaped Laura. Polishing words and worrying about all the ideas and feelings they could contain with someone who was forced into absolute silence when the story file was in view was completely lost in her rolling enthusiasm.

They worked paragraph by paragraph, Laura reading it aloud and waiting while he absorbed the words and his eyes would blink once for yes as a signal and then they would minimize the window and Eugene's program would come up so he could speak. It would have been so much easier if he could have just used a keyboard or voice recognition program, but the slow work had the advantage of letting Laura think as Eugene made comments and suggestions about the paragraph they were considering. It was like waiting for a few words that changed the tone and, even occasionally, the content of her voice. And to Laura, to her great surprise, from the very first paragraph she wrote, she did have a voice that was very different than Arthur's or Laura Lee's or even Eugene's.

One morning, in the second week of the storm, Sharon took a moment alone with Laura.

"There's something I'd like you to think about." Sharon began, "Everybody here does something that's part of the daily maintenance tasks of life. I think everyone looks at what you are doing with Arthur and Laura Lee's letters as very important. Doing chores doesn't have to be a requirement for you, you may be the one special case that's ever come to the farm, but if you'd like to help for half an hour with dishes after breakfast or dinner, it might be a good idea. It might be good because it would give you some time to work with Amanda. I have a pretty strong belief that working beside your children is one of the best things you can do in life."

Laura was surprised that it never had crossed her mind to offer to do chores. She felt and understood the respect everyone on the farm seemed to have for what she was doing. If anything, people tried to help and be considerate in any way they thought might make her life easier. People went for walks to bring her snacks or to bring her the morning newspaper that arrived in the mailbox late in the morning.

"I don't know why I didn't offer to do that before." Laura told Sharon quite honestly. "I think it's a good idea. Thanks for mentioning it. Really."

Sharon looked pleased and relieved, and from that day until the day Eugene died, Laura washed dishes on the same regular turn as her daughter. Sharon was right. Washing dishes with Amanda in the huge beautiful kitchen with the other children of the Van Fleet family came to be something she looked forward to as the social highlight of her day. She always loved being part of a group and the dishwashing detail had a range of conversational topics and interests that Laura would never have believed was possible to discover in a group of children. Laura was shocked that children in a group were actually interesting, they were funny, and they were amazingly perceptive. The aggressive curiosity they had was something she had never known among adults, and being an only child, adult company was all she had ever known.

One day after dinner, after she had helped with the dishes, she and Jonas ended up sitting alone on the porch because Sharon was busy with something else. Jonas had been one of the people who would bring her the morning paper or snacks sometime around noon because everyone knew she never came to the table for lunch. She asked him the one question she always wanted to ask but always felt might be too intrusive.

"How did you ever decide to become a priest, growing up here on the farm? When Amanda took me along to Sunday service this week, it didn't seem very much like the traditional religious service." Laura asked, tentatively.

"Once every month or two my Mom used to take us to a traditional church service, but after a while everybody seemed to prefer the one she created in the gazebo, everybody except me. She didn't want to force any religious dogma on us so my parents were both pretty anxious about what they were doing about our religious education. It was when we were studying native cultures that my mom decided that that was the model she wanted for us. Native peoples believe that religious duty comes down to respect and thankfulness. My mom decided that if she could give us that, it would be enough."

"These days, she was probably right." Laura agreed.

"I didn't think so. For me it just left too many questions and no way to understand how to look for an answer. It's only in the last couple of years that our family's religious service didn't seem somehow sad and empty to me. I'm coming around, but slowly."

"Why isn't respect and thankfulness enough?" Laura asked, knowing what a difficult time she had just living up to those simple ideals.

"They don't answer the old hard questions. People die, people suffer, people kill one another, senselessly. Why does it happen and how do you live with it? Respect and thankfulness don't get you very far, at least that's what I used to think.

There's never been, there'll never be any answers to those kind of questions." Laura replied, sounding almost indignant.

"I think you're wrong. There are answers but it's just hard to believe them." Jonas said, sounding as if he was one of the ones having that difficulty.

Laura's heart started to beat faster and she could feel her breath constrict as it came from her lungs and she thought of the boy gurgling his last gasps beside her in the snow." Tell... tell..." It was something she couldn't forget or accept, forgive or deny, and the unanswered questions about why it had happened and how she would live with it, slowly and secretly ate away at her heart because she just didn't believe in answers.

It was then that Jonas told Laura about watching his older brother many years ago when he was killed while they were logging with their father. A tree had kicked back and to the side as it fell when Jonas was just twelve years old, and it had grazed the right temple of his fourteen-year-old brother, and it had killed him after it left him in a vegetative coma for four months. Jonas remembered, but didn't tell Laura, that his brother had wasted away like Eugene before he died.

Putting your brother and ally in the ground when he's fourteen really does raise certain unavoidable questions." Jonas said, and Laura could see the heartbreak on the event horizon of Jonas's eyes.

"I think you can avoid any question, if you put your mind to it." Laura replied with what sounded like firm certainly. "Denial is highly underrated. Sometimes it's the only way you have to survive."

She lied. She had her own dead fourteen-year-old boy whispering from his sepulcher into her ear. The whisper was like a wind driving cold snow that would bury her if she ever stopped moving. And then she was thinking of Amanda and the rape and how the denial of the emotions inside her and her daughter was like an emotional amnesia. There was some pain that only denial could keep the heart from imploding like a hammer blow to the face of a vacuum tube. Laura's pulse was racing and she had no reply to any real questions, and the questions that remained unanswered, in denial, inside her as each new day rose, made each moment become all that mattered. She was giving her life to her invisible friends Arthur and Laura Lee.

Laura was going to get up and leave, but Jonas, cool Jonas, touched her hand and his eyes made her sit down again and then he told her the story of his own heartbreak and anger, his rejection of everything and his tentative reconciliation with himself and his life and his God.

"It doesn't take evil to break some people's hearts."

His great unanswered question, he said, was how anyone could grow up surrounded by love and still feel alone.

"It's how much can you ask from someone you love. I was twenty five. I was her priest. It was a love that could never be told or even speak its name. Nothing happened except she married my best friend and had three children. Nothing happened except ten years when our love never even made it into the confessional. I served at her wedding. I baptized her children. She was a master of denial just like you. When I met her I had no idea what it took to deny a perfect desire. They sent me into the wilderness to be punished for arrogance. They had no idea how well it would work."

Jonas went on to tell Laura all the details of the worst, best secret of his heart, and she became the second person, after his father, to ever hear what love had been and done to him. It was a kind of love out of romance novels. The Van Fleet men seemed to fall like silent Sequoias and Laura just couldn't relate to Jonas's great secret. As she listened, it was the woman who never responded with whom Laura identified. But, in the whisper and the roar of the different kind of heartache, her breathing calmed and her heartbeat settled, and when Jonas was finished his story, the question she asked him hit in the face like a glass of ice water.

"So what do you think your life would've been if your brother hadn't died?"

"Oh, my God!" Jonas replied. "I never thought of that."

Laura left him with the thought and it wouldn't go away for a very long time.

When Laura joined Eugene, a few moments later, she was tempted to replay the conversation she just had with Jonas, but she decided she didn't want to face the reality of pain. She much preferred the reality of the pain of two teenage lovers who were about to be separated by fate and an ocean. After the heavy talk and the heavier love story of Jonas', it was refreshing to lay beside Eugene once again and feel the momentum of their imaginary story moving downhill with the force of its feelings and its sweet, solid style. She didn't know why, but she felt a strange and powerful tenderness for Eugene that night and she told him how much she enjoyed writing the story, especially when Arthur and Laura Lee went to places they had gone together when they were young but were not nearly so innocent.

"One of my favorite memories was going swimming on Haystack Island with you, the way they went swimming; only they did it with so much more modesty."

"I remember." The words appeared on the screen, followed by, "It looks like the feeling is going to pass to Tom and Amanda."

The summer was so far away. The thought that Amanda would still be here in the summer shocked Laura when, in fact, if she had thought about it, it was the logical assumption. She didn't want to admit that her daughter was now part of the farm, even if her fears about its power and influence had diminished. Laura didn't want to talk about Tom and Amanda because she knew her hour with Eugene was almost up, so she asked him a question that would just change the subject, with a question she was almost sure he wouldn't want to answer.

"What does it feel like living with your disease, being so locked inside?"

Then it was Laura who knew what it was like to get hit in the face with the ice water of a reply.

"Like life." The two short words quickly appeared on the computer screen. His answer took no time at all.

Laura would feel the cold shock of those two words dampening her life for as long as she lived.

She didn't understand. At first she thought he was saying that it was like being locked in like her little shadow, David, his inaccessible son. Had he meant little David, his face in flowers, his face to the ground, his eyes following her everywhere, expressionless and inaccessible. He may have meant that too, she had no idea, but she only knew he had meant more than that, so much more than that, and so much more that it was impossible for her to even conceive of the living horror that he meant to include in those two words, two words that most surely, and most especially, included her. Then he wrote the first little poem of many to come that would echo inside her like a musical earworm.

And nothing really matters

If everything that matters

Is spoken silently.

Usually Laura squeezed Eugene's hand when she got out of the bed and left him and, at the very last second, she did remember to do it. She could do it. She could remember. She said goodnight and, "Tomorrow." And the next thing she knew she was back in the cabin shaking the snow from her coat as she heard Amanda's voice from the loft call down to her.

"How was work?"

"Work? Oh, right. It was good. Work was good." Laura replied distantly.

"Are you going to come right up to bed, or are you going to do some more work?" Amanda's voice continued.

"No. No more work."

"Can I make you some tea?" Amanda asked her mother.

"Sure. Some tea would be nice."

As Amanda came down the ladder from the loft, Laura asked her if it was all right if they didn't talk. She couldn't talk tonight. Amanda didn't seem to mind. She made the tea and the only sound above the wind was the kettle starting to squeal and rattle as it rose to a boil. Mother and daughter sat at the Arborite table, mother and daughter, like life.

The green tea was beginning to cool when Amanda finally spoke.

"You look terrible."

"So do you." Laura replied, "Is it Tom?"

"I don't know. He goes up to his room early so he can email Megan every night. I guess it's just stupid. I'm not really jealous. She's a hooker in Vancouver for god's sake. It's more than that. I don't know why, but the thing that really scares me is how much I love him and way, way worse is what do I do with his feelings for me. He's been really patient and sweet, but he makes everything into such an enormous thing, I just don't know if I'll ever be able to keep up. He's making me make all these enormous decisions without ever saying a word."

"Like what decisions?"

"Like I don't want to decide if I'm really grown-up, like I don't want to decide what that really means, like I don't want to decide what I really want and don't want in my life, like I don't want to decide who I really am."

"Join the club. Why do you have to decide right now? The one thing Tom doesn't know is how young you both are. I know that young love wants to feel like forever, and sometimes, for a very few people it may be true, and you and Tom may be one of the lucky ones, but the present can't carry the weight of the future."

"I know. I know. But he's not like that, for him it's like the future exists in everything that he does."

"And that's why you're worried about Megan."

"I never thought of that, but it's true." Amanda replied, looking shocked and hurt. "Why is being happy so scary and hard?"

"You know why." Laura replied, and Amanda did know and that was why Laura felt a rush of fear and tenderness for her daughter, and that was why she told her what Eugene had said about how his disease was like life.

Laura was surprised that Amanda seem to understand instantly what Eugene meant, and felt the same horror of the realization that she had experienced. Amanda's face had frozen.

"When I visited him, I guess he could see I wanted to know what it was like for him being locked inside because, out of nowhere, he said that everyone has ALS, nobody has a way to express what they feel, especially to the people they love. His is just really obvious."

"I don't know whether to feel more sorrow for him or for us." Laura added.

"This place is sometimes just too hard." Amanda replied.

"I know. It is. I know."

There was nothing more to say or do and so Amanda and Laura quietly sipped their tea until it was gone and Amanda announced she was going back to bed. As Laura undressed, Amanda's voice came from the loft.

"I can't wait to see Daddy tomorrow."

As they had arranged, Tom and Amanda picked up Ian at the railway station in Belleville the next evening. In Toronto, he got out of the office as soon as he could and took a cab to Union Station. The surprise for Tom and Amanda was that Ann Marie was with Ian when he got off the train. Ann Marie had talked to Sharon once more and she had invited her to come for the weekend because she very much wanted to talk to Tom about his correspondence with her daughter.

Ann Marie had spent a considerable amount of time talking with Wayne and Ian about how she could get more information from Tom, who seemed to be honor bound to disclose nothing that Megan wrote. They decided the best time for Ann Marie to try to talk to him would be during Saturday coffee house when Tom was relaxed and might be feeling more comfortable with her personal presence. By the time they got back to the farm from the train station, Laura was already with Eugene working on the book. The surprise had been incidental because she knew Ann Marie was coming but had completely forgotten to mention it to Amanda.

When Laura joined them on the porch by the fire, and Ian saw Laura and Amanda together for the first time in two weeks, he was stunned at the transformation. He did not have any idea what sleeping in the same bed, and doing dishes after meals, and tending a wood stove together and sharing tea and talk could do. He didn't know why it had happened, but it was as if the relationship between mother and daughter had walked into the sunlight for the first time. It was the same but different, so clear and vivid and alive that he and felt very much left in the shadows. It was the relationship that he always hoped he might someday have with his daughter. He worked so hard to give it the security and love to make it happen, but it never had, not like the simple, comfortable, knowing glances that passed between his wife and his daughter. His heart sank a little as he embraced Laura and kissed her before she sat down.

There was a strange tension in the room as Ian tried to reconnect with his family and Ann Marie tried to get Tom comfortable with her presence and Amanda tried to convey to her father how much she had missed him, how much his ordinary presence meant to the stability of her heart. The way all those mixed emotions expressed themselves was in people trying to be oh so pleasant who were so much more comfortable with being oh so smart. Subtle ALS was everywhere you looked.

It wasn't long before Tom left and Amanda explained to Ann Marie that he was going to write to Megan. The look on Ann Marie's face was like she was being told she was being denied a treasure she longed for with all her heart.

Not long after that, Laura announced that she heading back to the cabin and Ian and Amanda said they would join her. Sharon showed Ann Marie to the guest room in the farmhouse where she lay quietly, knowing that a few doors away a boy was able to reach out to the daughter she couldn't touch.

Back in the cabin, the McCalls sat and had tea and chocolate covered digestive biscuits that Ian had brought because they were Amanda's favorite. He brought Laura her own laptop computer and a huge box of Laura Secord chocolate creams that she shared. He was glad he had brought the presents, but it was hard for him as well because it only made him feel more like a visitor.

Amanda went up to bed first, leaving her parents sitting quietly alone. They were both shocked to realize that when they looked in each other's eyes they both felt the hot glow from the old embers of desire. They both knew, in the unspoken way old married couples know, when those embers were about to burst into tongues of flame. Ian rolled his eyes and Laura smiled and laughed, knowing exactly what he was thinking. They would never face a greater challenge in discretion and restraint, but they did make love that night with barely a movement, with barely a sound louder than a sigh. They savored the still touch of their warm bodies conjoined, the wet silken connection at their soft, sensitive core. And when Laura slept, denial was an eyelid asleep, softly enclosing the movements of her dreams.

The next morning the storm broke at last and the blue sky made black shadows on the perfect white world. Laura noticed.

After breakfast Laura joined Ian and Amanda and all the other children in getting out all the classic cars that belonged to the children to give them more than just their Saturday run. They were getting ready for the annual ice races around Haystack Island.

The snow blower had cut a wide half-mile track around the outside of the pasture beside the house, and when it was done, the track was a deep cut through high drifts of snow, piled higher and higher, as the snow blower circled and blew the snow twenty feet into the air.

The cars were revved up and brought out in long row to warm up before making their way onto the pristine white track.

The youngest children went first doing three laps each as they warmed up themselves and the cars before they raced the time clock Sharon used to record every lap time for every one of her children, for every lap they made that day.

Eugene had been bundled into blankets to get him in his chair to the minivan that was then parked at the start- finish line where he could sit inside, warm and delighted, watching the cars go roaring by in the hands of his children.

Ian and Amanda, Ann Marie, and even Laura, sat alone in cars in the waiting line warming them up, waiting until the cold oil became viscous and hot.

Laura didn't even last until her little cold Morris Minor convertible even got close to the front line. Seeing cars roaring by at speed was too much for her to stand. The older she got the more she hated to be at speed in an automobile, and the fatal accident carried too many flashbacks. She couldn't watch and enjoy the excitement. She knocked on Ian's window in the car ahead and told him she was going to work in the cabin. She looked so pale that it almost frightened him, but he nodded his understanding and she left him there wondering if he should follow her and spend the day with her. He had missed her so much for two weeks that seeing her go was disturbing. But it wasn't long before he forgot, almost completely, about Laura because he would be having the time of his life.

Tranh had arrived and come to where Ian was sitting in a 57 Chevy Nomad station wagon and told him that he should come up to the front of the line and take a turn in one of the cars.

Before he did that he got out of the car and left the engine idling in neutral as Tranh proudly showed him his own car two spaces ahead, a 1958 Cooper S. with an extractor exhaust and twin Weber carburetors that gave the little white box of a Mini the deep throated roar of a big Jaguar. Tranh showed Ian the polished, beautiful, tiny transverse engine and Ian was impressed and said so.

The first six weeks of every year at the farm saw each Saturday and many evenings taken up with the children practicing on the big oval course in the pasture for the ice races to come in mid February.

Each entrant would only be able to race two cars in the Haystack Island ice race weekend where anyone who showed up with a car that had been restored at the farm could participate. The Van Fleet children had twenty cars to choose among, and doing that in the six weeks before the February ice races was not an easy task.

Driving abilities changed, and so did the familiarity of the drivers with the cars, and so it was all great fun, but keeping an accurate record of lap times was very important.

Even the children under twelve could race in the Haystack Island event, so everyone was involved. The young children were restricted to cars with an engine displacement of less than 1000 cc but because the ice was such an equalizer, power wasn't necessarily an advantage, so even younger children did respectable lap times, after they had practiced for a while.

Ian and Amanda and Ann Marie were new to it all, of course, and when they were stuffed into cars and sent on their way, it was a heart-stopping new experience for them. They had been expecting their cars to slide all over the place and be almost impossible to control but, in fact, their studded tires, which were illegal on the road, were perfect for ice racing.

It was like driving on noisy egg shells, not the usual road noise, and by the time Ian and Amanda and Ann Marie had finished their first three lap sessions, the anxiety clenched in their hands on the steering wheel went all the way back to the anxious tension that had taken hold of their backs and their shoulders.

Ian and Amanda spent the morning like everyone else, in and out of cars, staying warm, getting cold, getting nervous, getting frightened, calming down, and relaxing in the sweet smell of engine oil riding the crystalline air. Ann Marie also had fun driving the old cars, and for the first time in her life, purposely going as fast as she could while racing a clock. Like most city people, she always thought that farm folks had very simple pleasures and so she was very surprised that her Saturday visit to the farm would include powerful adrenaline rushes that were actually fun. Ann Marie also enjoyed the morning's excitement because she could hang around Tom and Amanda without looking like she was trying to ingratiate herself, which was the secret real purpose of her trip that weekend.

Tom had already made clear to her, when she had talked to him on the phone previously, that he wasn't comfortable talking about his email connection to Megan, but he wasn't able to repeatedly look into an anxious mother's eyes without seeing her unspoken questions. Finally, looking into her eyes, time after time, broke down his will, and he told her the news that his birth mother was going to take Megan out the next day on her visit to Vancouver, and they would be spending the afternoon together. Tom realized almost immediately that it was a mistake for him to say anything because the one piece of news only made Ann Marie's ravenous hunger for more information rise like an Orca whale for a seal pup. The questions came so fast Tom was stunned, struggling desperately to know how to respond.

What was the purpose of the meeting? Why had it been arranged? How did Tom's mother know about Megan? Where were they be going? Where would they be meeting? How much did Tom's birth mother understand about the situation? Finally Tom had to put up both hands to protect himself from the assault of Ann Marie's questions and he confessed that it was probably a mistake for him to tell her about the meeting, but she should be reassured to know that his birth mother was someone who best understood Megan situation because she had been there herself.

"She knows the street. She knows the people. She knows the price people have to pay to stay and the price they have to pay to get free. My birth mom's a neat lady. It'll be okay."

"I'm sure your right." Ann Marie replied excitedly, "You think that there's a chance I could talk to your mother after she sees Megan?"

Ann Marie wanted to grab Tom's coat and scream at the top of her lungs, "Don't you understand; I'm her mother. You have to tell me everything you know!"

How it was that teenaged children had assumed all the power in family relationships, Ann Marie didn't understand at all, but like most adults who felt powerless with their children, she hated what society had become. She didn't know who to blame, and so she kept quiet as usual.

"I don't really think it's too good if there's stuff going on behind Megan's back." Tom answered, "If she found out it might shake her trust. She needs to learn how to trust." Tom added, seriously.

"I suppose your right." Ann Marie answered, but it was obvious that she was frustrated and disappointed and excited at the same time by what Tom had said to her.

Ian joined the three of them after climbing from the Gull Wing door of the Mercedes. He had actually spun the car completely around when he accelerated into the first turn of his first lap and, as he spun around all he could see were the thousands of dollar signs that it would take to repair the car that was worth more than everything his own little family owned. After his scare he drove very gingerly until the last straight in the last lap when he stamped on the gas a little too briskly so the torque in the engine almost spun him again. Ian's heart was still pounding hard when he joined Tom and Amanda and Ann Marie.

"I love that car. It just about scared me to death."

"You should try the Dodge Charger." Tom replied, "Not many people have ever made it around three laps without putting a few trails in the snow."

"The Mercedes was as much as I can handle I'm afraid." Ian replied, and he obviously meant it. His eyes were still wide with the remnants of fear and excitement.

None of the city people knew that it was only since Eugene's sickness that the Gull Wing Coupe had been included with all the other cars as a possible choice for each member of the family to consider for practice or race day. The first time that Eugene couldn't drive was the first time his family could. It was a bittersweet change in the traditions.

In the hour before lunch, Ian joined Eugene and Sharon in the big white Van as Sharon worked the stopwatch and time sheets for each of her children and guests. After Ian gushed for a few moments about how much fun he was having and what a wonderful tradition they had, there wasn't a lot of talk because he could see the intensity of the focus in Eugene and Sharon's eyes.

Ian let himself sit back in the big captain's chair and watch all the activities outside. The older children, Tranh, Jonas, Rosie, Lucy and Sara had arrived not long after breakfast some with children in tow, and Ian saw the generations climbing in and out of the cars, the younger children riding with their parents as they turned laps, the older children driving themselves for the first time since the year before. Martha was driving the big cars for the first time in her life and so she received a lot of special attention from her brothers and sisters as they went with her on her maiden laps in each car. For more than anyone else, the first day of practice for the ice races belonged to Martha, and it showed in her excitement and nervousness and dancing blue eyes.

As it was with so many material things on the farm, automobiles were so much more than their practical purpose. Each car had its own tradition, both intrinsic and personal. Each car had its own aesthetic, both intrinsic and personal. Each car had its own connections, both private and personal. A car was not just a car, was not just a car.

It was watching the common bonds of family opening and closing with the beautiful polished doors of automobiles that made Ian realize in a strange kind of envy, that there was so much more to what families were, and did, and possessed, than he had ever imagined in his life.

That night was the quietest Saturday coffee house gathering that anyone could recall for years. The older Van Fleet children who lived off the farm stayed home because they were tired after the long day of racing practice. With New Years so close and the big storm draining everyone's energy, the usual crowd of guests was thinned down to a few teenage friends and the McCalls and Ann Marie. The evening proceeded regardless, but it changed into a sing along jam session where everyone was either singing or playing an instrument or both. Laura had stayed after supper and she sang with Ian and Amanda and Tom, joining in various songs that they all knew.

There was as much laughter as singing as everyone improvised arrangements to songs that spanned generations. Ian got to sing the lead in Jim Croce's Leroy Brown with all boys on the stage, snapping their fingers and doing a chorus of Bad, Bad, Bad. The girls and ladies replied, with Sharon taking the lead doing the theme to McArthur Park while the others sang ethereal Oh nooooos behind her. Tom and Martha, as usual, were the chief arrangers. They understood the harmonics and could quickly make up simple bits of choreography for every song. Faces concentrating, feet finding patterns, and eyes alive and ready for laughter, it was intense fun. The McCalls and Ann Marie learned to do simple time steps and do Motown moves the Van Fleets knew by heart.

Both Laura and Amanda were silently, personally proud of Ian for his enthusiasm and his unexpected grace, and most especially his knowledge of old songs. He was almost strutting, he was so proud that he was such a big part of the show. He fit in like an old glove and acquitted himself like a trooper. Laura and Ann Marie finally relaxed when they realized that it was all right to be less than perfect, sometimes so much less, that they felt like two legs tried for a sack race. Ann Marie had never let her body do ridiculous things before in her life, but she did that night, and her nervous face let go because she was facing children who didn't care one whit about adult dignity. She even sang her first solo in public, Joni Mitchell's, Big Yellow Taxi. Laura had never been a part of a chorus before and she found that she loved the funny co-ordinations of being back up.

For Amanda, the two highlights of the evening, ones that she would never forget, came when Tom played the piano accompanying his parents singing There's a Place for Us, from West Side Story, and when Ian sang a solo to Laura, They Can't Take That Away for Me.

The most moving part of the evening was when Tom and Amanda sat at the piano and he sang You Go to My Head and she did Dolly Parton's showstopper, I Will Always Love You.

Amanda was still surprised when it happened, and so she blushed when she got another standing ovation, and her face tripped and fell when she saw the look in Tom's eyes. It was unmistakable, powerful desire. Sharon led the last song of the evening, the old traditional song that had been revived in the summer of love in 1968, Further Along. It was an old favorite at the farm, and everyone knew the words, except Amanda, as she sat quietly opposite Eugene.

Further along, we'll know all about it.

Further along, we'll understand why.

Cheer up my brother, live in the Sunshine,

We'll understand it all by and by.

Amanda watched as everyone sang, and she listened to the words and saw the tenderness connecting all the people in the room. It was the greatest power in the world simply gathered once again, and once again she was silent, the only difference being that now she knew, and everyone else knew, that she was the best singer in the room. Something about the thought changed something inside her she could neither understand nor express. She joined in the last chorus, and as she always did when she sang, she listened to the words and wondered if she would ever believe they were true, wondered if her parents would ever believe them, wondered how many of the Van Fleets already understood why. The thought gave her a chill.

The little party broke up just after midnight, and everyone was in bed half an hour later. The McCalls in the cabin loft were still too excited to sleep and Laura lay quietly for half an hour listening to her husband and her daughter talking about the fine points and perceptions of racing old cars in the snow. That the logic of life could lead to the most unlikely of conversations was almost a proof to her that life was absolutely arbitrary and completely unknowable. Her personal history had proved to Laura there would never be a way to understand it all by and by. Life was getting whatever sweet tastes it allowed, as she tried to savor the conversation passing over her in the dark. For once the sweetness of life was something she enjoyed second hand.

As it was every Sunday, breakfast was over by eight a.m. and those that wished to attend bundled up and made their way to the glass gazebo for the Sunday service.

Both Laura and Ann Marie were reluctant to intrude. Laura's experience the previous week had been less than satisfying. The truth was that almost an hour of silence and stillness was too much for her to endure. In the cold and the wind noise, it was hard to feel anything but uncomfortable.

It was Ian and Amanda, almost insisting, that made the city ladies give in and go along.

As everyone bundled up and went out to the unheated gazebo, the McCalls learned that Jonas was going to lead the service for the first time since he was a boy.

Sharon explained that Jonas had always chosen to go to Mass with the neighbors every Sunday, leaving his own family to explore and develop their own way of worship. Jonas had always said his family's way of worship was much too pagan for him. This was the first time Jonas had asked to lead his family's Sunday ritual, and everyone was curious and excited.

Everyone expected that this would be an emotional time because it might be the last time that Jonas was home while Eugene was alive, and everyone wondered how an ordained Catholic priest would conduct the simple ritual. It was unlike any service that had ever been done in the little glass-enclosed church surrounding the huge old walnut tree.

He began in the traditional way, with a song he had chosen. It was Bob Dylan's, Every Grain of Sand, and everyone knew the words except the people from the city. The McCall's and Ann Marie sat in the big wicker chairs and listened to the words of confession and repentance as all the other Van Fleets sat singing in the three circles of chairs around the tree. Sparrows fell out of the trees onto the bird feeder by the house as everyone sang in the glass room in the glistening snow that shone like white sand all around the acappella voices. What usually followed the song was some spiritually interesting thought or reading that whoever was leading the service had chosen for everyone to consider in silence for the next hour.

No one was surprised when Jonas started with a story. It was ten minutes before they realized the story had only just begun. Everyone was shocked that the story just went on and on, and everyone found it most interesting that Jonas seemed to be telling the story straight into the eyes of his father. Eugene's eyes danced where he sat bundled in his wheelchair, buried in his big sheep skin coat and hat, listening to the shaggy dog story that was the essence of faith.

"This is the story of young man with a passionate desire to understand the great questions of faith. He wanted, with all his heart, to know the answer to the mysteries and meaning of life. He wanted the answer that everyone seeks but few people attain, so he decided that he would spend his life searching for it. He would find a wise man who would tell him the answer." Jonas began soberly.

Over the next hour Jonas proceeded to tell the story of the young man's quest. How he made his way deep into the mountains of India where he went from one holy community to another seeking audience with one holy man after another, asking each and all of the great mystics he met, 'What is the answer? What is the answer? ' But no one would tell him the answer that satisfied his longing. Finally, after many years, he found an old hermit in a tiny cave, an old man with a body wrinkled with age, but with a face almost like a young boy. The hermit told him that he must sit down beside him and wait and, if he was patient, one day he would give him the answer he sought.

Jonas told the long story of the years the young man spent in the cave learning to face the cold and the damp and the silence, until he passed beyond the discomfort in the cold and the damp and the silence, so they were just like more stones on the hillside. Jonas told of the years that it took to learn just to enjoy the simplest moments, the diamonds of rain drops on grass blades, the mountain mist so fine that only way to realize it was there was when it touched a warm cheek.

For years he sat and slept and worked beside the old crooked monk with the boy's face and beautiful eyes, and he learned enough patience to know it was not yet time to ask his great question. Finally the old man grew very sick and was obviously dying, so he had no choice but to ask him, 'What is the answer? What is the answer?' Then the old monk looked in his eyes and said nothing, and died with a strange and lovely smile on his lips that was no answer at all.

Then Jonas proceeded to tell the long adventure of the man who was now in his middle years setting out once again to find his answer. His journey eventually took him far, far up the Euphrates, where he searched out a great wise man that he heard lived in a monastery where he danced every day until he was in a trance, after which he would sit down and answer the most difficult questions in the world. It wasn't easy finding him. There were great long adventures escaping from bandits and raging dust storms and cruel corrupt officials until he finally found the great Dervish who would spin and spin and dance and dance in his white robe. There was a long line of people waiting to ask questions, and Jonas gave a number of long examples of the questions and superstitions the dervish would consider. Finally the turn came for the man to have his audience, and he asked his question, 'What is the answer? What is the answer?' The dervish looked at him and said," You've got to be a dancer before you'll understand."

And so the man joined the monastery and learned how to spin like a top until the world was spinning under him and he could feel the great movement of the earth spinning around the sun, and the sun spinning around the galaxy, and the galaxy spinning in the universe. And when he became a great dancer, he came once more to the wise man and said, 'What is the answer? What is the answer?" and the holy men said, "If you don't know by now, I can't help you."

Sorely disappointed, the man next went to Japan and sought out the wisest Zen master in the nation and told him of his many years of searching and how he longed for the answer to the mystery of life. The Zen master's response was to slap him hard in the face and tell him to go away immediately. It was an unsatisfactory answer, although every time the man thought about the slap on his face, he suspected that he had missed the wise man's intention.

Jonas told shortened versions of many of the man's other adventures; studying with an Indian Sorcerer, an Inuit Shaman, and a greatest Christian philosopher, until the man was himself very old, and still unsatisfied with all he had learned.

By this time the usual hour long service had been taken up with the long, long story that Jonas was telling, but the telling was done with such sincerity and vividness that even the McCalls and Ann Marie were caught up in the story.

Jonas continued the story, telling about how the man ended up sitting on a park bench in New York City having decided he would search no more. His search was over. His quest was a failure. He was feeling sad and broken hearted, when an orthodox Jew sat down beside him, and the Jew could see the old man was broken and sad, and asked him the source of his sorrow. When the old man told him he was looking for the answer, told him how long he had searched, and told again the stories of his days in the cave, his days of dancing, his days learning the power of medicinal plants, his days in the North, his days in the South, his days among library shelves, the Jewish man said he had come to the right place because he knew just the person to satisfy his great need, the person who would give him his answer.

"If you want the answer, you should come to meet mine own Rabbi Morris. People come all the time with questions so hard, I can't even tell you. But the one thing I can tell you is no one has ever left Rabbi Morris without feeling completely satisfied, satisfied, satisfied. If you got a question, he's got an answer."

And so the man went to meet with Rabbi Morris and the waiting room of his office was indeed filled with people waiting to have their questions answered; questions of finance, questions of love, questions about children and questions about God. All the people in the room were talking about their questions and everyone seemed confident that their answers were near.

Finally, the man's turn came and he went into see Rabbi Morris and the man told Rabbi Morris his long, long story about his years in the cave and his years of dancing and his years in the North and his years in the South and he told Rabbi Morris how he was giving up his quest, that Rabbi Morris was his last chance, and that after him he would die a sad and disappointed man.

"So you heard my story, Rabbi Morris. You are my last chance. What is the answer? What is the answer?" the old man pleaded in desperation.

And Rabbi Morris replied immediately, "So, vat is da qvestion?"

After a terrible pause, the whole room groaned at the ending of the shaggy dog story, and some people laughed and some of the younger children didn't understand why the story was over and why everyone groaned.

Jonas waited for the reaction to subside, and then surprised everyone because the story wasn't over, as he added, almost as an afterthought,

"And that was the moment that the man understood the answer to the meaning and mystery of life. He too left Rabbi Morris completely satisfied."

Jonas listened to the silence that followed. The family tradition was that no one could question the story or the reading the person leading the service had chosen. Spiritual thoughts were to be considered, not discussed.

Martha broke the silence in the room by asking Jonas if the story was over and if there would be a song to close to service. Jonas replied that the story was indeed over and that he would like everyone to sing Every Grain Of Sand once more, and the family did that, and for many years that followed, Jonas's family would tell him it was the most memorable service they ever experienced, that they thought many times of the man and Rabbi Morris and how it was that the old man could be satisfied by having his question answered with the most obvious question of all.

Not only the Van Fleets, the McCalls thought about the story as well. Amanda and her mother talked about it before they slept that night, and when Ian called after returning to Toronto that evening, the story was also their main topic of conversation.

It was obviously a joke, but somehow it felt like the story was almost like the slap in the face the man received from the great Zen master, there was something about it that somehow made sense. Amanda loved the story. Not Laura, for some reason that she couldn't understand, it made her feel ashamed.

Ian and Ann Marie went back to Toronto, with Jonas, on the train that afternoon. Both of them wanted to talk about the story that Jonas told that morning, but he just laughed and said it was a joke. But when Ian pressed him, it was obviously intended to be something much more serious because Jonas confessed that he made up story so that he would have something to fill the silence between him and his father.

"I think I've come to believe that each of us has a question to answer in life, the answer to the meaning of our lives is in finding the question we are meant to address." Jonas said, and before he could be asked, he added, "My question, I think, is about the meaning of desire."

"Interesting question for a priest." replied Ann Marie.

"Who better to answer it?" Jonas responded, and it was obvious in his question that he meant that only someone who was supposed to spend his life with unexpressed desires could really appreciate what it was.

"You think there is an answer to the meaning and the mystery of life?" Ian asked.

"Yes." Jonas replied simply.

"You think an ordinary person can find the answer?" Ian pursued.

"Yes."

"How?"

"Love."

"Then wouldn't everyone know the answer?" Ian continued.

"I should have said being and feeling loved, seeing they are sides of the same coin." Jonas replied, and neither Ian nor Amanda had any reply to make to that.

"My mother always told us that we could change ourselves, and if we changed ourselves the world would never be the same. I think for anybody to change they have to find the question they were meant to answer with their lives." Jonas continued.

"I can't imagine the question my life was meant to answer." Ann Marie interjected.

"Me either." Ian agreed.

"Maybe you'd like the address of Rabbi Morris?" Jonas said as a joke. No one laughed.

Later that night,when Ian told Laura about the conversation on the train, she dismissed the idea of life having any real meaning beyond a personal reaction. What did interest her, was the idea that everyone had a certain question they were driven to answer in their life. She could not imagine such a question for herself or anyone she knew, but she could imagine that each of the stories she was writing with Eugene did have a question that each of the characters faced. That was what made them characters to Laura, and that was what made them fiction.

She told Ian what she was thinking and gave examples from the stories: how to live with total rejection like Petsuliack, how to react to the pure evil of a death camp, how to respond to an arbitrary God, how to love someone you may never see again. Each of the stories asked a different question and all of them came to a similar resolution in the dreams of Arthur and Laura Lee. Somehow each story came to some resolution, even when it didn't really answer the question at all. And the question that Laura was left to face after she hung up the phone, was how different questions could be resolved in a similar way, could have something in common she couldn't understand or put into words. She became more and more interested in the characters of Arthur and Laura Lee, much more than the characters that they visited in their dreams. She also became more and more interested in who and what Arthur and Laura Lee were to Eugene.

That night, Ian fell asleep thinking about the shaggy dog story and about the question his life was meant to answer. Amanda fell asleep thinking about that as well, after Laura had told her the conversation she had had with Ian. Amanda fell asleep wondering if Tom's question was how to be both native and white and whether her question might end up being the same one.

Laura wasn't interested in finding any question her life was meant to answer, but thinking of those questions as real and imaginary people in her life faced them distracted her from the two words dividing in her heart like the first split of a cancer cell that would eventually move slowly and silently and inexorably through her being. Like life, the two words terrified her like the two syllables of cancer.

Later that week, one of the few mysteries created since Laura and Amanda had been at the farm was solved. No one knew where Amanda went during the hour of silence and solitude everyone who lived on the farm enjoyed each weekday at four o clock.

Ryan had nearly jumped out of his skin when he had gone to the root cellar for onions and turned on the light and found Amanda sitting on the bench in the pitch pure blackness. He had not even noticed her sitting there blending into the deep shadows that fell from the forty watt bulb, so when she spoke his name as he turned to leave, the shock of her voice where no voice should have been, so frightened him that he ran screaming away to his mother. 'A ghost!\

For a few days he had to endure his brothers and sisters jumping out at him from behind corners and furniture because of his reaction to Amanda the ghost. Amanda was almost sorry that her secret place had been discovered, although she was pleased that everyone respected her privacy so that she could continue to use the root cellar as her own for her hour of solitude. It was a strange place to find comfort, the pure and perfectly black hole in the earth smelling of musk and sweetness, hard roots and red apples, but from the first moment she had sat in the root cellar with Sharon, Amanda loved the feeling of losing all her senses. Raven black, grave silent, Amanda could sit on her little bench and feel safe from her own senses, her eyes, her ears, and most especially her sense of touch, all of which still seemed so incredibly tender. Nevermore, evermore - indelible memories, how the lingered. The hour she had endured under the hands of the psychopath would never leave her completely. Unlike physical scars, emotional scars were often more tender when they healed, the nerve endings more alive as if the wound never completely closed, so that she was never sure when something would touch it and the nerve endings to her soul would scream in agony from the depths of her heart. Amanda loved the pregnant garden, and the root cellar beneath it, and the big heavy door, and the old iron latch, and the tiny bench, and the smell that she would never know anywhere else.

Amanda understood the symbolism, understood that her hours of gestation were something she needed so much, something she needed that she couldn't express, something she needed that no one could give her except the black womb of the earth. Amanda knew she needed to be reborn better than Tom or her parents or Ann Marie or Sharon or even Eugene knew it, even Eugene who, for some irrational reason, she believed understood her best. The most they would know, the most she would ever tell them of how she was finally reborn, was that it happened in the root cellar on the farm.

The one thing she would never tell anyone was that her body was reborn from her heart when the day finally came when she snapped the button on her jeans and slid down the zipper and felt her cold hand moving into the warmth of her body and she touched herself tenderly and sensation returned in the blackness and she could smell and feel the power and the beauty of desire flood through her body until it flung itself over a great precipice like a roaring river's waterfall. What was to come in Amanda's life began in the one place she finally felt safe from herself.

For Laura, it was different. Since her disastrous affair with George, and the dead boy lying in the snow, true desire had not touched her heart or even her imagination. She was glad that her body still responded to her husband when she felt his hands and his lips touching her, but that was sex, not desire. It was that week that desire returned to her imagination through the immediacy of many distant memories.

Being so close to the beach of her best summer of love, going to Eugene's bed every night and seeing what was left of his body, somehow made her mind move back to when his body and hers were so much more beautiful. She was surprised she could remember the feelings on her skin when it was supple and his was so hard, and so soft. The sun, the sand, the heat that made her body thirst for another's, were buried under drifts and decades of snow, but they came flooding back. Laura remembered Eugene's lean body and the feel and the power of his muscles when he lifted her into his arms like she was down. She remembered the feel of his hair in her fingers and his fingers in hers.

Then she thought about Ian and his body, still so lean and toned from running. Shorter by only in inch or so from what Eugene was as a boy, Ian, still in Laura's sense memory, felt so slight and angular compared to her memory of Eugene. Ian's receding dark hair was already flecked with gray but his body had hardly changed. Laura could remember when they were first together and how she loved his agility and stamina in bed. Laura remembered desire when it lived every day in her body and her mind. She remembered desire and what it became, as if it had the changed from its fast roaring headwaters to a wide black river that hardly seemed to move at all. Laura remembered desire and wondered whether it would ever leap into the air in another great fall as it had with George. Laura remembered desire and it was a bittersweet memory.

For Laura desire was a dessert cart she usually sent back. For Amanda it was the illusion of diamond dust floating on new snow. For Ian it was like chocolates. For Tom, like his father, it was heroin. For Sharon it was the warp to the weft of the tapestry of love. It was comfort, warmth, protection, privacy and intimacy.

Before the weekend, Laura told Ian, in one of his nightly calls, the news that Tom had passed to her through Amanda, about Megan's Sunday meeting with Tom's birth mother. It had gone well. They had lunch for two hours in a Japanese restaurant and then spent the rest of the afternoon walking the streets where they had both sold their bodies to strangers. Tom said that Megan characterized it as a walk down memory lane. Ian passed the short message to Ann Marie who seemed almost hysterically excited by the news, because she thought that Tom's mother's harsh memories might get her daughter to face reality and finally get her to come home.

When Ian came the following weekend, some of the children decided to make a tour of flea markets before they came back later in the afternoon and got in a few hours of practice for the ice races. Ian was completely torn. Tom and Amanda had talked Laura into going on the flea market excursion with some of the younger children. Ian wanted to spend time with Laura and Amanda, but he was absolutely excited to have another chance to race the beautiful cars against the ice and the clock.

Ian was glad that he chose to go along on the flea market excursion. Whenever he had gone with Laura through antique stores and flea markets, he had been invariably bored. This time he could feel the excitement grow in all seven of them in the passenger van because it was almost a month since the Van Fleet children had gone looking for treasure.

The McCalls had no idea how much money these children could make in a morning sorting through what looked like mostly junk. They began to get some idea of the money involved when Tom, as the banker for the trip gave each of his brothers and sister five hundred dollars in cash.

Tom stayed with the McCalls as they walked slowly through the aisles of vendors. Martha also stayed nearby, but the other two children were quickly lost in the huge room. Tom explained what he was doing as he looked at each piece that caught his attention. A brief history of glass and pottery factories came with each. He explained the stamp marks on pieces of silver. He explained how to tell fake from real cast iron doorstops. He was the traveling antique road show and the McCalls were entranced.

They moved with surprising speed because Tom seemed to quickly recognize the few things that might be of real value. He bought nothing until all of his brothers and sisters had joined them again, carrying their purchases in plastic bags. He took them all to a vendor who had a great number of old prints stacked on the floor behind tables of tools. Tom pointed to a big print of hunting dogs in front of a fire inside a modern brass frame. He asked Martha what she thought, and she said she had no idea, except it probably was a very good bet, because of its size, which was enormous for a print.

The vendor was delighted with the interest, and lifted the print up on to the table for everyone to see. Tom read the printing details identifying it as being from the Remington Gun Company. There was a price of a hundred dollars written in magic marker on a piece of masking tape stuck to the glass.

"These were made in the 'forties by the Remington gun company for their dealers, so there were very few produced, and they were done to the most exacting standards." Tom explained. He paid the dealer and then told him that the print was probably worth three or four thousand dollars. The dealer looked like he had been pole axed and couldn't believe what he heard when Tom told him that when he re-sold the print he would give the dealer a quarter of whenever he realized. He took the dealers name and address before they all went out to the van. As they drove to the next flea market Tom explained that the dealers who knew his family were happy to see the Van Fleets because they knew they might see a significant return on whatever they sold to them.

"If a dealer isn't sure about something they sometimes put it away until one of the Van Fleets comes along. They get a fair appraisal and a significant return. It's good business." Tom explained.

As they drove, the other children passed around their purchases. The Van Fleets usually only bought things in perfect condition because they were just so much easier to sell. Because all of their purchases went to only a few dealers, and mostly to their own brother Wayne, they wanted to make sure they did not have a lot of inventory that was difficult to sell.

As they walked through the next flea market in Belleville, time and mortality lay in the pieces of glass and China that once served to make personal and public history. Now the Van Fleets picked for the best remnants of almost two centuries of artifacts that were the history of the people who came and displaced the history and artifacts of the people who had borne Tom's blood. Cardboard boxes under folding tables were filled with past lives; old tools beaten and ground by hand, old tools from a different world of calloused hands. Hands had once touched and valued such things as a part of life, and now those things had a price tag that indicated how little of their value and values remained.

Soft hands in pockets, soft curious hands, soft hands, so indifferent, the busy aisles knew the new economy of old things. When fifty cents was half days work, things that cost a few pennies were now marked at three or four dollars. Small change. Crocheted doilies and tablecloths that had been hours or weeks of handwork lay in piles that could all be purchased for a half hour of Ian's time as a lawyer, or a few seconds in the fluctuation of the Van Fleet's stock portfolio. Shelves of salt and peppers, shelves of dusty books, shelves of kitchen implements, a pegboard rack of eggbeaters, collectibles for the casual collector, all waited for some impulsive interest from someone with a few dollars to spare.

On the way back to the farm Ryan, who was the expert on pre-war Disney, showed everyone a Mickey Mouse organ grinder he purchased for eighty five dollars. It was only in fair condition, but it still played a tune and Minnie still danced on the organ as Mickey played. Ryan was excited because Mickey had teeth and a long pointy nose, which made it very early indeed. He knew it was German, which also made it even more desirable. He estimated the value at about 2000 dollars. When it was sold, both he and the dealer were surprised that it brought nearly 6000.

Even without knowing final monetary values, it was clear to the McCalls that the Van Fleet children had turned a few hundred dollars into more than a few thousand in just a few hours.

When Ian was telling the Van Fleet children how he was surprised there was such a profit margin in old junk, they laughed.

"This was a lucky day. Flea markets are mostly picked over now." Martha answered, "It's when we go picking with the cube van on back roads up North on old century farms that we really make money. Old barns and old farmhouses still have things in them that are incredible. It's my turn to go next time with Tom. You should come Amanda."

Amanda said it might be fun but, without the knowledge of antiques the Van Fleet children had, she couldn't imagine it being any more interesting than the flea market. It would be the antique road show going door-to-door, and she wasn't sure that was something she wanted to do.

The rest of the weekend went by with the usual strange sense of time that seemed to exist on the farm. Days seemed to last such a very long time but a week was gone in what seemed like minutes. Weekends were always dedicated to fun, and when the Van Fleets had fun they were serious about it. There didn't seem to be enough time to fit in all the possible things that were going on around the farm. It seemed impossible to be bored, even for teenager. Amanda remembered her many lonely hours in her room, and on the street, and in malls looking for some distraction, something interesting in a shop door or window, something crying for attention.

Before Ian went back to Toronto on Sunday, they decided that the day was so clear and beautiful, and the snow was so deep and perfect, that they would go cross-country skiing. Tom and Amanda led the way over the pristine snow in the diamond dust dancing in the sun. With only her daily walks to and from the farmhouse, Laura was the one that was most out of shape, and when she could feel her breath gasping for air, before she got her second wind, she promised herself that she would have to do more exercise if she was going to stay trim and in shape.

Laura and Ian followed the tracks of the children as they made to slow climb up onto the rise past the family Cemetery. The sun had stripped trees of all the ice and snow they had been forced to carry by the big storm. Fence lines were short stretches of wire crawling out of serpentine drifts that had lost their clean lines to the wind. The temperature was just above freezing, and so the skis bit into the softening snow easily, and there was barely a breath of wind, and the sun shone round and lemon yellow in the cerulean sky, and the only thing breaking the silence was the sound of their skis and a blue jay screaming like an iron hinge in a dead tree.

Ian and Laura didn't talk as they skied side-by-side behind Tom and Amanda, who were twenty yards ahead. The children were talking softly to each other, and they didn't realize that their voices carried so well that it was like they were walking right beside Amanda's parents. They were talking about Otis Redding and the song Tom had sung the week before, These Arms of Mine. They were talking in quiet voices and they didn't realize they could be heard.

"Were you singing that song, just for me?" Amanda asked, nervously.

"Partly." he replied. They skied side-by-side looking straight ahead as they talked.

"What do you mean, partly?" Amanda pursued.

"It wasn't meant to press you or complain or anything like that. I know it's really hard for you, but my arms are lonely. Sometimes holding you feels like I'm holding a cardboard box."

"But you're not complaining? I can't help it. I can't help it." she whispered quietly, and her parents could barely hear her.

"Singing is just a way to let that feeling out." Tom explained, "There's a whole lot of feelings you can't really do anything about. You know what it's like to be able to sing and let them free."

She was thinking about the song she had sung after he did These Arms of Mine. She would always love Tom, just like the song said. She understood what he was saying and she felt the guilt and her own frustration pack down inside her the way her skis packed her weight into the snow.

When they finally reached the Cedar wall enclosing the Walnut Wood, Tom and Amanda stopped two abreast and waited for her parents who were now about three hundred yards behind them.

"How do you hug someone wearing skis?" Amanda asked, looking into Tom's eyes.

"I think you have to take a run at it. I've never done it, so I don't know." he answered.

Amanda skied away from him and did a slow, awkward turn on her skis, stomping little arcs in the snow. Then she pushed with her poles, and Tom stood and waited for her to come at him, and when he caught her in his arms and lost his balance, they both fell into the snow, laughing like lovers, awkwardly embracing with poles dangling from wrists, feeling nylon ski shells sliding between them, feeling the snow where it touched their skin. Amanda stuffed a handful of snow up Tom's shirt. He washed her face and she did his, and he was suddenly as happy as he had been in her arms on Christmas Eve.

By the time Ian and Laura arrived, they were both back on their feet and brushed clean of the wet snow that hadn't made its way into their clothes. Amanda's parents could see she was relaxed and grinning, and Ian was thrilled to imagine there might be many other moments like this to come for them all.

Tom led the way through the hall of Cedars and when they entered the five acre Cathedral it was to a breathtaking stillness that seemed to reach down and lift them as they went down to the dark stones resting, buried in the snow around the perfect white table-flat frozen pool.

The spires of the huge White Pines thrusting soft green into the blue sky seemed to be a living Parthenon. The old Walnut trees, spreading wide between them, were like enormous fists on huge black forearms rising from the white earth. At the base of each tree there was a twisted bare circle opened in the snow, leaving heavy roots exposed. No one dared disturb the stillness or the close and holy silence between them that they each somehow could feel was touching them, connecting them, holding them down, holding them up in an embrace as soft and light as down and as high as the sky. They each said a few words about how beautiful it was, and then they all knew it was time to go back.

### Chapter 12

Over the next few weeks the McCall's fit into the routine life of the farm as if they had never had a past history anywhere else. Ian came to the farm every Friday night and went back Sunday afternoon. Even for him, his real life seemed to be on the farm. His work and his home in the city were only his practical connections. His heart and mind never left the farm when he did. Laura and Amanda settled into their own routines so deeply that they barely ever thought about their home and their past in the city.

The first story of Arthur and Laura Lee was finished and Laura read it to everyone in the coffee house, after the children had done their monthly research presentation for the entire family. Laura wasn't sure that the strong reaction she had to the story meant it was as good as she hoped because of the emotional connection everyone in the room, except for Amanda and Ian, had to the stories. On some faces there was the funny pained smile of delight, on other faces there were tears.

She had captured the heartache of two ordinary, special young people connected so profoundly and separated by such cultural stupidity and its following physical distance. Laura didn't get a standing ovation, but as everyone clapped enthusiastically after she finished her reading, she knew in the faces and the eyes and the release of tension in the applause that she was a writer, a reach-into-the-heart, honest to God, writer.

While Laura wrote, Ian and Amanda spent hours each weekend with the Van Fleet family practicing for the ice races that were coming soon. Ian loved it. Driving safely up to the limits of adhesion was a feeling he never experienced in his life. His life had always been about staying in the right lanes, making sure that he was always in control of every situation. He loved finding out just how close he could come without spinning wildly out of control. The challenge was not only in how close he could come to the limits of control, but how sensitive his whole body could be to the feeling of when it was going to happen. Learning that each car had different handling characteristics and different limits, and that the feeling inside him when he was about to lose adhesion was also different was like a drug with many delightful variations. All alone at the wheel of one car after another, Ian often found himself laughing out loud as he almost lost control and had to braid his arms to catch a slide.

Amanda, on the other hand, enjoyed herself, but was much too cautious a driver to ever find racing to be as thrilling as her father did. It was losing control, going for a big spin, having such unfamiliarity with what to do or how to react when she lost control that made her stay well under the speed limits the cars she drove were able to manage around the course. For her, practicing for the ice races was fun in a much more sensual way. Each car felt different inside. Each car took some getting used to in just getting comfortable with how things felt and moved as she drove. The smell of each car was totally different. They were beautiful in such different and unexpected ways. And the best thing of all, for Amanda, was she could see how every one of the children who had restored their own cars had formed a personal bond with their car. Driving someone else's car usually meant that person would come and share their feelings and experiences and memories of the car with her. For Amanda, the thrill she could relate to, in the beautiful old cars was the thrill of their restoration. Making and preserving such beautiful things was an experience she envied each of the Van Fleet children.

When she explained to Ian and Laura how she felt one Saturday before they finally fell asleep in their cabin loft, Ian suggested perhaps Amanda should pick out an old car and think about restoring it with Tom's help, if he agreed.

Amanda knew he would agree and enthusiastically said so because they had talked about it a number of times. Amanda knew that since Laura had quit her job, money would be an issue for her parents. But that day she had learned from Sharon that she was going to be treated like all the other children and all the other workers on the farm. She was going to get a salary.

Amanda and Laura had been thought of as special cases when they came to the farm, so the idea of their working there did not seem to apply. But Sharon had explained to her that the children felt that both Laura and Amanda had worked so hard since they arrived that they deserved to be paid like everyone else.

Whether at school or at work, everyone on the farm earned twenty dollars an hour. Ten percent was deducted and directed to the charity of that person's choice, ten percent was deducted for room and board if that applied, thirty percent was put into savings that couldn't be touched by those who were under eighteen, the rest was paid in cash.

That meant that Amanda would be getting four hundred dollars a week and Laura would be getting five hundred and sixty dollars a week.

Sharon had asked Amanda to talk over her proposal with her parents and it was in the context of Amanda wanting to restore an old car that she brought it up. Ian and Laura were both shocked at the idea of being paid. They had felt that they were imposing on the generosity of the Van Fleets as it was.

"Why didn't Sharon bring this up before?" Laura asked.

"They said that everyone that isn't part of the family is usually on probation for a month to see if they are really prepared to work hard. With you and me, she said, it all just got forgotten in all the excitement when we came."

"Everyone makes twenty dollars an hour, even the children, even with all their money?" Ian asked incredulously.

"Sharon said that everybody on the farm lives on their earnings so they won't forget that money comes from working hard."

"Maybe I could quit my job and work here too. I can't believe this." Ian exclaimed.

"I hope you're still making a little more than twenty dollars an hour." Laura replied.

"I know. That's true. But if you clear five hundred and sixty dollars, and so do I, and Amanda brings in four hundred, that's almost sixteen hundred dollars a week. Not too shabby."

"Are you serious?" Laura gasped. "You want to give up being a lawyer to work in a garage?"

"No. I guess I'm not really serious. But I sure would love to be here with you two all the time." he replied while wistfully facing reality.

"I don't think it's such a bad idea." Amanda interjected.

"I'm not quitting my job. We don't really belong here." Ian said, soberly.

"I don't think any of us should forget that. We really don't belong here." Laura added, emphatically.

"Your mother will be coming home when her book is done, and I hope you'll be going to university." Ian continued.

"I know. Tom and I have already talked about it. He's going to write his SAT's this spring and apply for admission to Queens University. I think maybe, if work hard, I can write them next year and go after him."

"When did all this get decided?" Laura asked, "I think that's great."

"Tom said his parents always encouraged their kids to go university because it gave a person time to study when they didn't have to work at anything else. Being able to learn from people who are experts in the subjects you're interested in is supposed to be exciting. That's what Tom's says. He wants to study sociology and focus on aboriginal studies." Amanda explained.

"What do you think you'd like to study?" Ian asked, hardly believing he was having this conversation with his daughter who, a few months before, couldn't find any reason or purpose in life.

"I think I'd like to study music. I don't think they would probably let me in because I don't play an instrument, but I'm hoping that if I work hard and learn to read music, maybe my voice would be enough to get me in."

"Who would have thunk it." Laura replied, "I think that's fantastic!"

Ian screamed a "Yahoo! That's so, so totally fantastic."

Amanda had no idea that her parents would react as if she had told them they just won the lottery and she wasn't sure that both her parents weren't going to come crawling into her bed to give her hugs. Again, Laura was stunned by how much went unsaid in almost every moment that people shared: fears, hopes, ambitions, doubts. She'd come to see the human heart lay under a thin translucent sheet of dark emotional ice.

Amanda continued, "I know I should be saving my money for university because you're going to be using mine to send Stacy, but Tom and I found a 71 Buick Riviera that we'd love to restore. Tom's had somebody go to inspect it. It's only in fair shape but it's all there and it's only 7000 dollars and we could restore it for maybe another seven because we're doing all the work. I was hoping maybe, if you could get a bank loan that I could pay, it would be the car I could take to university.

"Absolutely!" Ian shouted in his enthusiasm. "Don't worry about the money, that's a very cheap car. Do you realize how much money we have been saving since you both came to the farm? No restaurant bills, no bar bills, almost no gasoline bills. A 14,000 dollar loan would cost maybe four hundred a month. That's half of what the two of you used to spend on clothes. The money is not a problem. You put what you earn into the bank for university."

"That's so fantastic!" Amanda exclaimed, "Did you know that the fast backed Riviera was Bill Marshall's last great car. He did the Corvette and the Shelby Cobra. It really is so beautiful!"

"Who's Bill Marshall?" Laura asked

"He's kind of a famous American car designer." Amanda replied, "I can't believe this is happening. I can really have it?"

"Absolutely!" Ian shot back.

"Absolutely." Laura agreed.

Ian then started humming, 'We're in the Money', and everyone laughed.

Laura was shocked that quitting her job actually meant that they had more money. It didn't feel very good to realize that she had been paying to work for all those years.

The big news for Ann Marie that week was that she started exchanging handwritten letters with Megan. Rather than have messages passed back and forth through himself, Wayne's friend got them to both to agree to write a few paragraphs every day and pop them into the mail. He had stationary and envelopes and stamps at the ready for when Megan dropped by every day. He made it the last task for her to do before she left to go back to her boyfriend or to the streets. Removing the practical considerations removed any excuse not to write, and soon it became part of Megan's routine to write her mother a few words about how she was doing and how great the weather was compared to Ontario, frozen in winter. Spring bulbs were already blooming and the days, damp and wet, were still pleasant enough to make her want to gloat. Ann Marie wrote back each day with her own news of the weather, her news from the farm she'd gleaned from Ian, and what she could share about her own experiences in the past day. Neither of them had any idea how wonderful it would feel to know that there would be a letter waiting for them every day, a letter they could hold and touch and carry and keep with others in a growing pile. It was a strange experience for both of them to realize the powerful emotions they felt in holding a little note that said almost nothing.

Tom still maintained his news blackout. It was Ann Marie and Megan who began to share little insights and feelings about Tom in their daily letters. Megan was anxious to know what he was like, what he looked like, and she wanted to know if he said anything about her. She was both pleased and disappointed to learn that he had said nothing, pleased that he had kept her confidence, disappointed that she had no idea what he felt about her.

Before long, Megan was encouraging her mother to go to the farm to visit. And although Ann Marie had come to like the farm, she still felt like a fifth wheel. The best she could do for Megan was to call Ian on the phone after his weekends at the farm and debrief him about what he had been doing, how Laura was doing with the book, how Tom and Amanda were getting on.

She could feel a romantic interest rising in her daughter like an ocean tide. She did her best to encourage it, even though she knew Tom and Amanda looked like they were really very much in love. Anything that would get her daughter to want to come home was worth encouraging as far as she was concerned, regardless of the consequences that might follow. Time vanished the way the remnants of the big snow dissolved in the sun and the wind, evaporating in the cold, clear air. Where the snow had piled in the deepest drifts, the snow banks were still more than four feet deep, and where the snow blower had heaved it, day after day, alongside the road, it was still much higher than anyone could reach.

The ice races were always the second Sunday of February if the ice on the Lake was deep enough to hold all the cars and all the people required around the course. The sun and the wind had cleaned the lake ice of snow and when it was tested, each test place was found to be over ten inches in depth. The conditions that year were almost perfect.

Other years it was often necessary to smooth the surface because of pressure ridges that might trip one of the cars and set it rolling. That was the nightmare, but in all the years since the ice races began, there had never been a roll over or even a serious incident to damage one of the cars. Considerations of safety were meticulously, and Sharon made especially sure that no one got reckless in the competitive exuberance of the day.

The day before race day was always frantic. There would be more than a hundred cars entering the races and there would be four or five hundred spectators to tend to and feed. The huge food tent had to be put up on the beach and all the folding tables and chairs and the portable gas grills and everything else necessary to feed that many people had to be picked up and conveyed and put up and prepared. Portable toilets also had to be set up and secured.

Saturday morning, Ian sat in the closed cab of the front-end loader with Rosie, whose job it was to clear a parking lot on the beach for all the cars that would be coming the next day, both those of the participants in the racing and those that belonged to spectators.

The snow that was removed from the parking lot was dumped all along the shore. It wasn't long before Rosie let Ian try his hand with the front-end loader ramming it forward and filling the big bucket with snow, and then shifting and swiftly emptying it in a long, long row as they listened to Rosie's favorite rhythm and blues CDs. It was so much fun that Ian couldn't help thinking about and anticipating the story he would have to tell on Monday to the other lawyers in his firm. Skiing Whistler or Mt.Tremblant was nothing compared to this. This was driving heavy machinery. They would eat their hearts out. After the snow was piled in a long deep wind row along the beach, Rosie showed Ian how to use the loader bucket to tamp down the snow and then cut it precisely in big steps to make a grandstand for all the spectators that would be coming. It took some practice because of the delicacy of the work, but as Ian got used to the hydraulic controls it was much more fun than just scooping and moving snow. It made him laugh as he worked. When they finished the grandstand, they went to the food tent to share cups of strong coffee in big black mugs with the other workers who had been marking out the course and preparing places for the marshals. Ian amused everyone with his descriptions of his newfound expertise with the front-end loader.

"You know what you should do? You should charge middle-aged professionals a hundred dollars an hour and let them dig holes and fill them up and drive dump trucks and front-end loaders just like real men. There isn't a guy in my office who wouldn't pay through the nose to have as much fun as I'm having. Let's face it, a man never gets over his first dump truck. There's a business in this, Big Boys-Big Toys." Ian enthused.

Men, boys, women and girls all laughed and nodded.

"It sounds like a great idea to me." Rosie replied, "But don't tell my mother. She'll have us building an executive ice hotel within the week."

Everyone really laughed at that. Rosie added that his mother would probably invent courses in jams and jellies for the women executives trying to reconnect with their domestic side.

"Tell me about it. Laura would be her first customer. Once every five years she takes a five hundred dollar cooking course that's meant to do just that. They are the most expensive three meals we ever ate." Ian added. Ian was glad that Laura wasn't there to hear him teasing her. The coffee tasted as rich as the air and as sweet as the entire experience.

Nearby, Tom and Amanda were creating a huge skating rink. An ice auger had cut through the thick ice and a gasoline pump was pouring water onto the Lake where it shone like Saran in the sun. The Van Fleet family in action was something to behold.

Later that afternoon, while she was helping with the baking, Laura told Sharon that the ice race preparations were like putting on a wedding in one day.

"I suppose if we had to, we could do that too." she had replied.

Unlike the food preparations for Christmas, the only thing that had to be cooked the day before were all the desert treats.

When Laura said that the smell of cookies and walnut scones baking was one of the greatest smells she'd ever experienced, Sharon shocked Laura by whispering into her ear, "That's because it smells like sperm." Laura gasped back her laughter. And Sharon went on to tell Laura that she should go and put her face in the oat bin in the barn if she really wanted to get a nose full.

Laura laughed so hard that Amanda asked her what was so funny.

"We're discussing the medicinal properties of rolled oats." Sharon replied.

Late in the afternoon, when everything was almost ready at the lake, and the sky was turning to colour on the horizon, people who had been working all day on food preparation started arriving from the farmhouse.

What followed was another of the Van Fleet's race weekend traditions, snowball statute tag. The two youngest children proceeded to pick sides and two big teams formed up behind each of them. Arthur's team wore white arm bands and Laura Lee's team wore no arm band at all.

Fittingly, Amanda and Laura were among the first chosen for Laura Lee's team. Tom and Ian and Sharon lined up behind Ryan for Arthur.

A coin flip decided who defended Haystack Island and Arthur's team was the first to defend.

The defending team had five minutes to make great piles of snowballs and position themselves at least twenty yards out into the lake.

One of the defending team fired a starting pistol when they were ready for the attack, and with the crack of the gun, bodies came running and dodging and dancing out onto the Lake trying to get past the defenders and make it to Haystack Island.

If one of the attacking team was struck with a snowball they had to freeze in the position in which they were struck. They could only be released if one of their teammates could get to them and touch them to set them free. The first-round of the game was over when the last moving body on the attacking team had made it to Haystack Island. Then the teams reversed roles and the attack came once again.

In big winter coats and boots it was a hysterical parody of war. People slipped and fell and went sliding wildly trying to dodge the snowball's flying from near and far. It was pandemonium, with human freeze frames scattered all over the ice. It was people gasping for breath and crying from laughter, in the hysterics of uncoordinated hunters and hunted. Slip- sliding away, it was zombies in snow pants in halting, falling-down, graceless, hysterical pirouettes.

Laura was not used to running for her life, and so she was frozen very quickly. Amanda, with the incredible agility of her youth, broke back from her team after they tried to do an end run around the defenders lines. Only Ian was pursuing her and he had to come from a long way when she decided to double back to free Laura. Amanda touched her mother and they both got a significant head start on Ian when he fell trying to make a turn, dropping all his snowballs and having to gather them up again. Running with an arm full of snowballs was not easy and a definite advantage to the hunted. When Laura and Amanda looked back, Ian was gaining on them steadily and then Amanda saw Tom break from the active defenders and take an angle to intercept them before they reached Haystack Island. Whether he had the speed to do it was the question. Running flat footed on the ice to avoid slipping and falling turned out to be incredibly hard work and they were all wheezing and gasping, pursuers and pursued.

It seemed that both Laura and Amanda would get to Haystack Island safely until they got near the shore where huge slabs of ice lay in deep tangled translucent layers. Climbing and sliding and picking a path through the ice sheets was slow going and Amanda screamed with surprise when Tom and Ian arrived at almost the same time, slowing down to walk as they approached their ladies, their last single surviving snowballs at the ready.

"This is the end, my friend." Tom sang in a ragged imitation of Jim Morrison.

He threw his single snowball as Amanda got up to run the last yards to the Island. She screamed when he threw his snowball and laughed, shouting happily when he missed.

Ian got closer and closer to Laura before he was going to fire his last snowball. Laura kept moving as fast she could, all the while talking to Ian without looking back at him, telling him that he was going to choke, that his aim had never been much a good, that he threw like a girl, that the footing of the ice was something he should consider, that he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

"In that coat your butt is not that much smaller." Ian teased, "Get ready to freeze."

He threw his snowball and, to his delight, hit her squarely on her scrambling butt.

Amanda was safe on the Island and when she saw her mother have to freeze in place and lay sprawled on her face flat on the last ice slab, she went running to free her and laughed hysterically as Tom and Ian tried to find snow to pack into snowballs in the slabs of ice all around them.

Amanda touched Laura's gloved hand and helped her mother to her feet as they strolled to the Island laughing and taunting their men. Laura and Amanda were two of the four people from Laura Lee's team to make it to the Island. When the teams switched roles, the pursuit and the capture were done in an even more exaggerate slow motion. The pursued ran slower, but so did their pursuers. Tom and Ian were frozen in the very first wave of the attack. Arthur's team attacked in a mass to the center of the defending line and as the other team concentrated their bodies to meet the assault, they split into two groups trying to out flank the concentrated defenders.

The strategy worked pretty well as the first ones hit with snowballs and frozen were touched repeatedly and freed by those following behind, and when the snowballs of the defenders were mostly exhausted, everyone made a break to out flank the defenders who were busy making and gathering snowballs before they could set out in hot pursuit. It was a rout. Almost half of Arthur's team made it to Haystack Island with Laura Lee's team pursuing in the distance. Tom and Ian stood like statues in place where they had been struck and frozen in the first wave of their team's assault. It was a strange and beautiful scene watching people scamper like uncoordinated ducks in the beautiful twilight of the evening.

"Your family sure knows how to live." Ian said to Tom, his frozen mate.

"Tradition!.... Tradition! " Tom sang, and felt anything but as useless as a fiddler on a roof.

Standing there in the fading light, looking at Tom in his winter coat and long hair singing an old show tune, Ian felt love for another human being for the first time since he held his daughter in his arms seventeen years before. That it would be for someone that she loved as well doubled the measure of its sweetness. The sky glowed behind the figures far away on the ice. Time froze its memories into life and life only, as the winter blue of the day disappeared. It was a strange, beautiful moment that Ian would never forget.

In what seemed like forever, the teams finally came back over the ice where the winner was declared to be Laura Lee's team. They had won nine to four. The half-hour had exhausted everyone, but before they went back to the farmhouse, Tom and Amanda took her parents to see the skating rink they had made for the next day's activities.

It lay as a huge black slab that the next day would see alternate every hour between hockey and free skating. Tom took Amanda's hand, and she took her father's, and he took Laura's and they walked out on to the pure, hard black hole, perfectly smooth, perfectly glowing in the half light. When they turned to leave, sliding as much as walking on the slick ice, Ian pushed Amanda and pulled Laura and all of them went down in a heap of thrashing arms and legs. Amanda screamed as Tom fell on top of her and so did her mother as Ian rolled on top of her squirming body.

"The losers demand a kiss in consolation." Ian announced, definitively.

"You deserve nothing but the contempt of the victors." Laura shouted.

Suddenly Amanda, squirming under Tom, started screaming hysterically, the weight of his body a sense memory that went down through her like an ax. Tom rolled away from her and then tried to gather her into his arms as she shook and screamed, until Laura crawled to her and took her in her arms and she finally calmed down and stopped crying. Tom and Ian sat there for those interminable moments and just stared helplessly, their hearts racing faster than when they had been running as fast as they could over the ice.

Amanda recovered.

Tom helped her to her feet and Ian helped Laura, and then Amanda put herself into Tom's arms and he could feel her trembling, and feel her warm lips imperceptibly kiss his cold cheek and hear her whisper, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry". Tom didn't know what to say except that it was okay.

A huge crowd gathered in the coffee house where the losers at snowball statue tag had to make and serve the winners food and drinks all night long. Later that night, thawed and red faced like everyone else, Ian told his table that the Van Fleets were the only people he ever knew who never let childhood get lost. It was true of course, but Sharon didn't mention the irony that her family was made of lost children, lost childhoods. Laura remembered how Eugene would always talk about his childhood when they were young, as if he had never left it behind. The fun traditions were often Eugene's.

Amanda thought about how her own pampered childhood was so lonely compared to the second childhood she had discovered at the farm. Her family was like three worker bees who had grown up in canyons of steel and cement and got trapped in a car and released far, far away, next to an orchard in bloom, but with no hive to return to. Amanda was embarrassed and frightened by her hysterics on the ice rink, but no one said anything, even though she could see terrified questions in so many eyes. The eyes finally warmed and settled when she got up and sang.

Later that night, when Tom and Amanda sat at the piano and sang Louis Armstrong's Wonderful World, it was clear they were both having difficulty seeing the trees of green and the red roses too. Amanda screaming, quivering on the black ice was a part of the wonderful world they couldn't skate around. Sometimes there were no blades to carry a heart over the frictionless cold that could be human pain.

Sunday morning dawned clear and cold, but it would be sometime before Ian and Laura knew that as they woke under their eider down duvet as they listened to Amanda who was already dressed and awake in the cabin, quietly breaking the silence with the soft thuds of the wood that she dropped into the wood stove to refresh the fire. She was gone without a word, and the click of the iron latch of the door was like a signal and Ian and Laura slipped into each other's arms with a passion that almost felt new.

All through breakfast time, almost all the way through Sunday service, they made love as they hadn't done in many years. Ian had a confidence and joy in his love making that Laura found startlingly new, and she was also startled that she found that her old memories had somehow lead to a fresh excitement in her own sexuality. It was the frustration of Arthur and Laura Lee's desire and their separation that somehow mingled with her own old memories of desire and recklessness that made her respond with a heat she hardly expected.

Sliding together in the heat and the slick sweat building between them under the eider down, they moved from one position and sensation to another as they listened to the roar of old engines as cars made their way to the huge parking lot by the Lake, the different notes, the different timbres vibrating through the cold air, vibrating somewhere in the solar plexus of desire. Later on, Ian and Laura went in the opposite direction to the stream of people making their way to the lake as they went up to the farmhouse and had showers and grabbed a coffee before joining all the others at the races.

They actually showered together for the first time in years because they found that the farmhouse was absolutely empty for the first time that they'd ever experienced. In the silence of the huge house, in the hot spray of water, in the white lather of soap in their hands, on their flesh, they made love again like they had long years before.

Later again, leaning against a side board in the kitchen after they had dressed and found a pot of fresh coffee, they found they had nothing to say about what they had just experienced, no way to explain where the last two hours had come from. For Laura, the sweet silence between them was like a shoe box of imaginary letters and memories, and one more time she realized that what went on between people was almost always unspoken. Life could be like Eugene's terrible disease, but sometimes, beautifully so.

The farm had been swarming with people and old cars since before breakfast, but it seemed that the volunteers were so familiar with the traditions and routines of race day that by the time the Van Fleets loaded up Eugene and a van full of baked goods, the races were ready to start at the lake. By the time Ian and Laura arrived at the big tent by the lake, racing was already well underway

A four by eight chalk board displayed a list of entrants in the various engine displacement categories, and another identical board served to list lap times for each car.

Ian insisted that Laura go for a walk with him in the parking lot reserved for entrants, just to see what was there. The cars were predominantly from the big three North American companies: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. But, mixed in with the predominantly European cars of the Van Fleet children were a few long defunct marques, Studebaker, De Soto, Hudson. There was a Nash Metropolitan and a big lumpy sedan called a Muntz Jet, the rarest car in the parking lot parked with a Nomad, Fleetliner, Torpedo, Biscayne, Charger, Mustang, a GTO and a Sedan de Ville.

A crowd of well over five hundred people had gathered for the ice races that day, and a significant number of them were wandering through the parking lot with Ian and Laura seeing who was there, greeting old friends, renewing connections that had all begun on the farm. Almost all of the entrants were children from the foster families who had come every summer for so many years to work on the farm.

Learning the basics of automobile repair in the huge garage on the farm, seeing old rusty wrecks become even better than new was usually interesting enough for young children. But understanding that they could have their own car restored if they did their best to help with the work of restoration was intoxicating. From the time they could afford to do it, the Van Fleets had offered the foster children on the farm the first chance to having their own cars done for them. They were offered interest free loans up to ten thousand dollars that they could pay for with their own sweat equity working at all the other necessary tasks on the farm.

Because they weren't paid for the time when they were working on their own car, the summer children usually worked late into the evenings and most weekends as well, to have their cars ready for when they would have their first license to drive.

The ice races were more than nostalgia for those who had come to maturity at the farm, it was going down into the basement and seeing the stone foundation of their lives that had set in those early years of restorations. Repair and renovation happened on a whole lot of levels.

The hours went by in the roar of engines, in the spray of ice behind tires and the smell of oil and exhaust drifting in the air. The start-finish line was set up very professionally with starting lights that counted down in four half second intervals from Red to Orange, to Orange and then Green. With the green light, the cars broke the photo-electric beam and the big digital display started counting the hundredths of a second that would accumulate until the car came back and froze its interim lap time. The display then proceeded to record the final time of the two laps of the frantic race against the clock. Most cars did the two laps around Haystack Island in between four and five minutes and so a whole day's anticipation was condensed into a very few moments of excitement.

Mostly, the day was spent socializing, eating great food and reminiscing.

The other part of race day that everyone loved, to varying degrees, was called, the buttonhook. The buttonhook was the simplest of races and was run parallel to the shore, well out of the way of the Haystack Island course. Three rubber Highway cones were set next to each other and ten feet apart, exactly a half-mile from the starting line.

The race was called the buttonhook because each participant had to drive the half-mile course, pass between the two right side cones and then circle back and go through the opening on the other side making a long, wide, erratic buttonhook.

Missing the gate or touching a pylon meant instant disqualification. Those were the only rules.

Because no studded tires were permitted on the tires, braking before and after the gates, soon polished the ice so that slowing down became excruciatingly difficult and turnarounds became long slides and spins and spirals of pure anxiety. There were many different strategies about braking and making the turn. There were great disagreements about changing gears and which car's driving characteristics adapted best to such a race. The buttonhook race was informal. Timing was done with a simple stop watch held by someone watching from the crowd. Speed was not the only consideration in winning the buttonhook. Style points counted as well and where given by designated judges using the same six point scoring scale used to judge figure skating. The slower the times became because of the faster ice, the higher the style points that came with it. Nothing about the buttonhook was fair or predictable; the only thing level about the playing field was the ice.

The buttonhook was going all-out, just for the fun of it. Winners and losers debated endlessly, then complained interminably about the judging. In the end, it was actually impossible to tell who had actually won because of all the sham protests and disagreements.

Ian and Amanda both ran the buttonhook that day. Amanda hated it and did it only once, driving back in Tom's Volvo looking wide eyed and white. It was too much like the feeling of vertigo in the panic attacks she had so recently endured.

Ian loved the buttonhook and got in line again and again with whatever car someone would lend him. And because all cars were permitted in the buttonhook, he even got the Lexus, and when he hit the brakes at the turn and cranked the wheel to one side to get the car sideways, he did what looked like a skater's scratch spin that left him so dizzy that it was almost a minute before he could get the car moving again and make his way to the finish line. Every time Ian got out of another car, his eyes were brighter and seemed to be dancing with frenetic energy and excitement. The buttonhook was the perfect distraction for the spectators, giving them something to watch and cheer almost constantly.

Amanda had been separated from Tom until the early afternoon as she did marshal duty out on the lake making sure each car got around the course safely. Tom worked the start and finish line while Ian kept the record on the lap times on the big slate board before he went and got involved in buttonhook racing

Sharon and Eugene were again in the white passenger van watching the excitement of it all. For them, it was seeing so much of their history in the people, in the cars, in the place and tradition that gave warmth and excitement to every winter.

Laura did not like watching the racing so she worked in the big food tent, first making flap jacks until her arm was sore from moving the big iron skillet on the gas grill. During the break between breakfast and when she would begin preparing hamburgers and hot dogs, she sat at a table and drank strong coffee and talked to people who came and went and treated her almost like a celebrity. People she didn't know and had never even met came and introduced themselves, obviously connected to the great Van Fleet grape vine that said she was someone special. It felt good to be the center of attention and a part of a big social gathering again. It had been her life for so many years that seeing the dynamic connections and separations in a big group of people was intriguingly enjoyable, almost as if she was wandering through a familiar neighborhood she had left behind for a new life.

Many of the people knew that she was writing a book, and she experienced, for the first time, what it was like to be on the receiving end of unanswerable questions. As with most authors, she was expected to distill one of the most difficult creative tasks in the world into a few pithy sentences. It surprised her how difficult it was to answer simple questions, especially the simplest one of all,' So what is your book about?'

Finally, like most authors, she got it down to a simple intimidating answer. "It's about imaginary loves, imaginary friends, imaginary dreams and time travel."

Most people seemed impressed with the answer and intimidated enough by it that they didn't usually ask any more questions.

Beyond the tent walls, as background to her conversations, there was the roar of the gas generator that ran the air compressor that ran the air wrenches that screamed at the lug nuts that held the tires that were replaced from the big stacks that were there in all different dimensions and tread patterns for anyone to use.

Laura didn't see Ian when he made his first run of the day in Rosie's Cooper S. She didn't see him pound away, the ice flying off of the studded front tires that dragged the car rapidly off toward the first big turn. Ian didn't see Amanda waving to him wildly from where she sat on the folding director's chair on the inside of the first turn around Haystack Island. He was weaving his arms trying to get as close to the turn as he could, feeling the centrifugal forces in every part of his body. Amanda heard the cheer from the grandstand as Ian passed by the first time, and she waved and jumped up and down, and Ian did notice her cheering wildly, and it gave his heart a kick from a throttle cable of pride that he never knew he had in him.

Laura was back at the gas grill doing custom order burgers, chatting with people while they waited, slowly getting a sense of the life stories of the people who came and went, who had come to the farm and had never really left its influence behind. Laura was surprised that most people talked about Eugene and not Sharon. To her, Sharon was the enormous generator of power that made the farm what it was, and she was surprised that people barely mentioned her when they talked about their past histories on the farm. To Laura, Sharon was the one with the dynamic personality and the force and determination of ambition and energy.

She always saw Eugene as having a quiet strength, a quiet confidence, a private, personal agenda that she couldn't imagine inspiring or overpowering anyone. Yet what people seemed to remember most about their experiences at the farm involved Eugene and practical things like the restoration of their cars, the organization of races and picnics, the lending of equipment, or the gifts of truckloads of lumber. It was Eugene's generosity that seemed to be the thing that connected him to people, the same generosity that had put a precious box of letters into her hands, to ignore or to make into a new life.

Midway through the afternoon, Laura looked up and her dear friend Ann Marie was standing in front of her, waiting like so many others for a burger. Both women were obviously delighted to see one another, the old city connection come to the farm, placing them in a situation neither of them could have ever even imagined through most of their long relationship. Ann Marie ordered a burger and Laura produced it almost instantly because the food line had been slow for some time. Laura pointed out the table of incredible homemade relishes that both of them already knew from Saturday coffee house feasts. The generator outside the tent also ran three portable deep fryers in which french fries were made all day long.

"Fries?" Laura asked her friend with all the nonchalance of a short order cook.

"Great." Ann Marie answered, and they both laughed at the situation in which they found themselves, such sophisticated ladies.

Laura asked one of the other people working in the tent if it would be all right if she took a break and talked with her friend, but before she was replaced, she made a toasted bun for her own burger. It would be the first food that she ate since she finished off the last pancakes earlier in the morning.

They talked as they waited for Ann Marie's French-fries and Laura learned that Ann Marie had been invited to the ice races but only decided to come at the last minute. It had been Megan who had encouraged her, almost pleading in her letters that she should not miss the ice races, that Tom had told her they were one of the two great social events of the Van Fleet calendar. He had described the skating and the racing and the food and all the cars and seeing old friends and the description had made Megan incredibly jealous and sorry that she would not be able to be there with Tom. She would have to be there vicariously and so Ann Marie had finally agreed to go up to the farm and see what all the fuss was about.

Laura went right to the bottom-line.

"You think Megan has feelings for Tom?"

"I'm sure. This sounds terrible but I hope she does. Since they've been communicating, she's actually started to talk in her letters about coming home. I try to encourage her without sounding too eager or hopeful. I don't want to spook her by letting her know how much I miss her. That boy is the only real hope I have of getting her home, and knowing that isn't easy." Ann Marie replied.

"Well, he's an amazing boy. What's one more romantic triangle in this place?"

"What do you mean? What triangles?" Ann Marie said curiously.

"Maybe I'm just generalizing." Laura answered, and then changed the subject, asking Ann Marie if she wanted to go out and watch some of the racing.

Ann Marie agreed enthusiastically and gathered up her fries and hamburger into a little wicker basket and the two of them went out from the soft light of the big tent into the blazing, beautiful winter blue afternoon. It was then that Ann Marie remembered Megan's absolute crucial instruction that when she went to the ice races, she was to take pictures of everything, especially Tom.

She told Laura about her instructions and handed her the little wicker basket with her food while she pulled a small automatic camera out of her coat pocket.

"You don't really have to take pictures if you don't want to. One of the Van Fleet children is the designated photographer and there'll be a huge pile of snapshots that you can choose from, if you like." Laura explained.

"No, I have my instructions." Ann Marie replied. "Let's go over to the skating rink. That looks like fun."

At the skating rink, it was mostly mothers and children who were not so interested in the car racing and were having a good time on the huge sheet of ice. Boys in hockey equipment sat on the snow benches waiting for their turn to get back on the ice to play.

Ann Marie set down her food for the last time because it was already cold.

She took pictures of the boys nearby and pictures of the people skating on the ice rink. She then switched the camera to its panoramic mode and did snapshots of all the activities she could see making an extended panorama of her own from the activities literally surrounding her.

"I wish I had remembered the camera when you were flipping burgers. That's a picture I would have treasured. You have another shift?" Ann Marie teased.

"Only if I want one. It's all volunteer and very loosely organized. When we go back for a coffee, I'll do a proper working-class pose, if you like." Laura replied

"I'd like." Ann Marie answered enthusiastically.

Ann Marie took a picture of the men's and women's ice skates resting in pairs, in two lines, supported by their blades where there were cut into the snow.

"Your remember when we used to take Megan and Amanda to skating lessons all those years ago?" Ann Marie asked Laura.

"Sure. But it wasn't that many years ago. It just feels like it. Two months ago feels like years. This place does weird things to time." Laura replied. "When's the last time you were on skates?"

"Probably the last time you were, one of those open family skating days at the arena. The kids were what, eleven?"

"That's probably right. What do you say we borrow a pair of those skates? I think that's what they're for."

Of course, that was exactly what the long line of skates was intended for. Little was left to chance. Every consideration was usually extended to the people visiting the farm. And so Laura and Ann Marie, the old friends from the city, laced on cold, used skates and glided onto the huge skating rink that Amanda and Tom had created the day before. Like their daughters, they had had the benefit of weekly skating lessons when they were both girls, and the practice and the skill and the balance quickly aligned in their muscles as their old sense memories and confidence came back from all the years before when life was all second nature.

Laura learned that her friend could skate with so much more skill than she'd ever shown as a mother tied down by a daughter in mittens. Ann Marie did spins and spirals and even a toe loop as Laura skated nearby doing a few simple turns. When she stopped for a rest and the two of them were skating side-by-side, Laura borrowed the camera from her friend and had her skate again so she could take pictures of Ann Marie moving so fast and beautifully through the air.

The skill that Ann Marie displayed on skates was something that Laura could match with a camera, and when the pictures were sent and Megan saw tem on her computer screen, she was shocked and thrilled to see her mother looking so free and beautiful. No one ever knew that Ann Marie once had dreams of ice skating glory when she was just a girl. After the pictures, the two friends skated together side-by-side, and after a while even put one gloved hand into another as they talked small talk about their week, about their work; not husbands, not children, just glided into the simple pleasure of moving effortlessly through the air and feeling almost like childless mothers.

Laura looked away from where she was skating when she saw Ian drive by on the lake, driving their own family car. It was then she could see the people gathered down the shore and the cones that marked the starting line for the buttonhook.

Ian stopped the Lexus at the starting line and an instant later sped off down lake and Laura felt her heart spin with the same centrifugal force as Ian hit the brakes as he passed through the pylons of the buttonhook and the car began to spin like a child's big clumsy top.

Ann Marie had followed Laura's eyes.

"What the hell is he doing?" Ann Marie gasped.

When Laura could finally speak and she saw Ian rush to the finish line, she told her friend she had no idea what he was doing but that he wouldn't be doing it again. The two friends skated out onto the rough ice of the lake and met Ian as he was coming back near the shore while another entrant was already blasting down the ice aiming for the buttonhook. Ian stopped beside Laura and Ann Marie as the car did a little shake on the ice as it came to rest. The window slid down and Laura could see Amanda sitting in the passenger seat beside her father. The two of them looked like they had just stolen the crown jewels.

"Did you see us? Did you see us?" Amanda shrieked.

"We're high on the style points." Ian added, proudly.

"Not with me you're not!" Laura spat at Ian. "You will never. You will never do anything like that again, not alone or with my daughter, for as long as you live. Do you understand me?"

Ian immediately understood the flashbacks of Laura's fear and apologized.

"I didn't think. I thought you were working in the food tent. We'll stop. I'm sorry. Why don't you get in?" he said, and Laura opened the back door of the car and she and Ann Marie got in. It was a moment before anyone spoke. Amanda told her mother that the buttonhook looked scary but it was actually very safe. There had never even been an accident or a crumpled fender and she had even done the buttonhook herself. Laura said that she didn't care, that the thought of someone she loved spinning out of control in a car was enough to make her want to throw up.

Ian let the two ladies off at the skating rink where they retrieved their boots. They had got out without saying another word. From the skating rink they proceeded with Ann Marie's photo essay for Megan, taking many pictures of Tom who was now recording lap times on the big board. From the board, Laura was shocked to learn that Ian was still in third-place in the Cooper S.

It was with serious anxiety that she learned that the last three races of the day pitted the four best times into two preliminary races and one final race to determine the champion of the day. The head-to-head battles were the highlight of the races.

Ann Marie took pictures of Laura and Tom as he was explaining the circumstances of the final race. In the photos, in stilled life, the horror on Laura's face was even palpably greater than it had seemed in real-time. Laura didn't know what to do or say or even if she could stay and watch her husband racing head-to-head on the ice.

When Tom said that he would come with Amanda to find Laura and Ann Marie for the final races, it was on the tip of her tongue to say,' Don't bother.', but she bit her tongue and said nothing.

Ann Marie was worried about the look in Laura's eyes and the sudden silence and lack of response to anything that she said. She tried asking her one single question about how she was coping with the aftermath of her own accident with George Marshall, but Laura just shrugged in helpless resignation at the feelings and emotions that were too strong and difficult to face or let go.

Later in the day it was in the discomfort of unspoken anxiety that the two friends finally ended up sitting with Tom and Amanda waiting for the final three races, sitting on beach cushions in the snow bleachers with the last big crowd of the day. Laura felt the comfort in the press of all the bodies. She thought she was calm and didn't even notice the cotton dryness of her mouth.

In what seemed like a breathless moment after a very long wait, the lights flashed down to green and Ian raced away against a huge tan Oldsmobile Tornado. A great cheer rose up and people chanted Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, the little white car obviously the favorite against the huge old luxury sedan.

After two laps Ian was ahead by about fifty yards and when he went by the start finish line to begin the last lap Laura was on her feet cheering with everyone else, but her heart was mute and she was actually cheering and hoping that he would somehow spin out and lose and not have to race again that day, or ever. Just as the two cars were about to make the turn around Haystack Island, a maroon-black Porsche drove onto the Lake and set out in pursuit of the racing cars. It was George Marshall driving his Porsche, the Porsche that had been perfectly repaired in the garages of the farm.

Everyone stopped cheering in shock at the intrusion of a car in the middle of the race. The car was already fish-tailing as it sped away and spun completely going into the first turn. In the silence everyone could hear George restart the stalled engine and set away once again.

Sharon had made clear to George that he wasn't welcome at the farm as long as Laura and Amanda were there. He had called a number of times when he was drunk to protest what he felt was his arbitrary exclusion from the farm. He had screamed at her about being Eugene's best friend and that she didn't have the right to keep him away, and he had almost refused to believe her when she said that it hadn't been her decision, but had actually been Eugene's. When George had said that Eugene was just jealous that he had had Laura, Sharon had hung up the phone.

George had come to the ice races every year and raced enthusiastically. To him, it was more his competitive style. The ice races were the only times that George felt there was much glory to be had in any of the activities on the farm. The more he thought about his exclusion, the angrier he had become. Driving drunk, driving suspended, he made his way to the farm to make the point that he still existed and wouldn't be written off.

It was a long anxious moment for everyone as they heard the motors muffled behind Haystack Island and then saw the Oldsmobile appear all alone, Ian having spun badly on the most distant turn. By the time he got the Cooper S moving again George Marshall was coming out of the same turn and it wasn't an instant before he passed breathtakingly close to Ian's passenger door. The shock of another car passing so close out of nowhere set Ian's heart racing as he set out in hot pursuit. He knew the car. He knew who it was. He was so angry he wanted to smash George Marshall's face.

As the black cherry Porsche came through the final turn, it slowly broke adhesion and it began a long slow slide, the same slow motion death spiral that now slid Laura's consciousness sideways as she watched the car come to a stop and people rush to it and drag George from the door.

Laura started to feel her hands trembling. Standing among the silent crowd, watching Ian drive up to the Porsche and stop and leap out of the car, Laura watched people hold her husband back as George was stumbling trying to shake away from people who were holding him up because he was so obviously drunk. George got his moments of attention. George made his self-centered point. 'He wasn't going to be banned. He had the right to participate. He had paid for it. He had paid for the right to be someone.'

Sharon left Eugene and made her way to where George Marshall had crumpled to a heap on the ice. He had stopped struggling. He was quietly talking to himself as everyone watched in helpless embarrassment. Ian had already left when Sharon arrived and she quickly instructed that George be taken up to the farm house where he could dry out overnight before he would be allowed to leave.

The Van Fleet children, especially the young ones, who thought they had left drunken adults long behind, were quite frightened and unnerved by the melodramatic behavior of their uncle George that day. He was ignored by the children until he finally fell asleep in a big wicker chair on the front porch. Sharon had sat with him and listened to him go on and blame her and blame Laura and blame everyone but himself for the pain that he could no longer distract or deny. He had lost his job. He had lost his purpose. He had even lost his will to perform. The pathetic little race around Haystack Island was the first little bit of theater he had managed since Ian had thrust him through the ice of the condominium swimming pool. Sharon knew better than to argue or agree with a drunk. She sat and listened to him rail as her children came and went and finally kissed her and went off to bed. When he was sober enough, Sharon told George that he was staying the night and it was his bedtime.

The last thing she said to George before she watched him go through the door of the guest room was, "So you've got a broken heart. It's about bloody time."

Before all that, earlier in the day, before Sharon had arrived and told people what to do about George sitting by his Porsche, Amanda had found Ian coming across the ice. She was running to get him, running to bring him to where Laura sat with Ann Marie in a cluster of anxious people. Laura was shaking uncontrollably. Ann Marie was holding her friend through their winter coats as Laura kept repeating over and over again, "I don't understand why I can't stop shaking."

Ann Marie had already given her two sedatives from the bottle of pills she carried for her personal use. Personally and professionally, Ann Marie knew the course that an anxiety attack could take once it had hold of a person's body. After her daughter had left for the West Coast she was often aware that she was getting very close to losing control. Drugs were good, sometimes.

Laura had lost control of her body even as her mind seemed clear and unaffected by what was happening to her, and her friend was the perfect person to be there to talk to her and comfort her and explain to her exactly what was happening and that her lost control was only momentary and came from the shock of seeing the car in which she had her terrible accident. Consciously Laura knew that her friend was right. The instant she saw the car it was as if she was sitting in the passenger seat once again, and when she saw it slowly slide out of control in its final turn, her sense memory was just too vivid and took possession of her like some wild spirit.

As Ian and Amanda arrived, running to Laura's side, the crowd opened and Ian and Amanda looked down and saw her shaking and it was as if someone had put an electric current into her spine that made her shake like a poplar in a heavy wind. Standing there helplessly, Ian asked Ann Marie what she thought they should do. There was an ambulance that always came to the ice races just in case there was an accident or an injury, and Tom suddenly arrived with the ambulance attendants, and when Laura looked up and saw them she started to scream and say she didn't want them, she didn't want them. Ann Marie said it would be good to get her inside where it was warm; someplace she was comfortable and familiar.

"Just let me go back to the cabin." Laura said after she recovered her calm voice after the ambulance attendants backed away.

"That's a good idea. We just need a little time to let the pills work. I think the fewer the people the better. I think it's best if you don't see people looking anxious about the way you are feeling right now." Ann Marie explained to Laura.

It made sense, even though it was difficult for Ian and Amanda to accept that they would have to let Ann Marie go and sit alone with Laura to see her through the course of her anxiety attack. They put Laura and Ann Marie in the nearest car and in an instant she was gone, leaving Tom and Amanda and Ian standing there wondering where they should go and what they should do.

It was almost dark when the last race went off and even those who didn't know Laura or the story of the circumstances of her anxiety attack were subdued by the strange final events of the day as a winner was declared for the ice races of 1999. It was little more than an hour before the sedatives and warmth of the quiet cabin settled Laura so that her body stopped trembling and she seemed to be completely back to normal.

Back at the lake, Ian and Tom and Amanda hadn't helped with the cleanup that started almost the instant the ice race winner was declared. They didn't know what to do except they wanted to be near the cabin so they would be able to go to check to see when it would be all right to join Laura and Ann Marie. To kill time, they put on skates and talked quietly while they skated three in line, Amanda in the middle between her father and the boy she loved. There wasn't much to say about Laura and so they replayed the events surrounding Ian's last race and the circumstances of George Marshall's appearance and talked about what he would do and what they should do about him.

"He couldn't have known I was in that race." Ian said.

"I think he was just mad at my mom for telling him he wasn't welcome. My uncle George was always a show boat when it came to the ice races." Tom replied.

"I can't believe he was so pathetic. What was he babbling about? "Amanda asked sounding anxious and agitated.

"God knows. Drunks are always crying over something." Ian replied.

It took only seconds gliding on the ice to go from one end of the rink to the other, even with the slow turns, even with the slowed momentum from their hands holding each other, they did dozens of laps in the gathering darkness. As they talked, the lake side emptied of people and sound. The roar of the cars, the clean sound of voices, people and things packed, then moved, vanished in the counter clockwise circles of the three of them skating and waiting for when they could see Laura again.

They didn't know Laura already seemed to have recovered when they decided to walk up to the barn so that Tom could show Amanda her Valentine's present. It was a day early, but he thought it might be a good idea to distract her from her concerns about her mother.

From his father, Tom had learned the secret of being a great lover and husband: anticipation. He had watched his father anticipate the considerations and acts of affection and the time Sharon needed. He could not have articulated it, but he learned it by example, and now he anticipated that Amanda would need to feel the positive side of love.

He was very mysterious and Ian was anticipating that Tom was letting Amanda see the Christmas and Valentine present that Ian and Laura had chosen with Tom's help, and had secretly smuggled to the barn.

Amanda was anticipating that the mystery of Tom's behavior had to do with the Riviera they had purchased over the phone. She thought that it had arrived and Tom was leading the way to show it to her.

She knew that Tom's mysterious ways always ended in something wonderful and considerate, intended to make her happy. But she didn't know whether she could get in the mood to celebrate anything because of the way she was feeling, because of her memory of seeing her mother so completely helpless and shaken.

While Tom and her family walked to the barn, Laura sat with her old best friend sipping tea, appreciative that she could actually hold the cup in her hand without shaking half of the liquid onto the floor.

"Two old shaky ladies." Laura said softly.

"We're not quite The Power Sisters we once said we were." Ann Marie agreed.

"You think our lives were always this shaky? Were the power sisters really an illusion all along?" Laura asked, knowing the answer before she heard it, remembering how they first dubbed themselves the power sisters when they were just young mothers.

"With lovers and children, I guess we've always been shaky ladies, just like everybody else we know."

"I don't understand how two strong ladies turn to such mush when it comes to relationships."

"I don't understand it either. If I did, I'd either get awfully rich or put myself out of business as a therapist."

"And what would we have to talk about? "Laura said pointedly.

"Do you remember when we were both brand-new mothers and scared to death and as happy as we've ever been in our lives? You remember holding up our babies so they could see each other for the very first-time? Do you remember how it felt? I never felt more powerful than that in my life. We were such romantic fools."

"Last fall I would have agreed. I would have said you were absolutely right. Now I look at Amanda and I listen to her singing, and she has such wisdom in the way she phrases the words of a song that I know we did something wonderful, in spite of ourselves. I've been such a lousy mother and look what she's become."

Ann Marie felt terrible, knowing that Laura was right, envying her to the depths of her being what Amanda had become, and she was crushed with guilt by the comparison to what her own daughter was living and feeling, even as they spoke.

It was Laura's turn to comfort her friend. She told her that Megan wasn't lost. She told her that she herself couldn't even imagine the strength she'd come to see in Amanda, and she was sure that same strength was there in Megan waiting for the flood that would germinate the seeds of her life.

"Those babies will be the real power sisters one day soon. You watch." Laura said as she let her hand slide from her friend's cheek and rest on the curve of her neck and her shoulder.

Ann Marie almost believed it, because she wanted to believe it so much. Laura, at least in the moment she said it, believed it too. Both of them thought about Tom, but were afraid to say what they were thinking.

At the barn, Amanda's eyes exploded in shock when she was shown the beautiful Appaloosa Mare, the black dalmatian spots exploding over the white flanks of the beautiful horse. She knew instantly that the horse was hers. She had her hands to her mouth as Tom opened the stall and she stood face-to-face with the beautiful lyric power that she would soon have at her complete control.

She touched the long forelock and felt the course white hair as she looked into the brown eyes of her new friend.

"You're so beautiful." Amanda said to the horse who nodded as if an agreement.

"Amanda this is Sweet Cream. Sweet Cream, this is Amanda." Ian said by way of making a very proud introduction.

"Sweet Cream; I can't believed anything in the world could be so beautiful. Sweetie, my Sweetie."

"Tomorrow we'll take Sweet Cream on a little ride down to the lake." Tom added and Amanda nodded and found her father's eyes, and put her head softly against his chest, and thanked him.

Ian said that they could never have found such a beautiful, gentle horse without Tom's help, and she took herself out of her father's arms and put herself into Tom's. After that, she put her arms around Sweet Cream's neck and the two of them nuzzled, pressed cheek to cheek.

"If you don't mind that your dad's here, maybe I can give you my Valentine's present a day early." Tom asked

"Sure, if you want to." she replied, and let go of Sweet Cream when Tom backed her into her stall.

You have to follow me." Tom answered seriously, and led the way into the barn to the big granary with the big smooth pine latch that slid inside the door, and Tom held the door open and they went into the pitch black room.

Tom took Amanda's hand and she took her father's as Tom led the way explaining that he was going to turn on the light when he was ready. He positioned them in front of a big empty granary bin standing in the feeble light spilling from where Tom had left the big door open behind them.

Both Ian and Amanda were shocked when Tom turned on the little forty watt bulb and their eyes adjusted to the dark and they saw in the corner at the back of the wooden bin, a huge, beautiful Snowy Owl standing on a heavy piece of barn beam resting in the corner of the bin.

It was almost a surreal sight because there was a potted rose bush exploding in red blooms entwined all the way up the beam on which the owl stood looking at them intently.

"Happy Valentine." Tom said as he joined Amanda and her father.

"I don't understand. Why would you capture such a beautiful thing?" Ian asked, "I think it may also be illegal to capture wild birds of prey."

"If you look closely you'll see his right leg is quite badly injured." Tom explained, "He was shot by some idiot hunter. There is a woman who has a refuge for injured birds who lives north of Kingston and sometimes we take in some of the birds that need help and rehabilitation before they go back to the wild. I just thought that maybe Amanda might want to help do that." He turned to Amanda," I know it's a weird kind of Valentine, but I thought it might be something that would touch your heart. I just wanted to touch your heart for Valentine's."

As usual, he had done it. No one could see in the half-light that Amanda's eyes had welled up with the straining meniscus of her feelings as Tom led her through the wire gate sealing off the end of the granary bin. He slowly took her to the beautiful white bird with the rows and ripples of black tipped feathers and the huge white face with big eyes and twin bands of gold around the black, black ellipses of its irises.

"He's quite calm with all the handling he's had to take." Tom whispered, "You can touch him if you move slowly and gently."

Almost as wide-eyed as the bird, Amanda moved her hand and touched the perfect head, and the feathers were so soft it was almost like they weren't there at all, just a coolness, a firmness, and then the sudden feeling of power as the Snowy Owl turned aside. Amanda let her hand run down the strong wing shoulder to the leg and she could see the ugly raw sore where the bullet had torn through the flesh.

"We have to put antiseptic ointment on the wound every day." Tom explained softly to Amanda. "It's still quite painful and it's amazing that he just stands there and shudders with the pain and lets you do what you have to do."

Amanda was mesmerized by the beauty of the Owl and the two of them couldn't seem to take their eyes off one another.

"It's such a privilege to be this close to something so wild and beautiful. How do we feed him? What does eat? "Amanda asked seriously.

."They usually eat mice and voles, but we slice up some strips of steak for him. We can come back from the house later and feed him." Tom answered.

Tom reached down and broke away one of the red roses beneath them and handed it to Amanda who took it as the owl shook in surprise at the movement.

"Rosie says that the rose is called Don Juan." Tom said quietly.

"That's you." Amanda teased," I bet I'm the only girl in the whole world who got a sick Owl on a rose bush for Valentine's. Does he have a name?"

"I call him Tundra because that's where Snowy Owls breed and spend most of their lives. We're at the most southern point in their range. They only come this far south when winters are really bad in the North."

"Tundra. Hello, Tundra." Amanda said to the Owl and it seemed to her that Tundra had the power and presence of a human being. "I wonder if my mom would want to help me nurse him?"

"I think that would be a great idea." Ian's voice answered. He spoke to Amanda from where he had waited on the other side of the gate and watched silently, treasuring the moment that he felt privileged to see, with both of them, for some reason, thinking of Laura.

When she was standing again outside of the gate looking at Tundra, Amanda asked Tom if it would be all right if she gave him her Valentine a day early because it seemed to her to be the perfect place and time. Tom agreed instantly and both he and Ian looked at Amanda as she just stood there, and then she began to sing. It was the first song she had ever composed in her life. She sang to Tom in the perfect acoustics of the wooden granary and both Tom and Ian felt the small anvil of love drop in their hearts as she sang.

The song described the feelings of a girl awakening from a dream and finding a world that she'd never imagined could exist, a world with a Prince with long hair and beautiful eyes who taught her how to love. Each verse was something he taught her, trust and patience and gentleness and courage and each verse ended with the same phrase tying it to the bridge of the song, "Some things, some princes. some feelings are forever."

Amanda's beautiful voice filled the granary and left the men standing there silently, and when the song was over and Tom took her in his arms, Amanda told them both that it was the first song she had ever written.

"It's spectacular." Ian said softly.

"So are you." Tom whispered in Amanda's ear.

After the song they closed up the owl and left the granary light on and then they said goodbye to Sweetie and walked back to the cabin, Amanda holding hands between her father and Tom.

Three hearts exploded in relief when they saw Laura sitting quietly sipping tea with Ann Marie. It was like a dam exploding for Amanda, and what poured out of her was her joy and excitement and all the details of her own beautiful horse, and the incredible injured Snowy Owl, and the climbing rose blooming in the black granary bin, and the horse was called Sweet Cream, and she would called it Sweetie, and the owl was called Tundra, and had the biggest eyes she had ever seen in the world and they looked right at you like it could read your thoughts, and some madman had shot it and it needed to have antiseptic ointment applied every day, and it needed to be fed little strips of steak, and maybe Laura might help her feed Tundra sometimes, if it wasn't too much trouble.

Laura said that it would be glad to help, and Amanda agreed and said that when Laura saw how beautiful it was, and how it's feathers felt under her hand, it was an experience she would remember for long as she lived.

"It's so wild and beautiful and gentle and calm and it really is a privilege." Amanda enthused.

"I remember seeing a Snowy Owl sitting on a telephone pole when I was just a girl." Laura said, "My mother and father stopped the car and I rolled down the window and the owl turned its head away and wouldn't look at us. I remember that it made me feel terrible and so I made a noise and it just spread its wings and drifted away over the fields." Laura added, almost distantly.

"Tundra looks at you like he is seeing into your soul." Amanda replied.

"My soul; poor Tundra." Laura answered bleakly.

Everyone ignored the remark, and Ian said that he had a little Valentine's gift for Laura that he would have to give her then because he would have to be going back to Toronto very soon. He went to his brown leather travel bag and everyone felt the sharp sound of the zipper and then saw the red wrapped package with the big bow and the big card in the manilla envelope. Everyone watched as Laura took the present and the card and when she opened the card everyone gathered around to look at the eight and a half by eleven printed collage of a marriage.

Ian had used the scanner and the computer to take pieces and images from the photos they had stored away in big albums in the bottom drawer of the bedroom dresser. He had cropped faces and places, a palm tree supported Laura perched in her string bikini, Laura in an evening gown leaned against the baby Amanda in a diaper. Amanda's and Laura's faces, as they changed over the past seventeen years, fell like snowflakes from the top to the bottom of the card. Legs and breasts and smiles and faces were blown up and pasted everywhere beneath them as a background.

On the inside of the card, the computer had printed in forty point italic This Is Your Life Laura Anne McCall and beneath it Ian had written in his fine hand, Your Valentine always, Ian. The words were enclosed by a rough red heart made with magic marker.

Everyone was staring at all the images on the card as Laura put it aside and stretched up and kissed Ian lightly and told him it was the best card she had ever received. And then she opened the little parcel and put aside the wrapping and the ribbon and opened a little cardboard box and lifted out a video camera.

"This is our video camera." Laura said in confusion.

Amanda recognized it instantly as well and flashed a look of incomprehension at her father. Ian reached down to the camera and flicked open the little video display and pressed a button and the images in the camera began to play.

Ian was standing there on the screen dressed in a wizards costume and cape that he had rented, all red and black brocade and gold thread, and beneath it all he made the sweeping melodramatic gestures and flourishes of an amateur magician.

Ian's voice came from the camera. "Welcome my love to the magical kingdom that you left far far behind as you have ventured forth on your great quest. I, your friendly neighborhood wizard, will take you on a little tour to remind you of all the charms and magical memories that abide in your own far away realm."

"Here is the table where nightly feasts are prepared to the exacting standards of your impeccable palate. What pizzas, what linguinis, what fondly remembered fondues have passed this way?Here is the leather sofa where my queen has curled up after too too many libations. Here's the love seat upon which so many special bums have spread, the famous and the infamous. Do you remember the princes of verse who have sat here, Layton, and Atwood, and even Leonard Cohen with his dour date. Remember how you called them, Glum and Glummer, and he laughed. These are and have been your subjects. These are among the many who wait anxiously for your return."

"Next comes the spoils and trophies of our campaigns."

Ian then took the camera on a tour of the apartment lingering over the paintings, the sculptures, the decorative pieces, the beautiful, expensive things they had gathered in their years together. A huge abstract acrylic by Barbara Klunder over the fireplace came with an anniversary, a raku bowl glowing with its dark iridescence sat empty where it usually sat filled with fruit. Laura remembered the gallery and the artist in Niagara on the Lake as she watched the empty bowl. With vacations and holidays and anniversary's came the spoils of their years of hard work.

Then the tiny wizard on the screen led Laura through the apartment beginning another more intimate tour with the words, "You may recall certain incidents in the following places my queen."

What followed was a visual tour that led from the sofa to the love seat to the floor to the dining room table, then into the kitchen, to the counter, to the floor, to the counter once again then back to the floor and then out to the foyer to the rug by the fireplace then into Laura's office to her chair and then to her desk and to the floor once again. Slowly lingering in long still seconds, the camera went to the bedroom and lingered for a long, long time on the bed moving slowly from one end to the other, traveling out from the floor on to the pillows. From there the camera traveled to the bathroom and the translucent shower door and an invisible hand pulled it back to show steaming billows of vapor rising as it had risen over them so long before.

Ian said nothing during the tour and Amanda, and even Ann Marie, were amazed at the sexual tension that came with the slow pans and close-ups of places where Ian was making Laura remember they had made love.

The shower door slammed to the invisible hand and the screen cut away to where Ian was standing once more in the living room in front of the camera mounted on its tripod. The music to Night Train, the old burlesque standard, was playing in the background as Ian told Laura that there were certain other amenities she may be missing from her kingdom and he dropped the brocade cape from his naked shoulder and he proceeded into a parody of a strip tease in which he would show an arm and then another shoulder and then a long hairy leg snaking between the folds of the magician's robe. He danced like a sensual stripper as he turned his back on the camera and wrapped the robe tightly around his body and did bumps and grinds side to side before he suddenly turned his head and with a lascivious look dropped the cape to the floor and the three ladies in the little cabin all gasped and screamed and laughed to see the sudden, instantaneous, short-lived appearance of Ian's naked backside. The movie was over on a freeze frame close-up of his butt marked with the foil words, The End, pasted, one word on each cheek.

Amanda screamed, "Daddy, how gross!"

But it wasn't gross; it was funny and had everyone laughing even though sharing the sight of her husband's naked body with her daughter and her best friend made Laura quite speechless in surprise.

"So there's your Valentine, my queen." Ian said to Laura, mischievously.

"It's certainly different. Perhaps a little too revealing, but thank you dear." Laura got up and the simple kiss of gratitude somehow turned longer and steamier than either of them imagined it might.

Amanda told them to break it up.

Ann Marie said the Ian would have to start documenting other erotic sites, if they didn't cut it out.

Shortly after, Ian announced that he would have to be getting back to Toronto and Ann Marie agreed that she too would have to be leaving soon. He quickly packed his bag when Tom and Amanda said they would walk them both to the parking lot. Laura excused herself from the walk and the goodbyes, saying that she wanted to just stay where she was. Everyone understood, it seemed. When Ian was packed and ready and had kissed Laura goodbye, he suddenly realized the opportunity.

"Ann Marie's going back to the city. I can go with her if you think you might want me to leave the car." he said to Laura.

Laura hadn't thought of leaving or even needing a car since she had come to the farm, but the idea of having her own transportation appealed to her, even though she knew that there was always a car she could borrow.

"That would be good. I don't know when I'd use it, but it might be good if it was there just the same." she answered.

It was decided just that quickly, and then Laura watched her husband and best friend go out of the big door with her daughter and her boyfriend leaving her feeling a disquieting sense of loneliness.

The next morning after breakfast Laura met Tundra for the first time. She and Amanda had walked back from the farmhouse carrying a little bundle of sirloin that Amanda had cut into small strips and wrapped in a little plastic sandwich bag. In the granary, Laura was engulfed in the heady smell of the oats that were meant for the horses. She remembered Sharon's comment and smiled but didn't say anything as Amanda led her to where Tundra was caged.

Seeing the big beautiful bird, feeling its eyes and two pure bands of gold falling over her like she was a bottle in an arcade game was electrifying and gave her an excited sense of anticipation she didn't understand. She thought maybe it was the bird's self-assurance or its white beauty in the dark corner, or the image of the surreal rose bush entwined beneath it, but it was a feeling she couldn't explain or deny. She was drawn to the bird by a force she had never experienced. It somehow connected with the feeling she had had when she had shouted at the Snowy Owl on the telephone pole when she was a girl. The attention she wanted so much from a beautiful bird so long in the past was still there and now she had it and having it, it was almost irresistible.

Amanda had already had the experience of feeding Tundra the previous evening when she had gone back to the barn with Tom. She was more comfortable and confident than Laura would ever be handling the beautiful bird. She took out the strips of red meat and Tundra didn't move or react until she held the strip of meat dangling to the side of his beak when Tundra would gently turn his head and take it from Amanda's fingers. After the third strip Amanda, asked Laura if she would like to try, and she did that nervously, eye to beautiful eye, tense and excited and exhilarated. After two strips, Laura let Amanda finish the feeding.

As Tom had showed her, Amanda then got ready to put antiseptic ointment on Tundra's ugly wound. She took a soft sponge from the warm water she carried inside a plastic yogurt container. She squeezed the soapy antiseptic water from the sponge and slowly reached up to Tundra's thigh and held firmly while she washed the wound with the sponge. Tundra shuddered to the touch and spread his wings wide for balance, and Laura stepped back seeing the majestic wingspan and the power in the soft contours of white.

As Amanda cleaned the wound, she asked her mother to reach into her pocket and take out the antiseptic ointment that was there, and Laura did that and did exactly as Amanda instructed as Amanda told her to squeeze some of the ointment onto her finger and apply it to the wound while she held Tundra's leg.

With Amanda holding Tundra's thigh in one hand and his talons in the other, Laura spread the white cream on the ugly wound as Tundra spread his wings above them and his whole body shuddered in pain as Laura tried to smooth the cream over the wound as gently as she could.

It only took a few seconds before it was over. And then Amanda and Laura began the long long two minutes of slow exercises they had to do, moving Tundra's leg and foot so the muscles would move and gain some flexibility and strength so they wouldn't atrophy and leave Tundra unable to hunt . The exercises were absolutely necessary so that he wouldn't die of starvation when he was released into the wild. Laura thought the pain she had seen and felt in the bird as she was touching his bare wound with her bare finger was terrible, but now the whole white beauty and softness of him shuddered silently under their hands.

The huge beautiful wings trembling, the whole body shaking, the eyes wide and staring and making not one single effort to escape or resist made Laura feel another strange, powerful emotion that she had never known in her life but that seemed to be strangely familiar and personal. She knew what it was to shake uncontrollably. What she didn't understand was that their pain was alike.

When the physiotherapy was done for Tundra, mother and daughter were strangely excited and exhausted at the same time. Amanda asked Laura to help her free the climbing rose from where it was entwined on the post beneath the Snowy Owl, and Laura did that, and doing it was almost as delicate as what they had been doing before, pulling the living canes and leaves apart, feeling the thorns in the dark pricking her flesh in warning.

Amanda carried the flower pot awkwardly out of Tundra's cage as Laura followed her daughter, closing the gate as she was instructed to do, leaving the on the light for Tundra. Amanda was ready to carry the rose bush all the way to the cabin but Laura told her that the blossoms would all be frostbitten before they got there, so they discussed what to do and they found some plastic feed bags and the skill knife used to cut them open, and they made a sleeve for the rose bush and wrapped it securely with binder twine against the wind. It was while they were wrapping the rose that Laura realized what it was like to work with her own child. She understood what Sharon was intending when she asked her to wash dishes with Amanda. There was some kind of bond in a simple, common purpose that enveloped a moment like the fragrance of the roses blooming under their hands. Hands at work tied living things so subtly, so securely. Who would have guessed?

After that, for the next six weeks, until Tundra rose into the air above the pasture and flew away, when he would turn his head back with his yellow eyes staring back, mother and daughter would go together every morning to tend to the healing of the bird that would be very late in his migration back to the Arctic.

Laura got back to the cabin with Amanda and they both saw a bowl of roses sitting in the middle of the red table. It was a miniature version of the enormous Valentine bouquet that Rosie had placed in the center of the farmhouse dining room table as his traditional Valentine present for Sharon.

Unlike the roses that came from flower shops, the roses that Rosie grew and bred in his green house were a mixture of antique roses that went back more than a century. The thick heavy heads of the blossoms nestled together beautifully and when Amanda and Laura approached them, the fragrance that rose from the table was more beautiful than any perfume they had ever smelled. No card came with the flowers and so they were not sure that it wasn't Tom who had put them there, and Laura only learned later in the day that they were intended for her, so in that moment of indecision and mixed feelings they just smiled at one another and said how beautiful the roses were, that they had never seen such roses for sale.

Amanda left her Don Juan rose by the only window in the cabin and she tended it and was amazed that it continued blooming for weeks, long after the hybrid perpetuals on the table had shed their blossoms and dried in place where Laura left them be.

The best part of Valentine's Day for Tom and Amanda was a short ride to the Lake on Sweetie and Jack. The food tent was gone and all that remained of the ice races were paths in the snow made by so many people and tires. They rode to the fallen black willow and looked at the sun shining on the still lake and they felt the hard beauty inside them, and winter felt forever and spring felt like it would never come.

The evening of Valentine's Day was like a regular day for Laura as she had worked on her book and went up to the farmhouse for dinner and waited on the porch for her hour with Eugene. She had been surprised with handmade Valentines from Amanda and Tom and all the other Van Fleet children.

Laura wasn't surprised when Sharon sat down across from her on the porch while she waited to see Eugene. What did surprise her was that she came in carrying an open bottle of red wine and two crystal glasses that she sat down between them. Laura didn't say anything as Sharon poured them each a full glass of wine. Laura had never seen alcohol anywhere on the farm except on the dining room table. It was an exception she noted without comment. Sharon raised her glass to Laura.

"Happy Valentine's."

"Thank you. And to you. "Laura replied as she took a sip of the beautiful Beaujolais. It was a treat, and she did appreciate great wine. That was another thing at the farm where only the best would do. The wine that accompanied dinner every night was always magnificent.

"So are you falling in love with Eugene?" Sharon asked after she sipped her wine, and the question caught Laura savoring her first swallow and it almost made her gag.

"Excuse me? That's like me asking you if you are falling in love with Ian?" Laura answered nervously, "Why would you ask me that?"

"It's Valentine's Day and you spend time with him every day and he does love you very much, it's clear."

"I don't think so. I don't think, considering the circumstances, you really have anything to worry about."

"Oh, I have lots to worry about. I've been pretty sure that I was first in his heart for all these years, and when I knew you were coming to stay here, I was pretty nervous that I'd feel my position slip. But when I first saw you with him the first day you came here with George, I knew that you didn't love him. But I know everyone falls in love with him eventually, and I just wondered if it's happened yet." Sharon explained matter-of-factly.

"I suppose I have. He's a wonderful man, but if you mean like romantic love, then no. He's dying for god's sake. Isn't romantic love kind of irrelevant now?"

"No, not to me. You really don't believe in heart stopping romance, do you?"

"I don't suppose that I do. So I guess we're all safe." Laura was thinking of the absurdity of wanting a dying man who looked like death already had most of his body.

"We're not as safe as you think. I was almost sure when you came here that he would eventually get to you, and when you started working on that book together I knew it. When you came here I knew that I was playing with fire, but I realized that book is the big boiler that's going to keep that fire nice and contained and keep us all from getting burned."

Laura was stunned by the idea that somehow her book with Eugene was some kind of sublimation of romantic feelings. She didn't want to believe it, but the thought of it made her decidedly nervous.

"Why would you take such a risk, letting me come here, if that's what you thought?" Laura asked pointedly.

"Well, it's one of the things that Eugene and I have in common, we're not afraid of taking risks because we have a certain optimism and certain confidence that we can handle anything that comes along, even an old love like you."

"That's probably why I think both of you live behind rose colored glasses. I hate risks. My daughter took risks and look where it got her. Every risk I've ever taken has lead to nothing but heartache. Look at my thing with George Marshall." Laura shot back.

"Nothing but heart ache? When the heartache was over were you better or worse as a person?" Sharon asked gently.

"Life is a learning experience. Right! When do I get the diploma? The only good thing about heartache is when it ends. Nobody is better for it. The only thing it leaves is more walls and more fear.

"So what are the walls between you and Eugene? What are you still afraid of?" Sharon pursued.

"I don't know. I haven't even thought about it. Why would I? Why would you want to know?" Laura answered.

"Because I don't think I could ever begin to describe to you how much I love him. I'll tell you the truth, I'm sure glad that you have that book between you."

"That makes two of us, I guess."

"Well, exactly. Happy Valentine's." Sharon replied, and lifted her glass of wine and the two of them touched crystal edges and drank the dry musky liquid inside.

After that they chatted like old friends and finished the bottle of wine and Laura's head was spinning when she went and took her place beside Eugene after she had walked into the farmhouse with Sharon. She kissed his temple and told him Happy Valentine's, and when she looked at the computer screen there was a Valentine card there with a big tree growing out of the middle of a red heart, and in the branches of the tree was a great mix of letters and as Laura watched, the letters began to fall and they fell into the heart where they formed words, line by line.

My eyes in yours...

Yours in mine...

What's reflection?

Laura read the words and didn't know what to say. Her heart felt very cold.

"The fundamental question for a narcissist like me." she managed to say after a long pregnant pause when she couldn't take her eyes from the monitor. Like life. Like life. Like life! It was all she could think.

Laura was almost completely sober when she left Eugene, and when she was making her way out of the farmhouse, she was surprised to see Sharon sitting on the porch sipping tea. Sharon asked her to sit down. The invitation made her decidedly nervous after their previous conversation, and she saw that Sharon saw that she was reluctant, and the smile Sharon gave her and the look in her eyes almost dared her to take the risk. It was the last thing she thought she would do, but she couldn't help herself, the eyes and the smile made her sit down.

In the next hour Sharon and Laura became friends the way only two women could do. They had decided, without knowing it, that they trusted one another, and for some inexplicable reason felt an affection for each other than neither would have ever guessed might happen. With affection and trust came the ability to express fear and reveal an intimacy that only exists in a woman's heart. It was as if they undressed with each other, for each other, undressing their hearts without shame or envy. They undressed together and weren't afraid to see or be seen. That was a feeling men never felt. It was a kind of trust whose roots went very deep. Only two women friends ever know what it means to be able to undress in front of one another and to feel both exposed and accepted at the same time.

That evening, Laura and Sharon knew they could expose their marriages, their husbands, sex, faith and desire, hope and fear and respect and the way it was in their own natures. That evening they began talking about marriage, and neither of them knew or expected that the other would see and understand so much of what they were saying and what they had each experienced. The interesting thing was that both of them realized that their marriages were set on bedrock that was so very different, as different as the two men who loved them.

It was a Valentine's Day to remember and it wasn't over.

Amanda had kissed Tom goodnight when they left the music room and he was going to his room to write to Megan, and when she was passing through the porch and saw her mother and Sharon sitting there so late, she was almost startled to see it. She was instantly worried they were talking about her. It made her even more nervous when Laura asked her to come and sit and share tea with them. Expecting some kind of lecture, she waited nervously while her mother poured her a cup of tea.

"So how does it feel to be in love?" Laura asked her daughter, handing her the full cup.

"Moma! God! You know how it feels. God! Why are you asking that?"

"Because I'm your mother and watching you and Tom, I think, maybe I've still got something to learn."

Amanda was absolutely stunned into silence by what her mother had said. 'Laura, something to learn? Impossible!'

"It's not a trick question." Sharon reassured her.

"It feels like a trick question." Amanda replied.

"So what does new love feel like? You have to remind two middle-aged ladies." Laura continued, "I'm being serious. We've been talking about love. I thought you'd have a pretty good perspective."

Amanda could see that her mother was serious, even though she was obviously having a good time asking the question, and perhaps even making Amanda feel a little uncomfortable discussing her deepest emotions.

"It feels like a big sheet of ice that goes as far as you can see, and you can hear cracks every time you take another step, and it feels like there's an enormous wind pushing at your back and you can barely keep your balance, and it's the most beautiful scary feeling, and the most beautiful place you've ever been in your life, and you wouldn't choose to be anywhere else in the world, even if you could." Amanda replied seriously, looking straight into her mother's eyes.

"Wow! That's it. My little girl's really in love."

"It makes you grow up awful fast." Amanda replied. "Does the ice ever get like it feels thicker?" she asked.

"It feels thicker all the time." Sharon replied, "You stop hearing the cracks and you're sure that's because it's thicker, but it isn't true. When you start off it's as thick as it'll ever be. The reason you stop hearing the cracks is that you both learn to walk so much lighter. When you love someone for a long time, you kind of learn how to levitate, to defy the gravity of life."

"Ooo., I like that." Amanda replied.

"Me too." Laura agreed, and she knew that it was true and she knew how heavy she had always felt in her marriage. And the strange thing was that knowing it made her feel immeasurably lighter. She thought about Ian and then she was thinking about Eugene lying like a flesh and blood stone in his bed not far away. Old loves, the words came drifting like autumn leaves.

"Let's talk about sex." Sharon interjected.

"Let's!" Laura agreed instantly.

"Oh, God!" Amanda screamed, "What have you two been drinking?"

"Heady stuff," Sharon answered, "It's the truth in women's eyes"

"It's the fellowship of females." Laura agreed, "You've passed the test. We've just formally approved your membership."

"You've paid your dues." Sharon replied.

"You are woman. Let's hear you roar." Laura teased her daughter, and the smiles and good feelings and something about the moment made Amanda realize that it was true, she was being made a member of the woman's fellowship and her heart felt so much lighter that she honestly felt that the gravity of life could be defied.

"And you want me to talk about sex with my mother and my boyfriend's mother. Right!"

"We're not mothers now. Part of the women's fellowship is leaving your roles behind and just telling the simple truth." Sharon explained.

"The simple truth, about sex. Right! So are there any other rules in the women's fellowship?" Amanda asked, trying to change the subject.

"There's only one other rule," Laura interjected," In the women's fellowship, everything you say stays with those who hear it."

"That's true." Sharon agreed, "Girls gossip, women relate."

"This is all kind of new, what do you talk about besides relationships?" Amanda asked, seriously.

"Not much." Laura replied, "Do you know anything that's more interesting?"

"No, I guess not."

"So do you have a question, something you'd really like to understand?" Laura asked her.

"I want to know why you had an affair with that man."

Laura felt like she had been slapped in the face, but when she looked in Amanda's eyes she saw the simple, deep emotion in the question, she did leave the role of mother behind and answered her as if she was talking to another woman.

"You're so busy you don't even know that you're burned out, so shutdown you don't even know that you're sad, and you're with so many people you don't even know that you're lonely. George was a shot at being young and excited and connected to something and someone that isn't as hard as everything else in life, something that wouldn't need any maintenance."

Amanda listened and thought about what her mother had said and it was a difficult moment of silence before she spoke and said, "I can see how it could happen. I guess I just always thought that you were so strong."

"Me? I can't believe you'd ever think that." Laura replied quietly.

"Just look at you. You are always such a powerhouse."

"And I've always been emotional mush." her mother confessed.

"Like mother, like daughter." Amanda answered and she saw in her mother's eyes that Laura no longer believed that what she was saying was even remotely true. She saw respect in her mother's eyes that her mother had never seen in her own. Amanda just nodded and tried to smile.

"There has to be more to your affair with George Marshall. You really aren't emotional mush." Sharon pointedly said to Laura..

Laura knew that Sharon was right, that the moment demanded a lot more honesty than she had given to her daughter and so she told about 'The Course' George did with young women and the variation of it that had happened because she was his equal. She told about how he had touched the old weakness inside her, her own self-doubt, her fear, her need to feel wanted and real.

"Every woman's weakness." Sharon agreed.

"It's true." said Amanda," A few months ago, I could have been somebody that would have wanted a man to do that to me. It's really sick, eh.?"

"I never knew why that man always turned me so cold." said Sharon, "I could never understand why he and Eugene had always stayed friends."

"Didn't you ever ask Eugene?" Laura replied.

"Sometimes you have to speak up. Sometimes you know there's no point in saying anything. I thought George Marshall was like that." Sharon answered.

Amanda had never seen or heard her mother being so honest and true, so strong, so real, and so much a women to admire. Laura told her feelings about what she had done and how she was sorry she had hurt both Amanda and Ian.

"I'm sorry you hurt him too. You should tell him all this."

"I don't think so. I think it would just hurt him more."

From there, the conversation spread and branched from the ideal to the practical, from the personal to the political in the intricacies and subtleties of love and lust and desire. The only subject that was left off limits was the one that was too terrible and close to Amanda's innocence. The subject was the one every woman knew only too well, violation.

No one, much less Amanda, knew how well or how deep her scar tissue had healed. No one wanted to explore it. The closest they got was when she talked about when desire faded. Amanda actually asked Sharon how she lived with the fact that she could no longer make love with her husband.

Sharon had answered her honestly and said she had put a wall inside herself. It was like a long snowbank that had formed against the barbed wire fence of Eugene's disease. Amanda realized there was a snowbank like it that had formed inside her against the paint that had dried on the canvas where she was raped.

The meeting of the women's fellowship lasted well past midnight and something fundamental had changed in the relationship of all three women. The way branches are grafted on to the boughs of a tree that would bear different fruit over the years, the three women were grafted onto the root stock of a past they had no idea that they shared until they could feel its living source in their lives. When the three women finally had to let the evening slip away, they got up to embrace and kiss and remember the circle they would never be able to break.

Back at the cabin after Laura and Amanda were dressed in their night clothes, they came into each other's arms to say good night and feel the connection, breast to soft breast, being mother and daughter and women. That was the night that Amanda left her mother's bed and went back and slept alone.

At home in Toronto Ian had gotten slowly drunk listening to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, as he looked around at his favorite things, taking a man's simple comfort in his very best toys. He wanted to tell someone how he felt inside, but he didn't know who he could approach. He wanted someone to understand how things changed and were the same and how the farm had transformed his life and how he felt so far away from it, like he was floating in space watching himself sitting there sipping his amber drink. He thought about making an appointment to talk to Ann Marie. He decided against it. He thought about going to visit Wayne and seeing what he could do, maybe even become a regular member of the Queer Agents of Karma. He decided that he would look as desperate and lonely as he felt. The one thing he decided that he really wanted to do and would do, was find a really beautiful piece of land. It was a long time before he slept.

Before Sharon went to bed that Valentine's night, she had gone to check on Eugene as she always did. He was breathing easily, sound asleep and he didn't wake as she crawled in beside him and took his hand and kissed it.

She heard his eyes speak as the computer came to life and she looked up at the screen

'So, you wanna fool around?' appeared in tlve point Times Roman.

"I'm feeling pretty hot." Sharon whispered, and she reached out and touched him tenderly, with all the intimacy her heart could muster.

### Chapter 13

For Amanda, it was another exciting week at the farm because her 71 Riviera arrived and it was off the trailer and on a hoist within an hour, and Amanda was there under it, wearing coveralls for the first time in her life, coveralls she would wear almost every day until the car looked more perfect and polished than it had when it had been new. Amanda learned to get dirty, and after the first day, she couldn't believe that she loved it, even as she showered and tried to get to get the grease and oil from under her fingernails. Working beside Tom, or he father, smelling the oil, hearing the roar of the air compressor as she felt the air gun shaking in her soft hands, as she undid the bolts holding the seats to the floor and the frame, made her heart kick to the thrill of masculine pleasure; power and force and precision.

For Amanda there were just not enough hours in the day for everything she wanted to do. With school in the morning, with her regular chores, with spending time focused on learning to read music and understand it and explore it in the enormous record collection in the music room, with taking care of Tundra, with her hour of solitude, with the time she wanted to spent with Tom, working on the restoration of the Riviera would mean she would have to work late into the evening almost every day. She often thought of her other life when she had suffered interminable boredom and was always nearly desperate for something to do.

Every weekday evening, after Laura had worked with Eugene on her book, she would walk from the farmhouse down the long lane way, but instead of turning into the sand dunes where the cabin was waiting, she kept going to the lake and walked along the beach where the parking lot had been plowed for the ice races and that had finally melted to bare sand. At first she did it strictly for the exercise, feeling she had lost her muscle tone and physical condition, but soon the walks became something that was almost a physical pleasure under clear incredible starlit skies or clouds running under the yellow moon like stones sliding on glare ice. The sound of the wind in the different kinds of trees, the sound of the ice sheering and booming like hand muffled bells, the sound of the ice giving way to spring when it was like continuously breaking fine crystal glasses shattering along the sand, the sounds were always new and different every moment, every night, every time that she listened and felt the sound moving coldly inside herself.

Within a month, the early spring had cleared the bay and the beach of all the ice and snow. One high wind, one night of big waves had shattered the bay ice into countless, beautiful, translucent panes. On subsequent nights the panes had moved and shifted and gathered together where the wind prevailed and within the first two weeks of March the moon had turned the ice to drifting singular dots and dashes shining like white Morse code signals, reflecting in the moonlight on the black water. Over all the night's beauty, the smell of spring in the trees and the water added a sweet musky note, cambium and seaweed thawing again in the sun of the spring.

Laura felt the great routines of nature stirring something inside her the way the routines of her life at the farm had done. It was impossible to articulate, but impossible to miss, as obvious as every unique sensory moment of her walks, everything she saw and heard and smelled and felt had all come before, all happened before, year after year, century after century and would probably do so for as long as she could conceive of time. Laura's quiet workdays were filling up with her new life.

In Toronto, early in March, Ian and Ann Marie had decided to have dinner together at least once a week. The truth of the matter was that they were both very lonely, Ann Marie having lost her only daughter in the bitterest way, Ian having lost his wife and daughter in the sweetest way possible. Ian felt secure and happy for both Laura and Amanda, while poor Ann Marie felt only the strange curdled hope that her powerful premonition of disaster was wrong. It was during the second dinner that they shared that they finally confessed their own loneliness, but both of them realized the fine dinner and wine they shared was a poor second choice to a pizza with those who were so far away.

"If I gave you two wishes, one for yourself and one for someone else, what would they be?" Ann Marie had asked over dessert.

"That's good. I like the two parts to the question." Ian answered and thought for moment before he replied.

"I guess I'd wish I knew what was going to happen when Laura finishes her book. That would be my wish. For someone else, I wish Laura's book is so successful that I could quit my job and we could buy a piece of property and build a perfect little house near enough to Amanda to see her every week."

"Those sound like two wishes for you." Ann Marie replied.

"I guess they are. For someone else, I guess I'd wish that Eugene would have some kind of miraculous cure, and Megan would come home."

"For that you get two more wishes, just for you." Ann Marie added quickly, obviously touched by his sympathy.

Ian took the new wishes gladly. "I wish I could make Laura laugh the way I did when we were first married. And I wish I could make Amanda forget everything about the night she..." he couldn't finish the sentence, but Ann Marie, of course, knew exactly what he meant. For some reason the dinner, the wine, their mutual loneliness, and just looking and acting as if they were an old married couple having dinner together, made the two of them relax as they had never done with each other before.

It was Ann Marie's turn to tell her wishes and she too longed for a place and a time when she could be with her daughter, both of them forgiven for the ways they had hurt each other, both of them hopeful for a future that included a man for each of them who would love them simply, honestly, faithfully, passionately, like Ian, like Eugene, like Tom.

Ian gave her two wishes more and she wished that what had happened on the streets of Vancouver would be removed forever from Megan's memory." And I wish me and Megan knew how to love one another."

When Ian drove Ann Marie home in Laura's BMW, they embraced with a warmth that they had never felt was appropriate before, and anyone seeing them holding each other so close in the front seat of the car would have thought it was most inappropriate for a married man to be holding his wife's best friend that way. Little did they realize that their weekly dinners would soon breakup with the explosive shock wave of river ice letting go.

Only Tom knew the crisis that was actually happening far away in Vancouver. Megan had been spending more and more time each day with Alan Artin, the boy she was trying to get off the street. She was also spending an hour every day at Wayne's friend's apartment, writing her daily message to Tom on the computer and doing her daily note to her mother.

As Megan's boyfriend's drug habit grew and the amount of money she brought home every day diminished, he became more violent and demanding, screaming at her, shaking her violently, finally slapping her every time she came home with less than the two hundred dollars he needed for his habit.

The nightmare of her life was balanced, in a strange way, by the sweet time she took to herself to spend on the street with the boy Alan, and the sweetest time of all spent pouring her heart and her circumstances out to the boy far away on a farm, a boy who she was now certain that she loved. Only Tom knew the crisis had come when Megan's boyfriend had beaten her so badly that she had to be taken to wait in the long emergency hospital queue as her split lip and cheek slowly stopped bleeding and swollen black flesh closed around her left eye. She was a mess, but she didn't cry or complain as she sat with Alan who was telling her she should go home, telling her that anything was better than living with a junkie.

She wanted very much to go home, and she knew that Alan very much wished that he had a home waiting as she did where he would be safe and accepted. Megan knew from his descriptions of his own life that, for him, going home really wasn't an alternative. After the emergency room they went to Wayne's friend's place and Megan sat at the computer crying at last, as she typed and told Tom everything that had happened. The long hours before Tom read the message and replied were taken up with tending to Megan's swelling and wounds, fetching and changing ice packs of vegetable packages taken from the freezer. Twelve stitches had been required to close the cuts on her face and when she saw herself in the mirror in the bathroom, Megan thought that she would throw up. She didn't even recognize herself.

When Tom finally replied, he had two suggestions. He would send Megan the money for a plane ticket home to her mother or she could come and stay at the farm until she was better. The invitation ripped Megan's heart because she wanted more than anything to go to the farm and be with Tom, but having just seen her face she just couldn't do it. She couldn't stand the idea that the first time he would see her she would look like battered meat. She also decided that she was responsible for Alan, she wouldn't leave him, abandon him the way everyone else in his life had done. As she had learned to do in her daily interchanges with Tom, she told him the truth the way she wouldn't tell it to anyone else.

He didn't argue. As always, he seemed to understand and accept her feelings. He wrote back that he had already talked to his birth mother on the telephone and that Megan and the boy were welcome to go and stay with her until they could sort out what to do. That was how Megan and the boy spent the first weeks of March living with Tom's birth mother in her simple house on Vancouver Island. Strangely, they both fit in like old shoes, living with someone who knew where they had been and what they had done and what they had left behind. They ate well, slept well, and went for long walks in the incredible rain forest that was so alive it filled the nostrils with the most powerful perfume imaginable. At night they sat and talked by the fire and listened to records Tom's mother loved so much.

The three of them played Billy Holiday's songs over and over and let their hearts vibrate to the incredible sympathetic pain in the beautiful raspy voice. Learning that Billy Holiday was a prostitute at twelve and a junkie all her adult life only made her words touch them more deeply. Neither of them had ever heard of Billy Holiday until they went to stay with Tom's mother.

Ann Marie knew little more than that her daily letter from Megan came from the town nearest Tom's mother's reserve. Megan had told her mother she no longer was with her boyfriend, that she had taken the boy Alan under her wing and was staying with Tom's mother until they could figure out what to do. It was more than implied that when she helped Alan got settled somewhere, she would be coming home.

Ann Marie's heart sang, not knowing the actual circumstances of her daughter's life. She wanted to do something to help solve the last problem that was keeping her daughter away. She was pleased at Megan's loyalty and compassion but helpless and frustrated, and for the first time she let out some of her own feelings in her letters to encourage Megan to come home, to bring the boy, to expect nothing but warmth and forgiveness and love. Megan had replied that things were still up in the air.

At the farm, every spring, in March and April, two or three times a month, expeditions were planned to visit century farms, looking for antiques. It was the time before spring planting when a farm family could be counted on to be near the farmhouse, to be able to make a decision about selling an old piece of furniture, an old family heirloom. The big white cube truck was serviced and readied for the trip while the exact route was planned on government mine survey maps that were in such a large scale that even the individual houses and out buildings were marked on them clearly. For the past number of years, the trip had concentrated on the Ottawa Valley northeast of the capital, along the Ottawa River.

One of the adult Van Fleet children would drive and be responsible for carrying the money which was not an inconsiderable amount, usually 10,000 dollars. It was not unusual for a weekend trip to clear five times that in profit when the antiques were sold in Wayne's Toronto store. That year, Tom would be leading an expedition for the first time, and it was soon decided among the children that Tom should go with Martha and Amanda.

There wasn't anything in the year that Martha enjoyed more than the antique expeditions, and because there was only a chance to go once or twice in the year, her preparations and her excitement were matched in their intensity. It was Martha who kept Tom and Amanda informed about her tentative plans as she prepared for the second weekend in March when they would be going. Martha, nervous about anything that might throw off her plans, kept asking her mother if she was sure if it would be alright, that Tom and Amanda, boyfriend and girlfriend, would be safe and appropriate, spending a night in a motel so far from home, with only her as a chaperone. She reassured her mother that she would be vigilant and that Amanda would not be slinking out of the room they shared and going to do illicit things with Tom in his.

Sharon had already spoken to Laura and both agreed that they trusted their children and especially trusted the vigilance of twelve year old Martha upon whose righteous reporting they knew they could rely. Martha was slightly shocked and surprised that she would be trusted to maintain the proprieties for her older brother and his girlfriend, but she was secretly thrilled at the responsibility and positively determined that no one would return from the trip dishonored.

Tom was anything but enthusiastic about the trip and both Martha and Amanda could sense it, but they didn't understand that the reason that Tom was reluctant to go away from the farm was because of what was going on in Vancouver with Megan. Now that Megan was at his birth mother's home and she had all day to herself, her email messages just got longer and longer and more personal and intimate, and Tom knew that the intimacy was directed at him. Like most men when confronted with intimacy they couldn't handle, he pretended it didn't exist, matter-of-factly, unemotionally acknowledging her gratitude and her open confessions of what his being there had done for her life and for her feelings about herself, and about how she saw the whole world. The fact that he was not only encouraging her to come home to her mother as the best case, but even to the farm if that was the only alternative, made him realize that he was creating a situation where he was going to hurt either Megan or Amanda or both of them, But the alternative of letting Megan find her way in the world without any support just wasn't acceptable to him. His own feelings for Megan were also very mixed and confusing. The truth he wasn't telling her or himself was that he was creating a situation he wouldn't be able to understand or control. There was a bond that only shared pain could forge. Still, when Tom told Megan that he could not disappoint Martha and Amanda and that he would be away for the weekend, away from a computer and the Internet, he felt very uncomfortable doing it.

The daily messages between them had come to be Megan's emotional life and the thought of Tom going away for the weekend with someone, someone she knew must love him, made her spend the weekend unable to eat, barely able to think, crying bitterly on the long walks in the rain forest with Alan as he tried to console her and sympathize and give her hope. Tom, of course, would never know anything about that weekend or how Wayne would call Ian late Sunday night and propose a plan to help Megan and Allen move to Toronto and start a new life.

Tom had finally broken Megan's confidence and told his brother Wayne the circumstances of her situation in Vancouver and asked his older brother for his advice and help, if there was any possible way he could give it.

Tom had made Wayne understand and accept that anything he did would have to be approved by Megan before her mother was told and, the McCalls, especially Amanda, could not be told of the plans because they might get back to Ann Marie before Megan had agreed to anything. Wayne had called Tom on the cell phone they were carrying in the Cube Van to ask him for one exception, he asked to be allowed to talk to Ian about the problem when he came back from the farm Sunday night because he had an idea of how Ian might be able to help get Megan and the boy to Toronto.

Tom and Amanda and Martha set out at dawn on Saturday morning in the big empty white truck hoping to come back with it filled with unknown treasures from farms that were some of the earliest settlements in Upper Canada, some nearly two hundred years old. Martha had packed a thermos of coffee and homemade egg muffins for breakfast. She had also packed sandwiches and fruit and drinks for lunch, because she didn't want to spend one moment in a restaurant when they could be going door-to-door seeking out treasures that might be waiting behind every new old farm door.

The time on the road flashed by like the utility poles and it was fun because, whenever the Van Fleets were alone in a car or a truck, somebody was usually singing, either accompanying the music on the CD player or singing songs that wouldn't be found on any commercial recordings. Martha had chosen the music for the weekend and it was almost entirely her favorite old Celtic songs sung by singing families from the East Coast of Canada, her mother Sharon's roots. Martha loved roots music and into the big pile of CDs Tom had added the roots music of their father and mother, the musical comedy Hair.

After the sweet high voices and the fiddle's and the traditional ballads and the infectious plaintive feelings of the old Celtic songs, Hair came on with the raunchy, raucous rock and roll explosive power of the rich middle class flower that it was. The old hippie musical was the highlight of the trip to Ottawa. Martha even sat there enduring the song Sodomy and all the other disgusting, forbidden words in it that one of her friends had explained to her in graphic detail. When Amanda started to sing along, it was too much for Martha, she could listen to such things being sung by someone on a recording, but listening to them in the mouth of the friend sitting beside her, terrified her own brother would join in, left her sitting there silently mortified until she leaped for the CD changer buttons and deleted the one terrible song from its selections. Amanda stopped singing and Tom sang the first two words, 'Sodomy, Fellatio,' off key, at the top of his lungs into the sudden silence and Martha screamed at him to stop, screaming how she hated that song.

As they drove, Amanda had the wonderful idea of singing the title song from Hair with her father and her mother at the next Saturday coffeehouse gathering, because all of them were so follicaley challenged in one way or another. Martha was relieved and delighted at the change of subject, and the three of them sang, repeating the song, as Amanda learned all the words and the tangled, poetic, attributes of long, beautiful hair; shining, gleaming, flaxen, waxen.

As they sang, they were traveling the paved remnants of the Opeongo trail, one of the first trails to settlements north of the great Lakes shoreline. The Irish, Scots, and Dutch had made the houses and barns into sheltering squares, and they could see them from the highway as they passed. The old faded buildings seem to fit with perfection into the rugged rough rocks heaving out of the earth, the bare granite remnants of some of the oldest stones on the planet.

Before they got to their destination, when they took a pause from singing, Martha showed Amanda her personal book of treasures, the long list of items from flea markets and excursions that she'd found over the years, each item described in detail as to condition, the purchase and selling price listed into columns at the right of the page. Amanda was interested and couldn't help but pick up the infectious excitement that Martha resurrected as she went over her great finds. Amanda looked at the handwriting on the pages as it had changed over the years, the writing that had changed and improved coincidentally with Martha's own education and understanding of antiques. It was all clearly reflected in the improving values of her discoveries.

When they stopped at the first farmhouse chosen on Martha's detailed map, she almost flew out of the truck to the door of the farmhouse where she politely asked the farmer if she might come in, that she and her brother were looking to purchase antiques for her older brothers antique store.

She was invited in cordially and asked to call Tom and Amanda to join her.

Amanda had no idea visits to an old log farmhouses could take so long. Almost always, especially because it was the children who did the antique picking, the simple strangers insisted on making them tea and offering them whatever sweets were at hand. The Van Fleets had learned it was an unavoidable ritual that they all eventually came to appreciate, and even enjoy. Learning they were farm folks too, usually sealed their welcome. Still, it was obvious that Martha was barely able to control her excitement and she could barely hear the questions or the conversation around her as her eyes flew from one piece of furniture to another, from one piece of glass or brass or pottery to another.

Finally Martha couldn't bear it anymore and asked the farmer and his wife about a number of the things in the room. There was a huge pine corner cupboard and a set of eight Chicken Coupe chairs that Martha looked at with particular lust.

As Amanda listened, Martha discussed with Tom some of the items she could see and asked the farmer and his wife if it would be all right she looked at some of them more closely. When she had permission to do so, she almost vibrated around the room from one old object to another. After tea, Tom asked if they might look in the barn and any of their old sheds for antiques the farm folks might not want to keep, and the farmer and his wife both dressed in their coats and led the way out into the sheltering square stockade of the old log barns.

Martha was the excited puppy on point as she searched through every building, carefully examining the dusty centuries of junk and old tools, old toys and heirlooms that had lost any meaning and personal value. Some of the best prizes were often found where they had been discarded. Often Martha would announce to Tom when she found something interesting and she would write it on her little notepad in her fine hand. The tour of the buildings took nearly an hour and Martha had more than two pages of notes to remind her of what she had seen. What most surprised Amanda was that Martha almost jumped out of her skin when she found an old pitcher in a cardboard box in the tool shed.

"I think it's Mallorytown glass." Martha said almost breathlessly. She brought the pitcher to Tom and he examined it and agreed that it was from the glassworks of the first glass factory in Ontario.

Tom explained to the farm couple that their pitcher was probably worth several thousand dollars and they should take it into the house for safe keeping. The old couple seemed to visibly shrink in fear as Tom and Martha discussed the value of the things they had carelessly thrown aside. Hundreds of dollars for this old weather vane, hundreds of dollars for that old box, hundreds of dollars for an old wicker doll's carriage, and thousands of dollars for an old jug. The world of high finance and expensive artifacts was new and exciting and shocking because they had never realized the value of the things that they took for granted.

In the barn stable, as two draft horses stared out of their stalls, Tom sat on a straw bale with his sister Martha as they went over the list of things, making estimates of value that glazed the eyes of the simple farm couple who stood silently and watched the two children talk like experts antique appraisers. Amanda was impressed. The couple was blown away.

It took fifteen minutes in the strange kind of time the farm couple clearly didn't understand, but there in the barn, Tom wrote out a list of the items that he and Martha had agreed they would like to purchase and the amount of money they would be willing to pay for them. They explained how they would pay more if the items turned out to be worth more than they thought, the minimum they would receive was the money they agreed upon, the maximum they would receive would be half of what they received selling the item wholesale.

Tom gave the farm couple the written list and the dollar amounts and their eyes got wider and more frightened as they saw they were being offered a total of three thousand eight hundred dollars for their old things.

The only thing they seemed reluctant to part with was the eight chicken coop chairs which carried the memories of when they were used when people or family came to visit, which they admitted was now almost never. The six hundred dollars Tom was offering for them seemed to be far more than they were worth, but they had a certain sentimental value, reminding them of happier and busier and more prosperous times in life. They decided that they could use the money and still keep the memories, even when the chairs were gone.

It took half an hour moving from one foot to another and handing the list back and forth before the couple decided they would be pleased to exchange their old things for thirty eight hundred dollars in cash.

The deal was done. Tom counted the money out, in hundreds, from the pile of bills that seemed enormous to everyone except Tom and his sister Martha.

It was already into the afternoon when the truck was more than half full. They only stopped at three other likely looking places and had taken a few things from each one so it meant they had only spent five thousand dollars. Packed carefully in the back were four cardboard boxes filled with toys from the turn of the century. There were three Nantucket baskets, two primitive washstands, a spectacular hand painted bonnet chest and a walnut wallstand of the most intricate carving packed among the small glass and china they had found. It was almost dark when they gave up for the day and drove to the nearest town to look for a restaurant to have their dinner and to find a motel where they could spend the night.

While they had dinner at a little Chinese restaurant, in an old wooden booth under an ornate, high, white painted tin ceiling, Amanda listened to Tom and his sister Martha replaying the day's activities, the discoveries, the histories of the artifacts, their estimated value and, most of all, the things that they found that they really thought were beautiful. Amanda felt like a displaced person whenever the subject of history and artifacts had come up on the farm. The years of experience and interest, and, in Martha's case, passion, left Amanda without any connections to tie her to the moment and the discussion. Her cultural past seemed almost blank to her, memories of media mostly, cartoons and commercials and mass produced toys for the mass-market of her childhood. As he talked, Tom ate his disgusting Poutine, the french fries with cheese and gravy oosing through it, while Amanda looked at the carved names and dates in the wood of the table where they sat. Mostly teenage boys made love permanent in initials and hearts and first names and sometimes, determinedly, first and last names together, and Amanda wondered how many of those carved loves had been real or dissolved or lived out a life together.

Over dessert, Tom read the paper. The front page was all Kosovo, the seemingly random brutality, the killing of Muslims by Serbs, had turned into state ordered ethnic cleansing. After six hundred years, people were being driven from their homes and slaughtered in their houses for simply having a different religion, for being different. In the middle of Europe, civilized people slaughtering civilized people was just too close to home and too hard to ignore as the disgust and the outrage in distant complacent Canada rose as it rose in Tom's heart. And for Tom, the horror and the outrage was actually personal and frightening because he had made friends with one in the foster children from the farm who had often come to the Saturday night coffeehouses even after he left university and was in medical school. He was now a doctor and his first two years would be with Doctors without Borders and his first service was in Kosovo. Every few weeks he would write or Email Tom back home, and the worries were more personal than the ones in the papers and far more heartbreaking for it.

After dinner, the three of them walked through the town that was so much like other towns in Eastern Ontario that had once been wealthy with mills and agriculture and timber, and now had its ornate architecture filled with boutiques and gift stores and discount outlets. Overhead, the detailed patterns of the brick set off ornate many paned windows where most of the second floor rooms appeared to be dark and unoccupied. The old limestone churches stood huge and white and cold in the mild evening air as the steel and glass of the new City Hall sat on its bare lot as if it had somehow been transported from the future to where it sat.

Martha asked if they could play, 'Did You Ever Notice', a game the Van Fleet family children played two or three times a year.

Everyone would pile into the passenger van and travel to a different destination; a city street, a town market, a bus terminal, an orchard, a meadow, or a forest ravine. There everyone scattered and spent two hours wandering alone, noticing whatever they might never have noticed before. The way plants grew or died, or how people walked, or the way they dressed or how they changed over time with age and with sex, the object of the game was to pick the most interesting new observation and bring it back to share with the others. All the observations were gathered and listed and there was a vote about which observation was the most interesting. The prize for the most interesting, incisive observation was being treated like royalty for the rest of the day, all requests, all desires, all whims to be satisfied with the obsequious, fawning, servitude of various brothers and sisters.

It was the first time Amanda had heard of the game and she thought it was a wonderful idea but asked if it would be possible to play the game while they walked along together. The rules were amended and conversation stopped as they walked through the streets of the town looking and thinking and trying to understand what they were seeing and why it was the way it was. They walked for an hour before Martha finally said that she'd made a decision about her best observation. Martha was methodical and patient and always very competitive. Tom's observation was that among the males they passed, most were wearing some kind of athletic shoes. Martha said she noticed that, of the first twenty people they passed on the street, only three had any discernible fragrance. Amanda's observation was not in the realm of statistical analysis the Van Fleet children favored. What she had noticed also had to do with the sense of smell. Towns smelled different than countrysides, and the thing that she really noticed was how difficult it was to describe the steel and cement and car exhaust aroma that she noticed for the very first time in her life. The vote was taken and, because a person wasn't allowed to vote for themselves, the winner was immediately obvious, Tom and Martha voted for Amanda's perception.

The prize was a lot less satisfying than Amanda imagined that it might be. She had no idea what to do or what to ask of her new, humble and ready servants. The inquiries about her comfort and her interests and her desires left her feeling more uncomfortable than she imagined they might, and the more uncomfortable she felt, the more offers of service and consideration came her way. Finally after having Tom feed her a hot fudge sundae, spoon by spoon, she had had enough and ordered them all back to the motel where they had rented two rooms and parked the big truck while they went for dinner.

Back at the motel, the three of them lay side by side watching television on the bed in the room that Martha and Amanda would share. The bare boxes of the motel room, the closet, the chest of drawers, the bed and the night stands, and even the television itself seemed rigid and small and cold in the heat of the room. Boxes in boxes in boxes, and Amanda noticed the boxes for the first time and the motel room felt very small and empty compared to the places they had visited that day, compared to the farm they had left behind.

While Tom and Martha watched a romantic comedy on television, Amanda sat and played, Did You Ever Notice, all by herself. She noticed the wear patterns in the rose colored carpet. She noticed there were only three wire hangers for clothes. She noticed the Chenille bedspread had been sewn down the middle, one made from two that had been washed too often. She noticed Martha's blond hair and the many shades mixed together. She noticed Martha's skin and her growing pores starting to get oily, showing red blemishes here and there. She noticed Tom's beautiful brown skin, his face and his long neck, and the way he held his hands in his lap like a lady. She noticed all the little scars that left their mark from his elbow to his fingers from working with his hands. She noticed his legs and the swell of his thigh and the mound in his jeans between his legs. She noticed and wondered and she saw that Tom had noticed where she was looking and she blushed and looked away to the television.

Around ten o clock Tom asked Amanda, the queen for the day, whether she had any further desires. He had no idea that desire was exactly what Amanda was thinking about, but she told him that she'd like to walk back to the dairy Queen and have him serve her another sundae. Martha was instantly suspicious, thinking they were going to sneak over to Tom's motel room and do some of the illicit things named in the disgusting song from Hair.

"If you two are going out, I want you to leave me Tom's room key." she said briskly. "If you don't, I'm going to have to get dressed and come with you."

Tom looked indignant and mortified, but saw the look in his little sister's face and knew that she would put up no end of fuss and that she meant exactly what she said. He gave her the key.

At the Dairy Queen, Amanda changed her mind and chose instead a chocolate dipped soft ice cream cone, and Tom had the same thing, and they went back to the streets and walked to the beautiful park beside the fast running black river. Walking in the dark, holding hands, without work or duties or activities or anyone's attention, they felt small and close and alone. There was a bench by the bank by a wide stone bridge and, when they sat down in the unusually warm spring evening, the ice cream cones were almost gone.

Amanda didn't know that she had longed to be away and alone with Tom, and as they sat there watching the light dance on the water, Amanda felt desire moving invisibly inside her like the river, and she felt her expectations, deeply and darkly, moving away into the future. The present moment focused on the long beautiful body beside her, and the pleasure in her own, silently waiting as well. Tom had been tender and so patient with her when they had touched or kissed, pulling back as soon as he felt any tension in her at all, and sitting beside him, she felt the clenched fist in her heart open and she could feel her lips tingle with desire. She felt almost normal, almost like a woman, the fairy tale sleeping princess waiting like the winter awaits the warm kiss of spring.

"I want you to put your arms around me." she said, turning to look at him, "And then I want you to do exactly as you are told, everything I wish, and I want you to do it enthusiastically."

Tom looked at her and put his arm around her and, as he did that, she swung herself over his lap, her thighs embracing his. She sat in his lap and looked in his eyes and she ran the fingers of her right hand over every feature of his face, finally moving her fingertips from his lips along his cheek bone and down his neck and then back beneath his long hair.

"My man, your mistress would like the most beautiful kiss any woman has ever received in this world."

Tom didn't say anything, as his eyes dilated in the dark and Amanda leaned forward and rose up as his head tilted back and his lips received hers, and the gentle kiss grew and grew and grew as his arms came around her and held her, and his hands moved under the heavy wool sweater she was wearing, pulling out the cotton blouse from her jeans, sliding his cool hands onto her hot soft back. From her open mouth, into his, from the tip of her tongue, a drop of saliva fell like a drop of dew.

It wasn't the most beautiful kiss he'd ever given to her, but it was far and away the most beautiful kiss he had ever received in his life. More beautiful than Christmas Eve, more beautiful than the kiss in the Walnut Wood, more beautiful than he imagined soft lips touching could be, and his heart was pounding and they could both feel his erection between them as his warmed hands moved forward around her torso and up between them and he reached up and felt her breasts fill his hands for the very first time. Amanda gasped. She felt her nipples between his fingers and the heat between their legs as she rose up and pressed herself hard into him, kissing him with a force she never imagined was in her.

It was a long, beautiful few minutes before the incredible intensity locking them together began to release. Both of them knew it was as far as they would go that night. Tom with his sense of Puritan principle, Amanda with her submerged fear, and Martha waiting as a monitor made both of them realize that nothing more was going to happen, they knew they were safe from having to give themselves completely. Knowing it helped open Amanda's heart, letting herself touch and be touched, like the sun touched and warmed the spring glades in the bare woods they had passed all day long.

Everything could remain unsaid. Everything could still be waiting for life. Everything could still be safe and beautiful, as Amanda moved her sore knees and shifted into Tom's lap, resting her head softly on his shoulder. The river drifting with the stars, the darkness drifting over the few, far glowing street lights, under the stone bridge there was a deep arch of pitch blackness.

At the motel room, Amanda opened the door with her key and the room was dark except for the blue light from the television washing over Martha were she was lying asleep. It was Amanda who noticed Tom's room key tied with a string to her slender wrist. She whispered and pointed and Tom saw the key and they both laughed quietly. Amanda slipped her hand into Tom's and led him to the little alcove in the room beside the dark bathroom. She reached into the bathroom and turned on the bright white light. She let go of Tom's hand and walked into the light and turned and faced him and their eyes held fast as Amanda reached down for the hem of her sweater and pulled it slowly over her head. Tom watched her fingers as they undid the buttons of her blouse, and when she pulled it from her shoulders and dropped it on the floor, it was Tom's turn to gasp. Fingers undid her belt buckle and the snap of her jeans opened with a click that seemed to echo in little tiled room, as Amanda slid down her jeans with her red panties inside them, and she bent over and pushed them down and stepped out of them, and she stood up and she was naked and so beautiful standing in Tom's gaze, and she smiled simply, and it was the smile that made Tom eyes lose focus and he understood why it was called blind desire.

Finally, finally he was able to smile into her eyes and just stand there and remember every curve, every detail, every soft shadow and crevice of her young loveliness. Amanda whispered that she loved him and he whispered that he loved her too and Tom whispered, 'You are so beautiful."

Amanda whispered, "I'm glad you think so." and then slowly reached out and gently swung the bathroom door closed while Tom just stood there in the darkness with his mouth so dry that he could barely open his lips.

Waking Martha for the key, she was barely conscious as Tom snapped the string from her wrist and she rolled over and was fast asleep before he even made it to the door. She wouldn't even remember waking up, and in the morning felt disgraced by her bare wrist. With no other evidence, she couldn't even dare make an accusation. Martha's guilt lasted barely an instant as she got the others up just past dawn, the blue eyed, tiny Sgt. Major of the day. She had everyone showered and dressed and force marched to breakfast in quick time. She knew farm people were up with the dawn and she didn't want to miss one minute of the great treasure hunt.

There was another new experience for Tom and Amanda: afterglow. Even with the call from his brother Wayne in the early hours of the morning asking Tom's permission to talk to Ian about a plan to get Megan home from the West, the world seemed warm and slow and simple and lovely as he walked with Amanda to the restaurant and they had their bacon and eggs while Martha poured over her maps, and Tom picked songs from the little jukebox in the booth. One two three, that's how elementary it was going to be. Falling in love was so easy, so easy, like taking candy from a baby. Martha noticed and was troubled by the new intense gazes passing between Tom and Amanda.

The day went quickly as it always did hunting antique treasures. They loaded and secured two harvest tables, a number of pine cupboard's and wash stands among their purchases, and the truck was almost full as pastel colors began seeping into the West. They had done very well and spent just a little over three quarters of the money they had brought with them.

Late in the afternoon, Martha had them turn onto an old narrow gravel road from the wider County Road they were traveling. The warm two weeks in March had melted the snow everywhere except the north side of the little woodland valleys where shallow black pools were filled from the little rivulets draining from under the dirty snow. The moss was already a brilliant green on the fallen trees and thick old granite faces. The road got narrower so there would not have been room for the truck and a car to pass abreast, and Tom was getting ready to find somewhere to turn around because the road was getting worse and worse, and the last thing he wanted was to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere without a farmhouse in sight. That was when Tom saw the lane way going up over a hill, and ten feet from the road a beautiful, perfect black 29 Studebaker with its back wheels buried to their axles. This was the lane to the house Martha was trying to find.

Tom parked on the road and went to the lane way and looked inside the car. There were still a few bags of groceries sitting on the front passenger seat. Walking back to the truck, he told the girls that he was going to try to pull the car free with the winch on the front of the truck, and he started the engine and turned it into the lane and stretched out the long wire cable and got himself absolutely filthy lying down on the dirt so that he could tie the winch hook to the frame of the car. He took the car out of gear and went back to the truck and the winch pulled the cable tight and the old car began to groan and then slowly almost levitate out of the two holes the tires had dug in the dirt. Tom loosened the cable and then went up and detached it and got even dirtier. When he was finished, he had Martha turn off the truck and the three of them walked up the lane way to the farm.

When they crested the hill they saw that the farmhouse and the big barn and the out buildings between them were made of logs like many others they had seen, the only difference was the scale of the buildings, compared to all the others. The house was two stories and an el shape, the barn was enormous. It was an absolutely beautiful setting, the buildings resting in a little flat valley among rolling fields spreading away in every direction. The other thing that was absolutely stunning were the perfectly pruned old apple and pear and plum trees nestled before the beautiful gardens along the walls of every building, even the barn. But what was truly unusual was the strange artwork positioned all around the property.

Stone or wood or heavy wild grape vines had been made into strange abstract sculptures. Raised up or dug into the earth, the sculptures were strange because they were held together by the simple forces of gravity. Nothing had been cut or carved or broken, things were simply assembled so their own natures and forms and shapes would hold them together and give them the form and the structure as the pieces of art they obviously were. It was nature gathered and reordered and made beautiful in a form nature never imagined. The beauty of nature was ordered in the other harmony of the human imagination. The three strangers looked at what seemed to be an abstract mandala made of field stones, each stone no bigger than a fist, the mandala slowly descending into the earth to a black pool of water at its center.

"This must be some artist's place." Martha said.

Amanda agreed and Tom said he liked the sculptures but Amanda and Martha weren't sure what to think. It was just rocks and wood stuck together

The door to the farmhouse opened and a tiny old woman stepped out to greet them. She looked like an apple doll in her old dress, with her gray hair pulled back and tied in a bun and her brown eyes shining under a beautiful, warm smile that reminded Tom of his mother. The old woman looked the way Sharon might, many years in the future.

They were greeted warmly and the women introduced herself as Miss Bridget Brown and Tom introduced himself and his companions and explained that he had seen a car at the bottom of the lane way and he took the liberty to pull it free from where it was stuck. The little woman threw back her head and threw up her arms, "Providence! My Providence!" she exclaimed, and she told Tom that it would have taken her many hours to jack up the car to get it free.

"That's why you look like you've been rolling in the mud." Bridget said to Tom," We'll have to attend to your clothes. What is it I can do to thank you?" She laughed and took his hand in hers the way his mother might have done with someone she was welcoming. Tom explained their purpose, picking antiques, and she laughed like it was the greatest joke of all.

"We'll have to go down and take a look in the barn. The one side of the hay loft is still full of the old things my grandfather brought from the old country. He was going to build a fine brick house but somehow the money and the success and the wealth of the New World never really made its way here." she explained.

"What kind of old furniture?" Martha asked expectantly.

"It's all these fancy pieces of hand made old things with all the fine turnings and carving. It just never belonged in the rough old log house that's been here all these hundred and fifty years. Those pieces were meant for the fine mansion my grandfather was expectin to build with his new fortune."

Martha's eyes exploded like Roman candles.

"First we'll have tea and cakes and then we'll go on down to the barn." Miss Bridget said brightly, but Martha apologized and asked if it would be all right if she went ahead to the barn because it would soon be dark and very difficult to see.

"That's true. We still use kerosene lights here. We could never afford the cost of the Hydro coming down the road this far. You go on ahead, if it's your mind. I'll take these two inside for some treats, if that's all right." Bridget said to Martha, politely. Martha said she was perfectly happy and it was true, and she walked, then ran all the way to the barn.

Tom asked Miss Brown if she had her car keys and if it would be all right if he went down the hill and tried to get the car up the lane. He asked her for something to put on the seat so he wouldn't get it dirty.

"You're a dear boy and your mother's pride, I'll allow." she said to Tom and took the car keys out of her dress pocket and handed them to him and then she went in the house and returned immediately with an old rubber raincoat which she gave to him. Tom took the coat and told the woman that his family restored old classic automobiles, and Bridget explained to him that the Studebaker was her family's first car and had now gone more than 43,000 miles.

"Most of those miles happened a long time ago." Bridget said, almost sounding wistful.

In the past seventy years the car had averaged less than five hundred miles per year and Tom and Amanda were stunned. Tom told her it was in incredible shape and she explained how it was kept in the drive shed on the wooden floor boards and how she oiled and greased it and maintained it to the standards of the owner's manual, doing the recommended service at the times recommended, rather than the mileages suggested. Tom was amazed at the story but said nothing and left the old woman with Amanda as he went down the hill to try to get the car up the lane. Amanda stood waiting when the old woman asked her relationship to Tom, explaining that she could see that she was not his sister, explaining there was a difference in the look in her eyes that made clear that Amanda saw Tom as someone very special.

"He's very special." Amanda agreed.

"I think you're right, and there's something about you that warms my heart as well." Bridget told Amanda, and the simple sincerity of what she was saying actually made Amanda blush. They stood there and said nothing as they heard the Studebaker start and then slip into gear and then roar to life as Tom climbed the hill at speed. The roar of the motor and the sound of the wheels in the wet dirt broke the silence of the still evening, until the silence finally returned when Tom stopped the car and turned off the motor as the sunset turned the windshield into a sheet of gold.

Inside the house, Miss Brown put a kettle on the wood stove for tea as she moved with surprising purpose and a graceful economy of motion. Tom and Amanda sat on pine arrow backed chairs by the huge hundred and fifty year old harvest table with turned legs the size of Canon balls. The kitchen where they sat was surprisingly spare, not unlike the cabins on the Van Fleet farm. The warmth of the wood stove's radiant heat made it comfortable and reminded Amanda of the radiant warmth she had come to love. Blazing light fell from where the house turned on its El and Bridget Brown got Tom and Amanda up and took Amanda's hand and led then into the light. The whole south wall of that part of the house was single pane windows, and what had been the living space of the family was now transformed into a greenhouse.

Proudly Bridget led her guests past trays and trays of seedlings, some with only the first two primary leaves open, while dozens of red geranium cuttings were already throwing off red blooms in the darkest side of the room. Dog tooth violets and trilliums were already blooming in clay pots clustered among the geraniums so they looked like patches of a woodland grove. Bridget's pride was all on the dark side of the room in the Woodland wild flowers and her greatest pride was the Lady Slipper orchids that grew on one shelf after another. Some, already succulently in bloom, received the caress of Miss Brown's single finger as she explained what they were and their habits. Most of the Lady Slipper orchids were native species she once found near her property and that she grew to put back into bogs and woodlands every spring.

"The lumber companies tore up everything." she said with contempt. "The great forests were leveled long ago and what was left was cut for pulp." Bridget was disgusted by the practices and said so, her decades of gardening effort were meant to restore and replenish the tenderest things lost to greed. Her focus was most often on the Lady slipper orchid and where there had been few survivors there were now hundreds, thanks to her. Where there were none, they were introduced and left to thrive until they would again feel the bulldozer tracks moving back from the future.

Amanda noticed that, despite Bridget Brown's lovely smile and obvious love for plants, she had sad eyes and an air of resignation that made her seem tender and alone and, in contrast to her welcoming behavior, somehow withdrawn and shy. She was a recluse. Her manner couldn't hide it. Amanda was absolutely fascinated by her and, over tea and scones drenched with wild fruit jams exploding with flavor, she slowly got Miss Bridget to tell about herself and her life. The Irish brogue had survived three generations from her grandfather who had been sent as a remittance man to the New World when Canada was almost completely wilderness.

"Back then, if you were a disgrace to the family, they sent you to the colonies with some money and a yearly allowance. My grandfather was just such a disgrace and he managed to disgrace himself again living in Ottawa, so he came out here with a new bride and all that furniture up in the barn loft.

"My Granda was the first to feel the disappointments of the land, but I never did. My family had riches they never even imagined. They walked through it and by it every day of their lives."

It was already dark outside and the coal oil lamps filled the room with shadows when a knock came on the door and they heard Martha's little voice on the other side saying that it was her. Bridget got up and went to the door and let Martha in like a new unexpected guest. Martha walked into the room and straight to Tom and she looked like she'd seen some incredible unspeakable horror.

"It's Hepplewhite." she whispered, and the two words caught in her throat.

Martha had come from poking through dusty stacks of furniture that had come from the Thomas Hepplewhite factory where it had been made in London England centuries ago. Stacked in the dusty old barn was perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of the most precious inlaid beauty and delicacy ever created by the hands of man.

Tom didn't realize the implications of what she was saying because he was sure she was talking about the copies and derivative creations done in the style of Thomas Hepplewhite.

"I think they're originals." Martha said in a small reverent voice.

"No." Tom replied, and Martha answered him by simply nodding her head over and over.

"Miss Brown, my sister tells me that your furniture may be original Hepplewhite pieces. That would mean that they were worth an incredible amount of money, more than we can afford to pay."

"I don't want to be talking about that old stuff when I have you delightful folks here to visit. You have to tell me about yourself and your family and how it is they came to be looking for such old things." Tom knew that the price and the process of acquiring antiques was gaining the confidence and trust of simple folk, and so, much to Martha's chagrin and anxiety, Tom had her sit down and take tea and sample the cakes and jams from the beautiful flo blue platter.

Tom described the farm and his family and the circumstances that made fourteen strangers into brothers and sisters, and he described his parents and all they had done to make them happy and prosperous and secure. He described the businesses and the summer foster families and he even mentioned how all the children had been educated at home.

Miss Brown sat there with her eyes focused on Tom as if she was listening to tales from the Arabian Nights. Sometimes she would repeat his last phrase in wonder or say,' How wonderful, How wonderful.' one of her favorite phrases. As Amanda listened and Martha got more anxious to be discussing antiques, Amanda realized the reclusive woman was overwhelmed by the description of the farm the same way she had been overwhelmed by its reality. They had both lived their lives alone in one room, the difference was that Amanda had always felt there was something enormous missing in her life. Bridget Brown had been content with everything in hers.

Finally, Martha couldn't take it any longer and asked Tom to come to the barn to see the things that she had found, but Miss Brown had absolutely no interest in the impatience of youth and told Martha that the old things had been there for a hundred and fifty years and weren't going anywhere soon. That was not what Martha wanted to hear and certainly not what she hoped would happen. This was the mother-load for Martha, the mother of all finds, the legendary discovery that would make her a legend among pickers. She would be the first one to see El Dorado. But she knew well enough to be quiet when asked, and so she sat there and squirmed while Miss Brown asked about the Van Fleet family's home school education. Again Miss Brown listened with wonder.

When Tom seemed to be finished with the topic, Bridget changed the subject radically.

"So, do your parents take you off to church every Sunday?" she asked.

"That's hard to explain. We have Sunday service around a tree, and we mostly just sit there and think." Tom replied.

"I suppose that's another invention of your mother's?" Bridget asked. And when Tom nodded, she rolled back her eyes and said that Sharon was the first person she'd heard about in many, many years that she wished that she could meet.

"You don't go to church?" Amanda asked Miss Brown.

Bridget Brown got up from the table and went and got a fat white book from beside her Lincoln rocker and came and handed it to Amanda. It was the collected works of Emily Dickinson.

"Everything I could ever imagine wanting to know or feel about God or human beings is in these poems. If I lived to be two hundred years old and grew another brain twice a smart as the one I have, I'd never be able to find the bottom or the top of the places Emily has been before and left little road maps in her words."

From heart, she quoted Emily Dickinson's poem, A Mile Out From Shore.

"We're people of the land." she said, "A church is a poor old tub to go out on the fathomless deep."

The visitors then realized they clearly were in the presence of something more than just a simple, uneducated farmer.

"What if it's the only old tub that you've got?" Amanda asked, gently.

"Then I guess you do like me and just wander over to the shoreline now and then and stare at the horizon and wonder. Do you ever wonder, Sweet Cream?" Miss Brown asked Amanda.

Amanda laughed at being given the nickname of her own beautiful horse and she told Miss Brown the coincidence, and then Miss Brown said the coincidence was all hers. None of them knew what she meant.

Bridget Brown looked at the strange nervous gaze in Martha's eyes and she took pity on her and said that perhaps it was time to go out to the barn and show Tom and Amanda the old things. Martha shot out of her chair as if she'd suddenly shifted onto a thumb tack.

"Oh, please!" Martha squealed.

At the big sliding barn door Tom strained to push it aside while the others all waited to go inside. Miss Brown stood with the coal oil light she carried from the house before she led the way into the enormous black throat of the barn where they could hear the dry coughs of a few animals moving in their pens and stalls, hooves on old cement. Bridget Brown led the way to the wooden stairs to the second floor of the barn in the muffled chords of their footsteps, and no one spoke as they all gathered at the top of the stairs, and then Miss Brown led them to the hayloft on the North side of the barn and she handed the lantern to Tom and he carried it up the wooden ladder to the loft where they could see the old furniture piled in deep rows. Martha was up the ladder in a flash, Tom and Amanda following while Miss Brown waited in the dark at the foot of the ladder.

Martha almost dragged Tom through the rows of furniture telling him to look from one piece to another, the lamp showing where her hand had wiped away the dust of a century to show the detailed marquetry among the incredible wood grains. Antiques that had belonged to Miss Brown's grandfather and his, had been preserved in their unblemished beauty over the centuries. Time was turned, time was carved, time was where it stood forgotten.

Little tears were actually running down Martha's cheeks as she moved the dust away from one piece after another exposing the beauty in the glow of the lamp light. Amanda followed in the shadows and she could see the electric excitement in Martha was now vibrating in Tom. He told Amanda that they were looking at some of the most beautiful furniture that had ever been created. She told him she could see that, but it was only partly true. She could see so much more beauty in the glow in lamp light in Tom and Martha's eyes.

They finally came back down the ladder where they joined Miss Brown, and Tom explained to her that Martha and he agreed that the pieces gathering dust in the loft would make her very wealthy indeed if she chose to have them sold at auction. Tom explained that his brother would be glad to have the chance to be her agent, and because of the enormous value they would have to negotiate a much smaller percentage than they usually asked when buying furniture wholesale. Tom was very clear and calm and business like as he spoke and Amanda had never seen him so sincere and careful. Martha stood beside Tom as he spoke and her anxiety made her whole body twitch up and down like a toddler needing a bathroom.

"There is a little inlaid writing desk I'd like to take to show my brother, if you agree to sell it. It's probably worth a hundred thousand dollars at auction and I could leave you two thousand dollars as a down payment."

"Oh my, all that money, all that fuss. You're welcome to take anything you like. I suppose it would be good if they found a place to be where they'd be appreciated, where they wouldn't be just an old forgotten dream." Miss Brown said as if she was talking about giving away a few rooted cuttings.

Martha almost fainted.

"Even that old forgotten dream makes them more valuable, their provenance is almost impeccable." Tom explained, "I insist that you take full value for your things, and I'm sure my brother Wayne would be happy to help your things find people to appreciate them."

"Then that's all that matters. It's been a great day for us all, it seems. My old car is out of the mud and you have found some things that you like." Bridget Brown replied matter-of-factly.

Martha couldn't help it. "But don't you realize there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars up there? Don't you care about the money at all?" she all but demanded to know.

"Dear, the government has been sending me this enormous amount of money every month for the past fifteen years. It comes whether I want it or need it and it's far more money than I can ever use or want. In fact it just keeps building in my bank account. What am I to do with hundreds of thousands of dollars?" she replied, as if Martha's question was the height of youthful inexperience.

Tom insisted that, regardless of her needs, it wouldn't be possible for him to take her furniture without giving her its fair value.

"If you don't need the money yourself, perhaps you'd want to give it to some charity." Amanda interjected, speaking to Miss Brown.

"Wonderful! Wonderful! I could leave that business all to you, if it wouldn't be imposing too much." she replied enthusiastically. "That's it then. Let's have no more talk about the money."

"There are charities where people give money to buy land so it will never be developed, so it will stay natural and wild." Tom continued, ignoring her admonition about money.

"What a perfect and wonderful thing that is. I'm sure Amanda will be able to find such folk." she replied and then she told him to go get the table they wanted to take with them and Tom and Martha went up the ladder and carefully gathered the little table and lowered it down to the floor. Martha stood over it dusting the surface with the sleeve of her jacket and she was breathing like she was in the throes of lust. And that was exactly what it was; her mind was reeling with the very idea that this old woman was just letting them take her priceless things.

Rather than bring the truck up the muddy lane way, Martha and Tom carried the little table downhill as Amanda walked beside them with the lamp, standing by until the last of the packing blankets enclosed the table like a silk moth cocoon. Then they closed up the truck and Tom and Amanda went back up the hill to say goodbye to Miss Brown. There was a cold wind starting to rise with the moonlight as Tom and Amanda stood at the door of the log farmhouse with Bridget Brown.

"We're so grateful for all this. I don't know how to thank you." Tom said sincerely.

"It was a pleasure meeting you all and I expect you'll be back for those other things, so this isn't goodbye." she replied, warmly.

"And you should really think about what the money might do for your life. You should talk to your family. Money is an important thing in life. It gives you great opportunities." Tom said gently, seriously concerned about the issue

"Opportunities are for those who need them, dear heart. And as to my family, I had a son. He was ashamed of being poor. He was ashamed of me. I guess the joke is on him, if what you say about all the old things in the hay loft is true."

"How could he ever have been ashamed of you?" Amanda asked, almost angrily.

"Aren't you a sweet thing to say so. Aren't you a sweet thing?" Miss Brown took her hand in hers and kissed it and the gesture caught a lump in Amanda's throat.

"Would you be coming back?" the old woman asked softly.

"I would love to come back and see you." Amanda replied enthusiastically.

"Then you will, and we''ll go for a long walk and you'll tell me everything that's important and I'll try to do that too."

"It'll be like having a real Gran. My only Grandmother lives in Victoria and I've only seen her once in the last five years." Amanda explained.

"We'll start you a hope chest in the space of your heart." Bridget Brown replied, and the idea of it seemed strange and thrilling to Amanda. For many days after, she thought about a hope chest in the space of her heart.

"I hope you don't mind, but I have a little book by someone you might just love. It's the journals of an artist, a painter named Emily Carr." Amanda explained.

It had been Tom's present to her. Emily Carr had lived and painted among Tom's own people. She remembered she had left it on the truck dash, and when she remembered, she just knew it was meant for Miss Brown.

Miss Bridget Brown thanked her and took the little book.

Amanda hugged Miss Brown and then she turned and went downhill beside Tom and she felt somehow that Miss Brown had turned some lever inside her, transforming the way she felt and saw. The quiet simplicity and the deep sensitivity she had found in an old reclusive woman was somehow even bigger and more beautiful than Tom's family and farm. It somehow had to do with being able to be alone and happy and contented and truly alive.

The road home was long; Martha obsessing over Tom's driving almost all the way. She couldn't help worrying about the little Hepplewhite secretary. It was with a great sense of relief to them all that Martha finally opened the back of the truck and gathered their undamaged prize. The secretary was carried to the front porch of the farmhouse and cleaned as Sharon and Laura stood in awe of its beauty, as Martha talked a blue streak, listing from memory all the other beautiful things that would come out of the black hayloft far away.

Amanda said that she would like to take Miss Brown a wonderful picnic and some roses, if Rosie could spare them. She told how Miss Brown was one of the most interesting human beings she'd ever met in her life.

Later that night, before they slept, Laura listened to Amanda tell the story of her weekend and she was amazed at how Amanda had formed such a powerful interest in an old reclusive woman in just the few hours they had been together. The woman seemed to have filled something that was missing in Amanda. Laura was completely intrigued. As Laura listened to Amanda speaking with a simple confident tone, she wondered if she had finally made love with Tom despite their promise and Martha's professed vigilance. Laura wondered how things could change, how things could happen so fast. A few hours with a stranger could be so eventful. A few hours with the right stranger could change a person's life.

The next morning began a day that would completely transform Amanda's life at the farm. It began at breakfast when Tom told her that Megan and her friend Alan were coming back from the West. They would be coming to the farm the next day. Before breakfast was over Amanda, was taking a phone call from her father asking her if it would be all right if Megan's friend Alan could stay in her room until the school year was over. He had explained that the boy was not interested in going to the farm; he wanted to stay in the city because the idea of living on a farm just wasn't something he wanted to do. Amanda was shocked and didn't know what to say. The idea of some strange boy she had never heard of living in her room almost felt like a violation of her own personal space. The thought of some stranger touching her things was something she couldn't bear, and she told her father what she was feeling. He told her he understood completely and he would pack all her things and store them in the locker in the basement of their condominium.

Considering where she was living and considering how much others had done for her, finally made it impossible for Amanda to say no. Reluctantly she agreed, and when she hung up the phone and knew that her father would be packing her things, it was as if she was somehow dead and gone. It made a knot in her stomach that felt like a fist when it cramped.

When she told Tom about the phone call he already knew everything, and that private knowledge, that he hadn't shared with her, made her feel somehow betrayed. What was worse was when he told her that Ann Marie and Megan would be coming the next day to talk to Sharon to see if there was a way to work out a plan so that that Megan would be staying at the farm indefinitely.

"When did all this get decided?" Amanda asked soberly.

"In the last two days, Wayne has been talking to my mother and to Sharon and your dad trying to work out a way to get her to come back home. I couldn't tell you anything about it, because nothing was finally decided until three in the morning last night."

"My dad wants to let some boy live in my room. Where she is she going to stay here?" Amanda asked dejectedly.

"Probably one of the cabins, if my mother gets her way; Megan's mom probably has to come live here with her. She's always said there is no point in taking in other children short term unless they come with a family. In her mind, letting your kids go away from home is the worst thing you can do. I don't know if it's going to work out. It sounds like Megan's mother doesn't want to come here. She wants Megan to move back home and Megan says she won't do it. She says she'd just get back in with her old friends. And she's probably right" Tom explained carefully.

"Do you want her to come here?" Amanda asked Tom directly.

"Of course. This is the best chance she has at turning her life around. Look what it's done for you?" he answered.

"Well, I can't help it, I feel pretty threatened. I'm losing my room to some boy I've never seen and some girl is coming here, probably to be with you. You're going to be the one who changes her life and she's going to fall in love with you for sure. And I'm supposed to like this. Amanda looked straight into Tom's eyes but he didn't give an inch.

"We're talking about trying to keep someone's life from going in the toilet. I've been in that toilet, so you're going to have to trust my feelings and you're going to have to think about someone else who needs help more than you do, and someone who needs a room that you don't even use."

Amanda knew he was right even though it was her room and her place with her father she was being asked to give up. She knew what she owed to Tom and what he owed to his parents and she felt selfish and small, but she couldn't help it because she was very much afraid of how things could change, how much she had to lose. She was looking at everything she had to lose and that absolute, sudden realization made her fear explode geometrically inside her.

"You're right. I'm scared to death, but we're talking about people's lives here. I really haven't forgotten what it means to have your life on the line. I haven't forgotten. You won't have any trouble from me. But I still hate it." Amanda said in resignation to the reality of the situation.

Tom could see Amanda was telling the truth, and he could see how hard it was for her, and part of him felt guilty for the secret personal intensity of his relationship with Megan, and part of him was afraid of what was coming, and part of him was angry she doubted him and the love that he knew was the center of his being.

That afternoon, Ann Marie and Wayne and Ian were in the arrivals lounge of the Air Canada terminal waiting for the plane from Vancouver. Ian had phoned her at three thirty in the morning to tell her the news that her daughter was coming home. Ian had talked and explained everything while Ann Marie cried like a baby on the other end of the phone. He had explained everything about where the boy would be staying and how they would be going to the farm to talk to Sharon and how the plane would be coming that afternoon. He had explained the details of the negotiated settlement the way a lawyer would do. He stuck to the facts and kept to the agenda and he could hear a mother's heart being torn apart between the forces of joy and fear. It was what she had hoped and prayed for and she had absolutely no idea what she would do to make sure her daughter would climb out of humiliation and self-destruction. All she could do was cry and say thank you, over and over, when Ian finally stopped talking.

Sitting in the airport lounge, Ian and Wayne tried to keep Ann Marie from exploding in anticipation of seeing her daughter. She was rehearsing the moment they would see one another and what she would do, and how she would react, and how her daughter would respond, and what would happen, and how it would be, and how she would feel, and how would she look, and how she would get through just the first five minutes. What was she going to say? The half-hour wait for the plane's arrival was filled with lots of anxious talk and replays of everything that had gone on in the past two days, Ann Marie finding out about the negotiations and arrangements that were necessary to get Megan to agree to come home. Ann Marie was embarrassed that her friends would have to negotiate for her with her seventeen year old daughter who was able to control professional adults from 3000 miles away. She was amazed to hear how involved the plans were for both Alan and Megan.

Wayne had arranged for Alan to undergo assessment and counseling before being enrolled in school, and depending on how the sessions went, he would be paired a with a gay ally his own age from the school he would be attending, Amanda's old school. Wayne had transformed the program that had evolved at the farm to one that would work with street children needing and wanting some kind of intervention and help. Ann Marie was amazed that she had no idea such programs existed, and her gratitude to both Wayne and Ian for what they were about to sacrifice in their lives was probably as great as any gratitude she had ever felt in her life.

She was very nervous about the tentative plans for Megan going to live at the farm, and the idea she would have to give up her work and go to live there with her was one thing that she was desperately hoping she would not have to do. She wanted her daughter in her house, in her time, in her own way. She did not want to share or surrender anything she was about to get back of her daughter. When the plane was delayed, the conversation suddenly hit a wall of disappointment. The empty runway into the arrival lounge looked as long and cold and hard as Ann Marie's terrified heart. A million stories had walked down that ramp. A million hearts had walked through the impersonal blue decor. There was only one story, one heart that mattered to Ann Marie.

The silence grew and Ian could feel the tension and so he tried to break it by talking about the first thing that came into his mind, the last thing he remembered that had interested him, the story that Laura was working on in the Arthur and Laura Lee book. It was the story of John Merrick, the Elephant Man. Ian wondered aloud how someone so disfigured and so abused and so tormented all his life could end up with the gentle sweetness and an unbound sense of forgiveness for all those who had tormented him. Ann Marie was barely listening, but Wayne, almost by heart, knew the very letters Arthur and Laura Lee had exchanged, knew how Arthur and Laura Lee would come to John Merrick in his dreams and describe to him the beauty of the human heart that no one could see and that so many would one day come to recognize. John Merrick had his dreams and his own memory of how his own mother had loved him and looked at him before she died when he was just a boy.

"I'm not sure if those aren't my favorite letters," Wayne replied, "Being gay can sometimes feel like you're hideous and ugly and a complete freak no one would ever want around. I wasn't wanted before I even knew I was gay, so it was kind of a double barreled blast to the old ego when I realized what I was. By then I was living at the farm and starting to feel like I belonged to a real family and then I was feeling things that I thought would make them reject me all over again. Feeling you don't belong, sometimes is worse when you think that people may actually love you." That got Ann Marie's attention. Wayne went on talking.

"It's like, what's wrong with this picture. Sometimes you can't help thinking that you're the thing that's wrong with the picture. I loved the farm and Sharon and Eugene, and even some of my brothers and sisters. I loved everything there, except it just wasn't me. You have to be really strong to let someone really love you. At the farm, you just can't get away from it for a second,"

"You know what finally got me off heroin, besides my dad following me everywhere? The best thing, the thing that made getting straight something I wanted to do, was having my apartment just the way I wanted it. Isn't that crazy? Decorating saved my life. How perfectly stereotypical." Ann Marie was finally transported from her own anxiety listening to Wayne confess his own fear of love.

"Why do you think that was?" Ann Marie asked seriously.

"I think everyone needs to feel they belong in the context of their life. Finding your own context is probably the hardest thing in life." Wayne answered.

Ian understood exactly what he was saying. His context was not the city, his context connected his hands and his heart and his mind the way it happened at the farm. That was where he really belonged. He knew it then with a terrible certainty and sense of loss.

"I love the context of my own life." Ann Marie replied, "It's obviously not the best context for my daughter. What do I do when she comes home?"

"Well, I think she and Tom have been working on that. I think she knows what it means now to have no context at all. She's going to feel lost and afraid and too proud to admit it, but she's made a long first step, and she's come with someone that she won't abandon. I think she's on her way." Wayne answered reassuringly, and Ann Marie wanted to believe it with all her heart. Wayne and Tom and all the Van Fleets somehow always made the future look hopeful.

Ann Marie suddenly saw the word 'Arrived' beside the flight from Vancouver, and it looked so real and final and as concrete as anything she'd ever seen in her life, and she saw the plane taxying to its ramp and then there was an interminable few minutes before the first people started coming down the ramp to the arrivals lounge. Somehow she expected to see Megan looking as she did before she left, dressed in leather and studs and silk scarves and platform shoes. She had also prepared herself for a hooker in hot pants and halter. What she did not prepare herself for was a girl dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt walking beside a beautiful blond haired boy in tight jeans and a white rayon shirt. They looked positively as normal as everyone else disgorging from the plane, and nothing like what they had been or what they had done.

Ann Marie couldn't help herself, she screamed and started to run to her daughter and when Megan saw her mother she looked absolutely terrified and stopped dead in her tracks. The force of her mother's emotion was irresistible as Ann Marie gathered her daughter in her arms, pressing her lips into Megan's cheek, tasting it like it was the most succulent, addictive fruit in the world. Megan endured the onslaught until her mother backed away, standing there crying, just holding her face between her hands.

"You look so beautiful. You look so beautiful!" Ann Marie said through her tears.

"Okay, that's enough, eh." Megan replied as Wayne and Ian joined them. "I'm not beautiful."

Wayne introduced himself to Alan and then introduced the boy to Ian, and Alan looked at Ian nervously, suspiciously. He was looking in Ian's eyes for his angle. He was looking for the price he'd have to pay, what strangers always wanted. Suspicious minds made it difficult for anyone to feel comfortable. No one knew anyone's real motives; no one knew what anyone really wanted. The best they could hope for each moment was that it wouldn't explode in misunderstanding.

Wayne bought everyone dinner at a Chinese restaurant downtown. Getting there, packed in one car was almost a surreal experience because everyone seemed to be trying their best to be civil and light and happy. The conversation sounded like Alan and Megan had been coming back from some middle-class holiday in Florida. The thing that made it surreal was that no one could ask or answer any real questions about what happened or where they had been and what they had experienced.

Dinner was better when Wayne and Ian put on their practical hats and started to talk about the logistics of the evening and the next day. Alan would spend the week getting oriented in Toronto with Wayne and Ian, settling into his room and school and meeting some of the people who would help him feel safe and familiar. That night he would be staying with Wayne and Charles, meeting some people the next day and then joining Ian for dinner before he went back to see where he would be living for the foreseeable future. Ann Marie and Megan would be going to the farm the next morning to talk with Sharon and Tom. Just the mention of Tom's name made Megan nervous and excited. She had sent him pictures of herself and Alan and Tom's birth mother in the past week. She had changed her appearance entirely, trying to imagine how people dressed on the farm, what she would have to look like to fit in and belong. The pictures from the ice races were the only clue she had, and that was the reason she was dressed in jeans and sweatshirt. Style wasn't substance at the farm. She knew she was going to have to dress down.

Ann Marie was amazed that the defensiveness and anger that had been so much a part of her daughter's demeanor seemed to have vanished. She looked nervous and frightened and looked more like a child then she had for many years. Ann Marie tried not to talk too much or to stare or get too involved in the conversation, because she was so conscious of her daughter's quick temper. She was as happy as she could imagine herself being in the circumstances, and she wasn't paying much attention to what the men were saying and how the children were responding. She was just happy to be there and be able to look across the table at the face she loved that look so tender and lovely and afraid. For the first time she could actually see herself in her daughter.

The evening was over many hours before Alan and Megan were used to. Even when they were living with Tom's birth mother, it took a long time for them to adjust to living in the day and sleeping at night. And the most difficult thing was not knowing where they should go and what they should do, what routine would get them through another night. Alan was going to a completely new life; Megan was going back to her old room. They both suffered from a similar anticipatory dread.

Back in her apartment, Ann Marie didn't know what to do or say to make her daughter feel comfortable and welcome. She understood that Megan was perhaps only there for the night and Megan's real hope was that they would take her at the farm where she could be with Tom. Megan did what all teenagers did when forced to be alone with a parent, she turned on the television. And that was what they did, sitting beside each other like strangers, mother and daughter watching television, Megan holding the remote control. In the morning Ann Marie was surprised when she got up and found her daughter still sitting in front of the television, drinking coffee and eating a pile of brown toast.

"So how was it being back in your room again?" Ann Marie asked bravely.

"I hate all that shit. It's all fucked up baby shit. I'm sick of pretending to be more fucked up than I am. I'm sick of wearing my pain on my sleeve." she replied, sounding angry.

"That's great. That's so great." Ann Marie's sighed in relief. She was hearing the first moment of honest self-awareness Megan had ever shared with her. She had no idea whether it was her own negative experiences or Tom's influence that had done it, but her daughter was obviously looking at the context of her own life. Ann Marie wanted to cheer out loud, but didn't dare.

Tom and Sharon and Amanda were waiting on the front porch of the farmhouse when Ann Marie's car drove down the long lane way. Tom led the way when they got up, and with the dogs following behind them, they went to meet the hope and fear stepping out of the opposite doors of the new car. When Megan first looked at Tom, her heart soared because he was just so beautiful, and like a speck of dust soaring in the sunlight, without weight or substance, her love for him exploded out of her. But, in the next instant, when she noticed Amanda beside him and saw her hand in Tom's, her whole being seemed to implode in the vacuum of loss and disappointment. She wanted to run. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream that it wasn't fair. But she did nothing as Tom let go of Amanda's hand and came to her and took her in his arms and she could hear his voice, his beautiful voice, telling her how glad he was that she was there. Amanda followed Tom and hugged Megan as well, as she remembered the girl that had become something of a woman.

It was then Sharon's turn to welcome Megan and, as usual, she turned her eyes and her smile on her like a search light. Sharon led the way and they all walked back to the porch, Ann Marie beside her, Tom between Amanda and Megan, no one speaking, no one knowing what to say. Amanda and Tom went to the kitchen for a pot of tea while Sharon sat down with Ann Marie and her daughter.

"Your mother knows her way around the farm already and after we have tea, you probably have time before lunch to let her show you the place. You're both probably feeling a little strange and nervous about the idea of living here and we'll talk about that when you come back, but I think you should look around together and share your own impressions without having one of us steer you." Sharon explained.

"I don't want to stay here." Megan said coldly.

"I don't understand. I thought that was what you wanted?" Ann Marie said in surprise.

"This place gives me the creeps." Megan spat out rudely. "I just want to go, OK?"

Ann Marie was stunned. From what she had understood, it would be up to her to decide if she was willing to come to live at the farm with Megan. She had understood that it had at all been arranged except for her final agreement. She didn't know whether to be relieved or grateful or upset.

"That's fine." Sharon answered Megan. "There's no point in you coming here unless you bring some kind of hope. But I'd like you to walk around and have lunch with us before you finally decide. And there's one thing that I'd like you to think about while you're looking around. I believe that if you stay three months with us, you'll find someone here who will love you for the person you're afraid to be with anyone else in the world."

"What horseshit." Megan shot back and it ripped her apart to say it because she already knew who that person was. Of that she was completely sure.

Ann Marie said nothing but was mortified by her daughter's rudeness.

"I don't think it's horseshit." Sharon replied," And neither do you. You can't lie to yourself by lying to me. But that's all right, just go for a walk with your mother and think about what I said."

"OK! Let's do it!" she said almost angrily to her mother as she got up out of her chair.

"All right." Ann Marie replied as she followed her daughter out the door in absolute confusion.

Even as a psychologist, Ann Marie didn't know to deal with the situation. She wanted to ask if seeing Tom with Amanda was the reason she changed to mind about coming to stay at the farm, but if it was true, she had no idea of the reaction she would get. She also wanted to know if she was going to be a sad second choice and if Megan was planning to come home. There was so much to see, but they went through one building after another like they were tourists killing time. Megan seemed to be barely holding on to her rage and impatience. This was the Megan that Ann Marie remembered.

It was the caustic inevitability of time that was killing Megan as the shock of her realization of Tom's connection to Amanda burned into her heart. She could barely hear and she could barely think, and she could barely talk when her mother spoke to her. Finally, in the barn, while they were looking at beautiful white Sweet Cream, Megan heard her mother say the hideous words that were pounding in her brain.

"You're in love with Tom."

"Yessss!" she squealed and slowly fell against her mother and started to cry the acid tears of her sorrow.

"You knew they were together when you decided to come here, but you're going to lose him for sure if you just walk away." Ann Marie said softly. She wanted her daughter to hope once again. It wasn't the first time she had hoped that Tom would do for Megan what he had done for Amanda. Holding her daughter close to her, she knew for the first time that it was possible.

"Don't give up on him." Ann Marie said seriously.

After a time, the tears stopped and the sobs became silent and Megan looked at her mother and just stared into her eyes, looking to see if she was being played. She knew her mother didn't want to come to live at the farm. She knew her mother really didn't want to go that far for her. Saying what she did, Megan realized that her mother was prepared to do what it took to make her happy, even if her happiness was just a pipe dream.

"But I'm just street trash. How could he ever want me?"

"Has he ever treated you like street trash? Isn't he the one who wanted you to come here?" Ann Marie asked pointedly.

It was true. The person she came to love in words on a computer screen, and the very real feeling she had when she was in his arms, said he cared about her and respected her, and understood her as no one ever had. To stay and watch him with Amanda would be the hardest thing she would have to do in her life. She had no idea if she could even survive one day. But there was no other choice.

It was then Ann Marie saw something she had never seen before in her daughter, emotional strength and resilience. Megan stood back and stood up and wiped away her tears as if they were all there was of all she had suffered, all that she had endured, all the things that made her know she could face humiliation and disappointment and survive. What she didn't know was if could survive it at the hands of the people she loved. She looked in her mother's eyes and for the first time in her life knew that she was undeniably on her side. That was what gave her the strength to go back and face Sharon and face Amanda and look in Tom's beautiful eyes.

Both Ann Marie and Megan were relieved that it was only Sharon sitting on the porch with a tea pot under a quilted cozy of a cat.

"Lunch will be ready in just half an hour, but you're probably thirsty from the drive. Sit. It's our own blend of Sumac and lemon balm."

Ann Marie and Megan sat while Sharon poured and asked how Megan liked the tour.

"It's cool. Tom's told me everything about the place in emails. He told me all the rules around here and they're sure different." Megan said trying to sound casual.

"The rules we have here aren't very complicated. Because there's so many people, and so much going on, everybody has to do their share. But nobody is forced to do anything. Nobody is sent to their room. If there's a problem, you work it out with me. I'm the alpha wolf. I'm in charge until somebody comes along who does it better. If you decide to stay, you go to school in the morning and work in the afternoon, and if you decide you don't want to work, you can just sit and watch everybody else while they do. But if you decide you don't want to work, you don't get paid that day or that week or that month. "

"Why would we be paid?" Ann Marie asked in surprise.

"Because we're serious capitalists around here. Work gets rewarded, not working doesn't." Sharon answered. "But that's never been a problem. Once anybody starts to enjoy working, it's more addictive than sex. They're actually a lot alike, the better you get at it, the more you want to do it."

Megan didn't believe it for a second but decided not to challenge Sharon, instead explaining to her mother how much they would be making in dollars and cents, and Sharon was bemused to watch her doing it. Thanks to Tom, secondhand, Megan really did know a lot about the farm.

"It's also especially good for the foster families who come here because parents get to stop having to be the boss all the time, and the kids learn what it's like to have a real one." Sharon added when Megan was finished talking.

"It would be worth coming to stay here just for that." Ann Marie said with a laugh, and she could see that her daughter agreed wholeheartedly.

"What happens if I really screw up?" Megan asked almost defiantly.

"You live with it. We live with it and I'll get to sound really fierce. If you screw up because you didn't know any better, we try to work out a way to learn from your mistake. If you screw up because you just want attention, we try to figure out a way to get you more than you ever imagined. There's good attention and bad attention. If you want bad attention you're going to feel very alone. Every one of my kids has had more attention for being bad than you could ever dream. Bad attention doesn't impress anyone around here." Sharon answered simply.

"Has Tom told you what he was like when he first became a part of our family?" Sharon asked Megan.

"A little bit." Megan answered, nervous at the mention of his name.

"Tom was the prince of bad attention. Ask some of the others. He was sad and scared and as angry as any one of my children." Sharon said without explanation.

Both Megan and her mother sat in shock and surprise at learning such a thing about a boy they both thought was as close to perfect as they could imagine.

"Why did you say that if I stay here three months I'll find somebody who loves me for the person I can't be with anyone else?" Megan asked nervously.

"It happens. It always happens on the farm. It's just my own observation." Sharon replied.

"I don't believe it. Everybody? Hardly anybody ever finds somebody that will love them for who they really are. It doesn't happen."

"I'll bet you ten thousand dollars against a simple handshake that it happens to you if you come to live here for three months." Sharon replied.

"Right! Ten thousand dollars! I really believe you." Megan said her eyes rolling in total skepticism.

"Why not?" Sharon answered, "It's worth ten thousand dollars to me to think you'll find someone who loves you for yourself. Just think of it as my little sweetener. I think it would be good if you and your mother came here, at least until the summer."

"I don't believe you." Megan answered defiantly. "Ten thousand dollars!"

Sharon got up and left the room leaving Ann Marie and her daughter not knowing what to do or say until she came back and counted ten pink Canadian thousand dollar bills into Megan's hand.

"There. You hold the money. If you decide after three months that I was wrong about finding someone who'll love you for yourself, you'll have ten thousand dollars to start a new life, if I'm wrong. I'm betting we've got lots more to offer than you ever even dreamed exists in life."

"Let me get this shit straight. If I don't find somebody who loves me, I get to keep the ten grand. If I do, you get it back."

"That's it." Sharon concurred. "The last time I won that bet was with Tom."

"He found someone who loved him for himself. Who was it? " Megan asked, pointedly.

"It was his father, just like Amanda."

Megan was stunned to hear it, and didn't like the deep connection it implied.

"You can't do this bet. I don't understand." Ann Marie said to Sharon.

"I think it's a great bet. There's no way I can lose." Sharon said. "I could make the same bet with you."

Ann Marie was stunned. "You really like betting the long shots. No side bets thank you. But I still don't understand why I have to be here with Megan. I have a lot of patients depending on me. I could probably afford the time off, but I don't understand what I'd be doing here." Ann Marie continued.

"You have a daughter who wants to be able to stop depending on you, and to do that she needs you beside her. You need to see each other working side-by-side; you need to stop playing tug-of-war with your lives. This is the only place you can learn to pull in the same direction." Sharon explained concisely.

"I guess I couldn't live with myself if I didn't take the chance that you're right."

"You can't lose, if you play." Sharon answered and mother and daughter looked at each other like they were waiting to see the color change of a pregnancy test.

Over lunch, Megan made one very important decision. She decided that if she was going to have any chance with Tom at all, she would have to become Amanda's friend. They had a history, as children, getting along well enough. Amanda wasn't a real friend she would have to betray, but she would have to become one. Megan began the process by which she would learn to make compartments inside her for her feelings for different people. None of the compartments would connect. None of the compartments would know the other was there.

The rest of the day was actually fun, the most fun she remembered that hadn't involved money. That she had ten crisp pink bills crammed in her jeans didn't even occur to her.

With Tom and Amanda, Megan and her mother cleaned and prepared the cabin beside the McCall's, lit the wood stove and washed the dishes and put new bedding on the mattresses in the loft. It was like going camping the way people lived a hundred years before. It was an experience only the rich could really afford. Ann Marie was enjoying each artifact of their temporary new life. The ironstone dishes, the eider down quilt, the pump handle and the pitcher and the pure cold water that filled it. Megan enjoyed watching Tom's angular body moving with such practical grace.

Amanda tried her best to enjoy playing house. She tried her best to ignore Tom's subtle, nervous excitement. He was obviously delighted to have Megan there. But she didn't look or act at all like the hard edged street person Amanda expected. She was also more than a little jealous of Megan's dark skin. Amanda knew that she couldn't let anyone know what she really felt, although she did wish that she could go to her mother and pour out the cold fear in her heart. Life had too many unwanted triangles. The other point of the triangle she missed most was the one that was far away in Toronto.

In Toronto, Ian was busy getting himself physically and psychically prepared to share his life with a stranger. All of Amanda's clothes and things were packed in moving boxes and moved down to their storage locker in the basement. The empty room was like Ian's expectations, waiting to be filled with whatever was to come. The furniture didn't suit a boy except the boy was openly gay and so Ian wasn't sure that the decor wasn't as right as he could have managed.

He picked Alan up from school the next day and they went shopping for clothes. It was an absolutely new experience for Ian, being in a men's store with someone who looked like his son, shopping with a stranger who was so nervously self-conscious about being able to touch and choose from really beautiful clothes. It was the perfect ice breaker. Shopping was the way modern people connected.

Ian was surprised that Alan didn't want to shop in the places created for people under twenty five. Alan wanted quality not quantity. He wanted to look like he just stepped from the pages of the best men's style magazine.

Aside from the sticker shock of the individual items, Ian was pleased with the things Alan chose. They were things he would've chosen for himself, if he had wanted to indulge himself and he weas thirty years younger. He had always let his ladies spend most of the clothing allowances they had as a family.

Ian had told Alan that he would have a thousand dollars to buy himself clothes for the next few months and the boy had been surprised and delighted and he couldn't believe his good fortune when Ian let him choose whatever he liked. It was more money than Alan had ever spent on clothes in his life, except in his imagination. Even knowing that he was almost certainly going to have to pay for those clothes with some personal humiliation, the thrill of choosing and having and wearing his best image of himself was worth it. They went to dinner in a third rate little restaurant Alan chose. His sense of style had not come to include food. Food was sustenance that he could never imagine being more.

Ian was delighted that his sixteen year old dinner companion was not a monosyllabic teenager, but rather had a bright intelligence and the tendency to talk too much, not too little. When Ian commented on his vocabulary, Alan told him that he spent a lot of time reading in libraries. Since he had run away from home at thirteen, it was where he was safest and least noticed, and also the happiest. Alan preferred being alone. It was a luxury he had never had until he found libraries. It was where he found all the best magazines to enjoy at his leisure. It was in those magazines that he learned about the world. He knew all the gossip and all the trends, who was hot and who was not, and the brief reviews of all the things that made it to popular culture. Ian felt like a glass cloche settling down over a young plant that had somehow survived a brutal winter. He very much wanted to give protection to something that looked so young and tender but obviously was as tough as nails.

It didn't take many questions to get Alan to open up about his life and the things that he had endured. He seemed to dismiss them, the beatings, the neglect, the sexual exploitation as just part of the common currency of life. He lived in the moment and this moment was good. He had seen things in his life Ian couldn't even imagine, especially because Alan seemed even younger than his years. He was like a puppy nervously nosing around some new backyard.

Back at the condominium, Alan's eyes went wide in shock at the luxury he would be living in. He fell in the big leather armchair like it was a pile of hay in a field. He jumped back up and went to the big entertainment unit, touching the dials and feeling the plastic CD boxes and paper vinyl record covers like he was touching pure opulence. He asked for Billy Holiday and Ian found him the CD of her collected work. Ian showed him how to work the amplifier, then put on the compact disc so the sweet notes of heartache filled the room. They sat and listen for a long time, saying nothing, Alan accepting a diet soda in a crystal highball glass. The way music could fill and connect the spaces between people laid the foundation of trust between Ian and Alan. It was less than an hour before they could talk over the music, and the first real serious question Alan asked Ian was why his wife and his daughter didn't live with him. It was then that Ian realized that Alan had been left out the most of the discussions involving where he was going and who would be part of his new life. They hadn't even bothered to tell him that Laura was at the farm with Amanda.

Ian decided that Alan deserved to be brought up to speed about where he was and whose lives he had joined as he tried to condense the enormous events of the past few months. The accidental death, the rape, the Queer Agents of Karma, Laura's connection to Eugene, the impact of the farm in all its ramifications, the book from the letters of two fictitious teenagers named Arthur and Laura Lee. It took more than an hour to sketch it out, but Alan was anything but bored. He listened like it was a story from a soap opera told around a campfire. And when the story was over, the boy literally had dropped his jaw. But it was the question that came out of him at the end that completely surprised Ian.

"Could I join The Queer Agents of Karma?" he had asked hopefully

"I don't know. You have to ask Wayne. Why do you ask?" Ian replied.

"I've always been kind of small and lots of people kind of ripped me, you know. I always had this pretty face and girls love it and boys hate it. I've kind of always known I was gay and I didn't want girlfriends, and the boys just beat me up. If I've got to go to school here, it's just going to happen again. That's why my foster homes never worked. That's why I'd rather be on the street. I just thought maybe if I joined the Agents of Karma maybe I could get some protection."

"You can count on it." Ian said seriously, "You don't have to join The Agents of Karma. I want you to believe that if anyone bullies you, we, you and me, can make them wish they'd never even thought of it. "

"No way!" Alan gasped.

"Way!" Ian replied and then went on to explain to Allen how they would document every incident, launch a barrage of subpoenas and civil suits against everyone even vaguely complicit in causing Alan the least injury. "The bullies, the witnesses, their parents, the school, the school board, we'll drown them in the one thing everyone fears more than anything."

"What's that?" Alan asked in surprise,

"Legal bills. Everybody is totally terrified of legal bills." Ian answered dramatically.

If Ian had told him that he would get him front row seats at the Oscars, Allen could not have been more impressed. He listened as Ian explained in detail how everything he had said might work and that it was really possible.

"If nothing else happens while you're living here, I promise you won't have to be afraid that anyone will touch you or hurt you again." Ian said forcefully. The look in Alan's eyes showed skepticism slowly dissolving to actual hope. A man whose daughter has been raped can convey a powerful resolution when it comes to violence.

That week, Laura watched Amanda slowly become more comfortable with Megan's presence. It was now the four of them that walked up to the farmhouse for breakfast early in the morning. Two mothers, two daughters, two childhood friends who were trying to position themselves in an unspoken, unacknowledged romantic triangle.

For Laura, there were strange associations with real life that once again came out of her work on her book. She was working on the story of Anna Lees, the young girl in eighteenth century England living in abject poverty, watching her parents repeatedly have sex in their one room hovel so her mother was constantly pregnant, and all of them were poorer each year with another and another mouth to feed. The wages of sex were starvation.

Arthur and Laura Lee visited the dreams of the young Anna and saw her revulsion at what sex did to human life. It was all around her. Sex meant babies and more suffering. She made a pact with the celibate Arthur and the celibate Laura Lee that she too would stay celibate. For her, Jesus would be her only bridegroom and one day He would appear to her and tell her just that. Anna didn't yet know that the real forces of life would make that quite impossible. Celibacy was not an option for a poor girl until Anna Lees created a place where it was.

It was an interesting question that all young people faced, and Anna Lees' response was very interesting and extreme because she came to believe that sex, that procreation was the most corrupting influence in society. . And Jesus told her so. But for her, celibacy was a social statement more than a religious one. Laura had no idea then that Anna Lees would go on to become Mother Ann to the Shakers in North America and her social and religious beliefs would create mail-order seed packets and washing machines and furniture that would one day sell for millions of dollars and would even be the distant origin of the little reproduction Shaker bench in her living room in Toronto. Laura didn't yet know the story of Mother Ann who invented a real society where black people and women were treated as absolute equals with men almost two hundred years before anybody had ever burned a brassiere or raised a fist over a podium. Laura didn't know there was a model for the farm that was nearly two centuries old, and that a secular model of hands to work; hearts to family could still be so powerful. All she knew was a story of a girl who long ago was appalled by the consequences of sex. All she knew was the story of another girl who wanted life to be pure.

She had no idea that in America, in its infancy, the descendants of those who came seeking religious freedom would revile and stone and drive Mother Ann Lee and her first few Shakers out of every settlement or that one such assault would finally end the life of Mother Ann. All Laura knew was that, when she looked around, there were celibate and almost celibate lives all around her. Eugene and Sharon, Tom and Amanda, Ann Marie and Megan and even her and Ian were all like Shakers abstaining from sex, but for all the modern convoluted reasons that had nothing to do with babies. Only Eugene and Sharon had a real excuse. Only they, but for Eugene's illness, might have perhaps, just possibly, been sexually active. For everyone else, it was the modern circumstances of life's relationships that were too complicated to allow the most basic connection. With fewer babies, there was less time for sex. The farm had even turned a young girl who had sold sex a dozen times a day into one who just thought about it a whole lot. For Megan, her recent sexual history seemed to have vanished from her consciousness the moment she looked at Tom. Like everyone else, she longed for sexual contact, but somehow it had to be left behind with the rest of the world, out past the lane way to the farm. Everyone longed for what they couldn't have, and everyone had a different reason for their self-deprivation. No one knew or realized they had become secret Shakers.

With spring the black birds came back in flocks, the cowbirds, the starlings, the iridescent blue-black grackles. One morning, Laura raised a huge flock of red wings from the meadow and the twisting black plane suddenly was crimson epaulets soaring in military formation. Everything, even something so simple, could change in a moment.

The next weekend was packed with activities. Ian and Alan had come to the farm with Wayne and Charles on Friday evening. Tom, Amanda, Megan and Alan spent the evening in the music room, exploring the Blues. Megan was thrilled to catch up with Alan. Megan was thrilled to learn how happy Alan was in his new school. For the first time he was able to walk through the halls of the school without fear.

"It was so incredible." he explained enthusiastically. "It was only the first day and these three huge geeks come up to me, and the big one I found out was called Psycho Bob, tells me he wants to meet me after school and that I'm going to have to give him my new shirt for his girlfriend. He says his girlfriend likes fag shirts. And then I asked them what would happen if I didn't give him my shirt, and Psycho Bob says that he'd take it off and make me take off my pants and my fag underwear."

"He would've done it too." Amanda added, "Everybody in the school is scared shitless of him. They don't call him Psycho Bob for nothing. What did you do?"

"I gave him and his friends one of your father's cards and Psycho Bob reads it and says he won't be needing any lawyer, but I would be needing an undertaker. Then I told them the card was from my lawyer and that, before he touched me or my shirt, he should give my lawyer a call and find out what will happen if he does. I told them about how he was on special retainer to sue anyone that touched me and he didn't care whether he won or lost, that my lawyer would make it the most expensive shirt he ever took off of anybody in his life. It didn't matter if I even won the case because the legal bills would be brutal. I told Psycho Bob that his parents would be poor for a long, long time and Psycho Bob wouldn't be able own anything of his own until he was pushing middle-age, if he was lucky. I told them to make the call if they didn't believe me. I told them he should know how bad it would be, how much he'd have to pay for my shirt. He just about freaked. He looked like I'd hit him in the face with a shit pie. When he kind of wiped it off, he started to say how he was going to a make my life pure hell and I let him go on and let his buddies join in and then I pulled out the little tape recorder your dad gave me and told him that I was glad for the evidence, that I'd see him in court. It was like Godzilla laid a dump right on top of all three of them. It was so cool. I could really get into being a lawyer."

They could all see how happy and excited Alan was at what he'd done. Only Amanda realized the terror of facing Psycho Bob and his goons. She tried explaining it, but with little success. She couldn't help it, she was really proud of her father.

Alan explained the list of clients he had referred to Ian from the school. When word got out what he had done, Alan had become the talk of the school. Children who has been bullied all their lives came to him for advice, and with Ian's permission, handed out his cards to be passed to anyone who was being harassed. Between the two of them, they wiped out the bullying practices that had survived for generations.

Ian had actually fielded a couple of calls from thoughtful bullies trying to find out if Alan was bluffing. Ian had explained to them, in brutal detail, the procedures and costs of the lawsuits they would face for any harassment, assault, or hate crimes stemming from the Charter of Rights protecting every person's right to security of person and sexual orientation. Ian had explained that he represented a very rich client who had been bullied as a child and was prepared to use all his financial resources to pay back any bully that might want to try him in court. Amanda couldn't help it, she was totally proud of her father.

"Is there really a rich client with deep pockets?" Megan asked.

"He said there would be, if there had to be." Allen answered, and it sounded as if he believed him. "It sounds like you would've been one of the people getting handed one of your dad's cards." Allen said to Amanda. "You must have been pretty tough. People say you got three years in juvie. They say you put some girl in a coma for life. She vanished and then so did you."

"She just moved schools. She's not in any coma. Do they know I got raped?" she replied.

"I never heard that." Alan answered.

"That's something." Amanda said in relief.

In the morning they packed the white cube van with packing blankets and the led a convoy to the Ottawa Valley and Bridget Brown's treasures in the hayloft. Tom, Amanda and Megan led the way in the truck. Ian and Laura, Alan and Ann Marie followed in the Lexus. Wayne, Charles and Martha, who would not be left behind, followed behind them. There was a map in each car, but they weren't necessary because the convoy kept together the whole way.

In the truck, Amanda and Megan listened to tapes and sang along. Megan didn't like it because she barely knew any of the songs, although part of her was glad she didn't have to sing and compete with Amanda's incredible voice. The long drive to the Ottawa Valley was the first time Megan felt like a fifth wheel. But she had actually started to like Amanda. In the Lexus, Laura and Ann Marie got to know Alan for the first-time. As always, he was quiet at first with strangers, but when he was more comfortable, he spoke enthusiastically, the associations and memories of the conversation filling and branching in his thoughts and quite filling the car with his personality. They all liked him. Ian was actually quite proud of the impression he made on the ladies.

When Ann Marie asked him about his friendship with her daughter, it was the first time anyone had ventured to talk about anything that wasn't very recent history. His response was entirely personal and had to do with how important Megan had been in getting him to think that he could actually someday get off the street. She had been there for him, she had listened to his dreams; she was there when he felt most alone. Ann Marie was stunned to realize her daughter had actually helped him stop taking Ecstasy to help him get through his days. They had become each other's' necessary narcotic and he admitted he missed her very much trying to adapt to a new school.

Wayne had connected Alan with an ally in his new school, and the first time the gay bashing jocks came calling, Alan had explained the lawsuits they would expect to follow. He again told the story of his meeting with Psycho Bob and how the story had spread quickly that Alan was someone who might be dangerous and might have serious resources behind him. He told again how Ian's business cards had become the safe haven for so many. Everybody in the car could hear the thrill in his voice while he told the story and everyone was delighted for him. Laura could see how proud Ian was as he sat listening to Alan talk. Finally, at the end of the long gravel road, they descended like crows ready to pick over the carcass of long dead dreams piled in the dusty old barn.

Miss Brown wore gingham and was hauling an enamel bucket of goat's milk from the barn when the convoy came roaring up the lane way. There was a great round of greetings and introductions and Amanda was unpacking jams and preserves Sharon had sent, as well as the Valentine rose that Tom had given her as well as a big bouquet from Rosie. She also had a big pack of photos taken around the farm since she had been there. Amanda couldn't wait to see the reclusive old lady who had fired her imagination. She was even trying to read Emily Dickinson.

Inside the farmhouse, Miss Bridget insisted that everyone sit down for cakes and tea. The problem was the there weren't enough chairs for everyone to sit down around the big harvest table. It was an excuse for Martha to ask to be excused so she could run to the barn and check on the furniture. It was an excuse for Wayne and Charles to join her. They looked almost as excited as Martha. When they were gone, it was possible for everyone to find a place to sit.

Bridget Brown worked steadily and let Amanda help her set Staffordshire cups and saucers and Waterford Crystal cream and sugar servers out on the table. From the pantry came a big tin box out of which she took a great pile of butter tarts and scones and current cakes, confessing that she had an insatiable sweet tooth herself. She had baked just that morning. Other Waterford Crystal bowls were brought out filled with jam and honey, and when Tom began to speak about the antiques in the barn, Miss Brown cut him off, insisting that all discussions of such things would have to wait until they got to know one another. It was small talk until the tea arrived and filled two beautiful old pots. Then everyone went for the treats, the caramelized smells irresistible. It was Ian who was the first one to nearly swoon with pleasure when he tasted the honey on one of the simple scones.

"This isn't honey. This is the honey they use in heaven." he exclaimed.

"It's bumble bee honey." Miss Brown proudly explained, "It takes a keen desire to find one of the nests in the spring just as they wake-up. Bumble bees nest in the ground. I only take a little for special occasions."

Nobody could imagine what special occasions might be in Miss Brown's solitary life, but everyone tasted the bumble bee honey and everyone agreed that, compared to regular honey, it was like the finest wine compared to plonk. The talk of wine inspired Miss Brown and she got up and came back with two full bottles, insisting that they be opened immediately and enjoyed. Waterford Crystal wine glasses came from a cupboard and a beautiful golden wine filled everyone's glass, even young Alan's. Miss Bridget said he could live a little recklessly that day. Alan laughed and thanked her. If the honey was a hit, the wine blew everyone away. No one could remember having tasted a more incredible wine in their life. Laura, who loved wine, and had tasted a few fine vintages in her time, agreed that what she was holding was by far superior to anything she'd ever tasted in her life.

"It's dandelion." Miss Brown explained, "I have a few hundred bottles like it. It takes twelve years before it's like this. I make thirty bottles a year and usually only use a dozen or so. They're kind of piling up."

"You could sell them for hundreds of dollars each." Ian said seriously.

"Money, money. This old lady would rather talk about anything before money." she replied, putting Ian firmly in his place.

Bridget Brown then told Amanda how thrilled she was with the little paperback copy of Emily Carr's journals she had left for her the last time.

"I thought Emily Dickinson was all the books I'd ever be needing, but this other Emily is the best complement to her there could be. One lady who never left her room, another lady whose room was the whole wild world. I wish I could see one of her paintings one day." she said wistfully.

"There are some wonderful Emily Carr's in the national Gallery in Ottawa." Tom pointed out.

"Oh, I'd love to go, but driving an old car through all that traffic, all those big roads."

"Would you like to go, if I drove?" Ian asked her, tentatively.

"That would be a dream. Maybe one day you'll bring my Amanda to visit and we'll all go." she replied.

"Why not today?" Amanda asked her. "My parents really just came to meet you. It'd be so great. There are too many people to pack furniture anyway. Please could we go?"

"I don't know." Miss Brown was taken quite aback.

"I think it's a wonderful idea." Ian agreed. "We'd be back in a few hours. Hands up, all those who want to go see Emily Carr?"

Amanda and Alan raised their hands as did Laura, and then slowly, almost shyly, so did Miss Bridget Brown. Amanda screamed in delight. Megan was thrilled with the idea as well. Tom's hand had not gone up. He would be staying. It would be the first chance to have him to herself, more or less. Tom tried talking to Miss Brown about the business arrangements for the antiques, but she would have none of it.

"Take whatever you like. I'll have no talk of money. You should talk about that with my Amanda." she said with finality.

After some necessary reassurance about her appearance, Miss Bridget finally accepted that her appearance would be fine for the National Gallery, Amanda telling her that they would be lost in crowds of hundreds and thousands. It was then Miss Bridget explained for Alan the reference to the title of the Emily Carr journals.

"Hundreds and thousands were tiny sugar candies you bought by the scoop a long time ago. You licked your finger and then dipped it in the candies and licked off the hundreds and thousands."

"I know the feeling." Alan replied, and Megan roared with laughter.

So it was that they were soon piled into the Lexus, Ian and Laura in the front seat, Miss Bridget between Alan and Amanda in the back. Bridget Brown mentioned that it was the first car that she had ridden in, other than her own, in forty years. She said she was very impressed with the comfort, but it would be a little excessive for driving into the local town once a month for supplies.

"Are you thinking of buying one with your newfound wealth?" Ian teased from the front seat.

"And how much would such a mobile palace be, in dollars?" she asked impishly.

"A little more than 50,000 dollars." Ian replied.

Miss Brown pretended to clutch her heart and swoon. "I'm riding with the Rockefellers." she gasped.

"Not quite." Ian replied, "From what I understand, your net worth after your antiques are sold will make you the real Rockefeller."

"The Saints preserve me." she replied and laughed.

Alan wanted to know what a Rockefeller was.

After that Ian and Laura mostly listened from the front seat as Miss Brown and Amanda and Allen sat and talked like old friends, Amanda going on about the Van Fleet family farm and the music and the gardens and the art studio, and the grove of walnuts a century old. Ian and Laura listened with a mix of delight and regret that the few months Amanda had spent at the farm was everything she had to say about her life. It was as if her first seventeen years had made no impression that all. The only time Amanda mentioned anything about her city life was when she said that she wished she had known her own grandmother, Laura's mother, who had died when Amanda was an infant.

"You can adopt me as your gran." Miss Brown reminded her gently, and Amanda took the old woman's little hard hand and squeezed it.

"I would love that. I would love you to be my own gran."

"Does that make you a Rockefeller?" Ian asked Amanda from the front seat.

"It makes me very rich." Amanda replied, and Miss Brown squeezed her hand in reply.

Back at the farm, while Wayne and Charles and Martha brought the furniture out of the barn to the truck parked nearby, Anne Marie and Tom and Megan wrapped and secured each piece in heavy packing blankets, each leg wrapped individually, each piece wrapped completely. There would be no scuffs or bruises or scrapes if they could help it. Megan felt that she was like one of those old pieces, and she felt she knew what it was like to have Tom's hands rap her up, all safe from harm. Working together, their hands moving past one another and between her mother's, was almost sensual for Megan.

While the pile of beautiful furniture slowly grew inside the truck, Miss Brown was standing in front of Emily Carr's, Indian Chapel at Friendly Cove, tears slowly sliding through the cracks of her weathered face. She seemed almost to sway and vibrate like the trees in the painting. The McCalls and Alan stood behind her for the ten long minutes she stared into another artist's soul, a soul to which she felt a harmonic resonance that was unlike anything she had ever felt in her life. The little group looked like a family of three generations having brought Granny out from the boredom of her life, doing their necessary duty to the old, a moment of time given back, a little bit of culture to enjoy before the grave. Seeing other people looking at Miss Brown, Laura realized that it was almost like she was an apparition of Emily Carr herself, standing in front one of her own paintings. It was a strange and beautiful feeling being moved at secondhand by someone so obviously overwhelmed. Miss Bridget was the most beautiful installation in the National Gallery that day.

"That's the church I'd go to." Bridget Brown said softly before she turned away from the painting.

When they were finally making their way out of the enormous glass Gallery, Miss Brown asked about the modern things she was passing, piles of sliced up fabric, piles of dirt and aluminum, little photos in rows the same size she remembered from her 110 Brownie.

Miss Brown couldn't get over the idea that this was modern art. And when she was told they represented concepts, she replied by saying that it wasn't true.

"I thought concepts were big things. These ideas are so tiny they'd look foolish if they were made by a four year old. They put them here with Emily Carr. It's a disgrace. When was it that artists stop being interested in the human heart?" she asked.

"The hands show what the heart knows. My mother used to say that." Miss Brown answered.

Their world was touched by old, distant moments of depth and perceptions.

In the museum bookstore, while Ian bought Miss Brown a big book of the paintings of Emily Carr, she stood nervously waiting by the door, overwhelmed by the people, the images in the racks and racks of books. Alan had been looking through the sweat shirts and brought her one with the White Chapel on it. Miss Brown looked at it like he had brought her a shirt made of fresh meat. Her eyes grew wide in indignation. Alan saw the look and without a word took the shirt back to where he got it. Miss Brown whispered to Amanda who laughed out loud before she went to her parents and told them Miss Brown wanted to see the manager of the national Gallery and tell him his new choices were an absolute disgrace.

Ian being Ian, he did just as he was asked. He asked for the bookstore manager and told him they would like to leave a message for the Gallery Director. Please tell him that Miss Bridget Brown, a very great artist, thinks the National Gallery is a disgrace in their new choices. And tell him that goes for the McCall family too."

The bookstore manager looked at Ian like he was a madman.

"It takes all kinds." the manager said coldly.

"It takes all kinds to do what?" Ian asked the manager.

"It takes all kinds to be more aggravation."

"You have any idea what this place is all about? Ian asked.

"Jobs." the manager replied seriously. "My job, her job, jobs, jobs, jobs."

"You're right. This isn't your fault. We'll have to speak to the management." Ian replied.

Amanda and Alan had followed Ian on his mission and were both impressed and amused with his vain protest.

"I think we should sue on behalf of the people of Canada, a class-action suit claiming our money has been misspent, misappropriated for the perverse pleasures of people who have no idea about what art is all about." Ian said forcefully.

"I love it." Alan enthused.

"Sign me up." Amanda agreed.

On the way back to Miss Brown's farm, Laura listened to them tell the story of the bookstore protest and how he could drive a petition campaign on the Internet to gather a class-action suit by the people of Canada who felt outraged by what was happening in the National Gallery. Alan was the only one who didn't know that nothing would come of Ian's ranting, although everyone enjoyed the fantasy, especially Miss Brown.

"How much would such a lawsuit cost?" Miss Bridget asked seriously.

."To the Supreme Court; hundreds and thousands?" Ian answered, "You're not seriously thinking of financing such a thing?"

"I just might. I just might." she answered and it sounded like it was more than an idle consideration.

Back at her home, Bridget saw that the furniture had been completely packed with the treasures from the barn and the white truck was parked near her front door. The packing crew was doing an art tour of the grounds around the farmhouse. Wayne and Charles were at one end of the garden looking at a sculpture made of flat stones slowly rising and tapering to a crest and looking very much like a miniature volcano. The colors of the stones made the volcano seem to be almost real because they'd been chosen to reflect sunlight and shadows the way they might fall on a distant mountain. The very crest of the volcano was a black hole made from a pail filled with water. The last stones covered the rim of the pail so that looking down one saw only the reflection of the sky in the black water. What broke the perfect symmetry, was a single black stone embedded in the slope of the little volcano, cutting a seam as if the black water in the pool at the top had frozen in place as it fell down the mountain. The only one missing from the packing crew was Martha who was nowhere in sight, still rooting through the barn and sheds for more treasures.

Tom and Megan were looking at a sculpture that was really a bench made from the curved trunk of a maple that had rotted from the inside leaving a four inch crust of hard wood from which Miss Brown had peeled the bark, and trimmed perfectly smooth with a spoke shave. Two short curved pieces of the same slab of wood formed the legs of the bench and were connected to the top with a meticulous joinery. It looked like something from a Japanese garden or an art deco house, all curves and waxen beauty.

Amanda saw Tom and Megan together and it made her feel somehow nervous. She had been glad that their nightly email conversations had ended when Megan had come to the farm and, until that day, almost all of their free time had been the three of them together. What was good could be bad, what was bad could be good. There was no way to separate feelings.

When everyone had gathered back in the house, it was again time for tea and cakes, but before that, dishes had to be washed and so Amanda and Tom, Megan, Alan and Martha were set to work heating the water and filling the rinsing bowl with cold water from the iron hand pump. The dishwashing liquid in the plastic bottle seemed like it had come from another century.

Miss Brown had chairs brought from upstairs so everyone could be seated around the table and when everyone was in place, she went to a curtain that seemed to be covering a bare wall and pulled the curtain aside. Mounted on a double bed quilting frame was the most unusual quilt any of them had ever seen. It was almost surreal in the way images were created from pieces of fabric with details embroidered in meticulous perfection. It was as if modern art had been created out of one the oldest, traditional practical crafts. The images were all of real things but the way they floated in space and came together had an abstract power that seem to swallow up the details in an almost explosive force. Everyone got out of their chairs to come to look at the quilt. The dishes were abandoned and everyone stood around the work of art that left the whole room absolutely silent. It was like looking at memory itself. Small things, a leaf, a feather, a single little stone were blown up huge while horizons and clouds and entire forests would be superimposed on them as part of them, in delicate hand stitching. The bark of a Hickory tree seemed so real that it was almost alive. Two six foot. tall hollyhocks stems stood like sentinels or lovers watching over everything before them. Every person in the room, but one, was aware that they were looking at a great piece of art. Miss Brown explained how she did one quilt every year and this one got busy very quickly. Wayne was the first to speak, telling her that she was a very great artist and it was absolutely essential that she show work.

"That's lovely of you to say, but that would mean people might want to buy them and they are like my children. You could let a child go to live with someone you trusted, but you couldn't just let one of your children go to a stranger." she replied.

Miss Brown cared more about her creations than many people cared about their own children. Many of the people in the room did not miss the irony of what she was saying. It was then that Miss Brown went to an old, huge cedar bench by a window wall and opened the top and brought out another quilt for them to see.

"There are fifty seven of them." she said, "I have more children than anyone can imagine. And they never leave home, and give nothing but pleasure, and they take very little space."

Wayne and Ian helped Miss Brown open the quilt and it was completely different than the one they had seen. It still had the strange hypnotic feeling of being living memories, but the colors and the details and the abstract design was nothing like its sibling. It too was breathtaking.

"Would it be possible for us to look at them all?" Wayne asked, gently.

"It would, but it would take such a long time. Are you sure you'd like to see them?" Bridget replied.

Amanda spoke for everyone as she looked in her eyes and told her they were the most beautiful things she had ever seen and they had all the time in the world. As they always would, Bridget's eyes melted for Amanda. There are instantaneous connections of the heart that are impossible to explain or describe but may be expressed in an unconditional gift of affection. What followed was the second great art show of the day. Miss Brown would bring each of the quilts, and others would open it to the light, and everyone would look at it in amazement, barely able to speak until Miss Brown, with a gesture, gave the signal and the quilt passed into other hands that folded it in the air beside the harvest table. Hands returned the folded quilt to the bench as Miss Brown brought the next one to show. When they were almost halfway through, they opened a quilt that was all stones and fungus and lichens overlain with beautiful individual flowers, apple blossoms, peach and cherry, tulips and dog tooth violets and trilliums and Lady Slipper orchids among the stones. Everything surrounded a black pool of water running with clouds and a single azure blue butterfly.

Amanda started to cry. No one noticed except Miss Brown. When the quilt went back to the bench, she took it from the hands bringing it and placed it aside. By the time all fifty seven quilts had been shown, everyone in the room was absolutely exhausted in the way only great art could exhaust a person completely. Letting feelings pour from the well of beauty exhausted the heart the way the chest and the arms were exhausted pumping water from a very deep well. One by one, the quilts had somehow fallen over the social energy in the room and no one could think of very much to say.

When Wayne changed the subject and presented Miss Brown with a detailed inventory of all the things that had been packed in the truck, she told him to take care of such details himself. She told everyone that seeing Emily Carr's paintings was worth more than all the old furniture in the world. Wayne assured her that he would keep her best interests in mind at all times. Miss Brown suggested, over tea, that they all stay to dinner, a clearly impractical suggestion considering their numbers. Tom pointed out that the packing crew had eaten the lunch they prepared before they left, and there was enough left for everyone else to satisfy their hunger before they got home. No one admitted to being hungry. Amanda suggested that they all go to a big restaurant and have a wonderful dinner to celebrate, but Miss Brown said that she'd never been to a restaurant in her life and wasn't about to let someone else start cooking her meals. Soon after, it was clear that everyone was starting to feel they were out-staying their welcome, and when Wayne suggested to Tom that they get going, everyone knew the incredible day with Miss Brown was almost done.

As all the people filed through the front door after having made a great round of goodbyes, Miss Brown held Amanda back at the end, and when Tom waited for her, Miss Brown shooed him out the door. She led Amanda by the hand to where she had set aside the quilt that had made Amanda cry. She picked it up in her small old hands and when Amanda realized what was happening she started to shake her head and say she couldn't, she couldn't.

"This is for your hope chest." Miss Brown said softly, "If I'm to be your adopted grandmother, you have to let me act like one. I want you to have this. I want you to know how dear you are to me. I want you to have this so you'll remember you can come to visit me whenever you wish, whenever you feel you might need a funny old grandmother."

"I don't feel like I can dare to say no." Amanda replied, "I'll keep this forever. I'll make sure my children know everything about where this came from and who made it and how it was part of one the most beautiful days in my life. I promise I'll always come back to see you."

"That's lovely. This is a day I'll always remember too."

Amanda put down the quilt so she could take Miss Bridget Brown into her arms and the half a century separating them dissolved between supple youth and rigid, indomitable age.

That night, for some reason, the coffee house gathering was especially boisterous and happy. It was all new to Megan. This wasn't like city clubs. No one was there just to fill the black hole in their life. The focus on the music and the participation of everyone was infectious. It was like a strange enormous family that had left behind the natural animosities of family life for the kind of celebration that usually only came with weddings. Megan couldn't sing very well but she could dance. She danced with her mother. She danced with Tom. She danced with strangers until her face was a sheen of sweat. She had expected a boring, menial work camp and instead was having the time of her life. It also felt great not to have to get stoned.

Near the end of the evening, after he and Amanda had sung, How Can People Be So Heartless, Tom announced a medley of songs from Hair from a new group, "All the way from Tranna, finally in the big time, give it up for The McCalls."

He and Amanda dragged Ian and a reluctant Laura up on the stage and Amanda coaxed them into 'Good Morning Star Shine'. Then it was, 'I've Got Life'. Then Amanda handed out the words to her parents and the three of them, follicaley challenged in such different ways, rocked into the theme song, and it was ironically funny that the one thing none of them had was long beautiful hair. They sang together and took turns with the lines and by the end of the song Amanda was playing with her father and mother's diminished locks, running her fingers through them as they sang and tried to keep from laughing with everyone in the crowd. "Here baby! There mama! Everywhere, Daddy, Daddy, Hair! Grow it! Show it!"

Ann Marie and Megan watched with a mixture of delight and envy. Neither of them had ever seen the McCalls look so close and happy. Both of them wondered whether they would somehow come to share such a moment themselves.

Ian was the last one to sleep that night, Alan tucked in a sleeping bag crashed on the futon below the loft. Ian could feel the soft press of Laura's thigh alongside him as he replayed the day in his mind. He couldn't get over how incredibly exciting and absolutely unpredictable life could be at the farm. His whole life had been one of predictable routines and duties, traditional expectations and organized play. He smiled as he remembered how Amanda had moved about the stage with such confidence and grace, and he could still feel her hands in his hair as she teased him with the lyrics of the song. Her sense of humor was always cutting but now it had a soft and subtle ironic edge as well. She had changed so much. She was like the little girl he remembered.

Ian thought about Laura and realized that she too had changed. She was more relaxed, less critical, more patient, and she was closer to Amanda than he had ever hoped would happen. Yet, there was a disturbing quietness coming out of her as well, her eyes often looking strangely sad, alone and vulnerable. They were feelings he always suspected were there, but at the farm, she had a harder time covering them. There was a liquid warm helplessness in her blue eyes that she couldn't help showing, a helplessness Ian had only seen years before when Amanda was just a baby in her arms for the first times.

Laura had taken to going for long walks on the beach, sitting alone for a long time on the trunk of the black willow that had lain down in the wind into the water so that half its branches had rooted in the sand by the shore. This too was something new. Laura had always hated being alone. She had always needed to connect herself to someone at work or play either physically or electronically. She was quiet now even when she wasn't angry or afraid. She was different. Laura had always believed that life was a performance. Her favorite movie, in fact, was called Performance and was about a reclusive rock star playedby Mick Jagger taking in a killer on the run, another kind of performer. When she was feeling drunk and frisky, she'd sometimes allude to the film doing a Cockney accent and saying. "I d know a bit about performin, meself." She would laugh, and her eyes would shine.

The next day Ian went from the morning service to helping Amanda and Megan with their chores.

"Do you really want to help us kill chickens?" Amanda asked her father seriously.

"Sure. Why not? Do we do this with an ax or a lethal injection?" he replied.

"We use a scalpel. You'll see. This is Megan's first-time too." she answered and led the way to the barn and the chicken coop.

In the barn there were three pens filled with White Rock capons. The first pen held the youngest poults, still young enough to need the warmth of an infrared heat lamp. The second held a hundred full-fledged birds, while the last pen held about fifty fully grown, powerful looking cockerels.

Ian and Megan stood silently as Amanda caught the first two birds that would die. She took each one to two galvanized funnels and dropped them through, reaching her hand to pull through the heads so they hung in the air and looked around in a frenzy. When the birds were hanging quietly, Amanda went to a box and took out the stainless-steel scalpel she would need to end their lives.

Both Ian and Megan were stunned and paralyzed in their silence as Ian watched his daughter proceeded with the absolute unsentimental killing of the birds. She took each bird's head in her hands and forced open the beak with her fingers and in one smooth quick gesture slipped the scalpel inside its mouth and with one quick thrust punctured the brain of the bird through the roof of its mouth. Each bird thrashed silently in turn as Amanda held its head and a black stream of blood flowed from its mouth and fell in the sand bucket below. When the second bird was finally still, Amanda quickly took them and put them on a bench and asked Megan if she wanted to try it.

It was a strange mixture of pride and fear that led Megan to hold the stainless-steel scalpel in her hand while Amanda caught two more birds and put them into the hanging funnels. Amanda was very careful and patient, instructing Megan how to hold the head of the bird and use her fingers to make the beak open wide, and when she was thoroughly comfortable holding the head of the doomed bird, she pointed to where she would have to push the knife into the soft flesh on the roof of the bird's month. Megan's hands only trembled slightly as she put the knife to work and with a quick motion pushed it into the brain, killing the bird instantly. It was the muscle spasm of the powerful neck that shook the head free from her hands, and she screamed as the head was suddenly thrashing violently around spraying them all with blood before they could back away. It was only a few seconds before the bird was still and Amanda was laughing at the look on the innocent faces beside her, but Ian and Megan didn't think it was very funny at all. Ian could not believe this was the same daughter who used to get angry when he would hit butterflies with the windshield of their car.

"How did you learn to do that?" he asked.

"Tom."

"Doesn't it bother you to do it?" he asked pointedly.

"Not anymore. These chickens have a pretty good life. They'd never have been born and felt what it was to be alive if they weren't going to feed someone. They live a much safer and longer life here than if we just let them go in the woods." she explained.

"Interesting rationale." Ian replied, but he was still absolutely impressed with her skill in killing the birds without an apparent second thought.

Megan gently asked Amanda if she could try again and Amanda was glad to help her do it, and with better preparation, knowing what to expect, she did it as if she had been killing capons all her life.

As they walked back to the farmhouse, Ian carried one of the dead birds under each arm while the girls carried one each. He had never held a bird in his arms before and he was amazed at the weight and the softness of the full white feathers. As he walked, Ian thought about how Amanda had stroked each one of the soft feathered heads for a few seconds before it died and hung limp in the air. He remembered the clear, cold gaze of the eyes and how intense and aware each bird was of everything going on around it.

In the kitchen, it was Amanda's job to boil a big open kettle of water and scald the birds and pull the sopping hot feathers away from the body and put them in a burlap feed bag. Holding the birds by the bright yellow legs, Amanda let the feathers drain before handing a bird to Megan who copied her example, pulling the feathers away until there was only the translucent flesh of the chicken's body and stubby wings between stiff legs and a dangling feathered head. Megan curled her nose, but did her work. Ian was stunned again to see Amanda take each of the plucked birds and light a propane torch and adjust the flame to a rich yellow coming from the wide tip, and then run it over the body of the birds, burning away all the pin feathers. The smell was acrid but didn't last very long. It was the first real smell of death.

Ian watched his daughter take the birds to the cutting board and slit each belly in turn and pull out the viscera and put them into a bucket. Watching her hand covered in blood pulling out the heart and liver and the intestines of the bird was almost as amazing to Ian as watching her doing avian brain surgery. This wasn't the daughter he knew.

Amanda asked Megan if she wanted to try gutting the last bird but it was too much for a city girl. She declined saying that maybe she would try the next time, but it was just too gross. Ian felt like the sentimental city boy that he was. Yet he was proud of his daughter and glad that his city girl had gone country.

"Just your basic chicken pluckin country girl." Amanda said to Ian, as if she had been reading his thoughts.

"You don't seem to miss all your stuffed toys." he answered, teasing her.

"I do actually. Maybe you could bring Miss Mouse when you come next week." she replied.

They laughed and he promised to do just that.

"You know I kind of even miss my room." Amanda added, "Isn't that weird?"

"It's not so weird." Megan agreed." It's funny. Since I came here, I actually started missing my own room. Maybe it's because this place is just so different. It's hard to believe that it's real."

"I know what you mean. If I didn't know it, if I'd never come here, I wouldn't think this place was even possible." Amanda agreed.

"Really." Megan concurred. "It's just so not what you expect on a farm."

And at lunch the family enjoyed the sweet fried chicken from the birds Ian had held in his hands only hours before.

And then the family started to talk about Kosovo and the ethnic cleansing going on. Tom had received an email message from his friend Charles who was with Doctors Without Borders and Tom explained how his doctor friend had been forced to run for his life from the bombing, running with the people on the roads, taking fire and treating wounds as the Serbs shelled the lines of refugees being run out of their own country. It was terrible listening helplessly to Tom's description, repeating what Charles had written of the exodus as he walked with and tended to the bullet wounds and broken bones and shock and dehydration of ordinary people. Charles was supposed to have moved out with a convoy of trucks carrying their field hospital but instead had chosen to walk with the refugees, to suffer the freezing nights and the privations of the men and women and children, the old and the frail, in the universal dispossessed common terror of the hundreds and thousands of people fleeing for their lives.

So far away and yet it was so personal because Charles was there among all the faceless refugees. The Van Fleets were people of action and everyone wanted an idea of what they should do. It was not easy to be hard or cold. Aside from sending money, or more money, as almost everyone in the family had already done, there was nothing to do but watch the news and read the papers and suffer the far away pain and feel the bitter-sweet pleasure of all they had. There was no heart that could bear the pain that came from the nightly news, and so everyone had to live with a sense of denial and a sense of lividity in their own living flesh, knowing they couldn't help, knowing there was nothing they could do that would make any difference. Knowing the world for what it is was hardest for those who loved it. The paralysis of good people faced with the evil that men do in the world was life. Laura sat and listened and realized that Eugene's disease filled the whole world. There was no answer. There was no intervention when ordinary people would take the permission of a few evil men and be the instruments of the most hideous potentials of human nature. When ordinary people were given permission to think of someone who was different as being less than human; ordinary people became less than human and could do anything. Smashing a baby's head against a post was sometimes easier than killing a bird in a funnel. Why and how it was only sometimes, some places, why it was easy to be hard, easy to be cold blooded was impossible to understand or accept. Amanda had listened to Tom talking about his friend Charles and what he had seen and she was sick with outrage.

"These people have been there six hundred years. How can anyone want to take back their land after that long?" Amanda asked

She was shocked when Tom answered her.

"You only took my people's land a hundred years ago." Tom replied, "Is that too long to get it back?"

The room was shocked into silence and no one spoke until Sharon finally asked Tom if the people in the room were part of his people too.

"You're my family, not my people." he said coldly.

Amanda was shocked. "Why are you blaming us for crimes we never committed. Those things happened so long ago." she shot back.

"Old crimes, right! That's why two percent of the population supply ninety percent of the child prostitutes in this country. That's why children would rather sniff gasoline and fry their brains than look around at how they have been forced to live." Megan added, angrily.

"That's why churches are being sued into bankruptcies but won't admit what they did to our people, five years ago, ten years ago, as long as white people have been here. Malcolm X was right, white people always slaughter people of color." Tom said to Amanda, standing with Megan and their people.

"White people slaughtered millions of people in China and Cambodian and Rwanda I suppose." Amanda shot back. She didn't like Tom and Megan forcing her to accept her white guilt.

"And so it begins." Sharon replied, and the whole table felt the hard germ in the seed of hatred and injustice begin to stir with life.

Laura looked into Eugene's eyes and it frightened her. He looked like he had seen one of his own children's head smashed against a wall. Eugene was the only one who realized that everyone in that room around the family table had once known what it was to be the one dispossessed, to be the other.

The next night after they had finished working, Laura sat beside Eugene in his bed and she didn't move and of course he couldn't, and so they both just sat there for a time. Her time with him had become strangely comforting and safe. She realized that Eugene had Henry James' obsession with not losing one precious moment of life. She was not sure that the moment they were experiencing wasn't one of them. 'This moment.' It was always one of his favorite expressions.

She spoke her feelings. "You know, you're one of the great pack rats of experience." And the three letters on the television monitor said, 'Yup.'

It was funny that all the experiences she had with Eugene, the one constant thing that she carried with him was his eyes. She could bring back the dissolving montages of memories and senses and things they had done and felt and said, but they just dissolved away again like dreams dissolved, the way reality spread over feelings like weeds.

Blue as a boy's baby blanket, bluebird wings, sunrise and sunset sky blue, Paul Newman blue, Brando blue, Our Lady blue, Rosemary flower blue, it was a kind of blue that she imagined was the color of his heart. His eyes followed her, touched her and held her like it was like a place all her own where she felt she would always belong.

Because of the conversation from the day before at lunch about Kosovo, Laura had decided to start working on his story from Arthur and Laura Lee's letters about Istvan, the boy in the Nazi concentration camp who slept on a bed of fencing wire and played the violin with the camp Orchestra when prisoners marched off to work, when prisoners were stood up and shot, when prisoners were stripped and marched to the gas chamber, when prisoners sat down to eat. The Germans loved music and they let the doomed play to the doomed the martial airs that were meant to inspire.

Arthur and Laura Lee had met Istvan in his dreams and they had no plan for his future, no answers to give him, no explanation to make for what he suffered, no hope to offer, nothing to do but to sing to him the song's they loved most, songs that he had never heard in his life.

Eugene was pleased that Laura had finally agreed to include the heartbreaking story that had no hope or resolution, no ending except oblivion.

"Istvan's story may be the most important one of all." Laura said to Eugene.

"Perhaps." Eugene replied, letter by letter.

"Sharon's given me permission to fall in love with you again." Laura said and turned around to look in his eyes, and they froze in the inescapable truth inside her teasing.

"Permission?" Eugene asked as Laura turned her head back and forth between his eyes and the television monitor.

"She says everyone falls in love with you eventually, but I was the only one she was afraid you'd love back more than you love her. She and I are friends now, and she says that she isn't afraid of that anymore."

### Chapter 14

After the upsetting exchange between Tom, Megan and Amanda that had divided them in anger on their racial lines, Eugene had everyone who came to visit him each day, read from a book of poems called, The Black Rhymes of History, that was edited by the poet Sawyer Strickland.

It was a heartrending anthology of poems written by people who had seen and suffered some of the greatest inhumanity the world had ever known. It went from one ethnic slaughter to another great war, to another ethnic slaughter, to one more, and again one more war, recording each outbreak of overwhelming brutality as it was witnessed in poems from some of the most sensitive hearts the century had torn apart like tissue. The poems sang the songs of the red and the black blood of millions. Turks killed Armenians. Germans killed Jews and the racially imperfect and impure. Americans instantly incinerated two Japanese cities to prove to the Russians that they could and they would. And before then, and after then, ideologically pure Russians and Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodians killed all their impure bourgeoisie. White people slaughtered Indians. White people slaughtered blacks. Hindus killed Muslims and were killed in return. And successions of dictators all over the world slaughtered each and all of the dissenting voices that rose against them, and innocent ones too that would never speak; again just to prove that they would and they could. The Black Rhymes of History couldn't speak of all those who came later without a poet to bear witness to the suffering; the Kurds, Congolese and Timorese, the Rwandans, Croats, Serbs and Kosovar Albanians who were all too different and dangerous to be allowed to just live in peace where they were. It just went on and on, and eternally on, so it seemed that the most impossible dream of the century was the old Jewish cry of the heart to the conscience, 'Never Again!'

Eugene wanted his children to know the price of one person condemning another for their difference. He wanted them to read what it felt like to be treated like they were just the road kills of history. He wanted them to remember they weren't so much different. He wanted them to remember that suffering could never be avenged. It was the one last formal lesson he would give his children until the day that he died.

Every year Eugene and Sharon, with the advice of their children, would find a great teacher, a great doer, a great thinker, a great artist to come to the farm so their children would know what a real passion for life was about, passion that didn't just come from their parents or from their own lives.

However many thousands of dollars it took, that week with a great passionate person was the highlight of the year for the children in their school, and often was, as well, for the other grown members of the family who came to listen and learn. Eugene had always said that a week with a great teacher was worth a year with a good one, and there wasn't one of his children who didn't know it was true. Over the years, Marshall McLuhan, Alan Bloom, Kim Ontdaatje, Wynton Marsallis, Christopher Lasch and Bernice Reagon were some of the teachers who had come to the farm before Sawyer Strickland, and had stood with the Van Fleet family for a group portrait when their week together was done.

The summer before, it was Sawyer who had brought her collection of the best poetry of humanity's horrors, the most heart searing poems of people who had seen and felt and recorded the pain of the branding iron of evil that human beings mindlessly inflicted on one another. The poet and the book had made an indelible impression on everyone in the family. Eugene's daughter Christa, the poet, who loved Sawyer's book of poems, Snow Geese Rising, was the one who lobbied for her to come. For weeks she would read the beautiful fragments of Snow Geese to anyone who would listen. And when she came, Christa became very close to the poet, the two almost inseparable for the week she was there. And when Sawyer left, the experience seemed to trip Christa over the grass blade edges of her emotional balance. Sawyer and her books seemed to be more than Christa's heart could bear. As she had said at the time, when she had said goodbye to her soul friend, she needed to start living her metaphors. And she did that. And what she did terrified and shocked everyone who loved her.

When she was arrested in the Quinte Mall a short time later, naked from the waist down, smearing the menstrual blood from her body on windows and tables and even the angry, surprised face of the policeman who came to arrest her, she had calmly explained that she was putting the color of life back in the world. 'Shame!', was written in her own blood on The Body Shop plate glass window.

If Christa felt the horror and pain of humanity too deeply, too personally as too much a part of herself, Eugene's other children didn't yet feel it enough to forgive it, or to understand it, or to share in their part of the suffering of their humanity. What no one knew was that Eugene was most appalled by the fact that only Tom, Megan and Amanda had spoken when the topic became personal. Having to read the poems of heartbreak was Eugene's response to that. He made them read the lines and lyrics of the limits of pain. It also put his own suffering in perspective, if they chose to see it.

Only Laura and Sharon understood what he was doing. The cold compress of collective guilt didn't make Tom or Amanda or Megan feel any better about what they had said about the suffering and guilt of native and white peoples in Canada. They didn't talk about it, but they could feel the way they were divided on racial lines in the unspoken self-consciousness about who they really were. They had had the courage to speak, but not the courage to understand or forgive.

Tom kept it to himself, although he would have liked to talk with Megan, to share once again their common ancestral suffering. Tom was not used to having someone of his own race to talk to, and Megan wanted to talk to him, but was afraid it would look like she was trying to trash Amanda.

Amanda and Megan, when they finally lifted the compress of guilt, both chose to speak with their mothers, two white women, two native women, who only knew one culture. Amanda told her mother that she couldn't understand Tom's total identification with his own race.

"He only met his birth mother after he was almost grown up. The only thing he knows about his race is what he's learned from books and a few visits. The only thing that isn't white about him is the color of his skin. I don't understand how he can make such a big deal about it. It almost feels like it's a racist thing for him to be judging himself by the color of his skin." Amanda said nervously.

Laura agreed with her. She told her daughter that her own friendship with Ann Marie had never involved any consideration of race because Ann Marie had grown up the way Tom had, with white adoptive parents.

"And I don't understand how he thinks he's going to go back to his people with all kinds of money and make a farm like this. He's just being another part of white society forcing his idea of culture on native people because he thinks he knows what's best for them." Amanda continued.

"Have you asked him about that?" Laura replied.

"How do I dare? It's kind of the big dream of his life."

"You're going to have to do it. If it's more than a dream, you have to ask. If you two are serious, you have no real choice." Laura said soberly.

"I know. I know. The thing that really makes me mad is that if all he sees is the color of a person's skin; then he's going to start liking Megan's and not mine. Except for their skin, neither one of them is anymore an aboriginal than I am. It's just too weird."

When Megan and Ann Marie talked before sleep in the quiet loft of their cabin, they saw the same truth from its other face. Megan explained to her mother what Tom had told her about cowbirds.

"You know those little black birds with brown heads." Megan asked her mother, and she could tell from her mother's silence that she didn't know what birds she meant.

"Tom says that cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, little warblers and things, so the warblers hatch the eggs and raise the babies. Sometimes the real warbler's babies starve because the parents are feeding the cowbird chick because it's bigger and pushier. Anyway, when the cowbird chicks grow up and leave the nest, they don't try to hang around warblers. They just know that they're cowbirds no matter if they never saw one until they left the nest. Tom says that people are like that, that culture is part of what a person is and the only way they have to be themselves is to recognize who they are. You and me are like cowbird chicks. We grew up with white people in their culture. You think we're really different like warblers and cowbirds?"

It was an enormous question and Ann Marie did not know where to begin because, as it was for her daughter, the difference of her skin color and heritage was undeniable, but it was also true that neither of them had any idea of what it was to be a native person.

"I don't know if Tom's right. Everybody says people are people, so it doesn't matter what color your skin is or what culture your ancestors had, but part of what Tom says is true because, unlike warblers, people see the color of your skin and guess your heritage and they don't treat you like the warblers, too many people just see another cowbird, even if they don't mind cowbirds." Ann Marie replied.

"I know. Everybody always looked at me so different. How did you stand it? They must of done the same thing to you. Is that why you always had boyfriends who weren't white? Is that why my own father wasn't white? Were you just a cowbird looking for another cowbird?" Megan pressed her mother.

"I dated white boys in high school and college and when I was growing up, and back then some boys thought it was cool to be with an aboriginal chick. And that was the problem; I didn't like being chosen for my race anymore than I liked being rejected for it. The really neat thing about cowbirds and warblers is that warbler parents can't see they're raising cowbird chicks. If white people were like warblers, it would make the whole world a lot better place."

"You think Grandma and Grandpa were different?" Megan asked about her mother's adoptive parents.

"No. They really were like warblers, all they could see was they loved us." Ann Marie replied tenderly.

"And look at the Van Fleets, this is the only place that I've ever been in my life where nobody cares about skin color."

"Tom cares." Ann Marie replied." It's really a hard question. Is being proud of your heritage kind of reverse racism? Would you want Tom to prefer you to Amanda just because you have the same colored skin?"

"I wouldn't care if it was because I had better tits." Megan said bitingly.

"Well, you do." her mother replied, and they both smiled and laughed quietly in the dark.

The rule in the cabins was that there would be no music, not because music wasn't appreciated, but because the cabins were too close, and everyone playing their own music would have made an unbearable noise. Both Megan and the Ann Marie were surprised that the hardest thing about adapting to the little cabin was learning to live without music. Like most modern people, silence was dead air; silence was dead space; silence was too much like death. Mother and daughter became co-conspirators when Megan borrowed a battery CD player from the music room so the two of them could play music softly late at night. Music connected loose ends between mother and daughter and bound the language of time and rhythm in each of them, so that the time they shared belonged to them individually, but also belonged to them together. Sad songs, happy songs, old ones and new ones, borrowed and blue ones, anger and pain, love and loss and heartache floated in the endless river of stars that were the notes of musical constellations playing in the dark. The other thing that caused the biggest change in their relationship was sleeping together on separate mattresses in the cabin loft. Sleeping on separate mattresses so close they could hear each other breathing, they found a simple intimacy in their proximity that they had never known before. Mother and daughter side-by-side, waking and seeing each other's still bodies, hearing each other's slow breathing had a dark intimacy they could barely recall, but could feel. And the best thing of all was the time before sleep when they could lie silently thinking or choose to speak about the day, or to choose to share the thoughts and feelings moving between them in the darkness, the way it had moved between mothers and daughters through the first two million years of humanity.

"Do you think that Tom's the one who's going to love me for my real self?" Megan had asked Ann Marie after they had been listening to some beautiful old torch songs.

"I hope so." her mother replied.

"Sharon's really ingenious about stuff like that. I never thought it'd be possible to be so happy to give someone back 10,000 bucks."

"It's an ingenious bet." Ann Marie agreed.

"Really."

Ann Marie and Megan chose very different places to go for the solitary hour everyone on the farm had between four and five. Ann Marie chose a little sheltered spot in the sand dunes where the sun spread its late afternoon glow. Ann Marie went with a blanket and lay on the warm sand and just watched the white clouds, the blue sky, as she listened to the high notes of the returning summer birds singing everywhere around her. Megan went to darkness. She went to keep Tundra company and feed him strips of meat she brought every day. For the whole hour, she'd stand near him, and it was from Megan that he learned to trust, most of all. He would climb on her arm, spreading his wings and jumping to her with his one good leg. The trust the wounded white bird gave her quickly came to mean more to Megan than the trust of anyone she had ever known, even her friend Alan.

When Ian came that weekend, Tranh invited all the Toronto refugees to come up to the Van Fleet lumber camp to see it and also, most especially, to see the final days of his private sugaring off operation where he made the maple syrup for the whole family for the whole year. Tranh's maple syrup was spectacular.

Alan had stayed in Toronto working with Wayne and Charles in the antiques store. There was so much to do, going over every piece that had come from Bridget Brown's hayloft. Each piece had to be cleaned and examined and identified. Each piece had to be given a tentative value, if possible. The beauty and the craftsmanship of each piece, as well as his having been a part of their recovery, made Alan excited and anxious to help in any way he could with the incredible treasures of the past that his hands cleaned and polished.

On the hour's drive to the lumber camp Tom reported on the email message he had received that morning from Kosovo from his doctor friend Charles. Charles was on the run with two hundred people in the mountains and they were suffering terribly from the cold and the lack of food. A twenty pound sack of sugar cubes was all they had left to eat. Children and old people had to be warmed between younger bodies to stave off hypothermia. They had out run the guns but not their suffering, which only grew deeper with every mile. The short sentences telling their condition left the imagination alone and overwhelmed in the great, black room of horror. Charles never explained how he got his message through, or questioned how the personal misery and suffering of so many people could flash around the world and yet no help would come. As Tom read Charles' message, he did not know it would be the last one he would receive. He did not know his friend was already dead. He did not know that only six people would survive the attack on the small defenseless band of people running for their lives. As Tom read the message from the back seat of the luxurious car, he had no idea that his dear friend was as cold as the earth in the sun, in the mountains.

As Tom read the message, the explosive cry of human cruelty drowned out the whimpers of old men and old women, the young and the frail, mothers and fathers and grandparents, generations that had come to one point and one place where all suffering was the same, in the sun, in the mountains.

As Tom read Charles' message, countless others crossed the planet for everyone and anyone to read, stories of rape camps and executions, neighbor against neighbor when the silent screams of distant humanity were drowned in the little sounds of a baby's death rattle.

Tom apologized after he heard the silence in the car, the silence of helpless pain. From such a distance, the fragments of suffering that Charles described, the simple sentences used to tell it, tore at the heart like simple things lying in the dirt after some indescribable disaster. It was a cap, a doll, a photo album turned to meaningless artifacts of war. It was bulldozers crushing and burying lives. Tom was the only one for whom the words had a voice, and he remembered the face but couldn't know he was feeling the distance in which the voice would fade forever. Tom didn't say very much more until they got to the lumber camp. His broken and terrified heart wanted to suffer, and he unconsciously wanted others to share it with him as he sat there imagining the pit of despair in those far away mountains. No one would look into the pit with him; it was bad enough to watch him standing at its brink. It was a great relief to everyone to finally open the steel doors of the car at the end of the rough road leading to the Van Fleet lumber mill.

A big log building with a galvanized roof sat in the center of a huge clearing and the scream of a saw blade turning logs to timber sheared the silence into regular planks of time. The clearing in the forest surrounded by the budding trees and high, lacy cedars was set among gentle, ancient granite hills, and the blond stacks of new lumber, piled everywhere, seemed strange and angular and small among them. The only movement in the clearing was a single man running a fork lift, stacking the boards coming down the conveyor belt onto the iron forks of his machine. Tom said a hello that no one could hear in the scream of the steel in the wood. The others passed and waved but drew no response as the man worked steadily at his task. Tom gave everyone the cook's tour of the mill, and all the city people were surprised at how few people it took to operate it. One man ran the huge band saw that cut the logs, like hard squealing butter, into squares that quickly turned into planks that the man stacked at the loading gate. Wood jingled on metal rollers, planks fell like long slices of bread. The sweet smell of sawdust was overpowering and so intense it almost forced its way to the back of the nostrils.

Laura stole Sharon's line about raw oats.

"It smells like sperm." she whispered in Ann Marie's ear.

The two women laughed in pantomime when their laughter was swallowed in the scream of a new made board.

Tom pointed to where the slab wood waste went out of the building and down to where it was cut into forteen-inch lengths. The great piles would be stacked on palettes and covered to dry until fall when they would be suitable for firewood. He pointed out the huge pile of branches that had been hauled from the bush and were waiting to be fed into the chipping machine that filled the dump truck that went to the farm to fill the hopper car of the locomotive to supply the heat and electricity for the farm. The only thing they left in the forest was the evergreen needles of the smallest branches, and they would replenish the earth.

As they walked from the clearing, down the rough road leading into the forest, the song of the saw blade cut time as it receded behind the little tour, the sound of their steps in the dried leaves from the previous fall, rising with the soft warmth of the earth. As they walked, the Toronto expats were all surprised to find themselves in the same cathedral-like majesty and order of a managed Van Fleet forest. Trees were cut so others could grow fast and full so that, as the forest aged, it became great pillars of green in the blue sky. Among the enormous white pines, sugar maples predominated and a network of white plastic lines threaded their way among them, weaving off towards bound groups of drums sitting on palettes, drums slowly filling with sap flowing from the lines. As the group walked, their voices felt close in the grand scale of the decades of the trees. Red pine and White Oak and Spruce trees were dotted among the Maples and had their branches trimmed high as they had grown, so that the sky shone out on the horizon like a perfect band of blue that seemed to be supporting the canopy of the trees. The track through the trees went through old glacial drumlins and old granite domes rising through the lush moss and old leaves. Everyone except Tom felt the warmth and sweetness of spring as they walked, everyone having forgotten the sober ride and the heartbreaking message. Ian, who had longed all week to be with his family once more, was vigorously happy, leading the way with Tom, who listened patiently as Ian and went on about the glories of the day and the wonders of the big machines they left behind.

A mourning cloak butterfly with deep embroidered purple wings danced beside him, and then danced away to greet Laura and Ann Marie, as they fell further behind the men. The women didn't talk. They listened to Ian's voice moving ahead of them. And both of them recalled, and neither of them mentioned, the walks they used to share in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery supporting each other in the trials of urban life. After all the years of shared sympathy for all the devil in the details of their lives, the reference lines between them had been so absolutely altered by the circumstances that had brought them to the farm, that it was frustratingly difficult for the old friends to know how to speak to each other.

Amanda and Megan trailed far behind their mothers as the walk lengthened. They had little to say to each other, both of them wishing they had somehow been able to fall in beside Tom, both of them wishing that Ian hadn't taken over all of Tom's attention with his enthusiasm for their new experience. Ian always loved talking to tour guides. It was strange for Amanda and Megan to know and understand the enormous competitive nature of their relationship and their feelings for Tom, yet it was also undeniable that that competitive feeling was moderated by the consideration and civility they both came to honestly feel for one another. They couldn't be friends, but they couldn't help but like one another. And so they said nothing. They both walked and listened to their footsteps, watching their mothers ahead of them, and both of them laughed when Ian started to sing, 'We'll Sing in the Sunshine', all by himself. Amanda and Megan and Tom were just another emotional triangle on the farm, like Laura and Sharon and Eugene; like Laura and Ann Marie and Ian, and even like the one between Sharon and Laura and Ian. That wasn't to mention the triangles that existed between Eugene and Sharon and the Toronto parents and the Toronto children. It was almost like it took three people to make one relationship to satisfy everyone in it, and make a person realize that there was more to the heart than one person could know or provide. So much was unspoken and so much went on in the connections between the three groups of two, marching through the spring with the mourning cloak butterfly's purple lovely dance joining them in the moment, passing them by like a dream.

Tom and Ian stopped by a little stone amphitheater bleeding deep green billows of moss that covered almost every part of it. Ian couldn't let it pass by unappreciated, insisting that they wait for the others. When the group had re-assembled, Ian looked at all the sober faces and it shocked him and challenged him. He became their song and dance man, the dancing irresistible fool for love.

"Now here is a stage." he said and everyone looked at the beautiful green theater. No one reacted.

Ian then became Albert Petersen from the musical comedy Bye Bye Birdie as he launched into his animated rendition of 'Put on a Happy Face', singing and dancing around them in the most absurd choreography he could improvise. Faces cracked. Bodies relaxed as everyone gave in to his silliness as he assembled them together, pulling up corners of mouths into bigger smiles, standing them side-by-side like a choir, and finally insisting that they join the next chorus. He was irresistible, spreading sunshine all over the place. Everyone sang as he conducted them and he took his little digital camera from his pocket and took a portrait that showed Tom and the Toronto singers happy and at ease, singing like they were without a care in the world. Framed by the depth and the delicacy of the dark green living moss, it was a picture every one of them would treasure for years and years to come. Tom came out of the portrait group for the last chorus and made Ian take his place in the choir and took the second picture, the second real image of the day that had all the feelings and connections all of them shared, in joy and pain, through all they'd been through. It was all there for an instant. Snap! This moment! The group stayed together, laughing and talking as they finally came to their destination in the woods.

The group gathered in front of a long, low wood building that looked like a greenhouse built into a little Valley. Smoke was pouring from the chimney that came from its center and steam poured from every window and door. The smell of maple syrup hung in the air all around them and it was so strange to smell something they all knew only at a breakfast table there in the middle of open nature. It made the smell seem strange and out of place and almost artificial. Tom called into the dark doorway of the sugar shack and Tranh emerged in a moment, dressed in white coveralls, looking very much like a scientist rather than someone who was working hard in the bush. His face was covered in the sweet steam he was creating. He saw the looks on their faces, and it made him smile as he greeted everyone, before he led them down into the darkness.

It took a moment for everyone's eyes to adjust, the steam pouring out at every window, making the world outside look like a foggy day instead of the blazing blue day that it was. Tranh showed them the wood fire he tended beneath a huge stainless-steel boiler and explained how it took forty gallons of clear sap to make one gallon of syrup. The boiler held four hundred gallons and would leave ten gallons of amber maple sweetness when the water had finally boiled away. Attending the fire was crucial because, if it got too hot, the sugar would caramelize and the syrup would turn dark brown instead of the beautiful transparent yellow it was supposed to be. Tranh's scientific precision and focus and determination produced absolutely the most perfect product possible, and it took most of three weeks before he had bottled the fifty gallons of syrup he made every year. The financial genius that made the family millions of dollars was most proud of the simple reaction of his family and friends for his making the clearest, the lightest, most delicious maple syrup it was possible to possess. Trahn slept in the woods the entire time the sap was running and two thousands gallons of clear sap were reduced to a gold that could only be truly valued on the tongue. Megan asked him why he had to do his work inside a stifling hot building and Tranh explained how the things that came through the wind, the things that fell from the trees would contaminate the boiling liquid.

"It's amazing the detritus that you never notice falling all around you." he explained gently.

Then he explained the evaporation process and his particular refinements to it with obvious pleasure and pride. Then he led the group up through the blazing light falling in from the door to the butterscotch light filling the trees all around them. They were all covered in a beautiful transparent sweat when they looked at each other outside.

"So how's the sap running?" Ian asked Tranh, trying to sound technical.

"Incredible." Tranh replied, "Warm days, cold nights."

"I know the feeling." Ian replied and smiled into Laura's eyes.

"You're such a sap." Laura replied to his unspoken accusation.

Tranh surprised everyone by asking if they would like to stay to lunch. The idea that lunch could be supplied for six guests in the middle of nowhere was surprising indeed, but everyone quickly accepted and so Tranh slipped out to his coveralls and led them off into the woods to the raging stream exploding as it turned around a huge flat rock. That was where Tranh left the big cooler that was brought to him every day he was in the woods. This day, there was a second cooler big enough to hold enough food to feed six guests. It was obviously a place where many other people had come to sit and look down into the swirling water. Tranh had made benches from logs on three sides of the huge stone, where everyone was glad to finally sit down.

From beside a tree, Tranh took a rough looking folding table that obviously stayed where it was all year long, and he opened it and began to prepare the meal, as everyone watched in anticipation as he opened plastic containers of salads and fried chicken and fruit. The smells rode over the swirling cool water smell rising from the stream, and the roar was incredible and made voices have to rise as the pastoral calm shuddered with the power of spring released from winter. The force that through the green fuse drove all of life was exploding all around them as they sat there waiting for what was to come. The little group sat and talked in good spirits, Ian's silliness still tugging at all of them like helium balloons. When Amanda told the story of the little choir in the mossy amphitheater, Ian offered to lead the newly formed choir in an encore. No one was game, and he berated them all for their lack of bravura, their lack of appreciation for a perfect venue.

No one cared. Everyone wanted to eat. The cold chicken and the old cheddar cheese sang with flavor in the sun. The sumac tea had a strange distant sweetness that poured from the big thermos like the distant sweetness of the hepatica flowers pushing thorough the leaves there beside them. Every flavor of life seemed more intense when it was carried back to nature. Over the meal, everyone could see the weight in Tom's eyes. It was so apparent that Tranh finally asked if he was feeling all right. It was then Tom told him about the email message from Charles and he described to Tranh the conditions they were in and that they only had a bag of sugar cubes left to feed two hundred people. Tom was terrified for the lives of those two hundred people and his friend. Those who heard the story, once again felt stripped of the pleasure of the moment. For Tom as well, the food and the security and the good feeling they enjoyed that was now an inextricable part of his life, stung like a paper cut, so small and so painful. Tom began to cry and the two young women sitting on either side of him each took one of his hands when they saw it, and Megan rested her head on his chest to try to make him feel better.

Tranh watched the little triangle of pain and comfort and, after a long silence in which he looked truly stricken; he began to describe an experience he had never described since it had happened. He described the circumstances of losing his parents and family and being lost at sea, thrown to his immanent death by Thai Pirates who had boarded the little boat running with a few dozen people from Vietnam to Hong Kong. He told how this family had had a good life before the Communist victory in South Vietnam and how his father was an army colonel who had been executed, and how his family had lost everything and were homeless in Saigon. The only thing of value they had were three raw sapphires his father had procured and hidden in case the family would one day need to escape. It took three years of fear and re-education and starvation so severe that two of his sisters had died before his grandmother and mother could make the arrangements to be on the little boat that would take them to safety and freedom.

"After a week at sea, we would have been very happy for a bag of sugar cubes." Tranh continued, "In the waves on that little boat, on an empty stomach, being repeatedly sick made me just want to die. There is a kind of dry heaves that I imagine only starving people can know. It had rained and so we were no longer dying of thirst, just hunger. And then the Pirates came and took the girls from the boat to be sold as prostitutes, and then they made everyone strip naked and forced us all into the water while they searched the boat for whatever valuables they could find. They took my little nine-year old sister and I watched them sail away after they lit the boat on fire, and we watched it burn, and I could have drowned then like everyone, just as I finally wished. But I didn't. When the ship went down, a few bits of wreckage floated on the water, and there was another boy about my own age who helped me swim to a round piece of wood, and the two of us lay across it and held each other's hands to keep from slipping off into the water. We were there like that for three days in the sun, and we were on fire with the pain burning our bodies like napalm, and our eyes were swollen from the salt spray and our tongues swelled so they were blue and enormous and we looked at each other like we were looking at monsters from nightmares."

"Finally, when we were both deciding we should let go and give up, and we wanted to do that, our fingers were so locked together that we couldn't open them, we couldn't let go even when we wanted to."

"I don't remember when the boat came or how we were saved, but when I woke up I was lying on clean white sheets for the first time in my life, on a bunk on a British destroyer. I was in the infirmary, my back covered in bandages, and I had to lay there for days until we arrived in Hong Kong and I was taken to a hospital at a refugee camp. The Captain came to visit me and told me that my friend had died; he was dead when they forced our fingers apart. I was very sad, almost as sad as I was for having lost my whole family; and he told me that I was the bravest boy he had ever met and that he admired my incredible determination to live. I did not feel very brave or determined, or that my will to live was truly wonderful. It didn't feel wonderful then. The next day the Captain came and stood in the doorway and he said that he had a surprise for me, and when I looked, I thought it was a ghost, because he produced, from behind his back, my little sister. That moment of happiness was the most intense moment of pain I've ever felt in my life."

"The Pirates had thrown all the girls they'd taken into the water when they were intercepted by a British patrol boat the day after they had burned our boat, and my little sister was the only one that was saved after they threw all their captives in the water to run away. They machine-gunned them all before they left. I learned all this from my sister who first came and kissed me, and we were together again until the refugee camp in Hong Kong where she got the flu three weeks later and died."

Everyone was crying, or trying not to do so, when Tranh finished the story.

"So Tom, there's no way to measure how much suffering it takes before people succumb. Those people in the mountains have each other and they have Charles. They have that chance." Tranh added soberly.

Tom nodded and said he hoped so, but he couldn't help being so afraid. Now Amanda also had her head on his shoulder and she was crying like Megan was.

"There is no knowing where life can lead." Tranh replied, "When I was lying on the South China Sea looking up the stars, how could I possibly imagine that one day I'd be living in Canada looking through a telescope at those same stars, trying to find an asteroid that might be coming to destroy all of humanity." Tranh added.

In the tears and the sorrow of old pain resurrected, they all felt light and alive and renewed, just like spring. It was so strange. The force that blasted the roots of trees and destroyed worlds and personal histories and ordinary families was there among them, and they were dumb to tell what anyone could do to stop it, yet it made them all feel so alive. Sometimes life changes like an iceberg suddenly shifting and turning, rolling over on itself, the invisible loss beneath it shifting its balance completely. And then there was stillness. That was the human stillness on the stone above the stream in that emotional moment. Looking at Tranh sitting there, reeking of maple syrup, how was it possible to imagine that he had known some of the bitterest moments of the endless, hard rain of horror that had scoured the twentieth century. If evil was remarkable only in it's banality, goodness and courage was remarkable for its simple ordinary human face. It was a simple goodness there in every face gathered above the stream, and it was so ordinary and obvious that none of them saw it.

Tom spent the next week frantically trying to get some news of his friend Charles. Doctors Without Borders only knew that he was missing. The message to Tom was the only one they had from him in the last weeks. The rest of his free time, Tom spent on the Internet trying to find his friend through refugee agencies and Web sites devoted to the refugees streaming out of Kosovo. After weeks of failure, he suspected what everyone was afraid to say, that his friend was dead. He was dead of course, and very much like the countless millions of innocents the century had buried with earth moving machines, he just disappeared. It would be a month before the memorial service in the little town near the farm would end Tom's search. He even buried his thankfulness there, when he held Charles' mother in his arms, the day they all said goodbye. It was then that Tom realized how devastatingly hollow funerals were without the last remains of life and love. The heart, as always, cried out for something tangible to touch.

It was such a contrast, the way spring had taken over the farm that month with sweet new life. The spring bulbs had pushed through the bare earth and all the little gardens around the farmhouse were alive with daffodils and elegant tulips, sky blue patches of scilla and white snowdrops and narcissus. The grass in the meadow turned green, as did the woodland moss, and then yellow coins of dandelion flowers scattered their treasure through the pastures.

The small summer birds came into the trees while they searched for nesting material and ate the insects that exploded in the millions from the earth. In the spring heat, clouds of black tiny bugs shimmered and swayed like undulating dancers. At dawn and dusk, the sound of them swarming within the trees was an electric hum that never varied in pitch or intensity so that it almost disappeared from awareness. For Laura, the warmth of the spring that opened her days and filled the air with life was a warmth she felt spreading in her flesh like the rising rounds of a chorus of a distant choir. Her writing was also getting stronger and more confident and warmer every day, the cold fear and self doubt inside her giving way to the young certain strength of the stories she was telling. Her real confidence as a writer began with the story of the boy who played violin in the bowels of hell.

Each week or two she produced another story from her quiet afternoons alone. She began to love taking her day's work to show Eugene. Without realizing it at first, she started to answer the questions he left her the first day George had brought her to visit him at the farm.

'Tell me about your daughter.' was the first question she began to answer.

After they were finished working each evening, after she had shown him her work from the day, and after he left her occasional questions about the story they were working on, Laura would sit back against the pillows raised beside Eugene, and she would look at the computer screen as she talked, as if it was his mouth or his face. She disappeared into the blank screen of her past.

She described the history and the feelings of her relationship with her daughter, and Eugene said almost nothing in reply. Her answer to his question was a long, beautiful soliloquy about the pleasure and guilt and jealousy and pain and sorrow and the unexpressed beauty of what she felt about being Amanda's mother.

Occasionally the computer screen would say something that showed he was listening with a passionate interest because of a single word or one sentence that captured the essence of just what she was saying. He mostly sat and listened as she talked about her daughter, and she couldn't believe that there was so much to remember and so much to say. She would never have imagined that her heart and her memory were so deep, so full; so rich. Laura suspected Eugene loved Amanda, and it was something she couldn't even begin to understand because they had no past, no history, no shared pleasure or pain, hope or disappointment. And strangely, the closer she came to her feelings for her own daughter, the closer she felt to Eugene.

She talked. He listened, and the long monologue made her feel close to them both and connected to each through the other, in a way that was impossible to describe. His confidence and his optimism were like Amanda's, only his had a history and passion that was like a rock she could feel beneath her. Eugene made things seem possible. He sometimes made them even feel inevitable. Mother and daughter, it was the first personal theme she'd chosen to reveal her heart.

As Laura recalled her own youth as the golden girl of the golden girl, she suddenly realized that she'd married a stronger and sweeter version of her own father. Her father was the good doctor with the alcohol problem, born to serve the whole world, especially his wife and daughter in all their many moods. Sitting next to Eugene, talking about Amanda, Laura started to understand the triangle of her, Eugene and Ian. She didn't understand how it was, or what it was, or why it was, but she understood at last that it truly was the way she could understand her own heart and her own life as she had never understood it before.

It was springtime for Laura. It was fresh and yellow as the tender pastel fog of the leaves filling the bare trees. If made her feel so young, with bells to be rung and songs to be sung. She came to life every day, silently working over her computer screen and the frail blue letters, and quietly talking about them and her life beside the dying love who had somehow given her access to her life through them. During the time she was talking about Amanda, Laura didn't tell Eugene how she remembered her own parents had responded to him with such mixed feelings.

Her mother's eyes had lit up at the sight of Eugene's young body but recoiled when she learned of his dream of becoming an auto mechanic. Laura remembered what her mother had said to her about Eugene, "You're going to be someone, he's not." The irony made her laugh. Her father had liked Eugene's intelligence and sincerity, but he deferred to his wife's ambitions for their daughter, being polite and reserved in his welcome the few times Eugene came to dinner. Laura wished that they had both lived long enough to see what he had done with his life. It made her success look so dry and pale in comparison.

From the book they were creating, from the depth of his understanding of the innocence of the young, to the enormous network of human beings who had come to the farm and been changed, taking away some of the inexhaustible treasure of Eugene's optimism and confidence, they would've been so surprised at what an unambitious boy who only wanted to use his hands to make a living, had done with them. She also realized the blindness of her own innocence that had never understood the depth there was in Eugene. She had once thought her mother was right. When they were young, their depth was completely useless and invisible to both of them. Yet it was there. The depth of the heart was invisible to youth because youth had no way to test it. It was invisible to adults because personal depth was like a foundation quickly buried below grade. The depth of the heart was invisible for very different reasons, but it was almost always invisible until it faced the enormous price it always paid when it was uncovered by love.

As Laura talked about Amanda and remembered, she started to see past the battle of wills, past her own fears and guilt, into the rooms that survived from her youth and Amanda's childhood. She and Amanda were very different indeed. Her daughter already had far less need of the approval of others, so much less than Laura still carried inside herself. Laura knew that whatever happened in her life, she would always feel that need and desire for honest approval of hard won success. The only place she felt that need was suspended was lying next to the dying, silent man who always cared about her regardless of what she had done. The book she was writing was ironically her greatest attempt at success, and it was happening in the one place success didn't matter at all. From her safe spot beside Eugene, she spoke of her daughter in ways she had never let her heart open before, even to herself. As she spoke, her voice cut the outlines of her own emotions, her own life with her daughter, like a chisel blade cuts a wood block. The images of both, appearing in opposite relief, were what the words cut away and kept. Writing the stories of Arthur and Laura Lee, the feelings of imaginary people had sharpened the blade of language in Laura so she could cut fast and deep into the hardest grain of her heart. She was amazed that it felt so easy. She realized and remembered the loneliness and the distance that an only child feels growing up with two successful professional parents, and she realized the suffering in her daughter's lonely childhood, the suffering that only appeared to be there in the last year before they had come to the farm.

In her young life, Amanda had never seemed to need to fight for her identity; she suffered invisibly, found a best friend in school to feel some personal intimacy, and moved from books to music to fill the endless hours her parents chose not to be at home. Laura had always wanted to be Amanda's friend, but she didn't really ever have the time, and time was the one thing a friend was never denied. Laura finally got it when she gave it. She told Eugene how it was Ian who made Amanda who she was, who gave her the time and attention she didn't have to spare.

"They are both funny and kind, unlike me." Laura confessed, "To think that I used to be jealous of how she would scream with pleasure when they wrestled on the floor. I used to sit there wishing that just once he would wrestle me to the ground and make me laugh until I cried, like he did with Amanda. And you know the weirdest thing of all, watching them wrestle used to make me wish he'd someday wrestle me down and make love to me until I screamed. I don't know why am telling you that."

When Laura looked up at the monitor and saw what Eugene had written she was shocked.

"Do you remember the time I did that to you?" Laura blushed. She hadn't remembered.

For Megan, adapting to the farm was so easy that she couldn't believe that a person could be so normal, so quickly, so completely. None of the other children seemed to know her history. No one seemed to want to pry. The Van Fleet children were used to foster families and they all knew, from their own experience, that asking questions about the past could open ugly cans of worms. Megan's old anger subsided in the hard work, finding herself in a place, for the first time in her life, where image and attitude wasn't everything. Every moment was so focused on the task to hand so that glory and credit and image seemed to be almost irrelevant. Megan's feelings for Tom, her emotional longing, the erotic dreams that were her own delicious secret, seemed to still her need to resist and rebel. For the first time in her life she had a purpose. Her purpose was to make Tom love her. She knew that for once, the offer of pleasure and her body wouldn't be anywhere nearly enough to win him. And Amanda's presence, in almost every social moment, cut off any direct attention she could give him to try to make him want her. With Amanda always there, it would be impossible to feed his ego without it being noticed. She was denied the two ways she had to make him want her.

In the month that he spent on the Internet looking for news about his friend Charles, Tom was almost out of touch with the social life on the farm because he spent so many of his free hours searching the world of refugees and war crimes. It was then that Megan had the idea to use the computer in the farmhouse to send him an email message asking him to renew their Internet friendship.

"I need an ally like your brothers and sisters. I need to find someone to talk to who understands me, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong about it, but Amanda is always there when I see you, and I just can't say the kind of stuff I want to when she's there." she wrote in her first message.

Tom had answered immediately that he would be glad to be her ally, even though it wouldn't be a formal thing like it was with his sister, whose sole ally he was supposed to be. Instinctively, Megan had found Tom's weakness; he couldn't resist someone who needed to be loved. He knew she wanted him to like her, perhaps even love her, but he thought he could keep such feelings safe and platonic, the Puritan ideals he'd always used to keep himself free of emotional complications working as they always had before. Tom didn't realize that keeping himself safe from emotional complications was impossible if the emotions were real. He was innocent enough not to know how complications wove their way between hopes and feelings the way cobwebs could gather unnoticed in the corners of rooms. Without knowing it, Tom would let Megan touch him intimately and distantly, raising the kind of lust only idealists know, the strange burning lust that can come from feeling someone stroking your cool shining armor.

Megan poured her heart out to Tom once again, talking about everything they shared: their race, its loneliness, her common history with his birth mother, the way they had both grown-up brown in a lily white world. She thanked him for the strength in his hands when he touched her and for the way he was leading her back to their roots, two cowbirds in a flock of warblers. Megan really fell in love with Tom as they wrote to each other every day, as she followed him into the private dreams of his heart. He knew what he loved and he knew what he wanted, and it made her think she could know that too. He told her about his dreams and his pride and she told him she wanted all those things too. He told her about the time before the farm and she told him about the drugs and the lost friends and the loneliness that was like a thirst that she thought would just never end. Headland and heartland and highland, he told of the homeland he dreamed he would one day come to see. They were two of a kind, cultural castaways, remembering a home they had never known. She stroked and polished his shining armor, telling how she would never be able to choose to love a weak man again.

"I thought I could love a junkie. How crazy is that? If I'd never met you, I'd never know how it feels to be around someone who's really a man. I never knew that I really wanted someone strong. I don't have a great history, I know. My mother was always attracted to weak men. The only men she ever brought home were such losers. I used to hate her boyfriends almost as much as she hated mine. Too weird, eh?"

When Megan, Amanda and Tom were together, Megan was all sweetness and light towards Amanda, especially when she realized that Tom was again keeping their Internet correspondence completely secret and private. It was then she knew that he felt it was, in fact, illicit. And that made it especially thrilling. At night, Megan would talk to her mother about the things she was saying to Tom. And in the course of their discussions, trying to understand how to win someone with such pure, impossible ideals, mother and daughter came around to discussing their mutual attraction to bad boys.

"I think there's something inside most women that's excited by men who won't follow the rules. Maybe it's because women depend on the rules too much, have always needed them to survive. It's only been my generation and yours where being a bad girl didn't get you run out of town, or worse. Men always had the choice of being bad. Women did it if they had no other choice. What made you want to be a bad girl?" Ann Marie asked her daughter.

"All the boys want bad girls now. "Megan replied to her mother.

"So what makes you want someone like Tom?"

"It's weird. He's so fucking gorgeous. He's the only boy I ever knew who made being good not some wussy kind of shit. He makes me almost think I could do it, be strong, you know?" Ann Marie did know. It was the way she felt around Ian. If he hadn't been her best friend's husband, she would've had serious intentions. It was a new insight about her feelings for Ian, but it was there. Then the question from her daughter hit her right between the eyes

"Did you ever know anybody like that, somebody that made you want to be strong?" Megan asked from under her warm covers. "Was my dad another bad boy?"

"When he drank too much. But he had a gentle side and I think I was the only one that he'd let see it. He was really smart and mostly quiet until he drank and then he either became the sexiest man I've ever known or one of the biggest assholes."

"What did he do for living?" Megan pursued softly.

"He was a lawyer. He worked on aboriginal land claims."

"So why didn't you make it with him? Did he hit you?"

"Just once. He was the one who dumped me. He said that I was too middle-class. He grew up poor. He said he liked ordinary people. He said I was only interested in sex and having fun." Ann Marie admitted, and her daughter could hear the hurt still resonating in her voice.

"Like me." Megan replied, "Until I came here, I didn't know there was anything else."

"I knew." Ann Marie replied, "I knew when you came into my life." There was a big pregnant silence.

"It must have made you sick to see me fucking up so bad." Megan finally replied.

"Well, you can imagine. I'm trained to help people with emotional problems and I've never been able to do a damn thing for either one of us." Ann Marie admitted, honestly.

"I never wanted your help. I never wanted to be good. I just wanted you'd to prove that you loved me. Funny, eh?"

"So how do I prove it?" Ann Marie asked nervously.

"I guess you have, coming here, believing I can actually get a good boy to love me."

"Wow!" Ann Marie replied, and it almost took her breath away to hear her daughter say what she did.

"Why do you think my dad never came around to see me?"

"Probably because he doesn't know you exist."

"Wow." Megan breathed, stunned at how much she didn't know and had never asked, never even wanted to ask. She didn't know what to think about her old secret bitterness then. She didn't know if it was something she should pass on to her mother or take on herself for always being afraid to ask, to hear the words that would say her father didn't want her. It took a long time before mother and daughter could sleep after they had talked that night.

Around the same time, one morning in late April, when the spring bulbs were at their most glorious, Sharon looked up from where she was massaging Eugene's heavy limbs and saw Laura and Amanda weeding the flowerbed just outside the sunroom window. It was now common for Laura to join Amanda for an hour in the afternoon so the two of them could work together.

It was when Amanda left for a short time, and Laura looked up and the two women looked into each other's eyes that the glass wall between them nearly shattered. There was such a thick stew of feelings reduced in each of their hearts, burning the two floating points of the triangle floating in the feelings they had for each other, that were impossible to measure or describe. Eugene lay there unmoved. Wonder and compassion, fear and its challenge, affection and pity were still so warm and fresh inside the two women. They were such strange rivals, each had an advantage the other couldn't match, and they both had the recollection of love's innocence that had quickly boiled away in both of their lives. As Sharon touched Eugene and felt his dead weight in her hands, she saw the look in his eyes and she never knew whether he guessed what she was thinking or if he somehow knew she was looking at Laura but, when Sharon finally turned to look at the computer screen, she saw the last message he had left her.

"She can't even imagine being as beautiful as you are." he had written and it made Sharon want to cry for the first time in a long time, and when she looked back to the garden at her rival, there were two tears in her eyes, and she was proud of them and wished that she could have told Laura what Eugene had just written to her. They were words she would always treasure for as long as she lived, and yet, and yet...

'What is it that you can imagine her being? How beautiful?' Sharon thought to herself, and a part of her was always sorry she never said it out loud, and a part of her was always glad that she didn't. The dormant desire and doubt in her flesh had lost all its nerves. Sharon was shaking.

Later that day, in the yellow warm spring day, Laura sat on her willow by the water and remembered the look that had passed between her and Sharon that morning, and it made her feel the detachment that also existed in desire, the connections that were never completed, the things that would always be unsaid and undone. The stronger she felt, the more fragile life seemed. The more she understood, the less she expected that anyone would really understand who she was. For the first time in her life, in the frenzy of spring exploding around her, Laura felt how rare and lovely it was to know stillness and peace.

That evening the pastels of orange and amber, alizarin, turquoise and gray deepened and flooded the high clouds overhead. The water flattened the colors in strange sweeping patterns that somehow flooded the breathless blue water that reached to the horizon and rose up to the sky. Nothing moved. Nothing stayed the same. Everything changed and it was impossible to see it happening. From where Laura sat, out past the horizon, an invisible lake boat was the only sign of humanity, its deep propeller turns moving like a heartbeat that worked hard to reach distant, invisible shores. Woom. Woom Woomm. Womb. Spring was so beautiful and warm that, by comparison, Laura, its newest visitor and member, felt very small, a little cold and alone. Yet still, for the first time in her life, she loved being alone. Time to do nothing, with nothing to say and no way to say it, just a part of creation and what it created inside her. She felt like her heart was about to break like a seed. It felt, for some reason, like she had been waiting too long.

In the week before Mother's Day, Rosie had asked Laura if she would like to come to visit his own home and have dinner and see his greenhouse where his roses were already blooming in the depths of an artificial summer. He had intended the invitation to be for Ian and Amanda and Tom as well, but Laura misunderstood and thought the invitation was less formal, less inclusive, and just meant for her.

"I should be finished the story I'm working on today. So tomorrow would be perfect. I can't imagine that Eugene would mind a day off from helping me with my book. I'd love to come to dinner." Laura had answered, and Rosie had looked a little surprised at her enthusiasm but told her that the next day would be fine. And so it was that her first evening meal away from the farm was with the man who was the quiet, practical backbone of the entire little family empire. Ambrose Bryant Van Fleet never said very much when he was working, and so Laura was interested in whether there was more to him, the way there seemed to be more to all the Van Fleets than met the eye. She wouldn't be disappointed.

Rosie gave her directions, and she left early the next afternoon so that she could go for a drive, and pick up some wine, and perhaps find an antique store in some little town where she could buy a nice present as thanks for her invitation. Her expenses at the farm were literally nothing, a fact that was almost embarrassing when Amanda brought her her weekly paycheck. So she decided to splurge and take the best bottle of wine she could find, and pick something special to try to personally thank just one of the members of the family who seemed to have everything. Laura, for whom shopping used to be a great recreation, had strangely and surprisingly lost interest in acquiring things. The desire for things had fallen away from her, and while she was shopping in the little antique stores in Picton, the kind of antique stores she used to love, she realized her own connections to things was falling away the way the nerves that were connecting Eugene to his muscles were falling way. Without things, how would a person know they had a life? How could a person live without their material connections? Her things were in Toronto and belonged to another place and time. 'Why was it always like Lou Gehrig's disease?' she thought, as she picked up a Bull's Eye glass pitcher and, for some reason, she thought about Ian and sex and realized she was also losing all the feeling between her legs. Since the ice races, she and Ian hadn't made love, and she hadn't missed it at all. 'The less you screw, the less you want to.' she thought to herself. She wasn't the Laura she knew. She was falling in love with two men at the same time, all over again, and she was stunned to know that such a thing was possible without feeling any sexual desire. Old feelings had become new feelings, for her husband and her first love. And there was no way to express it. Like life. Like goddamn life! The two words were moving inside Laura like an enormous crack in the foundation of her being.

Laura found Rosie's house where it had been built ten years before. Laura was surprised that it was very modern in design, glass and cement, in overlapping layers that flowed to the edge of the high escarpment looking over Picton Bay a hundred feet below. The view was spectacular, the Bay and its inlets looking more like Japanese Islands than something that was a part of one of the Great Lakes. Countless shades of green in unfolding spring leaves filled the many peninsulas over the sapphire blue water, sapphire water below an indigo sky.

A little stream wound its way and disappeared into one of the rooms in the house. The house was in fact built as a tribute, an homage to Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water. Laura would learn the house was jokingly called Running Water, the stream actually moving through the house until it emerged and spread over the limestone cliff, a dark shining stain falling forever, because a coffer damn controlled the spring flood. Along the entire south side of the house was a greenhouse designed as part of the architecture of the building, cedar pillars between huge plate glass sheets angled to maximize the sun.

When Laura parked by the side entrance of the house, she barely had time to think about what she was seeing or how she had never expected to find a Van Fleet living in modern house, before Rosie came out of the door to greet her. He was carrying two full glasses of white wine.

"Well here's a greeting, you don't get every day." Laura said as she took her glass and leaned in to kiss Rosie on the cheek. "I needed this."

"The liquor laws are a little looser here than the farm. I thought you might enjoy something for the palette while I gave you a little tour for all your other senses. I thought you might like to see my pride and joys." he said as his eyes pointed to the greenhouse.

"I was hoping to see your flowers. Is it all roses?" she asked, as she followed him.

The overwhelming perfume that fell from the door of the greenhouse was like walking into a convention of hundreds of invisible, rich old ladies. It almost knocked a person down. Through it, then into it, Laura followed Rosie into the tapestry of countless blossoms and emerald foliage. Pruned to perfection, each rose came out of a square wooden pot, each trained to a trellis of bamboo that rose to the full twelve-foot height of the greenhouse. Every blossom seemed perfect, and every color incredible. And, because Rosie's obsession was climbing roses; that was all there was in the greenhouse.

"You came at the best time." he said, with pride. "Our spring in here begins in the snow."

"This is spectacular. Do Van Fleet roses also have to aspire so high? " Laura teased and Rosie laughed as she toasted his pride and joys. "To Rosie's incredible flowers."

He told her they appreciated the toast and went on to explain his mission was to grow an ever blooming, floriferous, cold-hardy, pungently fragrant, disease resistant climbing rose.

"I want to grow the greatest red climber anyone has ever created." he said proudly while Laura was looking all around her at the most promising hybrids that Rosie had kept of the hundreds he had bred. And it was true, almost every rose was some incredible variation on shades of red.

He took her to the one corner of the greenhouse and introduced her to the rose he said began his passion. It was called, Guinee and had been created in 1937. He picked one of the dense blood black, full-blown roses and gave it to her, and when she smelled it, he smiled. He knew it was like smelling incredible red wine with overlaid fragrances of raspberries and musk.

"There is a part of her in every rose in this room." he told her.

The genetic history of each rose bush was printed on a laminated card, a family tree for each one fixed to its pot.

Rosie explained how roses were hybridized, the pollen from one forming seeds on another. The seeds were then raised to see what the new variety would become, but it wasn't too long into the lecture before Rosie could see that he had lost Laura to the smell of the one single flower in her hand. She couldn't have done anything better to please him than to completely forget everything he was saying, to forget he was even talking.

Inside the house, Laura's wine glass was re-filled as she greeted the children who she knew from when they came to the farm to go to school each weekday. Mick was seven, Elaine was six.

Unlike all of the Van Fleet children, the grandchildren just thought Laura was another person at the farm. They went off to play before dinner.

Laura was surprised when Rosie's ex-wife came into the room and greeted her. Just recently, Laura had learned that Rosie and Connie were divorced. Every time she had seen them at the farm with their children, they had seemed like a happy couple. It seemed the Van Fleets were even able to make divorces so amicable that it was hard to notice it had happened. Laura would soon learn that that wasn't the half of it. Rosie and Connie still lived under the same roof in the beautiful modern house Laura admired. Connie saw the surprise and the questions in Laura's eyes and explained the situation as she had done so many times before.

"When we decided we couldn't be married anymore, we also decided it would be a whole lot easier on the kids if we had separate bedrooms instead of separate houses."

"Amazing!" Laura replied, "So how do you tell that you're divorced?"

"No sex." Rosie replied.

"So, how do you tell that you're divorced?" Laura replied, and everyone laughed.

Laura asked for a house tour and her confusion only got deeper as she toured the beautiful rooms with the incredible modern furniture built in honey colored oak. There was a spare modern simplicity and elegance that she couldn't imagine in the home of a workingman. The most impressive room Laura saw was the dining room where the stream ran through the house, running over a bed of polished stones sunk in cement, and it looked as real as any stream in nature. Moss grew on the stones that rose out of the water and little minnows ran in the crystal currents.

After the tour, they sat and talked in the living room behind the solid glass wall that felt like it was almost hanging over the cliff. As they had walked through the house, Laura had realized that she was watching two people who obviously, completely enjoyed each other's company. Rosie and Connie were easier with each other than she and Ian had ever been. And they were divorced. It gave her a chill. As they sat and talked and drank a fine white Beaujolais, Laura was more and more fascinated by the relationship of a couple who seemed so compatible, so obviously in love. She tried to imagine the irreconcilable differences that made them divorce and still let them live together like it had never happened.

Before dinner, they had had enough wine for Rosie to ask Laura to stay overnight and use their guest room so they could enjoy the fine wine that would come with the dinner. Without much reluctance, Laura accepted. It was almost like going back to one of the sweet parts of her old life. Laura always loved dinner parties. Laura wondered if Rosie had known she was deciding whether to stop drinking because she was absolutely terrified of being in a car without feeling she was in complete control. Spinning wheels spun the threads of terror she could feel living inside her.

The lovely dinner by the stream progressed with Laura's intoxication. It felt so good to relax into it and let go. The children were polite and sweet and were gone to bed in soft cotton pajamas right after dessert. They kissed their parents and shook Laura's hand with all the sincerity their own soft tiny grasp could deliver. Laura was touched. Baby faces and beautiful translucent brown skin, clear crystal eyes were so lovely to Laura. It made her sentimental in the warm glow of the wine, and she remembered Amanda when she was in pajamas. She didn't understand how the Van Fleets could get children to be so socially self-conscious and confident at the same time. Amanda had been like that. She couldn't understand how that happened either. When she asked the question, Rosie's opinion was that it was because they went to school in the same class with children of all ages.

"I think it's obvious that when kids are at different stages of development in the same class, they have to learn to be patient and to see each other as individuals and respect each other for what they can do." Rosie said seriously.

"That may be true, but I don't think it's healthy that those children all belong to the same family." Connie replied.

Laura could see by the intensity in their eyes that this was a serious topic for both of them.

Connie went on to explain that the home schooling at the farm was one of the two issues she and Rosie couldn't resolve.

"We finally had to compromise or fight one another for custody, and I didn't want to try to go up against the Van Fleet money and power, so the kids are going to go to the family school until they're eleven and then they're going to go to school here in town." Connie explained into the cold stillness in Rosie's eyes.

"What do you have against the family school? It seems like an incredible school. I can't believe what a difference it's made in Amanda." Laura said to Connie.

"You see, I wouldn't have had a chance. Everybody thinks everything on the farm is so perfect. And everyone thinks that I must be crazy because I'm the only one who sees it. It's not real. The farm's not real. It doesn't prepare anybody for real life. You have any idea how hard it is to fit in to the rest of the world when all you know is that farm?" Connie replied passionately.

Rosie answered his wife with cold logic. "There isn't anyone who's left the farm that had trouble fitting in to the world, except Christa and she was losing control two years before she decided she had to go."

"You know what I mean. You know the Van Fleets always succeed, they have all the resources to go anywhere and do anything and be totally in control of whatever happens. You know very well that what I mean about not fitting into the world is that growing up on the farm makes the rest of the world seem small and unreal and unworthy. Van Fleets are only happy when they come home. It's like the world is a prison and the only time Van Fleets are free is when they drive down that lane way." Connie had turned her attention to Laura, "I'll bet it's already happened to you and Amanda. Can you imagine yourself going back to the world? And, just the fact that question makes sense is the best proof of just what I'm saying."

Laura knew exactly what Connie was saying. It was a feeling she had had from the moment she first drove down that farm lane way. She had been nervous, feeling that Connie was right, but she couldn't for the life of her understand what was wrong with what the farm was doing to her and Amanda.

"I know exactly what you're saying." Laura agreed, "It's always made me nervous. I think I've probably already lost Amanda to the farm. Tom was just the reason she needed to be sucked into the spell. But, how can you turn your back on something so rich and so wonderful and so personally satisfying?"

"I think your question implies the answer." Rosie answered her, "For me and my children and for so many others, it's the experience that made life satisfying and mean something. When you're at the farm, you're connected to people and you feel their connections to you. Where else is life like that? What's wrong with that? The reason people feel they belong at the farm is because they feel part of something bigger than they are. What's wrong with that?"

"That's just what people feel in a cult." Connie spoke to Laura. "Rosie hates it, but I call the farm the good Jonestown. If it wasn't for the poison Cool-aid; there wouldn't be much difference. And Sharon has just too much power and control over people's lives for it to be healthy. I don't want my children growing up knowing somebody that powerful is making decisions about their lives."

"That's ridiculous! My mother is so open and understanding that it makes the rest of us look like bigots."

"Rosie can't stand that anybody thinks St. Sharon isn't perfect." Connie replied acidly.

Rosie thought he saw that Laura was getting uncomfortable with the level of emotional intensity between him and his ex wife and so he apologized and told Connie it'd probably be better if they didn't re-fight their old battle once again. Surprisingly, Connie agreed and they seemed to both back down from their unassailable walls. Laura, however, as nervous as the emotional intensity made her, had wanted to pursue the discussion. It was something that was at the heart of her own life, and was probably the most crucial issue she had to face in deciding to come to live at the farm.

"I don't know what to say or what to do." Laura confessed, It's like each of you represents the two sides of the problem I really need to resolve myself. What am I supposed to do? I've never seen my family so happy and fulfilled. I've never been so happy and fulfilled. I've learned and felt more in the past months than I've learned and felt in my whole life. But I can't help thinking, and I can't help feeling that I really don't belong here. This isn't the life I would ever choose. This isn't the way I want to live. I know exactly what you're both feeling and I wish you had worked out an answer. It makes me very nervous and frightened to think that it could actually make two people like you get divorced. You love one another, for God sake. And that wasn't enough? That isn't enough? I don't understand why it isn't enough."

Now it was Rosie and Connie's turn to look nervous and frightened by the turn in the conversation. It was the question they both had left unresolved, the question they had simply moved into separate bedrooms. Laura's own wine induced passion was like an undertow that pulled them both back into the cold ocean of anger and fear.

"For me the bottom-line is the farm means more to Rosie than his own family." Connie said coldly.

"You really mean that you resent that the farm means more to me than your opinion of it." Rosie shot back. He was furious.

"Ya, that's right. You were married to me, not your mother. This is your home, not that farm. You'll just never break away."

Laura was embarrassed but excited by the argument. In the cold silence of anger, Laura quietly asked a terrible question.

"I wonder if I'm going to lose my husband and my daughter to the farm, whether it will mean more to them then I do?"

"You see! I'm not crazy!" Connie spat at Rosie.

"You're not crazy. You're just wrong. You're both wrong. The farm doesn't separate people; it connects them. Have you ever been closer as a family than you have since you came to the farm?" Rosie asked Laura.

"No. No, not at all. I don't know why I feel like I'm losing them. It's crazy. I just don't understand it."

"There is no answer." Connie said, at last. "I guess we're the last people that can help you. Most people don't even realize it's a problem. What are you going to do when you have to move away?"

"I don't know. I wish I did. If Tom and Amanda are really something permanent, the decision will be a whole lot easier. I don't know what we'll do without the farm." Laura replied, sounding almost broken hearted.

."And when my dad dies, it with be even harder for you to feel you belong at there." Rosie added gently.

It wasn't an easy thing to face. Eugene's death was a impending loss that took every bit of denial Laura was a capable of mustering. The look in Laura's eyes and the frozen expression on her face made both Connie and Rosie realize that Eugene's death wasn't a subject Laura could talk about. Connie, deftly, changed the subject or at least shifted it.

"The other thing that Rosie and I have never been able to reconcile about the farm was how much people had to give up to be a part of it. Rosie is one of my best examples. He has a degree in genetics. Can you imagine the incredible things happening in genetics right now? Can you imagine the things that are there to discover? He spends his life trying to grow the best climbing rose in his spare time. It seems like severe under achieving to me. It seems to me he could be doing a lot more with his life than running a lumber yard." The words were said in a soft almost wistful voice. The look of admiration she directed to Rosie was more a compliment than criticism and the exact opposite of what her words were saying.

"I like my work. I love my roses. I love my life." Rosie replied with finality.

"That's what everybody says that's part of a cult. But I won't go on. You've chosen what you want to do with your life. I'm sorry that I can't help thinking you could do so much more." Connie said to him, and turned and smiled at Laura. "I'm so glad you came. It's so great to have somebody who at least understands my side of things. Thank you."

"I understand only too well." Laura answered, "And I understand exactly how you feel Rosie. I wish one of us or all of us could find an answer."

"If you figure one out, you have to promise to let us know." Connie replied.

"Maybe I'll ask Sharon." Laura replied and they all laughed.

"Maybe you should ask my dad?" Rosie said when the laughter stopped.

"I could. I thought about it, but I'm just too scared of what he would say."

Laura was surprised that Rosie nodded in understanding and that Connie knew exactly what she was saying as well.

Laura felt like a great weight lifted from her heart, being able to share her deepest problem with two people who understood exactly what she was feeling. It was a feeling she knew she wouldn't ever be able to face with Ian. The farm had him enthralled even more than it had Amanda. Rosie apologized for the argument over the dinner table and Laura said that he shouldn't feel that way.

"It was great to hear two married people arguing again. Ian and I used to fight all the time. Since we came to the farm, nothing. No fights; no make up sex. We live in the Sunshine. We laugh every day. God, how I miss those fights."

They went back to the living room and soft candlelight was all the illumination in the room. Beyond the glass wall was the black bay, and the moonlight lying flat on the water, and the clusters of lights that were the houses beside the black shorelines. It looked very much like the view from where Laura used to park with Eugene long ago, the same place she had parked with George Marshall the night of the high school reunion when the moments began that led to her place in the soft chair were she sat. The wine kept flowing and the conversation got lighter and Laura felt like a smart, tipsy middle-class lady again, not someone pretending to be a part of the capitalist Walden that was the farm. The conversation shifted to Rosie's brothers and sisters and Laura learned about his sister Christa's nervous breakdown, of her bi-polar mood disorder that had begun long ago when she was just fourteen years old. She was a poet and so sensitive to pain that she couldn't seem to bear any suffering in the world and couldn't help but take it to her heart. The matter-of-fact killing that was part of raising animals for food was most often more than she could bear. When it came to human suffering, she was often inconsolable. She wasn't allowed to even watch the nightly news. It was after Eugene's diagnosis that she seems to get worse. It was only the last summer, after her meeting the poet Sawyer Strickland that she seemed to lose her ability to control her own actions.

Rosie left out the fact that Christa also seemed to be sexually promiscuous since she was in her early teens, and didn't seem to discriminate between anyone, old men or young boys, or even girls and women. Connie wasn't shy about filling Laura in, and explained to her about Christa's sexual promiscuity. "She always said that sex was the best thing she had to give. She always said it was too underrated." Connie said in obvious wonder.

"Underrated as a curse." Laura replied. "Ninety percent of the stupid things people do in their lives would never happen if it wasn't for sex."

"That may be just a little low." Rosie replied, and they all laughed.

"She's really a stunning woman. " Laura added, and both her hosts nodded to the obvious fact.

They talked until late, when the phone rang and interrupted them. Rosie thought it might be someone checking on Laura. He was right. He brought her the cell phone with shock on his face, and then Laura heard Amanda crying uncontrollably on the other end of the phone. It seemed that Laura and Rosie had both forgotten to tell anyone that she was going to dinner, and when the car was gone and she was not back before dark, Amanda was irrationally certain that her mother had been in a car accident again. No one had thought to ask Eugene, who was the only person who knew Laura wouldn't be writing with him that night. The fear and the panic pouring out of Amanda through her tears frightened her mother. She didn't know what to say. She didn't understand the hysterical reaction to her being missing. She wasn't used to explaining where she was going and when she was going to be home. Gently, Laura explained to Amanda that she would be staying the night at Rosie's house. She didn't want to drink and drive.

"You could have phoned. Don't you think I have a right to know if you're going to be home. Don't you realize how much I was going to worry? Don't you care about what I'd think had happened? And I'm going to have to sleep alone in that cabin. I'm going to have to sleep with no one else there. I can't sleep alone!"

Laura apologized again and again for her inconsideration, and slowly Amanda stopped crying. When Laura suggested that she get Tom to come and stay with her, the silence at the farm was like the silence in the walk-in cooler in the kitchen when the door closed in the cold.

"I think maybe I'll ask Ann Marie if I can sleep next-door tonight." Amanda replied at last.

"That's a good idea." Laura agreed and told Amanda that she'd be home in the morning.

Amanda then whispered to her mother that she loved her, and Laura fought back strange tears when she whispered it back.

Rosie and Connie had watched uncomfortably as Laura had tried to calm her hysterical daughter. Amanda always seemed so strong, and to know she could panic so quickly, so easily, gave them all serious pause.

"It's interesting that when you were saying goodbye to Amanda, you said you would be home in the morning. Does the farm really feel like home?" Rosie asked softly.

"My God, I did. I'll take it as a warning." she said, and Connie laughed.

But, as Laura thought about it, she knew her words were more than a figure of speech. Rosie was right. He had won his argument.

When she got back to the farm after breakfast, Laura was surprised to see Sharon waiting for her on the porch.

"Come sit for a minute." Sharon asked, and Laura did that, wondering what was going on.

"So what did you think of Connie?" Sharon said, curiously.

"I liked her." Laura replied.

"Did she talk about the good Jonestown?"

It was obviously a wound that Laura saw was easily opened. Her having had dinner with Rosie and Connie seemed to have stung Sharon. Her face was as hard as Laura had ever seen it.

"She did talk about the good Jonestown." Laura answered, "Her and Rosie seem to have gotten past it."

"If you call getting divorced getting past it." Sharon shot back. "Nobody understands her. I think she's obsessed. What does she want from us, to abandon our lives, to sell the farm? The good Jonestown! It's insulting. She's ripped Rosie apart, and for what? So her kids can go to public school?"

"Sharon, you're still really mad at her. It's okay. They worked it out. It doesn't seem that you have." Laura answered, honestly.

"It's true, I can't get over it. She's my son's wife and it hurts so much to know how she feels about our lives. It's so unfair. I suppose she went on about I'm the cult leader. Every community is a cult for god's sake. That's what a community is; individuals getting their value from the things they share with the other members of the group. That's what a family is. What are you, if you don't belong to something bigger than yourself?"

It was amazing to Laura to see Sharon so angry and hurt after what must have been a very long argument with Connie. Laura was surprise that she actually wanted to reassure Sharon of her loyalty, and so she told her what Amanda had said about the farm.

"Amanda says she didn't think anyone really ever leaves the farm."

Sharon smiled, reassured, as Laura realized the irony of what she was saying.

The next Saturday was the day they let Tundra free. The McCalls, Ann Marie, Megan and Tom gathered in the granary stall.

For three weeks, Tundra had been catching mice that Megan had caught in little live traps in the barn. It was amazing how quickly the little life within the granary stall was over once it was free on the floor below the big white bird. A little scream and a rustle of soft wings and the sound of tiny bones breaking and another life was over, vanished, unmourned. It had only taken Megan a few days before she completely lost any sentimental feelings for the mice in the similar detachment of surgeons and soldiers and artists and torturers, all those who had to face death and suffering and not feel the suffering of those they touched. For predators that had to kill to survive, death could sometimes be delivered with a merciful and painless speed when life or death were the exclusive choices. Death was just the closing of a single yellow talon.

Megan had spent her hour of solitude every day with Tundra, talking to him about her feelings, telling him the things she wouldn't and couldn't tell anyone in else in the world. The day of Tundra's freedom was a loss Megan couldn't even begin to describe. When he flew free her heart would once again be in the solitary granary cage of her deepest loneliness.

When they took the beautiful bird, tethered to Tom's wrist, out of the granary, Megan stayed behind, explaining that she just couldn't bear to see him go. And when the silence fell when the sound of the movement on the wooden floors vanished, uncontrollable sobs exploded in Megan's chest. It was so bad that she could barely catch her breath. She had never cried so hard in her life. Tundra was being given his life; Megan felt the loss like it was death. What was part of her was gone forever. Where beauty had been was now an empty wooden box. It was a death for Megan. It was death's dislocation. Knowing he was free and going to the arctic where he belonged was just no consolation to her loss. The only small distant thought that consoled her was that maybe, just maybe the white beautiful wings would bring him back and she would be there to see him with Tom the next year.

Outside, everyone stroked the soft feathers and said goodbye and the tears in Amanda's eyes made everyone cry except Ann Marie. It was goodbye. She knew it was never to look in those eyes again. It was never to have a hand on cool beautiful feathers. It was never to know something so free and beautiful again. From death to life, Tundra had been saved, and his freedom was nevertheless a clotting, collective pain; one treasured life flying eventually to a distant anonymous death.

Over the days and weeks to come, Megan and Amanda and even Laura, who had all cared for Tundra, knew what it was like to have a beautiful quiet presence vanish and have a time and place that once mattered become just an empty wooden bin where only Megan returned every day with her suffering. Loss could have a place as well as a time. Loss also had a familiarity connected to ordinary things that a person could only see when something or someone that mattered was gone. Part of a day could vanish with something or someone you loved and it was a part of a day that could never be recovered. When Tom lifted his arm into the air, Tundra rose and flew straight away from them, his head turning back all the way around, the beautiful gold bands of his eyes, breathtaking. It was over. He was gone. There was no way to know if he would ever really come back.

Tom went back into the barn to tell Megan about Tundra's release and found her, still crying, her head leaned against the wooden wall beside where Tundra had perched. When she turned to look at Tom, the tears that had calmed came back in the dry heave of a sob, and she waited for him to come to her, and he did that, and he took her in his arms and held her close and he could feel the sobs behind her breasts pressing into him. And when she looked at him and their brown eyes locked into their hearts, they couldn't stop. They kissed. Their senses reeled with what they were doing, and then Tom broke the kiss, and he just held her head to his chest, and she could hear his heart beating so fast, running away. And then desire turned to denial in a strange, silent calm when Tom realized that Megan was no longer crying. He took her hand and led her out of the wooden room but he let her hand go before they went out of the barn door.

The next day was Mother's Day and it was, of course, one of the sweetest celebrations that happened at the farm. Over the Sunday dinner, each of the Van Fleet children heard Sharon read what they'd written on the Mother's Day card they'd made by hand. Sharon accepted no commercial cards, period. Mother's Day was also the only day Sharon wasn't allowed to do one moment of work. It was also the day she wasn't allowed to tell anyone else what to do. She could make requests of a personal nature for personal indulgences and treats, but she wasn't allowed to be responsible to or for any of the practical things that were so much a part of her life.

Amanda had made her mother a card. It was just the simple impression of her own lips pressed to folded watercolor paper. Underneath she had written, 'I will never be able to tell you how much I love you, but I do.'

Megan had also made her mother a card that surprised Ann Marie by what it said. 'To my mom, Without you, I'm nothing!'. Love, Megan.

Each of the Toronto mothers also received a present with their card.

Tom had taken both daughters into the Walnut Woods, with the lime green leaves unfolding high above. They walked for an hour with their heads down looking in the leaves, moving them with a stick, looking for the present for their mothers. It took an hour, and their eyes had to adjust to looking among the leaves, but eventually it was Megan who found two little brown silk packets encrusted with bits of dried leaf. They were the cocoons of two Luna moths. They took them home and place them each in a cardboard box with dried twigs leaning across between the sides, wire mesh folded down over the top.

Both mothers and both daughters were aware of the metaphor, the Caterpillar turned into the lovely creature that would soon fly. But none of them had seen it, as Tom had done many times. The Van Fleet children had often seen the huge green Caterpillars that fed on the poison leaves of the Walnut trees. They knew firsthand what metamorphosis really was. And it was Megan and Amanda who checked every day for the month until the beautiful green Saturnalia moths finally emerged.

That night, before the coffee house singing was anywhere near being done, Laura whispered into Ian's ear while they were dancing that she was feeling really hot.

"We could sit for a while. If you want, we could go outside? "he said, considerately.

"I'm feeling a different kind of hot." she whispered, and she looked at him with dancing eyes.

"Then I think we should blow this pop stand." he said with a grin, and Laura took his hand and led him out of the coffee house and they walked in the moonlight down the lane toward the cabin.

The warm spring night was delicious and quiet and no birds sang.

When they got to the right turn to the cabin, Laura said she wanted to go down to the beach.

All Ian said was, "Wow!"

They walked along the beach with the diamond flakes of the stars spread over the black water, the greasy slab of moonlight flowing almost to their feet.

When they got to Laura's willow, she patted the flat trunk and Ian jumped up and sat in front of her. The dead silence, the black beauty and the romantic moment was so lovely that Laura ran her hand sensuously over Ian's thigh. She moved her hand higher and closer and with the gentlest touch she slowly made him aroused. It had been such a longtime. Such a long time! She could hear his breath, and then the little groan he always made.

"My man." she whispered.

"My lady." he replied.

They both laughed softly. And then her fingers slid open his zipper and then she moved her fingers and firmly released him to the moonlight. She looked up and, in the moonlight, she was beautiful, and she looked so young and lovely as she took him inside her warm mouth. He groaned much louder than he usually did. They were still connected. An old desire could even rekindle in the cool air, in the cool wetness of his hard, soft desire. After a long delicious two minutes, she took his hand and had him jump down to the sand and she undid his belt and slid down his slacks and undressed him and got him to lie down and lie back. She stood over him and undressed completely as she moved over him and moved down to join him and take him inside her as she made love to him, and she hadn't been kidding, she was hot. She was so passionate, so vocal, in such a sexual frenzy that she didn't see the question in his black eyes. 'Where had all this come from?'

It was all so new and spontaneous, and in a way so different an experience, with old levers of their coupling completely unmoved, and new ones discovered after all those years. It somehow felt so alive, it literally took their breaths away. It felt so different, that sex actually felt young and new again. And they felt they actually belonged to one another. It was so tender, the moment belonging to the very place where they lay, to the darkness, to the distant stars, to the rising moon, and to the enfolding farm. And when they came, they came together, and it was shamelessly loud in the absolute silence where even the water edges didn't lap at the sand with its wet tongue. It was like an excruciatingly beautiful cramp letting go, and Laura fell forward with her breasts on his chest, and her hair was like a thin halo around her face as Ian watched the moonlight stream through it and she was surrounded by the infinite canopy of stars. While they dressed, Ian pointed to the place in the sand where she had cast his body: his buttocks and elbows and heels between her knees and toes and hands, a dark shadow embedded in the pliable earth.

"We certainly made an impression." Ian said, teasing her.

"You certainly did." a strange male voice replied right beside them and they both jumped in surprise and shock. The voice had traveled across the smooth bay from where the first sailboat of the year was anchored in the shadows of Haystack Island.

"My pleasure." Ian replied in a normal voice.

"That's clear." the normal male voice answered, but the McCalls felt violated by the intrusion into their privacy. The funny moment had spoiled the intimate moment they had shared.

Ian and Laura didn't say very much as they walked back to the cabin, holding hands like teenagers, but the voice had taken something away, something that should have been theirs alone.

Ian told Laura that Sharon should rent out that spot by the Willow so poor rich city couples could come for the best sex they'd ever had in their lives. He couldn't remember a happier moment between them than before the strange voice had spoken.

"Middle-aged crazy." was all Laura said. She didn't want to talk.

And neither one of them would have believed for a moment, if they could have seen the future, that that was the last time they would make love for many months.

The next afternoon there was great excitement because Tom had asked that the whole family gather at the beach at precisely four o clock. He had left the farm after lunch, all alone, and it was all very mysterious. When the whole family and all the interested visitors gathered at the beach, they could soon see a strange craft suddenly come around the point of the bay. As it got closer and everyone could make out the details of the very strange looking boat, everyone was shocked by what they were seeing.

As it swiftly approached, it looked like some wild fortress from a bad movie about future warrior societies. It was long and thin and encased in redwood planks, its slatted sides going from one end of the boat to the other. It was like a boat designed by twelve year old boy discovering power and aggression. People were either laughing or talking or completely aghast as the boat came towards the beach, and everyone could see Tom at the wheel, and he didn't slow down one bit as the boat drove itself into the sand right next to Laura's horizontal black willow.

Everyone had walked along the beach to where they could see the boat was going to land and they could see Tom sitting at the steering wheel, his eyes absolutely alive with excitement. And when the boat was grounded for a moment and everyone had gathered around like a choir, suddenly the dark sides began to fall from the hydraulic chains that supported them, and the boat opened like a wooden flower, and they were all looking at the most beautiful, long, sleek house boat anyone had ever seen. It was Bauhaus at sea. While everyone was transfixed by the boat, Ian and Laura couldn't help noticing the impression they made in the sand the night before that was still there, the dried sand flowing in along the sides beginning to fill in its depth. Anyone looking could see the intensity of what they had done when they had joined. Ann Marie was the only one who caught Laura's eyes and directed them toward the little sand pit of desire. She knew, and was jealous.

The redwood walls descended along the two sides of Tom's boat made eight-foot wide porches that made the long boat seem suddenly wide and secure. The roof was a shed roof of black shining photo-electric cells that supplied the power for the boat. The walls were glass and steel and, underneath its redwood exoskeleton, the ugly old war boat was actually a beautiful Ultra-modern home. Tom came out where everyone was gathered and he told everyone to wait while he put up the iron porch railings that were folded down against the floor. They clicked into place with modern precision and when Tom came back to greet his first visitors, he manually unfolded a gangplank so everyone could come aboard.

When every one of the Van Fleet children turned eighteen, they were allowed to design their first home, and it was understood that the family would pay and help in any way it could to make it so that the house had no debt of any kind. Eugene had taken the wisdom of his father and his father's father in his determination that his children would never owe any part of their future to a bank. Tom had been very secretive about his house plans and only Eugene and Sharon, who wrote the checks, knew that Tom had commissioned a barge to be built in a Port Dalhousie dry dock, which was then sent to Belleville where it had been outfitted as a modern apartment.

Tom led the tour through the house with obvious pride and excitement, Amanda and Megan following close behind, there eyes dancing in harmony to his. It was obvious in the detail of the design that Tom spent many hours planning his boat house. The living room and kitchen took a little less than half of the space; the rest was also open but could be divided into separate bedrooms as he demonstrated the use of two sets of Walnut pocket doors that were slabs of shimmering polished beauty. A Murphy bed folded out of the wall in the master bedroom and a down-filled sofa folded out into a bed at the back of the boat where it looked out the patio door to the horizon. When the sleeping places were folded away, it left a wonderful clear open space that was perfect for a party.

Tom showed the small bathroom that had walls made entirely of solid Walnut panels. There was a granite floor with matching fixtures. The shower was also glass and granite. The big bathroom window was a floor to ceiling opalescent glass landscape of green earth and brown trees and blue skies and white clouds. The whole houseboat was shimmering in light inside. It was all breathtakingly beautiful and would have been at home in the richest sections of the most exclusive marinas in the world. As everyone gathered at the far end of the boat, Tom explained what he said was the real genius of his house.

"I had it made six inches shorter and six inches narrower than the big containers that go on ships all over the world. For a few thousand bucks, I can just have my house pushed into a container and put on a truck and taken anywhere in North America or I can have it put on a boat in Montreal and shipped any place in the world. When it gets there, all I have to do is have it winched out at a boat launch and pushed in the water and I'm home. What do you think?" he said to everyone and everyone applauded, but the answer came most enthusiastically from Megan and Amanda. This was one hell of a romantic dream. Tom was looking straight in the eyes of two very star struck dreamers. They were imagining this would be their house with him.

The house was a great success, and Tom had planned a party to celebrate, and so he produced, from the refrigerator and cupboards, drinks and cheeses and snacks, and he pushed buttons on a black remote control and music came on, and it was Amanda singing, 'There's a Place For Us.' Amanda actually groaned from the sensual pleasure of his house and his gesture to her. Megan was green with envy.

Ian and Laura and Ann Marie and Megan were enthralled with the house. It was a middle class architectural wet dream. Ian couldn't believe that this was the house rustic Tom had created. The Toronto families were so jealous; they couldn't even begin to hide it. When Ian asked Tom where he got the idea for his house, Tom told him that he wanted to build a house that could take with him when he moved to British Columbia to be with his people.

"I want to be able to put this down and feel like I'm home. The problem was simple; to make a portable house I could take with me. The barge idea came because I wanted it to be strong enough to take ocean waves." Tom explained.

"What do you think native people will think of your house?" Amanda asked shyly.

"I don't know. I hope they love it like I do." Tom replied, cutting off any negative thoughts about his house.

Ian told him that if he wanted to rent it until then, he knew many people who would be thrilled to do so, and pay enormous amounts of money to take it up the Saint Lawrence.

Tom explained the inboard motor had enough power to take it anywhere at considerable speed for its size and weight.

"You can take it through the locks and go all the way to Lake Superior, or down the Mississippi, to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, if you want."

"There's a business here." Sharon said. Eugene, in his wheelchair, in his eyes, was obviously incredibly proud of his son.

Before the party was over, Amanda asked Tom if he was going to move into his new house and he told her that he was thinking that maybe she and Laura would like to move into it for the summer.

"You could live in the style to which you're accustomed." he teased, but she could see in his eyes that he was also absolutely serious.

When she went to ask Laura what she thought about moving into the boat house, Amanda was first surprised, and then absolutely delighted that Laura loved the idea. Ian, who had been standing beside her, actually shouted for joy when Laura agreed to do it. Amanda lifted right onto her toes in delight when her mother agreed, and when she looked back and saw Megan, who was still standing with Tom, she looked like someone had hit her from behind.

Finally Tom gathered everyone outside and produced a bottle of Dom Perignon and asked his mother to Christen the boat with the hundred and fifty dollar bottle of champagne. He whispered in her ear as she took the bottle, and she then bopped it against the steel side as she said the words, "I Christen you, The Friendly Cove." The bottle bounced back like an ax from an ironwood tree. Everyone laughed and she put her shoulders into the next swing, and the black bottle smashed, and white sparkling foam spread away over the deck. Amanda quickly bent down to pick up the glass. Megan didn't move. The party went on until everyone finally went back to the house and Ian reluctantly headed back to Toronto.

The next day it rained and Laura and Ann Marie got quite wet moving things from the cabin to the boathouse. Ann Marie soon mentioned the dissolving sand impressions and wanted the details of the previous night's passion, and Laura simply told her it was spectacular, and then told the story of Ian saying they made quite an impression, and the voice from the invisible boat answering him. They really laughed.

The two old friends had a good time moving up two centuries. Ann Marie admitted to being very jealous. The idea of a microwave oven and electric lights, a toaster and a coffee machine and a shower so close at hand, all with an incredible stereo was really something to envy.

"It sure will be nice for you to be a modern lady again." Ann Marie pointed out." I'm not much of a one for manual labor, myself. If it wasn't for Megan, I'd be out of here, like that."

"You haven't looked very happy since you got here." Laura agreed, "It must be terrible to have to give up your work."

"I can't believe how much I miss all those neurotics, all those crazy dysfunctional lives. And coming here means really having to give up all hope of getting laid. You don't want to lend me Ian for a little walk along the beach?"

"No. Not this week."

"That's what I thought" Ann Marie replied and laughed, but she was more than a little serious about the question. She was actually, brazenly admitting what she was really feeling about Ian. If Laura knew it, she might watch her more carefully; she might feel more reluctant to actually take the chance to leave him alone with her. Her little teasing confession was emotional insurance against what she really wanted to do, although she was sure that if she had actually hit on Ian she would have received just an embarrassed rejection. But it felt nice in a way, admitting to her friend she still had desires, and her husband was definitely worth thinking about. Where fantasy met desire, there was no telling what might happen. It was good to have some insurance, if you could afford it.

It was that week that Laura decided to answer another of Eugene's first questions. She would tell him about her husband. And of course that led to her life, to marriage, parenthood and work, work, work. She had no idea of what she was beginning.

"I think I've always were been reluctant to talk about Ian because, in the ways that matter, I don't compare very well. Ian's soft, I'm hard. He's funny; I'm serious. He's organized; I'm a mess... well, spontaneous. He's a great father, I'm well, not that great at motherhood." she began, and each day, in the little time they had, she went on talking, knowing there was so much to say that was so hard to explain because it went so deep into what she was and who he wasn't, what she'd done with her life and what she hadn't lived up to. She tried to be clear and honest.

"We fit like opposites, mostly. Where he's strong, I'm weak. Where he's weak, I'm strong."

Laura was surprised when words came on the monitor and Eugene replied, 'Like you and me.'

"No. Not like you and me. You have to stop bringing up old times, if you want me to do this." she chided him.

'I wasn't talking about old times.' Eugene replied.

"Yes you are." she said emphatically, and then told him that he was going to have to shut up and listen.

Eugene typed OK with his eyes.

"I think for me and Ian, like a lot of professional people, love is this kind of contract where emotions get traded for logistical support. Romance gets to be like a really nice restaurant you can only afford to visit a few times a year. We're too busy, too engaged, too ambitious, too greedy, too realistic or just too shallow to try to believe that romance can really survive day to day. Still, sex has always been good, on and off. It's all we can really stand of romance."

She sounded wistful.

"Sex is like fast food. Romance is going around being hungry for recipes you see in glossy gourmet magazines. I think Ian still dreams of those glossy romantic dinners, I really don't. I guess I never have."

So ended her preamble, her address to the judge and jury of one.

What followed that night, and many nights to come, was the confusing, circumstantial, contradictory evidence of the consequences of living with unrealized expectations and feelings. Amanda was exhibit A for the defense and also for the prosecution, the best evidence of how they succeeded and how they had failed, why they should be proud of their life choices and why they should be ashamed of themselves for having done so much less than they could have with her and for her.

Laura knew Amanda was the beautiful daughter that the two of them, especially her, had been too busy to appreciate or know. Amanda constantly affirmed and destroyed any romantic ideas that either of them had about marriage, children and parenting, and yet she was the most precious things either of them had ever held in their lives. She had bonded them together and torn them apart. She was their living, breathing personal contradiction.

"If it hadn't been for Amanda, we wouldn't be so close, but our lives would be so much easier and the walls between us that we built because of her, are ones that I don't know we'll ever take down. He's been a good father but not a great father like he should have been, like you've been. And I've been a disaster at being a mother, and I don't know if he'll really ever forgive me for that. It's like you bring home a beautiful puppy and it's so much fun and then you just get busy and leave it home all the time, and somehow it grows up to be Lassie. I don't understand how we did it."

'Lassie loves you.' Eugene replied.

"Which almost makes it worse." Laura answered.

That night and the next night, Laura rolled back through the years of her marriage as she remembered and told Eugene things she had never told anyone, even Ann Marie, or even her own too busy self in the long years with Ian. Her modern marriage had been years of territorial pissing contests to mark the personal territories of their psyches that neither of them had any real interest in taking from one another. Then there was all the ways and times and places they had to learn the personal, individual considerations of life, and to learn to change when changing was nonnegotiable, and be prepared to live with what the other person was when they were unable to change at all. It all came back to her. First it was all the negative things, all the guilt and anxieties, all the things that were said that shouldn't have been said, all the things that one should have apologized for doing, all the things that were truly beautiful and sweet that were mostly left unacknowledged and untold in the strange muffled kind of spite only married people know.

Then Laura described the way they would fight and, by that time she finished describing their battles, she felt a nostalgia that was truly palpable. She described the wit and the stubbornness, the word play and the petty absurdity that was day-to-day conflict in marriage. She wondered, out loud, if she'd ever have that back. Since the farm, they didn't seem to know how to fight anymore. And she didn't, for the life of her, know or understand why that should be or why she missed it. Eugene said he missed the fighting too. Laura was shocked that he had had battles with the Perfect Lady Sharon, but didn't dare ask what they fought over.

Then Laura went on and told about the centerpiece of a modern professional relationship; work, work, work. They were the good times. It was because of work that they needed mutual support for their professional egos. And work was life. That was when you really needed someone to be there for you. She told Eugene the truth.

"You know, work's strangely addictive, the way sex is when you're young. It's such an irony that we began as flower children wanting sex, music and cheap drugs, and ended up addicted to work like our parents. All anybody talks about is having enough money to travel or have a tremendous cottage, and all anybody does is work. And all it is is moving money and egos back and forth, as fast as you can, and they move faster and faster all the time. Every moment seems so crucial, but when you look at it from here, it's all such a waste of time. How can people get so involved in such an empty life? But it is such a rush."

Seeing the city from the farm looked so frantic and so sad, everybody desperate to have enough to prove that they really were somebody. But, she missed it. She'd realized the book she was working on was just the same, it was going to prove she really was somebody. The difference was that she was really going to believe it, if she succeeded. Writing a really beautiful book was important. It really would make her someone. The brass ring would be hers.

As her nightly soliloquy proceeded, Laura lay back on the pillow beside Eugene and just talked, and she felt herself open like Tom's boat, letting down its dark porches. She sat back and got comfortable and let herself look back over her life as she told Eugene stories of ordinary moments and beautiful experiences, disappointments and frustrations. Like the wall of photos in the Van Fleet dining room, Laura showed him the album of her heart, and even showed him the most candid pictures and told him about them. And the more she talked, the more she trusted him. And it was strange that once she was finally worn out, talked out, she felt warm and alive and excited by her life.

Laura talked about her work: the stories, and the characters, lunches and laughing, the transience of everything; friends and projects that came then went. The city was a moveable feast that was set in time like a buffet. And liquor was the social lubricant that smoothed the rough edges of life's contradictions; and made for easy, self-serving connections of just doing lunch or dinner or a party of more than one. Laura missed the old, soft buzz that had been part of her daily life. She could see all the busy venues of her past and she described them for Eugene.

"People come and go, in rooms, talking of market share and phone calls from mothers, and diets, and the real people that matter. Chasing attention, not giving or getting enough of it, it all disappears like dew and hangs around like heavy fog. Who's hot, who's not, the sweat pouring down from your morning workout so you can keep looking good, or at least younger by ten years, if you're lucky. Begging the choosers to want what you have, trying to fluff a sagging career so it looks like it's maybe going to last. Actors and authors, publishers and reviewers, always trying to crack the A list and stay there. You know what it's like to have someone with real power just smile at you? You know what it's like to dream about them taking your calls, and the rush when they call you?"

"It's sweet people and pricks in a life-boat full of money. It's trying to get your hands on one of the oars. You have any idea of the rush in getting someone to really have a chance to grab the brass ring of the week? And you do it all so you can go first-class to St. Bart's or Rio, to curving beaches and sensual food and rooms with lush views where sex is part of the gross national product. You do it all for dirty weekends away where you might meet someone cool and connected in Nantucket, or Paris, or Rome. You live for three days, tasting food that smells sweeter than money, sleeping in beds with sheets as cool as an attitude. It's easy come and easy go and all so easy when you have the money to go and really indulge yourself. It's the diamond life, as hard and alive with facets of fire as anything you can imagine. The city sure ain't the farm." Laura told Eugene everything, just like it was and would be, her hour with him vanishing in her memories.

Eugene listened, only occasionally asking a question to make her go on. He was her perfect listener, and only when he was dead would she realize the opposite was also true. It was as she was talking about her family and her life that Laura finally let herself quietly admit to herself that she loved the dying man beside her. It was all so bittersweet. The one question she didn't answer was the one that went to the core of her being. 'Tell me about you.' Eugene had asked, and she had known when she had read the question that he meant something very different than telling him about her life. She had told him her feelings about all the things that had happened, she didn't dare to even begin to attempt the ultimate question. Who was she, after all?

She had always believed that question belonged to fools and philosophers, and not to her. But there was something about Eugene asking her the worst of all simple questions that made her know that the question was one he believed she could answer, and she knew because he loved her, that he believed that the answer wouldn't disappoint either one of them. To Laura, it was the absurd irony of love, people actually believed they could communicate what they were, and that it mattered. And there she was, going on and on. When she kissed Eugene goodnight each evening, she felt a fluttering cloud of sulfur butterflies inside her when she looked into his eyes, but she couldn't bring herself to say what she felt. She wanted very much to tell him she loved him. But she didn't do that, in words.

It was the following week that the bleeding heart of Europe flowed on to the farm. Refugees from Kosovo had come to the air base at Trenton, a half an hour away, and Tom had been among the first ones there, looking for someone who might have any news of his doctor friend Charles. When he came back, he was still stunned in the shock wave of the little ripple of chaos that had eddied into an army barracks from half a world away; he was overwhelmed, meeting the real people and faces from the teeming camps made real by television cameras on the Albanian border. He didn't know what to do. His mother did. Sharon was on the phone and found out that the refugees needed clothes and toys, most of all. The army supplied everything else behind secure wire fences. Three quarters of the clothes in the big walk-in closet were packed in boxes and in the Cube van and were at the air base within hours. Toys were a problem. The Van Fleet children rarely had any commercial toys. Sharon had to get out her checkbook and delivered the toys and clothes with Tom and Ann Marie. The other thing they said they needed desperately were psychologists who could help the latest traumatized victims of Europe's old recurring nightmare.

At the air base, they took the clothes and toys and turned the truck around and told them they would call Ann Marie when they had set up a system for counseling the refugees. The psychologists they needed didn't have logistical support to do their work. Having enough translators would take time. It was in the chaos of command decisions that Sharon drove her wedge of determination over the phone lines and found the person who was responsible that moment, and got five families released to her care. They were coming to the farm to live in the cabins that were used by the foster families. The last problem the military had was that they weren't equipped to decide who would be released to Sharon's responsibility. Ann Marie was Sharon's answer to that. She was the one who was trained to make such decisions, a psychologist would know such criteria, at least that was what she said to the Captain at the other end of the line. Ann Marie was stunned by what Sharon was telling her she had to do.

"What does anyone know about choosing the best candidates to release from a refugee environment? What were the criteria for their needs? How do you pick from so many in similar circumstances? How many do I interview? Do I pick the worst or the best cases? Am I supposed to do psychological triage?" Ann Marie pleaded with Sharon when she was told what she was going to have to do.

"When the question's too hard to answer, I think it's best to just go with your instincts." Sharon had answered, but Ann Marie was still wide-eyed with fear.

For the week that the military was releasing refugees into community care, five families; twenty two people, were chosen by Ann Marie, using her terrified, guilt ridden instincts. It was like choosing puppies at the pound; the eyes that looks most desperate and needy and wanted to come with you where the eyes that she answered. She had, in fact, learned the priorities of desperation from her own life. Ironically, Ann Marie's doctoral thesis had been, 'Immigrant families, the crossroads of culture.' She had learned that the crossroads were necessity and survival, what had been and what had once mattered were sometimes necessarily abandoned on the path that led far from the horizon of fear. She had discovered how hard immigrants tried to preserve their culture. In Canada, unlike most places, it was expected and understood that who you had been was a big part of who you might be. That sometimes lasted three or four generations, even long after the original language was gone. The quote that Ann Marie had used to begin her thesis was from the Grapes of Wrath. 'If we lose our memories, how will we know who we are?' was how Ma Joad had put it.

Now Ann Marie had to deal with people whose memories were of hatred and oppression that completely denied their humanity. Refugees were immigrants for whom bitter nostalgia was hard to swallow, and a staple, unavoidable diet. It was almost more than Ann Marie could bear. She didn't understand how human beings could lose everything they ever had, every place, every thing, every memory of hope, and seem so normal.

Within the week, Ann Marie was in the deep end of the psyche, the place where human reason just barely held. And yet people, ordinary people had a resilience that astounded her.

The one criterion she had used when selecting her families was that someone in the family had to at least speak broken English. The challenge she faced with her families was so much greater than what she knew from her practice, the personal urban anxieties and emotional intractability of people whose problems usually were that they had too many choices and too many unrealized expectations. It was a very hard thing to change from the problems of people who wanted more and more, to the problems of people who had nothing left but a terrified hope. Personal problems always seemed so personal in individuals, the problems Ann Marie now faced, in the hundreds and thousands, were ones refugees shared like cold soup served at long folding tables.

Ann Marie knew that she had no answers for these people who wanted, more than anything, to understand why people, often their friends and their neighbors, could have treated them as they had. Ann Marie didn't know how to explain how good people, when given permission to do it, would become entirely evil. Ann Marie only knew what she always knew when people suffered. They wanted to tell someone. They wanted someone to understand how they had suffered and what they had lost. Ann Marie became the witness of the witnesses, and witnessing changed her. Strangely, in the midst of such horror and pain, she no longer felt depressed. Purpose had come to the farm for Ann Marie with the wounds of six hundred years of hatred. She listened and waited and came to know and treasure each one of the ordinary faces and admire the courage behind the extraordinary pain in their eyes.

Confused, shocked, heart sick, brutalized, desperate, lost people had come, reluctantly, to trust Anne Marie who didn't even begin to try to make sense of where they were and why. The hard, unspoken questions would come more slowly after the world was no longer too terrible and real and too close at hand. Ann Marie was the one who could not look away. The families in the cabins around her were like the aftermath of the car wreck in the middle of a fast, unending highway.

The week after the refugees came, while everyone slept, Eugene's breathing seized in his throat and he was coughing and drowning on his own saliva, and finally, finally, the monitor attached to him realized he was dying and screamed in the room and screamed beside Sharon's bed where she was sleeping. Sharon ran through the house and when she got to her husband, she grabbed him and threw him over the end of the bed so that he was hanging from his waist and she pounded on his back to clear his airway of saliva. It helped, but the coughing continued, and then with a strength she had no idea she had, she lifted Eugene like a feather and lay him back on his pillow and fumbled with the air suction device she had only used, in pure panic, once before. She had been trained to use it so Eugene wouldn't have to be in the hospital, and she was surprised her hands didn't tremble as she slipped the plastic tube into Eugene's throat and cleared his airway. She had saved his life once more. He lay there limp, looking like he was dead, except for his exhausted eyes moving slowly and his chest moving in the regular rhythm of the respirator.

The news had spread like a fire alarm through the house and all Eugene's children flooded the room and the doorway, as no one dared speak the one pounding, unspoken question. 'Is he going to die?' While Sharon had been frantically pounding on Eugene's back, his mother had come into the room and stared in her typical confusion as Martha took her hand to try to console her.

"You leave my boy alone!" Eugene's mother barked.

Martha consoled her, explaining that Sharon was helping Eugene.

"Who is she? She should leave my boy alone. You shouldn't talk with your mouth full," she told Martha, as she brushed off her hand, and then turned and walked out of the room. Eugene's mother rarely spoke from her dementia any longer. Even her determination to work at household tasks could only accommodate simple, repetitive things. Her mind was gone long before Eugene's.

While a terrified family lay awake for the rest of the night, Laura slept silently in the houseboat, on the pull out sofa in the smaller of the bedrooms. She went to sleep that night looking at the stars over Haystack Island while Amanda slept as usual in the master bedroom, while the moon set once more in the West. In the days since she had moved to the house boat, Laura felt life moving around her in the beautiful chaos of spring: long lines of three and four hundred Canada geese called as they passed high overhead, wild geese, brother geese wondering where the heart would rest. Ducks came in flocks of hundreds to bob on the waves; Old Squaw and Golden Eyes, Mergansers and Mallards.

The songbirds sang and danced in the trees on the shore, and the tree swallows came in the hundreds, sweeping over the water and the willows. The Orioles sang with the warblers, the grackles clicked against the Red Wings cries as clouds of black insects gathered above the trees and shimmered like dancers swaying slowly to the warm hum their hundreds of thousands made for themselves.

The shore birds paired up and called to Laura when they passed overhead. As the Canada geese passed her, they spoke to her as they went back and forth to Haystack Island, and on still nights she could hear Bullfrogs chant and the geese talking occasionally. The blossoms of spring bulbs passed and fruit trees filled with bees and blossoms, white plum and cherry and fat apple pink. The orchard was always on the wind. Lilacs bloomed on the breeze in the dooryard as well, and the grasses became perfume. The place where she had made love with Ian was just another soft wave in the sand. Clear crystal waves slapped time to pink sunrises and red sunsets and it was all inescapable and sweet. A pair of Canada geese brought eleven newly hatched goslings the size of baby's fists to show Laura what they had done. And over the next month she saw the goslings grow until their down was turning to feathers, and then one day all the geese in the air and on the water disappeared to molt on Haystack Island, and the next time she saw the eleven babies again they looked, sounded and moved just like their parents, except they were one half the size.

Then there was the stillness: still water, still air, after the songbirds slept.

Laura slept as she had never slept before, and when she woke by the water she felt the fresh, cool peace inside her releasing the cold grip of the dead hand she had held in the snow.

Arthur and Laura Lee had been the invisible saviors of her mind.

When she found out that Eugene had nearly died in the night, Laura was stunned. When she saw him lying asleep, looking so frail and so small, her heart constricted to keep from breaking as she stared at his hands lying limply beside him. There were only two stories left to write and she realized that she might have to do them herself. She realized she might not be able to try to answer the question of who she was. Life was always errors of ommision. Eugene was too weak to work for the next three days and for Laura, the sudden knowledge that she might lose him, that he might never see their book completed, drew all the energy from her imagination. As he often had when she left after breakfast, David followed her to the door and he didn't cry or make a fuss but just watched her go.

The morning after Eugene had his crisis, Laura asked Sharon if David could go with her to the boathouse for the day. She would make his lunch; there were drinks available. He might enjoy the new setting. Of all the people in the world, David was the one person she needed that morning. He would be there and never ask anything.

It was difficult to tell when David enjoyed anything. His constant exploration sometimes seemed to slowdown, especially when he was with Laura. As she tried to work at her laptop computer, sitting and watching the slow rolling waves go by running yellow ribbons along the bottom ridges of sand, Laura tried to think about how she could even begin to tell Eugene who she was. Until she thought about what Arthur and Laura Lee would have thought about her, she didn't even know where to begin. When she did, she began to understand; and she realized she had to begin seeing herself when she was a girl, when she would have perhaps welcomed Arthur and Laura Lee into her dreams. Before the brightness, before the beauty, before there was sex or ambition, outside of her class, outside of her family, inside of her heart, she tried to remember what it felt like to be who she was. The interesting thing was that she realized that she was looking for a fictional character, someone who existed only in her imagination, someone who was only as real as the characters she had stored in Random Access Memory, an imaginary character based on someone that had once lived and breathed. While she sat thinking, David was like a moth that would return to her flame, and climb on her lap, and lay his blond hair back on her chest. He just sat on her like he was claiming a place that really mattered, and that was almost, actually his.

When it was time to go to the farmhouse for dinner, David did not want to go. He sat down on the dark porch and refused to stand, even when Laura tried to lift him. He didn't squirm and he didn't protest, but he wouldn't be moved. Laura tried treats and talking sweetly and even going off along the beach by herself leaving him alone, but he wouldn't move. He sat watching her until she came back, and Laura could see the relief in his eyes when she reached down and picked him up. Carrying an eight-year old boy half a mile was back-breaking, but there was no other way to get him to come with her, and although she stopped a number of times to try to take his hand and get him to walk with her, he sat down where he was, seemingly determined not to go back to his home.

Over dinner there was a serious discussion about what to do about David's strange reaction. He never before seemed to care where he was. The difficult thing would be deciding what to do if he acted out when Laura left. David never acted out. If he did do that, no one knew if it would be a good thing or a bad thing. Sharon did not want to give in if he insisted on going with Laura, even when everyone said that it was a wonderful thing and that perhaps bonding with Laura was something that should be encouraged.

"That's not fair to Laura, or David." Sharon insisted, "What will happen if he bonds and then she goes away?"

No one had an answer for that until Laura spoke.

"Maybe it's not so bad. If he bonds with me, he may bond with someone else. Maybe this is a developmental thing."

Ann Marie said there was no telling, but it certainly was an encouraging sign. As a behaviorist, she always believed in rewarding appropriate behavior, but no one knew if his attachment to Laura was appropriate or not.

"We're all going to lose someone we love." Amanda said softly, replying to Sharon. It won't be any easier for us than it will be for David. You can't stop loving somebody because you're going to lose them." Tom and Megan each looked like they had been slapped.

Everyone knew Amanda was talking about Eugene and everyone in the room, except Amanda, knew the experience of losing someone they loved, and sometimes being the loved one lost. The discussion died until the practical reality appeared. After Laura said goodnight to Eugene, David wouldn't be distracted or leave her side when she went to the door to leave for the evening. David stood pressed to the glass door when it was closed behind Laura, and when she was less than ten feet away he put his fist through the glass pane of the French door and cut the artery in his wrist. His hand on the other side of the door reached out for Laura as Sharon seized his arm, and slowly tried to pull his bleeding arm away from the large shard of glass still buried in his flesh, impaling him in the door. He didn't cry or flinch as the blood poured on the floor and all over his mother. Laura came running back screaming. When David's arm was free, Laura rushed through the door and held him while Sharon squeezed his arm and ordered someone to go for the first aid kit. Everyone could see the deep, ugly opening in David's soft skin that went from his wrist nearly to his elbow.

For the second time in the day, there was a total emergency as a tourniquet was tied on David's arm while Laura held him and stroked his head, and there was blood all over her and all over David, and it was like the feeling in the snow bank where time screamed to be released from its place of terror. No matter what they did, David didn't cry, he just settled himself in Laura's lap as if she was still sitting at the houseboat on the lounge chair. The artery was pouring blood when they released the tourniquet, and it was in the heart pounding slow motion of crisis that they got David to the nearest car and Tom and Amanda drove while Sharon and Laura sat in the back seat with David.

As Tom drove faster and faster, Laura's head began to spin like it was filled with dandelion parachutes and her breathing started to get faster and faster, and Sharon saw it and told her to put her head between her knees, and she did that as Tom asked his mother if he should slowdown, Sharon told him to keep going, that Laura would be fine. Amanda got out of her seat belt and turned around and reached over the seat and tried to touch her mother, to stroke her shoulders and neck, telling her she was going to be fine and how Tom was driving very carefully even though he was going so fast. It was then that Laura passed out, and as her spine uncoiled she fell to the side striking her head on the passenger window. Amanda screamed for Tom to stop, but Sharon ordered him to keep going.

"She's just fainted. She'll be fine. It's probably the best thing that could have happened." Sharon said into Amanda's desperate eyes.

At the hospital Laura and David were separated in the emergency room, David wheeled in to a team who worked on him until the surgeon finally came and sutured his artery and the huge gash on his arm. They wouldn't let Sharon stay while they worked, and when she came back to the emergency waiting room, Laura was sitting awake beside Amanda, still looking confused and weak and dizzy. Amanda was holding an ice pack at the back of Laura's neck as its sweat poured down the back of her shirt.

It was over an hour before they could see David. They had only used a sedative and a local anesthetic to do the surgery and so he was awake. It was one of the few times Sharon had ever seen David look frightened. He reached out his arms to Laura who went to him and took his undamaged hand and then bent down and kissed him. David didn't pay any attention when Sharon came and stroked his head or when Tom and Amanda waved at him from the foot of the bed. David would have to stay, at least overnight, so his wound could be cleaned and monitored. Sharon looked uncomfortable when Laura told her that she would stay with David until the next morning so he would settle into his new environment.

Sharon knew she had to get back to the farm if she could. The Kosovar refugees were coming that afternoon, so she agreed and thanked Laura for her compassion. Still, leaving David wasn't easy. He had chosen a mother, and both of them knew it, as Laura watched him close his eyes and Sharon silently waved goodbye and left Laura alone with innocence asleep.

They were in a familiar room in the same hospital were she had once come in to be cleaned and stitched from the glass embedded in her flesh. She had once again been the cause of an innocent boy's suffering. She lay beside him for the rest of the day while he slept in sedated sleep. Before she slept, Tom and Amanda brought her a change of clothes.

The Kosovar refugees were already at the farm when Sharon returned with Tom and Amanda. Rosie had given a tour and then taken them down to the cabins with Ann Marie and Megan where there was confusion and reluctance about what was happening. It seemed that having seen the beautiful modern house, the refugees couldn't understand why they were taken to these cabins without electricity or indoor plumbing.

"Are we to be your surfs?" one had asked, and Rosie and Sharon tried to reassure them it was not so.

Sharon tried to explain how the cabins were meant to build self reliance and they looked at her like she was insane when the translation was made.

"You live like Kings and we must live like animals. This is not how we live. We are not farmers. We come from a city." the spokesperson replied.

Another man spoke of the cars he had seen on the short tour that Rosie had given the refugees.

"Why you have so many cars for such few people?"

"They belong to our children who no longer live at home." Sharon answered.

"You have so many cars, you no need?"

As the short conversation went on, translations were made and people were shaking their heads in disbelief at what was happening and what they were being told. Finally, Sharon apologized for the accommodations and for the first time in her life she was actually embarrassed about asking people to live in simple cabins. The apology seemed to make a difference and someone said in translation that it was a little better than the Army barracks, in some ways.

That night the refugees were served dinner in the coffee house and then the Van Fleet children sang, and then the Kosovars picked up some of the instruments and sang as well, and the tension seemed to ebb. The only problem was the outrage among the refugee men when they asked for wine and Sharon told them there would be no alcohol allowed on the farm, except at dinner. The only reason this was grudgingly accepted was because the refugees had no money to purchase their own and so, as beggars, they couldn't choose what they thought was their right. Sharon was completely surprised that no matter how great the injustice a person suffered, it was the details and perceptions of injustice that were hardest to take. Sharon hated being seen as the oppressor.

The next day, Amanda drove almost too slowly so she could accommodate her mother's fear, after they picked her and David up at the hospital, and she actually drove all the way down the lane to the beach because Laura just wanted to find her bed and sleep. It was just accepted that David would stay with her. Until Ian came that weekend, David slept beside her, at peace. The first day, Laura even cooked the two of them regular meals and she was surprised that Sharon never questioned the new arrangements. After the first day, David seemed to understand he would be staying with Laura at the boat house and he no longer resisted going back to the farmhouse. He would follow Laura wherever she went, up to the farmhouse, anywhere; everywhere.

Over the next three weeks, the refugees turned the farm up side down. Two of the men who seemed to be in charge, made it clear they wouldn't allow the others to work in the fields or anywhere else. They were refugees, not free labor. When told they would be paid twenty dollars an hour the two leaders said it would be considered. They were willing to let women and children work but the two men would receive and administer the money. This wasn't acceptable to Sharon, which immediately brought an impasse of violent voices. No one protested even as the resentment grew as the two leaders of the twenty broke every rule in the place. In spite of having no driver's licenses, they took cars without permission. In spite of being told not to do it, they took wine from the wine cellar and drank in the cabins. When Rosie put a lock on the wine cellar door, it was ripped away the next night. The next day he installed the motion detector alarm that finally ended the raids. When the last intruder was caught, he denied any responsibility because of all that his people had suffered.

"We need wine. We need everything. You need nothing." he had shouted and how could anyone argue with him.

The most difficult thing for Sharon was to explain to the foster families who had expected to come that summer that their places had been taken by refugees. People were crying on the other end of the phone telling Sharon how hard it would be without the money and the personal support the farm gave them. Sharon couldn't help feeling even more frustrated by the irony of it all. Never had the farm felt so strange and foreign as when the refugees came to stay. The peace and quiet Laura knew at the beach was gone with the new people. The black lines of cormorants sliding above the water no longer came. The Geese made detours around.

Children were constantly coming onto the houseboat, and even David found it difficult. Children didn't understand that David didn't know how to play. He hated being handled. They constantly tried to engage him. All day long, as Laura tried to work, children would scream and run back and forth into the cold water. All day long they came for sweets Laura didn't have.

Tom and Amanda could no longer find a place to walk and stop and kiss and be close, in private. Finally, there seemed to be only one place left for them to find peace and privacy and Tom took Amanda into his tree house in the old Apple tree and it was there, with the fading apple blossoms falling around them, that they first undressed one another. It was cool and slow and Tom was trembling and Amanda touched him and made him lie back, and it was all such timeless pleasure, pleasure she had no idea was in her power to give. When he made her lie back to receive, she was silent until his lips found her breast and when she moaned it wasn't to tell him to stop. The heart longs for the one who longs for the pleasure in giving pleasure.

"Oh, my God." she groaned.

Tom stopped immediately, afraid she was afraid, and he could see it was true for a very different reason, and then he realized how close they had come, how close he had come to releasing his control. If she hadn't spoken, he would have made love to her and not stopped and the consequences of that rang in his head like the iron clapper of a bell. All he could think of was that he hadn't even thought he might need protection.

"We can't get naked again." he whispered, "Do you know how close we came?

She knew. She nodded. She wished it wasn't so because she wanted to make love with him and it didn't matter to her if she got pregnant or he broke his pre-marital vows. She wanted to give him her body and her heart completely. Her heart was ready but her body still was just too afraid. She would have done it, but with such mixed feelings. She could still feel her rapist's hands on her thighs.

Because the refugees had nothing but free time, Ann Marie spent most of every day talking with them. She realized how terror was a collective thing. It was rumors and rumors of rumors. It was atrocities in dreams and imaginations that just grew with time and unprotected sleep. It was the dislocation from everything familiar that made everything strange and terribly possible. It was anger at an enemy that was invisible. It was being afraid of people who meant no harm. It was having lost the past. It was having no future. It was clinging to anything familiar, even hate.

"They took baby and smash head on the clothes line pole.

"In the next village they rape women in front of children and take turns and then kill them like dogs."

"They make some pay money for each hand, each arm, each finger and if couldn't pay, they cut off."

"They put gun barrel at old persons head with one or two bullets and spin, and sometimes it go off and somebody have brains all over their own walls."

"They burn your house and shoot you down when you try to run out."

Not one of the people Ann Marie talked to had actually seen such things. They had seen the burned houses and the dead bodies; one family had seen babies and old people with bullets in them. They knew their nightmares were real. They knew what it was to be hated and slaughtered for being who they were, even at second hand. It was only a week before people began to come to Ann Marie to tell her more and ask her what was to become of them. Ann Marie became the listener they needed, the listener who seemed to understand. When they asked her what she had suffered because of her own race, she told them it was nothing compared to what they had known, and it was absolutely true. Yet, it somehow was enough to make her accepted, almost as one of the group.

Megan hated the refugees. They were frightened and frightening, different and strange. Their eyes were like people she knew in the Vancouver streets but, except for the two leaders, they were like sheep. They didn't begin to understand how style and attitude were all that a victim had. And she couldn't believe the irony of the fact that the thing she resented most was that they didn't work. She resented all the extra demands they put on Tom and everyone else. She wished they had never come.

The next crisis came when the refugee's spokesman asked Ann Marie to convey their desire to move their mattresses from the cabins to the coffee house. Ann Marie agreed to pass on the request, even after she had to quell the anger that erupted when she said that Sharon would probably not agree. Sharon didn't agree and the Van Fleets could barely eat their lunch when Ann Marie voiced the request. There were those who were reluctant to deny the refugees anything because of what they had suffered. There were those who said that their suffering didn't entitle them to take over the farm. There were those who said that there must be some way to compromise. There were those who said that compromise worked two ways. How much was enough to make up for suffering was the question, and as always, it was impossible to agree on an answer among any group who knew what it really meant. It was Amanda who suggested they have a formal meeting that night to try to resolve some of the questions and problems between the farm and the refugees. That was the solution, or at least the structure they would use to at least attempt to find one. If she had had to do it over again, Sharon would probably have had everyone sing for a while before the meeting began with the refugees.

It was almost immediately clear that the level of resentment on both sides was only going to get worse. The two spokesmen who spoke English and wanted to control the money for the refugees complained that their people were being treated like children. When Sharon replied and tried to explain to them the rationale behind living in the cabins and eating communal meals and having each person paid a separate wage, she didn't believe the translation was fair because of the resentment and anger she could see in the faces as they listened to the translation of their spokesman. When Sharon finally insisted on individual comments and questions from the silent refugees, she was disappointed that the discussion almost immediately deteriorated into arguing over specific incidents. When Tom finally said that it was the behavior of the two spokesmen that caused most of the anger, the two men exploded into Albanian, arms waving angrily as they spoke to their people, and it was obvious that what they told them was absolutely inflammatory. People were actually shouting in Albanian at Tom. Amanda and Megan were afraid. When Sharon tried to suggest that they try another meeting another time with a translator she would find, it was the last insult the two leaders would accept. Whatever it was they said to their people, the anger left the faces and it was replaced by fear and contempt. Sharon asked Ann Marie what she should do and Ann Marie was paralyzed.

All the good intentions in the world had not been able to respond to the anger and distrust and the manipulation of two leaders content on securing their own power. As Sharon sat in the cold silence, she realized how important it was for everyone to accept that the leader represented everyone equally. How was that possible with two different groups? As always, it would only be the use of power that would get two groups with different needs and agendas to accept the authority of any decision. Sharon couldn't believe that they were replaying the war in the Balkans right there in her own home. Both sides were sure they were absolutely innocent of blame. It was the leaders who argued. It was the followers who were inflamed and suffered the consequences of the clash of authority. The refugees accepted what their leaders said, just as her family accepted what she said and believed. It was all so heartbreaking.

The Van family and the refugees sat at separate tables and individuals would look over now and then and glances would focus into a held gaze, or eyes would be quickly averted. Fear and anger moved back and forth, hands closed, arms folded as bodies became visibly hard. It was the rigor of resentment. It was the resentment that could become hate. Finally, Sharon said that she would try to accommodate any problems the refugees might have, but ultimately all the decisions were hers. She would listen to complaints but they would have to accept her decisions, no matter how they felt. Those with the land and the money made the rules. Sharon hated the fact that it was true for her too. Her words were translated and the look of contempt directed at her was palpable as the refugees got up from where they were and the left the meeting in silent anger. The silence was broken when one of the people walking by Sharon said, "You like Serb."

That night, while Sharon did Eugene's physiotherapy, she told him how her she felt and she actually admitted that she wished she had never asked the refugees to come to the farm. Sometimes it was just too hard to be grateful for every experience.

"You think we really are the good Jonestown?" she finally asked him, and his eyes reflected her pain so well that she finally actually broke down and cried.

The next day Sharon got her wish. The two Kosovar spokesmen came to the house in the morning and demanded that they be allowed to go back to the air base. They were used to the military. They missed their own people and the own customs. They missed indoor plumbing. They missed not being treated with respect as people who had suffered one of the great crimes against humanity. Sharon didn't argue or disagree. She said she was very sorry but got on the phone and felt very ashamed as she found the person who would listen to her request that the refugees come back to the air base. The only thing that shocked her was how easy it was and that the policy of placing refugees in the community had been completely reversed. She wasn't told why. She didn't ask. Two days later the refugees had gone back to Trenton.

For Ann Marie, it was like the bottom fell of her world. When the refugees arrived she had some social purpose, something to do where what she was trained to do actually mattered. The sense of detachment she needed to do her work was, as always, a solid center for her life, and the sense of engagement in new problems gave her the novelty she craved in most moments of her life. For Ann Marie her work had a perfect balance, one that didn't exist in any other kind of social relationship. When the refugees went away, she went back to doing manual tasks. The only good thing about it was all the time she got to spend with Megan. She thought she didn't show it and didn't say anything to anyone, but she felt herself slipping back into the useless depression that came with the feeling that she just didn't belong at the farm. Laura saw her friend was suffering and it only took one simple questions to solve the problem, after Ann Marie admitted to missing the Kosovar refugees.

"I thought they were looking for trauma counselors. Why don't you drive to the base and volunteer?" Laura asked Ann Marie.

"They were supposed to call. I'm really supposed to be here connecting with Megan. Maybe I can ask Sharon what she thinks."

Ann Marie was surprised at how easily and eagerly Sharon agreed that it was a good idea for her to see if they needed her at the air base. Sharon had not got over her feelings of failure. It was the first social problem she ever met in her life that completely defeated her. It was the first time the farm had failed anyone, or so she thought. Sharon cut through the bureaucracy, as only she could do, and within the hour Ann Marie was on her way for an interview at the air base. Her heart nearly sang as she drove and felt free, felt like she had reclaimed her life.

Laura was relieved that the refugees were gone. She hadn't been involved in any of the arguments or the resentful discussions and all of the guilty gossip. It was actually a surprise to her when she woke up and they were gone. Peace returned to the beautiful bay, and the warm summer days and the cool nights on the water all belonged to Laura, little David and to her tired Amanda when she came home late every night from restoring her car.

Laura was undergoing a transformation she imagined she could actually feel in the cells of her body. The less she connected to the busy life on the farm, the happier and safer she felt. The summer warmth flooded her skin and the bright colors arrived blazing in the morning sun over the Eastern horizon. Her skin tingled in the black night, black like the moments she remembered long ago in a movie theater when all the lights went down. In the yellow sun, a shining graphite pair of rare black terns did that all day, turning and turning back and forth along the bay, touching the water with their beaks, squeaking like plastic toys as they passed, resting, so tiny, on the traveler stone out in the water while doves in the misty morning said,' I do. We do.' The stars were always incredible. Clouds rarely came by. Time moved as she had never felt it before. It felt almost like it moved inside her like a man. In the second week in June fireflies came down near the water and flashed by the black cottonwood silhouettes of the row of trees that guarded the back of the beach. The same blue and yellow colors, the fireflies streaked like huge shooting stars or flared like nova exploding, tiny fires in the infinite void. Walking back from her evening meeting with Eugene, thousands of fireflies exploded above the hay field that led to the beach. Bullfrogs on Haystack Island chanted like Tibetan holy men all night long, and when they were in full song, the night vibrated in a strange, deep harmony that sounded like the haunting throat singing of Inuit women.

David asleep, Amanda asleep, Laura sat and felt the night take her to itself. In all the emotional intensity of the farm, in all the emotional depth of her own work, standing on the emotional precipice of her feelings for Eugene, Laura felt happy for the first time in her life. For the first time in her life, every moment was exactly enough. She only let one worry into her thoughts. But there was no last story. She didn't know, and Eugene wouldn't tell her, what had happened to Arthur and Laura Lee. Sometimes when David would lie on her lap, Laura would talk to him like she talked to Eugene. It was the same safe harbor of acceptance. She would tell him about the story she was working on. She would tell him where her heart was afraid to go. She would tell him things she knew were beyond her own understanding. She would tell him things she wouldn't even have told Eugene. And one soft summer evening she even answered the last question she would never answer for Eugene. She tried to tell him who she was. She told him what she knew of images of herself and the images others had made from that. For Laura, what she was was once real, but she had somehow, somehow inevitably, turned who she was into fiction.

"It doesn't matter because it's impossible to live a life where you're just living a dream, even when your dreams seem so real."

Truth was in the spaces between dreams. Modern life was lucid dreaming that could only be controlled for a moment.

Memory and reality were like carbon paper; hard to find, and messy. Who she was wasn't who she'd become. What she recalled of herself was just too black and white. Looking for the original Laura was like looking for an author from another time. It was like looking in life's countless mirrors and always seeing herself for the first time. She was everything she had ever hoped to become and she was everything she feared she might be. For Laura, finding herself was like looking for Laura Lee. In her distant, childish longing to sing her life, she had just grown more silent, even to herself. With David, she broke her silence at last.

"David, you're like my little soul, moving between things that are beyond you, moving between places you don't understand. David, you love to hear me say your name like I love hearing mine and, like me, something inside will always be unknown. David, you're so lovely and so empty of feelings, I don't know why you want to be with me. It's like we're birds of a feather, little black terns going back and forth forever and forever. It's almost funny that we belong with each other where it's just sand and sky and water and no people. David, it's you that's real, I'm just a bad actor who never really learned how to listen and spent her whole life telling people what they wanted to hear. I'm the lady that needs people to see who she is. I'm still the lady that can tell the secrets no one ever admits. I'm the lady that loves the hunger in men's eyes and I'm the lady who doesn't believe in happy endings."

Like a child swept away by a swollen river and buried in clay and wet sand, who she was was gone and lost forever, even as her memory of who she was was undone, like long, wet hair.

When Ian came on weekends, he was as happy as he'd ever been in his life. Alan stayed in the city to work in Wayne's store, but he made evenings interesting in ways that Ian couldn't have imagined. They talked. They listened to music. They ran every morning and watched entertainment news. They went shopping for nothing and through every art gallery they could find. Alan even worked with Ian on a junior version of the Queer Agents of Karma. He even took Alan to work with him on, 'Bring Your Kid to Work Day'.

On weekends, Ian was usually covered in grease, working with Amanda underneath her Riviera. The frame had been sand blasted and primed, the exhaust and the radiator and all the brakes and lines had been replaced so that the faded chassis was soon going to come down over the rebuilt engine once more. Ian would've never imagined, in a million years, that some of his best moments with his daughter would come with the two of them and an open Chilton's manual for a Buick Riviera.

Ian saw the mystifying change in his wife. Her blue eyes were clear and her body language had slowed so much he barely recognized her when she was walking at a distance. She moved the way she once moved in high school, but Ian didn't know that. Only Eugene saw that change. Laura started to believe there might actually be a second act in a modern, professional life, although she had no idea of what it was.

Ian and Laura's sex life had been put aside when David adopted Laura and came to live in the boat house. Although he slept on a roll out cot most nights, sometimes Ian would wake to find David's small body curled up at his feet with his arm draped over Laura's legs.

Until the summer solstice, it would have been hard for any of the McCalls to believe their lives weren't moving into a new future that was better than they could have ever dreamed. Where it would be was a mystery, but what it would be felt real. The McCalls each had beautiful, new dreams of the future. But beautiful dreams could end with a blow from reality that could feel like a fist into the muscles of the diaphragm that left you gasping desperately for air.

It all began in the small black hours of one morning when Tom awoke to the lips that were tracing his naked body. Then he felt soft hands caressing the arch of his foot and felt lips move to his erection and he told Amanda that they should stop. But he didn't move and he didn't protest as the sensations built inside him and he could feel Amanda's silken body, naked and sweet, as he had come out of his sleep. In the room no one else had entered since he had come to the farm, Tom savored another moment of pleasure, and the moment became moments in the black room and he felt pleasures he didn't know he could feel, and he felt her soft, hard body move over him and he was inside her before he could even imagine protesting. Her breasts pressed down against him and he felt her lips on his mouth and he felt their full softness in their passion, in their swollen intensity and then knew, he knew, and his heart nearly exploded because he suddenly realized he was making love with Megan.

It was a victimless rape. It was betrayal. It was something he would never have done, and his pounding heart was split in the passion and the love he could feel consuming every part of him, like a fire. Megan moved over him with all her sexual experience and all the newness of love she could convey, and it was like no experience she had ever known. In the dark, in his room, in his own bed, it was her warm voice that reached into his heart as she groaned and took his body completely, and he began to move with her, responding to her love with all the intensity of their unspoken feelings, with all the wet connection of their passion, with all of their history thrashing together on his single bed. When Tom exploded inside her, their fingers were buried in each other's hair; their bodies were slick with summer sweat, so cool and so hot at the same time. Megan wouldn't let him go and it was only a brief moment before Tom saw her vague silhouette throw back and stifle a squeal as if she was an animal dying. Tom wanted to move from under her. He was thunder struck with what they had done. But she leaned forward and crushed her soft body to him and he felt her lips moving over his face, tracing his eyelids, brushing his cheek bones, caressing his lips with her tongue. Tom couldn't feel anything except that he was imprisoned beneath her, that she had taken his innocence and he had given it completely, and all he could think about was what Amanda would do when she knew. He felt absolutely sick at heart. He knew his own best ideals were a lie.

He reached up to roll Megan on to the bed beside him and he could feel her hands reaching for him tenderly, and he had to take them in his own and hold them still, and he didn't know what to say to her, to be angry or grateful that she'd exposed his own weakness, to be angry or grateful that she made him feel that such love and such passion could be combined. He couldn't deny it to himself anymore. In all the electronic messages and connections, she had opened part of him that Amanda never touched. He realized what he had done when the lightning bolt of regret hit the foot of his bed and he realized that he might have made Megan pregnant. He didn't dare ask. He only knew that the feeling in his heart was the terror that it might be true. It was then that he knew what he had done, how much he had betrayed everything that he was. All of the feelings he could no longer deny fell on him with their pure contradictions. He loved Amanda. He had made love with Megan. His future had always been in his heart with Amanda, from the first time they spoke on the phone, and it was that future that was destroyed in the truth of his feelings for the woman who was lying beside him. Tom felt how desire could move in two opposite directions at the same time. Tom felt how betrayal could move the same way. Tom felt how his unconditional love depended on so many conditions. He loved Amanda. He couldn't even ask himself the question of whether he actually might love Megan. Tom told Megan she would have to go. Megan could tell from the pain in his voice that something terrible was happening and her lips on his temple began to tremble.

"Could you tell me you love me, just this one time. I need to hear you say it. Please." she whispered.

Tom didn't say anything.

"I don't care if you can't say it. You said it with your body." Megan replied to the silence. Tom let go of Megan's hands and when she touched him, she could feel his hard body harden. Tears still running down her cheeks, she got up and dressed, scrabbling for her clothes in the dark. Tom turned on the bed light and watched her dress and all his desire for the beauty of her lovely young body dissolved in her tears and his lack of them. She wouldn't look at him, couldn't look at him. The most beautiful passion she could have imagined, when love was a part of every cell of her body, was now just a paralyzed moment before she finally got out of his room.

"This wasn't supposed to happen." Tom said softly. It made Megan angry but she held it inside.

"Like the song, I made you feel like you were the only man. You loved it. Where was Amanda inside you when you were inside me? This is real." she replied.

"I know it is. Too much is too real." he answered, "We can't do this again." he replied sounding completely unsure it was true.

"That's crazy. I don't care if you feel guilty. I know what just happened." Megan answered and stopped and looked at him lying naked and on the bed, and it was that last sight of his body that stopped her anger as she remembered his incredible touch. She tried to force a smile. She couldn't.

"At least I got your cherry." she said. She had stopped crying and her lips moved to the silent words as she told him she loved him and then she quietly opened the bedroom door and left him to a sleepless night of guilt and beautiful memories.

Before dawn, Tom was sitting beside his sleeping father, listening to the respirator, feeling ashamed, feeling like a branch stripped of its leaves. The computer came to life and Eugene asked Tom if he was okay. Tom told Eugene all the things he had been thinking before Eugene opened his eyes.

"You know how you once told me you should want to touch a woman's heart as much as her body; and how I should believe that was how she felt too? What if those feelings happen for two people at the same time? I don't know how to control my feelings. I don't know how to control my own thoughts anymore. I can't even control my own body. I just made love with Megan and it was everything you said it should be. But I love Amanda. I wish it was her, but it wouldn't have been like that. I don't know what to do." Tom confessed.

"You'll have to choose." Eugene answered.

"I don't know how. Amanda will probably hate me."

"Because she loves you."

"I don't know what I'd do if she had done what I just did. How can she forgive me when I wouldn't do it for her? She's never going to trust me and I don't blame her. I'll probably lose them both if I don't do something now."

"Probably." Eugene answered honestly.

"I'm going to go away for a few days and try to figure this out. Could you tell Mom?"

"O.K."

"Love sure ain't easy." Tom said as he got up, and then he was stunned with the last thing his father said to him.

"Maybe you should think about me and Laura and your mother.

Tom's heart felt like his father had hit it with a hammer. Inside an old wheel spun another one, and the centrifugal force almost took his breath away.

Tom didn't say anything as he kissed his father's sunken face and looked into his wide blue eyes before he turned and left him alone thinking about himself and Laura and Sharon and his son's beautiful triangle tumbling into a circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel with it's constantly changing endings turning to beginnings.

In the morning, the first thing Megan did before she even heard the news Tom was gone, was find Sharon and count out the ten, thousand dollars bills. In a strange way she was ironically paying for her own broken heart. It was almost as if both of them could feel the sound of the big three bladed propeller driving the huge Laker of love through their lives.

Megan told Sharon she had found someone who loved her for herself.

"It's my mom." Megan lied, and started to cry as she fell into Sharon's arms and wept like she had when she had gone back to the cabin and told her mother everything.

When Sharon told the family at breakfast that Tom would be away for a few days without making any explanation, all the young children wanted to know where he had gone, but Sharon put them off firmly and clearly. It was all very strange and mysterious.

It was the first that Amanda heard that he was leaving and the unspoken questions directed to her by the children made her uncomfortable in their implications. When she looked across and saw Megan wouldn't look in her eyes, she felt the slice of fear like a razor.

If Tom left without telling her anything, if his mother could not say where he'd gone, he was either planning something secret or running from his emotions. Amanda knew enough about men to know that when they ran, they were usually running from their heart. Megan's nervous eyes were all she needed to guess which one it was. Amanda's head felt like it was filling with cold oil. She felt dizzy and light headed and sick to her stomach, but she just sat there trying to make herself eat. After breakfast, she went to Megan who was standing with her mother and asked Megan if she knew anything about where Tom had gone. Megan honestly admitted she had no idea.

"Did you fuck him?" Amanda asked breathlessly.

There was an interminable second before she replied.

"You've had your chance. I took mine. So what?"

Shock. Rage. Reality. Amanda wanted to hit her for her cold reply and she was ashamed that the first thought in her mind was that Megan wouldn't have had a chance with Tom, if it wasn't for the color of her skin. Amanda turned and walked away without saying a word, and it was only when she was outside and saw her mother walking back to the beach with David that she broke into a run to catch up to her, and Laura heard her daughter running and stopped, and she could see something terrible had happened.

"Tom fucked Megan. How could he do that?" she said to her mother, holding back her tears.

Laura reached to touch Amanda's neck and kissed her forehead, tenderly. Amanda stood back, not wanting affection to touch her cold body.

"It's not my fault that I wasn't ready. It was always him who made me stop, anyway. I would've done it, if he really wanted to. It was his idea to be so pure and perfect."

"This isn't your fault." Laura said tenderly.

"Like it wasn't your fault when you screwed around on Daddy?"

Shock. Sorrow. Regret.

"That was my fault, not your father's. If you're going to start blaming, you better be able to tell who's innocent. Tom did this to you. He made you believe you were the only one. That's not something he can run away from." Laura said firmly.

"So what am I supposed to do?" Amanda pleaded.

"You have to wait and see if what you thought you have together is real." her mother answered, "Why don't you come to the boat house and spend the day. We can talk. You can get mad. You can scream, if you want to."

"No. I want to work. I don't want to sit and wallow in the pain." Amanda replied, "The worst part is that whatever I'm doing will remind me of him."

"That would be true, no matter where you were or what you were doing." Laura told her honestly.

"I know. Thank you. You can be really strong, you know? Thank you."

Amanda's broken heart was written all over her face as she tightened her lips and Laura kissed her again before Amanda walked away looking like she had lost her last friend. By the time she was back to the farmhouse her posture was straight, and from a distance, it didn't look like anything had happened at all. Laura's heart broke in harmony with her daughter's as she had stood and watched her go.

Amanda asked Sharon if she could do some job by herself that day, and even though that didn't happen very often, Sharon told her she could do some garden weeding or she could muck out the chicken pens in the barn. She chose the chicken pens. It felt most fitting.

Until lunch, Amanda breathed the acid bitterness from the end of the pitch fork, from crap she heaved in a wheel barrow that she took to the manure pile outside the barn. She decided that she wasn't going to cry until she knew it was over and he was really lost. She tried to stay away from the recurring thought that if it wasn't her fault, the fault was with the rapist monster in a prison an hour away. Amanda worked right through lunch.

Helpless. Helpless. Helpless.

When the private hour finally came, Amanda went to her root cellar and welcomed the darkness as she had never welcome darkness before. In the pure pitch of the empty void that enclosed her, she sat and felt she was somehow both alive and dead. The longer she sat, the more the root cellar felt like a tomb and, like Juliet, like Eugene, she didn't seem to be afraid of death. Time became the smell of the few vegetables that were left there. Time stopped moving like the smell of the earth. All she had was what she felt, and what she felt was so cold she actually started to shiver. It was only after time moved into her imagination, to Tom and Megan together, that life began to feel real once again. Shock gave way to throbbing pain. Pain gave way to envy. It was like her mind became a movie projector in the black room, and she saw the two of them making love, and she couldn't help imagining the images of the body she knew so well, and the feel of his lips and his hands, and she saw them moving on Megan and saw how Megan would've been so incredibly responsive as she had never been able to be. It was like watching a beautiful pornographic movie in her mind projected on her heart, and as she watched, she put herself were Megan had been, responding the way Megan must have responded, feeling his mouth and his hands and his whole naked body moving and touching her, wanting to excite her, making her feel his love inside her. Amanda began to feel the desire in her heart and she could feel it spreading through her whole body. She touched her lips with her fingers and felt how they were swollen and then she touched her breast through her shirt and felt her nipples were hardened and she slid her hands and snapped open the cutoff blue jeans she was wearing and slid her fingers under and into herself and she felt so excited, it was as if she had become the woman in the movie as Tom made love of her. And then he was inside her in her imagination and she was responding in her imagination to the images and the feelings that were so real that she was touching herself with the intimacy she knew and believed Tom felt for her alone. In the black room, Amanda could hear her own moaning and it sounded to her just like it would have if Tom was there and they were making love and she was responding and responding and responding, and then, and then she imagined him coming inside her and she was suddenly inside him. She could feel that her heart was inside him pounding, and she came with an orgasm that shook her body like leaves on a branch, struck by a wind, so sudden and strong, she felt like her heart was about to be ripped away.

That night, through the Walnut panels, Amanda's voice spoke her mother.

"What do I do, if he comes back and wants me to forgive him?"

Laura didn't know how to answer. "Ask your father." she said, and Amanda could barely hear her voice.

At two the morning Ian's phone rang and it was Amanda whispering into her mother's cell phone, whispering so she wouldn't wake her mother, the mother she didn't know wasn't asleep.

"You know when mom slept with that man? Tom's done that to me with Megan." Amanda began, right to the point.

Two hearts broke together as she told him what happened and he listened so quietly, so patiently and Amanda could just hear in the silence that his heart was breaking for her and it made her love him so much.

"What should I do?" she finally asked, and after a long silence, he spoke,

"If you can't forgive, you'll lose everything. The only time to quit loving is when there is nothing left. How much is left between you and Tom?"

That was the million-dollar question. Amanda knew the answer immediately. Everything was left except his perfection. She knew him in her soul, and she knew their absolute connection. What she didn't know was how long it would take for his fall to stop hurting. She didn't know if he could forgive himself. He wasn't like her mother.

Talking to her father who had been there and done that, she knew she would forgive Tom.

It was amazing to Amanda to know a person could learn to live at ease with fear and pain as she waited for Tom to come back. The first time she smiled was when she thought to herself that he would be really proud that she was so strong. He had really made her prove it. Amanda's broken heart became invisible, and no one except the two mothers and the two fathers knew what had happened.

Amanda and Megan passed one another and ate meals at the same table, and it seemed there was an unspoken understanding that there would be no blame or self justification expressed. There was just the cold metal taste of betrayal and guilt. It wasn't hate, but fear in Megan and Amanda's eyes that passed between them when their glances crossed and were held and were gone. Amanda and Megan both just tried to stay out of each other's way.

Tom stayed away. Amanda waited.

Tom stayed away. Megan waited.

The second day he was away Amanda went for a walk after dinner to the Walnut forest. He had once told her that it was the place that held the moment that she'd become part of his heart. It was their sacred, silent place. It was the place where her imagination first saw herself married and knew the first moment when her unknowable future had begun. In the wind in the soft pines and the empty walnut trees, sitting on a stone by the old black pool; no frog-splash, no rings disappearing, no eyes surfacing to see her as she began to sing. It was the song she had planned to sing for him on his birthday in September.

In this world of ordinary people, extraordinary people, there was him. In this world of over-rated pleasure and underrated treasure, there was him. In this world where too many people play at love and hardly any stay in love, there was Tom.

"I'd live to love. I'd love to live with you beside me. This role so new, I'll muddle through with you to guide me." she sang so beautifully.

It was all still true. It was all so sad and beautiful. Love was a mansion with such beautiful rooms, even if you had to live in your room all by yourself; even if you had to leave that mansion behind forever.

More than ever she was glad there was Tom.

It was after four o clock on the third day since he left that Tom drove down the lane of the farm.

He knew exactly where Amanda and Megan would be in their hour of solitude.

The heavy door to the root cellar burst open the blackness and Amanda's eyes were in pain at the sight of Tom in the blazing light. He called to her and asked her to come out and she did that in the pounding of her heartbeat in her temples.

"Could you please come with me? I have to talk to you and Megan." he asked her, and fear and sincerity and hope were mixed in his face. Amanda agreed, simply nodding her head.

Tom left her standing at the turn to the barn when he went to get Megan.

He opened the door into the granary and turned on the light and found her where she had tended Tundra not long before. He opened the wire gate and when Megan saw him she threw herself into his arms, and he felt her lips on his neck, before he stood her away and told her Amanda was waiting and that he wanted to talk to both of them. In the half-light he could see the terror in Megan's eyes.

Amanda and Megan both looked like nervous children waiting in the principal's office.

"Let's walk down to the beach. We can sit down and talk." Tom said, "But before we go, I want you both to know how sorry I am that I hurt you. Don't say anything now. There are some things I have to say before you say anything." he said, resolutely. They both agreed with dry voices.

At the beach, they turned and walked away, in the opposite direction from the houseboat, until they found a small place in the dunes in the afternoon shadows, Tom sat across from the two women who loved him.

"When I left, I was just going to drive and think about what had happened. Amanda, I can tell that you know something happened between me and Megan. We made love."

He could see in her eyes that she knew that too.

"People in love don't make love to someone else. I always believed that was totally true. And I still think it is when it's just two people in love. I was never willing to admit to myself that both of you love me. And I've never been willing to admit to myself that I loved both of you. I just never imagined it could be that way, but it is, I know it is, I can't help it, but it's true."

This wasn't what either one of them wanted or expected to hear. They had sat and waited like he was a jury of one about to condemn one of them, and they both were stunned that the verdict was that they were both not guilty; they were both innocent of all charges.

Tom continued explaining how he finally realized that he couldn't come up with an answer for what to do and how to take responsibility for his feelings and actions, and so he became more and more confused until he finally just wished he had someone to talk to that would understand. He knew his father and mother would tell him the truth, but they would ultimately accept anything he decided. He wanted someone who was wise, someone who would tell him what to do.

"I kept wishing I had an elder to talk to and ask advice, and then I remembered Miss Brown and how much she cares about Amanda and I thought that she was probably the only person I knew who could help me. I don't know why I thought so, but I was totally right. When I told her what had happened and how I felt and tried to explain to her that I really wanted both of you to love me, she didn't think that was so crazy. Then she asked me the one question I had to answer. She said it was perfectly understandable that I loved two people and wanted to have them love me in return. She then asked me if I thought it was possible to share my whole life with two people. That was the question." Everyone knew the answer to that. It was obvious that Tom knew he would have to choose.

"So who is it?" Megan asked coldly.

"I don't know. I can't decide that. If I loved one of you more, it would be easy. I'd just apologize for hurting whoever it was, and life would go on. But I can't choose. I don't know how to choose between love and love.

"You have to." Amanda said firmly.

"I know. That's what Miss Brown said too. I know it's true and when I asked her how I could possibly decide, she told me that the best thing I could do was just stand back and wait. She said time makes every decision, and if I gave myself time, I'd know."

Amanda felt betrayed. His absolute love was anything but. still, it was undeniable that it was more than she could ever imagine, more than she'd ever find with anyone else. She would wait.

Megan felt incredible hope. She had come between two perfect loves, between two loves that were ideal in everything but the flesh. She had made Tom feel love's ideal in his body and it was enough to give her almost an equal chance. She wanted to kiss him. But she would wait.

"I don't know how you'll both feel about this, but I think when we're alone it should be the three of us. And I guess, until I can decide my whole life, I don't think I should be touching either of you."

"So we have to act like we're brother and sisters?" Megan asked." Too weird!"

Amanda looked guilty but almost relieved. Megan looked like she was being unfairly handicapped. She didn't like it, but at least she had a chance. She was no longer playing the game in secret.

The story of Tom's two girlfriends amazed everyone and everyone was even more shocked at the next coffee house Saturday when Tom and Megan and Amanda were there together without the faces of love's triumph or loss. Amazingly, it was as if nothing had happened except the three of them sat together with their parents and had fun. Amanda didn't sing any torch songs as she had imagined she might. Past midnight, she and Tom actually pulled Megan to this stage and the three of them sang, 'Love Is a Bore.' and everyone laughed. The trio could only smile.

From her room that night Amanda sang a traditional ballad as Ian and Laura listened and loved her. It was Tom's song.

There is a boat

And it sails the sea

It's weighted deep

As deep can be.

But not as deep

As this love I'm in.

I know not if

I sink or swim.

So build me a boat

That will carry two

And both shall row,

My love and I.

My love and I.

My love and I.

Everything was the same and everything had changed. Love at a distance, out on the water was lonely, so lonely for Tom and Amanda and Megan

### Chapter 15

In the morning Ian woke with the sunrise and he could see Amanda standing outside, framed in wisteria blue. If an oil had been infused from lilacs and the color had been poured out over the bay, there couldn't have been anything as deep or as lovely, until a moment later when the reflected sepia in the sky came up out of the oil as the sun rose on the island rocks and they shimmered in the glow of the new light.

The silent voice within Amanda kept repeating, you, you, you. Night and day. She hadn't slept.

Ironically, it was that day the Luna moth cocoons came to life. Megan saw a little white thumb wrapped in green crawl out of its hard little cocoon and its red stick arms begin to immediately move it away, searching with its forearms, constantly reaching out, grabbing for something invisible, reaching, constantly reaching. And when it finally came to one of the sticks lying in the box, it immediately began to crawl to the top, until it was hanging upside down. Only then was it still. Megan watched with her mother as the green wings unfolded and the little white thumb opened to become lime green velvet trimmed in gold, four inches across, with beautiful swallow tails, it's beautiful black and gold markings making it look for all the world like it had tiny facsimiles of Tundra's eyes.

Megan told Amanda at breakfast what she'd seen. She went home to tell Laura that it was already happening, so the two of them watched the metamorphosis happen for them. It was all such perfect timing.

Amanda wanted an excuse to call Bridget Brown. The moth was her excuse.

Tom had told Amanda that he had left Miss Brown his cell phone so Amanda could call her if she needed to hear about Tom's time with her. Amanda needed to call. She wanted to call. She was so glad Tom had thought of that consideration for Bridget Brown.

When Bridget Brown finally answered the phone, Amanda told her about the Luna moth and then asked her what she knew about the hope chest of the heart. Amanda discovered she knew a great deal indeed.

Later that day, mothers and daughters took a walk to the Walnut Woods where the moths were released.

A few days later was a hot dry day when everyone had worked very hard setting up the stage for the Canada Day concert and picnic that was the highlight of the summer at the farm. It was the weekend the foster families came to stay, when school was finally out.

The stage was set in the meadow behind the garages where the hay had already been cut and the great round bales grouped on their sides together, a plywood floor bolted together on top of them. Long wooden poles secured an awning that would shelter the players from the sun.

It was a lot less work for the family than preparing for the ice races had been, because the food was going to be supplied by two commercial chip trucks that parked in the field and fed people all day long. Some people brought picnics, some ate fast food, and it was the only day of the year at the farm when people could celebrate with beer and wine. Sharon had made very clear from the beginning that strangers and friends were all welcome, but if anyone got visibly drunk they would never be allowed to come back. The picnic usually drew two to three thousand people. Local bands and singers always came, as well as the New Year's Eve jazz band from Montreal. It was a great party to launch the summer holidays.

After the stage was set, Tranh asked Tom if he might want to bring Amanda and Megan to see his telescope that night. The conditions were perfect and he thought they might enjoy seeing the universe from his perspective. Tom was delighted with the idea. Something inside him longed to see something that felt infinite again.

Megan and Amanda were game. It was a way to be with Tom without having to think about each other and their strange relationships. They were living in time like time was measured in baseball, where the game would be over when the last one was out. It was like the kind of time there was in musical chairs with three players and only two seats left, and no one knew when the music would stop.

It was after eleven when they drove down the lane way to Tranh's house, and Amanda and Megan were stunned at the glittering geodesic dome glowing in the dark, set on a hill in the middle of a great open field. Tom explained how the house rotated three hundred and sixty degrees so that Tranh could follow the stars with his telescope.

Tranh met them at his door and welcomed them warmly, and Amanda and Megan were amazed at the big open room that looked out through banks of windows onto black fields. Tranh had everyone sit, and he brought them tea, and offered sweet cakes that both girls gladly accepted. Tranh was alone because his wife and children had gone to sleep knowing his guests would only be engaged with his astronomical equipment.

Tom broke the ice by telling Amanda and Megan that Tranh spent most nights trying to find Near Earth Objects, asteroids that crossed the orbit of the Earth. Asteroid movies that showed the fictional Armageddon that would follow such a sudden impact were all the rage, and Megan was shocked to realize they were based on reality.

"You mean an asteroid could hit the Earth and destroy everything like it did the dinosaurs?" she asked Tranh.

"It could and it will, if we don't have a great deal of warning and figure out some way to stop it, and change its direction before it strikes." he answered simply.

"But what are the odds. The last one was millions and millions of years ago." Amanda pointed out.

When Tranh told them the last one of significance was at the turn-of-the-century, and that it flattened hundreds of miles of trees in Siberia and had been felt thousands of miles away, it didn't feel like it was such a remote possibility.

"That one was probably a ten meters in size and vaporized before it struck the Earth. There are probably 2000 objects a half kilometer or bigger crossing near the earth's orbit. We know about maybe two hundred. We find maybe a dozen more every year. I'm one of maybe twenty people on Earth looking for them." Tranh explained.

"What would happen if one hit?" Amanda asked nervously.

"If an asteroid bigger than half a kilometer struck North America, every city in the Western Hemisphere would be flattened by the shock wave, every building, every house destroyed. The dust thrown into the atmosphere would darken the sun for months and all the plants would die and all the animals would die after them. The billions of people who lived on the Earth would be reduced to perhaps a few tens of thousands who had access to some kind of life support systems and could live on canned goods for a few years. If an asteroid a mile in diameter hit the Pacific Ocean, the tidal wave would crest the Rocky Mountains."

The silence before the idea of such an unspeakable disaster was overwhelming. Even Tom did not know the things Tranh was telling them. He never talked about the details of his work. Tom always thought it was just a hobby.

"We could all die tomorrow." Megan said finally.

"Life as we know it could be over, yes." Tranh replied.

"Well, that's cheered me up." Amanda answered.

"Really." Megan agreed.

"It sure puts your own problems in perspective." Tom added.

And that's exactly what it did. It was hard to imagine that every moment of life sat in the balance of an astronomical event that was actually inevitable. The very thought that mankind's extinction was not only inevitable but might even be immanent, was breathtaking in its simple enormity.

"So who wants to go up and see if we can catch a glimpse of our approaching doom?"

"I'm game." said Amanda.

"Me too, I guess." Megan added weakly.

Tranh took them up to the second floor to the round center room in the apex of the house, and showed them the room that was filled with desks and cabinets, computers and photo displays around the platform that held the huge DMF sixteen inch Cassegrain telescope mounted on the platform beneath the two foot wide slit in the roof that opened the room to the night sky. Rotating the house and rotating his two telescopes on their axes meant Tranh could see most of the sky whenever he chose. The digital software on the other Centurion telescope allowed digital records to be sent by the Internet to the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian where they could be compared to the orbits of 48,000 known asteroids.

Amanda and Megan had expected a little telescope like the ones for sale in camera stores. They had not expected to find one with a barrel they couldn't even put their arms around. As it was with everything the Van Fleet's did, looking for the end of the world was done first-class. Tranh gave a short explanation of how he tracked asteroids, but the young visitors were drawn to the big telescope.

Tranh powered up the scope, locked the ephemeris star location and verified it before he set his coordinates. His visitors could then stand under the huge telescope and look into the viewing piece above them. Before the night was done their necks would all be sore.

Tranh used pictures from the Hubel Observatory to show the universe to his guests through a telescopic zoom out from the Earth. The Moon with its craters and mountains was stunning in its ghostly detail. They looked at Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and their classical offspring, Triton and Io and Calista and Europa. They moved beyond the solar system to Nebula and Galaxies that were stunningly beautiful spirals and globular clusters. To know that all the stars they could see with the naked eye was just a thimble in the ocean of stars brought a new, simple overwhelming perspective. The universe was so vast and beautiful that time slipped away as Tranh led them, hitchhiking on his wonder over time's own infinite face. Tranh set the stage and turned the polished mirror's face to single seconds of Infinity, pin holes in the universe that let them look at the features of a majesty beyond any believing.

It was strange how the silence of the universe infected everyone and made them quiet and reverent, almost the way the Walnut forest did. It was the great stillness of what they were seeing, and the inescapable feeling of standing on a spec of a planet, on a speck of a galaxy, a fly spec in the stable of existence that made them feel that strange quiet reverence, a reverence they could feel standing as infinitesimal presences among them.

What they didn't feel was what Tranh felt. He felt existence as a pulse: photons of light, white, day, dark, night, color, time, space, sight, electrons, protons, particles, waves, all as a pulse. What was and what would never be: one and zero: yes and no: God and grains of sand. It was all a pulse, beating time.

All they knew was that all they were seeing quickened the pulse in their veins. The scale of existence, the scale of beauty, the scale of life found a perspective none of the young people had ever known existed. The river of stars moved over the still water of the heart and sank into it with awe and wonder and loveliness.

When Megan said that she had no idea that the universe was so incredible, Tranh said that what was incredible to him was that all they could see, all the biggest telescopes would ever see, only showed perhaps ten percent of the matter in the universe, that ninety, perhaps ninety nine percent, of the universe was made of a dark matter that no one had even been able to find.

"And don't get me started on dark energy. The universe is accelerating from a force no one can yet even imagine." he explained to uncomprehending faces. He smiled.

The wonder remained as the three visitors drove home on the long, winding road leading to their home all three of them feeling the power of a force none of them had imagined.

And then Eugene died.

As Tom drove down the lane of the farm, the headlights glowing between the long serpentine stone walls, Sharon was lying asleep next to Eugene as she had every night since he had his last crisis. The violent shudder that shook the bed woke her, and she saw Eugene shaking in sudden convulsive spasms.

Sharon, her heart beating wildly was used to seeing Eugene almost rigid, but she froze when she saw the agonizing shudder suddenly coursing through his arms and legs. The look in his eyes was panic, like someone slipping away, slipping down a steel roof and clawing with his arms and his legs to hang on to anything, but the force of gravity and momentum was irresistible and there was nothing to stop his fall into free space. Time suspended. He wasn't choking, but there was a strange rasping noise coming out of his lungs as he looked into Sharon's eyes and she was shaking just like him, paralyzed almost completely, not knowing what she should do.

Slowly, tenderly she gathered him into her arms and held him to her breasts and told him to hang on, and tenderly told him it would pass. And it did pass, from sudden searing muscle seizures and cramps, to a shiver, to a trembling like a Luna moth hanging upside down from a twig pumping its wings full of life. Sharon was crying as she looked in his eyes and they looked like they were about to explode from his head. Black, black, black, and enormous, the blue bands of his eyes were gone. She was sure she was seeing the most excruciating pain that could silently be conveyed. The eyes she loved were gone. The gentleness, the tenderness, the sweetness and humor were gone. The muscles of his face were tightened in the same frozen impassiveness, but his eyes just grew and grew, and Sharon knew, she knew it was happening. He was dying and she started to sob and tell him it was all right, that no one on the Earth had ever known more love. She told him she loved him. She told him all his children worshiped his heart. His only reply was the gurgling in his throat, and his lips pursing and pursing as if he was a newborn again, desperate to suckle. And the last thing Eugene heard on this Earth was the sound of his wife's heart beating wildly, pounding inside her chest.

Sharon never knew if the pain and horror of his dying was greater than the horror of his death. His black eyes, dilated in terror, stunned the feeling from her heart for days after, haunted her memories always. She never described it to anyone. No one ever knew he had looked so afraid.

When his eyes rolled back and the black became white, Sharon screamed and the scream was strangled in her tears as she held him to her and she just cried and cried.

When she looked up to the tap on the sliding glass door, she saw Tom standing there, his forehead crushed against the glass. He was crying uncontrollably just like she was.

When Tom was finally able to look up through his tears, he saw his mother had put his father back on the pillow. She was disconnecting the respirator, and as he watched, she went to get a comb to straighten his hair.

He fought back more tears as he slid open the door and went to his mother and she came into his arms like a waif and held him so hard, that he was actually having to struggle to breathe.

"He was just so beautiful." Tom whispered into his mother's ear.

"I know." she replied.

Talking had put them both on the hard ground of grief and they stopped crying.

Sharon asked him to go to her bedroom and bring Eugene's burial suit. He did that.

Alone with Eugene, she looked to his body and saw the stillness that was beyond any pain. His body was a cocoon, a transparent chrysalis, and the peace of death filled the room like dry flowers. Only Sharon knew the pain and suffering Eugene had endured through the last two years of his life. The cramps, the weakness, the slow suffocation, and the screaming pain where the muscles let go of their nerves had been a silent torture that he tried to keep from everyone. Sharon knew, without having been told, and the end was almost beautiful in that way, like the silence at the end of a great Symphony.

When Tom got back, he was shocked that the laser printer to his father's computer was going a mile a minute. Eugene had told Sharon that when he died, he had a last message for his family and the name of the file to open. While she was waiting for Tom to return, she decided she needed very much to hear his last words. She had no idea that the computer file would print for over an hour, going through three pauses to replace paper.

It was to the rattle of his last torrent of words that his whole family assembled after Tom and his mother had dressed him.

She told Tom she would do it herself, but he asked to be there and help.

Eugene's tear-away pajamas came away, leaving him naked and so small and wasted. Tom had to make himself, force himself to move and touch death and his father's warm skin.

Dressing him into the suit that would have fit him when he was fourteen years old was poignant in the extreme. It was strange to Tom that the act of touching his father's warm skin as it cooled, touched an emotion Tom never would've imagine he would feel. It was an absolutely pure sense of privilege. Buttoning the crisp shirt, sliding his father's arms into the suit that felt like cool skin, was charged with finality and the precious power of the senses to make each moment transcendent.

When Eugene was finally formally dressed, it was the polished shoes on his feet that Tom had watched his mother slip in place that seemed to him was the strangest thing about what they had just done. Polished shoes, white sheets, fore-shortened death. Sharon's trembling fingers, tying Eugene's shoe laces, touched Tom's heart as if he could feel her fingers actually moving over it.

When his brothers and sisters were awakened and had gathered around Eugene's dead body, Sharon's suggestion to her frightened young children that they might want to hold their father's hand one last time broke the rigid shock inside them, and one by one they came and touched him. Some of them said goodbye, some of them said they loved him, and some couldn't say anything at all.

Finally, Sharon said that they could stay with their father if they wished, but she had to make phone calls to their other brothers and sisters.

When Sharon left, Tom left as well, walking the long lane under the same stars he had been looking at, close-up, a little while before, and the heavy shock and loss changed in his heart. The feeling that his heart was being filled with hot lead evaporated like dew as he walked past the fireflies that burned for love, each and all, in hundreds and thousands, and by the time he got to the beach and saw the house boat, it was as if his heart had been filled with pure, elemental hydrogen, burning as it collapsed in on itself. It was the fusion of love for his father that released that energy. The beauty and the enormity of the universe and all its blazing power, with all its dark matter and all its dark energy felt like nothing compared to what he felt for his father, for the life Eugene had lived and shared, for all the love he had nurtured and created. Tom had never felt more alive.

Inside the house boat, Tom slid open the Walnut pocket door and saw Amanda asleep in the glow of the night light beside her bed, so still and young and lovely, all of her life ahead of her. He tapped softly on the wood with his knuckles. He had to do it again before she opened her eyes.

She sat up instantly, in total surprise, and she whispered to him, "What are you doing here?"

She was stunned that his shining eyes could hold such terrible news.

"My dad just died. I thought I should tell you and your mom."

Amanda didn't reply, and she almost thought it was some kind of sick joke because he was speaking as if he was telling her he had just lost a hubcap from his car.

And then she knew it was true. There was a strange stillness and a strange dark energy in his body that sent a shiver through her as her mind flashed to Eugene, to imagine his blue eyes closed forever and, when her lip started trembling, Tom came and held her and she cried just like it was her own father who had just died.

Tom held her for a long time and it felt very strange because it was as if he was comforting her for her loss, and Amanda was secretly ashamed that finally it wasn't grief she felt rising inside her, but desire. That was the moment Amanda knew she was healed. When she finally stopped crying, it was because Tom was holding her and it felt so safe, and she had missed it so much, and it was the cruel pain of desire that made it so hard for her to catch her breath.

"I think we should tell your mother." Tom whispered.

"I know." she whispered, and she let him go and got up, and then the two of them opened the pocket door on the other side of the bedroom and saw Laura sleeping, and they paused and stood there watching her, so sorry to break such peace with such pain. Amanda was terrified to see it.

Amanda went and sat by her mother and took her hand and Laura woke immediately.

Surprised to see Tom standing there, surprised to feel Amanda's trembling hand, she almost didn't understand when Amanda said softly, "Mr. Van Fleet just died."

The words finally formed in the dark and Laura knew.

She said, "Oh,.. oh.. oh." as her voice trailed away into her heart in the descending scale of loss. "Thank you. I think I want to be alone for a little while." she asked, after a long, cold silence.

She didn't cry. Her only apparent grief was the little sigh she gave as Amanda kissed her forehead and got up and left her. Laura looked into Tom's eyes and didn't say a word and Amanda saw it and was disappointed her mother didn't acknowledge his loss. Tom understood.

They slid closed the wall to Laura's bedroom and Amanda pulled off her nightgown and proceeded to get dressed while Tom watched, thinking he should be embarrassed to be watching her naked, feeling ashamed for the desire splashing into his heart. He was pleased she was coming with him and hadn't even thought it might be necessary to ask.

The first gray smoke of the morning light that had fallen on Laura after she woke was now quickly turning the black earth to gray. The fireflies had stopped flaring. Amanda told Tom she couldn't imagine his grief.

"I don't really feel bad. That's probably going to come later. I don't know why, but it feels like it did when we were looking through Tranh's telescope."

Amanda said she understood, but she didn't.

Amanda asked Tom if he wanted to sit and talk before they went back to the farmhouse and he told her he didn't really wanted talk, but he'd like to sit with her for a while and watch the sunrise. He didn't want to go back to the practical reality of death. He wanted to feel it as he felt it then. Amanda agreed and they found a place to sit on the sand and they sat, side-by-side, and he took her hand, and they watched the sun light the earth before it appeared, rising red and silent over the water at the end of Haystack Island. The feel of the sun touched them like warm breath.

When the sun had risen above the horizon, Tom got up and led Amanda away.

They walked past the turn to the cabins and Tom didn't say anything about waking Megan and Ann Marie, and Amanda wondered if he had gone there first. He hadn't even considered waking them with the news. He knew intuitively that the first news of death went to those who were loved.

Tom was surprised the sunroom where his father had died was empty. The house seemed strangely silent. They found the whole family in the music room, sitting and standing, Eugene in his coffin, at the end of the room. Rosie and Tranh and Sarah were there and had helped carry Eugene and his coffin through the house.

Eugene's coffin had been made from Walnut from the Walnut Wood. Rosie had made it eighteen months before and it had waited, covered in the wood shop since then. It was made in the simple oblong shape the way coffins were made in the nineteenth century. The difference and the beauty were in the details, for the planks, joined at the flair where Eugene's shoulders rested, were made with wide dove tailed joints. The heavy wooden handles and hinges set off the glow of the cherry-black wood. The lid was a single piece of Walnut with the family tree and its many trunks chip-carved into the wood on both sides. It was simplicity and elegance, the polished beauty of thought and love.

Eugene lay at rest looking dead.

Rosie had been at his mother's side within twenty minutes and the rest of the family had waited in the music room while he brought the coffin and Eugene was placed inside. Only then was the family called, and the children carried their father to where he would wait for the hours before the doctor came and signed the death certificate, and the hearse came to take him to the crematorium. Jonas was there from the West early in the afternoon. Lucy, Wayne and Charles where there within hours. Christa was the only one who didn't come home immediately. Everyone was afraid about how she would react.

Amanda stood beside Eugene's body and felt so sorry she hadn't known him all her life. She had never even heard his voice. They had never even shared a conversation, but, as strangers, they had undeniably loved one another. Everybody knew it. Amanda thought about her mother and what part she had in that love. She stood beside Tom, feeling like she was sinking into wet sand. Amanda dared to touch Eugene's hand and lift it into her own, feeling the silky cool skin, the soft bones, the lightness free of his pain. If someone watching had known how her heart felt, they would have known it was like holding his hand.

Before the end of the day, all of the Van Fleet children and their partners, except Christa, had been there and said goodbye to their father. It was done in the hour of silence before Sharon went with Eugene in the hearse, taking him to become ashes, to become the billion year old carbon he always was. Eugene's mother had been brought in to say goodbye to her son and she knew immediately what she was seeing. Sharon had to hold her by the shoulders as she took her to her son, and Eugene's mother gave a cry like a bird and walked like a doll as she faced a death she had never imagined. The cry she gave as she stared in horror at her son was unforgettable. The look on her face was the first appropriate emotion she had displayed in months. She broke from Sharon and fled, and stayed in her room for three days. No one was able to persuade her to leave it until Sharon convinced her to put on her best dress to greet all the people coming for the picnic.

Eugene had thought out much of the aftermath of his passing except that one.

He left Sharon a detailed list of things she should do immediately upon his passing: people to be called, things to be done, things to be gathered, as well as instructions for his funeral.

The monument company was called and was there the next day with the huge portable compressor, the mason working on the lichen covered traveler stone that would be Eugene's death marker.

The biggest task was copying and collating all the printed pages from his last file. Eugene had left Sharon and each of his children printed extensions of the journals he kept by hand all their years on the farm. He had recorded the moments, the precious memories that lingered in every day, every ordinary day since he was unable to speak. The printed pages would accompany the actual journals in Eugene's own handwriting. His children would have his memory of them, memories they had already lost to the momentum of life. They found what was lost in time preserved in their father's attention and love.

With each bundle of his memories of each of them, he had included a single page, an essay, a eulogy from the dead to the living, the description of how Eugene saw each of them, the beautiful things that were never said, that never rose above the roar of the same momentum of life that took away its little moments. Eugene said to his living children the things that were usually appropriate to say over the dead. It was the things living people never heard said about themselves by those who loved them the most.

The last thing Eugene left each of the children was the final two letters between Arthur and Laura Lee. Eugene had introduced the circumstances that had led to Arthur and Laura Lee's death. He described the circumstances that had led to him reading their two last letters at their Memorial service. He could not have done anything to deflect the grief of his children any better than to transfer it to two fictional characters they all loved. Knowing the circumstances and feeling the loss of Arthur and Laura Lee, was almost more heart rending than losing Eugene. It came as a total shock, and he knew it would be like that. He wanted to teach them that death and grief and loss belonged to each of them separately and all of them collectively, that death connected as much as it separated lives. It was a part of feeling more than being.

It was afternoon before Laura came up to the house with David. Ian had driven up from Toronto with Alan the moment Amanda had phoned. He paid his respects to Sharon and the children and was surprised Laura had not yet appeared. Before he went to the boathouse, Sharon gave him Eugene's journals to Laura, and the printed pages, and Laura's living eulogy, and the last story of Arthur and Laura Lee.

When Ian found Laura, she was working on the last story for her book, sitting in a sun dress in the afternoon heat, David strangely still, sitting in a chair beside her. Ian had to bend over to kiss Laura, then kissed her hand tenderly, in real sympathy.

"Eugene left you these things." Ian said as he handed her all the paper. There were a dozen spiral notebooks as well as the printed pages. She took it and put it all aside.

"Everybody at the house is pouring over the things he left them. It seems he's kept a journal about you through the years he never even saw you. You'll probably be interested that there is also the story of the last two letters between Arthur and Laura Lee," Ian explained.

Laura looked at the stack of paper, and she picked the printed pages from on top of the notebooks, paper rustling like the heart moves feelings, rustling the way memory sounds; sibilant and breathless, and then still. When she saw the page on top that was titled simply, 'We Say Goodbye to Laura.' her heart fell into the words. She couldn't resist. He was speaking to her and she couldn't avoid it. She was terrified about what he would say, even though she knew it would be how he loved her. That was why she was afraid. The fear dissolved as she read.

'We say goodbye to Laura.'

The Laura I loved is keenly perceptive and deeply intelligent. She's graceful and gracious and unfailingly honest about what she sees. She's passionate and ambitious and so much more tender then she'd ever admit, even to herself. She's funny and fast and translucent like church glass, and secretly frightened, and secretly shy.

She shines in a crowd and loves making an entrance, and she writes like an angel and still doesn't believe it. She loves with conditions, but the conditions are clear. She loves but is afraid to be loved back. She loves and feels with intensity and expectations she's always been afraid to reveal. She's beautiful in ways she doesn't even imagine. She has touched lives in ways she will never know.

She always tells the truth, eventually, even to herself.

She is a beautiful woman. She was a beautiful young girl. But, for her, being beautiful was always something in other people's eyes. It was, for her, such a mixed blessing that she never liked considering its cost or its rewards.

She always knew, deep inside, that being beautiful was just a fact of life and that what other people saw was just makeup. She always wished she was as beautiful as others always told her she was and that's why she always made herself up for others, until she came back to the farm.

Deep in her heart she was always afraid of her beauty. She was afraid it would attract attention and expectations she didn't believe she could satisfy. Laura wants to be beautiful, but for all the wrong reasons, and all the right ones too, and wants to know she deserves to be loved but won't admit it.

And the most beautiful thing about Laura is that she never misses a thing. She sees and feels and it's all true, and that's why the thing she fears most is looking into herself, and that's why Laura will be the most beautiful when she's no longer afraid of who she is.

It was Laura's private honesty that taught me to see. It taught me to look at her in a way she never dared look at herself. It was how I came to love her and why I always will.

It was knowing how she would listen and how clearly she'd understand that taught me how to be who I am. She was a fact of my life that's impossible to describe or measure. She taught me to tell myself the truth, and eventually, even to tell it to her. She is someone I was so lucky to love.

Goodbye my love, I can't describe how much these months meant to me. Take care of Arthur and Laura Lee.'

Laura didn't cry. She got up and went into the bedroom and came back with the box of blue letters.

"Could you stay with David while I go up to the house?" she asked Ian. Ian nodded in agreement.

Laura found the whole family gathered in the music room with Eugene. Everyone hushed when they saw her, and Sharon came, and Laura looked in Sharon's eyes and told her how sorry she was that Eugene was gone. Sharon reached for Laura's face and leaned over the box of letters, and she embraced Laura, and briefly kissed her on both cheeks.

"We both know." Sharon answered cryptically.

"If it's all right, I'd like to put these letters with Eugene. You can take them back when I go. I just want my last memory to be of them together." Laura asked softly.

Sharon nodded and Laura walked quickly to Eugene where she placed the box of blue letters on the silk beside him. She didn't touch him. She didn't, and couldn't imagine kissing his corpse. She knew he was gone and she was looking at a crust, but seeing the box of letters beside him almost broke through the thin crust of ice she felt beneath her feet.

Everyone was silent as Laura left the room. Like life, like infinite, ordinary, beautiful life. Sharon didn't touch the letters. No one said anything, even when they were closed inside with Eugene before he was carried outside to the hearse for the ride they would take before they met the fire together.

It was on the ride with Eugene that Sharon looked at Eugene's last words to her. He had titled them Respect, Thankfulness and Love. He proceeded to describe to her the strength and beauty of her own heart, the strength and beauty that supported them all. He described to her her secret tenderness and vulnerability and described for her the indescribable bond of love between them. He called it the fabric she wove from life and love. The last thing he described was his own love for her, how it completed his being, how it made his own best feelings matter. He reminded her how he believed that memory was immortal and that it made their lives together infinitely precious. 'You are my other half in every way I can imagine.' was the last thing he said to her except for saying that he would love her always.

His last words to her were like a sunburst through black clouds. The tears she fought back, sitting next to the stranger beside her, were tears of an overwhelming joy that summed up their lives and their love together. And then she thought about what Eugene might have written to Laura and she knew for the first time, absolutely, that he had belonged to her all along.

While Sharon was reading, her children were also pouring over Eugene's notebooks. They had all read their living eulogies and Eugene had made each of them feel their own individuality and how precious it was to him, and some of them cried so hard they could barely see the words. Then they all moved to the story of Arthur and Laura Lee's deaths, and the grief they felt for the love that would never be consummated, never be shared in life, somehow made the sorrow of Eugene's early death pale in comparison to the loss of Arthur and Laura Lee's unlived life together. All they could think of was what life might have been for two young fictional people in love. Almost every one of the children quickly realized how that unlived, fictional loss compared to all that had been, all they shared with their father. It was Eugene's last, best lesson to his children.

The practical realities of feeding everyone and doing dishes and completing the preparations for the holiday picnic soon pulled everyone apart. It was almost like a normal day. That was perhaps the hardest thing to absorb.

Ann Marie and Megan felt very isolated and alone and it was because Eugene had left them nothing. Megan especially felt the overwhelming jealousy for Amanda who had received her own printed pages, her own living eulogy, her own collection of Eugene's memories, her own copy of Arthur and Laura Lee's last story, as if she had been one of his children.

Amanda couldn't imagine how someone she barely knew could have understood her and loved her so well. Her hour reading in the forty watt light of the root cellar was like seeing her portrait for the first time, a portrait done by painter who was unerringly able to capture the human heart.

Before dinner, Amanda used her mother's cell phone to call Bridget Brown. She had to wait for ten minutes before Miss Brown responded to the buzz of Tom's phone. Still, Miss Brown wasn't surprised to hear from Amanda. She had expected her to call again, but what completely surprised her was that she wasn't calling with the heartache of a troubled romance, but with the heartache of fundamental grief.

She told Miss Brown about the pages she had just read and how they made her see herself as she never had seen herself before. Eugene saw the same strength in her that he saw in Sharon, and he told her so. He saw the same inexhaustible sensitivity that he saw in her mother, and he told her so. He saw her father's wit and kindness. And he saw something that was hers alone. He saw someone who would never stop changing because she had an enthusiasm for life most people couldn't even imagine.

Miss Brown told Amanda that she didn't know the other people very well, and she told Amanda she had never even met Eugene, but she knew from Tom all she had to know about his father, and she was absolutely certain that he was right about her. "It's not just me who knows how precious you are." she had told Amanda. She asked about the funeral and when Amanda told her it was on Saturday, Miss Brown decided she had to be there beside Amanda.

It was only then that Miss Brown asked about Amanda's feelings for Tom, and Amanda said she was fine. Her broken heart was much harder on him than her she had said. "I know what's there between us." she said, and Miss Brown told her she was sure that she did.

The last thing they talked about was the cell phone. Miss Brown told Amanda she was so glad Tom had thought to leave her his telephone.

"I'm going to get one for myself, so you can call me whenever you want." she said.

"I would love that." Amanda replied.

"I guess missing the last half of twentieth century was enough." Miss Brown joked.

Laura stayed away from the farmhouse. She wanted to be alone with her grief. As the sun set like a bisected blood orange hanging over the horizon, the sky congealed to its bleeding. It was as if the water in the bay ran with a mix of white and red wine, the rolling waves lapping at the shore like the cool, repetitive sadness Laura felt filling her life.

At the farm, mourning was the same and different for everyone who loved Eugene. Each of them knew and remembered a different Eugene. Each of them felt this presence as part of their own individual being in different ways. Where his love began and ended was impossible to describe or trace or even appreciate. A gesture, a phrase, a feeling, and what each one of them made of them, and how they retained his own nature inside them was a mystery with no end. It was his passion and enthusiasm for life that was the one thing about him that his children all came to again and again.

To Rosie his passion touched the reverence for life. To Tranh it was making order from chaos. To Ian it was the gentleness in his clear blue eyes. To Amanda it was how he never let anything go. To Sharon, Eugene's passion for life was a sensual wonder. She could have told Amanda so much about how he saw and listened, even though he only occasionally told her the things he never wanted to forget.

'Scars of beauty.' he called them and there were some days when he actually seemed to her to be bled dry from his love of life.

Just one of his qualities had become so many things that had grown all around him in such different ways in each of his children, and thinking of the rest of him and what it was inside each of them was like trying to unravel a ball of old jewelry tangled in a box. The only thing common to everyone mourning was the vertigo they felt at the abyss of his absence. Even in death, Eugene took them higher and higher.

Like everyone else, Laura sat and picked at the gold chains of memories in her heart and pulled at the links and jewels and clasps of time. For her, her memories of what they had been when they were young, when their love was a slender thread between two great unknowns, were like old faded photographs of two people with different bodies, different thoughts, different feelings that had belonged to the world in completely different ways. Laura sat and felt the resonance of the old single thread of love still moving inside her, connecting her to his death. She had come to love the old dying Eugene: the father, the husband, the farmer, the mechanic, the dreamer, the strange secular do-gooder with whom she had absolutely nothing in common except creating a book about two fictional teenagers. She couldn't imagine how each part of him had all become such a precious part of her. Love was a curiosity wrapped in a conundrum, tied with Gordion knot.

That night, Laura left Ian and David sleeping, and Amanda quietly awake, and went for a long walk under the stars. In the black stillness of the night, in the black stillness of the sky, and the black stillness of the water was the black stillness in her heart.

The stonecutter had come as he was instructed to do, and he insisted that no one watch him work. On the Cemetery Hill, the truck and compressor sat until the work was done and what the Van Fleet children found when the work was completed was the big traveler stone covered in a canvas tarpaulin, locked with a padlock for which Rosie had been left holding the key. It was all very mysterious.

Sharon had come back with Eugene's ashes that were held in the Walnut box that Wayne had brought from Toronto. He had done it himself, carving it to look like a piece of the brain rock that made the serpentine fence his father and mother had built over the years. It was about one foot square and the top fitted in place so that it was completely invisible.

Eugene's ashes in the beautiful walnut urn were placed in the screened Chapel under the Walnut tree so people could come to say goodbye.

Wayne had arranged for the television coverage and radio announcements and the newspaper obituary to tell the world Eugene Van Fleet was dead. It was amazing that the phone began ringing long before any news had been made public. One of the most difficult jobs over the next two days was answering the calls of sympathy. Cars continually came down the lane as Sharon and her children greeted each person and every family with the strength and grace Eugene would have loved. For the Toronto people, it was a stunning example of how a good life could reach so far and so wide.

Ian and Ann Marie and their children tried their best to do the ordinary tasks the Van Fleet family usually did so easily. They made great potfuls of coffee and tea. They thawed cakes and scones from the big freezers. They picked up glasses and empty cups and did the dishes and then started all over again. Ian had insisted that Sharon focus on her visitors. The four friends from Toronto had never worked so hard in their lives, and Sharon and every one of the Van Fleet children thought it was the most touching tribute that they received. Ian had gone to the boathouse to try to get Laura to come to help, but she said she couldn't face the house and the people. The best thing she could do was watch over David. Ian saw she was right, but he was disappointed that she didn't or couldn't share the time of grief with the family of the man who loved her so much.

It was the day after Eugene died that Laura finally read Eugene's last letters between Arthur and Laura Lee. It would be the story to complete the work she had done, the stories that would show she could write like an angel so everyone would know it, the way Eugene did. It was so strange to read the new letters for the first time on white paper, in Times Roman 10. It was almost like they weren't real. It was then she really appreciated Eugene's effort in finding old airmail paper and envelopes to complete the illusion that gave time and imagination a solid place in the world.

The first letter was from Laura Lee.

Dear Arthur,

Last night I dreamed Eugene Van Fleet gave your eulogy as I sat and listened. He tried to describe who you were. He tried his best but he didn't even come close, even though he was your best friend.

The dream was like the dreams we share when we move through time, and as I listened to him talk, he missed so much. I knew things about you that he could never even imagine.

There's a way that love sees that no one knows except two people who were always meant to be together. It's the way we see when we travel in time. It's the way our letters always cross. Nobody can describe your heart except me. Nobody knows what I see. No one knows how much I love you and how it feels. No one knows except you, and I never even said it, except that one time. But it doesn't matter; no one can keep us apart. It doesn't matter what anyone says or thinks. I'm so scared of what is to come!

We'll soon be together. We'll soon have our own life. We'll dream together side-by-side, forever.

I love you so much. There, I've said it again. I hope you can hear me and feel me and touch me the way I will when I dream about you tonight.

Sleep well, as always,

My love forever,

Laura Lee

Laura loved how the letter foreshadowed what she knew would be their deaths. Her imagination took her beyond Eugene Van Fleet reading the letters for Arthur and Laura Lee's friends and family who didn't even exist, friends and family who would have been shamed by the love they had never appreciated. She understood why Eugene hadn't told her how the story of Arthur and Laura Lee would end. She picked up the next page and read.

Dear Laura Lee,

Last night I dreamed Gene gave your eulogy, and he tried his best, but all I could think about was that I was the one who should have been there talking about you. I couldn't understand why they didn't let me speak or why they thought I couldn't do it. If you died, a part of me would die too and I'd want everyone to know that.

I never told anyone except Eugene what I felt when they sent you away to school. I never even told you how it feels to only have your words on paper to hold. If it wasn't for our dreams, I couldn't stand it.

Even in last night's awful dream, I can remember every word Eugene said about you and how he even said that a love like ours happens once in a lifetime.

That was the one really true thing he said. If it was me, I would have wanted everyone to know all the things that would never be, if you died.

I'd want them to know how I'd miss your touch, and your smile, your laugh and the way you run like a girl. I'd want everyone to know how you would've held our children and how they would have grown up so beautifully in your eyes. I'd want everyone to know how we would have gotten old together, and how I would've loved seeing your wrinkles the way I love your beautiful soft skin. I'd want everyone to know what it felt like to share the same dreams and heartaches and be together through all the things that life brings. I'd want everyone to know how much I love you, and I want you to know that too. I want to say it and say it and say it over and over and over again because I never said it before, like this. I'm saying it now. I hope you can hear me.

Sweet dreams, as always,

I love you so,

Arthur

It was then Laura felt the same thing all the Van Fleet children felt, that it was possible to have a great love in this world. Having written all the stories and been a part of each of their hearts, Laura could feel, like Eugene's children could feel, that the ordinary facts of life and the ordinary weaknesses of people that most often unravel love, could not touch real passion. Eugene created two ideal lovers and had made them seem perfectly possible and real. He had made the impossible seem possible and even better, he had made a great love seem simple. He had made the aspirations of love an undeniable part of everyone who read the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee. He set them up for the best heartache in life.

Having written the stories, Laura knew she was now part of that same fictional reality.

When she went on to read the circumstances of Arthur and Laura Lee's deaths, they were actually anticlimactic. After Arthur and Laura Lee had written and posted their letters, they both were consumed with the absolute terror that they would never see each other again. Each of them decided separately to go to the other, to run away and make a life together no matter where, no matter when, no matter how they had to do it.

Laura Lee's airplane landed in Toronto and she was taking a bus downtown to the train station when a transport truck lost its load of lumber and Laura Lee's bus crashed, killing her and three other passengers. Arthur had borrowed the money for the plane ticket to Paris from his grandmother, and she was driving him to the airport when a tread came off a transport truck tire and came through the windshield killing Arthur instantly. Their letters were delivered after they died, and Eugene describe how he read them at the joint memorial service the two families decided they had to have some weeks after Arthur and Laura Lee had been buried. Eugene described the faces of the families, and it was as if he was traveling into the future and seeing the faces at his own funeral. Then Laura knew suddenly, with an absolute certainty, that as he was describing those faces, he was really only seeing hers. And of course she was wrong.

Wrong or right, Laura felt like the cascading crash of an overloaded power grid was collapsing inside her with the demands being made upon her heart. Eugene was gone. She was afraid she was losing her husband and daughter just as they had been found. Her book was all but completed. Everything was over. She felt she had no future. She couldn't do or say anything to stop it. All she knew was that she would use Eugene's last story of Arthur and Laura just as he had written it. They would share the author's credit as it should be. Their names would be linked forever. That was when Laura knew that the title of the book could only be, 'Arthur Laura Lee and Eugene.'

An imaginary mourning joined to the real one, as Laura felt the strange confusion of separating feelings of two losses that were so much the same. Imaginary people, who had died more than thirty years before, were lost with the same brutal finality as the new, old love of her true lost and found life.

The foster families came the day before the funeral, and it added to the chaos of feelings in the farmhouse. Practically, the extra hands finally relieved Ian and Ann Marie and their daughters from some of the intense work they had assumed.

Megan had tried to comfort Tom, but he was just too busy to respond to her tenderness.

After the family dinner, Tom and Megan were sitting on the front porch with his mother and all her children. Amanda had gone for a walk to the garages to look at her Riviera which had been painted the day before Eugene died. It was the color of wet sand and glowed like butter. She sat inside and turned on the engine and the rumble of the big pistons trembled inside her. She thought about how they had taken the whole car apart and re-assembled it, every part re-conditioned and made shining. She thought about all the time working with her father and Tom and she understood, at last, why none of the Van Fleet children was ever able to part with their first car.

She turned off the engine and felt very much alone. She couldn't understand why she suddenly felt happy. Her first car, her first love, her first feelings of mature reflection all felt so sweet and small.

When she walked out of the garage she was stunned to see Bridget Brown's 29 Studebaker parked among all the other cars. Her heart leaped for joy. She found Miss Brown on the porch just greeting Tom's mother, and being introduced to all her family. Amanda raced through the door and Bridget Brown smiled to see her and Amanda took the tiny woman in her arms and held her like she was all her own. Amanda told her how glad she was that she had come. Miss Brown said she was glad to do it.

"It's a long way for a lady who's never been further than Ottawa. But I got up and fed all the animals and then spent an hour in a gas station trying to find back roads I'd be comfortable driving. It was wonderful seeing the world." Almost no one missed the irony.

Miss Brown declined any food or beverage and she told Amanda, very directly, that what she would like to do, after speaking to Sharon, was see the farm. Amanda immediately volunteered as the tour guide and the two of them left to see the rest of the house. Walking with another stranger who cared for her so much somehow filled Amanda's heart. It was obvious to Amanda that the desire to see the farm was so the two of them could have some time alone.

When they were finally outside, Amanda showed Bridget the root cellar under the rock garden where she spent her hour alone every weekday. They went inside and sat on the bench in the dim incandescent glow. They were both surprised that they really didn't have much to say. It was as if Amanda's silent hours had become a living part of the place.

"I can't tell you how much easier the next day is going to be because you came." Amanda said thankfully.

"I don't know how it can be so, but it feels like you are my family." Bridget replied.

"I know." Amanda agreed.

After the tour of the farm, Amanda insisted that Miss Brown stay the night and not go back to be alone in the motel in Picton. It was slightly uncomfortable asking if Miss Brown would mind sharing her double bed, because all the other beds at the farm were taken.

Miss Brown laughed and said that when she was young, it was common for the children to sleep together, a half dozen in a bed, sleeping cross wise. Amanda was thrilled she agreed to stay. In a way, for Amanda, it would be like when she slept with her mother in the cabin not long ago, but this time such a simple intimacy would be beyond any fear.

Bridget Brown met Laura at the boat house and they embraced once again, and Laura told her how touched she was that she had come to support Amanda. Laura thought of Eugene, thinking that he should have had someone like Miss Brown as his mother. She was sorry Eugene would never see the old woman and her daughter together.

Laura went to bed soon after. Bridget Brown and Amanda sat on the porch and listened to the bullfrogs on Haystack Island chanting deeply, feeling like they were the only people in the world, so far from care.

"Were you close to Tom's father?" Miss Brown asked

"I don't know why, it felt like I was. I loved how he would see and remember all the little things. Somehow all the little things added up to so much more. Just watching him look at someone was amazing"

"He was like my two Emilys." Miss Brown replied.

"Except he was a man. His little things had car parts and racing and stuff like that too. One of my favorite things about Mr. Van Fleet was reading the stories about his life in the box on the family tree. I liked to go by and read about him every night before I went home. If you like, I'll let you read his journal about me, about the things he wanted to remember that I did. It's so strange; I don't think anyone loved me for being who I am, like he did."

"It must be very a difficult feeling, feeling you're not one of his children when he loved you so much." Miss Brown answered.

"It is, because I really feel like one of his children. It's so weird."

They didn't have very much more to say. Miss Brown told Amanda she was quite tired and the two of them went to bed. They both laughed like schoolgirls when Miss Brown came out of the bathroom wearing one of Amanda's short nightgowns.

Before they slept, Amanda took Miss Brown's hand, and except for its warmth and size, it felt just like Eugene's.

Feeding everyone in the morning got everyone through the emotional anticipation of Eugene's funeral. There would be a service in the screened Chapel beneath the Walnut tree, just for the family and the people on the farm.

"I'm going to go up and dig his grave." Rosie announced at the end of the meal. Tranh asked if he could help and Rosie nodded, and then all the other children said they wanted to be there too. Sharon watched her children leave the table together.

That was how Eugene's grave was dug by all of his children who were there at the breakfast table. They took turns with the shovel making the four-foot deep hole into which they would let down his ashes. Climbing down into their father's grave was a strange, spontaneous thing that made them feel like brothers and sisters. Except for Rosie, they all walked back to the farmhouse together, Rosie staying to plant two resplendent climbing rose bushes on either side of the stone that would mark his father and mother's graves.

Wayne's beautiful box, holding Eugene's ashes, sat on an old simple pine table in the Chapel. Everyone began gathering around it after they got back from the grave.

Laura had brought David to the farmhouse for breakfast to be part of his father's funeral. No one noticed, when everyone got up from the table that she slipped out of the farmhouse and went back to the boathouse to be alone. When Amanda noticed her mother was missing, she assumed she had gone to get dressed for the Chapel service.

When almost everyone had gathered and Laura still hadn't arrived, Amanda told her father she would go to check on Laura. Waiting with Miss Brown, Ian let her go, saving the two seats for the rest of his family.

Amanda found her mother sitting on the black willow, still dressed in shorts and a halter top.

The closer Amanda got to her mother, the angrier she became. It was obvious Laura had no intention of going to Eugene's funeral.

"Why aren't you dressed?" Amanda demanded.

"I'm not going. I can't do it. I can't." Laura replied in a cold, even tone.

"Get off there!" Amanda insisted and grabbed her mother by the arm and dragged her down to the sand. Laura was shocked. She didn't fight back, just stood there, looking stunned.

"You are going. You're going to go in there and put on a dress. Right now!" Amanda insisted, and when her mother just turned her head away, Amanda couldn't contain her rage.

"He loved you for God's sake! You were his Laura Lee. You're Laura Lee to all of them. If you don't come, you'll be betraying every feeling anybody has ever had for you in this place. You owe it to Eugene. You owe it to Sharon. You owe it to Tom and, goddamn it, you owe it to me." Amanda screamed.

"I owe everybody. But don't you see, I'm bankrupt, broke." Laura replied softly, evenly, coldly.

"You are going to this funeral, if it kills you. If you don't do this, I'll never forgive you." Amanda said in a voice as cold as her mother's.

Laura gave in. She gave a sad, heartbroken, "Alright, I'll go."

Laura looked into her daughter's eyes and walked into the boathouse and when she came back, she looked entirely normal, actually beautiful in the makeup she hadn't worn in many months. They said not one word on the long walk to the Chapel.

The family had gathered for the service exactly as they did every week, except everyone wore their best clothes. Sharon asked Jonas to lead the service and the song he picked was the old traditional 'Precious Memories'.

Everyone was surprised that by the time the service began there were four or five hundred people gathered all around the Chapel. Cars were streaming down the lane way and parking in the field where the music would be that afternoon. Jonas began to speak and silence fell to his voice.

"When the disciples complained to Jesus that he never gave them any commandments, He said He'd be generous and give them two: Love God with your whole heart and mind and soul and the other one was like it, 'Love your neighbor as yourself'. And we shouldn't forget how Jesus explained that a neighbor was someone like the Good Samaritan who would always care for those who needed help. Our father was a great Samaritan. He cared for us with an absolute, unconditional love. I think everyone here knows Eugene Van Fleet will never die."

That was all Jonas said. It would have been more than any of his family ever needed to think about in the next hour of silence.

Laura and Amanda had taken their seats shortly after Jonas spoke. The whole family was stunned to see the crowd gathering outside, until there was a crush of people as far as anyone could see, and they weren't dressed in casual summer clothes like the crowds that came every other year for the picnic. Almost everyone was properly dressed for a funeral. Looking out of the circular Chapel and seeing faces so sad and respectful was almost overwhelming.

The hour of contemplation was almost over when Christa finally made her way through the crowd. Sharon had talked with Brian Smith, Christa's psychiatrist, and they agreed it would be best if she only came home on the day of the funeral. Sharon worried about why Christa hadn't arrived because she had no idea she would be caught in the traffic streaming onto the farm. Christa had actually run the long lane way as her psychiatrist slowly progressed to where the cars were being parked.

She wore a sheen of sweat when she entered the Chapel and Ian got up to give her his chair. But she absolutely ignored everyone, her eyes fixed on the Walnut box that obviously held her father's ashes.

She seemed to float in a trance straight to it.

"Water is taught by thirst. Love by Memorial mold." Christa whispered as she lifted the heavy wooden box into her arms and began to cover it with gentle kisses. It was uncomfortable to watch, it was almost like she was kissing her lover's face, and the look on her face was unforgettable, and lost.

Sharon got up and went to her daughter and tried to take Eugene's remains away, but Christa only laid her cheek against the top of the dark box, holding it to her breast.

"Her words were from a poem of Emily Dickinson's." Bridget Brown whispered to Amanda while everyone waited.

"Christa, honey, come sit with me." Sharon whispered to her daughter.

Christa slowly put the urn back on the table and when she bent to kiss it again, her long Chestnut hair fell softly around it. It was one last sweet kiss on the cool wood. When she stood up, her eyes were like fire. She spoke to her family.

"Do you remember how he used to let us push him into a snow bank and wash his face until it was so cold and wet? Do you remember how he laughed when the snow tears ran down his face? Do you remember how warm it felt to have such cold hands touching him? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know his laughter?" she seemed to be talking to every pair of eyes. Then she focused on her mother. "I want to carry him."

"You can do that, but come and sit until it's time." Sharon said gently to her daughter and took her hand and took her to her own seat.

Jonas waited a few minutes after Sharon took Eugene's empty seat beside her daughter and then got up and asked everyone to sing Precious Memories once again.

'Precious memories, how they linger,

How they ever flood my soul.'

When the song was over everyone rose and Christa gathered her father's ashes into her arms and walked beside her mother as they left the Chapel, as the enormous crowd parted for the family procession to the graveyard. It took almost an hour before the family was gathered at the grave and the multitude of nearly 3000 souls covered the hillside holding the little cemetery. Because the Walnut box was so heavy, Christa finally let her brothers and sisters take it from her breast, and they all took turns carrying their father to his rest.

At the graveside, the Walnut box was placed in the small bronze coffin Wayne had ordered to fit the urn carrying his father's ashes. The children had decided the night before, at the dinner table, that they each wanted to take down their favorite photo of themselves from the family history on the wall, forever leaving its white space bare. Each took the photo they'd taken down and carried it to the graveside where they would all lie beside Eugene forever. They all put their photos in the box, one by one.

The dark box was closed and Wayne and Tranh let it down into the dark earth.

It was a moment in life and loss that was absolutely real. It was the last time any of them would have the chance to speak directly to their loss. Eugene had understood how important that last chance was. He had asked that his family read or speak something there, before his grave was closed. Wayne had understood there would be a great many people wanting to hear those words, and so he had placed a speaker on a table nearby, and each of the children passed a wireless microphone as they said their last words to their father.

The big knot of grief inside each person had its place among the great grief they all shared among the family, among the multitude. It was as much about remembered joy as it was about grief, as much about life as death, as much about connection as separation. Everyone was shocked by the volume of Wayne's voice when he began to speak. His amplified whisper carried out over the crowd sounding enormous and strange in the silence.

"My father was living proof that no matter who you are, you deserve to be loved. I think it's obvious by the people that are here, his love went so much further than his own family. He always pretended that he was just an ordinary man, but there wasn't anything ordinary about him. He would never give up. He never stopped waiting. He never stopped loving you, no matter what you did. He taught me the best things about respect and patience I know, and he taught me how to stand up and be proud of who I am. He was just so beautiful, but I guess you people all know that. Thank you all for coming and sharing our loss. It really does make it easier to bear."

Wayne passed the microphone to Tranh.

"My father made the impractical, practical; the impossible, possible; the emotional understandable, and the very best thing of all, the unlovable, lovable, so incredibly lovable. He taught us all what it really means to be rich. He taught us universal truths are really very simple. Rest in peace, dad."

Rosie spoke next and he talked the longest and that surprised everyone.

Staring down into the little grave, he told how he had come to be adopted and how angry and lost he was as a boy, and how he was so frightened when he first saw how big Eugene was.

"I thought that life was just learning to protect yourself from someone who was going to hit you. I thought life was just getting ready to strike back."

Rosie proceeded to tell how Eugene's gentleness slowly washed away his fear. He told about what a difference it made to how he saw everything and everyone, knowing life could be something beyond anger and fear.

"I couldn't imagine that it was possible to be someone who would never lift a hand in anger. When I realized my father would have died before he did that, it made me want to be like that too."

He told how he found peace and tenderness as part of his own heart and how his father had known how to nurture it as no one else had ever done.

"When I understood the softest part of me was the best one, just like it was the best part of him, I think I became who I am."

It was then Rosie pointed out the climbing roses on either side his father's head stone.

"The rose you see has had its name formally registered. As long as they grow, as long as it is propagated, this rose will be called, the Eugene and Sharon rose." He looked in his mother's eyes.

It was then that he started to cry and passed the microphone.

Sarah, everyone's teacher, had lost control of her voice. Her breath was as ragged as a leaf in the wind as she told her heart's deepest feelings.

"He gave us roots. He made us feel loved. He made sure we have a place for all time. He made sure that our own children would know that too. He gave us his heart and he gave us our wonderful mother. He gave us himself without asking for anything. He gave us a place to be ourselves. I love you, daddy. I'm sorry I never told you enough, that's all." She passed the microphone to Jonas. He heaved a great sigh as he began.

"It's almost impossible to think we'll never see him again. It's almost impossible because he's still so alive in every one of us. The reason I think it will always be impossible to feel that he's gone is because he taught each of us to create this world in our own imaginations. Our father believed that anything you could imagine could happen. He made us all believe that was true. And the funny thing is, the man who gave us the depth of our imaginations, was the only person that I ever felt was completely real. It goes without saying that he was a great father. Only his family knows he was such a good son and brother. Watching him with our mother, there isn't one in this family who doesn't know how beautiful a marriage can be."

"He once told me that he didn't believe anything died. He said we just changed our point of view. That's certainly true for all of us gathered here, because his death has changed our point of view. And I think he might have agreed that being born into life was another change in the way we see. He made us appreciate that change in ways none of us will ever be able to describe."

He passed the wireless microphone to Christa. Everyone wondered how she would respond. The family was decidedly nervous.

"He was a dog's tail banging on the floor, having a happy dream. I wanted to write a poem, but I didn't think it was possible to put Eugene in a box of words. Last night, dreaming, words came to me. These are the ones I'm supposed to say.

Look homeward, Angel!

Your eyes are all that's left

In the poor language of love.

Your eyes in mine, mine in yours

My father, Remember, I loved you

And the entry and the exit wounds,

Each of them, all of them, all.

When one heals, one never heals.

You came to me as I am.

A leaf, a stone, a broken door.

She had barely paid any attention to the microphone in her hand and so only the family heard what she said. Lucy had to take it from her fingers. Lucy said nothing. She simply began to sing in her sweet soprano voice.

"We have been gay

Going our way

Life has been beautiful.

We have been young.

After you're gone

Life will go on,

Like an old song we have sung.

When I grow too old to dream

I'll have you to remember.

When I grow too old to dream,

Your love will live in my heart.

So kiss me sweet

And so let us part,

And when I grow too old to dream

That kiss will live in my heart.

And when I grow too old to dream

Your love will live in my heart."

She blew a kiss into his grave as the song carried out to places only a beautiful voice could reach, and the whole crowd had fallen into the old sweet song as more and more faces dissolved in tears.

She handed the microphone to Tom.

No one understood what Tom did next. He didn't say anything. He could find no words for his grief and it was in that moment when his heart was pounding with the shame of finding nothing to say that he remembered a movie about wolves he had watched that had been about a man who had adopted a pack of them and learned to be accepted as the alpha male. Tom remembered the man's wolf howl, and had practiced it a few times when he was alone in the Walnut Wood. He didn't think twice. The amplified wolf cry slowly rose from his lungs echoing over the multitude, so high and poignant in one rising heartbreakingly pure note that it was almost chilling. The hair rose on the back of Tom's own neck hearing the cry coming from deep inside him, until the long plaintive note was finally over and there was absolute silence in response.

Amanda and Megan looked at each other in absolute shock. When Tom looked at his mother's eyes, he knew it was all right.

The younger children followed with their own thoughts and readings.

It was Martha, serious, busy Martha who picked the Whitman poetry that stunned then all.

"I will show you that there is no

Imperfection in the present and can be none in the future.

And I will show you that whatever happens to anybody,

It may be turned to beautiful result,

I will show you that nothing can happen more beautiful then death,

And I will thread that thread through in poems

That time and events are compact,

And that all things in the universe are

Perfect miracles, each as profound as any."

And she wasn't done, quoting again from Eugene's favorite poet.

"Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world,

In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

Sooner or later, delicate death.

Praise'd be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,

And for love, sweet love--- but praise! Praise! Praise!

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

I think that was how our dad felt about dying." she added simply.

Christa swooned hearing the words, and her knees gave out, and Sharon and Jonas had to hold her between them until she had the strength to stand once again. That was when Sharon first wept.

She composed herself as the younger children spoke. And when the microphone came to her, everyone was surprised she would find the strength to speak. Her voice breaking as she spoke the words that had burned inside her for so long, the whole crowd seemed to heave a great sigh to her anguish that caught in every throat and every heart.

"O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!

In the air, in the woods, over fields.

Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved!

But my mate is no more, no more with me,

We two together no more!"

Out of the cradle, endless rocking, Sharon tore the heart from the crowd, and her children, and her own breast. There had never been such tears. Even Laura broke down and cried, and that was when Laura saw George Marshall, his face buried in his hands.

It was then that Rosie went to the tarpaulin shrouding the great stone to unsnap the lock and pull away the canvas. Everyone near the grave waited until they could look at the brass plaque affixed to the place the stone Mason had made flat.

When the whole family saw what was written there, they absolutely exploded in laughter...gut-wrenching, tear-running, bend over, belly laughter. Eugene and Sharon's full names divided the brass Square in two. Eugene's side read,' Eugene Arthur Van Fleet, Sept. 14, 1949-June 30th 1999. Underneath the date was a simple sentence, 'There's no end to it.'

Everyone who could read the words that was not laughing out loud, thought it a simple and fitting sentiment for a grave marker and were shocked at the laughter. The younger children were almost beside themselves, bent over in tears, howling in comic relief. It took the rest of the morning before everyone in the crowd had had the joke explained.

Tom whispered to Amanda and Megan, "It's what he used to say every time, he'd fart. There's no end to it." They couldn't help it, because it made them laugh too. It was an incredible release.

Wayne took the microphone from his mother and, still laughing, thanked everyone for coming and invited everyone to stay for the annual picnic. He was sorely tempted to tell about Eugene's last best joke, but he didn't. How could he explain an in-joke to three thousand sad people?

Eugene had managed to replace gut-wrenching sadness with gut-wrenching laughter, and it changed the day completely. Even those who didn't know why the family was laughing, knew something had happened to soothe their terrible pain.

"We're going to sing every sad song we know." Wayne had shouted, almost defiantly, to the crowd. Still, everyone waited, whispering about the laughter from the Van Fleet family amplified over the crowd.

In the strange anticlimax that happens before people walk away at a burial, the whole family, the whole crowd, stood waiting for the first person to move away.

No one moved away. Rosie produced a shovel and started to fill in the grave. There was no sound of dirt on a coffin, just the scratch of gravel on gravel. Everyone stopped laughing. Everyone stood and watched Rosie shoveling in his dark suit until Wayne took the shovel away from him and worked until Tranh did the same, and all of the children took their turn closing their father's grave, until it was just a little square of open dirt.

When it was done, Sharon went to take David by the hand, and David, holding hard to Laura's, led the family and the crowd from the hillside Cemetery. Sharon was still getting over the light headedness of her laughter. Laura didn't speak.

Suddenly, Laura pulled her hand from David's and ran away over the fields, back toward the boathouse and her guilt and her grief.

When she got to the beach, her tears suddenly stopped, and as she walked and looked at Haystack Island, she stopped dead. She stood rooted to the spot in the sand and realized Eugene had been right in the last story, she was the one who should have spoken at his grave side, she was the one who knew who he was. All the beautiful words about how he had touched his family were nothing compared to what she knew and learned about who he really was as a man, and it was then that she knew the best moments of her life had been lying beside a man who could barely move. She hadn't spoken when he was alive; she hadn't spoken when he was gone. She hadn't said anything about all the things she knew as no one else, not even Sharon, could know. She remembered the last months of his life as one precious jewel in her heart, and she remembered the time long ago when they had loved one another and she had turned away.

She could feel herself surrendering to the strange nostalgia for her youth and she decided she wanted to be alone with what was left of Eugene inside her, and swim to where they had made love the first time. She didn't take off her beautiful sandals or her blue summer dress, she just walked into the warm water and began to swim, and she could feel the fabric clinging around her thighs as her arms pulled the clear water past. She was almost halfway to the Island when she felt the first cramp and it felt like the pain in her heart.

She knew what it was and she knew if she kept going, she might not be able to come back, or it might even take her and she would drown and there would be another gathering, a tiny funeral where no one would be able to say who she was because he was dead. It would be Arthur and Laura Lee's Memorial service all over again. Drowning felt almost appealing. If there was seeing, she would see Eugene again. To go on, to go back, it was the moment when she would have to decide the rest of her life.

As the cramp in her hamstring began to take hold like a predator seizing its prey, she could feel another seize her other leg, and she fought for herself in the incredible pain and began to fight for a way back toward the boathouse. Screaming, the pain was like nothing she had ever felt in her body, beyond childbirth, beyond love and grief, beyond anything she had ever felt. It was paralyzingly real.

Pulling herself with only her arms, dragging her legs like they were dead meat, she fought back toward the shore, straining and thrashing, and the enormous distance seemed to stretch out in her anguish until her exhaustion and her pain was like the sun and the water burning in her eyes like cold fire. And then, completely exhausted, she knew the decision was no longer hers. She was about to die.

With one great gasp, she slipped under the water and her dress came up all around her arms as she struggled to drag herself back to the surface, and it was only a second before her legs touched bottom and her feet were locked on point from the cramp as they buried themselves in cold softness, like death.

Her weight broke the cramp in one leg, and momentarily reeling in her blue dress, she ran and crawled to get some purchase underwater, stretching for the solid earth, kicking and crawling for some way to get back to the sun and the air. Her dress fell around her and she forced herself up, pulling and thrashing, and suddenly she broke the surface and she could breathe once again. She was like a dying sea creature fighting to survive as she swam in toward the shore, and when she looked down and could see that her feet might be able to touch the sand, she would be able to stand up and face the excruciating pain, and she would live.

When she stood, her feet gave into the pain, but she stood, her head back, her mouth above the water, gasping like a fish in the air. She forced herself ahead, back to the beach, and the pain slowly subsided as she walked like her old plastic doll Barbie doll. Then she just stopped. She stood and just waited until her ragged breath calmed and she could feel the sand slowly pouring over her feet. With only her head and shoulders in the air, she stood and felt the buoyancy of the water holding her as the cramps slowly let go of her legs. She stood and watched the clouds on the water and the boathouse looking so empty, and a storm gathering along the western horizon, dark and low.

And then, when she was finally safe and free to walk back into life, she found that she couldn't move. Life was like death. Death was like life. Like life! Like life! Like life! She was completely paralyzed with its total reality. As a daughter, as a mother, as a lover and a wife, she realized how rigid and unexpressed her whole life had been. She realized her parents, her husbands and lovers had been just as locked into themselves as she had been. It was the inescapable fact of life.

And, as she had aged, it had gotten worse, not better. And what was completely heart rending was that it was as true for anyone as it was true for her. It was even true for Eugene. The desire and anguish of youth, wanting so much to be heard and understood, was like a fading sentimental melody in the descending elevator of time. She understood it then, as Eugene's disease had made her realize it when he had said those terrible words, like life. The words rang in her heart like Cyrano's bell, pealing with the pain of a love that could never be spoken because of the one disfiguring truth that made life seem to be just like Eugene had looked before he died, wasted and rigid and cold.

Laura decided to walk back to where the water was deeper. She wanted to stand where it was only her mouth and her eyes left above it. That was all she was, anyway. When her neck ached, she moved closer to shore. She watched for an hour, and then another, as people came looking for her. She watched families come down to the beach from the music, to swim and play and be together. Lovers and families scattered along the beach and the wind began to rise and she had to walk closer to shore as the waves started to swell, and she thought it was strange that no one noticed her, but when her torso rose out of the water she was hidden behind the crests of the waves between her and the people on the beach. It was strange how she could see the shoreline and yet no one seemed to be able to see her. Watching, watching, separate and together, she saw the white bodies where they found places of their own. Children connected, grown-ups didn't. The water drew everyone eventually, and let them go. People were so beautiful and small, like stones, like shells, that had been by the water forever.

She could hear the music playing far over the fields as she just stood there trying not to feel anything but the cool water holding her. She had to fight to stay where she was standing, her dress clinging light and cold, until her body started to shiver as the seventy degree water drained her of her warmth. She stayed where she was, concentrating on the glassy rings that went out as the waves went by her body. And the wind rose like an expectation, until it was like the hot gasp death had knocked from life. Sheets of lightning spread over the sky but no rain fell. It was a dry wind. It was a sky incapable of tears. It was pathetic fallacy for Laura's grief. She didn't belong and she knew it as the waves kept pushing her towards shore. The pair of black terns she knew so well turned over her again and again crying, Like! Like! Like!

Laura saw Ian and Ann Marie searching for her again and felt so distant and strange. She wondered if it was how death felt. Her life seemed so far away. When they left and the lightning scared everyone from the beach, she was shivering the way she had at the ice races, and the circles shuddering from her body, drowned in the waves, looked like she felt. She felt her feet push against the sand and she was walking out of the water without even knowing she wanted to do it. Her body in water, her feet in sand, Laura rose from the waves and walked the long slow incline of the beach, feeling gravity return to her body, feeling strangely light and alive, except for her heart. She rose the way she had once risen in Eugene's eyes, long, long ago. This time, she was the one who was shaking.

At the boat house, she threw off her clothes and threw herself on Amanda's bed, and she lay there trembling and shaking for a very longtime before it stopped, and Ian found her looking still and naked and lovely.

He had two strangers in tow and he made them wait on the porch when he saw her.

"You've been swimming." he said, "You have to get dressed. You know who's waiting outside? It's Arthur and Laura Lee." he said, excitedly.

Laura just stared at him in shock. If Ian had said he had brought Eugene, risen from his ashes, she couldn't have been more shocked.

"What are you talking about?" she asked, breathlessly.

."I'm telling you, it's Arthur and Laura Lee. Now get dressed." he replied.

She got up and dressed, and it felt like she was drowning all over again.

Back in the pasture, the mood was electric with the release of joy and grief and music. Almost everyone had changed into light summer clothes wherever they could. It looked like the Van Fleet picnics from other years, except for the numbers. Two huge, open tents had been set up on either side of the stage for the instruments and musicians, and older people who couldn't take the sun. The little big band that came from Montreal every year had finished playing a set and everyone was ringing from the power of the horns. For the first time, the rules had been suspended and people could sing songs written after their mothers were born.

The first funny moment of the day came when Wayne and Charles and Jonas sang a medley from Staying Alive. They had the disco moves cold.

Tom and Amanda and Lucy sang the old traditional song Jewels that mourned babies who died and were mourned long ago, pouring out all the grief of seeing beloved innocents vanish in death over and over again. Death came early and often then, and when Tom explained to Amanda what the song was about, she came to love it completely. The three young voices singing the old, sad song made the first moment of silence since the nearby grave had been closed. Pain felt right when it was sung.

Tom and Amanda had been introducing Miss Brown to some of the other members of the family she hadn't met, and they all knew who she was. They brought her back to where Sharon was sitting with Christa, and Tom left the ladies to talk after he introduced his sister.

"Miss Brown, this is my sister Christa. She loves Emily Dickinson too."

Christa seemed transfixed by Miss Brown. She got up and went to Miss Brown and took her in her arms, embracing her with her whole, volatile heart.

"You've come. Thank you so much." Christa whispered to her.

And when Miss Brown got herself loose from Christa's arms, she was neither upset or embarrassed.

"You're so lovely." Miss Brown said gently.

"You know, don't you?" Christa replied

"I think I do." Miss. Brown replied sweetly, matter-of-factly.

"We're going to be great friends and lovers." Christa said as she led Miss Brown to a chair beside Amanda, who was looking decidedly nervous.

"So how did you two meet?" Christa asked Amanda.

"I was with Tom and Martha looking for antiques on old farms. We found a barn full of treasures Wayne is still selling off. It's kind of a legend now." Amanda replied.

"You miss things when you're in the shrink factory." Christa answered.

Christa asked Bridget Brown about her farm and her life and she heard the story of the lady, the recluse, and then Amanda made her tell about her sculptures and quilts and the lady slipper orchids. As Miss Brown talked, Christa became even more enthralled. For the third time in her life, she was falling in love, this time with a woman almost three times her age.

Sharon asked Miss Brown how she could live her life with no one to share it.

"You can share your life with more than just the people living with you. You don't have to be with someone to share in their life. Sometimes they can even be dead." Miss Brown answered. Only Christa understood what she meant, or so she thought.

"Her place reminds me of this one." Amanda told Sharon, "Except Miss Brown doesn't have so many things going on, so many distractions."

"I never thought of this place as having many distractions." Sharon answered.

"It does. It's all good things, but there are so many people. It's really good we have to have an hour a day by ourselves." Christa replied.

"It's like a little city, not like the country." Bridget Brown agreed, "If you want to find a very different connection to life, you should come visit me for a while."

Amanda realized suddenly, that what the farm was to the city, Miss Brown's place was to the farm. It was beyond all the ambition and the money and the social relationships that whirled around everyone, constantly.

"I think Miss Brown knows where she belongs better than any of us ever will." she said, and the older women had nothing to say. Miss Brown was very proud of her adopted grand daughter.

"I know the simple life can be very beautiful. Perhaps you can describe it for us?" Sharon asked Bridget Brown.

"I think I can. It begins with peace and ends with peace. I wake up in the morning and there is that beautiful quiet, even when the wind is raging outside. You look forward to every moment because you know that it's as beautiful as anything that's ever happened before. The bird's songs in the sunrise and the sound of rain, the jewels when buds burst on the trees, the graceful curve of grasses, the frogs, the flowers and clouds and the sun and the wind and the earth, it's all I need. Every moment is part of the things you touch. The hard part is not being overwhelmed. I have to stay busy, just like you, so my heart doesn't fill up so much that it bursts. That's why you stay so busy, isn't it?"

"I wish. You may be right. I never thought of that." Sharon replied, "That was probably only true of my husband. He woke up with peace and fell asleep with it too."

"He must have been truly wonderful. I've never seen such love in one place. I never imagined such love was possible." Miss Brown answered gently.

"It's true." Amanda agreed, and there was a strange, tense moment before she said, "There's part of me would like to live just like you do, like he did."

"Me too." Christa agreed.

"Until this moment, I never thought of such a thing, but I think part of me would like that too." Sharon said seriously.

"I think you must feel closer to life than any of us can even imagine." Christa said to Miss Brown.

"You all make it sound so extraordinary. It's just an ordinary life."

"That's easy for you to say." Amanda said, and everyone laughed.

"Would you like to see my tree house?" Christa asked Miss Brown, I haven't been inside it in ten years, but I would love to show it to you."

Sharon saw the connection between her daughter and the old woman and the light in Christa's eyes that seemed so easy and fresh and new. She hadn't seen that simple light since Eugene had gotten sick. She was stunned at the simple power of the old woman, and Sharon understood and appreciated real power as few people did. The old woman got up and went with Christa. Christa took her hand like a schoolgirl, but Bridget Brown was the one who looked small and unsteady.

At the boathouse, there probably wasn't anything in the world that would have reached Laura except the words she heard Ian say. Arthur and Laura Lee, were there, were real.

She dressed quickly and then Ian asked the ordinary looking, middle-aged couple to come in.

"But you're dead." Laura said to the strangers. "You don't even exist."

The two strangers laughed and the man explained that they were Dale and Betty Charboneaux."

"We were in the class behind you. I'm Betty McLaughlin. We saw you at the high school reunion."

Laura didn't remember either of them.

"We went to school together?"

"I remember you and Eugene sitting in the cafeteria all those years ago, and he looked so in love, it was really quite comical. The look of love." Betty answered.

"Why are you Arthur and Laura Lee?" Laura asked in confusion.

Dale told her how Eugene would send them letters about once or twice a year after they moved to Scarborough, asking if they would copy them on the old blue air mail stationery he had sent for them to use. He even included a box of old canceled Canadian and French stamps of the proper denomination for them to place on the letters.

"He even sent old pressed flowers to put in between the pages." Betty added brightly.

"Life is all in the details." Ian added grinning, overjoyed that Laura was meeting the people who had actually written the letters and spent the time to create the illusion that Laura had made into art.

Laura couldn't tell Ian or the couple that she was just heart sick at having had her illusions completely destroyed. Part of her, like Eugene's own family, wanted to believe in Arthur and Laura Lee.

"I don't know how to say this, but I'm really feeling very sad right now. I'd really like to be alone for awhile." And the school mates she never knew said they understood completely, and then Laura asked Ian to try to keep people away from the boathouse.

"David can't come back here, anymore." she said with cold finality. Ian just looked at her.

Christa took Bridget Brown into the orchard to the tree house in an old Plum tree that was just hanging onto life. A few hard green plums were swelling on the two branches that were still alive. Its days were gone when it would shed a huge circle of blossoms in the spring, when it would shed the green fruit, like baby butternuts, pruning itself of its too heavy burden, when it would shed its ripe fruit late in the summer and wasps would gather in clouds to sip at the sweet nectar of the windfalls.

Black bark had closed around the places where the frame of the tree house had touched its branches. Miss Brown's eyes directed Christa's to those places and she told her how she loved the little square board and batten room with the shed roof and the one little window. Christa reached up and opened the door to the little gray wooden room and pulled out a rope ladder and the two of them felt their weight, in good shoes and heels, holding onto old sisal.

Inside, they sat cross-legged looking at one another, youth, beauty and pain opposite age and wisdom and peace. A woman who could count her sexual experiences on one finger of one hand sat opposite a woman who had known countless lovers; a woman withered with age sat across from a young woman of breathtaking beauty; a woman who had only known one place in her life sat opposite a woman who had never been able to find a place in the world. They looked at each other and they both knew that they were the most remarkable of twins.

"You're the very first person I've ever asked to come in here."

"I'm very honored." Miss Brown replied.

In the next few moments, the tumblers of pain would fall together and release their absolute lock on Christa's heart. She could feel it spring open in the old woman's eyes. Somehow she knew she was staring into the face of her freedom. She simply had to give Miss Brown her heart. And the shackles of pain fell away the moment she realized that her stranger was going to take it.

Miss Brown told Christa that she loved the fragments of Emily Dickinson's poem that she quoted when she was kissing the Walnut urn. She quoted the whole poem for Christa.

"She's everything to me." Bridget confessed. "I sometimes spend two weeks just thinking about one of her poems, and most times I realize, I'm not even beginning to know it.

"You too! I know almost three hundred by heart." Christa answered.

It was then Christa asked Miss Brown the first of the impossible questions for which she sought answers in the poems she had memorized. She asked the questions in the same direct way that her father had taught her to ask them over the years. Her father's simple, impossible questions were almost the only structure she had for understanding her life.

'Tell me about your pain. Tell me what you're afraid of feeling. Tell me what loneliness is like. Tell me about how your life feels. Tell me what you believe. Tell me your hope. Tell me your guilt. Tell me what I see.' Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Over the years Eugene had asked his most sensitive child the questions only the most sensitive children can't help but address.

"Tell me about your life." Christa began. Miss Brown delighted her with her reply.

"To make a prairie takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And reverie.

Reverie alone will do,

If bees are few."

"Tell me about your life." Miss Brown asked Christa after she gave her answer.

And Christa thought for a minute and answered

"And then- a Day as huge

As Yesterdays in pairs,

Unrolled its horror in my face-

Until it blocked my eyes-

And Something's odd - within -

That person that I was-

And this One -do not feel the same -

Could yet be Madness-this?

Both knew the truth for what it was and wasn't. At first it would be dueling Dickinson quotations. One would begin and the other would answer. They would pause and listen and be silent and remember the poem and find its place in the heart, and then reply with a poem from another drawer where it was kept in the vault of truth and beauty.

"Tell me your philosophy." Christa asked Bridget.

Finding is the first Act

The second, loss,

Third, Expedition for

The "Golden Fleece"

Fourth, no discovery-

Fifth, no crew-

Finally, no Golden Fleece-

Jason-sham- too."

The answer took Christa's breath away. And then it was Miss Brown's turn to ask questions of the soul. Both felt enormous futility in confronting the enormity of existence because they both knew the passion that went from blank to blank that only lost pilgrims know. They spoke of love,

To wait an Hour \- is long -

If love be just beyond -

To wait eternity -is short -

If the love reward the end -

They savored the quotations of the poem about how love was sometimes known with the heart and seldom with the soul and scarcer yet with all of one's might, and how few loved at all. They both believed that love was anterior to life and posterior to death. They both believed love's strident, "why" was the little syllable that broke the hugest hearts. They talked about the pain so utter it swallowed substance, covering the Abyss with Trance. They both knew, like Emily, the worthiness of suffering, like the worthiness of death, is ascertained by tasting.

"Tell me your future?" Christa asked, and Bridget Brown replied.

"Wild nights! Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our Luxury!"

It was a pure and simple declaration of love that was so absurd and rash and beautiful they could feel the rush of blank, racing in their hearts. But still, neither of them dared speak the last stanza.

Rowing in Eden -

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor - Tonight

In thee!

A miracle of love and connection happened between them in the spark of a moment, a few brief words, but such words, such a moment. Her time in the mental hospital was nothing compared to that moment. Christa was looking at the person she knew that she might be. In the place where Christa had once dreamed and imagined love and passion in its absolute extreme, she sat and felt it fill her completely at last.

"You lost someone too." Christa said to Bridget.

"Heart, we will forget him!

You and I tonight!

You may forget the warmth he gave-

I will forget the light!" Christa told Bridget.

"I never lost as much; and but twice,

And that was in the sod.

Twice have I stood a beggar

Before the door of God."

Miss Brown answered solemnly.

"Who was it?" Christa asked.

"My father and my son." Miss Brown answered.

"Me too." Christa confessed.

And then Christa told the one terrible secret she had never told another human being, and Miss Brown sat and listened and opened her heart like a flower. Then Bridget Brown told Christa her own secret, the one that no one on the earth knew except her, and the secret was so much more terrible than the one Christa had shared, Christa felt like her heart was falling off a cliff.

Back at the stage, while two hearts were being poetically married like ropes, three were about to be torn apart. Amanda had just come off the stage after singing Running on Empty with a very good local rock and roll band. The roar as she came off was tremendous, the huge crowd stunned with her energy and her incredible pipes. It was the first time she felt good all day. She was grinning as she came up to Tom and Megan who were glaring at each other in obvious rage.

"What's going on?" Amanda asked.

Megan answered curtly, nervously.

"I just told Tom that what he did by his father's grave was just too weird."

"It was weird." Amanda agreed, "What was all that call of the wild stuff anyway?"

Tom was trying to control his anger as he took the attack from where he hadn't expected it to come.

"She said a lot more than that. But I think what I did over my own father's grave was my business not either of yours."

"Right. But it was still kind of gross. Are you going to do bird calls when your mother dies? Megan pursued thoughtlessly. "People were looking at us like we were supposed to know what all that wolf howling shit was about."

"I think you must have embarrassed your mother." Amanda added, and that sent Tom over the edge of rage.

"How the fuck would you know that? How is it any of your business how I face my father's death? It's like what I did was all about you. You didn't ask me to explain what I did because you were embarrassed. You were ashamed of me. That takes a fuck of a nerve for the two of you." he shouted.

"You have two years to get ready to say something nice about your father at his funeral and you decide to make animal noises." Amanda shot back.

"Really!" Megan agreed, and then she began a mocking imitation of Tom's Wolf howl.

"You two are pathetic! My mother understood, even if you two idiots don't. You wouldn't know what a wolf really was if one was standing right in front of you. My father was a wolf. If you knew anything about anything that didn't have a bar code, you know why that's true.

"Grrrrr..." Megan growled at him.

"Grrrrrr.." Amanda growled too.

"It was weird, admit it." Megan pressed.

"Really." Amanda agreed.

"If you really think that, I don't want to have anything to do with either one of you again. Mall rats!" Tom spat from his cold heart and its pure rage. He stalked away and they watched him moving through the crowd, fighting his way to the Cemetery.

"Did he just break up with us?" Amanda asked Megan.

"I think so." Megan replied sounding very afraid." I'm going after him."

"Why? He'll calm down."

"You're just worried that he'll take me back and not you. We should never have said all that shit."

"Right, you're going to go running after him every time he gets mad. Maybe he likes submissive gestures. He probably thinks he's a wolf too. Suit yourself."

"I always do." Megan shot back as she left.

As Amanda watched, she could feel the razor of truth cut into the anger and resentment she felt for Tom that she hadn't dare admit. She remembered him talking about wolves and how he had made her imagine what it felt like to be one, and she remembered the long mortifying howl. It came too close to her heart, and then she understood. Tom's gesture spoke the unspeakable in a way she didn't see until she was standing there in the crowd of thousands all alone. It was then she saw that Tom's howl might have been the truest thing that happened at Eugene's burial. Suddenly, she felt very small and ashamed.

There was nothing like music to express the fathomless complexity of sorrow and loss, nor the joy and connection against which it was measured. Under low clouds, in the brisk wind under the sheet lightning that seemed to take a very long time to pass by, the Van Fleet children sang through the afternoon, picking through the best moments and greatest hits of their life on the farm; being sisters and brothers who had once been lost in the world.

Jonas was on stage with his brothers Wayne and Tranh and Rosie. They had just finished singing an old Mills Brothers song, Under the Apple Tree, and were just beginning the Ink Spots classic, If I Didn't Care. White and yellow and black, gay and straight, they did the bass baritone and falsetto of the black black Ink Spots, almost perfectly. The crowd went wild.

''Honey Chile! Honey Chile! My Honey Chile!'

When they finished, Jonas looked down and saw half of his heart grinning up at him, clapping and laughing and looking so beautiful he thought he was going to swoon. The only one he ever loved, the one he loved with his life and the better part of his soul, the searing private secret of his inextinguishable passion was standing there in front of him waving hello. He waived back. The sweetest sound in the world in a single word came from his own mouth.

"Maria!"

He stumbled from his stage and she ran to him and she threw herself into his arms, and then he could feel the joy of her settle into her compassion for him.

"I'm so sorry about your dad." she whispered. "I'm so sorry I missed the service and the burial. The plane connections were terrible. The traffic in Toronto was a nightmare. Are you okay?" Maria asked gently.

Jonas tried explaining what it was like.

"The little hole in the ground, and all my family, all those people around my father's ashes, it was like, I just can't describe it."

"Like the face of God." Maria offered.

"It was." Oh, it was." Jonas agreed, looking as if he had been told an enormous secret, "It was life and death. It was so real. It felt like I was going to explode." How did you get here?" he asked in shock.

"Your mother sent me a plane ticket and some money. She said your dad asked her to make sure that I could come to be with you."

"The bugger! This is so great. You're the one person....." Jonas replied and he didn't know if he was fighting back tears that had their source in his father's heart or tears of his own happiness.

Megan had followed Tom to the graveyard to where he sat on his father's gravestone with his back to the crowd, his back to his own terrible feelings. Megan was right beside him before he knew she was there. She looked very frightened.

"Are you really breaking up with us?" she asked.

"You don't understand anything. I want you to leave me alone." Tom said coldly.

"So you're thinking about it. It was just something stupid to say."

"Even if you didn't understand, how could you think I wouldn't do the best I could to try to say goodbye to my father?"

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Megan replied desperately.

"I have to be able to trust the person I love, absolutely. How could you come at me today, today, like it was just any other day?"

"I'm so sorry. What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing."

"I'm not like your mother." Megan answered, "I won't ever be that strong."

"I know."

Tom's answer hit both of them in the face like a slap. They both knew what that meant.

Megan started to cry. "You're going to choose Amanda, not me."

Tom didn't say anything, and just as Megan was daring to hope he would disagree with her or console her, or reassure her about his feelings, he did the last thing she expected. He howled. He howled another high, piercing, heart rending single note, his contorted face looking straight up into the sky. When it was over and he looked back down, another high beautiful contralto howl came rolling up over the fields in reply.

Megan knew instantly, absolutely, what had just happened. Her heart stopped. She had lost. She was lost. Tom and Amanda were mated for life as she had sat there and listened and couldn't do a thing.

The long wait for Eugene's death slowly stretched every person on the farm; and the tightening made it possible to reach notes inside that were deeper and higher than anything they had been capable of feeling in their lives. Life vibrated with loss and possibility, numb fingers on frets made such pure vibrations. It was possible then to feel with an intensity that was impossible to sustain. No one knew it was Eugene's dying that made the day of his funeral so intense, and so beautiful, and so full of life. Death pulled the bow over the strings of the many assembled hearts. As the day wore on and the sky cleared, everyone was getting tired. The energy in the music was no longer enough to hold back all the unspeakable feelings.

Christa was sitting with Miss Brown and Sharon and her psychiatrist Brian Smith, her Smitty. Christa had already explained to him and her mother that she had decided to accept Miss Brown's invitation and go to stay with her at her farm the next day. Miss Brown made clear to everyone that Christa was welcome to stay as long as she wished. Smitty had made sure Miss Brown understood that Christa still wasn't always able to control her emotions, that at times her heart was in the very deep end of a pool and she still, sometimes, lost the ability to swim.

"I understand. I understand why that's so, why you're worried." Miss Brown had replied.

"And why would that be?" Smitty asked seriously

"Because her heart is so big, it's too small." Bridget Brown answered.

Christa looked at the old woman with such affection and gratitude and respect that Sharon spoke up, saying that she thought it was wonderful idea for Christa to spend some time with Miss Brown. She knew the old woman had power, more power than she even imagined. Sharon trusted power. Smitty was uncomfortable, but agreed to the plan and was very happy to learn Miss Brown had Tom's cell phone so Christa could call if she needed to talk to him. The unspoken truth was that Smitty was heartbroken at the idea of losing Christa forever.

When the sun was just starting to color the sky, there was strange moment on stage between sets. A middle-aged man in loose blue jean overalls came out on this stage like he owned it. He had long curly white hair and a flowing white beard and looked much older than his graceful movements seemed to say when he went to the standing microphone, waving to the crowd, carrying a tambourine over his shoulder like it was a waiter's tray. "So who ordered the 3000 beers?" he shouted. He was thin and graceful and seemed to have the ability to pull every pair of eyes straight to him. He held up the tambourine and the whole crowd roared when he pulled it down and looked at it as if he was reading an inscription. It was his Oscar, his Emmy, but even better than that, it was the Nobel Prize for literature. When he spoke everyone listened. Everyone could tell he was drunk.

"Thanks for this! I'd like to thank the Nobel committee." The crowd roared. His grin and his joy were infectious. Everyone thought it was act.

"I have to admit I'm here on false pretenses." he continued, " My work is so much better than I'm capable of doing, I'm sure there will be an investigation, I know that what I'm saying may be held against me later, but I don't care. It's true. Just like all the rest of you, I'm a fraud. I didn't write all those great books."

"They all came from the mouth of a little bird, no not a Raven, a little white bird, and all I did was take dictation. All those great novels come from the ethos, the muses,' Hey Mr. Tambourine man play a song for me.' "He sang the last phrase off key, and it was then some people guessed he was drunk. He played the tambourine and danced around the stage before he went on.

"So I take no credit. I give thanks to no one. All I can do is say to those that loved me too well and not well enough, I salute you! I salute you with the old British army salute, the longest way up and the shortest way down." And he gave a brisk demonstration, his arm sweeping up through the air and slashing down to his side. The crowd roared again.

"A--ten---shun!!!"

Suddenly he seemed to be overcome with sobriety, holding the Nobel Prize beside him, completely forgotten.

"I'd like to say a few political words. It's okay. Tut! Tut!" The crowd had groaned when he said the word political.

"I know I'm breaking new ground here, but I want to say a few words for trees."

The crowd cheered and laughed.

"I come to speak for the innocent, for the silent ones who respond only to the sun and the wind and the cold and the rain and the fury of the storm, the ones who weep in the downpour and suck silently from the earth and create the air that you breathe. Trees! Trees! Who will stand up for the trees?"he shouted. He challenged the crowd and it roared to his challenge, humoring him and hoping the jokes would get better.

"I speak for the Willow whispering, the Aspen trembling, the Oak in heavy snow. I speak for the Pine, the White and the Red and the Black and the Scotch and the Ponderosa." The crowd cheered at the word Ponderosa."

"The elegant Spruce, the Maples bleeding with red and yellow, like blood and sunshine, I speak for them. I speak for the Cherry, the Peach and the Plum, the Almond and the Apple and the Quince. I speak for every tree since the tree in Eden, since the cross of Calvary. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?!"

"We cut them down while they're living and breathing, and cut them with cold steel into piles, into board feet, carving them to our insatiable needs. We cut them for chairs and tables, to make walls and Gallows and pop stands. They die for you every day and you burn them to roast your weenies. You drive a billion nails in their flesh every day. Please! Please! Help me save the trees!"

Everyone was laughing and cheering at the satire. But no one in the crowd knew that he was absolutely serious. He loved trees like other people loved each other. He actually loved them better. He came off the stage and went straight to where Christa was sitting. For some reason, she was mesmerized. Looking like a rail thin Walt Whitman, it was impossible not to see the energy alive in his body. It was an energy that could transform a crowd of strangers into something cohesive and alive, words alone doing what only music usually attempted. He had a performer's gift that only rose when he was very drunk, but then it was amazing. He was still in the evangelical emotions of his oration when he introduced himself to Christa's little group.

"I am Jim Joad, migrant worker. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Are you any relation to Tom?" Smitty asked in good humor.

Joad answered seriously

"Ah, yes, my namesake in that second rate book. 'I'll be there. I'll be there. I'll be there'..... To love and comfort you." He sang the last phrase. "Please!"

"You must be pleased, winning the Nobel Prize." Smitty teased, "I don't think I'm familiar with your work."

"Like the other Joad, I'm a migrant worker. I follow my soul and I write down what it tells me. I haven't actually won the Nobel Prize, quite yet. I'm not mentally unbalanced after all. That was just practice, a little pre-Nobel humility." he said as he slumped down in a seat beside Christa.

They talked about trees and no one quite knew if he was serious, listening to him talk passionately about his passion. The more he talked, the more eloquent was his identification with the silent lungs of the earth, as he called them.

"If you really love trees, and you'd like a walk, I can take you somewhere you'll never forget as long as you live." Christa said to Jim Joad. "I was hoping that I'd have a chance to take Miss Brown, if she was up to it."

"A walk in the sunset, what could be better? You have me intrigued, I must admit" Jim answered.

"I'd like that too. I'm not used to sitting for so long." Miss Brown agreed.

"Well, let's go." Christa said, and the three of them got up and Christa led the way out of the field past the Cemetery to the Walnut Wood.

When they got there the sun was under the branches of the trees on the Western horizon, cardinal red swallowing bands of slate gray and yellow.

They walked down to the pool with the restless, resonant reverence to beauty all three of them knew with an intensity that made them able to almost separate from their bodies, to become someone beyond themselves. The mischievous Jim Joad seemed the most transformed.

The look on his face and the loss of grace in his body made it obvious he was overwhelmed. It was like he was in the presence of the living, breathing divinity, the idea of his soul, a majesty he thought only existed in his imagination.

When they stood by the pool, it was Bridget Brown who spoke first.

"I made a quilt just like this. It could be this very place." she whispered into the dusk of the forest.

"This is the place that's meant to be." Christa whispered back.

Then Christa stepped to a wide flat stone and undressed as the two others watched. She slipped under the black water like it was a black portal of silk.

"It's fed by a spring. So why are you waiting? Are you ashamed of your bodies?" Christa asked.

It wasn't shame they were feeling at all. They weren't ashamed of their bodies; they were stunned by the beauty of hers. The two strangers stood for a moment and then Miss Brown pulled off her dress and her underclothes and stepped naked into the water with Christa. Jim just stood there and it looked like his heart was going to burst. He looked almost stricken. Then he began to undo his overalls, and then he took off his beaten up work shoes and undressed while the two women watched him, and he joined them in the pool. Two tiny eyes watched them from the bank. Seeing was everything then. That was when the three of them felt as one.

When the sun was gone, and the last of the music had died, and instruments were being packed and the crowd had thinned down at last, Laura lay unmoved on her bed and watched the moon bleeding behind thin clouds, and then she heard a distant tap, tapping nearby, and it was then she saw a single Luna moth touching her window, trying to get to her light.

### Chapter 16

Waiting for death was like waiting for Godot, except death always showed up eventually. And when it arrived, nothing was ever the same. Things happened. Things changed. Life went on, even when it didn't.

Eugene was imagination to his family. Imagining the world without him was the one thing that anyone who loved him seemed unable to do. Imaginary worlds suddenly seemed somehow barren. They bled into the real one.

It wasn't depression that hit the farm so much as it was the reality of every present moment, and without Eugene's living imagination those moments were somehow almost impossible to face head on. Laura knew it before any one else because her relationship with Eugene existed almost entirely in their imaginations. It was her and Eugene, Arthur and Laura Lee. She looked at the notebooks he had left her and the idea of reading his real thoughts, for her and about her, was a reality she did not want to face. He was gone. That reality was gone, like youth. She didn't know how she could face such powerful artifacts. Like everyone else, she didn't want to face the reality that everything he was, was who he had been.

When Ian came home that night, she didn't have a lot to say. He wanted her to talk and he persisted in trying to help her through something so unavoidably real. When they went to bed he tried to hold her, but she was so cold and inaccessible, he pulled back leaving just a hand on her hip. Then he hit the nerve that went straight to her fear, and her diaphragm congealed like clotted cream.

"What are you going to do now that your book is finished?" Ian asked gently. He was secretly hoping she would decide she could never go back to her old life and they could make a life in Eastern Ontario that was simpler, closer, more connected.

"Why are you asking me that? You know I don't belong here. They know I've never belonged here. Not when I was eighteen, and not now. I don't know what to do. I don't belong anywhere. I belong in a book of adolescent dreams." she replied, almost hysterically, and her voice carried her anguish.

"If your book's published, like I'm sure it will be, you'll have to do a lot of traveling for a while. After that, I was hoping we could find a little place on a lake and I could become a folksy country lawyer and you could write books."

"That sounds lovely, but you know in six months we'd both be bored to death with that kind of life, and probably with each other." Laura answered seriously. Ian didn't know what to say. Knowing his wife, he knew she was probably right. Knowing the last months, he was hoping she had changed.

"We're in the no-man's land between the city and the country. We have to choose one." Ian replied.

"There are no choices anymore." she replied with no feeling.

In the morning, Ann Marie woke Laura and Ian. It was only then that they learned Amanda had not come home that night. It was strange but they weren't worried, because the one thing certain on the farm was that everyone made sure everyone was safe.

Ann Marie had knocked on the patio door.

"I just came to say goodbye." Her muffled voice came through the glass.

Laura asked her what she meant and told her to come in.

Ann Marie came in and sat on the corner of the bed and explained that she and Megan were setting out to explore the red highways of their racial heritage.

"It's going to be like a cross between Blue Highways and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We're going on the road to look for cowbirds."

"I don't understand." Laura replied anxiously.

"Tom picked Amanda. I guess he asked her to marry him yesterday. Megan feels she can't be here anymore. She lost. We hardly slept last night talking about what we should do with the rest of our lives, and we decided that the one thing we really have for sure is each other. We're just going to drive and visit native bands and see what's left of what we might have been."

"It sounds wonderful." Ian replied

"It sounds terrifying, if you ask me." Ann Marie responded.

"The future is always terrifying." Laura added, "Good luck, old girlfriend."

Ann Marie thanked Laura and then kissed her and held her tight then she did the same with Ian, kissing him hard on the lips.

"You saved my life, and my daughter's life. Thank Wayne for both of us. Alan is still at the cabin."

When she was gone, Ian turned to Laura.

"Our baby's getting married, my God!"

"I just hope it isn't too soon." Laura answered sounding anything but enthusiastic.

The day after a funeral is a meditation on death and a remembrance of life.

For Laura, death was a cartoon character moving in a two-dimensional world, a figure that could stretch and distort life like rubber, where things could appear from a strange kind of infinity, from nothing, where things could disappear as if they never existed. Death defied gravity, so a person could look down into space, and be suspended for a moment, before falling into nothing in a little puff of dust. Life was always about death and vice versa.

Laura couldn't stop thinking about Eugene's notebooks. They made her angry. They made her sad. They were precious artifacts of a wonderful life. They were always a reminder of what was gone. Like his shoes or his comb, his belt or his clothes, all the things that had known the touch of his fingers, the spiral notebooks weren't any different. What was in them was all just a stillborn nostalgia. Laura wished he had never given them to her, even though she was so touched that he had chosen to keep them.

Left hand cords descended the scale of Laura's heart until the last one just echoed inside her with a resonance just below hearing. It was the musical thunder of loss. The way things from the land fell to float on the lake, suddenly light and suddenly gone, was the way Eugene's notebooks looked to her. It was the afternoon before she had the courage to touch them. She finally did it as a distraction from her growing anxiety about why Ian hadn't come back from breakfast with Tom and Amanda, or even by himself with news of the sudden engagement.

She was surprised when she opened the first notebook that it was dated in 1961 when Eugene was just twelve years old. Reading the thoughts of a young boy was sweet, and he reminded her of the fictional Arthur. After the journals began, Eugene soon missed days, then weeks, then months without an entry, and she wasn't even a quarter of the way through the first book when he was fifteen years old, and it was only a few days after his birthday when he made the entry: 'I fell in love today. She was walking by old man Sider's Latin class. She looked angry. She's so beautiful. God help me, she's a cheerleader.'

From that day on, the entries in the diary happened every day. She was the cheerleader.

As she read, she remembered. She remembered seeing him and the way his eyes followed her, and she thought it was the way most boys looked at her. She had looked back at Eugene, unlike the way she did with other boys, because the looking was good. If he had only known the times she had imagined his body before she ever knew it.

Reading his entries, he seemed to have no idea that she knew he even existed. The mature reality of death faded in the soft light of innocent memory. Laura was almost enjoying herself.

Almost every one of Eugene's children on the farm was doing exactly what Laura was doing. They were pouring over the journals Eugene had kept of them, for them. Everyone was feeling the unique pleasure in finding old snapshots that no one had known had even been taken.

Tom and Amanda had vanished. It seemed that Ann Marie was the only one who knew about the engagement. When Ann Marie said goodbye to Sharon, and thanked her for everything, for saving her daughter and herself from a common middle class tragedy, she didn't bother to tell Sharon why Megan wanted to leave, why she had given up hope of having Tom. It was Ian who told her their children were going to be married.

The regular practical routines on the farm had vanished that day. There were no assigned duties, no one to clean or to prepare meals. On that one day, Sharon wanted to have no structure. She didn't want to make a duty roster. She wanted one day where she wasn't responsible for anything. She sat with Ian while her children read, and they barely spoke, just drank lemonade and felt the hot breath of the day moving through the screen porch. Sharon remembered Ian's tears at the graveside when she had spoken, and for some reason it was his tears that touched her most deeply. Ian had the same light heart as the one she had buried.

When Tom and Amanda finally appeared, it was obvious that they had been doing a lot more than reading. They both moved with the fluid grace of sexual abundance, so relaxed, so calm, so languidly at ease. Their hair looked radiant and full. Both their parents knew what they were seeing and because it was the day it was, they both accepted what they were seeing without the least anxiety.

"We have something to tell you." Amanda began.

"So it appears." Ian teased.

"Daddy!.... Tom and I are going to be married."

"So I hear. That's wonderful. I'm thrilled for both of you." Ian answered as he embraced and kissed his daughter.

"Congratulations baby. You couldn't have chosen a more beautiful woman. "Sharon said to Tom, and then she held him almost as hard as she had when he held her the night Eugene died. Then Tom and Ian hugged and so did Sharon and Amanda. And then it was Ian and Sharon and it was, oddly, the sweetest embrace of all. The tender roots of joy sank into the dark, heavy loam of loss and there were smiles and happiness all around.

"So when's the wedding?" Ian asked the couple.

"Christmas. We're both hoping to get into university next year. We want to spend one more year working on the farm, if it's okay." Tom answered.

"I have you both for another year. That's certainly okay." Sharon added. "Where are you going to be living?"

"The house boat. I'll have to put in a wood stove. It might be a little cool." Tom answered

"Really cool." Ian said with more than a little envy. He wished he had had a year with Laura so close to nature when they had first been married. "Can your mother and I visit you every weekend or so?"

"That would be great." Tom replied.

"Well,... maybe not quite every weekend." Amanda said seriously.

That was when Ian and Sharon knew their children really had their own lives. As parents letting go, it was hard to be happy, but impossible to regret that it was so.

At the houseboat, Laura had scanned the short year when she and Eugene had once gone from being strangers to lovers, from being lovers to what might have been. Reading his account of the night he proposed was sweet and sad, and she was so glad she had said no and still, finally, she was so sorry she didn't even want to give their love a chance. When they were young, she felt the same way about the future as she did all those decades later. It was unknowable, risky, no place to bet that anything survived, especially love.

Reading the words, remembering when it happened, sitting in his beautiful car, drinking a bottle of champagne after their graduation party, it was strange thinking that any two people so young could even begin to imagine the rest of their lives together. She told him no, she wouldn't marry him, but she would treasure the first proposal of her life. At least that much she knew would be true. It was. It would always be true.

After that, it was heartache and loss, as Eugene wrote, telling her all the things he hoped for the two of them and all the things she was turning her back on. Like everyone in love, Eugene couldn't understand why that wasn't more than enough. Laura knew then, as she did reading Eugene's thoughts, that it was never enough. She wasn't sure if Eugene had ever come to understand that too.

There was a whole book between the time they stopped seeing one another and the time Sharon came into Eugene's life. When the heartache was done, she was still his great listener. He told her all his thoughts and hopes and fears, and sometimes even the sweet things he experienced he wished that she would have known. The strange thing was that as she read, she could almost hear Eugene's voice, the cadence of the rhythm and the distant echo of his father's Dutch accent. She wondered how his voice had changed. If he was like everyone else at the high school reunion, he would've sounded just the same. She loved how a voice somehow survived. Laura flipped through the pages of one book after another and she saw that Eugene kept his greatest weakness for only her to know. Weakness and doubts and anxieties and anger about his marriage and his children and his life and his parents were things he told her and would never tell anyone else. He said so.

He had no idea that all those years later he would be destroying the illusion of his perfect, loving heart as she read. Then Laura realized that he probably knew that was exactly what she would be feeling. What he didn't know was that she'd come back and learn to love him, true. He had no idea how hard it would be to lose her illusions of him all over again. Laura couldn't go on reading. She knew she didn't want to read those journals, ever.

If there was a Pyrrhic Victory, then this was a Pyrrhic gift. He gave her the most precious gift of who he really was, and it was a gift he had no idea would break her heart. Laura decided she couldn't live with his gift and that he hadn't intended anyone else to have it, Laura decided the only thing she could do was burn his journals. It made her so sad, but it had to be done.

It was then that Laura moved from the question of 'why' to that of 'what if'. What if she had married him all those years ago? What if she had said yes? There never would have been the huge family: no Rosie Van Fleet, no Tranh Van Fleet, no Sharon, no Wayne, none of the other brothers and sisters. There would have been no Queer Agents of Karma. Amanda would never have been. Megan would have been lost, and with her Ann Marie and perhaps Ian, and most likely her as well. There would have been no beautiful farm, no foster families, no millions of dollars, no roses, no antiques, no Bridget Brown for her daughter to love. There would only have been the money from the Walnut Wood that she would have certainly made Eugene cut down.

There would have been the inevitable divorce and all that would have meant. There would have been no notebooks. There would have been no deciding where she belonged. The best thing she had ever done in her life was say no to his love.

Everyone knew where they belonged except her. She didn't know anything or any place she could touch. She had Eugene's hideous disease. People could touch her, but she couldn't respond.

He had left her the knowledge of the course of her own emotional paralysis. She could feel the emotional connections of her life going numb, just as she came to realize what they were. Laura was having a breakdown that left her looking as she always had, the way a plate can crack in half and its pieces fit so perfectly that the break is invisible. She dug a pit in the sand then put the notebooks in it with the loose leaves of his printed memories since she had come back to the farm. She crushed a number of them before she realized she had no matches.

Tom has supplied the boathouse with everything, and that included matches. She had used them to light the propane stove just that morning to make coffee, and she put them down, but she couldn't, for the life of her, find them. She almost tore apart the little kitchen. It was like an omen, it was the fates trying to intervene in what she wanted to do, and she had to put that thought right out of her mind. The decision was hard enough as it was. It took twenty minutes and there were still no matches until she opened the refrigerator door to get herself a drink because her mouth was so dry with anxiety. The matches were on the shelf with the milk. She almost laughed when she saw them. She forgot her thirst and she picked up the box of wooden matches and opened it and it flew from her fingers and fell to the floor, pickup sticks, another omen she had to ignore.

Even though there was only a little wind, she went through one match after another and they blew out before the paper would light. It was like some bad movie. The fates were working against her. She shouldn't be doing this, she thought. Her shaking hands didn't help. She went inside and brought some cooking oil and poured it on the notebooks and the first match lit the fire and she sat back on the beach sand, watching the yellow flames gather around the notebooks, curl one page after another and turn them to white ash.

Ian and Tom and Amanda were beside her before she noticed them.

Tom shouted, "Those are my father's notebooks!"

"What are you doing?" Amanda screamed, "Are you crazy? You're burning the thoughts of someone who loved you!"

Amanda didn't wait for an explanation; she started kicking sand over the little fire. Laura couldn't say anything. They looked at her like she was some kind of monster. She got up and left them. "What is the matter with you?" Amanda shouted after her mother.

When she was gone no one knew what to say. Amanda bent down and started digging the paper out of the pit and Tom helped her do it. They gathered the singed, dirty books and tried to clean them as they did touching them with the actual reverence they felt. Ian went after Laura. Laura did not want to apologize. She did not want to explain herself. She didn't expect anyone to understand what she had been doing and she was so glad that Ian didn't even ask.

"I'm so sorry. This must be so terrible for you." Ian consoled her.

"I'm all hung up. I just need some time to myself." she said wearily, "Would it be okay, if you didn't come for a few weeks. You're just too much pressure."

"That's not going to happen. You're obviously in too much pain. You need to stay connected to those who love you."

"But I'm not connected. When you're here, when she's here, you just remind me of that and it hurts so much, and I'm having a hard time feeling anything at all. It's so mixed up."

"I'm sorry, but I'm not leaving you alone." Ian said firmly.

"Please. I thought about this. Please. I spent my whole life with people; I have to find myself by myself. Now that Ann Marie and Megan are gone, maybe you could move into their cabin with Amanda until the end of the summer. Maybe you can ask Sharon, if I could stay until then. I should look over Arthur and Laura Lee and make the final corrections. Please. Please understand." Laura sounded like she was almost begging him when Tom and Amanda came inside carrying the notebooks.

"I know these are yours, and you can do anything you want with them, but I don't think you're in the right frame of mind to do something so final." Amanda began, "Tom says that maybe it would be all right if we put them in the vault for a while. Please think about what you're doing. I know this must be a terrible thing for you to get over. Please. These are so precious."

Laura just nodded her head and looked almost as lost and hurt as Amanda had looked after she was raped. Everyone was afraid for her.

"Your mother would like to have some time to herself. Would it be okay, if you and I moved to Ann Marie's cabin so she can be alone. I'll ask Sharon, if it's okay." Ian said quietly to Amanda

Tom said he was sure his mother would agree. He couldn't help thinking he and Amanda would have the cabin to themselves during the week. The flowers of passion were full-blown in both of them. It was like an addiction that couldn't be described, only savored.The double rush of reciprocal pleasure was absolutely irresistible.

"Maybe you could all go and talk to Sharon. I'll be okay. I just need some time, some space."

Ian said they would do that and just as there were leaving he said, "We really love you, you know."

"Really." Amanda added softly.

"I know." Laura replied, "Thank you."

"I almost forgot. Tom and I are getting married this Christmas." Amanda said, almost sadly.

"I heard. That's wonderful. I know you'll be very happy." Laura replied and she looked so completely sad Amanda could only reply, "Thanks." There were many layers to the irony. When Amanda was the last one still inside the houseboat, she turned back to her mother.

"I know something about pain. It's not all bad. There isn't anything I wouldn't do to help you get through it. It's what you did for me." More irony.

Laura didn't say anything but she knew that it was Tom, Ian, Ann Marie, Sharon and even Wayne who had really been there for Amanda.

After Ian said goodbye later that night and had gone back to Toronto with Alan, Laura was sitting watching the sunset when she saw Sharon walking along the beach, and she almost didn't recognize her because the way she walked was so different. The resolute purpose and energy her body usually carried seemed to have vanished. She was walking slowly, casually, as if time didn't matter, as if she was walking and holding hands with a lover.

Sharon sat down on the deck chair beside Laura before either of them spoke.

"Ian tells me you want to stay on in the house boat for a while. This is Tom's boat, you can stay as long as he's willing. You can stay here on the farm as long as you want to do that." Sharon said gently.

"Thank you. I don't know how it's going to make any difference, but this is the only place I feel comfortable right now. Until I finish with the last corrections to Arthur and Laura Lee and some publisher has it and I lose any real connection to it, for what it's worth, this is the place we belong. It's not much, but it's something." Laura explained.

"Gene dying must be harder for you than for me. I can't imagine how you'll endure it. I have the kids, the farm, enough great memories for another lifetime. You had six months. You fell in love with him like I said you would, didn't you?" Sharon replied.

"It's true. He was the perfect dream lover. It was true when he was seventeen years old. It's just the dreams were so different, although there's not much to choose between them." Laura answered, and it was the first time the two of them faced the fact that Laura had been Eugene's first lover.

"It's funny, thinking of you two making love doesn't bother me the way it did when I first saw you. You're so beautiful. When you were young, you must have been like a vision. The two of you making love together must have been so beautiful. When we made love, it was a different kind of beautiful." Sharon confessed.

"It must have been. I think I would've traded that face and this body to have experienced that kind of beautiful, just once. I think it's what Tom and Amanda must have. Arthur and Laura Lee is probably the most beautiful thing I've ever done. Doing that with Eugene is as close as I'll get to that kind of beautiful. Knowing they'll have a whole life, like you two had, is the best thing that could have ever happened." Laura replied, opening her heart completely, emotions and ideas mixed up and tied tensely together.

"Your life's not over." Sharon pointed out.

"Shouldn't I be the one saying that to you." Laura shot back.

"I suppose. But you're the one without anything to hold onto. That's why you tried to burn those notebooks, isn't it?"

"In a way. How do you deal with somebody that gave themselves completely?"

"Take it. Accepting someone's heart isn't necessarily about giving your own. I could never live up to his standards, and we both knew it, and it was okay."

"I know that. I guess I know that. If I learned anything from Arthur and Laura Lee, it's that giving and getting isn't all that important, it's all about being that's always been my problem. I don't know who to be, what to be and where to be."

"Then you'll need people to remind you. You'll need people you trust to triangulate your position, if you really feel so lost. You might even think about talking to somebody who doesn't carry old memories and guilt. Christa's psychiatrist is a man named Brian Smith. He's really quite wonderful. If I was in pain I couldn't handle, he's the only person I'd go to, except maybe Bridget Brown. Christa's gone to live with her and I'm very hopeful she'll help Christa find a way to be part of the world without it breaking her heart all the time."

Laura didn't react defensively to the mention of a psychiatrist. She didn't react at all.

"If I called Brian Smith and he came down, you two could meet and talk and you could see if you think he might be able to help." Sharon continued.

"Sure. I always thought professionals had all the answers. I sure thought I had them."

"I'm glad this isn't self pity. I always believed in respecting real pain."

"Well, I'm glad I've earned your respect." Laura said dryly. It sure felt like self-pity to her.

"You know very well, you always had my respect." Sharon said and smiled with her eyes.

"I know." Laura replied, but couldn't manage a smile.

For the rest of the week, Laura got acquainted with the heat of the summer. Most days, she spent sitting on the deck chair, and even with the sunblock, she was turning a beautiful brown like the grasses and weeds growing in the fields, struggling to survive the dry, blazing light. Summer was a season of stress. She was almost disappointed when Tom showed her how to engage the motor for the canvas awning that spread out over each porch so she could be out of the sun.

Laura kept one pleasure, the feel of her body. Whether she was in the sun or walking along the sand, feeling the dry wind of the day or feeling it cool after dark, whether she was feeling the cool water when she went naked to it or feeling it dry softly on her skin, whether she was smelling the perfume that was alive all around her that appeared the minute the sun fell below the horizon, Laura enjoyed every moment and sensation of her body. It was all she had left of who she had been.

She tried not to think. She tried not to remember. She tried not to think of the future at all.

Feeling her body was all she could do, all that was left that she could do really well. She had always been a master of momentary pleasures, and she was finally left with the simplest ones of all. This moment!

Tom and Amanda brought her food as she had asked, so she didn't have to go to the farmhouse for meals. She had asked about David, and he seemed to have forgotten her after three days of repeatedly saying her name; Or...Ore...Oar.

Laura gave Amanda her cell phone so Ian couldn't make his nightly call, so she wouldn't have to hear his unexpressed worry, his anxious hope.

Ian had a difficult week, as difficult as he had had in many months. Always trying to be the optimist, it was still difficult to imagine what their lives would be when Laura came home. It was impossible to know what would happen if her book was a success or if it just disappeared. There was no knowing what her loving and losing Eugene would mean to both of them. There was no knowing what would become of Arthur and Laura Lee. His only answer was the hope he felt in his dreams of a place of their own far from the lights and the darkness of the city. The future wasn't any easier for Ian than it was for Laura. That was how the city was different than the farm.

On the farm, the future seemed to carry the momentum of the past, much of what had been, would be. For people in the city, jobs, homes, relationships, children might disappear in one black day. Everyone in the city could feel the transience of life moving like sand under foot, every grain of sand responding to gravity and pressure. What had been probably wasn't going to be for very long. Life was a bargain with time. Hope could be like a morning glory hanging limp on its trellis after the first killing frost.

That was why the only thing Ian could imagine to resist the pressure of time was having something real that might survive into the future, and the only thing he could imagine like that was a place he loved, a place his family felt they belonged for the rest of their lives. Imagining a real place like that was what kept Ian going through the week. Imagining a place was something that could become real, something that could be found and created and kept and handed on. Ian finally understood the endless paralysis of the weekend gridlock around Toronto, the cars and people trapped on hot highways going and coming from cottages every summer weekend of the year. He wanted more than a cottage. He wanted more than a weekend of reality to touch with his own hands.

He wanted peace, privacy, solitude, serenity, he wanted to touch things he would have for the rest of his life. He wanted his wife and daughter to be at home in a place all their own, on land of their own. He wanted a place his grandchildren would love. Ian imagined a little lake surrounded by Crown land, a little bay, an inlet on a lake with a clear, sand beach. He imagined the lake accessible by only one road that ended at a little dock at the end of the lake from where they would have to take a boat or a snowmobile to their simple, beautiful log house. He imagined every room, the living room, the kitchen, the little library, the three bedrooms for Tom and Amanda and their children, and that was the best part of his dreams. He even started imagining the furniture and the things he would teach his grandchildren. He intended to have time for them he never had for Amanda. Finally, his life would know the best part of having money and time.

There would be a screened porch beside the lake that would be glassed in the fall with a fireplace made of granite field stones. There would be books and music and a little workshop and even a root cellar so they could be more independent. It was a stripped down version of the Van Fleet farm, without all the people, and all the furious activity. While Laura found solitary pleasure in her body, Ian was only happy in his dreams.

When Ian called Amanda and tried to share his growing excitement about his idea, he was disappointed that she was only polite in response. She had her own future and, if it wasn't connected to the farm, it would be far away and years in the making. That's when it first hit home that there would only be Laura and him for the rest of their lives. One child was a little base for a big thing like a family. He had never been so afraid of losing Laura as he was when he realized she was all he really had. He knew that the extroverted Laura wouldn't ever, for a minute, consider living in such an isolated place as he imagined, but her sudden need to be alone, to stay away from people made him hope that perhaps she was changing and she had seen through the superficial attractions of the modern society that used to be so much a part of her life. He was hoping she was coming to appreciate the slow movement of time that might be possible to experience, if they returned to a more natural rhythm of life. Times were a-changin, but even more to the point, time was a-changin. A place and time together, with time to spend. He wanted life to be like a song.

Laura fell asleep every night and she lost the memory of the pleasure of her skin as she lay there alone, feeling too loved and far too unloving, her emotional chickens finally coming home to roost.

For Amanda and Tom the commitment to each other they felt so absolutely, changed only one thing between them, their sexuality. They made love whenever they could, whenever they had time, whenever they found a place that was private, and Amanda had to learn like her mother to stifle the incredible screams she felt exploding in her orgasms. She shared orgasms with Tom, and that was the best thing of all.

Pre-marital sex wasn't encouraged on the farm, and the Van Fleet children couldn't even be alone with a member of the opposite sex before they were sixteen. Sharon made sure her children were well aware of birth control methods because she knew what babies did to a young life. That was why there was a constant supply of condoms in the bathroom. Both Tom and Amanda made sure they were safe. It was part of their culture. It was that of both their mothers.

Still, the hormones of real love made practical issues seem very secondary. They both thought constantly about each other, each other's bodies, each thing they had touched and how it felt when they made love. They thought about it all the time and everyone could see it in their eyes, if they really looked, so that by the end of the week the lovers were both sure they were addicted to each other the way Wayne had once been addicted to heroin. Too much, for once, was definitely not enough.

At the end of the week, Amanda and Tom had gone into Belleville and ordered a special engagement ring, one they had designed themselves, a horizontal one carat diamond between two oval blue sapphires. It looked like a cresting wave. The jeweler was impressed with their design and more impressed with the fifteen thousand dollar price the two ordinary looking teenagers treated so casually, and it definitely wasn't an engagement ring for someone who worked with her hands. Amanda would soon learn that most days she would wear it after dinner and mostly while she slept.

The day Amanda got her engagement ring was the day she started keeping a journal. She wanted to keep the special moments of her life for herself and for Tom and her children, and for the first time in her life, she even imagined she would have grandchildren one day, The first thing she wrote in her journal was her mother's reaction to her ring.

'My mom tried to smile when she looked at my ring and she said that when we lived in Toronto, if I told her I was getting married, she would have fought me with all her might. She said she couldn't imagine anyone as young as me and Tom being prepared for something as big as marriage, but she thought we had all changed. That's when she told me she wished she had married Tom's dad when he asked her when she was seventeen years old like me. What an idea! What a stupid, terrible, selfish, beautiful idea! Still, it's kind of great to think of her wishing she'd done something just from her heart. She does the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right ones. I wished she could have hugged me or Tom when we showed her the ring. Still, I may not have the best mother in the world, but I sure have the right one.'

It was that week that Eugene's mother took to her bed for the last time. With her growing dementia came a terrible fatigue, as if seeing her son dead had drained the life force from within her. She would only eat soup, if she was fed like a child. Her mind traveled through time so that her son's children that she had seen become adults with children of their own, became adolescents again. She reminded them of things they had done when they were just new to the farm. She sometimes barked instructions the way she did when she was fighting Eugene and Sharon for the control she had always wanted to have over people, especially her family. The only things she controlled at the end of her life were her eyes and her bowels, just like her son.

Ten days after Eugene's funeral, Sharon was feeding his mother and she gagged on the soup in her throat, coughed hard, just once, laid back and closed her eyes and died. It was so much easier than it had been for Eugene, and Sharon almost resented her mother-in-law for her effortless death.

Sitting with her mother-in-law in the same bedroom that the old woman had shared for so many years with Eugene's father, Sharon looked around and saw the simple remnants of a life. All that was left of the poor old furniture that had been in the farmhouse when she had married Eugene was in that room with a few decorative things, a few personal things, photos in frames on crocheted doilies. The old iron double bed that made a metallic groan to every movement, the depression era chest of drawers with mahogany veneer, the coal oil lamps that were never used, the linen dust covers, the wooden ladder back rocker, the Delft blue of two ceramic Dutch windmills, the faded wallpaper moss roses, the China brick-a-brac and the old glass lamp on the night table were all the artifacts of her life she had been able to claim as her own. As Eugene and Sharon had become more successful and the children arrived, and had then renovated the farmhouse and made the additions, all the poor old furniture was replaced with beautiful older things, with histories of other people. Sharon remembered how Eugene's mother had fought every change. "You're turning my home into a museum." she would bark. At the end of her life, nothing was left of her own life that wasn't in that bedroom.

Sitting with death once again, it was those poor, sad remnants of a long, rich life that Eugene's mother had been allowed to keep, that made Sharon feel sad and guilty. The civil, guerrilla war with her mother-in-law finally had cooled like the soup Sharon held in her hands in the white mug. Sharon sat for a long time and felt very hard and very stubborn. She knew how much Eugene's mother had paid to have her as her daughter-in-law. Even on the farm, tradition and generations, and the old order of things had been fundamentally displaced by the children of opportunity. She was just a part of her generation.

Eugene's mother's grandchildren came in and said goodbye, and then the ambulance came to take her to the mortuary were she would be prepared for a traditional funeral. She would lie in a casket surrounded by flowers in a somber, big room with plush chairs and polished furniture. She would lie in a simple print dress and would look like a gray wax copy of who she had been. People would come and her family would wait beside her and there would be a vigilance for nothing more than memories. Old people, old friends, her two surviving children and their spouses and her daughter in law Sharon would receive sympathy, and dust off a few more memories. They would sit in the big soft chairs, on the velvet sofas, speaking low, as if Eugene's mother was asleep and no one wanted to wake her. There were a few tears, but grief was too easy. Her son was a hard act to follow. The contrast between Eugene's funeral and his mother's was stark. Where he had received great garlands of grief, his mother had received nosegays of sorrow. Most of the time, during the visiting hours when she lay in state, Eugene's mother presided over the quiet assembly of her children and her children's children. People gathered together and were gone; people held one another and kissed with a brittle sadness.

In the filtered light of a country church filled to bursting with people, before a minister of the United Church her family had attended when her family was all her own, Eugene's mother's coffin glowed in the words that were said over her life. Her surviving son Frank, spoke after the minister, and it was obviously difficult for him to describe the long life, hard work, the strong values and love and the way it was passed unexpressed from a parent to child and was returned the same way. He told stories of hardship and courage and sacrifice, what it was to raise children, what it was to survive and sweat and laugh now and then. There was no poetry, no grand words because they didn't apply as they had to her son. The poetry was simpler; it was simple reality. It was no less true.

The thing that made Eugene's mother's funeral different than that of the countless others that went through the little church, was the funeral procession of cars that went back to the family Cemetery. Behind the hearse, mixed in among the modern cars were the beautiful, restored classic cars of the Van Fleet children, Eugene's children. It gave the long procession a gaiety and a freshness and a sense of fun that somehow lifted every heart that saw it.

Ian rode with Tom and Amanda in her newly restored Riviera. Laura refused to attend.

Eugene's mother was buried beside her husband and a short way from where the newly planted violets were just beginning to take root over Eugene's ashes. Marta Van Loon. 1921-1999. Beloved wife, mother and grandmother. Rest in Peace.

Red polished granite.

Ian came and told Laura about the funeral and she seemed almost interested. It was the kind of funeral she could understand. She even asked what Sharon had worn. Laura had agreed to start taking a herbal antidepressant. It was harmless. It couldn't hurt. Drugs were always a good way to postpone life. Laura didn't know that so well, until her whole life was one of pure postponement. She did less. She thought less. She ate less. She talked less. And for some reason, she suffered more. She couldn't understand it. She couldn't understand anything.

Ian tried talking to her about her feelings, but she just said that she was emotionally tapped out, and Ian could understand it. The last ten months had carried one shock after another, every one new, every one enormous, every one ripping at the stable foundation of their lives. Even if, as Walt Whitman promised, whatever happened to anybody could be turned to beautiful result, it didn't seem to be of any help to Laura. Somehow, the beautiful results didn't make up for the pain, the loss, the life sentence in the solitary confinement of the self that Laura now knew, thanks to Eugene, was everyone's fate. The more Ian went on about the beautiful results in their lives since they had come to the farm, the more Laura seemed to withdraw. His enthusiasm wasn't enough any more. She refused to ride the wave of his energy and commitment. Every one was concerned about her and no one knew what to do or say.

The Van Fleets all remembered how Christa had fallen into her emotional swings of euphoria and despair. Laura was missing the euphoria. She was becoming purely depressed. The Van Fleets knew the face of depression. They were more frightened for Laura than Amanda and Ian were, and were even more helpless.

Amanda tried talking to her mother, but Laura just said she'd be fine.

Sharon came armed with the best Bordeaux on another starlit night when Laura just sat on the boat house porch watching the lake and the black shadow of Haystack Island breaking the invisible horizon. Sunset was still only a few hours before midnight, and so when Sharon came, Laura was still remembering the twilight filling the day with dust motes of gold, with colors that meant more to her than money. Moon rise, wind rise, waves rolled under the boat, gently rocking it like a cradle.

"I wondered when you'd come." Laura said flatly as Sharon sat down beside her.

"Spirits to raise the spirits. Can I find some glasses?" Sharon asked, placing the two dark bottles of wine on the little table between them. Sharon didn't wait for an answer but went into the boat house and brought out two wine glasses and a cork screw. The wine glasses were filled and Laura groaned from the pleasure of her first sip.

"If I could afford wine like this, I'd be an unrepentant alcoholic." Laura said, sounding quite sincere.

"The wine is to loosen your tongue and lubricate your spirit." Sharon answered, "Tell me what's most important to you."

"Everything, nothing. I don't know what important means any more." Laura answered.

"Really. That must be very confusing. That reminds me of when Christa had a meditation chant when she walked for miles every day. When she breathed in she said, 'Everything is precious.' When she breathed out, she said, 'Nothing is important.' I think she made it up herself.

"I like her so much. That's just about it." Laura replied. "What's the best thing Eugene ever said to you?" Laura asked, seemingly out of the blue.

"That's easy. Do you feel it when I come with my heart."

"That's pretty impressive. He never said anything with me. Did you ever come with yours?" Laura asked, watching the excited expression glowing on Sharon's face in the porch light.

Sharon didn't seem shocked by the question, just had a sip of wine and smiled, almost sadly. Sharon never felt her loss more than when she was with Laura. It was one of the reasons why she loved coming to see her. She nodded yes, in answer to Laura's question.

"Really." Laura said, sounding just like Amanda's, 'Really'.

"You want to talk about Eugene?" Sharon asked her friend.

"No. No. I don't want to do that." Laura answered, and Sharon saw Laura visibly shut down. From that point on, Laura asked no questions, and she answered Sharon's with a few words or wan smiles. For some reason, Sharon's simple question was just too direct. It was too open ended.

Sharon, being who she was, didn't give up that easily. If Laura wouldn't talk, she would. The one thing she knew about depression from raising her many troubled children, was that underneath the pain was the unspoken belief that somehow, most people felt they didn't deserve what had happened. Underneath pain and guilt was always an innocence wanting to be recognized. For Sharon, life's pain and its resolution came from simply coming to terms with how life was so often, so brutally, so cold-bloodedly unfair. That was her theme. It was the theme that had served her through her life and she would come at it from as many directions as she could find.

Amanda's rape. It was helplessly suffering the suffering of her own flesh and blood. Nothing.

The dead boy in the snow and her affair with George Marshall, her betrayal of Ian. No response.

Personal selfishness and personal guilt, the possibilities she had betrayed in her life. That wasn't it, either.

Eugene's disease, her loss of her love after finally accepting it was real. Still nothing.

'You are not alone in this.' was a theme that Sharon knew most people wanted to believe, and that was why she decided to pour out her own heart as she never done in her life. For some reason, Laura's depression, her separation from life, was something Sharon wanted to resist with all her might. It was like she was family.

"You think that you know pain. I'll tell you about pain. You want to hear about the absurdity of suffering, the mindless heartache people inflict on one another, I know something about that." Sharon said passionately. Sharon knew the anguish the cruel fates could inflict upon the innocent. She built a life fighting against those fates, winning again and again, but losing occasionally, with painful results that somehow never made up for the successes. It took a hard heart to resist Sharon's experiences and her eloquence. Anyone else might have wept in the little modern Gethsemane Sharon made of the beautiful boathouse on the beach.

No tears, from either of them. Laura was obviously listening, she just couldn't respond. Sharon thought Laura was going to be one of her failures. It almost made her angry. No one had been loved as Laura had been since she had come to the farm. No one had found love as she had found it when she had come to the farm. Sharon didn't and couldn't understand that that was exactly Laura's problem.

Finally, Sharon asked the one question she always relied on when she faced the worst problems in life.

"Tell me what would have to happen to make your world better?"

Laura didn't reply at once and Sharon could see she was thinking, seriously.

"People would have to see what was right in front of their eyes. I'd have to be able to do it too."

"Good! I love that!" Sharon replied, excitedly. "Why don't they see? Why don't you see what's right in front of your eyes?"

"Life is a blind spot. Love is a blind spot." Laura answered seriously.

And that was it. She said she was too tired to talk any more, and Sharon could see she meant it. Under the stars and beside the rolling water, Sharon left Laura a last little speech, something to consider after she left

"You're everything I'm not and he loved you for it. I'm everything you're not and I think he loved me just as much." Sharon said softly.

"More." Laura replied, and it was Sharon's turn for the wan smile in response. She leaned across the table and kissed Laura's cool cheek. They looked in each others eyes.

"I'm so glad you're here." Sharon whispered warmly.

"Me too, I suppose." Laura replied, and her voice was as cool as her cheek. The two bottles of wine were gone. It was then she realized the reason she could have never been with Eugene. He was too extreme a romantic and she was too extreme a realist. He desperately needed her and she knew she would never be able to give herself to him. They were the opposite poles of the magnet at life's core. That was the reality he could never see.

In a way, Laura's depression became part of everyone's consciousness at the farm. The children and the older people all seemed to want to rise to the challenge of finding the secret taste in life Laura could not resist, the one irresistible taste that would give her back her appetite for the basic fare of living. Everyone sent treats with Tom and Amanda. People went swimming near the boat house much more often than they usually did so they might have a chance to talk to her. Children made cards and wrote short, sweet letters. She was invited to read from Arthur and Laura Lee. She declined all the invitations. She kept to herself.

In the limited patience of mothers and daughters, Amanda finally had enough.

"You're like some princess in a tower, pining for love." Amanda accused her mother. "You are loved! Don't you get it?"

"I get it." Laura replied, "I am a princess. I get it. That's the problem. But there's a pea under my pillow."

Amanda rolled her eyes and left. What she hadn't said, although just like everyone else, she had thought it. She wanted to say, 'He's dead. Life goes on.'

Everyone was secretly sure that Laura's depression was caused by Eugene's death, and so no one gave her the chance to deny it.

And she did try to get better. She tried not to give in to the gray clouds that followed her everywhere. She ate her herbal supplements. She tried to enjoy every moment. She tried to remember the good times. She even started walking and chanting with her breath, ' Everything is precious...... Nothing is important.' She spoke the words to herself hundreds and hundreds of times and all it did was made her lungs feel full of the sweet summer air. She wanted to believe that people could communicate love, but she couldn't make herself believe it.

When Ian came, Tom and Amanda asked him to get Laura to join them with Sharon at a little Lakeside restaurant that had wonderful food. It was going to be the only engagement party they had. It was going to be first time they would sit down together knowing they would be part of the same family. Amanda was very excited and hopeful her happiness would make a difference to her mother, and so she was angry when her mother refused to come. Amanda actually yelled at her mother the way she had the day of Eugene's funeral. Laura apologized and seemed very sincere and told Amanda she would just ruin the party.

"That's just ridiculous! You could try to fake it." Amanda shouted, "You used to sell being social for a living! You were the queen of faking it."

"That wasn't a living. That was just money." Laura answered.

"And what's more about living than your own daughter's engagement party?" Amanda shot back.

"I know. I just can't. You have to ask someone else about depression. Everything is precious and nothing is important." Laura replied before she dove into the water to get away from her daughter.

"If you don't come, it means we'll have to talk about you all night." Amanda shouted after her mother.

Laura was probably right about what her presence would have done at the dinner. The engagement dinner was easy and happy, easier and happier than it what have been if she had been sitting there in her new, strange placidity. The old brick Victorian house with the new, charming rose garden looked down the Lake from the screen porch where dinner was served. It was in a little Victorian village that was warm and summer busy, and it was all just what Amanda had imagined it would be.

An elegant, middle-aged woman seated them and the chef, her female partner, came in to greet them and everyone chatted before the elegant lady gave them their menus and the wine list. Everyone was excited and the woman was noticeably stunned by the size and beauty of Amanda's ring. Amanda loved the reaction and Tom loved seeing it. The woman simply ignored the obvious question when she learned Sharon and Ian seemed to be there as single parents. There were too many permutations of families joined and severed to get into that can of worms. It was then that the woman brought and introduced her teenage daughter who would be their waitress, and when everyone was seated and her daughter was very busy serving, the woman sat down to the grand piano in the parlor off the porch, behind the open French doors. While everyone ate, the sound of Mozart and Chopin and Scriabin filled the house and filtered out into the night.

The dinner was so delicious and the wine so soothing and delightful that everyone was soon feeling the glow of young love like it was real and forever and no one talked about Eugene or Laura until dessert and coffee. Then it was all about Laura.

Sharon had talked to Christa's psychiatrist, Brian Smith and he had agreed to come to see Laura, if Ian thought it was a good idea. Sharon explained what a difference he had made in Christa. He finally had her off antidepressants. They were actually talking about her coming home when she decided to go off to stay with Bridget Brown. Sharon was trying to make the McCalls appreciate that Brian Smith might really be able to help Laura.

"Sometimes, there are professionals who can really help." Sharon said seriously, "I don't usually believe in credentials, but this time I think they mean something."

The experience Ian and Amanda had with Ann Marie gave them more than just a little faith. They both believed Laura needed help, but they just didn't believe she'd accept it, so when Sharon told them that Laura had already agreed to meet Brian Smith, they were more than delighted. They were hopeful. They had both been desperately searching for some lifeline for Laura to hang onto to resist the inexorable gravity of her heart.

"The thing that scares me the most is not that she might not want help, it's that she looks like she can't even imagine it." Ian admitted.

"She must feel like those Kosovar refugees, totally displaced from her own life." Sharon agreed.

"Losing my dad must have been really hard for her." Tom added, gently.

"Eugene used to say that love was getting ready to lose, we're all born to lose, in a good way." Sharon said, and everyone touched the seam along which every heart was broken.

Tom saw the pain of the truth flicker over every face in the candlelight, and he was most touched by how deeply it held its place in Ian's eyes, so he tried to change the subject. He said he'd like to offer a toast, and he did.

"To the McCalls and the Van Fleets, here and far away."

"To the McCalls and the Van Fleet's, here and far away." everyone repeated and touched glasses and drank the red wine.

"To the beautiful children we never deserved." Ian offered.

"Speak for yourself." Sharon replied before she joined Ian's toast, "To our beautiful children."

"I'd like to toast Fate." Amanda asked, "Here's to Fate, and my mom never marrying your dad."

Everybody toasted before Amanda added that it sure had been good to her. That she could believe such a thing after what she had suffered, touched everyone else at the table.

Then it was Sharon's turn. "There's no end to it."

Everyone loved saying that together, more than anything.

Tom had a second dessert and they drank more rich coffee and talked like they were all the family they had in the world. They laughed when Ian teased, and they loved how Sharon looked relaxed for the first time since Eugene's funeral, so that it almost felt natural for them to be there without Laura, and finally, almost completely, without Eugene.

Everyone was finally thinking it was the end of the evening when the woman got up from the piano. Tom intercepted her as she passed by and asked if would be all right if he played Amanda one song.

"Certainly. That would be delightful." the woman answered, and when Tom got up, everyone at their table followed him to the piano.

He sang,' When I Fall in Love' and the whole room stopped to his beautiful voice and when Amanda joined the next verse, it was breathtaking in the intimate acoustics of the room. It was the first moment of the first memory of when they fell in love, in her room, on her bed, over the phone connected to the coffeehouse. In a restless world like this is, some things didn't cool in the warmth of the sun. Everyone watching knew what the words meant and wished they were true, and seeing them real, feeling them touching the heart like Amanda's hands on Tom's shoulders, was beautiful. The two parents glowed, and when the song was finished, there was a moment of silence that was as beautiful as the biggest ovation.

"I wish they could have been here." Ian whispered to Sharon, and she smiled and nodded.

None of the strangers in the room could have imagined the recent heartache those ordinary looking people had silently carried into the room. None of the strangers could imagine the passion and love that went unspoken that was right in front of their eyes.

Laura watched Smitty come down the Beach, and he was almost to the beach house before she realized the clear glass bowl he was carrying was filled with black cherries. She knew who he was, although they had never been introduced. She just knew the purposeful, casual air of a professional on a mission. She wasn't expecting his first sentence.

"I have a bowl of cherries, would you like some?" he said breezily, "My name's Brian Smith. Hello."

"Sharon told me about you, I like the cherry schtick." Laura answered, "I suppose you'd like to sit down and get me to start spitting seeds."

"I'd like that just fine. I might like to spit some beside you."

Smitty took his seat then placed the bowl between them.

"Sharon tells me you've helped Christa a lot and you might be able to help me." Laura went right to the point.

"I might. You think I might be able to help?" he asked as he began to eat cherries and spit the pits into the lake. Laura followed suit.

"It would be nice to go back to being totally self absorbed and unaware, but it's too late for all that."

"Unlike most people, you seem to have a very good idea of why you're depressed, why you want to withdraw."

"Knowing is the reason." Laura said sounding sad.

"I thought knowing is a good thing." Smitty answered, "What is it that you know now that you didn't know before?"

"That you can't tell anybody, anything. You should know that very well in your line of work."

"I suppose I do, but I'll spare you the old platitude about only being able to help you, if you want to help yourself."

"Great," she replied, "What aren't you going to spare me?"

"I'm not going to spare you an honest reply. How's that?"

"Sharon was right. You are good. So, tell me honestly, what does an honest person do with their life?"

"Live honestly, I suppose." Smitty answered, "Do you think you know how to live honestly?"

"No, I don't."

"Who does?"

"Everybody around here, everybody except me. I don't know why everyone fits in here and I don't. I don't want to be a farm girl. I can't be a city girl anymore. That's the rub."

"You sound like a teenager. Can't be a woman and no longer a girl."

"I like that. That's probably exactly true. I'm probably emotionally arrested at eighteen. There's an insight. Amanda would love it."

"So you think it goes deeper than just fitting in?" Smitty pursued.

"I don't know. I just don't think I have the energy to change."

"Or the motivation."

"Are you kidding, I've got all the fucking motivation in the world, my daughter, my husband, my sweet future son-in-law, the people here who actually care about me more than I can understand, my new book that I did with Eugene that is so beautiful it breaks my heart. I have motivation, believe me. What I don't have is a way to do them justice." Laura answered with passion, and they both knew that was a good start. Laura started to look uncomfortable with the intensity and focus that happened so immediately, and so she asked if she could take a break and they could just enjoy the cherries. "Of course." Smitty agreed, and they both sat and watched the dry heat of the day over the clear blue water. They sat for a very long time and that silence, sitting, was the reason Laura decided she trusted her new psychiatrist. When she spoke again, she knew she was committed.

"I suppose you want to talk about my childhood traumas?" Laura began.

"I don't imagine they amounted to much." Smitty said, matter-of-factly."

"No they didn't. What kind of a psychiatrist are you, if we're not going to root out my old resentments about my mommy and daddy?"

"I'm not too big on the past, unless it's a big problem. Is yours?" Smitty asked.

"All my sins are ones of omission. I'm just like anybody else."

"You are. You really are. That wasn't what you intended when you were eighteen, was it?

"Everyone thought I was special, except me. I thought I could pull it off. I thought I could become what everyone thought I was."

"It sounds to me like you have. Look at all your motivations."

"Right. I'm special. I just feel like crap. I guess that's why you're here, that's what you're supposed to help me understand. I'm just like all your other patients."

"Not very. The only thing my patients have in common is pain. Of course that's true of most everybody else." he replied, "I want you to think about one question, before I come back, if you want me to come to see you regularly."

"What question would that be?" Laura asked, curiously.

"Why isn't the present moment enough for you?"

"That's a great one. I will think about it, and you can come any time you want."

"How about Tuesday's and Friday's? We'll start next Friday."

"Great." Laura replied.

"Families often have questions, and what and how much I tell them is entirely up to you." Smitty explained.

"I've got no secrets." Laura said and gave a snort." You can say anything you want."

"That's fine. You should know that I'd never say anything to them that I wouldn't say to you. You have to trust me." Smitty added seriously.

He got up and extended his hand and Laura looked at it for a second before she reached to take it. They said goodbye and he left her the rest of the bowl of cherries. It was one of Laura's good days.

At the farmhouse, Smitty made his report to Ian. The look on the psychiatrist's face was relaxed and Ian took that as a good sign.

"She wants help. She is quite engaged, and quite engaging, I may say." he began, "She's certainly depressed and she's trying to stay on the surface. I think it's more than just modern ennui. She doesn't seem to feel she has a way to connect with her own future. She's different than most people who get detached from their own lives because she really understands the value of her attachments."

"That's good to hear." Ian responded enthusiastically, "But why has she withdrawn? She's always been so engaged. I used to think that she couldn't stand to be alone."

"That may be a good thing, crawling under a porch to heal." Smitty replied, "That doesn't mean she'll be able to stop the momentum of her slide. But she's fighting. I think we have to be patient no matter how it appears in the short run. She's agreed to see me twice a week. Is that okay with you?"

"Don't worry about the money. Are you sure you're going to be able to come all this way twice a week?" Ian answered.

"If it's all right I'll come after work. It'll be after dinner."

Before Smitty left, Ian asked if there was anything he could do to help Laura.

"It might be good if you kept in touch. Give her time and space, but remind her you're all still here. It's also sometimes good to have visits from someone she admires. Is there someone she used work with? Is there a friend?"

Ian looked troubled, and he was actually embarrassed for Laura, because, in all previous life, her only friend was Ann Marie. None of the people she had helped so much with their careers had ever become part of her life. Her relationships were like those on a movie set, intense in the moment and then quickly left behind. Ian explained there was no one. Smitty gave him a questioning look that made Ian realize how difficult Laura's problem actually was. Like Amanda and he himself, she was learning to start her life all over. Life did begin at fifty, for some, and that wasn't an easy thing.

"Depression, pain, change has a gestation period. Wait and care, that's all we can do for now." Smitty advised.

"She did have a friend who's an editor." Ian interrupted, "You think it would be good if I gave him a copy of the book Laura has done with Eugene? What if it's rejected? Would it be the wrong time for her to have to deal with that?" Ian asked. He very much wanted to help.

"Ask her. Ask her if that's one of the things she's afraid of." Smitty answered Ian.

"I will. There's a poet she worked with recently she quite respected. It seems he was fond of her as well. You think I should give him a call and tell him the situation?" Ian pursued.

"Sure. If he was a friend of hers, he'd probably appreciate knowing she's going through tough times. It's a poet's stock in trade, isn't it?"

That was how Anthony Holtz ended up coming to the farm. And it was circumstance that made him stay for a week, because the great teacher who was to come to teach at the school that year canceled at the last-minute because of a death in the family. When Sharon met Anthony, she prevailed upon him to teach her children about the passion of poetry, and Anthony did for Sharon what he swore he would never do in his life, he taught school.

When Smitty was gone, Ian got up to go as well. He was going to walk to the boathouse to ask Laura about her book and Sharon joined him and walked with him a short way before he stopped and turned and took her hands in his.

"People probably tell you this all the time, but I can't tell you how grateful I am for everything you've done for my family." Ian said.

"Thank you. It looks like we're going to be part of the same family soon." Sharon replied gently.

"We are the luckiest family on the face of the earth." Ian answered sincerely.

"Just like Lou Gehrig." Sharon replied with an irony that shocked Ian.

"It must feel ridiculous that it's all about us and Laura when you've just lost Eugene."

"It's not ridiculous at all. He would really hate knowing she was suffering." Sharon answered.

"He was a very lucky man to have you." Ian said, sincerely.

"Not much luckier than Laura." Ian wondered if she meant the double meaning in the words.

Two suffering spouses saw each other's pain, and neither one of them was sure who moved first, but they came into each other's arms with the force of an emotion that completely surprised them. A hug became an embrace that went on a little too long, because it felt to both of them that it was over too soon, that it hadn't lasted long enough. They didn't want to let go. In the open air, where everyone might see, Ian bent forward and they kissed, friendship as love, respect as affection, thankfulness becoming tenderness they both felt and needed so deeply. Such a long time for such a sweet kiss.

Laura fell into her new routine. In her old life, the only routine was exercise and constant motion. In her new life, the only routine was exercise and nothing to do. Where she had been a doer, she was now a watcher. Where her old life was a dog's breakfast of emotions, her new life was peace and pain. She thought about Smitty's question about why the present moment wasn't enough for her and it was amazing to her that the question could almost fill the days before he returned. The present had always been enough for her. It was all she knew, even sitting alone, isolated from everything she was, her entire former life. She didn't know whether the question was meant to challenge her to accept the present moment completely as all the satisfaction that life might allow, or whether it was meant to challenge her to connect her present moments to her past and her future. It was the question of questions, and Laura couldn't understand how he knew it was the perfect question for her.

She had lived her whole life in the present moment, always unsatisfied with it, always hoping the next one would give her the satisfaction she craved, always longing for more. There at the beach, her pain was just the opposite, the present moment was absolutely satisfying and the next one seemed like an abyss. She never knew she had had such an ongoing love-hate relationship with time, and it was time that contained the love-hate relationship she had with herself. Time and place had come together. As she had come to love the beach opposite Haystack Island, she had come to love the seasons and cycles, the precious trifles of nature's ever-changing moments. If the present moment was beautiful, the place that held it was too. What was impossible to reconcile, for Laura, was that she meant no more to that place and time than a piece of driftwood buried in the sand. It was like a magician's trick, pouring one pitcher of water after another into a cone made from a newspaper, and in the end, the newspaper would be crumpled to reveal there was nothing left inside. Time and life were like that. She was like that.

There was so much to think about when she considered the value and the meaning in each present moment, and that was why she actually anticipated Smitty's return, because she thought that if he knew the importance of the question, he must have some idea of the answer. She actually started to count the days. That he was thirty five years old and looked like he came from central casting with the tight good looks and the perfect hair of a lead actor, didn't escape her attention or interest. That too, she felt, was a good sign. It was so ironic that she had seemed to completely lose her libido, living a few feet from where she had had the best orgasm of her life. But those were different times, a different moment, about a different possibility.

In the meantime, while she waited, Laura liked what the hot sun did to everything. The flowers and grasses in the early summer had gone to seed and the cottonwoods exploded and there was snow in summer in drifts along the beach. Butterflies came floating on the wind, like there were caught in invisible wind currents that lifted them and dropped them like they were made of little pieces of plastic film. Yellow tiger swallowtails moved quickly like their smaller black cousins. Painted ladies and Admirals came and danced close to the sand, and the Monarch's, generations from Mexico, finally arrived with the pungent perfume of milk weed in blossom. The shore birds came: plovers and killdeer and a pair of black headed Napoleon gulls. Two gravel voiced herons passed every evening on the way to Haystack Island and the bullfrogs. An osprey came to join the black terns and the big white common tern and the pair of kingfishers that made blue scallops in the sky as they passed along the shore. Laura loved watching them hunt, pulling little fish from the endless schools that passed the shore, sometimes moving like brown rivers beneath the boat house. Laura loved the way the porcelain osprey would shudder to shake the water from its wings when it lifted back into the air. The sun, the moon, the stars, wind, water and earth and little lives passing, time was forever in summer for everyone except Laura who came to taste every moment.

When Smitty came back, Laura actually greeted him with a kiss. His one perfect question had made him so much a part of her consciousness that it was almost like she had known him forever.

"No cherries?" Laura asked.

"No. they're a little dangerous, if you have a long drive ahead. I was caught a little short, last time." he explained as Laura laughed.

"You and me both." she replied, "That was a great question you left me to think about. Do you ask all your patients that question?"

"No. Most people don't have your expectations."

"Here, sit." Laura instructed, and Smitty sat in the same chair as the time before. "Can I get you something, a beer, some wine, some lemonade? They keep me very well supplied. In my old life, I'd have paid plenty for this kind of treatment."

"I just had dinner, the beer would be nice." Laura went to fetch it while Smitty sat and enjoyed the view. When Laura came back, she saw the effect the landscape had already had on him. He was settling like sand.

"I haven't been able to stop thinking about why the present moment isn't enough for me." Laura began, "It used to be enough, but something's changed. I love each moment as it happens, I just don't know that I'll ever be able to enjoy the ones that happen anywhere else. I can't stay here for the rest of my life."

"You could. Or you can find a place like this one." Smitty answered.

"My husband would love it. It's absurd. Life has to be more than sitting watching the sky sit up. How pointless is that?"

"Because you have no purpose staying here?"

"Exactly. Purpose is the problem. Purpose is just some arbitrary way to make yourself get up every day. I don't have one."

"But you told me you have all those motivations in your life, isn't that purpose?" Smitty responded.

"I'm not Sharon. I'm not Eugene. I'm not my husband. I don't want to live for others. I guess that's the problem, I'm basically a selfish person, and I have no idea what I want. It's hard to be selfish when every moment is enough." Laura answered

"Why do you call it being selfish? "

"Because it's for me, me. It's all about me. It's always been about me. What do I do when I've lost interest in being me?"

"And it's not that you're not interesting. With your mind and talent and beauty and all the people that love you, you have to admit you aren't a dull woman."

"I'm not dull. But why do I feel like my life is the Titanic and all that's left is this stuff that's floated to the surface? I feel like an unsinkable ship lying three miles down."

"That's depression. There isn't a logical cause. There isn't a logical answer. All I can tell you is you're going to rise again." Smitty said with absolute certainty.

"Easy for you to say. You don't have three miles of black water over you."

"Just because it's black looking up, doesn't mean you're three miles deep. It just feels like that." he disagreed.

"I hope you're right. So tell me why the present moment matters so much. Tell me why you asked that question."

"Because you're such a perceptive woman."

"And how does that help with my problem?" Laura asked, sounding confused by his compliment.

"Where we've been are just footprints in the sand, and I thought you might be one of the few people who can tell directions by just looking down." Smitty replied and Laura wondered if he could actually be right.

"If I asked you what you were most afraid of losing, what would be the first thing that came to your mind?" Smitty said changing the subject.

"Two dead invisible friends." Laura replied almost instantly and she was surprised at how quickly the words came to her.

Do your dead invisible friends have names?" Smitty asked.

"Sure, but I don't like to say their names out loud anymore."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm worried they might not be invisible. I can't believe I just said that. That sounds crazy. Why would I be worried they might not be invisible?" Laura asked, nervously.

"I don't know. Do you ever feel that dead people might stop being invisible?" Smitty responded.

"I know dead people don't come back. I know that very well, but I just may have a problem with people that are imaginary. I think losing Arthur and Laura Lee is harder for me than the boy that died in the car accident I was involved in last winter, and it's harder, it's even harder than losing Eugene. You see, I told you I was selfish. It's always about me."

"Are you more comfortable in imaginary worlds?" Smitty asked with fascination.

"Isn't it ironic? I suppose I am. That's probably why I have always been drawn to artistic types. Creative people do tend to be a tad egocentric.

It wasn't a pleasant realization for Laura and it seemed to make her instantly withdraw. The active engagement she had in understanding her pain seemed to dry up like a stone at the water's edge its vivid color turning soft and gray in the heat of the sun. She turned away and Smitty waited, hoping she was thinking about her footprints in the sand. He didn't understand why the mention of her creativity and her imaginary worlds hit her so hard, but he was surprised that she could become almost unresponsive in an instant. He talked; she listened. He asked questions, she replied with single words or frustrated gestures. It was like she was a different woman. The moment had changed. It didn't take him long to decide that he should leave it as it was, so he just sat quietly with her for a long time before he told her he'd be going but he'd come back as they had agreed. She didn't respond one way or the other to his going, her sudden indifference actually troubling to both of them.

When he said goodbye, she didn't get up and when he held out his hand, she looked at it before she shook it wanly. A good day had gone bad, for no reason at all. They would both have lots to think about.

When he just stepped from the boathouse porch, Laura called after him.

"Do have another question for me?" she asked.

"I have one for you, if you have one for me." he replied, as he stopped and they looked at one another. Laura thought for a moment.

"My question for you is, 'Why can't we move when we're dreaming?'"

Smitty thought for a moment before he replied.

"Then my question for you is, 'Why can't we dream, while we're moving?' "

Laura's question was like one he would've expected from Christa Van Fleet. He was used to responding to difficult metaphors. In his time with her, he had learned how artists think. He liked Laura very much.

When Ian came that evening, he saw that she was distracted. When he asked about whether she wanted to talk about her meeting with Smitty, she actually gave him a short outline of their discussion. It was like a memo re: living in the moment; living with depression. He was fascinated with the approach her psychiatrist was taking. It seemed perfect for her. Laura always tried to make sense of the world she felt was basically absurd. She had always lived like an intellectual pack rat, hoarding bright bits in the nest of her mind. He loved the image of the present moment being a set of footprints in the sand. Laura didn't want to discuss the memo about her psychological state very much, but she tried to be open.

Later, sitting on the porch of the farmhouse with Sharon, Ian had a long interesting discussion with her about the present moment and its relation to the past and the future. That was when Ian told Sharon his dream of an isolated cabin where he could read and Laura could write and he could commute to the nearest small town to be a country lawyer.

"It just so happens we own a piece of property like that, it's part of 1000 acres we own next to a big tract of Crown land north of Verona. There's a pretty little lake about a mile across, there's a road that's pretty rough, but if you had a big four-wheel drive, it would probably be accessible most of the winter. We could sever ten, twenty or fifty acres, if you're interested. You're family now." Sharon said as Ian's eyes grew with excitement.

"You'd do that? There is such a place?" Ian asked breathlessly.

"We would, and there is. There are many such places. It wouldn't cost very much, three hundred an acre." Sharon answered, enjoying his obvious excitement.

They talked late into the night about Ian's dream, Ian learning how the Van Fleets could make dreams into realities in no time at all. They would supply the lumber at cost. The Van Fleets had the means to make a house appear in the middle of nowhere in just a few short weeks, once the decision was made. Talking through the practical realities and enjoying the heaven in the details of the design, the house in the wilderness took shape in their imaginations until it had a reality they could both feel pumping in their blood. Then they came to the difficult question of Laura.

They both knew she had no interest in such a dream. She had no interest in any dream at all. They talked about what would happen if her book was a success or if it was a failure. They tried to speculate on the effect each would have on their lives and on Laura in particular. They talked about her depression and how long it might last and how much depended on Smitty being able to help her. For the second time, Sharon's power was transferred entirely to a young man who knew the workings of pain in a way she would never begin to understand. The imaginary house gave Ian and Sharon a common concern that connected them as nothing else could have done. Time found them a place together, even if it was all in their imagination. In the end, they decided Ian would try to get Amanda to help talk her mother into at least going to see the property. Ian was ready to build, sight unseen.

The next morning, Ian talked to Amanda over breakfast and she agreed to go with him to the boathouse to press his case. Amanda was more than skeptical about their chances of success, but she was reluctant to resist her father's enthusiasm, even though she knew the incredible weight of her mother's inertia.

Laura's first response was that they would die of boredom. Ian replied that she didn't seem bored on the houseboat by the beach.

"I know Henry David Thoreau, and you're no Henry David Thoreau." Laura said, but Ian was more than encouraged because he knew when Laura's wit was engaged, she was accessible to new experiences and ideas.

"Touche. I'm no philosopher, but just imagine a place like this one, only with all the amenities. A library, a great kitchen, a music room with perfect acoustics, a place for you to write, a spectacular porch with a fireplace where we can watch the sun going down, just think of the possibilities. We could take long walks. Just think of the nature, right in front of our doors. Then there's the privacy, the security, the emotional intimacy. It's the Canadian wet dream of nature."

"And how would we pay for the groceries?" Laura asked, and Ian was delighted she was thinking about groceries.

"If we sold the condominium, and got anywhere near its value, we'd have almost four hundred thousand dollars left. Sharon says we could build our house for well under a hundred thousand. That would leave us twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year, even if it was invested conservatively. If we gave some of it to Tranh, God knows, we might be rolling in it. And besides groceries, there'd only be insurance and maintenance and a car to keep up. We could travel when we wanted. We'd be free for the first time in our lives. We could see Amanda wherever she was. We'd have a place for our grandchildren to come. I could be a down home country lawyer." Ian was making the closing summation of his life.

"Not so fast about the grandchildren." Amanda interjected.

"You may be surprised about that." Laura answered her, and Amanda blushed to hear her mother say that. She was stunned to think her mother, her mother, thought babies might not be very far away.

"I think you should come to see the property." Amanda responded, "You do love this boat house. You can't stay here forever, and besides, wouldn't it be nice to have a place close to nature, even if it was only a cottage?" Amanda pursued, and she had no idea that it was Laura's fear about where she was going to go after the boathouse that got her to agree to go to look at the property.

"When would we go?" Laura asked.

Ian took a large scale map out of his pocket and unfolded it before Laura, as he spoke, "We could go right now. Here, look, it's probably an hour and a half from here. Look at the beautiful little lake and the Van Fleet's own all the forest around it. This is all adjacent Crown land. This is the road to our new house." Ian explained excitedly.

"Okay. You have my attention. I'm not promising anything. I just can't stand the idea of being the big wet blanket on your dreams. I don't want to take away the enjoyment, even if they never happen."

"You're a wise, beautiful woman." Ian said grandiosely.

"Right." Laura responded, sounding like Amanda. Amanda laughed to hear it.

Two hours later they were driving a rough logging road past huge old igneous rocks heaved up out of the earth, the windows all down in the Lexus, the sweet smell of conifers, filling the car, everyone anxious, not one of the excited group having ever seen the place they were going. Sharon and Tom only knew Rosie's description and that Eugene had said it was one of the most beautiful spots he knew, and so they were as surprised and as delighted as the McCalls when they came to the lake after ten minutes driving through the bush. The road ended on a sandy inlet, a little sweeping bay looking out on a tiny pine covered island a few hundred yards from shore. There was a natural clearing by the beach, a little meadow perfect for a house.

Everyone got out of the car and Ian ran ahead to the beach, stopped in his tracks, looked around for a moment, walked a few yards looking around like he was sleepwalking when he suddenly stopped and threw back his head and threw out his arms and shouted at the top of his voice.

"Just like Brigham Young, this is it!"

The echo from the other side of the lake came back.' This is it. This is it. This is it.'

Ian turned around and saw everyone approaching, and even Laura was smiling.

"Isn't this the most beautiful place you've ever been?" Ian demanded to know. He looked straight at Laura.

"I know. I know. You knew Brigham Young, and I'm no Brigham Young." he said to her and she laughed.

Ian didn't wait for her to reply as he rushed down the shore in excitement and climbed into the little clearing, exploring it, walking around its circumference like there was a house already there, and he could see it. Everyone slowly followed Ian, the pleasure of the moment and the beautiful spot was as much the pleasure of seeing his joy as anything they were feeling themselves. To Sharon, it would be her new in-laws, people she had come to love, being close enough to see regularly. To Tom and Amanda, it was like a foreshadowing of their own future, a beautiful place close to nature, unspoiled, everything that was to be, still a possibility, everything they had been, carrying their potentiality. To Laura, it was a chance to make Ian happy. To Ian, it was the meaning and purpose of a long life in which he had never really felt either.

"So what do you think?" Ian asked everyone, when they were gathered in the clearing, although the question was really directed mostly to Laura. She didn't reply until all the others had said how much they loved the place.

"Would we have to sell the condominium right away?" Laura asked.

Ian screamed, "Yippeeeee!!!! And the echo, and the echo of the echo coming back made everyone laugh again.

"I meant could we wait before we sold the condominium. Could we buy this place and start the cottage before we had to decide about leaving the city forever?" Laura asked seriously, and she was actually nervous about being the wet blanket with her question.

"Why not? You're going to have rich relatives soon." Tom interjected.

Amanda slapped him and told him with her eyes, to stay out of it.

Sharon liked where he was going.

"Why don't we sever some land around this spot, if it's the one you really want, and then we can build the house to your specifications and we could sell it to you at cost. It would probably cost you less than the payments on your car." Sharon offered, effectively eliminating or postponing every concern Laura might have. It was a deal she knew Laura could not refuse.

"You make it all too easy." Laura answered, "People don't change their lives in a moment like this. What if we change our minds? What if I decide I can't live here?"

"Then we will have built Tom and Amanda a wonderful cottage. It would make a nice wedding present. You'd do the work. We'd do the money. What do you think Amanda?" Sharon asked her future daughter-in-law. Sharon knew how to make reality bend to her will like it was as flexible as young willow.

"I'd love it." Amanda replied, "What do you think, Tom"

Ian was stunned that his house was about to belong to his daughter, and said so.

"This is our house, not your house." he said, indignantly to Amanda.

"This land is my land, this land's not your land." Amanda sang, teasing her father.

"Right. Laura, how can you say no?" Ian said seriously.

"I guess I can't. When you're with the Van Fleets, anything you wish seems to come true." she answered, looking into her husband's eyes. "I guess this is our land now."

Ian looked completely stunned, and then he seemed to completely lose his mind because he started screaming 'Yippee!', as he ran to the shore and ran up and down the beach singing, "This land is my land, this land's not your land, from the beautiful little beach with wonderful soft sand to that sweet little island over there, from those beautiful old rocks to all those incredible trees." Ian ran to Laura and standing with his arms out stretched sang to her, "This land was made for you and me." He threw his arms around her and everyone laughed as he whispered that he loved her so much.

"You are a wise and beautiful woman." he said, breathlessly.

Ian spent the next hour and a half crashing around through the bush surrounding the lake and the meadow with Tom and Amanda who were the only ones willing to fight the mosquitoes with him. Laura and Sharon sat by the water on a blanket the McCalls always kept in the trunk for picnics they never seemed to have. At first the conversation, of course, was all about Ian's excitement and the sudden reality that this would be Laura's new home. She told Sharon her doubts about the whole idea. She didn't know if she could survive so isolated from the world. She told Sharon she had no idea that Ian ever aspired to cut himself off from the world so completely.

"I don't know if he could stand me full-time, and 24/7. All the time we've been together, most weeks, we could count the hours when we weren't just sleeping or passing each other." Laura confessed, "We may be investing everything we own in a divorce."

"I don't think that's true. I think both of you are far beyond worrying about your emotional territories. You seem to have come to enjoy being alone. Maybe Ian's a little jealous. He told me he's tired of the emotional drain of dealing with the under belly of city life. He thinks that that part of his life is over." Sharon explained, telling Laura things she knew but had never discussed with her husband, because there really was no option, as long as she was so committed to her own career. What surprised Laura was that Sharon had listened to him say things that went so deep. She had no idea they were that close.

"Could we really be living here in a few months?" Laura asked, sounding anxious about the idea.

"Depending on the size of the house, this is August, you could easily be living here by the end of November. It really depends on how fast you can make decisions."

"I'm going to leave all those to Ian. The one thing we do know pretty well is our respective tastes. It's hard to believe. You realize you may be completely changing our lives once again." Laura said to Sharon. They both knew that Sharon bore a significant part of the responsibility for what was going to happen. She made things possible. It was a power Laura remembered well, but found hard to even imagine she still had.

"Would you feel comfortable talking about Christa's mental illness?" Laura asked, changing the subject completely.

"I guess pain and discomfort are two different things. It always hurts to talk about Christa. It's hard to know that such a beautiful human being can't find a safe and happy place in this world. I don't mind talking about it, the pain is there whether I do or I don't." Sharon replied.

"Everyone says she's the most sensitive human being. Do you think it's possible to be sensitive and find a safe and happy place in this world? I don't have a fraction of her sensibilities, I'm sure, and I don't know how to live with the ones I have."

"I don't know the answer to that. I'm a practical person. I guess you should have asked Eugene that question."

"Among others. It must be so hard for you watching Christa in pain. The worst part of how I'm feeling is the responsibility of knowing there's nothing I can do to go back to being my old self, and there's nothing I can do to help those who have to watch me suffer. The worst thing about middle-class suffering is that it seems like such a self indulgence." Laura confessed.

"I don't think suffering has a class system." Sharon responded.

"I guess you may be right, suffering is suffering, the motives really don't matter."

"You're a wise and beautiful woman." Sharon answered, teasing her with the Ian's words.

"No, you are." Laura shot back

"No, you are."

"You are."

"You."

"You."

"It's you."

Sharon was delighted that perhaps the most serious conversation she had had with Laura suddenly turned into ridiculous teasing. Even in pain, even talking about the most profound suffering, Laura still knew how to have fun. It made Sharon very hopeful for Laura, and even for her own daughter who knew suffering as no one she had ever met.

When Ian came back with his cohorts, looking scratched and tired and sweating profusely, the ladies on the beach could see the power of a dream. There were some kinds of suffering that were their own luxury. Ian looked like he had seen his promised land, and promised it was.

On the way back to the farm, Ian spent most of the time talking about house plans and construction, and he was excited to learn that the Van Fleets had book shelves of plans and ideas for houses collected over many years. Ian grilled Tom about his experience with subcontractors and it was talk and testosterone, like boys in a sand box, only with big trucks and big plans and big earth moving equipment. It was more testosterone than the ladies felt comfortable sharing, so they sat and listened until Sharon finally cut in, asking if the new house would have curtains.

"Of course it will have curtains." Ian replied, sounding confused.

"Then I'd like to hear you boys, spend some time talking about curtains." Sharon instructed. The other two women in the car agreed wholeheartedly. It slowed the conversation considerably.

Ian was scarce the rest of the weekend because he was buried under piles of plans and books and magazines about houses and building them. He would've liked someone to go through everything with him, but no one could stand the chaos of his happiness for very long when they were with him, and he was showing options, discoveries, possibilities, lists of things to do, lists of things to ask, lists of important people who had no idea he even existed. He was able to sleep only a few hours because his imagination kept him awake with plans and problems and questions that were important to answer, and even more important to remember. It was only Sharon who took time to hear his ideas. She had considerable experience doing that. When he said goodbye to Laura before going back to Toronto that weekend, he looked exhausted, like he just finished a Marathon swim, looking loose and happy and spent.

"You realize there are literally thousands and thousands of decisions to be made about the house?" he had said breathlessly to Laura.

"And we used to have a hard time deciding on a restaurant." she answered.

"That was different. You can always argue about something that really doesn't matter." he replied, emphatically.

"I'd like to help you with your dream, but I can't, right now." Laura told him, honestly. "This has to be your project, your decisions. You understand?"

"I do. I'm sorry you won't get to enjoy the process, but I do understand. There'll be no resentments, I promise."

She thanked him and when he held her in his arms there was a sad tenderness she knew very well.

Ian was surprised that his real, succulent enthusiasm for the new house was something he got to share with Alan. The boy, for whom style was almost a religion, loved the idea of creating a house from the ground up, savoring every detail. It was one of the most exciting things he could imagine. This was all the style magazines in a pile waiting to be opened and discovered, but what was even better was the breathless idea that what he imagined might actually become real. Ian consumed books on construction while Alan poured through plans and the piles of magazines Ian had borrowed from the farm. He was also secretly delighted that there would be three bedrooms in the new house. The process of bonding, the strange kind of adoption that happened between people needing to give love to puppies and people needing to feel loved set very deep in Alan and Ian as they created the imaginary house in the wilderness.

When Laura woke up the Monday after they decided to build their own house, opening her eyes, she was stunned to realize that it was like she had fallen from the rock face of her heart she had clung to so long, fallen from the hard face of the reality she was trying to ascend. As she had fallen asleep the night before, she had actually thought she might be almost normal, she might almost be better, and she might almost be over it, whatever it was that had made the future seem so incomprehensible. Lying there perfectly still, she had the overwhelming feeling she was falling, falling through a blackness in which space and time seemed to have traded places or meaning, or both. As she lay there she could move in any direction through her memory of everything past, and she could move in shadowy dreams of the future, she could move through time like it had walls along endless lanes, but she was stunned to learn she seemed to be paralyzed, unable to move from where she lay. Without purpose, without will, without knowing why, she just couldn't bring herself to get out of bed. As she saw her future, she knew she would have to eat and empty her bowels, and even clean herself, and although she could see it in her mind, something had happened in the night, in her dreams, that had taken away her ability to move. She lay there for hours with her eyes wide-open, and the simple joy in the moment was finally gone. It was all she had been, all she had, but it was now entirely gone. She had become Eugene. It was her sympathetic dying. Infinite hours went by. The sun fell. The moon followed. The sun rose and Laura hadn't moved. Time was forever. She thought of Eugene frozen as she was for endless hours, for endless months, space enclosed in his body. The complete horror and reality of what had happened struck her when she finally realized the warmth she felt beneath her was her own bladder letting go. She was ashamed and horrified and didn't care. She lay there until it was cold. A single tear was all she managed.

When time and space changed place and meaning, her mind was just a montage of images, and the images could come from anywhere, from any experience, from any feeling: pain, beauty and envy, lust and ambitions, shame and anxiety, hope and fear and even terror all had images dissolving, one after another, when there was nowhere to go except deeper inside. Lying there, Laura felt fabric in her eight-year old hands, she felt a brush in her long blond hair when she was thirteen, she saw her breasts changing over the years. She remembered dresses and the smells of leather and food. She remembered what was like to want something desperately. She remembered guilt that had come from her body, and she felt pleasures and how they once moved inside her. There were places she remembered, there were people she thought she had forgotten, there were things that lasted a moment, and some that lasted forever. There was Tundra. Parents and lovers and a husband and friends who were all gone in space, were still there in time to remember. There was David, like-life, the boy she had pushed out of her life, and there was the other boy and blood, so much blood. Rape and birth and death and tears and laughter were all there inside. She remembered Amanda as a baby beginning life and she remembered cascades of feelings and sights and smells of her daughter. Her mind was a cascade of memories, fast, white water in sweet, clear water; pools, dark and brackish. People came and went in time, in different bodies, and different clothes and only Amanda's voice ever changed. Lying there, Laura listened to Amanda sing to her with her incredible voice. Music and memory, it was like sugar syrup preserving the years gone by. Laura heard Amanda sing old songs again, running on empty, running blind.

The one thing she couldn't understand was, 'Why?' She lay there like a catatonic, locked in and locked out, and the day had drained away and bled into the next one, and no one came.

Respecting her privacy, no one came because she didn't want them; no one came because they were too busy with the excitement of their lives. For Laura, it was like the story of anaesthetized people floating over their own bodies, etherized on a slab, seeing everything and being unable to respond. It was like being in a coma in which she was wide awake, a coma, a dream, and it was the morning of the second day and she was losing her sense of the world. A coma, a dream, a separate reality, she was drifting and feeling the drift, and feeling she was separating from shore made her reach back. It made her do the first thing, the first act, the first test of her own reality. She reached back. She spoke.

"I'm here." she whispered. She didn't know. She didn't know if her ears really heard her voice or if what she had thought were words had come from her mouth and not just her mind. She tried again.

"I'm here." It was worse, not better. She didn't know if everything that was happening was all just a dream. That would explain her inability to move. That would explain how she could wet the bed. She wanted to believe she was dreaming, and wanting to believe it, for some reason, gave her the lucid ability to move, and she placed her hand on her throat.

"I'm here." she said, and she could feel the vibrations of her voice in her fingers and then she was almost sure it was a dream. It felt distant, like a dream. And then she coughed, and the cough made her realize she was becoming delusional. She wasn't dreaming. This was reality. She started to cough and she felt saliva stick in her throat like an inhaled fruit fly, and then she had to cough so hard, spasming so hard she had to sit up to breath. That was how she came back to believing she was there, she was real, she could move, she could feel, she could see, and if all that was true, she could get out of her bed and walk. She did that, her muscles screaming, almost stumbling, looking back at the bed and down at her body, herself, feeling frightened and lost and helpless. She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower and stood under the water that was too cold. Finally, she reached for the handle and changed the temperature and she stood there wondering how such things happened when you least expected them. Laura's crisis echoed Eugene's and she knew it. Living was like dying.

When Smitty came that evening, he was shocked by what he found. The bright, articulate Laura, the woman with the questions, the woman with the incredible perceptions was like someone in shock, her reactions were so slow, her engagement so tenuous, that Smitty was sure some terrible thing had happened.

He was helpless to know what to do, because the only thing she would tell him was that she couldn't help herself anymore. She wouldn't explain. She wouldn't respond. She didn't tell him that he was lucky she was sitting there dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, coincidentally dressed exactly like he was, except his runners were her sandals. After the shower she had walked around naked for hours before it occurred to her to get dressed.

Smitty sat for an hour holding her hand, trying to get her to talk. To his questions about what she was feeling or what had happened, she only said, "Nothing happened." They felt each other's helplessness.

"We're going swimming." Smitty suddenly announced after ten minutes of frustrated silence.

She didn't say anything as he took off his shoes and bent down and took off her sandals, got up and took her by the hand, and walked her to the beach and into the warm water. She didn't resist. She just let him lead her until they were waist deep in the water, and then he pulled her back off her feet and held her while she floated on her back, and the automatic instincts took over. She floated over his hand, using her legs and her arms, floating. And then, all of a sudden, she began to do an effortless backstroke, moving parallel to the shore. Smitty watched her go and she was twenty five yards away when he plunged in the water to follow her. Laura just kept swimming, Smitty following close behind. She swam so smoothly, like it was a day at the beach. Finally, when she had gone a very long way and she was obviously tiring and Smitty could feel the burning fatigue in his own limbs, Laura just stood up, suddenly stood up and walked in to the beach. Smitty followed her and when he got to where she was standing, looking out at Haystack Island, she seemed almost like she was normal. Standing there, her T-shirt clinging wet to her body, she was almost naked. Standing there in his white shorts, Smitty was like that too. There should have been a jolt of professional fear or sexual tension or embarrassment. They noticed there should be, but there wasn't.

"How did you know what to do?" she asked, looking at him like he was the Wizard of Oz, and she was the Tin Man.

"It just seemed the best way to get you back into the moment, sink or swim." he answered, "Can you talk about what happened?"

"I can't believe you knew what to do. I don't know what happened. We're building a house. Everything is fine. Tom and Amanda are going to have a wonderful life. Eugene died. A boy died. I pissed myself. I don't know what happened."

"Let's walk." Smitty suggested, and Laura fell in beside him like they were lovers walking on the beach, strolling and talking, completely relaxed in each other's company. The exhaustion of the swim made the air feel fresh and sweet. The sun gathered colors to go down.

"Tell me about your work." Smitty asked, out of the blue. Laura looked at him in confusion but he had won her trust completely, and so she responded honestly

"My book work or my old job?" she asked, seriously.

"Let's start with your old job. What was it like? Did you like your work?"

"I did. That's the problem, I loved it."

"Why?" Smitty pursued.

"Because it was always Mickey and Judy putting on a show with the gang. The only trouble was Mickey's eight marriages and Judy ending up dead from her pills."

"You felt your work had no real purpose."

"What's real? What's purpose? I used to know how to be happy. What's happened to me?" Laura said, sounding like she was almost pleading.

"Everything. Everything is real. Everything can have a purpose." Smitty answered.

"Everything is precious. Nothing is important." she replied.

"How did you hear that? Is that your mantra too?"

"I guess."

"So what did you think about since I saw you last?" Smitty asked, changing the subject.

"Sand, water, sky, stars, sun, Franny Glass.

"Interesting elements. Franny Glass? It does beg the question." Smitty responded.

Laura was talking. Laura was thinking. Laura was so much better than when he had arrived.

"I'm like Franny. Eugene was Seymour. She had a breakdown. He died."

"Seymour was a suicide." Smitty pointed out

"Ate too many banana fish, I know."

"I thought it was a bullet to the brain."

"That part wasn't important." Laura said with certainty.

"Why not? It killed him."

"It was the banana fish. Besides, I'm not Seymour or Eugene. I'm Franny looking for some sacred tangerines. That's not true. I've got all the tangerines I can handle."

"And banana fish." Smitty added pointedly. "You're like Franny Glass because she had a nervous breakdown?"

"I relate to Franny Glass because I may be knocked up." Laura replied cryptically

"Congratulations."

"Thank you. But I think my baby may be like the one in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, just a hysterical pregnancy. My baby, my book, my life."

"Interesting. Maybe your hysterical pregnancy is more like Martha's imaginary child."

"Doc, you read. Interesting. You may be right. I relate to imaginary children, a lot."

"So you think, life is like a dream?"

"Sha ...boom!"

"I thought about your question a lot,' Why can't we move when we're dreaming?' "Smitty said, changing the subject.

"You have no idea how appropriate that question is. You have no idea!" she replied, "Do you have an answer?"

"Things matter. Things happen. Shit happens. Great, beautiful things happen. The highest ambition is not just sleepwalking through life." Smitty responded passionately. "Life is more than a dream, it's very real. That's why it hurt you so much. That's why you hurt others so much, and they hurt you."

"That's one way to look at it. Another way is to think this is just a lucid dream. We just think we can do things. We just think our choices matter. Rapes and dead boys and beautiful dead people aren't choices anyone makes. At best, they're God's lucid dreams and he has one fucked up subconscious. God is a lot more like Charles Manson than Jesus Christ."

"You're looking for the meaning of life, even though you don't believe it has one."

"I'm not looking for the meaning of life because I don't believe it has one. I just want to know why there's this Novocaine drip we can't reach that I'm desperate to pull out of my veins. Tell me you don't feel it. Tell me you feel more, not less as you've gotten older. Do you remember your first kiss, Doc? Do you remember the first time you were inside a woman you loved?"

Smitty looked like she had him with an ax.

"We all have Lou Gehrig's disease of the heart. Our whole generation, the generation that always wants more and more, always ends up with less and less, except for stuff, except for stuff."

"Like a new house."

"Like a new house. Like more money. Like fifteen minutes of fame."

"Now, I'm depressed." he answered, and he wasn't kidding.

"That's life." she replied, "It's an old Frank Sinatra song. I thought about the question you left me over the weekend. 'Why can't we dream when we move?' I think some people can, not me, but some people; Eugene, my husband, Sharon, Tom and Amanda, they have dreams and they walk around and make them come true. People like you and me know life is just dreaming and we don't know what to do in them. That's why you're a shrink, isn't it? You're no more immune to life's Novocaine drip, than I am. Sometimes you feel like a dead lip in a dentist's chair."

"Sometimes." Smitty replied, looking sad and hurt.

"It's all so ironic. We know all about irony, don't we? We're sensitive to life's ironies; it's what makes our generation so hip."

"Have you ever thought about writing all this down?" Smitty asked, just as they arrived back at the boat house.

"What for, to try and make a placebo for the root canals of life? Isn't that your job."

"Ouch! I give. You realize that you sound very angry. I think that's a very good thing."

"Sadly, I agree with you. I don't know how you've done it, but you've dragged me out of a pit I thought had Teflon sides. The next time you come, I'll tell you what I can. Thank you. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings."

"A small price to pay." Smitty answered, and he would carry the scars of their meeting for just as long as she would. "I'll see you Franny,... I mean Friday. Hello Dr. Freud."

"Thank you." Laura replied and extended her hand and Smitty took it.

"I had better get my shoes." he replied and they both saw each other's wet bodies.

Laura's last innocence seemed to have burned away. She was back to the reality she knew, but something had definitely been lost in the extremes of her crisis. She could wait and sleep and dress and feed herself and make herself clean, but she couldn't seem to get over the feeling inside her that life seemed dry as pith. Life was pithy. She was back to waiting for Godot.

Near the end of the week she looked up and saw the smaller of the farm tractors coming down the beach, its front end loader bucket raised high, Amanda driving all by herself. When she got to the boathouse, Amanda let down the bucket to waist level, turned off the tractor and got down and started unloading the bucket.

"I could use a little help." she said to her mother, "We're canning peaches. Wait till you taste these."

"I don't know anything about canning. I don't want to do this." Laura replied.

"You can learn. I learned. Help me with this stuff." Amanda insisted.

"Amanda, I don't really..."

"You do really.... Just think of this as mother-daughter bonding. Get off your ass, if you don't mind me saying so"

Laura reluctantly helped Amanda carry the pots and jars and the half bushels of peaches into the boat house kitchen where Amanda immediately began organizing everything. She told her mother which pots to fill with how much water and she broke open the sealer lid boxes and turned on the oven before she carefully washed the sealer jars in the sink and put them in the oven. By the time the water was boiling for the sterilizing bath for the full jars of peaches, they were ready to proceed. Laura mostly stood watching, stirring the sugar syrup Amanda had told her how to prepare.

When everything was ready, Amanda started dropping the raw peaches into boiling water and instructed Laura to stand beside her ready to peel them when they came from the ice water that was in the big stainless-steel bowl in front of her. It was only moments before Amanda lifted the peaches from the boiling water and placed them in the cold water in front of her mother.

"Just peel the skin away. Start from the top." Amanda instructed.

."Which is the top?" Laura asked as she took one of the peaches into her hands. "What do I use to peel?"

"Your fingers. Just pull the skin away with your fingers." Amanda answered, as the peaches continued to come until they had all been transferred into the cold water. She joined her mother who was amazed that the skins came away to the gentlest touch. Amanda peeled beside her mother and the peaches went back into the warming water as they proceeded.

"These are called Raritan Rose peaches." Amanda explained, "They have white flesh. They are incredible."

Amanda split the peach in her hands in two and fed the dripping white flesh into her mother's mouth. The shock and surprise at the sweet, mild taste made Laura's eyes wide.

The pale peaches with the deep red blush came dripping warm from the water, and one by one, they turned in her fingers as the skin fell away like wet petals, leaving a slippery wet beautiful white ball in Laura's hands. Because they weren't free stone peaches they were placed whole into the hot jars Amanda took from the oven. Flooded with hot syrup, they were sealed and plunged into a boiling bath of water for half an hour, while Amanda taught Laura how to make peach jam. The peaches were cut from the pits and placed for a few seconds into the blades of a food processor from where they went to the pot on the stove where they were mixed with the sugar Laura measured in equal cups with the white flesh of the peaches. Her job was to keep stirring.

By the time they were ready to put the jam in the jars, the whole peaches came out of the bath, Laura using the stainless steel tongs to transfer them to the counter, to rest on the bath towel, perfect balls in the glass gleaming white and lovely.

From the pink shed placentas of blossoms that had fallen in circles beneath each Peach tree in the orchard, it had only been a few months before the fruit left behind on the branches had changed from hard bitter green pills to succulent balls of white in the bottles Laura carried to keep, to keep, to keep.

After the jam was sealed and the metal tops soon began to pop with the contraction of the cooling fruit, Laura and Amanda looked with admiration at what they had done. Amanda made her mother taste the jam that was left in the pot and it was like Ambrosia.

"Now we're going to make a pie." Amanda announced. "This is a taste you'll never forget as long as you live."

Mother and daughter, in the most domestic of tasks, centuries old, turned flour to dough and rolled it out and sealed the fruit inside it and baked it until it filled the boat house with the most incredible smell.

It was amazing how easy and efficient it was. Laura and her daughter had learned to work with a speedy efficiency that somehow felt almost like athletics. It was moving things in space and time with purpose. Laura liked canning.

The dishes were done, and the pie was cooling, when Amanda poured lemonade over ice for her mother and herself. They could both feel the exertion in their muscles and in their backs as they talked, and Amanda had no idea how difficult the last few days had been for her mother. They talked like old times that had never been. Amanda, a woman who knew how things were done, shared small talk with her mother feeling as comfortable as a warm kitchen.

Laura asked about the wedding and Tom.

"He makes me so happy. He's incredible." was the most important thing that Amanda felt was necessary to say. It said it all.

"So are you." Laura said to her daughter and she actually felt it that moment. When Amanda cut the pie, it was still too hot, running with sweet smelling juices, but when Laura tasted it, she realized how true it was when Amanda had said it was a flavor she would never forget. It was the Chateaux Margot of peach pies. Amanda loved watching her mother devour her dessert.

When Smitty came back that Friday, Laura was waiting for him. Swimming and peaches and anger and the taste of a pie had brought her back a very long way. The abyss wasn't made of Teflon. She knew that, but what she didn't know, what she couldn't know, was what was absolutely, mind-numbingly undeniable, that she could go to sleep feeling fine and wake-up like the living dead. That was the uncertainty. That was the horror. That was what she was helpless to resist. The abyss took who it wished, when it wished. Why it wished what it did was unknowable and unspeakable. Going to sleep became harder and harder.

Laura was ready to talk when Smitty sat down in his chair.

"You didn't leave me a question, last time." she said, sounding disappointed.

"I didn't have one. It was you who left me with all the questions. I haven't been able to stop thinking about the Novocaine drip. You made me look at myself and really wonder if my feelings for life were slowly going to sleep. You may be right. It's hard to admit. Habit, responsibility, just plain old fatigue aren't easy to resist. Sometimes I live with a novocaine drip." Smitty confessed and Laura was uncomfortable hearing it. The last thing she wanted to do with pass on her suffering, and it was hard to listen as Smitty went on.

"Did you ever see the movie Equus? It's about a boy who blinded a barn full of horses because he had turned horses into gods and those gods demanded his soul. The horses became part of him. He became part of them, in effect he became a Centaur, half man, half horse and the union was orgasmic. The psychiatrist was trying to cure the boy of the pain of his passion, all the while looking for some passion in his own life. It was the ultimate irony.

Laura was looking decidedly uncomfortable.

"So does he cure the boy? Does he find some passion in his own life?" she asked nervously.

"No, but he does cure the boy; and part of him is sad about doing it. It leaves the psychiatrist with the boy's horse god asking him to account for Him. Is that what you are asking me to do, account for your missing passion?" Smitty asked softly.

"I wasn't asking you to do anything. I can't account for anything. I just know something is eating away my ability to feel. I can't reach the Novocaine drip. You're supposed to help me." Laura said, almost desperately.

"I can't reach it for you. I know you can't reach mine. This is very difficult. I just want you to understand that I appreciate how difficult it is. The one thing I know is that some things are pretty resistant, sometimes things happen and new feelings are born just as intense as a first kiss. I could argue that you're feeling things intensely for the first time in your life. I can argue your question to me is that kind of challenge, to accept how much you do feel. I've had that kind of challenge in the last year, much like you. Can you honestly tell me you felt less not more since you came the farm?"

"You're right. This place is chest deep in intensity."

"So where is in the novocaine drip?" Smitty asked pointedly.

"Don't you understand, I don't belong here. I don't belong." Laura shot back.

"Why not?"

"These people live for values I'd never choose for myself." she insisted.

"Isn't that what love is?" Smitty replied, and Laura looked very agitated.

"Pardon me, what's love got to do with it?"

"A part of loving somebody is loving them for values that are different from your own. If that wasn't true, love would only be narcissism, being in love with your own reflection without realizing it. Do you really want everyone to have your values? How is it they are able to love you, if their values are so different?" Smitty pressed.

"I don't know! I feel upset, confused. I don't like this." Laura seemed to almost be pleading for him to stop.

"You don't understand why Eugene loved your so much, do you?" he asked, and that was the question that hit her hardest.

"What do you know about that? Who have you been talking to?" she demanded.

"No one. Somebody you loved very much just died. Somebody who loved you very much just died. It doesn't take rocket science to recognize someone in mourning." Smitty replied forcefully.

"I'm not in mourning." Laura shouted, "Sharon's in mourning. His kids are in mourning. Even my own daughter is in mourning, but I am not in mourning."

"You've made that very clear." he said, dripping with irony.

"Don't tell me that. I don't want to be in mourning. It's totally absurd!"

"Why is it absurd?"

"I just don't belong here. I think I want you to stop. I think I want you to go." Laura said sounding desperate and angry.

Smitty got up to leave and she was surprised.

"I'll only stay if you want me to. But what you say begs the question, Where is it you belong?"

"What the fuck do you think I've been doing, except trying to figure that out?" she screamed at him.

"Then my question for you to think about is whether there's any place you'll be immune from your novocaine drip."

"Maybe I'm looking for my own good Jonestown." Laura said, recovering her voice. She could see he didn't understand. Anger was a tonic for Laura. "Everyman is an island." Laura said almost as an afterthout. At least for our generation."

"You have to explain that." Smitty replied.

"I'll explain it; but not now. Enough is enough, and never enough."

Smitty was forced to smile and saw how angry she was, and it was then he understood she really wanted to be pushed. He extended his hand and she took it and she didn't resist when he leaned forward and kissed her chastely on the cheek.

After Amanda, there was always Ian. His new obsession with their new house didn't diminish the obvious concern, the obvious love he brought each weekend to Laura. It was the most difficult thing for her to face. She had been given back the confusion and the powerlessness of her youth, and she was as unable to feel anything but helpless and frightened as when she and Eugene had been young. She had no great love until he lay dying. There was nothing she could have done with it, even if he had somehow been miraculously cured. She had never expected anything but life's compromises, and having made them, it left her with nothing but the realization that she'd made them.

'Ian. 'Tell me about your husband. Ian. Tell me about marriage as life's most heart rending compromise of all. Ian. He tells me he loves me, in so many ways, and he has no idea I resent him so often, and my love for him is so far from real passion. He won't tell me I don't love him like Eugene loved me. I can't tell him I just can't do it. It's such a betrayal.'

Laura talked to herself constantly and she didn't like what she heard, but she couldn't stop talking, even though no one else heard.

'Tell me about your daughter.' Tell you what? Tell you what a part-time, hectoring, social convener I was in her life. Tell you I resent her for the love her own father feels for her, and not me. Tell you how I have no ground to give her, and nothing to keep that I wasn't always willing to let slip away. A room of my own, is that all there is, my friend?'

'How can people love a self-centered, stupid girl just because she has eyes to see? My whole life has been such a waste. What do I do when most of it's gone. How is it people love me? How is it that I love them?'

Questions and answers, life's internal monologue: truth and lies, truth and its dares, dreams and reality, denials and admissions, commissions and omissions, Laura never stopped talking to herself.

Ian came and walked on psychic eggshells. He tried to get her to talk and he was being the good patient husband with the vulnerable, depressed wife. And when she would let him, he was a good defense lawyer presenting his case with care and serious preparation. Life was worth living. Life was worth defending, especially Laura's. She didn't deserve to punish herself. Life wasn't a Kafkaesque trial. Life was doing the best you could for and with the best people you could manage to find, and then trying to do it well.

Compromise! Compromise! Compromise!

The first, not the last step, was to accept that compromise was the best, not the worst thing in life. If everyone got half a loaf, nobody would have to do without. Maturity was learning to enjoy the half you got and were given. It was learning to see the glass was half full.

Laura listened to Ian sing the praises of modern marriage and motherhood and professional opportunity. And when she made the defense rest, because she was tired, she saw him waiting for her cross-examination, her motion to dismiss her life completely. She didn't respond, she just listened and admired his determined kind of love. She didn't tell him that she thought the baby boom generation had gone bust. She didn't tell him the big bang was just a whimper.

'I am woman! I'm invincible! Please!!'

Ian went from Laura to Sharon's and back again.

In the weeks since Eugene died, Sharon became, for Ian, the woman that he wished Laura would be. She had a strength and optimism that seemed to him was Laura's for the taking. They had the same intellectual processing and force, the same practical focus, except Sharon had the smile and the sparkling eyes, and the connection to other people that he now understood Laura had never had in her life.

While Ian mourned his lost, living wife and dreamed of being Orpheus to her Euridice, Sharon mourned her lost husband and shared it with Ian as she knew she could never share it with anyone in her own family. Her pain would become another part of the pain of losing him. Ian was shocked to realize that Eugene had been Sharon's only real friend.

Sharon looked and acted exactly the same, but she knew that one of the main bearing walls of her life had been cut away. She knew the house would stand, but she didn't know the damage the loss of the wall would eventually cause. The house stood, nothing collapsed, but what she would have to do to shore up his absence, to replace for herself and for her family the strength and the structure that had been Eugene would take time and patience.

Never to touch, to feel love's desire or feel the light of his eyes resting on her the way Eugene's had done, was the first conscious loss that Sharon replaced with Ian's touch and Ian's eyes. It was all very innocent, and it was with such envy that Ian listened to Sharon speak of her loss; speak of the fear that she was only one side of the arc of time and space that sheltered her family's life. What she had lost and what she told Ian were things he had never known. What he had had with Laura was something that would be impossible to describe, it wasn't a great love and a great life, like Sharon and Eugene's. How could he share with her his own love for his wife when they had been so reluctant to share it with each other?

The more Sharon talked, and the more Ian envied Eugene, the more he wished that he had been more like Sharon and Laura had been more like Eugene. The dreamer Eugene, that everyone loved, was, to Ian, like a character in a book. Sharon was real and practical. What she gave could be measured and counted and counted on. She did and had done for others what Ian had never even dreamed a person could do. Like an echo of Laura and Eugene, Ian was coming to love someone who was truly, completely, absolutely married to someone else, and that someone else was dead to life. The more Ian came to admire Sharon's life, the more he resented Laura's betrayal of her own. He even wondered what his life would have been, if he had married someone like Sharon, even though he knew she didn't wonder about the same question about him, or so he thought.

The one strange, illicit act and emotion they allowed themselves happened each time they embraced and kissed goodbye. What that was or what it said would never be mentioned, and it was an understanding that was unspoken as well. But, for a few seconds, their embrace was a world of its own that played inside each of them like some simple haunting refrain. It was impossible to find someone who would pour out their heart and let you see its most precious jewels, without loving them. It was impossible to find someone for whom you might pour out your own feeble store, and see that they found it more precious than you do, and not love them. Mourning became empathy, and empathy became so much more, for what was mourning except knowing that what was lost was so much more than what survived. What was precious was finding someone who would appreciate and understand how much was gone forever? What was acceptance but finding someone to whom that loss also mattered? Sharon and Ian found one another. What was lost bound them together in the present moment. In love, what had been began everything that might be, and Ian and Sharon came to love one another.

Ian felt sorry for himself every time he went back to the boathouse and sat beside Laura and watched the infinite changes over the beautiful lake. He was so glad he had the new house to create.

While she waited, Laura had become her own weather channel. She came to know the daily signs of the transformations that fell over the boat house and poured down in the rain and rose up in water, how clouds and breezes and blackness in the day could come running with the wind.

One night, when Ian had come to say goodnight to her, Laura told him she could smell lightning. Ian didn't believe her until the lightning appeared on the horizon. Above them it was clear, stars as deep as grain, while on the horizon an electrical storm cut yellow rips over the dark distant rumbling that seemed unconnected to the strikes joining the water and the sky. Shiva, destroyer of worlds, took the horizon with a light show to end all light shows. The scars of light slashed seconds apart. There would have been no way to count them all as they sat quietly and watched the power of nature passing by, and they didn't have anything to say that was appropriate to what they were seeing, until Ian softly admitted that the light show made him feel a sexual energy. Laura wondered whether he was hinting or asking.

"Storms are like that. It's strange." Laura replied, and she realized, sadly for him, that that was just where she was going to leave it. It was a moment that would never come again. It was a moment that wasn't meant to be.

"This is better than the Bridges to Babylon Tour." Ian replied, and that was as far as he went.

### Chapter 17

While Laura waited for truth, Tom and Amanda, of course, had no interest in the truth, because for them, it simply meant having an honest response to life. Truth is always searching for its meaning. Honesty has its own, built-in.

Engaged to be married, the young couple began the process of turning dreams to hope and possibility, possibility into what was about to be born into the world. A shared life comes when two people know absolutely that the person they love is, and will always be, on their side. Alpha male and alpha female become leaders of a pack that stakes territory, defends it and passes the territory and its knowledge on to the next generation.

Tom was right, his father was a wolf. So was his mother, so was he, and so was his future bride. The confidence and optimism that they found in their union was the absolute opposite of the tentative pessimism that had made Ian and Laura see the territory of their lives as nothing more than threatened parts of their own individual psyches. Neither Tom nor Amanda could understand what was happening to her parents.

Laura's suffering was clear. Her connection to everyone else was apparently opaque. That Ian had spent so many hours, not with Laura, but talking to Sharon was confusing and upsetting to Tom and Amanda. When Ian was at the farm, it seemed they were always together. Amanda was angry with her father for his inverted priorities, and she was frightened by the thought that he might be putting in place a possible new relationship to replace the one he was helpless to change or restore. Amanda expected her father's loyalty to her mother as she had expected hers to him. Tom expected the same of his mother, and didn't like what he was thinking. Finally Tom couldn't help it and spoke to his mother.

"Why are you spending so much time with Amanda's dad? It isn't him who needs help."

"He needs it very much, just like I do. This is a hard time for both of us. We need each other very much right now. Laura has made it very clear that neither one of us is going to be able to help her." Sharon answered.

"But dad's only been dead, eight weeks." Tom said, nervously, accusing her of some kind of disloyalty.

"I always told you that there were no pat answers for how to deal with sex and money or being a parent. Well, there is something else. There's also no pat answer for how to deal with losing someone you love. Are you worried about appearances or are you worried about me and Ian and Laura?" Sharon said, and Tom could see she was holding onto her anger. Tom felt young and foolish. As usual, his mother knew just how to give him an intellectual shake.

"I'm sorry." he said. His mother with her cool, clear ferocity always made clear when someone crossed into a place she thought they didn't belong. Ian was part of her territory she would defend without question, just as he was. Tom saw the fire in his mother's eyes, and he knew, if he continued, he would feel the heat long before the light. He beat a hasty retreat.

Still, he and Amanda worried that the emotional triangle of their living parents included some unseemly and dangerous possibilities. The only way they could stop obsessing was to turn their attention to themselves. They began to actually plan their lives together. It wasn't just Tom's plan anymore. They both had to learn how alpha wolves share power.

Amanda's questions about Tom's plan to start a farm on Vancouver Island had to be addressed and answered. Tom understood that there was a big difference between a dream and reality. The first question to ask was the one his mother had taught him, 'Do the people you care about actually want your help?' In imagining a new reality, it was hard to believe that people wouldn't embrace opportunity, but Tom knew very well that people who lived without hope for a long time saw opportunity as nothing but another unattainable dream. The first thing they had to do was to go to the community they wanted to join. They decided their honeymoon would be close to Tom's birth mother on Vancouver Island. Tom needed to graft himself back onto his own roots. Amanda had to see how well she would take to completely new ones, and how well another culture would take inside her. For both of them, it meant so much more than just starting a family; it meant becoming part of a completely foreign family. She hoped it wouldn't turn out like the Kosovars. Tom had had the same experience when he was adopted by the Van Fleets. Since she moved to the farm, Amanda felt she knew something of what that meant too. Sometimes she actually thought of Ian and Laura as her birth parents; Eugene and Sharon as the parents who had given her life.

The biggest problem about becoming part of another culture would be all the money Tom had to bring with him. Money was power and opportunity, and it would be a difficult issue as they were becoming part of the community that had neither.

It was Amanda who helped Tom realize how much they would be asking; not only of themselves, but of the people they had never met. It was a sobering realization, and they decided that going to college on Vancouver Island would be the best way to learn what might be possible to realize of their high hopes. The first thing they had to do was make themselves available for adoption by Tom's people. Their plans and dreams sometimes frightened them with the uncertain possibility of a harvest they might never see. The Van Fleet farm was like an old Apple tree producing bushel after bushel of sweet, heavy fruit, while the farm in their dreams was a sapling with only its first heavy blossoms.

The Van Fleet family was also anxious about their feelings for Arthur and Laura Lee, the book Laura had written with Eugene. The only reason Sharon had allowed the blue original letters to burn with Eugene was that Laura had made copies of them all and given a copy to each member of the family. It was the first time they could read the letters and not have to remember them from when Eugene had read them aloud or were retold by Sarah. Laura had also read a number of the completed stories in the Van fleet homeschool as she had finished them, and Amanda had made a copy of each as it was finished to share with the whole family. The consensus was that they loved the way Laura had changed them from letters to short stories. Ian had asked Laura's permission to show them to her publisher friend David Orser, and he had done that, but Ian had heard nothing in response.

After Smitty came and went the next Friday evening and their emotions had settled into something less intense than what they had experienced in their first meeting, Laura actually felt stronger. They decided they would again leave each other a question every time they met. Laura's question to Smitty that day was about whether people actually changed. Smitty's question to her was to think about the one thing she would never want to change about herself.

Smitty and the sun were long gone as Laura waited for Ian. They had discussed his quitting his job and giving notice to his firm, and that was the week he was going to do it. The only income they would have would be what Laura was paid at the farm. Laura was surprised when she saw two figures coming down the beach in the moonlight, and when she realized it was Anthony Holtz walking beside her husband, she could feel her spirits lift on the breeze. Laura embraced Anthony before she even spoke to Ian, telling Anthony how surprised and happy she was to see him.

"I come bearing great news. Orser is going to publish Arthur and Laura Lee. He called me today and sent me the manuscript. I've been devouring it ravenously on the drive from Toronto, and I was shocked. It is so good, it made me jealous, and there are few books that do that. Congratulations, dear heart." Anthony announced.

"It's going to be published." Laura didn't sound surprised.

"It is, as you knew it must be." Anthony replied soberly.

"I thought it would feel different." Laura confessed as Ian arranged chairs and they all sat down on the deck.

"How did you think it would feel?" Ian asked.

"I thought I'd feel scared. Anthony is right, it just feels somehow inevitable."

"Exactly." Anthony agreed, "That it was written on the deathbed of a man who couldn't speak, and was written as a moral guide for a family of fourteen adopted children made Orser just salivate with the marketing potential. You've got a sob story that will get you on every talk show in North America."

Both Ian and Laura were shocked to realize that Anthony was absolutely right.

"Just me and my sob stories. I would have once killed to be my own publicist on that tour. How's that for irony?" Laura said pointedly.

"And you can be the petulant artist you deserve to be." Anthony added with a grin.

"I've been practicing, haven't I?" Laura said to Ian.

"I don't think that's quite fair." Ian disagreed.

"How did you learn to write like that?" Anthony inquired, "It's as if you been doing fiction all your life instead of hyperbolic old press releases."

"That's why I know fiction." Laura said ironically.

"We are the creators of our own characters." Anthony agreed. "It's an absolutely beautiful book, dear heart. You've done something almost impossible, found poetry in adolescence. The last person to do that was poor old Salinger."

"Thank you. Did you come all this way just to bring me the news?" Laura asked.

"I did. More to the point, I want to talk to you about being a writer. You obviously know how to write, the only thing I can offer you is hosannas about that, but being a writer is different. It isn't what you imagine, even though you've worked so closely with so many writers." he explained.

"How do you mean?" Laura asked.

"Being on a book tour is having to go through your whole life in sound bites and having everything you say completely misunderstood. Will you tell strangers that Eugene was your first love or not? Where you young lovers? Does his wife, know? Were you a virgin? Will you tell strangers about how you felt when he died? How does your husband feel about Eugene? Is it true that you had a nervous breakdown when he died? You will be asked hideously personal questions, and they will be asked over and over and over again. Unless you're going to live like old J.D., you're going to have to decide how you're going to deal with that kind of intrusion in your life."

"Well, what's new? I'm so glad you came to cheer me up." Laura replied, actually sounding frightened, knowing what he said was absolutely true.

"That's actually the other reason I came. I'm told you are having emotional difficulties. For anyone else, I'd advise drugs. For most artists emotional problems are currency. It's how you gain access to your own heart. It's what you decide to sell to strangers. Life is an emotional problem and artists don't have any solutions, but they do have a way to create a certain resonance."

The light had actually returned to Laura's eyes because what Anthony said meant something to her. Moths started gathering around the porch light.

Anthony went on, "Now, onto what's really important. Me. I have to share with you the better details of my life since we parted company, and I was no longer your client. It's been miserable without you. No one knows how to have any fun. They're all these earnest young things who cry too easily, or not at all, and always expect me to try some inspired seduction. Young professional publicists are anything but inspiring. Without you to get people to listen, my book is slowly vanishing like a tree falls soundless in a forest." Anthony explained.

"I'm indispensable." Laura teased.

"On many levels." Anthony agreed, and Ian nodded that he concurred. He was trying to stay out of the conversation because he saw Laura was so engaged.

"Since our escapades, I'm now seen as the Mike Tyson of poets, dangerous to himself and others. Everyone expects me to be urbain and insane, barely in control of my mouth and my libido. I'm supposed to take apart every talk show host like they were overdone squab. My favorites are those people who have never read a poem in their lives and are supposed to ask me about my collected works. All they really want to talk about are my issues, my sexual adventures and proclivities. When I find out an interviewer hasn't read my book, I feign incredible outrage and demand to know why the poor schlub doesn't have a better personal assistant, better support and more time to do the basic task required in the difficult job of being a talk show host. How can anyone with a job that is nothing but talk, be given no time to read? I love stupid interviews."

Anthony went on. He told more outrageous stories of things he had done to people on the book tour after Laura retired and Laura was secretly glad, and secretly disappointed that she wasn't there with him through it all. Ian heard Laura laughing for the first time since Eugene died. He had made himself useful and opened bottles of wine as the three of them sat in the moonlight and told stories. And it was like the best of the best of the good times the city could offer, bright and intelligent, irreverent and self-mocking, and always dripping with irony.

Past midnight, they were all quite drunk and Laura impetuously asked Anthony if he would like to stay with her on the boathouse during his visit. Amanda's bed was there. She didn't think of the risk of being alone with one of the most notorious womanizers in Canadian arts, nor did she think about their little private, personal history. The thing that surprised Laura after she asked Anthony to stay was that she wanted to ask Ian to sleep with her that night, only that night, but she didn't know how to say that part without hurting him, and so she didn't say anything about it at all. He was staying with Amanda in their old cabin when he was at the farm. Still, it was all such fun and such inebriated excess. Ian finally said he would go up to the house to explain to Sharon that Anthony wouldn't be sleeping in the guest room. It was then the party broke up. Laura kissed Ian good night and her mouth opened so that his followed hers, and his eyes opened in surprise as he felt her tongue.

Laura and Anthony watched him walk away in silence. When he was gone, they talked together for hours about what it meant to be a writer, what it meant to be in pain, what it meant to live in the imagination. By the time they both went to their beds, Laura had no need to worry about Anthony's advances because they were both so very wrecked.

When they both woke up the blazing light of the sun, it was anything but pleasant, except for the tangled memories of their talk. Laura made Anthony breakfast before he went to the farmhouse where he had left his bag. Before he left, Laura learned that he had planned to stay the weekend and learning that, she told him that she would prefer it if he stayed the rest of the weekend in the guest room at the farm. Hell was other people, sometimes even the people you loved. Neither of them knew when he left that morning that Sharon would talk him into teaching the family home school the following week. Laura didn't know that Ian would come back that afternoon and tell her that he would finish his last cases by the end of the week and that he would be free to supervise the building of their house.

It was a big and busy weekend for Ian because he wanted to carefully explain the plans that had been drawn for the new house to everyone who he thought might be able to help, as well as everyone who might be able to make good suggestions. Tom was almost as easy to talk to as his mother, and the close attention he gave to the bigger issues like heating a big house using only wood heat was much appreciated. He also suggested that Ian go to visit the property and think about microclimates, about where the sun would be at different times of the day and at different times of the year. It was all very helpful. The orientation of the house would have to be decided before the foundations could be set. When they were finished talking about the house plans, Tom asked Ian how Alan felt about the new house.

"We've had a great time designing it. He is going to take a break from working at Wayne's store and come on weekends to help with the work. He loves the house." Ian explained enthusiastically.

"He must be very nervous about what's going to happen to him." Tom replied.

"I had to bring it up. He was afraid to do it himself. It's a funny thing, and it may sound terrible, but it's like taking in a puppy; pretty soon you can't imagine being without it.

"I know the feeling, having once been a lost pup myself." Tom admitted.

"He doesn't want to live in the boondocks with us. Wayne has asked him to come and live with him and Charles. We have become really close, but he really does belong in Wayne's world. They have so much more in common than their sexual orientation. He's a city boy through and through. It's really hard because we both know that if we don't go back to live in Toronto, it will be hard to feel like we're family. If you two move to the West Coast, I worry that we won't see you very often, and that'll be pretty hard. We've had Amanda for seventeen years. We were hoping you'd settle somewhere close."

"I know it's hard. It's really hard for me to let go of my family here. Why did you decide you wanted to be in a cabin in the woods? You could do that near us. I can't imagine wanting to be alone like that, even if it was just me and Amanda. For me, you are your connections."

"Laura and I have both had very connected lives in a weird and impersonal way. Maybe we need some time alone." Ian replied, and he could see Tom didn't understand what he was saying.

"It's going to be pretty hard for me and Amanda to live so far away."

"You're going to have to be prepared for your in-laws to be pretty regular visitors. Maybe we will be able to talk your mom into coming with us sometimes. Some connections are like fat ropes, they can't be broken, and they're heavy. This place has a lot of big fat heavy ropes."

Laura had been the next person on Ian's list of people to show his plans. Listening to him talk was seeing the house being constructed in her imagination as it had been constructed and deconstructed, and reconstructed so many times in his. She could barely absorb all the details, all the excitement, and his description of every room was overwhelming. Laura didn't know how much his joy would infect her as she listened and looked and thought about the imaginary house that was soon going to be so real. It was definitely going to be a very cool place to be.

"You seem to see everything so clearly." Laura replied, amazed at his confidence in it all. Laura's cynicism about the future was not letting go and Ian could see it.

"Now we have to talk about furniture. If we are renting the condo, we will need a lot of stuff."

"I just can't help you with those kinds of decisions, don't you understand? Laura insisted, "Besides where is all this money coming from, if you quit your job?"

"I think from the Van Fleet National Trust."

"That family is swallowing our lives. Are you sure you want to do this?" Laura said impatiently.

"Do you really want to go back to city life? Were we ever really happy? We don't have much to show for all those years."

"I know; lives of quiet desperation. But it's the only life we've ever known."

"So what? Why can't you see the possibilities? Why can't you see that our future is there for the taking, and it won't be empty; it will be full to bursting." Ian answered passionately.

"I'm sure it will." Laura said, sounding anything but convinced. It was impossible for her to describe to Ian how she had lost the will to have and to hold and to be who she was, or even begin to accept who she wasn't. She needed a lot more than a room somewhere, even a very nice room with a spectacular view, even in a house decorated with an exquisite sense of wealth and taste. Without Laura's help in making decisions, from that moment on, Ian's life became very busy indeed. He had to create Laura's new life from his own imagination and from what he knew of hers.

When Laura passed on the chance to make decisions about furnishing their new home, Ian turned to Amanda. Knowing how busy she was with her own life, Ian was reluctant to ask her to take days to go shopping with him in Toronto; he knew the idea of asking her to go back into the city would not be an easy sell. He decided to do it as an addendum to his presentation on the house plans.

Tom excused himself from having to go through the presentation again and left Amanda alone with her father at the table in the coffeehouse where he had spread out all plans. Amanda was much more interested than her mother. She loved the idea of customizing a house to suit their particular needs. She loved making suggestions and when she was well into the dream, she realized how much she would miss if she let her father do all the shopping himself. There was also something about renting the only home she had ever known in Toronto that was also unsettling and unpleasant. The thought of someone else living in her room made her uncomfortable. All memories have a sense of place and, until that moment, she did not realize it was impossible to go back to her old life. It was not just the rooms they lived in, it was the parks, the architecture, and all the things she had done. She'd grown up in the city and the condominium in Toronto was going to be the abandoned web of her old life. Seeing the imaginary house on the table in front of her made Amanda realize that her new life was really beginning, and it would be many years before she again had a sense of place that was truly a part of her. It was a hard realization.

As Amanda watched and listened and interacted with her father the way he they had done while they were restoring her Riviera, she had to let go of the past in a way she could never explain to anyone, even Tom. She had to grow up. There was no choice. It was a new world, whether she liked it or not, whether she loved enough or not.

When Ian brought up the idea of her helping choose furniture for the new house, her first instinct was to be absolutely thrilled, but as he explained all the things they would need to buy, she realized how much time would be involved. Her busy life would become absolutely hectic, as hectic as her father's would be until the new house was finished. And that would mean less and less time to spend with Tom.

"How much time would this take?" Amanda asked, seriously.

"Probably a couple of days of a week for the next couple of months. I know it's a lot to ask, and I know you're going to have to talk to Sharon about taking so much time away, and there's your school, but I would really love it if you and I could do this together. It's not a chance we'll ever have again."

The guilt and the opportunity were too much to resist. Amanda sighed and agreed. She didn't know it would be the most fun she would ever share with her father. It would also be the time she came to know Alan and the strange mixed feelings of having an instant brother. Ian was more than delighted about it all, and he too had no idea how much fun choosing furniture would be.

When Amanda asked Sharon for permission to be relieved of her duties while she went shopping with their father, she was surprised at how enthusiastic. Sharon loved the idea. As far as she was concerned, this was the chance of a lifetime.

"Can you imagine how much fun you'll have?" Sharon enthused, "It's what having money is all about. Things can express who you are. That your father wants you there with him to make those choices is wonderful. That new house is going to be part of both of you, even if you never live there."

"I never thought of it like that. I just thought it would be fun, like when we worked on the Riviera." Amanda replied.

"Just look around our place. Every thing you see was a choice. Somebody in the family thought something was beautiful and made it a part of our lives. Material possessions have a history and create a little resonance inside everyone who knows their story. That's why so many of the things we own have little cards about the history they had before they came to our family. I like to think that you can adopt things, just like people."

"That's really interesting. I'll remember that when we do our own house, me and Tom. Did your husband feel that way about material things?"

"Eugene? He was more enthusiastic about things than anybody I've ever known. The interesting thing is that he was just as enthusiastic about people. With most people, it's usually one or the other. I think this place all started with his love for cars and car enthusiasts."

"That's funny." Amanda said, and then she asked Sharon her big unspoken question.

"What was it like being married to Mr. Van fleet?"

"It was funny, busy and sad, sometimes, and we both had strong opinions that we defended pretty hard. We contended a lot. We were contenders. Do you think that you and Tom are like me and Eugene?"

"I don't know. He seems so much like his father, but I don't know if I can live up to you." Amanda confessed. "You're a hard act to follow."

"I hope the emphasis is not on the hard. Love isn't what you do with it. Love is what it is. You can't compare Tom to his father or yourself to me. We loved each other very differently. It's never the same between people. Look at Eugene and your mother, they loved each other very differently. I used to be anxious about comparing myself with your mother, but I got over that one. I realized their love lived in a room that didn't connect with the one I shared with Eugene. Love can't be compared. It'll only make you crazy, if you try."

"You think that's what's wrong with my mom, comparing her love to yours?" Amanda asked pointedly.

"No. I don't think your mother is comparing her life to anything except the person she can't imagine herself being."

"I don't know how you can be so strong. It's really hard to be as young as me and Tom and be sure your love is going to last for the rest of your life."

"Love makes illusions out of life, and then destroys them. The illusions can be beautiful, but they eventually have to come down. And the reality of love is beautiful in a way that's never been written in a love song."

"But I love, love songs."

"Don't we all. Except maybe your mother."

Monday morning was the first time Laura left the boathouse since Eugene's funeral. Anthony had felt the full force of Sharon's persuasive ability and he had agreed to teach in the home school that week. Sharon made him sit with the photo album of all the great teachers who'd come over the years, and it was difficult for him to turn down the opportunity to be in the company of some truly great minds. Bloom, Updike, Marsalis, Fry, McLuhan were among the very famous teachers. But there were other great teachers whose names Anthony didn't even recognize. Fate had given him the opportunity, and Sharon made sure he realized that, if he declined, he would be turning down the chance to pass the best part of himself to children who were just forming their lives. She told him she couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't share the best part of themselves with children who wanted to learn. She told him she thought it was artistic arrogance to think that teaching children was somehow beneath an artist's calling. She was hard to resist, as so many others had learned, and so Anthony finally agreed to teach school, in spite of his lifelong determination never to presume to try to teach anyone anything.

It was Anthony himself, who came to the boat house very early in the morning, banging on the glass sliding door, looking in at Laura as she slept. When she opened her eyes, the glare of the new morning made Anthony a shadow that almost frightened her.

"Get up." he insisted, "I need your representation. I need your support. God help me, I'm teaching school this morning. This is my first day of school, and I need someone to hold my hand. Get up! The subject is poetry, the kind that doesn't sway on your chest."

Laura slept nude and when she got up; she didn't even consider that Anthony was seeing her poetry in motion.

"Anthony, I don't want to go to school." she protested.

"You are going. All your friends will be there. This is not an option. If I have to come in there and dress you myself, you're going."

Laura realized the state of her undress, but didn't care as Anthony came into the room and started looking around for clothes for her to wear. He picked up the blouse and the shorts she had left on the corner of the pullout sofa and threw them at her.

"This is not negotiable. Put on your clothes. You're going to school. That's final." It was funny, but Laura wasn't laughing.

"Anthony, why are you doing this? Why would I want to go?"

"Because I asked you; and because you can't stay in your room for the rest of your life. You have to start somewhere and listening to me speak honestly about art and poetry for the first time in my life is something I think might be pertinent to you, personally. I'm going to be speaking directly to you, if you'd like to know. It's the only way I can do this justice. I'm going to tell you what it means to be an artist, and that's what you are, dear heart, whether you want to admit it, or not. Now, get dressed." Anthony insisted.

Laura, sat and waited while he stood over her, looking down expectantly until the silence was finally too much to bear, and she got up and without the smallest embarrassment at him seeing her naked, she put on her clothes. He was going to be speaking directly to her. What could he possibly have to say that would make the least bit of difference? Yet, for all that, it was the thing that made her agree to go. She really wanted to know what he would be saying about being an artist that could possibly be pertinent to her life.

"Can I brush my teeth?" Laura asked, and Anthony smiled, knowing that she had tacitly agreed to come.

Both Anthony and Laura were surprised that the farm had literally shut down during the mornings the year's special teacher came to the home school. There were more than fifty people in the coffeehouse when Anthony came in with Laura. Anthony expected seven or eight young children, and so he was more than a little surprised. He was much less nervous about talking to adults than he was to children, and so the full room settled him. Laura sat with Ian, Amanda, Sharon and Tom.

Anthony cleared his throat and began. "I'd been expecting to speak to young children, so I'm not sure my first metaphor will be something adults will appreciate, but here goes." For the first time in Laura's memory, Anthony's voice actually had tension in it. It didn't last long.

"One of my grandchildren used to collect a toy that was called a transformer. It was a starship that would turn into a truck, or a truck that would turn into a robot. Inside the basic structure of its design was the ability to become something completely different. Artists are not transformers; they are the engineers who design them. Artists are the ones who can feel the way human beings are made, the way life and nature exists, and the way those things connect, and can be shaped and reshaped in the most intricate, painful and sometimes beautiful ways. Artists are the emotional engineers who create designs that can transform life. But that leaves the most important question unanswered; 'How do transformers really work?'

"The first thing an artist understands is the transformation of the mundane into the meaningful. A painter takes ordinary oil and pigment, a brush on a flat surface, and if you are very good, you can turn something that means almost nothing into something that means as much is the human heart can hold. If you are a sculptor you turn clay, stone, steel or wood, the commonest things in the world into something absolutely unique and individual, and like nothing anyone has ever created before. Looking around your beautiful home, I've been privileged to see paintings and sculptures that are transformers of the mundane to the meaningful, the truly beautiful reality that begins in imagination."

"Moving from one place to another through space and time is the most ordinary thing in the world, but a choreographer can make that something that is indescribably moving, if you'll pardon the pun. Musicians can take a simple scale of notes and create symphonies, folksongs and rock 'n roll, and the transformers of music are the only ones who use the one language all human beings share."

"I agreed to teach you this week because I knew this room would be filled with engineers who understand and respect transformers. I'm not a painter, sculptor, choreographer, or musician like so many in this room, but I understand how words can transform the world. The transformers of words can arrange them in a way that lets people see and understand anger, hope, grief and happiness, and even the unspeakable pain and pleasure of love. More than anything in life, words give it meaning. More than anything in life, words also make us want to look for that meaning. I understand Eugene could not speak for the last year and a half of his life, and so you, gathered here, probably understand how precious a few words can be when they are the only ones possible, how precious a voice is, if it is forced to be silent."

"Writers all know Lou Gehrig's disease. Writers know how hard it is to choose words that take the mundane facts of life and make people understand how precious it is, and how important it is when someone speaks and someone listens."

Anthony was looking straight into Laura's eyes. For the rest of his introduction he didn't look at anyone else.

"What happens when someone speaks words that matter, writes them down so they will never be lost? What happens when someone tries to find exactly the right words to make someone want to listen and hear the unspeakable sound of an individual's heart? It takes an engineer who understands how to change mundane life to something meaningful."

"Transforming the mundane to the meaningful is only the first way an artist tries to understand how change happens. For me, there's a second transformation very much like the first, but it's more abstract and much more difficult to define. It's not like changing wood, paint or words into something else, it's changing the idea of things. It's changing the simple to the complex."

"The Japanese created a kind of poetry that I think is the best example of that. It is called haiku. In seventeen syllables, in one natural breath, haiku tries to find the infinitely complicated meaning of life in the simplest things we see every day. It's changing the idea of a butterfly sitting on a bell into the idea of how a simple thought connects to the universe. It's knowing the bell is going to ring and everything will change for the butterfly when that happens. It's knowing that the bell is going to ring and knowing the butterfly doesn't. We're like butterflies sitting on a Temple Bell. An artist is an engineer who transforms a butterfly and a bell into you and me perched on the enormous potential feelings we can experience in life. Changing the simple to the complex is more than transforming the mundane into the meaningful; it's understanding how we can transform the meaning of life itself."

Anthony went on talking about poetry and how it can transform the feelings we have about ourselves and others, and even about our place in the world. He said that the power to transform one thing into another, to transform ourselves and others, is the ultimate goal of poetry. He said that every experience we have, every feeling is a chance to transform the world in a way that can never be defined, but experienced in just the way a butterfly experiences the Temple Bell before and after it rings.

"For the rest of the week," he said, "I'm hoping each of you will bring to class a transformer that has changed your heart or even your life. I hope we can use the rest of the week to understand what it means to be an engineer of the heart. I'm hoping you won't think that you're being shortchanged, but I'd like us to leave right now and think for the rest of the day about our best transformers and any questions you might have about them. I'm hoping the first engineering problem we might all address is transforming the ordinary things I said today into the extraordinary feelings you might each have about a work of art that has made you someone different."

"Thank you for coming. As always, it was a pleasure to hear myself talk."

Sharon got up, went to Anthony and actually embraced him as people gathered around, and it was a very long time before he could free himself from the crush of people. When the crowd finally began to open like a flower, Laura went to Anthony again, and everyone was shocked when she took him in her arms and kissed him passionately, the right on the mouth. He didn't know what to think. He was not alone.

Everyone agreed that the week was moving and transformative. People came with their individual transformers, and it wasn't surprising that most of the Van fleet children brought a written work of art, and most were stories of Arthur and Laura Lee, the ones Laura and Eugene had written. Still, almost everyone was surprised by the poem or story some individuals chose as the most profound transformer in their life.

Amanda was amazed to learn that Tom's transformer was a little book called Love and Provence about a young couple who went to France and lived in a village called Gigondas, had their first child and became part of the very old culture there.

For Sharon it was a little poem Eugene had written in the last week of his life.

When words don't come.

Where words can't go

I am...you are.

She said that it reminded her that there was no way to say how you love someone. She went on for some time about moments they had shared that were beyond words, beyond description, beyond anything they could have described. She said his little poem had helped her get over her pain, anger and bitterness at how someone like him could have been afflicted with the most terrible disease imaginable. She said the last line said everything and nothing, because the only way to know who you are, the only way to know someone else is just to experience it, like a sunset or a sour pickle.

Laura missed everything because she refused to go back and listen to Anthony speak after the first day. Amanda tried to describe what happened each day, but she wasn't really listening. Amanda asked her mother if it was the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee that was her great transformer and she said that it was, but she had no idea of what that transformation had done. The one thing it hadn't changed was the underlying fear that had always been with her, that her life had no real meaning; that it was all just a theatrical improvisation as George Marshall had so forcefully made her realize.

Finally, she recognized that it was fear that kept her imprisoned in the boathouse. But it wasn't the world she feared so much as her own vulnerability, her vulnerability to her own feelings. Life was an autoimmune disease. Her fear was literally taking over her own body, leaving her conscious of nothing more than its pain.

Laura remembered Eugene's little poem

And nothing really matters

If everything that matters

Is spoken silently

It reminded her of Freddie Mercury's Bohemian Rhapsody and she put Queen on the spectacular stereo Tom had installed on the house boat and put it on repeat so that the one song played over and over and over again from the time she got up until dusk when she would turn it off and watch the sunset. Interestingly, it kept people away from her, the house boat and even the beach, but attracted the interest of all kinds of animals, from rafts of ducks and geese to a single coyote that came every day around noon and sat listening for over an hour while Laura had lunch on the deck.

Wednesday night was Eugene's birthday. The family celebrated as they did all birthdays with a big cake and singing in the coffeehouse. Amanda was sad because it made her realize her own mother and father had only her to celebrate who they were. Tom saw her look and she didn't explain when she told him that she wanted to go for a walk by herself and stop to visit her mother. She left everyone and went out into the darkness alone.

It was moonlight and crickets and loud Katydids singing her down the lane to the lake, the grey moon dust on everything, like the grey moon dust of love, like the grey moon dust of memory on her hands, her face and her body. Amanda felt so sad. She couldn't help her mother. She felt so sad because she couldn't imagine what her mother was going to do with her life. She felt so sad that she was all Laura had, and she was just a face on a train that was passing through. Leaving home forever was something she never understood before that moment. She was sorry, sorry for herself.

She got to the beach and took off her shoes and held them in the fingers of one hand. She walked into the little black waves with the silver crests that broke a few inches from shore. The water was cool like the air and Amanda felt the embrace of autumn as she saw the light in the boathouse and thought about Anthony's butterfly and bell. She wondered if moths ever rested on bells. There was a part of the human heart that only knew darkness and never found a place that would ring with all the resonance of what could be. There was a broken bell that hung in the dark and its sound would never travel. As Amanda got close to the boathouse, she could hear its muffled sound.

Laura was surprised to see Amanda alone, and to see how sad she looked. Amanda was invariably transparent where her mother always seemed invariably translucent.

"Sit down. You look upset. Can I get you some tea?" Laura asked gently.

"That would be nice." Amanda replied and sat down next to the place where her mother had been sitting. Laura came back and sat beside her while the kettle boiled.

"Can you talk about it?" Laura asked, softly.

"I don't know. It's his birthday party and he just died. Everybody is telling stories about him. All you've got is me. It made me feel so sad to know that I'm all you've got."

"All? You were born to be beautiful. Just to have you love us makes me and your dad the luckiest people on earth." Laura said. She took Amanda's hand.

Amanda stared straight ahead, unable to look at her mother because she knew she was now a woman and would be going away. She couldn't look at her mother because she thought that she would see the truth.

"Easy come, easy go, will you let me go? We will not let you go, never.' We're little rich girls, everybody loves us." Laura said softly, and it made Amanda laugh.

"Are you going to move from the boathouse when the new house is done?" Amanda asked.

"Maybe." Laura answered honestly and they sat and watched the moonlight on the water for a long time.

Some mornings are like porcelain with shine, clarity and the hard brittleness of cool reality. Some mornings are like clay, wet and smooth, uninformed and as cold as hope before it becomes reality's vessel. It was either mud pies or Meisen. Laura's morning was like porcelain.

That day around noon, Amanda came running down the beach to the boathouse. She handed Laura her cell phone and breathlessly explained that Tom's sister Christa who was now living with Bridget Brown was going to call in a few minutes. Sharon had sent her the manuscript of Arthur and Laura Lee and Christa had called to say she wanted to talk to Laura about one of the stories. Amanda left her mother holding the phone, explaining that she had work to do at the farm. Ten minutes later, the phone rang and it was Christa's lilting voice speaking over Bohemian Rhapsody. Laura turned off the music and told Christa how her breathing meditation had helped her so much.

"Everything is precious; nothing is important. That's gotten me through a lot of my worst times." she explained.

"Every child lives that mantra. My mother's prayer, that it's possible to be thankful for every experience is kind of the same thing, but that one is too hard for me." Christa replied.

"Me too." Laura agreed. It seemed that they were experts on the inability to deal with pain, and it was an instantaneous bond.

Christa got to the point of her call asking Laura to reconsider the story in which Emily Dickenson refused to stand up in church and be counted among those God had chosen to be saved. She explained that she thought it was more than just rejecting the fact that God saved some and doomed others, that she would rather go to hell than accept that there was such a heartless God.

"What do you think she was saying?" Laura asked.

"Maybe she was outraged that anyone would presume to say they knew what God knew or wanted. Maybe she just sat there because no one could possibly know if they were among those who would be saved. I think that's what your story should be about, having no way to know the truth about anything, especially salvation. What made her poetry so special was she tried to tell the truth, even when there was no way to describe it."

"It's hard to write a story about someone dealing with an inexpressible truth."

"I think you should talk to my dad." Christa replied, and the words made no sense to Laura. She was stunned into silence.

"Here's my dad."

The voice that followed wasn't Christa's. It was, and it wasn't. It was very much a deeper in tone, almost like the voices of women who undergo sex change therapy. But what gave Laura chills all over her body and blew the air from her lungs was the voice had Eugene's inflections; all his cadence, the light ch instead of a j, the Dutch lilt like a Kingfisher in flight. All Laura could hear was her memory of Eugene's voice roaring in her ears from decades before.

"This is so wonderful. This is so wonderful." the voice said. And the word wonderful had a long accent on the first syllable exactly as Eugene used to say it. Laura was fighting her fear and confusion like she had fought to get back to the surface when she had almost drowned. Was she talking to a crazy woman or a dead man? She couldn't speak or even breathe as she listened to the voice, so much like his voice, until finally she understood what his voice was saying. It didn't tell her he was fine and happy and glad to be released from his pain; the voice was telling him what it was like to be beside her while they wrote Arthur and Laura Lee. The voice said things that only Eugene would know, things that happened when they were alone together. And finally the voice told her that she had become the person he loved since she was fifteen years old. The voice told her that everything she was was there in the beginning and would be there at the end, and that what they were would stay forever young. "There is no end to it." Laura heard the voice say, and it wasn't a joke anymore. And then the voice said the words that turned the bizarre moment into a Gothic nightmare, a bloodcurdling moment of terror that turned her spine to a spear of ice hanging in the wind from a high, high roof.

"Arthur and Laura Lee is our baby. I know about the other one... It's okay. It's...."

Laura almost strangled in shock as the voice told her the secret she had never shared with him. In panic, she pushed the buttons to disconnect Eugene and then screamed at what she had done. She screamed at the dead screen like it was the horror of seeing the dead boy in the snow, like it was seeing Amanda's eyes the night she was raped. Laura screamed and stared at the phone in her hand, and if her fear could have dissolved her and made her lose her mind, it would've done it that moment.

A moment later, she realized what she had done. She had hung up on someone she loved, someone who loved her so much he might be speaking to her from beyond the grave. And knowing that, almost believing it in that moment, was indescribable, inconceivable. She had hung up! She wanted him back! She wanted to know if he was real. As terrified as she was, she wanted to know. She had to know if it was really him. As she tried to push the buttons to somehow restore the call, the phone flipped out of her hand and over the deck railing into the shallow water. She literally ran to pick the phone from the water and the sand, and when she pressed the button to turn it on there was nothing but a dead screen.

Laura looked at the phone the way Christa had looked at the Walnut urn that had carried her father's ashes, with tenderness, loss and horror that connected to a kind of reality she couldn't even imagine. Her heart was pounding on a coffin lid. Laura had had him in her hands, and cut him off. She had hung up again and all that was left was pure sorrow. 'Goodbye everybody I've got to go. Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth.'

And then Laura mourned. It hit her like a tidal wave. Laura cried. She cried like she had never cried in her life; she cried like people cry watching their home burn to the ground. It wasn't tears of anger, frustration, or self-pity, it wasn't even the tears of guilt or compassion she had shed so rarely in her life. As Laura cried, she watched her past consumed. She cried for her youth and the dead boy in the snow, and her parents, and her first husband, and Amanda, Ian then Eugene, her beautiful Eugene. Laura cried and she cried, standing in the water, her feet in the sand, leaning on the steel rail of the boathouse and she couldn't stop, sobbing like her lungs were going to burst or collapse, and then she collapsed on the sand like an infant past comforting. It was nearly an hour before her eyes ran dry and empty and all she had left was the aching in her chest. Laura was washed clean, washed out, washed empty, washed completely away, washed up and washed free, and it was so much more than having nothing left to lose. When she got up, the sand sticking everywhere to her body, she walked back into the water and washed herself clean and went back to the boathouse to sit on the deck chair and face the horizon. It was early in the morning when she went to her bed. 'Easy come easy go, will you let me go... Let him go.'

Ian had come from Toronto to drive Anthony back the next day. Knowing that Laura slept like a stone, he waited until early Friday morning to sneak into her bedroom. He could see by the nightlight that always burned by her bed that she was fast asleep. He put down the box of photographs he had chosen from the albums they had collected over the years, took out a tape dispenser and began to assemble the collage of his little family's life. This was her life. This was their life. It took him almost an hour and every time she shifted in her sleep he thought that she would wake up and he would be busted. But he was gone when she opened her eyes and saw all the photographs assembled on the sliding Walnut pocket doors. Her heart sank like a hot knife in cold butter. She couldn't help the dry smile that forced its way to her lips. Finally when she stood up and went to the wall, she couldn't imagine what he expected it would do. Did he think she would see the direction of her footprints in the sand, if he laid out all the ones that had come before? Did he think he needed to remind her of who she was? Did he think he needed to remind her of who she would always be? She knew the answer to all those questions. What she didn't know was why it made her so afraid.

Ian let her stay alone with the wall of photos for the rest of the day and spent the time talking to Anthony who had decided to stay the weekend painting.

Later in the afternoon Ian found Laura sitting on the down sofa in the living room of the houseboat with her feet up on the big Walnut coffee-table. She smiled in the soft light of the room and it made him feel hopeful that the pictures had mattered as he had hoped they might. He sat down beside her and she immediately put her arm around him and kissed him sweetly on the neck. He used the remote and turned off Bohemian Rhapsody.

"We're mushy tonight." he said in delight.

"You're so sweet. You try so hard. The pictures were such a surprise." she replied.

"I just wanted to remind you that wherever you are, it should include the people who love you."

"This has been so hard for you. You've always given me the space and time I needed. I never appreciated it enough, but I don't know why, but I can't let you come back to our bed just yet. Remember when Amanda was afraid to go out of the condo even when she knew she had nothing to fear, well maybe it's genetic. I'm afraid. I'm so afraid, and I just can't explain why; and why it won't stop. I don't know how long you're going to have to wait. I wish that I could be strong and brave and take my part in our lives, but wishing can't make it so. Smitty says I shouldn't feel guilty for asking you to be a little more patient. I hope you will wait for me. I want to wait for me." Laura asked him in a weak, quiet voice.

Ian held Laura close and didn't say anything. He kissed her hair and the two of them sat and watched the big beeswax candle burning in the center of the coffee-table. "I've always known why I love you, why you are my life, but I never understood why you picked me when you could've had any man you wanted." Ian said in a quiet conversational tone.

"You're safe. You made the world safe. I know you wouldn't ever hurt me because you have such a gentle heart. I've known bright and handsome, powerful and creative men, but you and Eugene are the gentle ones. That's why I love you. That's why I picked you. That's why I treated you both so badly. I was always afraid I couldn't live up to your standards. I have never been gentle. I'm so sorry I had so little to give back." Laura confessed.

She told Ian about her conversation with Christa and the haunting impression of Eugene that had given her the shock of her life. She also told him she wanted to go back to Toronto; that she didn't want to sell the condominium. Ian didn't know what to say.

"What about the new house?" he asked, and was afraid of her answer.

"You should build it. I'll come when I can, but I don't think it's going to be my home." she replied flatly.

"I hope that isn't true."

"I know. I'm sorry. I think I'll stay the weeked before I go back.

"I guess it's good you made a decision. I'm just sorry. I don't know what to say. I'm so sorry."

"I'm sorry I'm such high maintenance." she told him sincerely, "I need some time."

When they went outside, they were both stunned to see an enormous flock of trumpeter swans floating in the water near the boathouse. They stood silently staring at the pure white grace, the silent gathering, the perfect beauty floating on the still water before them. Ian whispered to her, "seventy seven."

He left her with a kiss and an embrace, but the kind people share beside a coffin. Laura had broken Ian's heart, broken his dream of a new future, and he didn't understand what had happened.

Amanda came and tried to talk to her mother and went away looking afraid. Laura looked absolutely normal, except for how her eyes and voice had changed. They had both lost the timbre of life. Laura waited for Smitty's Friday visit to tell him that she would be all right, that she wouldn't need therapy any longer. She knew that he would disagree, but she was sure, absolutely sure she could get through the rest of her life. 'If I'm not back this time tomorrow, carry-on, carry-on as if nothing really matters.'

Smitty came at his usual time near dusk, and they sat quietly after she told him her decision. She did not tell him about talking to Eugene, or what she intended to do when she went back to Toronto. She asked if they could just sit quietly, so she could remember the last time with him filled with the peace that saturated the shoreline opposite Haystack Island. They did that and they both seemed to appreciate that there really was nothing more to say. After the sun and the last color of the day were gone, they saw a small group of people coming towards them across the beach. In the moonlight, it was possible to see that each person was carrying a bottle of wine.

Once again breaking the farm rules on alcohol use, Tom and Amanda, Sharon and Ian, and Anthony Holtz had come for a nightcap, and while Ian opened the bottles of dandelion wine that Bridget Brown had sent with him for Amanda's hope chest, Tom and Amanda took firewood from where it was piled on the deck and built a bonfire on the beach. Laura didn't know how to protest, and so she just quietly watched as everyone gathered on the sand around the blazing little fire. No one made small talk in the silence under the stars and moonlight.

It was Ian who finally spoke. "There are endings and beginnings, and it's hard to tell one from the other, but what we are, gathered here, is bigger than anything I ever imagined could exist among people just trying to love one another. It's funny how gratitude and sadness can get so mixed up together. 'Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy caught in a landslide, no escape from reality?' Thanks to Laura, Bohemian Rhapsody is stuck in my brain like my feelings for all of you. I don't know what else to say."

"There's nothing to say." Sharon added.

Everyone was quiet after Ian's little speech because there was no escape from reality or fantasy's landslide. The faces in the firelight, flickering in the moonlight were lovely. Time and the warmth of the fire drew them closer, and then Amanda began to sing,

This little light of mine,

I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine,

I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine,

I'm going to let it shine,

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine...

Laura understood immediately what Amanda was trying to do, marshaling the greatest power on Earth. Amanda had told her the story of when Sharon had her family sing for her to make her realize what it meant to belong to something bigger than herself or choose to turn away from that belonging.

"Amanda, I know what you're doing. This won't work." Laura said, sounding very beleaguered.

Then Sharon started to sing with Amanda,

This little light of mine,

I'm going to let it shine.

This little light of mine,

I'm going to let it shine.

Then Laura screamed at the top her lungs, screaming for them to stop, and they did stop and everyone stared at her, and there was a terrible fear among them. Laura was about to get up and leave but was instantaneously caught in the landslide of her heart when she saw each of the individual faces of the people she loved in an old impossible light, saw the feeling in their eyes, and how each was so very different, so absolutely different one to another. None of them saw her as she was, not one, and each of them obviously cared so much. She was loved, undeniably loved for the person they would never really know, and the paradox hit her, and with it the perfect irony that to belong was to be longing. Being with people you loved was the reason you were sometimes most alone. To belong was to be longing. That was the arc of time's pendulum swinging over the gathering places of the heart. Life was a deaf mute choir singing the background music of life, and she could hear the music begin to move inside her like the blues; blue water, blue sky, bluebirds of happiness, blue-eyed like a poor blind animal, and Laura could feel the music move up the length of her spine, slowly with feeling, and when the blue light reached her skull, it burst inside her like a star imploding heaving off supernovas of light. It was expressing the inexpressible, a ball of snow melting in her hands by a fire. It was like nesting dolls inside one another, each one different, each one smaller, until the last one was opened, and it was the one that held everything. It was me and mine and ours, and she understood. Everything is precious; nothing is important. And this was where she belonged with her inexplicable longing. That longing was our shared affliction, the universal Lou Gehrig's disease that could bind us together even as it could tear us apart. She was among the luckiest people on earth.

Laura wanted to laugh or cry, but all she could do was look into the faces of the people she loved. She was smiling, grinning like a fool, and somehow the realization that she was doing that flooded her body with a warmth she had never felt in her life. She could feel a part of each of them inside her, and it touched her so deeply she had to look away to the island of her youth, to the island where love abides. She was smiling, she couldn't stop smiling, grinning at the ordinary incommunicable miracle of love. And that was when Laura started to sing.

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