A Map Of Glass Part 11

His absence was temporary, however. He walked back toward her from the inner room and carefully laid six black-and-white postcards in a line on the floor at her feet. "This is all that I have from my early childhood," he said, "all that is left."

Sylvia was careful not to pick up the cards, change the pattern, the sequence he had chosen. She leaned to one side and dug in her handbag for her gla.s.ses, then bent forward and looked. The head frame and outbuildings of a mine, a log house situated on a point of land that reached into a lake, a partly built town site with a new church and evidence of a forest fire blossoming on the horizon, several men standing beside a dog team with the message 4 feet of snow, 38 below zero !!! 4 feet of snow, 38 below zero !!! written beneath them, a trio of miners posing in a rough-hewn underground tunnel, one man pouring liquid gold from a furnace, the town site now fully developed with a drugstore, soda fountain, small frame hotel. written beneath them, a trio of miners posing in a rough-hewn underground tunnel, one man pouring liquid gold from a furnace, the town site now fully developed with a drugstore, soda fountain, small frame hotel.

"It's all gone now," said Jerome. "The mine closed and everything disappeared. It had hardly begun and then it was over. There is nothing left, nothing at all." He was silent for a moment. "They said there was no more gold. But the truth was that my father made a mistake. His mistake closed everything."

Jerome was hunkered down quite near her. She could see that there was a moth hole in the shoulder of the sweater he was wearing and that his blue jeans were worn at the knees. Mothers, she knew, sometimes attended to things that needed mending.

"The mistake," Sylvia said. Malcolm had taught her that one need not always use the interrogative. Sometimes a repet.i.tion was enough encouragement, and she found herself wanting to know.

Jerome pointed to a man on the fourth card. "You see that miner?" he said. "That was the miner who died, fifth level down, one level too far. His name was Thorvaldson." He turned the card over to check the list of names on the back. "Yes, from Iceland. The men came from all over northern Europe, you know, and from Cornwall and Wales. There was a rock burst. Everyone else my father included got out."

"I'm sorry, but I know nothing about mines... your father was a miner?"

"No, he was the engineer, so he should have known, probably did know. The veins... the veins of gold became larger at deeper levels, but everything would be less stable. The mine closed after that, the community disintegrated."

"Because of the miner who died?"

"Because the company bosses finally became aware as a result of the burst that they weren't going to be able to get any more gold out of that ground."

Jerome stood and began to walk back and forth across the concrete floor. "My father smashed the gla.s.s of the frame that held his diploma. He tore up the diploma itself and tossed it the fire. I remember this. He was drunk, of course, enraged. My mother and I were terrified. He never went near a mine again no one would have hired him anyway. We moved to the city, or at least to the edge of the city. He worked for a while making geological maps for a metallurgical company, then, when his hands began to shake too much, as a janitor for the same company, and, finally, he didn't work at all."

The term alcoholism alcoholism slid into Sylvia's mind. It occurred to her that like so many things that can go wrong, the word started with the letter slid into Sylvia's mind. It occurred to her that like so many things that can go wrong, the word started with the letter a a.

"I'm sorry," she said to Jerome.

"What's to be sorry about," he replied. "He was the one who made the mistake." Jerome's anger was so visible that Sylvia, who had rarely experienced anger, could feel it hissing in her own blood. Her fear of the fluorescent lights began to return. She wondered about the lighting in the mine, and remembered a photo she had seen of men with lights, or was it candles, in their hats. "People do what they have to do," she said, something she remembered Branwell saying in Andrew's writing. "And," she said, recalling the story of the timber, the barley, the sand, "and they almost always go too far." was the one who made the mistake." Jerome's anger was so visible that Sylvia, who had rarely experienced anger, could feel it hissing in her own blood. Her fear of the fluorescent lights began to return. She wondered about the lighting in the mine, and remembered a photo she had seen of men with lights, or was it candles, in their hats. "People do what they have to do," she said, something she remembered Branwell saying in Andrew's writing. "And," she said, recalling the story of the timber, the barley, the sand, "and they almost always go too far."

Jerome bent down and s.n.a.t.c.hed the cards from the floor, as if he were a gambler sweeping up a suit of cards. "Did he have to drink so much that you could smell it coming from his pores day and night?" he said. "Did he have to take us down with him?"

"Yes," said Sylvia. "He probably had to do all of that."

"Did he have to kill my mother? The whole thing, the drinking, the humiliation, the crummy apartments, his sordid death, all of it killed her... and not quickly either... it killed her by degrees. She didn't last two years after he was gone."

"No," said Sylvia uncertainly. "He didn't have to do that. But she, she likely had to die for him."

Jerome stood, postcards in hand, looking directly at Sylvia, and she willed herself to look back. The air was thick with antic.i.p.ation, as if anything at all might happen and she was momentarily aware of the risks two people took simply by being alone together in a room. Murder, love, collision, caress, were they not all part of the same family?

Jerome turned away. "I'll take these back now," he said, looking at the postcards in his hand. "I'll put these away."

When Jerome returned to the room, his expression was neutral, removed. He sat on the couch and folded his arms over his chest. "My childhood," he said. "I don't know why I brought it up. It's all over anyway. It's finished. I shouldn't have bothered you with any of it."

"Please," Sylvia said, leaning forward. "I wasn't bothered. I'm glad you told me." She smiled. "Now I will be able to remember that I knew you," she added, then looked away, feeling almost shy. "How little, in the final a.n.a.lysis, we really know about another person."

Jerome raised his eyebrows at this and nodded. "But, still," he said, reconsidering, "after reading Andrew's journals, I think maybe landscape place makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past. It seems there's not much of that left now. Everyone's moving, and the landscape, well, the landscape is disappearing."

"Have I mentioned that the old cottage was approached by way of a grove of trees?" Sylvia asked. "These were planted a century ago to line the driveway that swung up toward the marvelous entranceway of Maurice Woodman's old house. Andrew and I would have to walk past the lightning-struck burnt foundations of that house in order to meet."

In the early days, she'd often had to walk though a herd of staring cows as she moved along the edge of the hill. There was always a soft wind, an echo of the breezes that would have touched the sh.o.r.e of the prehistoric lake, and she had always stopped to look at the view, which included the village below, rolling farmland and woodlots to the west, the charmed surface of the lake in all directions, and the arm of her peninsular County bending around the waters at the eastern horizon. Then, after pa.s.sing through the dying orchard, and walking farther, she would begin to sense a shift in the land underfoot, as she moved past the scattered fieldstones, and in some spots the vestiges of the walls and crumbling mortar that were the last remains of the foundation of the great burnt house, the gra.s.sy basins of its cellars and kitchens. Andrew had done some digging in these basins and had come across a few ceramic marbles, ones he believed that his own father, T.J. Woodman, must have played with as a boy, and a porcelain cup and saucer, miraculously undamaged. But most exciting to her were the large, smooth, oddly shaped pieces of melted gla.s.s, which he had come across, evidence that the rumor about the gla.s.s ballroom floor was true.

"It was true true?" exclaimed Jerome when she told him all this. "The artist Robert Smithson would have been fascinated by that. I keep thinking all the time about a piece he made. It was t.i.tled Map of Gla.s.s Map of Gla.s.s, I've never known if he meant a map of the properties of gla.s.s, or if was referring to a gla.s.s map, which would then be, of course, breakable. But even he... I don't think even he would have thought about melted gla.s.s. A ballroom with a gla.s.s floor, on fire and then melting melting. That's just wonderful!"

Sylvia laughed at Jerome's reaction. "Andrew told me that lightning striking sand can cause gla.s.s to form spontaneously. I never knew that, did you?"

"No," said Jerome. "No, I never knew that."

"Once, toward the end of that last summer, Andrew said that he wanted me to think about the great cities of Earth, to think about them not being there any more, about them never having been there at all: the forests of Manhattan Island, the untouched riverbanks of the Seine or the Thames, the clear water moving through reeds near the sh.o.r.e, the unspoiled valleys that existed before agriculture, then architecture, then industry changed them."

They had been looking through the windows of the cabin into the forest as he spoke and occasionally deer would drift by, soft and brownish grey, between the tall trunks of the trees. Andrew once pointed out that the earth colors of their coats echoed a patch of yellow dried gra.s.s, or a pale grey log, brown bark, or the rust of fallen pine needles.

As he had told her this, every part of her was touched by his voice. There had been the warmth of his skin against hers, and the delivery of syllables all through the sunny afternoons. Later when the rains came, the sound of water falling through the holes in the roof into the pans they had placed here and there on the floor was like punctuation marking the cadence of his speech.

"You, Jerome, may never know what it is to enter another kind of partnership, what is given to you in such circ.u.mstances. Somehow, neither person leaves a footprint, casts a shadow. We remained utterly unrecorded, unmarked."

You, she remembered Andrew once saying, playfully b.u.mping his shoulder against hers, all the time you come to this place, climb this hill, simply because I am here. I don't want to leave you all the time you come to this place, climb this hill, simply because I am here. I don't want to leave you, she had said. But you have to But you have to, he had replied. You have to leave me so that you can come back again. You have to leave me so that you can come back again.

He had begun to seem older, softer in body and in spirit, vague in some ways, and therefore kinder. His moods were no longer as swift and sharp in their arrivals and departures, and his love for her if that's what it was carried with it no unsettling urgency. Yes, he was kinder, and she, for her part, felt a depth of tenderness for him that at times almost overwhelmed her. It was like a long silken banner or a column of smoke drifting in a warm wind, this tenderness she felt, something hovering above them that changed the air. The months would pa.s.s, autumn would arrive, and things would become confused, painful between them as he began to become lost. Once, as she walked away she turned to wave and she saw him framed by the open cottage door. There he was, standing quite still on the stoop, as exposed as she had been all those years ago when they had met on the edge of traffic. He raised one arm: a gesture of welcome and warning and farewell. The sun had come out in late afternoon and the surroundings were starkly lit. His eyes were almost closed. He was wincing in the face of the glare.

"There was warmth," Sylvia said, "and the sense that while we held each other we were, in turn, being held by the rocks and trees we could see from the windows and the creeks and springs we could sometimes hear running through the valley. And then there was the view from the edge of the hill, a view of distant water and far sh.o.r.es, and a few villages positioned like toys around the bay."

For just a moment it occurred to her that she might actually have died, that she and Andrew might have somehow died together and that all this recounting of facts and legends to Jerome combined with her life in the hotel was the fabric of an afterlife that would go on and on like this, day after day, for eternity. Then she remembered Malcolm and how he had now entered this afterlife.

She placed the mug of tea Jerome had given her on the floor. "By early autumn he had begun to say odd things, things I knew he had never said before; at least he had never said them before to me. He began to speak about people I didn't know as if I knew them. Sometimes he was quite pa.s.sionately angry with some person or another and he would pour his heart out about this without explaining who the person was, or even what the situation was that caused the anger. I would listen; I would listen without questions because I couldn't bear to interrupt in any way this miraculous openness: I was so eager for any kind of information that might deepen my knowledge of him. As the autumn progressed, though, the anger was starting to spread, and by November it was beginning to include me. But then it would vanish as soon as it arrived. He would simply stop in midsentence and embrace me. Once or twice he wept at that moment. And," Sylvia paused here, unsure whether to mention this, but wanting to articulate it so that it would be real, a fact, "often, during those last months, often he wept when we made love."

Jerome was staring at the wall, embarra.s.sed likely. To him she would have been always a much older woman, one with few rights in the territory of s.e.xual love. She must remember that.

"It wasn't until then," Sylvia told him, "that I fully realized that not only had the inside of the cottage deteriorated but the gate that I remembered at the top of the lane was gone altogether and the cows were gone as well. What had been pasture was now scrub bush, almost impa.s.sable except for one narrow, winding path. The surviving orchard trees were choked and twisted and the view was visible only in certain empty spots. I barely knew where I was. I couldn't recall the wind that was tossing the trees; my memories of this forest had to do with seasonal color, never with motion." Bright green of spring, the bruised white of winter, she thought, wondering where the line had come from. In the past, she had believed the trees had been entirely still, a stage set, frozen in time.

Arriving one November morning, she had taken off her coat, had laid it over the back of a wicker chair that was grey with dust. The room had been cool and there was a faint smell of mice beneath the stronger smell of wood smoke. Aftermath Aftermath was the word that crept into her mind; the windows were foggy, clouds of dust had gathered under the furniture. Cobwebs swung from the beams. This was the territory of aftermath. was the word that crept into her mind; the windows were foggy, clouds of dust had gathered under the furniture. Cobwebs swung from the beams. This was the territory of aftermath.

Annabelle's painting was askew on the wall. She had walked across the room to straighten it.

"Annabelle's painting," she had said.

He hadn't replied, had moved instead just as he always had in the past slowly across the room toward her.

"In the beginning there was this difference between us, Jerome: I believed that anything that I permitted to happen to me would go on happening... forever. He, being fully engaged with human life, believed, I think, that when something stopped happening, it was over. Not that it wouldn't happen again, just that this particular session was over, and that there would be something else taking place, something else that was equally worthy of his attention. His view of life was sequential, symphonic. But I could tell this view had changed."

Near the very end before he had stopped talking altogether, Andrew had spoken about nothing but furniture. These were the only nouns that appeared to interest him. At first Sylvia had thought he was speaking metaphorically, something he had often done in the past. "Look at the... table," he would say, when they stood near the window, surveying the view of the lake, "look at the mirror." A table laid out before them. A mirror of the sky. It made some sense to her. She didn't question it, or him, or the fact that he was not saying the lake was like a mirror, like a table under the sky.

"How did you lose him?" Jerome was asking.

Sylvia sat entirely still, her face averted. "How can I describe those last meetings to you, Jerome? I who had spent years attempting to interpret his most fractional gesture, his most subtle shift of mood, would find him tremendously altered: unshaven, unbathed, sometimes, even after I'd arrived still expecting me, sometimes not, but in either case, utterly unprepared. Once, as I stepped though the door, he said, 'Can I help you?' with a kind of cold courtesy, as if I were a salesperson or a pamphleteer. At times he would look at me with longing for minutes at a stretch, then turn away as if in disgust, or he would swiftly take himself to the opposite corner of the room where he would all but growl at me in anger, refuting every sentence that I spoke. Each phrase began with the negative. 'Don't talk to me about the trees,' he would say. 'You know nothing about the trees.' Or, 'It's not your lake, don't speak of it.' Often he said, 'We can't go on with this.' His tone would fill me with fear, but the reference to 'this' could cause temporary relief. 'This' was the word that made reference to our connection, our communion. 'This' meant that we weren't finished. Not yet.

"I would remind him of the stories he had told me, attempt to bring the lovely talk back into the room, but he would deny that he had ever told me such stories 'You have invented those,' he would say and would refer instead to problems he was having with people I had never heard of. They had stolen his wallet, his life, his soul. They had abandoned him in alleyways or on park benches, cast him adrift in a leaking vessel, denied him food and water.

"He would pace like an animal around the room, then peer at me with great suspicion. 'I am willing,' he would say, 'to resolve this here, now, but... What?' he would plead. 'What is it?'

"'Tell me about Annabelle,' I would say, 'about Branwell.' I wanted the family history or, failing that, his descriptions of geological formations, his descriptions of strata.

"'We will stop,' he said. 'We will stop.'

"Then he would cross the room, bury his face in my neck, pull back and show me his face, torn by grief." Sylvia hesitated, almost unable to continue. "That was when I knew that emotionally he had fully entered me, and that from then on his grief would be my grief, his story my story, his enormous waves of feeling, my feeling. I had felt almost nothing until him, and now I would continue to carry all of the rage and terror and anguish that he would leave behind, that he would forget. And shortly after I understood this, he asked the terrible questions. 'Could you tell me your name, your date of birth? Could you tell me who you are, what you are doing here?'"

She had known then that her horses were finally and wholly smashed, that all the objects in the house that had held her had crumbled into dust. No words were possible then. No words at all.

"Sometimes, early on," she told Jerome, "during our first long season, Andrew and I would meet accidentally on a street corner or in a shop. He was still mapping the County then, recording abandoned houses, or those that had evolved into ugly attempts at modernization. Often he was searching for things that had completely disappeared: a burial ground connected to an early settler, a scuttled ship, a hotel eclipsed by a moving dune of sand. These quests would bring him into Picton, to the registry office or the library with its haphazard archive, and once or twice a year, we would encounter each other without preparation, without warning.

"Always, I reacted to his appearance with panic, believing that I was the casualty of some terrible mistake, that I was wreckage. And yet somehow I would be able to speak, to exchange greetings, and to my later sorrow, to behave the way Malcolm had taught me to behave with all the other strangers whose paths intersected my days and evenings, in spite of my terror, my sense that everything had gone wrong, was lost, irretrievable, that there was only unfamiliarity and fear. For days afterwards I would be certain that this encounter, this distance and awkwardness, was the truth, and I would be certain that this was all we were to each other: exchanged civilities in the vicinity of traffic, indifferent, removed, suspicious of each gesture. There was no sweet secret, no complicity between us; nothing belonged to us not the present, not even the past. He became a man walking away from me. He became a man I had never known. That November, remembering those times, it seemed as if they had been a terrible premonition of how things would end between us, with this difference: I I became a woman became a woman he he could not remember. A woman he had never known." could not remember. A woman he had never known."

Sylvia was sitting upright in her chair as she said this. Jerome was looking at the wall. "That's terrifying," he said.

"Yes, I became afraid, afraid that we didn't exist." She paused. "That perhaps we had never existed. And then last year, in early December, I drove along the lake through one of the season's first heavy snowfalls in order to get to the hill, to get to him. By the time I arrived the weather was so bad I could barely see; it was as if the landscape itself were being eliminated. I remember thinking as I struggled through the wind along the edge of the hill that this was the first time I had been unable to look at the view before walking into the interior, before entering his embrace, though I was, by then, certain of neither the interior nor the embrace. I had been taking all the responsibility for some time, making all the appointments for our rendezvous, moving through the relationship in the way that, in recent months, I had learned to move, trying to ignore his lack of partic.i.p.ation. I was carrying a bag of food in my arms because I knew there would be no food. I was carrying several things in my mind, things I wanted to say to him to try to bring him back to me, because I knew by then that he was going, because I feared, by then, that he was gone. As I walked past the foundations, I saw that the indentations that marked the ancient cellars and kitchens were filling up with snow, as if the last vestiges of the old house were finally being folded into the white landscape. The door of the cottage was ajar. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. I could find not a trace of him not a trace of us anywhere." Sylvia stopped, lowered her head.

"But still I waited, as I had always waited. I sat on the chair with the torn rush seat and remembered our clothing tossed there by arms much younger than the ones that lay, useless, in my lap. I ran the ancestral stories over and over in my mind. And then I saw Annabelle's sc.r.a.pbook lying beside two green leather journals on the table. I opened the velvet cover and read the captions Annabelle had written to describe the fragments she had pasted in it. A piece of parchment from a map of the bogs, lace from the collar of the first good dress Marie had been given as a child, a ticket to the Louvre museum found in Branwell's desk drawer, the last rose of summer 1899, that fateful match that had lit Gilderson's pipe, lake-bleached splinters stolen from the hull of several timber carriers, bark from the recently felled cedar tree the men always erected in the middle of a raft for good luck, the sole of a shoe washed up at Wreck Bay probably belonging to a drowned sailor and still he did not come. Yes, these were the things I looked at while the knowledge of his permanent absence grew in me, and the light in the cottage grew darker, and the light in the sky grew dimmer.

"I closed the sc.r.a.pbook and slipped it into the bag I had brought with me. Then I opened one of the journals and saw his handwriting. It was the ink on the page that made me want to take them with me, that last trace of his moving hand. Outside, the storm had moved to another part of the province, or had sailed over the lake to the country on the other side. The air had cleared and there was still a trace of a red sunset in the western sky, though not a whisper of it on the grey winter lake. As it had the first time that I had climbed that hill so many years before, deep snow slipped over the tops of my boots and scalded my legs as I walked toward the car. The storm had left a piercing wind in its wake and the newly fallen snow was beginning to arrange itself into a series of drifts. My footprints couldn't have lasted longer than a half-hour. Had Andrew come the following day there would be nothing to tell him about my approach, my retreat. But I knew he would never again walk through the orchard, enter the cottage, light the stove. I knew he was gone."

For the first time, Sylvia rose from her chair and began to walk back and forth across the room as she spoke. Jerome watched her move from place to place. "How might we have appeared, I wonder, to someone observing us from off stage: a man, a woman, alone together in a broken-down cottage?" There would be the glances, smiles, the long silences, and the sessions of speech that would pa.s.s between them, the unconscious gestures: he leaning toward her, she touching his wrist, placing her hand on the side of his face. They would curl together on the bed, for hours at a time, sleeping. They would often touch, sometimes casually, sometimes pa.s.sionately. They would approach each other, withdraw, and eventually separate, permitting concession roads, fields of grain, entire townships, a body of water to come between them. Strings of migrating birds would emerge, like dark sentences, in the sky, as the season changed, the years pa.s.sed, and the lake altered under varying degrees of light. And finally, finally, they would forget; forget, or be themselves forgotten.

By now Sylvia was standing in the part of the room where Mira so often worked on her performance pieces. There was still a small amount of sand on the floor, and each time she stepped forward or back it crunched softly under her feet.

"I often ask myself what river, what lake or stream the ice came from. I am for some reason anxious for this piece of the puzzle though it makes, I know, absolutely no difference to the outcome or even to the explanation. I've had the maps out, you see." Sylvia, standing entirely still, was visualizing every bend in the sh.o.r.eline, each creek that fell into the Great Lake, lakes rising like rosary beads from the tangled string of a northern tributary, the whole watershed. "I want to know how long the journey was," she said to Jerome. "I want to be able to mark the point of entry, the port of embarkation. I want to be able to add some information to the long, sad message of Andrew's silence."

"Poor Jerome, I thought, reading your name, learning your age, and the fact that the sail loft had been given to you as a studio in which to make your art. Poor young Jerome. He would have dropped the brush, or pencil, or whatever was in his hand and he would have descended the stairs of the sail loft, then he would have moved out through the soggy late-spring snow and down to the dock.

"The ice would have been dark blue with a grey tinge... am I correct? It would have been feathered at its edges with snow, a frosty, almost decorative edge receding a little because of the water that would be nuzzling it like an animal. The figure frozen in it would appear to be halted forever in the att.i.tude of one who is about to rise from a bed or from the grave, a figure interrupted forever in the midst of an act of resurrection. The arms would have been outstretched, I think, as if about to receive a blessing, a vision, the stigmata, or perhaps simply a lover."

Sylvia paused and looked away from Jerome, toward the wall. "Simply a lover," she repeated.

"I had seen him like this, you see," she continued, still not looking at Jerome. "I had seen him in morning, in afternoon light, partly rising from a bed with his arms outstretched, his lower torso buried in white bedclothes, his expression benign, tender, as I walked toward him, his entire self exposed. I had seen all this in him, and he had seen all this in me, and yet each time there would come the moment when we dressed, gathered together the few belongings that we had brought with us, and prepared to leave."

Sylvia, as if finishing a performance, walked back to her chair.

"Not ever, not even at his weakest moment, did he ask me to stay, although once I remember, once he said, 'Don't go yet, not quite yet.'" Her voice began to break. "I will always, always keep that memory."

Jerome had moved swiftly, soundlessly, from the couch and was sitting on the table directly in front of Sylvia. Here he was able to lean toward her, to be within reaching distance. He took both her hands in his and held on to them.

An hour later, Sylvia and Jerome were standing side by side in front of a drafting table slowly, deliberately, going through the photos Jerome had taken on the island. "I finally began to develop them," he told her, "just this week." He moved one photo to the front of the table. "In the mornings," he added, "before you arrived."

Just after Jerome had shown Sylvia some of the "Dugouts" that would be used for his Nine Revelations of Navigation Nine Revelations of Navigation, and after he had found in himself the courage to point out the place where he had found the body, they heard the front door open and a few seconds later Malcolm and Mira entered the studio. "I was just putting the key in the lock when he walked up behind me," Mira said. She looked serious, worried. "He says he's your husband."

"Yes," said Sylvia, "he is." She stood to one side and stepped back so that she could see all the photos that were laid out on the table, and so that Jerome could point to them and tell Mira what they were. There was a calmness in her now that she realized was in opposition to the tension that had entered the room with Malcolm. "His name is Malcolm. And Malcolm, this is Mira and" she turned toward the young man "Jerome."

Jerome turned slowly, a photo of a milkweed pod still in his hand. Then he carefully put the picture down and, without making eye contact, walked across the room to extend his hand, a hand that Sylvia now knew well, having held it and then watched it move from one black-and-white landscape to another. Malcolm shook hands and then said that Sylvia had told him that this was an art studio. He looked around the room, clearly searching for paintings.

"The art is different than you might think," Sylvia told him. "Jerome takes photos and makes things out of doors." She gestured toward the collection on the table, then looked at Mira, who was removing a grey pea jacket and hanging it on a nail beside the door. "Mira does a kind of dance... a mysterious performance."

"This is the island," Jerome said to Mira, who had moved toward the table. "This is what I was doing on the island."

The girl bent over to look at the pictures more carefully. "Yes," she said, "yes... this is good."

Once they entered the living s.p.a.ce, as Mira called it, Sylvia and Mira sat on the couch while Malcolm continued to stand near the door. Jerome walked over to the crate, lifted the journals, placed them in Sylvia's hands. "Don't forget these," he said.

"We loved them," said Mira, placing her hand on Sylvia's sleeve, "those stories. But what happened to Branwell... and Ghost?"

"What stories?" asked Malcolm before Sylvia could answer.

"Just some notes," said Sylvia, "that I found somewhere. That's all... all it is. I read them at night, when you were on call or when you were sleeping so you didn't... well... you didn't know about it." She saw her husband flinch when she said this. "I don't mean that I was keeping it from you, exactly, no, I wasn't doing that. It was just something that was private, known only to me."

"And now known to these two strangers," said Malcolm.

"Not strangers. Not now."

"No, I suppose not." He glanced at Jerome, who, like himself, had remained standing. "I hope this wasn't too disturbing for you."

"Disturbing?" said Jerome. "No, it wasn't disturbing."

"It was fine," said Mira. "It was good. It was all just talking... and interesting." Her hand was still on the older woman's arm. "What are you going to do, what do you want to do now?"

"I'll go back, I suppose," said Sylvia. She raised one hand and touched the top of Mira's head. "You have such wonderful hair."

Mira stood, took Sylvia's hand, and helped her rise from the couch. "Come into the bedroom," she said. "I'll show you the new fabric that I bought. And I have some borders, just some sc.r.a.ps really, that would be good, I think, for those tactile maps you make."

"Wait a minute," said Malcolm, "shouldn't we be going?"

"I don't think so," said Sylvia softly, "not yet, not quite yet."

Jerome could sense Malcolm's irritation as Mira drew Sylvia out of the room. The older man looked around the s.p.a.ce for a while, then turned toward him. Jerome was leaning against the wall farthest from where the doctor stood. The man's coat remained fastened, his scarf tied, and Jerome could tell that he wanted to be gone, that this was not the kind of interior in which he felt comfortable. He had looked at the fluorescent lights and the cement floor with distaste the minute he had come into the room. Jerome could imagine him wondering how the h.e.l.l his wife had managed to spend so much time in such stark surroundings.

"So it was you who found the Alzheimer's patient, the one in the ice," he said to Jerome. "They often get lost like that and come to a bad end. It's always a tragedy... but what can anyone do?"

Jerome remained silent.

"I've often wondered if they think they know where they are going when they wander off, if they have a destination in mind, and then forget all about their original intention. But by that stage it's almost impossible to determine what is in their minds. Must have been a shock for you to find him like that."

"Yes," said Jerome, "I was out there alone... but fortunately I had my cell phone with me. I went " He stopped speaking. Why was he revealing this pointless information? He didn't like the direction the conversation was going but did not know how to introduce another subject.

"I suppose she... I suppose Sylvia told you that she knew him, this... Andrew..." Malcolm paused, trying to come up with the last name.

"Andrew Woodman," said Jerome. "His name was Andrew Woodman."

"That's right, Andrew Woodman. I suppose she told you she was his lover, had been his lover for some time."

"I don't think we should talk about this," said Jerome, his eyes narrowing. "Whatever Sylvia said, she said it to me... in private."

"Well, he wasn't," said Malcolm, "he wasn't her lover. He would never have known her, never have met her. She read about him, about the discovery of his body, last year at the same time that she read about you. It happened like this once before: she collided with someone on the street, and he was her lover too, though she claims it was the same man one lover encountered several times."