And funny enough, that dark night, no one wanted to hear.

The next morning they drove on to the sprawling grape-growing country near Tumbarumba and partook in a tasting tour of the region's best cool-climate sparkling wine made from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. They took all unmarked trails out, but on the way back to Jindabyne they drove down the almost inaccessibly narrow but paved Alpine Way past Mount Kosciusko, through the snow gum and Alpine ash woodlands, all the new bushies exhausted and exhilarated. Many people said it was the best tour they'd ever been on. Larissa knew what they meant.

The first time she and Kai marked the tour on the dirt roads that ran parallel to the paved highways, she never thought her lungs could breathe so deep, her heart could beat so profoundly, that she could feel so happy. She was giddy with the alt.i.tude, with rapture, as she chanted the name of her grandest lover under the stars, his mighty limbs the length of grace. KaiaKaiaThere had never been anyone like him in the open country.

After two years, when the birth control pill ran out, she didn't go to the clinic to get more. Let's see what happens, they said with an excited shrug. If it's meant to be, it will be. She wanted to say to him, you know, children are a big responsibility, but didn't. He had lost one of his. She had lost three of hers. No use dredging up the bottom-dwelling grief.

There was no baby.

They shrugged. Obviously it wasn't meant to be.

And things had changed in the five seasons they'd been here. Without getting a second vehicle and hiring more people, they reached a ceiling to the money they could make off eight people for a twenty-eight-hour tour. They were busy, but they weren't growing their profit. Last summer all the money they made went right back into renewing the supplies and repainting the desert-tan Land Cruiser a jungle camo color. It felt like business was drying up, like there was no way out.

Caldwell's market was before town, on the downhill road overlooking the lake. They knew her there; Caldwell, the man who owned the store, kept trying to sell her kangaroo tail. "Jimmy, I just want ground beef," she would say to him. "Got any of that?" Not giving up, Jimmy kept trying to convince her kangaroo soup and stew were just the ticket on a cold winter's night, and she couldn't explain that it was July and wasn't supposed to need winter stew. She kept buying ground beef because she wanted to make a summer barbecue. "Do you have some chicken wings, Jim? I want to marinate them," she said to him this morning, rubbing her hands together to get warm. Caldwell didn't have chicken, but he ground up some chuck for her.

"Jim," she asked tentatively, her palms on his gla.s.s counter, "is there any work around here?"

"What kind of work are you lookin' for, darling?" he said. He was a short man, perpetually in overalls and a plaid shirt. He had told her he was from Scotland, but his wife was Polish, and she made stuffed cabbage sometimes and pierogi that Larissa loved, having never had them before. Such foreign tastes, but good. Every once in a while Anna asked her if she needed a cleaning woman, and Larissa was surprised by that, as in: the Caldwells own a store that's open seven days a week and is the only provider of fresh produce and packaged foods for miles around. And yet Anna asks if she can clean Larissa's house, as if Anna is the one who needs the money and not the other way around.

"Oh, no. There's no work here," Jimmy Caldwell said. "Our son wants to go to England to college next year. We don't know what to do. How to explain to your only son that you can't afford to send him?"

"Is he smart?" said Larissa. "Does he have sports or musical ability? Maybe he can get a scholarship?"

"I don't think so," Caldwell replied. "He rides horses. He fishes. Do they even give out scholarships for that?"

Larissa was about to offer Jared's sage advice. Mortgage your store, she wanted to tell Jimmy. Take out a large loan with your business as collateral. That's what Kai and I would do, if we had a child. Sending one son to college in another country was a big expense. Now imagine if you had two children, barely eighteen months apart, and they were both in college at the same time. Imagine they went to private universities that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Those parents would have to mortgage their business, their house, their cars, their jewelry, everything, wouldn't they, to send two grown children through four years of higher education. Larissa suddenly felt sick. The feeling came again, falling straight down, all oxygen sucked out of her lungs, unable to catch even a shallow breath, the steepest rollercoaster drop but without the childhood and the joy, and the rollercoaster. First it a.s.saulted her only during dreams, the awful rushing plunge, but then started to come during the waking hours too, like now, hatefully increasing in occurrence.

"I'm sorry, darl," Caldwell said. "Don't look so sad. I want to help you. I would, if I could."

"No, that's fine." But he looked worried; she must have lost the blood in her face. Long ago she lost the color in her hair. She started bleaching it herself, dousing it with peroxide and lemon, to remove all color. She removed it, all right. She wasn't so much Winter Gold now, as winter ash. Kai said he liked it; called it lemon blonde.

Caldwell gave her a pound of ground beef and two baked potatoes on credit until Wednesday. He gave her coffee for free. She drank it black, without sugar, the way she hated it, and then slowly walked back uphill to Rainbow Drive, carrying the little plastic bag of food for Kai.

A woman was taking out her garbage. "Good morning!" the woman said. "Isn't it lovely out? Did you see the lake today? It's absolutely gorgeous."

"Good morning," said Larissa, speeding up. She didn't glimpse at the lake.

What was it that haunted her? She had been doing well for so long.

Was that true? Had she been?

After she got home, she scoured the kitchen for something to eat. The bread was stale (thought she didn't throw it out, just in case; after all, what was a little mold when you were hungry), and the milk was sour. She thought of taking the six dollars and walking downtown to Gloria's Jeans, where she could get a coffee and a delectable pear and raspberry bread and sit and read the newspaper. Often there was news from back home. America this, America that. Even New Jersey was in the news once, something about a governor resigning amid charges of flagrant impropriety. "This is my truth," he had said. Larissa liked that formulation so much. My truth. She had some truths of her own. Inarguable really.

Maybe instead of reading the paper, she could ask Serge at Gloria's if there was any work. She could serve coffee to the migrants.

She didn't want to walk so far again, but she liked the idea of being there, the smell of the coffee, the sitting down in a warm place full of food and people. Hearing other voices. No wonder she couldn't put on any weight, all that walking. Larissa didn't think Kai liked her this thin. She didn't know for sure, he never said, he wasn't mean, butawhen they were in bed and he fitted in behind her, he didn't say, you feel so good, as he ran his hands over her. He didn't compliment her in clothes or out. Well, what was there to compliment? Her clothes were his clothes. Jeans, Henleys, boots, Akubra hats, his a Cattleman, hers a Stylemaster. Her body was his body. If it weren't for the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she'd be narrow-hipped, long-legged and tall like him. Her hair was straight, his was kinky, but when they put it in ponytails, put on their safari jackets and hiking boots, from the back who could tell they were man and woman?

From the front who could tell they were lovers?

Once you could tell.

Yet at Balcony Bar on Wednesday nights after he got paid, they drank and danced, and she put on a little lipstick, and let her hair down. She still looked pretty, she thought; did she still look young? Ish?

The bungalow they rented came spa.r.s.ely furnished. In the years they lived in it, they bought a new mattress for the bed because they broke the old one; all the coils burst out of it one night, a slasher movie about the evils of too much s.e.x.

The TV flickered, and there was no radio, except for the clock by the bed that hissed the AM stations and was full of static on the FM as if the DJs were walking on carpet as they spun the records. In the kitchen, there was a small table for almost four, in the living room a brown couch and an armchair by the window. The curtains remained drawn. They had no pictures on their walls. No framed and well-placed photos of their families, of her children in the pool, of each other. She had started to acquire some second-hand books, to rebuild her collection, but when the brakes went out on the troopie, they p.a.w.ned the books and what remained of her jewelry to get them fixed, and then let the deadline pa.s.s for getting her things back. At night, they rode the Ducati to town to drink. Sometimes, when they were really broke, they stayed home. They weren't much for T V, but they read a little bita"when they had books. They played cards, pretending they were in Vegas or Reno. They had a pretty good time, sipping whiskey mixed with heavy cream to make it taste like Bailey's. But whiskey was expensive, and heavy cream went off. It cost three dollars, and sometimes they didn't have it. So they played cards without whiskey and cream. Sometimes, she lay down in bed and pretended to sleep. Like now.

At first, things had been too exhilarating to be frightening. Though they were a little frightening.

Larissa left her house at 11 a.m. that Friday, with a small bag, just bought, clothes all new, pa.s.sport, license, and crisp cash. She didn't turn back to look at her house one last time, she didn't turn her head to glance at the golf course. She just kept her eyes to the ground and her feet steady. It seemed like forever to walk that one mile to the train station. But it only seemed that way. Because she powerwalked, was almost running. She left the house at eleven, and by 11:16 she was already on the train, at the window, her face pressed to the gla.s.s as the train glided away, gaining speed, its urgency calming her, comforting her, as she dreamed of the life she was about to live the only way she wanted toa"together with him, somewhere where it never got cold. She was a gothic traveler, her pounding heart full of lush imagery of the future, heading not east to New York City, but west to Hackettstown, the last stop on the Jersey Transit Rail, where he was already on his Ducati, waiting for her and her little bag. "You okay?" he said. "I'm great," she replied. That was one of the few times they had discussed IT, the thing that would not be discussed, the unnamed disarticulation. Why talk when they had wilderness to explore? She hopped on, and they sped away with the wind in their hair; she clutched to him with both hands like she did during love, and pressed her cheek to his leather-jacketed back. They had jumped on his bike like baby joeys. He had sold his gift Jag; they had money. Larissa wished she could have sold her gift Jag for being a good wife seventeen years out of eighteen. She was filled with equal amounts of terror and elation. She had never felt more alive.

For four glorious hours through the Alleghenies, in full late spring, the wind in her face, she gulped for breath, holding on to him. The open road, the greening sloping fields, the up and down of the rolling hills, the breathtaking beauty of western Pennsylvania. They stopped for food and gas in the field country store in flat Ohio. They stopped for good when it got dark near Indianapolis, found a cheesy motel off the Interstate and made abandoned love on the white sheets until four in the morning, and then slept till noon.

They didn't want to leave; they hadn't ever had this, a night together, waking up together, mornings, a full day stretching out ahead.

"How can I be so lucky?" whispered Kai, caressing her bare stomach with the tips of his fingers.

You are my salvation and my refuge, she wanted to say to him. It sounded like a psalm Maggie might sing. She closed her eyes, losing herself in her own romantic posturings. This was all just prelude to the boundless adventure about to begin. Nothing was known, not a single day. There was no certainty, no plan. Every minute was strange and new. By the time they finished pancakes and French toast at Waffle House, it was nearly three, and they giggled like schoolgirls, like Che and Larissa at the playground, about the indolent decadence of not having to get up for work, for school, for anything.

They rode through Illinois, spent another purgative night at a roadside motel in Des Moines, Iowa, and it was there, at a deli on Capitol Avenue with a full view of the gilded capitol dome, that they had their first disagreement. She wanted to ride all the way to the west, across the country she'd never seen. "I want to be the bike girl from Chico," she said, reaching for his hands. The girl from Chico rides the back of a man's bike, and never thinks of tomorrow. Where did this dream of herself come from, this hazy yet clear definition of herself?

But he, pulling his hands away, wasn't interested in the Chico girl. He wanted to get to San Francisco ASAP because a ship was leaving for Maui and he wanted to be on it.

"We're going to Hawaii?" That was news to her. She told him she'd never seen the Great Divide, or the salt flats of Utah, the endless expanse of the Western sky in Nevada. The Pony Express, Kai, she pleaded into his indifferent face. She wanted to see these things all the more, partake in the exploration of the wilderness because she would see them from the back of his Ducati, pressed against his back, the back she grasped at night. What about this was so hard to understand? I want to get lost with you, she said to him.

"They'll kill us in the west for my bike," he said. "We'll be good and lost then, won't we? I can't leave it anywhere. What about that is so hard to understand?"

She sulked. She said let's get a gun to protect ourselves. Larissa said this. "Get a gun." She, who'd lived in Rockland county, in a little suburban house, who'd gone to college in New York City, who lived in Hoboken, and then tranquil Summit, who'd never even seen a gun up close, was now advising her twentysomething lover to get a gun to protect them against the forces of evil in the lawless west. Afterward she was sore and raw from love, the excitement of her life pouring into night, the excitement of the night spilling over into life. It was all one, and the gun was part of it.

Kai refused to get a gun, citing registrations and records and waiting periods, reminding her they were on the run, on the lam. Did they want to be found? Is that what she wanted?

No, she admitted. That was the last thing she wanted. To be found. That was the truth of it. Lost is where she wanted to be.

Kai told her they would come again to these parts, would see the things she hadn't seen, there was so much time, not now, not today, but in the boundless future. He was ardent and persuasive and she believed him. I don't care where I am, she whispered to him in anonymous motels, as long as I'm with you. They took a train from Omaha to Union Station in San Francisco, and alighted a ship headed for Wailea, Ducati in cargo. It took three days to cross the Pacific, and Larissa spent most of the daylight hours on deck, standing at the rails, looking out onto the vastness of the slate ocean, just sea and horizon in every direction, humming to herself a vague, half-forgotten Marianne Faithfull tune that she stopped humming immediately upon realizing what it was: "Falling from Grace." She deemed it inappropriate. Of all the things to hum!

Kai was less impressed with the sea. "I liked the train," he told her. "I like looking at people's lives outside the train stations, imagining if I could live there, too. Here, there's nothing to imagine."

"Yes," she said with a falling face. "But lots to think about." She had had no way of telling Jared that Michelangelo couldn't go anywhere without his blue bunny, no way to remind him to take the bunny when they went to Lillypond or to Boston to visit her brothers, or to Piermont for dinner with her mother. There was no good way to nudge him about something like that. But that wasn't even the truth. She had forgotten all about it. Had she remembered, she would've figured out a way to slip in a sentence about the importance of the blue bunny to the blond boy, but she was preoccupied and didn't. And now Jared had no idea. They were so absent-minded, both father and son, they'd be halfway round the world before they remembered that the little boy couldn't sleep without his bunny. What could Larissa do about it now?

"Thinking? Not a good thing," Kai said, smiling, prying her clenched fingers away from the railing. He was besotted with the idea of love on the open sea. He said it felt like Baccha.n.a.lian debauchery. He couldn't get enough of her.

Kai and his joyful welcoming smile, like he hadn't a care in the world, just a guy rolling through life. He was a magnet, an instant polarizing elixir against the plagues of the heart. Smile, Kai, pull me away from the bottomless ocean. When I see you, there is nothing else but you. The ornery stubble, the soft mouth, the frizzy hair wet from shower, the restraining hands, the unforgiving bounty. For Larissa, her journey had already begun and this was part of it: learning how to take responsibility for her life unstoppably intertwined with his. It was on the ship through the Pacific that she flung herself in the waters, cleaving herself into the Larissa before and the Larissa after. It wasn't her sins she wanted the water to wash away, because that would imply there had been wrongdoing, and there wasn't, there wasn't; there was choice and freedom, and owning her actions, all virtues, admirable, dignified, every one. They were full of goodnessa"look how profoundly still the ocean and the skies were around them. Kai and Larissa were one with nature. They were in sync with the earth. Long after she had ceased to be, nothing would change in the great Pacific. That was rea.s.suring, for she felt herself to be part of a larger creation, a freeform tone poem in the center of the cla.s.sical symphony that was the ordered universe. What the vastness of the ocean succeeded in doing was to wash away her past life so that the mind didn't fly to it, didn't wallow in it, didn't stub the toe on it; it was put in a compartment inside, locked, excised and heaved into the salty straits, so that by the time they alighted in Hawaii, Larissa was reborn and new. Such a clean break, not even the nerve endings twitched. The limb of Past was severed and healed during the pa.s.sage over the sea.

They were barefoot wanderers, plunging into the waters, foregoing the expensive wine. They didn't need it. Kai was like air. Without him Larissa could not live.

Jindabyne was cold. Larissa hadn't expected it. This was incongruous to her about Australia. It was like Africa being cold. How could there be snow on the ground, pungent air filled with woodsmoke, ice around the edges of the recessed span of the lake, blue cold winter light reflecting on the distant hills and the paved roads? It was August when they got there! It was supposed to be only gold hues, orange, red, yellows and greens in Australia. Where did this violet cast come from, this aberrant chill? Larissa shivered as she asked these questions of Kai, who was cheerful and unbothered. "It's winter. Of course it's cold."

"But I thought we were going to live somewhere warm." Like Hawaii. Why couldn't they have stayed in Maui a little longer? He didn't want to; Larissa could tell. Hawaii was like the 7-Eleven in the strip mall off a suburban tract highway for him. He didn't see anything in it. His a.s.sociations to it were not a balm on the soul, the way beauty is supposed to be. Not the warm water, nor the fire flowers or the mangoes.

"It'll get warm soon. You'll see."

But it was still wrong. It made no sense. In the cheap Lake Jindabyne Motel they stayed at, the cast-iron radiator was on, pumping out heat! What was this, winter in Jersey?

Larissa had no warm clothes. No sweaters, no parkas. Wistfully she thought of all the winter jackets she left, the downs, the Thinsulate, the thermals, the furs hanging in her closet, the cashmere scarves and gloves, the woolen hats, the ear m.u.f.fs. Maybe she could write away for them. Dear Jared. Sorry I'm gone, but be a dear, forward on my favorite sheepskin, it's freezing here in the Red Center.

It's not the Red Center, said Kai. It's the Snowy Mountains. These are Australia's Alps and skiing villages. This is where the Australians come to enjoy the winter sports. Thredbo and Perisher Blue is where they ski. Let me take you there, so you can see. It was icy atop his bike, with the wind chill frosting up the windows of her eyes. Pressing her face against his leather jacket didn't shield her from the bitterness. Were they really planning to stay here?

He took her to a waterfront cottage on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Crackenback where they remained two weeks, sleeping, making love, pretending to figure things out, and every morning the frosty mist rose from the lake like a shapeless Loch Ness, and the lake underneath the rising haze looked like a winter glade, crystal bright and sparkling clear.

"What are we going to do? Do you know someone here?"

"I told you. My friend Bart and his wife, Bianca. They love it here. You'll see. It'll be stupendous."

"So we're definitely staying?"

"At least through the summer."

She listened to Kai's bold plan: a tour through the rivers and the mountains, legends of times long past, fishing, fires, songs and stories. It did sound remarkable, every syllable.

"But what about the wintertime?"

"We'll make so much money in the summers, we won't care. We'll hibernate and recreate. Come here. I'll show you what we'll do."

She came, but she wasn't convinced. Still, she didn't want to be a spoilsport. It just wasn't what she imagined. It wasn't quite what she had signed up for.

Larissa made dinner for him who didn't come home at six or seven or eight or nine. She didn't know what was going on. It was Tuesday, and he wasn't getting paid till tomorrow, and yesterday they'd already gone out. After they came home, he felt so dirty and broke, he said he wasn't going out again for a week. And here it was the next day and he was outa"without her. He didn't even call. Perhaps the phone had been turned off; Larissa picked it up. No, the d.a.m.n dial tone. She didn't have enough money for a cab, and she wasn't about to walk to town, seven kilometers without a shoulder or a sidewalk in the dark. After she angrily ate her hamburger, she thought of throwing his out, but hunger and frugality stopped her. She sat and waited in the silent house, without even the TV on to break the silence.

At ten, she went next door to Mejida's house. Mejida and her husband owned a car service business; sometimes Mejida helped her out and rolled the car fare into the rent.

"Sorry to bother you again," Larissa said. "But I think something is wrong with Kai's bike, and I can't get in touch with him. I'm afraid he might be stuck in town. Would you mind terriblya?"

"I don't mind driving you," Mejida said. "But it's three weeks into July and you haven't paid the rent."

Larissa was shocked and embarra.s.sed. Kai usually paid Mejida; Larissa thought it had been all taken care of.

"Not only not taken care of," said Mejida, "but Kai paid me only half of June. I won't even mention the hundred dollars in cabs you took between then and now."

"Oh," said Larissa, stepping off the porch. "Thank you for not mentioning it. I'll be ready in five."

She sat like a stoic in the pa.s.senger seat, not even enough guilty courtesy for a grateful conversation, too mortified that a month and a half's rent was due, and she knew, knew, they didn't have even a hundred bucks put away toward August. Mejida was an attractive, heavy Indian woman who always smelled of curry spices. c.u.min, coriander, and cardamom like a savory rice pudding. Tonight, the sickly sweet spices were making Larissa subtly nauseated.

"So is it true what Bart tells me?"

"I don't know, Mejida. I didn't even know you talked to Bart."

"Of course I do." Bart and Bianca rented out skis and toboggans to the tourists whom Mejida and Umar then drove to Thredbo.

How could Larissa forget. "What does he tell you?"

"Wella" Her soft Indian voice belied bluntness of her words, "Bart said you had a husband and children in the United States you left to be with Kai."

"Bart told you this?"

"Actually, Bianca."

Larissa stayed composed. "Why would Bianca talk to you about me, Mejida? That's weird."

"No, not weird. I complimented you and Kai on your commitment to each other despite your age difference, and Bianca told me that you sacrificed quite a lot to be with him."

Larissa said nothing, digging her sharp nails into the palms of her hands to force herself to keep steady and silent. She didn't remember ever telling Bianca anything. She didn't talk about personal things to their new friends. Perhaps Kai did? Except Kai was even more closed-mouthed than she. He talked only about the weather; he sang songs; he told jokes.

"Well, I think it's incredible," continued Mejida. "Not everybody can do it, view the rules of society as nothing more than a contrivance. Kudos to you. You the individual triumph over social constraints. Have you kept in touch with them?"

"Have I kept in touch with them?" What a strange question! "Um, no." The rules of society? What was she talking about? It had nothing to do with that. It had to do only with love. When were they going to be there? Didn't Mejida see the arms twisted around Larissa's stomach to stop her from hearing more questions?

Mejida clearly didn't see, busy driving down dark winding roads, because she continued evenly. "It's odd to imagine you as a married woman with children." She chuckled. "It doesn't seem like you at all. You fit so perfectly with Kai. You both give off a slightly dislocated vibe. Like two journeymen. A mother, a wife doesn't jibe with that."

"Doesn't it?"

"I can't imagine you as a mother at all," Mejida declared as she drove. "Motherhood is a word that has too many geographic limitations. I don't feel that with you, either the sacrifice or the convention." She smiled pleasantly in profile.

"You don't have any children, Mejida?"

"No, we just got married."

"Three years just."

"We hope to have children soon, when the business is more established. We want to be a little more secure."

"Yes, it's always good to be certain of the future," Larissa said through her teeth. She and Jared waited to have Michelangelo until they were more secure.

"Well, you probably don't think so. You've proved that. But it's important to us."

Larissa said nothing, wanting this conversation to end, this ride to be over.

"How come they haven't visited you?" Mejida asked. "They'd like it here; all children do. They could learn to ride horses, ski."

"Well, we have horses in America," Larissa managed to get out.

"Yes. But I'm sure they'd like to visit you."

"I suppose," Larissa said.

"Oh, my goodness," exclaimed a startled Mejida, turning her face to Larissa. "I just understood. You haven't been in touch with them at all, have you?" She sounded shocked. She stammered a little. The two women fell silent.

Staring straight ahead, Larissa spoke scornfully. "Mejida, obviously I can't explain it to you. You don't have children."

"Ah," said Mejida, calm again, mild. "Do you think, Larissa, that if I had had children, it would make it easier for you to explain to me how you could have left yours?"