From the beginning we were a fortress against the world. A unit. As Kahlil Gibran said, we two were a multitude. Our world was, from the very first, the small one of our work and the people who shared it with us. For neither of our families would.

My mother slammed the telephone down when I called to tell her that Alan and I were being married; I could picture her, in her mercilessly new brick ranch house in Kenmore, saying to the deacon, "It was a wrong number." I am sure she was afraid that he would leave her if it got about that her daughter was marrying a New York Jew. And Alan's mother wailed and shrieked for weeks; his father came around in the end, and his brother the rabbi, but his mother was inconsolable and unshakable in her conviction that I would bring nothing but ruin to her son. After Stephen was born she allowed herself to be cajoled and lulled, and we saw a good bit of her, but when he died she felt herself vindicated, and closed her door and heart to us for good. Or rather, to me. In her eyes I had kidnapped her son and murdered her grandson. There would be no sufferance for me. Alan saw her rarely and grimly, and so far as I know, her absence from his life was not the profound sorrow it might have been. The two of us together were always enough, sufficient. Sometimes, in the early years of my marriage, it seemed simply miraculous to me that I had found this port, come home to this. I did and do love Alan Abrams with an enduring sweetness and complexity that I did not know myself capable of. And I know that he does me.

I don't know when, in that first year after the civil ceremony in Carl Seaborn's living room in Bridgehampton, I realized that I was in love with my husband. I knew, when I married him, that I loved him, and that he was the best and most constant friend I might hope to have in the world, now that Cecie was lost to me. And I knew that nobody else could ever understand me as he did, or make me laugh as he did, or comfort me and anchor me to the earth as he did. And I knew by then that I adored going to bed with him; that slight, fluid, hard-muscled body sated my emptiness while it fanned my greed for him like a desert wind. But I was not aware, for a long while, that those things were enough to add up to being "in love," for "in love" was what I had been with Paul Sibley, and that drowning, consuming, helpless thing was light-years away from the lighthearted, sweet-fitting, lockstep rightness I felt with Alan. And then one night, when he was away on a project and I was alone in the apartment, puttering restlessly and feeling as empty and wrong as a shoe for an amputated foot, it struck me that I was deeply in love with him and very likely to stay that way forever. A tide of elation washed over me, followed by a dark surge of fear. If I had been religious, I would have been on my knees praying, "Dear God, please don't let me lose this." I think on some level I was, anyway.

When he called later that night, I said, "Do you know that I love you so much that my toes curl up and I can't get my breath?"

And he laughed, and said, "It's about time."

Early in the second year of our marriage Alan bought two lovely old weathered-silver potato barns and had them moved to the top of the dune line on his lot on Potato Road. All that summer we built decking around them, and a breezeway to connect them, and started work on a crow's nest sleeping loft atop one of them. I began my garden that summer, and though it was another year before we were able to move out to the gray house beside the sea that has been our home for all these years, it became the central reality of our life to us. In those first years we shared it with our friends, bringing food out from Manhattan on weekends on the train or in Alan's battered Toyota, and later cooking our sprawling dinners in the small kitchen we built off one end of the larger barn. I know I speak truthfully when I say that no one who ever sat on our deck amid my rioting flowers and watched the surf on the wild beach below failed to feel the spell of the house and the sea. Even Alan's mother, who spent only one night under our roof in all the years of our marriage because, as she said, the sound of the ocean upset her, said also that she approved of the house.

"You've fixed things up real nice, Kate," she said. "If you like this kind of thing, that is."

"Thank you, Golda," I said, managing not to grin at Alan, who rolled his eyes behind his mother's back and pantomimed stabbing her.

"You're welcome, I'm sure," she said.

"If your mother likes it, it must be some kind of house," I said to him that night. "What makes it so special, do you think? There are grander houses all over the Hamptons."

"It's a happy house," he said seriously. "It was built by people who love each other and it, and it had a good, productive life on this old ocean before it became a house. Everything about it works hard and has a purpose, and works in harmony like a good team. I think you feel that in houses."

"Is that what is known as artistic integrity?" I said, grinning.

"Holy shit, I hope not," Alan said.

That fall Carl opened a branch of the office in Bridgehampton, to handle the burgeoning spate of residential beach work. The Hamptons were starting their great odyssey toward mediocrity and overdevelopment, and the firm was swamped with requests for beach properties. Carl, who loved the wildness of the area, nevertheless saw the potential, and turned the office over to Alan and me.

"If it's going to be done anyway, it ought to be done well," he said, "and I can see the handwriting on the wall. If I don't put you two out there I'm going to lose you to those potato barns of yours. I will anyway, sooner or later, but maybe this way it will be later."

And so we moved into the house on Potato Road, and there took up the life that would sustain and nourish us for all of our years, and there conceived our son Stephen, on a night of wild, moaning November wind...I know that, because a Nor'easter blew for most of November, and for a good part of it we were without power...and there, the following summer, Stephen Daniel Abrams was born. And then we added the big studio wing over the dunes that Alan had planned long ago, and there wasn't anything else in the world I could even conceive of wanting. The three of us, then, were a multitude.

After Stephen's first birthday party, as we sat on the darkening deck watching the citronella torches gutter in the sea wind, Stephen asleep in Alan's arms, I said, "Five years ago I was getting ready to get married and live in a house on the beach with a brilliant architect, and here I am. Only it's a different beach and a different architect, and now there's Stephen. Everything I ever wanted, and then some...and nothing I thought I would have. It's eerie, how things worked out. It makes me superstitious. It makes me afraid to wish for anything else; my wishes come true, and I must have used all of them up."

"What else would you wish for?" Alan said.

"Nothing," I said. "Except to be able to keep what I have. To keep on keeping on."

And for a long time, we did that. Three years later we left McKim, Mead and started our own design firm, and after that we worked out of the house as well as lived in it. We did well, if I do say so myself; at that time, in that place, you would have had to be very bad indeed not to make an ample living designing beach houses and furnishings. We worked prodigiously, and I hired a housekeeper/babysitter for Stephen, and we made friends with some of the permanent residents of the Hamptons...writers, fishermen, nurserymen, artists, a lawyer or two, an overworked GP, the owners of small shops and businesses that sustained the villages during the long winter seasons. We did not know many of the new summer people. I did not mind. Many of them had too much money and too little else; the Hamptons were different places when they were in residence. We built and designed some of their beach houses...the best, I think; the ones that today look the least like silos for missiles...and we were asked to their parties. I might have gone, dutifully, if Alan had wanted to, but he did not.

"Why should I like them kneedeep in the ocean when I don't like them in Manhattan?" he said. "If we get into that routine we'll have to get new clothes and a new car and start giving parties out here, and then old Stephen will be seduced by one of their snippy, airheaded daughters and marry her, and there we'll be."

I laughed. It was no loss to me. I did not want Stephen to move in that world. I wanted him to live in the one we made for him, Alan and me, in the house by the sea.

He did that, too. For another three years he did just that, my dark little boy, and then, in August of his fifth year, he drowned in the swimming pool of our friends the Montags, in full view of their three children and their babysitter, who thought he was playing at snorkeling with the oldest Montag child's mask and fins. We were at a cocktail party over in Sag Harbor, one of the very few of the summer cocktail parties we had ever been to in all those years. When the call came for Alan, and he came out onto the terrace to me, his face somehow shrunken and mangled in the twilight, I was drinking a gin and tonic and talking to a woman named Haralson about Richard Nixon. She was a nice woman, I remember; we both hated and feared Nixon, and had found in each other a haven in that fervently Republican gathering. After that night I could never remember her name or face, though I ran into her many times in the village shops, and once at the dentist's, and she came to see me the next week with a lovely pot of dusty miller and white philodendrons. I soon came to hate the sight of her, quite literally, and to avoid her. I'm sure she always wondered why. I cannot say, except that in some irrational and arcane way, she was a lightning rod for the monstrous red pain of that moment.

It is useless for me to talk of the year after Stephen died. I do not have the words; no one does. I know that two things got me through the first days: the presence of Alan, who never left my side even in his own crushing grief, and the thought that when the pain got too bad I could end it as my father had. As I have said, the suicide's legacy is not an unmixed curse. It helped save my life that fall and winter. So did my husband. I know that many marriages do not survive the anguish and guilt and outrage of a child's death, but it never occurred to Alan or me that ours might not. We clung together like survivors in a life raft. I remember something he said to me late in that first night, after they had taken Stephen's little blue body away to the funeral home and I had fought my way up out of the sedative our GP friend had given me.

When I got to the surface, Alan's was the face that I saw, and as memory swept over me like a cold, black salt sea, he held me fast and said, "One thing we will not do is blame ourselves. Of course it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't gone to that terrible fucking party, but I want you to remember this, Kate: neither of us wanted Stephen to die. Either one of us would have died to prevent it. So we can cry, and we can mourn, and we can stand it or not, but we are not going to blame ourselves or each other. And we are going to get through this one minute at a time, and one hour, and one day. Just like that. Together."

And from that moment on, I knew that we would get through it, and just how we would...because he had given me the blueprint for it. Alan always knew exactly what I needed in order to live. When he could, he gave it to me.

After that our horizons shrank. Or mine did. I was not comfortable out in the world. I seemed to have lost all sense of context. I had been Stephen's mother for five years; now that he was gone, my arms, indeed, my very core, felt hugely empty and flaccid and useless. But I could not go back to being just Kate, wife of Alan, designer; it was too late for that, after I had been that other perfect thing. I did not know what I was. The world where I had moved with my son was not only unreal, it frightened me. I often thought, later, that if there had not been that vast, exposed emptiness inside me, the Pacmen never could have gotten a toothhold. It was a stupid fancy, of course; the real truth was that the death that came into my emptiness was more the death of connectedness: I wanted little from the world where Stephen had died, and very gradually I built my secret, walled garden and drew away from it.

"I should have stopped it," Alan said to me much later. "I should have seen where it was leading. I should have just plain made you stay in the world; I should have gotten Carl to ask you back to the firm, or gone back myself, and taken you with me. But we made such a good thing of it; I loved what we built out of that awful time. It was good, Kate, wasn't it?"

It was. After a string of blind, featureless white days where moving and breathing through the pain were, had to be, my only concern, I emerged into a too-bright, too-large, too-vivid world where it seemed that a little work might be possible, and Alan and I threw ourselves into that. Once in, the old, rhythmic sorcery of form and color and texture and space claimed me, and I let it take me down and under. I worked as I never have before, getting up in the pink sea-dawns, working over my board until far into the night. Alan, in the big studio wing, was working just as hard, just as singlemindedly. He urged me to set up my board there, to use part of the vast, beautiful, light-washed space as my own, but somehow I could not. I needed, at that time, enclosure, small spaces, minute and manageable slices of the world. I set up in the bay window overlooking the deck and the garden. By that time it was almost completely walled away; shielded by house, fences, windbreaks, dunes. There I made a new world for myself, one I could orchestrate and control. There I have stayed.

The firm flourished. We began to win awards, modest ones at first, and then one or two really lustrous ones; I have never ceased being amazed by that. Our work has appeared not infrequently in national design magazines, and once an international one. People with cameras and tape recorders began to come to the house on the dunes; after the first time or two, when I found myself sick and sweating from the intrusion, Alan and I worked out an arrangement. He would handle the interviews and the photographs, and he would do it away from the house. The thought of my face, even my name, on a page for the world to examine, perhaps to remember, terrified me with the same superstitious terror an aborigine must feel facing a camera: the primal and awful fear that your soul will be stolen away.

"Don't you want any credit?" Alan would say. "At least half of it's yours."

"Please," I said. "Oh, please. Don't ask me to do that. We don't need that."

And we didn't. We had all the work we could handle. Our arrangement included other divisions of duties: Alan did the outside contact work, and we designed on the board together, and he oversaw construction, and I stayed in my bay window and did specs and expediting and ordering and the overseeing of models and fabrics and details. When he was away, as he frequently was, I stayed behind and read and listened to music and walked on the beach and gardened. Mostly, I suppose, I gardened. Somehow I only felt completely safe with my fingers plunged directly into the rich earth I had brought to nourish my flowers and vegetables and herbs; I was, then, about as connected to life and living as I would ever be. Only a few very close friends saw the garden by then. I saw little else.

We talked of having other children, but somehow we did not do much about that. We didn't try not to have them; we just never went the route of tests and temperature-takings and calendars and all the rest of it. I've often wondered since if we did begin children, and the Pacmen ate them. They say that most cancers grow for years before they are found. But it is a thought I have not shared with Alan.

"I will not have you anthropomorphize that goddamned thing," he said once. "It's tough enough to fight reality. I'm not going to let you stack the deck against yourself."

He was really very angry, and so, even though I habitually thought in terms of Pacmen and gobbling mouths, I rarely shared them with Alan. As he said, reality was burden enough for him.

Not in those good days after we built the firm, though. Once I asked him if he missed children, the fact of them, too terribly badly.

"No," he said. "I miss Stephen terribly, awfully, and I always will, but it's the particular little person I miss, Stephen himself, not the idea of a child per se. I don't think I've ever really wanted anything but this, this firm and this house and you, from the minute I met you."

"Really?" I said. We were lying in each other's arms in a flood of white moonlight, on the big double chaise with the faded duck pad, on the deck. It was a September moon, but the air and water were still as soft as summer on our naked flesh. Sweat was drying slowly on our bodies.

"Really," he said. "I still wake up and pinch myself to see if it's all real. Sometimes it scares me, though; sometimes I think...I don't know...there should be something more in our lives. Other people. Especially for you. This oneness stuff is almost dangerous. It's like it's too perfect, and the gods will take it away from us. I feel sometimes like we ought to share it, just on principle. Just to propitiate...them."

"With who?" I said. "Who would you want to share this with?"

"That's just the point," he said. "Nobody."

"Well, don't worry," I said, and nibbled his shoulder at the small hollow place where it joined his neck. "The gods are not going to get you."

And they didn't. They got me. In my forty-second summer, I had a miscarriage, not even realizing I had been pregnant, and the resulting D&C turned up ovarian cancer. It is a terrible and insidious and secret cancer, and almost always does irreparable damage before it is found; my gynecologist told me that my never-to-be-born baby probably saved my life.

"Or to look at it another way, the cancer murdered him," I said.

"Maybe. I wouldn't have put it that way," he said. "It's more that diseased tissue can't sustain life. You don't want to go putting a face on this thing, and giving it a name."

Which is precisely, and almost at that moment, what I did. The Pacmen were born on that day, and their murderous, cheerful, gobbling images have been by far the hardest things to kill.

For they think they have killed the cancer. Ovarian is a dread and savage cancer because it shows no flags, causes no early symptoms to speak of. Even the later ones are vague and easily misunderstood and misdiagnosed; by then, usually, the cancer will kill you. Mine, though, was caught very early, in what they think of as the second stage...involvement in both ovaries, but no discernible metastasis...and they went after it aggressively, with a diagnostic laparotomy and a following hysterectomy, and enough chemotherapy to render me bald as an egg, weak and thin and nauseated most of the time, riddled from mouth to genitals with sores and a virulent kind of acne that sometimes seemed the worst of all. All to stop, so far as they can tell, the march of the Pacmen.

I have two doctors, John McCracken, my old, good friend on Madison Avenue, who saw me through my pregnancy and delivered Stephen, and Carter Hilliard, the flamboyant, handsome, immensely gifted medical oncologist who saw me through most of my cancer and delivered me of the Pacmen, and both went after the cancer with surgery and a pantheon of drugs, terrible, pragmatic-sounding things like Leukeran and Neosar and Adriamycin and Adrucil and Folex, that left me in infinitely worse physical shape than before I had had the miscarriage. After more than a year of chemo, there was another exploratory operation to "see where we stand," and two years later still another, and after that I went home to my secret garden and ripped out my perennials and planted annuals and waited to see if I would live or die. Now, in late October, I will have the last, the five-year one, the biggie. By now Alan and Carter and John are euphoric with shared certainty. And I have a blank white wall where November should be, and in that quiet whiteness, if I listen, I fancy that I hear the Pacmen gobbling.

This is not a story about cancer, and even if it was, other women with greater gifts of tongue than I have told about the terror, and the lethargy, and the moments of wild, cheeky elation and the subsequent dizzying plunges into despair, and the fury and depression and denial. I had them all, beginning with the moment in John's office on Madison when he told me, and the air seemed to brighten as if a small, silent, invisible nuclear blast had gone off, and the hanging plants seemed to tremble in the radiant air, and I stared at him for a long moment and then vomited into his wastebasket. But from the beginning I knew three things...I knew that the abyss lay under all, and always had; I knew how to find an abyss-denying world and live my way into it; I knew that I could always and literally die as my father had if I found that I could not live. No, make that five things: I knew also that in my house and garden by the sea, under the sun, there is pure timelessness, and I knew that Alan would never, for one moment of one hour of one day, leave my side.

I have had it easier than most cancer victims because of those five things, and the greatest of them has always been the timelessness. With that I could and can live. Without it, I simply do not think so.

I wish that I had died before Alan asked me to choose between that and him.

When the dew began to fall the little night wind off the sea was suddenly too cold, and I got up and went into the house and lit the birch logs in the fireplace. I made coffee and took the big road atlas down from the bookshelf and spread it out on my board and looked at it, sipping coffee. There it was: Nag's Head. Lying far to my south in all that great, windy blue. And on its bright tan outer dunes a great black house with, now, a seaward wing like a gull in flight rising from it, and in that house three girls frozen like Keats' brides of quiet, waiting for me to come and finish, with them, a book that had lain open and unread for more than twenty-five years.

I studied the map. I could take 95 to below Philadelphia, 13 on to Norfolk, and then over to 158 and finally 12, to Nag's Head. It should take me no more than a day of steady driving. I would take the sports car. It should be a lovely drive; much of the last part of it bordered the sea, or was close to it. There were many bridges. One, the Chesapeake Bay bridge-tunnel, just before Norfolk, was immense. There would be wind, and blue space, and high sun, and under it, like a great tundra, the restless glitter of that other sea....

I saw, suddenly, what I could do. I could go, and I could spend my time in the sun with them, with Ginger and Fig and with Cecie...Cecie...as much time as I needed, or as little. And then I could get into my little red Alfa Romeo and start home again, home early, so that Alan would not yet be there waiting for me. I would go in the early morning, while it was still pearled and gray outside on the beach, and when I came to that great bridge across the air, I would need only to turn the wheel once, sharply....

I thought that at some point, in midair, I would not be able to tell which was sky and which was sea, and that it might well be like rising up to meet the young sun.

Outside, on the gravel, I heard the crunch of Alan's tires, and I went out to meet him on the front deck and tell him that I had decided, after all, to go to Nag's Head.

Chapter Eleven.

ONCE I left the Interstate at the Delaware state line a subtle change took place in the air and light, or perhaps I simply imagined it: I was in the South. Imaginary or not, the tenor of the journey eased and slowed, and the light thickened, and I stretched my legs and arms and took a deep breath. I smiled to myself. I had not been South in almost thirty years, but the pace of it still called out to my blood. It might have bothered me once; today, nothing did.

Highway 13 through Delaware down to Norfolk is studded like a cowboy's belt with small towns, farms, fields, and forests. There was something near-magical about them all in that golden September morning, some rare and wonderful thing to see. Perhaps it was nothing more than the light on a weather vane, or a roadside stand utterly scarlet with the first fall apples, or a sign on a sagging rural grocery that said STOP. GAS. SEE BIG SNAKE. But there was no hour's passing that did not give me a gift to enchant the senses. By the time I left Pennsylvania I was singing along with the radio.

Just after noon, almost precisely between Laurel and Pepper, in Delaware, I saw a vacant field that seemed, at first glance, to be full of marching elephants. I slowed and stared; there were, indeed, in deep green-gold grass, a line of great gray shiplike elephants swaying trunk to tail across the field, and another line of them tethered, fortresslike, off to the side. Then I saw the trucks and the puddled billow of big, dirty tents, and the bustle of workmen in the distance, and saw that the elephants were being led by a man who walked at the head of the leader with a long pole.

I laughed aloud in pure delight.

"Oh, Lordy," I said to the sweet, rushing air. "Circus has come to town. Everybody stop everything and go!"

A great surge of joy swept me, so fierce and pure that my head snapped back and my eyes closed for a moment, and wheeling dots of light swam behind my lids. I remembered the feeling from when I was a very small child; I would sometimes be so overwhelmed with it that I would dance about and hug myself. I had not felt it since then. I thought of something Cecie said once, at school, watching a cat out on the quadrangle lawn suddenly jack-knife from a demure crouch into a wild, stiff-legged leap, spin around twice, and shoot sidewise across the grass before subsiding into a sunny doze once more.

"That cat," she said, "is having an attack of delicious. It's what Aunt Martha always called it. Don't you know just exactly how that feels?"

"I am having an attack of delicious," I said to the elephants, and drove on down the sunny road laughing loudly. Anyone meeting me on the road would think I was drunk, or mad.

And I was very nearly both. I was quite literally drunk on sun and sky and rushing air and the music pouring out of the Blaupunkt, and strangeness and freedom. The top on the little red Alfa Romeo Spider was down, and the sky overhead was steel-blue with oncoming autumn, and the sun was as thick and sweet as poured cane syrup. My hair blew wild around my head and stung into my mouth and nose, and I could feel the top planes of my cheeks beginning to burn slightly with the sun. Under everything there sang a kind of secret glee, a delectable and hidden madness. And of course it was just that; anyone who has planned their death and set a date for it is mad, though perhaps not in the commonly accepted sense of the word. Or, at the very least, has left human context behind.

But it was precisely that death...or, rather, the idea of that vivid moment of free-floating, and the thought of exultant oblivion in bright air and water...that gave the day its wild sweetness. Death blued the sky to crystal and lit the sun to poignant gold; it stopped time like the sea did, and promised that winter did not have to come, or age, or pain. Or, in the odd way, death itself. I smiled again; I was dying so that I would not have to die. That was crazy, no doubt about it. No matter. The sense of control was as heady as wine. I was, with this death, finally in charge of the world.

"Death is the mother of beauty," I said aloud. Who said that? Where had I read it? I had a swift sense of a winter classroom, with cottony gray outside tall, dirty windows, and a radiator hissing, and wet wool steaming. Randolph, almost certainly. I would ask Cecie. Cecie would know. It was the kind of quote we had loved; if I had heard it I would have quoted it to her, and she would remember. I did not doubt that she would.

"Half in love with easeful death," I said then. That was Keats, I was almost sure of it. We had been just that, Cecie and I, in those untouched and unknowing days. And now I was again...

In mid-afternoon I stopped for a traffic light in a small town in Virginia. Onacock, I think it was, halfway down the long peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. The sense of great waters on both sides of me was heavy, though they were out of sight, and the vast bridge and tunnel looming up ahead was like a spot of deep, cold shade on the sunny road. I had been driving since five A.M., and my arms and neck and buttocks were tired. I rolled my head on my neck, back and forth, and saw, in the pickup truck ahead of me, a young woman reach up and touch the face of the man driving. He covered her hand with his, and then put his face down to hers and kissed her. She snuggled into his right arm, and he drove away with her head on his shoulder and his cheek bent to rest on her hair. I felt a single deep trembling pang, as if someone had touched a violin chord within me. How could I be leaving, have left for all time, Alan?

But I knew the answer to that. Far better to let him be anguished and angry at me than torn to death, along with me, by the Pacmen. Oh, far better, and a better love...besides, I lived in timelessness now. There was no longer any such thing as for all time, or forever. There was only this instant, this hour, this day. I would, I thought, write him a long letter on the night before I left Nag's Head. He would understand then. I had not said goodbye this morning; we had lain close together all last night, drifting in and out of sleep, and I had gotten up at four and simply put my packed bags in the Alfa and driven away. As I had left the dark bedroom he lifted his head and said thickly, "You going already?"

"Shhhh," I said. "Go back to sleep. If you try to say goodbye to me I won't be able to go at all, and then you'll be mad at me. I'll call you when I get there."

"See you in a week," he said, from the depths of the down pillow. "I'll be here when you get back. Be careful. Love you."

"I love you too," I said, and swallowed a startled sob, and was away from there as the dawn broke. Going around the deck to the front of the house I felt a track of wetness drying on my face. I flung my arm out toward the sea in a backward salute and ran the rest of the way to the Alfa. Until I cleared the Hamptons and was bowling down the tunnel-like banality of the Sunrise Highway, I resolutely thought of nothing at all.

After that it was easy. I had not brought Alan Abrams on this trip. I had not even brought Kate Abrams; in a sense, she had already died. It was Kate Lee driving this car along this September road. Kate Lee, going back at last to find the truth of the four girls who had left each other all those years ago.

I thought, somewhere in those bright, spinning hours, that the truth of us might turn out to be just what we had thought it was then. No more and no less. That would, in an odd way, be immensely reassuring, as if somewhere, somehow, those girls still lived, whole and vivid. But I already knew that it would not. I knew that the instant I called Ginger Fowler Sibley a week before, to tell her I was coming.

Her voice was exactly the same. It was as if she stood in the next room from me, all those years ago. I felt the breath go out of me in a little sigh, and the smallest smile tugged at my mouth. She was Ginger only and fully, no doubt about that. I have read that the voice is the last thing to change with age.

"Oh, my God, Kate," she burbled. "Oh, I can't believe it! Oh, you sound so...good! And you're coming; your nice husband said you'll come..."

"Well, I'm thinking about it," I heard myself saying. Somehow I could not make myself say the words, "Yes. I will come."

"Oh, Kate, please," Ginger said. "I want to see the others, of course I do, but it's you I've missed most. We'd lost you so completely; nobody had any idea where you were for all those years, until the directory came out, not even Cecie...Kate, listen, I've hated it all these years, that we were estranged. I've known how badly I behaved, and how it must have hurt you...I've wanted so badly to try and make things right with you. Paul..." she hesitated. "Paul won't be here. He'll be at the Norfolk house. It'll just be the four of us. But if you don't want to, I'll understand..."

My heart gave a fishlike flop. Remembered love flooded me. I realized that it had been more than a quarter of a century since I had minded about Paul Sibley, but that good, single-hearted Ginger had been suffering because of it all those years. Suffering at my imagined suffering.

"Of course I'm coming," I said. "I've missed you all, too. Oh, I have! Lord, though, Ginger, where on earth did you find Fig?"

There was another pause. Then Ginger said, "Kate, don't you know who Fig is?"

"Who she is?" I said. "No..."

"Kate...Fig is Georgina Stuart. You know, all those books with the half-naked women on the jackets? All those television talk shows? All that shit in People and Entertainment Weekly?"

I could not speak. I literally could not. Fig? Georgina Stuart? Whose string of lurid bestsellers and affairs and public outrages were the stuff of tabloid headlines and national morning and late night shows, whose platinum-streaked mane and half-naked breasts had been in as many magazine pages as the rapturous harlots on the covers of her paperbacks? And whose husbands had been nearly as numerous? Even I, buried in flowers by the sea these many years, knew who Georgina Stuart was. You would have to have lived your life on Uranus not to know.

"Stuart?" I said numbly. I heard my voice squeak.

"Stuart with a U," Ginger laughed. "You know how she felt about you. I always thought she wanted to be you, and I guess she did, at that. I don't wonder she borrowed your name; she borrowed everything else. Don't you remember? She even looks sort of like you, Kate, or like you used to. You wouldn't know her now. Literally. God knows how much weight she's lost, and how much plastic surgery she's had."

"Dear God, old Fig Newton is Georgina Stuart," I said, beginning to laugh. "I wouldn't miss this for anything in the world. I'm going to have to read one of those awful books before I get there. And she'd really bother with the likes of us now?"

"It was her idea," Ginger said happily. "She called one day early this month out of the blue and said she was coming down this way on a book tour, and wouldn't it be fun if we could meet at my house on the beach, like we did that time back at school. You remember. She even offered to pay for it, but of course, I said no to that. And Kate, she absolutely insisted that you come. She said it was a condition. She wanted me to write you because she said she knew she used to drive you crazy and she didn't want to spook you off. She even offered to send a private plane for you. I said I'd bet the farm you wouldn't come in a private plane, but I'd ask, so consider yourself asked. I know she really did bug you awfully at school, but she seems so different now, really nice, even if she is famous all over the world. Don't let what you remember of her keep you from coming. She's bound to have changed..."

"No, I don't care about that now," I said. "I'm dying of curiosity." And cancer, I thought but did not say, and giggled. "No plane, though. I'll drive down. I've already looked at the map: I think I can do it in a day. Listen, Ginger...what about Cecie?"

"Cecie's coming, if she can get her mother-in-law into a respite program of some kind the government has. She's wheelchair-bound now. There's not anybody else to stay with her."

"Mother-in-law..." I said stupidly.

"Have you heard from Cecie at all?" Ginger said. "I've kept up with her a little, but she hasn't mentioned you..."

"No," I said softly. "Not at all."