"She'll have him lifting the plane when we land," Ginger whispered.

"I doubt if he'll have to," Cecie snorted. "Looks like she's halfway to those Magic Fingers as we speak."

"Even at night," Poolie Prout said to Fig. "Even with no moon and no stars. Even in fog at night. Even in rain at night. I've landed in any kind of weather you can imagine all up and down this coast. You get an itch to see the Carolina Moon by night, you give me a call. I'll get you there."

"I'll keep it in mind," Fig laughed, and looked back at us and winked. Poolie Prout put his hand on her thigh and left it there. She did not move it.

We set down in the little harbor at Ocracoke and had lunch there, at a fish place on the wharf. Poolie vanished into the dark bar, to play video games and frog biceps with his buddies. We could hear their raucous laughter. He was undoubtedly telling them about his conquest of the rich older woman. We four each had steamed blue crabs and cold beer, and a slice of the lemon pie that a handwritten sign on the wall said LaVerle, the wife of the Prop., made herself. If she did, she was not a great deal better than Cecie. We ate the gummy pie, laughing. We laughed a great deal at that lunch; I don't remember at what, now. But I remember the laughter, and under it, the sadness, like chill dew in grass.

When we were finished with the pie and coffee, Ginger said, her voice blurry with champagne and beer and unshed tears, "I love you all so much. I don't want this ever to end."

"Me either," Cecie said. "But if I'm not back in three days Mama Fiori will have one of her screaming fits and they'll throw her out on the street. Even the government won't keep her one minute longer than they have to by law."

"Why don't you just pack her up and send her back to the brother?" I said. "To Gino. Surely they're better able to handle her than you are. Surely, now that you're alone there..."

"Because dear Celeste, my sainted sister-in-law, says she'll leave Gino if his mother comes back," Cecie said acidly. "Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say, but somehow Gino can't see it that way. I keep thinking she'll die any day, but she never will; she'll outlive me, and then my poor sons will probably get her. She's going to be passed down from generation to generation of Fioris, like a family curse."

"Isn't it hard to go back, after something like this?" Fig said.

"It will be the hardest thing I ever do," Cecie said. She was not smiling. I felt tears come into my eyes. I wanted, suddenly, to hand her the moon; to fix things for her; to make her life good again, with one grand, sweeping gesture. I had money enough to do something: get her book published, stake her to a year's study at the Cloisters, hire her a year's respite from the old woman. But I did not, now, have the time...

"Let's at least make it an annual thing," Ginger snuffled. "Let's come every year, this time of year...the fall is best, I think, don't you all?.... Oh, let's do! Every year! It will give me something to look forward to..."

She fell silent. We did not look at each other or her. The little sentence, broken off, told me much I did not want to know about Ginger's marriage to Paul Sibley.

"Well, we have three more days, and the rest of this one," I said briskly. "Let's fill 'em up. Let's do things we'll remember till...next time. Everybody gets to pick one day of their own. Cecie, you're first because you're the smallest. Pick something and we'll do it this afternoon."

"I want to go to Currituck Gardens," she said, smiling at me."And I want to take the runabout and go out into the sound and watch the sunset from there. Y'all don't have to come, but that's what I want to do."

"You got it," I said.

When we got back to the dock in Roanoke Sound it was just coming on two o'clock. We had drunk the rest of the champagne coming back up the wild, blue coast, and my head spun gently and rhythmically with it. I smiled and smiled, at whatever transpired, at nothing. On the dock we stretched and yawned and blinked around us. The day had warmed like an apple in the sun: on the surface there was a bronze, sweet-smelling heat, but at its heart there was still a crisp coolness. A little afternoon wind was picking up; the tide would have turned an hour before.

"Nap for me, if we're going out to dinner," Ginger said sleepily. "I can just about make it to bed. Y'all drop me off and take the Rover and go on over to the gardens. And if you still want to take the runabout out, it's the one at the end over there, under the tarp. Just tell Bobby in the boathouse. Keys are in the blue saucer on the kitchen counter. Do either of you know how to handle a boat?"

"Are you kidding?" Cecie said. "I was born in a boat."

"Well, then, sayonara," Ginger mumbled. "Bed, here I come."

"Fig?" Cecie said.

"I think," Fig said in a slow, molten voice, "that I may just run on up the coast with Poolie a little way. He says there's lots up toward Duck and Corolla I ought to see."

She smiled at us and then slid the smile around to Poolie Prout. His face did not change, but his bull neck reddened.

"I'll just bet there's a lot she ought to see," Cecie said, as I wrestled the Land Rover onto the main highway and headed it south toward the causeway over to Manteo. "And she undoubtedly will, the minute he unzips it."

"Cecie Hart Fiori!" I laughed. "I never heard you talk trash before."

"Well, they sure ain't going to play mah jongg," she said. "Lord, she was practically panting. I never saw such a performance. He must be twenty years younger than she is."

"I somehow don't think that's the subject closest to his mind right now," I grinned. "Maybe she's researching a book."

"You're probably right," Cecie said, propping her feet up on the dashboard. "Fig is just not the type to do something without a reason. Even that."

When we got to Currituck Gardens there was only a half hour left until the new autumn closing time, and so we loped around the trails and circles of raked white gravel, drowning ourselves in the flaming splendor of the fall annuals and perennials. The gardens were formal ones, seventeenth-century English, with statuary and vistas and follies and a yew maze, and many leaping fountains. I admired them, but somehow I could not warm to them. They were too tamed, too groomed and controlled and considered. To my eye they cried out for splendid chaos, for randomness and unseemly opulence and the rowdy sweetness of the accidental. I trotted along behind Cecie as she looked, and exclaimed, and knelt to sniff, and cocked her head to consider. At the very back of the gardens, against a wall of warm, rosy old brick, we both stopped, our breath indrawn together.

The entire wall was covered with roses. They were a living fire, a mantle of burning, golden-hearted pure pink. The entire wall seemed to shimmer with life and light and health. The very air around it seemed suffused with radiance. You could, I thought, see that wall of roses for fifty miles in weather like today's.

Cecie looked up at me, shading her eyes with her hand.

"You know where these would be gorgeous?" she said. "On the dunes just outside your garden, the ones in that picture you showed me, that shield the garden from the beach. You couldn't see them from your side of the garden, but from the beach they'd just knock the socks off anybody passing by. And they'd live forever. They're rosa rugosa. Nothing kills them."

"What good would they be if I couldn't see them?" I said.

"I don't know," Cecie said, looking straight at me. "I guess they'd just say to the world, 'Hey, I'm Kate Lee, and I was here. I am here.' "

I turned and walked away, down the path toward the car. Cecie wanted to stop in the Garden Center for postcards, so I went to the Land Rover and climbed in and turned on the radio, and put my head back and closed my eyes and listened. The mannerly strains of a song I had liked at Randolph swam out into the warm air: "Lisbon Antigua." It had had a revival that summer and fall.

"She knows," I thought. "I don't know how, but she does."

I tried very hard to think of nothing else but the spilling strings on the radio, and by the time Cecie climbed into the front seat beside me, I was submerged in it, gone far away into the country of our youth.

We took the slender little runabout far down the Sound toward Oregon Inlet. Once we passed under the Umstead bridge over to Manteo, we were in wilder country, and the shacky little boat-houses and sagging docks and fish restaurants gave way to the uninhabited, undulating gold-green marshes that bordered the warm, shallow water. Salt marsh cordgrass waved in the late breeze, and huge, fierce green stands of marsh elder and myrtle and cottonbush rose beyond it. Cecie cut the motor to its lowest idle, and we drifted on the black surface as slowly as a water bug or a sailing leaf. Sometimes, near the shore, she put her paddle out to feel for the muddy bottom. She was as deft and sure with the exotic little red-hulled boat as if she had spent her life in one. But I felt sure that she had never been in anything as sleek and expensive as this arrow-shaped bauble. Ginger had said that it was new: Paul had just ordered it at the New York Boat Show the previous spring.

I knew that the highway down to the Hatteras National Seashore was just out of sight over the stands of vegetation; we could hear, faintly, occasional cars whining by. But the sense of isolation was acute and all-encompassing. Night was coming on, a purple shelf to the west, over the distant shore, and the slapping gray water was going pink and silver out on its middle. I shivered.

"It feels like the dawn of time out here," I said. "I keep waiting for something huge and scaly to rise up out of that marsh, bellowing."

Just then a great blue heron rose up out of the long spartina, flapping wetly. A big, flopping fish flashed silver in his beak; he lumbered away into the clear air directly over our heads, showering us with drops of blood-warm water.

"Make that a pterodactyl," I said, laughing, my heart pounding.

Cecie lifted her paddle and saluted him.

"Good hunting, amigo," she called after him.

"You ought to be a hunting and fishing guide," I said. "Or even better, a white goddess. Boy, wouldn't those little red guys have loved you, with that wild white hair and fierce blue eyes and white skin? They'd have danced around you at the council fires, and given you all the best pemmican. You'd have had it made."

"Pemmican and council fires," Cecie snorted. "Lord, Kate. Those were the Plains Indians. What an ignoramus you are. The Roanokes ate mainly fish and crabs, and were tall and skinny. But I know what you mean. It does look prehistoric out here, doesn't it? A salt marsh like this is probably the oldest and most unchanged part of the earth we have left; it wasn't a whole lot different when the Manteos and the Wancheses were paddling around here. And rich. There's the richest and densest life system on earth all around you here. It's absolutely self-sustaining; it doesn't need anything else. There's more life down there than along the Ganges."

"Looks like plain old mud to me," I said, watching a smoke-like cloud of bottom silt rise at the touch of her paddle.

"Yeah, but in that mud there's everything from plankton to all kinds of fish, crabs, shrimp, and squid. Plus oysters and mussels and snails and periwinkles and turtles and terrapins and raccoons over there on the banks, and mice, and about a million birds and herons..."

"You could be a marine biologist," I said. "As well as a medieval herbalist. Why don't you write about this?"

"Other people have done it better," she said comfortably. "I just want to live in the middle of it. I'm going to get back to the Tidewater, or some kind of salt marsh, one of these days. I may have to stake Mama Fiori out on a hummock like a goat to do it, but I'll get there."

As we neared the great cut through the ribbon of the Banks that was Oregon Inlet, the water began to move faster down deep, and the surface rippled with motion and purpose. The air cooled, and the sense of the sea's vastness, just across the line of vegetation, was strong and urgent. Cecie cut the motor and tossed the anchor overboard. It settled to the bottom with a silvery sucking, and we rocked on the pinkening skin of the water until the ripples subsided.

"This is far enough," she said. "I don't want to mess with Oregon Inlet at high tide. There's just too much water coming through there too fast. Did you know that there wasn't an inlet here until 1846? It was just the Banks. But there was a huge hurricane in September of that year, and the water just cut right through the Banks and made the Inlet. It's named for the Oregon, a sidewheeler that was the first ship through it into the Sound."

"How do you know all this?" I said. "You know more about the Banks than Ginger does, I think."

"I got some books out of the library when I knew I was coming," she said. "Most of them are ghost stories; it's hard to find any hard facts about this old coast. Right where we're anchored there's supposed to be a ghost ship that shows up on winter nights, burning for all eternity. It's on its way down to Ocracoke, but it never gets there. So they say."

"I'd just as soon be about our business," I said, shivering a little. The Sound and the marsh and the sky above it were absolutely empty. The afternoon had turned, for good and all, toward evening.

"Let's wait a little," Cecie said. "There's something that happens sometimes, around sundown, and I wanted to show it to you. If it doesn't, in a few minutes, I promise we'll head for home."

"What?" I said apprehensively.

"Surprise," she grinned.

"It better be real," I said.

"Realer than Dick's hatband," Cecie said. "If it happens. It doesn't, always."

She wouldn't tell me anymore, and we sat quietly, feeling the great, inexorable drawing away of the sun, the huge, formless oncoming of the night. The air was still as clear as spring water, and a sunset like a conflagration burned over to the west. It was all purple and red and pink and gold, shot through with streaks of pure, pale green. I have never seen anything so lovely; there seemed no sense in remarking on it, so I did not. Once Cecie turned and smiled at me over her shoulder, but she did not speak either.

There was a long, green afterglow. I knew there would be light for another hour and a half yet, but suddenly, I wanted to go back to the cottage. I wanted yellow lights and the sound of jazz or rock drifting from the studio, and the smell of something cooking, and the ripple of laughter. Anything could happen out here in this flat place where the land slid into the water. Anything could come.

Cecie seemed to sense my mood. She swung around on the seat and said, "You know that you never talk about Alan? You don't talk about him, and you don't talk about what you want to do with him, how you want your lives to be tomorrow or next week or next month. Don't you have any kind of agenda, old Kate?"

She wrinkled her nose at the yuppie phrase, and I smiled. I cast about in my mind for some way to nudge her away from this. I did not want to talk about Alan; could not, in fact. Alan belonged to another woman, and she no longer existed. I intended to keep it that way for as long as I had to. If that woman did not exist, then neither did the Pacmen.

"There's no tomorrow,' " I sang. " 'There's just tonight.' "

"Thank you, Jean Paul Sartre," Cecie said sharply. "A nice existential philosophy. Only aren't you curious? Don't you want some say in tomorrow?"

"I'm not awfully sure there's going to be much of a tomorrow," I said. I meant it lightly, but it did not sound that way here on the darkening water.

She shook her white head.

"There were people like you in the hospital," she said, "and they scared me to death. Well, not like you, but they said the same thing. They didn't live one minute ahead, not one second. They had no stake in the future. Didn't want any. And that did scare me. And you scare me when you say that."

"Just tell me what's so hot about tomorrow," I said. "What's tomorrow got that right now doesn't?"

"Tomorrow is when I might see a Canada goose up close, or win the lottery, or one of the boys might marry Brooke Shields, or a man from Venus might land in my thyme patch," Cecie said. She said it intently. "Possibilities, Kate. Tomorrow is about possibilities."

"No, it isn't," I said in a low, furious voice. "It's about death. If there's a tomorrow, then there's death in it somewhere. Tomorrow won't bring back Stephen. Or Vinnie."

"How the hell do you know?" she said, just as vehemently. "It might. You don't know. You never will. You don't have to worry about death, Kate, because you've already had yours..."

Something bumped the boat. It bumped again before I could jerk my head around to look. I heard Cecie draw her breath in in a soft little gasp, and then I saw them. The boat was ringed with big, sleek, wet, gray seal-like heads, nudging and bobbling and splashing. I started to scream and Cecie laid a hand on my knee. Two of the heads came out of the water and stared over the gunwale of the boat directly into my eyes, and I saw the bright, wide-set black button eyes, and the upcurved snouts, and the smiles; heard the strange, wet little breathy exhalations from the blowholes, smelled the sea strong on them. Dolphins. We were surrounded by dolphins.

I drew in my breath again, and Cecie said in a low voice, "They won't hurt you. They're the sweetest, friendliest things in the sea. They're curious, and they want to play. Sit still and see what happens."

I did and it was incredible. It was like something out of a wonderful childhood dream, or a fairy tale. There was an element of fright in it, of eeriness, because they were so big and so close, and so wild, for all the bumping, nudging friendliness, and the clowns' antics. These were sea creatures, things of myth and legend, born of wildness and a different element entirely. But mostly it was simply...enchanted.

For they did play. There were, we counted, twelve of them, twelve enormous, shining creatures with sleek skins like wet gray inner tubes; I know because I touched one. Reached right over and touched him as he reared himself up out of the sea to look at me, grinning his greetings. He felt sleek as glass and firm and alive, yet unlike anything I had ever touched. He felt...transcendent.

"Oh," I said softly. "Oh. Oh."

For fully half an hour, until the last green light began to fade, they put on a show for us. They swam in formation around the boat and then away from it; fell into a straight line and porpoise-dived toward us like swimmers in a water ballet; leaped in pairs and threes far out of the water, sometimes completely, tossing their tails, and splashed down again, still in their sets. They swam backward in formation, their bright faces staring at us; I had the sense that if they had been on land they would have been dancing backward on their tails. They dived and surfaced directly under and around us, smacking the water with the gray, rubbery tails; they arced and capered and soared, and slapped the water flat with their beautiful big bodies, sending silver sheets of it over us in the boat. If we clapped our hands, they shot out of the water in unison, like underwater missiles. If we shouted and applauded, they raced away and came booming back down the Sound in twos, fours, sixes, and once, all in a line. Twelve of them. They put their faces up to ours, and squeaked and whistled and chittered their strange, unearthly little cries, and sometimes lay still in the water with just their heads on the boat, gazing soulfully at us. If we had wanted, I think we could have slipped out of the boat and mounted them and ridden away. We laughed and sang to them, we shouted and clapped, we whistled and petted them, and once Cecie reached over and hugged a massive gray head. "Ondine," I thought. "She is Ondine."

And just as suddenly they were gone. There was a last fillip of tail, and they submerged, and in a moment the dark, satiny sea was as still as if they had never been there. We looked at each other. Neither one of us had said a word. Both of us were crying, silently.

"That's why tomorrow," Cecie sobbed. "That's why."

"I love you, Cecie," I said, and reached over and kissed her, and hugged her close.

"I love you, too," she said. We sat for a moment with our wet cheeks pressed together. We had never said it to each other before. I felt an enormous sense of peace.

She flicked on the motor and the running lights, and we headed up the Sound toward the dock in Nag's Head. We said very little on the silent, deep-blue trip back. Soon the lights of Nag's Head began to appear on either side of us, and the world of people leaned in close once more.

"Shall we tell them?" Cecie said, as we turned east and began to cut in toward the dock.

"No," I said. "I don't think so. I think I want to keep this for us."

"Me, too," she said.

She began to whistle through her teeth, and then she chuckled, in the dark.

"You know Maslow? The peak experience guy? What he said about a real peak experience: that it told you something about your relationship with the harmony of being? He'd have loved those guys," she said.

"That's nice," I said. "That's a nice thought."

"Fuckin' aye," Cecie said.

As we drew close to the dock, she pointed up toward the east.

"See that light? That top one? That's in the studio at the cottage. Ten to one old Fig's up there with the telescope, looking at us. Hi, Fig!" And she waved gaily into the darkness.

I laughed.

"That's ridiculous. How do you know? Why would she do that?"

"Because I went up there and looked one day when she wasn't there, and she's got Paul's telescope pulled over to the window where she can see the house and the yard and the road and the dock. And because that's what Fig does. She looks at you. She watches you. Stand up, Kate, and let's give her something to look at..."

"What on earth..." I said.

"Stand up!" Cecie shouted, and I did. The boat rocked wildly. I staggered, and braced myself.

Cecie threw her arms around me and kissed me on the mouth and hugged me hard, and then turned to face the light and shouted, "Looky, Fig! Kate and I are queer for each other! Queer as three-dollar bills, gay as geese! Just what you always thought! Look ahere, Fig Newton!"

And she held up her hand and shot a bird into the darkness.