I began laughing. I laughed so hard that I could not stand, but slumped, my arms still around her, back down onto the seat, pulling her down. The boat wallowed wildly. She was laughing, too. We wept and howled and roared. I had not laughed so hard since those nights at Randolph so long ago, and then it was, as it was now, at Fig Newton.

"L'chaim, old Kate," Cecie gasped as the dock rose up before us in the darkness.

"L'chaim, old Cece," I said.

When we got out of the Land Rover in the sandy yard of the cottage, still giggling, Ginger came unsteadily down the wrought-iron staircase from the studio to meet us. She wore the yellow silk caftan that she had on when I had first gotten there, and her hair was snailed and lacquered into a gleaming helmet atop her head, and vermilion lipstick leaked crazily up the small furrows around her lips. She carried a full glass, and she stumbled twice.

"In the bonds, Tri Omegas," she said, slurring, and giggled. "I have a surprise for you. Come on up and see."

Something prickled at the back of my neck. My skin felt as if a little cold wind had rippled over sunburn.

"What?" I said.

"Paul. He came in while you were gone," Ginger said merrily. "He's waiting for you in the studio. For y'all, I mean. Of course."

And so it ended.

Chapter Fourteen.

LATE that night the outriders of the storm came in. I saw them stream slowly across the high white moon, the mare's-tail clouds that Ginger's father had shown us long ago at just this time, in just this sky. From where I lay, my face turned on the hot pillow so I could see the sky and sea, they looked like long, wind-blown tresses of silver hair flung across the sky. Mermaids' hair, maybe. Paul had said, as we all left the studio for bed, that the mermaids had gone from the Outer Banks, but perhaps, after all, they had not. Surely, if you were to hear them singing, it would be on a night like this, riding the slow silver sea before a storm. I rolled over on my other side and then back to the window, and flung the covers off me. The night was thick and still, even with the window wide open. There was no wind off the sea. The moon-bright room was airless. I had been lying awake since before eleven. I knew by now that I would not sleep.

The week was over, of course. The girls of September were scattered even before we parted physically. We might stay on for our appointed three more days, but now it would be middle-aged women who slept and ate and drank and laughed in the big house on the Outer Banks. Other people entirely. Well, I thought, surely it would have ended before it ended, anyway. I can't imagine how we carried it as long as we did. The center could not hold, and didn't. I lay under the weight of the moon, not young Kate Lee anymore, and not Kate Abrams, either. I did not know this woman...for woman she was. Desire dark and mature and fierce flamed along her veins and made her toss in the hot bedclothes, desire with nothing in it of tenderness or wit or subtlety. Simply, I wanted to go up to Paul Sibley in his dark studio and make love to him until there was nothing left of either of us. Until we were consumed and gone.

If it had not been for the utter shock of seeing him when I had thought not to, I think I could have kept the fragile skin of timelessness and content around me. I think, if there had been any warning, I might have kept it intact no matter what. But I had had no warning at all. Ginger's words shattered the shell, and the sight of him blew the shards away. And ever since I had been as I always had in his presence: naked, skinned, vulnerable to anything and everything in the world. Vulnerable to death: the Pacmen and the waiting bridge shimmered and sang. Vulnerable to the life I felt leaping in his flesh when he touched me. Vulnerable to the answering thunderclap of life in my own.

He had only kissed me lightly on the cheek, as he did Cecie; brushed my burning cheek with his mouth and said, in the voice that I had not remembered except in the marrow of my bones, "My God, Kate, you've struck a deal with the devil. Get out of here and age twenty years before you come back."

And I had said, my ears roaring, "Well, hey. Fancy meeting you here."

And he had laughed, because after all, where else should I meet him but in his own white room above the sea, even if it was no longer white? And I had blushed because it had been a stupid thing to say, and he had said, still grinning, "You still do that, don't you?," and gone back to his seat in the wing chair by the fireplace. And this new woman was born, whole and vivid and hungry, and I feared and hated her. She was all hunger and thirst and fear and anger; she gnawed and raged and shrieked inside. Outside her, I smiled cheerfully and chattered, and drank my scotch, and laughed as Cecie and Fig and Ginger told him about our week. And sat as far across the room from him as I could get, in a deep leather armchair, with my knees drawn up against my chest and my arms wound tightly around them so he would not see the beating of that other woman's heart.

I watched him as he listened to us, amused and attentive. He had changed; you would not mistake this man for the hawklike young architect I had left behind at Randolph. He was heavier, massive, now: it was as if even his long bones had thickened. But he was not fat. Muscle played along his forearms and in his neck. There would be enormous power in his grasp. He was deeply tanned, as tanned and leathery as Ginger, but of course it looked right on him, and the Kate I had known felt a flicker of annoyance at the unfairness of that. His thick black hair was striped with pure white. It was startling and theatrical; you would remember him. He would stand out in any crowd now. Well, he always did. That had not changed. The presence of him smote the air around us four women like something not heard, but felt: the percussion of an explosion.

"You look like an aristocratic skunk," Cecie said.

He laughed. His teeth gleamed white. There were deep, sallow circles under his eyes, and long furrows in his forehead and cheeks, but he was, somehow, still the young Paul who had overwhelmed them all with French cooking and wine and music at that long-ago dinner for them. It was, I remembered, when Ginger and Cecie and Fig had first met him. It changed a lot of things, that night.

"And you look like Peter Pan grown a little older but still not up," he said. "You look just like I thought you would. You and Kate. Me and Ginger, we haven't managed so well. And Fig...what can I say? Is this a Fig I see before me?"

"In the flesh," Fig said. It was the throaty purr she had used with Poolie Prout, and Cecie grinned at me. I made myself grin back. I wondered where Poolie was, and in what condition. Fig looked languid and creamy.

"In the very considerable flesh," Paul said. "I was prepared for you, though. I've seen you on about a million book jackets and talk shows. But Cecie and Kate..."

He looked from her to me. His eyes stayed on me.

"Fix us another round, honey," Ginger said. "I'll go get some munchies."

He looked levelly at Ginger, and I did, too. Somehow it was hard to do it. Looking at her was not good; looking at Ginger had always given me a little surge of warmth and safety, but there was nothing of that Ginger here. Even less than there had been of her when she had met me on the stairs. Was it only a few days before? I had thought we had lost that sad, wrecked, lacquered woman for good, but here she was back. She smiled widely and fixedly at her husband, her jewelry flashing in the firelight, her heavy face painted and strange, her hair impenetrable and dreadful. Her eyes glittered under the beading of mascara, and there was sweat on her upper lip and forehead, and crescents of it stained the yellow silk caftan under her arms. She swayed slightly on the gilded sandals.

"I'll go get the munchies," Paul said. "I don't want you taking a header down the stairs. We just got your leg out of a cast after the last one. Fix yourselves another, girls; I think I'll pass. I have to get up early tomorrow; I've got a long drive ahead of me."

"You're not staying?" It was a wail of disappointment, from Ginger. I thought that tears as well as liquor glistened in her eyes.

He shook his head. "Can't, I'm afraid. I've got to be in Alabama for a directors' meeting day after tomorrow, practically at dawn. I just came by to get some proxy forms. I'll be driving till midnight tomorrow night as it is. And the weather doesn't look good; there's a tropical something or other coming across the Carolinas from the Gulf, that should hit in the afternoon. They thought it would go the other way, but it didn't. You all might think about cutting it short and leaving in the morning, if you can bear to; it could just be a day's blow, but then again, it could hang around for two or three days and kick up all kinds of fuss. You never know about the Banks in September."

"Oh, no! Oh, don't any of you go," Ginger cried. "Even if it lasts, we could just dig in with the fire and the booze and the records and have a wonderful time. The Banks are famous for their hurricane parties..."

"I'm not going anywhere," Fig said languorously. "I'd love to see a real storm from this room. Or some room." And she smiled, silkily.

"Fig has become a close personal friend of Poolie Prout," Ginger giggled. It was a silly giggle, high and artificial. "I do believe it is to him she refers."

"My God, Fig, Poolie Prout is pond scum," Paul grinned. "The surest way I know to get busted for something unfunny and unsavory is to hang around him. He's been flirting with the Feds up and down this coast for years. It's only a matter of time."

"I like a little salt with my...ah...meat," Fig said.

"So I hear and read," Paul said, the grin widening. "Well, on your head be it. Whoever doesn't have a big, solid car better skedaddle, though. Whose Alfa is that?"

"Mine," I said. "But I really don't think..."

"You'd better be on the road early, Kate," he said, and he was not smiling. "I'm not kidding. I've seen the coast road three feet under surf in bad storms, and as it is it'll be following you up the coast if it doesn't blow out to sea..."

"I'm not leaving," I said loudly. My heart was pounding, and my ears rang with pure fright. I saw, as clearly as I saw him across the room, watching me, the great bridge arching into air in the dawn over the Chesapeake Bay. The bridge, and rain blowing straight across it...The girl who had not feared the bridge, who had been half in love with it, was gone now. The new woman went cold at the thought of it. No, I would not leave. To leave would be to go to the bridge...

Deep inside me the Pacmen gobbled and gnawed.

"No," I said.

"Oh, it is going to be just so perfect!" sang Fig in a new voice. We all stared at her. Her face was radiant, and her eyes glittered; her whole small, carved body seemed to vibrate, to shimmer. You could practically feel the heat coming off her. No one spoke.

"So wonderfully, totally perfect; just like at school in winter, all closed in, just the four of us sisters, remember, Effie, the time we had the ice storm and we couldn't even leave the house, and we didn't have any power, and we wrapped up in blankets in yours and Cecie's room and ate apples and drank tapwater coffee and you read poetry to us by a flashlight..."

It was Fig's voice. Not Georgina Stuart's, but Fig Newton's. Long-ago Fig, shrill and skewed and...wrong. What had called her back, I wondered? The storm? No, of course, it was Paul. I thought then that she was probably still in love with him. Why, I thought bitterly, should that change?

"Well, then, it's settled. Let's drink to that," Ginger chortled, and snatched up the heavy Waterford whiskey decanter and dropped it. It flew into a cloud of stinging crystal shards, and amber liquor splashed everywhere. I saw it spatter over Fig's white silk breasts, and drip slowly off Paul's brown face. The silence was long and terrible. I saw Cecie close her eyes. Fig smiled and smiled, looking about her interestedly. Ginger began to cry.

"I'm sorry," she whimpered, her eyes on Paul's face. "I'm so sorry..."

"Come on, Gingerpuss," he said neutrally. "Let's get you to bed before you wreck the joint."

"Oh, no, please..."

"Come on. Party's over," he said, and took her forearm in his brown hand. I saw Ginger wince, but she did not pull away.

"I'll probably read a little and turn in, too," he said, looking around at us pleasantly. "You all carry on. I'll make pancakes in the morning if anybody's up early enough. Specialty of the house."

"You got a deal," Cecie said, and I nodded. Relief flooded me; under it, the new woman wailed, "Don't go!"

"Do you remember the mermaids?" Fig said in her old-new voice. "Remember, Ginger, about the mermaids who sang in the storm, for sailors who were going to wreck? Maybe we'll hear them. Have you ever heard them, Paul?"

"Nope," he said. "Nary a trill. I think they must have relocated. Maybe up to Long Island. What about it, Katie? You ever hear the mermaids?"

"Nary a trill," I said.

He turned and was gone down the outside stairs, marching Ginger before him. I heard her voice all the way down, pleading like a small girl's. I did not hear him speak at all.

"Anybody for a nightcap?" Fig said brightly.

"Maybe I will, just one," Cecie said.

I was surprised; she drank seldom, and I had never known her to seek out Fig's company. But the surprise was dulled and blunted under the howling of the new woman.

"Shut up," I said to her aloud, out in the still, thick night, and went into the big house and down the hall to my bedroom, and shut the door, and crawled into my white bed without washing my face or putting on my nightgown. I did not sleep. I did not think I would.

At three A.M. I got up and slid into my robe and went out onto the deck. I know it was three because I heard Ginger's foolish little cuckoo clock strike the hour in the kitchen as I tiptoed past Cecie's bed. She had come in an hour or so earlier, and had whispered, "You awake?"

I had not answered. Neither young Kate nor the new woman had anything to say about this night. Over, just let it be over...Cecie slid into her bed and did not speak again. Presently I heard the familiar small sigh that meant she had slipped into sleep. Now, as I went softly past her bed, she stirred but did not waken. She usually did not, once she slept. I wondered how Cecie handled those heart-sickening, breath-sucking night horrors of middle age, whether she simply made dreams of them, or even if she had them at all. I thought that if anyone could avoid them, it would be Cecie Hart Fiori. The night horrors are about death. Cecie was more about life than anyone I have ever known.

Out on the deck, the night was dark. The clouds had curdled over the moon and cobbled the entire sky now, flying, ragged gray, shot with silver from behind. Where the sea had been burning cold silver it was now leaden, pewter, tossing. The wind was strange; it whispered and moaned, then fell still, then crooned again. The night air was chilly, but the wind was warm and thick with wetness and, somehow, the odor of tropical trees.

I had thought I might walk down to the edge of the sea, but with the moon gone and the rags of gray clouds flying and the eerie little moan of the warm wind the beach was suddenly a fearful place. I remembered a strange little horror movie I had seen when I was a child, called I Walked With a Zombie; through it all a warm wind keened over a black tropical sea, while a giant emaciated black zombie came on and on down the silent beach, his monstrous feet dragging in the sand. This wind was like that. I turned away from the dunes and the sea and went around the end of the deck to where the big hammock hung, far under the porch eaves. I would finish the night there, and wait for the morning.

He was there, of course. I had known he would be; or at least the new woman knew; knew it on the backs of her hands and in the loosening joints of hips and knees. I saw only the bulk of him, black against the blackness, and the slight motion of the hammock. But there was no doubt who it was. I turned to go back into the house, in blind flight, but my naked feet hung back, and he saw me.

"Don't go back," he called softly. "I've been sitting here for two hours, willing you out here. Stay and talk a little while."

"I can't, really," I said. "I was just...I was on my way..."

"You were on your way here, and here you are," Paul said, smiling. I saw the gleam of his teeth in the dark. "Come sit. I'm not going to molest you. No nose dives out of hammocks this time. It's a different hammock."

I went over and sat down in an old green-painted Boston rocker across from the hammock. He was stretched out full length, his arms crossed beneath his head. He wore shorts and a white sweater, and was barefoot. In this thick darkness, he looked perhaps thirty years old. He did not sit up, but he turned his head to face me.

"You couldn't sleep," he said. It was not a question.

"No. It's sultry tonight, and the wind sounds funny. It's the first time since I got here I've been too warm."

I thought that that sounded suggestive, and reddened. He could not have seen the color, but I heard him laugh softly.

"It's the tropical air coming in from the gulf," he said. "It always leads a storm about twelve or fourteen hours. This one doesn't smell like a big one, but still, I wish you'd get on out of here in the morning."

"I'll be okay," I said. "I can always wait it out here with the others. But I can drive that car in anything. We have some pretty hairy Nor'easters on Long Island."

"You and your sports cars," he said. "I've never forgotten that little MG. Long Island...somehow I never really pictured you in that part of the world. You were always the quintessential Southern woman to me. But at least you got your ocean, didn't you? And your house beside it. I'm glad I didn't do you out of that, too."

"Paul..."

"Don't worry, Kate. I'll keep my mid-life crisis to myself. I just meant that I'm glad you've had the life you deserve. The man you deserve. From what Ginger tells me, you've made it all work for you. I'd like to know your Alan. I see your credits and your awards: Abrams and Abrams. It's really nice stuff, Katie Lee. Way beyond nice. You know, for the longest time, I didn't know that the second Abrams was you? I'd lost you completely..."

He broke off. Then he said, softly, "Completely."

Warmth flashed in my groin and ran along my legs and up into my arms. My wrists felt heavy. His voice had always done that to me.

"How did you find out?" I said chattily. Stay away from that...

"Oh, I guess Fig told Ginger and Ginger told me. Fig's been tracking you for a while, I think."

"What do you think of her?" I said brightly. This was safe. "Of Fig as a living legend?"

"What is there to think about a woman who completely made herself over from scratch, including your nose? It is, you know. I think that on the eighth day she rested. I think, in a way, you have to admire it, but in a way it scares me. She's so totally singleminded. She always was...inexorable, I guess. I never doubted that she'd get just what she wanted."

I laughed. It sounded almost natural.

"She didn't always," I said. "For a while there, she wanted you more than anything else. From the way she carried on tonight, I think she still does. I thought she was going to jump your bones in front of all of us."

He laughed.

"So did Cecie," he said. "She sat up with old Fig until close to two, just to keep her in line."

Revelation and amusement and new love for Cecie flooded me.

"She did, didn't she?" I said. "I wondered about that. Little old Cece, sitting up there choking down booze and trying not to fall asleep, looking out for Ginger's interests."

"I don't think," Paul said, "that it was Ginger's interests she was looking out for."

"I don't want to do this, Paul," I said.

"I know, I'm sorry," he said. "Tell me about your life. Tell me what you're like now."

"What you see is what you get," I said. "Nothing much has changed." I was having difficulty breathing. His body, barely visible in the dark, was like a magnet to my flesh. The space between it and my hands felt huge and cold and alien.

"Oh, Katie, it has," he said. "It has all changed."

"Tell me about you," I said desperately. "Tell me what you do. Besides being a captain of industry, I mean. Ginger has told us about that. You've just about tripled the mill operation, she says. Are you terribly rich?"

"Terribly," he said. "What do I do? Well, when I'm not in Alabama or Norfolk, I do things around here. I do an awful lot of fishing and hunting, and I run on the beach, and I hang-glide up at the ridge, and I stay out on the water a lot. Mainly, I fish. You remember that old motel we saw the first time we came up here?"

"The Carolina Moon," I said.

"Yeah. Well, it sits right in the middle of the best fishing banks on the East Coast. People come from all over the world to fish Pamlico and the ocean there. I have a permanent room at the Carolina Moon, and I come and go when I please. There's really nothing else in the area. There are guys from Miami to Bangor who'd kill me for the key to that room."

"The Carolina Moon has loomed large over my stay here," I said lightly. "The incomparable Poolie Prout said this morning he has a permanent room there, too."