IT should have taken me about four hours to get there. It is seventy-eight miles from Nag's Head to Avon on the narrow blacktop National Park road, and the rain was gusting horizontally by then, so hard that the windshield swam continually, the little wipers laboring at top speed just to keep a thread of vision possible. The wind prowled high overhead, and the moaning rose occasionally to a keen. It was not dark, but rather strangely bright; it was as if the entire world was immersed in a radiant, flying spume. There must have been sun somewhere out to sea, but the storm, coming in from the east, was eating it alive. It was another element entirely, not wind or water or air, but a crooning melding of the three. I could see little but the teeming silver-pewter and the occasional white shafts of oncoming headlights, and could hear nothing but the roar of the storm and the hollow boom of the surf, hidden by the dunes to my left, and the frying static of the Alfa's radio. Those, and the profound staggering of my heart. I should have been afraid; I should have hugged the right shoulder and crept along, and stopped periodically to clear my windshield. I should, of course, have turned around and gone back. But I did none of those things and I was not afraid. I made the trip, finally, in two hours and fifteen minutes, and I drove those howling miles in a consuming and immutable flame of rage as bright and hot as the vanished sun.

There were two of us in the car that morning, and the rage belonged to the new woman. The old Kate hung on and whimpered and begged ineffectively for her to stop, to go back, to turn around, to go back along the coast road to the quiet bridge and the quiet dawn and the quiet death. But the new woman, sizzling and shimmering with the delectable rage, overrode her.

I was angry at my whole life, of course, angry at my father and mother, angry at that young Paul, angry at Ginger, angry at Stephen for dying, angry at Cecie and angry at my vanquished, never-born self. The anger filled the world and the car and my head. I did not attempt to understand it, or to mitigate it. Anger is its own excuse and its own reward, and needs no assistance from its owner. It was all the anger I have never felt, all the anger I had been afraid to own, all the anger I had abjured for my cherished timelessness and peace. Over it all rode the two great, sustaining tides of this rage. Anger at death. Anger at Alan.

I flew down the wild coast road on invulnerable wings of anger. I could, that morning, have driven the Alfa Romeo into and through hell.

Madness rode with me, singing; oh, yes, I knew that. I knew that it was never far from the two Kates. It rode the wind over the little car like a stormy petrel. It set us, the old woman and the new, to humming and singing through the lava of anger, and to speaking aloud to each other, and even, once or twice, to laughing.

We sang "Waltzing Matilda" and "Once I Had a Secret Love" and "Ebbtide." We sang, choking and gasping with secret laughter, "The Man That Got Away" and "Stormy Weather." We shouted Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and Dorothy Parker: "Death's the lover that I'd be taking; Wild and fickle and fierce is he.

Small's his care if my heart be breaking...

Gay young Death would have none of me."

and: "You will be frail and musty With peering, furtive head, Whilst I am young and lusty Among the roaring dead."

We conducted Wagner, the great, booming storm overture from The Flying Dutchman, and sang wordlessly along with it. We shouted aloud, from Ulysses, Molly Bloom's wild, joyous cry of surrender: "...and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes,...

and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

And from Shakespeare: "O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful!

and yet again wonderful..."

"You're nuts," we said to each other. "Certifiable. Where are you? What is the date? Who is the president?"

But under and over and through it all, the blazing, sustaining anger.

"Why are you so mad at Alan?" I said to the new woman.

"Because he didn't come and get you, if he wanted you back so damned bad. Because he didn't stop you from coming here. Because he didn't stop Stephen from dying. Because he didn't stop you from getting cancer. Because he can't stop you from..."

"What?"

"You know."

"Say it."

"Dying, then. Dying."

"It's not his fault..."

"It's not yours. To hell with him. To hell with him. He can't even make you come."

"That's not him. That's the Pacmen. You know it is. They eat the sperm, they would eat him..."

"Bullshit. It's him. You can have that again. You can have that for as long as you want it. We're going down there now, to get it. That's what this is all about..."

"I can't go down there. I have to go to the bridge. You know that..."

"Then," shouted the new woman, "go to the goddamned bridge fucked like a lioness or a cat! Go fucked like a whole woman, one more time!"

"I've never been that, have I? Whole?"

"We're going to get that now."

Far ahead, through the solid, radiant rain, I saw the frail flashing of red lights. We were coming up on the narrow spit of land where Oregon Inlet poured through from the sea to Pamlico Sound, and I slowed the Alfa automatically. With the dropping of the engine, I heard a new sound: the deeper, wilder boom of angry surf, near at hand, of furious water crashing on concrete, instead of sand. I inched the car closer; without the forward motion, the rain was a solid, impenetrable sheet on the windshield; it was like being totally submerged in a maelstrom.

I got out of the car and shielded my eyes with my hands and peered ahead. The force of the wind pressed me against the car and drove stinging needles of rain and spray into my face and arms. The wind was still erratic; when it steadied into its storm force, I knew the car could not go forward through it. Ahead, dimly, I saw that the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet was two or three inches under white water, and that every third or fourth wave that broke on the piling seas trying to crowd through the inlet surged over as though no bridge existed. The sea was a great, gray and white animal battering at the bridge. There was no one about, no police or emergency vehicles. Just the lights, on their sawhorses, flashing in the rain.

I got back into the car. I was sodden with rain and spray. I tasted salt. Standing still as it was, the car was rocked by the wind erratically, like a demented child with a rocking horse.

"I can't get this little car over that," I said to the new woman. "I could get washed right off that bridge if one of those big waves hit while I was on it. At the very least the engine is going to drown out."

"What difference would it make if you did?" she said. "You were going to go into the water anyway."

"It has to be the other bridge," I said. "The one over the Chesapeake."

"Why? A bridge is a bridge is a bridge."

"I have to choose. It has to be my choice."

"Go on. Ram the gas and take this thing over."

"No."

"Go on!" she shouted. "Go on! Who knows, maybe this man can do it, maybe this man can fuck the Pacmen right out of you! Alan Abrams couldn't do it; what have you got to lose by trying? This man...this man just might scourge you clean inside!"

I knew we were at the heart of it. For this I had come to the Outer Banks, for this I drove the coast road in a raging storm. For this. To be purged empty of death and filled with life.

Paul Sibley owed me a life.

The surf crashed over the bridge and withdrew, leaving a sucking wash of white bubbles. The wind keened. I revved the powerful little engine up as high as it would go. I closed my eyes. And I heard the singing.

I was mad; of course I was. At that moment, I was madder than a March hare. But I heard it. Far out at sea, pure and clear and impossibly thin and high, it floated over the storm like a white bird, the voices of the mermaids, singing to me.

" 'Human voices wake us, and we drown,' " I whispered, and rammed the car forward. We hit the sheet of water on the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge like a small red projectile, and then I felt the Alfa fishtail, lift, plane, and soar, riding the water like a racing shell. We crossed the bridge to the sound of the silvery singing out at sea and the scream of the wind and the shrieking laughter of two women who became, finally, one.

I was still laughing, off and on, an hour later, when I parked the car beside Paul's Mercedes behind the end cabin of the Carolina Moon Motel.

He had the door open before I knocked. I stumbled in on the wings of the wind and a fierce spatter of cold rain, and he caught me in his arms and drew me away from the door.

"God, look at you, you look awful, you look beautiful," he said, holding me against him and rocking with me. He kicked the door shut and the tumult outside dropped to a low, dreamy roar, like a waterfall. In the silence I heard my heart, a rapid triphammer, and his, deeper and slower, and a little crackle of static and jazz from his transistor radio, and the soft snicker of a wood fire. I heard my own breathing in my ears, and the little puff of his breath on my wet face. I heard the rhythmic, faraway bronze lament of a bell buoy out at sea. I heard the little liquid chuckle as ice shifted in a bucket, and the spatter of rain on the small-paned windows of the little cottage. I heard the occasional secret sigh of the fire as a raindrop from the chimney found it. They were the sounds of peace and safety, profound and enfolding. I sighed, a long, bleeding sigh, and ground my face into his soft sweatered shoulder.

"Hold on to me," I said. "I almost didn't get here. The bridge is under water up at the Inlet. I haven't seen another car since I came over it."

He held me away from him and looked at me.

"How'd you get through?" he said. "They close it once the water comes over the road."

"I just came through. I put the pedal to the metal and came on through like gangbusters," I said, and began to laugh. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

"I was going to give you a drink by the fire," he said, turning me toward the bathroom. "But first, I'm going to give you a hot bath. You're about to lose it, Katie Lee."

He walked me through the crowded little room and into the tiny bathroom. He turned on the shower and it coughed and bucked and spat, and then hot water streamed out in a comforting shower and dimpled into the bathtub. The tub, washbasin, and toilet were a violent pink, and the tiny-tiled floor was pink and burgundy. The shower curtain swarmed with Disneyesque roses. The ruffled curtains that shut out the wild sea beyond the little window were filmy pink net over deeper pink vinyl. The thin chenille bath mat and towels were faded candy pink. I laughed harder. By the time he had peeled the sopping clothes off me, the bathroom was swirling with steam and I was weeping with laughter.

"I'm going to wring your clothes out and put them by the fire," Paul said. "When you've finished, yell. You can have my bathrobe."

He opened the door and the steam gushed out and cool air streamed in.

"Paul," I said. He turned back to me.

"Wash me," I said. I stood in the swirling steam, still gasping with laughter, my legs and arms weak from it and from other things, and held my arms out to him.

"Oh, yes," he said, and came into them.

I ripped the soft sweater dragging it over his head, and I ripped buttons getting his shirt off him. I whimpered and pulled at him while he struggled out of his socks and shoes, and I had him in the shower with me while his shorts still clung about his knees. I met him as he came to me and climbed up his body and wrapped my arms and legs around the warm, wet length of him; I pulled his hair and bit his mouth and clawed his back and shoulders and left deep scorings from my fingernails on his buttocks as I pulled him into me. I could not be still and I could not wait; I found his center and opened myself to it and thrust myself up to him to take him inside me; I screamed out like a falcon when I felt him slide deep, and felt the hot water pound and pound, and fought and clung and bit and licked him. He braced himself against the wall and I rode him like a tiger, clawing and screaming. We slid down the wall and into the tub, water pounding down over us, and finished it there, thrashing, screaming, exploding. I felt the molten core of me surging out into the water, and felt the life and heat of him pounding into me. When at last we lay still, I was bobbing slightly between his opened legs as he lay back in the cooling water; I said: " 'Would you like something to read?' "

He lay back, laughing, his hands covering my soap-slicked breasts from behind. We bobbed there for a little time, until the water began to be uncomfortably cool. Outside the storm lifted a notch or two in intensity, and the lights flickered.

"Dylan Thomas. I remember," he said. "You know, that's what I missed, that I never knew I did. That's what I haven't had in all these long years. Besides your incredible long, skinny body, I haven't had your poetry and your laughter, to light me up. I haven't had laughter and love at the same time since you."

"How could you live with Ginger and not have laughter?" I said.

"You can laugh at Ginger," Paul said. "It's hard to laugh with her."

We got out of the bathtub and he wrapped me in his big terry robe, and I bound my hair in a flimsy piglet-pink towel and we sat on the heart-shaped braided rug in front of the miniature fireplace and drank the wine that he had chilled in a plastic motel bucket. He had brought cheese and a baguette and some good pate from somewhere, too, and we ate that, and fed lumps of coal from the dingy scuttle to the sputtering fire, and listened to the storm take the Banks in its teeth and shake them. We did not talk much, not then. I knew we would, but not yet. It was like the beginning of the week, when I had just come to Nag's Head, and the four of us women had talked little of ourselves and our lives. I had the sense that should we start to talk, Paul and I, we would talk until dawn broke the next day. I thought we would say, must say, things that would change things, things that would start engines that could not be stopped. Somehow I shrank from that. What we had done together already had the force of an inexorable phenomenon, like the storm; words that we chose and set adrift into the air were acts of deliberation, of affirmation and intent. Later for those. For now, peace and depletion and languor; wine and wind and fire and perhaps sleep; cleanness and lightness and rest. For now...now. I could not hear the Pacmen and I could not feel them.

"Down the drain," I thought drowsily. "Washed those suckers right down the drain."

"I didn't think you'd come," Paul said. "I really didn't. I thought I'd just hole up here until the storm was over and go on down to Alabama and that would be that and I'd never see you again. But somehow when you came I wasn't surprised. God, it was like Easter morning or something, seeing you walk in that door out of the rain and wind. Or no, like watching some amputated part of yourself come back and hitch itself in place after years and years. What now, Kate? Don't you see that things have to change now?"

Fatigue, simple and white and whispering, swept me.

"No talking," I said. "Later, maybe, but not now. Now I want to sleep, and then I want to drink some more wine and then I want to do that nice thing we just did again, and after that maybe once or twice more, for good measure, and then maybe...maybe we'll talk. Although I don't guarantee it."

We fell asleep spoon fashion, my back fitted into his stomach, with the thin, fuzzy, antiseptic-smelling pink nylon blanket pulled up over us and the fire whispering and sparking in the grate. I slept deeply, thickly, dreamlessly; I do not know how long. Sometime during the afternoon the storm came down upon us in full: the air outside blackened and the wind rose to a shout that reached deep and dragged me up from sleep. Just as I raised my head the lights flickered and went off, and the sound of the surf on the beach outside seemed suddenly much closer. I got up and padded to the window and pulled the curtain back. I could see nothing through the slanting black rain, but the wind was so vast and alive that you could almost see the shape of it, prowling outside. The little cabin shook with it, and the roof squeaked and tugged, and lightning and thunder struck simultaneously. In the constant green light I could see the dark, fussy bulks of the other little cabins and the office, but no lights glowed; lantern, candle, fire, nothing, and our two cars were the only two I could see. I shivered. Kate...young Kate...put her head out momentarily and thought, wildly, what am I doing here alone at the end of this frail earth in this storm, with this man? With that monstrous ocean out there? It's not even the right ocean. Where is my ocean? Where is Alan?

When Paul came and stood behind me, as naked as I was, and put his arms around me, it was the new woman who turned into his arms and said, "Gentlemen, start your engines."

We did it again, did it twice and three times, on the bed and on the floor, and before the fire, and even under the silly, ill-made burn-scarred tea table that sat before the windows. We bumped our heads and carpet-burned our buttocks and bruised each other's flesh and rasped our throats. The new woman knew things that Kate did not know, had never known, and did them shamelessly and with joy and greed. The man Paul knew things that the young Paul had not discovered, either. The man Paul did them all to the woman, found new sources of heat and light in her thin body, stroked new chords altogether, called out new urgencies of muscle and blood and pressure. I took what he gave me with absolute, savage appetite, and asked for more, and got it, and when at last we fetched up once more before the fire, hair and faces and necks and legs slick with sweat, bodies emptied out and trembling, it was near eight o'clock at night. I could see the green glow from Paul's Rolex clearly. There had been no abating of the wind and rain and hollow-booming surf, none of thunder and lightning, but it had not risen, either.

"Is it stopping?" I said. My throat was so raw that I could barely whisper the words. I was as sore as if I had been in some physical accident. I remembered that I had felt this same soreness after Stephen was born. Who, I wondered, what, had been born this day?

"No, it'll blow and rain and so forth for another six to twelve hours," Paul said. "But it isn't going to get any worse. It isn't a real hurricane. The wind will start to drop very gradually now; by morning the bridge will be open. You could probably get through it by midnight in a four-wheeler. But I wouldn't want to try. Does it really matter? We're not going anywhere yet."

"Not yet," I said. I drank some tepid wine from the bottle he had just opened, while he built up the fire. The ridiculous, rococo little room leaped into shadowy life.

"I will never, as long as I live, forget the Carolina Moon," I said, nestling back into the tumbled covers of the bed. They smelled of him and me and salt and love.

"It'll be our place," he said, smiling and tracing his fingertip lightly from my chin down to my navel, slowly. My flesh rippled like a horse's when a fly lights on it.

"We'll come here at least once a year," he said.

I did not answer. He pressed close to me in the fire-shadowed darkness. I could feel all the bulk of him, the knobs and long bones and flesh and heat, the fine tangles of dark body hair. He seemed very large.

"Kate," he said into my snarled hair, "what is it? There's something...I don't know. Something not right yet. What is it? Tell me so I can fix it."

I sighed. Something inside me that had been knotted and frozen, some last small ice-shut lock, opened. I could tell this man. There was nothing I had held back from him this day. I could tell him.

"You can't fix it," I said. "Nobody can."

"I can. I will. Only you have to tell me."

I stared into the darkness and felt his arms and his weight and his blood, coursing calmly and strongly.

"I'm sick," I said. It was not at all hard to say the words. Easy, in fact. Easy.

"I've been sick a long time. I don't think I'm going to get well."

I felt his muscles freeze. It was uncanny. I had the idiotic thought that if I had had my fingers in his hair I could have felt it lift from its prickling roots and stand aloft. I went still, too.

He was out of the bed and around it, standing on my side looking down at me, before I even realized he had moved. I looked up at him, speechless, breathless. His face swam whitely in the darkness above me, and there was white around his eyes. I could hear him breathing, and hear his heart beating fast and hard, even over the wind and the surf. Beyond us the bell buoy off Diamond Shoals cried and called in the dark.

"What do you have, Kate?" he said. His voice was nearly inaudible. "Do you have AIDS?"

"AIDS?" I said stupidly. "AIDS?"

He looked down at me, my naked, oldest love, and it seemed that despite the fire-red blackness, I could see him very plainly. His spectacular black and white hair was in his eyes, and his mouth was open. I could see the tip of his tongue, moving on his lips. They were bruised and pulpy where I had bitten them. I said nothing; I simply looked at him.

"You do, don't you?" he whispered. "You do, and you let me do that, all afternoon, all night...you were getting even, weren't you? Kate, goddamn you, tell me..."

"Cecie was right," I said mildly. "You do look like an aristocratic skunk. AIDS. Yes, well, as a matter of fact, Paul, I do. That's just precisely what I do have. AIDS."

"Christ almighty, Jesus, Joseph and Mary..." He was across the room skinning into his clothes when I began to laugh. It was like vomiting, that laugh; it pumped out of the deepest part of my stomach and flowed out from between my lips, and I could not have stopped it if my life had depended on it. In a way, I suppose, it did. I laughed and laughed; I rolled back and forth in the bed and gasped and wheezed for breath, and when it came I laughed some more. I pulled my knees to my chin and ground my knuckles into my mouth and roared and howled with laughter. I was still laughing when he slammed out of the cabin, his half-buckled suitcase trailing a red and blue striped tie. I was still laughing when the Mercedes roared to life and screed around in the gravel and slewed out into the rain. I had not stopped laughing when he had looked back at me from the door, with a terrible face, old and caved-in, and said, "Kate, you bitch. Even if you're lying you've killed me." I did not stop laughing until long after the sound of the Mercedes had died in the wind.

But I did stop then. The laughter segued into weeping without missing a breath, and I lay in the bed with the Magic Fingers in the Carolina Moon Motel and cried without stopping and without hope until I fell asleep. The last thing I remember hearing was the clamor of the drowned bell buoy off Diamond Shoals.

I was dreaming. I was dreaming that I stood in the shower in the cluttered little bathroom that had served our suite in the Tri Omega house at Randolph, and cold water poured down on me, and I was late for a final examination, but I could not seem to wash myself clean of the stickiness that covered me. I was in a panic about the examination and a sick agony of shame about the stickiness: I knew it was seminal fluid, and I could not let them see it on me, Cecie and Ginger and Fig. But they stood outside both doors and pounded and pounded, and I could not remember if I had locked them...

I woke abruptly, but the pounding went on and on. And the water went on pouring. I pushed myself up on my forearms, the covers sliding off me. It was cold in the room. I shook my head, hard, and my hair flew about my face. The pounding continued.

I realized where I was and that the knocking was at the door at the same instant, and fury flooded me. So he had come back. For what? To apologize? To have the truth out of me? To resume our lovemaking? Let him knock all night, let him pound his hands bloody; let the rain drown him and the lightning char him...I would not unlock the door. I would not answer him if he called out.