"Kate! Kate, are you in there? Open the door, Kate..."

The voice rode eerily over the sound of the wind and rain, but it was not his voice. I stood still, wrapped in his terry robe, and stared at the door. My mind slipped out of its tracks and wandered loosely in time and space for a moment. I could not move or think.

"KATE! LET ME IN!"

It was Cecie's voice. I ran across the room and jerked the door open and she stumbled in, much as I had done almost twelve hours earlier. The wind drove her nearly to her knees, and the rain poured in as if someone had thrown a bucket of water in at the door. I slammed and locked it and simply stood, looking at her. She looked back, her chest heaving and her breath coming in huge, tearing sobs, unable to speak. She wore her old yellow slicker and rain hat from school, and her face was blanched gray and running water, and the fringe of white hair showing under the hat was plastered to her forehead. Her glasses ran with rain, and blue veins beat in her temples. She made a funny little sound, a whimper like a small animal might make, and her knees buckled, and she would have gone down if I had not caught her. I shoved the flimsy carved chair under her and pushed her head down. The hat slipped off and lay on the scarred yellow pine floor, puddling there.

I brought towels and dried her face and hair, and eased her out of the slicker and draped the blanket from the bed around her shoulders, for she had begun to shiver violently. I saw that she still could not talk, although she tried a couple of times. I looked out the window to see if anyone had followed her there, or come with her, but there was nothing but the cabins and the blowing rain and my Alfa and now the bulk of Paul's big Land Rover. Was he here, then, waiting in his car? But he had been driving the Mercedes...A forked branch of lightning showed me that the Land Rover was empty.

"Is Paul with you?" I said.

She shook her head, but could not manage words. Her breathing was still deep and shuddering, but it was beginning to slow. I built up the fire and gave her a glass of red wine, and when she could not hold it against her chattering teeth, I held it to her mouth and steadied her chin with my hand, and she drank it. I had never seen Cecie in anything remotely resembling this panic. Somehow, incredibly, it did not really alarm me; I observed her with a kind of objective anxiety, and a mild clinical interest. As soon as she could talk, she would tell me about this night, and we would talk about it. I would understand. All would be revealed.

"Now will the scales fall from my eyes," I said aloud.

Cecie raised her head and looked at me, and took a deep breath.

"Have you seen Fig?" she said. Her voice was weak and thin, a sick child's. "Has Fig been here?"

"Fig? No. How would Fig get here?" I said. "Did she bring you? Did she drive the Rover, then?"

Cecie shut her eyes and shook her head. Her lips were absolutely bloodless. She breathed deeply again, and said, "No. I drove it." And then she began to cry.

I knelt beside her and held her like a child, and she cried like a child worn out with terror, her head pressed against my shoulder. I could feel the sobs bucking at her ribs, and feel the racketing of her heart. I rocked her in my arms, back and forth, back and forth, and whispered into her wet, matted hair, "It's all right now. Everything's all right now. You're safe and I'm here and the storm is going to end soon, and we'll stay here safe and warm till it does. We won't go out again until it's gone."

She shook her head violently against me, and wailed, "No! No! We have to go..."

I patted her back, feeling tears start in my own eyes once more. How much worse those endless miles must have been in the dark, with the full force of the storm savaging her. And the lightning, and oh, God, the surf...the surf at Oregon Inlet...and she could not drive. So far as I knew, she had never driven. To drive that great, plunging car in that...

"Shhhh," I said. "Shhhh...whatever it is, it's not bad enough for me to make you get in that car again in this storm. Whatever it is, we'll fix it, in a little while..."

Cecie took a great, sobbing breath and pulled herself erect, and fought for control of the tears. She stared into my face and held both my hands in her cold white ones, and said, "Paul's gone." It was not a question.

I nodded.

"Ah, yes. Like a scalded tomcat, hours ago. Tell me now, Cece."

She drained her wine glass and said, "Come over by the fire. I can't get warm. And listen and don't ask questions until I finish. I don't think we have much time."

And so we sat on the rug in front of the coal fire and I watched as it burned bluely down, and she told me. She drank wine steadily, and occasionally she shuddered, a great, profound ague, and her sweater and jeans steamed in the heat from the grate, and she told me about Fig Newton. She kept glancing at the locked door as she talked, and once, when the coal shifted and a lump fell to the bottom of the grate she jumped like a nervous cat. And she kept looking at her watch. It was nearly midnight when she began to talk.

"Kate, she's crazy, and we didn't know. I mean really crazy," Cecie said. "She has been, all these years. Since the beginning. And since the beginning, almost, she's been after you, and now I think she's coming..."

"Cece...sweetie..."

"No!" she shook her head violently. "You promised! Don't talk. Let me finish...Kate, all afternoon after you and Paul left she was...just on fire, just burning up. Jittering around, talking a mile a minute, not making real good sense, almost...glowing. Like last night, you remember, only worse...and she made Bloody Marys before noon and started Ginger on them...Ginger wasn't in real good shape; you saw her...and by two Ginger had crashed and it was just Fig and me. The storm was really getting bad and I was getting worried; I never saw such wind, but she was just drunk on it, running outside in it, and singing, and yelling...said she heard the mermaids singing...and then she went up to the studio and did something or other up there until about five, and I took a nap...and then she came back and Ginger was up and we started on the scotch. I should have noticed something, but I didn't; everything was just too strange...but I did notice she wasn't drinking, and that she was making the drinks herself and bringing them to us...well, Kate, I think she drugged us. I mean, I'm sure she did. Ginger was out like a light on the sofa by seven; nothing could wake her, and I went out, too, and if I hadn't thrown it all up after a couple of hours I'd be there on the rug by the fireplace. It was about nine when I came out of the bathroom, feeling just awful, and I tried to wake Ginger and I couldn't, but she was breathing okay, and then I tried the phone, to call Fig in the studio, and it was out, and so I started out there after her and...I saw her come down the stairs carrying her bags, and kind of look around, smiling this...terrible smile; God...and then she got in her car and drove off. So I went up to the studio; I really don't know why, and there was this note for Ginger saying she'd decided to go on home and beat the storm, and thanking her for the week. I knew that wasn't right; the storm was already here, nobody would drive in that..." Cecie smiled a watery, rueful little smile. "So I sort of...looked around. And I found the stuff she'd used on us in the bathroom; she'd left a lot of stuff behind. It's Dalmane. Makes you sleep like the dead, if you take enough. I know she gave it to us in the scotch because they tried it on me in the hospital and I threw it up every time, about two hours later. There was other stuff there; Percodan and something I think might be dexamine, and one or two antidepressants, and other stuff I never heard of. She must have been on it yesterday, and today, and maybe the rest of the time, too..."

I simply looked at Cecie. What was this madness she was telling me? Perhaps it was she who had become unhinged from reality; it had happened before...

"Oh, shit, Kate! I'm telling you the truth," Cecie shouted at me. "You goddamned well better listen to me...so, okay, then I looked around some more and I found her diary. And I read it...all of it; I sat there and read it...and then I knew about her being crazy. Because it was all lies. You know what she read us this past week? All the sweetness and light, all that stuff how much she loved us, about you being her soul sister, and Paul being a god, and all that? It was lies, Kate; it's not in the diary, that isn't what she wrote at all! What she wrote...God, she hated us! She hated me for being closer to you than anybody; I was right; she did think we were gay. Lezzies, she called us...and she hated Ginger, and she hated you most of all. For laughing at her and mimicking her; she heard all that, through the wall. She used to lie there and listen, night after night, oh, Kate, I told you...and she hated you for looking like you do, for having an aristocratic nose and name, for God's sake. She just hated that. She even hated you for trying to be nice to her. And most of all she hated you because she knew it was always you Paul wanted. She knew he only married Ginger for the money. She's the one that threw Ginger at him after you were gone, so he'd drop you, and rubbed it in to him about the money...and then she hated poor Ginger when he married her. Oh, Katie Lee, I knew that then, and I never told you..."

I shook my head silently. I looked at her. I did not know what to say, and so I said nothing.

"I read the rest of it," Cecie said, looking down at her clasped hands. "She tracked you all those years in New York, Kate. I don't know how. She doesn't say. But she knows all about your life, and I know how she got you here. Or at least, I know why right now, and not some other time. She's been having an affair for years with your doctor, and he told her. She knew...she knew your last checkup was next month. She knew all about your...illness; she knew everything. She said that it had to be now because you might find out you were going...not going to make it, and she couldn't let you get away with that. This one's on me'; she wrote that. Oh, my dear Kate...why didn't you tell me? I knew there was something, but I didn't know what..."

I looked at her, still shaking my head.

"Well, so anyway, she engineered this week, and then yesterday...or no, night before last...she called Paul in Norfolk and told him you still loved him and that you said for her to tell him to come to Nag's Head. And...she was listening and watching you last night. In the hammock. Just like she did before, all those nights...She knows you came down here, Kate. It's in the diary. She wrote it last night. I wouldn't have known otherwise. I wouldn't be here otherwise."

I said nothing; I watched her.

"She's coming here, Kate," Cecie said. "I don't know how. I didn't see another car on the road, she may have had to stop, to wait some of it out. But you've got to get out of here. We've got to go now..."

I heard the wind outside in the silence, and the voice of the surf, and the bell buoy. All sounded further away. Lightning still bloomed, but the cracks of thunder had grumbled on past, up the coast toward the Tidewater. Cecie's breathing was even now, but light and fast. The coal fire snickered.

Far beneath me the abyss howled. Something down deep in it sang. Well, of course.

"Have you ever heard the mermaids singing, Cecie?" I said.

Her shoulders slumped and she closed her eyes.

"You don't believe a word of this, do you?" she whispered.

"Well...I know you do," I said carefully. "I know you do, or you wouldn't have made that terrible drive...but Cece, it's just crazy. This is bad horror novel stuff. Fig's not coming here. How could she come here? You know she's a fiction writer...and listen to that outside...nobody could drive in that..." Color came back into her blue eyes, and she looked at me levelly. And I thought, "Cecie just did."

For a fraction of a moment I could feel it, the danger prickling in the air around us, the full extent of her sacrifice for me. But then disbelief flooded back, and a deep, sweet, limb-numbing lassitude: too much, I don't care, so what, let it happen then...

"What will it take?" Cecie said, beginning to cry again. "What will it take?"

"My doctor would never do that," I said, and felt, suddenly, an invincible raft of certainty solid beneath my feet, buoying me up. "John McCracken would never on earth have an affair with her and tell her about...all that. I know that, Cecie."

"It wasn't McCracken," Cecie said. "It was somebody named Hilliard. Your specialist, I think..."

I sat for a long time, it seemed, though it could not have been; sat looking into the fire. I saw us, the four of us, in a booth at Harry's in Randolph, drinking coffee. I saw us piled into my car, top down to the moony whiteness of a summer night. I saw us lying in the starlight of the Tri Omega house roof, drunk and singing. I saw us in winter nightclothes, sitting on mine and Cecie's beds, drinking hot chocolate. Each time, in all the pictures, we were laughing. We were laughing, and we were very young.

"Give me the diary," I said through stiff, numb lips, and Cecie did.

"I marked some places for you," she said.

I picked up the shabby book. The pages were coming loose from the binding; crumbs of glue fell over my hands, and flecks of yellow paper showered down. Fig's childish, looping handwriting covered the pages, closely and densely. There must have been hundreds of thousands of words in this book and the others like it, I thought. Words and words and words, a bridge of words stretching back into those years and forward into these...stopping last night....

The first passage Cecie had marked was the first one Fig had read us this week, the one she had written the night of her initiation into the soroity. I stared at the page. I remembered what she had read to us, the cloying words that had made us giggle and squirm, words of adoration and sisterhood and that strange, canted love she bore for me.

This passage finished up: "She almost vomited on me. I raised my face for the kiss and I saw her; she couldn't look at me. I made her sick. My face made her sick. The thought of my mouth on hers made her sick. She ran into the kitchen and vomited in the sink. And she thought I didn't know why. Well, I know. I've always known. I've always known everything about her. I always will. I'll never lose her and I'll never let her go and she'll wish she had died before she almost vomited on me. The day will come when she'll wish she had died before that."

The second was the passage written the night we had gone up to the roof to celebrate Ginger's making her grades. She had read that one to us, too. About the music of the spheres and the holy bond between us. About my face in the starlight, and her yearning to live up to my faith in her, to live for me.

"Effie's face in the moonlight looks like an effigy on a Crusader's tomb," she had written. "Pure and chaste and perfect; nobody has a face like Effie's. But she doesn't want me. She's told me a thousand different ways. She only wants Cecie. I know about that; I know what they do together after they turn their lights off. I hear them. I hear them every night. Effie isn't pure. Effie is a devil whose flesh burns with the unclean passion for another woman's..."

I raised a sick face to Cecie. She shook her head and looked away.

The last passage was the one she had read us last, about the night that she and Ginger and Cecie had come to Paul's to have dinner. I remembered that we had all laughed about that, and Fig had said, laughing herself, "Lord, I embarrass myself. He must have wanted to drown me like a puppy. I followed him everywhere that year..."

"I heard them through the wall again tonight," the passage said. "She was doing it again. Mocking me. Talking in my voice. Saying what she imagined I said to Paul, and what he said to me. Saying what she thought I wanted him to do to me, and what he would say and do if I asked him to...what does she know? What does she know of love? She thinks that what he says to her and what he does to her is love, but it isn't. What he says to me with his mind and his eyes when we are alone, that's what love is, and she will never have it...so she mocks it. She laughs. Well, she won't laugh long, because I know him better than she does or anybody else in the world, and I know what he wants and I know how to get it for him and I will. And I will kill her. One day I will kill her for laughing. And him. When it's time."

Cold started at my fingertips and ran up my arms and down my legs. It reached my heart and froze it rocklike and dead. I kept on thumbing pages. All of them were the same. All those years. Hate, venom, obsession, rage. Madness. Madness, clear and real and alive as the flames in front of my face.

I found the last page. Written this very night, only a few hours earlier. It was as Cecie had said, all of it. It was there. Fig's handwriting had grown larger and more erratic as she wrote, until the last few lines covered whole pages, and the point of her pen had torn through the flimsy paper. I could read the lines, though.

"It's time now," they said. "Everything's right. It all worked. They're down there together and it's time. I can be halfway to Manhattan before the others wake up. She never should have laughed at me. She never should have. Oh, yes, it's time. And past time. Twenty-eight years past time."

"What a book this would make," was the last sentence.

I put the book down very carefully and put my hands on my knees and looked at Cecie without seeing her.

"Wow," I said.

"Kate," Cecie said, standing up, "get up now, and put your clothes on. We're leaving. You're going to have to drive, but I'll navigate for you. Come on, I'll hand them to you..."

"This can't be happening," I said serenely.

"This is happening!" Cecie shouted. "I know how: I just figured it out, while you were reading; it's Poolie Prout, of course...she called him to come for her, and he did; he said he would, remember? And she drove over to the dock in the Sound to meet him...get dressed; she's coming, she'll be here..."

I stretched and let my head roll around on my neck.

"I don't care," I said.

Cecie slapped me. She drew her arm back as far as she could and slapped me so that my head bounced on my neck. I put my fingers to my face and stared at her. She grabbed my shoulders and shook them and screamed into my face.

"You want to die, don't you?" she shouted. "You're planning it, aren't you? I should have seen it; I've seen it before, in the hospital...I know what you're doing; you're going to go home and do it some nice, neat, seemly little way before you have to see the doctor...you've been telling me you were all week, and I didn't hear you...goddamn you, Kate! What is it, the cancer's back? Is that it? Well, let me tell you something: so the fuck what? You think it's going to be better for Alan to do it rather than let the cancer do it? You think it's going to be better for me? You think your little boy would thank you for this; you think your friends will? Did it make you feel better when your father did it; did that help you live your life? Death is bad, Kate, but to go courting it...that's obscene! If you kill yourself you've killed all there'll ever be on this earth of Stephen. And you'll kill Alan. And me. Kate...I'm not going to lose you again. I simply will not do it. Get your clothes and come on, now. Kill yourself on your own time; as long as I'm in this place with you I AM NOT GOING TO LET YOU DIE!"

She hauled me to my feet and tossed my clothes at me, and stood thrilling like a wire while I put them on. I looked at her while I did. Her face and body seemed wrapped in flame, shimmering in the dimness almost as Fig's had last night. I thought again that she was a beautiful woman.

We started for the door. Lightning and thunder flashed and boomed, close once more.

"Wait, get the diary," she yelled over her shoulder at me.

"Why..."

"GET IT!"

I turned back and picked up the diary.

Cecie jerked the door open. The lightning forked again, close and greenish-white. The wind howled, and I heard it once again, far and pure and silvery out on the black sea. The singing. The singing...

Fig stood in the door. She stood very still looking in at us, as silent and sodden as a drowned woman. Her hair was pasted to her skull and her lipstick was eaten off her wide mouth and her cheekbones seemed carved from the dead white skull of something wild. Her eyes stared at Cecie and at me behind her, in the doorway, but I did not think that she saw us. I did not know what she saw. She might have been there a very long time; she looked as if she had just risen from the bottom of the sea. The lightning flickered again and she gave us a small, formal smile. In her hand was a ridiculous little snubnosed pistol with black and white calfskin on the handle.

I thought, very clearly, "It's only a toy. One of Fig's little pieces of theater. We're okay, because it's only a toy."

"In the bonds, Effie Lee," Fig said, and fired the gun. I saw the white spurt of flame before I heard the report. Thunder cracked then; I have never been sure that I heard a report at all. But, of course, I must have.

Cecie fell. Fig looked down at her. She shook her head slightly, as you do in annoyance when you have made a trifling mistake.

"Get it right, Newton," she said, and fired again.

When she fell, it was backward, out into the rain.

Chapter Sixteen.

IT is nearly noon, though from the angle of the sun on the back of my neck, you might think that it was mid-afternoon. It is strange, how different the light is just this much further north, and what a difference two weeks makes. The last time I knelt in the sun among flowers, in the Currituck Gardens on the Outer Banks with Cecie, the light hit me almost full in the face. Today it strikes my shoulders and neck and dapples the old blue sweater of Alan's that I wear for gardening in the autumn. We had frost this morning. The wind, before it dropped, was almost cold.

It fell only a few minutes ago, and now there is that profound hush that I love, that means the turn of the tide. I hear the earth hum again. I had not thought I would do that. I hear the earth hum, and the soft slap of the waves on the beach below my garden, and that is all. I do not hear the wind off the abyss. And I do not hear the Pacmen. This time tomorrow, I will know whether or not they are still there. I think John McCracken will tell me that they are not. Somehow, I think they are gone; that they went with that other Kate when she died on the Outer Banks. For she did die. Just not from a small lead pellet. Not in a cold sea.

But if the Pacmen are still here, it is hardly important. I know something else about living and dying now. It is something entirely new to me. It changes everything.

Right now, just at this moment, the world is timeless again. The world stands still in high sun, waiting for the blue wind of autumn to come with the turn of the tide.

I know I will never see them again, my sweet, punished Ginger, and Paul. Paul: less than nothing to me now. Less than zero. I know that we will not even speak of that night on the telephone, or write words about it in letters. We are done with each other. That died, too, on the Outer Banks. I will mourn Ginger. I have already forgotten Paul.

And I find I can remember nothing of the woman I left lying in the cabin at the Carolina Moon that night. Neither the sad, terrible, vulnerable young Fig Newton that she was, nor the even more terrible, mad, beautiful Georgina Stuart who came to Nag's Head. Nothing. When I think of her, I see darkness and a spurt of white fire. And that is all.

I saw a truly strange thing toward the end of that night, even stranger, somehow, than everything that had gone before: I saw a woman grow up before my eyes. I wish I had liked the sight better, or my part in it. When I got to the house in Nag's Head early the next morning, before dawn, Ginger was still asleep where Cecie had left her, on the couch in the living room, and it took me several minutes of shaking and calling to waken her. When she did, her face crumpled with grief and rage at me. When I finished speaking, it was another face altogether: much older, somehow harder, and with the child that I had loved irrevocably gone from behind the eyes.

I still do not know what she thinks. I know she knows that I was somewhere with Paul, but she also knows that it came to nothing and is over now. What she made of Cecie, gone away without her clothes, I do not know. Neither do I know what she made of Fig, dead in the Carolina Moon Motel down the coast near Avon on the night of the great storm, dead and alone and without a car, in a room permanently kept by Paul Sibley. I do know that Paul was in Alabama by the time that Fig was ascertained to have died and could prove it and was cleared, and I know that there is no official doubt that Fig fired the gun that killed her. Powder burns and fingerprints and all that grisly arcana saw to that. I think that no matter what she eventually comes to believe, Ginger will not speak of it. She has her husband back, and from the look on her face when I drove away from there, she is going to keep him on a short leash from now on. He is going to need her attention and her protection; it was that I went to tell her that night. That, and to tell her that I loved her and would miss her.

No, I do not think she will speak of it. So I think that, despite the blaze of publicity that followed...NOVELIST FOUND DEAD IN SEASIDE MOTEL IN HURRICANE, DEATH WEAPON FOUND, etc....We are done with it, if we want to be. Paul Sibley isn't going to mention it. Neither is Ginger, most likely. If Alan does, it will be when I am ready to talk of it, and only then. It is unlikely that Poolie Prout will, wherever he might be. I try to imagine how he must have felt, awakening in his room at the other end of the motel, the taste of the drug in his mouth and her gone, perhaps finding her there, perhaps hearing sirens...I feel sure that once he got the drift of things, he found it expedient to move his base of operations to a more hospitable climate. I imagine he left, as I did, before dawn that same morning.

It was first light as I drove over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Just as I had planned before I started out for Nag's Head. A long time ago; so long...I had driven most of the way in the rain, and for a great deal of the trip I cried. I thought of Cecie and of Stephen, of Paul and Ginger and Fig-the young Fig-and of Alan, and I cried and cried. There were many people in the little car that night; I rode with the living and the dead beside the black sea, in the dwindling rain. By the time I came up on the big bridge, the rain was only a soft mist. I thought of the poem that Cecie and I had loved: "Oh, let it be a night of lyric rain And singing breezes, when my bell is tolled.

I have so loved the rain that I would hold Last in my ears its friendly, dim refrain..."

Grief doubled me over the steering wheel, and then I raised my head again. She was with me and would always be with me. I would see to that. I would never let her go. I thought of what she had said to me on the beach in Nag's Head: "As long as we live, they do."

All right, then, I thought. While I live, she does. While I live, Stephen does. While I live, we all do. We live as we did then, we four, whole and clean and laughing. With all our hopes and dreams and that foolishness still ahead. That's enough. That's more than enough. That's everything.

I learned the central lesson of my life from Cecie Hart Fiori that night: that life can only be kept by giving it away. But then it will bloom.

When I came to the highest point in the arc of the bridge, I stopped the car and got out and walked to the railing. I knew just how to do this; hadn't I rehearsed it, only a scant week before? Yes, I knew how to do this. Down on the water the last of the rain dimpled the flat, oily gray swells of the great bay, but out at sea the sky was bright. Morning was coming up fast. The day would be fair.

I raised my arm over my head and threw the diary far out into the misty air. I did not leave the rail until I heard it hit, far below.