"Come inside now," I heard my voice saying, fogged and thick with languor and liquor. "I want you to love me."

The next memory I have is lying in his arms in the tumbled bed of the guest room, my sweat-damp body shivering in the wash of the ceiling fan and the wind off the sea that billowed the sheet muslin curtains, crying as I had not cried since Stephen died, crying the sour, endless, breath-sucking tears of loss. He held me silently and loosely, his breathing still ragged, and I could literally feel the heat ebbing out of his body against me. I was clutching him as a drowning person might clutch a floating log, my arms and legs locked around him. His small, hard body was cool and slippery with sweat. I remember feeling a great, simple desire to press myself through his skin and into his flesh, to become him. To become...not me. Loss flattened me like the corpse of an animal in the road. It was so strong and terrible that for a moment I thought I was back in those first anguished hours after we heard about Stephen. I must have called Stephen's name, because Alan was murmuring into my wet hair, over and over, "It's all right now, Katie. It was a long time ago, and it's over now."

I think I slept a little then, because my next clear memory is sitting up in the guest bed to take the cup of scalding hot coffee he brought. The sun was off the deck and the light in the room had cooled from the shadowed red of mid-afternoon to the gray-blue of nearing dusk. I shivered, and he saw it and switched off the overhead fan. It thumped and shuddered to a stop, and the silence was very loud. Even the sea had cooled, with approaching evening, to the gentle husshhhhh that meant the dropping of the wind. In the silence I could hear, as well as feel, the dimly-remembered throbbing in my temples and throat that meant hangover. I sipped the coffee with one hand and scrubbed at my aching temple with the other.

"The wages of sin," Alan said, sitting down on the bed next to me. He reached over and brushed my tangled hair off my face.

"You feeling better?"

"No," I said miserably. "I feel just like I should. I feel awful. I don't know what got into me...besides vodka. Did I pick a fight with you, or what? I remember waking up feeling like I'd lost you forever."

"Not me. You were back with Stephen, I think. Don't worry about it. I still cry for him sometimes."

"Do you?" I said in surprise, looking at him. His face was just the same as it had been for twenty-eight years: wry and sweet and faintly simian, and so somehow redolent of health and balance and youth that I used to tease him about having made a deal with the devil. I had not heard him speak of Stephen in a long time, not since the cancer, and it surprised me profoundly to think that he still cried for him. I had not myself, not for a very long time.

"Sure I do," he said. "It doesn't mean I'm desolate, or that what I have isn't enough, but I do. I love him and I miss him."

I felt the tears come back into my eyes and throat, and I leaned my head against him.

"It's been awful for you, too, hasn't it? I keep forgeting," I said against his bare chest. He wore shorts now, but no shirt or shoes, and his skin was cool and sweet-smelling, from the Frenchmilled soap I kept in the guest bath. His hair and beard had droplets in them.

"Not, I imagine, as bad as it has for you," he said, and there was such a universe of rational perspective in the sentence that some of the pain in my chest eased, and I had a sense of the world shifting forward into another gear, and flowing on. It has always been his best gift to me, that all-healing clarity of vision, that unshakable grounding in the earth. I feel sure it was why I married him, under all the other reasons. For all these years he has been, as well as my friend and my lover, my anchor. No one was ever that before, not even Cecie. It was only then that I had a brief glimmer of what the role has cost him. I had taken it for granted, his constancy, his never-flagging willingness to be present at my pain, but I saw in that moment that it must have been a heavy load to shoulder and carry. He had lost a son, too. He had just missed having two other children, too. His wife had had cancer; his wife had hung for five years over an abyss that was open for him, too.

"I cannot imagine what I would do on this earth without you," I said.

"Me, neither," he said, and kissed the top of my head. I wriggled across the bed to come nearer to him, and felt a large patch of sticky wetness. Like the hangover, it had been a long time since I had felt it.

"Whoa," I said, grinning up at him. "I must have jumped your bones. I think I remember mentioning something about it, around the tenth drink. Well, what do you know. Did we...was it okay?"

The few times we had tried to make love, after the last chemo series was over, I had not been able to finish. I would want to, and his hands and body would bring me just up to the brink of that long, red fall that I so loved, and I would be crying out and clutching him like a small monkey, as I always had, but then, when he slid into me, a smothering white panic would rise up in my throat and over my head, and I would literally feel inside me the Pacmen boiling up out of my flesh, where they had lain vanquished, and swarming at him as he entered me, mouths gobbling. It was as if, with the act of love, he released death inside me, death both to me and to him. I felt both poisoned and a poisoner. I would wrench away violently and cry, shivering and nauseated, unable to go on and unable to help him finish. I know that he understood, and that he did not blame me, but it had been a very long time since he had approached me, and I had had the soaring thought, when I touched the sheet where he had spilled out, that this time we had done it, and I was healed.

He did not answer for a moment and I knew that it had not been okay.

"Oh, God," I said hopelessly.

"Don't," he said, holding me and rocking. "It was a lot closer this time. We got a lot further. We got so close this time that I couldn't...I didn't stop. Sorry about that. We'll make it next time. We really were almost there."

I started to cry again.

"It's my fault," I said. "I just plain seduced you, and then I...God. It's not bad enough to be frigid. Now I'm a drunk cockteaser and still frigid..."

He laughed.

"And a pederast and a closet Klansman and didn't vote in the past four elections. Come on, Katie, it isn't your fault. We'll get it next time. We could probably get it now, if you're still interested..."

"No," I wept. "No. Not now. Soon, I promise, but not now, Alan. I'm sorry, I'm so ashamed..."

"Well, make it soon," he said mildly, into my hair. "I want to screw you sometime again before we're both dead."

Before I even thought the words I heard myself saying them.

"It's back, Alan."

He went perfectly still. I felt him draw a deep breath.

"No it isn't," he said.

"Yes. This summer. I've known for a while."

"How?" he said fiercely. "Do you have pain? Are you bleeding? What?"

"No, none of that. I just know..."

"You don't know!" He almost shouted. "You don't know! How can you know if there's no pain and no blood, nothing? How on earth can you know?"

He had pulled away from me and we sat looking at each other in the dim, underwater light. His eyes were very white in his tan, and there was a ridge of white around the base of his nose. He looked scared to death, and angrier than I have ever seen him.

"I just know," I whispered. "Alan, I just know."

He pulled me to him again and began to rock me once more. He rocked me back and forth, back and forth, on the bed.

"No, it isn't back, Katie," he said softly. "No, love. You're upset, and you've got this last checkup coming up, and it's natural for you to be apprehensive. I've known all along you were sweating it out. But you're okay. I'm going to prove to you that you are. I'm going to call John McCracken tonight and get him to see you tomorrow, and then we'll be past and done with this, you'll see..."

I shook my head against him. I must, must have the rest of the summer. If he insisted on taking me to the doctor, I did not know what I would do. I would run away...

"I'm sorry," I said, as reasonably as I could. "I'm being silly. I knew I was even when I said that. Don't make me humiliate myself in front of John. He already thinks I'm a world-class hysteric. It was just the booze talking. And I guess the letter did upset me a little."

I felt his chin move and knew he was smiling.

"Did you know that you called me Paul this afternoon?" he said. There was no pain in his voice, only mild amusement. I thought the pain was there, though. I thought I could feel it moving through him in the very conduit of his blood.

"Oh, Alan, oh I never..." I said, appalled. "Oh, shit. I can't believe it. Alan, you know I don't think of him anymore. You know I don't, and I haven't, in all these years...it was just Ginger's letter, and the thought of going back to that house after all this time..."

"I know," he said. His face was calm, his eyes clear again. Alan is certainly not incapable of jealousy, but he would know in an instant when it was warranted and when not.

"I really do know all that, Kate. Of course, it doesn't mean that I shouldn't have killed the bastard back when he first needed it."

"You didn't have to," I said. "I killed him myself. Her, too. Dead and buried and out of my life for good and all. That's a promise."

"I know," he said again, and kissed me. "Now why don't you finish your nap and then maybe we'll go get a hamburger at Bobby Van's, or something. I'll call you about six."

I did sleep then, with the sound of the ocean fizzing on the tan sand far below the dunes in my ears, and the cool, fresh-fish smell of the incoming tide in my nostrils. Just before I slid down into it, I thought, I did kill them. I really did.

But the dead do walk.

Three days before that winter quarter began, Tri Omega initiated its pledges in a formal candlelight ceremony in the Chapter Room of the house, and Fig Newton became, officially and for all time, one of us. My sister in Omega Omega Omega.

The Fig who had left Randolph a heroine came back considerably diminished. At our ages, memory, even of heroism, was short, and most of us had forgotten our canonization of her in the flurry of the holidays, and preparations for Initiation. Few of us made a fuss over her anymore, and, understandably reluctant to relinquish the only glimmer of limelight she had ever had, she found ways to remind us.

"Did I tell you all that my church asked me to make a little speech at Youth Appreciation Sunday?" she said to us at our first dinner the first night we were back, modestly looking down at her meatloaf and batting her lashes. The effect, Cecie pointed out sotto voce, was that of two centipedes trapped behind portholes.

"No," I said dutifully. "That's great. What about?"

"Well...about the...you know. About the little fire. And my getting your stuff out..."

"Heroism travels far and fast," Cecie said.

"The minister's daughter went to Randolph. She gets the Senator," Fig said primly. No one else spoke.

"I haven't seen you wear the blue cashmere," she said to me in the company of most of the chapter, after breakfast. "Is it ruined? It was at the back of the closet; I couldn't get to it very fast. I think that's how I burned my hands."

"No, it's fine," I said, though in fact the sweater smelled horribly of smoke and always would, and I had left it in Kenmore. "I just haven't worn it yet."

"I wonder if my lashes will come back dark and long?" she said, peering into the hall console mirror as we gathered one evening for a pledge swap. "I read somewhere that they usually do when they've been burned off."

"Oh, Fig, enough about that stupid fire," Jeanine Sefton said irritably. "Your eyelashes don't look any different. You didn't burn a one of them."

"Well, I did, too," Fig said indignantly. "Right off. This is just mascara."

But we could not be wooed back, and she soon became as fully and dismally Fig as she had ever been.

"The reason I know there's a God is that it's you who have to take her through initiation and kiss her, and not me," Cecie said. She had come back seemingly herself, and a weight had slipped off my heart. The Cecie who had left for Virginia before Christmas had haunted my days at home.

"I lie awake at night thinking about it," I said. "I'd kill myself now, but I figure it's going to be my good deed for the century. Who else is ever going to kiss her?"

"I bet she's been practicing on her arm for weeks," Cecie said. "Did you used to do that? Kiss your forearm passionately, with your eyes closed like they did it in the movies, so you'd know how when the time came? Every one of us in the convent had big red hickeys on our arms. The sisters thought it was impetigo."

"Oh, God, yes...I'd forgotten," I cried, convulsed with laughter. "All over America at any given time you can hear the piggy, snorty little sounds of ten-year-old girls kissing their arms."

We were off into one of the late-night gales of glee, laughing until we could not speak and clutching our sides, keeping it going out of sheer relief and joy at having each other back.

"Listen!" Cecie hissed. "Hear that? She's in there now, getting ready for the one she's going to lay on you. Listen!"

And she made a hideous noise with her mouth on the back of her forearm.

"Oh, stop, I'll throw up in her face, I'll be sick on her shoes!" I cried. "I'd rather kiss a frog!"

"And you will," Cecie howled. "When you kiss Fig that's what she turns into!"

"Shhhh! She'll hear us!" I gasped.

But it was a long time before we could stop the laughter.

Three nights later we stood in a semicircle in the darkened chapter room, dressed in white robes over white formal gowns, the air dense and funereal with the smell of banked pine boughs and carnations, our twenty-seven new pledges in a semicircle before us. They wore white formals like us, but not the robes, and all were blindfolded. The room was silent except for the sound of a triangle being struck softly and monotonously in the back of the room by our Music Master, and the quick, shallow breathing of the pledges. The room was darkened by thick, heavy drapes and hot from the sucking tongues of many white candles, and our waists were all girt into breathlessness by Merry Widow waist cinches. I knew that before the five hours were over at least one of the pledges would have fainted. A pledge always did, at a Tri O initiation. It was as much a matter of exaltation as airlessness. Tri Omega brought you into its body on a tide of mystery bordering on the Eleusinian. Even though I had been through it twice now on the other side, I could remember vividly my own initiation far away in Virginia.

I cannot remember now a single secret and holy vow that I took, but I knew them all then, and I could recall in stark lunar detail the terror, exaltation, and sense of life-changing import I had felt when I became a sister. I had a craven, fleshly urge to go to the bathroom, but over that was the tremulous conviction that when the blindfold was removed and "the scales fell from my eyes," as the ritual had it, my life would forevermore be changed. I would be enhanced, enfolded, accepted; I would be given substance and purpose and definition.

I would know who I was, and what.

It had not happened so far, but I knew that our pledges felt the same. The developing hyperventilation told me, and the tears that slipped from behind several blindfolds. I felt a great surge of sisterly love, looking at them. I had wept, too. Even Fig, whose nose rattled with mucus, seemed at that moment vulnerable and dear, blood of my blood. They were all roughly eighteen years old, and as featureless and malleable as tablets of clay. That night began the process of their formation. We, the full members, were the sculptors. We loved them, in that moment, as the artist does the dream of creation before the actuality of it has sullied his canvas.

"This is going to be fine," I thought to myself. "I'm not going to have a bit of trouble kissing her." Beside me, Cecie cut her eyes over at me and grinned slightly.

"Piece of cake," I mouthed silently at her.

The ceremony began; candles were lit and extinguished, bells and the triangle rung, chimes chimed and songs sung. Solemn, binding Greek phrases, rendered doubly exotic by our Southern accents, were chanted and our pledges parroted responses like young cockatoos. The room heated and seemed to shimmer in the wash of candlelight and the miasma of nervous young bodies; the droning and the bells and chimes were both hypnotic and faintly nauseating, like the onset of seasickness. I saw a couple of pledges start to sway.

We were nearing the end of the fifth hour when the first one went over and was neatly and quickly dragged out to the anteroom. We habitually had a second, shortened ceremony for those who fainted and missed the entirety of the first one, but it was matter-of-fact and sparse, somehow shameful. A moment later another pale white form was ushered out, head bobbling. The sound of sobbing rose over the chanting, and I could hear Fig in full cry, blubbering like a giant toddler. I hoped wearily that she could get herself in hand before kissing time came round.

It was time then for the vows, and the pinning on of the golden pins, that lay in a row on a length of velvet at the altar. Each pledge was led forward by her big sister, and together the two repeated the vows of Tri Omega, and the Big Sister pinned the pin on her pledge and gave her the secret handshake and whispered in her ear the most holy Greek words of all, words that must never be said aloud. And then we untied the blindfold and kissed our new sisters, and the service was over. For reasons known only to our original founders, three pallid, bookish young women at Temple University circa 1894, this kiss was bestowed on the mouth. Many jokes were made about the founders' proclivities and the extracurricular activities at Temple but the kiss was really not a laughing matter. In those days of passionate homophobia, everyone dreaded it as if it were an act of Babylonian perversion.

I felt the first coil of nausea when the pledge just ahead of Fig was drawn forward from the semicircle by her big sister and placed before the altar. The tuna casserole we had had for dinner gave a greasy wallow in my stomach, and rose up into my throat. It stung in my nose. I shook my head, hard. I had never been sick at my stomach before in my life, or fainted. Panic rose behind the tuna fish.

I looked at Fig, and another wave broke. She was holding her arms out before her, her fingers grasping and ungrasping air, and her thick lips were working as if she were trying not to spit, or perhaps mumbling to herself. Tears spurted out below her blindfold; it was totally sodden, and the top of her skimpy white formal was as wet as if it had been rained upon. Her chest and shoulders were wet with tears, too. Her tongue flicked out and claimed one, like a lizard's a fly. She gave a great, rattling sniff. I shut my eyes and half turned away.

"Dearest God, just get me through this," I prayed. "Just do this one thing."

Somehow I found myself standing in front of Trish Farr at the altar, my hands on Fig's shoulders as she stood in front of me halfway through the vows of sisterhood. Rote took me through them. Nausea and dizziness howled around me like a storm. Fig cried loudly and openly, but she managed to repeat her vows, and I pinned the pin on her flat chest and gripped her icy hand in my icier one, and whispered the unspeakable words into her ear, and fairly jerked the blindfold off her. One more obstacle, just one, and then I could escape to the kitchen, where there was light and cold water and cool air. One more...

I shut my eyes and leaned in for the kiss, and then opened them. It was fatal. Fig's face was truly hideous: mottled and wet and mucus-tracked, her eyes screwed shut until they almost disappeared behind the scummed glasses. Her nose was completely sealed, and bubbled. But her mouth was slightly open, lips parted so that she could breathe through them. I could see the veining of blue on the underside of her lower lip. And I could see her pink tongue as it slipped in and out of her mouth after a stray tear, like a hummingbird darting, like a snake's. Ecstasy played around her face like heat lightning. I thought, suddenly, that when I put my mouth to hers she was going to put her tongue into it.

"I can't," I whispered. "Oh, I can't." And I turned and ran past Trish into the kitchen and slammed the door and was sick in the aluminum sink. I was still there, retching miserably, a cold dishcloth on my forehead, when the service ended and Cecie came into the kitchen to see what was the matter with me. Fig was behind her, her face blind and rapt.

"I'm so sorry," I said weakly. "I've never done that before. It was just so hot, and I felt sick..."

"Please don't apologize," Fig said, putting her arms around me and hugging me. I stiffened, afraid that I would vomit on her. She stepped back.

"I was deeply touched and honored," she said, her voice trembling. "I felt it, too. It was the most wonderful and powerful emotion I have ever felt. We're sisters forever, now."

Cecie and I looked wordlessly after her as she scuttled out of the room, fresh tears starting behind the thick glasses.

"Dear Jesus, God and Holy Mary," Cecie said.

I was sick in the sink once more.

Fig lost no time in exercising her powers as a Tri Omega in good standing. She was entitled to, of course, but tacit chapter etiquette held that new initiates eased into it gradually, observing a kind of seemly apprenticeship, keeping silent in meetings until opinions were invited, voting with the majority, volunteering for the most onerous tasks, like kitchen detail and pouring for coffees and teas. By the second quarter of full membership they might begin to voice opinions, and by the second year had full shouting, disagreeing, and policy-setting privileges. But Fig, being Fig, waded right in at her first chapter meeting, the one held to discuss winter rush.

This rush was far less elaborate than the big fall one, and far less favored. It was widely agreed among the Greeks that the best pledges had been snatched off in fall rush, and pickings in winter were dreary, but we went through the motions nevertheless. The dean of women had long since decreed that winter rush be held to "give those thoughtful girls who had held back in the fall a chance to make their decision." We all knew what that meant, but there was no circumventing this small official stab at humanity. We held the rush, gracelessly and flatfootedly. As Trish Farr said grumpily, "Nothing good ever came out of winter rush."

But that year Ginger Fowler did, and it was Fig who brought her to us.

At first, we simply stared at her when she rose at the end of the meeting and said, "I've found a really super way to pay you all back for letting me be a Tri Omega. I've got us a new pledge you're all going to just love, and she's already said she'd pledge the second we bid her. She's already left Montevallo and she gets in tomorrow."

She flashed her gummy grin around the circle of sisters. Her new gold pin rode astride an astonishing left breast wrought by a new, fiercely stitched Peter Pan bra, and her eyes, behind the harlequins, shed benevolence on us like the morning sun.