We spent most of the time at a motel in Muskegon, keeping our fingers crossed that Dr. Kroft wouldn't show up with a team of men in white coats. But neither he nor anyone else from the state psychiatric bureau ever appeared, and finally we were told we were free to go home.

On the same day that Chief Bradley was due to be officially charged with the killing of Horace Rollins, we took a last drive up to Seven Lakes. Officer Cahill -- who'd been temporarily appointed acting chief of police -- was waiting for us on the Gage property with a demolition crew.

The cottage had only partially collapsed, which was one reason why Chief Bradley hadn't been more badly hurt. One wall had come down, and about half of the roof, but the majority of the structure, its frame still propped by that telephone pole, remained intact. It probably wouldn't have lasted much longer in any event, but Officer Cahill had decided to declare it a public-safety hazard and bulldoze it into the ground; and he'd invited us to come watch.

"Does anyone want to say anything?" Officer Cahill asked, when we were all gathered in the front yard. He looked at Andrew, who seemed lost in thought, and Andrew roused himself and said, "No, I don't want to say anything, but. . . give me a minute, OK?" Officer Cahill nodded, and Andrew faced the cottage, his expression going through a whole series of changes as a parade of souls came forward for a final look at the place. I recognized some of them -- Aaron, Jake, Samantha, Seferis -- but there were others I don't think I'd met before.

Then Andrew was back, and he turned to Officer Cahill and said, "Go ahead." Officer Cahill signaled the bulldozer.

The cottage was down in just a few minutes, but Officer Cahill had the bulldozer operator drive back and forth over the wreckage for a while, mashing it flat. Finally Officer Cahill turned to Andrew again and said, "Enough?" Andrew nodded.

Officer Cahill gave another signal, and the bulldozer rolled off into the backyard. Meanwhile Andrew's face changed again, taking on a mischievous expression: Adam. He walked up to where the cottage's front door had been, and took out a salt shaker that he'd stolen from Winch.e.l.l's Diner that morning. He unscrewed the top, poured the salt into his hand, and sowed it over the ruins.

When Adam was done he tossed the shaker away and gave the body to Aunt Sam. Sam went over to Officer Cahill, surprising him by giving him a big kiss on the cheek, and surprising him again by saying: "You're still a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Jimmy, but thank you for this." Then Sam gave way to Andrew, who stepped back red-faced and muttered, "Sorry."

"It's OK," Officer Cahill said, "I understand. Or actually, I don't, but. . . I'll live."

There was one more crash as the bulldozer knocked down the toolshed. The bulldozer operator leaned out of his cab and called to Officer Cahill: "Anything else?"

"No," the officer told him. "No, that's good!"

And then Andrew, looking tired, turned to me and said: "What do you think, Penny? Are you ready to go home now?"

"Yes," I said. "I'm ready. Let's go home."

30.

Surprised?

I couldn't resist including that, but at the same time, I don't want you to get the wrong idea; Penny did not undergo any sort of miraculous transformation as a result of our adventures. It would take almost a year of weekly therapy with Dr. Eddington before she came to honestly regard herself as Penny rather than Mouse, and another year and a half for her case to reach its final disposition. As part of her therapy, Penny would eventually read through Thread's electronic diaries -- the same diaries I have drawn on in recounting her side of this story -- and rewrite portions of them in the first person; but that came very late in the course of her treatment. In the nearer term, the fact that she was now in direct communication with her other selves did represent a major breakthrough, but it was only the first step in a lengthy process.

So we went home to Washington and resumed the course of our lives there, a return to order that went much more smoothly than I, at least, had any right to expect. Not only did we still have our jobs at the Reality Factory, but Julie, in an incredible act of generosity, insisted on paying us full wages for the time we'd been away. "Medical leave," she said. "All the best companies offer it."

Julie. One of the first things I did after getting back to Autumn Creek was write Julie a long letter of apology, which I delivered to her in person. After she read it, we went out to dinner (by unspoken agreement, we chose a restaurant with no liquor license) and had a long heart-to-heart talk. I won't claim that we worked out all our issues, but by the end of the evening I felt like we'd repaired most of the damage to our friendship.

Of course, Julie being Julie (and -- let's be fair -- me being me), there were always new challenges. My second week back I started my own course of therapy with Dr. Eddington. My appointments were on Friday afternoons at four. Penny drove me; we'd leave the Reality Factory around three and head into the city. Coming back I'd take the bus sometimes, but most often Penny would drive me home, too -- or Maledicta would drive Aunt Sam, if they'd both been good. Penny's own sessions with Dr. Eddington were on Wednesdays, and I took to riding along on those, as well; I'd let Adam, Jake, and the others explore Fremont while Penny was with the doctor, and afterwards, depending on Penny's mood, we'd go see a movie, or take a walk along Lake Union, or -- if the session had been an especially bad one -- just sit in Gas Works Park and talk.

All of which was nice, but it did mean that we were both leaving work early twice a week. At first Julie was perfectly fine about this -- anything to keep us from running off to Michigan again -- but by midsummer she began to grouse about the lost work hours, saying it was "hurting productivity." I don't think it was hurting productivity; I think Julie was just jealous of all the time Penny and I were spending together. Penny got her therapy sessions rescheduled to Friday, directly after mine, to cut down on the lost worktime, but Julie continued to complain anyway, and I surprised myself by not caring all that much.

As it turned out, the Reality Factory's days were numbered. In September, a big venture capital deal that Julie had been working on for months fell through. She called a meeting and informed us that unless she could find a new source of funding, the Factory would soon be bankrupt. Then Dennis dropped his own bombsh.e.l.l: bankruptcy or no bankruptcy, he said, he had decided to move back to Alaska.

"What are you talking about?" said Julie. "You can't just leave! How are we supposed to finish the project without --"

"Come on, Grand Poobah," Dennis said, fanning himself with his open shirtfront. "You know as well as I do that it's never gonna be finished. I'm sick of it."

Penny and I slipped out during the ensuing bloodbath. Irwin was right behind us. "I'm not going back to Alaska," he announced fiercely, and fell to silent brooding until Julie came to tell us it was all over: we were out of business.

By the middle of October, Dennis had gone. Irwin, true to his word, and much to his brother's surprise, chose to remain in Washington, though he left Autumn Creek. He moved to Renton, and got a job with a fantasy card-game company that was headquartered there; Jake was pretty envious when he heard.

Penny and I both landed jobs at Bit Warehouse. Yes, that same one. I know what you're thinking, but it turned out Adam's joke was true: enough time had pa.s.sed for them to forget about my "drug problem." Actually, high employee turnover had produced a conveniently selective memory loss.

Mr. Weeks was long gone, as were all my father's closest coworkers. But my father's mostly positive work record was still on file, so I had very little trouble getting rehired, as a cashier rather than a restocker this time. Penny went to work in the Technical Services Department, fixing and upgrading computers.

As for Julie, I'm not altogether sure what she did for work in the months following the Reality Factory's closure. I know she did a number of odd jobs for her uncle, and she spent a lot of time in Seattle, probably temping. But she didn't like to talk about it. Much of her time was taken up by a lawsuit: when she tried to break the lease on the Factory lot, the landlord sued her for unpaid rent and for her failure to complete the promised improvements to the property. The case was eventually settled out of court, with Julie paying the landlord a couple thousand dollars (don't ask me where she got it) and letting him keep all the gear inside the shed, or at least that portion of it that hadn't already been seized by the Factory's other creditors. The computer equipment was sold for cash, and the Honey Bucket, I hope, was taken out and burned, but as far as I know the tents are still there, gathering dust and mildew and waiting for the next visionary entrepreneur to come along.

One day near the end of the following summer, Julie took me out to lunch and announced that she too would be leaving Autumn Creek. "And you'll never guess where I'm going: Alaska."

"Alaska?" I said. "What, are you planning to track down Dennis and get even with him?"

"No, I've already forgotten all about Dennis. . . I mean, OK, if I do come across him, and if he happens to be standing at the edge of a cliff with his back turned to me, who knows, but no, I'm not planning to kill him." What she was planning to do, she said, was get work aboard a fish processor, which is a kind of big factory ship that goes to sea for months at a time, catching thousands of pounds of cod and haddock and processing them right on board into frozen fillets and fish sticks. From Julie's description, it sounded like the worst job in the world -- sixteen-hour shifts, hazardous work conditions, crews composed largely of male ex-convicts, etc. -- but Julie insisted that, if she survived, it would be well worth it: "They pay you a percentage of the proceeds, which if the catch is big can be a huge amount of money."

"What if the catch isn't so big?"

"Well, that's why you've got to pick the right ship. . . don't worry, it'll work out. I'll spend a few months in h.e.l.l, make my fortune, and then I'll come back here and we'll start a new company."

She had a couple of going-away presents for me, even though she was the one who was leaving.

The first was her Cadillac. "I can't take it with me," she said. "It wouldn't survive the drive up, and even if it did, three months in an Anchorage parking garage would kill it for sure."

"Well I'll be happy to watch it for you, Julie, but you know I still don't have a driver's license."

"You'll get one," Julie said. "Penny tells me you're a really good driver. . ."

Which brought us to her other going-away gift. Julie's apartment lease ran through next February, and after all the ha.s.sle over the Reality Factory's lease she didn't want to risk breaking it. So she'd arranged to sublet the place to Penny, whose current apartment in Queen Anne rented on a month-to-month basis. "Lose one neighbor, gain another," Julie said. "Now I know you won't be lonely."

I had no objection -- I thought it would be great to have Penny living in Autumn Creek -- but I said: "It's still not going to happen, Julie."

"What's not going to happen?"

"You know perfectly well what. You're matchmaking again. But Penny and I are just friends."

"Matchmaking? Me?" She smiled the fake-innocent smile I knew so well. "You're imagining things, Andrew. Still. . . the two of you would make a cute couple. . ."

She left for Alaska in September. In December I received a letter from her saying that the fish-processing job hadn't panned out, and she was working a concession stand at the Anchorage Zoo.

"Big joke, really. We're only open during daylight hours -- ten to four this time of year -- and half the exhibits are hibernating right now. Still it's a living. P.S. I need you to sell my car and send me the money."

I sold the Cadillac, for a sum far smaller than Julie had once hoped to realize, and sent her a cashier's check padded with a little extra money from my own savings. Since then I have received occasional letters and e-mails from her, providing sketchy details of her life in various Alaskan cities and towns -- she seems to be moving closer to the North Pole as time goes on. Her last postcard read: "Wedding plans canceled. I am in Fairbanks taking flying lessons & by spring should be a licensed bush pilot. x.x.x, Julie."

That was seven months ago. I haven't heard another word since, though I would be willing to bet that Julie has not, in fact, become a bush pilot. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. I hope that whatever she is doing, she is happy. I still love her, of course, and while I accept now that it was not meant to be, I will never wish her anything other than the best.

And no, I have no idea what wedding plans she was referring to.

If this were a made-up story, Julie's matchmaking efforts would ultimately have succeeded: Penny and I would have fallen in love and lived happily ever after. Reality has (so far) fallen well short of that, though not as short of it as I would once have predicted.

For a long while after we came back from Michigan, we really were just friends, albeit several times over: I was friends with Penny, and Aunt Sam was friends with Maledicta; Adam was friends -- poker buddies -- with Malefica; and Jake, strangest of all, was friends with Loins, who had an unexpected soft spot for The Little Mermaid and other Disney videos. We discovered other affinities between our households as well, though there weren't enough hours in the day to cultivate them all.

After Julie left Autumn Creek and Penny moved into her apartment, our friendship(s) naturally intensified. Penny was already driving me to and from work every day. Now we started having breakfast together too (sometimes she'd come over to Mrs. Winslow's, sometimes we'd go out to the Harvest Moon Diner), and spending a lot of our evenings and weekends together, I mean even more than we had before.

At first I thought it would feel strange, hanging out with Penny in Julie's old apartment. But Penny completely redecorated: she threw out all the furniture Julie had left behind, repainted the rooms, and got the landlord's permission to put new tile on the bathroom floor and new linoleum in the kitchen; she strung lights in the outside staircase, and finally replaced the k.n.o.b on the downstairs door. By the time she was done, it looked like a whole new place, and though I still experienced occasional flashes of deja vu -- most often going up or down the stairs -- it wasn't anything like what I'd been expecting.

It wasn't just the new paint job and furnishings that made the difference, of course; it was Penny herself. Although our friendship had its rough spots, Penny never mystified me the way Julie had. If there was something about her behavior that I didn't understand, I could ask her to explain it to me, and her explanations made sense. If she got mad at me it was usually for a good reason; an apology meant that a fight was over, rather than signaling a new phase of discord. Most of all, I never had the feeling, so common with Julie, that I was dealing with someone whose perspective on reality was bent ninety degrees from my own. Penny and I might reach different conclusions sometimes, but we saw the same things. We got each other.

"This is too easy," Adam complained one time after Penny and I had, without rancor, agreed to disagree about something. "Where's the pa.s.sive-aggressive behavior? Where are the mixed signals and the hidden messages? Where's the pain?"

"You can keep all that," I told him. "I like this."

Penny seemed to like it too, and so I guess it's not all that surprising, given how close we became, that we would eventually explore the possibility of moving beyond friendship. It started one night in February of 1999, when in honor of my birthday we went into the city to attend a Lyle Lovett concert.

It was snowing when the show let out, and Penny and I decided to go for a ride on the Seattle monorail and watch the snow fall. Somehow during the ride we ended up kissing. That's all we did that night, kiss, but from then on things were different between us, and later -- not very much later -- we did other stuff.

We did stuff, and it was fun, but it also caused problems with the other souls in our households, some of whom weren't happy with this new development. More crucially, a couple of the more intimate things we did dredged up memories about Penny's mother, very dark memories that Penny had, until then, been successfully avoiding. In March she started having blackouts again, her first in more than a year. In April she disappeared for three whole days, and woke up in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Charter Hotel in Spokane. After that incident, we decided to go back to being just friends, at least until Penny worked through a few issues.

She began going to therapy two and then three times a week. I saw less of her, which was hard; but when I did see her, I could still ask questions, so I always knew where we stood. And she was getting better: as though a last barrier had been knocked down, her therapy progressed with great rapidity, until by midsummer she was talking about a final resolution.

But before she could conclude her treatment, Penny had a decision to make; and her choice, when it came, left me stunned.

"Reintegration?" I said, not sure I'd heard right. "Penny, that's. . ."

". . . a shock, I know," she said.

Crazy, I was going to say; like opting for a lobotomy. I tried for a more tactful phrasing: "Reintegration doesn't work, Penny. It doesn't work, and if it did, it'd be like dying. You wouldn't be you anymore."

She bit her lip, unhappy that I was reacting this way. "Dr. Eddington thinks it could work," she told me. "He thinks --"

"He's wrong," I interrupted her. "If Dr. Grey were here --"

"Dr. Grey never said reintegration couldn't work, Andrew. I've read her book: she said reintegration was optional, not impossible."

"It's a bad option," I insisted. "What about the others? They can't all agree to this."

"They do," said Penny. "At least, none of them disagrees. And anyway it's my decision. I don't want to go on living my life as a time-share; I want to be one person. You can understand that, can't you?"

I could understand it. I just couldn't accept it. I continued to argue against the idea, and the next time I saw Dr. Eddington, I really lit into him.

"You know I can't discuss Penny's therapy with you, Andrew," he said. "If you feel this raises a question with regard to your own treatment. . ."

"My treatment? It's got nothing to do with me. I'm never going to reintegrate."

"Which I believe is the right decision -- for you. But you aren't Penny." He sighed. "Look, Andrew. . . I know you think you and Penny have a lot in common, but there are some important differences between your two cases. With Penny, the basic personality split, as profound as it seems, just isn't as severe: the original Penny Driver still exists, and still wants to exist. Now" -- he held up a hand -- "that doesn't guarantee that reintegration will work, but it means there's a chance. And since this is what Penny wants, I would hope that you, as her friend, would choose to be supportive."

I did try to be supportive, but Penny and I still argued regularly about her decision to reintegrate.

My father, usually a good peacemaker, was no help either -- he was even more opposed to Penny's decision than I was. But nothing we said or did could get her to reconsider.

In August, Penny left for a monthlong retreat at The Orpheus Center in Port Townsend, a sort of multiples' halfway house that specialized in reintegration. She went without saying good-bye (we'd fought the night before), though she did leave a note and the key to her apartment. For the next four weeks, I dutifully collected her mail, all the while wondering if the person I was collecting it for would still exist when September rolled around.

The day she came back, I was in Fremont for my own weekly therapy session; when our fifty minutes were up, Dr. Eddington asked if I'd like to go say hi to an old friend. Penny was waiting for us at a cafe a few blocks from the doctor's office. She was sitting at an outside table, and I was relieved to see I could still recognize her without help. Her hair was longer -- she'd been growing it out all summer, and now it had finally reached her shoulders -- but other than that she looked like the same Penny.

Her body language confused me, though. As we approached, she was smoking a cigarette, ordinarily a sign that Maledicta had control. But when she looked up and saw us coming, her reaction -- the look on her face, the slightly tentative way she waved h.e.l.lo -- said "Penny" to me. . . and then, without changing expression, she took a last draw on the cigarette and stubbed it out with an impatient gesture that was pure Maledicta.

I spent the first few minutes of our reunion imitating a fencepost. I think I did manage to say hi, but after that, Dr. Eddington had to handle the opening round of small talk on his own. He didn't stay long; after getting me settled in a chair and verifying that I wasn't actually catatonic, he excused himself, saying that he'd be in his office for a while yet if either of us needed him.

In the silence that followed his departure, Penny reached for the pack of Winstons on the table in front of her. I watched her knock out a cigarette and light it, her hand gestures once again suggesting Maledicta. But after taking her first puff, she exhaled over her shoulder rather than directly at me, and when the smoke started to drift back over the table, she waved it away.

"I'm sorry," I said finally, lowering my eyes. "I don't mean to stare. . ."

"No, it's OK," said Penny. Her voice seemed fuller, or at least louder; and also -- but this had to be my imagination working overtime -- I thought I detected a trace of harmony. "I know this must be weird for you. It is for me too, still, and I've had some time to get used to it."

"What's it like?" I asked.

"Hard to describe." She laughed, a laugh I a.s.sociated with Loins. "Like this. . ." -- she held up her cigarette -- "I don't actually enjoy smoking, but at the same time, I really do. I mean, I want to quit, but I don't."

"Maledicta and the others," I said. "Are they. . . ?"

"Still alive?" Penny nodded. "It isn't like I thought it would be -- they, we, we're all still here, just, less separate than we used to be. We don't have to occupy the body one at a time now; we coexist in it."

"Coexist? So you're still multiple?"

"Yes and no." She laughed again. "This is the hardest part to put into words. It's like, right now, I'm looking at you, and I'm seeing you, feeling about you, the way Penny does, and at the same time, I'm seeing you and feeling about you the way Maledicta does. And I can sort out, if I want to, the Penny-feelings from the Maledicta-feelings, but I can also just let them flow together. . ."

"And the others, too? All of them?"

"Everybody at once is hard. I can bring them all up at the same time, but it gets confusing."

"And that's. . . this is better, you think, than the way things used to be?"

"Yes." Having finished her cigarette, Penny started to draw another from the pack, then shook her head and shoved it back. "Yes, it's better -- most of the time. The doctors at Orpheus, they said it would get easier with practice, that as we shared more experiences we'd start to mesh better. I'm not sure if that's really true, though, or if the doctors just thought it ought to be true. I guess I'll find out."

"Well," I said. "As long as you're happy. . ."

"We're. . . content," said Penny. "I'm sorry if I don't explain it very well. But that reminds me: I have something for you." She brought out a small gift-wrapped package. "I meant to give you this before I went to Orpheus, but, well. . ."

I was suddenly uneasy, for no reason I could put my finger on, but I took the package from her and opened it. Inside was a gold-colored CD with "Thread.doc" written on it in Magic Marker.

"It's a copy of my Thread diaries," Penny said.

"What are you giving it to me for?"

"To read. . . if you want. It's to help you understand why I felt I had to do this. And also --"

"Oh, Penny," I said, "you don't owe me any explanations. I'm sorry if I --"