"I want to be in West Virginia before we stop."

She studied Tammy, whose eyes were darting from side to side beneath closed lids. "Did you take away those sleeping pills?"

"No."

"Might be an idea. At some point she's going to crawl far enough out of her pit to get her self-will back. That's when she's liable to do something stupid."

Tammy umphed and turned in her seat, moving Julia, who said, "Bony hips. I think she's lost weight," and I suddenly couldn't stand the idea of Julia touching another woman, not touching me, never touching me again.

"Please," I said.

Julia raised her eyebrows.

"This-I can't-" I braked and started to pull over.

"What?" Tammy sat up.

Julia vanished. I yanked on the parking brake before we quite stopped moving and Tammy jerked forward against her seat belt. The engine rumbled. The wind howled. Her gaze slid this way and that but she kept her head down.

"Get out."

She put her hand on the door lock and prepared to get out, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, without even looking at me. It was as though she had expected all along to be abandoned, as though she accepted it, even deserved it.

Shame raised prickles on my skin from knees to neck. "I mean get in the backseat. There's more room, you can stretch out."

She climbed out and into the back without another word.

"Are you warm enough?" She nodded, eyes huge. "Good, that's good." The truck started up again smoothly and I pressed the accelerator down and down until it wouldn't go any further. Lane marker studs streamed under my wheels. The engine began to whine. Annoying.

"It's all right," I said, to myself, to Tammy, to Julia, wherever she was, and eased my foot off the gas. The stream flowed more sedately. "We'll take the next exit and stop for the night."

The Days Inn was plain and comfortable; spending the night with Tammy was neither. She didn't take off her underwear or her watch and lay rigid on her tautly made bed like a knife from the wrong set of silverware set out on its napkin by mistake. She didn't talk, she barely breathed, and her eyes glimmered slightly: wide open and empty even of fright.

I woke at six the next morning, and opened my eyes just in time to see Tammy's flick open and watch me. Back to square one. I got up, ignored her, and went and had my shower. There was no packing or unpacking to do.

"I'll be back in an hour," I said. "Be ready to leave. Assuming you still want to come with me." It took most of that hour to get a copy of the elevator key made, to find and buy an envelope, to persuade the desk clerk to run it through their stamp machine, for a fee. I put the original key in the envelope, addressed it to Geordie Karp at his loft address, and dropped it in the mailbox. The duplicate went back in my pocket; you never knew.

When I got back I walked around the parking lot for the remaining minutes, saw license plates from sixteen different states, almost all on American cars, and wondered what the percentage of foreign to American vehicles would be at a hotel as opposed to a motel. Probably some ethnologist has done a study.

Tammy was washed, brushed, and standing by the bed like a cadet in a military academy when I got back. So she could at least make sense of what I was saying.

"Hungry?" I asked. She waited a fraction to see if I'd give her a hint about what I'd prefer her answer to be, and when I gave her no clue, she shrugged very slightly. Apart from that single "What?" when she woke in the truck, she hadn't said a word since we'd left New York. "I need to eat before I drive." She picked up her purse. She was connecting at least some of the dots. I drove us through a quiet, gray morning and, when I could find nothing else, to the violence of light and plastic and noise that is Denny's.

Our server's eyes were overbright, as though he were in the middle of a speed jag, but it could just have been the light. "What'll you have?"

I ordered pancakes and eggs and bacon, with coffee. Tammy refused to look up from the menu. I smiled blandly at the server, offering no help at all. He shifted from foot to foot.

"Regular breakfast is pretty good," he said finally. Tammy nodded. "With coffee?" She nodded again.

We ate in silence. When the bill came, I stood up. "I'm going to the bathroom. I'll see you outside." She made a panicked, abortive movement, but no sound. "Your wallet should be in your purse."

"She's not ready to do things for herself," Julia said from behind me as I washed my hands.

"I think she is." I pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, lifted my gaze to her reflection in the mirror, and the floor seemed to drop six inches: Julia's indigo eyes had darkened to chocolate brown, like Tammy's.

"Imagine if it were me out there," she said.

The bathroom door swang back and forth behind me as I walked rapidly back to the restaurant.

Tammy, pale-cheeked, was still at the table, but she had her credit card out, sitting on top of the bill.

"You-we should probably take that up front."

After a moment's hesitation, she picked up the bill and card and followed me to the cash register. She handed it over to the server without a word. He handed her a slip and a pen. She looked at me with those empty brown eyes.

"Sign," I said. She wrote slowly. "And add five dollars, for a tip." The faster she came back to the real world, the faster I'd be rid of her.

In the parking lot, I went to the driver's side, unlocked it, then climbed in the passenger seat. Tammy looked at me, looked back over her shoulder at Denny's, then up at the sky when a solitary raindrop hit her shoulder.

"Better get in before you get wet."

She got in. I handed her the keys.

"I've done too much driving lately, I'm tired. Wake me in a couple of hours." I curled up and closed my eyes. We sat there for nearly thirty minutes before she put the keys in and turned the ignition. I kept my eyes shut while the engine idled.

"I can't," she said at last. I waited some more. "I don't know where we're going."

"No," I agreed.

Another long, long wait.

"Where are we going?"

"North Carolina, near Asheville." I sat up and turned to face her. "Unless you'd rather go somewhere else. I'll travel with you wherever you want, get you settled somewhere."

"Not Atlanta," she said.

"All right."

"North Carolina?" I nodded. She nodded back and steered us carefully out of the parking lot, onto I-81 South. Her driving was bad at first, but improved rapidly. She stayed slightly under the speed limit. I was starting to go to sleep for real when she spoke again. "What's in North Carolina?"

"Woods, birds, a house. There's room enough for two, for a little while." Until Dornan can come and get you. She didn't say anything but the engine hit a higher note.

I didn't sleep but drifted in a theta-wave state for a while until she began to brake too hard and make abrupt lane changes.

"Take the next exit," I said. "I'll take over."

When she sat in the passenger seat it was obvious that returning to the world had taken its toll; her shoulders were hunched around her ears, and she picked endlessly at her thigh where the corduroy had worn thin. A person who is new in the world-a child, or an adult in a foreign country or just out of hospital-needs safety, first of all, but then they need to know that they matter, that their opinions are considered, that there are choices. The trick is not to offer too many options at once.

I turned on the radio and skimmed through channels: the blandly perfect smile of fusion jazz, a huge-voiced country music diva belting out about how her dawg done left her, an apoplectic talk show host ranting about tax reform, a commercial for wireless phone service that degenerated into the low-toned gabble of federally regulated footnotes. I kept trying, and eventually plumped for some college station that sounded as though it was broadcasting from the bottom of a disused well. "Not exactly to my taste. Feel free to change the station." The thigh-picking slowed, but we listened to well-bottom music until the weak signal started to fade. "Find something else, will you?"

She found something that called itself adult contemporary and sounded as though its artists, mostly women with little-girl voices, lived on Prozac. Still, it was a decision.

"Maybe we should stop at the next town and buy some CDs." I couldn't remember the last time I'd shopped for something unnecessary.

I drove for another hour. Tammy napped. When the adult contemporary signal faded, she sat up and changed the station without prompting. Mommy's little helper.

At Wytheville, just north of the North Carolina border, I left the interstate and took us onto the Blue Ridge Parkway: more than two hundred miles without a single traffic light or fast food franchise. With a speed limit of forty-five miles per hour-less on some of the hairpin bends-leaving the interstate meant adding at least two hours to our journey, but it was an essential buffer zone between where Tammy had been and where she was going. I turned off the radio and opened both windows.

"Breathe," I said. Valleys ran long and deep to either side, and cows grazed in pastures framed by split-log fences. The air was rich and cool and edged with life.

"It's cold."

"Put your sweatshirt on. We're two thousand feet up a mountain."

"You live up a mountain?"

"A valley halfway up a mountain, but we've a couple of hundred miles to go." Somehow, in four or five hours, I had to show her how much there was here to appreciate. She had to know before she got there how special this place was. It had to become special to her, too, otherwise she would trample all over the fragile peace of my refuge. She squirmed into her sweatshirt and we drove for a while in silence.

"These are the Blue Ridge Mountains."

She nodded, but didn't say anything.

"Part of the Appalachians, one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth. They're so old that they appeared before most animal and plant life existed."

"No fossils," she said after a moment.

"Right. Lots of gemstones, though." Smarter than she looks, Dornan had said. "Some of the rivers are even older than the mountains."

She didn't seem interested in the apparent paradox. Mountains form in geological time, in slow motion. A river that exists before the mountain forms will cut through the new, soft rock to get to the sea. Most of those seas were long gone, but the rivers remain. We passed a sign for Blowing Rock, the head of the New River. Stupid name for the oldest river on the continent.

"It's about time for lunch. We could stop and eat and take a look at the river."

She nodded, though I'm not sure whether it was the food or the river that appealed.

Blowing Rock is a small town with a lot of money whose inhabitants had managed to keep the ugly face of tourism from their doors. We ate fettucini in a cafe under a bright awning, surrounded by window boxes spilling flowers; sun warmed those wood and fieldstone houses not sheltered by maple and poplar. Tammy spent more time watching relaxed, clean, happy people walk past the window than eating.

"Is this real?" she asked eventually.

I nodded, and for a moment I thought she would burst into tears, but she just shook her head.

When we got back in the car, she watched the scenery more intently, and once pointed to a speck hanging high over the canopy. "What's that?"

"Hawk," I said. "I can't tell what kind."

She was silent the rest of the drive, and I left her to her thoughts, because now we were driving through the beginnings of Pisgah, and the air began to smell like home.

An hour later we drove into Asheville and I parked in more or less the same place I'd parked when I got my hair cut, and when I climbed out of the truck into the slanting afternoon sun, I had the absurd urge to drop into the Heads Up Salon and see if Dree was there.

Tammy was trying to get out of the truck and pull off her sweatshirt at the same time. She managed both, then just stood there holding the sweatshirt in a bundle in front of her, as though it were something dirty.

"Is your house near here?"

"No. It's ... some distance outside Asheville. We're here to pick up food, and clothes for you." She might be staying with me, but she wasn't going to wear my clothes. "Bring your money." She rooted around in her purse, then hesitated, still clutching the sweatshirt. "You won't need that. It'll stay warm for another hour or so."

Somewhere between the sidewalk and the first hanging garments, Tammy's body language changed; her brows arched disdainfully; she sighed and shook her head dramatically at the offerings, then fingered a slippery rayon dress.

"T-shirts and shorts and boots would be more appropriate for where we'll be; some jeans; a sweater for the cool nights."

She swung the hair back from her face and eyed me sullenly, now the perfect teenager. Infant to child to teen in one day. With any luck she'd be dead of old age before we reached the clearing.

"Your money, your choice." It would only be for a day or two, anyway. And if she bought all the wrong things she could either suffer or drive herself back here. Nursemaid was not part of the job description.

Tammy remained in teenage mode as we drove north and west along secondary roads which narrowed to gravel, and then took an abrupt turn left and hit the unpaved track up the mountain.

"Where are we going?"

"My cabin."

She sighed heavily and pulled her sweatshirt back on. After another ten minutes she rolled up the window.

I took the last half a mile in second gear. Judging by the mess alongside the road, hogs had been through recently, and tree debris indicated high winds sometime in the last couple of days. For some reason my heart was beating high as we pulled into the clearing.

It was all there, as I'd left it, cabin roof still on, tarps snug and tight across windows, trailer fast shut, but different. Forest litter from the wind or storm lay everywhere, and foliage that had been green had faded to yellow, what had already been yellowing was now gold, and the elder and dogwood and maple leaves had deepened to rich, winelike hues. I parked and just sat there for a moment, drinking in the smell, which was loamier, wilder.

"This is it?"

"Yes." Even I heard the smile in my voice.

"What happened?"

"A storm. The wind must have really ripped through here while I was gone. We can use the deadfall for firewood."

"No. I mean the house. It looks ... scabby."

"I'm rebuilding it," I said shortly, and climbed out of the truck, but I looked at the cabin again, at the different colors of the old and new wood-that could, I supposed, look leprous to the uneducated eye-and the messy tarps, the gables. "It will look better when the windows are in and the new wood's had a chance to weather." But I wondered, which made me angry. "Did you pull the wings off flies, too, when you were little?"

Her face changed abruptly, the same look a child gets when she breaks a parent's favorite ornament and looks up, too frightened to even cry out that it was an accident.

"This place means a lot to me. If you don't have anything good to say about it, keep quiet."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I-"

"You weren't to know. Let's get unpacked. We'll be sleeping in the trailer."

We unloaded the food, then her things. I showed her where to stow her clothes, handed her sheets, which she accepted wordlessly, and pointed out the sofa bed. I left her to it, and went to start up the systems. There was enough propane for a while, but after Dornan's visits and with Tammy here, I'd have to take the trailer out in a few days and pump out the gray and black water tanks. Refilling with fresh from the pump was no problem, but there was no point if the sewage tanks were full. That would be another new thing; I hadn't had to pump the tanks since I'd arrived here, shell-shocked and more than half mad, not wanting to shower or wash dishes or use the toilet, not wanting to have anything to do with civilization at all.

I went back into the trailer. "Tammy." She was sitting hunched on the couch that was the sofa bed, as though she had been given permission to use only that piece of furniture. "Come sit at the table." She did, cautiously. "I'm going to show you how everything works. Most of it's simple, but if you have questions, ask. Tonight I'll cook dinner, but from tomorrow you'll take your turn."