There's no pee left but he keeps checking to make sure. He stares in the mirror over the clean hotel sink. He drinks water so he'll make more pee. He goes back to bed. He needs answers. His dreams usually help him, illuminating his prob-lems and giving answers to inner dilemmas. Sometimes they give clues to the future. Tonight they give nothing.

He recalls nothing but loss, emptiness. If he feels anything at all in this hotel it's the sensation of emptiness. A glass drained of wa-ter, dry, and that water he just drank-tasteless. He licks his lips and goes back to bed. Or starts to go to bed and stops, shocked by a white apparition sitting on his bed in apparent agony, a woman beating her face with her own hands, then stopping to look at him as if seeking his approval. At least this is something. He moves quietly to the drapery pull and lets the moonlight in. The ghost turns toward the window and continues to cry silently. Neddy creeps closer, trying to recognize her.

"Who are you? What do you want with me?" He sounds like an actor in a B-movie. He feels like he should know her. The ghost tears at her stringy hair (that's very familiar) and opens her mouth to scream. Automatically, Neddy puts his hand over his ears but there's no sound and the apparition disappears, leaving no trace, not even a chilliness in the air. Sighing, Neddy crawls back into bed and curls into a fetal position. He used to read Tarot cards for a woman named Laura. Then she died.

People die. He came here to get away from death and death's not something you can escape. The ghost who just left, maybe it was Laura and he ran her off because he didn't want to hear her scream.

His body grows pleasingly lax. He stretches out and snug-gles into the plump pillow. "I want to dream about what I should do tomorrow" he whispers to himself. Sleep steals over his features and feeds him pictures he won't remember when he wakes up, an odd event for a man who normally experiences over fifty percent complete dream recall.

Morning slides into the room pearly grey and still. He stares at the ocean view bathed in mist. He has to do some- thing. Go to the bathroom. Take a shower. Go get something to eat. Get out of here. He does just that, with an urgency to his movements that surprises him. There's no hurry. He doesn't have to go to work. He's on vacation. Neddy Jones has all the time in the world.

After a rushed breakfast in the coffee shop, Neddy buys an overpriced umbrella in the gift shop and goes out into the morning air. The minute he leaves the hotel, tension seems to lift from his body and he breathes easier. Images of Laura rush into his brain and guilt mixes with the now familiar pain. Why is it becoming so easy to forget her? It's probably just a normal reaction to bereavement. Certainly it's a selfish grief. He's just gotten used to having her around, loved her needing him because she was feeling so badly. He didn't have to see it in her cards because any fool could read her eyes and her crooked, sliding mouth, the way she used to try to smile and could never quite pull it off convincingly. Still, he couldn't head the reaper off at the pass. He couldn't even get her a time-out.

Good old Neds heads for the beach, heading into the wind, using his umbrella like a medieval shield. He turns the pain over and over in his head, examining it with relentless curi-osity. The pain's like a lump of fool's gold, fascinatingbut monetarily worthless. He finds a bench to sit on. The rain's let up; he closes the umbrella carefully and puts it beside him. The bench is wet but his raincoat protects the seat of his trousers.

"Have you ever fed seagulls? I used to feed pigeons, now I feed seagulls."

The abrupt, scratchy voice astonishes him. To the left, right beside him, a burly black-haired man studies him with a jo-vial but oddly menacing smile. "Excuse me?"

"Barney's the name, Jake Barney, retired Air Force man. And you are-?"

Suddenly, Neddy's ashamed of his nickname. It's not tough enough. "Ned, Ned Jones. I'm an accountant."

Jake Barney mulls over this bit of news, obviously not very impressed. "I'm from Texas."

"I'm from New Jersey," Ned says, not exactly proud of the fact, but not exactly ashamed either. But it is time he stopped letting people call him "Neddy." He no longer feels worthy enough to be a "Neddy." Neddys don't let friends kill themselves. Neddys are good and brave and kind.

Jake slings himself down on the bench and it wobbles for a second from the impact. "Passing through?"

"Just visiting."

"I'm passing through. I've been passing through for about five years. The Bay's that sort of place. You just never want to leave. I've been meaning to. Lord knows I love Texas- I'm from a little town called Weatherford. You know Mary Martin and old mean J.R. on T.V.-from Dallas, he's from there, too." Jake wads a paper sack and aims for a trash can a good distance away. He makes the basket, hits his thigh, whoops and then looks at Ned with a sudden seriousness. "You come here to get away and whatever it was you was getting away from, well, you find it's here, too and you either look it in the face or die."

Ned feels a little strange to be having such a conversation with a stranger. He avoids Jake's eyes. They're dark eyes, stern, knowing. He nudges Ned. "Running away from a dis-appointment in love or what you thought was love?" That offends Ned. "No, somebody died. A friend." "I'm sorry." Jake glances at the water. "Looks like the rain's gonna start up again any second. Say, do you know what a mockingbird is? It's the state bird of Texas. I like them, clever sonsabitches-they imitate sounds. Mainly other bird sounds and such. Puts me in mind of people, you know, tricking themselves with their feelings." The Texan punches Ned in the side. "Say, you don't do that-you're not one of them birds, are you? Just kidding." He laughs to himself, then punches Ned again. "It ain't the end of the world yet, old buddy. Lighten up."

Ned finds Jake offensive. Where does he get off talking to him that way?

"Yep, sure am sorry about your loss, young sir, but what's dead is dead. Don't ever try to bring the dead back and don't kid yourself about how come they're dead and you ain't." He won't look at Ned. He searches the water for a light-house, a ship, a shark. Ned feels something. Maybe Jake is a psychic? Jake finally seems to feel Ned's glance and he greets it with a lazy half-smile. "You know what mean, Ned, sure you do." "Who are you?"

"Nobody in particular, I guess. I've gotten to that point in life where only inner names matter, the ones between you and God."

"Spare me, mister," Ned's got to get away from this weirdo. Who needs that kind of crap from an absolute stranger?

It takes all kinds-Laura told him she didn't like her family. She told him she hated growing up here. Ned stands outside the house she used to live in. It's a small white frame house with prim green shutters and an overgrown rose garden out front. Her Aunt Harriet brought her up. Her dad, a man she professed to hate, lived there off and on, a man named Frederick Petersen who had married Harriet's sister, Judith Campbell, Laura's mother. Judith had died giving birth to Laura.

Someone looks out the front door. Someone leaves the front porch, someone old and bent, a soft prune of a woman.

"You there-what do you want? Stop staring! Stop star-ing!"

Ned can't move. The tiny woman all dressed in black car-ries a walking stick with a brass tip. She points the stick at him and hobbles down the walk. "Can't you leave a body alone? Haven't you any common courtesy-"

"Harriet?"

"I don't know you-""I'm one of Laura's friends. I thought I'd pay my re-spects-"

She radiates a pain much greater than his. Ned comes face to face with her, or rather, her face to his chest. He lowers his gaze to see her better. The old woman fights back tears. "I'm sorry; I'm sorry. My neighbors don't like me and they're always gawking, nosing around, making fun of me. Maybe they don't even know about Laura. Lord knows I'm getting on. I take everything to heart, you see. You knew Laura, did you? How can you know Laura? Didn't think anyone could, she was so crazy. I loved her but she was crazy, poor soul."

"I'm sorry I missed the funeral."

"Wasn't much of one. Her father was such a bastard. Still is. He didn't come either. He's off farting around New York or somesuch pit of evil. He drove her out of Greystone Bay, then he left right behind her. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say. But not Laura. Poor Laura."

"Nana?" A sweet sound from the porch from a woman with long brown hair and sad blue eyes, eyes like Laura's, large and deep-set. "You want some tea? Do you want to invite him in?"

She looks very much like Laura without her hair dyed blonde. She looks enough like her to be related and she is, she's Laura's cousin, Anne.

"I was named after Anne of Green Gables. My mother thought my hair would turn out red like hers but it turned out just plain brown," she explains over tea and sandwiches. She sounds very much like Laura, only her grammar is better and her clothes far more elegant. Anne finished high school and two years of college. She works at the local newspaper, or what passes for one. "I've been intending to finish up my degree, but you know how it is. Things cost."

She lives with Harriet in the tiny white house. She's over thirty and has a peace about her that Laura never had.

Ned wants peace. He feels something very wonderful. He holds her hand for a moment before he leaves and asks her if she'll have dinner with him that night. Amazingly, she accepts his invitation and they make plans to meet at a sea-food restaurant, the Dinner Bell, at seven.

Going back to the hotel, Ned notices that the closer he gets, the more he dreads entering his room with the big win-dows. It's so lonely. He thinks about Laura and then about Anne. She's similar to Laura but their eyes, though the same color, are very different.

The stone dogs greet him with a silent snarl.

Her eyes are not lost. They laugh with light. He holds her hand tightly. He feels corny, like a butterfly in a sun-dappled meadow. He feels drunk, but not too drunk. She talks about all the things he likes to talk about but he has no idea at all what they're talking about. He thinks they're eating lobster. She's telling a terrible joke. Over dessert (key lime pie or lemon chiffon?) she brings the talk around to Laura. He doesn't want to talk about her but she insists.

"Were you her boyfriend? She mentioned someone in her last letter, a friend who was trying to help her get straight.

Was that you?"

"Maybe." His fork makes swirls in the creamy pie.

"Were you in love with her?"

Hands seem to encircle his throat, choking out the air. He coughs into his napkin and shrugs non-committally.

"I know about Laura. I was always fascinated by her when 1 was growing up. She was three years older than me, glam-orous. She was always the bad girl and I was the boring little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, not that I really wanted it that way. I was too shy to be anything else or too scared, I don't know. I wanted to be more like her. She did anything she wanted, wore fake eyelashes, dyed her hair, always had a boyfriend." Anne pushes her pie away. "But she was never satisfied, never happy. She hated her father-they had awful fights. She used to come to my house-my parents were alive then-they died in a car accident up in Maine two summers ago-when they'd have some real knock-down-drag-outs. Aunt Harriet couldn't go anything with either of them. Always fighting. I think her father was angry that Laura lived and her mother died. I guess he held her responsible. It's sad." Anne stops, reaches her hand across the table and touches his hand."I wish I could've stopped her."

"Stopped her from killing herself?"

"Well, it seems you ought to be able to do something like that. I wanted to. I knew she was going to do it-I knew it-it's my hobby, see, you might think it's crazy but I see things sometimes. I know things sometimes-it's a responsibility- a gift-"

"A curse. I know."

"What do you know?"

"Things." They stare at each other with surprise. Thoughts leak out and inter-mix.

"You mean you're a psychic?" His voice is low and in-"I don't know. Tea leaves, Tarot cards, palms, crystal balls and dreams? I think you're fooling yourself when you use those sort of things to predict the future. You can't predict the future. All you can do is know your habits, predilections, yearnings and sometimes only half-vaguely. You can know what you really think and that predicts what's likely to happen if you follow what you think is going to happen.

All those things are just tools to open your subconscious. Do we see the future or only what you want to see? I don't think anyone can bear it. Even if you know it you don't recognize it usually because you're never strong enough. You know?" Anne sips her cold coffee and frowns. "Is that waiter staring at us? Do they want to close or something?"

"Let's get out of here."

He leaves another enormous tip with his bill, wondering what the hell he's doing it for. He'll be broke by the time he returns to Cedar Bridge.

They continue their conversation along the boardwalk, holding hands tightly. "So, basically, you don't believe peo-ple can see the future?"

"You might feel something, a hint, maybe, but it's impor-tant not to base your life around it. We have the ability to say yes and no, remember-"

"I think I use the Tarot like therapy-self-therapy-"

"Yeah." Anne smiles in the dark. He pulls her closer. The silence entwines them for a few minutes, sheltering. Ned's loath to break it but can't stop his next words from bubbling out. "I brought my deck, or thought I had-to the hotel with me-and I got them out the other night and someone had switched them. The cards were absolutely blank."

"That's funny. Who'd do that to you?" They're coming to the hotel. Ned's afraid to ask her up, so he's just going to kind of lead her there, hoping she won't protest. They don't have to make love or anything, Lord knows one must be careful these days, but he wants the night to last forever, or at least a few hours more.

"I don't know, but it sure got to me. It seemed so cruel somehow. My cards are important to me. I miss them when they're not there, especially the sun card."

"Why?" They're going past the dogs now. Are they smil-ing? Is one dog letting his tongue hang out like he's thirsty? She's not saying a word. She wants to be with him, too. Astonishing.

"He always makes me feel better." That's an understate-ment. He won't tell her about the time he kept getting the Tower of Destruction, the Death card, and the Devil card and how he got so mad he threw the whole deck across the room, then stomped and yelled at them like they were alive and how later, after he thought he'd picked them all up, there was the Sun card smiling up at him from the closet floor. He'd prac-tically wept with joy he was so glad to see it.

They went straight to his room, still holding hands. They went to his bed and sat down.

"Why don't you show me those cards," she whispers.

He's afraid to but he's getting the fake deck out. She's cross-legged on the bed, arms crossed too, head down, hercurly hair obscuring her features. "Why do you think of the Sun card as masculine? Isn't it odd how people think the sun is male and the moon is female. I've always thought that was strange."

He sits beside her, hands her the deck of cards in its worn box. She unties the bandana around it and opens the box.

She turns the first card over. The Sun card smiles up at her. Ned screams.

"Maybe you were dreaming or maybe you were just worn out from grieving about Laura." He's resting against her breasts, soft and gentle against his cheek. He wants to cry but he can't. He's too tired.

"Yeah, probably."

"You want me to stay?"

"I want you to stay," he says, kissing her.

"You know I feel I've known you for a hundred years."

"Me, too," he says, "but we don't have to-you know-"

"Really?" she laughs.

He laughs, shuts his eyes and kisses her, thinking of those damn blank cards. He could've sworn they were all blank. Is he going to die? Is that what his vision meant? He's fright-ened. She moves away from him, goes to open one of the windows to let fresh air in. It's cool but refreshing. She left the box open and the Sun's been blown off the top, now a page stares face up at the ceiling. It should be face down. It annoys him. He gets up to shut the box and tie the red ban-dana around it, tightly, securely.

Anne's in bed, wrapped in the coverlet. Her bare shoulders shine in the darkness, softly. He joins her, pulling back the coverlet, he stares at her pale belly. It has a face.

"Ned, what's wrong?"

"I don't know-the cards-me-who knows." He doesn't remember undressing. He doesn't remember the lights going off. Things happen so fast.

"Be still," she whispers and they curl into each other. "Let's go to sleep."

His arms encircle her, fingers brushing the side of her torso. The belly's right there. It's smiling, probably. Ned knows he is.

He watches her pack. He's stayed three weeks in Greystone Bay and now Anne's going to return with him to Cedar Bridge for a visit. Maybe he can convince her to stay. He thinks she's going to stay. She's quit her job. He sometimes sees Laura's image faintly stamped across Anne's features but every day they grow fainter. He feels like some magical gift has been bestowed upon him.

"I really knew it, though," he suddenly says, holding a pair of Anne's panties. The material is pink and lacy. Anne snatches them away, smiling. "Knew what?"

"That Laura was going to kill herself."

Anne flinches like he's just slapped her. "I'm sorry but when you get right down to it I can't believe that."

"I didn't mean to know. Maybe I was hit on the head when I was a kid."

Anne closes the suitcase, zips it up and starts going through her cosmetics bag. "I guess I'd better take my electric curl-ers, just in case."

"You said you knew things sometimes, back at the restau-rant, remember?"

"I know what I said!" She slams a hairbrush down and holds a rat-tail comb like a weapon. "Can't you just drop it? It was just talk. Maybe I know things, but just general stuff, like how I really feel. God, can't you just drop it? Does it do any good-just tell me if it does any good? I mean, Laura died. I knew something bad was going to happen to her just because of the way she lived her damned life. Her daddy beat up on her all the time and Laura did it all, drugs, bad sex, booze-you name it, she did it. Maybe not drugs-you never knew for sure. She talked a lot. She was tough. Oh God, she liked to play like she was. But I liked her. But she was mean, too. When we were kids she used to pull the heads offmy Barbie dolls and bury them out in Aunt Harriet's flower bed. She'd tell me and I'd go digging up the flower bed and never find them. She'd just laugh." She drops the comb, searches Ned's face earnestly. "You say you think you could've stopped her. Well you didn't. Some things you can't change."

He thinks of all his readings. Some hobby. His serene pose of Mr. Know-It-All Magic Counselor telling everyone how to take care of their lives when his own was such a joke. "I'd like not to know."

Her face is like that of the Queen of Cups. "Well, just do that.'' She takes a tube of mascara off her dresser. She waves it through the air like a scepter. "I think we both spend too much time thinking."

He checks out of the hotel at noon. The young girl has been replaced by a white-haired woman with arthritic hands and a genuine smile. The porter who takes his bag out to his car, however, is the same dour soul. His expression refuses to change even after Ned gives him quite a decent tip, con-sidering he's running low on funds and will have to stop by a cash machine before he picks up Anne.

He leaves all the cards, except for Mr. Sun, back in the hotel room. He clips that card to his sun-visor.

Anne greets him with a bear hug and they throw her gear into the back of his Toyota with gleeful abandon. Ned feels great. It's an Indian summer sort of day; even Aunt Harriet brims over with sincere joy as she waves them down the road.

Ned feels like something's been pressing down upon him the entire time he's been in the Bay. Even when he was with Anne, there had been such pressure. As they go past the city limits sign, the release continues to grow. He's almost giddy with the freedom surging through his bones.

"Do you think we'll ever go back?" Anne says, putting her window down to let the wind in. The sun's hot.

Ned sinks down into himself, searching for a premonition, a feeling, a clue. Shockingly, he finds he has no earthly idea. Panic wells up inside as he studies this newfound blank-ness. He thought his gift of second sight was a birthright, an attribute forever his and unchangeable.

He slows down. Anne gazes at him apprehensively. "What's wrong?"