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————

It was as if the Volkswagen had driven off the road and into the driveway on its own volition. There is
nothing
you can do for her, he told himself, cutting the engine. She sprung out of the rocking chair and stood, very nervous and brittle, regarding him with an angry panic as he got out, straightened to his full height, and approached. Her hair was shorter, cut bluntly and shiny clean.

“Hello, El,” he said.

“Hi.”

He juggled two peaches in his large hands. They were fuzzy and pale and not ripe. The basket was not even full. The shelf tipped at an angle. She looked down at her feet, then around at the display that was not up to snuff, and her face showed signs of another panic. He put the peaches back in the basket.

“Hell,” he said, “I don't want to buy anything.”

“Good,” she said. “I don't want to sell anything.” Suddenly she grinned.

“Are you running?” he asked.

She sighed. “A little. I swim more now.” She squinted again, pointing past him, across to the motel where he could see the turquoise glimmer.

“Not much of a pool,” he said.

“It's enough,” she answered. The energy seemed to be collecting in her chest, about to come charging out in a torrent of words, he knew, if he waited. She squinted at the road as a car slowed down. The car drove on. Her eyes brightened. “I've started swimming underwater. I do laps underwater and it's as if I don't even need to breathe, I get into this rhythm, and the water takes over and there's no difference between the water and me.”

“It must feel good,” he said.

“Yeah.” She paused. “It's really the only time I ever do feel good.”

His heart seemed to contract.

“And all the chatter in my head is quiet. What a relief!” She gave a little laugh. “It's like I don't have to be there any more. It's enough that there's energy and water and—and feeling. When I'm underwater, I don't have to keep talking to myself.”

He smiled.

“I don't have to keep listening to myself, either,” she said, smirking.

He smiled again. She needed to lose herself in those sensations, and yet the sensations rendered themselves into words, almost despite her. Then the words sought
him
. And he wondered if she would stay with her body, in the energy and sensation, or if someday she would abandon it, to wander off entirely in the chatter of her head, locked irrevocably into articulation.

He said, “Keep swimming, El.”

“I know,” she said.

He turned back to the Volkswagen, opened the door, and folded himself up to fit in. “But for Chrissakes,” he yelled sternly. “Don't forget to breathe!”

————

She watched the gray car get back on the road, she heard one gear shift, then another as it passed the mailbox and the pines—and it was off, dissolving into the world of one dimension. But here it had stood out, as he had, in its entire form, all dimensions. Everything had, while he was here. Even the bushel baskets of fruit had suddenly jumped out at her, alive with their own color and shape. Peaches round. Baskets square. He had stopped to talk to her! And by stopping, he had made the world fill out and occupy itself again, so that there was within her vision a distinct near and far, a brighter and duller, a center and an edge. There were spaces between things, there was
here
, and there was
there
. He had stopped, for
her
, in the middle of a summer afternoon!

————

Like the year before, he sat at his desk, facing her, as she sat atop a front-row desk, a tenth-grader now, no longer in his English class but
there
, after school, alone. She wore nylons now instead of socks, but still swung her feet in the old ungainly way. Her shoes had fallen on the floor. She sat there, reciting by heart the T. S. Eliot poem he had once mentioned that
he
knew by heart, and she did it with fine intonation, tender feeling, not a word wrong.

“Hey, pretty damn good,” he said when she finished. She beamed at him with good color in her face, the wrinkles gone, her dark hair showing blond sun-streaks, her eyes full of light.

“It's good to have the old kid back,” he said softly.

Suddenly the light and feeling in her face vanished. “I am
not
the old kid!” she shouted. “And I will
never
be the same!”

He saw at once that she was right. She would blossom—had already begun to blossom—into all the facets of adulthood from that single stem, her father's death.

“El,” he said.

She looked down at her stockinged feet. “It's no use. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell. It's just that everything seems ruined.”

“Hey, El. You were never what I'd call a happy-go-lucky, carefree sort of kid to begin with. You
think
, remember? It's what distinguishes you from the apes.” He coughed. “And a few other people we know.”

She smirked, almost as if she would laugh. But she did not laugh. “I know.” Her face darkened. “But this is worse.”

“You miss him,” he said softly.

She shot that angry look at him again. “It's
not
that easy!” she shouted hoarsely. Then her voice lowered. “Don't you see? If you, if someone had mixed feelings about a person to begin with….” She stopped, shook her head. “Okay, yes, I loved him, he was my father, but he was difficult. Don't you see?”

He nodded.

“And everybody comes up to you and says, you must be
heartbroken.
Well, that's not it! I'm not such a good little girl! But it's death. It's so final. I was in the
middle
of something with him!”

They were silent for a minute. Then he spoke. “You can't say, ‘Poor, wonderful Daddy, he was a saint, only the good die young.'”

“Right,” she said, almost triumphantly.

Again they sat in silence. Again he broke it. “And you can't hack through the rest of your understanding of each other.”

She sighed. “Yes,” she said.

Another silence occupied another minute. Finally he said, “Well, hell, El,” deliberately elongating the rhyme. “If I were you, I'd be pissed as hell at him.”

She nodded. “There,” she said.

“Don't,” he began, and then he paused, wondering if he should say it, because he didn't
really
know, did he?—except from some mute instinct. “Don't let anyone stop you.”

————

She lay absolutely still in bed, but her mind began to rush out, further and further, hurtling into a black space that had no end, it went—she went—at a dizzying speed, racing outward through the blackness, which was suddenly infused with faint sprays of light, then utterly black again. The force and speed of her mind's propulsion into blackness erupted into a buzz, a hum, that grew into a grinding racket that got faster and louder and faster again until the sound itself exploded into white light, a terrible flash! And still she hurtled into space, all directions at once, until—what was it? Everything began to contract in upon her, the vast oceans of space dipped inward, faster and faster, it all came hurtling back at her, whirling up a storm in the spaces of her head. The blackness streamed inward now. She lay there. In the box. With blackness. The voices around her were distraught. Her mother, her sister, her aunts were all weeping. No! I am
not
dead! She tried to cry out. But the furious streams of movement, in a sudden whoosh! swept her core into their current so that in this fraction of a second she felt herself ebb away, the all of her gone, except for the thinnest thread; and there was nothing but the vast quiet that she would not even know, but for this thread….

She awoke with her head pounding violently; she realized that even awake she was still on the thread's end overlooking the negation of her self. And she could not bear it, this complete encircling with all her senses of the core that was her death, the knowledge itself as total as the emptiness it knew—and for a brief second the two were in balance, the thread stretched taut. If it broke, she would not be there to know it or to know the rest of the world going on. “No!” she cried aloud, and the thread brought her back into herself, so that in another second she could not even imagine where she had just been.

————

“And I was dead,” she said matter-of-factly. She had summoned him for a talk during lunch instead of waiting until the usual time after school.

“Except for this thread—no, not even a thread, like a fragile spiderweb hair, that's all. That's all there is between life and death. Now I know exactly what it is.” She spoke with intense animation, her face flushed. “It snaps—and then you're gone. All I had was this thread; I felt the rest of me flow out and leave. I heard them talking around me, at the funeral. And then I was gone, and all that was left, beside the thread, was the nothing.”

She shuddered. And it was about time, he thought, because he had felt his own hair—what was left of it—stand straight on his head at the start.

She went on. “But then the thread pulled me back enough into being alive that I was
aware
of the death, I had a complete grasp of it, just for a fraction of a second. Not the dying, exactly, but the
not being there
. And
that
” she paused, eyes bright with fierce assurance, “was horrible. I can't describe it.”

“You just did,” he said.

“Oh, no. You can't imagine.”

“Give me a chance.”

She laughed nervously. “But even
I
can't imagine. Not now. Even right after it happened I couldn't. Because as horrible as it was, I did try to bring it back. But I couldn't. I tried very hard to summon it back.”

They sat in silence for several minutes. Finally he said, cautiously, “Do you think if you can get back there again—into death—you'll find him there?”

Her response was not at all what he expected or what he feared. She burst out laughing. “How mystical!” she cried. “Oh, God, no, that's not it at all,” she said, laughing harder. And then, her laughter subsiding, she said, “No, I just want to
know
what it is, that's all.”

And although he thought he was relieved, the hair stood up straight once again.

————

Thwop! The piece of maple went splitting out into two big chunks. Thwop! All the muscles of his back rippled in the motion. He stacked half
a cord of wood from an hour's work, which was still not enough. He needed more: not more wood, he had mounded up enough, during the summer and fall, for another three winters, but more motion.

He put on the worn running shoes and took the trail at an even pace down the hill and along the rushing stream, but instead of climbing up to the main road, he turned and took the stream trail back again, lost in the music of his own footfalls. At the flattest stretch he thought he'd try it
her
way, just for once, and he took off in a sprint. But after fifty yards a deep ache started in his lungs, and not long after came a knot that seized the muscle in his right calf. Then both knees buckled.

Later, as his wife massaged the leg, she said, “A cramp in your leg usually comes right before your foot goes in the grave.”

“Hey!” he barked. “That's not funny.” And tears of pain moistened the corners of both eyes.

————

Putt-putt-putt. She heard the under-rhythm of the Volkswagen in the distance and waited in the shadow of the stand, boarded up now, grass growing high around it. Across the street, Nelson pushed the laundry cart along in his slow, quiet routine. At last she heard the sound more clearly, putt-putt-putt. It set off a pounding in her chest as it grew closer. She stood motionless, knowing she was hidden, and watched the small gray car putter past with him gigantic in the front seat. She felt the first surge of a yearning so new, so vague, so light a flutter in her throat, that she hardly knew she was feeling anything at all. And then the putt-putt-putt faded and was gone.

She took off down the driveway and forced herself into
his
rhythm, so that she could feel the lifting from the ball of one foot and the firm landing of the other. What was the point? Plod—plod—plod—she jogged along this way,
his
way, the length of the driveway, down the highway the short distance to the dirt road, and halfway up to the Sayer farm. Then she broke into a sprint, filling her lungs on the first leap, and tore out of the jog in a burst of her own breeze. The air brushed her cheeks, her hair flew out, her feet barely touched the ground, and she flew! Along the road and down the hill the wind was her very soul, and as she dissolved into the wind she felt herself become life, pure life, her surge through the air matching the push of
blood through her veins. She was the same as that force and no more than it, she was the thread of life, flying down a country road.

————

In his quiet classroom after school, she sat at a desk by the long row of windows, her geometry book open next to a sheet of lined paper and two sharpened pencils. She had already worked out the answer to the first problem in her neat print and careful triangular drawings. But now she dropped the third pencil beside the book and looked out the window. The afternoon sunlight filtered across the deep green soccer field and through the row of stately maples at the far border, where it wove a gold pattern on red leaves. As the breeze blew, the gold tones shimmered. The air around them seemed to shimmer, too. She watched the breeze waft through the grasses below, which leaned gently. And then the team of boys in shorts and sweatshirts came running down one side of the soccer field, the whole group at the same brisk jog along the field, then toward the trees. They were all caught by the slant of sunlight and lit momentarily by the golden hue, and from the gold they jogged into the trees and disappeared. Ellen stood up to watch the last boy fade away, the gold light closing back in around the space where he had been, and a peacefulness, which had not been disturbed by the runners but made somehow more luxuriant, now redistributed itself along the grass and trees and sky.