X.

       Maybe she felt then that Eben was illumined in some way that now she would never understand or that he was a mirror that might have revealed to her aspects of herself that now would forever elude her. Whatever was true, she felt an aching desolation over her irreparable separateness from him, the loneliness of a shipwrecked survivor on a sea of grief, grasping for a lifeline of meaning. Maybe it was desperation that compelled her to create one, because now, as she paused, a powerful impulse—appearing on the periphery of resolve and swooping down—took hold of her. Suddenly she felt the great weight of her manuscript—and not merely on her shoulder—and realized in the same instant that she could divest herself of this burden with a single gesture.

     She took her leave briefly the next the day—of Alana only, who, when Seely returned some pots she’d borrowed, was mild and noncommittal about her sudden departure. Jean-Michel she couldn’t find anywhere though she searched throughout the town. He must have glimpsed her packing her suitcase, she guessed, and lit off on his motor scooter or sailboat. On the step outside her bedroom she‘d found a note: “I think you leave. A kiss.”

     By mid-morning she was on the bus to Figueras; by afternoon, on the train to Madrid. As she leaned out an open window in the corridor of a passenger car that evening, drinking in the landscape as it darkened, the rush of wind making her eyes water and hair stream, she felt deliciously spare, pared down to the essential. Words had been a vehicle, she realized with sudden clarity—a transport to deliverance, and what they had delivered her from was finally…themselves.

                                                                                …

    Seely sits on a stool in a spotlight of sunshine that pierces the skylight of her studio. She closes her eyes, feeling its warm pressure on her forehead, her cheek… In front of her is a canvas taller than she is, blazing with red poppies. As she wipes her brush on a rag, its stain as vivid as blood—she’s a painter now—she remembers red-beaded anklets and a stormy climb up a hillside a long time ago. And Eben. She still thinks of him at odd moments, and when she does, she envisions him holding a page of her manuscript, now as soft as a rag from handling, by the light of his fire—imagines herself a companion in his solitude. For her, it’s enough to have created this possibility, however remote—for she’d retraced her steps on that distant hillside and left her satchel behind—her ragbag of personal stories—by the side of Eben’s hearth.