![]() 'Exactly, but it's deeper even than that. He liked the look in her gray eyes he liked the simplicity of her easy, languid gestures. He didn't like it, but he liked to hear her tell about it. He had liked what she said about going out to sea about being alone on the bridge with the coffee in her hand, the wind howling past the wheelhouse. It was an easy exchange, deepening their knowledge of each other, and amplifying the intimacy they'd already felt. All alone out there in that big awful cruiser right at the moment when darkness fell.Who the hell else would have been there? Who the hell else could have gotten him out of the water? Why, he could easily believe what she said about determination, about her powers. But she was part and parcel of what had happened, her strangeness and her strength were part of it. If only that awful accident hadn't happened, and he had found her in some simple ordinary place, and they had begun to talk. 'Well, it was luck for me, all right,' he'd responded, and he had felt an extraordinary sense of well-being when he said it, and he wasn't so sure why.Īll these weeks, if only he could have seen her, been with her. He figured he ought to get up and help her no matter what she'd said, but she'd been pretty convincing on the subject: 'I like to cook, it's like surgery. ![]() He could hear her working in the kitchen. The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. She had said only, 'I don't know how I reached the ladder, I honestly don't.' Yet she had been pitched right into it, and she hadn't lost consciousness. She had said that a person loses consciousness almost immediately in very cold water. When she'd been describing the rescue to him in more detail, she had said a strange thing. ![]() He still had to go home and he had to determine the purpose. How could he continue to know her and maybe even get to love her, and have her, and do this other thing he had to do? And he still had to do this other thing. What I'm saying is, when you look down at that body, and you realize all the life has gone out of it, and you can scream at it, and slap it around, and try to sit it up, and do every trick in the book to it, but it's dead, absolutely unequivocally dead. I'm talking about ordinary people in the modern world. Nothing scientific about this power of his might be physical, yes, and measurable finally, and even controllable through some numbing drug, but it wasn't scientific. Knowing her, yes, that was there, but even that was suspect, he still believed, because there was no profound recognition, no 'Ah yes,' when she told him her story. Besides, on the deck of the boat last night, he'd caught nothing of that. His head was full of too many images from his past, and the sense of destiny that united these images was too strong for it to have come from some random reminder of his home through her. Now he lay on the rug, thinking how much he liked her and how much her sadness and her aloneness disturbed him, and how much he didn't want to leave her, and that nevertheless, he had to go.Īs for her having been born down south, it had nothing to do with it.
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