Valerie stared gravely at the curtain shielding Grady from us a few feet away. Calmly, leisurely, she took from a pocket a book of matches. She stretched full out on the floor, struck the match, touched the flare to the spine of the paper. I watched the cremation in a catatonic frenzy, gawking at the burst of orange flame, at Grady flying upward among the sparks, then stomping the conflagration to embers. The whole room reeked; by the time the dead flakes curled blackly across the floor, he was gasping and she was gone.

Jesus. I spent the rest of the evening, of course, thinking about my little incendiary. About her fractured, inspired syntax. She was weird and Nancy… Her slither across the rug to firebomb Grady. I wondered what next, how I’d manage to see her again. And when, the following afternoon, I ventured to the window of my cell—Glory be to God there she was, swinging through the woods with long coltish strides, wrapped in a low-lying mist, wading through blood-red leaves, kicking at pinecones. She picked up a rock and threw it: a flutter, a flash, and a rabbit, swift as a wind-up toy, bolted through the bosk and disappeared like an illusion. With the speed of the rabbit I plunged down the stairs.

“Hello!” I yelled above the wind.

No answer, not from her, but she paused. I sped to her side. We walked in silence, which was trumped by a torrent of sound, a cascade entangling the rude orchestration of winter. The clinging cold wind wailed around us like the disembodied voice from the moors that cried Heathcliff. The disorderly leaves cackled as we plowed through them. Beneath us the earth smelled of sour apples and the antique rot of vegetation, while over us hung a cloud as large as a continent.

The thorn bushes whistled at her and that wind like a wild river pressed her jeans to her thighs. The peppergrass and the gnarled old chestnuts bowed like devoted retainers along her path. I too was enchanted, managing to brush against her as we walked, feigning awkwardness.

And then she said softly, speaking as much to the trees as to me, “I don’t like to be laughed at.”

“Grady?” I asked. “I think he was laughing at me.”

“Then why didn’t you do something about it?”

“Because, because, because I, I…” My tongue went bankrupt.

Her lips curled. “Men!” she said scornfully, kicking at a moldering acorn. It shattered explosively. “That fucking Derek,” she muttered.

“Derek? You say Derek?”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone?” It was as though I had been slammed on the back of the head with a mallet. “You don’t know where?” I asked hopefully.

“Of course I know where. New,” she kicked a rusty can about twenty feet, “York.”

“What for?”

“To be a nactor. What else do you go to New York for?”

“When’s he coming back?”

“Who the hell knows?”