She went back inside and filled an old backpack with bottles of gin. Threw in candles, her matchbox, some cans of soup. Padded it all out with underwear and a sweater or two. The white stuff on those mountains was probably snow.

If she put her ear against the sliding glass doors that went out to the canal, she was listening to the eye, that long moment of emptiness when the worst is still to come. Versailles Kentucky was still asleep in the bathtub with the iguanas who were not. There were red marks on Versailles Kentucky’s arms and legs where the iguanas had scratched her. Nothing fatal. Lindsey got a brown eyeliner pencil out of the drawer under the sink and lifted up the sleeper’s leg. Drew a birthmark in the shape of a battleship. The water in the air would make it smear, but so what. If Alan could have his joke, she would have hers, too.

She lowered the cool leg. On an impulse, she lifted out the smallest iguana, still wrapped in its towel.

When she went out her front door again with her backpack and her bike and the iguana, the meadow with its red and yellow flowers was still there and the sun was coming up behind the mountains, although this was not the direction that the sun usually came up in and Lindsey was glad. She bore the sun a grudge because it did not stand still; it gave her no advantage except in that moment when it passed directly overhead and she had no shadow. Not even one. Everything that had once belonged to her alone was back inside Lindsey where it should have been.

There was something, maybe a mile or two away, that might have been an outcropping of rock. The iguana fit in the basket on her handlebars and the backpack wasn’t too uncomfortably heavy. No sign of any people, anywhere, although if she were determined enough, and if her bicycle didn’t get a puncture, surely she’d come across whatever the local equivalent of a bar was, eventually. If there wasn’t a bar now, then she could always hang around a while longer, see who came up with that bright idea first.

Dedication

For Henry William Link III

Acknowledgments