One evening in late February, some time after Monica had learned that Sheila was away, she accepted a last-minute invitation to a potluck supper with the Starkies. She was somewhat distracted throughout the evening—but the evening went well—well enough—and then, after the meal, an astonishing event occurred, an incident sui generis which Monica was never to understand: Monica was helping to clear the table, found herself alone in the kitchen with James Starkie, they blundered into each other, laughing, slightly drunk, and with no warning James’s enormous fingers closed about Monica’s shoulders, and, in an outburst of sheerly animal ebullience, he loomed down to kiss her—pressing his wine-sweetened lips hard on hers, mashing them against hers, then withdrawing, turning quickly away, as if nothing had happened: just as Jill swept into the kitchen, splendid in her long orange gown, her hair slightly askew, her face flushed with joy. Of course Jill saw nothing, Jill guessed at nothing, and, afterward, Monica came to the conclusion that the kiss was nothing: James meant no more by it than he meant by one of his bone-aching handshakes, or his casual blessings.

And would he try to contact her, later?—Monica wondered uneasily.

And did she want him to do so, as a kind of diversion, at least?

No. Surely no. For the kiss had been a boy’s kiss, and not a man’s—sudden, rough, well-intentioned, forgettable.

8

Monica would not have cared to admit it but she had fallen into the habit of driving home by way of the Poor Farm Road. It meant an extra four miles but (as she told herself) the landscape was more interesting, more varied: hilly farmland interspersed with woods that ran out to the road, so that entering them, speeding into them, was vaguely disorienting, vaguely pleasurable, like rushing into a tunnel. Many of the tallest trees were pines, so that the forest, in midwinter, was as dark as it would be in summer. Often, after a heavy snowfall, it was even darker.

An eerie sensation, plunging into one of these stretches. Feeling her eyes begin to dilate at once, to adjust to the sudden change of light. Feeling as if . . . as if she might emerge in another part of the country . . . not in Bucks County, not on the Poor Farm Road that led past Sheila Trask’s house, but in, perhaps, one of the isolated survivalist areas . . . North Carolina, Montana, New Mexico . . . the “sand counties” of Wisconsin. Wild vistas, distant snowy mountain peaks, a lunar landscape pitiless in its frigid beauty; perhaps a choppy river running close beside the road. “And if I were to disappear no one would know where I had gone,” Monica thought, a wave of chill pleasure breaking over her. “She would never know.”