David put down the tote, stepped out of the house, pulled shut the door, and ran to the nearby Explorer, splashing across the sodden lawn. Emily had left the driver’s door open, the headlights blazing. He swung in behind the steering wheel, slammed the door. She hadn’t engaged the emergency brake. He needed only to shift the vehicle into drive and tramp on the accelerator.

As they rocketed away from the house, a thousand knuckles of rain rapped the windshield, the safety system loudly warned him that he had not engaged his harness, and he expected bullets. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, it filled with a roiling mass of reflected fire. An instant later, a concussion wave rocked the Explorer on its tires, and the steering wheel stuttered in his hands.

Before they reached Highway 101, another blast wave rattled the tall Monterey pines that flanked the long driveway, shaking loose a whirling mass of dead needles. Sleeping birds, waking from sheltered branches, swooped in front of the racing Explorer and seemed to blow away into the storm, as if they were swatches of celestial fabric torn from the starless night sky.

Third and fourth concussions, each greater than the one before, were not the work of the bomb, but perhaps signified the collapse of whatever elemental power sustained the bridge that linked this troubled century to one more troubled in the future.

| 96 |

The night, the rain, the southbound blacktop glistening in the headlights like some magical highway leading to an enchanted land. Emily beside him, untouched by time and by those tormented creatures who had conquered it. She was an impossibility, but real.

She said, “A man . . . he stabbed me.”

“Yes.”

“I . . . I died.”

“Almost. Thank God, not quite.”

In his face, she seemed to see the years that she had lost but he had lived. “How long ago?”

“The man, the knife? Ten years.”

Shock silenced Emily for a mile, and then she said, “I dreamed. I didn’t realize how very long I was dreaming, Davey. I dreamed of anniversaries, celebrations, journeys, children. I dreamed . . . a life. Davey, what was that place? What happened there?”

For the moment, he had lost the talent to weave a story. He was unable to think where to begin.

Instead, he wondered how they would explain her reappearance, what tale of amnesia they would concoct and how they would anchor it with enough hard facts to satisfy both those who had known her and the authorities—and Isaac Eisenstein. There would be a way. He had no doubt they could do it. Life was a tapestry of stories. People spun stories ceaselessly, every day of their lives, whether they were writers or not.

She respected his silence, as if she understood that he wasn’t buying time to deceive, but was struggling to decide how best to lead her through the extraordinary maze of truth that they could never dare to share with anyone.