She stays in the house another week, longer than she meant to. She feels herself getting antsy, walking the fence during the day, helping Maisie in the kitchen just to have something to do. Mrs Grierson teaches her a card game called pea-nuckle, but she gets too good at it and has to let the old woman win half the time out of pure graciousness. Nights, she takes the path to the bluff and looks out over the city and counts the lights. Sometimes James Grierson goes up with her, and sometimes she is alone. Sometimes she passes by his room in the middle of the night and the door to his bedroom is open. She finds him lying on the bed waiting for her. They do their business, when hes not too drunk, but she doesnt sleep in his bed, because shes not used to sleeping next to someone and she doesnt want to get accustomed to it. In the dark, she wonders where the light is coming from that is reflected on the surface of his eyes. They drink from the same bottle, and he tells her she can come with him the next time he makes a run for supplies.

She nods, thinking shell be long gone by then. She imagines the road, the car, by herself again, the long, narrow tarmac leading forward deep into a country that keeps unfolding, dead and alive.

She wonders where she will go next. Shes been down south for a long time now, almost as long as she can remember, flying like a blackbird back and forth from post to post along the same decaying fence. Maybe shell go north to see Niagara Falls where Lee the hunter had been all that water tumbling over the edge of the earth, the river never running out of it. It is something she would like to see, no doubt about it. And then maybe up into Canada since shes never been to another country before, except maybe Mexico, and only because the border isnt so clear any more so she may have tipped over it to the other side once or twice when she was in Texas.

Or the beaches of California that shes seen in tattered magazines published decades before. Palm tree sunsets, the wide white meridians of sand, the piers projecting out towards the horizon and the water crashing violently against the barnacled pilings. She has heard that there are places in California to live large areas fenced off and safe. Places where commerce has resumed and governments have been re-established on a small scale. Oases of civilization. It puts her in mind of a new world. She might like to see something like that.