“Sitting around with a lot of other shriveled-up people, waiting for the grim reaper express to pull into the station, is not my idea of company. It’s my wish—should say my hope—that I’ll die in this house before it sells. Speaking of your mother, she told me that you’ll be leaving soon, now that the divorce is—”

“Next week,” Sybil interrupted.

“Arizona, she said.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t think of people your age going to Arizona, although I suppose they do. Think of people closer to my age, coots and codgers hitting drives over the bones of dead Apaches.”

“It’s not golf-course Arizona.”

“What Arizona is it?”

“Cowboy Arizona, I guess. The San Rafael Valley. I bought a piece of a ranch. I’m going to raise horses. Quarter horses, reining horses, maybe show horses. I’m not real sure, but horses.”

“Yeah. Think Catherine mentioned that. Well, you always were a fine rider, always seemed more at home in the saddle than on a boat, like most of the rest of us.”

“I hate it,” she said, gesturing out the window, and Myles did not ask her what, because he knew. Sybil wasn’t sure if he knew the why: that she was fleeing to the desert because she wanted and required a climate, a landscape, an atmosphere as different from New England as she could find without leaving the United States (though she would almost be leaving it; she could see Mexico from her new living room); wanted and required distance from the sea—a distance not geographical (she would be farther from saltwater if she were to move to Kansas) but psychological in nature. The southwestern borderland, scoured by arid winds swooping down from mountains trod and named by Spanish Jesuits a full century before her forebears set foot on their pilgrim shore, was the diametric opposite of the sea and seemed, to Sybil, to deny even the possibility of ocean. The meadows of sere grama grass and the dusty arroyos, bristling with cholla and agave, almost persuaded her that this planet was as dry as Mars, as they allowed her almost to forget the days she’d cruised the Maine and Massachusetts coasts, or the nights foghorns and bell buoys sang her to sleep, or the dawns when squabbling gulls roused her from her bed in the capital of her family-nation, whose halls she walked, past the closed doors of still-sleeping relatives, past the ancestors glowering with cracked-oil eyes, austere, righteous, and a little crazed by the flawed optics that had made them see witches in their neighbors’ faces and hell’s fiends embodied in the Indians skulking in the unredeemed forests (which those Puritans had redeemed with a fear-born zeal more enduring in its effects than the greed-born zeal of the Castilians who’d plundered the desert seeking a nonexistent El Dorado), and stepped out onto the veranda to feel her child’s heart quickened by the scent of tidewrack and by the sight of the great ocean—the same scent and sight that today froze the woman’s heart with hatred, even as the woman’s mind told her that it was as pointless to hate the sea as to despise a star, the heart hating it, nonetheless, because her sister had been lost to it, and when she cried out, “Why?” its answer was ever the hiss of broken wave sliding back to breaking wave.