“No.” Lea shivered and huddled into her coat. “Not tonight.”
“Don’t be too long,” the driver smiled. “It can’t be much longer, you know. If you get back when no truck’s in, just call Mmm. Karen’s Receptor this week. Bethie next. Someone’ll come in to get you.”
“Thank you,” Lea said. “Thanks a lot.” And she turned blindly away from his good-by.
The diner next to the bus stop was small and stuffy, clumsy still with the weight of the night, not quite awake in the bare drafty dawn. The cup of coffee was hot but hurried, and a little weak. Lea sipped and set it down, staring into its dark shaken depths.
“Even if this is all,” she thought, “if I’m never to have any more of order and peace and sense of direction-why, I’ve at least had a glimpse, and some people never get even that much.
I think I have the key now-the almost impossible key to my locked door. Time, patience and believing-and the greatest of these is believing.”
After a while she sipped again, not looking up, and found that the coffee had cooled.
“Hot it up for you?” A new waitress was behind the counter, briskly tying her apron strings. “Bus’ll be along in just a little while.”
“Thank you.” Lea held out her cup, firmly putting away the vision of a cup of coffee that had steamed gently far into the morning, waiting, patient.
Time is a word-a shadow of an idea; but always, always, out of the whirlwind of events, the multiplicity of human activities or the endless boredom of disinterest, there is the sky
-the sky with all its unchanging changeableness showing the variations of Now and the stability of Forever. There are the stars, the square-set corners of our eternities that wheel and turn and always find their way back. There are the transient tumbled clouds, the windy wisps of mares’ tails, the crackling mackerel skies and the romping delightful tumult of the thunderstorms. And the moon-the moon that dreams and sets to dreaming-that mends the world with its compassionate light and makes everything look as though newness is forever.
On such a night as this…
Lea leaned on the railing and sighed into the moonlight. “Was it two such moons ago or only one that she bad been on the bridge or fainting in the skies or receiving in the crisp mountain twilight love’s gift of light from a child? She had shattered the rigidness of her old time-pattern and had not yet confined herself in a new one. Time had not yet paced itself into any sort of uniformity for her.
Tomorrow Grace would be hack from her appendectomy, back to her job at the Lodge, the job Lea had been fortunate enough to step right into. But now this lame little temporary refuge would be gone. It meant another step into uncertainty. Lea would be free again, free from the clatter of the kitchen and dining room, free to go into the bondage of aimlessness again.
“Except that I have come a little way out of my darkness into a twilight zone. And if I take this next step patiently and believingly-“
“It will lead you right back to the Canyon-” The laughing voice came softly.
Lea whirled with an inarticulate cry. Then she was clutching Karen and crying, “Oh, Karen! Karen!”
“Watch it! Watch it!” Karen laughed, her arms tender around Lea’s shaken shoulders. “Don’t bruise the body! Oh, Lea! It’s good to see you again! This is a better suicide-type place than that bridge.” Her voice ran on, covering Lea’s struggle for self-possession. “Want me to push you over here? Must be half a mile straight down. And into a river, yet-a river with water.”
“Wet water,” Lea quavered, releasing Karen and rubbing her arm across her wet cheeks. “And much too cold for comfortable dying. Oh, Karen! I was such a fool! Just because my eyes were shut I thought the sun had been turned off. Such a f-fool” She gulped.
“Always last year a fool,” Karen said. “Which isn’t too bad if this year we know it and aren’t the same kind of fool. When can you come back with me?”
“Back with you?” Lea stared. “You mean back to the Canyon?”
“Where else?” Karen asked. “For one thing you didn’t finish all the installments-“
“But surely by now-“
“Not quite yet,” Karen said. “You haven’t even missed one. The last one should be ready by the time we get back. You see, just after you left-Well, you’ll hear it all later. But I’m so sorry you left when you did. I didn’t get to take you over the hill-“
“But the hill’s still there, isn’t it?” Lea smiled. “The eternal hills-?”
“Yes,” Karen sighed. “The hill’s still there but I could take anyone there now. Well, it can’t be helped. When can you leave?”
“Tomorrow Grace will be back,” Lea said. “I was lucky to get this job when I did. It helped tide me over-“
“As tiding-over goes it’s pretty good,” Karen agreed. “But it isn’t a belonging-type thing for you.”
Lea shivered, suddenly cold in the soul, fearing a change of pattern. “It’ll do.”
“Nothing will do,” Karen said sharply, “if it’s just a make-do, a time-filler, a drifting. If you won’t fill the slot you were meant to you might as well just sit and count your fingers. Otherwise you just interfere with everything.”
“Oh, I’m willing to try to fill my slot. It’s just that I’m still in the uncomfortable process of trying to find out what rating I am in whose category, and, even if I don’t like it much, I’m beginning to feel that I belong to something and that I’m heading somewhere.”
“Well, your most immediate somewhere is the Canyon,” Karen said. “I’ll be by for you tomorrow evening. You’re not so far from us as the People fly! Your luggage?”
Lea laughed. “I have a toothbrush now, and a nightgown.”
