turned the ring around and around and around and fell asleep.
I slept for what felt like only seconds, then woke to discover I’d been out for hours. The fire had burned down to embers and the whole house was dark and empty. I listened for anyone moving and heard nothing, then sat up and listened deeper, using my “ability.” I could only hear the wind swirling outside and the old house straining against it.
Suddenly the hair stood up on my arms and I shivered from head to foot. It happened again, then again and again, like waves, until I had to shout out loud to make it stop. I was not frightened — the Meq cannot afford superstition — and I was not cold. Still, something or someone had made the hair stand up on my arms.
I went to the fireplace and stirred the embers, adding new logs and waiting for the flames to catch. I felt off balance, out of breath, and something else I couldn’t quite define. I knew I was awake, but everything seemed to be taking place in a slightly altered state and time — a dream time.
Then, far away and barely audible, I heard the sound of tires on gravel, the sound of someone turning down the drive into Caitlin’s Ruby and approaching the house.
I started to move toward the door and found I couldn’t do it without tremendous effort. My legs and feet seemed long and thick, my hands and fingers useless and unnecessary. I tried to think and couldn’t concentrate on any line of thought or single image. I wasn’t spinning, but I felt weightless and weighed down at the same time, as if I would begin to spin, if I only knew how.
The fire popped and cracked and the new wood began to catch. It sent shafts of light across the room and cast shadows of the furniture on the walls and windows. The shadows became dangerous cliffs on a dark coastline and I was being drawn toward them. I was adrift at sea and I was going to crash for certain. The cliffs danced and beckoned. I knew it wasn’t real, but I was losing all perspective. One reality was slipping easily into the other and I didn’t know which was which or even care. I was weightless, inside and out. A beam of light swept back and forth across the cliffs or the walls, I couldn’t decide, and the lighthouse kept moving and coming closer. I could also hear it and it sounded like a car, but that didn’t make sense at sea, or did it? I couldn’t decide and it was so hard to think.
It was then I heard the cats. In slow motion, I turned toward the sound and there were six of them on a window ledge, outlined clearly by the beam of light and staring in at me. I heard a door slam on the lighthouse, the car, the house — I couldn’t decide and all sounds had an echo and the echoes all had different origins.
I heard a voice repeating something. It was a woman’s voice and she seemed to be shouting, “Is me own home! Is me own home!”
I closed my eyes and tried to find what was real and what was not. I knew I was fatigued, but that didn’t explain what was happening. Where was the voice? Whose voice was it?
I heard another door open and a gust of wind followed the sound and brushed across my face. I opened my eyes and a woman in a red cape with a hood pulled over her head stood in the doorway between the shadows of the cliffs and coastline.
“Is anyone—” she started, then stopped when she saw me. She took another step inside the room. “Home,” she said flatly, then added, “Z, is that you?”
I couldn’t see her face clearly inside the red cape and hood, and I knew it made no sense whatsoever and probably proved me insane, but my first thought and explanation for what I saw was that she could only be one person — and that person had died long ago.
“Caitlin?” I asked in a whisper. “Caitlin Fadle?”
The woman slowly pulled the hood down from her head with one hand and unbuttoned her cape with the other.
“No,” she said, taking another step toward me. The firelight framed her face and I knew in an instant why I’d felt that first shiver. “It’s me, Z,” she said. “It’s Carolina.”
There is no word in English, Meq, Basque, or any other language I know that can describe the feeling, the sensation, relief, warmth, surprise — the utter and infinite dumb joy I felt at that moment. Life has only a few moments that can stop the heart and empty the mind. Perhaps that’s why there is no name for them. I only know I couldn’t speak and could barely stand, so I sat down right where I was and stared up at her, and for the first time in years, I felt exactly like the child I appeared to be.
“Is it true?” she asked before I’d said a word. “Have you found her, Z? Have you really found Star?”
She spread her cape on the floor beside me and sat down cross-legged. She wore borrowed clothes — a man’s sweater and trousers, and some kind of all-weather boots that were coming undone. In the center of the red cape was a red cross on a white background. It was the symbol for the International Red Cross Society and explained her cape, but not the rest of it.
I watched her adjust her sweater and run her hands through her hair. She was eighteen years older, in her late forties, and the years had not changed her beauty, they had only made it sharper and more permanent. Her hair was shoulder length and the color of winter wheat, with a few strands of silver among the gold, and the gold flecks in her blue eyes literally danced in the firelight. There were lines and creases around her mouth and eyes, and even they seemed sculpted and natural. She picked up one of my hands, keeping her eyes on mine, and held it gently between hers. I had not yet said a word. I glanced at her hands and after eighteen years and a thousand scenarios played out in my mind of what I would say to her, all I said was, “Freckles.”
She looked down, puzzled at first, asking “What?” Then she looked up and began to laugh, saying, “Yes, yes, yes, they’re everywhere. I’ve got families of them now, Z. You should see them, they’re everywhere.”
“Carolina, how did—”
She cut me off and put her fingers to my lips. “Shhh,” she said. “You must tell me, Z, is it true? Have you found Star?”
“Yes, but—”
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it was true. I told Owen I knew it was true the minute we heard. I told him, I’m going to meet them, I’m going over there.”
“Carolina—”
“Just a minute, Z. I want to tell you first that I am still angry about you and Ray leaving the way you did. You promised me—”
“I promised you I would find her.”
“But you never wrote or wired or anything, not a clue. not to me, anyway.”
“It’s complicated.”
She put her hand to her face and rubbed her eyes. She was exhausted and pushing herself to the brink. “Where is she, Z?”
I reached behind me and pulled Mama’s glove off the couch and handed it to her. She smiled and held it close to her face and was about to say something, then opened her eyes in surprise and started to cry. I knew she was sensing Star’s presence, touch, scent. something. Anyway, I’m not sure there is a name for that feeling either.
With more hope than truth, I said, “She’ll be back soon.”
“Oh, God, Z, can it be true, finally? So much has been lost. So much time and. so many other things.” Carolina exhaled and drew in a breath slowly, trying to gather herself, then suddenly sneezed violently several times, almost uncontrollably.
I panicked. “You’re not sick, are you?”
“No, no,” she said, wiping her nose and eyes with her sweater. “It’s those damn cats outside. How many are there?”
I laughed and reached for Mama’s glove and she stopped me, grabbing my hand and turning it over until my thumb stood upright. I’d forgotten about the ring.
Her face went blank and her eyes glazed over. She slipped the ring off my thumb and held it in her palm, staring down on it as if it were the most curious and precious thing on earth. Then she closed her eyes and made a fist around the ring, holding it so tight her knuckles showed white through her skin.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“He was in St. Louis, at the house, at the moment Sailor’s message arrived. He. he had to come. he wouldn’t wait. He must have caught this strange virus on the way. He got here before us. He was sick, no, they were sick—”
