The Twelve

vehicle in park though she’d left the engine running, just as Wolgast had done. “It was a pleasure to finally meet you, Amy. You’ll want to watch your step getting out.”

“Why don’t you come with me? I know he’d like to see you.”

“Oh, no,” said Rachel. “It’s nice of you to ask, but that’s not how this works, I’m afraid. That’s against the rules.”

“What rules?”

“Just… the rules.”

Amy waited for more, but there was none; there was nothing to do but climb out of the car. By the open door she turned to look at Rachel, who was waiting with her hands on the wheel. The air was thick and warm beneath the green canopy of the trees; insects were buzzing everywhere with their bright, chaotic music, like the notes of an orchestra tuning up.

“Tell him I’m thinking about him, won’t you? Tell him Rachel sends her love.”

“I don’t understand why you can’t come with me.”

Rachel directed her gaze over the dashboard, toward the house. It seemed to Amy she was searching for something, her eyes, which had clouded with a sudden grief, pausing at each of its many windows. Tears appeared at the corners of her eyes.

“I can’t, you see, because it wouldn’t make any sense.”

“Why wouldn’t it make sense?”

“Because, Amy,” she said, “I’m already there.”

She found him kneeling in the flowerbeds, working in the dirt. A wheelbarrow was positioned nearby; piles of dark mulch, exuding a heavy earthen smell, were dispersed among the beds. At her approach he rose to his feet, removing his broad-brimmed straw hat and drawing off his gloves.

“Miss Amy, you’re right on time now. I was just setting to work on the lawn, but I reckon that’ll keep.” He waved his hat toward the patio, where glasses of tea awaited. “Come and sit a spell.”

They took their places at the table. Amy tipped her face to the crowns of the trees, letting the sunlight warm her. The aromas of grass and flowers filled her senses.

“Thought you’d be more comfortable this way,” Carter said. “The two of us can have a time, talking and such. Make the days pass.”

“You knew he’d be there, didn’t you?”

Carter mopped his brow with a rag. “Didn’t send him, if that’s what you mean. Wolgast just had his way. No talking him out of it when he set his mind on it.”

“But how come the others didn’t know who he was? They couldn’t have. They would have killed him.”

Carter shook his head. “Their kind never could read me, one way or the other. You could say we been out of touch awhile. It’s a two-way street, and I ain’t sent nothing back their way since the beginning. Shut my mind to all of them.” Carter hitched up in his chair and returned the cloth to his back pocket. “You done right, Miss Amy. Wolgast, too. Was a hard and terrible thing, I know that.”

She was suddenly thirsty; the tea felt cool and sweet going down and left a bright, lemony taste on her tongue. Carter watched her, waving his hat in a gentle motion to push a breeze over his face.

“And Zero?”

“I expect there’s time yet. But he’ll be coming for us. This here’s personal now. He’s surely the worst of ’em. Put ’em all together and you still ain’t got one Zero. Bridge we cross when we come to it.”

“And until then, here we stay.”

Carter nodded in his patient way. “Yes’m. Here we stay.”

They sat together in silence, thinking of what would come.

“I’ve never tended a garden before,” Amy said. “Would you teach me?”

“Always lots to be done. Reckon I could use the help. Mower’s fussy, though.”

“I’m sure I could learn.”

“I’m supposing you could, now,” he said with a smile. “I reckon that’s the case.”

Amy remembered her promise. “Rachel told me to send her love.”

“Did she, now. I was just thinkin’ on her. How she look to you?”

“Beautiful, really. I’d never really had a chance to see her clearly before. But sad, too. She was looking at the house, like there was something she wanted.”

Carter seemed surprised. “Why, it’s her babies, Miss Amy. I thought you knew.”

Amy shook her head.

“Haley and the little one. Woman can’t see or touch ’em, where she is. It’s her babies she’s always dreamin’ on. It’s the most awful ache to her.”

Amy finally understood. Rachel had drowned herself, leaving her children behind. “Will she ever see them again?”

“I expect she will when she ready. It’s her own self she has to forgive, for leaving them like she did.”

His words seemed to hover in the air, not sounds alone but things of form and substance. The temperature was dropping; the leaves had begun to fall.

“She not the only one, Miss Amy. Some folks can’t find a way on they own. For some it’s a bad feeling in the mind. Others just can’t let go. Them’s the ones that love too hard.”

In the pool, the body of Rachel Wood had completed its slow ascent to float upon the surface. Amy looked down at the table; she knew what Carter was saying to her. Every day I cut the lawn, she thought. Every day she rise.

“You got to go to him,” said Carter. “Show him the way.”

“I just …” She felt his eyes on her face. “I don’t know how.”

He reached over the table and cupped her chin, lifting it upward. “I know you, Miss Amy. It’s like you been inside me all my life. You the one was made to set this whole world right. But Wolgast’s just a man. It’s his time now. You got to give him back.”

Tears trembled in her throat. “But what will I do without him?”

“Just like you always done,” said Anthony Carter, and smiled into her eyes. “Just like you do now. You Amy.”

70

He came to her a final time. Or it was she who came to him. They came to each other, to say a last goodbye.

For Wolgast it began with a sensation of abstract motion. He was in a kind of nowhere, floating through an infinite space, though bit by bit the scene resolved, its spatial and temporal parameters firming, and he became aware that he was, of all things, riding a bicycle. A bicycle! Now, that was strange. Why was he on a bicycle? He hadn’t ridden one in years, but he’d loved it as a boy: the feeling of pure freedom and gyroscopic lift, his body’s energy flowing through this marvelous mechanism that joined him to the wind. Wolgast was on a bicycle, riding down a dusty country lane, and Amy was beside him, perched on a bicycle of her own. This fact surprised him neither more nor less than anything else about the scene, it all simply was, just as Amy was both a little girl and a grown woman, and for a time they rode together without speaking, though the idea of time itself felt strange. What was time? How long had they been riding like this? Some period of hours, perhaps, or even days, and yet the light was always the same—a permanent penumbral twilight that enriched the colors of everything around him with a golden glow: the fields and trees, the dust that rose under his wheels, the small white shapes of houses in the distance. Everything felt very close; everything was far away.

“Where are we going?” Wolgast asked.

Amy smiled. “Oh, it’s not much farther.”

“What… is this place?”

She said nothing more. On they rode. Wolgast’s heart was full of warm contentment, as if he were a boy