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At the ranch, lunch was set out as it had been on Becky’s wedding day, but it was easier this time with fewer people. The women sat in small clusters talking about who was getting married and who was having babies. No one knew about Hiroko yet, and they were much more interested in whispering about Ginny Webster. She had put on weight, and there were rumors about her sleeping with Marshall Floyd. Someone had even seen them leaving a hotel in Napa.

“She’s pregnant, mark my words,” Olivia announced conspiratorially, and Becky added that Ginny had almost fainted the week before during a church social.

“You think he’ll marry her?”

“He might,” one woman offered. “But he’d better do it quick, before she gets any bigger.” The women talked as the men stood apart and drank and ate, and the children played just as they had the year before. Two years after the end of the war, nothing much had changed, except
that the children seemed a little older. Crystal herself no longer seemed so childlike. Her body seemed to be all curves with long graceful legs and a figure that caught the men’s eyes now. Her dresses no longer concealed her as they once had, and her eyes were quieter and wiser. She had been worried about her father all winter. Jared had finished high school in June, and he was going to work full-time on the ranch with Tom and his father. His father had wanted him to go to college, but Jared didn’t want to. He tinkered with the ranch cars, and went out driving with his friends. He had a girlfriend now, in Calistoga.

“He’s quite a young man,” one of Olivia’s friends said admiringly to her, “he’ll be getting married next, mark my words. I hear he’s seeing the Thompson girl.” His mother smiled proudly in answer, and her eyes clouded when she glanced at Crystal. She was wearing a blue dress the same color as her eyes that her father had brought back from San Francisco. “She’s a fine-looking girl … a real beauty. …” The other woman had been watching Olivia glancing at Crystal. “You’re going to have to lock her in the barn one of these days,” the woman teased, and Olivia pretended not to notice. Her youngest child was still a stranger to her. She was so different from the other girls, and particularly from her sister. She was quiet and solitary, unlike the rest of them. She had deeper thoughts, and when she spoke of them, which was rare, it always annoyed her mother. A girl didn’t need to think about deep things, or dream about the places she and Tad talked of. It was all his fault, filling her head with those things. And his fault, too, that she liked to run free in the hills, riding her father’s horses and swimming naked in the streams, like some wild thing, disappearing for hours sometimes.

She wasn’t like the other girls, or Becky or her mother.
She never had been, and it was even more noticeable now as she grew up. She didn’t even seem to notice the boys at all anymore. She seemed happiest alone, or talking for long hours with her father about the ranch or the books she read, or the places Tad had been, and she wanted to go to. Olivia had even heard them talk about Hollywood one day. And he had known that was crazy. At this rate, it wasn’t going to be easy to find a husband for her, even with her looks. Looks weren’t enough. She was just too different, and if anything, her looks set her apart from the rest of them, it made the women wary, and the men stare, but not in a way that flattered Olivia. It was small comfort being the mother of the prettiest girl in the valley. She was too beautiful, too free, and much, much too different. Even as the women talked, Crystal was sitting alone on the swing, soaring high, as the others played nearby. She seemed not to notice them at all, or even see them. She had grown more solitary in the past year, instead of more like them. And, busy with his own life, even Jared left her alone now. The only time anyone noticed her at all was when they heard her singing, as in church on Sunday mornings. She had the kind of voice that whether you liked her or not, you had to stop and listen. It was the only thing anyone ever said about her. She was sailing through the air on the swing, unconcerned with what people were saying, almost unaware of the party around her, singing to herself, as she saw his car drive up, and she recognized him instantly as he stepped out. She hadn’t seen him in a year, but she would have known him anywhere. She hadn’t forgotten him, and only now and then had she dared ask Boyd if he’d had a letter from Spencer. But he had come to the christening, and Crystal fell silent and let the swing slow as she watched him shake her father’s hand, and then go to find Boyd and Hiroko. He was as handsome as he had
been a year before, perhaps even more so. She hadn’t forgotten Spencer Hill for a single moment and her heart stopped now as she saw him.

He was wearing a summer suit and a straw hat. She thought he looked more dashing than he had the year before, and she saw him laughing as he said something to Hiroko. And then slowly, he looked around, past his friends, and as she sat silent on the swing, he saw her. Even from the distance, he knew that she was looking at him, and he could feel her eyes riveted to him, as he walked slowly toward her. His face was serious, and his eyes were a deep blue as he stopped very near her. And the air between them was electric with something neither of them understood. Something they had both remembered for a year could not be denied now as their eyes met. It was a kind of passion that went beyond words or simple understanding. And yet, as they both knew, they were strangers.

“Hello, Crystal. How’ve you been?” He could feel his hands tremble as he slipped them into his pockets and leaned against the tree from which the swing was suspended, trying to sound normal, trying not to let her see all that he was feeling. But it wasn’t easy. She wasn’t moving, she was only looking at him, and for an instant, it was as though everyone else at the party had vanished. There was a magnolia bush nearby, and the air was heavy with its fragrance. And it was almost as though there were a drumbeat in the distance.

“I’ve been all right, I guess.” She tried to sound normal, wanting to ask him why he hadn’t come back again, but she didn’t dare. Neither of them could put their feelings into words. All she could do was look at him, impeccably put together as he had been a year before, his dark hair perfectly groomed, his face tan, and his eyes searching for something she didn’t yet understand, yet she knew
she couldn’t bring herself to move away from him. She wanted to stand near him for a lifetime, breathing his scent, and feeling his eyes on her. The sultry afternoon suddenly seemed much hotter. He felt as though his insides had just melted, and yet he had to remind himself that she was only a child. But they both knew what he wanted to tell her was that he loved her. Except he couldn’t of course. He barely knew her. It was distressing to realize that the girl he’d fought to keep out of his mind all year was even more haunting than he had remembered.

“How’s school?” Her eyes seared him as she asked. She was part child, part siren, and now after only a year, she seemed to be all woman.

“I just finished my bar exams.” She nodded, but her eyes asked him a thousand questions that neither of them would have been able to answer. And although he felt like molten lava inside, everything about him suggested strength, as though nothing could ever frighten him, nothing except what he felt for her, this child he barely knew. But she could see none of that on his face as he watched her hair floating in the gentle breeze of summer. “What about you?” He wanted more than anything to reach out and touch her.

“I’ll be sixteen the day after tomorrow,” she said quietly, and he felt his heart sink. For a moment, just a moment, he had hoped that he had remembered wrong, and she was older. And yet there had been a change in the past year. She seemed so grown up, so womanly in her blue dress. More woman, yet still child, and he wondered again at what madness drew him to her. It wasn’t only to see Boyd that he had come back today. He had come to see her, too, hoping that she’d be there, wanting to see her one more time before leaving California. But there was no point torturing himself. At sixteen, she was
still a baby. And yet … her eyes told him she felt all the same things he did. At twenty-eight, it was insane to feel this for a sixteen-year-old girl. “Will you have a birthday party?” He spoke as though to a child, and yet everything he saw told him she was a woman, as she laughed and shook her head.

“No …” It was impossible to explain to him that she had few friends, that the girls hated her because of her looks, although she herself didn’t understand it. “My dad said he might take me to San Francisco next month.” She wanted to ask him if he would be there, but she didn’t. Neither of them could say any of the things they wanted. They had to pretend not to care, not to understand what they were feeling for each other, despite the gap in years, and the vast difference their lives put between them.

And as though reading her mind, he answered the question she hadn’t dared to ask, about where he was going now. “I’m going back to New York in a few days. I’ve been offered a job by a law firm on Wall Street.” He felt foolish explaining it to her. “That’s part of the financial world,” he smiled, and shifted his weight against the tree that seemed to be holding him up. He wasn’t sure at that precise moment if his trembling knees would hold him. “It’s supposed to be big stuff.” He wanted to impress her, but he didn’t have to work at it. She was impressed by him anyway, by a lot more than just Wall Street.

“Are you excited?” She looked at him with wide-open eyes, as though wanting to see deep into his soul, and he was almost afraid she might, and he himself wasn’t sure what she’d see there, probably a man frightened by what he felt for this girl … this girl who was no longer a child and not yet a woman, and who stirred him as no woman ever had before her. He wasn’t sure whether it was just her looks, or the mystery he saw in her own eyes.
He wasn’t sure what it was, or why, but he knew that there was something rare and different about her. She had haunted him for the past year in spite of all his efforts to forget her. And now, standing next to her he felt his whole body go taut with the excitement of just being near her.

“I guess I’m excited. And scared.” He seemed to admit it easily to her. “It’s a big job, my family would be disappointed if I didn’t live up to what everyone’s expecting.” But his family seemed unimportant now. Only Crystal mattered to him.

“Will you ever come back to California?” Her eyes looked so sad, as though he was deserting her, and they both felt the loss even before it happened.

“I’d like to come back sometime. But probably not for a while.” His voice was quiet and sad, and for a moment, he was sorry he had come. It would have been easier not to have seen her again. But he wouldn’t have been able not to come. He had known for weeks that he had to see her, and now she was watching him, her eyes wise and sad, the loneliness she lived with most of the time etched into the eyes that watched him. Today was a gift, one that she would always cherish. He had become a dream to her, like the dreams of the movie stars pinned up on her bedroom walls. He was just as distant and unreal, and yet she had actually met him, but he was no more accessible to her than they were. The only difference between him and them was that she knew that she loved him.

“Hiroko’s having a baby in the spring.” She said it to break the spell a little bit, and he sighed and looked away, as though trying to get some air, and force himself to think of someone other than Crystal.

“I’m glad for them,” he smiled gently at her, wondering when she would marry and have babies. Maybe if he came back here one day she would have half a dozen
children clinging to her skirts, and a husband who drank too much beer and took her to the movies on Saturday nights, if she was lucky. The thought of it almost made him feel sick. He didn’t want that to happen to her. She deserved so much more than that. She wasn’t like the rest of them. She was a dove, trapped in a flock of peahens, and given the opportunity, they would devour and maybe even destroy her. She didn’t deserve that. But he knew that there was nothing he could do to save her. “She’ll be a wonderful mother.” He said it about Hiroko, but for an instant he wondered if he had meant it about Crystal.

Crystal only nodded and pushed the swing slowly with one foot. She was wearing the same white pumps she had worn to Becky’s wedding the year before, but this time she had kept them on, with another precious pair of nylons.

“Maybe you’ll come to New York one day.” He said it to offer himself hope, but they both knew it was less than likely.

“My father went there once. He told me all about it.”

Spencer smiled. His life was so far removed from hers. It made his heart ache again to know that. “I think you’d like it.” He would have liked to have had the chance to show her … maybe if she had been older …

“I’d rather go to Hollywood.” She looked up at the sky dreamily and for a moment she was a child again as he watched her. A child dreaming of Hollywood, and being a movie star. It was as wild a dream as his dream of loving her, although he didn’t say that.

“And who would you like to meet in Hollywood?” He wanted to know who her favorite movie stars were, what she talked about, whom she dreamed of. He wanted to know all of her, perhaps in the hope of growing disenchanted. He had to forget this girl, once and for all, before he left California. She had haunted him all year,
more than once he had thought of driving up to see Boyd, but when he had, he knew it was only because he wanted to see Crystal. And afraid of the fine madness she seemed to induce in him, he had purposely not come, until now … this last time before he left. But it was already too late. He knew now that he would never forget her.

She was thinking about his question about who she’d like to meet in Hollywood, and finally with a smile as she drifted on the swing, she answered, “Clark Gable. And maybe Gary Cooper.”

“Sounds reasonable. And then what would you want to do in Hollywood?”

She laughed, playing with her own dreams, and him a little bit. “I’d like to be in a movie. Or maybe sing.” He had never heard the voice that had haunted the people in the valley, even those who didn’t like her.