Jane Was Here (41 page)

Again.

By the time he reaches the last stanza he is reading the corny words out loud:

Though the sound overpowers,

Sing again, with your dear voice revealing

A tone

Of some world far from ours,

Where music and moonlight and feeling

Are one.

It’s no use trying not to think of Jane. Now he permits himself an orgy of remembering.

All evening long, her image envelops him.

Switching off the kitchen light at midnight, he gazes into the backyard, where he first glimpsed her. A different moon, low, swollen and coppery, shines behind the sycamore tree. But there is no silhouette of her beneath its branches.

Thinking back to that night, he feels the eerie rightness of their meeting. Just as when, in the rented van, he turned the wheel toward Graynier: the same sense of clarity. The same way he feels about mathematics, when he encounters the immutable, somehow loving, perfection of things.

There is a perfect order to these events, hidden behind the riotous sprawl of the universe. So of course he found her. Of course she found him. Of course she knocked on his door.

Now comes the tap-tap on the etched daisy panel of glass.

Of course he is racing to open it. Of course she stands there on the stoop, gazing up at him. What could be more right?

“Jane!”

She looks even thinner, a wraith, her skin drawn tighter over her cheekbones, mauve hollows carved around her eyes. Her jeans are torn and filthy; a tank top hangs loosely from her delicate shoulders, one of them swathed in a bandage; bruises, scrapes, and black charcoal smudges cover her face and bare arms. In her hand is a battery lantern, its weakened light almost dimmed out. A gold brooch of twined roses, fastened to her top, gleams incongruously through the grime.

Her gray eyes are alight, as joyous at the sight of him as he is to see her. She lets out an exultant laugh, white teeth radiant in her sooty face. The sound echoes through the empty street, its landscape now transformed into a world of music and moonlight and feeling.

“Papa! I have come home!”

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MY GRATITUDE TO
Grey Swan Press for taking a chance with me. Thank you to Christopher Schelling and Helen Eisenbach for their crucial help in shaping this yarn. Love to James and Phoebe Lapine for indulging my writing addiction. Thanks to Colette Baron-Reid for reminding me what I came here to do.

C
OLOPHON:

This book was typeset using ITC Garamond, a classic 16
^th
century typeface interpreted by type designer Tony Stan and released in 1975. Originally, Claude Garamond created the roman form and Garamond’s assistant, Robert Granjon, designed the italics face. Together, this font family is considered to be among the most legible and readable serif typefaces because of its fluidity and consistency.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part Two

Part Three

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter-Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Acknowledgements

Colophon: