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Who told you you could be in here? says a voice behind her

She turns and finds Richard Grierson standing in the doorway, his fists clenched at his sides He is five years her senior, but he’s one of those young ot fully shut of his boy self

I was just takin stock, she says It’s quite a captain’s cabin you got here

He shakes hihtens the lapels of his jacket

I apologize, he says with a formality that makes him seem almost feminine We’re not used to visitors You are of course welcome in this room anytime

So you’re the one responsible for all the ships I see around here, she says

I aood touch, she says It takes a fine hand to play music and build itty-bitty boats My hands, they’re er scale

She holds up her hands, with the one clipped pinky, to show hihtly

Yes, he says Well

You do the maps too?

No, he says I just found thes soraph e, but the routes, you drew thehtens, and he comes to stand beside her and pulls so to go when everything is back to nor to sail around the world

Really? You can do that?

People have Look, have you ever heard of New Zealand?

I didn’t even know there was an old Zealand

Look here, he says and opens the books onto bright photos of rolling hills, tall n markets populated with street stalls and colorfully dressed people--picture postcards from all the world around--a collector’s set of beautiful places And here’s Australia, and this is Tahiti And Madagascar Even Greenland, which isn’t green at all but frozen in ice all year long

Gosh, she says You kno to get to these places?

He closes one book and looks down at the binding of it

I would try, he says

Then why ain’t you goin now? she says Greenland ain’t co for?

He looks at her uncos the way they are? he says It would be iets back to the way it’s supposed to be

What do you know about the way it’s supposed to be? You ain’t that much older than me You were born into the sa his hand across all the worn spines of the books on the shelf All these books Hundreds of theain Grandmother says it’s only a matter of ti se in the colorful corners of his own crayon fantasies She looks at the books, their titles hazy with a thin filinary journeys along the red dotted lines of a child’s map, and she looks at the exotic pictures in the books still open flat before her, and she understands that these places are just places of the mind, and she wants to be able to exalt his wild drea about the she’s ever seen

SHE STAYS in the house another week, longer than sheMaisie in the kitchen just to have soaood at it and has to let the old wohts, she takes the path to the bluff and looks out over the city and counts the lights Sooes up with her, and sometimes she is alone Soht and the door to his bedroo for her They do their private deeds, when he’s not too drunk, but she doesn’t sleep in his bed because she’s not used to sleeping next to soet accusto from that is reflected on the surface of his eyes They drink from the same bottle, and he tells her she can come with him the next ti she’ll be long gone by then She i narrow tar, dead and alive

She wonders where she will go next She’s been down south for a long ti like a blackbird back and forth froo north to see Niagara Falls, where Lee the hunter had been--all that water tu out of it It is so she would like to see, no doubt about it And then maybe up into Canada since she’s never been to another country before--except maybe Mexico, and only that because the border isn’t so clear anymore and she may have tipped over it to the other side once or then she was in Texas

Or the beaches of California that she’s seen in tattered azines published decades before Palm tree sunsets, the hiteout toward the horizon and the water crashing violently against the barnacled pilings She has heard that there are places in California to live--large areas fenced off and safe Places where coovernments have been reestablished on a small scale Oases of civilization It puts her inlike that

Or the snowy mountains, where she could build a castle of ice She saw the snow once before, in thea snowy road without seeing one slug--they don’t naturally take to the cold They don’t die, but they slon to a stop and freeze in place She ree A community of frozenthem and wondered what God had to do with a tableau like that one, for surely Heexisted

Even Richard Grierson knows that the world is a wide place And the way she figures it, it’s as s that stay with you no o