Inkling
an online journal of poetry and prose

04/13/09

LISTENERS AT THE STILL POINT

            Francoise stood in front of her mother's picture window, tracing Toronto's skyline with her finger.  The skyscrapers around the Lakeshore, usually bright, metallic, were discolored by a pale scrim of heat.  She slid her finger up against the tower's slender tip; even its spire didn't pierce the atmosphere. "I don't see why I need to ask Richard's permission.  I just want to get out of this city in August," Francoise made her voice low, reasonable.  She knew what her mother was afraid of; she wanted to make her say it, to name it out loud. 

            Diane was stretched out on the sofa, studying a cookbook filled with glossy photographs.  She held a place with one finger and flipped back and forth between the pictures. Swaddled in the sofa's round arms and scalloped back, she seemed to be resting in a bulky vanilla cloud.  

            "But it's so remote there, what will you do?"  

            "I'll bring some charcoals and some paints," Francoise said.

            "We'll discuss it with Richard on Tuesday," Diane said. She had used the same tone when Francoise was five, when her father was still with them.

            "You rely on him for everything."

            "Francoise, that's not true."

            Francoise twisted a strand of hair around her finger.  Richard had become a foreign and annoying fixture in her life; like a scratch on a pair of glasses, his presence imposed itself on her vision like a tiny distracting fleck.  She could be running errands, or listening to music, when one of his comments, quiet as a raised eyebrow, flitted through her thoughts.  From the beginning he wanted her to call him Richard, instead of Dr. Abrams, as if this familiarity would encourage her to be more talkative, less cool.  Diane consulted with him too, but she and Francoise never saw him together.  Francoise often thought about Richard and her mother in their concerned collusion; it was as if, for a few hours a week, her mother had hired a substitute husband. 

            "You could come with me.  It would be a break for both of us," Francoise suggested.

            "I have too much to do before this shoot. I have to find half a dozen things." Diane marked a place in her book.  She worked as a photostylist, and she moved through the world leaving elegant gestures in her wake: flowers in the bedroom, leftovers served in special dishes, matching placemats, cloth napkins.  She was not merely fastidious; she had a way of pulling unusual things together and making them fit, a desire to make what might be whimsical, whole.  She had stumbled on this metier after her husband left.  Disappeared in fact, a few postcards from the western provinces, then nothing.  Francoise remembered her mother sitting in the evenings over the checkbook, touching the calculator keys with a pencil eraser.  The light from a small desk lamp shone on her hair.  Francoise had believed that she did this over and over because the figures, if pursued, might come out differently.  Diane had eventually talked her way into a job in advertising, and in a decade of generous budgets, she had become sought out.  Her taste, people said, was impeccable. 

            "I'm going out for a bit." Francoise turned away from the window.  The wide brightness was oppressive; the apartment seemed too close to the humid sky.

            In the lobby she paused to light a cigarette.  She didn't smoke in front of her mother; it would be interpreted as a sign of anxiety.  She started downtown, glancing at herself in store windows as she passed by.  She had inherited her mother's coloring–olive skin, light brown hair, a thick tangle falling halfway down her back.  The contrived wildness made her angular face seem almost delicate.  She did not think of herself as pretty: she had a small square chin, a once-broken nose, deepset hazel eyes.  An envious friend once said she would have made a beautiful young man.  A birthmark splashed her right cheekbone.  It was almost the length of her thumb, a soft brown comma running down into her cheek.  When she was little, her father had explained that everyone had some tiny imperfection: he said God had smudged her with his thumb because she was so pretty.           

            In the heat the wide sidewalk seemed soft under her sneakers, like the thick rugs in Richard's office.  He had been recommended to Diane almost six years ago, after Francoise was expelled from University.  She had always been moody–temperament, Diane had called it, almost proudly; but in the springtime of her sophomore year Francoise had slipped over an invisible border, invisible because most of the time, really, she felt fine.  After the "incident" as Diane referred to it, they had pressed Francoise to talk about it, and she had never adequately been able to explain how the pressure of thinking about something so many different ways, the containment of so many perspectives, built up inside her head until it all became colors and shapes, hard and bright, intersecting, until it was all too much, and the thoughts inside her head went white, like chalk-line drawings against a dark blue board.  It happened so quickly, and then the world outside snapped back, bright and unreal, its focus too sharp, like coming out of a movie in daytime.  Richard made notes of what she said and multiplied them, spinning her words into something apart from her, until she didn't want to talk to him at all. It was talking about it--being forced to put into words what wasn't meant to be voiced, that had blown things out of proportion.  Shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday, Richard and her mother agreed she must take medication.  Francoise hated the way it made her feel–drowsy, muffled, as if her thoughts were wrapped in cotton.  The pills seemed to prevent the buildup of pressure, but they also blunted the ends of her perception, as if the subtle shadings in a palette had been removed, and what remained was plain and bright, mediocre.  Painting, even drawing, seemed to require too much energy.  She couldn't imagine going through her life feeling so sleepy and vague. 

            At her appointment on Tuesday, Francoise waited until almost forty minutes had passed before she made her case for going on vacation.

            "It's my uncle's summer house; he's a priest in Quebec.  Every year he sends us cards at Christmas and Easter, and offers us the cottage for a few weeks.  My mother won't even consider it."

            "Why is that?"

            "He's my father's brother."

            "Why do you think he offers it?"

            Francoise paused for a moment; she looked out at the white light beyond the venetian blinds.

            "I think, maybe, he feels bad about my father leaving.  It's a way of making up, well, he can't make it up, but..." she didn't want to sound anxious.  She lowered her voice, tried to sound encouraging.  "He's sent us pictures, it looks lovely, a little place on Tancook Island."

            "Where's that?" 

            "It's off the south coast of Nova Scotia."

            "Why do you want to go?"

            "I'd like to get out of this awful heat, have a change of scene.  I could do some sketching, bring some watercolors.  It would be quiet, it would be good for me."

            Richard tapped out his pipe.  She waited for him to begin a line of questioning about her father and her uncle, but he refilled his pipe, slowly tamped it down, and lit it.  As he lit his pipe, she closed her eyes and imagined that instead of his inevitable brown suit and argyle socks, he was wearing loose, white clothes, sitting crosslegged on a rug in front of her, a high white turban over his dark hair.  He would look at her with compassion, let her out of this stifling city.  The antique clock on his cabinet ticked, ticked her back into the August heat.  She wanted to smash it.

            "I'm feeling good these days, I'll take my medicine,"  she said.  The phrase echoed in her head, take my medicine, as if it were a punishment, as if it were her fault that voices talked to her, as if she wanted them.

            The air conditioner grew loud in the silence.

            "I don't see any reason why you shouldn't,"  Richard smiled. "I think this heat is awful myself."

            Francoise rewarded him with a smile.  He set down his pipe and smiled back at her; his teeth were small, his smile genuine in the defenseless way of men.  She tried not to rush out the door.

            On the way home she bought a fresh sketchpad. 

            "Richard says I can go!"  Francoise shouted as she bounced in the door.  Diane sat on the living room floor, surrounded by swatches of fabric, linen napkins, and lacquered chopsticks.  The room was still.  Francoise closed the door behind her gently.

            "What are you working on?" Francoise asked.

            "I'm doing an ad for a Japanese restaurant downtown."  Diane shook out a batik napkin and set a small bamboo tray against it.  She stared at them for a moment, then looked up at Francoise. "So he really thinks it's all right?" 

            Francoise looked down at the arrangement on the carpet. 

            "Yes, he really does think it's all right."  She heard the edge of irritation in her voice, and  walked toward her bedroom.  She hated how her mother relied on Richard to decide whether her thoughts were in or out of bounds.  The idea of lines, of neat delineation, seemed to comfort Diane, who tried to hide the fact that she watched Francoise with a poised anxiety, as if every mood might stress a fracture that could shift and split without warning. Her mother saw everything as a sign of going up or coming down, but that wasn't it at all.  Sometimes Francoise felt as if she were shifting sideways, picking up speed, and often the feeling receded.  But there were other times when her thoughts came quickly, moving her into new alcoves in her mind that opened out, one onto the other, like a long series of hidden rooms.  She was arriving at her secret self, a place still and perfect.  She saw images of what she would paint: fantastic cities floating in blue, surrounded by moats and canals, linked by turning bridges.  She wanted to show how every angle was true, how every captured image had a rare and different color.

            Last year she had found a stack of books hidden in Diane's nightstand.  She read them while Diane was at work and saw how her mother screened everything through a new vocabulary.  The books were highlighted with a thick marker, and Francoise felt a sting of recognition at certain sections marked with clear yellow.  But some passages had nothing to do with her at all, and she felt angry that her mother was clutching at books, categorizing her according to theories.  She understood her mother was frightened, and words and theories were something Diane could grasp.  No one else could hear the voices.  Mostly the medication kept them quiet, but it also made her cotton-mouthed and listless.  Every time she took her pills, she felt she was being unfaithful to herself in a small but significant way, like smoking a cigarette when she was trying to quit.  Francoise had tried to tell Diane how seldom the voices came, but her mother had looked nervous and changed the subject.       

            Richard had probably told Diane the less said the better.  He had told Francoise not to name the voices, that it would give them weight.  But each of the three voices was distinct.  It was impossible to think of them any other way.  The first voice, high and playful, was often mischievous, like a knowing child who poses questions to test the boundaries of adult patience.  The second was comforting, a voice of good counsel.  All of them were oddly sexless, but the second voice made her think of a wise, older woman.  The third couldn't properly be called a voice, it didn't speak, but it was darkly liquid, fearful.  She knew it rather than heard it, felt its apprehensive presence tinge her thoughts like spilled and spreading ink.

            They began her freshman year at University, layering her anxiety about school with questions of their own.  Little questions and phrases.  She heard them.  Like whispered fragments in an empty room.  She told herself they weren't real.  Hearing voices was what happened to crazy people.  Sometimes they were dormant for months at a time; often she was sure it had all been a phase, half-imagined.  They might never come back. 

            Through the plane window, Lake Ontario dropped away below her.  Toronto was left behind, dulled by a filmy wave of heat.  She had expected to feel pleasure at her escape from the city, but her medication made her feel lethargic and bored.   This week would be her test.  She would see for herself.  She settled back in her seat and wondered about her uncle.  He had been so courteously persistent in offering the cottage; he must feel sorry for them.  Her only memory was of a man with black-framed glasses and flowing dark robes.  As a child she hadn't believed he was actually her father's brother; his collar made him seem a kind of foreigner.  The only time she saw a resemblance was when they laughed.  A few simple words towards the end of a meal made them roar, slap the table, and Francoise remembered her mother smiling too, and then she herself would start to laugh without knowing why, and she felt a buoyant light fill her and ripple out across the room.  Even then, her uncle had a busy parish in Quebec.  Why had he bought a house in Nova Scotia?  When she wrote to ask him about staying there, he answered quickly, saying how delighted he'd be to have her use it.  A neighbor had the key and would be expecting her. 

            Finally she would do some painting.  Already Francoise felt it, like the tingle before a headache.  When she was small, Diane had bragged about her drawing ability; as Francoise grew older, her art teachers commented on her feel for line and color.  Now, Diane saw her painting as an omen of trouble.  Rather than upset her mother and risk further containment, Francoise had left her colors alone.

            She looked out the window as the plane began its descent into Halifax.  They circled over a bright splattering of lakes, dark pine forests split by slim roads.  At the car rental counter she studied a map while the agent checked her credit card.  The ferry for Tancook Island left from Chester, an easy hour's drive.

            Chester was a quiet little town with white clapboard houses and neatly tended hedges. Francoise parked the car and walked past a few bed-and-breakfasts, a bakery, and several shops that sold hand-made tourist gifts: gingham pot holders and hand-sewn children's toys.  A banner announcing Race Week in September stretched across Main Street, and posters with a pen and ink drawing of a sloop were mounted in shop windows. It had been so long since she'd been anywhere unfamiliar.  She sensed herself as a presence in the little town.  The air felt clear, cooler, it was good to find her way around.  At the drug store she picked up a schedule for the ferry and asked where she could buy groceries.  Her uncle had written that she should buy food in Chester; the island market sold only canned food and dry goods.  She walked down the wharf lugging her bag and her groceries.  The harbor, ringed with dark pines and few old warehouses, was quiet; a forest of pale masts stood out against the trees.  From the boats the sound of a small radio and fragments of conversation floated through the air.  She stopped and shifted the bag of groceries to her other arm.  At the end of the dock, a bearded man in a blue uniform coat and old jeans issued tickets and guided people onto the boat.  She paid him fifty cents and saw that he noted her, a stranger, as he told her to watch her step.

            Inside the boat, the passengers sat in clusters on molded plastic benches.  She sat down near three white-haired ladies, two of them gently teasing a third about her youthful figure.  The slender one smiled, tapped her knee with her hand, "oh go with you now, I don't," she protested.  They nodded at Francoise and smiled.  She arranged her bags on the bench and went up on deck.

            On the dock, two men fastened cables to a large refrigerator box.  The winch creaked when they signalled for the box to be lifted, and it tilted awkwardly into the air, swaying toward the boat.  Other supplies were piled on the dock–kerosene, mail, a pale blue armchair covered in plastic. 

            When the motors shifted and the boat started to pull away, she walked around to the prow of the boat and looked out toward the ocean.  Out in the harbor, a few white sails moved lazily in the distance.  In sunny late afternoon the water was deep blue, like new paint mixed with only a single drop of water.  She turned to look back toward the dock and stood still for a few minutes, feeling the sun on her face, the cool air.  Then she went inside and rummaged through her bag, feeling for the vial that contained her prescription.  Cupping the container in her palm, she walked back up to the deck.  As they picked up speed, she leaned over the rail and stared down into the water, pale green and white where the boat cut it.  She knew what was inside her head and what was outside it.  That was the important thing.  You didn't go through your whole life being fine, and then all of a sudden go crazy.  Everyone had contradictory impulses.  It was just that in her, these disparate urges had coalesced into distinct voices.  The medication had been a mistake from the start; it dulled everything inside her, made her feel quiet, unconnected to the world.  She opened her hand and watched a pale yellow dot fall into the water, then she tipped the container over and a scattering of dots fell into the spray.

            When she looked up, a red-faced man was staring at her.  She blushed and looked away.  From the deck where he stood, he couldn't have seen the flight of tiny pills, but her thoughts seemed loud, as if they'd been spoken.  She hoped she hadn't been moving her lips in thought.  When the ferry cut its engines and eased into the dock, he seemed to disappear.

            The land surrounding the harbor was studded with bright houses: turquoise, raspberry, she'd never seen houses painted such colors.  Her uncle had sent pictures of his cottage so she could find it–there were no house numbers on the island; there was only one road.  She pulled the photos out of her bag.  He'd told her to turn left at the end of the jetty and walk about a quarter of a mile.  He'd drawn a little map that showed the road running along the south shore of the island, splitting into a fork on the east side; one branch leading to the market, the other to a beach.  The road didn't even make a complete loop; the island's north side was rocky beachfront.  She picked up her packages and started down the tarmac.  To the south, behind the houses and lawns, the ocean stretched in a vast gray breadth.  Inland, the countryside was forested, slightly hilly; corn-flowers, black-eyed susans and tiny scarlet-petaled stars were bright and distinct against the cloudy afternoon.

            Her arms were getting tired; she had sweated through her t-shirt.  She approached a gray clapboard house with a wide deck that matched the photos.  She set down her bags and groceries on the porch and went across the road to get the key.  She barely had time to knock. A round-faced woman, in a plastic apron that said Bar B-Q, came to the door. 

            "Hello, dear.  Father Austin told us you'd be coming.  You're a painter, he says," she smiled at Francoise, curious. "I turned on the furnace so you'd have hot water and some heat at night."  She turned back toward the kitchen and yelled, "Harmon, fetch the key, will you?"

            A boy wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt appeared behind her.  He pushed the key at Francoise shyly, staring at a point beyond her shoulder.  She thanked them and walked back across the road.  Her belongings and groceries sitting on the porch seemed vibrant, out of place next to the shuttered windows and weathered gray paint.

            She let herself into the house.  When she shut the door behind her, the sound of the ocean was cut off, and the silence inside the house seemed tangible, like the opening shot of an old movie that slowly reveals a room before the sound starts. The living room was furnished with comfortable arm chairs, a pale grey sofa, white ceramic lamps on pale wood tables.  It wasn't rustic, or masculine as she had expected.  There were no photos or pictures–only a few old paperbacks, probably left by another visitor, scattered on bookshelves by the television.  A large mirror hung on one wall.  She hadn't realized how much she'd hoped for some image of her father among her uncle's things.  She moved from room to room; in the bedrooms she opened every dresser drawer: each was neatly lined with shelf paper, clean and unoccupied.  She found a package of tissues, a Tom Clancy novel, not one photo or scrap of handwritten paper.  The absence of sound was palpable; she felt as if she were moving underwater.  She turned on the refrigerator and its hum rippled the silence.

            She sat down in the living room.  It was light, uncluttered, a perfect place to work if she had to paint indoors.  The pleasant anonymity of the room depressed her.  She lit a cigarette.  Her mother wouldn't talk about it, but Francoise remembered, distinctly, coming home from school one day and knowing the house was different, knowing that her father had left.  The photos were gone, that was the first thing she recognized; other things were missing too, but she couldn't say what they were.  When her mother went to take a shower, she walked into her parents' bedroom, looking for what he might have left behind.  The large bed was made, but the room seemed diminished, somehow smaller.  She went and stood in her father's side of the closet.  Standing amidst his suits she smelled their dark, leather smell, felt the scratchy wool and linen against her cheeks.  She made a little space for herself on the low shelf that usually held his shoes, and she leaned against the back of the closet, looking up at the dark suits, the empty arms reaching down to her like the soft arms of ghosts.

            The following day she felt lighter.  She walked, she napped, and felt reminded of what it was like to be alone, to do as she pleased.  If she could stay here and paint, and the voices did not come, then it meant she was all right.  It was foolish to spend her whole life taking a drug to keep them away. 

            She felt shy, at first, about choosing a place to paint.  Every person on the island–there were only forty or fifty inhabitants–seemed aware of her arrival.  The first time, she set up an easel in the front yard.  The day was light and clear; the long grass blew around the boundary fences and the trees seemed to sway and settle as if breathing.  She looked out over the road and the few widely spaced houses beyond, their grassy backyards running off to a low cliff drop, and spreading beyond, the broad expanse of ocean reflecting blue.  She felt apprehensive as she took out her paints. She had brought watercolors because they were easier to carry.  After so long, what if nothing she did pleased her?  But looking out over the lush grass and the sea, the tiny, scarlet flowers clustered by the fence, the colors invited her, and she wanted to put their brightness into something of her own making.  She dampened her brush and paused for a moment over the paints.  When she finally touched her brush to the paper she felt a ripple of connection: paint, water, paper, dipping her brush the way her small hand had reached for holy water in church; her father teaching her to cross herself: father, son, Holy Ghost.  She swept a wash of blue against the paper and felt the breeze washing over her. 

            That night she felt festive.  She sauteed scallops in butter in a heavy black pan.  The thick rounds of fish grew firm in the heat and she drank a glass of wine with her dinner and thought how good it was to be coming back into herself.  After dinner she sat and smoked.  She tried to read one of the paperbacks that someone had left, but the book didn't occupy her and she stretched out on the sofa and thought about how glad she was to be away, how everyone had made too much of just one incident, something that was really mostly a temper tantrum on her part.

            Late in April, her sophomore year at University, she had gone to the art studio to decide which paintings to submit for her final portfolio.  It was late in the afternoon, the light on the granite buildings fading from blue to gray.  She had pulled out a stack of watercolors and set them on an empty table in the middle of the studio.  Moving slowly through the stack, she had studied each painting, then slid it over to a separate pile.  Her earliest work was on the bottom, and as she came to paintings she had half-forgotten, they seemed almost unfamiliar.  She had thought of each one as a separate piece, but reviewing them together, she saw, for the first time, how they revealed her.  It was like seeing a friend with her siblings for the first time: the shadow or impulse of a gesture somehow arose from the same place.  Most of the paintings were imaginary cityscapes.  Fantastic buildings floated above the ground or hovered in odd juxtapositions.  Tiny figures walked through doors turned sideways.  The colors–orange, magenta, deep blue–were bold, or at least that was what she'd intended, but now they seemed garish, like clown faces gone evil. 

            The daylight in the studio had faded; shadows settled in the tiled corners.  She moved to turn on the lights, then stopped.  She didn't want to see anything else. It disturbed her, how her paintings revealed the bright and shifting pressure slowly building up, the kaleidoscopic garishness inside her.  Then the first voice, a high whispy laughter, seemed a beating glimmer in her ear.  The voice had flickered at the edge of her consciousness for months.  She thought of it as playful, a daring part of herself.  As she lit a cigarette, she saw herself touching a match to the corner of a painting.  Touch it. Just touch it.  The first voice was always light, urging her to touch, to try.  Touch it. Go on.  The whimsy of the idea pleased her.  Then the second voice, a voice that often soothed her or encouraged her, the voice she almost desired, said  yes, go on,  steady and comforting, as if she were taking care of something disagreeable, but necessary. 

            She pulled a painting from the stack and struck a match.  The light flared up from her fingers and she watched the black line move down the matchstem, ahead of the flame.  She held it.  Then she lit another and, carefully lowering her hand, she touched it to the corner of the painting.  It wouldn't catch at first, so she struck another match and held it to the paper until a small orange flame moved slowly across the corner in an uneven, widening line.  She touched another match to a reluctant stretch of paper and the painting flared up, drowning the colors into sheets of dark ash.  Then she did another and another.

            Later she tried to explain that she didn't feel commanded; she wasn't doing anything in spite of herself, but when she finally revealed the voices, her mother's reaction frightened her more than what she'd done.

            The next day she decided to look for a different spot to paint.  She had already followed the road to the east where it forked: one way led to a ramshackle market with a rusty gas pump outside, the other to a little school house.  Walking down the road in the other direction, she passed small houses with vegetable gardens and clothes hanging out to dry.  The pavement ended at the edge of a large field; tire tracks continued through the long grass to a weathered house set on the edge of the cliffs.  A wooden sign read Private Road.  The house looked empty, so she skirted the sign and walked around the edge of the field to the rocky shore.          

            A metal sign, courtesy of Tancook Island Public Safety, warned that the rocks were dangerous.  A broken cable stretched below the sign like an interrupted thought.  High steps of mottled rock rose up to scrub pines on the ridge.  She watched the water.  The tide was going out.  She climbed up onto the first step of rocks, walked down towards the island's tip and pulled herself onto a higher step, then she sat down and looked out over the ocean.  The whitened sky was opaque: a day that wouldn't go dark but wouldn't get sunny.  The wind was damp in her hair and she clapped the grit off her palms; she felt happy.  In the wind she sometimes heard something faintly, faraway, like voices behind a closed door.  She tried not to worry about them. They were like a migraine, she told herself; if she feared them too much she might bring them on.  But the faint sibilance was distracting, like a conversation she could only hear a part of.  It made her sad in a way too, because she wanted to know what the voices would tell her.  After all, the voices were a part of her, and sometimes she felt they might tell her some true thing about herself, something she couldn't get at any other way. 

            She turned and headed back.  A faint path ran along the ridge, and before reaching the tarmac road, it angled off to the north.  When the path merged with an old dirt road heading into the forest, she turned and followed it until it became grassy tire tracks and finally dwindled to a narrow path in the long grass.  The morning was quiet.  Moving inland she heard the light rustling of leaves, the intermittent cries of birds. The path led into a forest of slender poplars and elms.  The forest was young, full of light, and here the path seemed no more than a deer trail.  The forest opened onto a clearing.  At the far side she saw the edge of a pine forest, but there was something strange about it.  As she walked closer, she saw that the trees were loaded with feathery, pale green moss that hung like heavy nets of tangled hair.  The moss dangled over the pine branches in clumps and, in spite of the heat, it reminded her of pale green snow, a scene from a fantastic picture book.  She touched the moss, tough and wiry against her fingers.  She would come back and paint this.          

            She followed the path to an old fire circle and realized that she had come out at the north side of the island.  Walking over to a bank, she was high over the ocean, at the edge of cliffs that dropped down to a broad rocky shelf, and down again to black boulders resting like dark animals in the water.

            She sat down a safe distance from the edge, and looked out over the water and the boulders.  Had her uncle ever come here?  She tried again to conjure up some picture of him, and then, distinct and clear as a bird call, the second voice said:

            He's coming.

            She didn't move. Its clarity was undeniable; it felt strange to hear it outdoors. She looked out over the water.  It unnerved her to hear the voice without any sense of directionality. 

            "My uncle?"

            No.   This voice was the patient one.  In the pause she felt a sense of expectation; there was something she was supposed to understand.

            "My father?"  She hadn't known she was going to say it, but as she spoke, she had the sudden feeling that everything made sense.  Her uncle must have known, all along, where her father was.  This place was for them to see each other.  She felt a sense of almost unbearable excitement.  It was perfect.  And suddenly she felt the presence of the third voice.  She knew what it thought.  Its presence urged caution; it seeped, large and dark, below the other voices.

            "I know," she whispered. "He'll be nervous about seeing me.  It will probably be a little strange at first."

            She picked herself up off the grass.  She imagined the full ashtrays at the house, the breakfast dishes left unwashed.  She had to go and get ready.  She hurried back, past the forest with its pale, heavy moss, past the clearing and into the trees.  She would bring her father here.  She would show this to him.  She ran down the trail toward her uncle's house.

            When she got inside, she was breathing hard.  She closed the door; the thick silence seemed to absorb her.  She stood for a moment.  She had doubted the voices, but maybe this was what they'd been for all along. 

            Francoise took a deep breath and moved to the kitchen sink to begin washing up.  She would take the ferry to Chester to get some more groceries so she could make him a nice dinner.  She swirled soap onto a dish and wondered if she should go down to the pier for the next ferry's arrival.  

            She went into the bedroom to brush out her hair.  Her cheeks were red.  Her hair floated from the brush.  And then she heard the high whispy giggle, the first voice, amused at her excitement.  It didn't say anything, but she heard its small laughter in the corner.  She clenched her hair brush, annoyed. 

            It'll be fun.   The voice giggled like a girl at a slumber party.

            "Shut up,"  Francoise said.  "I don't need you now."  She bent over and started brushing from the nape of her neck.  She felt herself shaking.

            I'll bet he's very handsome.  The voice came from the corner, teasing her.

            "Shut up!"  Francoise shouted.  She straightened up and stared at herself in the mirror.  The mark on her cheek accentuated her eyes. "You have to be quiet when he comes," she said.  She used the hairbrush to sweep her hair back.  She would go now, and meet him.  She would watch from the road for the ferry's approach, watch for the small darkness on the horizon to come to her and take its shape.