the salmon and squash. My eyes fell on the globe of a red tomato, and I considered biting into it for its juice. Having milk would be almost as good as ice cream, I thought. Vanilla, anyway.
Suddenly Adam was standing in front of me with a clay jug in his hands. “Look,” he said, “I made it out of river clay and fired it hard. Days ago.” The jug was a round globe with a very wide neck. “You can get your hand down in it to swab it out.” His vessel was practical as well as beautiful. The clay had been fired a purplish black, and its color and shape suggested an artful version of an eggplant. I remembered Adam had spoken of wanting to draw.
“You even made a lid,” I said. I thought the piece was really quite lovely. The lid had a knob on it for easy grasping. “You could make a whole set,” I said, “if you wanted to.” Then I asked, “What’s in it?”
“Milk. I thought we might all enjoy some goat milk.”
I smiled. So it was my destiny to have what I wanted. At least in Eden.
By the time we finished eating and drinking, a curtain of rain hung all across the opening, and we watched the reflected firelight flash gold and silver and bronze across it. The water curtain fell straight and hard for over an hour, then in rivulets and trickles from the runoffs down the rocky slope above us. It was good to have all the warm, dry space around us instead of the close quarters of the damp lean-to. As the night storm passed, Adam occasionally added more wood to the fire, and our talk, too, flared up and then died down in fits and starts.
When I had spent nights with Janet and Margarita Stimson, or with my friend Nancy, it had been like this. Anyone could speak, but gradually, in the most natural way, the restful silences began. A few last water droplets clung to the rock lintel and dropped singly, elongating as they fell. The only curtain across the large open side of the overhang was the soft darkness.
I could easily imagine the landscape now obscured by the night, how in the morning the sunshine would flood the valley. In the far distance, we would see the green spires of the redwood grove we had formerly inhabited. How strange that step by step we had been able to come from there to here, leaving something of ourselves behind.
But there was Riley now, in front of me. His hair had grown out—dark red, as I’d expected, made mahogany by the fire glow. His face was almost free of bruises and swelling.
“I forgot to tell you, Lucy,” he said. “I crutched myself down to the beach.”
“It must have been hard,” I answered, “with the crutch sinking in the sand.”
“Not too hard,” he replied. “I wanted to see what was left of your plane.”
“Not much,” I said.
“That plane had sort of a little glove compartment,” he went on. “I pried it open with one of the broken struts.”
“And?”
“A piece of needlepoint. My sisters used to do needlepoint and crewel, cross-stitch—that sort of thing. There were needles, yarn, and thread.”
“Really?” I pictured the somewhat frail circle of an embroidery hoop, its ends connected with a metal screw. I thought of holding a loose, floppy skein of six-ply embroidery thread, how one could pull the plies apart into two sections of three threads each. My grandmother had done that, stitching and telling Bible stories all at once. I recalled Arielle Saad—perhaps crewel or cross-stitch had been a hobby for her.
“What was the picture?” I asked Riley, brother of many sisters. “The image on the canvas?”
“It was a big jar. Kind of a fountain.”
At once I vividly recalled how I had admired the fountain at Nag Hammadi. The dazzling sunlight and the heat. In a distant life, I had stood in front of a museum dedicated to texts found in a jar on the slopes of Nag Hammadi in 1945.
“When the plane came down,” I said slowly, gathering the attention of both Adam and Riley before I went on, “I was transporting some ancient texts. For friends.” I envisioned myself following Arielle, wearing sunglasses, through the streets of the little town, and my hurrying to catch up whenever she disappeared around a corner. I envisioned Arielle’s father, in the white room beyond the pit of baby crocodiles, the man sitting at the rough table,