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your time.

Don't listen to that old bigot, Wilkie said. Now's your time to act.

Pushing the barn door open, she tried keeping the dogs blocked behind her, but they were too strong and they forced themselves by, running ahead down the driveway. The mist had cleared but overhead the sky was still a low ceiling of cloud, the nimbus of the sun visible only as a brightening patch of gray on the horizon.

Don't go, he said.

Slowly, she turned, the membrane porous, time's order shuffled.

Eric sat on the weathered oak bench by the ladder, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, as young and beautiful as the night she'd met him.

Don't go, he said. Stay here awhile.

"But if the man comes back ... I'll lose my nerve."

You never did. You've always been beautiful to me, in that way. You never lost your conviction.

"I kept thinking of you."

I know. I heard you. You were heard. And Nate, you were good to him. You have to remember: our love isn't the only kind. You have loved, my darling. You have loved so much. I see it. I see it in you now. You're beautiful.

"No," she said. "Look at me. Look at what I'm about to do."

But you won't. I know you won't. It's okay. Close the door. Sam and Wilkie, you can let them go now. They'll be all right.

"But there's no one to feed them."

Someone will feed them.

She feared he would disappear if she stepped closer. And so she remained still, blessed now, she understood. The dearest thread in that old fabric of being had loosened, letting him pass back through to her. And so at last she could tell someone, "It's not the dogs' fault - the things they shout. They're in me, the ministers. The puritans and the slaves. God help me," she said, tears leaking from her eyes. "I tried to love my country."

As it should be loved.

"But weren't we fools?"

Yes. Loving fools.

She wiped at her dripping eyes. And when she looked again he was gone.

She stood motionless, gazing at the bench, at its bleached wood, still as stone. A mute object. Eternal in the perfection of its indifference. For the first time that morning, she noticed the clouds of her breath visible in the bitter air.

Heading back up the ramp, she crossed the breezeway, and stepped back into the kitchen. The fridge door hung open, its shelves holding nothing but a jar of pickles and a few bottles of soda water. In the drawer, greens rotted in a plastic bag. A sack of sprouted potatoes lay on the floor between the fridge and the counter. The counter itself was barely visible beneath the clutter.

Proceeding into the living room, she wondered how it was that she had never seen the mess. How long had she been living in this ruin? When, precisely, had the storm struck?

She sat on the one cleared spot of her sofa. She could hear the dogs barking at the door, clawing at it, trying to get back in, to get at her once more. Even at this distance, their voices reached her. They were no longer distinct and yet louder than ever. A roar that nearly drowned out the litany in her head, the one she'd lived by and with, her litany: Henry II and Magna Carta and Gutenberg and Calvin and Milton and Kant and Paine and Jefferson and Jackson's rabble and Corot and Lincoln and Zola and Dickens and Whitman and Bryan on his cross of gold and the patterned fabrics in the paintings of Matisse and Walker Evans and Copland and Baldwin and King in Memphis, the chorus exploding in her, the ideas all that were left, a pure narrative drive using up the last of her.

It had to stop, she thought, reaching into her canvas bag. She could make it stop. She could at last exercise her will over history's reckless imagination of her.

The open-faced books on the coffee table soaked up the turpentine like arid soil.

She thought to close her eyes as she struck the match and dropped it, but then that wouldn't be right. She would watch.

Chapter 19

The press conference announcing the discovery of trading fraud at Atlantic Securities was held at the U.S. attorney's office in lower Manhattan one morning in late October 2002, shortly before the opening bell on Wall Street. Minutes later, Jeffrey Holland, solemn but confident, stood before another lectern at Union Atlantic headquarters in Boston to inform the public that the authorities would