have to run them like glass hammers, they can be drydocked for lack of a bolt. The U.S. refuses to trade with us and then makes secret, niggling lists of what we get from the Eastern bloc. The embargo having slipped their minds, apparently."
In another letter she said they heard gunfire almost every night. "People talk about the second reconstruction. They mean after the U.S. invades. We get up every day and scan the horizon for holocaust." In this same letter she talked about her young trainees and the joy of seeing a new idea take root in a mind; I knew the moment. When Raymo grasped DNA, his countenance was touched with light. We'd shared something.
I stayed up most of the night rereading letters, all the way back to the first one from the Guatemalan border, where she saw women running from the army carrying babies and backstrap looms. And earlier, on the beach, where she'd watched a man sell shrimp from a bucket that was counterweighted with a plastic jug of drinking water. He drank as he went along, to keep the load balanced. The purity of direct necessity.
But the letters ended, finite as a book or a life, and I had no choice but to keep coming back to the last one, scrutinizing it for a sign of goodbye. It wasn't there. It was a description of the children's Christmas Eve pageant, three or four words about Julio, and a self-effacing story of how she'd broken her plate that morning at breakfast. Of course it was a disaster; there was only one anything per person in the house. She was mad at herself for being careless, but the neighbor women rounded up a new plate. They made a joke of its being tin, unbreakable.
Nothing else. The closest thing to prescience had come a few days earlier, in a pensive pared-down note that said: "Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery-store shelves with thirty brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and I think, 'What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?' I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can."
I had my own nightmare again, but this time I understood that it wasn't blindness. It was a flashbulb in my father's camera. Even from inside the dream I knew that, and I didn't wake myself when I heard the glass pop. I took the risk of staying where I was, and went on dreaming. What I saw next was an infant face that wasn't my own but my child's, lit in the flash. Then I saw her whole body in moonlight. She was a seventeen-year-old girl, naked and long-limbed, walking up the path toward our house. I stood in the kitchen and watched her through the screen door as she came up the path from the river. For a second she disappeared in the inky shadows under the cottonwoods and I felt completely afraid, but then she emerged again in the light. Her skin glowed white.
I thought: "If she tries to walk through this screen door into Doc Homer's kitchen, she'll evaporate. She can't come in here." So I ran outside and gathered her up, a ridiculous bundle of long arms and legs. I carried her back through the cottonwood grove and down the path, away from the house. Over our heads was a chalky full moon with cloud rubbed across it, like something incompletely erased. I was hunched over and stumbling and I started to run along the dry riverbed, absurdly burdened with this long-legged child as big as myself. I didn't talk or look at her, I just carried her along.
Hallie followed me down the path. I didn't see her come, but I heard her voice right behind me.
"Codi, stop. She's too heavy. You can put her down now."
I clamped her weight against my chest. "No I can't, she'll fall."
"Let her go. She won't fall."
"I can't."
Hallie urged gently, "Let her go. Let go. She'll rise."
And then I woke up with empty arms.
Chapter 24
24 The Luckiest Person Alive
The call came sometime before dawn.
While I brushed my teeth I watched the mirror closely and became aware of my skull: of the fact that my teeth were rooted in bone, and that my jawbones and all