looks past the falling water to watch a man pacing a well-worn path along the far edge of the pool. Logic, surfacing from a long imprisonment, tells her that this cannot possibly be him, not after all these years. See—this man’s clothing is ragged. There are holes in his elbows and one knee. His hair is gray; there is a stiffness in his steps, as though his knees hurt him; and above all, he does not look up with eyes alert and wide, blue as the sky above them, does not sense her here and run to fling his arms around her, is so intent on this pacing, forth and back, and back and forth, that he is unaware of her presence, he whose heart beats faster whenever she is close by.
And so she knows that it cannot be him, and yet her heart refuses to accept this and beats an erratic and rapid rhythm and her knees begin to tremble. She presses her hands flat against the cold stone bench, grateful that it clings together, remains solid, does not become another chair in another place and time.
As she sits, she becomes aware of the sound of the fountain, the plink and splatter of water drops, the susurration, the flow. A bird trills and is answered by another. Near her feet a grasshopper explodes into the air with a crackle of wings. A low buzzing, the sound of bees, is all around her. Even the sound of the pacer’s footsteps on grass, the rhythmic pad, pad, pad of his feet reaches her and she realizes that the clamor in her head is still and silent.
It is a luxury to sit in silence without the constant voices in her head, asking, demanding, instructing, so many of them and all at once so that she can’t possibly ever get it straight what it is that they want. She has taken endless notes over the years, has tried writing color-coded shorthand, what this voice says in red, and that in green, and another in blue, but there are too many and they all talk at once and she can decode only bits and pieces. This has, for uncounted years, seemed so important that she feels she is neglecting a duty on the days when she gives up and sits silent and overwhelmed, or when she takes the pills that mute them.
At times the only thing she can think to do is to lay a sharp edge against her skin, to release the blood that powers her brain, hoping to break free. Always they find her—her daughter or her jailers—always there are sirens and bandages and the spell once more of medications.
But now, in this moment, the voices are silent and she watches the man, pacing, and it occurs to her, at last, that he is sad, with his bowed head, and his hands clasped behind him, that perhaps he wears away the hours and the grass like this because it is the only thing that eases some ache in his heart. She feels that ache herself, and so, even though it isn’t, cannot possibly be him, she gets up and walks around the pond toward him, intercepting him by standing directly in his path as he paces in her direction.
He stops in his trajectory, staring at her feet. She is barefoot, she realizes, feeling for the first time the dust between her toes, slightly cool, and looking down she sees also that her legs are bare and that she is wearing only a nightgown. But then she looks up and sees him raise his head. His eyes, so wide, so blue even after all these years, reach hers.
There is a sunrise on his face. He whispers in a voice on the edge of breaking, “Isobel?” And then she is in his arms and he holds on to her as though she is life itself, crying, “Tell me it is really you, I cannot believe.”
She is laughing and crying all at once, trying to tell him, “Yes, Landon, it is me,” and he is kissing the tears from her cheeks, her eyes, and then his lips find hers and the kiss is the end of all the insanity, a perfect moment of rejoining something that should never have been sundered and nothing else matters, nothing, except that the two of them are together.
“I couldn’t find you,” she says, “except for that one dream.” Sees his face change as she says the words and begins