closest to mine, not the one Frank had slept in. Getting him into long johns was easier than dressing him after his bath. He did most of the work himself, but I had to remind him to keep his socks on for warmth. His bed squeaked when he sat on it. He echoed with his own squeak of surprise and leapt up. I laughed. He grinned before gazing warily at the bed.
“It’s just the springs.” I lifted the mattress to show him and then I sat down bouncing and patting the bed beside me. I left him squeaking and grinning.
In my room, the sound of the rain drowned any noise he might have made on the squeaking bed, but I was aware of the wall between us as I changed into sleeping clothes and got into bed. I had been in bed only a few minutes when I heard him at my bedroom door. Then he was a darker lump in the darkness beside my bed.
“I want to be in here with you,” he announced with such simplicity that I opened the covers. Given what I had seen bathing him, he was in no shape to take advantage of me.
We slept that night spooning together for warmth as we had the afternoon I found him. All night, I dreamed of hands and eyes and tongues, of an indistinct jumble of flesh and skin sliding by and around and then into me. Boundaries disappearing and reappearing. My own hands cupping a kneecap or a shoulder blade, or tracing the rippled expanse of ribs. They were liquid dreams, familiar and unfamiliar. Disturbing.
Waking in the morning, I was conscious first of something good and new. Then I remembered. Yes, him. That was how I thought of him—just Him. He needed a name. I wanted to find out what his name was rather than give him one. His lack of knowledge about himself was, otherwise, becoming peculiarly undisturbing to me.
He turned in the bed beside me, a column of warmth. I lay there a moment, not moving as I listened to his breathing and the rain. Beyond the rain there was silence. Even the trains were flooded out now. It would be days before the road would be clear again. I would have my stranger to myself. We were alone in a house of present tense; for now, he did not need a name or history. The extreme weather fit him. Something equally extraordinary and extreme had happened to him.
When I got out of bed, he moaned sweetly. Before I got the stove warm, he walked into the kitchen looking even better than the day before. His hair, about an inch long, was red—bright red like mine and my mother’s. A carrot top like me. His skin was more natural, all the yellow gone out of it, though it did not appear quite normal in its smoothness. He moved well, too, lowering himself gracefully to sit cross-legged on the floor where he watched me make our breakfast. His eyes never left me, going from my face to my hands and back again. I did not ask myself how he could heal so quickly. My mind went around that question like creek water around a stone. I thought, instead, of a cicada I’d once watched emerge from its chrysalis. The short, nubby wings, clearly not large enough for its bulk, had expanded as if converting the air itself into more wingspan, the delicate veins growing as I watched.
All day, he shadowed me, watching and listening while I did my chores. We went to the coop first. The chickens murmured as I unlocked the door. They fluffed themselves and strutted to the feeding pans. He laughed when he saw them, a bubbly, metallic laugh. I measured their feed at the first pan and he copied me with precision at the second feeding pan.
We were a parade of three, me doing my routine chores, jabbering away. Him big-eyed, one step behind me. And Hobo was at the man’s side at every opportunity. While we were in the barn, the cat joined us. I explained everything—chickens, the sow, bridles, the pump, the water coming up from underground. Everything seemed new to him.
Becky nickered softly and one of the cows lowed deep and long when I opened the barn door. Behind me, he exclaimed, “Ooooh!” and stopped on the threshold. I pulled him out of the rain into the barn. I lit the lantern. He stood beside one of