I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct.

—Dante, Inferno

The voice arose unbidden, coaxing, earth-succored, barely a voice at all: a whisper of wind and trees, a rustle of greenery driving up through rich loam. She saw a dim figure, a shadow moving in the recess of a tangled wood.

Come to me—

More than fifty years had passed. Sylvia slept restlessly and woke with no memory of what had passed in the night.

Even now, it was the voice she heard in dreams.

She fooled herself into believing it had started with the incident in the garden, but of course it began before that. With the want of a word, maybe, and maybe before that, all the way back—

—in England, it began in England—

—on the day when she walked out of a classroom for the last time. The incident in the garden marked a turning point, perhaps the turning point—yet even then it was the word that concerned her. She had been a connoisseur of words her entire life, reserving for them an appetite usually lavished on more sensual pleasures. It disturbed her that now, here, in this late stage of her decline, she could find no word to describe the state of her soul.

About her physical state, Sylvia had no illusions. She could think of a plethora of words to describe that, ranging from the innocuous (elderly and superannuated) to the hateful (desiccated and obsolete, among others). In the parlance of the day, she was a senior citizen; in the secret language of her heart, she was old.

Just old.

But she had no ready language for her soul.

On a narrow shelf in her study stood two slim volumes, her life's work—her corpus, she called it in her grimmer moments. A book of poems published when she was twenty-four, hardly more than a girl back from her post-graduate tour of England; a work of negligible scholarship published much later, during her years at Holman, when the ardor of youth had hardened into austerity and the failure of her muse became intolerable. Yet this was not much consolation after all: her past expressiveness haunted her present, coloring these last days with a sour tincture of desperation that only grew more oppressive.

She fidgeted. She could not concentrate. Words seemed to swarm the very air around her, ghostly, insubstantial. And so it went, until at last her discontent entered a more desperate season.

Afterwards, she remembered the moment only in fragments, bright razor-edged shards of perception. The garden behind the house, where the wood encroached in a wild tangle. The April air bright and dense with moisture. A single lonely birdcall.

Crouching there, her fingers knotted around the spade, Sylvia saw how the flesh of her hands had shrunk from the marbled ridges of her veins. Dizziness overwhelmed her. And then the world blossomed with fierce beauty. A fecund vapor breathed from the ripe soil, root woven and strewn with the regenerative fragments of spade-torn worms. Sunlight bathed her in fragrant waves. Her heart lurched. Involuntarily, half-uncertain how to account for her sudden panic, Sylvia cried out, lifted her hands to her face, and saw that the sharp edge of the spade had slit her ring finger. A single ruby droplet fell away. The thirsty earth drank it in.

"Horny," said Daphne the next day at lunch.

"Excuse me?" Sylvia placed her sandwich atop a stack of exam booklets and stared at the woman behind the desk.

Thirty-seven, unmarried, dressed in lime-green pants and a baggy cream sweater, Daphne wore her weight like armor, her beauty—which was genuine if unfashionable, the voluptuous generosity of a Renoir—sheathed in smooth protective fat. "Horny," she said once again. "Maybe that's the word you're looking for." She swallowed a spoonful of yogurt and grinned.

"I'm seventy-four years old."

"You want something fancier? Ennui, maybe? Malaise?"

"All I'm saying—

"All I'm saying is, you're human, you've got needs."

"It's more complicated than that."

"Oh?"

"Something happened yesterday." Sylvia shifted on her chair. Daphne's office smelled of books and chalk dust, but Sylvia found it disconcerting all the same. The books had odd titles: Geographies of Female Desire, Text(SEX)uality: Eros in Post-Modern Fiction, others. Sex, that rude biological imperative, glistening and organic, thrusting its way even into this sacrosanct retreat.

"What happened?"

Sylvia sighed and looked out the window. Two stories below, students clustered in groups or strolled across the quad toward the library. "Nothing. I was in the garden. I felt a little dizzy is all."

Daphne pursed her lips. She stirred her yogurt for a moment in silence. Then: "You miss teaching, don't you?"

"My life is very full."

"Are you working on anything? Are you writing?"

"Trying," Sylvia lied. And then, an impulse she could not quite define compelled her to elaborate: "I'm trying to write poetry again, but it's not easy. It's been so long."

"I really think you need someone."

"You don't have anyone."

"In case you haven't noticed, I'm not conventionally beautiful," Daphne said breezily. "And anyway, I'm not the issue here."

"Am I? Is that what I've become? An issue?"

In the succeeding silence, they stared across the desk at one another. Daphne skated her spoon around the rim of the yogurt cup. "I have this," she said, waving the spoon in a gesture that took in the office, the campus, everything—the entire life Sylvia had surrendered. "Besides, I don't mean a lover, not really. God save us both from lovers. I was just having some fun with you."

"Then what do you mean?"

"You're not getting any younger, Sylvia. At your age, you have to look at life a little differently."

"I suppose you mean I should stop living altogether."

"Don't be ridiculous. All I'm saying is you should slow down a little. You don't need a garden, for example, and certainly not such a big one."

"And if I want one?"

"Of course you want one. But it's not wise. Anything could happen out there."

The wall clock ticked, dividing the silence into discrete segments of discomfort. A chorus of laughter drifted up from the quad. Sylvia began to pack the remains of her lunch.

"Sylvia, what are you doing?"

A spoon clattered to the floor. Sylvia snatched it up with shaking fingers. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

"That's no way to behave—"

"I'm not a child. I'm capable of deciding when my behavior is inappropriate."

"I'm just concerned, Sylvia. I think it might be a good idea for you to hire someone to stay with you, that's all."

Sylvia picked up her lunch.

Daphne stood, looking stricken; her earrings dazzled the room with bright reflective coins. "Sylvia—"

"You were my student once, Daphne. I won't have you speak to me this way."

"Sylvia, please—"

"Please what? We have been friends for years—friends! I am an adult, I have a Ph.D., I have written two books. I am not ready to be packed off to the old folk's home, and I certainly don't need a babysitter. I need a friend, but I'm not sure I have any." Standing there, clasping her lunch bag to her fallen breasts, Sylvia felt tears start up—

—but no—

—she would not allow herself that weakness. She drew herself erect. "I will not be patronized," she said, and she let herself out of the office, shutting the door quietly behind her.

What was his name? And then she had it. "Professor Green. I didn't see you."

"I know. You had a real head of steam up there. Say—" He looked at her closely. "You all right?"

"I'm fine," she said. She waited for him to step aside and let her pass, but he only stood there, fidgeting, his mouth screwed into a thoughtful grimace. After a moment, she said, "Are you settling in here at Holman, then?"

He rubbed his face. "Oh, yeah, yeah I am." He laughed nervously.

"Is your semester going well?"

"Great. I meant to thank you for your notes by the way. The ones on Capellanus?"

She wasn't sure why he had phrased this as a question.

"Daphne—Dr. Maclean—said they'd help," he went on, "and she was right. Dr. Maclean, I mean."

"Yes. Well. Always glad to help. If there's anything else I can do—" She lifted her eyebrows.

"Right. You bet."

He ran a hand through his thatch of hair, started to speak, reconsidered.

"I'll just be going then."

She stepped past him and moved toward the elevators, conscious of his eyes upon her back, conscious also of Daphne's closed door. She was obscurely hurt that Daphne hadn't—

"Dr. Woodbine."

She turned.

"There is one thing actually. You could do to help, I mean." He touched her elbow, drawing her into the alcove by the stairwell. He stood there, bouncing uncertainly on his heels.

"What's that?"

"It's about Daphne? Dr. Maclean?"

"Yes."

"I—Well, I couldn't help noticing that you're friends, the way you come up and have lunch with her every Thursday?"

"Yes. Daphne was my student, here at Holman actually, years and years ago."

"Right, well, what I was wondering, see, was, is she … you know, seeing anyone?"

"Daphne?"

"Yeah."

She hesitated, a wave of obscure emotion welling up within her. The alcove seemed oppressive suddenly, crowded with Green's nervous energy. She could smell him, a faint woodsy scent of coffee and something else, something earthy and organic, as if he'd broken a light sweat beneath his clothes. Not unpleasant, but too much somehow. Somehow overpowering.

"No," she said. "Not that I know of."

"Oh great, that's great. You don't think she'd be … you know—"

"Really, Professor Green, I can't speak for her."

"Yeah, I know, right." He paused. "Well, if you wouldn't mention this to her—"

"Of course not."

"Thanks, then," he said. He nodded, lifted his arm as though he wanted to shake hands, and then drew it back. A moment later, he was gone. She stood there a moment longer, catching her breath, and then, hearing a door—

—Daphne's door?—

—open in the hall, she ducked into the stairwell and started home.

In the dank cigarette-smelling stairwell, memory hit her dead on, like a truck. Sylvia stumbled, her heart racing. Her lunch-sack slipped away, and she clutched at the iron rail as if it could anchor her in the present. A dizzying bank of vertigo rolled over her.

Then, one hand clenched at her breast, Sylvia settled back into the present. Blood throbbed at her temples. The door eased shut behind her with a pneumatic hiss. She gasped when it clamped into its metal frame with a boom that scaled the risers.

It might have been a prison door.

In the silence that followed, she felt her dry lips—unwilled, unwilling—shape his name. "John." It was the name of a stranger. "John."

Forty-three years. Had it been so long?

She had known him before they became friends—she'd met him when she interviewed at Holman, they'd exchanged pleasantries in the mailroom. Once they'd spoken at a party, but only once; Sylvia usually came to parties late and left early, and John Thistle—she noticed—rarely came at all. He was pleasant but aloof, a bit forbidding. An air of old catastrophe clung to him, something too terrible for words.

Their first memorable encounter—unforgettable to her, anyway—had come her second year at Holman, on a Friday night. Returning to campus late to collect a forgotten book, Sylvia had come upon him unawares. He hadn't seen her, and afterwards she'd been grateful, for there had been about him an aura of privacy she was loathe to disturb.

She had been striding down the darkened corridor with the stealthy haste of a woman at night, alone and apprehensive, when she came around a corner into a wedge of golden light. She stopped abruptly, and without pausing to wonder why, stepped back into the shadows.

The light radiated from John Thistle's half-open office door, and that in itself—even on a Friday night—was not entirely unusual. Pulling into the gravel lot, Sylvia had noticed two or three lighted offices in the dark facade of Ayers Hall. What was unusual—so unusual that she could not forget it—was that John Thistle wasn't doing anything. Not reading or making notes, not staring pensively into the dark well beyond the window, not even sneaking a flask from an open drawer.

Just nothing. Nothing at all.

Through the open door, Sylvia could see a wall of books, a length of checkered tile, a desk, barren in the glow of the reading lamp. Thistle sat stiffly, his hands splayed on the desk, his tie loosened. His rough-hewn face, thrown half into shadow, was utterly still, but it was the stillness of becalmed waters, where dangerous currents churn the depths. His hair tumbled in untutored rings over his collar, but there was nothing of vanity in it—a want of female attention maybe, or the riotous vitality that radiated from the man even in repose, but nothing of vanity.

From the corridor, Sylvia watched for an instant, afraid to breathe. Still he did not move. He merely sat there, patient and enduring as an oak, with something of an oak's weathered dignity.

A terrible certainty possessed her: he would look up, he would see her standing there in her white dress, ghostly in the shadowy corridor. And though she could not imagine why the idea of such a confrontation might disturb her, it did. It disturbed her very much. She spun silently and fled, her traitorous shoes ringing down the tiled corridor, and then the stairwell, these same torturous stairs, and out, out into an October night chill with rumors of winter.

—a leaf—

—between the pages of a dusty book.

Forty-three years.

Sylvia knelt to retrieve her lunch-sack, but she could not shake the feeling that she had somehow stepped into the past. The recollection had a brittle clarity, a disquieting immediacy she associated with senility. She thought of her grandmother in her dotage, chatting tranquilly to people decades lost.

Shaking her head briskly, Sylvia descended the stairs with a swollen-legged old woman's gait. And though she believed she had quite overcome her confusion by the time she emerged from the stairwell and stepped outside, she was distressed to discover there not the crisp October night she had half-expected, but only April.

A hawk circling far overhead, a distant speck against the blue spring sky, might have observed her: an old woman fleeing from the little cluster of buildings where she had passed her working life (what kind of life? at what price?); an old woman threading the currents of young people who flowed down the shaded walks, their chatter rising to these rare altitudes as a faint faraway cacophony, mere human noise; an old woman passing now the brick clocktower where the hawk had lately roosted, slipping now beneath the vast canopies of the centuries-old oaks, where lovers lazed this bright April noon, careless of their studies; an old woman moving at last into the town itself, Holman, like the college, with its quaint brick sidewalks, its tiny business district (a grocery market and a book store and a strip of bars just below Fraternity Row), its winding streets, and (had the hawk known to look) the old woman's rambling Victorian farmhouse, swathed in spring finery at the very edge of the deep wood. Higher still, the hawk might have seen the town entire: a small place fast in its bowl of hills, tethered to the bustling world beyond by a few narrow strands of gray concrete, cracked and weather pitted, rent by the deep-thirsting roots of the great trees, the wild wood, the ancient forest rising up to hem the town in, to surround it, to envelop it with the threat and promise of an older world, the powers and dominions of a world that could be beaten back, cut down, that could be paved over and driven into submission with enough vigilance and determination, but that would ever and again reassert its presence, in the shriek of the hawk itself maybe—

—come to me—

—drifting down the wind, or in the first blade of grass to thrust through the frost-heaved macadam of some abandoned parking lot; and, yet higher, reaching now to the very limits of its great wings and peering down through shreds of thin high vapor, might have seen even this disappear, might have seen the very curve of the earth, might have seen all this and more and still not seen the lie in the old woman's heart.

Lie?

Oh yes, she had lied to Daphne.

Nearly twenty years of friendship in which Sylvia had never been anything less than honest and now, today, she had lied to her twice. She had promised herself all those years ago never to lie to her students—promised to show them the beauty in the world, yes, but to show them the steely truth of it as well, that beauty did not last, and the earth to its very core was made of iron.

Yet she had lied.

Now, hurrying home, Sylvia passed students lunching under trees or drifting classward, all of them talking, talking, talking. The air swarmed with their prattle and everywhere she looked Sylvia saw girls with careful eyes and voices brassy with false confidence. Girls like Daphne all those years ago—Daphne, alone in the back row, overweight and armored with sarcasm, but bursting with shrewd intellect. Sylvia had vowed to reach her then, had succeeded, and ten years later, when Daphne returned to teach at Holman, Sylvia had vowed to befriend her. She had succeeded there, too. And she had never lied to her.

Until now.

Lie number one: it was just a dizzy spell.

In truth, she could not remember what had happened in the garden, could recall only the smell of the air and the slant of sunshine and that strange light which had blossomed in every surface of leaf and earth. And her heart, her heart hurling itself at the cage of her breast like a maddened bird.

Perspiring, suddenly afraid, Sylvia paused in the shadow of an enormous oak arching above the sidewalk. A car slipped by. She swallowed. There were other things she might have said if the conversation with Daphne had gone differently.

The incident in the car, for example. Coming home from the supermarket, at an intersection not two blocks from her house, she had forgotten which way to turn. She had hesitated, frozen with alarm, until the driver behind her touched her horn. Pulling to the curb, Sylvia had watched the other car move past, a station wagon full of kids with a bright red sticker pasted to the bumper: Choose life.

Funny how the mind worked. You could forget the most basic facts of your existence, you could forget how to find your way home, but the most insignificant things imprinted themselves on your mind forever. She didn't think she'd ever forget that ridiculous bumper sticker; it seemed in its blind certainty to epitomize the absurdity of her predicament, and she had still been staring at it when she burst into tears. That's when it came to her. A left. A left turn. And just as suddenly the tears had turned to laughter, glassy laughter edged with hysteria, and somehow that had frightened her even more. She might have said that to Daphne—but how could she?

So she had hinted only—just a little dizziness—and in the end she had lied.

"I'm writing poetry again," she had said, another lie, except—

—and here, at the very edge of town, Sylvia turned the corner and saw her house, her familiar, orderly house, with flowers, everywhere flowers, tumbling like waterfalls from window-boxes, nodding like drowsy old men in planters, bowing in neat rows in bed after glistening bed—

—except maybe that wasn't a lie.

Sylvia paused, mindful of the nagging pain in her joints, and surveyed the house, a hundred years old or older, standing there at the end of its street, encircled on three sides by the forbidding wall of the forest, which she had fought so hard all these years to subjugate, beating it back and back, waging a relentless campaign to establish and preserve the wholesome order of the grounds, their harmony. Her house. The yard had caught fire with flowers, the house burned with color.

It was a revelation.

I am still writing poetry, she thought. This house, this garden is my poem.

And once again she thought of Daphne—fat, shy, frightened Daphne who under her guiding hand had blossomed into a woman.

Daphne is my poem.

A weed had sprung up in the back garden, there where the wood spilled over into lawn. Had it been there yesterday, when she had knelt in that very spot, turning up the rich earth with her spade?

Sylvia stood in her gardening clothes, rubbing the scab on her ring finger, frightened not so much by the plant itself, though it had a poisonous beauty (she thought of Rappaccini's fabled garden), as by the implications of the memory lapse. Surely she'd have noted the thing if it had been there; surely she'd have uprooted it. She shuddered, recalling the incident in the car, recalling Daphne's words—

—maybe you should hire someone to stay with you—

—bright and hurtful as broken glass.

And if it hadn't been there, well, that raised an entirely different issue: how on earth had it grown so large?

Sylvia stared down at it, erupting from a bed of annuals like a tumor, a thorny hateful thing anchored by medusa coils of encircling runners. Each serrated leaf shimmered blackly, iridescent as the carapace of a fly. A single blossom glistened at its heart: broad petals of midnight purple cradling a greenish black bud already swollen to the size of a man's fist. She could smell it from here, sweet and pervasive as compost, rotting to pulp beneath a humid sky.

She dreamed that night of John Thistle.

In the dream, she sat alone in a lecture hall while Thistle stood at the lectern, expounding on Andrew Marvell. She couldn't follow it—something about Marvell's fame as a politician, something about—

But who cared?

There were other things to think about—the sweet breath of wind that blew in through the wide-flung windows (was it a forest that grew out there?); or John Thistle's craggy face (was there another face behind that face?), that wide mouth, those knowing eyes. He leaned forward, gripping the lectern, and she saw the strength rooted in those fingers. Just for a moment she imagined how it might feel to let him touch her, those strong fingers sliding across her flesh …

(She felt the forest press close.)

"Miss Woodbine!"

She stretched languorously, knowing how the sweater would cling to her breasts.

"The quotation," he said. "Identify the quotation."

"I don't know. I didn't hear it."

And so he repeated it:

How could such sweet and wholesome hours,
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers?

Sylvia said, "I don't know. It doesn't matter."

He circled the lectern and paused before her, leaning close. She could taste his breath, a deep woodsy scent, still waters and the shade under old trees. She lifted her fingers to his cheeks (that face, was there another face?) and drew him near, tilting her head to be kissed—

(A green frond brushed the windowsill, listening.)

She threw back the covers and crossed the room. There, in the armchair by her window, wrapped in an afghan, she gazed out over her garden, toward the thick forest rising beyond it. After a minute, she lifted the sash an inch, just enough to taste the night air, the scent of the wood, a wild earthy odor of leaf rot and hidden pools scummed green with algae.

Memory stirred inside her. She closed her eyes.

She did not know how to begin.

But he saved her the trouble, for abruptly he looked up, sensing her there maybe, poised on the knife-edge of uncertainty. He blanched, his hand trembling as he placed his pen on the blotter.

"Sylvia, you frightened me. For a moment there you reminded me—" He broke off. "Come in, please. How can I help you?"

She sat, smoothing her white dress across her knees. "If you have a minute—"

"Reading for Monday. It can wait."

He closed the book and folded his hands on the desk. She studied them for a moment—the long powerful fingers and the clean nails, the tiny hairs that curled just below the knuckles—and then she looked up. The intensity of his green eyes was ferocious, unnerving. She suddenly understood his reputation: why students notorious for disrespect held him in awe, why colleagues infamous for gossip held their tongues on the subject of John Thistle. Simply put, there was no hiding from those eyes. As he gazed across the desk at her, she felt that for the first time in her life she was being truly and fully seen, as though he could pierce right through whatever disguise she might fling up to protect herself.

"Sylvia?"

"I'm sorry. It's—there was a boy in my office just now, he's not doing well. His papers are—he's practically illiterate—"

"What happened?"

"He cried. He wept like a baby, and I tried, I tried to show him how he could do better and—" And suddenly she found that she was crying, that she was weeping like a baby. "I couldn't help him. I don't know how to help any of them."

She cradled her head in her arms, right there on the desk. Thistle said nothing. He simply touched her, a single hand across her forearm, and not as other men had tried to touch her. It asked nothing of her, that hand. Expected nothing. I'm here, it said. Simple human contact, nothing more.

After a moment, he stood and closed the door. When he sat down again, the hand came back.

"They laugh," she said. "When I turn my back, I can hear them snickering. When I ask a question, all I get is this sullen silence—or something smart. And then they'll laugh again."

He said nothing. The hand went away to peck on the desk. Her skin burned in its absence. Then:

"How long have you been teaching, Sylvia?"

"Two years. I started here."

"Well that's the secret, then. Everybody is bad when they start."

"You?"

"I was the worst. When I started, I prepared for hours. Wrote lectures, rehearsed jokes—rehearsed them, can you imagine—and every day I went in and fell flat on my face. I thought about quitting, would have, probably, except one day I said, to hell with it. I went into the classroom, I said, 'Are there any questions?' and a moment of shocked silence passed. Then someone—a girl, bless her, I remember her to this day—she raised her hand. From then on it got better. I had bad days, I still have bad days, but it got better."

And somehow she found herself laughing—an unpleasant, mocking laugh. "So that's it—I'm supposed to walk in without an ounce of preparation and just wing it?"

He barely raised an eyebrow. "Of course not." He leaned forward, steepling his long hands. "But you do have to surrender some control—let the class follow its own course, and learn that it's okay if a question arises and you don't have the answer. It's okay to say, 'I don't know.'"

He was silent for a moment and then he turned in his chair to gaze out the window into the barren November quad. When he turned to face her, Sylvia had the sense that his thoughts had drifted away from her, that when he spoke again he wasn't talking entirely about teaching anymore.

He said, "The secret is not to be afraid."

Yet she had been, hadn't she? Afraid when that first talk led to another ("How are things going, Sylvia?" he'd said in the hall the following Tuesday) and then another, and then, somehow, to lunch, once, twice, three times a week. Afraid when one Friday afternoon he took her walking down the paths that dipped into the deep wood beyond the campus, afraid when somehow, as they dallied beneath the sun-dappled canopy of the forest, her small hand found its way into his large one, his long fingers every bit as strong as she had imagined. Afraid of the way her colleagues wouldn't meet her eyes after they glimpsed the two of them together in the halls. Afraid of what her parents would say (he's old enough to be your father, they would say).

She had come to Holman to get away from all that, just as she had fled to England the summer after she had finished her undergraduate degree—three summers waiting tables and she had blown it all on that vast romantic gesture of defiance. A child's gesture, her father had called it (it's time to put aside this literary nonsense, he'd said, time to take that position in policy adjustment, he'd been holding for her). And she supposed he had been right. But it had been necessary all the same. Necessary if she were ever to shrug off the woolen shroud of their expectations. But her parents had followed her even to England, and now she discovered that they had followed her here as well. They were in her head. She knew what they would say without ever having to ask. And in that thirty-first year of her life, her second at Holman, she had feared that, too: feared that she wouldn't ever stop hearing their voices in her head.

Most of all, she was afraid of John Thistle. She feared the feelings he engendered within her. She hadn't wanted him to relinquish her hand that day in the wood. She hadn't wanted him to stop at the hand. And one day—this was at the end of the semester, during the waning days of the year, with Christmas on the horizon and the threat of snow perpetually in the sky—one day he didn't.

She hadn't known he was on campus, hadn't expected him to be. Exams were over. Most of her colleagues had already finished up. But Sylvia took her time about grades, she always did. She relished the process, following the neat lines of numbers as they trundled across the ruled pages of her record book, toting up the passes and failures, the triumphs and the disappointments; most of all, the fact that here, finally, at the close of the year, the turmoil of another semester resolved itself into a kind of order. So there she was, summing it all up, when a shadow fell across her.

John Thistle leaned in her doorway, his great thicket of hair in its usual disarray.

She stood, smoothing her dress.

"Nearly done?" he said.

"Almost," she said, flustered, the memory of their walk in the woods rising up inside her, the memory of her small hand in his.

He came all the way in, brushing the door half closed behind him. "So you're going away for the holidays?"

"I'm not sure yet actually. And you?"

"No, I'll be here. I'll be right here in Holman."

An uncomfortable silence stretched between them.

"Well, I just wanted to say good-bye," he told her. "Happy holidays and all that."

"Yes. Merry Christmas."

He turned to go, his hand gripping the door knob. And then, without really intending to move, she found herself on the other side of the desk, an arm's length away, the pile of final exams forgotten behind her. She could smell him, a faint smoky odor of tobacco, and beyond that, or under it, his own smell: the smell of his flesh, an earthy virile scent, unwashed, but not unclean.

"John?" Her face felt heated.

"Yes?"

"Will you be spending the holidays with family?"

He hesitated. He always hesitated when she made some personal inquiry, and in that moment of hesitation, her courage always failed her; she always waded in with some other statement. The truth was, she didn't want to know about his family, didn't want to know if he even had one, and to forestall his response, she said, "The holidays can be so hard, can't they?"

"Yes, they can be difficult."

"I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate your help this semester. It's made all the difference."

"Yes. I've enjoyed it. In fact—" He hesitated, looking down at her, and she had once again that odd sense that another face, a true face, lay concealed beyond the familiar lineaments of this visage which had lately grown so familiar to her: those startling green eyes, that remote and slightly self-mocking smile. "In fact," he said, "you've become quite important to me."

She swallowed, at a loss for words.

Thistle moved toward her, hesitated, and then his hands came to her cheeks. No, she started to say, but the word died on her lips. She didn't in that moment need words, didn't for once in her life want them. What she wanted, what she needed, was this, only this: John Thistle's intense green eyes, his weathered face, his hands against her skin. No, she did not say, and lifted her face to kiss him, gently at first, and then with growing hunger, a kind of fierce gnawing privation she hadn't known was in her. She let him embrace her, there in her office with the door half open at his back, let him kiss her, let him bear her back until her hips crashed into the edge of the desk. A stack of exams slid to the floor, and still he kissed her. Unbidden, her arms drew him closer. She could feel the length of his body, sinewy and hard, she could feel one strong hand kneading her breast, the other sliding down across her stomach—

"No," she whispered.

A bright wire drew tight within her. She tilted her hips to meet his touch.

And now, stronger, she said, "No. No, John, no—"

He stepped away, breathing hard. In the next moment she heard it, they both heard it: the clatter of footsteps receding down the hall.

He drew the back of his hand across his mouth. "I'm sorry," he said, but there was nothing sorry in his green eyes.

"Did someone—"

"No."

"Someone did, I heard them, you heard them—"

"Listen—"

"You listen." A fit of trembling possessed her. "You've got nothing to lose here, you've got tenure—"

He stepped forward, enfolding her in his arms again. She didn't know how long they stood like that. Her heart pounded. Her lips felt bruised. She hated him. She wanted him to kiss her again. The trembling passed.

He stepped away. "I'll go."

She nodded. She didn't trust herself to speak.

At the door, he turned back. "Sylvia," he said, "there's nothing to be afraid of." He held her gaze a moment longer. Then he was gone.

And yet she was afraid.

Now, remembering, Sylvia thought, perhaps that's the word. Afraid.

She leaned closer to the window and gazed past her ghostly reflection into the night. The garden was a well of shadows, the trees black against the opalescent sky. In the distance, Holman's clocktower sounded out the hour—five musical chimes borne to her through the still April air. Dawn was breaking, and it was easy enough to imagine the town bestirring itself for the day, kids waking and dogs pawing at back doors while their owners sat yawning in sleep-soured sheets. Soon newspapers would be thumping against porches; soon the first birds would test the dew-sodden air.

But nothing stirred here, not in this narrow crepuscular bedroom.

Sylvia leaned her head against the glass as dawn poured slowly across the lawn, drenching in nacreous gray the ranks of flowers, the careful symmetry of the garden paths, the sundial in the grotto where she sat most evenings, there on the moss-grown bench, where the little fountain chattered and danced. The garden comforted her somehow, its harmony, its simple human order.

But this too would pass. That was the bitter truth of the thing: everything passed, even this simple garden. She could see how it would happen, how the forest would creep in, gradually at first—here a questing vine, there a stray sapling—and then faster, until it reasserted its dominion at last. A season, that's all it would take. Weeds would crowd out the delicate annuals. Vines would shatter the stone pedestal of the bird bath. In the end it would swallow even the house. Maybe some wanderer would stumble across the site centuries hence. Catching a flash of sunlight in the weeds, he would hunker down and fish from the tangled undergrowth the brass compass of the sundial. He would scrape away the crusted residue of years and hold the tarnished face to the sky, wondering how such a relic had come to be here, in this wild place.

It had begun already, she saw. There at the back of the lot, where the woods had encroached upon her handiwork, where the vile weed lifted its face to the morning sun. She could see it. She could see the thing from here, visibly larger, impossibly larger, squatting like a toad amid her drowsy banks of annuals: the bowl of midnight purple petals and the great greenish-black bud at its heart, a strangely beautiful seedpod the size of a severed head.

Her heart stuttered as she stared out at the thing, transfixed by horror. A scrap of some old nursery rhyme lodged in her mind—

—Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow—

—and in short, she was afraid.