Work was the thing for it. She had that much from her parents anyway, the old Puritan legacy of labor. Idle hands are the devil's tools, her father had been fond of saying, and Sylvia had never escaped that principle, not even during her wild flight to England, when she had vowed in defiance to do no work at all and had instead found herself scratching her first poems in a dog-eared notebook, laboring to order and define the rugged Yorkshire landscape, the stone fences hemming in the sheep-mown hills, the stark green line where the heath met the English sky.

It had paid off, that work—paid off when she first held in her hands the slim published volume, and paid off again by landing her the position at Holman when otherwise she might have been forced to declare it all a failure and take a job in her father's agency. And it would pay off, now, too. She could lose herself in gardening and forget everything else—forget John Thistle and the trouble with Daphne and this strange sense she had of being ill at ease in her own skin, at a loss for any word to describe her lot here in this late day, when she should have been well content with the life she had chosen. Work was the answer for it. Through work she would escape it all, even the strange vile weed growing there at the edge of the lot, where the forest began.

Over breakfast she had decided to destroy the thing, to uproot it and hurl it back under the trees, where it couldn't do any damage if it went to seed. But when she stepped out on the back porch just after eight, she saw that the weed had, impossibly, grown larger still. The great purple blossom had turned black, the petals slowly deliquescing. The seed pod glistened in its bed of serrated green-black leaves, a bulging cocoon the size of a watermelon, covered with faint shiny down. She would have to get the shovel from the garage. She'd have to dig the thing up, she'd do it first thing—

But the strength seemed to have gone from her legs. Sylvia lowered herself heavily to the porch step and sat there a long time, staring at the thing. A fly buzzed in the morning stillness. In the dim reaches of the wood a bird whistled tentatively. The sun crept imperceptibly higher. It must be nearly nine by now, she realized with a sudden pang of longing. She had given it up, she had given it all up: the desks in their sensible rows, the busy hum outside her office door, the security of her nine o'clock Chaucer, predictable as clockwork for more than four decades. Daphne was right: she missed it. How she missed it—

Inside, the phone rang. Sylvia climbed to her feet, gripping the baluster for support, and slipped back through the screen to lift the receiver. The phone brayed once again as she searched for the right button. It had been a gift from Daphne, one of those sleek ultra-modern devices with a rubberized antenna (so you can carry it in the garden, Daphne had said), and Sylvia had never really gotten accustomed to the thing—

There. She punched the button, silencing it mid-ring.

"Sylvia?" Daphne said.

"Shouldn't you be in class?"

"I've got a minute, I just wanted to call. Listen, about yesterday—"

"I don't have anything to say about yesterday."

"We have to talk about it—"

"I said I don't have anything to say."

"Sylvia—"

Sylvia broke the connection. Sliding the phone into the pocket of her gardening apron, she stepped back out onto the porch. The weed awaited her, but she suddenly didn't have the heart to deal with it.

Besides, there was plenty else to do. The bed on the north end of the house needed weeding and she'd been meaning to stake the tomato plants she'd planted in the little vegetable garden at the end of March. Work was the thing for it. And when the phone rang again, just after ten, spilling shrill vibrations through her, she was fertilizing the forsythia that bordered the porch. She jumped, reaching toward her pocket to silence the thing, but then, mindful of Daphne's Friday schedule (Shakespeare at nine, World Lit at eleven), she drew her hand away. She simply stood there, her knuckles white on her clippers, counting the rings. Eleven, twelve, thirteen—

And then it was still.

She sighed, gathered her strength, and went back to her trimming.

She wouldn't think about it. Not Daphne, not John Thistle. Not the bizarre weed. She focused on the tasks at hand, the simple rhythm of trimming and weeding and crushing underfoot the black slugs which feasted on the flowers. At ten-thirty, the phone rang again. Twelve rings. She wouldn't think of that either.

It rang again at ten-forty-five. Again she ignored it.

Yet perhaps they had upset her, all those phone calls. Normally, she'd have taken a break around eleven—a glass of iced tea on the porch, a slice of cantaloupe. But today, despite a faint unsteadiness in her legs, she continued to work, obstinately lugging the tomato stakes to the vegetable patch at the south end of the lawn. She dumped them at the garden's edge and began driving them one by one, using the flat of her hammer to pound them deep into the soft earth. Each blow throbbed in the taut muscles of her arm, the tense column of her spine. She paused, panting, and glanced back down the row, each plant bound neatly upright with ribbons of white cloth. The black soil glistened, weedless and moist. Sweat stung her eyes. The sun beat down upon her.

When had it gotten so hot?

She knelt for another stake. A wave of dizziness rolled through her. She levered herself erect, using the stake as a crutch. The world reeled around her, the air suddenly ablaze. The earthy fragrance of the vegetable patch flooded her nostrils: the scent of rich soil and bagged manure, of sun-stroked greenery ripening inexorably toward decay. Her heart slammed against her ribs. The woods loomed against the sky, a green hieroglyph—

—come to me—

—pulsing with enigmatic significance. The hammer slipped from her nerveless fingers. She watched it tumble away in slow motion, end over end, and then, somehow, she too was falling, the stake slipping away as the ground lifted itself to meet her. She tried to cry out, but there was no sound, only the rustle of her own body settling painlessly to earth, and then a deep pervasive stillness.

Damp soil buoyed her up. She lay still, staring through a tangle of greenery at one outflung hand. The telephone had tumbled from her apron, a slim white lozenge half hidden by drooping fronds. She would just lie here for a moment, and then she would reach out and pick it up. She would climb to her feet and go inside and pour herself a glass of iced tea. She would make herself a cucumber sandwich, and eat it in the cool shadows of the back porch …

An ant trundled up the curving slope of her ring finger, pausing to investigate the scabbed-over wound.

Sylvia took a deep breath. She just needed a minute to gather her strength.

Any time now.

The telephone started to ring. Sylvia closed her eyes.

Words had been her true passion, her Avalon, her axis mundi.

In her wildest flights of fancy, it was words that snatched her home and centered her, words her compass and her core, her ballast and her anchor (it was words that weighed her down). In the midst of tempests, it was words she clung to; in the whirlwind, it was words; it was always words, ordering, imposing, and clarifying words, first orison of creation—

—in the beginning was the word—

—and final supplication, the world (the word) itself a kind of poem maybe, endlessly dying, endlessly renewed. Now, groping blindly in the dark, she sought the solace of a word, and they enveloped her, a pathless wood of words, a wild thicket of them, a briar-patch, a thorny labyrinth of thistle and bramble—

—bramble?—

—where a clutch of sweet berries grew.

Earth welled up between her toes. She opened her eyes.

She stood before the book shelf in her study. She stood in an abandoned lecture hall, gazing through an open window. (Was it a forest that grew out there?) She stood in the nave of a vast cathedral, in a green and silent space, a canopy of interwoven branches (branches?) arching high above her. A carven figure leered down from a high cornice, a daemonic man with fierce eyes and a face made all of leaves. The thing's mouth opened—

—come to me—

—and a plume of greenery spewed forth to wind around her, to enfold and penetrate her. A wild hunger blossomed in her as the branches swept her up, and she cried aloud in ecstasy and terror. The cathedral fell. Roots plunged deep, stone cracked and shattered, the altar fell to ruin. A shaft of moted sunlight pierced the green shade and all the world was forest.

Sylvia pulled down a book and let it fall open in her hands.

(A leaf eddied slowly to the earth.)

She plucked the berries and crushed them to her lips.

She woke to flowers, green jacketed and headily aromatic. For a moment the dream—had it been a dream?—lingered: a leaf drifting slowly earthward, the taste of berries on her lips, wild and sweet as wine. A fragment of some old poem—

—insnared with flowers, I fall on grass—

—spilled through her thoughts, and then the illusion dissolved.

The flowers stood in a cut crystal vase. When she moved, an IV needle tugged at her arm. Her last moments in the garden came back to her: the cool soil against her cheek, the ant trundling up the curving thoroughfare of her index finger.

She took in the room at a glance, a silent white room with the dead eye of a television peering down from one wall. A faint antiseptic odor hung in the air. It was the kind of room where they brought old people to die, Sylvia thought, and the presence of a roommate—another old woman, shrunken and still beneath her covers—seemed to confirm the notion.

She swallowed and turned her head. Daphne stood at the window, gazing out into a dusk-shrouded parking lot. A hard rain slanted past the glass, a root-stretching, flower-budding rain.

She closed her eyes, opened them, and spoke, her voice a dry croak. "Daphne?"

Daphne turned. Her cheeks were flushed, her mascara smeared. "You're awake."

Sylvia swallowed. "Something to drink."

Daphne poured water from a plastic pitcher and held the cup to her lips. Sylvia sipped at it for a moment, and then, feeling stronger, tilted it sharply, drinking greedily. When she finished, she said, "What happened?"

"I found you in the garden. I got worried. You hadn't answered the phone."

"Yes, but—What happened? What caused it?"

"Well, that's kind of a mystery right now."

The breathing of the old woman in the next bed filled the silence. Rain ticked against the window.

Daphne swiped at her eyes angrily. She reached down to take Sylvia's hand. "You scared me, Sylvia. You scared the hell out of me."

"I'm sorry."

"Why did you have to hang up like that?"

"I'm sorry. I was angry."

Daphne squeezed her hand.

They said nothing for a long time.

"That goddamn garden," Daphne said. She said, "Don't you know you're all I have?"

The IV line tangled. Rain hammered the window with the steady cadence of a metronome. When at last she dozed, a nurse jarred her awake. Sylvia endured in silence the awkward business of the blood-pressure cuff, the icy disk of the stethoscope in the fold of her elbow.

"The woman in the next bed," she said when the nurse finished. "She hasn't moved."

"I shouldn't think so."

"What's the matter with her?"

"Alzheimer's. It's end stage now. She won't be much company to you, I'm afraid."

"I won't be here long."

The nurse smiled over her clipboard. She made a note on Sylvia's chart.

"Do you know her name?"

"Philbrick, I think. Louise Philbrick." The nurse hung the chart over the foot of the bed. "She won't disturb you, anyway."

"No, I suppose not."

"Can I get you anything?"

"No."

The nurse nodded and stepped out. When the door swung closed, a forest of shadows sprang up. Sylvia adjusted her pillow. The noises of the hospital weighed upon her: the drumming rain and the cool hum of monitors, the moist, steady clamor of her roommate's respiration. Turning, Sylvia gazed at the next bed. The woman lay still, her mouth slack. She won't disturb you anyway, the nurse had said, but in fact she disturbed Sylvia plenty, the name most of all.

Louise Philbrick.

Not because she recognized it, either. No, it disturbed her simply for the human face it cast over the shriveled husk beneath the sheets. Louise Philbrick's first kiss, the taste of wine against her parched lips: these things had happened in some irretrievable past. There might have been a Mr. Philbrick once—lovers, children, the thousand trivial events of a human life. And now the name alone survived—Louise Philbrick—sole relic of a history otherwise forgotten, erased as surely as Sylvia had herself erased her chalked notes after a lecture, restoring the slate to a blank and perfect void. Tabula rasa. In the end as in the beginning.

Everything perished.

Sylvia closed her eyes. She summoned the steady pulse at her temples, the rhythm of her heart still beating in her chest; she let them lull her into uneasy sleep. She dreamed of the green nave, of John Thistle at her back, his hands upon her breasts. She cried aloud, she turned to embrace him, to pierce the veil at last, to see the face behind his face—

Don't you know you're all I have? Daphne said.

What kind of life? What kind of life?

A leaf drifted from the pages of an open book.

In the shadows, a foliate face peered down at her.

She dreamed of England.

Schaper was a thin woman, small, aging gracefully into handsome middle age. She gazed steadily at Sylvia, her gray eyes piercing and attentive.

"One thing at a time," she said. "Why don't you try telling me what happened in the garden?"

"I got dizzy, that's all. I woke up here."

"What did you feel beforehand? Do you remember?"

"I remember thinking how hot it was. The heat made me dizzy."

"Nothing like this has happened before? Episodes of vertigo? Forgetfulness?"

Had Schaper been talking to Daphne?

Sylvia hesitated, thankful she'd said nothing about the incident in the car. Her gaze fell on the shrunken frame of Louise Philbrick. "Nothing I can think of," she said.

"What about after you fell? Do you remember anything at all about that?"

"No."

"Paralysis? Aphasia?"

Sylvia pictured the ant ascending the crook of her index finger. She could feel the moist earth against her face. "Are you suggesting I had a stroke?"

"Nothing quite so serious, I hope. Maybe a mini-stroke. Or something called TIA—transient ischemic attacks. The blood vessels spasm in the brain, producing temporary stroke-like symptoms. Or maybe you're right. Maybe it was just the heat. We'll have to look into it."

"I want to go home."

"Let's do some tests first. Four or five days, that's all."

Sylvia crossed her arms sullenly. "I want to go home."

Schaper merely smiled.

There was something subtly infantilizing about the experience, as if the entire hospital staff had pooled their resources in a covert campaign of diminishment, a vast, well-intentioned conspiracy to strip her of every token of maturity. One nurse scolded her for getting up to empty her bladder without assistance. Another prodded her to eat her vegetables. And everyone called her by her first name. You must be Sylvia, they would say, or, barging cheerily into her room without knocking, Good morning, Sylvia!, thus neatly divesting her of two graduate degrees, more than forty years in the classroom, her very status as an adult—of, in short, everything.

Daphne was her consolation. She came every night, lingering until visiting hours closed and the nurses harried her to the elevators. Even then her words seemed to hang in the air, somehow disquieting. Don't you know you're all I have?

"I don't want to be a burden," Sylvia told her.

It was evening. Clouds hung like smoke in the square of sky beyond the window, and a gray drizzle gauzed the air. It had rained for five days running, one shower after another interspersed with heartbreaking intervals of sunshine. It would be good for the garden, anyway, Sylvia told herself. At least it had saved Daphne the trouble of watering—Daphne, who looked up from the set of quizzes she'd been marking, her soft features puzzled.

"A burden? Whatever gave you that idea?"

"Well, you're here every night, like clockwork."

"I want to be here, I like being here."

"Don't you have something else to do?"

There was a brittle edge to Daphne's laugh. She waved the sheaf of quizzes. "I'm doing it here," she said. "This is what I do."

Sylvia said nothing. She stared at the rain, pattering softly against the glass, in counterpoint to Louise Philbrick's sonorous breathing. Sylvia had tried pulling the privacy curtains around her bed, but that was worse somehow. They obstructed any view of the corridor, entombing her in diaphanous white—and they did nothing to stop the sound. So she endured the other woman instead: the steady cadence of her respiration, the faint moans she emitted when white-jacketed orderlies came to turn her in her bed. The turning didn't stop the bedsores. Sylvia could smell them: a faint rotten odor lurking just beneath the omnipresent scent of antiseptics and industrial detergent. She had glimpsed them once, oozing pits in the woman's untoned flesh—glimpsed them, and turned away.

When she judged a decent interval had passed, Sylvia said, "I saw Robin Green the other day."

"Thursday?" Daphne chewed her pen.

"After lunch."

Daphne arched one eyebrow. "Umm."

"Is he settling in at Holman all right?"

"I guess. Students seem to like him okay." She looked up. "He said your notes were a lifesaver."

Sylvia smiled.

"He's kind of …" Daphne hesitated. "Bothersome. He's harmless enough—he's actually kind of nice—but he's always hanging around. He pokes his head inside my office half a dozen times a day."

"Maybe he's interested."

"Yeah, I get that a lot," Daphne said drily. "Interest, you know. From men."

"You needn't be sarcastic."

"Well, come on, Sylvia. He's not a bad-looking man."

"I never said he was."

"He can do better. Trust me. He wants me to be his girl Friday or something, that's all. Or his best friend. You know, the cheerful fat chick who helps him win the movie-star blonde."

"Don't be so hard on yourself."

"I'm not being hard on myself. I'm being realistic."

"You don't have to be alone."

"Do we have to talk about this right now?"

"We don't have to talk about it at all."

Daphne capped her pen and stuffed the quizzes into her briefcase. "Maybe I choose to be alone," she said abruptly. "You did." She held Sylvia's gaze for a moment, and then turned away, biting her lip.

A minute passed in silence. Sylvia looked out the window. Night spilled through the sky, an inky backdrop to the clouds. She should have known better. It wasn't her place. "Daphne—" she said. And when the other woman turned to look at her, her eyes bright: "I'm sorry, really I am."

Daphne sighed. "No, I am." She stood, adjusting the strap of her briefcase. "Look, we're both a little stir crazy. Let's start fresh tomorrow, what do you say?"

"I'd like that."

Daphne bent to embrace her, and for a moment it was enough: this simple human contact. Sylvia hadn't known how much she'd missed it. And then Daphne withdrew, letting her lips brush Sylvia's cheek before she strode resolutely into the corridor. Her words seemed to echo inside the room.

Maybe I choose to be alone. You did.

Sylvia touched a button, lowering the bed, and turned out the light. She stared into the shadows until patterns began to coalesce before her, faces, enigmatic constellations of meaning, a print of leaves against a harvest moon.

Did I? she wondered. Is that what I chose?

Christmas had been hard that year. Her father had called, entreating her to come home. "We're not getting any younger, Sylvia," he'd said, and she could picture him in her mind as he said it, cradling the phone against his shoulder as he paced the length of its cord, the desk at his back covered with reports, half-written policies, the actuarial tables he had stared at for so many years he hardly needed them anymore. Thirty-five, male, a smoker? He didn't have to look it up, he knew your odds in his bones. He knew plenty about mortality, her father did, and she knew that he was right—none of them were getting any younger. She was thirty-one years old, unmarried, alone. She knew everything she ever wanted to know about not getting any younger.

But all she said was, "Not this year, Dad."

She stayed in Holman and worked—or tried to. She was still trying to write poetry then, knowing with a kind of inarticulate certainty that her muse had died, hopeful that praying over the corpse might somehow resurrect it. She hunched over her desk for hours at a time, tore pages from her notebook by the handful, paced the still unfurnished floors of her old farmhouse until the dark behind the windows deepened to black, when the only sounds were the university clocktower measuring out the hours and the occasional shriek of some small hunted thing as an owl swooped down from the surrounding wood.

One night, desperate to discover the source of that one great flood of words, she plucked her slim volume of verse from the shelf. When she opened the book, a leaf had slipped from between the pages. (It had! She remembered; an old woman in a narrow hospital bed, she remembered at last.) She picked up the leaf—she hardly glanced at it—and tucked it back in place, staring with incomprehension at the poems. She read until the print blurred before her eyes, until the words dissolved into green chaos. And then she closed the book and collapsed into her spinster's bed, where she dreamed a long involved dream. In the dream, a green shade pursued her through emerald depths of forest. She fled before him until the breath burned in her lungs, until her legs ached, until she could taste her own sweat, salty against her lips—until finally she collapsed, exhausted, in a sunshot glade at the very center of the world, in the heartwood itself. Her pursuer appeared beneath the trees, clad all in green, and she stood to embrace him. The face he wore was John Thistle's face, but as she tilted her head to meet his kiss, she saw that there was another face behind his face—

The dream haunted her all the next day—the day the letter came, an unassuming envelope without return address, tucked among the Christmas cards and catalogs. It had been postmarked at the college, and her name and address had been typed neatly, anonymously, on the outside. Curious, she unfolded the single page of white paper within. Two words had been typed at the center of the page: He's married. Nothing more. Yet the two words shook her to very core. Married? In a kind of horror she recalled that moment in her office: the exam booklets sliding unheeded to the floor, his mouth hot against her own, the clatter of footsteps in the hall.

Married?

She crumpled the letter and threw it away—nasty thing (you're the nasty thing, she heard her father say)—only to find herself standing over the trash basket not ten minutes later, drawn back to the thing as inexorably as the needle of a compass, spinning and spinning until it settled at last on its own true north, this lodestone lodged like a weight in the center of her breast. She fished it out and unfolded it, smoothing the wrinkles in the paper. She had misread it, surely she had misread it. But the same words—

—he's married—

—stared up at her, stark and accusatory. Married. Married. Married. How long did she stand there, clutching the letter, listening to the funereal toll of that word inside her mind? For of course she had known it, hadn't she? She had suspected it all along. She had seen it in the averted eyes of her colleagues. Wasn't that why she'd avoided asking him any personal questions? Wasn't it?

Anger boiled up inside her—at herself, at John Thistle. Anger drove her out of the house, and into the twilit streets, coatless and bareheaded, clutching the letter before her like a talisman, impervious to the cold and the strange hard beauty of the night as a horned moon climbed the rungs of heaven. A few crystal flakes of snow began to spin down out of the dark, and as she hurled herself along the empty sidewalks, the street lamps flickered alight before her, like so many penny candles. Later, how long she didn't know, the same anger drew her up short and breathless on the stoop of the house—his house, the house she had driven by just once, weeks ago, when her curiosity about his life away from the university became for a moment unbearable. Anger punched the doorbell, and anger held her stiffly as she listened to his footsteps approach the door.

"Sylvia," he said. "What—"

And then he must have seen her, truly seen her—slumped beneath the lintel, her face streaked with tears, the single sheet of paper crumpled against her breasts—for he broke off abruptly. "You're not even wearing a coat," he said. "Are you crazy?"

He seized her by the shoulders and pulled her inside, the gesture unaccountably, inevitably, becoming an embrace. They had stepped across some kind of threshold in her office that day, and now there was no going back. "You're freezing," he said, and she felt her traitorous body warming itself in the circle of his heat. She lifted her face and kissed him hard for a moment, helpless to stop herself. Then, with a wrenching effort of will, she pulled away. That's when she saw the woman standing at the end of the hall: a stout, severe woman clad in loose blue clothes.

Sylvia met her eyes and took a long despairing breath. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

Thistle stepped back, his face darkening. "For God's sake," he snapped to the woman, "put some tea on! Can't you see she's half dead with cold?"

The woman turned, disappearing silently into the kitchen.

"What's wrong?" Thistle asked. "Is it this?" He reached for the letter.

"No." She drew it away, a question rising unbidden to her lips. "That first day, you said I startled you—"

"Sylvia—"

"Why?"

He said nothing. He stood two feet away, breathing heavily. Crockery rattled in the kitchen. His hand lashed out, snatching the letter. He blanched as he read it, livid with anger, shock—something else maybe, she didn't know what, another facet of that dangerous and brooding intensity she had sensed that first night, spying on him from just outside the circle of light. He crushed the letter into a ball and hurled it away.

"So?" he said.

"Why? What did I remind you of?"

"You reminded me of my wife! Is that what you want to hear? You reminded me of her, standing there in your white dress!" He paused, his hands in fists at his sides. In the kitchen, a kettle began to whistle. Someone set it off the eye, and in the ensuing silence, John Thistle said: "You looked just like her, all those years ago."

"I'm not her—I don't want to be—"

"No, Sylvia." He touched her arm. "Sylvia, you've become more than that to me, infinitely more."

Something twisted inside her. Sylvia lifted her hands. She didn't know what she wanted to do with them. A shadow fell across her face. The woman stood framed in the doorway. "The tea's ready," she said.

Sylvia stepped forward. She could hear her father's voice inside her head, telling her she had to apologize, there were lines one did not cross, the man was married. "I'm sorry," she found herself saying, and she could hear her father saying it: "Mrs. Thistle, I just want to say how very, very sor—"

"You bloody fool," Thistle said. "She's not my wife. You want to see my wife?"

He didn't wait to hear her answer. Grasping her by the shoulders, he propelled her down the hall, past darkened apertures where furniture stood in shadowy clumps, past the woman in blue—

—scrubs, they were surgical scrubs—

—and through the bright kitchen. Another hall, a darkened stairwell. She stumbled, his hands bearing her up. A light glowed on the landing.

"No," she whispered. "John, please—"

An open door beckoned. A faint unpleasant odor flowed out: a floral mask of disinfectant, and below that, permeating the air and carpet, the furniture itself, the ineradicable stench of human waste. Half-revealed in the dim yellow oval of a bedside lamp lay a woman, wasted, shrunken, unformed as a fetus in her nest of yellowing sheets, whatever beauty she had possessed long ago used up. Staring across the room at her, Sylvia realized she could smell something else, too, an odor she would not encounter again for more than forty years, and which even then, in the sickroom she would share with Louise Philbrick, she would not allow herself to recognize. Yet her undermind would know it, for the stench was unforgettable: it was the ripe pustulant stench of bedsores, of a human body churning mindlessly on, year after year, consuming itself by infinitesimal degrees, no longer truly alive but powerless to die.

"No," she whispered. "No—"

Thistle's hand had gone limp on her shoulder. His face sagged. His mouth hung open.

The nurse appeared at the doorway. "I don't think—"

Sylvia lurched past her. She wasn't strong enough, not for this. She stumbled down the stairs and through the kitchen. The house was hot, unbearably hot. She threw open the door and plunged into the night. The moon hung far above, remote, and wreathed in cloud. The snow was falling steadily now, mantling in silver the empty sidewalk, the uplifted arms of trees, the winter-ravaged world. Sylvia hurried toward the street, leaving footprints in the enameled perfection of John Thistle's stoop.

He caught her by the sidewalk, one thick hand clutching at her elbow. "Sylvia!"

She spun to face him, slipping in the snow. "What?"

Snow dusted his shoulders, his unruly thatch of hair. His breath plumed in the cold. "Come inside. You'll catch your death."

"I'm going home."

"Let me drive you then—"

"I'll walk."

She wanted to shake herself free of him, wanted to back away, to flee. She could feel the pull of her own house through the wintry streets, the laundry waiting by the ironing board, the dishes stacked in the drainer, the books neatly alphabetized on the shelves her father had built—the pull of everything safe and familiar. Yet something held her there—the desperation in John Thistle's eyes, the memory of his lips against her own—and for a moment she thought the torsion would wrench her apart.

Thistle must have sensed her conflict, for he stepped closer, pitching his voice low. "You've got to listen to me, Sylvia. You've got to talk to me."

"What's there to talk about?"

"I thought you knew. Everybody knows."

"It doesn't matter. You're married. Can't you see that? You're married."

"Married?" He flung his hands out in frustration. "It's a word, that's all. The woman I married—she's gone. Don't misunderstand me. I loved her, I still love her—but she's been gone for years. That woman you saw upstairs, that's just meat, Sylvia, a shell. The woman I married would've hated everything about this—what she's become, what I've become. She was so alive, and when, when—" He closed his eyes, he took a long breath. "A part of me died with her," he said, "and now, now for the first time in a decade, I feel alive again. It's like … it's like spring, Sylvia. And you feel it, too, I can see that you do. She would have liked that. She would have liked you. She would have wanted us to be together."

"It doesn't matter," she said. "What you want, what I want, even what she might have wanted—none of that matters. What am I supposed to be, John? Your comfort woman? Your lover? Because that's what people will say, isn't it, people like the one who wrote that letter. That's what they're saying already. That I'm your mistress, your—your whore—" She broke off abruptly, the word—

—her father's word—

—hanging between them, irrevocable.

Thistle laughed. "So that's what you're afraid of, what the sniveling Philistines will call you—"

"I'm not afraid!"

"—marriage, mistress, whore—those precious words of yours—they're names, that's all. They're only names, Sylvia. Just words, just … human noise. For God's sake, it doesn't matter what people think. Don't you understand that? There's nothing to be afraid of—"

Yet she was afraid. Afraid of the vast accumulated weight of decorum, the whispered judgments in the hall, the unblinkered regard of her colleagues, her students, the town itself, Holman, narrow and parochial in its deep-cleft bowl of hills; afraid of these strange feelings flaring up inside her; afraid most of all of John Thistle. He stepped toward her, seizing her by the shoulders as if to shake her—

—as if to kiss her—

—and this time she did wrench herself away. She stumbled back a step, and then turned, fleeing, slipping and scrambling to her feet with the same clumsy haste. She stole a glance over her shoulder when she reached the end of the street. He was still standing there, a lone figure in the snow-torn radiance of a streetlight, his hands outstretched. She hesitated a moment, and then the wind picked up, hurling a billowing veil of white between them. When it cleared, John Thistle was gone.

She would see him again when the spring semester got underway—they would nod in the halls or speak if chance threw them together in the elevator—but that was professional cordiality, nothing more. Thistle's wife passed away a year later, and from the departmental talk that followed, Sylvia pieced together the rest of his story: a pitted ribbon of asphalt plunging through the wood, a car veering across the yellow line, a cataclysm of shrieking tires and metal. John Thistle had stepped from the smoking wreckage unscathed. The other two victims hadn't been so lucky. The drunken undergrad behind the wheel of the other car had died instantly; and John Thistle's wife (her name was Anne, Sylvia learned) would never regain consciousness. So began the long twilit hiatus of John Thistle's life—the endless negotiations with insurance companies, the grim procession of hired nurses, his wife's slow, irreversible decline. And then, twelve years later, on a bright March morning that found Sylvia spading under a patch of weedy back lawn, commencing the garden that would become her life's substitute for the words she had lost, Anne Thistle died.

The day after the funeral, Sylvia stepped into John Thistle's office for the first time in more than a year. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry," she said.

"Yes, I'm sorry, too," he responded, and that was the end of it.

He didn't return in the fall. In the months that followed, Sylvia heard conflicting rumors—a tenured position at another school, a long-delayed European tour—but she never learned what became of him. In the end, it didn't matter. John Thistle had given her permission to fail as a teacher, and that was all she needed to succeed. In lieu of the life she might had led in his company, she found fulfillment in the classroom. She began to write again; not poetry, but a study of English folklore, the Grail quest, the Fisher King, the vegetation myth of the dying and resurrected god. She cultivated her garden.

A time came when she rarely thought of that December night, of John Thistle standing bereft in that diminishing circle of light or her homeward odyssey through the frozen dark. On those few occasions when she did find herself recalling it, she thought mainly of the utter desolation of the journey, the townsfolk enbosomed in their orderly rows of houses as she made her way alone through streets faërie-struck with snow. And of course she recalled the cold. By the time she reached her house, Sylvia's feet were numb. Her ice-stiffened fingers fumbled the door knob; once inside, enveloped in the womb-like heat, she burst into tears.

She woke sick the next morning, fuzzy-headed and full of ill humors. The illness lasted into the new year, and then one January morning she woke with the bright, hard-edged clarity that comes in the wake of fever. She put aside her abortive attempts at verse and sat down to draw up syllabi for the spring.

She would never be the same again.