Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
It’s no use trying not to think of Jane. Now he permits himself an orgy of remembering.
All evening long, her image envelops him.
Switching off the kitchen light at midnight, he gazes into the backyard, where he first glimpsed her. A different moon, low, swollen and coppery, shines behind the sycamore tree. But there is no silhouette of her beneath its branches.
Thinking back to that night, he feels the eerie rightness of their meeting. Just as when, in the rented van, he turned the wheel toward Graynier: the same sense of clarity. The same way he feels about mathematics, when he encounters the immutable, somehow loving, perfection of things.
There is a perfect order to these events, hidden behind the riotous sprawl of the universe. So of course he found her. Of course she found him. Of course she knocked on his door.
Now comes the tap-tap on the etched daisy panel of glass.
Of course he is racing to open it. Of course she stands there on the stoop, gazing up at him. What could be more right?
“Jane!”
She looks even thinner, a wraith, her skin drawn tighter over her cheekbones, mauve hollows carved around her eyes. Her jeans are torn and filthy; a tank top hangs loosely from her delicate shoulders, one of them swathed in a bandage; bruises, scrapes, and black charcoal smudges cover her face and bare arms. In her hand is a battery lantern, its weakened light almost dimmed out. A gold brooch of twined roses, fastened to her top, gleams incongruously through the grime.
Her gray eyes are alight, as joyous at the sight of him as he is to see her. She lets out an exultant laugh, white teeth radiant in her sooty face. The sound echoes through the empty street, its landscape now transformed into a world of music and moonlight and feeling.
“Papa! I have come home!”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
MY GRATITUDE TO Grey Swan Press for taking a chance with me. Thank you to Christopher Schelling and Helen Eisenbach for their crucial help in shaping this yarn. Love to James and Phoebe Lapine for indulging my writing addiction. Thanks to Colette Baron-Reid for reminding me what I came here to do.
COLOPHON:
This book was typeset using ITC Garamond, a classic 16th century typeface interpreted by type designer Tony Stan and released in 1975. Originally, Claude Garamond created the roman form and Garamond’s assistant, Robert Granjon, designed the italics face. Together, this font family is considered to be among the most legible and readable serif typefaces because of its fluidity and consistency.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Two
Part Three
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter-Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowledgements
Colophon:
Jane Was Here Page 27