He wondered suddenly when all sexual activity had stopped. In Washington, or immediately after they left. He had decided it wasn’t working for him. It was too hard to pretend the other men were his brothers; finally, it had been too unsatisfactory, too frustrating. Somehow it had been better with Molly if only because no pretense had been necessary, but even that had failed. Two people trying to become one, neither quite knowing what the other needed or wanted. Or maybe it was hunger that killed the sexual appetite. He wrote in his notebooks.
Molly, watching him, felt as if a thick clear wall separated her from every living thing on earth. Nothing could get through the wall, nothing could touch her in any way, and where the feeling had aroused terror, never fully dormant any longer, now it simply bemused her to think of it. Every day they got closer to home, and curiously it seemed less from their own efforts than from an irresistible pull. They were powerless not to return home. The pull was steady, dragging them back just as they had dragged the boat up the bank to save it from the flood. Their every act was instinctive. And the terror? She didn’t know its source, only that waves of terror coursed through her unexpectedly, and when they did, she felt weak and cold. She could feel her facial muscles tighten during those times, and she was aware of the way her heart leaped, then paused, then raced.
And often when she had been at the oars for a long time, something else happened, and she felt a release. At those times strange visions came to her, strange thoughts that seemed untranslatable into words. She looked about in wonder and the world she saw was unfamiliar, the words she would have used to describe it useless, and only color would do, color and line and light. The terror was stilled, and a gentle peace filled her. Gradually the peace would give way to fatigue and hunger and fear, and then she could mock herself and the visions, and even while mocking, yearn for it all to happen again.
Sometimes when she was forward, watching for hazards, it was almost as if she were alone with the river that seemed to have a voice, and infinite wisdom. The voice murmured too softly to make out the words, but the rhythms were unmistakable: it was speech. One day she wept because she could not understand what it was saying to her. Ben’s hand on her shoulder roused her, and she stared at him blankly.
“Did you hear it too?” she asked, keeping her voice as soft as the river’s.
“What?” He sounded too brusque, too harsh, and she pulled away. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Nothing. I’m just tired.”
“Molly, I heard nothing! And you heard nothing! We’re pulling in to rest, stretch our legs. You get some tea.”
“All right,” she said, and started around him. But then she paused. “What was it we heard, Ben? It isn’t the river, is it?”
“I told you I heard nothing!” He turned away from her and stood stiffly in the prow of the boat to guide the men at the oars in to shore.
When they turned the last curve in the river and came upon the familiar fields, they had been away from their brothers and sisters for forty-nine days. Thomas and Jed were both drugged into insensibility. The others rowed numbly, starved, dull-eyed, obeying a command stronger than the body’s command to stop. When small boats approached and hands took the lines and towed them to the dock, they continued to stare ahead, not believing yet, still in a recurring dream where this had happened repeatedly.
Molly was pulled to her feet and led ashore. She stared at her sisters, who were strangers to her. And this too was a recurring dream, a nightmare. She swayed, and was grateful for the blackness that descended on her.
The sunshine was soft in the room when Molly opened her eyes; it was very early morning and the air was cool and fresh. There were flowers everywhere. Asters and chrysanthemums, purples, yellows, creamy whites. There were dahlias the size of dinner plates, shocking pink, scarlet. The bed was absolutely still, no water lapping about it, no rocking motions. No odors of sweat and moldy clothing. She felt clean and warm and dry.
“I thought I heard you,” someone said.
Molly looked at the other side of the bed. Miri, or Meg, or . . . She couldn’t tell which one.
“Martha has gone for your breakfast,” the girl said.
Miriam joined them and sat on the edge of Molly’s bed. “How are you now?”
“I’m all right. I’ll get up.”
“No, of course you won’t get up. Breakfast first, then a rubdown and a manicure, and anything else we can think of that will make you more comfortable, and then if you don’t fall asleep again, and if you still want to get up, then you may.” Miriam laughed gently at her as Molly started to rise and sank back down again.
“You’ve been sleeping for two days,” said Miri, or Meg, or whoever it was. “Barry’s been here four times to check on you. He said you need to sleep all you can, and eat all you can.”
There were dim memories of rousing, of drinking broth, of being bathed, but the memories refused to come into sharp focus.
“Are the others all right?” she asked.
“They’re all fine,” Miriam said soothingly.
“Thomas?”
“He’s in the hospital, but he’ll be fine too.”
For many days they babied her; her blistered hands healed and her back stopped aching, and she regained some of the weight she had lost.
But she had changed, she thought, studying herself in the large mirror at the end of the room. Of course, she was still thin and gaunt. She looked at Miri’s smooth face, and knew the difference lay deeper than that. Miri looked empty. When the animation faded, when she was no longer laughing or talking, there was nothing there. Her face became a mask that hid nothing.
“We’ll never let you out of sight again!” Martha whispered, coming up behind her. The others echoed it vehemently.
“I thought of you every day, almost every minute,” Miri said.
“And we all thought of you together each evening after dinner. We just sat here in a circle on the mat and thought of you,” Melissa said.
“Especially when it got so long,” Miri said in a whisper. “We were so afraid. We kept calling you and calling you, silently, but all of us together. Calling you home over and over.”
“I heard you,” Molly said. Her voice sounded almost harsh. She saw Miriam shake her head at the sisters, and they fell silent. “We all heard you calling. You brought us home,” Molly said, softening her voice with an effort.
They hadn’t asked her anything about the trip, about Washington, about her sketchbooks, which they had unpacked and must have looked at. Several times she had started to speak of the river, the ruins, and each time she had failed. There was no way she could make them understand. Presently she would have to get to work on the sketches, using them as guides and drawing in detail what she had seen, what it had been like from start to finish. But she didn’t want to speak of it. Instead they talked of the valley and what had happened in the seven weeks of Molly’s absence. Nothing, she thought. Nothing at all. Everything was exactly as it always had been.
The sisters had been excused from work in order to speed Molly’s recovery. They chatted and gossiped and caught up on mending and took walks and read together, and as Molly’s strength returned, they played together on the mat in the middle of the room. Molly took no part in their play. Toward the end of the week, when they dragged the mat out and opened it, Miriam poured small glasses of amber wine and they toasted Molly and drew her to the mat with them. Her head was spinning pleasantly and she looked at Miriam, who smiled at her.