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Remember Glinda in The Wizard Of Oz?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I remember.”
    Nichole and I exchanged looks. See? Nichole’s look said: a total flake. But I was recalling my soap bubble dream of a few months ago.
    “What did the Harbinger thing look like?” I asked Mrs. Roberts.
    She laughed. “That was so odd. When I saw him I was actually scared for a minute. He looked like an old larch tree we had in the backyard of my house when I was a kid. A big old gnarly larch tree. Let’s order a pizza, kids. I’m starving.”
    Nichole and I slept in the cottage that night, but not in the same bed, or even the same bag. I doubt Mrs. Roberts would have objected, but Nichole whispered to me that it would be too “creepy” with her mother right in the next room.
    There was only one bed in the cottage anyway. So Nichole slept on the sofa and I unrolled the sleeping bags on the floor, one on the bottom for extra padding. In the dark the air was salted and the ocean surf a constant susurrus calling me out.
    I lay on my back, fingers laced behind my head. Moonlight ivoried Nichole’s face, her cheek squashed and lips puckered in sleep on the sofa cushion. I was going out, and I thought about touching Nichole, waking her to come with me. But I decided to let her sleep.
    I walked the night beach. The surf was luminous. At this hour there were only a couple of fires. I removed my sneakers. The dry sand was cold under my feet, the wind off the water blew sharp. Was it here that Nichole’s mother had seen a bubble like the one Glinda The Good Witch had ridden down to Munchkin Land?
    I gazed upward, not really anticipating a visitation. The wind whipped my thin hospital pants. I hunched inside the comforting bulk and dusky smell of my brother’s army coat.
    Sensing someone behind me, I turned. A figure walked toward me from the direction of the cottages. At first I thought it was Nichole. I mean I was all but positive it was Nichole. She looked so much like her mother.
    “I thought I saw you come out here, Ellis,” Mrs. Roberts said. And I wondered how that could be. Her bed was in the back of the cottage where no windows faced toward the beach.
    “In my dream I saw you,” she said, as if reading my mind. “And then I sat up and realized it wasn’t a dream anymore.
    “Okay,” I said.
    Mrs. Roberts was wearing a rain parka. She produced a pack of Salems and offered me one. I shook my head. Back then it seemed like practically everyone smoked, but not me. Even later, when I knew for a fact that nicotine held no lethal threat over me, I refrained from the habit. I learned to smoke other things, but not cigarettes.
    I watched Mrs. Roberts light up, the way she cupped her hand over the lighter to protect the flame and inclined her head, cigarette between tight lips, toward it. The light flickered briefly on her face—and there was Nichole’s future of lines, of slightly pouched skin under the eyes, of a jaw gone soft. Time’s alchemical insult, slowly transforming precious youth into something withered and mortal. It was more than a simple resemblance between mother and daughter. It moved the blood coldly through my heart.
    She let the lighter go out, raised her chin to the stars and drew on the cigarette.
    “I know what you are, Ellis,” she said, wind tearing smoke from her lips.
    “What do you mean?
    “The Harbinger told me.”
    I stared at her. “So what am I?”
    “You’re one of the impossible things. A pointer. You’re like a crop circle or a UFO. You’re a precognitive dream, synchronicity, something meaningful and inexplicable. Something that is but shouldn’t be.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    She chuckled, blowing smoke that the wind tore away. “To tell you the truth, neither do I. And please call me Adriel. That ‘Mrs. Roberts’ stuff makes me feel old.”
    “Sorry.”
    “You’re such a boy, Ellis.”
    My face turned hot. “Are you serious about the Harbinger?” I asked.
    “Serious how? That he