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calls her Ruby and she pays keeping her eyes down. Ruby McManus, about thirty, is extremely pretty, and she doesn't look at me or anyone else directly. It gives her a mysterious appearance, something that's not at all Midwestern. I can see why that attracts Harry. Mystery is seductive. To some of us, anyway. Good for Harry. His relationship with the widow McManus is about to work in my favor.
    I hear Mother talking to Father that evening in their room: "...more comfortable seeing her go out at night with Harry knowing he has a female companion." I realize I'll be going withHarry more often, which is just what I've wanted, and I feel a bump of elation, then, suddenly, anxiety, which I can't figure out. It's strange. It's not about Harry—being with Harry more often can only be good. The anxiety is about me. I sense something.
    The planets are aligned. Everything is in place. Something is coming and I'm uneasy about it. That's what it is. Look, I don't believe in the dreamy premonitions people talk about—my feet are planted squarely on the ground—but something is imminent. I can feel it and it keeps me awake. I don't eat well and I'm easily distracted.
    Something is close,
I write in my diary.
Don't know what it could be.
Twenty
    I begin going with Harry twice a week, and on a dark, moonless night of the second week, this imminent thing happens. I don't see it coming at all. It is an evening like many others with Harry.
    "We'll be going to worker cabins this time," he says, and off we go in a different direction, across a field of stubble, through some trees, along the Cut. We come to a long line of small structures, the cabins housing laborers by their country of origin. Harry goes to work.
    He knocks at the doors, calls out greetings in Spanish. The responses come in various tongues—Chinese, Greek, Danish, Portuguese, in the first hour alone. Harry impresses me all over again with his uncanny ear. He has an amazing gift for language.
    Chinese almost stumps him, but with hand signs and a few words in Mandarin, he gets his questions answered.
    "I'll go there one day," he says as he tacks the red tag on the Chinese cabin.
    "It's so far."
    "Steerage."
    "Ah, right." And he'll learn the language, too, I have no doubt.
    We hike to a dozen cabins with workers jammed into junk-jumbled rooms, very different from the barracks. Fewer men, smaller spaces. These are wretched shacks, not cabins. But none of this figures in my premonition—not so far, anyway.
    I busy myself taking notes: the look of the place, the total lack of hygiene, everything filthy and broken. And the whole camp reeks. Cans and papers are thrown out doors. Boxes litter the space between structures. Bits of rag hang off sagging rails. Maybe shirts or what's left of them out to dry—a hopeless process in a sultry jungle.
    All this is material for essays, observations on the canal's working class larded with Harry's fire about the laborers' burden. Mrs. Ewing will love it. Still, I feel the uncertainty. It's not fear. It's an unsettledness—is that a word?
    We move on, saying very little to each other. My notes keep me occupied.
    We come to a cabin that's not like the others. There is no debris outside, not a scrap of paper or a tin can. It's so clean, it seems uninhabited. This is it. The totally unpredicted. The unpredictable, imminent thing.
    Here's where my life is about to change.
Twenty-One
    "Maybe no one's living here," Harry says.
    I look closely. "But there's a light."
    A glow comes from the window. We go to the screened door and knock. In well-articulated Castilian, a voice tells us to enter.
    There must be some mistake. No worker talks like that.
    We step into a freshly scrubbed, well-ordered cabin with clean cots, a small table, and a hammock. A Spaniard is sitting alone reading, one foot propped on the only other chair.
    He looks at us, undisturbed and calm, no trace of alarm. He wears newly washed work clothes. He's holding a