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I reached forth my hand, and closed my fingers around it.
    I waited until I was sure that no one was watching, and that my silhouette would block what I was doing. I closed my hand around this source of light, and immediately my hand jumped back.
    It was a feather.
    What was the matter with me? It was just a feather—nothing more remarkable than that.
    I thrust it at once into the deep pocket of my robe. I did not allow myself to look at it. I told myself that it was nothing, just another curiosity washed up by the waves.
    But another part of my mind knew. I had found something wonderful.
    Fern stood in the dark, his car parked at an angle behind mine. The police doors were thudding shut, engines starting.
    â€œDid you find something?” Fern asked.
    Show him the feather, I thought. Go ahead.
    â€œIt was nothing,” I said.
    And all the way home I wondered what had happened to me, why I had bothered to lie.

6
    When I got back to the house I listened to Nona’s voice on the answering machine.
    It was painful pleasure. The machine duplicated the sound of the woman I loved, and yet she was far away from where I was. “How did your meeting with DeVere go? I was thinking about you all day.” There was a long pause as Nona apparently considered the futility of talking, for the moment, to no one. “Everybody’s interested. But I don’t know if that translates into more funds for the children. Everybody says money is tight.”
    She sighed into the phone, a breathy whisper exaggerated by the telephone. There was a rustling sound, and I could imagine her looking at her watch. She made a mocking groan. “I have to run. I love you, Strater.”
    I did not like the silence of my house. I picked up the phone and calculated the time in New Orleans. I put the phone down again. Nona had sounded weary, distracted. She would be asleep by now, and I did not want to wake her.
    When we love someone, we lose a part of our own lives, and even, in a sense, a part of our innocence. We can never be fully at peace away from the person we love, and it is no accident that tradition blames Adam’s love for Eve for the fall of mankind. Without Nona, I felt that I had lost that simple self-centeredness I had enjoyed as a child.
    I called Collie’s name, hoping that she was here, by some chance, in the pantry making one of her essay-long shopping lists. But, of course, she was gone. It was late at night. There was no one.
    I nearly laughed at myself. I was afraid to be alone.
    The house I lived in, the Fields family refuge, was a grand house among grand houses on Alta Street in Saint Francis Woods, although ours had been the first one built in that neighborhood. The house was a modified Georgian, beaux-arts-style edifice, with the pleasing handsomeness that is neither earthquake resistant nor easy to keep up. While the building had survived earthquakes, many of the rooms were rarely visited, and my favorite room, the study, had been in the midst of remodeling when I had been forced to delay further work.
    Now some of my treasured books, and my favorite chairs and tables, were draped with plastic dust covers, shrouded, hidden by the work that had exposed the wooden bones of the walls. If I were absolutely free to live anywhere in the world I don’t think I would chose to live in my family home, and yet I felt responsible for it, and respectful of the way the solid walls absorbed the sound of footsteps, the way each window looked out upon a prospect of flowers or ivy, lawn or copper beech hedges.
    Some part of me said: Don’t be alone. Call someone. Go somewhere.
    The phone rang, and I clutched at it, but it was only Fern.
    â€œI’m all right,” I reassured him. “Cold, but fine.”
    He must have realized that I had hoped to hear Nona’s voice. “Don’t worry. I’ll follow up on it in the morning.”
    What he meant was: Don’t think. It was one of his enduring