Breathless

intellectual, said to trust your will, trust in the power of will, and all things would be possible. He said, “What a man does, that he has.” He said men didn’t need hope and fear, meaning the hope of anything beyond themselves, meaning the fear of eternal consequences.
    Henry Rouvroy had nothing to fear from his murdered brother, only from an unknown tormentor who, when the truth was at last known, would be a man like him, not his dead identical come back to life, but a man
like
him, shaped by the same influences, with a mind clear of all superstition.
    He used spare pillows and blankets to shape a body on the bed. He drew the bedclothes over the faux sleeper.
    In the kitchen, he removed the chair from under the doorknob and returned it to the dinette table. Likewise, he returned the chair with which he had braced the front door. For the time being, he left the chair bracing the cellar door.
    Let the tormentor use his house key again. This time, Henry would be prepared for him.

Twenty-six

T hese rural roads were deserted at an hour when no logging trucks were en route to the mill and when no loads of lumber were outbound.
    The Explorer’s headlights worked across various combinations of geometrical white ranch fencing and caused tree shadows to swing open like dark doors across moon-frosted meadows.
    The forested mountains were blacker than the sky, and the moon rode high across a sea of stars.
    At the end of the county road, Cammy followed Grady’s driveway past the house and parked behind.
    On those occasions when she came to dinner, they always ate at the table in the kitchen, so she usually knocked at the back door instead of the front.
    She and Grady were nothing more than friends. No man—or woman—in her life was more than that, but she counted Grady Adams as an especially good friend.
    He possessed the grace of knowing what to ask about and whatto leave unasked. He understood that caring didn’t require that every curiosity be satisfied.
    Perhaps they got along so well because she, too, knew the limits of therapy talk in a society that counted nothing higher than the therapeutic. She didn’t expect to heal a friend or to be healed by him.
    Sharing didn’t have to involve complete revelation. In fact, the more you shared of the past, the less people saw you for who you were in the now, the more they saw you as who you had been and who you had struggled so long not to be.
    Neither words nor time healed anyone. Only living healed, if it healed at all, living as you were meant to live, as best you could with your learned habits and confused intentions, living through time and finally beyond time, where neither therapists nor surgeons were any longer needed to smooth away the pain or cut it out.
    Cammy carried her medical bag to the house. As she climbed the back-porch steps, Grady opened the kitchen door.
    As always, she liked the look of him: big, a little rough, an impression of determination in the set of his jaw and in the line of his mouth, but then the kindness in his eyes, the kindness that was as apparent as the blue of his irises.
    Some might argue that kindness could not be seen in a kind man’s eyes any more than evil could be seen in the eyes of an evil man. But she could see them both when they were present: evil because she had much experience of it, kindness because she’d had no experience of it for such a long time that the absence of it had made her acutely sensitive to its eventual presence.
    She had read about a man named Homer who, as a six-year-oldchild, suffered a mysterious neurological disorder that left him unable to smell anything for the next thirty years. One day, when he was thirty-six, as he picked a rose to savor the sight of it and the texture of its petals, his sense of smell returned to him full power, so overwhelming him that he fell to the ground in shock. In the years thereafter, while he enjoyed every bewitching scent of a world rich in them, he was so sensitive to the fragrance of a rose that he could smell a bush of blooms two blocks away and knew before he opened the door of a flower shop if it had a generous supply of roses or was temporarily out of stock.
    Kindness in a man’s eyes was as apparent to Cammy as the promise of roses was manifest to Homer at a distance and beyond closed doors.
    This time, as Grady greeted her, she saw something additional and less familiar in him: a childlike exuberance and wonder.
    He said, “I should’ve prepared you