Odd Hours

of my parents.”
    “Tell me about them.”
    “You would be bored.”
    “Try me.”
    A smile. A shake of the head. She continued eating and said no more.
    She wore the white tennis shoes, the dark-gray slacks, and the roomy pink sweater that she had worn earlier on the pier. The long sleeves were rolled up now to form thick cuffs, exposing her slender wrists.
    The graceful silver bell gleamed on the silver chain.
    “The pendant is lovely,” I said.
    She did not reply.
    “Does it have any significance?”
    She met my eyes. “Doesn’t everything?”
    Something in her stare made me look away, and fear found me. Not fear of her. Fear of…I knew not what. I felt a helpless sinking of the heart for reasons that eluded me.
    She fetched a ceramic pitcher from the kitchen and refreshed my tea.
    When she returned to her chair, I reached across the table to her, palm turned up. “Will you take my hand?”
    “You want to confirm what you already know.”
    I continued to reach out to her.
    She acquiesced, and took my hand.
    The garage apartment vanished, and I no longer sat on a chrome-and-vinyl chair, but stood upon a beach in bloody light, with the sky afire and molten masses rising in the sea.
    When she released my hand, the dream relented. The only fires were those burning on the lamp wicks, safely contained in glass.
    “You’re part of it,” I said.
    “Not like the big man on the pier is part of it.”
    He had been surprised by the vision that I had passed to him; but Annamaria was not surprised.
    She said, “That man and I are in different camps. What camp are you in, Odd Thomas?”
    “Have you had the dream, too?”
    “It isn’t a dream.”
    I looked into the palm of my hand, by the touch of which she had summoned the nightmare.
    When I lifted my gaze, her dark eyes were ages older than her face, yet they seemed gentle and kind.
    “What’s going to happen? When? Where—here in Magic Beach? And how are you a part of it?”
    “That isn’t for me to say.”
    “Why not?”
    “All things in their time.”
    “What does that mean?”
    Her smile reminded me of the smile of someone else, but I could not remember who. “It means—all things in their time.”
    Perhaps because time was the subject, I glanced at the lighted wall clock in the kitchen. I compared its declaration to that of my wristwatch.
    The correct time was one minute until seven. The kitchen clock showed one minute until midnight, a five-hour error.
    Then I realized that the thin red hand counting off the seconds had frozen on the 12. The broken wall clock had stopped.
    “Your clock doesn’t work.”
    “That depends on what you want from a clock.”
    “The time,” I suggested.
    When I returned my attention to Annamaria, I discovered that she had unclasped the silver chain and had taken it from around her neck. She held it out to me, the tiny bell suspended.
    “Will you die for me?” she asked.
    I said at once, “Yes,” and took the offered bell.

 
    FOURTEEN
    WE CONTINUED EATING, AS IF THE CONVERSATION and the events that had occurred since I had walked through the door were as ordinary as those of any dinner hour.
    In fact, people were not in the habit of asking if I would die for them. And I was not accustomed to answering in the positive, without hesitation.
    I would have died for Stormy Llewellyn, and she would have died for me, and neither of us would have needed to ask the other the question that Annamaria had posed to me. Stormy and I had understood, at a level more profound than mind or heart, at the level of blood and bone, that we were committed to each other at any cost.
    Although I would have given my life for my lost girl, Fate had not allowed me to make that trade. Since the bullet-shattered day in which she died, I have lived a life I don’t need.
    Don’t get me wrong. I do not seek death. I love life, and I love the world as its exquisite design is revealed in each small portion of the whole.
    No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place—home—above all others.
    I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love—the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street—and I