The Husband

had ever been in her life, she killed herself."
    Another pause requires a response, and Holly can think of nothing she dares to say except, "How sad."
    "I knew you would see. Yes, sad. Sad and stupid. El Valle is a portal that makes possible a journey to great change. On that night, and in that special moment, transcendence was offered to everyone present. Yet there are always some who cannot see."
    "The countess."
    "Yes. The countess."
    The pressurized darkness seems to brew itself into an ever blacker reduction.
    She feels his warm breath upon her brow, upon her eyes. It has no scent. And then it is gone.
    Maybe she didn't feel his breath, after all, only a draft.
    She wishes to believe it was a draft, and she thinks of clean things like her husband and the baby, and the bright sun.
    He says, "Do you believe in signs, Holly Rafferty?"
    "Yes."
    "Omens. Portents. Harbingers, oracle owls, storm petrels, black cats and broken mirrors, mysterious lights in the sky. Have you ever seen a sign, Holly Rafferty?"
    "I don't think so."
    "Do you hope to see a sign?"
    She knows what he wants her to say, and she is quick to say it. "Yes. I hope to see one."
    Upon her left cheek, she feels warm breath, and then upon her lips.
    If this is him—and in her heart she knows there is no if—he remains undifferentiated from the gloom although only inches separate them.
    The darkness of the room calls forth a darkness in her mind. She imagines him kneeling naked before her, his pale body decorated by arcane symbols painted with the blood of those he killed.
    Struggling to keep her quickening fear from her voice, she says, "You've seen many signs, haven't you?"
    The breath, the breath, the breath upon her lips, but not the kiss, and then not the breath, either, as he withdraws and says, "I've seen scores. I have the eye for them."
    "Please tell me about one."
    He is silent. His silence is a sharp and looming weight, a sword above her head.
    Perhaps he has begun to wonder if she is talking to forestall the kiss.
    If at all possible, she must avoid offending him. As important as it is to leave this place without being violated, it is likewise important to leave this place without disabusing him of the strange dark romantic fantasy that appears to have him in its grip-He seems to believe that she will eventually decide that she must go to Guadalupita, New Mexico, with him and that in Guadalupita she will "be amazed." As long as he continues in this belief, which she has so subtly tried to reinforce without raising suspicion, she might be able to find some advantage over him when it matters most, in the moment of her greatest crisis.
    When his silence begins to seem ominously long, he says, "This was just as summer became autumn that year, and everyone said the birds had left early for the south, and wolves were seen where they had not been in a decade."
    Wary in the dark, Holly sits very erect, with her arms crossed over her breasts.
    "The sky had a hollow look. You felt like you could shatter it with a stone. Have you ever been to Eagle Nest, New Mexico?"
    "No."
    "I was driving south from Eagle Nest, on a two-lane blacktop, at least twenty miles east of Taos. These two girls were across the highway, hitchhiking north."
    Along the roof, the wind finds a new niche or protrusion from which to strike another voice for itself, and now it imitates the ululant cry of hunting coyotes.
    "They were college age but not college girls. They were serious seekers, you could see, and confident in their good hiking boots and backpacks, with their walking sticks, and all their experience."
    He pauses, perhaps for drama, perhaps savoring the memory.
    "I saw the sign and knew at once that it was a sign. Hovering above their heads, a blackbird, its wings spread wide, not flapping, the bird riding so effortlessly on a thermal, but moving precisely no faster or slower than the girls were walking."
    She regrets having elicited this story. She closes her eyes against the images that she fears he might describe.
    "Only six feet above their heads and a foot or two behind them, the bird hovered, but the girls were unaware of it. They were unaware of it, and I knew what that meant."
    Holly fears the darkness around her too much to close her eyes to it. She opens them even though she can see nothing.
    "Do you know what the sign of the bird meant, Holly Rafferty?"
    "Death," she says.
    "Yes, exactly right. You are arising into full spirit. I saw the bird and believed