The Signature of All Things

the boy ran away. The flimsy object that called itself a door swung closed behind him without a sound.
    Alma could not fall asleep again after that, but she did not immediately rise, either. She was every bit as weary now as she had been the night before. Who would come to her room next? What sort of a place was this? She must find a means to block the door somehow—but with what? She could move the little table in front of the door at night, but that could easily be shuffled aside. And with windows that were nothing but holes cut in the walls, what good would it do to block the door at all? She fingered the brass eyepiece in her hand with confusion and longing. Where was the rest of her beloved microscope? Who was that child? She should have chased him, to see where he was hiding everything else she owned.
    She closed her eyes and listened to the unfamiliar sounds around her. She felt almost as though she could hear the dawn breaking. Most certainly, she could hear the waves just outside her door breaking. The surf sounded disquietingly close. She would prefer to be a bit farther away from the sea. Everything felt too close, too dangerous. A bird, perched on the roof directlyover her head, uttered a strange cry. Its call sounded something like: “ Think! Think! Think! ”
    As though she ever did anything else!
    Alma rose at last, resigned to wakefulness. She wondered where to find a privy, or a spot that might serve as a privy. Last night she had squatted behind the fare , but she hoped for a better arrangement nearby. She stepped out the front door and nearly tripped over something. She looked down and saw—sitting right on her doorstep, if one could call it a doorstep—Ambrose’s valise, waiting politely for her, unopened and tightly buckled as ever. She knelt down, undid the buckles, and threw it open, then quickly dug through the contents: all the pictures were still there.
    Up and down the beach, as far as she could see in the dim morning light, there was not a sign of anyone—neither woman nor man, neither boy nor dog.
    “ Think! ” shrieked the bird over her head. “ Think! ”

Chapter Twenty-three
    B ecause time does not object to passing—not even in the strangest and most unfamiliar situations—time passed for Alma in Matavai Bay. Slowly, haltingly, she began to comprehend her new world.
    Just as she had in childhood, when first awaking to cognizance, Alma began by studying her house. This did not take long, for her minuscule Tahitian fare was not exactly White Acre. There was nothing but the one room, the halfhearted door, the three empty windows, the sticks of crude furniture, and the thatched roof full of lizards. That first morning, Alma searched the house quite thoroughly for some vestige of Ambrose, but nothing existed. She looked for signs of Ambrose even before she began the (completely fruitless) search for her own lost luggage. What had she hoped to find? A message to her, written on a wall? A cache of drawings? Maybe a packet of letters, or a diary that actually revealed something other than inscrutable mystical longings? But there was nothing of him here.
    Resigned, she borrowed a broom from Sister Manu and swept clean the cobwebs from the walls. She replaced the old dried grass on the floor with new dried grass. She plumped her mattress and accepted the fare as her own. She also accepted, as instructed by the Reverend Welles, the frustrating reality that her belongings would either show up eventually or they would not, and that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—that could be done about it. Though this news was distressing, something about it feltstrangely apt, and even just. To be stripped of all that was precious made for a kind of immediate penance. It made her feel somehow closer to Ambrose; Tahiti was where they had both come to lose everything.
    Wearing her one remaining dress, then, she continued to explore her environs.
    Behind the house was something called a himaa , an open oven,where she learned to boil water and cook a limited assortment of foods. Sister Manu taught her how to manage the local fruits and vegetables. Alma did not think the final product of her cooking was meant to taste quite as much like soot or sand as it did, but she persevered, and felt proud that she could feed herself, which—in her entire long life—she had never before had to do. (She was autotrophic, she thought with a rueful smile; how proud Retta Snow would have been!) There was a