Finished with dinner, she took from her purse Calida’s curious little book. She returned to the table with it.
Three times, she had glimpsed lines of cursive writing flowing swiftly across the creamy paper, pale gray and seen as if through water, so that she hadn’t been able to read them. Now she riffled through two hundred or so blank pages, alert for the manifestation of the script. Just when she thought the phenomenon would not recur, she saw it, and then again, but still the words flowed at such speed and with such distortion that she could not track them—though this time she recognized the writing as her own.
She didn’t understand how her handwriting could appear, even in this ghostly form, in a book to which she’d never put pen or pencil. But that was only one more ingredient in this stew of mysteries.
From her purse, she retrieved a pen and sat again with the book, wondering what might happen if she did write in it. She hesitated, but then began to inscribe lines from “The Evening of the Mind,” a poem by Donald Justice that she particularly admired. As she started on the second line, the first disappeared from the page, vanished left to right, in the order that she had put down the words. By the time she finished the second line, it was the only one to be seen, and it flowed out of existence while she finished the third.
As when she’d paged through the book in the parking lot that served Donut Heaven, she had a sense of time passing in units much larger than seconds or minutes, and she felt…spellbound. She became aware of something flickering in her peripheral vision, and though turning her head required effort, she slowly brought her gaze around to the right. Apparently oblivious of Bibi’s presence, a woman in a uniform, perhaps a maid, flitted about at an inhuman pace, as if in a film projected at high speed, and it wasn’t a motel room anymore, it was someplace else.
Startled, Bibi dropped her pen, let go of the book—and found herself alone in the room, everything as it had been. The Barnes & Noble bag on the bed. Her wheeled suitcase beside the bathroom door. According to her watch, not more than a minute or two had passed.
Nothing she had written remained in the book. Where had those lines by Donald Justice gone?
Pax sat alone in the lounge, listening to the roar of engines as airplanes taxied and were airborne, but thinking about St. Angelus Meadows, the family horse ranch in Texas. His folks had on the one hand been disappointed when he chose not to go from high school into the family business; but they were proud to say their boy was a Navy SEAL. Of his three brothers, Logan, two years his junior, had also made it in the SEALs, while Emory and Chance had forgone military service, somewhat reluctantly, to work the ranch, get married, and have kids. Angelus was great for kids, a fine place to grow up with a deep attachment to the land and family that kept you balanced all your life. There was the river for swimming, the dogs always ready to play and chase, winters white and magical, summers hot and green, walking doves and quail up from the tall grass in the autumn hunt, and of course the horses, the beautiful and wise and joyous horses.
They raised Appaloosas, ideal working horses for their own ranch and for sale to others. Paso Finos for aficionados of that exquisite riding horse with its singular gait. Likewise Andalusians and Belgian Warmbloods, magnificent for dressage, show winners more often than not. And there were the quarter horses bred and raised and raced. You could spend a life with horses, day and night, and never become blasé about them, about the ever-charming colts in spring, about their intelligence, their capacity for affection, their beauty and grace.
Bibi was born a surfer, not a horsewoman. Pax loved to surf and especially with her, but the horseman could never be trained out of him. It was a question for which they had to puzzle their way to an answer. They had talked about it some, but he still had a few months left of his commitment to the teams, and neither of them had doubted for a moment that they would settle the issue to their mutual satisfaction—if given a chance. The coast or the high plains, or both, or neither. It wouldn’t matter which, as long as they were together.
The door opened, and an aircrewman leaned in from the hallway. “Chief Petty Officer Thorpe? Your ride is ready.”
Pax rose from the chair and hefted his big duffel bag, relieved to be in motion once more.