CHAPTER 67
It was when she was riding Akaba home that it finally came back to her. Valentina, the last time she had seen her. Valentina, opposite the tiller of her too-small sailboat giving one long look back as she cleared her mooring and headed out to her doom. Valentina, wearing her necklace as she always did. The same string of shells and silver Penny had seen suspended above the ship’s compass, and still there when the ship set sail for other seas in a shimmer of unnamable light. The same “bones of the sea” that should have been lost forever, somehow returned. Then she knew.
Andrew didn’t hang the necklace above the compass. He found it there after their first encounter with the whale! That is how he knew what its purpose would become. A key, a tiller…and it made sense in its own way that the dome would connect together something of Valentina’s to the ship that bore her name. And also to the man closest to them both.
That night, Penny went to bed early, pleasantly tired from a late session in the garden. The June sun had been warm against her skin all day, and it had grown even warmer as the sun was setting.
It was a few hours past midnight when she awoke. A breeze was blowing the sea smells up from the Strait into her open window. Despite having only a few hours sleep, she was wide-awake, remembering. The dream had come again, the old one. The man on the pirate ship, she on the shore, standing this time on a small rock outcropping. Something about where she stood waiting had seemed so familiar, and now that she was awake, she knew why. And where to go. And when.
Tonight…
She wasted no time, closing the door to her room quietly before padding down the hall to the back stairs. The kitchen was still warm from last night's baking. On her way out she grabbed a roll and pushed a pad of butter deep into its yielding crust. A small bottle of water went into the pocket of her thin jacket and a blanket under her arm.
Akaba snorted as Penny entered the barn’s gloom and his raven flanks shivered in anticipation. She had learned that he liked to ride in the early hours before the heat of the day, so the job of saddling him went easy. They rode out from the barn into the blush of a full moon, a spectral mist rising from the meadow below like a faint cold fire. The mossy trail that led down to the inlet was illuminated only by moonlight slipping through the trees here and there, but Akaba had his own uncanny ways and never missed a step. She was grateful as much for his company as for the conveyance. They didn’t hurry, but soon they were there.
The water of the inlet was glassy smooth and so clear that, even at this hour, she could see a Steelhead gliding below the surface. Suddenly the fish shot up and took the life of a fly into his own, their interlude as quickly over as it had begun. The cry of an owl sounded, far away.
Penny dismounted and let Akaba graze on some of the virgin grass in the clearing, while she went to the rocky outcropping and looked out. It was the same place he had stood when he had watched her swim a year ago. A half hour or so went by, and she finally spread the blanket on the grass and sat down. There was nothing to be seen but a second moon dancing on silvery water like a distant lover.
She awoke, still sitting, from a half-sleep with a buzzing in her ears, some now forgotten reverie hovering just beyond memory. Her neck was a little sore from hanging down, so she lifted her head slowly. The moon had dipped down below the trees, but the faintest glint of daybreak was just hitting the tops of the tallest of them. Several geese flew over the Strait, outlined in chevron flight against the dawn. A gentle lapping sound came from the water, and she stood up.
Then, without a ripple, a dark head appeared out in the placid waters of the inlet.
He looked at her, and his large eyes, though nearly black, held the hint of a familiar golden light. The breeze died down to nothing, and silence held the few sounds like jewels on black velvet. A voice began to sing inside her, flowing and ebbing, sounds turning to color and feeling and finally one word.
You…
He swam closer, turned and circled, swam closer again until he was in front of the rock. She stepped back. He paused for an instant then leapt out of the water’s grasp to stand gleaming naked before her in quiet confidence. All his hair had grown back, and he wore a full beard on a slightly leaner face that contrasted with his now more muscular body. But this she barely noticed, for in his dark eyes, along with tiny shimmers of gold, she saw herself encompassed by his love, as clear and warm as the sun that was now rising. She reached out and Matthew’s hand came to hers. They looked at each other but remained silent, neither moving as time slowed, then seemed to come to a standstill. Tears rolled down his face, but he smiled. Her eyes watered up, and she cried softly, holding nothing back.
His mouth opened, then closed for a moment as if he was trying to remember how to speak. “Out there,” he finally said, “a single day was like an eternity. Everything that ever happened, all the pain and happiness, fell away from me like sand through a child’s fingers. I was gone forever. And then you were…with me, and I remembered. You brought me here.”
Akaba whinnied and stomped his hooves, as if in delight at recognizing an old friend.
“Much is before us,” Matthew said.
“And much will be asked of us,” she answered, somehow knowing this to be true without a single detail clear.
He looked toward the trail. “Your mother and father. They need to know I’m all right.”
“They’re away. We’ll go up in a while and find a safe means to let them know.”
Then, remembering Chiffrey’s stories of high-resolution reconnaissance satellites, she glanced up through an opening in the leaves that shimmered in the breeze.
“We’re sheltered,” he said as if guessing her thoughts. “I can tell things like this now.” He glanced down. “Even so, I’d better find some clothes.”
“There’s a blanket here,” she said. Then, with a smile, “But not just yet.”
A returning breeze set the leaves of the aspens to whispering their ancient secrets. On the moss knoll below, Matthew and Penelope reclined in each other’s arms and drifted far from the sea we know to where the tides of time and space hold no sway. There they drifted through colors that can never be named and sounds that can never be sung until the deep thrum of an engine called them back. Wrapped in the blanket, they stood up and gazed out across the water in time to see the Valentina gliding like a phantom out of the morning mist.
The End
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
— Robert Louis Stevenson