Red Leaf Travelling Blues

Red Leaf Travelling Blues

By Nathan Turowsky

Allowed by the conductor to get on the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus despite not having enough money and being at the very edge of the PVTA service area at best, they settled down into two isolated seats at the very back, their heads resting against the cold metal behind them as they listened to the power train’s almost maternal hum. They went through the fields south of Bernardston and down the old streets of Greenfield. Past there, they crossed the big river at Turners Falls, where it fell over the power-dam in triple cataracts. South of Sunderland they got off and looked down past Amherst to the distant humps of the Holyoke Range. The hills north of the Quabbin were blazing with foliage to the east beneath the morning sun.

            ‘So what’s new with you?’ asked one of them casually, clapping her hand down on her friend’s shoulder.

            Her friend cleared her throat and said ‘Not much. Not much.’

            ‘Oh, come on. I haven’t seen you in quite a while, you know, Mattie.’

            Mattie nodded and blushed and looked shyly down at her girly little black shoes. ‘Well…’ she said, and seized up. She looked up a little—only a little. Ellie was short enough that Mattie needed only to change her gaze a tick upwards for her face to come into the top edge of her vision. It was a pretty face, firmly round with heavily-lidded grey eyes and unevenly cut auburn hair falling down to either side. Ellie had a big forehead, which years ago she had self-consciously covered with bangs. She didn’t do this any more. She looked better with the forehead visible, Mattie thought.

            It was a chill day at the beginning of October, one of the first sub-fifty temperatures of the year. Mattie was dressed in a long coat and a scarf and boots and a fuzzy hat—but then, she had been dressing like this for a month. Traditionally, as soon as school started, she would hurry her skimpy summer clothes back into her closet (‘skimpy’ by Mattie’s own definition; by anybody else’s they were quite modest) and put on her full cold-weather gear. Even now, out of college for a little over a year, she still did this at around this time of year.

            Ellie, on the other hand, was underdressed, Mattie thought. She was dressed quite well for what the weather had been like a few days ago, before the storm from the sea that had broken against the Berkshires and harrowed the valley from Springfield far up into New Hampshire and Vermont. As it was, though, after the storm, she was shivering.

            ‘We’re about fifteen minutes’ walk from Sunderland Center,’ Mattie said, ‘and twenty-five from Amherst Center. What do you want to do?’

            ‘Why don’t we go for a hike?’ asked Ellie with a smile.

            ‘Forget it,’ said Mattie. ‘You’re too cold.’

            ‘No I’m not.’

            Mattie sighed. ‘I can tell that you are, Ellie,’ she said. ‘Come on. We’re either walking to Sunderland or we’re walking to Amherst. Either way it was stupid to get off the bus here and you’ll catch your death of cold.’

            They started walking—towards Amherst. The maple trees blazed red and the beech boughs seemed to drip with gold. The road was poorly paved hereabouts, if at all, and soon enough they were in a little hollow from which the broader lay of the land was invisible.

            ‘It’s a good thing we know this country,’ Ellie observed as they passed a whitewashed old Congregational church. ‘Otherwise I’d be worried we’d get lost.’

            ‘Mm,’ said Mattie with a nod.

            ‘You used to get lost all the time, you know,’ Ellie continued, prodding Mattie for a more involved conversation as she so often had in the past.

            ‘Mm,’ said Mattie again.

            ‘Remember when we went up to Stratton Mountain that time when we were, I think it was when we were about ten or eleven?’

            ‘I do.’

            ‘You had just had to get your first pair of glasses,’ Ellie said, casting her head up at the trees above as she remembered. ‘You still weren’t accustomed to seeing with them and you somehow misplaced them on your person or in your backpack or something while we were on the ground waiting for the air car to take us to the top of the ski slope.’

            ‘I don’t think it’s called an air car,’ said Mattie. ‘I think there’s a different word for it.’

            ‘But you admit that you were lost and started crying?’

            ‘It’s not a question of admitting it, Ellie,’ said Mattie. ‘That’s just what happened.’

            ‘Well, but Mattie was cute that day, too!’ Ellie said, spinning under the flame-touched trees and across the dusty road. The ground was very hard and her shoes were way too thin. In her happy little fall pirouette she hurt herself a little and nursed a limp behind the taller, quicker Mattie for the next two thousand feet or so. By the time she felt better they were in a landscape of sparse undulating woodlands interspersed with old, staid New England houses and at least one golf course. The links were turning an unappealing brownish-yellow as a sign of the season. Trees were so much more worth looking at than grass in this time, which was part of why Ellie’s three semesters at the University of South Dakota had been such a failure.

           Mattie had still not said anything by the time they reached the intersection of Montague Road and Pulpit Hill. ‘Mattie?’ asked Ellie, peering over with her neck stretched out forward and her small tufts of pigtail falling beside her chin.

            ‘What?’

            ‘You mad?’

            ‘Not really,’ said Mattie, ‘no.’

            ‘I’m sorry if I upset or embarrassed you.’

            ‘You didn’t,’ said Mattie. ‘It’s just…’ She sighed and looked down at the ground again. ‘Ellie, I don’t know if you picked up on this when you started seeing me again a few months ago, but in the, you know, the almost four years we were apart I had some pretty bad stuff going on. Nothing really horrible, but stuff that just makes me not want to think about what a shy crybaby I was.’

            ‘You’re still a shy crybaby,’ said Ellie flatly, and regretted it as soon as she said it. But Mattie did not protest this description.

They hung a right on Montague Road and very soon came to an open space with relatively widely spaced-out homes and business. It was set up in a vague sort of half-assed triangle with Montague Road, Cowls Road, and some kind of slashing connector between Montague and Route 116 forming the sides.

            ‘Oh,’ said Mattie. ‘We’re not in Amherst Center. There’s North Amherst.’

            ‘Yes,’ said Ellie. ‘Did you forget that there’s a North Amherst?’

            ‘I suppose so.’ Mattie wrapped her coat more tightly around herself as a gust of wind blew a torrent of fresh-fallen leaves across the road and shook the trees and telephone lines. ‘I didn’t really have much occasion to come up this way when I was at UMass, and I’ve spent the rest of my life in Franklin County. Even when I went to a movie when I was little, or had to do a lot of shopping once I got older, places like Greenfield and Shelburne Falls and even Brattleboro were closer and more relevant to my interests than anything down in this area.’

            ‘Then why did you have us come down this way?’ Ellie asked. ‘I could have driven us up to the Amtrak station in Brattleboro and then we could have gone pretty much anywhere in New England. Why these parts?’

            ‘Because they’re pretty in the fall,’ said Mattie. ‘I mean, specially so for me. I don’t know why but the foliage on a road like this always amazes me more than those cheap ‘scenic spot’ views from the highway.’

            ‘You always liked being more down in the dirt,’ said Ellie, ‘so to speak.’ She coughed and instinctively wrapped her arms around her chest. Mattie gasped in a sudden fright.

            ‘Let’s get inside.’

            ‘You know, there’s more to North Amherst if you go a little while longer down this road. There’s a road that cuts across east to west. It actually goes all the way out to the Quabbin if you follow it far enough and in the right direction.’

            ‘No,’ said Mattie, ‘I really think you should get inside. We can rest up and wait for another bus. You’re coughing. It’s not a good sign when you cough.’

            ‘Right,’ said Ellie with a nod. There was no use pressing this issue when Mattie got into so maternal a mode of thought. So they went into a building supply place. Ellie seemed to remember it having been an Agway at one point, but she wasn’t sure.

            ‘Also,’ said Mattie once they had sat down and warmed up a little, ‘I don’t think Pine Street goes anywhere close to the Quabbin. Are you maybe thinking of Shutesbury Road?’

            Ellie nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said.

            Mattie thought ruefully about what the last few years had been like. She could have had a reasonably happy relationship with Cathy, even if there hadn’t been any future to it, if it hadn’t been for that stupid ass from Boston who’d just swept in one day with his slicked-back hair and macho ‘hey baby’ attitude. The level of insensitivity that Cathy had shown her completely eclipsed any sympathy that she otherwise would have had for any woman getting into a relationship with somebody like that. Now Cathy was dating somebody sort of like a much, much younger John Olver and trying to get over the man from Boston in the same way that Mattie was trying to get over Cathy.

It fell to them to next determine what they would actually do once they were in Amherst Center. They decided to eat at a Mexican restaurant called La Veracruzana, which Mattie vaguely remembered from her first two years or so at UMass was less inundated with pretentious undergraduates than most of Amherst’s dining establishments. Five more minutes of walking and another ten minutes of bus and they were there.

            ‘Do you like tacos, Ellie?’ asked Mattie.

            ‘Yep!’ said Ellie happily. ‘Do you?’

            ‘Not really. I’ll order one, though.’

            ‘But…’

            ‘Who said we were splitting it?’ Mattie smiled wanly. ‘I’m having the same thing I used to have here when I was a student. Corn chips with salsa.’

            ‘There are five kinds of salsa.’

            ‘I like all five. I’ll have just a little bit of all five.’

            Ellie nodded. ‘I didn’t know you liked spicy food.’

            Mattie threw her head back and shook out her long brown-black hair. ‘I didn’t used to,’ she said.

            Ellie was a little perturbed at this and similar things that Mattie had been saying to her recently. It seemed that Mattie’s personality had over the past few years changed in some apparently inconsequential but possibly indicative or ‘bellwether’ sorts of ways. The basics of who Madeline Groves were as a person seemed to be the same—she was shy, easily-upset, quiet, and a little selfish in her solitude. She reminded Ellie of a younger version of one of the tactfully withdrawn Yankee matriarchs who had scared Ellie a bit growing up in the Vermont village of Putney. This may not have been far off. Ellie’s family, the Sorens, had come over from Denmark about a hundred and forty years ago, so she did not have the way these things worked bred too deeply into her bone, but Mattie did. The first Groveses of Western Massachusetts had come over to Rockport while William Bradford was yet Governor and moved out to the valley, then wild and rough and full of bears and red Indians, after King Philip’s War.

            Mattie was as ancient as her name, it sometimes seemed. So great was Ellie’s love for her…

After eating, Mattie and Ellie decided to take the train from Amherst to Brattleboro and spend the afternoon in an area more familiar from childhood and less from later years. Mattie being from Bernardston just on the Massachusetts side of the state line, and Ellie being from Putney a bit further up the river (though she now lived in Charlemont, one of the Massachusetts Hill Towns along the Mohawk Trail), Brattleboro made sense.

            The train station in Amherst was set a little bit away from the centre of town, but the train station in Brattleboro was right in the middle of things. Immediately across the large open swathe of road where Main Street, Bridge Street, and Vernon Street met was the Brattleboro Food Co-op, a heart of commerce and good friendly society; to the other side of the station, almost immediately with only one street and yet another line of blazing trees intervening, was the Connecticut River with its long low bridge into New Hampshire. It was colder in Brattleboro than in Amherst by about two degrees Fahrenheit, but not as windy. Mattie felt comfortable with Ellie’s health for the first time that day.

            It wasn’t that Ellie really got sick that remarkably easily, Mattie thought as they walked past the co-op and over a footbridge across a little stream. Mattie simply worried a lot.

            Ellie became gregarious again now, pointing out the objectively unimpressive sights of Flat Street, which was about as interesting and bustling as its name suggested, as if they were the cathedrals of Paris or the colonnades of Rome. She made the Insight Photography Project sound like St Paul’s, and Northeast Home Loan a new Holyrood on a Royal Mile that went from Windham Wines past TJ Buckley’s, which was a restaurant that was in a train car or something very like one, to, wonder of wonders, the Vermont Country Diner.

            ‘This is a hippie town,’ Mattie observed at one point.

            ‘Yes,’ said Ellie. ‘It is. It’s also a non-hippie town. There are hippie and not-hippie populations. Do you have a problem with that?’

            ‘It’s just an observation,’ said Mattie.

            Ellie looked at Mattie with the old familiar desperate feeling. It was an inversion impulse directed on her own identity, a drive to be close to and like unto her friend. Mattie was tall at five feet and ten inches; she was appealingly thin at a hundred and thirty-five pounds; she had a gaunt, angular, pale Yankee face with hazel eyes that smouldered like the limekilns below Mt Greylock in the days of Hawthorne and Melville. Those eyes were so keen. They were the only consistently vital and vibrant and happy and alert part of Mattie Groves’s generally quick and queer and questioning physical frame. They sat burning as the trees burned behind little round rimless lenses like a communion wafer in a monstral. When they took in the sight of the covered bridge near where they had the farmers’ market in the summer the eyes themselves took on a new and more joyous colour. As if responding alchemically to the redness of the bridge-walls and the greyness of the roof the hazel flashed redder and the tint of the glass seemed greyer.

            ‘Let me tell you why I might seem so on-edge, Ellie,’ said Mattie.

            ‘Please, Mattie,’ said Ellie, ‘do.’

            ‘Two years ago,’ said Mattie as they went looking for something to eat again—so hard was the walk from the river to the flanking hills—‘I met this girl named Cathleen Ditchfield. She was a history major at Mt Holyoke who specialised in New England regional history, she was exactly my age, she was really pretty, and she was from Turners Falls. So naturally I fell quite in love.’

            ‘It’d almost have been remiss of you not to have,’ said Ellie cockily. ‘Remiss.’

            ‘Yeah,’ said Mattie, apparently not seeing this as a joke.

            ‘So what happened?’

            ‘We were blissfully happy,’ said Mattie, as another part of her mind recalled the presence nearby of a bakery called Ziter’s, ‘for…weeks.’

            ‘Uh-huh,’ said Ellie.

            ‘Then she started blowing me off and…honestly, yes, I started blowing her off sometimes. She would always call me up and badger me with questions that I didn’t know the answer to, like ‘what were things like on Beacon Hill when Nathaniel Prentiss Banks was Governor?’ and get annoyed when I didn’t know. I started wondering if she liked me-as-me at all, not only just if she loved me.’

            ‘Uh-huh,’ said Ellie. They walked into Ziter’s. ‘I’m listening.’

            ‘Hold on a sec’, Ellie,’ said Mattie. ‘I need to look at this menu.’

            ‘I’ll order,’ said Ellie. ‘You can keep talking.’

            ‘No, I was going to make a very specific bagel order, okay?’

            ‘Uh…’

            ‘Very specific. It’s what I’ve been ordering for years in terms of bagels.’

            ‘Fine.’

            Mattie looked up at the menu. ‘Hello,’ she said.

            ‘Hello, miss,’ said the man behind the counter in the sort of easy drawl common only to people who have worked at one bakery counter for a matter of decades. ‘What’ll it be?’

            ‘I would like two bagels,’ said Mattie. ‘One sesame seed, one poppy seed. Both toasted. The sesame seed with butter, the poppy seed with cream cheese.’

            ‘That’ll be three-eighty,’ said the man without missing a beat. ‘Anything else?’

            ‘If you have day-old dollar bagels for those kinds of bagels, I’ll actually have that,’ Mattie said, looking in her wallet with a frown. ‘And some orange juice.’

            ‘Okay,’ said the man, ‘that’s still three-eighty. Two-eighty for both bagels and one for the juice.’

            ‘Fine,’ said Mattie, ‘that’s fine,’ and gave him four dollars. Within five minutes she had her bagels, and Ellie had a cinnamon roll, and they were off again.

It was colder outside, almost down to forty. The wind had picked up and Mattie felt a few raindrops on her forehead.

            ‘Well, Ellie,’ she said. ‘Coming way up here was a stupid idea.’

            ‘We’re something like two and a half miles from downtown Brattleboro,’ said Ellie morosely.

            ‘I know,’ said Mattie. She sat down on a bench outside the bakery and started to cry.

            Ellie had always hated seeing Mattie cry. She had always done it quite a lot. They had first met, in point of fact, in 1992, when Mattie was five and Ellie was four, because Mattie was crying during a Groves family hike on the Pinnacle, a mountain in Westminster West north of Putney. Ellie had heard her from her own position elsewhere on the mountain looking for fairies and gone off through the woods with her twelve-years-older sister to see what was the matter. And ever since then, Ellie Soren had hated to see Mattie Groves cry.

            ‘I met Cathy in the rain,’ Mattie said.

            ‘Who, Cathy Bitchfield?’

            ‘Ditchfield, yes.’

            ‘I’m sorry, based on what you’re saying, I’m going to assume she hurt you.’

            ‘Yes. Apparently she actually only really likes men and was messing with me as some sort of ‘fun experimentation’ bullshit.’

            Ellie frowned. It was rare, Mattie swearing. She was particularly vehement in her sadness here. ‘So,’ Ellie said. ‘Cathy Bitchfield, basically.’

            Mattie laughed weakly. ‘You could say that. So.’ She pointed up at the louring grey sky. ‘What are we going to do about this?’

            ‘Well,’ began Ellie with a rising tone, ‘we could try hoofing it to the Brattleboro Country Club and begging someone to give us a ride back to the train station, and then we could take the bus from Amherst to around Turners Falls, and then walk home, since the bus only sometimes goes up as far as Bernardston…’

            ‘…none of which sounds very appealing…’

           ‘—No, of course it’s not. Plus it would take exactly as long as just going back if not longer. The country club, from what I know of it, I’d guess is about as far away from this bakery as this bakery is from the downtown.’

            ‘If we just went back downtown,’ said Mattie, ‘we could sit in the co-op or that wine store or something until the train comes again.’

            ‘What wine store, Windham Wines?’

            ‘Yeah.’

            ‘I don’t like wine, Mattie.’

            ‘Oh,’ said Mattie.

            Silence for several minutes. Then Ellie said ‘So what did you do after the thing with Cathy Bitchfield?’

            ‘Ditchfield. Nothing, really. I finished my degree. It was a communications major. I really don’t know what the heck to do with it.—So hey. Let’s…let’s just go back downtown. It should be quicker, actually, since we’re going downhill.’

            ‘You’re the one who’s worried about me being cold.’

            Mattie nodded. She looked around at the trees. Somehow they were much, much less spectacular in the rain, a difference not solely caused by the different light from the sky. It was just a difference in how the world felt. Such things could profoundly affect Mattie and her mood. Ellie, remembering this from their early days, reached out and grasped for Mattie’s hand. Mattie grasped back, and smiled in a way almost without shyness.

Suddenly Ellie said ‘Mattie, are you gay?’

            Mattie’s smile evaporated. She got up and began walking downhill. Ellie tagged after her, also without words. They passed the same sights again and it was not until they got back to TJ Buckley’s, a walk of a little over half an hour, that Mattie spoke.

            ‘Shouldn’t that have been obvious?’

            ‘I don’t know if you’re gay or bisexual, ‘bi’ if you will, or…’

            ‘Uh, I’m a lesbian,’ said Mattie, ‘but…Ellie, if it’s not something you’re comfortable talking about with me, I can…be quiet or…’

            ‘No,’ Ellie said firmly, and vigorously shook her head. ‘Don’t police yourself like that and don’t fool yourself with false nostalgia. You were never Miss Perfect Normal Girl in the first place. I never asked you to be and I still don’t want you to be.’

            Mattie gasped and turned around and studied the roundedness of her friend’s features and the pleasantness and the code of happiness therein through the drizzle. Blues music was drifting out of the door of the restaurant.

            Ellie could make out a Delta bluesman’s voice singing about a hellhound on his trail but not register it coherently in her mind or memory. She was thinking very intently about something entirely else. The sky was clearing up and the sun was peeking out, in the west now. Church bells were clanging in Ellie’s head. Mice were running on wheels. There was some very important, very big thought forming there, maddening in its ponderousness as she tried to grasp at it.

            The full-moon face of Elinore Soren looked upon the crescent-moon face of Madeline Groves with a new sort of love. Scales fell from Ellie’s eyes and she suddenly stopped up, swayed on her legs, and nearly collapsed into Mattie, who had begun walking again back towards the middle of Brattleboro.

            Now it was fully sunny again. The trees on Mt Wantastiquet across the river stood proudly in their full glory, the autumnal and the evergreen radiance.

Once, when Mattie had been about eleven and visiting Ellie at school on a day that Massachusetts public schools had off but Vermont ones didn’t, an old and powerful senator—very important, crusty, maybe a little scary—had come to visit for some reason related to a fact-finding mission for an educational bill. Vermont, because of its very small population, was a state with a long tradition of highly personal stakes in statewide politics and this senator’s visit evoked strong reactions—most of them positive, since he had just been re-elected with three quarters of the vote after even his own opponent endorsed him. Mattie had been crying about something or another, as usual, when this senator found her huddled in a hallway.

            ‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked.

            ‘Some girl called Emily Wilson hit me and took my daisy chain,’ Mattie said. ‘Then she told me I was a little whiny…’ She trailed off. ‘Elinore said I’d get in trouble if I said what she said.’

            The senator knelt down, with some difficulty considering that he was in his late fifties and used to standing most of the time in public. He knelt in such a way that his bald head hovered like a bespectacled potato in between the ‘Putney’ and ‘Central’ in the Putney Central School sign behind him. ‘What’s your name, girl?’ he asked.

            ‘Madeline,’ said Mattie. ‘Madeline Groves. I…I’m not at this school…I’m visiting my friend. I live in Bernardston.’

            The senator nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. A little twist in his mind turned him briefly down a path in which the most salient thought was that this girl was not in fact one of his constituents. Almost immediately he decided that this did not matter after all, because he was kneeling in front of a crying, still very childlike sixth-grader and this was simply not a situation in which ‘election mode’ was the proper mode of thinking.

            ‘It’s okay to cry,’ the senator said.

            ‘Eh?’ said Mattie.

           ‘It’s okay to cry when somebody you like hurts you, or when somebody you don’t like does something mean. It’s okay to cry even when you’re upset with people you love.’

            ‘I don’t love Emily Wilson. I only know her ‘cause she hit me.’

            The senator nodded. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I cried at one point over Clarence Thomas.’

            Mattie flashed back to that day now, because Ellie was crying, and like the senator then Mattie now had no idea why. It was more worrisome, because Mattie knew Ellie. She was supposed to be able to work out these things. But her thinking was confused, she was getting tired, and Ellie was almost incoherent.

            Ellie gazed at the girl standing over her as firmly as she could through the tears slipping over her eyes. Mattie looked almost strong in her worry.

            She was in love. She, Ellie Soren, age twenty-two and just this last May graduated from Middlebury College with a BA in English, was hopelessly in love with Mattie Groves. With the girl Mattie Groves had been. With the woman Mattie Groves had become. It was so scary…she didn’t know what to do. Ellie knew nothing about love or sex. It had never come up, and she had tried to support Mattie as best she could during the difficult and confused teenage years, but even then, nothing…

            …and especially now…

            …nothing in the heart, the id…

            The leaves shook over the streets. The sun flashed behind them over West Brattleboro and Marlboro. Before them there were just beginning to be some streaks of purple in the sky above Wantastiquet.

            ‘Let’s get some dinner,’ Mattie suddenly said, and helped Ellie walk the rest of the way to a cheap little restaurant on Main Street (TJ Buckley’s was too expensive).

            ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Ellie asked weakly when they got there.

            Mattie looked at her watch. ‘It is five o’ clock,’ she said. ‘Or—wait for it. There: Now it’s five o’ clock. It was just four-fifty-nine.’

            ‘This is awfully early for me.’

            ‘Yes, it’s pretty early for me too. But we’ve been doing a lot of walking. And I want you to be okay. Remember, death of cold. I don’t want that.’

            And this made Ellie wonder. But, no…should she? What should she say? Was there anything to say?

            She felt that she should sleep on this, as they said. Go home and wake up in the morning and call Mattie and say hi and maybe…maybe she could…

            But she noticed things now, new things about the way Mattie was looking at her, was interacting with her. Loving glances with head held low, over the top of her glasses. Reaching her own hands out for Ellie’s hands, unselfconsciously and apparently almost on instinct, when she talked about Cathy Ditchfield. Mattie, born from the arms of darkness in the land of Ethan Brand, loved it, embraced it, made it hers, because she was a person with a heavy and loving heart. Ellie loved it. Her mind was running wild on her and she loved it.

After dinner Ellie got her car from a garage in Brattleboro. What Ellie’s car was doing in Brattleboro was not clear, but there it was.

            It was dark now. Orion hung low and off-balance over the hills of New Hampshire with Hercules and Lyra rising up on the other horizon. To the north the Great Bear, to the East the Pleiades; and look!—to the south. They drove to a clearing in Dummerston, between Brattleboro and Putney, and Ellie got out, and made Mattie look. There was a single shooting star, whose path flashed immediately just over Jupiter in a sudden burst of preternatural heavenly radiance.

            ‘I have something I’d like to talk about with you,’ said Mattie softly as they stood there in the night so pure that the Milky Way cast a shadow on the ground before them.

            ‘What is it?’ asked Ellie, eyes still fixed on Fomalhaut over Massachusetts and the spangled band that stretched down to meet the river. Milk met water. Heart met head. Something pulsed in the night.

            ‘I think this has been a really good day,’ Mattie said in a firmness that she usually reserved for statements of sadness or disappointments. Ellie’s heart thrilled at the firmness now. The Dogs of Orion rose.

            ‘I think…’ said Ellie, looking back on the day’s periplus of the Middle Connecticut Valley, ‘…that I would have to agree.’

            ‘I want to have more days like this with you,’ said Mattie. ‘Because, honestly, you’re one of the high points of my life after college.’

            ‘Really?’

            ‘Yes. I still don’t know why your car was in Brattleboro but I’m glad it was because I really like just standing here with you like this, underneath this sky.’

            Ellie nodded. There was not that much to say.

            ‘And…’ said Mattie, ‘…I want to have more nights with you, too. Because there’s not that much that’s good about my nights. I have nightmares easily and I wake up and I’m too scared and often sad to get much more sleep that night. It’s always been that way, except when I would have sleepovers with you.’

            Directly overhead, straight up millions of miles in the blueness and the blackness, they saw the gap between Cassiopeia and Andromeda. Division stretched between the girls’ identities and the girls. And the girls qua girls were more important to each other here.

            ‘In fact,’ Mattie went on, ‘that’s the case in general.’

            ‘What is?’

            ‘Most things in my life…don’t make me especially happy. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one exception right now. And that’s you.’

            Ellie was still confused and afraid as Mattie caressed her face, but it was a fear and a confusion that admitted of the hope of salvation and the wish for resurrection in the calling of a love. Twin lenses flashed in the pure light of the stars. It was a new moon to-night, and the heavens were out in full force. The rural sky was like Mattie, blazing brightly in its own darkness and ponderousness.

            ‘You are the only exception,’ Mattie said, ‘and that’s a fact, Ellie Soren.’

            ‘I’m…working out something in my head here,’ said Ellie.

            ‘I’m sorry!’ Mattie yelped.

            ‘No,’ said Ellie, her arms splaying out in a universal gesture of immediate reconciliation. ‘That’s not what I meant. You’re not an exception but you are exceptional.’

            ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

            ‘Only that…’

            No. Best not to yet say ‘I love you’. There would be time enough for that later, decades on Earth and maybe millennia in Heaven or in other lives—maybe that stuff was true. If so, at this very present moment Ellie wanted nothing of it to change, except perhaps the confusion playing in the fear. Not the fear itself—the fear itself…she revelled in it. It thrilled her, this sudden impetus to love.

            ‘Only,’ said Ellie, ‘that I’m glad that our paths have finally crossed again.’ She reached out and touched Mattie’s face as Mattie had touched hers. It was crazy and it was new and it would take weeks, months, perhaps years to make sense of.

            But she had to start.

            ‘I’m so glad to see you again, my dear friend, Mattie Groves.’