And then both she and Chick Pea gave a little leap and a yelp when the floor began buzzing beneath her feet. An instant after that the entire room was vibrating from an enormous swell of sound.
Like the earth heaving an enormous sigh.
And it was nuts... but she thought she recognized that sigh.
“Ava, can you hear me? Shouldn’t wetalkabout this?” Corbin, oblivious Corbin, obsolete Corbin, was still squeaking away on the phone in her hand.
She ignored him.
She drifted toward the window with almost as much trepidation as she had the morning a truck full of gourmet poop had been delivered to Mac, but with much more anticipation. She put her hand against it.
It was buzzing from sound.
And then she was positive. Because she knew this song the way she knew the sound of her own voice. How it sort of sighed into being, like a surrendering lover. The way the percussion slipped in, like a skipping heartbeat. The way the bass eased sinuously in alongside it, to give the melody shape.
How Bryan Ferry’s voice was like a murmur from the next pillow.
She threw open the window.
And in rushed Roxy Music’s “Avalon.”
Heat rushed over her skin like a rain of stars. Which was exactly how she once thought she would feel if a wizard had waved a wand over her.
She drifted over to the next room. She closed her eyes and murmured something like a prayer before she stepped outside onto the deck, her heart pounding twice as fast as the beat of the music.
And like the spire on a church, or the ornament on the hood of a Rolls-Royce, there was Mac. Tiny, but visible.
Standing on top of Devil’s Leap, holding a boom box aloft over his head à la Lloyd Dobler inSay Anything.
She clapped her hand over her mouth over a stunned laugh. “Oh, my God.”
Whoops. It happened to be the hand holding her cell phone. Corbin was squawking now. “Ava, what the hell is—”
She dropped the phone like a live coal.
She moved as if borne on a current of air, slowly at first, toward the stairs.
And then she walked sedately down them.
She managed to open the front door, even as her hands were shaking.
She closed it behind her.
And she followed the flagstone path. Walking. Like a grownup. Like the woman she was, who had learned to be cautious.
And then she couldn’t help it. She moved faster.
And then she was running.
Hair flying out behind her, elbows pumping, the memory of the path in her body, she ran like a little girl. Down the drive. Past the mailboxes. A hard left up the gravel road for fifty or so feet, a swift scratchy plunge through some underbrush. Down the path lined with blackberry vines where he’d first kissed her, that narrowed to the sandy path that heralded the beginning of the little beach.
She picked her way through a collection of familiar stones, a dozen shades of gray from green to brown, and curved toward those slabs of stone that had helpfully been arranged over the centuries to form a sort of stairway for the nimble and brave, all the way up to Devil’s Leap. But you had to know where to put your feet.
She hadn’t taken this path since she was seventeen, but rocks don’t change much over decades. But they do indeed change. It just wasn’t visible to the naked eye.
Kind of like stony hearts.
And then, at last, she was on top of the rock, flat and broad as a stage.