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else,” she says. “You’ve suffered grievous harm, and as the woman who was and still is, in name, your wife, I hurt for you. But I believe you suffered in a cause that was unjust. God has judged it so. We posed our question, and He answered the whole South in blood and ruin, and history will have no pity on us, Harlan. No pity for what you suffered on Morris Island, none for me because my dreams that I would be a happy mother and a wife did not come true. We’ll die and be forgotten. The grass will grow over our graves. The best we can do now—for ourselves and for each other—is to surrender any claims we had or thought we had and live and let each other live, and do the best we can.”

“You made a vow to me in church before Almighty God. You are not released. I do not release you. God does not release you.”

“I made a human vow based on human understanding, Harlan. That was our marriage. But with Jarry, God spoke and He corrected me. It was He who told me, love and live. I am under His command, and I will follow it, unto death if need be. But if I die today, if you kill me now, and He asks me to justify my hours, it is to this love that I shall point, and I trust He’ll have mercy on me then, even if you, now, cannot.”

With this, she leaves and goes upstairs, and Harlan sits there starkly for a while. Then he gets up. He takes the gun. He carries it and goes toward the swamp, the opening in the trees.

Outside the house, he stops and calls. “Clarisse?”

The door opens. Backlit, she holds the little boy.

“You did this, didn’t you?” he says. “You did this to bring me back to you…. Well, here I am.”

“Ya no me importa,” she says. “I no longer care. You cut the heart right out of me. But this—this—is your son. She is carrying Jarry’s.”

“I want him dead,” he says. “I want Jarry dead, Clarisse. I want you to give me back my wife. Do this for me, and name your price.”

She frowns into the dark and doesn’t answer right away. Then his sister stands aside, and Harlan goes to the last place he has left.

FIFTY-NINE

Sitting by the cabin, Ran stares up into the branches of an oak, and it seems to him the whole of human wisdom is small and negligible beside that tree. Not the peak…no, not the peak… Something from a prior chapter of the book, which he remembers to forget, or has forgotten to remember. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Beyond, the sky, so blue. So blue.

Years go by while Ransom is away, before he thinks, It’s time, before he remembers, It’s that day. That day. And Ran gets up.

The house, which previously receded, is coming toward him now, coming with relentless motion, relentless speed. He’s on the journey once again, he’s written several chapters more. But already he’s forgetting them. He’s on the porch now, the “piazza”—he had to learn to call it that, like pants and trousers, like so many things. A surge of ugly bitterness. Claire was ever free of that. Was this what Ran resented most? Time, now, to be done with all of it.

As promised, here then, at the end, a door. No man. No matter, though. Beyond the door, a room of books, and Ran, returning, knows the book he seeks is there, and maybe it is up to every man to open up the Book of Life and write his own name there, and where else should the story end? There will be no further chapters or adventures after this. How sad that is. It’s time, though. It’s that day. He puts his hand on the glass knob. Whole worlds, in the facets, are eclipsed. He bows his head against the wood. He feels so tired, so tired.

That’s right, open it, says Nemo. A single step is all it takes. You’re out of it for good and never coming back.

“Is that what I want?”

What’s the option? Starting over?

“So true. Too true.” The futility requires no comment.

There are voices from within. The knob is turning in his hand. There is a whoosh, an undertow, a roaring wind, not blowing out, but in….

“I’ve been waiting for you….” She starts across the room toward him. Who is she? Ran wonders, feels he ought to know, but doesn’t. She knows him, though, this woman with blond hair, in her dress of white and purple calico.

She takes his hand. She says, “I can’t live this way, do you understand?” Ran feels the warmth and pressure of her flesh, her living flesh, against his flesh. “I can’t,” she tells him, “this is death, and I’ve consented to be dead, but now I want to live….”

The undertow is sucking, sucking Ran—but who is Ransom now?—down into the vortex, down into the past….

“I want to live,” she says, “to live….”

“Do you know who I am?”

“I didn’t,” Addie says, “but now I do. I looked into the pool and saw only myself; then I looked through, and I saw you—do you understand? Now I do. I do see you. And it was you, Jarry, you alone, who ever made me feel this way.”

“Jarry,” she calls him, “Jarry…” Ransom, thinking there is some mistake, looks down at Addie’s hand, white, on his black arm.

This is a dream, he tells himself. How can this be?

But Ransom can’t wake up, and it’s too late for questions now. The door the door is swinging open. The tall, gaunt, bearded stranger enters with the gun. The first shot comes. Addie blinks her startled eyes. She looks down at her dress. It’s torn and ragged. Smoke is rising from the bloody hole.

Addie tries to speak and something leaves her mouth, hovers near the ceiling like a bird