Weaving the Dark
By LAURIE KING
As the darkness gathered around her,
she embarked upon the greatest adventure
of her life—in her own backyard.

We're all blind to something—the mind's eye can't hold everything at once. And we're all dying—just some more rapidly than others.
But platitudes were only so much whistling in the dark, mantras to reassure the senses, soothe the terrors, distract the rat-mind gnawing at the vitals. The truth of the matter was, Janna was dying and Suze Blackstock was more the type to blast the dark with a bonfire than whistle into it. Suze did not want to be soothed, not even when she woke, as she did now, to an unrelieved blackness. Ah shit, she thought. It's gone, I'm blind.

And it had happened while she slept, not even a last flicker to grab on to, or to wish goodbye.
Then rationality elbowed its way to the fore: Maybe it actually was still dark. This was, after all, a place without streetlights, so it could be—
But no. She didn't just wake; she'd been awakened by ... yes, by the sound of digging, a shovel blade biting into soil. That meant Andy was here. And builders did not work in the dark of night, not even eccentric, senior-citizen odd-job-men builders like Andy.
So, that was it, then. Her optic nerves had given up the fight, closed down in the night, died. Once, she'd been left in a desert without water; another time she spent a week trapped by a blizzard, but she'd never been abandoned so completely, never left with two vestigial lumps on her face that would do nothing more than dribble weak tears, as they did now onto the pillow. She lay back, prodding the soft, useless skin and the wet, cowardly lashes, then pressed down in a sudden spasm of anger that she hadn't even been there to see her sight off. And the night flared in reaction.
She froze, then flipped over and stretched for the big flashlight under the edge of the bed, kept there for times like this when she needed to know that the world of light was still there for her. She fumbled after the handle, knocked it away, lunged for it and thumbed the switch and—light! The brilliance of it assaulted her retinas, blinding her with glory, making her head spin with relief. She laughed, even, and patted her eyelids in apology, loving the wetness of the lashes, the slight ache from where she had pressed down hard.
A full five minutes went by before she remembered the sound of shovel blades digging into soil. Obviously it hadn't been the builders; Andy was a conscientious old coot, but surely he wouldn't come out here in the middle of the night. Besides, hadn't he finished with the retaining wall?
She switched off the beam and sat, listening, but the noise did not come again. After a while, she stowed the light in its place under the edge of the bed and got back under the covers, wondering, as she'd wondered for the past five weeks, just what the hell she was going to do.
Suze Blackstock had always been a woman who met her fears head-on. From the day she took her first steps she'd been called a tomboy, a reckless kid, a daredevil. The pattern of her adult life had been set when a high school boyfriend turned first possessive, then violent, and in a desperate bid for self-respect, she'd signed up for a karate class. Lesson learned: When life spit on you, pull back and let fly. She'd set out for Europe at nineteen with $104 in her pocket, spent the next six years walking and hitching across five continents, and come home with eleven dollars and change. She started skydiving at the age of thirty-one during a nasty, threat-filled divorce, the mind-blowing rush of each near-suicide stripping the mess of her life down to essentials. Rock climbing followed at thirty-seven, when her mother died in April and a close friend four weeks later. And she swallowed her claustrophobia and went caving a few years after that, when her world was crumbling in six directions at once. In each case, death looking over her shoulder steadied her; flirting with it and then walking away left her strong and cleansed. Will the parachute open this time? Will that tiny jut of rock hold me? Will the huge weight of the earth above me choose now to sigh and settle down? It was as if, when life spiraled out of control, seizing Death and staring him down was the only way to bleed off the intolerable pressures. In the face of death, she felt most alive.
But she'd never met a pressure like the one now, measurably tiny, insidious, deadly, and taking over her life. An infinitesimal buildup of the aqueous humor inside her eyeballs, a slight malfunction in the drainage that led to an increase in pressure, and a degeneration in the sensitive nerves. Glaucoma. A pressure she'd been forced to meet, not with fury, but with patience and humility.
Suze was forty-eight years old, a woman who'd lived with desert nomads and jungle rebels, who'd fought free of robbers in three countries, who'd lost a toe to Everest; a woman now sitting in a cabin in the woods, waiting for a half-known lover to die or to recover. Suze was really bad at patience and humility.
She lay in the bed that had been hers for ten short weeks, remembering the power-moments in her life: the time the chute lines had tangled and she'd felt the Arizona desert rushing up at her; the sensation of looking down the barrel of an Ethiopian rebel's gun; the incredible high when her right foot found a ledge, stopping her free fall two hundred feet from the Scottish soil below. The line between terror and exultation was so thin as to be nonexistent. And the tiny pressure in her eyes was pulling her back from that line, so far away she didn't think she'd find it again.
Toward dawn, Suze dozed, and when she woke, the sun shining into the room made the moment of panic brief. Still, it was there, and she hated it.

Suze was coming to hate Courtney, too, although she took care not to show it. Courtney was Suze's sixteen-and-a-half-year-old neighbor, housekeeper, and errand-runner—or more precisely, Janna's neighbor, passed on to Suze in this peculiarly uncertain period. Janna had not lived here for five weeks, might (nearly time to face this) never live here again. But still Courtney came, and now that it was summer she was here four mornings a week to help Suze. She organized the bills, did the shopping, drove Suze to appointments in town, performed those daily functions that required the service of eyes that could do more than distinguish white from black. She was, Suze had to admit, sensible for a girl her age, though oddly conservative, and possessed a priceless knack for putting everything back precisely as she had found it, so that when Suze was prowling up and down the unlit house at night she didn't trip over a stray lamp cord or bark her shins on a misplaced chair. Suze was glad for the girl's compulsiveness, overlooked her complete lack of humor, and tried her best not to snap at the child too often.
Today was Tuesday, so they went through the week's mail. Bills came first.
"The mortgage is here, and Andy's account, and the insurance," Courtney told her.
"House or car?"
"House."
"Then send it all down to the bank." If it had been the car insurance, Suze would have paid it herself, since Courtney was driving Janna's car for Suze's benefit.
"And the electricity. Boy, that's sure gone down a lot," she said, as if the savings were the result of her own work. "When I told Mom what the bill was for March, she said we ought to have the meter checked."
Great, Suze thought; now the girl's whole family knows how much Janna spends on her utilities. "I'll pay that, and the phone bill." She'd also pay for the propane, when it came—those costs she considered her responsibility. Not that she'd had any chance to talk the arrangement over with Janna: One minute they'd been sitting in Janna's living room planning a trip to Tahoe; the next, Janna was slumped on the wood floor making terrifying noises while Suze scrambled to locate the dark telephone on the dark table. And five weeks after the stroke, Janna was still only half-conscious of the world around her. Tuesdays, Suze dictated a letter which the nurses assured her they read to their patient. Sundays and Thursdays, Courtney drove her thirty miles to visit the nursing home. It was an impossible situation, and not becoming any easier. She and Janna had only been together a few months; if Janna didn't regain her senses pretty soon, her family would take over her affairs, and Janna would become a what-if in Suze's life, a brief fling.
But loyalty and the beginnings of love kept her here, in Janna's cabin in the woods, edgy and frustrated and in limbo. As soon as the constrained letter to Janna was in its envelope and the checks made out (Courtney repeating her satisfaction that the winter's enormous electrical bills had settled down) she let the girl get to the mop and the shopping, and with a sigh of relief moved over to the loom.
As she slid onto the weaver's bench, Suze reflected, as she had a thousand times before, how odd it was that she felt so comfortable there. This middle-aged daredevil, this adrenaline junkie who dangled from precipices, walked across continents, and flung her body out of planes into thin air, returned home to make her living as a weaver—just about the least impetuous, most encumbered, most tightly controlled art form there was. In weaving, one set of threads was strung onto five hundred pounds of loom, the other attached to a shuttle: right to left then back again, the threads locking into a pattern predetermined before the warp threads were on the loom. In weaving, there was little scope for wild improvisation even on the big hangings; in weaving, focused intensity counterbalanced the boisterous disorder of her wanderings.
Oddly enough, before her sight had begun to fail, she had already been turning from the intense colors she had worked in for so many years—colors she had learned along with the techniques, in Guatemala and Rajasthan—to stark black and white. Almost as if her mind had known that the world of sight was about to draw in on her. Last year, she had produced a series of all-black or all-white pieces, with subtle patterns emerging from the tactile qualities of the thread. An astute gallery owner had dubbed the pieces Weaving Darkness, a couple of important critics had commented on the interesting things Suze Blackstock had to say concerning texture and about color-in-colorlessness; to her considerable surprise, Suze was on her way to becoming famous in the weaving world. She "saw" the growing piece with her fingers as she was weaving it; fully sighted people saw it in a slightly different manner when it was hanging on the wall. A gallery in New York wanted her pieces for a one-woman show in the fall, there was talk about an article in Time, the Smithsonian had written about acquiring a hanging.
Suze was not unaware of the irony of her success.
Today she was working on a white piece, a glowing expanse on her vision where the sun poured through the south window onto it. She could as easily have worked at night, and occasionally did with the black pieces, but the sensation of brightness seemed to emphasize the sensations in her fingertips, and make the piece more of a whole. She barely noticed when Courtney left for town; was surprised, when the girl returned, to find she'd been at it for an hour and a half.
When Courtney asked her from the kitchen if she wanted tuna fish or turkey, she told the girl to choose, and went to wash her hands. She and the girl usually ate lunch together; she thought it made Courtney feel noble to think she was providing company to the lonely old lesbian instead of just cleaning her floors and buying her groceries. And in fact, although she didn't care much for being the object of Christian charity, Suze didn't mind eating with the girl, even though the conversation was sometimes hard going.
Courtney had chosen tuna, and set it out, as always, four-square, with the glass a precise two inches from the plate's one o'clock mark. The glass held iced tea, as usual. When Suze had suggested a beer one warm day, the girl had gone silent. Courtney was willing to overlook the irregularity of her neighbors' relationship, would dutifully run her dust rag over the bottles of gin and scotch on the sideboard (replenished periodically by odd-job Andy), washed up without complaint the glasses smelling of Suze's nighttime sins, but even if she'd been old enough to buy the stuff, Suze knew that she wouldn't ask her. Drugs, too, even when they were by prescription, could fall under Courtney's disapproving gaze: Twice, the girl had failed to bring Suze's bottle of sleeping pills back from the drugstore. Her parents were probably alcoholics.
She was, Suze had to say, scrupulous about bringing the drops and pills that kept down the intraocular pressure. It had, of course, occurred to Suze that cannabis was a specific for her type of eye degeneration, but she had instantly dismissed the possibility of asking the girl for the phone number of one of the high-school potheads. Sooner or later, the ophthalmologist would decide the standard medications weren't keeping her IOP low enough, and they'd start the rounds of medicinal pot. In the meantime, she'd just have to wait— with the way her luck had been going lately, the first person she asked about buying grass would turn out to be a narc.
Courtney might look askance on a lesbian relationship, but she was dutiful at her Christian goodwill, and as she sat down to eat, she asked, "Any news on Janna last night?"
"Much the same. That new nurse suggested I bring some music when we go on Sunday."
"You want me to help pick some out?"
"I'll do it," Suze said. Then, hearing the shortness in her answer, she added, "If I have any problems, I'll ask for help."
"We prayed for her in youth group last night. I hope you don't mind."
Suze did, but what could she do? Tell the girl to stop? "Of course not."
"My friend Lin's grandmother had a stroke last year; she's a lot better now, just a small limp and she slurs certain words."
"Good for her."
"I only meant—"
"I know, Courtney. I'm just finding it tough to be upbeat." Five weeks of limbo; at what point should she think about getting on
with her own life? And maybe she should let the girl choose the music; Courtney probably knew more about Janna's taste than Janna's whirlwind lover did.
When Courtney drove away, as always, Suze felt a great relief. With, as always, a sense that the cabin was terribly remote.

Some evenings, after her ritual call to Janna's nursing home, Suze turned up every light in the cabin, setting the small world to blazing, giving form to the uncertainty in which she lived. Other nights she settled into the darkness as she would have stepped into a woodland pool, slowly, half apprehensive of encountering some slippery creature underfoot, but intimately aware of the rich sensations to be gained by allowing the cool water to rise around her, submerge her, transform her into one of its own.
Tonight was a night for darkness. For one thing, she was nearly finished with the piece on the loom, and tomorrow or the next day she would cut it off, put it aside for finishing, and prepare the warp for the next one. The next piece would be black, and she needed to think about it for a while, in the darkness.
The night was cool. She poured a glass of whiskey and picked up the thick alpaca-and-silk blanket she had made for Janna, her first piece off the new loom, finished just days before the stroke. She curled into the deck chair on the porch, wrapped in warmth, sipping the drink, shaping the weaving in her inner eye. It would be a big one, as wide as this sixteen-harness loom would take. And for once, she would incorporate color—although even the sighted would only be aware of it peripherally, as a texture in the darkness. She had once, several years ago, worked with a glossy, seemingly black thread that in fact had a few, a very few infinitesimal threads of intense color spun into it, turquoise and coral and emerald, invisible from more than a few inches but adding an emotional richness to the final black. She'd already had the spinner do the yarn for her, knew it would be precisely as her memory held it, knew that if she blended it on the loom with the same unrelieved flat ebony linen as the warp threads, it would give her a strong contrast while appearing monochromatic. The mind, she reflected, often saw things the eyes did not perceive.
The glass emptied, the night felt its way through the soft wool, and Suze was about to throw the wrap off and go inside when all her senses rose as one: a digging sound. She'd forgotten all about it, thought it was a dream, but here it was again. What kind of animal made a sound like a shovel in the soil? A burrowing creature, raccoon or opossum, maybe? Not a skunk—she'd surely smell it.
But this was not the scurry of claws in the earth; the chink of metal against stone, the purposeful rhythm, the size of the thing in the night were those of a shovel. Suze's first outlandish reaction was to wish she'd brought her cell phone out with her, followed instantly by anger, good and clean and scouring away the timidity.
The noise persisted for ten minutes or so. By the time it stopped, she had eased herself down from the porch and crept softly down the gravel drive, far enough to get a rough idea of the source of the digging, two hundred yards away, past the first curve. She knew the drive intimately, an easy stroll when she didn't feel like risking her ankle on an unseen hole or her skin on a stand of poison oak; by now her feet knew the road's hazards as well as they knew the cabin floor. But her mind could not make an image of what was happening out there.
When the digging sounds ceased, she stayed where she was, head down and concentrating. She couldn't quite tell, but she didn't think the sounds had stopped completely: nothing distinct, but the audial impression of footsteps, the sensation of clicks and taps, once a sawing noise that lasted for perhaps twenty seconds. This went on for a quarter of an hour; then the digging noise started up again, although the pace was quicker and it did not go on as long.
Then silence. This time the night settled into a more profound quiet, like a lake of darkness after the ripples passed, placid and undisturbed. A cricket buzzed; a horned owl called; Suze was alone again. She made her way back to the cabin, where she reluctantly— resentfully—checked to be sure all the doors and windows were locked before going to bed.
The next day was Wednesday, not one of Courtney's days, but already Andy, Janna's ninety-year-old odd job man (actually only seventy-three, but his complaints were those of a geriatric) was due in the afternoon. She ate her breakfast, listened to the morning news, dismantled the white warp threads from the loom, and began measuring the black linen on her warping mill, all the while waiting for the sun to brighten and reach the proper angle for illuminating the drive.
Finally, she could wait no longer. She went back to the lean-to where Janna kept her gardening tools, locating a trowel more by memory than by sight. She stuck its handle into the back pocket of her jeans, and set off up the drive.
Janna's road was dirt, graded and graveled when the ruts became too deep, with concrete only on one brief steep stretch near the main road. As Suze approached the first curve, she found that she was deliberately scuffing her boots through the loose rock as if to warn intruders. She made herself stop, and pulled the trowel from her pocket, holding it in her hand like a weapon. Not that she expected to find anyone there—whoever had come by dead of night would hardly hang around to see what came along in broad daylight. Still, she wanted to get some idea of what had happened here before Andy the builder came—he was elderly, but he was a male, and his immediate instinct would be to take control. And although Suze might have got herself bogged down in a morass of cowardice and indecision, she did not wish to be taken control of, thank you very much.
At the curve, she stopped, letting her eyes give her what fuzzy information they could, which wasn't much. So she closed them and went on, allowing her other senses to come into play. The soft patch of ground underfoot here was as usual, the odor of the oak trees, the faint underlay of wild mint, and the single eucalyptus someone had planted decades ago, fading as she walked on. Soft earth gave way to gravel again where the bulldozer's blade had cut into the slope to the right last year. Fragrance rose from underfoot at the bay tree where Janna used to pause, pulling off a fragrant twig—Suze caught herself: where Janna would soon again pause, to strip the leaves and breathe in their clean, acrid smell. Gravel now, then the crunch of deeper gravel, and the moist air rising from the streambed, carrying with it odors of redwood and ferns and the sound of water—a muscular rush when she'd first come here, now reduced to a trickle. And in a few more paces, her feet would hit the hollowness of the old culvert that contained the stream. But before that, a change: Where normally the gravel thinned under her boots, today she felt the stiffness of fallen leaves.
Puzzled, Suze squatted to let her fingertips play along the ground. Yes, as she'd thought, the roadway was littered with the distinctively prickly leaves of the live-oak tree. But the next one of those was around the bend, and it hadn't been at all windy; how then had they gotten here?
Standing, she peered at the vague patches of light and dark. She was too early; the sun was still caught in the branches of the redwoods that rose from the streambed. She stuck the trowel back into her pocket and went to sit on the railing over the culvert, counseling patience as she listened to the murmurs of the stream.
A squirrel spotted her, and coughed irritably for a long time in the branches overhead. A distant plane vibrated the sky, vague bird-shapes ducked across her vision, and the brightness slowly crept toward the relevant patch of ground. Suze got up, brushed off the back of her pants, and walked forward.
Darkness and light, textures rather than objects. She had a pair of glasses thicker than cut-glass tumblers, glasses so heavy they made her whole face ache, but all that weight only brought objects into greater contrast, not clarity. So—typically—she'd gone to the other extreme and begun doing without them, allowing the sides of her vision to interpret shapes, seeing with her mind, not her retinas. As now she saw a swath of pale texture against the darker background of undisturbed leaves.
The path stretched down from the road at the same angle as the stream. There was, Suze knew, a rough deer track along the bank, clear of the poison oak and blackberry tangles that demanded greater sunlight. It had been one of Janna's favorite moonlight walks. She remembered the dampness against her face, the tickle of the ferns against her calf. Remembered, too, Janna, pressed between Suze and the padded bark of a massive redwood; Janna's mouth.
It would happen again, Suze told herself fiercely, and knelt down with the trowel in her hand.
Her fingers found disturbed soil underneath the scattered leaves, soil her trowel dug into with ease. She mounded it on the gravel road, excavating one, then two lengths of the trowel blade. Her fingers probed the soft, dry earth, seeking for she knew not what. Buried treasure? In these mountains, more likely a buried body part.
At this thought, her fingertips cringed back from their seeking. Jesus; what would it be like, to encounter dead flesh with her own warm hands? Would she ever be able to scrub the sensation away? Gingerly, she lowered her hand again, delicately fingering the soil where she had been pushing. But it was the trowel blade that found what she was seeking, when it hit something and slid to one side.
She followed the metal blade down with her left hand, encountering a shape that was unnaturally smooth and hard. Almost like a tree root, but as she rubbed at the soil, she knew that no tree could have produced a thing as smooth and unblemished as this. It was a pipe—plastic, by the feel, and when she'd dug a bit more, the sun confirmed it: white PVC pipe. She scraped the soil away, working in the direction of the road until she encountered another pipe, larger and at right angles to the first. This larger one would be the cabin's main water supply, winding along the edge of the drive from the well and storage tank near the main road a mile away. The smaller pipe joined the main line smoothly; the faint odor of fresh plastic cement rose from her trench.
Someone had recently tapped into the cabin's water supply.
Suze stared at the patterns in front of her, shades of brown with flashes of white running through it, and thought about leaving the hole for Andy to find when he came along the road in two or three hours. But without knowing quite why, she found herself scraping the dirt back over the pipe, slowly at first, then more rapidly, as if she had heard the old man's truck chugging up from the road. She scraped and tamped and scraped some more, getting up to walk the fresh mound flat with her boots. She kicked some of the leaves back over the trampled earth, and then went across the drive to the inside curve where the gravel accumulated and scooped up one trowel-load after another, flinging the gravel over the offending patch until it had obscured in her vision.
When she was finished, she was satisfied to note that a legally blind woman could do a better job of concealment than her thieving neighbor had at night. She scrubbed at her caked hands, then climbed cautiously down the confusing darkness of the stream bank to where the water played, and washed the dirt from her hands and the trowel blade, humming under her breath.
When Andy drove up later that afternoon, she had coffee for him, money for the two bottles he brought her, and questions. She made it seem like a friendly chat, sitting him down on the porch to talk over the projects he was near to finishing up, suggesting one or two more things that Janna might have had in mind (the roof, for one—Andy didn't think the flat area had been done right, and was going to leak come a heavy storm.)
Then she casually asked, "Do you have a lot of illegal building around here?"
"What, like people neglecting to call the building inspectors when they're adding a room? Sure."
"I was thinking more along the lines of building from scratch."
"That'd be tough to do," he said after a moment's judicious thought. "Hard to hide the access road, for one thing. The neighbors might not report them, but the inspectors are up and down these hills all the time; they'd spot it eventually."
"What if you didn't build an access road?"
"Then how'd you get in and out? It's a fair walk to town. And how'd you take delivery of building materials? Unless you're talking about a teepee, or a cave with a bush dragged over the mouth, you'd need wood, cement, window glass. There's only so far you can carry a sheet of plywood through the bushes. Why do you ask?"
"I was just wondering how hard it would be to live completely off the land in these hills."
"Pretty tough. Oh, there's probably a few here and there, but I'd doubt they stay for long. One winter'd do it for any Thoreau fantasies. You haven't been bothered by any strangers, have you?" the old man said, suddenly catching on to the gist of the conversation.
"Oh, no. Just something Courtney and I were talking about the other day, got me to wondering. Now, about that roof..."

The next night, Suze was not disturbed by the sound of digging. Nor the next, and although she knew that she should report her mysterious, water-usurping neighbor, it seemed to her that if all he wanted was a little clean water, she couldn't really begrudge him. After all, she was living here off the goodwill of a woman she barely knew; why not this Thoreau in the woods?
And then came the call from the nursing home, the long-awaited, nearly despaired-of call to say that Janna seemed to be waking up and alert, and maybe Suze would like to come and talk to her? In the flurry of the days that followed, in the exhilaration of feeling that limp hand finally squeeze back, in the first slurred words from the long-empty mouth, the digging noises were forgotten. The weaving was neglected for long hours at the nursing home, and Courtney's housekeeping and shopping skills were supplanted by those of driving Suze and pushing Janna's chair through the grounds.
Two weeks later, on a spectacular summer's Sunday afternoon, Janna's doctor asked Suze to stop by his office for a talk. She had to ask a nurse for the correct door, and then had to allow the doctor to lead her to a chair. His news was good and bad.
"I think Janna's going to be ready to go home before too long," he said, but before Suze's heart could begin to sing, added, "We need to think about her care. She tells me you have glaucoma."
"It's under control," she said quickly, not a complete lie.
"Who's your doctor?" Suze told him, and his form shifted in a way she knew meant a nod. "A good man. But you can't drive. And caring for Janna is going to require a lot of effort in the early days. Can you ask that girl to move in full-time, maybe for the first month?"
Suze very nearly stood up and walked out. She'd stuck by Janna all these weeks, stretching the bonds between them far beyond the flimsy beginnings. She wanted to tell this man, "Look, I barely know Janna—I only met her in January, moved here on a whim. Really, it's time I moved on." Nearly told him, "If I have to live with that hymn-spouting child, I'll go nuts." Almost decided that she'd done her part as a faithful friend, and that now she'd seen Janna back on her feet, it was best to clear the way to putting two lives back on track.
But she did not. She'd seen the beginnings of something real with Janna, felt the rare touch of a person who understood the forces that drove her. Janna had never once told Suze that she shouldn't do something because of her sight, had even egged her on; who was Suze to tell Janna goodbye?
"Her insurance won't cover a full-time nurse?" Suze asked, not expecting much. She was answered by the rustle and shift of a shaking head.
"Afraid not."
"Then I guess we'll have to try Courtney."
The child was overjoyed. They had ten days before Janna would be released, and Courtney spent it in a whirlwind of busybody virtue, overseeing Andy's building of a wheelchair ramp (which Suze insisted be made temporary), rearranging furniture (each shift accompanied by multiple reminders to Suze to take care not to trip over the sofa, the table, the rug), fretting about throw rugs and wheelchair access and the cabin's apparently inadequate water supply (which had been fine until the child had decided to launder every bit of bedding in the house on Monday morning). Spare furniture was stored in the shed, a bed was brought in for the girl, and Suze's loom shoved as far into the corner as it would go. Suze knew damn well that they'd be hard put to get rid of Courtney when school started up next month, even if Janna was up and dancing.
Janna was set to come home on the twenty-fourth of July, a Wednesday. With two days to go, the water tank again ran dry, and Courtney spilled over in shrill cries of distress and disaster. The rest of the day was taken up with Andy. He looked at the small tank behind the house, then at the big one near the road, and scratched under his baseball cap in puzzlement.
"This here pressure pump's working fine now," he told Suze, who had driven down with him, more to escape the flurry of last-minute housecleaning than because she thought she could do any good.
"Some kind of intermittent fault?"
"Can't see any. Sometime you get bugs on the contacts, breaks the flow of electricity. I've cleaned 'em off, gave 'em a shot of Raid— we'll see if that does it. If it doesn't, you'll probably want to get the water people in, pull the well pump itself and see if it's packing up."
"How many gallons did you say this tank holds?"
"You got a five thousand—gallon tank here, five hundred near the house. That's a hundred loads of laundry, or a couple days of leaving the hose running. Shouldn't happen."
Suze looked at the green plastic monolith of the tank, her mind's
eye clearly seeing that length of PVC pipe cutting into the main supply line. She teetered on the edge of telling the old builder about it, of ratting out on her Thoreau. But Courtney would have a thousand fits, and Andy would take manly command, and Suze's preferences would be trampled underfoot. So she'd think about it, before she said anything to Andy.
Tuesday, Courtney arrived with Janna's car crammed to the brim with boxes and bulging trash bags filled with clothes and essential teenage equipment. She spent the day settling in, having made no such proposal to Suze. At three that afternoon, she came out of the guest room, clearly intending to start dinner. Suze had other ideas.
"Well, I guess we'll see you tomorrow," she said cheerily.
"What do you mean?"
"When you come and get me in the morning, so we can go get Janna."
"But I thought I might stay here tonight."
"Oh, Courtney, I couldn't ask you to do that. Your parents will be missing you so much in the next three weeks, before school starts, I really think you should let them have a last night with you." She was at the loom, and kept her face down, her voice without guile.
"I have most of my stuff here, now."
"That was foresighted of you. But I'm sure you could find a toothbrush and pajamas. I'll see you in the morning," she said, and continued working.
Hurt, and making sure Suze knew it, Courtney flounced into the car and drove off.
When she had gone, Suze poured herself a stiff drink and went out onto the porch, wanting to scream. She wanted to walk away down the road, never to look back. Wanted to get roaring drunk, take off for the Amazon in a canoe, leap out of a plane without checking to see if she had her chute on. Tomorrow the earth would sigh and settle onto her the combined weight of an invalid lover she barely knew, a good Christian girl with head-nurse fantasies, and a pair of dying eyes.
Pressures all, and as her only release, the knowledge of digging in the night, ten thousand gallons of missing water, and a remembered conversation concerning the exorbitant seasonal cost of electricity.
She swallowed the last of her drink, feeling the pounding of anticipation in her veins, thinking, Tomorrow the weight comes, but by God, I still have tonight.
That night, Suze went for a walk in the woods.

In her early days and weeks here, Janna had taken Suze on countless "blind walks," as if those remnants of the touchy-feely days would make an actual blind woman feel better. The odd thing was, they did. The first few were terrifying: It was one thing to jump out of a plane able to see the ground below, quite another to step onto a moon-dappled path surrounded by vague shapes and incomprehensible motion. But somehow Janna had known that although she had to bully Suze out the door for their first five-minute outing along the drive, by the end of the week Suze would relish the challenge of setting off into the night with only three senses to guide her. The feel of the ground underfoot, the smell of the air, the sounds of creatures and the trees themselves guided her into an intoxicating foreign country. By the end of the second week, she was leading Janna.
She didn't know how far she'd go tonight, but following the stream, how lost could she get?
She armed herself with the big flashlight; as she was headed out the door, she paused and went back, tucking one of the tall spools of black warp thread into the waist pack with the light. If she had to leave the stream, she could always lay an Ariadne's thread through the trees. At the door, she picked up the thin, flexible stripped branch she sometimes used as a cane, and stepped off the porch to the ground.
The full moon created a pale smear in her vision and a sense of texture to the night, as if she were entering one of her black-on-black hangings. It was distracting; she closed her eyes to concentrate on memory, and after a minute, found the drive in her mind. She set confidently off, her feet locating the defining patches of gravel here and soil there, her nostrils finding the tang of eucalyptus and the approach of the stream, until she was through the curve and standing on the misplaced oak leaves over the intruder's pipe. Apprehension bubbled in her chest, and she waited: The old Suze Blackstock wouldn't have panicked; would the new one? But the apprehension warmed her, like buckling on her helmet as the wind battered her body, like looking upward for her first sight of virgin rock wall; the welcome quickening of her heart was more excitement than fear.
Suze smiled, and stepped off the road.
The deer track ran alorig the hill above the stream, a faint flat trail cut by generations of delicate hooves. At first, Suze inched her way along, tapping trees with the stick-cane, not entirely trusting her feet, pushing back the fear that jabbered at her mind, You can't do this, you're nearly blind, you have to be sensible. . . .
But she went on, and it became easier. Then suddenly, a mile along, the shrubs ahead of her exploded in a thunder and rush of movement, and she nearly leapt into the creek in terror before the noise resolved itself into the identifiable repeated thump-swish of a pair of fleeing deer. She leaned against a tree, weak with reaction, and tried to laugh.
Another half mile, and she was beginning to wonder if she'd imagined the whole scenario, the electricity and water—
And then she stopped. Between one step and the next, a peculiar tang brushed the air: not trees, not the odors of damp and stone from the creek. It was such an unexpected addition to the night, it took her a while to identify it.
Chilies. Someone in the area had recently cooked a meal of chilies and cumin and tomato. Mexican food, and now the savor of coffee. It was incongruous, and brought in its wake a note of the ominous that kept her where she stood, undecided. What the hell did she expect, that the men illegally camping here would offer her a plate of rice, a cup of coffee, take her on a tour of their patch?
Because she could smell that now, too, an acrid odor of exotic vegetation. The breeze that brought the odor also stirred up the rich susurration of plants, tall and full, rising up before her. Suze had smelled cannabis growing before, in hilltop patches in Mexico and South America. It smelled much the same here.
It had taken her some time to put together all the threads. Courtney's exclamations over the winter's high electrical bills, when power stolen from Janna's lines had warmed and illuminated someone's well-concealed greenhouses. Digging in the night, but only when the cabin was dark. Ten thousand gallons drained from the tank, watering the crop when it had been transplanted into open ground, flowing into the roots once a week, on Mondays.
And the other threads, those that stretched into the future, the unknown: How the local drug squad's helicopters would be gearing up for its annual sky searches, while the stand, nearly ready for harvest, stood vulnerable to potential thieves. How paranoia would be at its height. How the boss man would not trust his year's income to hired hands; he would be out here, keeping guard.
How he would be armed.
Suze's recent, timorous self quailed at the thought of what she was about to do. Go back to the cabin, it urged; You can get a prescription, for Christ's sake. Be sensible! But sensible was not what Suze Blackstock was all about. Suze Blackstock was a woman who wove darkness and walked into the unknown, a woman who used adrenaline to bleed off unbearable pressures. Who used near-suicide to keep her from the real thing.
She straightened her shoulders and stepped into the luxurious growth, heading toward a dancing glow as if toward a lover's eyes. When the stand was at an end, she held her hands up as if seizing the straps of a parachute, and took a last step out in the open. Her blood thudded through her veins as she prepared to weave herself, one way or another, into this place: On the one hand, the joy of Janna coming home; on the other, the terror that she, Suze Blackstock, was about to be shot dead; the two extremes acted as counterbalances, with her in the middle, standing firm.
But the shot did not come, not with her first appearance from the plants. When the flurry of movement near the fire had ceased, she cleared her throat and sent some words out toward the indistinct figure that remained, wondering which way the words would tip the balance.
"You guys are using kind of a lot of our water and power," she said. "I wonder if you might be interested in a trade, once your harvest is in?"
—With thanks to Susan Orrett and Zoe King