Marco

We are at Marco's house. We are sitting within the house but outside, too. We are sitting in a great square hole in the middle of Marco's house, a courtyard open to the air, surrounded on all sides by roof and rooms. The earth colored tiles on the roof slope downward on all sides. They cover a square porch that surrounds the courtyard, making it difficult to tell where the roof of the porch ends and the roof of the house begins. Marco's house is like an onion: garden, porch, rooms, porch, courtyard. He has a word for this place, but I have forgotten it already. He is trying to explain it to me, but I am not paying attention.

"It makes plenty sense," he tells me. "You see where the suns falls now? We are in shade." We are; our backs are against the welcome cool of white rock that makes around much of the edge of the courtyard like a bench, or perhaps large steps. He points to our left. "In the mornings, the sun falls there," he says. "Never here. It is always cool here."

"Do you see the gutters?" I look, then, at the lip of the roof and see none. I am about to tell him so when I think about it instead. It has become a puzzle to me. "The water falls off, straight off," he says. "Fush!" He makes a movement with his hands. He pats the stones we are sitting on. "It falls here, and then down to where our feet are. You see the lip? You sit in my gutter!" He laughs loudly at this, and I can tell he's told others this story in this way. He points at the corners of the courtyard: "the drains are there, and there, and there and there," he says. "It is very easy to clean the leaves out of them."

"It is very quiet here," I tell him. He nods to me, and then lets us rest a little against the end of the day. The sound of the small fountain in the corner steps carefully to the front, and somewhere up in the square of blue and white above a plane goes invisibly past, betrayed in its passing only by a low trembling of the air.

"We should eat," he says, and pulls me to my feet with two hands. We stop for a moment under the roof but still outside to linger, looking back out from this cool and shaded place into the slant light of the old day, still bright against the white walls.

"I would like to see it when it rains," I say. I know this will add some days, or maybe weeks to my stay here.

"Alright," Marco says, testing a new word. "That is alright."

Juliet and I are making fun of Juliet's name. It is almost awful to do it, for it is a beautiful name and speaks of this beautiful place, but Juliet is insistent. She is also a guest of Marco this summer. Juliet is pacing up and back on the paving stones outside in mock agitation, for the house lacks a balcony. I applaud politely. She stops, and becomes serious.

"Come with me," she says. She takes my hand. "I want to show you something." It has been her habit to do this, pulling me to this corner of the grounds or that part of the estate, down to the stream to see the poles in clear water duck and dive the hungry birds who crash into their quiet wet world, hungry. She pulls me around the house clockwise, but this time veering to the outside of the potting shed, under a quince bush. We brush against lilac as we pass, and the little flowers shake sweetly for us.

Soon we are back in the sun again, in a little yard with a low brick wall, in spots heavy with ivy. I cannot see the house from here. The floor of the yard is crunchy river pebbles the color of old bone. On the gravel is a forest of pedestals carved in all styles, and they hold sundials in the air at waist height, a logged forest topped with thin sticks of brass and copper at angles, all casting shadows on broad faces etched with lines darkened by time outside.

"Look at that," I tell her. "They're on the wall. I've never seen a sundial on the wall before."

Her lips are soft. They seem soft enough to make my lips soft, too.

There are ants in the kitchen, but this does not bother Marco. We are somewhat out in the hills, here, embedded in vineyards and low golden fields and patches of tree and bush that are neither of these things. The kitchen itself is half out of the house. It spills from the southern edge of the house through large doors that are often wide open in warm weather, onto an ancient patio and then on into the rows of vegetables and herbs. The ants march merry into the kitchen, sometimes lulled by the dish of honey we put out by the door, sometimes bolder.

Marco does not store food in the kitchen, of course. In the cooler part of the house under a staircase is a thick-walled room that is sided with shelf after shelf of neatly stacked plastic pickle buckets and a refrigerator in the back. I do not know how he got the buckets. He stores food in these, in that room. It is a measure of his humor that he has taken to labeling the buckets in Korean. He does not speak, read, or write Korean, and the contents of the buckets often change. If at one point the labels were accurate, he does not say. He has always had a good memory, and is rarely confused for more than a handful of days after the basmati is gone and has been replaced with jasmine. The rest of us more often than not remove lids.

We bring to the kitchen what we need for meals and we suffer the ants as they suffer us, eating under a tired sun on the long, thick wood of the patio table. Marco on various occasions has made it quite clear to the ants that the kitchen is as far as they are welcome in his home, and they seem to have decided to abide. For the most part, they eat what we discard into the small pile by the door on a battered and plain copper place; we discard little, but it must be feast upon feast for them. After a time we bring what is left to the compost, and clean the kitchen for the evening.

Sometimes when I am sent to pantry to fetch some more flour, when I am alone in the cool quiet of that room with the one thin window that does not open, high on the wall, I pop the lid on the large bucket of wheat and plunge my arms in to the elbows, the cool flour, filling the room with the smells of summer and sun.

I have been exploring Marco's house in the early afternoons, when things are calm and heavy with heat, and it is nicer to be outside. The house grows quiet and empty, and I can move about undisturbed, looking at old things. I do not mind the heat so much, so I have been spending handfuls of minutes stealing up the back stairs to the third floor. Marco's house is like a lot of the houses here, built long ago in proportion to the third and squattest floor in the house; the second story being twice as tall, and the first one three times as much. The first floor is very airy with distant ceilings. The third floor is tight with boxes of old papers and books easily stacked to the low overhead, focusing the heat. I mind the heat somewhat less than the confines, and I do not really mind either.

I stumbled into an alcove four days ago under a high gable on the third floor. A man sat there, making no noise; I had caught him in the middle of some activity, but I had not heard him. He was Asian, from some province I did not know, most likely from the southern island states where I have spent no time at all. I did not recognize him from around the house, and I'm certain I would have remembered him. He was very slight and frail. He was sweating a little in the heat under the roof.

My own skin had made a paste of the dust on my face. I told him hello and tried to clean myself with my hands, but I think I could only have worsened things. He nodded to me, and offered me a bowl.

He was eating a lunch of new potatoes, cooked tender and coated with chives and parsley and garlic in oil. I do not know how he had prepared it; I could see no kitchen. He had a lump of cheese for grating, and although he did not take any himself, he offered it to me. The potato was cut small, and he ate with slow care, eating with a pair of pointed sticks as thin as reeds in one hand. He offered me sticks and I took them with the bowl, forced like him to slow myself.

I do not expect to find anyone else up there. I do not think I can speak any words he would understand, nor he me. He minds the heat less than I do, though, and we both mind it far less than anyone else. Because we have that in common I sit with him now, in the afternoons, and take him vegetables from the garden. I do not know why else he welcomes me, but he does.

Sometimes Marco opens the garage to bring a car down into town, to go shopping or run other errands that can only be done where people collect, down in the wells of valleys. I am sitting near the driveway on one of the little teak benches that are clustered there, so I see him open the huge panel door of the garage with deliberate care, disappearing into the murk and dust. Somewhere in there an engine wakes, squalling and eager to be gone. He gentles the car out into the sun.

He has selected the red one.

He sees me there and waves me to him. I would be stupid to refuse; the red one does not come out much. I hop in over the door, sliding into the cool seat. Marco fishes in the glove box for a pair of sunglasses for me: it is a requirement, somehow. With a smirk, we are off. We bounce down the hills and flow around the corners, testing physics with the tires and the wheel. We flow and slip across two lane roads, one lane roads, roads that would be pressed to be called so. Half lane roads. There is dust and sun and the only thing to do is relax and see what will happen.

We arrive at the village (Marco always does). Marco hops out even before the growl has fully died, and busies himself with pushing coin after coin into the meter. His tongue is showing a little as he concentrates on this, and it makes him look like a little boy. He looks at me.

"I knew a man who tried to cheat on these," he says, tapping the side of the meter with a coin. "Or merely be very efficient." He shrugs. "It came down to the same thing. He knew the patterns of the meter maids, and made guesses as to how long he would have to get back to the car after the coins all fell in his meter, racing their slow patrol."

"You have enough in there to keep us until Tuesday," I tell him.

"Maybe," he says. "We might get the shopping done and go right back, or stop for a coffee, or meet someone in the coffee shop, or get invited to go dancing, or spend the night in some small house up the lane with candles and an old man playing the lute and better food than we can make." Marco is a very good cook. "That man I knew worried a great deal, and it made him unhappy." He claps me on the shoulder and smiles at me. "You are too young to worry."

Marco has another kitchen.

This is possibly overstating it. The second kitchen is largely a slab of concrete, covered over with fitted slate tile. There is a well head here, made of old brass. It is pumped by hand, and pours water out onto floor in gasping spurts if there is no bucket there to catch it. The floor is wet. There is only one wall, one low wall of brick and topped with tarred wood. There are holes in the floor, filled with dead leaves. Marco says he has poles and a wine red canopy to give the kitchen shade in summer, but he cannot find them. The plants have grown wild and thick out here, on the other end of the garden. There is little need for poles or canvas.

I am sitting in the reclining chair of slatted wood turned grey by the battery of the seasons. The only other furniture is a table, even greyer than the chair, knocked out of true by time and use. It looks as if it barely be able to support itself. Juliet is thin enough that for her to sit on the table would look only mildly dangerous. Juliet is sitting on the table. She is swinging her feet beneath her in careless, deliberate arcs, and the table creaks and sways with the movement.

Juliet asks me, "do you think Marco built this himself?" Her feet make work of the air beneath her, and she has turned out against the table. I stare at the slate below by feet. I do not know too much about stone or building. I imagine how much work it would be, to mix and haul enough concrete to make the bottom part of this place. I am briefly gripped with the image of the two of us, sitting on a thin square of stone bridging some secret and terrible pit of ragged walls that reaches deep into the earth. It passes.

I imagine bringing up the slates, two at a time and heavy, piling them perhaps there or there before putting them down in mortar. I have a little experience with brick walls: the wall would have been hard work, but simple work. I think one man could be capable of it if the concrete came from a truck. I can certainly imagine Macro out here, younger, hair back under a kerchief, building because he wanted to.

"Perhaps," I tell her.

Juliet nods at me, oddly in time with her feet. Her skin is darkening, now, even as her hair is turning lighter under the days of unstemmed sun. She does not look at me, but keeps her eyes on the thicket of wilds beside us, on the opposite side of the kitchen from the garden, where things grow dark and strange.

"I've been here longer than you," she says. She is looking at me now. There is little challenge in her voice, and I wonder now how many days she has been staying at the house. "In the winter, I've watched him come out here and bank coals against this wall." There is a spot down the wall that is blackened, and she points to it without her eyes leaving mine. "He roasts things over them." She gestures towards the floor by my feet. "He sits here, out of the wind, under a blanket."

Around us it is hot, and growing hotter. The air is thickening into a summer afternoon. I try to imagine the private comfort of the blanket on the cold wind, pulled together at the chest, but the sun shines on around me and I cannot. The green around us is pure and deep under the tempered blue sky and the light, golden and strong. For the moment, Winter has been made impossible in this place.

We are in the kitchen, the usual kitchen. Marco is at the far end, coring strawberries, and I am at the big table carefully peeling potatoes with an ancient metal peeler that feels near collapse. I am moving slowly, drawing brown peel away from the creamy flesh beneath, mounding the peels in a loose pile under my hands. When it comes time to remove the eyes, I flick them out with the tip of the peeler and try to get them to sail across the table into the stainless compost bucket. I have made a game of it, making soft noises in the otherwise quiet kitchen as we are bent to our respective work. I fail to hit the bucket far more than I succeed.

Juliet is cutting carrots, concentrating. Her hands are steady as she grips each one, then brings the knife carefully down only as far as she needs to and no more, all with impressive speed. The curious thing about this is that she is using the cookbook as her cutting board, open to the pages of her recipe. The book is one of the old ones, bound by some old man's hands in red coastal leather, the gold leaf on the spine and the boards all but a mystery. The book contains engravings of oddly shaped men standing and slaughtering and roasting sideways, always sideways. The paper flexes a little under each sharp snap of the knife.

I watch her for a while. She realizes this, stopping to look up and meet my question.

"I am careful," she tells me, wiggling the knife in my direction. "But it remains that books like this must live in the kitchen." She returns to the chopping. "They become part of the kitchen," she says. "The sops and spills in here become part of them, give them history." She points to the Carello in the corner. "I cracked an egg over the almond bread in that one. It turned the paper like oilskin." She looks over her shoulder, and nods to her self. "All of the bottoms of the pages in Fortune's Fool are stained purple from a bath in good Barolo. All of these books bear traces of what they taught to make." She has paused again. "It is right that it is this way."

Marco coughs on his end of the room. "It is true, too," he says, "that angels live in books." He looks at us, smiling. "They rest in the threads, in little beds hung between the folds of the signatures. It is good to let a little food fall into the cookbook, for they eat it, and they thank you." With a shrug, he is back to work.

The kitchen once again becomes a quiet collection of the sound of hands on ingredients and the occasional shake of insects outside and in. I may have heard Juliet grunt, but I am not sure. I flick a bit of potato across the table, and I have many yet to do. It hits in inside wall of the bucket and sticks for a moment before tumbling to the bottom. I am getting better.

Two men have come to the door. They have come to the front door of the house, where we almost never go, up the drive that no one ever uses. The gardens are kept over there, to be sure, but not by us. The northern door is surrounded by ordered plants and is approached on swept stone, clinical and clean. We prefer the soft mess of the kitchen and the garden and everything beyond it.

They came from the North. They came on the drive that Juliet says no one but the salesmen use, or the real estate agents who come to beg Marco for the property. The drive is kept clean, too. Marco tells his friends to approach from the south, and often ignores the north door. To think about it, it seems odd now that I have never seen anyone tend to the paving or the plants.

They came in a large black car. We can see it through the thin windows of the upstairs closets, leaning still against the wall in the shadow of some old sport coats. Juliet sits beside me with her head on my chest to see. The car is black, a deep black, and glossy as if wet in all this dry valley. The car is smooth and curved. I frown at it; it is an impractical vehicle. It is low to the ground and has no room for packages or more people than two. Juliet mumbles her own thoughts. Somehow the car is clean, clean like the plants and the drive, far too clean of the dust and the rain and the world. It is clean enough to let the eye slip past it, searching for rougher purchase.

They are wearing light suits of warm tones over crisp white shirts, and the cloth moves effortlessly with them as they stride towards the house after locking the car (I have never seen anyone lock the car, here). They wear leather shoes that look very comfortable. Their arms swing freely, and they walk with purpose. They are both tall men, and strong, and wear their hair short and slightly slicked against the day. They somehow make sunglasses seem sinister.

We hold each other still in the quiet heat of the closet, trying to make sense of the muted stumblings of the conversation taking place below us. The heat makes the air thick. I imagine that we listen to them as if they were underwater below us, or perhaps it is us that is at depth. We do not move. From the tenor and pace, we can be somewhat sure that Marco dislikes them. We recognize his farewell, and watch as the men move away again, back over the gravel to the car, which spins away and spills down the hill and a furious rate. I smile for a moment, knowing that whatever else is true of them, they enjoy this part of their job, even though it means they may want to come back this way again for the most trivial of reasons to test these hills with that beast of theirs.

We are still. I imagine telling Juliet that we should go down stairs, behave as we do, meet later to compare notes. I imagine meeting her in the canopy of the willow by the stream, exchanging secrets. I feel her shiver a little. We do none of these things. The air is a muffler cast over everything, smoothing the edges of the noise from Marco knocking around downstairs.

Juliet and I are walking the long sandbank in the lazy turn of the stream far below the house. The light is dappled here, partitioned and slotted by the leaves in the trees above, sending down thin beams where it is dim enough for the motes to glow in the light. Juliet is behind me when I hear her squeal and then splash into the stream.

I turn; I find her sprawled leftward with her arms in the stream, shaking her head. The tips of her hair have become wet. She sits up and checks her hands for damage. I see none. I ask her if she is alright.

"Your footsteps," she says. "I was walking in your footsteps." The most recent examples have been scuffed somewhat, so she points down the sand a bit. "Did you know you walk in a straight line? It made me fall over."

"What?" I look where she is pointing.

"You put," she says, "one foot right in front of the other. It's maddening. I can't do it for long." She brushes sand from herself.

I look up the bar to where we had been, and there are my feet, one after another, in a slightly weaving line. Farther back there is a another set of prints to one side and then the other, finally mixing in with mine. The prints end here at my feet. I help Juliet up.

"There used to be a book," I tell her. "When I was little, I liked to read a book about the Indians of America." I stop a bit, it was long ago, and difficult. "The book said they walked in straight lines, one foot right in front of the other. The book said they did this to walk quietly through the woods, like ghosts." I look at my feet. My toes used to point out, but they point in now. I do not know why. "I wanted to do that, too, then. I spent a summer learning, walking through the woods in a straight line, one foot in front of the other, always."

She rubs the water from her arms, and holds herself a moment. "Go on," she says, nodding up the stream. "I need practice."

Marco is on the phone. The only phone in Marco's house is in the big room. It sits on a small table next to a comfortable chair. It is an older phone, and very plain. It is made of a smooth black plastic, and looks heavy. Marco rarely uses it, and I have no one to call. I have never seen Juliet go near it; if there is a reason for that, she has not mentioned it. The phone almost never rings of its own accord.

We are all in the big room, for no particular reason. We are spread out into separate spaces, each working on private projects. I have taken over the big table, covering it with a collage of maps. Juliet is curled in the opposite corner from Marco, next to the cookie jar. She is eating cookies and knitting. She is doing both things quite slowly. Marco is on the phone with someone named Privet.

"No, Privet," he says. He says it again. "Cooperate with them. Find out what is wrong." When he is agitated his voice booms from his corner of the room, runs around the rafters, shakes spare motes of dust loose and spills them down onto my maps. He seems to remember himself, then, and lowers his voice into the smiling calm of his usual self. I cannot overhear him then. I go back to my maps.

I have never seen so many shades of green as there are on these maps. I have discovered the map drawers in Marco's library just off this room, long shelves of flat treasure. They are printed on creamy paper that has begun to brittle slightly at the corners, and are made out in a thin, well-conditioned hand. The watercolor shadings bloom from embattled corners to large swaths of colored wash, mottled and grained and inconsistent. I do not think they were done without skill. The effect is pleasing.

Marco is angry again. "No, that is secondary." I look up to see Juliet, taut like a cat in her chair, legs folded beneath her, back straight, and eyes alive. "Let them go where they wish." The chair by the phone is large with a wide back, and I cannot actually see Marco. He voice returns to normal, and he is placating Privet.

I find too many of the lines before me too fine to have been drawn by a human hand, but I know all of them to have been. It is a marvel, what we are capable of with time and effort. The maps speak of strange lands on the table, some of them old enough to refer to notions of the world that have long since been broken by actual exploration. I imagine those first boots on alien sands, those impressions that marked the end of the land on the map, and the beginning of the land as it was.

Marco hangs up, and strides quickly through the room, out into the hall. Juliet's hair moves a little in his wake as he passes her, but her eyes are intent on her knitting, and the soft touch of the needles seeps into the new silence in the room. I reach for the maps and shuffle them, and they make feathery noises as they slide over the table and each other. It sounds good.

Later, I ask Juliet why she sits in that chair in the big room.

"It is easy to hear from corner to corner in there," she tells me. "I can hear someone on the phone as clear as a good day."

I do not ask her anything else.

We have gone down into village for supper, Marco and Juliet and I. Macro took us down in the red car. He would not ordinarily do this: the red one is close inside, and meant to vigorously defend the luxury of needing only two seats. The arrangements had put Juliet somewhat stretched across my lap. Marco would instead I think have taken a more sedate vehicle to make us more comfortable, but he deeply enjoys the red car, and he has been troubled lately. He is a believer of relaxing when eating at restaurants.

Marco arrived in the village refreshed. It is lucky that Juliet is so slim, as her weight on me was pleasant, and I do not think she would have fit otherwise. I had thought it improper, but halfway down she gently pulled my hand across her and I held her as well as I could the rest of the way. After Marco had pulled to a stop, we wobbled from the car, spent from spending so long on the edge of such terrible forces. I cannot claim that I did not enjoy it, but it did not relax me. Juliet's thoughts are inscrutable as she calmly leads us to the restaurant.

Marco spoke to us of the place on the way down the hills. The Bel Canto lives in the rebuilt remains of what used to be a church, the back half of which is something of a legend for the habit of being blown apart in war. It has been built and rebuilt many times. The front with the carvings over the door and the tall, blunted bell tower stand quietly in one corner of the square, humble in their lasting. The lines are thick tonight, with many waiting for their supper in glittering evening gowns and inky suits with constellations of neckties. As we approach them from across the square, their conversation builds from the silent animation of hands to a low collective mumble. They take no notice of us as we walk past them to the top of the line at the door.

The man at the podium is gently dressed, ticking off and adding names to a page of creamy paper in precise lettering under the soft point of a fountain pen. I am beginning to feel out of sorts; Marco is dressed in a cotton arab shirt and painter's trousers, both of which show ample evidence that he was indeed painting earlier, and with some vigor. His hair is its usual raggely mass. He is wearing no shoes. Juliet is not wearing shoes, either, and I know both from her minimalist leanings on such things and the frightful descent that she is wearing cotton shorts and a linen shirt, and that is all. Her hair is soft and smells sweet. I am somehow wearing shoes, but for the rest of me I cannot imagine how I appear to these people. The man at the podium is uttering strings of perfect honorifics in three languages, and I fully expect to find myself in the gutter in moments, rubbing a sore ear. Marco and Juliet seem unconcerned. I follow as best I can, trying not to look at anyone in the line we are disregarding.

Marco steps up smartly to the podium, and we are mercifully ignored by everyone but the man behind it. I am curious as to what honorific Marco will rate, but the gentleman with the pen simply says "Marco," then "three?", then "please" and with a sweep of an arm leads us through the doors. I briefly see the main dining room, murky and lit by candles on the tables, but the man with the pen leads us instead to the left and up the stairs. They are old and dark, and take us up at least a turns' worth of the tower. We emerge into the soft air of evening in the open space of the bell above us, safe in the top of the tower and unmoving. I am staring at the bell.

The man with the pen touches my shoulder. "It will not ring, sir," he says. He slips down the stairs.

The four walls are open up here, offering a breathtaking view of the village. All are roofs, everywhere, the soft shades of tiles interlocking. We can look down on the square as we please, at the long line of men and women snaking out past the cafe. Better, we can see the hills, heated by the setting sun. The air is cool, and moves playfully past us. They have set out a table, three chairs, three places, three glasses and a bottle of wine. The wine is beading slightly in the breeze.

"There are no menus," I say.

Marco has settled into his chair. He looks very comfortable. "We do not get menus," he says. Juliet has already found her way into her chair, curled and unfurling the napkin across her lap. Marco has begun pouring wine from his seat with a long arm, almost carelessly. He spills nothing. "All will be well," he says. "Please, sit. We eat."

Juliet is teaching me how to lift together lettuce and onions in a large wooden bowl when I absently put an elbow into one of Marco's wine glasses and send it floorward. The wine glass is thin, and well made. We have spent evenings dipping thumbs in the little pool of ruby wine at the bottom of these glasses, gently running them around the rims, making the glasses tremble with pure descant song. This one taps the floor once and turns to shards.

We stare at it.

"Marco is very wealthy," Juliet says. Her voice is shaped in the careless way she tells other people's secrets. I am not surprised. "He has cases of those in the bottom of the study." Neither of us have anything on our feet. I feel the need to flex my toes.

She turns to me, spilling her hair over her shoulder in the strong light from the window. "Do you know the little machines?" She waves her hand at the chaos of the garden. "The machines that are too small to see. The machines that sit in the lawn and keep the grass short, and the bushes smooth." I think of Marco's front garden, immaculate. I think of the drive, free of weed of blemish. The machines are new things, and still quite expensive; I cannot remember what they are called in the stores. "Marco made those. He has a lot of money."

I frown at the back garden, look around at the gentle patina of a kitchen well used. An ant has crawled an and steps daintily over the shards of glass on the floor, tasting the residues of the wine.

"He does not use them in the house," I say. "Or the kitchen garden, or the grounds."

Juliet is watching the ant, too. She nods. "Just the front," she says. "I asked him once about it, and he told me that it is better for us to live the lives we earn." She shrugs. "I will ask him again, maybe."

As we watch, the ant has selected a small shard stained with red and begins to drag it back to the door. I find myself expecting all of the other pieces to move, too, ordering themselves neatly in a small pile and then marching in a shaggy mass in the direction of the waste bin.

Juliet gingerly moves off her stool, testing the floor with her toes. "Be careful," she says, and "look for the dust pan by the sink." She moves off towards the cupboard, looking for the broom.

Juliet has sent me a note.

This is unlike her. Most of my time with Juliet has not been the result of such planning. The paper feels tender between my fingertips. It asks me to come to the last terrace.

The sun is bright when I get there. She is waiting for me, sitting simply beneath a tree.

She does not get up, and squints at me in the sun. She asks me, "do you know about olives?" She motions me down.

I sit next to her. I tell her I like olives fine. She searches me for a moment for something, but I do not think she finds it: she shrugs. "Here," she says. She hands me an olive. She says, "it's fresh."

I have never had a fresh olive before. I cannot believe the bitterness. I spit and it lingers, crawling across my tongue.

Juliet is peeling a peach. "Do you know about peaches?" I make no motion of knowing anything. She is so calm, pulling strips of skin away from flesh the color of the sun, trembling with juice. "Peaches are only worth eating now, in the sun, when they are best. The only way to eat all of them, which is almost enough of them, is to eat too much. It is easy to make oneself ill." She is gentle with the fruit as she carves a piece away from the stone for me, gives it to me gently with a thin hand. "It's fresh," she says. It is impossibly wet on my tongue, and sweet, sweet.

"The trick," she says, "is not to eat the peels."

I cannot see them, but Juliet and Marco are in the kitchen, and I hear Juliet swear softly. Marco can fill his voice with sunlight, and I hear him ask her, "Juliet, Juliet. What did the carrots do to you today to call them so?"

I know her answer to that. The carrots have done well this year. We have filled baskets with carrots, barrels with carrots. The sand box in the root room is full of carrots, and Marco is building another for the potatoes. We have pickled them, salted them, eaten them. We eat quickbread of them in the mornings with the coffee. We have taken a hint of color to our skin from them.

We have pulled carrots of all colors from the rich patch of dark soil where he grows them. Some are the yellow of the sun at morning, but most take their rich hue from the burning sky on days of good sunsets. We even have some in purple.

The carrots from Marco's land are rebels, all. They twist and spin and tangle. The branch and branch again. Some of them are thick, but with a wasp's waist. They are impossible to peel, I have given up for the day. Juliet has not.

In town, the carrots are straight and strong, lined up on rows on the old wooden market benches. I had asked Marco about them: they looked easier to peel. They looked firm, and crisp. They were proud carrots. He shook his head sadly for me, letting curls fall into his face. "No, no," he said. He bought me one then. I watched him peel it for me with his pocket knife, the peel falling away with straight pulls of the cloudy blade. He asked the seller for some salt, then handed me the carrot.

It was a fine carrot. But: it did not speak of the earth it grew in, or the clads that turned its path. It was crisp, but it did not clutch the teeth for that moment before giving in to the hard chomp. It was sweet, but the only that. A light, flat confection, without any hint of bright sun or hot days.

Marco said: that is why. I will help Juliet peel more tomorrow.

Juliet has told me the name of the Asian man living on the third floor. She was sitting across me on the big chair on the study when she closed her book around her finger to keep her place and leaned her lips close to my ear. I do not know if Juliet has been to the third floor, or even if she has met him. I do not think she has. More than me, though, she knows his name. Or: she has managed to name him.

The stairs to the third floor creak and strain with age and the effort of supporting hesitant feet. I have resigned myself to never going up there without broadcasting my approach. In turn, I do not feel that I am ever unannounced, and I do not knock on doors. The stairs are loud enough to hear anywhere in the house. I have never heard him come down from there.

The only thing strange about that is that sometimes he is not there. I likely imagine the difference, but I can sometimes tell. The walls feel closer, and the smells hold more age, and the air becomes softer to better swallow my foot falls. On those days, I cannot find him. It may be that he hides from me, up there in the boxes and all of the jumble and pile, but I do not think so.

His name is Mr. Shen.

They are renovating Artur Montrevasso's house. I have never met him, but Marco knows him well. You can see his house from the kitchen, a bright fleck of white wash against the gold and green hill. At night, his house is brighter still, lit up like a white sun-candle against the darkness. Marco curses the light when he wants to look at the stars, and rings Montrevasso and speaks sternly to him. Sometimes the lights go out then.

We know that they are working on the house because of the noises. It is unclear what beasts of machines make them.

Some of them ring high. We do not hear too much of them; the sounds get lost in the treble air between there and here. Juliet says that the higher frequencies do not propagate as well. Marco says they do not come to us because the noises would rather spend their time playing with the birds, darting in the currents above the valley. I look at the raptors floating, and think of them diving on the high, thin machine wailings, thinking them mice or rats and then crashing through them, talons grasping nothing.

The low noises are worse. They come in deep thrums, sent down into the earth by the big engines to shake the soil and loosen the grapes. There is a pounder over there, too, sending out each minute a dull thump, so deep in the earth and the bone that it seems to come from all around and nowhere. If I am careful I can see it in my water glass sitting outside. They turn it off at night, but they begin early the next morning. This has not been going on for long, but it feels as if it has been a long time, and we are mostly used to it.

Someone is pounding on the door. I have fallen asleep under Juliet again on the sofa, and she is snoring lightly, face upturned. Our books have fallen to the floor, and I can see from here I have lost my place again. My leg is numb. I make effort to roll myself from under her, but I am clumsy with waking, and she tumbles over me into the sofa with a grunt. I stand up and try to shake sense into my leg.

"You've lost your place again," she says from the cushions. She is prone and soft, with a sleepy eye on me. There is someone pounding at the door. It does not occur to me that it is the front door, the unused door. I manage to limp there, and open it.

Outside in the moon's light is a ghost. He is tall, impossibly tall, with a drawn face that makes him look taller. He looks old in years and old in life. He is wearing white clothes: an older but smart looking coat, a bone shirt, rumpled white slacks. His skin is whiter still, and he hair is so light as to be nearly white, helped by the glim of the moon. He stands surprised still in a pose of knocking, making a murmer of a sound with his lips. I rub my eyes.

"Marco," he says. He drops his arm as he says it, breaking the spell. I see he is trembling a little. "I need to see Marco."

I do not know what to do with him. I have never seen him before, and such complete strangers are rare up here in these hills. I test the feel of Marco's home, to see if it is made tense by this man. I am made as mute by him as he is by me, and I wonder if I am dreaming. There is a clatter behind me; Juliet has gone to the kitchen to make tea. I am willing to bow to her judgement. "Come in," I tell him. "There's tea. Come in." He moves to me to take my hand, and holds it as if for strength. I lead him to the kitchen.

I have only managed to seat the man at the table when Marco comes in through the study door. "Jacobo!" The man has only enough time to stand before Marco has gathered him in his arms. Marco is happy to see him, and I am glad of that. Juliet is puring the tea. Marco steps back and grips the man's shoulders. He makes Marco look like a happy child.

"Jacobo," he says. He searches his face. "What is the matter?"

Jacobo starts to shake harder, and sits down again.

To talk to Jacobo, Marco had shooed us from the kitchen. Juliet and I wandered the house for a while, taking in some of the new paintings in the upstairs hallway and testing the window seats. It is usually Marco's way to tell us what we need to know if and when we need to know it. I have not met Jacobo before, but I think Juliet may have. My concern is mainly for the man's health, not his secrets. Marco has taught me about secrets.

We are all in the living room, now. At the least, Marco has told us that Jacobo will likely be staying with us for a few days. I am in the corner, working a puzzle in the good chair, and Marco is opposite, making noises at his desk. Juliet and Jacobo are on cushions on either side of the coffee table in the middle of the room. Juliet is teaching Jacobo to play Casino.

I believe that Jacobo's tousled state is a natural one to him, even now, when I think he is beginning to relax. His hands that hold the cards shake less. He eyes the cards that lay haphazard on the small area of cleared table, then again at his own. His lips move to himself, reciting the rules like prayers: "ten of coins", he whispers. "Two of swords, and swords, too." I hear him fine. He is rocking back and forth a little.

On the other side, Juliet watches him as still as winter water, curled upon her oversized pillow. Her eyes are darker in this light, and they never leave him. She lets her cards fall from her fingertips across those she wants from the table, and then darts in to sweep them up after a pause. The cards snap as she pulls them across the edge of the table. She plays very quickly, and it makes him play fast, too.

There is no room for piles on the table, so they pull their cards off and let them fall to the floor in front of them. I know that neither of them are cheating. Juliet is winning handily now, but in the winning she is teaching him things, and he is getting better.

I am out on the Veranda, where Juliet has put me, and told me to stay. There is a slight briskness in the air tonight, and the stove pot has been lit. Juliet comes clattering through the doorway from the house will her arms full of things, and I rise to help her, but she tells me to sit, and I do. She manages to bring all of it to the table intact.

She has brought a kettle, and the sugar pot, and a can of something. She has brought the press, and it is already filled with course grounds. She is sweating lightly from grinding them. She has brought two mugs. The kettle goes on the stove pot. She curls her lip a little in concentration as she punches through the lid on the can with a chiave. The syrupy white liquid in the can leaps a little bit from the violence and coats her thumb. She offers it to me. It is thick and sweet, and seasoned by her skin.

I ask her, "coffee?"

"Café Cubano," she says. She is pouring from the can and the sugar pot into mugs. She is using a lot of each.

I tell her that it's getting late for coffee.

"Café," she says. The water is ready and she fills the press. She looks at me. "I wasn't planning on sleeping tonight."

I am saved from having to think of anything to say to that by Marco, who arrives quietly. He sits down.

He is hesitant to begin. "Jacobo," he says. He starts again. "Jacobo works for me at the laboratory. He is something of a consultant for us. He is a very gifted troubleshooter, I think it is. We were having some worries with the valve array of recomb-". He looks at us. I do not know if he thinks we will understand what he is saying. "There is a room," he says, "with many valves." He waves his hand. "Hundreds. They act as a whole, but they were not acting as expected.

"Jacobo has a talented ear for sifting. He enjoys the symphony, but because he can hear each instrument individually, yes? We could not find fault with any of the valves mechanically, but we hoped Jacobo could lead us to the misbehavior in the system."

Marco has stopped, and is mulling the press. I ask him if Jacobo did it; Juliet asks him if Jacobo can hear us talking.

Marco shrugs. "Certainly, he can. Do not worry yourself. I have told him I would be telling you. He has adjusted." Juliet clears her throat. Marco says to me, "it was not any one valve. The failure moved from apparatus to apparatus, and they chased it around the room. So." Marco reaches out to the table and lets the weight of his hand press the coffee for us. He fills our cups. "The thing about it," he says, "the interesting thing is that the valve was whispering words."

Marco stands and hands us our mugs. "I will likely be at the laboratory a good deal for a few weeks. I trust you both with the house. I would humbly ask that you see to the comforts of our guests as best as you are able."

"Of course," Juliet says.

He puts a key on the table. "This will start the cars, if you have need of them." He is quickly gone, and we are alone again on the veranda.

The coffee is very sweet, and we say nothing.

Juliet has helped me peel potatos; Juliet has helped me peel cloves of garlic. I cut the potatoes into pieces and tossed them with the garlic and several sprigs of rosemary in oil. We roasted all of that in the outside oven until the garlic turned gold and sweet, and the potatos crisp on the skin. We are eating them now, with the salt cellar between us, and an open bottle of wine. We have put Marco's car key on the mantle above the kitchen hearth, and we sometimes look at it, on the other side of the room.

"He trusts us," Juliet says.

I nod, and eat. We have not used it.

Autumn is coming, and the market is full. The aisles are packed with people. Some of them are local; some of them I know. A great many are tourists, and I am unsure what they are going to do with all the food they seem to buy. Most of the kitchens in this place are jealously kept. There are also those who stand between the camps, obviously not from here, but somehow at home. Juliet says that as the season winds down, they stay longer.

There is the food, too; great heaping mounds of it, fruits and squash piled together in pyramids as tall as a man, requiring the deft fingers of the shopkeep to judiciously pluck out just what the old woman wants without sending the entire pile down around her ankles. Under a sunny and cloudless sky there are vast open bins of grains and flours, buzzing with young boys earning pennies by shooing away old and portly men who waddle through the market on the ends of fat cigars. The smells from the fishmongers cart are clean and fresh. The smells from the bakery are enough for lunch. We have brought Jacobo to the market.

Juliet was also determined to bring Mr. Shen, but found the thought of the third floor unpleasant. I still do not know what he does up there, or if she knows it. She sent me. I was unable to find him. I had the notion that he was there, somewhere, perhaps that he was moving around the third floor at my pace, in the same direction, keeping as much of the route between myself and him as he could. As I moved up there, I was suddenly taken by the urge to laugh and run after him, or stand still in a quiet corner and perhaps wait for him to pass me. I did neither of these things. After tracing the route once, I stood lamely at the top of the stair and called to him, told him we were going, and we would be back soon.

We have left Jacobo at a draughts table. Rather: he has decided to stay there. He is playing draughts for oranges, and playing very fast. His fingers whip forward to move pieces, and his eyes are calm. There is a line of takers waiting to challenge him, and the box of oranges at his feet is growing heavy. I think Juliet is impressed.

We did not take the red car to come here. Earlier, Juliet and I had stood before it, close together and breathing, the key in her hand and hers in mine. We had come instead in a sensible sedan. I do not think we chose so because Marco would have known, but rather that we would have him know something else. Juliet shows me the chopsticks she has bought for Mr. Shen, and I look up into the warm light of the afternoon at market. We will need food for tonight.

Marco has returned for a few days. He does not seem upset, but he has not been taking meals with us much. He is spending a good amount of time on the phone. I think he has been sleeping a lot. Juliet thinks something is troubling him. Jacobo has locked himself in his room, and no one can find Mr. Shen. Juliet and I have taken a picnic down the hill to give Marco the house for the day. The air is a little cooler, but it feels good, and we have brought blankets.

We have walked further than we had planned; we are some hours out now, in old and quiet forest, a gentle carpet of old leaves and needles under our feet. We are walking slower now, taking time to idle in little clearings. Juliet makes me still, and we stand like trees as deer move around us in the dim distance, dappled with shifting light, then gone. We stop to eat upon a blanket. We have apples and cheese and a good wine. We hear the noises of other things, but we do not see them.

I catch Juliet at one tree, and point. In the smooth bark of the trunk, someone has carved words and times. Juliet runs her fingertips over the lines of the figures, tracing the furrow in the wood. I watch her lips tremble as they move, reading the words to herself in a whisper.

This is a place of churches. Standing in the kitchen yard, it is easy to see cupolas on nearly every hill. It is not so easy to see the fading paint on the walls of them and the tippling slates of those roofs from there, but Juliet and I have taken walks to these places. Up close they look to have leaned a little into the wind with the days, and the slow course of seasons has made them shabby. This is a place of churches, but bit by bit the goers are leaving to time, or greener lives. The parishes have been finding other means to fund themselves. Marco has bought a doorbell.

It is ancient, or seems so, even after polishing. It weighs a tremendous amount. Marco has had to have men come to build a small belfry for it into the roof over the front door, and they have been working for days with stout beams and fat planks to hold it. It is on the porch, now, and it gleams in the sun. Marco says that it is quite spectacular when rung.

It is not so much that he wishes harm on anyone who would ring the front doorbell. I think he was more enamored with the thought of a graceful disincentive. He said it is a very elegant solution. I could only see men with cases, staggering at the door, samples spilling across the planking. Juliet shrugged.

We are in one of the smaller churches, Juliet and I. It is cool and dark here. There is no one else, but the floor has been well swept, and while there is not a great deal of decoration what there is of it is in good repair. One candle burns in the corner. We sit for a moment, and there is nothing to kneel on but the floor.

"Listen," Juliet says. It is peaceful here, and the sounds of the world fade at the doorway. Her breath is gentle, and I cannot hear my own. She reaches for my cheek, reaches up to brush her lips to mine. I can barely feel them pass.

It is cool, a little too cool to be outside at night. We are up on a little hill, and there is a breeze which does nothing to make it warmer. Juliet is not dressed for this: she is wearing a light shirt and light cotton pants, and there are sandals on her feet. I somehow left the house with three shirts, two of heavy cloth and long sleeves, and I give one of them to Juliet. The valley below us is filled with emergency lights, strobing and spinning red then blue. There are no sirens, and no one is shouting as they walk quickly from car to car, barricade to barricade. Something has happened at the Laboratory.

It is strangely quiet. From up here by the car, we can hear voices float up from below. They sound tired, and serious. Juliet folds her arms across herself and shivers, and I look for Marco. I find him: he is standing near a cluster of guards, checking people as they slowly file outward from the building. Marco is waving to us; he is waving us down.

We slip down the wet grass, and manage our way over to him. He looks very worried. He tells us that there has been an accident, but he does not say that much about it. He asks us if we have Jacobo, and I tell him that Jacobo is in the car, but wanted to stay there. He asks he we have seen Mr. Shen, and I tell him we could not find him.

"There he is," Juliet says.

Mr. Shen stumbles toward us, as dazed as all the others. The guard looks at his name tag, checks his clipboard, and crosses off a name. Marco looks relieved. The guard watches as Mr. Shen searches Marco's face, but Marco nods to the guard, and tells Mr. Shen about Jacobo, and the car on the hill. Mr. Shen begins to shuffle up the wet grass towards the car.

Another guard comes to us across the parking lot from the other entrance. He is carrying papers, and he trips a little on a curb, but spills nothing. He starts a quiet conference with one of the guards near us. They are going over lists. I can hear them calling out names and taking notes.

Eventually, one of them calls "Shen", and then the other does, too. They talk a while, and misunderstand, and each claim the other in error. Mr. Shen could not have walked out of both doors on either side of the plant tonight. There is no one else coming out of the building, now, and men in environment suits start in through both doors.

Marco softly asks them for totals. They add their lists, and the voices become more strained. They have more people on the lists then the plant has employees. Marco looks very tired.

Later, they begin to pull the bodies from the building. Soon after that we go home.

As the weather has turned cooler, it is not so strange to have rain on some days. This morning at breakfast Marco looked up from the paper, and told us this: "rain today." It has not come yet, and I have already taken my walk, so I am happy to sit here in the warm and dry comfort of the study and read my book. Juliet clears her throat, and I look up to find her beckoning to me, holding a socket wrench. I put the book down. It is usually best not to deny her when she is holding tools.

She leads me upstairs to her room. From the doorway, it looks like a giant fist has come down from the sky to shatter her things, sending them into the corners to pile up like sand. I look again: the explanation is simpler. She has taken her bed apart. She tucks the socket wrench in with her waist, and picks up a piece of bed, a slat of smooth, honey-colored wood. She hands it to me, selects her own, and leads me back downstairs.

In one place on the lee side of the house, the porch and roof bulge a bit, bowing out to create a round and sheltered space. We spend a half an hour bringing pieces of her bed down the stairs and out into this place, stacking them neatly against the wall at her direction. We spend another putting it all back together: the massive headboard, and the carved footboard, and posts, and the canopy rails. She brings me back upstairs a final time to fill her arms with bedding, and to fill mine with pillows.

As we make the bed, it begins to rain.

Juliet pulls me under the blankets. We have been working, but it is cool out, and it is cooler still under the fresh sheets. We settle together into the pillows. All around us has become rain, and now rain and wind, whispering to us in swirls. The roof protects us from this, but it seems a fragile defense. The weather stomps and shakes at us now, only paces away, and we pull the blankets tighter. It is the house that shields us, I know. With the wind shadow we are dry in the soft bed, and we are getting warmer from each other. I mean to ask Juliet something, but she puts fingers to my lips.

"Hush," she says.

I am most of the way up the stairs. Mr. Shen is at the top of them. We have been here this way for a little while, now, but I have not minded. I had come up to see him, and to find out how he has been doing since the laboratory. He caught me here, nealy at the top of the stairs. I do not think he wants me to come up.

He nodded patiently as I asked my questions. I find it easy to talk to him, sometimes. I do not know how long I have been standing here on the stairs, giving him little details of life in the house, and how the air in the woods in changing with the season. He is a good listener. He is quiet.

There is a cough from below. I turn, and at the bottom of the stairs in the light of the second floor stand Juliet and Marco. Marco is wearing concern on his face, and Juliet is wrapped in a soft blue blanket she is holding tightly to her chest from beneath. The blanket rides together on her shoulders to make a collar, and a fold of blanket has been pulled over her head, covering some of her hair. Marco has an arm around her, which makes her look smaller. Her eyes are bright.

They beckon me down. The third floor seems darker. I turn back to look, but Mr. Shen is already gone.

Marco is balancing the doors of the house. He has tools with him in a large canvas and leather bag, and the bag keeps them quiet. He has oil in a can. He has toothpicks he is using to seat screws when they have bent away the wood under the dull brass hinge plates, as he needs to. When he has to take a door down, he calls to one of us, and we help him wrestle it out and against the wall. He clucks as he inspects the lintel.

He is not done until the door swings free and true. He checks the jambs that they all catch the door well. He listens to the hinges. The foot board must clear the rug. He is careful, and uses a spirit level when he needs to.

He is not done until he can push the door closed with a careful finger, and have the weight of the wood carry the well oiled lock past the lock plate, settling the door shut with a quiet click. He smiles at this. He moves on to the next one. He has many more to go.

Juliet has taken ill.

It is not a severe condition. She seems a little pale, and she feels a little weak. She looks small in one corner of the expanse of the sofa, and smaller still against the pillows and piles of blankets. We have tried to make her comfortable. Marco looks worried.

I was reading to Juliet earlier, but she has closed her eyes, and I have stopped. Jacobo is with us in the room, bent over one of the side tables and working on some tiny mechanism with delicate tools, squinting with the tight, bright pool of light thrown down by one of the reading lamps. He is singing a little song:

snip, nip, the wick trimmers come

He is singing it to himself. I do not recognize it.

Yesterday I had been reading to Juliet, too. I was tired, and do not remember falling asleep. I was brought back a little of the way to waking by Mr. Shen, who waved to me as he shuffled past us from the kitchen. A minute later he had done it again. I think I may have dreamed it.

Juliet is feeling better, but is not yet well. She has asked me to cover one of the porch benches with blankets. The bench is quite deep, and there are enough throws and quilts to make the hard woods of the seat pillowy. I have saved the other half of the blankets for Juliet to wrap around her. It is a chilly evening, but I find myself comfortable with a light jacket and a cup of hot almond milk.

In the dim across the valley, something has happened at Artur Montrevasso's house. We cannot see to well, but in the drive are several vehicles with strobing lights, red and blue and white. We do not know how many there are, or why they are there. We can hear no noises of engines, and none of them are moving. The lights reach out across the valley to lick the tops of trees.

We watch for a while. It is quiet, and we say nothing to break it. We see nothing change, and we wait.

I think I am lost in the woods.

I did not mean to be. Marco understands these hills very well, and sometimes his directions are vague when he sends us here or there to fetch him this or that. I am further down through the trees than we usually go. Marco has casually mentioned a set of cisterns in these hills, and I have learned that it is often those things which pass quietly that turn out to be of most interest.

The path back began to give me trouble when the hill curved away in a direction I did not expect, either on the crude map on my napkin or in the steps I had took before. The sky had become cloudy, and the sun has stayed hid, and while I recognize the hills, I do not know which is which.

The sky is growing dim, but it is not unfriendly out here. It is cool, but there is no wind. I have a good coat and good boots, and a blanket, too. The picnic that was packed for me was over large, and there is plenty left. I have managed to keep a hold of my hat.

These hills have felt the feet of travellers for centuries, tens of centuries, more. The hollow at the foot of this tree may not have seen others through the night, but I would like to think that it has. I imagine I can start a fire if I have need, but I do not.

It is very quiet.

I have been getting up early in the mornings. It is a peaceful time. Today, it is raining, and the cool air and small drums of the droplets on the house have taken Juliet in, burrowing her under the blankets. She is defending her lair with the surprising strength of those not awake. For their own reasons, none of the others have arisen yet either, and I have the house to myself.

I have taken to eating breakfast on the landing of the great stair. We do not use those stairs, much. Marco keeps the stairs sparse, and there are no pictures on the walls. They are wide, and I feel out of place with my hand on the bannister, with too much room to my left as I climb. I am holding a small plate of cheese and fruit.

On the landing there is nothing but a small window and a tall chair. With the plate on the sill I can rub my arm, and it feels a little better. The chair is thin but strong, and has a low back. I do not know where it came from. It was not always there. I sit, putting my feet on the rung to perch. I can lean over and look out the window. I nibble on some cheese.

There is rain on the window, but only a little. The window is set deep in the wall, and frames the little formal garden that we never use. I cannot see the distance. Instead I watch leaves get heavy with water and drip it away, shaking with each release. The rain is not so hard to chase the squirrels home, but they are slowed by the wet, and move about the lawn with care. The light is soft, and I eat some grapes.

Marco comes down the stairs, softly. I have meant to thank him for this chair, but I have never done, and I stay quiet now.

He asks me, "is Juliet feeling more well?"

I tell him that I think so; she has been eating more, and has begun to disassemble things in her room again. He nods at that. He bends down to peer through the glass. I lean lower, too. Through the window, the garden falls away, and I see the sky, sliding over the distant hills of turning trees.

Marco has his little projects.

Some months ago, we received a long box in the post. I helped him carry it into the kitchen, and we laid it out on the table after some hasty shuffling of the pastry implements. The return address was from a hamlet on the coast, and I did not recognize the name of the sender. Marco stood in the kitchen for some time, considering the box, letting a soft grin spread across his face. We made short work of the ties with the utility knife, and spread open the cardboard and papers to see what he had been sent.

In the box were two planks. They had been scrubbed clean by the sea, and turned white by the sun. They smelled gently of salt. They were very smooth. Marco ran his fingers along their surface, and tapped the table gently with the utility knife.

"We," he said, "must go shopping."

We took the red one into the village, going slower than usual, although Marco still enjoyed himself. In town, he pushed a crumpled mass of bills into my shaking hand and sent me to the Apothecary to purchase little clay crucibles. For reasons I do not know, they came in cases of twenty-seven. They came packed in little nests of bright paper, held set by cleverly notched pieces of card. I bought two cases, and carried them carefully back to the car.

Marco had bought a mirror. It was full length, and leaned against the passenger door, showing us the sky. Marco had also bought wax, white wax, in little straw colored boxes that sported cows. The wax and the crucibles fit easily in the footwell. We pondered the length of the mirror and the lowness of the car.

"This," he said, "will never fit."

We dropped it on the pavement. It broke nicely.

With gentle care, Marco picked up each fist-sized piece and put them in a canvas bag he keeps behind the seat. He borrowed a broom and pan from the smith's, and I carried the frame to the post office and leaned it against the wall, adding it to the collection of things people had thought others might use. When I came back the pavement was clean again, and Marco was ready to go back.

Marco moved the planks to the shop. On one went the crucibles in no useful pattern, set down with weatherproof glue. To the other, he affixed the pieces of mirror, making haphazard mosaic and letting the leading of the wood show through between. He has been teaching me, a little, and I made a crude stand for him out of beech. It was notched to hold the first plank flat, steady and level, and the other plank behind and up, like a picture on the wall. I was proud that it was level. Marco was pleased.

Marco has called us to dinner.

Juliet and I are sitting at the small table in the back of the garden. It is a clear night, and cold, but we are dressed warmly and wrapped in blankets besides, and we both have large mugs of chocolate. There are slim logs burning merrily in the terra cotta oven-pot. Jacobo made mention that he would join us, but was not ready yet (Mr. Shen is at his own devices). Marco is in the kitchen, tending to things and grating cheese. It is quiet here, and I touch Juliet's hand across the table.

Behind us are the planks. The crucibles are clean and pure, and I know that they will change as life outside finds them, but I do not mind. Marco has filled them with wax and wick. Marco has lit them all. The air is very still, and the small flames only tremble a little as it drifts carefully by. The pieces of mirror behind catch the light and send it out around us, and the illumination is gentle, and warms us well.

Marco is bringing the pumpkin ravioli, and a bottle of wine.

It is time to eat.

Marco has taken us to a wedding.

The ceremony was held earlier at the warm end of the day. The church was made of heavy stone, and painted the day's light blue and purple between the leading of the windows. It looked a small place, but it held us all easily in comfort. It became cozy within, filled with candles, the thin stream of grey blue smoke from the censer, and people wishing well. The stout doors kept the cool air without, and left it to play on the steps with the leaves. The place focused us, giving slow and lovely weight to a ceremony which seemed, after, to take no time at all.

We are at the gathering after, now. It is being held on the grounds of the Castle Metle, on a wide and ranging lawn made comfortable and close with plantings and well placed screens. There is something roasting over fire over there, and another over here. Tables groan with fruits and breads and cheeses, and a gentleman in Friar's costume is deftly making highly alcoholic coffees for all who ask. The wind scents us with the aromatics of the nearby pines. The smells mean to overwhelm us. Torch light dances over everything.

There is a square of well-mortared paving stones in the center of the lawn for dancing. The stones are smooth, but the dancers are being careful not to trip, and fall laughingly into each other's arms when they do. The bride and groom are both very good, and have spent the evening taking turns leading each other. I am sitting at a table, hewn from wood. My chair is quite comfortable, and my fingers take heat from the coffee cup they cradle. Marco is standing nearby, with a drink; he looks relaxed.

Two men approach Marco; they are too carefully dressed to be part of the party. I can hear them clearly, but I try not to look like I notice them.

"Marco," one of them says. "You are a difficult man to find."

Marco shrugs at that. "My home is not hidden."

The other man laughs at that. "Perhaps," he says. "Perhaps you live on a road with no signpost. And perhaps your neighbors give poor directions." He has a drink, and he takes a sip.

The first one speaks again: "Well." He has a careful smile, but it is rough with use around the edges. "We have found you now. We would like to ask you some questions."

"Certainly," Marco says. He is swaying back and forth a little, letting the ice in his glass make small music. "Please, first: who are you?"

"Marco," the first one says, holding out his upward hands. "We are police."

I think Marco was ever sober, but he shows it now. His back becomes straight, and the glass stops. The second man is clumsily pulling identification from his pocket, but Marco pats his arm. "Come," Marco says. He leads them off into the shadows of the castle gardens.

Juliet is dancing with a tall and silent man. I cannot complain; I cannot dance. Juliet enjoys it. His light hair falls around his face against the dark of his jacket, and he steps with care, drawing both of them slowly back and forth across the stone. He is gentle, and his arms are strong. The air is cool, and Juliet winks to me.

She moves within them like liquid.

I drift slowly awake, upwards. It is first light, the gentle grey light, the light that creeps in through the windows and drifts to the floor like so much smoke, doing little to chase away the unseen in the corners. The living room is dim, diffuse with it. I am sprawled on the couch, and the ottomans. Last night we pushed them together for more room. I am not uncomfortable. They were made for this.

From the doorway on the other side of the room spills sweet yellow light from the kitchen, in neat edges across the dark wood of the floor. There is shuffling beyond the doorway, where shadows occasionally fall. I do not move, but my eyes clear, and across the room I can see Mr. Shen, busy in the kitchen. I keep very still, even as I clutch at Juliet's arm. I hope I do not wake her.

Mr. Shen is making himself eggs.

He cracks eggs into the pan on the stove, first one, then two, then three. He stirs them gently with a spoon, carefully adding cream from the little clay jug and butter from the pallet with a long, thin knife. He reaches slim fingers into the pepper pot, letting pungent dust fall into the pan. His stirring is slow and strong, and the moments stretch in the strange light, and I am very still. When they are done, he nods to himself and makes a little noise, sliding the eggs out onto a plate that has been sitting on the radiator. He is careful when he puts the plate before himself on the table, and then again when he returns with two forks.

For Mr. Shen is also sitting at the table. There are two Mr. Shens.

They eat quietly, gently, letting the forks make only the smallest carefree noises as they strike the plate. They keep their heads close as if in quiet conversation, but I hear them say nothing. They are calm and careful as they eat in the little pool of light, an island of gold in the dark house.

I am dreaming it, but for Juliet. I turn to her, for she too is too still, and see her lips barely parted, eyes open and shining.

The air has turned chilly and swift again, but the sun is bright today. I am safe from the wind in any case. I am in the kitchen, behind wide panes of glass. I am cleaning. I have dried the plates, and they make a pleasant click as I stack them.

"So there are two of Shen," Jacobo says. He is limp in a chair, facing the garden in the window. He looks very tired, even though it is only just past midday.

The tableware is of all manner of pattern. I hold a soup spoon up to the sun. The bowl is round and fat, and free of spots. It gleams in the light. Around the stem of the spoon roses curl in shallow cuts, only the barest careful nicks for thorns.

"What if there were two of Juliet?", Jacobo says. A sigh escapes him. "Imagine that."

The phone is ringing.

The rain and the chill have by turns chased us together, and then teased us apart. We have gathered into thick knots of family, invading rooms to fill them, until we scatter to corners of the house in search of weathering peace. We compress, expand. The house is breathing us.

The house exhales. We have fled each other, and the afternoon has settled quiet over this place, letting in only the barest drumming of the rain on the roof. The noise is easily swept into commonplace and ignored, but I am listening.

I have crept in here, into the far corner of the living room. I have my book, half read, and a small pot of salted almonds. I choose the comfortable chair in an effort to be wise, and perhaps a little greedy. I wonder at it now. The chair is next to the phone.

The bell burbles at me. There is no other phone, and I do not hear anyone coming to get this one. There is a heavy stillness, strangely made more so by the insistent peal. It seems suddenly that I am alone in the house. The handle is smooth to the touch, and cool.

I hold the receiver to my ear, but I do not know what to say.

There is static and buzz on the wire. It comes in gentle swells, quietly washing the line clean. There are other noises, too: muddled and uncertain earmarks of work and movement, somewhere on the far end of the other side. Someone makes a small sound. It may be a question; it may be meant for me. But they are gone, now, and the line is quiet again.

I do not know how much I weigh.

There are no scales in the house: there are no scales in the house meant for us. There is a scale in the kitchen that we use for baking, but I cannot put to much on it before it begins to complain, spinning false tales on its little dial. Marco keeps an old postage scale on his desk, with a shined copper platter and small lead baubles that slide on tiny rods marked with progress. That one weighs even less, and it would be more impractical besides. I do not think Marco has seen fit to have a scale, to determine how heavy we are.

We have eaten well, here, at Marco's table. The meals are laden with good things, and I have known them to be bad for me, if I am idle. We are not shy at the table. We are not idle, either. With the weather cooler, we walk for much of what we need, sometimes long and heavy paths. We stoke the fires well within us to temper the chill. We eat bean soups laced with salty ham and glossy spinach, and wipe the bowls clean with bread from the oven which is now almost always ready to warm us. We are packing on solidity for the winter.

Juliet shifts, and begins to snore gently. She is lighter than I.

Juliet holds out her hand. "Give me your shoes."

We have driven down the coast to the city: Juliet had an appointment with a specialist. We have a competent doctor in the village, and I like her very much. She is very kind, and had no shame in telling Juliet that she wanted her to see someone with greater knowledge than she. Marco says we are lucky to have her.

Juliet and I are standing in a quiet alley, the quiet stacks of flats making a canyon above us. It is dim now, and late in the evening. Juliet and I are taking a walk after dinner, and Juliet has been taking the two of us down the back ways of the city at random, finding secret places and webbings of clotheslines to segment the sky. All around us is lit only by a sodium bulb burning high above and the hot blue moon, full in the sky and higher still.

The drive to the city was pleasant; we took the big car, because the roads were simply too long for anything smaller. Juliet spent the trip in the front next to Marco, legs folded gently beneath her on the wide leather seat. I spent my time alone in the back, uncomfortable in my luxury of space. The big car is very quiet. We did not talk much.

The alleyway is cobbled, and spaces between the wide stones are filled with tiny bits of broken glass, a geologic settling of every beer and wine bottle dropped in carelessness or thrown in revelry in this place. I flex my toes on the cool stones. Juliet's bare feet look delicate next to mine.

During the trip, I would sometimes find Marco's eyes in the rear-view mirror. His eyes looked tired, and under some weight. Marco has been looking worried in recent weeks, but then again I have never known him to not appear somewhat so.

I take a careful step. The spaces around the cobbles are deep, and the skin of my feet stays well clear of the jumbled edges beneath. The moon and the lamp make them shine and shift, and the street is mortared with jewels. Juliet steps up next to me, and puts her arm carefully in mine. "You see?" She is close to me now, and she is scented gently with lavender. "It will be fine."

I am in the kitchen, reading a cookbook. Jacobo is making noises in the living room, putting together model airplane kits. Marco is busying himself with the coffee machine. Marco, I think, could easily afford a much nicer machine that would take care of things for him. He enjoys the work. The coffee he makes is quite good.

He has made us each a small cup, and puts them on saucers and then to the table, with little spoons. He is rummaging in the cabinet, and stands up with a small bottle of clear spirit. He carefully pours a dollop into each cup, and then slides mine towards me until it is touching the pages of the cookbook.

He gives his cup a lazy stir with his spoon, and nods to me. "Tell me," he says. "Do you have a desire?"

The spoon is small, and quite plain. There is nothing stamped on the handle, just simple metal. I send the coffee in a careful circle, and the perfume of the anise rises up, heated by the coffee. I somehow know not to reach for the sugar.

I shrug. "I'm not sure."

"Something," he says, waving expansively with the spoon. "Is there a thing in you, deeply?" He frowns a moment. "Is there one thing over all else?"

I try the coffee. It is deepened and sweetened by the addition, full on the tongue and heady, rich. It is new to me, and the novelty stops me, and I am making plans, now, that once I am done with this cup I will sometime have another.

"What do you do?" I ask him.

Marco thinks about that. "You have never before asked me this."

"No," I said, "it somehow always seemed unkind to." The coffee is so very good.

Marco is interested. "This is your desire, then?"

I am looking at the coffee. "No."

There is a clatter and swearing from the living room. If we are lucky, Jacobo has only glued his fingers to each other this time, and not to his cheek.

Marco rises, and smoothes the front of his shirt with his hands. "I will make more," he says.

Mr. Shen and Mr. Shen have taken to wearing scarves. They wear them tied neatly over the shoulder, over their house jackets. One of them wears one of blue, the other one of green.

They have each been acting strangely, in their own ways. One has taken more liking to the lower floors of the house, and has been spending time on the periphery of occupied rooms. The other is usually above, marking passage with a careful creaking of the floorboards. We are still unsure if they are trading colors.

The other evening, Blue Shen joined us for dinner, sitting carefully at the far end of the table. He ate slowly, chewing each bite and sometimes looking out the window into the evening countryside, hidden by our reflections in the glazing. He said nothing, and we moved the conversation around the table, Jacobo, Marco, Juliet and I, trading ghost stories and laughing.

We were completely unprepared when Shen giggled and reached across the table to poke Jacobo in the arm with a fork.

When Marco wishes to show us something, he sometimes tells us to make a picnic. It is cold, so Juliet and I spent time in the kitchen in the sharp light of the morning sun. I filled the big thermos from the pot of white bean soup spiked with savory, and the small one with strong coffee laced with warm cream. Juliet had risen early to bake small rolls and a thin sweet cake with apricots, and she wrapped them in towels to sit in the basket on top of a plate of cold meats.

Marco has taken us to the lake.

There are other lakes up in the hills, but Marco tells us this is the best of them, and I am given to believe him. The lake is clear, tucked under with a watery green, settled into a shallow valley that is mostly trees. The clouds have all been chased away, and the sky is a perfect vault of unbroken blue. It is colder still up here, but the wind is mercifully absent, and the sun is strong. We are taking our picnic on a small rocky shoal that spills out of the trees and into the lake. For all our bundling, we are a little cold, and I am careful to open the thermos. The soup steams within, and once we eat a bit we are all right.

The ground is strewn with flat round rocks, and I send one over the smooth surface of the water. Juliet is interested; she has not seen this before. I warm my hands on my coat and take hers in mine, showing her to place the stone against the fleshy join of the thumb to the hand, and to curl her forefinger around the edge to find good purchase. I make the motion with my wrist and arm, and she mimes it, testing flexibilities.

Her body finds the throw, and her arm reaches out, her wrist letting the rock sing free and spin toward the water. The stone splashes true and comes up true again, and again, and still again. It marches from us in a gentle leaning curve, stepping into the water to leap free, perhaps unhappy with the temperature. By the time it slows to nestle into the water and sink from sight, it is a long way away, and I have lost count. Juliet is clapping, and resting on her toes.

"Ah," Marco says, taking a pull from his coffee and sitting on a rock, comfortable in the sun. "I have always wished it to be able to do that."

I am sitting in the kitchen. Jacobo sits across from me, with his arms down on the table and his chin upon his hands. We are both looking at a small tub sitting in the middle of the table. It is very still in the kitchen, as if both Jacobo and I are waiting for the tub to move, somehow, dancing away past the parsley in the vase and scuttling into the hallway, chortling. Jacobo has made some yogurt.

"It might be safe to eat it," he says. We look at it some more. Jacobo forgot to heat the milk before culturing it. "Stupid, stupid," he says to himself. His hands rise to thin his hair, and his chin thumps wood. The yogurt shimmies a little. "It might be safe."

Juliet comes by with a bowl of jam. "Excellent," she says, and reaches for a spoon.

"It might kill you," Jacobo says. Juliet shrugs, and dollops yogurt on the jam. She marbles the two with her spoon. She tastes it.

"It's good," she says.

Jacobo holds his head in his hands.

"Ah, good." Marco has found me in the living room. "I have news. The mayor is coming for dinner..." Marco stands very still, and I can hear faint music in the distance.

"Cheese truck," Marco says. "Come with me."

We take the path to the road, and a little white van comes slowly around the corner. Marco waves it down, and the van comes to a quiet stop. There is a little horn mounted on the van, and I can hear the chugging of a compressor. The window on the side of the van slides open, and a little man puts out his head to us.

"Raphael," Marco says. "Hello!"

"It is good to see you, Marco. I thought I might find you today." He waves us over, and we move to the window. I can see a little of the inside. The ceiling is full of pegs strung with cheeses, swinging slowly above Raphael's head. "How fares your parmigiano?"

"She is old, but she still walks," Marco says. "My subscription is all right?" Raphael nods at that, and Marco peers into the truck. "I have need of other things." Raphael steps back and spreads his hands, bumping into cheese with his head.

"Provelone," Marco says pointing, and a round ball in string is handed to me, and I hang it from my arm. "Fontina from the valley," and I am given a little wheel, which I leave in the crook of the other. "Gorgonzola."

Raphael grins. "Are you having guests?" Marco nods with a sad smile, and I am given a block of butcher paper, already greasy. I hold it very carefully.

"You are lucky," Raphael says. He leans out of the truck in conspiracy. "Di bufala. I have it."

Marco stops. "How long?"

Raphael beams at him. "You are my first today. I came from there: 45 minutes, maybe less." Marco asks me if Juliet is in the house, and I say I think she is. Marco holds up 4 fingers, and four pearled balls appear on a clean piece of paper, placed into Marco's hand.

Marco takes the wheel from me to free my hand, and offers me the paper. It rustles with the movement, and the cheeses are wet and fat.

"Eat," he says. "They are very bad at waiting."

Juliet is sitting across from me, on a wide cushioned bench that she built. It fits her well, and I have seen her feet rest solidly on the decking that holds the benches above the ground. Her arms are resting wide on the bench back, furling her sweater. The sweater is too big for her, but too comfortable not to wear in the cool of the evening, and her slippered feet are tucked beneath her. The bench I am sitting on is a twin of the other, but I am too tall for it, and my feet can only rest awkwardly thrust into the space between us. The line of Juliet's arm ends in a mug of cocoa. My own sits in my lap, warming my fingers. Night has nearly fallen all the way, and the air is cold. I am glad of it.

"The Mayor is coming," Juliet says. "Marco is making a stew."

She built a pergola, too. We planted vines, but they have only begun to climb the corner posts, and the naked slats do little to shield us from the purple sky or the strong stars, fighting through the light from their terrible distance.

Juliet sips her cocoa. "Do you know why he's coming?"

Juliet had asked me to bring a clay chimney down from the house, and I have set it on the granite hearth she built at one end of this place. Slim pieces of split wood burn in it, and embers float from the top of it from time to time, stepping carefully into the night and slipping through the rising air, hesitant. The fire casts low amber light across us in tides.

"I hope nothing has happened." She looks carefully still.

The light spills across her face, and she is lovely.

Dinner is over, and we are lingering at the table. I am idly pushing creases around on the table cloth, and Juliet is sitting back, content, attempting to make her wine glass sing. Jacobo has fled upstairs, and neither Shen ever came down, although we set places for them. It was not a formal meal, but a good one: the stew turned out well. Marco has brought coffees, and the Mayor sips his with gentle fingers, even though the cup is stout.

"Thank you, Marco." The Mayor is a short man, with thinning hair and tired cheeks. I have seen him in town, but I had not known who he was. "It has been some time since I have had such a pleasant evening." He touches his cup carefully.

Marco is sitting back and softening, feeling good from the food and the wine and the dim light like the rest of us. "The nights, they are still hard?"

The Mayor smiles a little. "Yes," he says. "It is very quiet in my house, in the evenings. I am not used to it." He looks up at us. "What do you do, in the evenings?"

Juliet is peering through the wine in the bottom of her wine glass, nearly elsewhere. "Sometimes we tell ghost stories."

The Mayor becomes still. His hand reaches out to find Marco's across the table, as if unable to see.

"Marco," says, and his voice is firm. "You remember Greta well, no? I do not know if I have ever thanked you for your kindnesses to me ever since she went on." Marco nods. A waiting falls across the table. My finger has stilled in forming a long wake in the white of the table cloth, and I can see Juliet's eyes focus on the wine, intent. The Mayor begins again. "I have a ghost story to tell you. I am sorry it is not a very good one. I do not know how to tell it except in this way, and I have told few.

"It is the evenings of the Fridays that are dimmest for me. The work of the week is safely put away, and the revelers sing from step to step on their routes from a place to another, all outside my windows. I do not wish to join them and I do; it would be nice to taste too much wine at the public tables, pressed to the arms with others, but I know that the Saturday will come after, and it is the Saturdays that I still dread.

"It was the Saturdays that Greta and I kept for ourselves, you see. We would take the long walk through the hill yards, stealing a grape or two and talking of the week. We would measure the lives of our children against our hopes for them and never find them lacking, we would tell tales of the things we had yet to see." He stopped. "She had wanted to see the Moon, did you know? She knew the impracticality of it, but she always thought it would be nice to stand there, in the grey, and look up at this pretty place.

"And then, one Saturday, she was there in the kitchen when I woke. She had made coffee and biscuits, and fretted that there was no proper jam, for I had been trying different kinds, and I had none of her favorite. We ate and bathed and dressed, and too easily we found ourselves walking the back ways to the market on our Saturday. I was afraid to arrive at the market, for then I would know if this was a dream, or perhaps worse, forgive me, if it was not.

"At the last turn before the market I took her hand. I remember that it was warm as mine, healthy and slightly dry in the cool wind like mine. I told her, 'Greta'. I told her that she should not be here, that she had gone on. I told her that I didn't know how to tell her, but there it was.

"She smiled and told me she knew that, but here she was, and we needed jam. Then she frowned. She said the strangest things: that she was sorry to be so light about it. She had no answers for me, she said. Only that she wanted to walk with me that day, and perhaps discover some new corner of things like we often did. I did not know what to say. We bought jam from Kasper, and he said nothing to us. I have not been able to ask him about it since, and he is careful with me now.

"On Sunday, I awoke to find she had laid out on Sunday clothes for Mass: my good suit, her favorite dress. She had laid them out on the dressing table like always. But she was gone."

The Mayor's fingers tighten Marco's hand. "Marco," he says. "What is happening to me?"

Juliet puts her hand to my face. "Stop," she says, "listen." We are quiet, and the voices filter up through the floor, Marco and Jacobo. "They're fighting."

They are moving around downstairs; they are pacing from room to room, feet falling heavy to gently shake the house. Their voices are murmurs and shouts, and someone pounds a table. Jacobo is in the hallway, shouts "homunculi!", and it slips across the banister to come upward towards us.

Marco is at the foot of the stairs too, now, and his voice climbs the stairs easily:

"It is not I that make them. They themselves make them!"

We are sitting in Juliet's room. Juliet is spinning the globe on the desk, quickly enough to blur the land into the blue, the world spinning at terrible speed and in the wrong direction. With her eyes closed, she reaches out with a fingertip and brings it slowly to a stop under pressure. She does not open her eyes.

"We could go here," she says.

Her finger is leveled at the gentle blue of the Pacific, touching down in the middle of that wilderness. I imagine a small isle there, the simple foods of fish and fruit, the quiet when the winds are low, the lashing rains when they are not.

"I do not know if I can swim," I tell her.

Her eyes open, and she frowns at her finger. She sits down quickly into the chair, angry at the globe. "Too much water," she says. "We could head into the mountains."

"I could take a horse, perhaps," I tell her. "We don't know how to drive."

"Marco has been teaching me a little," she says. It is new to me. "I can't do so well enough to know when I am wrong."

We look at the globe for some time. All the world is there, so small upon her desk. On that little ball, everything is so close to us. So much is in reach.

Jacobo has gone.

Dinner is over, and we are in the front room. We are spread out some, Juliet on her end of the long couch, I on mine, with Marco rumpled into the easy chair. Mr. Shen is making noises in the kitchen, cleaning dishes. In the room it is cool and dim.

There is a knocking at the door, and Marco rises.

The man at the door is sharply dressed, a dark suit, close hair. He nods to Marco in greeting.

"Thank you," Marco says, "for not breaking my door."

The man smiles at that. "They wanted to," he says. "I told them it would be unnecessary. Thank you for letting me tell them the truth." A woman in a technician's coat is wrestling a large machine through the door, trailing cables that snake out into the night. The man waves his hand at the walls. "They have this house surrounded."

Marco shrugs. "Do they think that will help?"

"They do not know," the man says. "It worries them." He looks at Marco. "You do not know, either, and that worries me." He looks around the room. He nods to us, Juliet and I, but says nothing.

"We need to end your experiment," he says. "We are not losing the war so badly anymore. We are winning it, in fact. We are doing well. We no longer need to take risks." Marco says nothing. "This information is of little use to you, I know, but I thought it best to come tell you." He pauses, and looks around the room again: Juliet, I, the rose tree in the pot in the corner. "I am sorry about the lawn. It is very lovely."

Marco sits down heavily in the chair. "I will let it grow, I suppose."

"Yes," the man says, and "well," and he turns to the technician, who has been waiting. "Please," he says.

Juliet is close to me, on the couch, but we are not touching. My eyes are in hers, and her eyes mine. There is a crash of tableware in the kitchen.

We are almost ready to go. Marco has paper envelopes.

"Some money, some papers," he tells us as we turn them over in our hands. "Some letters." Juliet takes mine and slips them into a bag.

"The war will help you both," he says. "Once you are over the border, you can establish yourselves as refugees." He looks old, and soft. "It will be very hard. After a time, you should be able to make your way anywhere."

"We will come back here," Juliet says. Marco smiles.

Marco looks to me, now. "I do not know what you can do," he says, "but caution, caution."

I nod, and it is very easy to tell him: "Do not worry, please. I do not think we can be too special." Juliet fits nicely against me. "We want too much to be us."