And then, finally, Gaines’s mind slowed down too. Perhaps it was the whiskey, perhaps the sheer mental and physical exhaustion of what had occurred, but he knew that if he lay down, he would sleep, and he wanted to sleep so very badly.

Gaines left the half-empty glass, the melting ice cubes, the bottle of bourbon. He went through to his room, shuffled off his clothes, and collapsed into bed. He breathed deeply—once, twice—and then he was gone, his thoughts extinguished like lights.

And within moments, they came. Both of them.

The girl comes first and then her mother, both Nancy and Judith Denton, and they stand at the door of his room, a pale light within each of them, and they beckon him. They don’t speak, but everything they wish to communicate is in their eyes, their expressions, their outstretched hands.

He does not wish to go, but he knows he has to.

He follows them, seems to pass right through them, and yet when he steps beyond the threshold of the door, they are still ahead of him.

The rich cloying decay of rank vegetation fills his nostrils.

Once again, as if this sound is now an inherent and integral part of his very being, he can hear the distant chatter of CH-47s, the crack and whip and drumroll of the 105 howitzers and the Vulcans, behind that Charlie’s 51 cals and the 82mm mortars. But it is all so very distant this time, so deeply lost in the sound of his own heart, his own breathing, the rush of blood though his veins and arteries, that he has to strain to hear it. He wonders if in fact those sounds do not come from without, but from within.

They fold into the vegetation, and the jungle swallows them, and he is swallowed also, and he understands that he has vanished from view and that no one but Nancy and Judith can see him, and no one will ever find them.

He does not wish to be here.

He calls out to them, asks them to slow down, to stop, to tell him what they can.

Who killed you, Nancy?

Was it Michael?

Was it Matthias?

What happened to you all those years ago?

He hears nothing now but the sweep of foliage as they flit through it—appearing, disappearing, the indistinct trace of laughter as they vanish ahead of him once more.

Eventually he tires. He cannot follow them any more. He sits on the damp earth, the moisture seeping through the seat and legs of his pants almost immediately. He smells blood. He knows it is blood, and he feels the warmth of the blood as it seeps up through the dirt, through the roots and undergrowth, and yet he does not care anymore. Perhaps this is all the blood that he has seen spilled in his life, and wherever he hesitates, wherever he pauses, it will seek him out and remind him of his past.

Michael is there. He sits facing Gaines, cross-legged, his head and his hands attached to his body, and he speaks so quietly that Gaines cannot understand a word he is saying.

Louder, he says. Speak louder, Michael.

But Michael just goes on and on, his voice like a whisper, incessant, too fast to be anything other than a torrent of unintelligible words, and Gaines feels the frustration and desperation of this thing in every pore of his being.

And then he hears a single word. Clear, precise, defined, unmistakable.

Goodbye.

A word from reality that has somehow found its way into his dreams.

And he knows. Even in sleep, he knows.

He knows the time has finally come.

John Gaines opened his eyes and lay there for some time. How long, he did not know. It could have been merely a handful of minutes, perhaps half an hour, maybe more.

He knew what had happened, and yet he struggled to absorb it.

Gaines had not imagined it would be this way.

He had imagined a hundred different scenarios, but not this one.

He had believed he would be there, always there, that he would be the last one to whom she spoke, that she would hold his hand, that there would be final words exchanged, a final gentle admonishment to marry, to raise up a family, to be a father. Be like your father, she would say, if in that way alone, be like your father.

But not this.

Not waking in the cool half-light of nascent dawn with a deep and profound certainty that this had finally happened, and without him.

He rose slowly. He dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He glanced at the clock. It was 4:15 a.m.

He stood at the window for a while. There was a flicker of light in the back field behind the house, perhaps a hundred or so yards away. He paid it no mind. His mind was elsewhere, perhaps looking for her, trying to sense her presence, trying to register some vague awareness that she was still with him.

There was nothing.

Gaines stepped into the bathroom and sluiced his face with cold water. He held the towel against his skin for a long time, and he felt the emotion rising in his chest.

He set down the towel, turned back, and left his room.

He stopped at her door, and with his fingers upon the handle, he paused for some moments. There was silence everywhere, even within, everything but his heart, but it did not race. It did not fight within his chest. It merely swelled with something indefinably sad and powerful and deep.

He opened the door.

The scent of lavender was in the room. He was aware of that. He hesitated in the doorway, and then he closed the door behind him, almost as if to exclude the rest of the world from this very private moment.

He did not know how it was to be irretrievably alone, and yet now he was.

It was just him—John Gaines—and no one else.

He stepped closer to the bed, and he could see her. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be sleeping, and yet there was no sound at all. The blankets that covered her did not gently rise and fall. The lids did not flicker. She did not murmur words known only to her dream self. She was gone. Her body was there, but she had left.

Gaines stepped closer, sat on the edge of the bed, took her hand, and held it.

Some slight vestige of warmth remained in her skin, and yet Gaines was certain that, whatever élan or soul or spirit had occupied this body, it had left. She looked like Alice Gaines, and yet she was not Alice Gaines. This was Alice Gaines’s body, but that was all it was. Alice herself was not present.

For some reason Gaines felt the need to kneel. He did so, there at the side of the bed, and he placed his hands together, steepled his fingers, rested his face on the edge of the mattress, his cheek to the blanket, his eyes directed toward his mother’s face.

Why had he not seen this coming? Was it always meant to be this way? That he would not have any prediction at all? That there would be no sudden and noticeable decline? That she would fight to go on living even as she knew the end had come?

He wanted to cry, but he could not. Not now. Not here.

He needed to call Bob Thurston. He needed to deal with the official aspects of her death.

He rose to his feet once more. He looked down at her, leaned to kiss her forehead, to whisper I love you, and then he hesitated, closed his eyes, felt the salt sting of tears, the taut knot of grief in his chest, his throat, and he uttered a single, whispered word—“Goodbye”—and turned once more to leave the room.

Standing in the hallway, the receiver in his hand, he felt awkward about waking Thurston, but there was no choice.

The phone was answered within moments, and Bob Thurston’s slurred voice greeted him.

All Gaines said was, “Bob, it’s John . . .”

Thurston replied, “I’ll be there right away.”

He was there right away, or so it seemed, but when Gaines glanced at the clock, it was nearing five thirty a.m. More than an hour had passed, though had he been asked, he would have said that he’d stepped across the threshold of his mother’s room no more than ten minutes earlier.