The second is that she knows exactly what he means.
“Sophie.”
“Yes.”
“Sophie-Sophie-Sophie.”
Trying to get the reality of it. Trying to pound it home like a nail.
A smile lights her face and enriches her mouth. Jack thinks of how it
would be to kiss that mouth, and his knees feel weak. All at once he is
fourteen again, and wondering if he dares give his date a peck good-
night after he walks her home.
“Yes-yes-yes,” she says, the smile strengthening. And then: “Have you
got it yet? Do you understand that you’re here and how you got here?”
Above and around him, billows of gauzy white cloth flap and sigh like
living breath. Half a dozen conflicting drafts gently touch his face and
make him aware that he carried a coat of sweat from the other world,
and that it stinks. He arms it off his brow and cheeks in quick gestures,
not wanting to lose sight of her for longer than a moment at a time.
They are in a tent of some kind. It’s huge—many-chambered—and
Jack thinks briefly of the pavilion in which the Queen of the Territo-
ries, his mother’s Twinner, lay dying. That place had been rich with
many colors, filled with many rooms, redolent of incense and sorrow
(for the Queen’s death had seemed inevitable, sure—only a matter of
time). This one is ramshackle and ragged. The walls and the ceiling are
full of holes, and where the white material remains whole, it’s so thin
that Jack can actually see the slope of land outside, and the trees that
dress it. Rags flutter from the edges of some of the holes when the wind
blows. Directly over his head he can see a shadowy maroon shape. Some
sort of cross.
“Jack, do you understand how you—”
“Yes. I flipped.” Although that isn’t the word that comes out of his
mouth. The literal meaning of the word that comes out seems to be hori-
zon road. “And it seems that I sucked a fair number of Spiegleman’s ac-
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cessories with me.” He bends and picks up a flat stone with a flower
carved on it. “I believe that in my world, this was a Georgia O’Keeffe
print. And that—” He points to a blackened, fireless torch leaning
against one of the pavilion’s fragile walls. “I think that was a—” But
there are no words for it in this world, and what comes out of his mouth
sounds as ugly as a curse in German: “—halogen lamp.”
She frowns. “Hal-do-jen . . . limp? Lemp?”
He feels his numb lips rise in a little grin. “Never mind.”
“But you are all right.”
He understands that she needs him to be all right, and so he’ll say that
he is, but he’s not. He is sick and glad to be sick. He is one lovestruck
daddy, and wouldn’t have it any other way. If you discount how he felt
about his mother—a very different kind of love, despite what the
Freudians might think—it’s the first time for him. Oh, he certainly
thought he had been in and out of love, but that was before today. Before
the cool blue of her eyes, her smile, and even the way the shadows
thrown by the decaying tent fleet across her face like schools of fish. At
this moment he would try to fly off a mountain for her if she asked, or
walk through a forest fire, or bring her polar ice to cool her tea, and
those things do not constitute being all right.
But she needs him to be.
Tyler needs him to be.
I am a coppiceman, he thinks. At first the concept seems insubstantial
compared to her beauty—to her simple reality— but then it begins to
take hold. As it always has. What else brought him here, after all?
Brought him against his will and all his best intentions?
“Jack?”
“Yes, I’m all right. I’ve flipped before.” But never into the presence of
such beauty, he thinks. That’s the problem. You’re the problem, my lady.
“Yes. To come and go is your talent. One of your talents. So I have
been told.”
“By whom?”
“Shortly,” she says. “Shortly. There’s a great deal to do, and yet I
think I need a moment. You . . . rather take my breath away.”
Jack is fiercely glad to know it. He sees he is still holding her hand,
and he kisses it, as Judy kissed his hands in the world on the other side
of the wall from this one, and when he does, he sees the fine mesh of
bandage on the tips of three of her fingers. He wishes he dared to take
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her in his arms, but she daunts him: her beauty and her presence. She is
slightly taller than Judy—a matter of two inches, surely no more—and
her hair is lighter, the golden shade of unrefined honey spilling from a
broken comb. She is wearing a simple cotton robe, white trimmed with
a blue that matches her eyes. The narrow V-neck frames her throat. The
hem falls to just below her knees. Her legs are bare but she’s wearing a
silver anklet on one of them, so slim it’s almost invisible. She is fuller-
breasted than Judy, her hips a bit wider. Sisters, you might think, except
that they have the same spray of freckles across the nose and the same
white line of scar across the back of the left hand. Different mishaps
caused that scar, Jack has no doubt, but he also has no doubt that those
mishaps occurred at the same hour of the same day.
“You’re her Twinner. Judy Marshall’s Twinner.” Only the word that
comes out of his mouth isn’t Twinner; incredibly, dopily, it seems to be
harp. Later he will think of how the strings of a harp lie close together,
only a finger’s touch apart, and he will decide that word isn’t so foolish
after all.
She looks down, her mouth drooping, then raises her head again and
tries to smile. “Judy. On the other side of the wall. When we were chil-
dren, Jack, we spoke together often. Even when we grew up, although
then we spoke in each other’s dreams.” He is alarmed to see tears form-