He escorts her upstairs. Three tiny bedrooms, tucked under the eaves; in the ceiling of the hallway is a hatch with a cord. Logan pulls it down and unfolds the rickety wooden stairs that lead to the attic.
They ascend into the cramped, low-ceilinged space. Standing a dozen deep, his mother’s paintings line nearly a whole wall. Logan kneels and draws the protective cloth aside.
It is like opening a door onto a garden. The paintings, of various sizes, depict a landscape of wildflowers, the colors burning with an almost supernatural brightness. Some show a background of mountains; others, the sea.
“Logan, these are beautiful.”
They are. Bound up in pain, they are, nevertheless, creations of stunning beauty. He takes the first one and brings it to Nessa, who holds it in her hands.
“It’s …” she begins, then stops. “I’m not even sure how to say it.”
“Unearthly?”
“I was going to say haunting.” She looks up. “And they’re all the same?”
“Different viewpoints, and her style improved over time. But the subjects are identical. The fields, the flowers, the ocean in the background.”
“There are hundreds.”
“Three hundred and seventy-two.”
“What do you think this place is? Was it someplace she’d been?”
“If it is, I never saw it. Neither did my father. No, I think the image came from inside her head someplace. Like the music.”
Nessa considers this. “A vision.”
“Perhaps that’s the word.”
She examines the painting again. A long silence passes.
“What became of her, Logan?”
He takes a long breath to steady himself. “It eventually got to be too much. The spells, the craziness. I was sixteen when my father had her committed. He visited every week, sometimes more, but he wouldn’t let me see her; I gather her state was rather bad. My junior year in college, she killed herself.”
For a moment, Nessa says nothing. And, really, what is there to say? Logan has never known. One minute there, in another one gone. All of it far in the past, nearly forty years ago.
“I’m sorry, Logan. That must have been very hard.”
“She left a note,” he adds. “It wasn’t very long.”
“What did it say?”
The rope, the chair, the silent building after everyone had gone to bed: this is where his imagination ends. He has never permitted it to go further, to envision the mortal moment.
“ ‘Let her rest.’ ”
They return to the inn. There, for the first time, in Nessa’s room, they make love. The act is unhurried; they conduct it without words. Her body, firm and smooth, is extraordinary to him, as wondrous a present as he has ever received. In the aftermath, they sleep.
Night is falling when Logan awakens to the sound of running water. The shower shuts off with a groan and Nessa emerges from the bathroom in a soft robe, a towel wrapping her hair. She sits on the edge of the bed.
“Hungry?” she asks, smiling.
“There aren’t a lot of choices. I thought we’d go to the restaurant downstairs.”
She kisses him on the mouth. The kiss is brisk, but she allows her face to linger close to his. “Go dress.”
She returns to the bathroom to finish her preparations. How swiftly life can change, Logan thinks. There was no one, now there is someone; he is not alone. Telling the story of his mother was, he realizes, his intention from the start; he has no other way of explaining who he is. That is what two people must give to each other, he thinks: the history of themselves. How else can we hope to be known?
He puts on his trousers and shirt to go next door to change for dinner, but as he enters the hallway he hears his name being called.
“Dr. Miles, Dr. Miles!”
The voice belongs to the hotel proprietor, a small, deeply tanned man with jet dark hair and a nervously formal manner, who bounds up the stairs. “There is a phone call for you,” he says with excitement. He pauses to catch his breath, waving air into his face. “Someone has been trying to reach you all day.”
“Really? Who?” As far as Logan is aware, nobody knows he’s here.
The proprietor glances at the door to Nessa’s room, then back again. “Yes, well,” he says, and clears his throat self-consciously, “they are on the phone now. They say it is quite urgent. Please, I will show you the way.”
Logan follows him downstairs, through the lobby, to a small room behind the check-in desk, where a large black telephone rests on an otherwise empty table.
“I will leave you to it,” the proprietor says with a curt bow.
Alone, Logan picks up the receiver. “This is Professor Miles.”
A woman’s voice, unknown to him, says, “Dr. Miles, please hold while I patch you through to Dr. Wilcox.”
Melville Wilcox is the on-site supervisor at First Colony. Such calls happen only rarely, and always with considerable advance planning; only by positioning a chain of airships across the Pacific, a tenuous and expensive arrangement, can a signal be relayed. Whatever Wilcox wants, it’s bound to be important. For a full minute, the line crackles with empty static; Logan has begun to think the call’s been lost when Wilcox comes on the line.