Sometimes when she was forward, watching for hazards, it was almost as if she were alone with the river that seemed to have a voice, and infinite wisdom. The voice murmured too softly to make out the words, but the rhythms were unmistakable: it was speech. One day she wept because she could not understand what it was saying to her. Ben’s hand on her shoulder roused her, and she stared at him blankly.

“Did you hear it too?” she asked, keeping her voice as soft as the river’s.

“What?” He sounded too brusque, too harsh, and she pulled away. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m just tired.”

“Molly, I heard nothing! And you heard nothing! We’re pulling in to rest, stretch our legs. You get some tea.”

“All right,” she said, and started around him. But then she paused. “What was it we heard, Ben? It isn’t the river, is it?”

“I told you I heard nothing!” He turned away from her and stood stiffly in the prow of the boat to guide the men at the oars in to shore.

When they turned the last curve in the river and came upon the familiar fields, they had been away from their brothers and sisters for forty-nine days. Thomas and Jed were both drugged into insensibility. The others rowed numbly, starved, dull-eyed, obeying a command stronger than the body’s command to stop. When small boats approached and hands took the lines and towed them to the dock, they continued to stare ahead, not believing yet, still in a recurring dream where this had happened repeatedly.

Molly was pulled to her feet and led ashore. She stared at her sisters, who were strangers to her. And this too was a recurring dream, a nightmare. She swayed, and was grateful for the blackness that descended on her.

The sunshine was soft in the room when Molly opened her eyes; it was very early morning and the air was cool and fresh. There were flowers everywhere. Asters and chrysanthemums, purples, yellows, creamy whites. There were dahlias the size of dinner plates, shocking pink, scarlet. The bed was absolutely still, no water lapping about it, no rocking motions. No odors of sweat and moldy clothing. She felt clean and warm and dry.

“I thought I heard you,” someone said.

Molly looked at the other side of the bed. Miri, or Meg, or . . . She couldn’t tell which one.

“Martha has gone for your breakfast,” the girl said.

Miriam joined them and sat on the edge of Molly’s bed. “How are you now?”

“I’m all right. I’ll get up.”

“No, of course you won’t get up. Breakfast first, then a rubdown and a manicure, and anything else we can think of that will make you more comfortable, and then if you don’t fall asleep again, and if you still want to get up, then you may.” Miriam laughed gently at her as Molly started to rise and sank back down again.

“You’ve been sleeping for two days,” said Miri, or Meg, or whoever it was. “Barry’s been here four times to check on you. He said you need to sleep all you can, and eat all you can.”

There were dim memories of rousing, of drinking broth, of being bathed, but the memories refused to come into sharp focus.

“Are the others all right?” she asked.

“They’re all fine,” Miriam said soothingly.

“Thomas?”

“He’s in the hospital, but he’ll be fine too.”

For many days they babied her; her blistered hands healed and her back stopped aching, and she regained some of the weight she had lost.

But she had changed, she thought, studying herself in the large mirror at the end of the room. Of course, she was still thin and gaunt. She looked at Miri’s smooth face, and knew the difference lay deeper than that. Miri looked empty. When the animation faded, when she was no longer laughing or talking, there was nothing there. Her face became a mask that hid nothing.

“We’ll never let you out of sight again!” Martha whispered, coming up behind her. The others echoed it vehemently.

“I thought of you every day, almost every minute,” Miri said.

“And we all thought of you together each evening after dinner. We just sat here in a circle on the mat and thought of you,” Melissa said.

“Especially when it got so long,” Miri said in a whisper. “We were so afraid. We kept calling you and calling you, silently, but all of us together. Calling you home over and over.”

“I heard you,” Molly said. Her voice sounded almost harsh. She saw Miriam shake her head at the sisters, and they fell silent. “We all heard you calling. You brought us home,” Molly said, softening her voice with an effort.

They hadn’t asked her anything about the trip, about Washington, about her sketchbooks, which they had unpacked and must have looked at. Several times she had started to speak of the river, the ruins, and each time she had failed. There was no way she could make them understand. Presently she would have to get to work on the sketches, using them as guides and drawing in detail what she had seen, what it had been like from start to finish. But she didn’t want to speak of it. Instead they talked of the valley and what had happened in the seven weeks of Molly’s absence. Nothing, she thought. Nothing at all. Everything was exactly as it always had been.

The sisters had been excused from work in order to speed Molly’s recovery. They chatted and gossiped and caught up on mending and took walks and read together, and as Molly’s strength returned, they played together on the mat in the middle of the room. Molly took no part in their play. Toward the end of the week, when they dragged the mat out and opened it, Miriam poured small glasses of amber wine and they toasted Molly and drew her to the mat with them. Her head was spinning pleasantly and she looked at Miriam, who smiled at her.

How beautiful the sisters are, she thought, how silky their hair, and smooth their skin; each body was unmarred, flawless.

“You’ve been away so long,” Miriam whispered.

“Something’s still down there on the river,” Molly said foolishly, wanting to weep.

“Bring it home, darling. Reach out and bring back all the parts of you.”

And slowly she reached out for the other part of herself, the part that had watched and listened and had brought her peace. That was the part that had built the clear hard wall, she thought distantly. The wall had been built to protect her, and now she was tearing it down again.

She felt she was speeding down the river, flying over the water, now swirling brown and muddy and dangerous, now smooth and deep blue-green and inviting, now white foam as it shattered over rocks . . . She sped down the river and tried to find that other self, to submerge it and become whole again with her sisters . . . Over her the trees murmured and beneath her the water whispered back, and she was between them, not touching either, and she knew that when she found that other self she would have to kill it, to destroy it totally, or the whispers would never go away. And she thought of the peace she had found, and the visions she had seen.

Not yet! she cried silently, and stopped her race down the river, and was once more in the room with her sisters. Not yet, she thought again, quietly. She opened her eyes and smiled at Miriam, who was watching her anxiously.

“Is it all right now?” Miriam asked.

“Everything is fine,” Molly said, and somewhere she thought she could hear that other voice murmur softly before it faded away. She reached out and put her arms about Miriam’s body and drew her down to the mat and stroked her back, her hip, her thigh. “Everything is fine,” she whispered again.

Later, when the others slept, she stood shivering by the window and looked out at the valley. Autumn was very early. Each year it came a little earlier than the previous year. But it was warm in the large room; her chill was not caused by the season or the night air. She thought of the mat play and tears stood in her eyes. The sisters hadn’t changed. The valley was unchanged. And yet everything was different. She knew something had died. Something else had come alive, and it frightened her and isolated her in a way that distance and the river had not been able to do.