She danced with Barry, then with Meg and Justin, then with Miriam and Clark, and again with Meg and Melissa and two of the Jeremy brothers; not with Jed, though, who stood against the wall and watched his brothers anxiously. He still wore his own bracelet. The other brothers had an assortment of bracelets on their wrists. Poor Jed, Molly thought, and almost wished she had given hers to him.

She sat with Martha and Curtis and ate a minced-beef sandwich and drank more of the amber wine that made her head swim delightfully. Then she danced with one of the Julie sisters, who was looking solemn now as the hour grew late. Presently the Lawrence brothers would claim them for the rest of the night.

The music changed. One of the Lawrence brothers claimed the girl Molly had danced with; the girl looked at him with a timid smile that appeared, vanished, appeared again. He danced her away.

Molly felt a tap on her arm, and turned to face Ben. He was unsmiling. He held out his arm for her and they danced, not speaking, neither of them smiling. He danced her to the table, where they stopped and he handed her a small glass of wine. Silently they drank, and then walked together from the auditorium. Molly caught a glimpse of Miriam’s face as they left. Defiantly she held her back stiffer, her head higher, and went out into the cold night with Ben.

Chapter 15

“I would like to sit down by the river for a little while,” she said. “Are you cold?” Ben asked, and when she said yes, he got cloaks for them both.

Molly watched the pale water, changing, always changing, and always the same, and she could feel him near, not touching, not speaking. Thin clouds chased across the face of the swelling moon. Soon it would be full, the harvest moon, the end of Indian summer. The man was so cleanly outlined, so unambiguous, she thought. A misshapen bowl, like an artifact made by inexpert hands that would improve with practice.

The moon in the river moved, separated into long shiny ropes that coiled, slid apart, came together, formed a wide band of luminous water that looked solid, then broke up again. Against the shore the voice of the river was gentle, secretive.

“Are you cold?” Ben asked again. His face was pale in the moonlight, his eyebrows darker than in daylight, straight, heavy. He could have been scowling at her; it was hard to tell. She shook her head, and he turned toward the river again.

The river was alive, she thought, and just when you thought you knew it, it changed and showed another face, another mood. Tonight it was beguiling, full of promise, and even knowing the promises to be false, she could hear the voice whispering to her persuasively, could sense the pull of the river.

And Ben thought of the river, swollen in floodtide, flashing bright over gravel, over rocks, breaking up into foam against boulders. He saw again the small fire on the bank, the figure of the girl standing there silhouetted against the gleaming water while the brothers pulled the boat up the hill.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come today,” she said suddenly in a small voice. “I got almost to your door, and then didn’t come the rest of the way. I don’t know why.”

There was a shout of laughter from the auditorium, and he wished he and Molly had walked farther up the river before stopping. A cloud covered the face of the moon and the river turned black, and only its voice was there, and the peculiar smell of the fresh water.

“Are you cold?” he asked again, as if the moonlight had held warmth that now was gone.

She moved closer to him. “Coming home,” she said softly, dreamily, “I kept hearing the river talk to me, and the trees, and the clouds. I suppose it was fatigue and hunger, but I really heard them, only I couldn’t understand the words most of the time. Did you hear them, Ben?”

He shook his head, and although she couldn’t see him now with the cloud over the face of the moon, she knew he was denying the voices. She sighed.

“What would happen if you had an idea, something you wanted to work out alone?” she asked after a moment.

Ben shifted uneasily. “It happens,” he said carefully. “We discuss it and usually, unless there’s a good reason, a shortage of equipment, or supplies, something like that, whoever has the idea goes ahead with it.”

Now the cloud had freed the moon; the light seemed brighter after the brief darkness. “What if the others didn’t see the value of the idea?” Molly asked.

“Then it would have no value, and no one would want to waste time on it.”

“But what if it was something you couldn’t explain exactly, something you couldn’t put into words?”

“What is the real question, Molly?” Ben asked, turning to face her. Her face was as pale as the moon, with deep shadows for eyes, her mouth black, not smiling. She looked up at him, and the moon was reflected in her eyes, and she seemed somehow luminous, as if the light came from within her, and he realized that Molly was beautiful. He never had seen it before and now it shocked him that the thought formed, forced itself on him.

Molly stood up suddenly. “I’ll show you,” she said. “In my room.”

They walked back to the hospital side by side, not touching, and Ben thought: of course, the Miriam sisters were all beautiful, most of the sisters were. Just as most of the brothers were handsome. It was a given. And it was meaningless.

She pulled a blind down on the window in her little room and threw her cloak on the chair behind her worktable. Then she pulled out drawings, sorting through them. Finally she handed one to him.

It was a woman, no one he knew, but vaguely familiar. Sara, he realized; changed, but Sara. Beside her, mirrors reached into infinity, and in each mirror was another woman, each Sara, but none exactly like her. Here a scowl tightened the mouth, there a wide smile, another was laughing, another had graying hair, wrinkles . . . He looked at Molly in bewilderment.

She handed him another drawing. There was a tree, nothing more. A tree rising out of a solid rock. An impossible thing and he felt unsettled by it.

Another drawing. She thrust it at him. A tiny boat on a vast sea that filled the paper from margin to margin. There was a solitary figure in the boat, so small it was insignificant, impossible to identify.

He felt upset by the drawings. He looked at Molly on the other side of the drawing table; she was staring at him intently. She looked feverish, her cheeks flushed, her eyes too bright.

“I need help, Ben,” she said, her voice low and compelling. “You have to help me.”

“What?”

“Ben, I have to do those things in paints. I don’t know why, but I have to. And others. It won’t work with pencil, or pen and ink. I need color and light! Please!”

She was weeping. Ben stared at her in surprise. This was her secret then? She wanted to paint? He suppressed an urge to smile at her, as if she were a child pleading for what was already hers.

She read his expression and sat down and put her head back against the cloak. She closed her eyes. “Miriam understands, and so do my sisters,” she said tiredly, and now the high color in her cheeks faded and she looked very young and weary. “They won’t let me do it.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with painting?”

“I . . . they don’t like the way the pictures make them feel. They think it’s dangerous. Miriam thinks so. The others will too.”

Ben looked at the tiny boat in the endless ocean. “But you don’t have to paint this one, do you? Can’t you do something else?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were still closed. “If someone had a bad heart, would you treat his ear because it was easier?” Now she looked at him, and there was no mockery at all in her face.

“Have you talked to Miriam?”

“She took some drawings I did of the brothers on the trip. She didn’t like them. She kept them. I don’t have to talk to her, or the others. I know what they will say. I bring them only pain anymore.” She thought of them with the Clark brothers on the mat, laughing, sipping the amber wine, caressing the smooth boy/man bodies. It wasn’t group sex, she thought suddenly. It was male and female broken up into parts, just as the moon broke on the smooth river. The sisters made one organism, female; the Clark brothers made up one organism, male, and when they embraced, the female organism would not be completely satisfied because it was not whole that night. One part of its body was missing, had been missing for a long time. And the missing part, like an amputated limb, caused phantom pain.