He held it out.

“Thank you,” I managed, and headed for the door.

At the wharf, the lights were still out from my last visit. The surface of the river was choppy in the wind. I watched it awhile. The riverbank is the one place in the jungle where an animal is visible from the air and the ground.

The grate in the pavement was hard to lift one-handed, and I got a bruise on my wrist when it fell the first time I tried. It seemed appropriate. This should not be too easy and painless.

Turning on the lights was like stepping out into the open. “My name,” I said to the wind, to the river rolling to the sea, “is Frances Lorien van de Oest. I live here.”

I would spend the rest of my life by the river, being visible.

I got to the plant just as the shift was leaving. Magyar was the last out. Maybe she had been waiting as long as she could, giving me extra time, or putting off the possibility that I might not be there. Her shoulders were hunched against the wind, her face pinched and worried. Her head turned this way and that, searching.

I stepped into the light. “Magyar.”

When she saw me she smiled. It was like opening the door of a furnace: a blast of light, fire, warmth. For me. This woman’s eyes were bright and lively, full of herself and her vision of me. I could see myself there, if I looked.

I held out my hands. She took them, then lifted my left hand to the light. “What happened?”

“I had the false PIDA removed.” For a while, I would be nobody but the Lore I had made. We stood in the street, wind howling around us, Magyar’s hair streaming behind her. I imagined her in my kitchen in the morning, skin warm and smelling of sleep, that beautiful hair tucked behind her ears, making coffee, talking of this and that. “Come home with me.”

“Yes.”

We walked hand in hand down the street. When I met my family again, I would introduce them to both of us.

Author’s Note

There is a disturbing tendency among readers—particularly critics—to assume that any woman who writes about abuse, no matter how peripherally, must be speaking from her own experience. This is, in Joanna Russ’s terms, a denial of the writer’s imagination. Should anyone be tempted to assume otherwise, let me be explicit: Slow River is fiction, not autobiography. I made it up.