Sole Survivor

on a gently rising hillside shaded by a scattering of stone pines and Indian laurels. Squirrels scampered across the grass on milder days than this, and rabbits came out at twilight. He believed that his three treasured women would have preferred this to the hard scape of a mausoleum, where there would not be the sound of wind-stirred trees on breezy evenings.
        Far beyond the second of the two burial services, he parked at the curb, switched off the engine, and got out of the Honda. He stood beside the car in the hundred-degree heat, gathering his courage.
        When he started up the gentle slope, he didn't look toward their graves. If he were to see the site from a distance, the approach to it would be daunting, and he would turn back. Even after an entire year, each visit was as disturbing to him as if he had come here to view not their burial plots but their battered bodies in a morgue. Wondering how many years would pass before his pain diminished, he ascended the rise with his head down, eyes on the ground, slump-shouldered in the heat, like an old dray horse following a long-familiar route, going home.
        Consequently, he didn't see the woman at the graves until he was only ten or fifteen feet from her. Surprised, he halted.
        She stood just out of the sun, in pine shadows. Her back was half to him. With a Polaroid camera, she was snapping photographs of the flush-set markers.
        “Who're you?” he asked.
        She didn't hear him, perhaps because he had spoken softly, perhaps because she was so intent upon her photography.
        Stepping closer, he said, “What're you doing?”
        Startled, she turned to face him.
        Petite but athletic-looking, about five feet two, she had an immediate impact far greater than her size or her appearance could explain, as though she were clothed not merely in blue jeans and a yellow cotton blouse but in some powerful magnetic field that bent the world to her. Skin the shade of milk chocolate. Huge eyes as dark as the silt at the bottom of a cup of Armenian espresso, harder to read than the portents in tea leaves, with a distinct almond shape suggesting a touch of Asian blood in the family line. Hair not Afro-kinky or in cornrows but feather-cut, thick and naturally straight and so glossy black that it almost looked blue, which seemed Asian too. Her bone structure was all out of Africa: smooth broad brow, high cheekbones, finely carved but powerful, proud but beautiful. She was maybe five years older than Joe, in her early forties, but a quality of innocence in her knowing eyes and a faint aspect of childlike vulnerability in her otherwise strong face made her seem younger than he was.
        “Who are you, what're you doing?” he repeated.
        Lips parted as if to speak, speechless with surprise, she gazed at him as though he were an apparition. She raised one hand to his face and touched his cheek, and Joe did not flinch from her.
        At first he thought he saw amazement in her eyes. The extreme tenderness of her touch caused him to look again, and he realized that what he saw was not wonderment but sadness and pity.
        “I'm not ready to talk to you yet.” Her soft voice was musical
        “Why're you taking pictures… why pictures of their graves?”
        Clutching the camera with two hands, she said, “Soon. I'll be back when it's time. Don't despair. You'll see, like the others.”
        An almost supernatural quality to the moment half convinced Joe that she was an apparition, that her touch had been so achingly gentle precisely because it was barely real, an ectoplasmic caress.
        The woman herself, however, was too powerfully present to be a ghost or a heatstroke illusion. Diminutive but dynamic. More real than anything in the day. More real than sky and trees and August sun, than granite and bronze. She had such a compelling presence that she seemed to be coming at him though she was standing still, loomed over him though she was ten inches shorter than he. She was more brightly lighted in the pine shadows than he was in the direct glare of the sun.
        “How are you coping?” she asked.
        Disoriented, he answered only by shaking his head.
        “Not well,” she whispered.
        Joe looked past her, down at the granite and bronze markers. As if from very far away, he heard himself say, “Lost forever,” speaking as much about himself as about his wife and