The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

there was.
    The old lady sniffed. “Didn’t I just say you’ll never get any two people to remember anything the same?” she asked.
    “Can I talk to her? To Lettie?”
    “She’s sleeping,” said Lettie’s mother. “She’s healing. She’s not talking yet.”
    “Not until she’s all done with where she is,” said Lettie’s grandmother, gesturing, but I could not tell if she was pointing to the duck pond or to the sky.
    “When will that be?”
    “When she’s good and ready,” said the old woman, as her daughter said, “Soon.”
    “Well,” I said. “If she brought me here to look at me, let her look at me,” and even as I said it I knew that it had already happened. How long had I been sitting on that bench, staring into the pond? As I had been remembering her, she had been examining me. “Oh. She did already, didn’t she?”
    “Yes, dear.”
    “And did I pass?”
    The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
    I put the empty cup and plate down on the ground.
    Ginnie Hempstock said, “I think you’re doing better than you were the last time we saw you. You’re growing a new heart, for a start.”
    In my memory she was a mountain, this woman, and I had sobbed and shivered on her bosom. Now she was smaller than I was, and I could not imagine her comforting me, not in that way.
    The moon was full, in the sky above the pond. I could not for the life of me remember what phase the moon had been in the last time I had noticed it. I could not actually remember the last time I had done more than glance at the moon.
    “So what will happen now?”
    “Same thing as happens every other time you’ve come here,” said the old woman. “You go home.”
    “I don’t know where that is, anymore,” I told them.
    “You always say that,” said Ginnie.
    In my head Lettie Hempstock was still a full head taller than I was. She was eleven, after all. I wondered what I would see—who I would see—if she stood before me now.
    The moon in the duck pond was full as well, and I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who had gone fishing in a lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung in the sky.
    And, of course, it always is.
    I got up and walked a few steps to the edge of the pond. “Lettie,” I said, aloud, trying to ignore the two women behind me. “Thank you for saving my life.”
    “She should never’ve taken you with her in the first place, when she went off to find the start of it all,” sniffed Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Nothing to stop her sorting it all out on her own. Didn’t need to take you along for company, silly thing. Well, that’ll learn her for next time.”
    I turned and looked at Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Do you really remember when the moon was made?” I asked.
    “I remember lots of things,” she said.
    “Will I come back here again?” I asked.
    “That’s not for you to know,” said the old woman.
    “Get along now,” said Ginnie Hempstock, gently. “There’s people who are wondering where you’ve got to.”
    And when she mentioned them, I realized, with an awkward horror, that my sister, her husband, her children, all the well-wishers and mourners and visitors would be puzzling over what had become of me. Still, if there was a day that they would find my absent ways easy to forgive, it was today.
    It had been a long day and a hard one. I was glad that it was over.
    I said, “I hope that I haven’t been a bother.”
    “No, dear,” said the old woman. “No bother at all.”
    I heard a cat meow. A moment later, it sauntered out of the shadows and into a patch of bright moonlight. It approached me confidently, pushed its head against my shoe.
    I crouched beside it and scratched its forehead, stroked its back. It was a beautiful cat, black, or so I imagined, the moonlight having swallowed the color of things. It had a white spot over one ear.
    I said, “I used to have a cat like this. I called her Ocean. She was beautiful. I don’t actually remember what happened to her.”
    “You brought her back to us,” said Ginnie Hempstock. She touched my shoulder with her hand, squeezing it for a heartbeat; she touched my cheek with her fingertips, as if I were a small child, or a lover, and then she walked away, back into the night.
    I