VACANCY & ARIEL

“That’s not a judgment I can make so quickly. But I’m of a mind to think you’re sane.” Her eyes drifted toward the stack of notebooks on the nightstand. “What you said about the project and the crash. Ah’raelle’s transformation. Her memory loss and Isha tracking her down to California. It’s the plot of my second book. I thought I’d dreamed it.” She relaxed from her rigorous pose and settled beside me, laid a hand on my cheek, suddenly ultra-feminine, holding me with her eyes. “Let’s not think about it. I’ll deal with it later.”

“How can you not think about it? Jesus! If somebody told me what I just told you, I’d…”

“The future can wait, but the present cannot wait.” A smile came slowly to her lips. “If I’m the woman you believe I am, how can you deny me?”

I MUST NEGLECT the story of how we were with one another, of the accommodations we reached, the mutualities we achieved, and the unmemorable civil wedding that followed. I would like to show you, to demonstrate with scene and line the exact proportions of the contentment we enclosed in our arms; but that is a common tale whose minutiae would distract from the less common one I am compelled to relate. Suffice it to say that it seemed we did have a connection. We became lovers with none of the usual falterings and tentativeness. It was as if we were lovers who had been apart awhile and needed only to reconnect in order to resurrect the institutions of our relationship. If someone had told me that I could be happy with a woman given to fits of temper and days-long periods during which she became cold and distant, a woman given to barking orders at me, I would have laughed at the prospect and said, “Not my type.” But Ariel was exactly my type. It appeared there were places in me into which the spikes of her behaviors fit perfectly and, conversely, she was tolerant of my shifting moods which—I came to understand—were not dissimilar in their intensity and variety from her own.

I could not persuade Ariel to leave California. She was committed to uncovering her past and if she had to confront mortal danger in the process, that’s what she would do. I moved in with her, bought the cabin in which she lived and a dozen acres around it, and spent a small fortune in having it enlarged and made secure. Electrified windows. Motion detectors in the surrounding trees—the cabin was situated in the midst of an evergreen forest, grand old-growth firs mixed in with pine and spruce. I purchased a small armory of rifles and handguns, but Ariel refused to let me keep any of them, limiting our defenses to a tranquilizer rifle. She did not want to kill Isha. Though he might be unable to communicate with her, to tell her about her old life, dead he would be useless.