Valley of the Moon

As I said it, I was struck by a foreboding which I realized I’d been trying to fend off from the moment she arrived. But now it overtook me, filling me with trepidation.

“Mid-August,” she said, “practically late August. The sixteenth. Nineteen seventy-five—in case you’ve forgotten,” she added, looking me up and down. My trousers and suspenders. My boots and linen shirt.

I could sense everybody behind me stunned into silence, holding their breath. I finally said, “Well.”

Well was a workhorse of a word that could mean so many things. Well, nice to have met you. Well, this certainly has been an illuminating conversation. Well, a madwoman had found her way through the fog to Greengage.

“I don’t feel so good,” said Lux.

“What’s wrong?” asked Martha. She was using her clinical voice, firm and calming. It made you want to tell her everything.

“I’m dizzy,” said Lux. “I think I’m going to puke.”

She swayed and slid to the ground, the pig falling out of her arms. Then she went very still. Martha sank to her knees and pressed her fingers to the side of her neck, seeking out her pulse.

Dear God! Had I done this by forcing her back into the fog? Had I killed her?

“She just fainted,” said Martha, sitting back on her heels. “She’ll be fine. No thanks to you, Joseph. Asking her all those questions. Scaring her half to death. What were you thinking?”

Fancy, dumbstruck, said, “Nineteen seventy-five?”

Fancy’s comment triggered the crowd and everybody started speaking at once.

Martha ignored the hysterics.

“Let’s get her home,” she said to me.

I bent and lifted her into my arms. Lux. This stranger.

Her name meant light.

We were halfway to the house when Martha said, “It was a full moon yesterday, wasn’t it?”

During the four months we’d been trapped, it seemed that full moon days passed differently than all the rest of the days of the month. Just after midnight on the day of the full moon, time began to race by. Like a record on a gramophone played at ten times the normal speed, we sped up, too. Hours seemed to go by in minutes. The sensation lasted for twenty-four hours. It was only on the morning after the full moon that time resumed its natural pace.

“The earthquake happened on the day of the full moon,” she reminded me.

“What are you implying?”

She made the irritated face she always made when she hadn’t quite figured something out.

“Obviously she’s mentally unstable,” I said.

“That’s just it. She doesn’t seem unstable to me. Joseph—” She stopped. “What if she’s perfectly sane?”

“Put her in the wing. The back bedroom,” said Martha.

I laid Lux on the bed and she did not wake. Since she was unconscious, the two of us took the opportunity to survey her openly.

“What is the meaning of her shirt?” asked Martha.

“Something … sexual?” I guessed.

“Maybe. But why does she wear it?”

“Perhaps she likes drawing attention to herself.”

“How can she breathe in those trousers? That can’t be good for her reproductive organs. I wonder if she has any identification on her? I’m going to check her pockets,” Martha announced.

She approached the bed and slid her hand into Lux’s left dungaree pocket. Nothing. From her right pocket she pulled out a wrinkled-up sweets wrapper. Jolly Rancher. She smelled it.

“Cherry,” she said. “Admit it, Joseph.”

“What?”

“You’ve never seen any woman dressed like this.”

“Yes, because I do not make a habit of cavorting with the insane.”

“Oh, stop it. Something about her isn’t right, but it isn’t that she’s crazy. There is no mercantile on earth that sells clothes like this in 1906.”

“You’re saying she’s telling the truth?”

“I’m saying you have to open your mind. The unexplainable has already happened. We’ve been trapped by a fifty-foot wall of fog for four months. If we try to walk through it, we die. We must consider other”—she whispered, as if it hurt her to say it—“possibilities.”

I sat down in a chair.

“What are you going to do?” she demanded.

“I’m going to wait until she wakes up.”

“And then?” she pressed me.

“And then I’ll ask her some more questions,” I said, trying to sound as if I had a plan.

LUX (#ulink_35f6cad2-27ca-5828-b365-0f3c77a4206c)

The sheets smelled of sun. The man who’d made me kill poor innocent Wilbur stood looking out the window, his back to me. I coughed and he turned around.

“You’re awake,” he said.

Joseph, that was his name. He was about six feet tall, with dark hair and eerie light blue eyes. His face was tanned and a bit weathered; he was middle-aged, probably in his forties, but he was in good shape. He bristled with vitality.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You fainted.”

“I did?”