“Bill? Is that really you?”
“Course.”
“Bill,” she said again, and took a glad step toward him. Her legs betrayed her and she
thought she would fall, fall right through him — he was, after all, a ghost — but he caught her in arms as strong and as competent as those that had carried her over the threshold of the house that she had shared only with Alden in these latter years. He supported her, and a moment later she felt the cap pulled firmly onto her head.
“Is it really you?” she asked again, looking up into his face, at the crow’s-feet around his eyes which hadn’t sunk deep yet, at the spill of snow on the shoulders of his checked hunting jacket, at his lively brown hair.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s all of us.”
He half-turned with her and she saw the others coming out of the snow that the wind
drove across the Reach in the gathering darkness. A cry, half joy, half fear, came from her mouth as she saw Madeline Stoddard, Hattie’s mother, in a blue dress that swung in the wind like a bell, and holding her hand was Hattie’s dad, not a mouldering skeleton somewhere on the bottom with the Dancer, but whole and young. And there, behind those two —
“Annabelle!” she cried. “Annabelle Frane, is it you?”
It was Annabelle; even in this snowy gloom Stella recognized the yellow dress Annabelle had worn to Stella’s own wedding, and as she struggled toward her dead friend, holding Bill’s arm, she thought that she could smell roses.
‘ ‘Annabelle!’
“We’re almost there now, dear,” Annabelle said, taking her other arm. The yellow dress, which had been considered Daring in its day (but, to Annabelle’s credit and to everyone else’s relief, not quite a Scandal), left her shoulders bare, but Annabelle did not seem to feel the cold.
Her hair, a soft, dark auburn, blew long in the wind. “Only a little further.”
She took Stella’s other arm and they moved forward again. Other figures came out of the
snowy night (for it was night now). Stella recognized many of them, but not all. Tommy Frane had joined Annabelle; Big George Havelock, who had died a dog’s death in the woods, walked behind Bill; there was the fellow who had kept the lighthouse on the Head for most of twenty years and who used to come over to the island during the cribbage tournament Freddy Dinsmore held every February — Stella could almost but not quite remember his name. And there was Freddy himself! Walking off to one side of Freddy, by himself and looking bewildered, was Russell Bowie.
“Look, Stella,” Bill said, and she saw black rising out of the gloom like the splintered prows of many ships. It was not ships, it was split and fissured rock. They had reached the Head.
They had crossed the Reach.
She heard voices, but was not sure they actually spoke:
Take my hand, Stella —
(do you)
Take my hand, Bill —
(oh do you do you)
Annabelle… Freddy… Russell… John… Ettie… Frank… take my hand, take my hand… my hand…
(do you love)
“Will you take my hand, Stella?” a new voice asked.
She looked around and there was Bull Symes. He was smiling kindly at her and yet she
felt a kind of terror in her at what was in his eyes and for a moment she drew away, clutching Bill’s hand on her other side the tighter.
“Is it — ”
“Time?” Bull asked. “Oh, ayuh, Stella, I guess so. But it don’t hurt. At least, I never heard so. All that’s before.”
She burst into tears suddenly — all the tears she had never wept — and put her hand in Bull’s hand. “Yes,” she said, “yes I will, yes I did, yes I do.”
They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind screamed
around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her. It went up into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang then, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a summer evening draws down to summer night. They sang, and Stella felt