Here and Again Read Free Page B

people living there new faces to look at. She had laughed then. Now, eleven years later, the bridge seemed just as strange and out of place as she felt.
    Heading in that direction, Ginger felt a longing for her home in Seattle. She wanted her parents and the city. She wanted lots ofpeople and noise and traffic and large bodies of water everywhere. Ginger was born in 1972, the only child of Tim and Monica Barnes. It might have been 1972 for the rest of the planet, but for Tim and Monica it was still the sixties. They raised their daughter in a small flat above their retail store, the Ginger Moon, which they named after their daughter. The shop was a community fixture in the Fremont District. They sold brass Buddhas and silver dancing Shivas; tarot cards, hemp handbags, and cotton tie-dyed dresses were bestsellers. Patchouli was the first scent Ginger remembered smelling, and the sound of the sitar, the first music she heard. Her childhood was free and magical, full of raw milk and tofu and people from everywhere speaking many languages, most of which she did not understand. Yet all of their voices became the rich background music of her life. She wanted to travel one day and submerge herself in the deep water of the world of which Fremont was just a tiny raindrop.
    That was what she said she wanted to be when she grew up, a traveler, and always she wanted to be a nurse. But art was everything to her parents. When she began to show an interest in science, her father and mother, in absolute terror, fought back. They sent her to after-school art classes, drama classes, dance classes, and singing classes. Ginger enjoyed it all, but mostly her attention was drawn back to small things—bugs or moss or the soft brown feathers on the top of ferns. She liked microscopes because even tinier things could be seen—like bone tissue or liver cells. To Ginger, histology was art. So, loving their daughter as they did, Tim and Monica relented, falling back into the community of their store and letting Ginger pursue her nursing degree and then sail away from them into the waters of the world.
    It was as a traveling nurse in an emergency room at a hospital in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that Ginger had met Jesse. He’dseemed cold that night, coming to collect two soldiers who were in her charge due to a bar brawl in town. Distant and aloof were not words enough to describe being in his icy gray gaze. When she’d enter the room to check on her two patients, the quiet murmurs of Jesse and his men would stop. In silence, she’d check an IV or administer a painkiller without looking at any of them and it wasn’t soon enough for Ginger that the soldiers were released and headed back to Fort Bragg.
    So it was quite a shock when she stepped out of the hospital, dawn just rising, to find Jesse in jeans and a sweater standing next to his truck, asking her out for coffee and maybe breakfast. He was not cold, but warm—not aloof, but more present than anyone she had ever met. He loved her full name, Virginia, for it was his home state, he said, which made them both laugh. They dated for three weeks, after which time Ginger’s contract was up and she sat weeping on a plane back to Seattle. When she arrived, she stepped into the Ginger Moon and fell apart in her parents’ arms, trying to understand the incredible emptiness in her body. Forever, she had been free, light, and airy, with no particular need to go any one direction or to be responsible to anyone but herself. But such freedom seemed now hollow; being without direction seemed suddenly pointless.
    Ginger was a contract nurse who took assignments all over the country. Quickly she searched for contracts on the East Coast, but nothing was open in North Carolina. She could have gone to Virginia or Georgia, but what use was that? Her schedule would be erratic, as was always the case for a traveling nurse, and unless she lived closer to Fort Bragg, there was no guarantee she could get enough