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me, I had compassion for his misery.
    He often sank to the bottom of emotion’s darkest well, particularly when he drank too much. At times he would stare at the horizon for hours on end, as if he were hardly more than a corpse. At other times he ignored me for days, refusing to acknowledge me even when I spoke to him.
    On one occasion, when I spilled flaming oil on the stove and nearly burned down the house, he refused to acknowledge my cries for help, and I became so frustrated that I threw a frying pan at him. It struck his shoulder, but he hardly gave me a glance.
    Honestly, I don’t know how he became this way—he wouldn’t speak about it. Even worse, I don’t know how he managed to hide his true character from me until after we were married. He was a master of the shift, as I called it. Put him with men discussing an oil deal in South America, and he could shift into smooth talk on the fly. But at home he had few words for me, even on the best of days.
    At times I wondered if my father had paid my husband to court me, marry me, and offer his seed for a son. Once that job was done there would have been nothing left of the arrangement to interest Neil. Father would never confess to such a thing, naturally, and I never wanted to burden him with the question.
    Within six months of our wedding, I woke up realizing that I despised my marriage. Despite my family’s disapproval of divorce, I think I might have left Neil in the first year if I hadn’t learned that I was with child.
    The change in me was nothing short of a radical conversion. As soon as I grasped the notion that a baby with fingers and toes and a tiny nose was growing inside my womb, I became obsessed with love for the child. Nothing else really mattered to me, only the life that moved in my belly. I dreamed only of my healthy baby cooing up at me with round eyes, suckling at my swollen breasts before falling into sweet sleep.
    The day Stephen came into the world, a part of me found heaven.
    And it was on that same night, while I was still in the hospital, that I first had the dream that would change the course of my life forever—the same dream that landed me on the white sailboat in the middle of the raging sea.
    I wasn’t one who normally remembered her dreams, but the next morning the details of the jungle I’d seen while sleeping were still so vivid that I forgot I was in a hospital.
    In the dream I was looking down at a large valley filled with a tangle of trees and vines the thickness of my forearms running all the way to the ground. Flocks of red-and-blue parrots took flight and flapped over an endless swamp at the valley’s far end. The landscape was both savage and idyllic at once.
    As I watched, thinking what an enchanting place this was, a single sweet high tone began to reach out to me, wooing me. A presence seemed to have taken notice of my own and was calling in an unbroken, haunting note.
    I looked around, wondering where the song could be coming from, but I could see no one. The singular, evocative tone grew in volume, and birds from all corners of the jungle took flight, not away from but toward the sound.
    And then I too took flight, as one sometimes does in dreams, sailing above the trees, up the valley. A low tone joined the higher one then, a deeper note that seemed to reach into my bones. I wasn’t afraid—on the contrary, I found the sound exceedingly comforting. It seemed to wrap itself around my whole body and pull me forward.
    And then I was rushing, faster and faster, headed directly for a barren hill. It was there on that hill that I saw the form of a human. I couldn’t make out if the person was clothed or naked, man or woman, but I knew that the song was coming from him or her, and in my mind’s eye the singer was majestic. An exotic creature from another world called out to me in a voice that was unearthly, both high and low at once.
    Come to me , it sang without words. Find me. Join me. Save me…
    Before I could see