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"I know."

"I've never known anyone as generous and loving as you, Gabriel. I wish you could hate me. It would be easier to live with myself."

"Then you are doomed to suffer with yourself forever and ever," I told him.

He smiled. "Look at you," he said with a small laugh. "You're very pregnant," he added.

"Am I ugly now?"

"Far from it. I wish I could be there with you, holding your hand, comforting you."

"You will be," I said.

"I promise, I'll spoil our child something awful, just because whenever I look at him or her, I will see you," he vowed.

I nodded, my own tears burning under my eyelids.

"I'd better go," he said, his voice cracking.

We simply stared at each other.

"Promise you'll send word to me if you need anything, ever," he said.

"I promise."

He stepped toward me and we embraced. He kissed me and held me for a long moment.

And then he turned and walked away, into the dark path under the cypress, disappearing just as I imagined my ghost lover would. It seemed centuries ago when, on our way home from school, I had told Yvette and Evelyn about the myth.

But it wasn't a myth for me any longer.

For me, it had come true.

Epilogue

.

I don't remember poling home that day. One

minute I was saying good-bye to Pierre forever, and the next minute I was sitting on Mama's rocker, staring out at the road, watching the sun sink below the crest of the trees and the shadows creep out of the woods and into my heart.

When Mama stepped out on the gallery, she was surprised to find me sitting there.

"I've been looking for you, honey. Where have you been?"

I smiled at her, but I didn't answer. She tilted her head for a moment, studying my face, and then her eyes filled with alarm.

"What's wrong, Gabriel?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Nothing, Mama," I said, and held my smile.

Mama said I moved around the house like a ghost, drifting from one place to the other after that. She said I was so quiet, she thought I was walking on air. Suddenly she would turn and find me beside her.

She told me I became a little girl again, confused about time, easily hypnotized by something in Nature. She said I would sit for hours and watch honeybees gather nectar or watch birds flit from branch to branch. She swore that one day she looked out and saw me approach a blue heron. It didn't flee. She claimed I was inches from it and it had no fear. She said she had never seen anything like it.

I remembered none of this. Time drifted by as anonymously as the current in the canal. I stopped distinguishing one day from the next, and always had to be called to the dinner table. I wasn't very much help to Mama either, barely doing any of the work. If I started to do something in the kitchen, she would chase me away and tell me to rest.

It really was difficult for me to move around anyway; my stomach had gotten so big. I thought I would just explode. Mama examined me almost every day, sometimes twice, her face full of concern. Occasionally my underthings were spotted with blood and I began to have what Mama called false labor pains.