Valley of the Moon. Melanie Gideon

opportunity to survey her unseen. I estimated her age as somewhere in her twenties. Her face was without wrinkles, her complexion fair but tanned by the sun. Her brown, shoulder-length hair had fallen out of its braid. She impatiently pushed her fringe to the side, exposing dark straight brows. She had a small but sturdy frame and was of medium height. I could smell Martha’s soap on her skin; it was unnerving.

      “Can I have one of those?” she asked.

      I gave her one of my precious cigarettes. She leaned forward and I lit it with a match. She inhaled deeply, held the smoke in her lungs and blew it out.

      “Do you still think I’m mad?” she asked.

      “I’m on the fence.”

      “Well, how do we get you off the fence?”

      “Do you have any identification?”

      “Not on me.” She thought for a moment. “Everything’s at the campsite.”

      “You could answer a few questions,” I said.

      “Okay. Shoot.”

      “Who’s the president of the United States?”

      “Gerald Ford,” she said without hesitation.

      “What number president is he?”

      “Thirty-eight.”

      “Who’s the prime minister of England?”

      “I have no idea. But I can tell you that in 1914, England, along with France, Russia, and Japan, will declare war on Germany. America will try and stay neutral, but finally in 1917 we’ll join the fight and help win the war, but at a terrible cost. Something like seventeen million people will die. Trench warfare. Gas. U-boats.” She shuddered. “World War I.”

      “World War I?”

      She looked at me calmly.

      “That implies there’s a World War II.”

      “From 1939 to 1945,” she said. “Something like seventy-five million casualties.”

      “Dear God. World War III?”

      “Not yet. But America just wrapped up a war with Vietnam.” She took another puff of her cigarette. “Oh, yeah, and a man walked on the moon.”

      I grunted with skepticism.

      She grinned. “I’m not pulling your leg. Neil Armstrong in 1969. Do you want to hear more? I could tell you about the Depression, about Prohibition, about the civil rights movement, about Martin Luther King, about Roe v. Wade. Abortion is legal now, by the way.”

      I held up my hand. “That’s quite enough, thank you. A few minutes of quiet, if you don’t mind.”

      “Of course. You’ll want to take that all in,” she said a little smugly, pleased to have put on such a convincing show.

      The crickets chirped. A moth batted its wings futilely against a closed window. My mind reeled.

      “Don’t you want to ask me any questions?”

      “My questions were answered today when you took me on the tour,” she said.

      “Are you saying you believe me?”

      “No. Yes. I mean kind of. What else can I do? At some point you just have to sort of commit, right?”

      “Commit to what?”

      “This. Us. What’s happening. That I’m here. That you’re here. That this can’t be, and yet it is. It’s beyond the laws of nature, but until some other evidence surfaces to disprove you, I’m going to go along with all this, and maybe you’ll go along with it, too. What other choice do we have?” She shrugged.

      She’d just expressed the same conclusion I’d been coming to. Continuing to mistrust each other seemed like a waste of energy, at least for now.

      “Do you think we did something? To bring this on?” I asked.

      “Like what? What could you have possibly done?”

      She was right. We had done nothing but work hard to be self-sufficient and treat each other fairly and equitably.

      “You were happy?” she asked.

      “We were happy.”

      Clarification: most of us had been happy. The O’Learys hadn’t been happy. Paddy’s last words? “If we stay any longer, we’ll never leave.” How right he had turned out to be.

      “So. That’s not a crime. That’s what everybody wants.” She took another deep pull on the cigarette. “I have a joint back in my tent. I wish I’d brought it.”

      “A joint?”

      “Pot. Marijuana. Um, cannabis—I guess that’s the proper name. What do you call it?”

      “Hashish.”

      “Is it illegal? It’s illegal now.”

      “You could mail-order maple sugar hashish candy in the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”

      Lux laughed. “You’re kidding.”

      “No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

      She flicked the ash of her cigarette over the railing.

      “Are you married? Do you have children?” I asked her, changing the subject.

      She sat down in the rocking chair next to me. “I’m a widow. I live with my son, Benno. He’s five.”

      She said this dryly, with very little emotion.

      “My condolences.”

      “Yes, well, it was a while ago.”

      “Still, that must have been very difficult.”

      “He was in the army. He died in the war.”

      “The war with Vietnam?”

      “Yes.”

      “Where is your son right now?”

      “He’s with my mother.”

      “You live with your parents, then? Siblings as well?”

      She gave me a strange look. “I live alone. Well, I have a roommate, Rhonda, but she’s barely ever home.”

      “Where do your parents reside?”

      “In Newport, Rhode Island.”

      “Across the country? Why aren’t they with you? However do you manage on your own without help?”

      She stood, walked down the stairs, and threw her cigarette in the dirt. “I manage just fine. Nobody lives with their parents anymore. Everybody leaves home. Everybody. It’s just what you do.”

      This was the moment when I fully believed she was from a different time. She could relay an encyclopedia’s worth of historical facts to me; she could tell me of every scientific, mathematical, and medical advancement; she could describe the plots of award-winning novels that hadn’t yet been written, hum the tunes of unheard operas and symphonies, tell me of new planets, new cocktails, new styles of clothing—but none of it would convince me more than this simple fact. She was alone, she and her son. This would have been a very rare scenario in my time.

      Lux walked back up the stairs. “I’ve got to get some sleep. What time do you wake up in the mornings?”

      “Five.”

      “Everybody gets up then?”

      “It depends on the crew.”

      “What crew will I be on?” She tipped her chin up, looking defiant, as if I were about to deny her the opportunity to be put to work.

      “What crew would you like to be on?”

      “Garden,”