Through that night by a fire of gray greasewood they shared the flesh of the person they had killed, which was the worst thing Roo had ever tasted, not a thing to be consumed at all, and she couldn't continue with the rest of them, and never could tell if what she knew ever after had been imparted to her by the being they had all partaken of that night or was something she would have come to know anyway. Beau had said that we, we here, are the Old Ones that were awaited in Cloud City, and she knew then what it meant to say that, though she might not ever be able to say what she knew—that she was indeed old, the result of a process ages long; that her body was hers, a thing infinitely complex and valuable, made of the rarest and most delicate materials and parts, that she would have to bear it and tend to it and keep it from harm every day of her long, maybe endless life. Wonder and weariness. She laid it on the desert floor by the fire, wrapped it gently like a mummy in her sleeping bag, fended off the enormous stars from entering too far into it.
All of that—all that knowing, those stars, that search, those roads—was feelably gone now, persisting in her tissues if at all in amounts almost too small to perceive, by no matter what tests, just trace elements. Maybe because of an association with tracer bullets, Roo thought of trace elements as brief stardust streaks across or within the matrix or mass they were detected in, evanescing as soon as caught, without effect. She had only ever been an observer of those people and places, those tribes and crowds and families she made her way into; as willing as she had been to seek them and lucky as she was in finding them, she hadn't ever really quite been able or been allowed to join or become enfolded with them. Why? They were no less wanderers than she was, she was an ox for work, she had insights into their ways that she knew they could use if they'd listen. But she remained outside, and always walked away, and when she was long gone she felt sometimes with weird conviction that she had caused that world of wonders to cease to be because she could not be part of it, and now it was lost to everyone.
Anyway she went on, and her onwards came more and more to resemble her backwards, because that was when she parted from Beau and those who went with him. Because Beau, the only one she would have stayed with, was unclaimable—not all the nights she had spent by his side had let her into him, he would stop at her frontiers, always, or gently stop her at his own—and it was so painful and disorienting that she thought she had better find out if it was because of something that was in her or something in Beau or something in all men, something that wouldn't couple with whatever it was in her, as though she were threaded wrong, or they were. She went into town, went into the city, found a job and then another job, recovering those things (cities, towns, jobs) and taking them on again as she had done on her way away in the first place. Figuring out how to live, pulling a way to live out of the future, careful not to hope, careful not to trick herself into thinking she could see far or know much about what was coming next. She got good at a few things she would later have to unlearn. She got married, and divorced, and pregnant—those weren't among the few things, though the few things maybe led her there, the worst hole or burrow without exit she'd ever find herself in, she found herself as though finding a zombie twin, inert and helpless. The rage she'd learned was aimed at herself, at that self, as much as it was at the morons and hardheads and inert unmovable men she'd lived among in those days—for now she had a those-days that could be counted again, counted in rented rooms and thirdhand cars that she could name, their wheels turning backward to link one to the previous one (ah, the Nova; oh right, the Barracuda) until in them she passed back eastward again, creating the world in that direction as she went. And as she did so she could almost (never entirely) remember how she had first gone west, on those same roads. How she'd shut the door on her life in the Faraways, or the life of her house at any rate—it didn't seem to her that it was her life, nor had it been hers for a long time; she couldn't have said when it ceased to be hers, it ought to have been easy to identify it with the year her mother was caught by love and left, but when Roo told herself the story that way, it seemed not to be a story about herself; all she knew was that the onward-pointing life she had afterward occupied with Barney led down an ever-narrowing tunnel or gullet, like those tight spots she now and then willingly and stupidly (oh well okay) entered into in dreams, eventually to be stuck irremediably and suffocating till she woke asweat, heart racing. Anyway it was some sensation like that which impelled her outward and west (the note she left Barney said east, but that was a lie, the only lie she told). She hadn't understood then all that had gone into her decision, but she definitely applied a lot of good sense to the doing of it. She had money saved, all her own. There were plenty of rides to choose from around the house, always three or four cars in the driveway, some splendid and glossy and others more odd and declassé, trade-ins that Barney had an interest in—she suddenly remembered (but not until she hit Route 6 on her way back, when she got within a few miles of the dealership) the very one she had left in, the scabbiest and least valued of those available on that June day, crimped rocker panel, babyshit color, Japanese in the days when that meant cheaply made and impossible to fix when broken—most of the intersecting roads she'd taken thereafter had sprung from garages where grinning mechanics without even a set of metric wrenches had stared into the ridiculous mysteries of its innards, while she sat in the bitter sun smoking a Lucky and awaiting the offer that she got used to arriving at just that juncture, an offer from somebody to go somewhere.
So then she had them all, and in the tale she reached the time when she arrived back in the Faraways and the town of Cascadia, which seemed to awake from sleep as she went through it, confused and unready for her, building after building and road after road, till she stopped her last car in the driveway in front of her father's house in Labrador, thinking that she remembered the house as oriented the other way on its lot, as though it had been flopped somehow meantime, like a photograph, but her feet seemed to be unconfused and to know it was okay, and she was already used to it this way by the time she reached the unlocked door, pushed it open, and called to her father.
Pierce had told her how people once thought of the world as made of Ys, that you are constantly choosing one or another branch, the obvious and easy one or the less clear and harder one, but Roo thought it was really the reverse or upside down of that (as she had lived it, anyway): the ways didn't part from one another but led to one another, like the thousand little streams coming down Mount Randa: each one joining another, which joins another till they reach a stream, or a Y's stem, wide enough to contain them all, which will be the only way the drop of yourself can go or could have gone. When she came home to the Faraways she learned (almost the first day she was back) that Beau was there too, had come to live in the county, the town up the road from the town where she was born. But near as he was, glad as she was, amazed as she was at whatever it was in the world or the heavens that had contrived to bring him so close (the same forces that had brought her back the way she had come to find him there), he was as far from her as ever; farther, because she wouldn't endure those people who gathered around him and depended on him. She said cruel things to them, told them the truths they ought to have known and didn't, and Beau sent her away, or didn't welcome her there, which was the same thing. And in the last winter, at the drought's end, as though the plotted curves of the two of them rising and falling in opposite directions had only happened to cross as they, or the worlds that bore them, moved apart ineluctably, he was gone again. She wouldn't join with those others who wanted her to mourn with them, wouldn't share her grief. She kept hers for herself. Beau had taught her—she knew it before he said it, but that didn't mean she hadn't learned it from him—that if you divided love it wasn't like dividing money, or food, which came out less for each portion you made. It didn't; the act of dividing it did not cause it to lessen, actually it grew, it doubled with every division and everyone got more. She knew it, and she knew that Beau not only knew it but could do it, which not many people could, not she certainly: she wondered if the original allotment she had been given was so small that it could never be divided, and so grow larger. A little hard uncracked nut inside her: that's what she felt as she came and went to and from Barney's house, and learned to sell cars, which was what was left for her to do, and one day in spring came home to catch the phone ringing: somebody needing a car.