It was how once when she was a kid, when she still—for just a while longer—lived in this county with her mother and father, and was sent to play at a big farmhouse with a girl she hadn't known before, whom she found she didn't like after spending the day with her in her big bare yard and barn. At last she decided she'd had enough; she'd earlier determined that if she took a dirt road or path through a wood beyond the house, she'd eventually come out on a road she knew, and could walk home. With the other child's cold imprecation following her, she went into the wood, and the way was clear; she expected that in only a little time, not half an hour, the open land on the far side would appear. But in a while, when the way back had grown occluded by trees, the path she followed dwindled away to a track, became less clear (as the other child had warned her it would, trying to keep Rosie with her); she seemed to see its continuation ahead amid the lichened stones and wood plants, but when she struck out to reach it, it somehow snuck away—what had seemed a weed-and-sapling-bordered path was only weeds and saplings when you got there, or seemed to have got there. But it couldn't be far anyway through this middle part before the track picked up again to lead out on the other side, if she just pressed on straight ahead. She went on a long time. She put her foot into a swampy spot and wet her sneaker and sock, which seemed like a bad sign, and the wood did seem to be gazing on her or looking away from her with that unsettling indifference that accumulates in wild places as marks of human habitation get left behind, but Rosie wasn't scared—she was only growing aware that in a while she might start getting scared—and at that point the woods, as though relenting unwillingly, really did thin in the distance, and show sky and space ahead. Then the path reappeared, as she certainly knew it would; she wouldn't have to wander for hours lost in the trees and undergrowth or, worse, have to turn back and face that mean and needy girl again. The track became a path and then a real road, divided into two wheel ruts and a grassy hump between, and she could see where it went out through an arch of trees. She came out. She wasn't at the paved road, as she expected, but at the edge of a ragged field, across which she guessed the road must run. A small field. On one side of it a frame farmhouse, on the other a gray barn. A truck in the drive that led to both. A doll's baby carriage in the drive too. All these things were at once intensely familiar and entirely foreign, foreign because of the impossibility of their occurring here, at the path's far end. The mean girl in her striped shirt appeared, and looked Rosie's way, squinting and uncertain.
Later on she'd read in books how people who are lost wander in circles, and could explain to her mother or whoever she might tell about this (she told no one) that she had proved or illustrated it. But then on that day she didn't think that. She thought (she knew) that she had kept straight on, and that therefore the farmyard and barn and house (reversed as in a mirror by her coming at them backward) were actually not the same ones she'd left behind; she had in fact gone through to where the same things occurred in a different place, and that was the place she now was. She almost turned, to go back the long straight way she was sure she had come, but just then her mother's car appeared too in the drive, come to collect her (as her mother put it), and that evening at supper Rosie was told that they, she and her mother and her father, were moving away from this place and this state, going west to live—told by the two of them leaning close to her and smiling their nicest smiles, touching her shoulders and taking turns to speak softly to her—and so it seemed to her that the path she had taken into the mirror world would just continue, as the backward worlds in mirrors do or must though we can't see them.
Look now, though. She had finally found that path's extension: had gone straight on far enough to have come around again to the unreversed world, and this was it.
Far off she saw Sam, sitting alone on an iron bench. The car salesman's daughter sat down beside her.
Where anyway was that farmhouse, would she recognize it now? That girl, who stood at both ends of the path, in and out again, the same hostile anguish in both her faces? As old now as herself, and gone on as far. A joyous pity struck her, for that girl (Margie!) and for herself. Only one world after all, here where it had always been, like it or not. She had thought a summer ago that she and the county and everybody in it lay under a spell, and somehow it was hers to break it, but she'd come finally to see that of course she never had been, and neither had they or anyone and that's how spells are broken.
"That's a pretty dress,” Roo said.
Sam smoothed it with her hand. “We have the same."
"Sort of. I think it's called eyelet lace.” She smoothed hers too.
"I have seizures,” Sam said.
"I'm sorry to hear that,” Roo said. “Do you have them a lot?"
"I had the last one,” Sam said. “The last."
"Good.” They looked at one another for a moment in quiet stillness. “It's nice for your mom, getting married,” Roo said.
"I made them a song,” Sam said. “Do you want me to sing it?"
"Yes,” Roo said. “Definitely."
"I made the tune,” Sam said. “But God made the words."
"Okay."
She began to sing, and the tune was long and lilting, without shape or repeat, an endless melody; Roo guessed it was never the same twice. The words God had made up were not for human ears, apparently, or not for other humans, for they were only Sam's voice put forth in a single vowel or call, shaped by the melody and the movement of her mouth and slim throat—Roo could see it move as she sang. Pierce and Val and Rosie and Spofford heard it too, and Rosie took Spofford's hand, laughing, as though she'd had the gift before, maybe in another form though not different.
Sitting beside Sam, on her left hand as Roo was on her right, was the last of the great crowd of small brothers and sisters Sam had once known well, inhabitants of her old house; he was a girl as well as a boy, he was the mean one who laughed and smiled and whispered in her ear to tickle her until she made him stop. Stop! And for the first time, on this afternoon, he did: he stopped, and he began to go away. He wasn't angry and he surely wasn't sorry, he just went away. And since for Sam whatever departed from her into the past seemed (would seem, always, all her life) not to have gone outward or into the distance or even behind, but to have gone in—to have been swallowed by her, or passed away in the direction of her innermost inside (which seemed to her endless or bottomless, containing all of her own self and all of everything that had gone before her as well)—then he remained a part of her, though he was no longer with her, and soon wouldn't be remembered by her at all. The last.
Sam couldn't know all of that; nor could she know that the song without words that she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing. What I tell you three times is true: it was the Hieros gamos achieved in her own small person, and thus achieved for everyone; it was the final reconciliation, too, of Wanting and Having, Having and Giving, kind Wisdom and hard Knowledge, if only for the space of one afternoon in one faraway county. Never mind; in her singing and our listening was completed the renovatio and atonement we all needed, whether or not we knew we had longed for it and sought for it, or would ever recognize we had it. It was the Great Instauration of everything that had all along been the case, the last part of the work set out for all of us to do, never to be finished, as it never has been nor ever will be.