The Time of Her Life by Robb Forman Dew Page A

to allow some substance of the day
     to fill her a little. Besides, this was not just any piece of land between two houses; she had invented this terrain at age
     eight, when her parents had bought four acres from the Tunbridges’ and built their house. The steep path between her house
     and the Tunbridges’ was of her own making, and it wound narrowly through the high grass. Diana was sitting beneath the Four
     Trees—four great pin oaks that formed a hollow square. Summer before last she and Diana had buried a cache of candles and
     matches and a flashlight there in two layers of Zip-loc bags and a larger plastic bag enclosing those and fastened with a
     twist-tie.
    They had marked the turnoff to the Troubled Rocks with a handful of assorted stones that they had arranged to look as if those
     various pebbles had merely rolled into place there along the main path. Only one or the other of the girls could detect that
     separate trail so subtly marked through the head-high weeds, and they could find their way along it to a large boulder and
     some other good-sized rocks that lay in an inexplicable clearing. Jane had gone there alone, now and then, willing herself
     to sit among those stones even when the low-moving clouds threw her into deep shadow beyond which she could see the sunshine.
     At a moment like that she would press herself flat back against the boulder,because such a selective darkening of her environment opened out before her an abyss of desolation so extreme that she lost
     any faith in her surroundings. Most days, though, she was sure that that large boulder brimmed with serenity and that she
     could draw some of it into herself merely by her own proximity to it.
    “I don’t think we should call them the
troubled
rocks,” Diana had said when Jane first led her to them. They had spent arduous hours debating these points, naming their
     landmarks. “I think it would be better to call them the Rocks of Trouble. Because we can come here if
we’re
in trouble, or if we’re depressed or something. I mean, the
rocks
can’t be troubled, Jane. What about the Comfort Rocks?”
    Jane had disliked the meter. “No, Diana. That just doesn’t have the right sound.” And she had drawn her straight pale eyebrows
     together in an unchallengeable expression. Privately she invested those few stones with an ability to suffer or give solace.
     Pummeled as they were, mute and exposed, tossed into this space by some ancient force—Jane believed in them. When Jane gave
     herself over to this landscape, she extended the connection between reality and sentiment. Each facet of this world that she
     had named had personal significance, and she would move through the meadow in a state of exquisite melancholy that was a permutation
     of nostalgia. Here was order. Here was control. Here was peace, and here was she; she was known.
    Farther on across the meadow was the Secret Feather River, which was a drainage ditch that, over the years, had cut deep,
     grassy banks down the hill. Two miles away water streamed off the carefully laid planes of the golf course, running off the
     greens and fairways intounobtrusively placed red clay pipes, through which it was channeled into a cement tunnel and carried along underground, until
     it poured out into the culvert at the top of the hill and flowed beautifully clear all the way to the Lunsbury Sand and Gravel
     Works and into the Missouri River. When Jane and Diana had first discovered this stream, it, too, had been hard to name. Jane
     had first said to Diana that it was the River of Paradise, but that had been met with such condescension on Diana’s part—she
     had not even acknowledged it as a serious notion—that for a while it had been the Blue Feather River. Diana had suggested
     that one day when she had found a jay’s feathers strewn mysteriously along the bank. It was a good name, but Jane was always
     chagrined to give any amount of control to her best friend.
    “If we just