Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page B

the way the music or the thought comes right, comes clear, is true. Maybe that's the same thing as moral rightness. I don't know.
    It was she who said, "I love you." Not me. I never did say it to her.
    I said what I'd said before, stammering—I couldn't stop—and pulling her towards me.
All of a sudden her eyes got very bright, and she scowled and pulled away and stood right up. "No!" she said. "I
won't
get into this bind with you! I thought we could manage it, but if we can't, we can't, and that's it. That's all. If what we have isn't enough, then forget it. Because it's all we do have. And you know it! And it's a lot! But if it's not enough, then let it be. Forget it!" And she turned and walked off, down the beach to the sea, in tears.

    I sat there for a long time. The fire went out. I went and walked up the beach by the foam line, till I saw her sitting on a rock over the tide pools at the foot of the northern cliffs.
    Her nose was all red, and her legs were covered with goose pimples and looked very white and thin against the barnacle-rough rock.
    "There's a crab," she said, "under the big anemone."
    We looked into the tide pool a while. I said, "You must be starving, I am." And we walked back along the foam line and built up the fire, and pulled on our jeans, and ate some lunch. Not very much, this time. We didn't talk. Neither of us knew what to say anymore. There were ten thousand things going on in my head, but I couldn't say any of them.

    We started home right after lunch.
    About at the summit of the Coast Range, I found the one thing I thought needed saying, and said it. I said, "You know, it's different for a man."
    "Is it?" she said. "Maybe. I don't know. You have to decide."
    Then my anger came out and I said, "Decide what? You've already decided."
    She glanced at me. She had that remote look. She didn't say anything.
    The anger took over entirely, and I said, "I guess that's always the woman's privilege, isn't it?" in this sneering, bitter voice.

    "People make the real choices together," she said. Her voice was much lower and smaller than usual. She started blinking and looked away, as if she was watching the scenery.
    I went on driving, watching the road. We drove seventy miles without saying anything. At her house she said, "Good-bye, Owen," in the same small voice, and got out, and went into the house.
    I remember that. But nothing after that. Nothing until the following Tuesday.

    I T'S CALLED specific amnesia, and is quite common following accidents, severe injuries, childbirth, etc. So I can't tell you what I did. My guess is that, being extremely upset, and since it was only about four-thirty, I didn't want to go home, but just went on driving around, probably so that I could be alone and think.

    There's a steep grade between two suburban towns west of the city. I don't know why I was out there, I guess I was just taking whatever road turned up; but anyhow, apparently what I did was take a turn too fast on that grade.
    A car behind me saw the car go off the edge and turn over, and they got help. Ambulance and all that, because I was out cold. Concussion, also dislocated a shoulder and had a whole lot of really weird bruises that came out green. I was lucky, as they say, since the car was totalled.
    By the time I came to, they had moved me into a hospital in the city, and after another day I could go home.
    I don't remember anything about either hospital, except my mother sitting there and telling me that Jason had called twice, and that Natalie Field had come over. "What a nice girl," my mother said. It all seemed perfectly natural but quite uninteresting to me. The fog had really and truly closed in. I was so alone in it, I didn't know there was anything or anybody else out there. Nothing mattered. It was the concussion, of course. But not only that.

    The whole thing was very hard on my father. First, of course, when some strange voice calls up and says, "We have your son here in the