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  He saw a flash of black as Hillburn brushed by him, and was assaulted by the strong scent of his cologne.

  "So, Raymond," Hillburn said, "have you come up with a new name? If you paint just one new piece for me, I'll organize the show for next month, but I still think you need to come up with another name. Raymond Gonzales is too ethnic, too generic. It just doesn't have the right connotation to it. You need something exotic, a little mysterious, something that gives nothing away."

  "Black," Raymond said, just wanting the man to leave him alone, allow him to return to the solitude of his thoughts.

  "Not bad," Hillburn said, twirling the backing on his studded earring, causing the diamond to move around in circles. Seeing Raymond's eyes dart to the sparkling stone, Hillburn quickly stopped fiddling with it. He knew his people. Raymond loved things that reflected light. He also liked things that turned. And Hillburn had seen him crawl deep inside himself, completely mesmerized by a simple object, unable to speak or work for weeks on end. "Okay," he said, snapping Raymond out of it. "But it has to be two names. You can't just call yourself Black."

  "Stone," Raymond said, gazing at the earring. "Stone Black."

  "Hmmmm," Hillburn said, his large, fleshy lips pursed. "Stone Black, huh? I like that. I like the sound of that. It almost sounds American Indian or something. It's mysterious, strong, exciting."

  "I have to go to work now," Raymond said softly.

  "Of course, Stone," Hillburn said, smiling with satisfaction. This was much better. Their little talk had worked wonders. Already Ray-

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  mond was eager to get to work on a new piece, and he could certainly sell Stone Black more easily than he could sell Raymond Gonzales. "From this day forward, you're Stone Black. That's how you sign your new painting." He stared at Raymond for a lew more minutes and then headed for the door. "Call me when it's ready," he tossed out. "Three days, remember?"

  As soon as Hillburn had left, Raymond grabbed his coat and raced down the stairs to the street. It wasn't a bad name, he thought, even though he didn't know what his name had to do with people purchasing his artwork. Symbolically, however, it made sense. To Raymond, he had been trapped inside a black stone, unable to get out. The stone had been made of glass. He had become a part of the glass. But he hadn't been able to reach through to the outside. The world he had lived in before the woman had appeared had not contained humans, only colors and designs.

  He glanced at his watch and panicked, picking up his pace. It was already three-thirty, and he had to be at work by four o'clock. Under his overcoat Raymond was wearing his work clothes, black pants and a white shirt, and he had secured his long, straight hair in a tight ponytail in order to comply with the health codes. He didn't mind working as a busboy, although he would have preferred to be able to paint full time. No one bothered him, and a busboy wasn't expected to interact with the customers.

  A few minutes later, he reached West Street and saw the sign reading Delphi Fine Foods. Quickly stepping through the doorway, he headed to the back of the restaurant. Hanging up his coat, he punched his time card and tied on his apron.

  "What's your name?" a dark-haired girl asked him just as he was about to walk out into the main section of the restaurant and check the tables.

  "Oh," he said self-consciously, "I'm just a busboy. That woman over there is a waitress. Maybe she can help you."

  "Oh, really?" she said, giving him a big smile. "Well, I'm a waitress, too." She pointed at her uniform, wondering why the handsome young man hadn't noticed it. "This is my first day here." She stopped and stuck out her hand to shake. "Sarah Mendleson," she said. "And you're—"

  Words seemed to be coming at him like bricks, and his head started throbbing with a splitting headache. What was she saying? Why couldn't he understand her? Sometimes his illness was maddening. There were davs when he had no trouble understanding what

  people said, days when everything seemed to work perfectly. And then there were other days—days when he felt so alienated and bewildered that he wanted to -die. "I . . . I . . ." he stammered, unable to find the words inside his mind. He would walk away, he told himself. It was the only thing to do when he got this way.

  Then a whiff of her distinctive scent reached his nostrils. She smelled like chocolate and lemons, something incredibly light and delicious. He slowly raised his eyes, looking not at her body specifically but the space around it. Green. Raymond loved people whose auras were green. That color denoted charity, freshness, goodness. When he'd seen the woman in the Sunday school class that day, he had seen her in clouds of green light. But this girl was not his mystery woman, even if she did resemble her somewhat. Long, silky black hair cascaded down her back. Her lips were painted bright red, the focal point in her face, but her eyes were unadorned with makeup, as was the rest of her face. An unusual look, he noted. For shoes she was wearing black, lace-up boots with rubber soles, not exactly the standard shoes for a waitress.

  He smiled again, his eyes bypassing her pronounced lips and finding her eyes, shocked that they were green, too. Green. Emerald green, vibrating green. He knew those eyes. He knew that green. It might not be worth the effort to try to communicate with most people, but Raymond suddenly had a burning desire to communicate with the girl in front of him.

  Under his intent stare Sarah Mendleson brushed her dark hair behind one ear, and was taken aback when she saw Raymond mimic her gesture. To make certain she wasn't imagining it, she rubbed her palms together and watched as he duplicated her movements again. Even though she found him attractive, Sarah knew now that there was something wrong. "Why are you doing that?" she asked abruptly. When he just stared at her blankly, she added, "You know, copying my gestures?"

  "I don't know," he said in a high-pitched voice that was not his own, but the closest imitation he could manufacture of her voice.

  "Can you speak, tell me your name?"

  "Raymond," he said in the same feminine voice, and then shook his head in confusion. "No, it's Stone." He sighed and dropped his head in embarrassment. "I'm sorry."

  "Hey," she said, patting his arm and smiling, "don't worry about it. I like Raymond, though. If you don't mind, I'll call you Raymond.

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  Stone is weird, if you ask me. Sounds like you're a pet roek or something."

  Before he could say anything else, she walked away to wait on some customers. His heart fell. For the first time, he had found someone that really appealed to him, and he had been unable to communicate with her.

  Then he decided that it was useless anyway. How could he explain it to her? How could he tell her that sometimes he had to borrow gestures and voices simply to speak? Regardless of what the professionals thought, he knew most autistics did possess language abilities. But their language was unintelligible to normal people, consisting of whistles, chirps, grunts, and various unformed sounds. When people spoke, these were the sounds Raymond heard instead of words. Like a person in a foreign country, he had trained himself to translate the alien words and strange sounds of normal conversation to his own personal vocabulary. But many times he could accomplish this only by pretending to be the person who was speaking, copying his or her voice and body language.

  Raymond stared at the pretty brunette with longing. Something told him that she was different than all the others. He'd had many girls before, and had learned to enjoy sex and the physical pleasure it gave him. But he found it impossible to connect emotionally, and although Francis wanted him to find another subject, he simply could not paint these girls. They were too one-dimensional, their faces too worn, their odors too repulsive, their voices grating and shrill. Even though most of them were young, they were void of life, old before their time. Their hair glowed with an artificial luster. Their eyes were flat, the colors dense. Those that managed to linger past one night invariably developed an irrational jealousy of the subject he constantly painted.

  "Who is this woman?" they'd ask repeatedly. "She's
your girlfriend, isn't she? Why can't you paint me? Why do you always have to paint her?"

  It didn't take long before they were gone. In most instances, he was glad to see them go. It was hard to have them in his world: their demands, their mere closeness annoyed him and made it impossible for him to work. Lately he had elected to spend his time alone, but the longer he remained isolated, the more he thought about his mystery woman.

  What he recalled was vague and obviously distorted over the years. He made every attempt to keep the memory pure, but knew

  that was impossible. It was hard to separate what he had felt and experienced from what had been told to him by his mother, Deacon Miller, and old Mrs. Robinson. His mother's last letter informed him that his Sunday school teacher had died. Deacon Miller had died many years ago. The only people left to remember that day were Raymond and his family.

  But something had happened. And bits and pieces of that miraculous event were firmly planted in the young artist's mind.

  "It was like a silvery thread entering my world," he told his mother repeatedly, forcing her to listen to the story every time they were together. "My world was a solitary world of glass. The thread broke through the glass somehow. I saw it snaking around me and tried to grab it. Like thread through the eye of the needle, the thread touched and entered my body. It was painless. At first I was frightened. You know, when I first saw it in there with me—inside the glass with me. When it left, it took a part of me with it. Like an explosion, I was suddenly outside the glass. Noises were magnified many times over, and the colors, odors and sensations overwhelmed me. That's when I saw her face and everything changed."

  In the two years he had been in New York he had spent most of his meager earnings trying to find the redheaded woman, strapping himself so severely that he sometimes didn't eat for days at a time.

  The ring was the only solid piece of evidence that she'd even existed. It wasn't that unusual a ring: a one-carat ruby and twenty small, individually set diamonds. But the private investigator he had hired had finally traced it to Weisman's Jewelers, an enormous jewelry chain originating in Israel. The news he had brought back, however, had not been good. They had made over a hundred of the exact rings and had sold them in outlets all over the world. There was no way to identify the owner.

  "Why can't they trace the ruby, find out who cut it?" Raymond had pleaded. "Every jewel cutter has a distinctive style."

  "True," the investigator had said, "but all Weisman's jewelers cut the same. They're all trained by the same people. I mean, we're talking about a one-carat stone, not the Hope diamond. You're never going to track down this broad. Let it go, guy. Go on with your life. There's plenty of fish in the sea, if you know what I mean."

  Raymond saw that one table had finished their salads and rushed over to remove the plates, his thoughts still fixed on the woman and the ring. Everyone told him to forget it, forget the woman, forget the whole thing.

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  He could not. He had been drowning and she had saved him. She was a mystical, magical creature. All around him he saw violence and despair, sirens screaming all night, the television news so bloody and horrible that he'd picked up a lamp the other day and smashed his screen. She was the key, and Raymond knew he had to find her. If she existed, there was hope for them all, hope for the future.

  She would know all the answers.

  Just then he smelled the enchanting odor emanating from Sarah Mendleson's body as she brushed past him, carrying a heavy tray. 'Table three needs bussing," she said quickly, a line of moisture appearing on her forehead.

  "I want to paint you," Raymond blurted out without thinking.

  "Oh, you do, huh?" she said sarcastically, thinking he was into some type of kinky activity like body painting. "You gonna paint me all over? Is that it? What color?"

  Raymond felt a wonderful feeling fluttering in the pit of his stomach, the nervousness of earlier gone now. He could communicate with her, see through her to the part that mattered. He was certain he could paint her. The more he stared at her, the more he saw how much she resembled the woman. "Green," he said foolishly.

  Sarah held her heavy tray over her head with ease, resting her free hand on her hip as she reappraised Raymond Gonzales. She should have known, she told herself. He wasn't retarded or insane, he was just another goofy artist. She'd worked with them before in menial jobs, along with dozens of aspiring actors. It was just as she always told her friends—working in a restaurant wasn't such a bad place to meet men. Raymond was incredibly handsome. For all she knew, he might actually be talented. "You're an artist, aren't you?"

  "Yes," Raymond said. "Will you pose for me?"

  "I might," she said, winking at him. "But first I think you better bus that table."

  Even without her husband in the bed, Toy had slept soundly. She was used to him not being there; all the calls in the middle of the night to rush to the hospital. Waking around six, she retrieved her purse from the floor and pulled out a small black book. It was an Episcopal prayer book that she purchased one day when she'd walked through the cathedral to look at the stained-glass windows. Now every morning when she awoke, she would read a few prayers, but only after Stephen had left for the day. Like her father, Stephen was an agnostic. Toy, however, was curious, drawn. She couldn't go

  through her entire life believing in nothing. Just touching the book gave her a feeling of comfort, even though she was uncertain what she actually believed. Her recent acquisition of the prayer book was probably one of the reasons she had mentioned her childhood fantasy of becoming a nun to Sylvia.

  After reading a few prayers, Toy put the book back in her purse, and went to the guest bathroom to shower and wash her hair.

  Instead of getting into the shower, however, Toy just stood there studying her reflection in the mirror. Through the looking glass, she thought, believing at that moment that if she looked long enough, she could see through the mirror, see what was on the other side. Something had happened to her in the past three or four years, and it was threatening her marriage, her very existence. She had always been so happy, so contented, so at peace with herself. While many of her high school and later college friends had lapsed into periods of depression over grades, boyfriends, stress over their future, Toy had not been one of them. She'd always been focused, steady. Other than the stream of childhood accidents and the one instance when she was seriously ill, she had never been sick for more than a few days at a time, and never with anything more serious than a cold, a virus, a mild case of the flu.

  She thought of her fears. She didn't fear much. She didn't fear death as most people did. Her experience in the hospital had eliminated that fear completely. As she'd tried to tell Margie, death must be the last mystery, the greatest of all adventures. When her heart had stopped beating and she was technically dead, she had felt no pain, no terror. She thought of Margie Roberts and wished that she shared her experience. The next time she saw her, she decided, she would tell her all about it.

  Poverty didn't terrify her as it did her husband. She knew his need to be affluent and respected in the community was his driving force. If he didn't feel important, if someone criticized his work, even something minor like the woman who had complained that Stephen had left an unsightly scar, he would fly into a rage. If not, he would sulk around the house for weeks and make Toy's life miserable.

  For Toy, money was insignificant. She didn't care where she lived, what she wore, what kind of car she drove. As long as she had a roof over her head and food on the table, she was satisfied and happy.

  If she feared anything, she decided, it would be to wake up one morning and realize her life was almost finished and she had taken more than her share.

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  Toy liked to think her passing on earth would leave it in as good a condition as the day she was born. She religiously conserved water. She drove a car that consumed very little gas, and when the temperature soared to a hundred degrees, Toy
still refused to turn on the air conditioner and waste electricity. Even when she went to the grocery store, she carried her own cloth shopping bags, and she wore the same clothes several times before washing them.

  But even with her earnest efforts to protect the environment and the many sacrifices she made for her students, Toy sometimes felt insignificant. The one thing she had always yearned for had been denied—a child. Would anyone remember her after she had died? Would she leave even the smallest legacy behind to make her time on earth worthwhile?

  She stepped into the shower, running the water only a few seconds and then turning it off while she lathered her hair. Then she turned it on again and quickly rinsed the shampoo out, telling herself that the only real traumatic experience she had ever had was the one she was experiencing right now. And except for the problems with Stephen, she felt good, felt like she always felt: happy, safe, glad to be alive. Did she really need therapy as her husband suggested, as even Sylvia had implied last night?

  Stepping out of the shower, Toy dried herself off and then wrapped her wet hair in the towel, deciding to call Stephen as soon as she got dressed. Seeing the California Angels T-shirt and her jeans folded neatly in the chair, she realized she had nothing else to wear to school. She could never wear Sylvia's clothes.

  Besides, she decided, Stephen had to be worried about her and that wasn't right. Checking the clock, she saw it was almost seven. Sylvia's alarm clock was ringing in the next room, and Toy didn't want her to talk her out of calling. By now Stephen should be out of surgery and back at his office, preparing to see patients.

  "Can he talk?" she asked the receptionist. "It's me, Toy."

  "He's seeing an early patient," the woman answered, "but I can ring him anyway."