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330 58 Rosie couldn’t believe she’d almost made them late, but here they were. She was settling into the dark, enjoying their birdlike perch at the top of the hall, happy to have glimpsed Mikala’s new girlfriend, when she heard it. The White Salmon minister’s hymn. Her minister’s hymn. Just a few notes of it, tucked away in Mikala’s music, but unmistakable, like a nod to the song, a brief embrace of the lovely melody. How did it get in Mikala’s symphony? Then, like the lightest touch, a feathery tickle, she heard another familiar refrain. But from where? The music opened up inside her and she remembered. The cold snow on her back. The spiraling galaxies. The sudden warmth, a pressure against her chest and stomach, between her legs, a human blanket. And then that song. Until now, she hadn’t remembered anything about the time and space between leaving Hotel South Pole and the moment when she’d come to consciousness in the clinic, her head pounding and her joints throbbing, with someone coaxing a cup of hot water to her lips. The time and space in between, when she’d lain on the snow. She’d heard strange notes and an eerie rhythm, a song of aching beauty that came to rescue her. She heard it again now, a song that carried all the epic hope of that continent. The song that brought her home. ...
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