I looked for a long time at the new grave in the Little Big Rock cemetery.

Then I balanced my beer on the stone fence and strung my hammock under the oak tree a few feet away. I flopped into the netting and gave myself a push. Took a slug of the beer: Allagash White from a brewery in Portland.

I said, "Man, Dewey, yours never tasted this good."

I finished the bottle and closed my eyes. Birdsong spilled through the branches. The October breeze brought the scent of hay and Atlantic coastline.

Smelled like home.

You don’t want to hear about the long, long days of my homecoming and recovery. I’ll spare you that. I'll spare you Patty’s fierce hug, and Gustav weeping and Trish turning gruff to hide her feelings. I’ll spare you the Bankheads and the Johns and Dr. Wainwright.

I’ll spare you Mr. and Mrs. Dougherty. I wish I could spare them, too.

Weeks passed. I'd always healed fast, maybe on account of that fourth orb, hidden behind muscle and bone in my chest. The doctors had resuscitated me three times that night before Rachel told the senator to make the hospital transfer me away, afraid they’d get curious about what made me tick. They'd airlifted my unconscious body home, where Dr. Wainwright treated me in the same room where I’d woken after the Storm.

I didn't ask for hot fudge this time. I just cried.

The first week on my feet, I’d kicked around the Rock, hating everything. The next few days, the Bankhead brothers dragged me onto the boat and I pulled traps in their silent and uncompromising company. Once, for no reason, Richard Bankhead said, "The sea's too big to fight."

Then I mowed the Johns' lawn and fixed the Reuter’s fence and replaced the Emerson’s boiler. The only person I didn't see was Shandra, not since she’d dropped a nightmare on that mercenary named Teegan in the Manattan crosswalk--weeping blood and losing her hair in clumps.

Until, in the cemetery, I caught a flash of color above me.

When I stood, Shandra swung toward me from the thickest branch of a tree. Hanging upside-down from her knees, her lips curved in a grin. Mischievous and teasing, wearing a bikini top and a skirt that pooled around her waist.

Oh, and she’d gone completely bald. Plus her eyes were crimson: the white, the retina, the pupil--everything red.

She laughed. "You should see your face."

"You should see yours," I said.

"Catch me," she said, and dropped.

I caught her, and she draped her arms around my neck. Grass stained her bare feet. She smelled of a warm summer midnight, despite the chill of autumn in the air.

"Do I look that bad?" she asked.

She looked alien, inhuman and striking. "You’re beautiful," I told her, and she knew from my touch that I meant it.

Her impish grin turned into a smile that burst across her face until she glowed with joy. She hummed like a child with an ice cream cone, and three chickadees whirred from the underbrush and chased each other around the cemetery.

"You’re not bad either." She trailed her hand across my chest and tapped one orb with her fingertips. "For a freak."

I set her on the ground. "What happened to you?"

She stretched into the branches above and snagged a scraggly bouquet of wildflowers. "Back there in the city," she said, "on that crosswalk, a million minds burned through mine. They scoured me clean."

"You’re not afraid anymore."

"Nope." She arranged the wildflowers on the gravestone. "Oh, and I’m Little Big Rock now."

"Congratulations," I said. "I’m downtown Dubuque."

She laughed, which started the chickadees hopping around. "My mind shattered, Lark. It melted down. And when they brought me home, I poured myself into the Rock, into every tree stump and cliffside and anthill. I’ll never leave here again--I’m finally free."

"And crazy as a loon," I said, though I felt myself smiling in return.

"You wouldn’t say that if you meant it."

"Maybe not."

She pointed at me. "Nothing on this island is beyond my dreaming."

One of the chickadees landed on her outstretched finger. Then the second. And the third hopped down her bare shoulder to nuzzle her chin.

"Holy crap," I said. "You’re Snow fucking White!"

She laughed. "Without all that hair."

"What does that make me?" I asked. "One of the Seven Dwarves?"

She exhaled and a ripple of surf sounded in the distance. The chickadees spiraled into the sky through a breeze that smelled of leaf litter and lilac and freshly-dug graves.

We stood there and listened to the afternoon slip into evening.

I asked, "Are you okay?"

"For the first time in forever, Lark, I’m better than okay." Her smile turned gentle. "I’m not the one weeping into my pancakes every night."

"I just miss him. I miss them, and--" I stopped. Nobody had seen my midnight cooking and crying. "How do you know about that?"

"I’m the island, remember?"

"So wait--you know everything now?"

She toyed with a meadow flower. "I know this: nobody will hurt us again--not here. Everyone who takes one step onto the Rock puts themselves into the palm of my hand." She crushed a flower in her fist and for a moment, her alien eyes unsettled me. "What I’m telling you, Lark, is that you're not bound here anymore. You can leave the island, for as long as you want. I can free you. You’re free."

"Free of what?" I said. "I’m home."

"Almost."

"I don’t know what that means."

She touched my lips with two fingers and said, "You love her."