The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

I held her, smoothed her hair. "It's all right, wookie," I murmured, "It's all right. It's just a house. The home is us. Wherever we go ... someday we'll build another house better than this one, and your gardens will be everywhere, fruit trees and tomato trees and flowers more than we ever dreamed of here. And we'll get to meet new wildplants and a new deer-family will come live near us. The place we're going will be even more beautiful, I promise!"

"But Richie, I love this place!"

She sobbed deeper and deeper within herself, till I helped her into the car and we drove away. The valley where we had lived dropped behind us, out of sight.

I didn't cry, for we had an unspoken agreement-only one of us goes off-duty at a time, one of us at a time exhausted or ill or injured, grief-stricken, dependent. I drove the car in silence, and at last Leslie cried herself to sleep against my shoulder.

We're free at last, I thought, turning north on the Interstate. We can start

over, and not from nothing. We can start over, knowing everything we've learned along the way! Principles of love and guidance and support and healing, those are working for us, even now.

Bankruptcy, losing the rights to the books, it may look like unjust disaster, Richard, but we know better than to believe appearances, don't we? Now's our chance to hold strong to what is, in spite of what seems.

Clean slate, no ties, no anchors-I've just been handed a chance to prove the power of my so-trusted Unseen! It's

Cosmic Law, I thought, unbreakable: Life never abandons life.

Lifting from the ruins of wealth is like lifting out of a dungeon in a light-balloon. Rough dark walls dropped from around us both; the most challenging, testing, difficult iron-bound years were falling away. Yet within those walls had grown the gold-and-rainbow answer to the barnstormer's search ... I had found the one person who mattered more to me than any other in the world, the restless search of decades had stopped at last.

This is the moment, right here as the hills of Oregon disappear in twilight, that any good writer would whisper, "The End."

forty-four

MOVED farther away north, started over in a house rented with Mary Moviestar's money, which Leslie now insisted was our money. How strange it felt, not to have a dime of my own!

She was as prudent and careful as I had been profligate. Prudence, thrift-qualities nowhere to be found on my list of requirements for a soulmate, yet such is the foresight I expect of the universe: one of a charmed pair must always supply what the other might lack.

What I had missed, from the moment of first attack by a heavyweight income, was simplicity. Unless one is ready in advance for the shock, sudden wealth buries one in complis-tiquesque multibranch crosswebulated tangleworks weight-freighted toward intricationary ponderositives. Simplicity, like quicksilver, disappears when it's squeezed.

Now simplicity shyly knocked on the jamb where the

door used to be. "Hi, Richard. Couldn't help notice your money's gone. Have you seen the sky, lately! Have a look at them clouds! Regard what happens when Leslie plants flowers, even in a rented garden! And isn't it beautiful to watch your wife come to work at her computer?"

Beautiful it was. On warm days, Leslie dressed in the simplest clothes: white sailcloth pants, a gossamer blouse to work next to me in our little office. It was lustful pleasure just to turn and ask her the right way to spell compatable. How I loved simplicity!

Not all pressures were gone, however. The time came at last when the trustee in bankruptcy, charged to liquidate all my former assets, sent us notice that he was ready to receive bids for the copyrights of my books. They were for sale, seven of them. Like anyone else, we could make a bid if we wished.

Our roles reversed. I was the cautious; Leslie, after months of waiting, the sudden spendthrift.

"Let's not offer much," I said. "Three of the books are out of print. Who's going to offer good money for that?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't want to take any chances. I think we should offer every penny we have."

I caught my breath. "Every penny? How are we going to pay the rent; how are we going to live?"

"My parents said they'd lend us money," she said, "till we're on our feet again." Leslie was ferociously determined.

"Not borrow money, please. I can go back to work, now. There's a new book to write, I think."

She smiled. "I think so, too. Remember when you said your mission was done? Remember when you told me you could die anytime because you had said everything you had come to say?"

"I was a silly goose. I didn't have anything else to live for, then."

"Now you do?"

"Yes."

"Make sure you do," she said. "If you die, there are going to be two bodies on the floor! I'm not going to stay around here if you go."