Farallon Woman

I gathered my courage and said, "Tara, wül you marry tiffany ring?"

The ring waited, neatly wrapped and hidden. It had been waiting for a couple of months. Now that I'd gotten the words out of my mind and through my mouth, it seemed so easy that I wondered why it had taken me so long.

Tara FaraUon looked across my dining room table, past low-burning candles and almostempty wine glasses, smiled the quiet, mysterious smile that seduced me six years ago, and said, "No."

"No?" I wasn't surprised and didn't know why. Stunned. That was it. Stunned, but not surprised, if that makes sense.

Her smUe became oddly, differently, more mysterious. She came to stand behind me, cradling my head between her breasts as her hair feU like a veU over my fece. "You want to know why, Jack," she said tenderly.

I tried to say, "Yes," and the word stuck in my throat. Her hands were cool and gentle, caressing my forehead, down my cheeks, and across my shoulders.

"I can't teU you," she said, tiffany rings and frustrated, as it had been at first when she spoke longingly of her lost memories - the part of her life that was simply . . . gone.

"You don't have to," I said, hearing myself as if someone else was talking.

"I know," she said. "That's what makes it so hard." She squeezed my shoulders, and squeezed again, as if she felt my tension and couldn't let go until shed kneaded it away.

She walked to my wide front window and sUently looked out on the Ughts of Berkeley, San Francisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

A ship moved slowly across moonUt water.

Pale nightglow outUned her body, while flickering highlights danced across the curve of her back as the candles guttered toward extinction.

Unable to speak into her sUence, as if it was something private and sacred, I remembered our first meeting. . . .

Sandy Applegate, the director of Project Black Box, had tiffany silver a staff meeting Friday afternoon. Sandy's official, visible job is with Project SETI. Ten years ago, she'd put together a string of stray radar tracks that others considered "gUtches" and realized that a starship had crashed in the Pacific, five-hundred-some mües west of San Francisco. The topsecret replacement for the Glomar Explorer fished it off the bottom- and Project Black Box was born. We aU had "normal" jobs and worked at Black Box in our "spare" time.