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Show 286 wipers scraping the windshield. Or if not forever, then until she drove into a future of sunshine and warm beaches, where she would live the rest of her life. Her own person, independent, free. Coming out of the fog now was the huge stack of sea mines to the side of the road, which she remembered from childhood. The giant steel balls stacked like some child might carefully stack marbles. They seemed alien, from a different planet. It had been her dad who had explained that they were sea mines, from the war, used to mine the harbors here along the coast. Yes, they were from his world, a world of the past. And to come upon them like this, these stacks of alien gray balls sealed in this close gray fog-it seemed as if she were driving into the past itself, into some living remenant of a world which had vanished. At Costa Mesa she turned right, out into the deeper fog of the peninsula. This had been her favorite place as a child, this extension of the land out into the sea. She passed the smaller frame beach houses, crowded against each other, there was little room for them here on this bottleneck of land. How wonderful it would be to live here, surrounded on both sides by the ocean! She could not imagine a place where she would rather live. Even Robbie's apartment at the Marina. Further out on the peninsula, where the land was higher, wider, the small beach houses turned into larger homes, with high walls surrounding them. Some of them mansions almost. The homes on the right faced the open sea, with the long open beach before them. But the ones on the left she liked even better. For out of sight from here, behind the walls and buildings and private tennis courts, were the boat |