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Show 100 toward her rock, hesitates, then recedes; she sits motionless, deep in contemplation, as the sun drops in the west, sinking through the layers of bloodred cloud, until it is at last extinguished in the sea. When she moves at last, she finds she is numb. She walks slowly up the beach towards the motel, opens her door. She takes the Do Not Disturb sign which dangles behind the knob and places it on the front of the door; she closes and locks it. The room is still small and ungainly, but she does not notice now: she removes her clothes, almost mechanically. She thinks suddenly of the nightgown which had been her mother's and is now in the box for Luel's child; it is the only thing which she would now like to have. She finds herself taking a sheet of paper out of the drawer of the desk; it has the name of the motel printed garishly across it. "If you bury me," she writes, "make it in mother's nightgown." She sits back, looks around the room, looks at the note. "Nonsense," she thinks to herself. She crumples the note into a ball, and throws it across the room towards the wastepaper basket. She begins to get into the bed, but she suddenly realizes they will find the note, even if it is in the wastepaper basket. She retrieves it, sits down at the desk, flattens it out, crosses out what she has written. "Please remember I'd rather be cremated," she writes, and adds that the nightgown is to go to Luel's daughter. She doesn't need to wear it, she thinks to herself. She goes to the bed, turns down the covers, lights two of the candles, one on the night-table at each side of the bed. She wraps the paper baby diapers around herself as best she can, and fastens the adhesive tabs at the sides. Now she slides into the bed, opens the drawer to the bedside table, |