Does one get a second chance, Jenny asked herself. She had been asking herself that question, quietly, for hours. It became a mantra in her head as the wind rippled across the lake, chattered diabolically in the dry weeds, and blew sand in her eyes. Over and over, trying to calm herself, trying not to think what would happen if the answer were no. Does one get a second chance?

The sun was going down, dyeing the late monsoon clouds with rich desert colors: golden orange, deep rose, vibrant purple. But to Jenny the colors looked strange, and just before the sun disappeared behind a distant mountain pricked with saguaro cacti like many-pronged daggers, she swore the sky flashed blood-red. The oasis-style park had always been strange, out of place in the desert with its artificial lake and the maze of pipes that maintained it, palm trees that didn't grow anywhere near this part of the world, and a brigade of hideous aluminum picnic tables arranged throughout the park like metallic parasites. The other people who visited the park didn't seem to know just how strange it was, though. Jenny couldn't explain it; she had never considered trying to tell someone else about it. But she had noticed it many years ago, when she had dragged one of the picnic tables—by herself, as her aching arms would remember for days—across the perilous wooden bridge and onto the island that poked out of the lake. She had never understood why no one else went out across that bridge. The island was secluded, isolated from the rest of the park by the ungainly palm trees and the fabricated humidity. Just the thing Jenny wanted. She had stayed there until the brown-uniformed state park official came to chase her away at closing time, but she returned as soon as the sun came out the next morning. The picnic table was upended in the shallow part of the lake, its legs sticking out of the water like a half-buried corpse, as if the wind had blown it off the island in a fury. The walking paths that traversed the park were swept clean, as they had been the day before. There had been no wind.

It was not until the day Jenny turned eighteen that she witnessed something first-hand. She had spent the afternoon signing the truckload of paperwork that severed her wardship to the state, and since her foster parents no longer had any responsibility to her, she had no choice but to ride the bus across town—ten miles in an hour and a half—and walk the rest of the way to the park. She got there after closing and climbed over the silly chain that the officer had draped across the entrance. She crossed the bridge, dropped her backpack on the sand, flopped down on her stomach, and fell asleep.

She later swore that what happened next was a dream. She was woken by a burst of music, strange and unrecognizable, shaking the earth beneath her. Water touched her, waves lifted out of the lake somehow, and the music felt as if it was in the water. Jenny bolted upright, gasping for breath like someone drowning. The sound, bone-jarring and all-encompassing like heavy drums or an organ in its lowest key, but not like any of these, filled her head so fully that she couldn’t see. But images forced their way into her mind anyway, shapes and shadows of things she couldn’t describe in words, circling around an unreal fire that made her tremble with its heat. When she finally found her legs under her, Jenny lunged for her bag and reeled backwards across the bridge, off the island.

For three years she didn't go back. It's not that I'm scared, she told herself. There's no such thing as witches, devils, ghosts, or any of that supernatural crap. She hadn't gone back to the park because she was too busy, working two jobs to pay the rent on a little apartment near the university. It would have been cheaper to get a roommate, but Jenny preferred to be alone.

Besides, she had found a new pastime. The university library was open all hours of the night and possessed a wonderfully eclectic assortment of books, scattered on tables by weary students and abandoned when those students left to saturate themselves with more caffeine. Jenny could browse through Darwin's complete writings, two different translations of The Odyssey, and a programmer's guide to COBOL, all at the same desk. One night she picked up, idly, an anthology of English literature. It fell open to a poem by William Blake. She looked at the footnote first: Blake, an early Romantic artist and a mystic, was flying in the face of every philosopher of the eighteenth century, denying empirical science and rationalism. Jenny went back to the top of the page and started reading the poem.

The day after Jenny's twenty-first birthday she came home from losing one of her jobs—naturally, the better-paying one—to find that her apartment had been broken into. She spent the rest of the evening trying to track down the manager and get him to move her into a different apartment. Instead, he changed her locks and nailed a board over the broken half of her window. It was eleven-thirty by the time he left and she couldn't sleep. She caught the very last bus across town and went to the park.

It was raining, an unseasonably early storm with wind that nearly took her off her feet as she made her way toward the island. Part of her was screaming to turn around, but her reason overrode it. There's nothing there, she told herself as the rain blinded her and the crack of thunder resonated in her bones. Keep walking.

The sounds started when she reached the bridge. The droning, the screeching that tried to split her head. Jenny's reason shattered and fell to the ground like broken glass; her entire body was overwhelmed with the instinct to run. Then she saw the man.

Family bonds meant nothing to Jenny. Being pulled out of her house at the age of twelve by the court and thrown in a foster home taught her that. New attachments, friends, were also worthless; she had learned that when she was sent to the second foster home. Love was foolish. The boy she dated when she was fifteen had been shot in the street outside the shelter where he stayed, three blocks from the courthouse that had put him there. Jenny felt no pain over that any more. She had been young and silly, not really in love at all, and though his death was tragic, it was unreasonable to go on mourning it. It taught her how to be alone.

Hide behind the wall, dodge the bullets, watch out for yourself. But in the midst of a shadow that was impenetrably black Jenny saw a hand reach out to her, a face raised with an impossible hope that shines while it drowns in torment. She ran across the bridge.

The shades clawed at her as she clung to the man. Screams of the sirens split her ears, the strangling tentacles of gorgons lashed at her, harpies drew blood from her bare legs and arms. The man held fast to her; she couldn't have pulled away from him even if she wanted to, but somehow she never even thought to. The cacophony that enshrouded them accelerated to a maddening pitch, whipping around them with the impassioned wind, tearing, wrenching, severing. And then it was gone.

He had no place to go, of course. His clothes were worn and tattered, and looked like the costumes men wore on the covers of romances set in Regency England. Jenny would have believed anything at that moment. As they walked the aching march back to her apartment and the claw marks on her body faded and began to look like scratches one could get from raking an arm across the gravelly dirt, her reason resurrected itself. The man said nothing to explain himself, and with each bone-jarring step the street lights and graffiti-splattered bus stops became more real to Jenny, and the park with its nightmarish images drifted further away. The man finally told her, in an almost foreign inflection that could have been learned in the theater, that his name was Alain.

Jenny had long been convinced that there would be no second chance at love. She ceased to even think about it; her childish romantic notions had died with a fifteen year old boy named Joey. Alain was a perfect gentleman in the time he stayed with Jenny, which contradicted what she knew about Regency England and further proved that he was nothing more than an amnesiac or mildly insane. She had no fears about him. A strange feeling gnawed at her for about two weeks after she met him, though, something that crept up her spine when she walked into her cranny of a living room and found him sleeping there. She finally realized it was just because she was no longer alone in the apartment. She told Alain about the break-in, and as he sat in a folding chair and tapped his hand on the fireplace poker that some previous tenant had unexplainably brought and then abandoned, Jenny felt for the first time in many years that she no longer had to be so afraid.

After some time she told Alain about her family, her numerous temporary families, the courts. Alain had wide gray eyes that spoke, deeply and silently, of pain and compassion. She talked about Joey. She talked about isolation. She got angry at herself when her eyes misted over and began to run down her face, but Alain set his arms carefully around her, as if she were something cherished and fragile.

He rarely said anything about himself. He had a steady and self-secure manner when he guarded Jenny's door with the poker on his knees or walked beside her through the streets at night, but at other times he was timorous, trembling, and his gray eyes were fearful and haunted. Noises sometimes woke Jenny, and she would feel the wind blowing over her in the half-sleeping hours of dawn, though all her windows were closed.

Jenny came home one day and the front window was destroyed, lying in shards outside and inside the wall. Burglars, she thought, but when she found Alain, cowering behind her bed, he told her no.

And Alain finally told his story. At the close of the eighteenth century there was a movement of people, artists and writers and musicians, who disagreed with the preceding generations of rationalist philosophers. Corrupted youth, Jenny thought. Rebelling against society. They hated empirical science, they hated rationalism, they hated the rejection of mysticism. And so they delved, like Goethe's Faust, into the realms of the unknown, the arcane, the dark. They wrote of witches and bargains with the devil. They gathered up old books of magic, seeking things that science could not explain. I know this, Jenny thought with a strange flash of anger. She had learned in school about Goethe and his contemporaries, people like William Blake. They were the Romantics. All passionate, irrational people that modern psychiatrists would make a lot of money off of. All dramatic people with tormented lives. Jenny stopped for a moment and reflected; their lives were not too unlike her own.

"Some of us delved too deeply," Alain murmured, in a voice whose intensity did not necessitate volume. One could not learn without paying the price. One did not bargain with Mephistopheles without offering something dear in return. Few understood this; fewer still escaped the payment that was due.

Outside the wind came up; it howled in the corridors between buildings, through the stairwells, around the gates that swung open and shut on shrieking hinges. Jenny asked, disturbed by her lack of skepticism but even more disturbed by the weakness of her voice, "But they're not looking for you anymore, right?"

When the monsoons came later that summer the rain leaked in through the windows and air vents, soaking the floor. The noises that Jenny heard at night became more frequent. One stormy, dark August afternoon the wind tore out the other window in the apartment and overturned the room's contents, shredded the rug, shattered the lights. The two occupants ran, clinging to each other, hiding under whatever they could find that would hold against the wind. The black clouds finally parted, and the wind subsided. For a time.

They did not stay in one place for long. They stopped in any place where they could find food, shelter, those concerns of living that now seemed so small and insignificant. They slept little. Everywhere they went in the prickly, jagged desert, the wind followed them. Days were washed away by the treacherous monsoons, minutes were cracked by lightning. They grew weak and wan. Jenny thought once, as her rational mind sought out the cause of this flight in an attempt to eliminate it, I wish I had never seen him.

And she was heard. When she returned to the abandoned house where they slept one night, having stepped outside for only three minutes, Alain was gone.

The monsoons died away and with them went the wind. Jenny asked for directions and hitchhiked her way back home, where she claimed her belongings at the police station, telling them that burglars must have sacked the apartment while she was visiting someone out of state. An uncomfortably warm and windless autumn ensued.

She moved into a complex on the north side of town. A security guard worked there. The only sounds she heard were children in the pool and someone's muted rock music, with its thin drums and whining nasal guitars. Still, she woke in the middle of the night, for no reason, frightened. She accepted one of the kittens that a neighbor was giving away so she would not be alone in the apartment. Watch out for yourself, she had been taught. It wasn't true. What she had longed for, what many longed for even as they denied it, was not isolation but a chance to reach for the outstretched hand drowning in the darkness. A chance to reject the reason that told them not to.

When the storm came late in the year Jenny went immediately to the park. The rain cleared before she got there, and the setting sun played tricks on her eyes. There was a shape there on the lake, a strange shadow—but no, it was only a palm frond swaying in the weak breeze. So does one, having rejected the first, get a second chance? She would hold on this time. The wind wrapped around her legs and released them, tossed her hair in her face and left it. She had thrown Alain against the wind. Now she waited, imperfect mystic that she was, hoping that it would blow him back again.