Free Last Summer at Mars Hill by Elizabeth Hand Page A

except for Jason.
    “It’s kind of on the way to Brunswick,” he explained when Diana protested his driving Moony. “Besides, Diana, if you took her she’d end up crying the whole way. This way I can keep her intact at least until the airport.”
    Diana gave in, finally. No one suggested that Ariel drive.
    “Look down when the plane flies over Mars Hill,” Ariel said, hugging her daughter by the car. “We’ll be looking for you.”
    Moony nodded, her mouth tight, and kissed her mother. “You be okay,” she whispered, the words lost in Ariel’s tangled hair.
    “I’ll be okay,” Ariel said, smiling.
    Behind them Jason and Martin embraced. “If you’re still here I’ll be up Columbus Weekend,” said Jason. “Maybe sooner if I run out of money.”
    Martin shook his head. “If you run out of money you better go see your mother.”
    It was only twenty minutes to the airport. “Don’t wait,” Moony said to Jason, as the same woman who had taken her ticket loaded her bags onto the little Beechcraft. “I mean it. If you do I’ll cry and I’ll kill you.”
    Jason nodded. “Righto. We don’t want any bad publicity. ‘Noted Queer Activist’s Son Slain by Girlfriend at Local Airport. Wind Shear Is Blamed.’”
    Moony hugged him, drew away to study his face. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
    He shook his head. “Tonight. When you get home. So I’ll know you got in safely. ’Cause it’s dangerous out there.” He made an awful face, then leaned over to kiss her. “Ciao, Moony.”
    “Ciao, Jason.”
    She could feel him watching her as she clambered into the little plane, but she didn’t look back. Instead she smiled tentatively at the few other passengers—a businessman with a tie loose around his neck, two middleaged women with L.L. Bean shopping bags—and settled into a seat by the window.
    During takeoff she leaned over to see if she could spot Jason. For an instant she had a flash of his car, like a crimson leaf blowing south through the darkening green of pines and maples. Then it was gone.
    Trailers of mist whipped across the little window. Moony shivered, drew her sweatshirt tight around her chest. She felt that beneath her everything she had ever known was shrinking, disappearing, swallowed by golden light; but somehow it was okay. As the Beechcraft banked over Penobscot Bay she pressed her face close against the glass, waiting for the gap in the clouds that would give her a last glimpse of the gray and white cottages tumbling down Mars Hill, the wind-riven pier where her mother and Martin and all the rest stood staring up into the early autumn sky, tiny as fairy people in a child’s book. For an instant it seemed that something hung over them, a golden cloud like a September haze. But then the blinding sun made her glance away. When she looked down again the golden haze was gone. But the others were still there, waving and calling out soundlessly until the plane finally turned south and bore her away, away from summer and its silent visitors—her mother’s cancer, Martin’s virus, the Light Children and Their hoard of stolen sufferings—away, away, away from them all, and back to the welcoming world.

From the start I had a somewhat uncanny feeling about this story, just as I did with “The Have-Nots;” though it took much longer to write. Mars Hill was inspired by an actual spiritualist community a few miles up the road from where I live in Maine. I often drove by it but never went in for a psychic reading until well after the story appeared. The place was pretty much as I had imagined it to be, though there were no golden phantoms around the day I visited.
    People I loved had died of breast cancer and AIDS, and that was the impetus for the story, along with a strange song by Fred Frith called “The Welcome” (which was “Mars Hill’s” original title). When I wrote this, it was pure wish fulfillment; protease inhibitors had not been recognized as the crucial treatment