it until it
looked pretty good.

They made me a purse, too. It didn't have anything in it except the
diamonds, but the women we saw always seemed to carry them, and they
thought it might be a sort of superstition or ritual necessity, and
that we'd better not take a chance on violating anything like that.

They made me spend a lot of time practicing with the car, because
without a license, I couldn't take a chance on getting into any
trouble. I must have put in the better part of an hour starting and
stopping and backing that thing, and turning it around, and weaving
through trees and rocks, before they were satisfied.

Then, all of a sudden, there was nothing left to do except _go_. They
made me repeat everything one more time, about selling the diamonds,
and how to register at the hotel, and what to do if I got into
trouble, and how to get in touch with them when I wanted to come back.
Then they said good-bye, and made me promise not to stay _too_ long,
and said they'd keep in touch the best they could. And then I got in
the car, and drove down the hill into town.

I knew they didn't want to let me go. They were worried, maybe even a
little afraid I wouldn't want to come back, but mostly worried that I
might say something I shouldn't, or run into some difficulties they
hadn't anticipated. And outside of that, they knew they were going to
miss me. Yet they'd made up their minds to it; they planned it this
way, and they felt it was the right thing to do, and certainly they'd
put an awful lot of thought and effort and preparation into it.

If it hadn't been for that, I might have turned back at the last
minute. Maybe they were worried; but _I_ was petrified. Only of
course, I wanted to go, really. I couldn't help being curious, and it
never occurred to me then that I might miss them. It was the first
time I'd ever been out on my own, and they'd promised me, for years
and years, as far back as I could remember, that some day I'd go back,
like this, by myself. But....

Going back, when you've been away long enough, is not so much a
homecoming as a dream _deja vu_. And for me, at least, the dream was
not entirely a happy one. Everything I saw or heard or touched had a
sense of haunting familiarity, and yet of _wrongness_, too--almost a
nightmare feeling of the oppressively inevitable sequence of events,
of faces and features and events just not-quite-remembered and
not-quite-known.

I was born in this place, but it