Hiyako Miyazuki was not Jasmine’s birth mother but she loved that bright little being with every ounce of her caring, gentle heart.

She sat, depressed, at the golden wood table, tired of the dangerous game they had to play day after day. She still drank her Sencha but she’d been powerfully tempted to ask RJ to make her a coffee drink. He took his coffee black but Hiyako, on the rare occasions she drank coffee, needed it with enough sugar and half-and-half to be coffee ice cream.

RJ seemed immovable as a bear but Hiyako knew he would ordinarily be at his drafting table and not cradling a coffee mug at the kitchen table.

He loved that drafting table. He had built it with his father nearly 35 years ago. Hiyako had met RJ’s father once before the old man passed away: an older version of RJ himself, massively calm but with many more wrinkles and with hair and beard white like moonlight on the last of winter’s snow. He still lived at Featherstone, the hippie commune he had helped to found, with two other white-haired, winkled hippies. (Featherstone, sadly, had dried up and blown away when old Frank Reynalds had passed.)

Hiyako had imagined old Frank as a middle-aged man, looking exactly like RJ did now, saying to his teenaged son, “’F yer gunna be an artist, let’s get you a drafting table you can love.”

Young RJ had sketched out a design, complete with an angular black bearded hippie sitting at it, bushy eyebrows wiggling. They had built the legs from a storm-downed pine but the flat tilting top had started life as the floor of a high school basketball court. Together they had fixed an ugly crack with wood glue and sanded and oiled the old surface until it was a sensual pleasure to stroke. RJ had worked at that drafting table almost every day of his life.

But today he sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, thick fingers resting on the table top but not drumming.

Hiyako understood. They both fretted about Jasmine, out there in the wild somewhere.

Ordinarily Hiyako would be deep in her practice routine. Except for a rebellious period in her teens and a three-day stint at the hospital when she had her miscarriage, she had not missed a day of practice since age ten.

Now she made herself rise and get her flute from its protective case. She warmed up with deep breathing and then spent five minutes on each note of the pentatonic scale.

She projected love to Jasmine as she played each note, starting so quietly that a mouse would not have trembled as it whisked a grain of corn into its hole, gradually getting louder until the note polished shelves and ceiling like the soft cloth with which she cleaned her flute, and finally trailing off to nothing again. She started notes with a natural breath, as casual as a swan floating up to the shore to accept a square of RJ’s corn bread, and with infinite patience trailed off to nothing so that the silence became a note of its own.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She began to improvise, incorporating memories of long walks up Mount Davidson or a day on Mount Tam with Jasmine, where she would play into the wind, feeling the subtle differences of playing with or against the wind, listening to the cries of birds, the rustling of squirrels, the almost inaudible shaking of a glistening spider web in the early morning or the dropping of an acorn in the fall. All of it was in her music.

The only things she loved as much as her music were RJ and Jasmine. She still treasured the memory of Jasmine’s ardent and trusting little face telling her that she and RJ should fall in love.

If not for Jasmine, she would not have thought of RJ as a man to love. But he was the perfect complement for her. They had a relaxed courtship for months with long quiet walks side by side through the herbal Spanish greens of the chaparral, the windy salt of wild beaches, the comforting mist of redwoods. She had talked with Jasmine, who almost always was with them, much more than with RJ.

But she had seen the tender way the big man held and carried his child, patiently answered her questions about the hard mushrooms that grew in arches on fallen logs, the gleaming banana slugs, the dead squirrel they found.

Hiyako at 36 was a quiet vegetarian living in a small studio in Oakland, an in-law cottage in someone’s backyard. The tranquility and order of her music showed in her quiet living space with petite wooden chairs, the single bed neatly made every morning and the comfortable routine with her landlady’s dog Psycho (who in spite of his name was a friendly beagle with limpid puddles for eyes). Syke knew he wasn’t supposed to jump on people so when Hiyako left her cottage in the morning, there he was with his paws on the rise between the lawn and the vegetable garden, tail thrashing madly. She knelt and petted him for a minute. When she stood, he bounced ahead of her to the gate to the street and put his paws on that for Petting Session Two, which she always gave. When she came home, the routine was reversed.

When RJ visited her, she was amazed how such a bear of a man sat so neatly on her chairs without sprawling but without seeming trapped. He had a gift of modulating his energetic size to his environment and never seemed to resent it.

It was even better when she visited him. His home had that same ability: the space modulated itself to the energy of the visitor. It held RJ’s relaxed disorder and Hiyako’s delighted symmetry and both felt at home.

By the time they finally made love, they already felt married. They shared a gourmet vegetarian dinner at Green’s, drinking wine-quality grape juice as they watched the sun set behind the Golden Gate Bridge, and then went back to his home to pay the babysitter. The lovemaking lasted for several hours and was as much a piece of art as one of Hiyako’s flute pieces or RJ’s drawings or the magical building he lived in.

And then in the wee hours, as she sat and read on her iPad while RJ dozed, Jasmine breathing softly in the next room, she heard a sound. A soft creak and a puff of air, not cold like from a grave but with a perfume of old roses. She looked up.

The small door in the far wall had opened softly. Shyly a woman stepped into the room. She had half-lidded eyes that seemed to see into another time and place and her ghostly hands glowed so that the wall seemed dim and drab.

As Hiyako gazed in awe at the phantom, the other woman looked at her own hands with amusement. I seem to be a ghost, her mischievous mysterious eyes said. Now just how should a ghost behave?

And then she was gone.