Helen is running late. She'd lost track of time at the library, where she'd been working on preservation protocols for the Sacramento Room's long-neglected local-writers collection. She'd taken special interest in the small-press poetry magazines of the 50s and 60s stored there. The city had been a hot bed of New American poetry during the period and her passion for that movement, along with her general love of working with textual materials, had caused her to work much longer than she'd planned.
She arrives looking charmingly disheveled, carrying with her a nice bottle of Lambrusco, the sparkling red that is her preferred drink of the warming months. Upon entering Edna's she is momentarily seized with the panic that comes whenever she confronts a crowded scene. It is a panic born of the conflict between the young woman she is at heart, the one she was before being taken, who wants nothing more than to live and to live among others, and the older, more withdrawn person she is now, the one that came back, the one who prefers the company of books.
Hast thou the power to live and to conquer death? The answer can only be 'yes.' So Helen makes her way into the party, clutching the bottle before her in ink-stained fingers, casting smiles and winks about her, to those she knows and to those she doesn't, making her way to Terri and Rick where they stand together. "Madame Proprietor, dear sir, I present you this bottle of moderately priced, yet delicious, wine," she says warmly. "Where would you like me to put it?"