degrees of love
by
rachel basch

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK

Copyright 1998 by Rachel Basch
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data
Basch, Rachel.

Degrees of love / by Rachel Basch.

p. em.

ISBN 0-393-04625-7

I. Title
PS3552.A784D44 1998

813'.54--dc2l 97-40319

W W Norton& Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

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CIAIPU

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

For David, for everything,
and
in memory of our Caroline,
who was with me as much of this
was being written

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to my sister-in-law Maria Gould Cronin for
so generously lending me her expert medical opinion, as well as
the kernel of this story.

Writers usually thank foundations for granting them the time
to write. My "foundation'during the writing of this book was my
children's daycare provider, Heidrun Morgan. Her loving care of
-my children quite literally freed me up. My many thanks to Sarah
Sturgis, Patti Noone, Sarah Halper, Asia Martin, and Lorrie
Jones, women whom my children and I came to rely on during
the long process of making this book.

I am indebted to my parents, Norma and Sheldon Basch, for
stepping into the the domestic fray that heralded more than a few
deadlines, and more important, for raising me to embrace challenge. And
thanks to my brother and sister-in-law Fred and Susan Basch for their
abilities at jollying up the niece and the nephew.

I had the good fortune (and sense) to marry into a family that has, for
me, doubled as a vast and voluble cheerleading squad.

Sally Gould, Forrest Gould, Maria Gould Cronin, Geoff Cronin, Peter
Gould, Joan Gould Kelley, John Kelley, Claudia Kuper vaser, and E J.
Gould have been tireless in their suspension of to sweep my children off their feet so that I might work.

My thanks to the attorneys Linda Medeiros and Zoe Manos for their legal
expertise. I am indebted to the social workers Stephen Thermes and Cindy
Gersd for illuminating the child welfare system for me. My appreciation
also to Cindy and to Cathie Petrosky for taking into account my own
children's welfare and extrcating them to long afternoons far from my
desk.

The writers Tricia Bauer, Bill Bozzone, Bonnie Friedman, and Anna
Monardo all shepherded me along the way. Their generosity in sharing
information, offering advice, and providing encouragement continues to
be invaluable for me. My writing students have been a gift. Communing
with them weekly fueled the process. Jill Edelman taught me about
mothering with equal me a sures of insight and compassion. My thanks to
her is unending.

My writing life turned around one hundred and eighty degrees the day I
met Alice Martell, my literary guardian angel, my agent.

I continue to be awed by the commitment my editor, Jill Bialosky, has
demonstrated toward this book. Her rigorous guidance in the rewriting of
this novel was indispensable. Ted Johnson, the copy editor on this book,
also deserves my many thanks.

There is no way to properly thank my family for stomaching the chaos
that was the sometime byproduct of living alongside a work in progress.
Nathaniel and Hannah have gone from toddlers to readers in the time it
has taken me to complete this project. Along the way they cheered me,
consoled me, and thankfully, engaged me in real life. They have endured
much and have done so with stunning equanimity. My respect for them is
limit less, their presence in my life my greatest joy.

My husband David Gould has supported me in every sense of the word. He
has read and reread and reread my work and brought his prodigious
editing skills to bear. He has lavished upon me the great gifts evident
in his own writing: passion, truth, humor, confidence, dedication, and
patience. @

BOOK ONE.

The caseworker wasn't there yet, and technically, Lily told herself, she
wasn't late unless the caseworker knew that she was late.

Jack, of course, knew that she was late. She could see him looking out
the living-room window. He'd probably just put away the vacuum and had
not yet laced up his tan bucks.

She could say that she had spent the last five miles of the ride home
from the hospital behind .. . a thresher, a tractor, a backhoe? Or she
could explain that for the past ten days she'd only left the hospital
when she was sure that Katie was sleeping deeply enough that she
wouldn't wake soon but not so deeply as to be in danger of slipping off
into some other realm, and to leave Katie there this morning, after
she'd waked up but before the doctor had made her rounds, had been
difficult. Or she could tell the truth. She was dreading this interview
with Mrs. Thorns from the state's Department of Social Services, almost
as much as she had dreaded the daily debridement of Katie's burns. On
her way home for the first time in over a week, she had stopped once for
coffee, once for half a Xanax, and a third time for a pack of
cigarettes, which she had later tossed unopened into a trash can when
she stopped again to fill the Subaru with gas.

"Mom, Mom." Their seven-year-old, Ben, came running out to the
driveway as Lily was pulling up the emergency brake.

Brakes, gates, safety straps-she always remembered them now.

"That lady's going to be here any minute, Mom." Ben allowed himself to
be kissed when Lily stepped out of the car and even reciprocated with a
one-armed hug.

"I missed you, buddy, a lot."

"I missed you too."

"You look nice."

Ben looked down at his navy-blue shorts and white golf shirt.

"We're supposed to, " he said, looking up now at Lily's brown Tshirt
freckled with bleach.

"I know. I'm going to change."

"How's the little? " he said, studying her face for a moment, then
bending down to pull up a fat weed from between two squares of slate on
the front walk.

"Good. She misses you and Greg."

"Will she still have the bandages on when she comes home?"

Lily stopped walking and looked down at Ben, engrossed in uprooting a
whole family of weeds now. "Her legs look much better. A little pink,
that's all. Nothing like before, no blisters, nothing like that."

Ben had walked in while Jack was changing Katie's bandages that first
night, after the doctor in the ER had sent her home.

He'd seen the tops and sides of his baby sister's feet and the front of
one leg bubbling with green, fluid-filled blisters. By the time Jack
carried her into the Shriners Burns Institute in Boston the next
morning, Katie's feet were swollen and she was running a fever of 104.
The doctor who admitted her at the Shriners cursed under his breath as
he picked threads of macerated gauze out of the oozing blisters. Not
nearly enough Silvadene ointment had been applied by the emergency room
physician at their local hospital, the one who'd negligently released
Katie from the ER, the one who'd later filed the report of possible
abuse.

Jack was waiting for them just inside the house, behind the screen door.
Through the mesh, Lily could see that he had dressed himself to match
Ben, with navy pants instead of shorts.

She imagined that Greg was similarly clothe .

"The Von Trapps, " she said.

"Who's that? " Ben asked, sidling up to her.

"Christ, Lillian, " Jack said wearily. "It's five past."

"I know, " she said, fingering the blond curls at the back of Ben's
head.

"You're just lucky you didn't pull into the driveway after her."

"I am lucky@" Lily took her hand from Ben and squeezed the trigger of
the door handle. "I'd say we're all lucky."

He'd done a good job of cleaning. The wood floors were free of any sign
of the outdoors, of the dried grass and sand of summertime, of the three
children who usually lived there. Jack had polished the dining-room
table and cut some peonies from out back, and he'd bought a new high
chair and placed it here, in this room where no one in her right mind
would feed a sixteen-month-old, but where there were no hot plates or
grills or burners, only mahogany and porcelain and glass.

She wondered what he'd done with the old high chair. She hoped he'd
thrown it out. On some afternoon in the spotless future when she was
rooting around in the basement for somebody's ice skates, she wouldn't
want to stumble across that cheap tray with its brown half-moon where
the pot must have landed, molecularly rearranging the plastic so that it
had begun to fold in upon itself The high chair was still functional.
The tray still slid across the arms, probably even locked in place. Lily
thought that there must be an unfortunate mother in town who could have
used it. But she would have hated for that woman to sit night after
night feeding her kid rice cereal, staring at the scarred tray, to come
to the inevitable conclusion that the chair had once been used by
another mother as a means of punishment or even torture.

Lily wondered if Mrs. Thorns would want to see the chair.

"Incongruities in the mother's story .. . combined with the presenting
injuries .. . necessitate further inquiry in this case, " the ER
physician's report had stated. She'd want to see the kitchen, "the
site."

"She'll want to see that you've corrected the problem, installed safety
devices, grasped the acute seriousness of the situation, " Linda
Polowitz, the hospital social worker, and seemingly their only advocate
in this whole mess, had said.

Lily hadn't been in the kitchen since the morning of the accident.

When they'd come home from the emergency room, Lily had taken Katie, all
bandaged and full of Demerol, upstairs.

From there she could hear Jack cleaning up-the pot, the eggs, the empty
juice glass that had been swept off the counter when Lily had very
nearly thrown Katie into the sink to immerse her leg in cold water. When
the boys got hungry, Jack fed them.

When Lily was thirsty, she ran the tap in the bathroom. And on her
endless tour of the house that night, she closed her eyes each time she
found herself at the kitchen doorway.

Almost every night at the hospital, she'd dreamed about the kitchen, not
her kitchen exactly, but one she knew as well or better, one she could
find her way around in night after night in her sleep.

The kitchen in her dreams was not so much an amalgam of all the kitchens
she had worked in as it was a reduction, an essence.

Each night in her dream, she followed the path of thick, black rubber
floor mats from the reach-in at Allison's where she had worked during
high school, to the walk-in at UHERMITAGE, past the proof boxes at the
Hilton, around the grinding Hobart from their own shop, all the way to
the storeroom at the Wiscasset Way, where she'd first met Jack fifteen
summers ago, and where, on the nights he was left to close up, they
would scrub each other with stiff towels in the ancient metal shower,
drenching the wooden shelves piled high with worn banquet cloths and
yellowing monkey dishes.

Invariably the cries of the babies on the burn unit or the screams and
curses of the older children would wake her. She'd lie on the narrow
cot, hungover with failure and fatigue after a night spent filling
never-ending orders in a strangely silent, cold kitchen, and she'd
whisper to herself that everything was really okay. Only a dream. Then,
beyond the mound of her own blanketed shoulder, she'd see the metal crib
with its caged top, and she'd remember where she was and why.

During those first few critical days the pigskin had to be changed every
morning and every night. Lily would grip the bars at the head of Katie's
crib as Dr. Wheeler lectured to the interns who crowded into the tiny
room.

"The xenograft tricks the skin, keeps the granular skin from forming a
scar." She'd try to do most of her talking before removing the bandages.
"We're looking to make sure it's not dirty, to see if the skin is
attempting to make a comeback."

Lily was grateful that Dr. Wheeler spoke softly. Katie often slept
through the winding discussions of edema, lymphangitis, tachyeardia,
morphine. But as soon as Dr. Wheeler removed the bandages and the burns
were exposed to the air, the baby would jerk from sleep into struggle.
Her face wet with tears, she'd thrash her head back and forth against
the pillow, again and again like a beating.

"Sing to her, " Dr. Wheeler would murmur.

"Three little ducks that I once knew. Lily could remember only that one
song.

"Hold her down now .. . that's right .. . flush to the mattress," the
doctor would instruct as she scraped with the metal tool.

"A fat one, a skinny one, a .. ." Lily would watch herself close in on
Katie, her fist around her child's wrist, her bosom pressed against her
baby's belly.

"Mam'mam'mama Katie would cry, watering Lily's own dry mouth.

The whirlpool baths followed some days later, when the burned tissue
began to separate from the underlying tissue.

"Debridement. The eschar needs to be tfioroughly sloughed off," the
nurse would appeal to Lily, as Lily forced herself to carry Katie
through the doorway of the room with the tubs.

"Submerge. Submerge the whole leg .. . just like that." The nurse would
shout to be heard above the roaring of the jets.

Lily would sink her arms into the chaos of wound and water and metal.
The nurse's freckled arm would disappear beneath the churning water.

"Mam'mam'mama was Katie's sole unbroken plaint above the scrubbing and
the roiling. The cure seemed so like the accident itself "Mam'mam'mama..
." The same word for both mother and pain.

"Mummy, Mummy Mummy's home, " Greg, Lily's four-year-old, cued down
from the top of the stairs, where he had lined up a traffic jam of
Matchbox cars along the base of the new gate Jack had installed.

"How's my guy? " Lily yelled out as she raced up the stairs so fast that
Greg squealed. "Can you let me in? " she asked, looking at the locked
gate.

"Oh, sure, Mum. It's easy. Look. Oh, wait, wait, wait. This is my
tollbooth. First you have to pay me."

Lily uncurled his hand from its pudgy grip on an ambulance and pecked
his palm with her fingertips.

"I missed you the whole time you were gone, " he said, as he swung open
the gate.

"I missed you, too." She hugged the top of his head and bent over and
kissed his hair. "Maybe you should pick up some of these, " she said,
starting down the hall to her bedroom. "We wouldn't want anybody to
trip."

"You mean that lady, right? The lady who's coming to talk to me and Ben
about safety and stuff, right?"

"Right, honey."

Lily swung open her closet door and took a look. Jack had brought her
something to wear last night when he'd come to see Katie in the
hospital. After Jack had rocked Katie to sleep, singing "Mountain of
Love, " Lily had walked him downstairs and waited in the lobby while he
ran from streetlight to streetlight toward his parked van. She watched
as he ran back with something dangling from a dry-cleaning bag.

She wished she had gone with him. It was warm out and she would have
liked to run fast, feet pounding the pavement, scot-free.

As she waited, she pretended she was in stride with him, that she could
hear his breathing, see his chest rise and fall with something other
than the weight of his anger. She forced herself to look around the
lobby at the security guard and the two Shriners waiting to walk some
red-eyed mother or aunt out to her car, and then she rewarded herself by
looking past her own reflection in the glass door to the street again.

When she spotted Jack, she registered a kind of thrill that she
momentarily mistook for love, but realized was envy.

"I'm not going to wear a dress, " she said, as he emerged from the
revolving door. He walked past her to one of the insistently cheerful
orange vinyl couches and laid down the dry-cleaning bag. It was the blue
linen dress she'd worn to Jack's father's funeral three years before and
hadn't worn since. It looked to her like a dress for a funeral.

"It looks like a dress for a J'oh interview, " she said, lifting up the
plastic.

"And .. .

"I already have the job, and it's not at the Bank of Boston, which-"

"Fine, " he said, heading toward the door.

"Thank you .. . for bringing it." She started to follow him. He was
shaking his head back and forth.

"I mean, I'm sorr-37@ Really, I'm sorry." She reached out to touch his
wrist, but he shook her off and kept walking. "You've got to admit, "
she said, smiling, "it was sort of a Perry Mason thing to do.

Don't you think?"

She laughed, but he didn't. She watched as he sl'pped into one of the
sections of revolving door and turned out onto the street.

"How about this one, Mum? " Greg stuck his skirt-draped head from out of
the front line of clothing in her closet. He loved to hide in there,
walking slowly through the flannel shirts and corduroy pants and, in the
back, the ridiculous cache of silk dresses that had belonged to her
grandmother.

She usually hated for him to play in her closet. But the list of things
her children did that irked her had been erased. She felt a vague
gratitude toward Ben and Greg now, something more companionate than
maternal.

Either Jack or his mother had brought the boys to the hospital nearly
every day. They weren't allowed upstairs-risk of infection was too high
on the unit. So they would sit downstairs with Lily at the big yellow
table near the vending machines and show her their scorecards from
miniature golf They'd ask her again if she knew that Winstead Lake had
been closed all because one dumb kid-the one who spent last summer
telling about the Titanichad got sick from drinking the water there. Ben
was getting Mr. Rossi for second grade. The letter had been mailed home
the other day. Nana wouldn't buy frozen pizza. Daddy was mad.

She would listen to them talk as if she were an invalid and they were
describing a life at which she could only guess. There was a distance.
She loved them, but didn't deserve them. She had been stripped of her
rank. She couldn't imagine telling them what to do, let alone
reprimanding them. And as she watched Greg now, walking in one pair of
high heels all over the other shoes at the bottom of her dusty closet,
she wondered if scolding wasn't a kind of bond, the constant affirmation
of mother's and child's place.

"This one, Mum. This one is really it." Greg had pulled forward a long,
flowered split-skirt dress she'd worn to her mother-in-law's on Easter.

"You think? " she said. He nodded.

She moved in toward the mirror beside the closet and took a long look,
something she hadn't done in over a week. She seemed to have shrunk down
from her five feet four inches and away from the seams and waistband of
her summer-weight clothes. A week of fluorescent hospital sun had
leached the olive from her skin. Her straight hair had grown beyond the
edges of its bob.

"Midnight tresses, " her father had called them, back when she was young
and her hair was long and truly black. Now, coarse white strands arced
wildly across her head like so many dying comets.

"And these to go with it." Greg held up a pair of spike-heeled black
velvet shoes she couldn't remember ever having worn.

"These shoes would be purrr-feet, " he said, in what she hoped was an
unconscious imitation of herself and the way she sometimes exaggerated
to punch up the relentless routine of dressing and grooming children.

"I don't know about the shoes, " she said, tossing her shorts and shirt
into the wicker hamper in the corner of the bedroom.

She unzipped the dress that Greg had picked out.

"They're kind of.. .

"Steep? " he offered.

She nodded. "I might fall over, and that wouldn't look very good."

"No, " he said. "It wouldn't."

Looking good, sounding good, that's what the next hour or two was all
about. "Act like you have nothing to hide, " Linda, the hospital social
worker, had said as they sat in her office on Friday.

Lily had looked over at Jack, willing him to return the glance, but he
was looking down at his hands, picking at the Band-Aid on his thumb.
He'd cut himself on the meat slicer at work.

"Attitude counts. Maybe it would help you to understand where they're
coming from, Bums are the second most frequent cause of accidental death
in kids age one to four. It takes one second for an adult to receive a
full-thickness burn from water heated to one hundred and sixty degrees.
Children's skin is thinner, so the exposure time is even less.
Second-degree burns, certainly full-thickness burns, raise flags.
Emergency room physicians are mandatory reporters.

And splash burns can be tough to call."

Jack shook his head, and Lily could hear him suck his teeth.

"But she's going to be fine, " Lily pleaded. "Dr. Wheeler's prognosis
for her is excellent. Some scarring, some depigmentation."

The threat was over. The infection that had coursed through Katie at the
outset had been successfully treated. She had avoided a skin graft.
They'd splinted her right leg and ankle into the position of function,
and after the first week, they'd started her on physical therapy. For
thirty minutes each day, the splint and the bandages were removed and
Katie was forced to point and flex her feet, to move the burned skin
over the bones in her ankles and toes. She was not expected to suffer
any loss of contour or function on either of her feet or her right leg.

"That's important, isn't it? " Lily said. "That she's going to be fine?"

"Since no one else was home at the time, they'll need to be reassured of
the accidental nature of the injuries, " Linda explained.

"When all the measurements add up-her physical dexterity, the size and
placement of the pot-you'll be golden.

They'll be looking for a cause, a reasonable explanation for why the
burns on the feet were more severe than the ones higher up on the leg,
which sort of runs counter to gravity." Linda flashed them some kind of
knowing smile.

"And will they be looking at the hack in the ER who's trying to cover
his own negligence in releasing her? " Lily said.

Linda nodded vigorously. "Try to enter into this with a positive,
cooperative attitude. I don't know this Thorns, which is good. She
doesn't have a reputation for hostility or extreme idiocy or anything
that precedes her. But understand, these caseworkers are not licensed.

Few if any are MSWS. It isn't often that these people get to ride out to
the burbs to check up on professional white couples with private
pediatricians. All I'm saying is, don't make it any )uicier than it
already is. Put the BMW in a friend's garage, stow the mink in the
basement-"

"It's a Subaru and a down coat, " Jack said, cutting her off.

"And when you say'these people"-"

"Jack, " Lily interrupted, "I think Linda is only trying to warn us that
we might be dealing with someone who has an ax to grind, a paper pusher,
a public-"

"I think we all understand what Linda is saying, " Jack said, squeezing
his bandaged thumb with his other hand. Lily looked across the desk at
Linda, fairly certain that the older woman was unaware that Jack had
stopped just short of calling her a racist.

"She'll want to talk with your other children. You have .. .

two "Boys, " Lily said.

"Most likely she'll want to speak with each of them alone."

"Mom. Hurry up. She's here, " Ben yelled from downstairs.

"She's coming up the driveway right now."

Lily could tell from his voice, the fast whine of it, and the slapping
of his sneakers-first partway up the stairs, then thinking better of it,
down the hallway to the front door-that he was nervous.

Of the three children, he was the most like her. She supposed it was
from having spent the most time with her when she was still herself,
before she became so much of a mother to all these children. He had even
called her Lily when he was a toddler, thinking it funny to refer to her
the same way that his father did, to get the same response, the turn,
the smile. He tended to be anxious, like Lily usually was. And she
suspected that her uncharacteristic lack of preparedness was as alarming
to him as his father's furious silence. Katie's accident had turned
things inside out. Mother and father had swapped roles, and subsequently
temperaments. Lily doubted Ben was old enough to know that this veneer
of calm, this lassitude on her part, was really still a function of
shock and fatigue, that her heel-dragging was the only hostile act that
depression allowed her.

His father was another matter. The children were used to him being loud.
He talked loudly, laughed loudly, made them laugh loudly.

Lily could always tell when Jack was in a room with the kids-the steady
buildup of squeals edging toward screams as he pressed Greg to the
bathroom ceiling with one thick chef's arm, or dangled Katie's Barney
over a whirling bowl of batter, or dashed when the phone rang, straight
toward an unpeeled banana, cupping it to his mouth and ear.

Lily excused all kinds of lapses in Jack because he could make her
laugh. His fuse was long, too long, she had often thought. It took a
willful and heinous offense for him to lose his temper, and now he was
angry all the time. His anger invited no response. He was not like Lily,
who blew off steam in great verbal clouds on a regular basis, then stood
back and waited to see what would transpire. No, Jack's anger was
hard-boiled and resolved. After thirty-eight years of open-mindedness,
he had received in Katie's accident definitive evidence, proving beyond
a shadow of a hope, that life, in general, was an exercise in
disappointment, and that life with Lily, in particular, was an exercise
in agony.

"Hi, Ginnythoms ." The caseworker stood up from her place in the good
chair in the living room when Lily came downstairs.

"Sorry, " Lily, said, greeting the very young woman. "I just came from
the hospital. I'm running a little behind, I guess."

"Coffee? " Jack said.

Lily looked at him in a panic. They hadn't worked this out.

Was he offering some to the caseworker, or asking Lily if she'd made
any, knowing full well that she hadn't? He was sitting on the couch with
the boys on either side of him. That left only the piano stool for Lily.

"No thank you." Mrs. Thorns gathered up her long blond hair and laid it
across the front of one breast like a shield.

"Tea? " Jack countered.

Lily spun the seat a few times to raise the height of the stool.

"Actually, a glass of water would be great. Ooh, goodness, did you make
these? " With one hand she held her short denim skirt against the back
of her legs and with the other she reached for a mini-muffin from a
plate on the coffee table.

"No, we did, " Ben said.

"You baked these all by yourseip"

"No, our grandmother did it with us. He's too young to use the stove or
the mixer, " Ben said, pointing to his brother. "And I'm not supposed to
either, " he added after a pause.

"We're all a little nervous, " Lily said, as Jack reentered with the
water. Prepare them, the hospital social worker had said, but whatever
you do, don't coach them. Lily and Jack had spoken with the boys when
they'd come to the hospital to visit the day before. As soon as Jack
started talking, Greg had wandered to the far end of the lobby and begun
to construct a teepee out of the various Shriners brochures, the
burning house, the boy in the wheelchair, the time-lapse photo of the
girl with the crutches.

But Ben had been confused. "What am I supposed to say? " He poked the
plastic tip of a shoelace into one of the eyelets of his sneakers.

"The truth, " Jack said.

"What if I don't know the answers?"

"Oh, buddy, " Lily said, sinking down in the seat next to him.

"It's not a test. just a conversation."

"What about?"

"Our family, " Jack said.

"Like how old everybody is and what grades we're in?"

"Yeah, mostly things like that, " Jack said, slipping his hands into his
pants pockets. "Maybe a few other things. I don't really know. We've
never done this before."

"Done what? " Ben looked up at him.

"We've never gone through this kind of thing before, this interview."

"Does she want you and Mom to cater a party or something, and she like
wants to know if you're good at it?"

Lily laughed. "No, sweetie. It's about Katie and her accident.

I guess they just want to make sure we don't have a lot of accidents at
our house." She stifled the urge to put her arm around him, knowing he
wouldn't like her to do that here, in public.

Instead, she lowered her elbows to her knees and cradled her chin in her
hands.

"Who is this lady?"

"Mrs. Thomas."

"Thorns, " Jack corrected.

"Is she like a doctor or something? " Ben asked.

Jack shook his head.

"Well, is she a policeman or a sheriff, or something like that?"

"Of course not, " Jack said. "She's-"

"I'm sure she'll be very nice to you and Greg, and if she needs to talk
to you at all, it will only be for a few minutes. Okay?" Lily said.

Ben shrugged and, after a while, looked up at Lily and smiled knowingly.
"Let's just hope that Greg the dreg doesn't mess it up.

"I'd like to talk to each of you separately for a few minutes, and then
maybe we can all talk together at the end, okay?"

Mrs. Thorns took a sip of water, loosened the drawstring at the top of
her woven knapsack, and pulled out a bent file folder.

"No, Daddy, I want to stay with you, " Greg blurted out, nesding his
head into his father's shoulder.

"Honey, you're not going anywhere, we're all-" Lily said.

"Greg? Is that right? " The caseworker leaned forward in her chair and
smiled warmly. "How about if I talk to you and your brother together,
okay?"

Greg shook his head and stuffed his face into Jack's lap.

"Come on now, " Jack said firmly, trying to stand him up.

Lily didn't know what to do. Her inclination was to pick him up and hold
him, but what if her physical interference was misinterpreted?

She remained on the stool. Indifferent, uninvolved.

Better that than getting caught in the crossfire of a tantrum and having
it look as if she were battling it out with a four-year-old.

"Did I see a swing set outside? " Mrs. Thorns said, trying again.

She nervously spun her wedding ring around her finger.

Greg didn't answer, and after a while Ben said, "Yes, in the backyard."

"How about if we go out on the swings, the three of us, for a few
minutes?"

"Daddy, too? " Greg said.

"Well, Mom and Dad are going to stay inside-"

"No. I want my daddy to come, too."

"I'll give you a great big push, as high as the sky."

Ben shook his head and said softly, "He doesn't like to go high.

He's only four." Jack looked up at the young woman and said, "Maybe you
could talk to my wife first, and by then .. ."

"Okay, " Mrs. Thonis answered, this time hitting those two notes with a
forced perlaness. "Is there somewhere we can go.. ."

"I'll take the kids outside, " Jack said, picking up Greg.

"Twenty minutes should do it." The caseworker smiled anxiously.

Lily hooked the heels of her sandals around the footrest of the stool
and tried to smile, too. They waited for the slam of the screen door.

"You look tired, " Mrs. Thorns said, staring down at her chart.

"I've been sleeping with Katie at the hospital."

"And your husband?"

"Well, he's been here, with the boys."

"Oh, from what they said, I thought that a grandparent was watching
them."

"Well, during the day, yes, my mother-in-law has come up-"

"Do you work?"

"Well, I did, up until about a year ago, up until about the time Katie
was born. We had a gourmet shop and catering business in town."

"Boston?"

"Oh, no, right here in Winstead, down by the train station."

"Oh. And now? " Mrs. Thorns asked, looking straight at Lily, while
fishing around in her carpetbag of a pocketbook for a pen.

"When Katie was born, Jack took a job with the Quabbin Group, running
the executive dining room. It's a large company with benefits, and .. .
it seemed to make the most sense at the time." Lily reasoned that the
whole truth-they'd been forced to close Station Break after more than
eight years because they could no longer make a living from it-was
beyond the purview of a caseworker.

"Then you're home alone with the children all day?"

"Yeah, well, mostly. We still do some occasional catering.

Well, Jack does, and I'm sort of, of counsel." Lily smiled.

Sometimes now she might ask Jack what he had cooked that week at work
and he might tell her. It had been almost two years since they'd gone
out to dinner and raced back home in a great white heat, stopping at the
last open superrp-market on the way.

Jack would uncork a bottle of wine and Lily would reach for the large
wooden cutting boards above the refrigerator. Slicing into the dewy meat
of a summer squash or scraping the seeds from the inside of an ancho
chili, Lily would feel a surge of adrenaline, as if a powerful engine
had been ignited, and she and Jack were about to travel together far and
fast. She remembered eating at Fenimore's in the Back Bay one night,
then hurrying across town, without discussion, to buy live lobster. By
the time they got home, the four-pound lobster had clawed a hole through
the bag, leaving a trail of salt water from the car to the kitchen. She
laid the magnificent thing belly side down on the cutting board and
stroked its black hard shell with her left hand. As Jack swiftly brought
down the blade of his knife, Lily flinched, almost imperceptibly. Life
was too rich.

At two that morning she and Jack sat down at their own kitchen table,
one plate two forks, and ate Lobster Wellington for the second time in
one night. It was understood between them that they could improve on
anything, that anything was possible. Cooking together, they had assumed
an identity far headier than husband and wife. But now that the great
engine of their creative life together had been cut, they were
plummeting precipitously into impoverished territory.

You must be bored, home all day, " Mrs. Thorns said.

A warm breeze blew through the living room and sent the plastic-tipped
cords for the blinds rattling against the windowsills.

Lily shook her head. "Not at all, " she said.

"Well." Mrs. Thorns shifted her tiny body in the overstuffed chair. "I
assume you've taken the time to find out how all this goes .. . the
initial report, the 51A, then my 51B?"

"Yes, " Lily said, leaning slightly against the old upright and
accidentally sounding a note. "We've spoken to a few people at DSS."

A few days after things began to "miraculously" turn around for Katie
and it seemed that she wouldn't be needing a skin graft after all, Jack
had received a letter issuing the formal complaint against them. He had
spent most of the day on the phone with DSS, trying to find out who had
filed the report. By the time he'd gotten to the hospital that evening,
Lily had already been paid a call by the hospital social worker.

Linda had approached her in the playroom, where Katie was busy filling
and refilling a plastic egg carton with slightly chewed plastic eggs.
Lily stood up quickly and greeted Linda, sure that she had come for some
informal play therapy with Katie. This place takes care of everything,
she had thought as she watched Linda ease herself into one of the
child-size red chairs.

"Do you like to go shopping with Mommy? " she asked.

Without looking up at Lily, she continued in her remedial tone, "I'm
going to need to interview you and your husband. It seems there's been
some question somewhere along the line about Kate's accident.

Standard stuff, you know. Sixty percent of the parents and guardians who
walk into this place end up going through this. It's the nature of the
beast."

Lily had replayed this scene again and again for the past week, trying
to understand what had been said, what was happening, what could happen.
But it was like the accident itself, really. To envision what had
occurred during the few minutes in which she had left the kitchen that
Friday morning, a leap was needed. A suspension of disbelief was
necessary to comprehend that somebody could actually suggest that she
had burned her baby. And Numething akin to a total conversion would be
necessary for her to even begin to entertain the idea that she might now
lose her Katie, not to this injury, but to the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.

Some part of Lily was stuck back in her bedroom, upstairs for longer
than she should have been, that Friday morning. And the rest of her, the
part that had motored on until the following Thursday, the day she
learned that she was named as a possible child abuser, was frozen in the
play therapy room on the third floor of the Shriners Burns Institute in
Boston. The Lily that was on the piano stool now was like a figure
trapped inside one of those cheap holograms the kids sometimes brought
home in their goody bags after birthday parties. The context here was
continually shifting, impossible to isolate.

"I make my report based on this interview and a review of the scene, "
Mrs. Thorns continued. "Then all your materials are looked at
together-the hospital social worker's recommendation, although you do
understand that she does not work for the state, your pediatrician, your
priest, whatever."

Lily nodded.

"How long have you and your husband been married, Mrs. Keliher? "

"Sterne. I'm Sterne."

"Oh. You go by your maiden name, " she said, as if it were an alias.
"And you've been married .. . ?"

"Twelve years, " Lily said.

"And these children are .. . all from this marriage?"

Lily nodded.

"How long at this address?"

"Six years."

"Do you have friends in town? " Mrs. Thorns asked, scribbling loudly on
a form she had attached to a pink acrylic clipboard.

Lily wondered if this was a summer job. The caseworker reminded her of
the self-important seventeen-year-olds who spent the hot months
life-guarding at the town lake.

"Of course, " Lily said. "I mean, I can't imagine living anywhere that
long without making friends."

"And would you mind giving me the names and numbers of two for
references?"

"No problem, " Lily said.

Each night at the hospital, after she had gotten Katie to sleep, Lily
had walked to the pay phone in the hallway outside the burn unit.

She had talked to her brother in Chicago once, but her close friends she
had called every other day. She had even cried to Julia. Her friend
Ellen had worked out a rotating schedule of invitations for the boys,
and in so doing had spread the story of the accident far and wide. It
was the kind of story that mothers of young children are incapable of
keeping to themselves. All the elements were so common, the very stuff
of a weekday morning, the radio, the unmade bed, the eggs in the pot,
the high chair, the baby. Lily had in the past been guilty of this same
kind of talismanic gossip, as if the act of telling and retelling
somehow inoculates the teller against similar tragedy. And so she had
freely endorsed the passage of this information, the story of the
accident, but not this business with the state. That she had told to no
one.

"Family? " Mrs. Thorns asked.

"My husband's family all live pretty nearby."

"And how about you-parents or siblings nearby?"

The woman's assumption that Lily still had her parents irked her.

"I have a brother in Chicago."

"Church? " Mrs. Thorns asked, her eyes on her clipboard.

"Hmm? " Lily said, leaning slightly toward the caseworker.

"I need to know .. . the degree to which the family is connected to the
community, " she said, clearly reading from the form. "I do know that
you had a priest pay a call to your baby in the hospital. Are you fairly
active in your church?"

Jack's mother had insisted on having her priest visit Katie in the
hospital. She also now insisted on giving the man more than partial
credit for Katie's having avoided a skin graft.

"Oh, no. My husband, his family is Catholic. I'm Jewish."

The caseworker placed her petite hands theatrically over her ears.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean for you to tell me your religion.

That, of course, is not a factor. Okay, so why don't we go into the ..

."

She paused while she shuffled through some papers on her lap.

"Into the kitchen, right?"

Lily rose slowly from the piano stool and led the way.

Mrs. Thorns gathered up her papers and her bag for the short trip.

"What an interesting house, " she said, following Lily into the center
hall, which separated the living room from the kitchen and dining room.

"It's old. And it's in need of some work." From behind she heard a
misstep in the regular flapping of the young woman's sandals. She turned
to see Mrs. Thorns recovering her balance.

"Are you all right? It's these scatter rugs, I'm sorry."

Mrs. Thorns nodded and reembraced her stack of papers.

"I know they sell those pads for putting underneath, and I've been
meaning to get some."

"It's very quiet back here."

"It's great for the kids, being so far from the road."

"You realty don't have any neighbors, do you? " Mrs. Thorns said,
stopping at the entrance of the kitchen to jot this down.

"Well, of course we do, we just can't reach out and touch them."

Lily laughed. "I mean, down the road, as you came up, on the left, the
big white farmhouse, they have two boys." Lily pointed out the window
over the kitchen sink. "My husband just finished building a soccer goal.
It's great for the kids-half the town's been back here playing soccer
this spring, it seems."

Mrs. Thorns smiled and spread her paperwork and her clutch of pencils on
the kitchen table. "I just have to find one other form here .. ." she
said, beginning to sort the papers into piles.

Lily craned to try to read something, anything, But all that she could
make out was that DSS didn't have high-quality copy machines.

She straightened a few dish towels and fingered the spoon rest and
wished that the phone would ring. Monday morning, ten a. m. What kind of
people were these whose phone never rang?

In his effort to clean up, Jack had erased all evidence of the fullness
of their lives. He'd stripped the refrigerator door of the schedules and
appointment cards that had all but completely covered it during the
school year. He'd stowed the stack of half-read newspapers and community
bulletins somewhere out of view.

There was no mail in sight, as if they were people who didn't receive
even junk mail.

"So, why don't you just walk me through the whole thing, " Mrs. Thorns
said.

"Excuse me?"

"The day of the accident. Show me what happened."

kwell, @ Lily fingered the collar of her dress and leaned against the
sink. "Well, it was the last day of school for both of my sons.

Ben was finishing first grade, and Greg, Greg's nursery school was
having a family picnic that morning. I was supposed to make eight egg
salad sandwiches. I'd done about half of them the night before, but I'd
run out of eggs. So I was just finishing up the rest that morning."

"You were cooking? " Mrs. Thorns said, writing as fast as she could.

Lily nodded. "I had about six eggs-ii "How were you cooking them?"

"Well, I was hard-boiling them. I had them in a pot on the stove."

"Was it covered?"

"The pot? No. I was in a hurry for them to cook, so-"

"Can I see the pot? " Mrs. Thorns said, writing carefully on her form.
"I just need to see the size of it, see where the handle is, to see if,
you know .. . Katie weighs about?"

"Twenty-two, twenty-three pounds, I think. Well, at least before this
week." Lily pushed the faucet arm back and forth a few times.

The good short stockpot had been in the refrigerator, filled with
leftover spaghetti and sauce. So she'd grabbed the ancient tin pot, the
one Greg liked to use as a drum in his marching band. It was useless for
anything but boiling water. "I'm pretty sure the pot is gone."

"VVHAT do you mean?"

"Well, my husband cleaned up. I think he" just threw everything away.
The kitchen was a mess. There was a glass on the counter that broke when
I tried to get Katie's leg in the cold water.

"I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here, " Mrs. Tboms said,
pushing her chair back slightly from the round kitchen table. "The pot
was on which burner?"

Lily pointed to the front one. The stove was old, and none of the
burners were level. "It's the only big one that works. That other one in
the back has been broken for, oh, I don't know .. .

I mean, it's not dangerous or anything-"

"And this? " The social worker pointed to the stove guard that Jack had
just attached. "Was this here?"

Lily shook her head.

The social worker scratched away with her pencil. "And the baby," she
said, looking now right at Lily. "Where exactly was the baby?"

"She was eating a bowl of cereal in her high chair."

"Which was?"

"I'd say about over there." Lily walked across the kitchen. "I'd say
about over here. I usually put it here. Well, I used to-with the back of
it against this counter, so that she could watch me at the sink."

"Then what happened?"

"I ran upstairs for a moment to do something, " Lily said.

"To do what?"

Up until now, in the emergency room, with Jack, and with the social
worker at the Shriners, no one had thought to ask her what she was doing
when she was out of the room, or even how long she was gone.

"I had to make the bed, " she said, doubting herself.

, , The baby was still in the high chair when you left the room?

She was alone?"

"Strapped in, " Lily said.

"Eating?"

"She may have had a few Cheerios on the tray. I don't know.

To tell you the truth, I really don't remember." Choking was the
childhood accident Lily had, until ten days ago, worried about the most.
When she'd left the room there had been only a few soggy Cheerios on the
tray. Lily had taken away Katie's cereal bowl and her cup after both had
been thrown to the floor twice amid peals of laughter.

What Lily had intended to do that morning was call in to Gwen
Harrington's show on VVXBO. Harrington's guest, a psychologist, was
going off the air at ten. The microwave clock read 9, 53. All she wanted
was a few minutes to herself to run upstairs and make this phone call in
relative silence, to bring up a point that no one had yet made in the
two hours she had been straining to follow this vapid discussion of
motherhood as she drove two kids to school and ran in and out of the car
doing errands.

It had already been a bad day. Katie had screamed her way through the
Red Brick General Store because she wanted something, Lily didn't know
what and didn't care. She could be so stubborn, especially compared to
the boys. Lily's mother-in-law called it ego strength.

"I've never seen a baby with such a clear sense of herself."

Katie was willful in a way that continually surprised Lily. Jack said
it was a stage-"Call it "hell" and give it a time frame."

When they'd reached the checkout at the market, Lily had perched Katie
on the high counter, and the baby had screamed in fear, grabbing Lily's
hair as Lily rifled through her purse for her wallet.

"God damnit, Kate, " she yelled, and the baby had cried even harder.

She couldn't believe that she had just heard this "noted" psychologist
say that unless you were out there discovering a cure for cancer there
was no more important job than staying home with your kids.

Except for the cashier, the store was filled with men. They were on
their way to work and they stood behind her in line with doughnuts and
rolls stacked on top of sixteen-ounce coffees.

None of them looked as though he was on his way to cure cancer.

She hadn't thought about what she looked like to them, not then. She was
too busy worrying about whether she had the $1. 13 to pay for the eggs
and whether there was going to be enough time for her to cook them, let
them cool, and make them into a salad all before ten-thirty, when she
would need to leave the house.

Now she wondered if there was some way for those people in the General
Store to be contacted, unofficially subpoenaed.

There were any number of people in town who had, over the past few
weeks, seen Katie in the post office or the dry cleaner or the liquor
store, seen her arch her back and swing out her arms and legs at the
inception of a tantrum. And there were any number of people around town
who had witnessed Lily respond to the sixteen-month-old with all the
control of a child herself.

"Okay, 1 e't me get this straight." Mrs. Thorns stood up from her seat
at the kitchen table and walked over to the empty space where Lily had
roughly indicated she usually kept the high chair. She pulled her skirt
down from the hem with a slight wiggle. "Are you in the habit of leaving
your baby alone at mealtime?"

"Look, " Lily began, but she caught herself, swallowed some air, and
walked to the cabinet where she kept the coffee mugs.

Taped to the inside of the door were the instructions for the Heimlich
maneuver, the same ones that had been posted in every restaurant she'd
worked in since the mid-'80s.

"I know about choking, " she said, gripping the white wooden knob of the
cabinet. "I've taken infant and child first aid and CPR twice now,
enough times to know that I don't ever want to have to use it.

Meals are social times. I don't even leave my older children when
they're eating. I left the room for a minute, and when I did-" Lily
stopped. She had told this story so many times now-to people in white
coats in hospitals, to friends over the phone, to the mothers in the
burn unit, who jumped each time hot coffee splashed down from the mouth
of the vending machine-and always when she told it she was far away from
this room, from the moment of the story, and more important, from the
point of it. Up until this minute, the point had been Katie's injuries,
Katie's prognosis, Katie's recovery. Now the point was Lily.

"Was the water boiling when you left the room?"

"I really don't know." Lily was standing on the threshold of the
kitchen, leaning against the doorframe.

"How much water was in the pot?"

"I don't know. The pot was small. A quart, maybe less."

"How long were you out of view? " Mrs. Thorns grabbed her clipboard from
the table. "How long was she out of your sight?"

, , I just ran upstairs."

"A few seconds?"

Lily stared. The accident had happened at the end of a long week.

It was hot. She was tired. And she was pissed. Pissed at Katie for
whining so much, pissed at herself for yelling so much.

Pissed that some woman was getting on the radio throwing down a moral
gauntlet, telling other women what they should and should not be doing
with their lives, when no one ever told men they had to choose between
fathering their children and furthering their careers. Most women who
worked had to. It wasn't a matter of learning to make do with less or
working for the extras, as this expert kept insisting.

Katie had banged on her empty tray a few times when Lily left the
kitchen. Lily paused at the top of the stairs and listened.

The baby wasn't crying, she was only mad. If Lily could be granted two,
three, five minutes in which to function in a different realm, she'd
return to the kitchen a better mother. Everything would be okay.

The number. Lily reached the top of the stairs and realized that she'd
probably heard the phone number of the radio station repeated twenty
times this morning, but she couldn't remember it. She cursed herself out
loud and ran down the stairs to the front hall closet for the phone
book. Katie was quiet now, so Lily ran back upstairs without looking
into the kitchen.

She picked up her nightgown from the floor by her bed and began
rehearsing what she would say. She slid her hand between the mattress
and the box spring and tucked in the top sheet. It was unnatural for one
person to stay home all day and only care for the home and the children,
and for the other to be gone all day from those children and do nothing
but work in the world outside the home. Hadn't we evolved beyond that,
yet? She pulled the sheet taut on Jack's side of the bed.

She wasn't the kind of person who wanted her thoughts broadcast all over
the greater Boston area, was she? She pulled up the spread and placed
her grandmother's doll with the magic wand on top of the pillows.

God, who the hell did she think she was?

"And you think she pulled the chair along the counter-like hand over
hand-until she reached the pot on this front burner?"

Mrs. Thorns pointed with the eraser end of her pencil.

Lily nodded. She'd seen tfie high chair skate across the tile floor in a
game the boys sometimes played.

"Was the pot handle in or out?"

"I always try to remember to turn my pot handles to the back of the
stove." Lily paused. "I'm not sure, though."

Mrs. Thorns's pencil moved rapidly across her paper now, deboning this
mess, Lily thought, into tidy piles of right and wrong.

"Did she scream immediately?"

Lily nodded. She had never been able to distinguish among the various
types of cries in any of her newborns, but as they got older it was easy
to pick out pain from frustration or anger or injustice. And this cry
was unlike any she had ever heard. It was, itself, a kind of siren. As
Lily ran down the stairs and neared the kitchen, she involuntarily
screamed, matching Katie's volume, as if to staunch the pain. She
alternated between "Oh my God! " and "It's all right, baby, it's okay!"

Katie's face was red and tight, not from crying, but from exertion. She
was frantically trying to push herself out of the chair.

Lily ran to her, crunching bits of eggshell underfoot. The floor near
the high chair was wet. When Lily finally reached the baby and gripped
the sides of the high chair tray, she saw that it was filled with
steaming water. The small white plastic tray had buckled slightly at one
corner, probably where the pot had landed and rested for a moment. Katie
was kicking her legs furiously and screaming, "Mam'mama-Mama."

Working counter to her ever-y instinct, Lily moved slowly. She slid the
high chair tray away from the baby. As she began to turn with the tray
to place it on the counter, some of the boiling water that had collected
in the trough around the edges splashed onto Lily's shorts, and she
jumped. Struggling to unhook the strap around Katie's waist, she saw
that the baby's bare legs were dripping wet. The front of her right leg
below the knee and the tops of both feet, even her little round toes,
were bright red, as if from a bad sunburn. She whipped Katie from the
high chair and headed for the sink, kicking the dry, hot pan that lay on
the floor and sending the two remaining eggs rolling out across the
uneven tile floor.

The sink was full of breakfast dishes. Lily smacked the faucet to cold
with her elbow, and with one hand began tossing the knives and glasses
up onto the counter. A juice glass glided across the large puddle that
had formed on the Formica and smashed onto the floor. Lily only barely
registered the crash above the sound of Katie's screaming.

"Why didn't you call 911? "Mrs. Thorns asked.

"I wasn't really sure what had happened at first. Katie was trying to
get out of the chair, and as I went to her I saw the water, the hot
water on the tray, underfoot, on her feet. I filled the sink with cold
water and then I put her legs in it."

"And then?"

"I knew the best thing was the cold water. As it turns out, I probably
saved her the skin graft, keeping her in that water for as long as I
did." As far as Lily knew, this effort with the cold water was about as
beneficial for Katie as the late-night hospital-room visit from her
mother-in-law's young priest. It was hard to tell a story in which your
every action was the wrong one. So Lily had allowed herself this one
embellished instance of good mothering.

"Didn't you call your husband, a neighbor? " Mrs. Thorns glanced out the
window then, as if remembering their "Isolation."

"Jack was at work. The company's in Government Center. It would have
taken him forty-five minutes to get here." Jack had asked her the same
question in the emergency room.

Why hadn't she called him first? The five minutes she had forced herself
to force Katie to remain in the cold water had seemed an eternity. "It's
almost over, honey, almost over now, " she kept repeating to the baby.
Some part of her really thought that this immersion in cold water would
be enough. Encircling the baby with one arm, Lily dipped her free hand
into the water and traced the rest of Katie's body, checking for any
other places where she might have been scalded. Not her scalp, her
forehead, not her face, thank God, not the almond-shaped eyes she'd
inherited from Lily, nor Lily's mother's blunt nose, nor Jack's bowed
lips. All these people had remained intact in Katie. She had not melted
the skin on her hands, as had the little boy from Lowell whom they would
soon meet at the Shriners. Katie's little white hands with the tiny
squares of nail were still perfect, as were her round arms and chest and
belly. Not even the tops of her thighs had been burned, having been
shielded by the high chair tray.

"You didn't call anyone? " Mrs. Thorns asked, seeming to have just
noticed the antique phone mounted on the wall directly below the real
one.

"I called a friend who has a little boy in Greg's nursery school class.
She was going to explain my absence at the picnic and take Greg home to
her house if I wasn't back from the emergency room by twelve-thirty."

"Didn't you want someone to come with you? " Mrs. Thorns stared directly
at Lily. "I'm not one hundred percent sure I understand your .. .
reasoning."

Lily massaged her temples. There could be no pill-taking, not even
aspirin, in front of this woman. "I didn't know how bad it was.

We live seven minutes from the hospital. I just wanted to get her there.
The doctor at the Shriners told us it takes forty-eight hours to assess
a thermal burn. Even the doctor in the emergency room classified them
then as first-degree burns. I didn't know, I just didn't know."

Before leaving for the hospital, Lily had grabbed a couple of dish
towels and thrown them into the cool water in the sink and tried to wrap
one each around the baby's legs. Katie was alternately crying and
moaning now. As Lily ran to the car, the baby clutched at her bare arms,
her hair, her sweaty tank top. Lily couldn't possibly put Katie in her
car seat, in the back, where she couldn't see her, couldn't touch her.
So she tried to lay her down in the front. But the bucket seat wasn't
wide enough, and Lily had ended up holding her somewhere between her lap
and the console that housed the emergency brake. She had thought about
that, about how dangerous it was to be driving that way, about how
something worse than had already happened might happen.

She had even thought some keen-eyed policeman might stop her, give her a
ticket for breaking the child restraint law, for endangering her
daughter, for being a bad mother.

Mrs. Thorns slowly flipped through some of her papers on the table. Lily
watched her and wondered if this business with the car seat was going to
come up. She opened and closed the silverware drawer a few times. There
was an unopened package of napkins left from Katie's first birthday
party. The boys had picked out the paper goods-bears in pink tutus.
That's what girls like, they'd said. Maybe Lily could make a little
party for Katie when she came home from the hospital, just family and
cake and ice cream.

"Little ones can be hard to handle, can't they? " Mrs. Thorns said.
"Would you say that Katie is a difficult child for you to handle? "

"She's spirited, " Lily said.

"What kind of discipline do you use with your children? Your boys seem
to be quite .. . calm, but with a spirited child, say?"

"She's only sixteen months old, " Lily said.

Mrs. Thorns wrote this down and smiled. "I really have only one more
question for you." She looked up at Lily. "Why do you think this
happened?"

Lily knew why it had happened. Of course, there had been abuse.

Not the kind the caseworker had in mind. No, Lily had not abused the
body of her child, but rather the gift of her.

Conceiving this third child had been self-indulgent. She'd wanted once
more to possess for nine months the thrill of a double life, a dual
existence. She'd wanted another chance to transcend her solitary self At
thirty-six, certain possibilities had already boiled out. She would
never apprentice in a kitchen in Lyons.

She would never be a hot "young" chef She would never own a restaurant
with a three-star rating. But she could have three children. Three
children were an accomplishment, as well as a means of slowing down
time. Even if she was no longer young, she could remain the mother of
young children.

She'd hungered to sate a wholly personal desire, but babies, and
certainly children, should never be intended as the complete source of
their mothers" private nourishment. And the postpartum depression that
loosed itself in Lily after Katie's birth was nothing more than a
minute-to-minute reminder of the proper order of things. Babies suckled
their mothers to sur""Ve, not the other way round.

And so with the advent of this planned but unexpected baby, Lily bobbed
and weaved through her days, obsessively scouting escape. Two newspapers
were delivered to the house on weekdays and three on Sundays. Lily left
them unfolded on tables, counters, and beds. On her way out the door,
she'd grab sections to lay down in the front seat of the car, to scan
while stopped at a red light or stuck in traffic.

She asked Jack to bring home his professional journals from work. A
year's worth of Food lay on top of her nightstand, in a sloping
pile high enough to block her view down the hallway when she was lying
in bed. When it was just she and Katie, as it often was now, the radio
would be on, news and talk, in the kitchen and the car. She'd even
brought a little transistor down to the laundry room. She suspected that
all this had less to do with being connected to the world at large and
more to do with separating the world of adults from that of babies.

Lily had known it was abuse from the moment the nurse in the emergency
room held Katie's leg under the overhead spot. "The dermis has but so
many layers, " the resident who first saw them said. Lily thought she
might vomit as the doctor poured bottle after bottle of cool saline
solution over the burns. She remembered how perfect that milky baby skin
had looked and smelled when Katie had first been handed to her, just one
flight up, in that very building only the year before.

Lily knew why the accident had happened. She was being punished for
having abused the gift that was her daughter.

"I asked you why you thought this happened, " Mrs. Thorns said, somewhat
impatiently now.

"Accidents happen, " Lily said. "It was an accident."

"Mum, Mum, " Greg yelled and banged on the screen door.

"I've got to go, Mum, bad. Daddy said to go outside, but I didn't want
to."

Mrs. Thorns walked to the back door and swung it open for him with a
grand gesture. "When you gotta go, you gotta go."

Greg ignored her and ran through the kitchen.

"Do you need me to turn the light on? " Lily said, half running with him
down the hall.

"No, " he said, from behind the closed door. "The whole time you were
gone I could do it myself."

"Okay. Call me if you need me." Lily walked back into the kitchen
slowly.

"So, " Mrs. Thorns said, repositioning herself at the table.

"You're saying that you think the burns were the result of an accident.
Nothing could have been done to prevent it."

"I didn't say that."

"Mum, I'm done and I can't snap, " Greg called from the bathroom.

Lily walked toward the hallway, and with the length of the whole kitchen
between her and Mrs. Thorns, she turned. "Had I realized that she was
capable of pulling herself along in the high chair like that, I never
would have placed it where I did."

"Well, frankly, I think it's a bit more complicated than that."

"Mum, I said I couldn't snap." Greg stomped up to Lily. He was
struggling to connect the two sides of his waistband.

Lily sank down and snapped his shorts. "Please don't talk to me that
way, " she said, picking him up and holding him close.

"Do you think parenting classes might help? " Mrs. Thorns asked.

Greg struggled to get down, and then he ran across the kitchen and out
the door into the backyard. Before the screen door could slam shut, Lily
heard him yell to his brother and his father, "That lady wants Mum to
get parents" glasses."

Lily walked up close to Mrs. Thorns now, close enough to notice for the
first time the slightest flaw on her perfect face, scarred-over bite
marks at the outside edge of one eye. She wanted to say, "I'm a good
mother." Instead she said, "My oldest child is seven. In seven years
we've only been to the emergency room twice. You can check the records
at Lincoln."

"We check the records of a number of area hospitals. Some parents shop
around, " Mrs. Thorns said, tapping the eraser end of her pencil on the
top of her files.

Jack wiped his feet slowly on the welcome mat and then pulled the screen
door closed behind him. Lily knew he'd want to wash his hands next, so
she slid out of his way as he started for the sink, She walked to the
corner nearest the back door, behind the kitchen table, and pressed her
cheek against the cool wall.

From this angle, she could see Mrs. Thorns and the boys outside, but
couldn't be seen by them. This corner was where the boys always hid,
snorting and slapping each other, when they wanted to scare her as she
came in from the yard. Mrs. Thorns was showing them something she'd
pulled from her enormous pocketbook.

Jack was making coffee, shaking the open can over the filter, as he
always did, without measuring. Lily stuck her finger into the dry soil
of the African violet in the center of the table. No one had been
watering anything around here.

"You did a good job on the house, " she said, looking over at him.

His hair was lighter from the time he'd already spent outdoors this
spring. He was tan too, that pale melon color he got at the start of
each summer, when he was patient enough to take the sun slowly. Except
for a softening around his cheekbones and jaw, he looked about the way
he had when she'd first met him at twenty-three, "like the beach, "
she'd said, blue eyes, sandy hair, and skin the warm color of the sky
just after the fireball has set.

"Really, " she said. "Everything looks great."

His back was to her, and he nodded slightly, so slightly that Lily
wondered if he hadn't just noticed a nick in the Formica. It was his
turn now, and she waited.

He blew a ladybug from the counter into his palm and followed it as it
crawled up toward his wristwatch.

"Don't you want to know how it went? " she asked finally.

He looked at her, at the ladybug, at the hissing coffeemaker, then back
at her.

"I think we're okay, basically. I mean, it seems like an exercise in
hurnillation. And maybe that's it." Lily turned and looked out the back
door. The boys were laughing, at least Greg was, loudly. "Well, they
don't sound too traumatized, " she said.

Jack walked to the cupboard and pulled down one mug.

"I thought maybe we could have a little party for Katie when she comes
home in a few days. I thought that the boys and I would decorate, and
then you could stop and get a cake from Angelo. I'll call him. Maybe
your mother would come? " Lily said.

"I think we should have Father Paul talk to her."

"To Mrs. Thorns? You mean your mother's priest? " Lily had taken to
referring to him, silently, as Monsignor Miracle. He was a nice enough
guy, and intelligent, actually, she thought, for a priest, but Jack's
mother bowed and scraped around him, and ever since the "healing"
incident, it struck Lily that she was lobbying to have him canonized.
"He doesn't even know us, " Lily said.

"He knows the family."

"He knows your mother."

"He knows Katie, " Jack said.

Lily laughed."

"The suffering of the innocents." That's actually what he said when he
first saw her, " So?"

"Nothing." Lily looked down at the soil trapped under her fingernail.
"Wouldn't it make us look more guilty to come up with a priest at this
point?"

"There aren't degrees of guilt, Lillian, " Jack said. "It's not like a
burn." His back was to her again, and he was bracing his palms against
the countertop as if he were trying to bench-press the entire kitchen.

"Why are you doing this to me? " she said.

"What, what am I doing?"

"What is it, exactly, you think I'm guilty of?"

"I don't know." As he spoke, Lily watched his shoulder blades
rhythmically poke the flat cotton of his shirt. "I'm trying to figure
that out."

"Why don't you fucking ask me? Why don't you talk to me?"

She was eager now to bring his consecrated fury to the surface.

"That would only confuse things. Your voice confuses me. It gets in the
way of my trying to figure out who you are and why what happened .. .
how you allowed that to happen." He said all this slowly, with a kind of
remote beneficence as if he were narrating an Old Testament story for an
untutored modern audience.

"It's not yours to figure out, " Lily said. "It was an accident.

It just happened."

"You know what amazes me most about this whole thing?" Jack said. "Your
lack of remorse."

She jumped up from the kitchen table. This guilt was hers, generated
solely by her actions or inactions, one of her few wholly personal
possessions. How dare he name it and define it, serve it up to her as
his own creation.

She pushed her chair into the table hard.

"Cut it out, " he said, stepping away from the sink toward her.

She slammed the chair again, and he lunged for the African violet, too
late to catch it as it slid off the edge of the table.

Shards of painted pottery and clods of dry soil littered the tile floor.

"We're thirsty, " Ben said, announcing himself before he'd reached the
back door.

"I think we're just about through, " Mrs. Thorns said, stepping into the
kitchen. "Jesus."

"Mummy, what did you do? " Greg said, moving toward her, crunching bits
of the broken flower pot under his sneakers.

Mrs. Thorns held out a protective arm and pulled him back toward her.

"Don't cry, Mum." He broke free of the caseworker and ran to his mother,
hugging her around the hips.

"V'at's happening? " Ben said. He was barely inside the kitchen, his
fingers still on the handle of the screen door.

Lily wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and used the other to
stroke Greg's head.

She looked over at Ben. His cheeks were reddening, and his small hand
was balled up into a fist by his side. "Mom, what did you do?" he said,
opening and shutting the wood-framed screen door, softly at first, so
that it sounded like the distant beating of birds" wings.

"I'm not going. I'm not going with her, " he said, as he slammed the old
door, again and again.

"Who? " Mrs. Thorns asked. She turned toward him and knelt down.

As she waited for a response, she looked back toward Lily, who was now
slowly making her way across the hazardous floor, Greg still clinging to
her leg.

"Who wants to take you away? " Mrs. Thorns asked, reaching out to touch
Ben.

"You do, " he said, finally letting go of the door and backing up
against the screen. "You do, you bitch, " he added in a quieter voice.

"Benjamin! " Jack yelled.

"It's all right, " Mrs. Thorns said. She stood up and began to move
away.

"No one's taking you anywhere, honey, " Lily said, cradling his face.
"No one's going anywhere."

"You said Katie was okay. I heard you say that to Daddy, yesterday, that
if it wasn't for her"-he tilted his chin toward Mrs. Thorns-"Katie might
be home sooner. Katie's just a baby. She didn't do anything wrong. She
doesn't know better."

"Nobody said she did anything wrong, " Jack said.

"That's not really a hospital, is it? " Ben said.

"Of course it is, " Lily said.

"Well, then why can't we go up there? Why aren't we allowed in?"

"Oh, Ben, honey." He was crying now, hard and loud. Lily sat down and
pulled both her sons to her.

"But I liked that flower, Mum." Greg looked down at the uprooted African
violet and started to cry too, now. "And we'll never be able to glue it
together. Look. It's wrecked."

Mrs. Thorns laughed nervously. "Really, you'd think it exploded."

"I was wiping down the table and went to move the plant. You know how
things just skim across a wet surface, " Jack said, looking her hard in
the eyes.

Mrs. Thorns pulled down her skirt and picked up her bag.

"Well, whatever, be careful cleaning it up. Those sharp pieces could go
right through a sneaker sole." She looked at her watch.

"I was just about to wrap things up anyway. Since Katie's scheduled to
be discharged in the next few days, you should be hearing something
soon." She turned and ran her eyes the length of the kitchen floor
again.

Jack walked over and shook hands goodbye, but Lily remained in her
chair, holding Ben and Greg. Mrs. Thorns nodded to her, and Lily nodded
back. Only after the screen door had slammed shut did she feel the tiny
ceramic shard in her ankle and notice the thin but steady stream of
blood running down into her sandal.

Visiting hours were long over. The fathers were gone.

At night, the hospital was a female ghetto. Jack watched from his spot
in a corner of the visitors" lounge as mothers and grandmothers, the
occasional selfless female friend, quiedy walked down the hall to the
bathroom, clutching their toothbrushes and overnight bags. The Sox were
on TV somewhere in this building, he was sure. If he, rather than Lily,
had been the one to do the nine-night tour of duty here, he would have
known where to watch the game. When the caseworker left this morning,
the boys had begged Lily not to go back to the Shriners, and she had
finally agreed to let Jack stay over with Katie in the hospital.

The lounge was noisy. Jack assumed the six women sitting in the center
of the room were all here for the same eleven-year-old Cambodian boy
whose face had been burned by splattering grease in his uncle's
restaurant. They were breaking the rules, staying past eight. They
spoke, it seemed to Jack, in spurts, all at once on top of each other,
Then there would be a lull and one would resume some needlework and
another would fold and refold the paper coffee cup she had ripped open
into one long strip. The mother of the boy had twice now shuffled up to
Jack and handed him a picture of her son "before."

"See how smooth his face .. . perfect." While her relatives exclaimed
again and again over something, she sat hunched in her molded seat,
staring out toward the hallway. Jack wondered what kind of drugs they'd
given her to take the edge off the guilt. Kids in a restaurant kitchen,
what a shitty idea.

He'd worked in a family-run restaurant when he was in college. It was a
steak place, and on weekends the owner's wife would come in wearing a
cocktail dress, hair all sprayed stiff.

She'd spend the dinner rush half standing, half sitting on a bar stool
just inside the order window, drinking White Russians and smoking
Winstons. The kids, a girl and a boy, would watch TV in the lounge until
it filled up, then they'd come into the kitchen to "help." Jack liked to
tease them, forcing them to race around his spitting Fryolator as if it
were a tetherball. He never let his own kids into one of his kitchens
except after hours. Wet heat, dry heat, knives-not to mention
guttermouths-kitchens were no place for children. He wondered what
horrors that Cambodian mother had endured bringing her son to this
country, only to allow him to be permanently disfigured by a takeout
dinner.

Every once in a while one of the women would look over at him and he
would smile, then look back at his book, The Sekcted Works of Edgar
Allen Poe. He'd spent a couple of nights since the accident at his
mother's house-going to get the boys, staying for dinner, and then
collapsing in one of the small bedrooms upstairs-and he'd found the book
one morning at three o'clock after a bad dream. He'd climbed out of bed
to switch on the whole-house fan in the attic. His mother had lined the
hot wood steps leading up with all the old Modern Library editions. He
squinted his eyes against the light from the bare bulb in the atticway,
and the gold-embossed men with their flaming torches began running up
the right side of the staircase.

Those Modern Library editions were what his parents had read when he was
a kid. After dinner, they'd station themselves at either end of the
living room. Jack's father would be on the couch, his mother in the
Harvard chair, each with a reading lamp and an ashtray pulled from where
it looked best to where it was useful. The phone, the Rolling Stones,
Laura Nyro, none of this seemed to distract them. They would read until
it was late. His mother couldn't go to sleep, she said, in a house where
teenagers where still awake and roaming. Jack would brush his teeth
upstairs and hear the percolator, the clacking spoons, the box of Lorna
Doones. His father would invariably read a passage aloud to his mother,
some nugget, one she had probably underlined when she read the book
herself the week before. "Just like in Dorset's class, " he'd say,
referring to a course they'd each taken twenty years before. Then she'd
murmur agreement, only to ask him a few minutes later what he really
meant by that.

Katie's accident had made him think more about his father than he had in
the three years since he'd died of a heart attack.

A group of cyclists had found him in his car off to the side of Route 2
outside Leominster. After losing his father, Katie's burn and all that
went with it was the next worst thing that had ever happened to him.

The night he found the book he had dreamed about his father, and now
every two or three nights he had that same dream, a nightmare, really.
In the dream his father would call him on the phone. Jack would be
ecstatic to hear his voice, that mellow pulse of consonants against air,
like the rhythmic brush of the jazz drummers his father had so admired.
The fact that he was dead and talking on the phone, they both agreed,
was pretty damn funny. They'd hang up, planning to meet later. Then Jack
would find himself at work. He'd pick up the phone to place an order,
but no matter what number he dialed, his father was always on the other
end. At first it was okay. Jack had so much to tell him, everything he'd
missed. But as the dream progressed, his father would begin to question
him, his choices, his actions. With each additional phone call, his
father would get nastier, taunting him, then harassing him, something he
had never done to Jack in real life.

The last phone call before he woke up was always the same, it was always
a vague but violent threat to the kids.

Jack marked his place in the book with the business card of a beef
purveyor he no longer used. The overhead lights in the hallway
connecting the lounge with the burn unit had been dimmed, and what
looked to him like running lights had been switched on at ankle height.

He'd seen only one familiar nurse tonight. Wendy, he thought her name
was, the one who'd brought them dinner that first awful night after
Katie was admitted.

He toed the large metal circle on the wall that activated the double
doors leading into the unit. Before going in, he stared down at the
stack of blue paper gowns and the box of latex gloves. They didn't
expect him to sleep in these things, did they?

Lily hadn't mentioned that, or maybe she had. He was doing his best to
ignore her. just now he didn't give a fuck what she thought was funny or
amazing or outrageous. He couldn't stand for her to broker his
perceptions anymore. Her slant on reality, her particular interpretation
of daily life, was fine, it even turned him on sometimes-when life was
regular. But this business with Katie, this hospital, the social
worker-it just was what it was, and to hear her mull or analyze or
rationalize or hypothesize, even slightly, sparked small fires all along
the lining of his gut.

"Jack." Father Paul stepped out from behind Katie's privacy curtain. He
quickly held up his gloved hand and smiled. "No, no, everything's fine."

"Christ, you scared me." Jack ran his fingers through his hair,
"Everything okay? I was just down.. ." He motioned toward the lounge.

"Sox on?"

"No TV in there." At least Paul still liked baseball. Father Paul, Paul
Cooney, the younger brother of a high school friend, No particular
interest in religion that Jack had known about. In fact, he'd been a
little wild. Jack vaguely remembered a night down the Cape when Paul had
passed out under a lifeguard chair.

Maybe not.

"How'd it go today? " Paul asked, pushing open the doors into the
hallway where they could talk above a whisper.

Jack shrugged. "They mostly talked to Lily. She says she thinks we're
okay. It's crazy, a bad dream."

One of the nurses walked by and patted Jack on the shoulder.

"Father, " she said, nodding to Paul.

"I hope my mother didn't fly you down here. She's been known to be a
little .. . obsessive?"

"Your mother's a gem."

"You mean compared to the other wackos who attend Mass on a regular
basis, right?"

Paul laughed. "These go in a special garbage can? " he said, looking
down at his gown and gloves.

"Probably." Jack watched as Father Paul ripped the paper smock from over
his black shirt and clerical collar. He balled up the gown in one hand
as if he were doing a grip exercise. "Want to get a beer?"

Jack looked at his watch. "Catch the last few innings? Sure."

Longfellow's was almost empty. Jack ordered a pint and a shot for each
of them. He wondered if he should have left the hospital without telling
anyone where he was going. Lily had never left, at least that's what she
said.

Paul reached his long skinny arm down the bar and grabbed a side salad
bowl filled with pretzels. "The bishop's actually gotten a few calls
about Kate."

"From DSS? You shitting me?"

"No, from people who think her healing was .. . from people who want the
bishop to know about the unusual nature of her recovery."

"Yes! " Jack tapped a victory beat on the edge of the bar.

Cooper had just doubled. When it was clear that he was safe, Jack looked
away from the TV toward Paul. "What do you mean", What people?"

"Some people from St. Stephen's-somebody's barber, a nurse from the
unit."

"Yeah? " Jack said. He saw that one of the waitresses was staring at
Paul. From the back, all in black, he looked like any otl-ler yuppie in
this town.

Father Paul blushed. "This is a little embarrassing."

"What? Being here? " Jack asked.

"No, Jack, what I'm trying to tell you. Your wife must have told you
that I visited Kate two nights in a row, right around the time the
doctors were telling you she'd need a skin graft, remember? She had a
fever. Anyway, I did a laying on of hands, I mean, your wife said it was
okay, left me alone with Kate to pray, for me to pray for her .. .

and you know.. ." Dr. Wheeler had explained to Jack and Lily at the
outset that the difference between second- and third-degree burns was
that second-degree burns healed. "Infection can actually convert a
classification, " she'd said one evening as Lily sat cradling Katie
through a tangle of rv lines. The fever was still high. They were
pumping her with antibiotics and checking her diaper every hour. Her
urine output was low because her fluid loss had been "significant."

As Wheeler talked, Jack doodled on the back of one of Lily's magazines,
interchangeable cats and dogs. Occasionally he'd hold them up for Katie,
whose eyes were at half-mast from the morphine.

"What we're hoping for is that there's enough underlying tissue for
healing to take place." Wheeler was leaning against Katie's crib.

The lapel of her lab coat was a jumble of clip-on angels. "You saw when
I removed the dressings how the eschar, the burned tissue, was, in
places, just beginning to separate. We need to debride it, and by that I
mean clean it-get rid of all the slough-so that only the granulating
wound is left. The challenge is to get rid of all that necrotic tissue,
" she said, grimacing.

"If we don't, then the healthy skin will get infected. Right now, the
wound is looking dirty." Jack had not been able to listen the next
evening when things were no better and Wheeler tactfully began
describing the process of an autograph.

Lily called him the next morning at work to say there'd been a
turnaround. Wheeler explained that there were obviously these islands of
epithelium in these deep granulating wounds, enough for some significant
healing to begin. "Children's bodies are amazingly regenerative, " she
said. Jack's mother had used the word "miraculous," but Jack hadn't
thought she meant it literally. It was a saying, an expression, a
sixty-five-year-old's version of il awesome, " or "radical, " words he
wished had never made it east of the Rockies.

"So, are people going to start camping out on my front lawn or yours? "
He reached for a handful of pretzels.

Paul laughed and ran his thumb around the edge of his stillfull shot
glass. "I hope not. This kind of healing, it's really all about love,
you know. I just dropped by tonight to see how Kate was doing.

I figured I'd bump into you or your wife, and I thought I might warn you
that you might be getting a call from the diocese."

"The same guy who handles exorcisms? " Jack looked at Paul and laughed.
"Sorry. It's just a little weird. I guess it's just one of those
Cathoholic things I can't quite get into."

"Cathoholic? " Paul sipped his beer. "It's really just an extension of..
." He stopped, and Jack relaxed, relieved not to have to hear him use
the word "love" again. He never knew what priests were after when they
used that word. How could a childless priest who supposedly didn't
participate in flesh-and-blood love possibly understand the magnitude of
what he was preaching? It seemed to him that priests were these ritual
intermediaries, just like the host and the wine. What did he need a
priest for when he had God? And what did he need communion for when he
had Benjamin, Greg, and Katie?

"Some people are, you know, more open to the possibilities of the Spirit
than others, " Paul said. "I understand that."

Christ. Jack looked up to see the Sox make their last out for the
eighth. Paul wasn't even watching.

"So, will this be good for your career? " Jack said. If the bishop was
into this now, Jack wondered if he would make a call for them to the
state. "Has a Mrs. Thorns gotten in touch with you, from DSS?"

Paul shook his head.

"If you can think of anything good to say about us .. ." Jack patted the
breast pocket of his shirt. It was empty. "I must have her number at
home."

"You mean this caseworker? Except for my brief chat with your wife the
other night, I really don't know Lily. Did Father Burke marry you? At
St. Stephen's? Maybe you'd like to give him a call."

Son of a bitch. Jack shook his head and finished the last of his Jack
Daniel's. He chose not to tell Father Paul that he and Lily had been
married in the bar of the Eagle Mountain Inn in New Hampshire, where
Lily was working then. They'd planned for the ceremony to be held in the
field behind the restaurant, with a view of Mount Washington ten miles
away. Rain on your wedding day is good luck, everyone repeated as they
were herded into the dark cocktail lounge with its tartan-plaid carpet
and rum-barrel stools. They'd been married by a local justice, which had
satisfied no one, including the justice herself Jack had spent the first
few minutes of his married life apologizing to the woman for the fact
that the ice machine had let loose a few hundred cubes just as she began
her brief remarks.

They'd wanted a priest and a rabbi. Father Burke had smiled and said
that was fine, just as long as he was the one who performed the actual
marriage vows. Lily had found only one rabbi who would, by his presence,
condone this intermarriage, and he was a therapist who could "deal with
being a team player" as long as they consented to twelve sessions of
prenuptial counseling at sixty-five dollars a session.

None of the children had been baptized. The boys had been circumcised by
the doctor who delivered them, and some weeks after each birth, Jack
would buy half a dozen bottles of sparkling wine, smoke a turkey, bake a
"Welcome" cake, and invite some friends and family.

After the turkey and before the cake, he and Lily would stand holding
the crying newborn in front of their crumbling fireplace and take turns,
she explaining the meaning behind the names-Benjamin for her father,
Boris, Gregory for her mother, Gloria, Katherine for Jack's father,
Kevin-he making a toast that his mother would refer to later as "that
lovely prayer of yours." Jack wondered if Katie's nonstatus as a
Catholic would interfere with Father Paul's being dubbed a miracle
worker. He hoped so.

"I'd better be heading back, " Jack said.

Paul reached for his wallet, and Jack waved him away.

As he walked back to the Shriners, Jack wondered what his mother would
make of all Paul's brown-nosing. Maybe she already knew.

His father would have called it typical, and dismissed it, but his
mother's relationship with God and the Church was far more layered. On
their way to confession one Friday afternoon years ago when he was a
boy, his mother had pulled the car over and told Jack that her greatest
transgression that week was against herself, her true nature, and did he
think that was really the sort of thing that Father Phillips could
possibly fathom, well-meaning soul that he was. She had, by that point,
stopped telling her children what to believe, and instead had subverted
her natural inclination to instruct into a voracious scrutiny of her
own faith. Jack's two older sisters alternately called her a hypocrite
and a head case. And on a given Thursday night, these questions of soul
would flare dramatically, raising him above the flat plain of
seventh-grade life. "The challenge, always, is to transcend this, " she
would say, slapping the surface of her skin, with one hand, while the
other held open a copy of Heschel's Man's Questfor God. Pressing the
spine of the book flat to the kitchen table, she would read to whoever
would listen."

"A-S a tree torn from the soil, as a river separated from its source,
the human soul wanes when detached from what is greater than itself .. .
Unless we aspire to the utmost, we shrink to inferiority.. . The self is
not the hub"

"-she would look straight at Jack, who somehow liked hanging around for
these exhortations'but the spoke of the revolving wheel."

" Things were different in the houses of his friends. Their mothers said
their rosaries while their nails dried. They decorated their dens with
side-by-side pictures of the Pope and JFK.

They probably thought Thomas Merton was a guy who lived two blocks over
and worked for the MBTA. His parents had only one picture in their den,
a rip-off of Ben Shahn's peace dove.

Around the time he was twelve, his mother showed him that there could be
breathing room in one's relationship with God.

And by the time he was fifteen and smoking pot and driving around Boston
with friends in "borrowed" cars, he had come to depend on the presence
in his household of a Catholicism that at times stood apart from, and
even in opposition to, the Church. It was license to misbehave without
being dubbed wicked, to walk the high wire, knowing there was a safety
net. Above all, his mother believed deeply in an ever-loving and
forgiving God. Jack knew now, only after having his own children, that
what he believed in was not so much his mother's God, but his mother.

Jack manipulated Barney's purple paw to feed Katie a piece of jellied
toast from her breakfast tray. At mealtime the nurses tried to arrange
the children in a semicircle in the middle of the ward. Three were in
high chairs, five in regular chairs with hospital trays rolled up to
them. Some remained in their beds, with the curtains pulled open so they
could see the others if they wanted to. Many of the children who were up
and eating had already been grafted at least once, and most multiple
times. A few of them had graduated to this little semicircle of their
peers after months spent in isolation in the hyperbaric chambers down
the hall. For them, sitting out here on the ward was like being at a
party.

Jack couldn't look at some of these kids. Exploding furnaces, faulty
wiring, kerosene heaters, caustic chemicals, sizzling grease, scalding
water-that's how Lily referred to the other children, categorizing them
by the agents of their destruction. That was Lily, not satisfied unless
she had the inside story. Jack was happier not knowing the "how" of it.
He classified these kids in only the most general ways-worsening,
improving, bedridden, ambulatory, disfigured, scarred.

Only about two-thirds of the kids spoke English, so Jack had Barney
nibble a few Cheerios, sip from a couple of straws, wipe his always-open
mouth on a hospital gown, collapse on an empty stretcher, and burp.

"Can I talk to you?"

Jack looked up from his place on the gurney. The cold hand with all the
bracelets belonged to Linda, the hospital social worker.

She nodded in the direction of Katie's bed. Jack looked over at Katie,
who was still eating, laughing now at an older boy balancing a spoon
across the bridge of his nose.

He followed Linda into Katie's "room" and looked at his watch.

He'd missed so much work during the last week. Lily was supposed to have
been here at eight-thirty this morning.

"There seems to be a bit of a snag, " Linda said, shielding herself
behind the rocking chair.

Jack hated this woman. Her concern was so global it was ludicrous.

"The investigator in your case, the caseworker who went out to your
house, has petitioned for an Order of Care and Protection, and the judge
has granted it."

"What? What are you talking about-"

"It's an OTC, an Order of Temporary Custody. It's a seventy two-hour
hold, during which time DSS gathers more information about the case.
It's rather unorthodox, since your daughter is still hospitalized, but
my guess is that there's been some question as to when she'd be
medically ready for discharge. DSS has a certain window of opportunity-"

"They came to my house. I let this woman come into my house-" He looked
down at Katie's little sneakers, lined up neatly beneath the crib. He
picked them up and held them to his chest.

"I know this must be very hard for you .. . difficult to understand ..
." Linda stood, swaying slightly from side to side, and batting at the
back of the rocker as it rolled into her again and again. "The state
seems to feel-"

"No, " Jack said. "The state doesn'tfeel a fucking thing."

Linda swayed some more. "DSS, from what I gather, has reason to believe
that your daughter may be at risk at home. They have an obligation .. ."

Jack thought back to what Ben had said in the kitchen yesterday-that
this place wasn't really a hospital.

"There'll be something called a seventy-two-hour hearing, at which point
the judge will appoint an attorney for you, but between you, me, and the
wall, " she said quietly, "I strongly suggest that you get yourself a
lawyer now, today."

"Really? " Jack said. He slid his fingers inside Katie's sneakers,
barely past the second knuckle. "I thought you told us that would look
bad." He slammed the soles of the sneakers together. A rwoweek-old
pebble dribbled out of the treads. "I asked you that last week, when
this whole thing started, remember?"

"It's a completely different ball of wax now. There could be the
potential here for a criminal charge against your wife." Linda ran her
hands down two of the spindles at the back of the rocking chair and set
her bracelets jingling. "Based on what's in their file now, they could
possibly hand that over to the county prosecutor's office. Your wife
could be arrested. If they wanted, they could make a case, possibly, for
removing your other children as well. You need to defend yourself
Actually, you need to defend your wife. This whole thing has
snowballed."

Jack nodded at the hospital social worker and looked over at the things
in Katie's crib-her blanket, the stuffed penguin his mother had brought,
the old tan bear from home, the one the boys called Tedda-he'd have to
leave them behind. He'd walk slowly out to the center of the ward where
the children were still eating, release her from the high chair, as if
he were just hugging her, and walk off the ward.

He slid open the privacy curtain and moved past Linda. One of the nurses
had already taken Katie out of her high chair. Jack scooped her up off
the floor, careful not to disturb the splint on her right foot.

"Come on, Katydid, " he breathe into her ear.

"Boon, boon, " she yelled as he began to walk toward the double doors
carrying her.

"It's okay, hon, Mumma's waiting for us."

"Boon! " she screamed. "Boon!"

"I think this is what she's after, " Linda said, touching him through
his paper smock and handing Katie a partly deflated Mylar balloon that
said "Get Well Soon or Else."

"Trust me, " Linda said.

"You'll only make things worse if you leave, please."

Jack looked around, beyond Katie's sticky cheek, the dying balloon,
Linda's nest of black-and-gray curls. Nobody noticed that this was
happening. Nurses were talking on the phone, clearing trays, a kid was
screaming in Spanish, carts were squeaking, toilets were flushing. No
one knew he was losing his baby girl. He could feel the blood pulsing in
his fingers as he stroked Katie's bare arms. Care and Protection. That
was his job. How could she be safer with anyone else? How could this be
happening?

"You're my girl, " he whispered as he placed Katie on the floor in the
center of the ward. "No one's going to take away my girl."

He turned to the social worker. "Is there something in writing?" he
said.

"You'll be served a summons."

"I'd like to show my wife something in writing." Lunch for 18. That's
what it said on the chalkboard by the phone.

Wilted greens with goat cheese, loin of tuna in rosemary sauce, new
potatoes, strawberry tartlets for dessert. Cyn, his assistant, was
separating the eggs for the creame anglaise when he walked in at ten
twenty-seven. He waved and walked past her to his locker at the back of
the kitchen. He pulled his golf shirt up over his head and slipped into
his whites.

"How's the tuna look? " he yelled to her, fingering a pair of checked
pants through their dry-cleaning bag. Fucking nubby pants.

He'd wait until noon, when he'd be on view, to change out of his khakis.

"Sushi it's not, " she said.

He could see her now, maneuvering the half-empty flat of eggs back into
the walk-in.

"Don't know what I'd do without you, kiddo, " he said.

She kicked the walk-in door shut with one industrial-weight black boot.
"What?"

"Were you sweating? " He pulled the knotty fabric buttons of his Jacket
through three of the four buttonholes.

"It's the board, you know? The board's having lunch, " she said.

"Six for lunch, sure, you could do that, no problemo-"

"Eighteen, Jack. It's eighteen, Jesus Christ-"

"Gotcha, " he said, and shut his locker door. "I love to see you
squirm."

"You're a real cocksucker, you know that? " She laughed. From around the
corner he heard her slam the saucepan down on the range.

"What are you doing back there anyway, your nails? We got a case of
rocket lettuce to wash, asparagus to trim. We got to do up the tuna
sauce, hull and slice these berries. Ask me about these fucking
berries."

"Hey, Cyn, " Jack said, walking over to the pen-gouged conference table
that served as his desk. "Mind over matter."

She held up her hand, "I know, I know, "You don't mind and I don't
matter."

"It had taken him a long time to get out of the hospital.

Lily had cried in the middle of the ward when he told her about the
seventy-two-hour hold. She had wept so openly and so loudly that several
of the other mothers ran over, assuming, of course, that Katie's medical
condition had worsened.

Later, when they were in the play therapy room, Lily had looked out the
window and said, "God's punishing us, for something." Jack watched Katie
and one of the volunteers as they shoved a spotted dog down the chimney
of a Little Tykes cottage.

Jack had seen the woman before, accepted the challenge of looking at her
straight on. The majority of the volunteers had been childhood burn
patients. Many were scarred, some had been grafted, Jack guessed.

But for this young woman, scar and skin graft were the only messages of
her face. Wherever the patchwork needed to be slack enough to allow for
movement, around the jaw and lips, the transplanted skin hung in flaps,
reminding Jack of a homemade puppet. Each time the plastic dog came
flying out the front door of the plastic house, Katie laughed, as if
perfectly surprised and wholly delighted. And every time the woman
perched the dog back up on the chimney Katie smiled at her, as if she
were perfectly familiar and wholly beautiful.

"A'y .. ." Lily began again, looking over at Jack. "Why is God punishing
us?"

God, Jack thought about saying to his wife, you mean the God who didn't
allow Katie to die, the God who saved her at the last minute from having
to undergo a skin graft? Instead he walked up beside her at the window
and in a low voice said, "If in fact there is a God, Lillian, it seems
painfully clear to me that it is Katie who is being punished."

"We've got to be in this together, " she said sharply, as if commanding
him.

Cyn backed far enough away from the stove to make eye contact with Jack,
just as Jack's call went through to his brother-in-law in Chicago.

She turned toward the range when she heard his voice crack.

David hollered hello into the phone three times, before Jack could get
out a weak "Hey." It was stupid to call David. David did real estate
law. Jack knew David would waste no time telling him he couldn't help
him and asking, incredulously, didn't he or anyone in that whole
enormous family of his know one goddamn attorney out there.

And he'd end the call asking Jack if they needed money. Just say the
word.

"Yeah, hey, buddy, it's Jack."

"Everybody okay? Katie?"

"Jesus, man, we've, ah, ah .. ." Jack sat down on his desk, on top of
menus and memos and pens and pencils. A bulging can of pitted black
olives that had to go back to Monarch rolled to the floor.

"We've got a huge problem here. It's all fucked up. All fucked up."

Jack could hear that he'd been taken off the speakerphone. He pictured
his brother-in-law nuzzling the receiver with the aid of one of those
executive phone perches. Maybe he even had a headset. As he told David
the story, he realized that Lily had related almost nothing to him, not
about DSS, not even about the initial attending's report.

"You do understand that I can't represent you."

"Of course, " Jack said. "I just need a name, a good name.

Someone who can make this unhappen."

"Shit. What did the two of you say to these people? I don't understand.
How did it get this far? This is crazy."

There was a beeping on the line.

"I'm going to have to take this call. You need someone who does family
law. I've got to think, okay? .. . Private counsel doesn't usually .. .
You're going to be hard pressed to find an attorney familiar with this
territory. I mean, we're talking about the wasteland of court-appointed
attorneys here-this social agency stuff."

"The guy you clerked for out here .. . I thought maybe he might know a
lawyer .. .. ..

@6I'll get you a name. You're at work?"

"Yeah." Jack gave him the number.

"I'll call you back around three your time. And tell my sister to call
me. I want to know exactly what she told this caseworker.

The interview should have been .. . she should have talked to me about
this before."

"Lily's-" 69 Jack, look, you're going to have to be prepared to come up
with some money here. This kind of thing could get quite expensive."

"I hear you."

Garni? "Jack said, walking over to Cyn's prep table with a few bunches
of fresh rosemary.

"Garnish? Fuck the garnish. We've got no sauce, no veggie, no-)I "Okay,
okay."

"The chicken stock is in the walk-in, under the tray of leftover Indian
pudding-a no-go in the summer, Jack."

He saluted and marched around the corner. When he pulled down on the
handle of the walk-in he could smell it, smell what a fuck-off he'd been
lately, even before the accident. From where he stood on the threshold
of the refrigerator he could see an uncovered stockpot filled with some
kind of chowder that had obviously broken down, a four-quart bowl of
asparagus and walnut risotto (he hadn't done a risotto since before
Memorial Day, he didn't think), and a loosely wrapped package of lamb
shanks that should have been frozen a week ago. He kicked aside a crate
of runny yellow peppers and checked the thermostat. All he needed now
was a visit by the Health Department, that and a case of corporate food
poisoning.

Where had he been for the past few months? Fucking the dog? He had no
secret vice he'd squirreled away work time to pursue. On the contrary,
before the accident he'd been coming in earlier and staying later. But
he hadn't been working harder.

He'd spent almost no time planning his menus for the summer.

Living simultaneously in the present and a few weeks ahead of yourself
was the executive chef's chief function, catering to the diner's
immediate desire all the while planning for the secret pleasures of his
future. To hump like that in two directions you had to jot down "shad
roe" on the slim calendar you should have been carrying around in your
back pocket all the time. You had to consider it a loss to have missed
the short season for fiddlehead ferns or soft-shell crabs. To satiate
others" desires you had to register desire yourself You had to care
deeply about what was ripe, juicy, firm to the touch, full and sweet
and ready to pluck from the soil or the sea. Somewhere along the way,
his sensuality had boiled out. And now he was left with a job he didn't
particularly like and that barely engaged him.

"Did you find it? " Cyn yelled. "If you talk and work it might help.
Talk and work, work and talk."

Jack finally emerged with the chicken stock and slid the pot onto the
heat. Some of the liquid sloshed over into the flame, causing a brief
sizzle and a flare.

"When are they going to let Katie come home? " Cyn said, reaching up to
turn down the boom box on the shelf above her station.

"Let's do tabouleh instead of spuds. It'll be quicker."

"Tillson loves potatoes."

"Fuck him. We're doing a breakfast tomorrow. He'll get potatoes twice
tomorrow." Jack pulled the box of asparagus toward him with a spatula.
"Shit, then, we'll need tomatoes. Do we have tomatoes?"

Cyn turned and glared at him.

"Sorry. I'm off my game, way off." With the flat of his knife, he tamped
a bunch of asparagus into line. "Katie, " he finally said.

"They're keeping her .. . a few more days, at least."

t'i'm sorry, Jack. Lily must be so upset."

He kept the tip of his knife on the cutting board and brought down the
wide part of the blade into the bundle of asparagus spears. A few ends
rolled onto the floor.

"You're still not talking to her? " Cyn was behind him now, whisking her
custard on the stove.

He lined up some more asparagus. "I never said we weren't talking."

"Well, you haven't exactly- Shit, this is curdling."

Jack grabbed the dish towel slung over his apron strings and pulled the
creame anglaise off the heat.

"Look at that, right there, scrambled yolk, all balled up ..

Jack took the whisk from her hand and beat the custard with force.

"That's it? " she said. "All you're doing is breaking the lumps into
pieces. That's not exactly fixing the problem."

Jack plunged his index finger into the hot yellow mixture.

"Look. See anything? I defy you to find a lump. Set this up in an ice
bath before you go any further."

"I thought you were like going to do something, you know, something
chemical, " Cyn said, returning with a mixing bowl filled with ice.

"Your pie shells cool?"

"They're frozen."

"Better get them out." He trimmed the last of the asparagus, then
grabbed the flat of strawberries from Cyn's bench and began slicing off
the green tops.

Cyn came back around the corner with a tray of individual tart shells.

"It's a mess, " Jack said, beginning to slice some of the berries into
little fans, their pointed ends still attached. "The state's holding
Katie in protective custody. Seems the caseworker didn't have a very
good time at our house yesterday."

"God, Jack. I'm sorry. I figured, you know .. . I heard you on the phone
before .. . I figured something bad was going on." She arranged the
shells in neat rows along the butcher block. "You know, if there's
anything I can do .. ."

Jack smiled at her. "Hey, you've got a fucking earring in your nose. You
don't know your earlobe from your nostril, and you're going to help me."
He wiped the red berry juice off his fingers and looked over at her.
"Thanks, hon."

Cyn began ladling the warm custard into the shells. "You've got to talk
to her, Jack."

"I don't have anything to say." He pulled out the garbage pail from
under his bench and scraped in the green stems with the back of his
knife.

"This must be awful for her." Cyn reached over and popped a couple of
strawberries into her mouth.

"I feel awful for Katie, and at the end of every day, when I'm done
feeling bad for Katie-it's an amazing thing-but I don't have any
sympathy left over for Lily. I'm plumb out." He slid the stainless-steel
bowl of sliced berries over to Cyn and pulled open a crate of lettuce.
He watched for a moment as she began arranging, the berries in
concentric circles on each tart. She looked up and he nodded.

"How are the boys doing?"

"I'm trying to keep them busy."

"Yeah, but how do they seem?"

Jack plucked at the heads of lettuce, piling the gritty leaves into a
colander. "Fine. They're fine. You know, they'll be okay."

"What are you telling them?"

When the colander was full of greens and reds, Jack carried it over to
the small vegetable sink and began washing the lettuce gently under cold
water, leaf by leaf. They'd had a small sink like this at their shop,
and until each of the boys was about three months old, they had bathe
them there, dish towels rolled along one stainless-steel edge to protect
their floppy necks, and one clean white apron laid out on the counter
for bundling and drying. When he left the hospital this morning, they
hadn't discussed what they would tell Ben and Greg.

Nothing. They didn't need to tell them anything.

"This is hard for them, too." Cyn dumped a jar of jelly into a pot on
the range.

"My mother's spoiling them rotten." Jack spread out two dish towels and
piled on the wet lettuce.

, , It probably isn't helping that their parents are at each other's
throats. I'm only speaking from experience-as a former kid."

This was something Lily never did in the kitchen, not when they were
working. Of course they talked, but not like this. Cyn used talk. She
needed conversation to distract herself from the work, the physical
work, the tedium that cooking in quantity could engender. She hadn't yet
learned, maybe wouldn't ever learn, that the repetition of the task
could become a kind of mantra, loosing your thoughts. He always had his
best ideas when he was deep into it, peeling fifty pounds of potatoes or
shredding twenty pounds of cheese.

Jack was grateful that he'd gone into the restaurant business before the
advent of the celebrity chef and this new generation of foodies. Cooking
was manual labor. Cooks were servants. That had never bothered him, and
for Lily it had been a kind of antidote to her childhood. She had told
him once that she hadn't felt real until the day she first walked into a
restaurant kitchen.

"Sushi it's not, " Jack said, reaching into the plastic-lined box of
tuna. "Fish." He fondled the thick flesh until he got Cyn to laugh.
"Fish, " he said again, bringing the raw stuff to his lips.

"Fish." He kissed it, and she laughed even harder.

"Mama ." Katie laughed a low, muffled laugh, her thumb deep inside her
mouth, as Lily reached over and licked the tiniest speck of tomato sauce
from her eyelid. One of the other mothers had ordered pizza for the
children at lunch. The nurses encouraged the parents to bring in food,
anything at all. Weight loss was inevitable with burns.

The children simply needed calories.

"Who loves you? " Lily said as she lay next to Katie in the crib.

The metal cage surrounding the mattress could be made to give way in all
the right places, allowing parents to comfort their children, comfort
themselves.

"Mama, " Katie answered, her thumb still a big wet impediment in her
mouth. "Mama."

Lily twirled a curl of Katie's black hair around one finger, stroked her
full belly with the back of her hand, put her nose in the soft, warm
hollow of flesh at her neck. She could not stop touching her. During
those first few days when Lily thought Katie might die she had caught
herself synchronizing her breathing with Katie's. It was a reflex-like
opening her own mouth while spooning food into the baby's.

In the throes of that medical crisis, Lily had recognized in herself an
almost atavistic desire to heal Katie by pulling her back inside, so
that the pain might be borne on Lily's own nerve endings, the
regeneration of the skin born of her own sturdier system. And now that
the threat of being separated from Katie had reemerged, so had the urge
to assume her, body and soul, up into that waiting space.

Katie was almost asleep. Lily pulled the baby's free thumb up to her own
lips, and a spasm of a smile caught at the edge of Katie's mouth. There
was no other truth but this.

Lily walked to the pay phone in the hall. She reached into her purse for
some change and for a fragment of a Xanax. She'd made a mess of the last
two pills by trying to cut them with the side of her Subaru key.

Ben answered the phone at her mother-in-law's house. His mouth was full.
"We knew it would be you, Mom. We're eating lunch."

"You are? " Lily said, the words coming out through her nose as she felt
herself beginning to cry.

"Did you know that Nana makes red soup? " Greg had picked up on another
extension.

Lily shook her head just the way he did when he responded in the
negative to a question over the phone. "No, honey, I didn't."

"She didn't make it. It's from a can, " Ben said. "Mom, did you know
that there was a kind of clam chowder that was red?"

"No, me, me! I want to say it! I'm telling her. Mum, " Greg continued,
"Nana calls this soup Mummy's soup because, you know what, Mum, you know
what it's called?"

"What, sweefie? What's it called?"

"Manhattan Clam Chowder, " Ben jumped in.

"I'm saying it! I'm saying it, Ben! Mum, you know what it's called?"

"No, sweetie. What? What's the red soup called?"

"Manhattan Clam Chowder."

"Really? " Lily said. She craned her neck and dried her eyes on the
shoulder of her blouse.

"Manhattan's another word for New York City. Did you know that, Mum? "
Greg said.

"Every one knows that, " Ben said.

"So, Mum, " Greg continued, unscathed , "that means you like it better
than the white kind-"

"New England Clam Chowder, " Ben said officially.

""Cause that's where you're from."

"Actually-" Lily began.

"Lily? " her mother-in-law asked cautiously.

"Is everybody still on? " Lily heard one click, some breathing, and
finally a slam.

"Are they off, Fran?"

"Don't cry, honey. Oh, Lily. She's going to be okay."

"Jack hasn't called you yet, has he?"

"No."

"That caseworker got a judge to grant this Order of Protection.

They race to do these things before the hospital discharges. The
Department of Social Services actually takes custody while they
determine-"

"Oh my God, Lillian." Lily could hear her mother-in-law pulling out a
chair. "How can this be happening to you? How can this be happening? You
poor lamb."

God, Franny. You won't let them take my baby away.. .

Lily was sobbing hard.

"Who's there with you? Is someone there with you? Is Jack there?

Lily, where's Jack?"

There was a long silence, while Lily swallowed hard and looked for a
tissue or a napkin or something in her pocketbook.

"I didn't do anything wrong, Franny." Lily blew her nose loudly.

"You know that, don't you? Of all people, you know that."

"Of course I do. Did you call your brother? I imagine you need to get a
lawyer. Did you call David?"

"No. Jack said he would. He hasn't called me since he left here.

That was before ten. He found out first. He's at work. He went to work."

"You want me to come down there? I'm coming down there right now."

"I don't want the boys to get scared. I don't think .. . I don't look
very good right now .. .. .. Lily said.

"Could that, that friend of yours, glory be, what's her name?

You know the one, the one with the house with the peeling paint and the
dog, the dog with the skin problem."

Lily laughed. She was still crying, but she laughed. "Julia, Julia
Cozzi."

"Could she take them this afternoon? I'll call her. Those kids are
forever calling down here to see if they can help me out."

Lily appreciated the way her mother-in-law referred to her and Jack's
friends as "kids."

"I'm sorry to put you through this, " Lily said. "I'm so sorry."

Lily hung up the phone and shoved the shredding Dunkin" Donuts napkin
she'd used to dry her eyes into the pocket of her shorts. She wished
there were someone else to call. Jack was the person she usually called
when she was in trouble. Years ago, before they were married, she had
called him from a pay phone in the subway. She'd just come from a dismal
interview for a job as a pastry chef at a new restaurant. Above the
echoes in the leaking station, she told Jack that the celebrity
restaurateur had asked her what the hell he was supposed to do with a
Barnard girl in his kitchen.

"Where are you? " Jack said.

"Astor Place."

"Who are you?"

"What? " she said, already somewhat saved by the sound of his voice and
the intensity of his attention.

"You're Lily Sterne, the Greatest Chef in All the World, " he roared as
if anticipating competition from an oncoming train.

"Right." She laughed.

"There's nothing you can't do, Lily. I'm serious. There's no limit to
who you can be. How come I know that, and you don't?

You're going to let some third-rate actor tell you about your
profession? Why would you do that?"

"You mean when I could be listening to you, instead? " she said,
wondering how sad it must be for everyone else in the world to live
without this.

Jack had told her about the prospective custody this morning, delivering
the bad news as if it were not news at all, not to him, but rather the
preordained result of her freely chosen failings as a human being. He
had not held her hand or even taken her aside. She was in this, and
maybe everything else, alone. For the first time, Lily wondered whether
he had said something about her to the caseworker, something strange,
something that in some way implicated her, something to punish her,
never envisioning how it would mushroom. Maybe he'd set her up with the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts", The Xanax wasn't working.

Lily stretched on a pair of gloves and unfolded a gown. Katie's room was
cool, and she pulled the cotton blanket up over the baby's skimpy
hospital gown. Last night at home, she'd slept in Katie's hot little
room. She'd become used to the noises on the burn unit and had forgotten
about the house sounds, the creaking floorboards and the scraping of the
pines against the upstairs windows. At two, she'd wandered in and turned
on the old metal fan on top of Katie's dresser.

She lay down by the crib, covering herself with a worn receiving blanket
and wedging her head into the soft black crotch of Katie's panda bear.
When Greg found her there sometime after seven in the morning he said
that he'd asked Daddy almost every night about sleeping in Katie's crib,
but Daddy had always said no, because he was a big boy, and it was great
to be big.

The unit was almost quiet now. Except for the youngest babies, most of
the children tended, after a few days, to fall into similar schedules.
During nap time the stereo din of Sesame Street gave way to the warring
plaints of soap operas.

The nurse rocking little Pearl was watching One Life to Live.

"Poor thing just had a cathe er put in, " she said as Lily walked over.

Lily reached out with a gloved hand and stroked the baby's toes.

This baby probably didn't even know what skin-to-skin touch felt like.

Pearl had been there for three months, since she was about ten weeks
old. Somebody, Lily hadn't heard who, had plunged her headfirst into a
pot of boiling water. Lily had been told that she'd never grow hair or
eyelashes or eyebrows. Her eyelids were scarred, but her lips were
smooth and rosy and wet, just as a baby's lips should be. Her hands were
still bandaged.

Those had been burned, too. Perhaps Pearl had instinctively reached out
to the sides of the pot.

"Will it hurt her if I stroke her head? " Lily said, reaching out to
touch Pearl's rippled head. The nurse was familiar to her, but wasn't
one of the ones she knew by name, who'd treated Katie.

The nurse was looking up at the "IV "And we're supposed to believe that
this guy's straight? Look at him."

Lily laughed. "I think she might be sleeping."

"This one likes to catnap, big on catnaps."

"Sounds good to me, " Lily said.

"Really. The kids get sent home and the mothers wind up sick as dogs."

"What's going to happen to her? I mean, when she gets discharged? " Lily
said.

"Who? Our little Pearl of the Sea here? God, I don't know.

But any mother who does something like this, if you ask me, ought to be
fried in oil. Some things you shouldn't get a second chance for, ever,
you know?"

Lily nodded.

"Too bad that she's a girl. No hair on a boy wouldn't be as bad.

And her face .. ." The nurse sighed and rubbed the baby's back while she
looked up at the "IFV.

"I'd be happy to hold her, if you need a break."

The nurse looked directly at Lily now for the first time. She nodded to
herself as if she had just recognized something.

"You've got your own rocking to do, don't you?"

Lily let her smile fall slightly as she stepped back out of the room.
Every one knew. She couldn't be trusted.

Jack was already seated in Eleanor Snow's office when Lily arrived at
five-thirty. He turned and stared out the window as she took the leather
armchair beside him.

"I've a meeting at seven in Concord, so we'll keep this brief," Snow
said in a manner that struck Lily as more military than businesslike.

"Let me quickly reiterate what I've told your husband." The lawyer
smoothed out the skirt of her seersucker suit as she perched on the edge
of her desk. "I want to be perfectly up-front with you from the start.
In my practice, my knowledge of and involvement with DSS is tangential.
For the most part, my clients tend to be involved in custody battles
with former spouses, rather than with the Department of Social Services.
I told your husband over the phone this afternoon that the Juvenile
Court judge hearing this case will appoint counsel for you, should you
not engage a private attorney, quite possibly counsel for each of you.
That representation is free. Counsel will also be appointed for your
child."

Lily looked around the office-white oriental carpet, rosewood desk,
leather chairs, a view from the twenty-third floor.

This hour with Eleanor Snow, who was now telling them she didn't
especially practice the kind of law in which they were ensnared, was
likely to cost close to a day's pay for Jack. The medical expenses were
covered. The Shriners wouldn't be charging them, that was the principle
behind all their children's hospitals. She and Jack had no savings. On
the contrary, they owed close to $24, 000 in credit card debt they'd
incurred when the gourmet shop had started to fail. "The Angel of Debt,
" Jack had joked one day, dropping the Visa bill onto the prep counter.
But that was over $10, 000 ago, back when they could joke, when it still
seemed possible to turn it all around. Legal fees would bury them for
good. One more reason for Lily to feel guilty@ "It's my understanding
that the state is very much on the defensive right now about their
record in a number of abuse cases." Snow moved behind her desk and
flipped the top page of a yellow legal pad. "I'm of course referring to
the infant in Methuen .. ."

Lily remembered switching off the radio in the kitchen the evening the
story broke about the six-month-old who died of injuries when her
mother's boyfriend raped her.

"The little girl had been treated at a hospital for burns on the
buttocks only weeks before, " Snow continued. "Treated and released.

Last winter there was the three-year-old in Worcester who froze to death
when his mother left him sleeping in her locked car overnight while she
worked the third shift. After his death a number of the mother's
neighbors and coworkers came forward claiming they had repeatedly called
the police about the mother's treatment of the child, but DSS had never
followed up.

Both cases received large amounts of media attention, and a hue and cry
has gone up, as well it should, for a total overhaul of the department."

The lawyer lowered her gray head to look for something on her desk.
"Okay, so that's the political climate in which you find yourselves
right now, just so you understand." She fingered her silver helmet of a
hairdo and finally pulled out a Post-it note from beneath a stack of
papers.

Lily understood that these news items, which months ago she'd considered
tragic yet distant, lamentable but as unconnected to her life as a
famine in sub-Saharan Africa or a civil war in Eastern Europe, had
quickly married into her family of troubles.

These public deaths were, in some way, responsible for her own private
life being offered up in sacrifice to this government agency.

They couldn't afford not to hire Eleanor Snow or someone like her.

"The judge granted the Order of Care and Protection based on allegations
made by the investigator, the caseworker, Mrs.. ..

Thorns, right? You're to have a preliminary hearing within seventy-two
hours. The burden of proof is on DSS. Unfortunately, it's my
understanding that this is a fairly low burden.. .. The hospital social
worker? Now what's her name? She has no real influence here, but she did
give me .. ."

Lily watched as the lawyer retracted her long tanned neck, forcing her
light blue half-glasses to slide to the tip of her nose.

She looked over the tops of them at her notepad.

"Linda Polowitz, " Lily said.

"Good, " the lawyer said without looking up. "This Polowitz on the
hospital staff did fax me-she must like you-reports by the two doctors
there who were assigned to Katie's case. Their reports to DSS were
inconclusive in determining abuse."

The lawyer rolled her chair back from the desk and stretched out her
legs. "They're going to run a skeletal series on your daughter, x-rays,
to check for past fractures. You'll want to prepare her for that. And if
they haven't yet taken photographs, most likely they will. Try to be on
hand for as much of this as you can. Your presence at the hospital"-the
lawyer swung her eyes up over the tops of her glasses and looked at
Lily-"is important now for myriad reasons." Snow pulled off her glasses
abruptly and while deeply massaging her closed eyes continued to talk.

"Apparently, while no one claims to have seen a line of immersion
anywhere on your daughter's body, the investigator found enough to
confirm the suspicions of the emergency room physician, who was the
reporter, the one who filed the 5 IA. I don't yet have the caseworker's
report, which would be .. ." She scissored her pen between her second
and third fingers. "Of course." She thrust forward her lips
disparagingly. "Form 5 1 B." Lily thought that maybe she had been wrong
about the lawyer and her Army-issue interpersonal skills.

What she had first discerned in Eleanor Snow as a hot-potato Brahmin
accent she realized now might be the inflected voice of an ex-smoker.

This woman, whose calf muscles were probably as taut as the catgut on
her tennis racquet, seemed more approachable when Lily pictured her
drinking her way through a soft pack of Newports.

"I am wondering"- Lily cleared her throat and slid for-ward in her seat,
her bare legs noisily unsticking themselves from the leather
upholstery-"why we're on the defensive here? " She crossed her ankles
and tugged on her shorts. When she left home this morning to go to the
hospital, it had never occurred to her that she would be sitting in an
attorney's office on Federal Street that evening. "I was hoping you
could find a way to, if not erase this whole thing, at least put a halt
to it-something procedural done wrong from the beginning.. .. I mean,
there's no reason this should be happening to us."

Instead of responding, the lawyer looked up over her glasses at Jack.

"This is something you've already discussed? " Lily said, annoyed.

"Your daughter sustained some very serious injuries, Mrs. Kellher." Snow
bowed her head toward a curling piece of fax paper on her desk and
quoted. ""Partial- and full-thickness burns, categorized as both second-
and third-degree burns. "" The attorney looked up at Lily now. "I did a
little research prior to our meeting this evening. It is my
understanding that burns such as these in a child as young as yours when
the skin is still thin can be fatal. DSS would have cause for suspicion
based on the lnj'uries alone. Your claim that there were no witnesses,
coupled with the fact that the account of your daughter's accident is
seemingly incompatible with her age and her developmental
characteristics, her strength and dexterity, lay a solid foundation for
a real case against you. And perhaps, most significantly, what you claim
are accidental splash burns on your daughter's legs can be nearly
impossible to distinguish from burns caused by the deliberate throwing
of boiling water." The lawyer slid her glasses back along the bony ridge
of her nose. "A judge has heard these allegations and declared your
daughter to be in imminent danger.

This is quite serious, Mrs. Kellher."

"Has my husband told you the story? Did he tell you how the accident
happened?"

The lawyer nodded.

"I wasn't even in the room."

"Nobody can corroborate that, " the lawyer said.

"Why do I need corroboration? I've been taking care of kids for
thousands of hours. My oldest is seven .. ."

"I was given to understand that until fairly recently, you and your
husband shared the child-care responsibilities. You've mostly reared
your children, with him, in full view .. . you had some kind of a retail
business?"

"Gourmet shop, " Jack said softly.

"Are you playing devil's advocate here? " Lily asked.

"Your husband is very concerned, Mrs.. .. Sterne, " the lawyer said,
correcting herself.

46 My husband is in the room. Maybe he'd like to tell me exactly what
his concerns are? " Lily pulled her purse from the floor up onto her
lap, as if for protection. "Did you voice these concerns to Mrs. Thorns?
" she said, turning to him.

Jack had his arms folded across his pin-striped shirt. For the first
time Lily noticed he was wearing a blazer.

"Did you say something to that doctor at Lincoln? " she asked.

"I asked a question, " he said, running his fingers through his curly
hair. "When you were at the pay phone, checking on the boys, I asked a
nurse what temperature water has to be to burn skin."

"So? @) "And then I told her that I'd worked in a lot of kitchens.

I'd seen some burns before, but I'd never seen anything this bad, not
even when an old Garland blew up on a guy. She asked me if you worked.

I said you were a professionally trained chef, too. And she said
something like, this seemed pretty careless, at best, leaving a child
unattended near a stove. She said that sometimes they got these mothers
in with these borderline lqs, women who might make that kind of mistake,
but someone educated .. ."

"So, if I had a borderline IQ, I'd be in the clear? " Lily shook her
head. "What did you say then?"

"You came back into the room, and then the doctor walked back in with
the prescription."

"You didn't say anything?"

"Well, she had a point, " Jack said, almost under his breath.

"You think I would burn a child, our child? " Lily said, looking down at
the rug. "How could you think that of me-"

"Not on purpose."

"So what are you saying?"

"Maybe you were careless? I mean, you know, you walk around at home,
practically talking out loud, never about what's going on at the
moment-" I've got three people's schedules, no, four, other than my own
to keep track of. The desires of four other people to remember at all
times-their likes and dislikes and comings and goings. I'm going to talk
to myself I have to keep it all straight."

"Will you at least admit that you're preoccupied much of the time?"

The lawyer took off her glasses and balanced them on top of the steeple
she had formed with her long, intertwined fingers.

Lily looked at her. Strangely, she was not embarrassed for Eleanor Snow
to have heard all this. She was unconcerned with the picture being
painted of her here, not because she was confident in her sense of self,
but because there was simply no space in her conscious mind for the
safekeeping of any more regret.

She stared now at the lawyer, hoping to convey at least this much.

After a long silence, the lawyer shifted her body in her chair and said,
"What you are undergoing is extremely stressful. Your private life, your
family life, has been invaded, exposed. That's got to be trying on a
marriage." She slid open the center drawer of her desk and began jotting
something down on a notepad. "I happen to know a first-rate marriage
counselor."

"My wife already has a therapist, " Jack said quiedy.

Lily rolled her eyes at him and then said, "I had a kind of a postpartum
depression after the birth of our daughter. I went to a psychologist for
a while." This statement, like everything else central to her life right
now, did not represent the whole and unabridged truth, which was about
as unwieldy as thirty-seven years of life. Lily had been going to one
headshrinker or another on and off for years, and even that statement
obscured a view of her past she had once considered as integral to her
identity as a birthmark. She'd met her first shrink while in restraints
in an assessment room at Bellevue when she was sixteen.

"Were you on any medication? " the lawyer asked, taking notes now.

"Zoloft, an antidepressant."

"She stopped nursing to take it, " Jack said.

"Katie was seven months old. I nursed her for seven months, " Lily
explained. She turned in her seat toward Jack. I wasn't careless enough
to take drugs while I was breast-feeding."

"Could this be a problem? " Jack said.

"When did you go off the medication? " the lawyer asked.

"April, " Lily said.

"Are you still under a doctor's care?"

Jack looked over at Lily.

"We had agreed that I should stop at the beginning of June. It just
wasn't something we could afford any longer."

Lily had been going to Lucy Balsaam for two months when Jack asked her
if she saw an end in sight. "No, " she said. "That's exactly the
problem." After about six months, Jack agreed that Lucy-or Dinsey, as he
renamed her when she began prescribing the drugs, in an imitation of the
way Greg mispronounced the creator of so much Technicolor fantasy@was
helping her, that she seemed happier. After about nine months, he asked
if she always had something to talk about each Tuesday night, or did she
sometimes have to dream things up, the way he used to invent suitable
sins while waiting for his turn in the confessional. A few weeks later
he wondered aloud if, when she stopped, they might be as disciplined
about saving money as they were about paying Dinsey's bill each month.
"It's nothing, what she's charging, " Lily said. "I'm near the bottom of
her sliding scale."

"Still, " he said, "over time it adds up, could add up to a vacation, or
part of one child's first week in college."

Lily had sought out Lucy Balsaam a few months after Katie's birth
because she knew enough to know that everything was all wrong. She had
found herself rolled up to the very edge of her life and she sensed that
the drop was steep. The baby was to have been her hedge. She'd been
counting on the arrival of a new baby to compensate for the loss of
their business, and it hadn't, it couldn't. What kind of mother was
joyless in the face of new life?

Only the very worst kind.

In the end, she'd given up Lucy, not because Jack wanted her to, but
because over time, Lucy had helped to roll her away from the edge and
toward the flat, broad plain of her life. "I'm taking up couch space, "
she said to Lucy one day. "Someone else probably needs this time slot."
Lucy had told her that her door was always open, something Lily had
thought about more than once in the last twelve days.

"Could my therapist be asked to disclose information about me?" Lily
asked. She was thinking now of all the treatment notes Lucy had been
required to send to the insurance company, which continually threatened
to deny even 50 percent coverage for the sessions. She and Lucy had
written the appeals together, always citing "Ms. Sterne's need to be
able to function in the capacity of mother to three young children."

"You left on good terms? All paid up? She agreed you were done?" Snow
asked.

"Yes, " Lily said. What Lucy had told her was that she understood the
financial pressures they were under.

"Rather than letting them dig for information through your insurance
company, why don't we ask this doctor to write a letter on your behalf,
to be put in your file? I'm going to try to get letters from your
employers, coworkers-"

"But that's for Jack. I mean, I'm the one who needs the-"

"Friends, " the lawyer said. "Any one with an impressive letterhead."

"Most of my friends are other mothers."

"Certainly through the business you had before you have the names of
some people who'd be willing to write on your behalf.

Husbands of friends? Couples you socialize with?"

Lily nodded.

"Teachers, sitters. Did you ever have the kids in any kind of day care?"

"No, " Jack said.

"What about when you were both working?"

Jack shook his head. "We were pretty strapped."

"What did you do with the children all day?"

"There were only our sons, then, " Lily said. "And we'd bring them with
us. One of us would open up. The other would follow later on with the
kids. Sometimes my mother-in-law would come by and take them home for a
nap, or we'd take turns. We had a small carpeted area in a window seat
with toys and books, a playpen when they were little. When we had to do
a big party my mother-in-law would watch them, or sometimes we'd get a
high school kid to baby-sit."

"They'd be inside all day? " the lawyer asked.

"They were inside as much as any other kids living year-round in New
England." Lily infrequently told people that she and Jack had worked
together and had shared most of the child care.

Women, especially, were incredulous or jealous or both, as if Jack and
Lily had gotten away with something. Every one always brightened when
she got to the part about having to sell the store.

"We weren't taking a whole lot home, " Jack added. "Babysitting's
expensive."

"No one ever complained about the children? Any problems with the Health
Department? Any previous problems with DSS?

What about school?"

"When Ben started public school, the bus would stop at the corner, in
front of the store, " Lily said.

"You kept them home until then? Until kindergarten?"

"No, " Jack said. "No, they both went to nursery school."

"What about the summer, this summer? A-re they in any kind of rec
program, summer camp? Will they be visiting relatives?"

"Why? " Lily asked.

"One of the things the state looks for is the degree to which the
children are at risk because they're unknown quantities in the
community."

"What are you talking about? " Jack said.

"Caseworkers have a risk scale. Infants are at the top. They're not in
school. No bus drivers or friends or teachers to keep tabs on them. And
they can't talk. The nonverbal child, according to the state, is most at
risk for abuse. As children get older and start school, neighbors, store
owners, teachers are all considered ameliorating factors-that, along
with the hope that since they can talk, they'll report instances of
abuse." The lawyer frowned. "If you have a child showing up for the
town-run camp program every morning at eight-thirty, someone is going to
notice if he's unkempt or hungry, or bruised."

Lily twisted the thick strap of her purse into a knot and started to cry
at the thought of Ben arriving somewhere as unforgiving as the town park
without the scent and sustenance of her home.

gt Lillian, " the lawyer said tentatively after a while. "Is there
anything else? I should know everything, no matter how small it may seem
at the moment."

Lily raised one hip off the chair and reached into the pocket of her
shorts for a Kleenex, which she knew she didn't have. A hand touched her
outstretched leg. Jack was offering his handkerchief "Thank you, " she
said.

He nodded.

She tried to catch his eye now for a cue as to how to proceed, but he
was back to looking out the window. She waited for a moment for him to
mention the semester she'd spent at Payne Whitney. But the moment
passed.

"Okay, then-" The lawyer stood up.

"Worst case? " Jack said.

"We want to get this resolved prior to Katie's release from the
Shriners. I'm going to try to get this seventy-two-hour hearing moved
up." Snow rested her elbows on her desk and flipped a page of her
engagement calendar.

Lily saw a picture of a firecracker fly by.

"We're coming into a four-day weekend, " the lawyer murmured to herself
"The reality here is that I'm not an overloaded public defender. I've
got the time and resources to make this happen.

"What happens at this hearing? " Jack asked.

"The judge will want to identify Katie. DSS will have a few people
there, their own attorney. They'll try to back up the allegations, and
we'll basically come in with our letters of reference.

You have a private pediatrician you've had for years. He knows your
family. You are a known quantity in the community.. .

Why don't I make a copy of the summons?"

Lily hadn't yet seen the actual order. Jack had been served at work.

The lawyer screwed up her face. "Well, we'll get it changed, " she said,
still staring at the summons on her desk.

"What? " Jack asked.

"The date." She shook her head. "Unbelievable." They don't have you down
for a seventy-two-hour. They have you down for a prelim."

"What's that mean?"

"It means some poor scribe hit the wrong box with his pen. I'll
straighten it out. What else? They got your last name spelled wrong, but
at least they spelled it that way twice." She looked up at each of them.
"So we're prepared, call everyone who's going to write for you tonight
and have the letters faxed here."

The air was close and still when they stepped out of the airconditioned
lobby onto Federal Street.

"Where's the van? " Lily said.

"Cyn's borrowing it. She had to go pick up a bureau in Charlestown or
something."

, , Oh. How are you getting to your mother's?"

"She's going to meet me." He gestured toward a bar halfway down the
block.

"Oh. Well, are we straight about who we're each calling, the letters and
references?"

"I am, " he said.

"Good, " she said. "I'm in a lot around the corner. I would have been
late otherwise."

"Tell Katie I love her, " he said, starring to turn.

"Tell the boys .. ."

He had his back to her. As he broke into a trot, he reached his arm up
into tfie air and waved.

111. past the moon and his mama and papa sleeping tight into the light
of the night kitchen .. . "" Fran was sitting cross-legged on the
linoleum in the middle of a group of children when Lily got back to the
hospital. Lily plucked at her rubber gloves and leaned against the
wall, unnoticed.

"Look at this poor little guy. Not only does he fly from his bed, he
somersaults out of his clothes."

The little girl who'd burned both her hands and forearms when her
brother's homemade bomb exploded slid on the bottom of her hospital gown
and toed the edge of the book. "Where does he have no clothes on?"

"What's this big round thing outside his window, and all these little
white things? " Fran asked, lifting the book up high, so all the
children could see.

"Moon and stars, " the children called out, echoing one another until
all seven had had tfieir say.

"Do you ever look up at the moon and stars at night, when you're at
home? Sometimes it looks big and round like this, and sometimes .

.."

"Sometimes there's no moon, " one of the older boys said.

Fran nodded. "Sometimes we can't see the moon and sometimes it only
wants to show the tiniest sliver of itself, right?

And what do the stars look like to you when you see them?"

Lily looked at the group of children. Some of them were young enough and
had been in the hospital long enough to have forgotten about moons and
stars, except as illustrations in books.

"You know what they look like to me, " Fran continued, "they took like
eyes, zillions of bright little eyes. If we were at home right now it
would almost be time to go to the window or go outside and say
"Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight, wish I may, wish I
might, have the wish I wish tonight."

"I'd wish for all the Power Rangers, red, blue, green, white, but not
pink and yellow, "cause they're girls, " one four-year-old boy said.

The other children were quiet, either so young that they were confused
by the notion of a wish, or older and skeptical that good things could
happen to them as inexplicably as the bad.

Fran opened the book again."

"Where the bakers who bake till the dawn so we can have cake in the morn
mixed Mickey in batter .. ." Do you think you'd like to fly through the
night in a bowl full of batter?"

Her mother-in-law read to children the same way she talked to adults,
digressing again and again from the story, rolling the kernel of the
original tale up and over and through a million sensory observations
until the listener found herself fuller and rounder, her capacity for
response deepened to accommodate an empathy Fran expected.

"Maybe if it was chocolate, " Fran said as a discussion of favorite
flavors ensued. In an attempt to be heard, the louder children moved
closer to the book and to Fran. When she began reading again, one child
was on her back and three others had tunneled up under her arms.

Lity's parents had both read to her a lot when she was child.

On Friday afternoons, her mother would come home after teaching her last
class with a warm challah and two briefcases-one filled just with
picture books from the neighborhood library.

When Lily was older, already a reader herself, her father began reading
to her. "The real King Anhzir, " he would say, unearthing a volume from
his own ancient childhood, the real Robin Hood, the real Treasure
Island. Until she'd had her own children, Lily had thought,
uncharitably, that her parents" energy for reading to her and David,
their singular enthusiasm for that one parent/child activity, had merely
been a ploy to make their own lives easier down the line. Those late
weekend afternoons when her parents would have taken over the
dining-room table with books and papers would go much smoother if the
two children would only engage in the same quiet activity. But when Ben
was old enough to be read to, she realized that of all the duties
required in caretaking and all the millions of little interactions,
reading offered both structure and intimacy. It was something they could
do together removed from the relentless quality of domestic life, it
picked up where nursing had left off, a way to be together both inside
and beyond the life of mother and child.

For her mother to put aside the monograph, the first edition, the
doctoral candidate's dissertation, the latest issue of Russian Studies
in order to read to her was an enormous victory. It was Lily's
grandmother, her mother's mother, Shayria, who did all the cooking and
washing, the wiping and hand-holding. She used to laugh that she was
fat, that she had rolls and rolls of time, all for Lily. Lily felt logy
from all that time. She loved her grandmother deeply, but she was quite
old by the time Lily was born. Lily couldn't remember a time when she
hadn't been aware of the need to be careful with Shayna. The stewardship
of that much older generation had required a constant vigilance, which
called for an abridgment of her self.

Her mother had abdicated what she considered to be the tiresome job of
being a daughter and the time-consuming one of being a mother.

Not knowing any better, Lily had spent her whole youth expecting her
mother to reclaim her role. She was always waiting for her mother-to be
done with her work, the last class of the second semester, the final
edit, the return from the conference in Ann Arbor or from the sabbatical
in Leningrad. Her mother had been forty when she was born and her father
forty-seven. They were a fiilly established team by then, both
romantically and professionally. From the time Lily was old enough to
master subtraction, she'd been figuring and refiguring how many years
until their retirement, until they stopped this obsessive reading and
writing and started to live like everyone else.

They had died, each of them rather suddenly, eighteen months apart,
almost as if they had planned it, one more collaboration. Now, thirteen
years after her mother's death, Lily had been made to realize by her
therapist that she had not been robbed of some idyllic last trimester
with her parents. They never would have put aside their file cabinets to
make room for a Portacrib, never would have moved to the Cape or bought
a car or traveled somewhere normal. "People tend not to do abrupt
about-faces, not at sixty-five and not when they're relatively happy
with their lives, " Lucy said. Lily had argued for a couple of sessions
that they weren't happy, that they had died before they'd learned to be
happy. They were exclusive, negative and judgmental, cynical and
sarcastic. They graded everything from their students" papers to their
children's spouses and career choices, Lily had said.

"Who wasn't happy?" Lucy had asked her.

The first time her parents had met Jack was at the end of Lily's
apprenticeship at the Wiscasset Way. Lily had filled the last breakfast
order, changed into a fresh pair of whites, and stepped out onto the
back porch of the hotel, where her parents were drinking coffee. "He's
very "other, "" her mother said in her typically definitive way, clearly
audible above the sound of the pounding surf.

When they noticed Lily approaching, her mother slid into a zipping
Russian and her father stood up from his chair, as he always did, even
at home, whenever anyone entered the room.

"Doesn't quite possess your drive, does he? " her father had said
rhetorically, a few weeks before the wedding. It was a year after her
mother had died. He probably already suspected he was sick. They were
talking about money. They had to talk about money. There wasn't much, a
little for her, a little for David.

Maybe down the line, in the future, she'd want to make a change.

That was what the money was for. "I'm giving it to you, not to you and
Jack, is that clear? Sit on it if you want. Just know it's there in case
you ever need an out. There's nothing worse in this life than being
without options." The money was all gone now.

They'd used half to start up their business and the other half as a down
payment on their house.

"My parents worked so hard, " she had told Lucy guilfily.

"They never relaxed. They were always working. Even when they were with
us, they were always working, the two of them."

"Who wasn't happy@" Lucy asked again.

Watching Fran now, with all ttiese little children around her, Lily
longed for her mother, not because she would have been able to descend
upon this nightmare and right it, not even because she would have been a
shoulder to cry on, no, Lily had Fran for those things. Fran could enter
a house where someone was dying or about to be born and seamlessly set
about cooking and cleaning and tending.

Fran eased the way in other people's lives. Fran was a mother's mother.
Lily longed for her own mother right now merely to be reminded, however
briefly, that she had been a child once, that she'd been cherished. She
would have paid a huge sum for one instant of experiencing either of her
parents with her children, for that glimpse she knew adults were
occasionally allowed of what might have been true about their
childhoods.

"Again, again, " the boy on Fran's back was yelling in her ear.

"Read it again."

As Fran reached for a new book, Katie noticed Lily and held her hands up
toward her mother. She should already have been walking on her healing
feet. Lily and Jack had been told to encourage weight-bearing and not to
carry her around. The tops of both feet had been burned, but the right
foot was more severely affected, since all the toes were involved. In
the end, the damage to the skin between her knee and her ankle on the
right leg would be cosmetic-no muscle had been involved, nothing to
impede function permanently. Lily beckoned to Katie, and Katie shook her
head. Lily beckoned again, exaggeratedly this time, as if she were
summoning her daughter to emigrate from one continent to another. Katie
smiled now and began to crawl toward Lily, pulling herself along on her
palms and her elbows, dragging her stomach along the dirty linoleum, her
bandaged right leg safely in the air.

Lily could barely watch this poor imitation of a skill Katie had
mastered nearly a year before.

"Are you my tired girl? " Lily said, carefully picking her up, wrapping
her ratty, unraveling white blanket around her own neck.

Before the accident any mention of sleep was always met with hysterics.

Now, Katie laid her head on her mother's shoulder and stroked her
mother's cheek with the fringe of the blanket. Lily lowered the lights
in Katie's room and sank down into the rocker with her. The baby rolled
her body into Lily's, sucked rhythmically on her thumb, and ran the
unbandaged part of her left leg up and down Lily's bare arm.

Now that she had the docile child she'd longed for two weeks ago, she
felt sick. She had read in one of the many cola-stained parenting
pamphlets scattered about the waiting rooms a short article about the
effects on development of severe illness and injury. The piece cited
cases of famous people who had suffered physical trials as children and
had emerged transformed. Several mentions were made of children having
been fundamentally altered by the trauma experienced by a brother or
sister.

It frightened Lily to think that the scalding water had tamed and
tempered Katie. Before the accident, Lily had wanted Katie to knuckle
under, be a good girl, be quiet, reasonable, and then Lily had thrown up
her hands, turned her back, and it had happened. Had Katie been older,
Lily thought, she might consciously have made a connection between the
two. That she was so young meant only that Lily would never know for
sure what conclusions the child had drawn.

Left alone once in her mother's office at the university for what seemed
like a long time, Lily had devised a game of crisscrossing the room in
the rolling armchair. She pushed off from desk drawers and walls,
closing her eyes as she spun across the gray linoleum, trying to
anticipate the moment of contact. She grabbed onto the doorknob and
pushed hard against the frosted office door and the chair sailed into a
tower of metal file cabinets, causing the bottom corner drawer to fly
open. And there she was, in her red tartan-plaid dress, staring up from
the bottom bin, Just on top of David's picture. Shayna had dressed them
up back in the fall and taken them downtown to Best & Co.

The framed photographs lay at the top of an uneven pile.

Underneath was the silhouette David had made of himself in art class,
Lily's Mother's Day card, a macaroni necklace, and the cat ashtray she'd
made just that past winter, one ear now chipped off Lily reached in
carefully. There was something with Hebrew letters on it, David's
sixth-grade report card, a sachet Lily had sewn in Brownies, and
somebody's baby picture with a pile of gummed-up paper clips stuck to
it. Lily plucked out the cat ashtray and stuffed it into her raincoat
pocket. She took Davids silhouette and taped it to the front of her
mother's desk. She reshuffled everything so that her mother would know
she'd been there. When she shut the drawer she saw that it was clearly
labeled HOME.

She climbed up onto the windowsill in the office and rested her cheek
against the cool damp glass. The campus was nearly empty on a Sunday
morning. She calculated. Five more years until she was a teenager. Nine
until she got to leave home and go to a place like this. Maybe only
twelve until she was married and a mother. Twelve more years until
everything could be set right.

"My kids will love me, " she said aloud, letting her lips graze the
black casement on the window. "When I'm a mother, my kids will love me
more than anything in the world."

"God forgive me, " Lily said aloud as she stroked Katie's smooth round
arms. "I'm sorry, little girl, so sorry, " she said, looking into her
dark eyes, while Katie massaged Lily's cheek with tfie dusty fringe of
her blanket. "Mama loves you so much, so much." Lily pulled Katie's head
to her lips, and the baby allowed herself to be held too close, to be
smelled and kissed and very nearly inhaled.

"More than anything in the world."

When Lily stopped just outside the ward to strip off her gown, she found
her mother-in-law neatly folding a stack of rubber gloves.

"If I leave three dollars .. . I think that should cover it, " she said,
looking up nervously at Lily and then reaching into her jeans pocket for
some crumpled bills. "Water balloons, " she said.

"Won't the boys just love these. I'm running out of .. . ideas,
distractions, you know. They need to be distracted."

Lily nodded. "I don't think you need to leave money."

"Oh, I want to." She jammed the gloves into her purple fanny pack and
looked up at Lily. "How did it go? You know, I asked Bobby Mcevoy-you
know the Mcevoys. Bobby was a classmate of jean's or Erin's. Anyway,
he's a partner at Fiske and Dolan. He didn't know her, but he knew of
her, Eleanor Snow. He had heard of her."

"Good things", " Lily asked.

""Thorough" is what he said."

Lily shrugged.

"Have you had your supper? " Fran asked. "There's an Indian restaurant
somewhere in this neighborhood. What's her name .. .

Kiley." Fran waved her hand in what would have been the direction of her
next-door neighbor's house had they been standing in Fran's kitchen.
"She raves about it. Wouldn't you love to try that?"

"We've got all these calls to make. Apparently we need a stack of
letters at the ready."

"Oh, Jack's with you? Here? I didn't see him. I thought.. .

"No, he was going to get the boys at Julias and then go on to your
house, I guess."

"Oh, " Fran said. "Well, come. We'll have a bite."

Lily shook her head.

"Can I write a letter? " She unhooked the fanny pack from her waist and
rooted through it for a pen and some paper. "What can I do?

I'll make a list. Let me help call some of these people, at least."

"No, I really have to make these calls myself, but thanks."

"It's a lot of B. S. , you know." Fran spread her sneakered feet apart
in a combative stance. "The whole thing. I decided on my way down here.
Now that you have a lawyer, they'll back right down. I'm committed to
not worrying about this. By next week, it'll be nothing more than a
reason to write a letter to the commissioner of DSS, which I fully
intend to do, whoever he is. I'd love nothing more than to expose the
kind of hurtful ineptitude.. ."

"Actually, Fran, there is something. I hate to put you in this position
.. . just talk to Jack for me.. .. You know, he's angry at me.

.."

"Oh, Lily, I don't think he's angry at you, per se." Fran tilted her
head to one side. "He's-"

"He's not talking to me. I mean, he holds me responsible, you know, and,
of course, I mean, he's right, I was .. . I am responsible."

"For an accident?"

"He's disappointed in me. I've disappointed him deeply. I guess .. ."

Fran's fanny pack had slid from her shoulder where she'd slung it down
into the crook of her arm, and she let it swing there as she shook her
head. "What kind of crap is that? He never learned that in my house.
"Disappointed in you'-come on.

never said that to any of my children. It's not a concept I ..

."

"Well, you know what I mean. You know what he means. I hope he's at
least talking-to you. Telling you .. ."

"It's been crazy for him, running down here, the boys, work.

He's worried about work, I think. We have talked about that."

Lily nodded. Fran twisted the bracelet of her Swiss Army watch.

It had been her husband's and she'd worn it on and off since he died.

Greg called it "Nana's clock." Lately she seemed to always have it on.

Fran didn't want to hear anything bad about Jack or their marriage.

It was, Lily knew now, the reason she hadn't told her mother-in-law
about going to a therapist, because if she were to tell the whole tale,
she would have to say something less than positive about their marriage.

"Tell him I love him, " Lily said.

Fran stepped in toward her and took Lily's hand in her own and said,
"You can't worry about that now. Now, all that matters is Katie.

Will you be all right? Do you need anything? Want me to bring something
up to you before I head home?"

Lily shook her head, allowed herself to be pecked on the cheek, and
watched as Fran walked slowly, head down, toward the elevator.

Lily was slow to realize that she had been tricked. She and Katie had
been in the playroom building walls out of cardboard blocks when Linda
gently kneaded her shoulder and asked her to come to her office. just
for a minute. She held up a finger and motioned for Lily to follow, as
if Lily were deaf. It was four-thirty when she left the playroom,
telling Katie that she should keep on building, as high as she could go,
Mama would be right back.

"These are warning signs, " Linda said, handing Lily two photocopied
forms from the file drawer in her desk. She motioned for Lily to sit,
then stood behind her, leaning over the back of her chair, pencil in
hand, pointing to each item on the first sheet.

"Things to look for post-trauma, not just with the injured child, but
with other family members, especially the siblings."

Later, Lily would remember looking past the checklist and the No.

2 pencil, out to the hallway, where a policeman was walking, noisily,
the leather and metal around his hips creaking and clanking. She'd
remember because it always frightened her to see a cop in a hospital, a
doubling up of misfortune.

Linda looked repeatedly at her watch as she talked to Lily.

"Sleeplessness, bed-wetting, regressive behavior of any kind, aggressive
behavior, lethargy, lack of interest in peers "Thank you," Lily said
finally, inching toward the edge of her chair. "This will be helpful
when we're back home, all together."

She started for the door.

"Wait, " Linda said. "We haven't talked about you, though, have we? "
Linda slid into a seat on the client side of the desk.

"I'll be fine once we're all back home."

Linda nodded vigorously as if attempting to reel in Lily's insincerity
for inspection.

ic You know, I did tell Katie I'd be right back .. . I hate-"

"Often parents are the ones who suffer these symptoms most severely.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you how traumatic it is to have a child
injured in this way."

In this way. Lily thought about that for a moment, wondering if Linda
was baiting her. Everything went into the file. Was she hoping for her
to spill her guts, or was she picking a fight to see what might reveal
itself "At the risk of sounding rude, " Lily said, "we did hire a
lawyer, and it would be, I guess, inappropriate for me to talk about any
of this with you." She turned to leave the room, and Linda )Umped up
from her chair and began to follow her. As they walked back down the
hall toward the playroom, Linda squeezed Lily's arm and said, "Coffee?"

Lily ignored her, and a few steps later the social worker again pumped
Lily's bare upper arm. "Katie's being released, " she said.

"When? " Lily stopped in front of the doors to the rest rooms.

The drinking fountain between the doors was stuck in the on position,
and she could hear the trickle of water gurgling down the drain.

"Now." Linda looked up at the clock in the hall.

It was ten minutes of five.

"I mean, by now she's been released to the custody of DSS."

Linda stepped in closer to Lily, too close. She had crossed a boundary,
touching Lily as she spoke, breathing these words directly up Lilys
nostrils. Lily's cars began to buzz. She could hear Linda's voice, but
more clearly she could hear the water from the fountain gurgling and
choking. She turned her head slowly from Linda toward the open doors of
the playroom at the end of the hall. Instinctively she began to run,
past the kids in wheelchairs, past the ones propelling themselves along
on stretchers or pushing other kids in what looked like wheelbarrows.

The cardboard blocks designed to look like bricks had been piled high,
almost beyond the windowsill. Most of the same children and aides who
had been there twenty minutes before were still there, humming and
talking, whining, clapping plastic against plastic. She heard the tired
ring of an overhandled toy telephone as she scanned the skin and hair
and bandages that individuated these children all dressed in the same
blue dotted gowns. This had happened countless times before, this panic,
in stores, at the playground, the pond, running up aisles, through
mazes, to the edge of the dark water, knowing she would find her in just
one more second, sensing her body nearby .. .

"I recommended that your mother-in-law be made her temporary guardian, "
Linda said, catching up to her. "They seem to have a wonderful
relationship from what I've witnessed. This is extremely unusual .. .
this whole case .. . the fact that she was still hospitalized when the
initial OTC was granted-"

"Shut up, " Lily said quietly. "Just shut the fuck up."

She walked from the playroom down the hall to the left, toward the ward.
She got her hands partway into the plastic gloves and pushed open the
doors.

"I thought it would be easier, " Linda said, following a few paces
behind. "I know it is easier this way."

Lily looked around Katie's room. The diaper bag was gone, and so was her
blanket.

"Why didn't Dr. Wheeler come talk to me? Why didn't she tell us she was
going to be released? " Lily stared over at the crib.

They hadn't yet stripped the sheets.

"I gather there were some security concerns."

"What? 1) "If the doctor had told you today that Katie would be released
in the morning.. ." Lily shook her head. "She's still on antibiotics.
Does someone have the medicine? What else? She's supposed to have soaks.
Are there prescriptions I'm supposed to fill?

There are things that need to be done for my daughter. She has medical
needs." Lily was shouting now.

"Mrs. Thorns, your caseworker, saw to all of that. She packed up Katie's
belongings. I'm sure that everything she needs was included."

6@ Was my mother-in-law with her when they took her? Is there anyone she
knows with her right now?"

"No. Your mother-in-law will be called. Katie's most likely at Mrs.
Thorns's office with her, or on the way. They drive with the police."

"Did my husband know about this, that this was going to happen? I mean,
you don't just go around snatching children, right?

I mean, you do have to tell the parents?"

"I'm going to call him, " Linda said.

Lily reached behind the crib Katie had slept in for almost two weeks and
pulled up her pocketbook. "Can I at least go sit with my daughter until
my mother-in-law gets there? I told her I'd be right back. She thinks
I'm coming.. .. You people have to be fucking kidding."

Lily looked around the room. Her things were everywhere, hairbrush,
magazines, newspapers, address book, the notes she'd taken at the
lawyer's office yesterday, her suitcase, and a gym bag filled with
laundry. She moved quickly around the room with the laundry bag in one
hand and piled in everything she'd lived on for the past twelve days.

"DSS will arrange for Katie to meet with her court-appointed counsel.
Feel free to call me once you're home." Linda tried to make eye contact.
"I'm happy to talk with your attorney. Truly, I'd like to help you out."

Lily ignored her, and looked around the little room one last time.

"Solet'ssee, I've got two Dalmatians, two Barneys, a Power Ranger, and a
.. . name the planets." Jack's oldest sister, jean, was standing on a
chair in her mother's kitchen.

"Solar system, Mum, " Jack's niece Chris said. The six cousins were
milling about, waiting to eat.

"Kate the Great gets to pick first, " Jean said.

"She got to pick first last night, " Greg said.

"I feel like one of those women on QVC." Jack watched as Jean swung her
hips and leaned in toward the large standing fan, letting her long hair
blow wildly around her.

"Watch out there, Auntie Jean, " Jack said casually as he walked by the
spindly chair where she was perched and suddenly grabbed her around the
waist as if he'd just saved her life. She screamed and the kids all
laughed.

"Uncle Jackie, do that again, " Erin's little boy, Pete, said.

"Jack, " Greg said. "My dad's name is yack."

"Jackie's a girl's name anyway, " Chris, the oldest of the cousins,
said.

"Mum and Auntie Jean call him Jackie, and so doesn't Nana, " Pete said
in his defense.

"All right, come on, " Jack said. "Soup's on."

"Soup! " they all screamed. "We're not having soup."

Jack and jean helped the kids onto chairs, slid them in, poured milk.
Jack buckled Katie into the crusty wooden high chair his mother had used
for him and his sisters. He got out the ketchup and swung around,
Elvis-style, slamming the refrigerator door shut with his bare foot.
The kids laughed and Jack felt successful.

His sisters" kids were owed a good time. Jean's and Erin's husbands
worked together in a business they'd started over ten years before,
managing municipal golf courses around the country.

When they weren't traveling, they were busy counting their money.

Jack ran into them about six or seven times a year. He doubted their own
kids averaged much more than that.

Jack looked at the small city of wine bottles on the counter, tfie
pyramid of unshucked corn, the freshly baked shortcake. For a minute he
tried to remember what the occasion was.

"Where's my mother? " Ben asked quietly as Erin placed a hot dog on his
paper plate.

"In Nana's room. On the phone, honey."

"Who's she talking to? " Jean mouthed silently to Jack.

"Beats my ass, " he said.

"jaaaaack, " Erin admonished.

"She told Mum you're being weird." Jean bent over Katie and began
slicing her hot dog into smaller pieces. "Jack, you can't give a
one-year-old .. . Look at this, " she said to Erin.

Jack noticed that Erin wasn't looking at the food on Katie's tray, but
at the bandages on her leg and feet. They looked like finely woven
cotton tube socks. They reminded Jack of the shapeless knit caps given
to newborns in the hospital.

"Weird. He's always weird, " Erin said, turning her attention to salting
her son's hot dog. "She asked Mum to talk to you."

"Who? " Jack said, pinching a part of Katie's roll and popping it into
his mouth.

"Lily. Who do you think? " Jean said.

"Well, Christ, the two of you have a goddamn phobia when it comes to
using proper names. Mum does the same thing, like pronouns are going to
narrow it down."

"You can be such a dick, you know that, " jean said, placing the pot of
macaroni and cheese back on the stove.

"Mum's worried about Lily. She looks awful." Erin walked around the
table slicing apple onto each child's plate.

"She's scary thin, " Jean said.

"You're just jealous." Jack leaned back in his chair and grabbed the pot
from the stove. He scraped up the last of the macaroni and cheese with
the metal slotted spoon and shoved it into his mouth.

"So aren't you, " jean said, squeezing the flesh above his belt.

"Cut it out, " he said, a bit too harshly.

"I don't get it, " Erin whispered as she walked past Jack to get more
milk. "I mean, who's going to know if you bring Katie home with you guys
tonight? I just don't understand this arrangement."

"Oh, Petunia, " Jean said, leaning over her younger daughter.

"What happens when we don't drink our milk? " She made a monster face,
which Kyla ignored, but Erin's little boy started to cry.

"In the hospital they make you drink all your milk, right, Dad?" Greg
said. ""Cause if you don't drink your milk then your burns get badder."

Chris and Ben laughed.

"Maybe you two should go out tonight, " jean said. "Mum'll watch the
kids."

"I'll watch the kids, " Erin said. "Mum's been through enough."

"Go out to dinner, " Jean said, beginning to clear the plates.

"Somewhere nice."

"You payin"? "Jack said, starting to wash the pots in the sink.

"To tell you the truth, I'd be happy to if it would improve your mood."

Jack smiled at jean. "Thanks, but Lily's going to want to be with the
kids anyway."

"So what's the deal? " Erin said. "I mean, how much longer is this going
to go on?"

"The holiday weekend is screwing everything up, " Jack said.

It had been four days since the Order of Care and Protection had been
granted and they had yet to have their "seventy-twohour" hearing.

"It seems to be something of a euphemism, " Snow had informed him on
Thursday evening. She'd spent the better part of the day in Juvenile
Court, only to find out that the docket was so backed up-case overload,
vacation scheduling, the long Fourth of July weekend-they'd be fortunate
to be heard by the middle of the month.

"Lily's talking with the lawyer right now." Jack reached under the sink
for some Brillo. "I'll tell you one thing. I'm not spending another
night in this house. Mum's got these museum-quality mattresses. It's hot
as hell up there, anyway."

"It's hot as hell right in this kitchen, " Kyla said.

"Hell's a bad word and an even worse place, " Jack said.

"Hell's bells, hell's bells, " Greg said, clanking his dirty spoon on
the side of his head.

"Where did he hear that? " Jack asked, looking over at Benjamin.

"Nana, " Ben said. "She says it a lot."

Jack shrugged. "Cocktails, girls? " he asked his sisters.

"That's another thing." Erin began to pick up the cups from the table.
"Mum thinks you're drinking too much."

Jack let out a laugh. "She does not. Christ, she's been matching me
glass for glass every night for the past, whatever .. . two weeks."

He turned off the water, wiped his hands on his shorts, and walked into
the dining room, where his mother kept the liquor, in the cabinet on the
left side of the breakfront. It was always January in his mother's
dining room. Ever since he was a boy the room had seemed like a winter
forest, the tangled thicket of cherry-wood chair legs, the heavy,
pine-colored drapes. The on'ental rug lay like a layer of snow on top of
the regular carpeting, so thick underfoot he always tripped.

The hierarchy of Irish crystal in the china cabinet refracted light into
tfie heart of the dark, overgrown room, reminding him of the morning
after a spectacular ice storm.

Rye was what his father had drunk, just one a night, neat. The same
bottle of Canadian Club, mostly full, after three years, still stood in
the breakfront cupboard at the back, partially hidden by the half gallon
of vodka Jack had bought a week ago, the quart of Beefeater, the jug of
red he would only have used for cooking, but that his mother said was
just fine with dinner.

He liked to drink, so did his mother. They could both drink a lot. Same
with drugs. As a teenager his tolerance had always been higher than
anyone else's in the car, down in the basement, out by the woods. The
only drug he'd ever seen his mother take was aspirin, and when she did,
she took at least four, and often six.

Nothing less worked on her, she said. When he had smoked cigarettes, he
had smoked a lot. He hadn't been able to enjoy just the one after dinner
or sex. If he was going to smoke he was going to smoke two packs a day,
every day, just as Fran had done, back when she had smoked.

He had always thought that a chef's occupational hazard was eating, but
during his first restaurant job he realized that smoking and drinking
were the vices of men and women who worked for ten hours at a clip,
standing and sweating the whole time.

Every night, before the rush, the kitchen would send dinner out to the
bartender, and when the tray was returned it would be filled with rum
and Cokes, White Russians, or 7-and-7s. He'd met a lot of alcoholics
working in restaurants. Some of the nicest people he'd ever worked with
were drunks.

He remembered finding the sous-chef of the Colonial asleep in a corner
of the dining room one morning when he opened up.

Les was curled in a ball under a blue linen tablecloth, and Jack thought
he was dead until he touched him. Les coughed, rolled over, and showed
up ten minutes later at his station in fresh whites, hair combed and
face washed.

Les had his own set of Henckels. He allowed no one to touch the knives
he used to carve apples into swans, watermelons into steamships,
turnips, radishes, and carrots into entire blossoming gardens. That
morning, Jack watched Les wedge a cigarette between his pale lips,
unlock his knife drawer, pull out his tools, pour himself a cup of
coffee, and, hands trembling, begin to carve the tops of four pounds of
pure white baby mushrooms.

Les was about ten years older than Jack, old then, he had thought,
easily thirty-two. Jack wondered why Les had decided to do that to
himself, why he always hung out at the Colonial's bar after work instead
of going home, why he didn't have a wife, why he had never worked
anywhere else but at this second-rate food hall when, clearly, he was an
artist. He was good with a knife and even better with an ice pick. For
the Thanksgiving buffet he had carved a turkey with its wings spread,
doves for a wedding reception, a golfer in full swing for a retirement
party.

"Just too boring to do it without a hangover, huh? " Jack had said to
him that morning.

Les said nothing. He put down his paring knife, sipped his coffee, and
finally lit the Camel that had been dangling limply from his lips.

"Sorry, " Jack said. "What do I know?"

"Damn straight, " Les said, words and smoke blasting out together.

Jack pulled out the bottle of vodka and placed it on the lace runner in
the middle of his mother's dining-room table.

Maybe he expected too much from people. He'd heard that more than once
from kids who worked for him. Almost everybody was a disappointment to
him, except Lily. Lily was the only person, aside from his mother, whose
standards exceeded his own. That's what bothered him so much about the
accident. She wasn't a careless person.

If one of them was going to have something like this happen on their
watch, clearly it should have been him. He could be reckless, unmindful,
cocksure that harm's way would never cross his way.

She was the safe one. He'd somehow improved his chances, he knew,
lengthened his life, by attaching himself to her at a young age. She
represented a kind of sobriety and evenness, good fortune itself. She
was his hedge against everything that could go wrong in life, even
randomness. It was horrible enough that this had happened to his baby,
but so much the worse that it had happened when the careful parent was
home. Because now she could no longer be trusted with balancing out all
that was disappointing in himself and the world.

4@ At least she returns calls on the weekend."

Lily was standing in the doorway between the living room and the dining
room. She was wearing one of his mother's dresses.

This was her new thing now. She didn't want to leave Katie, not even for
forty minutes to drive home and get some clothes. He hadn't offered to
bring clothes back to her. He wasn't getting involved in that again. He
hoped to Christ she was at least wearing her own underwear.

"Jean and Erin think we should go out to dinner, " he said, raising his
eyebrows slightly. He didn't want to argue again about Eleanor Snow's
competence.

"God, they live in a dream world, " Lily whispered and shoved her hands
into the pockets of the dress.

"I told them you wouldn't want to leave Katie."

"Like we have all this extra money.

"Their treat."

"Right. We still owe jean fifteen hundred dollars for the van.

I'm really going to let her buy us dinner. Christ, we're probably going
to need to borrow money from all of them now to pay Snow. The
court-appointed attorney will be calling your mother, so she can set up
a meeting with Katie. Now, Snow thinks we need to just turn the
seventy-two-hour hearing, or whatever they're calling it now, into an
evidentiary hearing-act like it's a full-blown case .. ."

"Well it is, " Jack said, running his thumb along the glass seam at the
back of the vodka bottle.

"You know what I mean. She tfilnks we should go in there with actual
character witnesses, not just letters of reference. She wants all of us
to undergo psychiatric evaluation-everyone, Katie, the boys.

She doesn't think it's good enough now just to have Lucy Balsaam vouch
for me, even if I could get hold of her."

Whining. That was her newest means of communication.

"She got the name of the psychiatrist, one of the psychiatrists, I
guess, the court uses. She wants to know about the nurses. Do we think
any of the nurses from the Shriners might vouch for us.

"How could we ask people who work downtown to drive all the way up to
Suffield County Juvenile Court-with little or no notice, be out a day's
pay? I'm not going to do that to those women, not after the way they
extended themselves for us, for Katie. It's just not fair."

"Fair? " Lily said.

"Are we that up against it that we have to pack a courtroom with-"

"Hey, you're the one who's committed to sticking with Snow.

I told you I thought it was a mistake .. . I mean, she gets to the end
of the conversation and she has the unmitigated .. . whatever, to tell
me, again, how fortunate we are that they appointed Fran as Katie's
temporary guardian and that I'm even allowed to be with her without
supervision."

"She's just trying to-"

"Backpedal?"

"Well, she didn't expect it to go this way, " Jack said. They'd been all
through this at least twice before in the last few days.

"We really need to talk about how we're going to pay for this," Lily
said, changing the subject only slightly.

"Does it really matter? " Jack leaned into the handle of the vodka
bottle.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that her services are not a discretionary purchase."

"Why don't you just say "dismissed" when you're all done.

That way I'd be clear, you know."

"Fuck you, " Jack said, under his breath. He picked up the vodka and
started to walk toward the kitchen, around the dining room table so as
not to have to pass Lily.

"Oh, good, " Erin said, craning her neck around the doorway from the
kitchen. "If we race out of here now we can make the six-o'clock down at
St. Stephen's. Your kids want to come. Is that okay? You want to come,
don't you, Jack? Lily will probably love the peace and quiet, won't you,
Lily?"

"Is your mother going? " Lily asked.

"T don't know. Why?"

"Katie, " Jack said.

Erin appeared confused.

"Well, we can bring her, no biggie."

Lily sighed and turned, walking through the dining room into the living
room.

"Katie can't go if Mum isn't there and she can't stay here with Lily
unless Mum stays here. Got it? " Jack said impatiently. He pushed past
his sister with the bottle and went into the kitchen.

"You can't possibly expect us to remember all this every minute of every
day .. . these arbitrary rules, " Erin said.

"Nice, Erin, " Jean said, wringing out a facecloth, getting it ready for
the next set of saucey lips and sticky hands. The littler kids were out
on the back porch and the older ones were skulking about the kitchen
with cookies, listening to the grown-ups.

"Make her a drink, " Jean said to Jack.

"Before church? " Erin said, incredulous, as she sponged off the kitchen
table.

"God drinks, " Jean said. "I'm sure of it. Are you going? " she asked
Jack as he rooted around in the refrigerator for a lime.

"It would be nice for your boys if you went, " Erin said.

Jack ignored her.

"Where is Mum, anyway? " Jean asked.

Erin pushed Jack aside and ran some water from the tap into a Barbie cup
for herself "If we go to church, I'm not going to St. Stephen's. Let's
go to Our Lady, " Jack said.

"Down by where that box factory or whatever it is used to be?

Have you ever been to that church? " Erin gestured toward him with the
empty Barbie cup. "The people who go to that church smell."

"Gross, " Chris said, looking up at her aunt from the floor, where she
and Ben and Kyla were passing around a box of Teddy Grahams.

"We all smell, somewhere, " Jack said.

"He's just like Mum, " Jean said, barely able to keep from laughing. She
grabbed a highball glass from the cupboard and then swung out her arms
in an imitation of their mother. "Why don't we all go down to that
wonderful old church on Mechanic Street. It's so, so .. . everyone there
is so real."

They took up an entire pew at St. Stephen's. His mother had tried to
orchestrate the seating, holding back grandchildren so that Jack and
Lily would be forced to sit together, but it hadn't worked.

Neither had her manipulations in the crumbling driveway as she had
attempted to assign passengers to cars. Jack had ended up alone in the
Subaru with his boys.

"Mom's going to church? Mom never goes to church. Why's Mom going to
church? " Ben had asked him ten times on the way to St. Stephen's.

"There was a church at Katie's hospital, wasn't there, Dad?

Nana told me, " Greg said.

"Mom's really not supposed to go to church, is she, Dad? " Ben
continued.

"She wants us all to be together, " Jack had finally said, hoping to
shut him up.

"That's why we're moving to Nana's, right, Dad? " Greg asked.

"We're not moving to Nana's, " Ben said. "We're just staying there
because of all the baths Mom has to give Kate."

Jack had let his mother come up with what she called "the white lie that
comforts." And so he and Lily had told the boys that they would be
staying with Fran for a while because it was so much work to give Katie
three long soaks a day. Neither of the boys had questioned it.

"I know why Mum's coming to church, Dad, " Greg said certainly from the
backseat. "She wants to be Christmas like us, right?"

"Catholic, you idiot, and we're only half. This is very, very strange, "
Ben said.

The kneelers were filthy and Jack pulled out his handkerchief to wipe
them off. He rested his elbows on the pew in front of him and let his
forehead press into his fingertips. He'd attended more Masses the past
two weeks than he had in the previous two years.

His mother had gone most mornings since Katie's accident, and he'd
joined her and the boys once or twice.

"Are we the only continent people here? " he'd whispered to her one
morning as they sat down, and his mother had laughed and laughed until
tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. But the eleven ancient women
scattered throughout the church were so nearly deaf no one had even
turned around. A few times at the hospital he'd gone off to get a Coke
and had wandered into the chapel. He'd prayed for only one thing these
past few weeks. He could be very focused when it was demanded of him,
and so for the past three weeks he'd been able to scrape to the side all
but Katie's health each time he knelt down to pray. Petitioning God for
recovery, for the cessation of pain, for good health, was about as
textbook an entreaty as one could make.

But now, the row full of tapping, tsking, sighing children that
stretched all the way from his right thigh to Lily's lap perverted what
otherwise might have been a perfectly fine communication with his God.

He could only shout over the heads of so much distraction to tell God
what he didn't want-to protest, rather than pray. He didn't want his
sisters and mother to spend a summer's worth of nights dissecting his
marriage amid the roar of fans and the sloshing of jug wine. At least,
he didn't want to be called in for testimony or examination while the
vivisection was occurring.

And he didn't want Lily, in some tranquilized state, to spill her guts
in a late-night kitchen-table session.

He looked up past the altar at the martyred Jesus and prayed to be made
less angry. He stared at the back of the just barbered head in front of
him for distraction. He could tell by the guy's tan, the way it just
crept over the top of his collar and out from under his short sleeves,
that he was a golfer. He hated golfers.

He looked down at the dirty toes of his nieces peaking out from their
sandals, past his sisters" running shoes to his wife's unraveling canvas
slip-ons. He hated her for fucking it all up for them.

He whispered to Ben that he had left something in the car, and just as
Father Paul said, "All rise, " he bent his head and buckled his knee and
asked God one more time to forgive him for being so angry.

Then he walked quickly down the aisle, through the narthe , into the
thunderstorm outside.

You missed it, you missed it, Dad, " Ben yelled as they all raced to get
into the car. The parking lot was a sea of families in skimpy summer
clothes holding bulletins over their heads and bobbing between starting
cars.

"Where's my mother? " Jack said as Lily buckled Katie into the car seat
in the back and then got in front, flinging rainwater on him as she
finger-tossed her hair.

"She's talking to Paul. It's all right, go. jean and Erin will wait for
her."

"But we have Katie." Jack shook his head and turned off the ignition.

Lily swiveled around, her wet dress squeaking on the vinyl seat, and
smiled at the children in the back. Jack looked at them through the
rearview mirror.

"Do you realize this is the first time in fourteen days that we've all
been together, alone, just our family? " she said.

"That's because Katie was in that hospital with all the burnt kids,
right, Mum? " Greg said.

"Dad, you're going to wish you hadn't left when we tell you what you
just missed." Ben was standing up, trying to wedge his body between his
parents" bucket seats. "Father Paul called Kate to the front, the front
of the whole place."

Jack turned and looked at Lily. She was still smiling, hair plastered to
her forehead, her lashes dark with water. Runny eye makeup blurred her
face slightly, making it seem as if he were looking at her through a
scrim. For the first time in weeks, she looked happy.

He couldn't imagine why.

"Really? " he said.

"I had your mother take her up. Greg wanted to go, too."

"Yeah, when Nana was already halfway there-so he goes t-unning up the
aisle. Dork."

"Benjamin! " Jack yelled.

"Well, " Ben said, leaning all the way into the front now, his lanky
arms draping the tops of the car seats.

"It was just fine, " Lily said. "And when they got up to the front-"

"The altar, " Jack corrected.

"Whatever. He had your mother and Katie face the congregation, and he
said he just wanted to introduce a little girl who had been through a
great ordeal. And that prayer and good care from the Shriners staff had
healed her and that if people in the church didn't know about the
Shriners they should. He explained about the Shriners being free, flying
in kids from all over. And then he asked that everyone donate the money
they might have spent on fireworks for the Fourth to the Shriners, who
would, no doubt, be busy caring for a number of kids injured by
fireworks over the weekend."

"He's not supposed to do that, you know. I mean, if people want to pony
up for a hospital, he should be telling them to give to Holy Name, or
someplace like that. Then he plugged his own little miracle show, right?
" Jack said.

"No. Not at all, " Lily said.

"What miracle show? " Ben asked.

"Nothing." Jack cracked the window slightly. The glass surrounding the
car was opaque from the exhalation of the excited little breaths in the
back and the deeper sighs up front.

"Father Paul came and prayed for Katie when she was in the hospital, "
Jack said.

, , Anyway, " Lily continued, "after the service-"

"The Mass, " Jack said.

"Afterwards, all these people came over to us and kissed us and patted
Katie on the head, and blessed her and grabbed my hand.

It was more support than I've felt anywhere, ever. And it was genuine,
all this concern, all these good wishes. It was incredible, really."

"Roll down your window and see if my mother's making any headway," Jack
said.

"Wait a minute, " Ben said. "What miracle?"

"Father Paul prayed for Katie and she got better, " Jack said, using the
back of his hand to clear a spot on the windshield.

Lily turned toward Ben. "When it looked like Katie was going to need a
special operation on her burned skin, Father Paul came and prayed for
her, and the next day, by coincidence .. . You know what that means,
right? The next day it just so happened that she was better and didn't
need that operation. But .. . some people .. . want to think he worked a
miracle."

Jack laughed. "Not quite that simple. You're flushing the very basis of
Christianity down the toilet with that kind of an explanation." Jack
turned the engine on again and blasted the defroster.

"If you're Jewish, you don't believe in miracles, right? " Ben said.

"He's got you now, " Jack whispered.

"No, " Lily said slowly. "There's lots of miracles in Judaismthe Red Sea
parting, the oil lasting for eight nights-"

"But those are all old ones, " Ben said.

"It's complicated, " Lily said. "I guess it has to do with the way that
priests and rabbis are different .. . with power-"

"Turtle Power," Greg said absentmindedly from the backseat.

Jack looked in the rearview mirror and saw him wrestling two action
figures against the mud flap of his booster seat.

"You're such an idiot, " Ben said.

"Be nice, " Lily said.

"Mine, " Katie said, leaning over the side of her car seat and trying to
grab one of Greg's X-Men.

"Muuuum, " Greg called. Jack could hear the scuffle behind him, the
repeated clacking of plastic against seat-belt buckles, the muffled
sound of skin getting pushed and hit, slapped a little, maybe even
bitten.

"That's enough, " he said loudly, still not turning around to look.

"Don't touch her leg, you moron, " Ben yelled.

"Oh, God." Lily hopped out of the car and opened the back door.

"You're never to touch her leg, " she hollered. "Do you understand?

Never. What did you do? God damnit, what did you do?

"You should be crying, Greg, " Ben said. "That was an evil thing to do,
and you should be crying. Crying and begging God to forgive you."

"Enough, " Jack said. He released the tension in the buckle of his seat,
and pushed it all the way down, so that he was now lying on the knees of
his children.

Katie and Greg laughed.

"It's not funny, Dad, " Ben said, pounding Jack's headrest with his
fist. "Not everything's funny."

Jack hated Ben when he was like this. When the boy was angry he could
age forty years in a matter of seconds, ascend some mount of
righteousness from where he talked down to his father.

"You're right, son, " Jack said in his best Dudley Dooright voice.

"Not everything is funny. Right now, for instance, even with that thing
hanging from your nostril, you are not funny."

"That's it, " Ben said. "I've had it. I'm sick to death, to death of
you." He pulled on the door handle and kicked open the door with his
sneaker. Jack watched as he started to run across the wet parking lot.

"Shit, " Lily said, looking straight at Jack. She yelled for Ben to come
back. She walked to Jack's side of the car. "Nice family scene, " she
said, gesturing to the entire car. "There's people still here."

Jack waved her away and pushed in the cigarette lighter. Katie was
crying now, "Mama, Mama, Mama.. ."

Jack narrowed his eyes through the drizzle and watched Lily follow Ben
around the side of St. Stephen's as his mother began to head toward the
car, smiling and waving, oblivious to the whole ugly world he lived in.
Full up to the eyeballs with some kind of faith and blind as a fucking
bat.

Jack stopped in front of the biggest Victorian on Fairview. It looked
naked compared to the other houses on the street, which were still
decorated for the Fourth with flags flapping and red, white, and blue
bunting draped over the doors.

He'd always wondered who lived in these showplaces, who could afford to
heat them in the winter, Shrinks. Yeah, that made sense.

He fingered the black-and-gold "Patient Entrance" sign nailed to the
corner of the house. It was a tacky thing to do to a house of that
stature, slapping on a hardware-store sign. For Rent, For Sale, Help
Wanted, Checks Cashed Here, Brains Washed This Way. Lily was supposed to
have seen this Dr. Melick first, then he, then the children. But Katie'd
had a followup visit with Dr. Wheeler this morning and Lily had insisted
on going with Fran to take her.

Jack had called Cyn at seven a. m. from the pay phone at the Lauralee
Diner to tell her he'd be late for work. He'd waited out on the front
steps for them to open. Each night he slept alone in the house he woke
earlier and earlier. Couldn't blame it on noise, not real noise, anyway.
As he dialed Cyn's number, he looked around the diner quickly for an
excuse.

"Squirrels, " he told her, looking at a landscaping crew seated at the
counter. The greasy teen closest to him was wearing a Chip "n Dale
T-shirt, maybe Chippendales, he couldn't tell.

"Chipmunks or squirrels, " he said to Cyn, "got into the attic last
night. Christ, they'll do some damage."

"Have a heart, " she said. "You know those things? Get a Havahart trap.
Promise me you will, Jack."

When he entered Melick's waiting room he could hear the yapping of some
little dog from deep within the recesses of the house.

A shrink with a little dog. There were no magazines in the waiting room,
just books. A cheap shrink. Poetry .. . Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop,
Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, great.

"Maybe you'll get something out of it, " Lily had said as he'd left his
mother's last night. "Try, " she said. "Try to get something from it."

This appointment was an evaluation, not an elective in finding more
meaning in his life. How could she not understand that what was being
researched here was their ability to care for their child? This guy was
going to comb the scene for violence and dysfunction. None of this was
about emerging a happier individual.

"Charles Melick." A small, thin man with a beard stepped into the
waiting room and nodded, his hands clasped behind his narrow back.

Jack stood and extended his hand.

"Watch your step, " the shrink said. A little ball of white fur ran
between Jack's legs as he followed Melick down a narrow hallway.

The dog barked so loudly it seemed to shake from the force. Melick
stepped on the button at the top of the whitenoise machine outside the
office, gestured for Jack to enter, and then rolled two enormous sliding
oak doors closed behind them.

"You know, well perhaps you don't, that what you say to me today will be
used in your Order of Temporary Custody hearing?

This, unfortunately, is not a privileged session. It's all for the
record."

Jack nodded and looked at his watch. "We all have our jobs to do.

1@ The shrink smiled.

"Lots of Kleenex, " Jack said, nodding in the directions of three boxes
of varying size.

"Sometimes I work with families."

Jack nodded.

The shrink smiled.

Jack looked at his watch again.

"Are you late for something, another appointment?"

"Just work, " Jack said, shifting his weight on the couch he wished he
hadn't sat in. He was in the middle, too far to reach either armrest.
"I'm just .. . a little impatient to get this rolling."

"By all means, " the shrink said, picking up a notebook. "What would you
like to tell me? " He crossed his legs.

"Nothing. I mean, there's nothing extraordinary to say. We're
mainstream, right in the middle, as far as parents go. We're average
good parents. We're fine, maybe better than fine."

The shrink nodded vigorously. "You don't think you should be here, do
you?"

"Well, it was our choice, in a way. Our attorney thought it was a good
idea."

"You still don't think you should be here?"

"Do you? " Jack said. "Really, I'm sure you've read about us, the case.
And now looking at me .. . I mean, I'm not covered with tattoos or a
week's worth of facial hair."

The shrink stroked his own beard.

"I don't beat my kids."

"No one has suggested that."

"Good. 9) "I have read a lot about your family. And from what the
caseworker says, there seems to be some tension between you and your
wife."

"She never interviewed me. The caseworker never interviewed me," Jack
said.

"Someone from DSS did come to the house, though, yes?"

Melick nodded as if answering his own question. "She alleges that she
heard an argument between you and your wife, and that your wife is .. .
Well, why don't you finish the sentence for me?"

"Of course we had an argument." Jack exhaled loudly. "We had someone in
our house judging us, watching us. That'll make you snap."

"Do you feel responsible for your wife's behavior?"

"She's a big girl."

Melick put his notebook on the small glass table beside his chair.

Jack imagined that the deep blue armchair was equipped with all manner
of mechanisms somehow hardwired to the patient couch and capable of
evoking uncensored responses from him.

"We only have this one meeting. I have only this chance with you.

So, let me be honest about what I know. And, in turn, I hope you will
level with me. This is all for your daughter's sake, right?

The caseworker who did the home study, the intake, writes that you lied
for your wife, that you covered for her." He picked up his notebook.
"She says that your wife threw something at you in the kitchen the day
she visited."

"A plant, a potted plant, happened to break that day."

"Accidentally? " Melick asked.

"It slid off the kitchen table. Bad timing, " Jack said.

"In the caseworker's 5 1 B, she says you covered for your wife.

In essence that you lied for her."

"There was nothing to lie about, " Jack said slowly. "It was .. .

an accident." He felt the first part of the word on his tongue hiss and
slip and he was shocked at its assertive finish.

"Has she ever thrown anything at you? " Melick asked.

"I don't know. No." Jack laughed. "A baked potato, once."

"Was it hot?"

"She missed me. It hit the wall and smashed."

"Does she throw things at the children? " Melick asked.

4@ No. 1@ "Do you think she might throw a pot of boiling water?"

"Fuck, no.. .. Look, you let a twenty-year-old come into our house and
play connect the dots .. ."

"Are you afraid of your wife, Jack?"

"Do I look like I am?"

"What do you mean? " Melick asked, putting down his notebook,
thoughtfully.

"I outweigh my wife by about eighty pounds."

"Fear is not always physical."

Jack stared at the shrink.

Finally, Melick picked up the notebook again. "Why don't you tell me
something about your relationship with your wife."

Sex. If he'd prepped at all for this exam, it had been on this question
and this one alone. That's what shrinks always wanted to talk about,
wasn't it? Lily had said she didn't talk much about sex with Dinsey.
She'd told him that once, but he hadn't completely believed her. She had
also told him that when she was sixteen and at Payne Whitney, she'd had
these strange erotic dreams. They were from the medication, she was
certain. And there was a period in their lives together, sometime before
they were married, when she would deliberately arouse him by recounting
those old odd dreams.

"You mean sex? " Jack asked.

"If that's significant."

"It's usually a plus when it is." Jack leaned over and pulled up one of
his socks.

"On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your marriage?"

"Right now?"

"Or, before the accident, before all this trouble."

"It was getting easier, I guess. We were adjusting to a pretty major
rearrangement."

"How so?"

"We lost our business over a year ago, " Jack said.

"So, around the time that your daughter was born, then?"

Jack nodded. He had never linked the two events, certainly not in a
causal way. Most days, he blamed the crappy New England economy.

People didn't pick up chicken breasts stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes on
their way home from work when they weren't working. Execs seemed to have
all but quit entertaining at home once their budgets for doing so were
eliminated.

Sometimes Jack thought of those months when it was becoming more and
more clear that they might have to give up the business as months in
which Lily was getting larger and larger. But he had never associated
any of his children with his wife's pregnancies.

If anything, Katie, this third child they had impulsively conceived, had
functioned in utero as a kind of mascot for their team, which was having
an exceptionally bad season.

"When quantitative studies are done of major life stresses, losing one's
job is very near the top of the list, " Melick said.

"Well, we lost everything."

"How so?"

"Money. We lost a lot of money. No one wanted to buy the business from
us. We had problems getting out of our lease. We couldn't even unload
the equipment at a decent price. We ended up getting half, less than
half, of what it was worth."

"Did you enjoy working with your wife?"

"It's what we'd always done. That's how we met. It's how we know each
other. We've always worked together."

"You must miss that, tlien. You're apart all day now. That's something
that takes some time getting used to, no?"

"Well, we're not dependent, " Jack said. "We always had our own lives.
It's just not what we'd planned. But, hey, that's life, right?

I mean, we're lucky. Ever-y fucking day I tell myself how lucky we
really are."

Dr. Melick was silent for a while, as if Jack might reveal more than he
already had.

"You're angry, " he said after a while.

"Isn't everybody?"

"I'm asking about you, " Melick said.

Jack rearranged his body on the too-soft sofa.

"I think about this a lot. I spend a lot of time thinking about the
money that we lost. And over the past year or so, I finally realized
that what bugs me so much is not that we lost out, but that someone
somewhere, lots of people, actually, benefited from that loss.

Do you know what I mean, The jackass who bought our stuff, our ovens,
the mixer, the refrigerated cases, all that, for less, a lot less, than
it was worth. The landlord who turned around and rerented the space
while we still had to cough up for five of those months. They all rode
on our backs, you know? I wouldn't have minded if the money had just
burned, burned up, ceased to exist, for us or anyone else."

"Justice, " Melick said.

"Yeah, exactly."

"You're concerned with that?"

"Sure."

Melick scribbled in his notebook for what seemed like the first time,
Jack couldn't be sure. He hadn't been as vigilant about watching Melick
as he'd intended. In fact, he'd lost track of this whole meeting back
somewhere a few minutes ago.

"IA'hat does that word, "justice, " mean to you@" Melick asked, still
writing.

"I don't know." Jack gripped his earlobe. "Fairness, I guess."

All he could think of was stupid sayings from his childhood, 4@ even
steven, "

"just deserts, "

"fair and square." He remembered his sister Erin actually bringing a
ruler to the table once when there was cake to be cut. "I'm not worried
that I'm getting ripped off. I mean, I'm not paranoid. That's not what
I'm talking about.

I hope I'm implying something larger. Cosmic fairness, I guess."

He laughed.

"A value system?"

Jack nodded. At least the guy wasn't dim.

"Yes." Melick nodded. "So, then, given that value system, how do you
feel about your daughter's accident?"

"I don't think about it, " Jack said, realizing after he'd spoken that
he was, in fact, telling the truth.

"What happens when you do?"

Last night, when he'd bathe Katie for her third soak of the day in the
mixture of water and baby oil, he'd massaged the thickened skin of her
feet and toes and leg and thought about what happened to different foods
when they were blanched.

Greens deepened in color when dropped into boiling water.

Spinach wilted and shrank. The skin of poultry toughened and sealed
itself Blanched. His baby's skin had been blanched.

"How do you feel when you think about the accident? " Melick pursued.

"Bad, " Jack said. "I feel bad."

The doctor nodded, inclining his slight body forward, almost bowing, as
if in empathy. "How do you think your wife feels about the accident?"

"I don't know, " Jack replied.

Melick cocked his head.

"I guess she's upset. I mean, I know she's upset. She won't let our
daughter out of her sight. She's very clingy to the kids, right now."

"And with you? How is she with you?"

Jack shrugged.

"You're not very interested in how she feels, are you?"

"Not at the moment."

"Do you hold her responsible?"

"It was an accident, " Jack said, allowing the word to slide out
somewhere toward the end of a sigh.

"Do you trust her around your children?"

"It was an accident, " Jack said.

The doctor leaned back in his chair and capped his pen.

"I've seen those bumper stickers. I'm sure you have, too. "Shit
Happens."

"

"Right, " Jack answered. "And shit keeps happening."

When he got to work at ten-thirty, two messages were nailed for him
on the chalkboard by the phone. At the top was "Call home," and under it
was "See Norris." Next to Norris's name was a picture of a firecracker,
or at least that's what he thought it was a picture of. Norris wanted
lunch today to have a Fourth of July theme?

Yesterday had been the holiday. The family had all gathered at Erin's
for a barbecue. She'd insisted that they walk in the blazing sun to some
field in her town to hear a local LIFE and drum corps perform.

Jack had barely been able to watch as the mostly older men marched
around the soccer field in long red coats with wool trousers and
knee-high black boots.

It was like waiting to witness a heart attack. Katie had cried at the
hollow boom of the oversized dr-urns, and Lily had let out an audible
shriek when the muskets were fired.

After that there was volleyball. Erin had set up a volleyball court in
her backyard. She'd looked up the official measurements. The court was
regulation. It had taken her all morning.

In fact, it had taken so long that she really hadn't had any time to
fuss with the food. Lily begged off the volleyball and headed for the
kitchen with Jean. And Jack and his mother and Erin and his
brothers-in-law, and what seemed like too many small children, had
played ruthless volleyball for two hours in a yard without a single
shade tree.

He wondered if Melick had made much of his sunburn.

People thought that was reckless behavior these days, getting sunburned.
As he picked up the phone to dial Norris's office he rolled his right
wrist. It had taken a pretty good beating during the game.

Norris's secretary told him to come up. It would only take a minute.

Jack had spoken to Norris no more than five or six times in the year or
so that he'd worked there. Norris had hired him. He was the only one of
the partners to feel very strongly about the importance of a private
dining room. He was fat. A great fan of nouvelle cuisine, he'd told Jack
on the first interview, and Jack had smiled politely. He maintained a
wine cellar at the office as well as at home. He'd continue to do the
buying, but would leave it to Jack to select the appropriate wines for
each meal.

As Jack stepped out onto the seventh floor, he wondered if one of the
other partners had finally put a gun to Norris's g-ut and said that the
dining room was an insupportable indulgence. The partners traveled
frequently. There were days during the past year when he and Cyn had
prepared fairly elegant meals for one or two people, and occasionally
the dining room sat empty.

"So, is he shitcanning me, or what? " Jack said, picking up a copy of
Institutional Life from Lou's desk. Lou was Norris's secretary, a
former caddie from his club. "Is he going on a diet?

What's the story here?"

"You got any more of that .. . what's that stuff with the cake and the
cream all layered?"

"Layer cake? " Jack said.

"No, no, " Lou said. "It's got an Italian name."

"Tiramisu?"

"Yeah. You got any of that left? Cyn brought me some of that last week
.. . excellent stuff."

"Jack." Norris waved to him from his office. Jack left the door open
behind him after he entered, and Norris made no move to close it.

He shoved over a legal pad on his extra-wide windowsill and plunked
himself down on top of a cooling vent. People usually closed doors and
sat behind desks to fire you, Jack thought.

"Lou faxed me down in Falmouth last week. You're looking for
references?"

"Yeah. I wanted to call you myself, to explain the situation, but I
didn't want to bother you on vacation."

"I don't give out the Cape number, " Norris said, smoothing out a blip
on the placket of his starched shirt.

Jack nodded.

"This is a legal proceeding you're involved in?"

"Now. Yes. It is." Jack looked out the window through the morning heat,
down to the sidewalk. There were no windows in the kitchen, just
stainless steel.

"I didn't act on this last week, wouldn't, in fact, act on it without
talking to you first."

Jack nodded again.

"You're being sued? Negligence?"

"No, " Jack said. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "My
daughter had an accident at home, at our house, and somehow, through a
series of .. . miscommunications, I guess, the Department of Social
Services stepped in and got an Order of Temporary Custody."

"Sounds serious, Jack, " Norris said, staring up at him.

"It is. Our attorney suggested we gather some letters of reference,
character references to submit to the judge .. . well, actually, now I'm
in the position of needing character witnesses to make a brief
appearance at a hearing."

Norris raised his eyebrows, as if Jack were telling him of something as
foreign and distasteful as eating monkey brains.

"What sort of .. . accident are we talking about here?"

"A pot of boiling water got upended on my daughter's feet and most of
one leg, " Jack said. "My little girl is almost seventeen months old.
She pulled the pot off the stove, onto herself "Jesus, " Norris said,
impressed. "Is she all right?"

"She's okay .. . now."

"Good. Keep me posted."

Jack nodded and turned to leave. He thought about what the shrink had
said earlier that morning, about his value system and justice.

This would cat at him all day now. Jack turned around at the door and
faced Norris.

"The hearing will probably be held at the end of the week.

We're looking for as many people who can vouch for us as possible.

As my employer-" Norris had his hand on the cradle of the phone. "I see
no point in coupling the group's name with this.. .. We're talking about
a legal proceeding here." He looked down again and began to bang the
oversized buttons on his telephone.

"The bus'll pick him up at Mum's, " jean said to Lily as they stood in
Erin's kitchen, trying to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Jean let most of a half gallon of Hellmann's glug out of the jar and
into a lobster pot filled with macaroni.

"What bus? " Lily said. There had been some talk, over the past few
days, now that life was communal and no discussion private, of sending
the boys to camp. But it wasn't until five minutes earlier that Lily
understood Jean had already registered and paid for Ben to go to the
soccer camp run by the Rec Department in Winstead, and for Greg to
attend a Y program in Fran's town.

"I put down Mum's address. The bus will get him right there at
eight-thirty and drop him off at one. God, how does she stand this
kitchen? " Jean said, looking around at the piles of paper that covered
nearly all of Erin's green marble counters.

Lily sat very still and stared at the heap of raw ground beef in front
of her. "You didn't put your mother's name down as Greg's guardian, or
anything, did you?"

"No."

"Well, what about next week? When we're back home?"

jean was slicing celery, long reckless incisions down the spine of each
stalk. "I figured nothing was really definite with that, anyway."

"Well, we should know something tomorrow. We should have a hearing date
by tomorrow."

"Can you open this? " Jean said, handing her a jar of pimientos.

"I mean, we'll all be back in our house in a week." Lily whacked the
Jar lid against Erin's butcher block island.

"So, he won't go anymore, or you'll drive him over." Jean reached over
for the pimientos. "Don't sweat the small stuff."

She reached into the Jar with her fingers and made a face.

"Gross.

Does anyone really like these?"

Lily thought about telling her to use the tip of a knife.

"If I'm driving Ben to Winstead, then I won't even be there when the bus
comes for Greg."

"Mum Will."

Lily squeezed her own hand in an attempt to comfort herself.

No one seemed to understand what it felt like. Her children were being
hacked away from her, first Katie, now the boys, as if she were some
kind of strangulating weed from which they needed to be saved.

Nothing was the same. There were no rules anymore.

No routine, no logic, no gravity. "He's never been on a bus before."

"God, " Jean said, breaking apart the big flaps of pimiento with her
fingers. "What do you bet that will be his favorite part of the whole
day? They love the bus. They all do."

"DSS can use anything, you know, " Lily said. "I mean, I would hate for
them to use this camp form as proof that I was dumping the kids on your
mother."

"Look at these things." Jean lightly fingered the pewter pull on one
drawer after another and watched as the drawers gently rolled open.

"And not one good spoon in any of them."

Lily listened to the pencils and skewers and rolls of tape being lifted
and dropped in disgust.

"I thought you said the lawyer told you to send them to camp.

It would make them look well-rounded, or something." jean laughed.
"Extracurricular activities for the college application."

Lily sank her hands into the chopped meat and began forming patties.
"What she said was that it would make us look normal, involved. The
whole thing is so ludicrous, so unfair. It's medieval.

There's nothing twentieth-century about this experience."

"On the contrary, Lily, " Jean said, pushing aside the macaroni salad
she'd been stirring. "This is where it's all led." She pulled out a
stool from under the island and sat down.

"Where what's led? " Lily asked.

"Just another example of the long arm of government."

This was about her life, her children, her very self. It wasn't fodder
for stimulating conversation. It wasn't an abstraction.

"This isn't a conspiracy, " Lily said, although at times during the past
few days she had nursed that very idea. "It's random .. .

unfortunate. It's like another accident." She didn't really believe
this. The notion that blame and guilt could be completely absent in the
face of misfortune was attractive, but thoroughly dubious.

Jean smiled and shook her head. "There's no such thing as private life
anymore. You guys are the victims of too much social legislation, right?
We're all overtaxed and overregulated. You let the federal government in
.. ."

Lily placed the full thick patties in layers on a paper plate.

"You should see some of these kids, Jean. There's this baby, this
infant, at the hospital, who was burned on purpose. If it wasn't for
this arm of the government you think is so long and awful, she'd go back
to that mother and most likely be killed. Would you want to live in a
society that couldn't be bothered with burned babies?"

"Women like that shouldn't be allowed to have babies, but that's beside
the point. Why should everybody else be punished because some people
aren't up to the task of living in a free society?

Lily took the last wadded-up bit of ground beef and used it to pick up
all the little stray strands of raw burger on the butcher block.

"Everything is being sacrificed to the least common denominator."

Lily grabbed a sponge from the sink. "Everything or everyone "Well, this
is a perfect example." Jean upended a brown bag filled with tomatoes
onto her part of the counter. "In the girls" school, they've completely
eliminated all the gifted and talented programs, while increasing all
the remedial ones. Now does that seem right?"

She took a dull paring knife and began trying to slice through the thick
skin of a tomato.

"You want to grow old in a world where people can't read?" Lily said.

"Well, I certainly don't want to live in a world where the goal is to
get everybody to some kind of comfortable mediocre level."

"Maybe none of these kids are being served well, most especially these
kids in the middle who get neither remedial or gifted help-what about
them?"

"God, you're so like Mum, I swear, " Jean murmured. "Don't you want the
best for your kids?"

"Doesn't everybody? " Lily said. "I mean, the other kids in the class
are somebody's primary concern, too, or they should be."

"Well, exactly my point."

Lily didn't see how it was. "We can't only care about our own kids."

Jean laughed. "Yeah, but if we did, and everybody did really care about
their kids, we wouldn't even need DSS, would we? And none of this would
have happened to you. I'm telling you, Lily, you're paying the price for
other people's criminal behavior. Your kids are paying the price."

Lily clasped a Spanish onion firmly against the chopping block and began
peeling, careful not to slice off the root end, releasing the vapors
that would make her cry. She envied Jean, in a way. She was someone who
was prepared, always ready to sort through experience and order it in a
way that made sense. Lily's mother had been like that.

in eighth grade, Lily's social studies teacher had asked them to outline
a chapter on the Gold Rush. Lily's outline had been longer than the
chapter itself. Her mother had bent over the pages at the dining-room
table, a long brown cigarette in her left hand and a red pen in her
right.

"Lilliput, " she said. "It's all about being decisive. What counts, what
doesn't. You need to impose a structure, your structure.

Give me the book."

Lily handed her the fat yellow text and watched her mother do what she
always did with books, open to the copyright page, check the authors"
names, the publisher, the date, then guess what they'd been paid for
"such idiot's delight."

"Not everything is of equal importance, right? " she said. "An outline
is a kind of hierarchy, a pecking order. You've got the crowned heads
here with the Roman numerals, and then all the little vassals down here
with these lowercase letters." She skimmed down Lily's pages with her
pen and began crossing out huge chunks of Lily's work. She shook her
head. "Once you get into the swing of it, you'll see it's really kind of
fun. It's your chance to better the book, you know."

"I like all those details. That's the interesting stuff, " Lily said.

"You need to hit the high points."

"It's mean to get rid of all that stuff. It seems wrong."

"Good God, Lillian, sometimes you scare me."

"I didn't say I couldn't do it. I just don't like to."

"Well, it's work. It's hard." Her mother dragged deeply on her
cigarette.

"That's not it. It just feels wrong. I don't like leaving things out."

"That's neurotic, " her mother said, flipping through the index at the
back of the text.

"How can you be sure you're right? What if everything is the same, and
nothing is more important than anything else?"

Her mother stubbed out her cigarette and looked at her.

"Where do you come from?"

Lily slced through the rootof the onion, thendidthe same with another,
then another, letting the tears flow in an unbroken stream while Jean
walked back and forth to the patio with trays of plates and cups and
silverware. She envied Jean her politics and her religion, not the
content of them, but the structure they afforded. Had Lily's mother
believed in God, she would have made a first-rate zealot. She could have
proselytized, become a missionary. She might have saved hundreds, even
thousands, of souls.

Those days just after Katie was released from the hospital reminded Lily
of the weeks right after childbirth. She was living life on an unreal
plane, in which time and expectation were loosed from their usual
bounds. What had happened in that hospital had been violent, and the
only way to overpower the memory was by living wholly in the present.

She was under the spell of an odd kind of elation, as if she were
existing in that liminal, manic state after the biopsy and before the
diagnosis, desperate now for all that was vital in the universe to make
itself present, to insinuate itself within her. She fell in love with
Katie again in those days after the accident, before the hearing, just
as she had with each of her children in their first days of life. The
infatuation was uncontrollable and unpredictable, and she reaped its
rewards each time she rounded the corner of her mother-in-law's yard or
turned from the sink in her kitchen and saw her little girl standing
there close enough to touch.

The hearing was finally set, for Tuesday, the 12th. Until then she did
nothing but indulge in her children. She canceled Greg's enrollment in
camp, and every morning she and Fran and the kids traveled the forty
minutes to Winstead for Ben's soccer.

Then she and Greg and Katie accompanied Fran on her errands.

Lily brought puppets to the Jiffy Lube on Tuesday. On Wednesday, while
Fran was getting her hair cut, Lily seated herself and the kids under
the dryers and played astronauts.

In the afternoons they went swimming at the lake in Winstead so that the
k-ids could see their friends. Lily gave innumerable water rides,
allowed herself to be squirted and splashed, and never once retreated up
the beach. She didn't even bring the newspaper, had not looked at one in
weeks. And when the ice cream truck rolled to a stop under the pines at
a quarter of four every day, she ran with her kids to line up. Then
they'd sit on the bed of brown pine needles dripping grape Popsicle
juice down their arms, onto their thighs, no napkins, no worrying about
mess, or dinner or money. And all the while Lily would repeat to
herself, "I'm a good mother, look. See, I'm doing good."

And it built on itself The more she allowed herself to tumble down into
the sweet sticky world of her children, the more fun they had and the
happier she was, until it felt as if they were all spinning at the apex
of some spectacular high, together in one ecstatic orbit.

How nice . You have your grandma staying with you."

Caroled Ellis stepped away from her sons, who were in line for ice cream,
and squatted down between Ben and Katie. Katie looked up at her, then
fished a handful of vanilla ice cream from the top of her bathing suit.

"Katie looks just like her, " Carole said, nodding in the direction of
Fran, who was reading in the shade of a nearby maple.

Fran's fingers and toes were the only parts of her that were visible
beneath her Panaiiia hat and sunglasses and the long shift she'd made
from two beach towels.

Lily smiled. "My husband's mother." She barely knew Carole.

The sports moms all looked alike to her, relentlessly upbeat and
unlronic, simply popping open their brightly colored golf umbrellas
along the sidelines when it began to pour during practice, while Lily
ran to her car for a couple of sections of the newspaper.

"Great summer, " Carole said. "You guys having a great summer?"

The boys nodded. Katie tried to reach the ice cream drips on her chest
with her tongue.

"Hot one, " Lily said.

"I love it. Can't get enough of it. Clark j'just goes nuts when I turn
off the central air and open the windows-but I love it. I guess that's
just how I was raised."

Lily smiled.

Carole seemed at a loss for what might come next in the way of
pleasantries, and just as she was about to reclaim her full height, she
noticed Katie's feet and leg. The new skin was protected beneath a
double thickness of knit bandages. Lily had been told not to expose the
area to the sun for at least a year.

"What a lot of bandages for a little girl. Trying to keep up with your
big brothers?"

"No. She got burned all on her feet and one leg, too, " Greg said,
working away at his Fudgsicle.

"Well, if you're out here enj'oylng the day it must be all better, "
Carole said.

Lily stood up and brushed the pine needles from the seat of her bathing
suit. "Maybe we'll run into you again. We're here almost every
afternoon."

"She was in the hospital, " Greg continued. Ben pinched him, and Greg
swung his small but pointy elbow into his brother's ribs.

Carole looked toward Greg and then up at Lily with raised eyebrows.

Lily nodded and smiled. "She's fine now."

"She almost died, " Greg said.

Lily laughed, and Ben hit Greg on the back of his head. "No she didn't,
you idiot, " Ben said.

Greg looked up at his brother, more hurt than mad. "How come you told me
that then? " he said, his Fudgsicle dripping down his wrist.

Lily looked over at Carole, feeling the need to explain. "It looked at
one point like she was going to need a skin graft."

"You're so stupid. God, I wish you would die, " Ben said. He threw his
ice cream in the direction of the white pines behind hiiii and ran down
toward the water.

@4 Sorry, " Lily said, keeping her eyes on Ben. Blond hair, skinny brown
back, fluorescent green-and-purple swim trunks.

"You take care now. And you, little one, you feel all better."

Carole walked back toward her own sons, who had gotten to the head of
the line and had begun calling to her for more money.

"Go and sit with Nan for a minute." Lily Jogged from the picnic area
down toward the water. Ben hadn't gone in. He was still her Benjamin,
her cautious and obedient firstborn.

"That must have been some rotten ice cream, " she said, falling into
place beside him as he walked away from the swimming area toward the
part of the lake the kids called "the swamp."

"Don't do that, " he said, swinging his arm out, as if he might hit her.
"Dad does that. I hate it."

"What? " Lily said impatiently.

"Make a joke out of everything. It's not funny."

"Right now, if my dad were here he would noogie your arm and say,
"What's the matter, lost your good humor? -'cause Good Humor was the
kind of ice cream, the brand that we always got in New York .. . from
the ice cream truck, anyway." Lily belted her arms around her own waist,
fighting the urge to touch him.

"Well, my father didn't die when I was a kid, " Ben said, kicking the
wet sand as he walked.

"Well, mine didn't either, " Lily said.

"He didn't", " Ben stopped for a moment. "But he didn't know me.

"Well, he died before you were born, but I was already grown up and
married by then."

"Oh."

"Is there some reason you're thinking about dying?"

"T'm not thinking about that, " he said. He could be curt for a
seven-year-old.

"Oh, " Lily said. She looked back at Fran and the kids. Fran was wiping
something off her beach dress. "Did you really think that Katie was
going to die? " Lily said after a while.

"I don't know, " Ben answered in a pained voice, as if she were removing
a splinter that was far deeper than either had expected.

"You're right that some kids do die from burns. Maybe you read that
somewhere or heard it on the news. But a lot of your body has to be
burned for that to happen."

"I know, " he said.

"Good." They had run out of beach. Here the lake was edged with tall
grass and Illy pads. The soil underfoot was thick and gray and muddy.
Greenheads hovered. Lily pressed her feet into the sludge and watched
the ground ooze up between her toes. "You know, " she said, "you can
tell me anything. That's my job. Never be afraid to ask me something or
tell me something."

He looked up at her for the first time since they'd been walking.

He reached down into ttic water and tried to pack the dirt into the
shape of a ball. The mud dripped through his fingers like raw egg.

"That's not true, " he said.

"A'at? " she said, startled. "What's not true?"

"There's some things I can't tell you."

Her instinct was to ask, "Like what? " She belted herself tighter.

"I wish you didn't feel that way."

"Well, I do, " he said, sounding more like a teenager than a little boy.

Lily stood next to him for a while as he aimed at different lily pads
with his unformed mud balls. When he was done, he swished his hands in
the silty water and started back toward the swimming area.

"You don't seem very happy, " she said.

"You always say that, " he said, walking now through the shallowest part
of the water.

941 do?"

"You always want everybody to be happy. That doesn't make sense.

You can't always be happy, " he said.

Lily sighed. "No. I guess you can't, " she said.

While the kids combat-crawled under the cast-off furniture in Dr.
Melick's waiting room, Lily tallied shrinks. This new one would bring
the total to six, she thought. First, and always, there would be Dr.
Treadwell, who had moved her from Bellevue and checked her into Payne
Whitney. He had seen her from the time she was sixteen until the end of
her sophomore year at Barnard. During her senior year, she'd gone for
three appointments to someone in mental health services, who, she later
found out, also worked in the admissions office. Then there was the
woman in Poughkeepsie she'd seen two times a week for a little less than
two years while she was at the Culinary Institute. Then when they'd
lived in New Hampshire there was the social worker she'd gone to at the
clinic in Conway. Then she was "clean, " as Jack liked to joke, for a
long time, until Lucy, so that totaled six, if she counted this new guy.
Six shrinks, one more than the number of men she'd slept with in her
life.

Fran was tense. She seemed overly concerned with the children's
behavior. She pulled Katie down from her standing position on an old
armchair and told Ben to please not touch the delicate books. The plan
was for the boys to go in together first, then Lily. Fran had said she
would walk with the kids up to North Street for ice cream while Lily was
"inside." All the way here in the car she'd insisted on referring to
Melick as "the counselor, " until Greg had finally asked what the name
of this camp was.

Lily walked around the waiting room and looked through the poetry,
Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and, of course, Robert Bly.

Before she'd found Lucy, Lily had walked out of a psychologist's waiting
room in Acton. She'd arrived early for her initial visit with the woman,
but had been somewhat slow to pick up the inspirational messages of the
framed posters that hung on the walls amid the Amish quilts and the
collection of antique maple sugar buckets. just before the hour, she
read the caption on one of the framed photos, ".. . and when the man
looked back from where he'd come, he saw that all along the way there
had been a second set of footprints, in step with his own .. .. ..
Certain that she was overreacting, she quickly flipped through the
magazines on the coffee table. Under a copy of Arts and Antiques Weekly,
she found a thick volume entitled Biblical Healing, Scripture Readings
for Recovery.

Katie cried when her brothers were shown into the office by Dr. Melick.
Greg looked back once, and Lily reminded him that there would be a trip
to the ice cream shop afterward. Before the doctor closed the door to
the waiting room, Lily heard Greg ask him if there was going to be a
shot.

"He seems nice enough, " Fran said, looking out the window into the
doctor's backyard. "He's a small man. That's nice for the boys, less
threatening."

Lily bit her lip.

"Maybe we should go outside. Go for a walk. There's nothing here for
Katie. Did you bring any toys? " Fran slid her fingers beneath her
wire-frame glasses and rubbed her watery blue eyes.

Fran was tired. This had all been too much for her.

"Sometimes I think about what would have happened if you hadn't been
here, been able and willing to be the one to take Katie .. ." Lily said.

"You need to have a little more faith .. . faith that things will work
out, " Fran said sharply.

Lily sank down into the sofa and crossed her legs under her long denim
skirt. Lucy had said that often. "You need to tr-just that things in
general generally go well. That in the end, all will be fine." There
wasn't a single fiber in her body that operated under that assumption.
"Glass half empty or half full, " Lucy had said. But Lily knew that it
was far more complicated than that.

You couldn't just shake off an entire belief system, one you'd been
raised with, even conceived under. Watch your step, watch your back,
don't kid yourself, that's what she'd always heard. Be alert, be aware,
don't miss a beat or a glance or a whisper or the faint hint of the
distant odor of doom. Get the jump on it, don't let anything take you by
surprise, or anyone play you for a fool.

The presumption of security, "faith" as Fran called it, was not part of
that mind-set. And Lily knew it to be a particularly Jewish mind-set, so
much so that it had become a joke, an exaggerated ethnic characteristic.
But Lucy Balsaam and Fran Keliher detected it in her as an unfortunate
and amendable personality trait, rather than the genetic marker Lily
suspected it was. Maybe they were right. Maybe fifty years beyond
Auschwitz, a hundred years after the pogroms in czarist Russia, this
trait, the suspicion that had kept Jews on their toes farther back than
fifteenth-century Spain, back to the time of Ramses 11, had produced the
desired Darwinian effect, and was now obsolete, even deleterious to sur,
, . , Ival. "It's holding you back," Lucy had said to her. "Your fear, "
she had called it. "Your fear is holding you back in life." But her fear
was part of her. It was inextricably linked to who she was.

"Do you think this is happening because you're white? " Fran said
suddenly. She bent down to trade her car keys for the pile of hardcover
books Katie was attempting to stack.

Fran had said J'just the opposite yesterday after talking on the phone
with Katie's court-appointed attorney. The woman explained that while
she had been appointed to the case when the judge initially ordered the
OTC, she often didn't meet with her clients until the hearing date.
After having read the file and talking with Fran, she decided to hold
off on the meeting. There were other cases in which the children
involved were wholly dependent upon her advocacy. Legal triage, she
said. Fran had gotten off the phone and said, "Thank God we all went to
college and aren't on food stamps." Jack said, "Thank God Mum has such a
high charm factor."

"I've been thinking about it, and I think it might be a kind of reverse
discrimination, " Fran said, looking out the window of the waiting room.
"Which, I think, actually, has a place, you know.. .

for the pendulum to swing back to center."

"I don't know, " Lily said. "The lawyer told us, last week .. .

warned us that the department's hired a lot more caseworkers.

They've messed up .. . kids have died, more than a few children have
died in the state in the past year." Lily whispered this last part,
hating for even an unaware child to be subject to the information.

"Why? Why else would they be pursuing this, pursuing you?

I can't, for the life of me, imagine why this hasn't already been
dropped." Fran sighed and reached out to stroke Katie's straight dark
hair.

Lily thought that Fran was capable of making her feelings known in a
strangely ambient way. She had a knack for expressing doubt and
displeasure with people so that it only came over you sporadically, like
a patchy high after smoking homegrown pot, forcing you to spend longer
and longer periods of time doubting your own perception. She could be
genuinely disingenuous. Lily tried to determine if this was one of those
moments now, if Fran was voicing some involuted displeasure with her.

"If they could do this to you, they could do this to anybody.

And we're paying for this. Our tax dollars are going to pay for this ..
. kangaroo court." Fran crouched down next to Katie on the floor and
beeped the horn on her imaginary car. "Parents do all kinds of things to
get through the day. Three little ones all to yourself.. .

Some of these judges who put their kids in day care all day ought to
just try it. Just talking to you, any idiot could see that you are a
loving, conscientious mother with nothing to hide."

The great counterclockwise system of Fran's outrage was going to cut a
wider and wider path, leveling whatever was structurally unsound in its
wake. The fear that the last person she could depend on was about to
denounce her whipped about Lily so loudly that she could only barely
hear herself say, "It was my fault."

Fran didn't look up from her spot on the faded thurrie, where she
alternately pressed down one heel then the other on the pedals of
Katie's pretend car.

"I left her downstairs while I went up to call a radio show, which I
never did. I just wasted time up there." From down the hall Lily could
hear someone cough or laugh, maybe the shutting of a door, she couldn't
tell above the buzz of the white noise machine. "I don't know how long
it was. , Four, five minutes. No, probably longer."

When Fran finally did look up at her, Lily could see she was pale, her
skin papery dry. "I used to tie Jack to a tree when we lived on
Broadbridge Avenue. Three kids all under the age of five. I had no
choice."

Lily had heard this before, many times. The doorknob to the waiting room
turned one way, then the other, and then Lily heard the pounding of a
small fist. It was Greg.

"He wants me to be in here and Ben in there. Then we'll switch, he
said."

Lily looked at her watch. "How was it?"

Greg shrugged. "Can I drive too? " he asked Fran.

"You'll need to pop the hood first. Engine trouble."

Greg laughed and knelt down on the floor in front of his sister and
grandmother.

"Five minutes to contemplate your navel, or whatever. Good grief.

Honestly, you should see the look on your face. The cat who swallowed
the canary. My sister-in-law, Thea, used to .. ."

Fran laughed. "She used to switch on the TV, take the phone off the
hook, lock the kids in the house, and run down to Cleveland Circle, have
her hair done. Once a week, for years. Honestly. No seat belts.

The kids used to roam around the car like it was a playground. When jean
was ten, I used to have her baby-sit for the other two. I mean, we'd go
all the way down to Duxbury to visit my brother. Never came home before
one. When I was in high school I used to baby-sit for the people next
door. Every night of the week those people went out. I'd come over at
seven. The girls would be in their nightgowns, and Mrs. Blumenthal would
tell me that if they weren't back by eleven-thirty, I should just lock
up and go home and she'd pay me the next day. Those kids were five and
six, something like that. We were young and dumb and it all worked out
fine. I feel terrible for mothers today .. . all this awareness .. .
where has it gotten them? Mothering is not a profession. It's a
affliction, a wonderflilly important, at times divine, function, but it
can't stand up to the quality controls career women want to impose on it
or the ego gratification they try to get from it."

Fran continued to work the stiff imaginary pedals, flexing and pointing
her ankles with fury. "It's not a profession. It's not comparable to
anything else. There's a lot more leeway than.. ."

She waved her hand. "Honestly, I wish there was a mirror in this room.

You should see yourself. The anguish. I'm really sick of it.

Women spend their lives twisted up in knots always trying to see where
they went wrong-the unkind word or gesture, the omission, the neglect.
Women are the ones who buy all those "How to" books-the parenting books,
the marriage books. All that improvement .. . it's just a form of
misogyny. It's all crap. I'm so sick of it."

Lily had seen Fran this angry only once before. It was the winter after
her husband had died, and there was a great deal of confusion when it
came time to file her tax return. Neither the attorney who had probated
the will, nor the accountant, nor Fran herself could find any record of
Kevin's having paid his third-quarter taxes. Lily and Jack had come over
to help. They were down in Kevin's office in the basement. Twenty-five
or thirty Garelick Farms milk crates, each tightly packed with file
folders, covered the floor.

"Look at the mess he's left me with, " Fran railed. Lily watched her
mother-in-law walk in and out of the maze of crates, waiting for Fran to
upend everything, heave thirty-two years of paper toward the washer and
dryer, the spare fridge, the piles of bent bicycles and broken hockey
sticks. But instead, Fran began furiously dialing numbers. She called
Kevin's friends, old accounts, public agencies.

As Lily methodically read through the last six months of canceled
checks, she listened to Fran work her way up some chain of command at
the IRS. "Hi, I'm Fran Kellher and you are .. . ? Oh, it's a pleasure to
speak with you, Lawrence, Dave, Kenneth, Roland. Perhaps you can help
me. Actually, I'm sure you can help me. You sound like a very helpful
fellow. I'm recently widowed .

.." It went on like that for hours as Lily read through the last checks
Kevin had written, to the mechanic and the septic service, then all
through the checks Fran had written to the hineral home, the cemetery,
the supermarket for the deli platters, the hospital for the services
they'd rendered to a dead man.

When the last IRS employee had gone home and the dirty basement windows
had filled with black, Fran told Jack and Lily to go. She pulled down an
old electric typewriter and began clacking away. "I have a list, " she
said. "Nineteen names and they're all going to hear from me. A
fifty-eight-hundred-dollar estimated payment. I'll be damned if I don't
get credit for it.

Damned. Make yourselves a sandwich before you leave."

Lily thought Fran was having a breakdown and shouldn't be left alone. As
they walked past the lit cellar windows on the way to their car, Jack
said, "That's her way. Some people have temper tantrums and throw
things, my mother chooses to repeat herself, wear you down rather than
knock you down."

Three days later they received a letter. It was addressed to all the
siblings. She told them how she'd stayed up all night writing nineteen
letters, the same letter nineteen times. The nuns who had taught her in
school had known something. Rote karni'ng can reach down into you and
ignite awareness. With every ktter I wrote to those bean counters, I
cursed yourfather, out loud, for keeping his business records so Poorly,
for his massive disorganization, his inattention to detail. I thought
about the moment I had first laid eyes on him. He was doing a bandstand
in front of Dunster House, showing off to some girl, and everything, but
everything, came tumbling out of his pockets, walkt, keys, coins, pens,
chewing gum, comb. And he had the biggest goddamn grin on his redface of
anyone Id ever seen. That was the way Dad was. He'd do a handspring when
he felt like it, with no mind to it all tumbling out. Your dad lived a
happy life. Keep no secrets, children.

Have fun, goddamnit. And kave a mess when you die.

The letters kept coming for the next several months, one a week,
sometimes more. After a while Jack and his sisters stopped calling each
other when they received them. Often the letters centered around an
anecdote, a memory of Kevin, previously unknown to the children.

Many were intimate, but never embarrassingly so, Lily didn't think. As
time went on the letters focused more and more on Fran herself, her
childhood, her parents, experiences she'd never told to her children,
feelings she'd never admitted to anyone. It's an inhuman burden to be
the sok receptacle for memoly, she wrote.

Sometimes Lily would be moved to write back to her, to respond to, or
comment on, some of these intimacies. It seemed all wrong to her to
receive the letters, as Jack did, without a word of thanks or
encouragement. But in the face of so much raw emotion, Lily's letters
back struck her as nothing more than an empty act of etiquette. She
politely acknowledged receipt of a lifetime of secrets, but never
replied by way of sharing any of her own.

And then the opportunity came to an end. The letters ceased.

Fran emerged somehow fitter, as if certain now that she, too, wouldn't
die without having impressed upon her family the importance of who she
was.

"Fran, " Lily said now softly, hoping to draw her away from Katie and
Greg for a moment. "There is something else.

DSS figures I have a kind of a history. I saw a therapist over in
Holloway for most of a year, not long after Katie was born. I was on
some medication for a while. They made some hay out of that, I guess."

Fran smoothed her hands over the bumps her knees made under her white
cotton slacks, the way kids leveled off the sand in a pall J'just before
inverting it to make a castle. "How are you now? "

"I've been off the medication since February. It was mostly a postpartum
thing, I think."

"And .. . are you still seeing a counselor?"

Lily shook her head.

"You know, you could have told me."

Lily nodded.

"I'm sorry. Sorry that I couldn't have been more help to you.

.. . I didn't even .. . When did all this happen? You seemed so good
with the baby. So happy to have a girl. Well, I'm not very observant."

Lily laughed, relieved that this hurdle had been passed. "It wasn't a
big deal, " she lied. "I was embarrassed."

64 Jack should have told me. That's what family is for."

"I asked him not to."

"He should have anyway." Fran massaged the corners of her eyes, and both
the kids laughed, as if she were making funny faces for their amusement.
"Your old Nana looks funny, doesn't she?"

Lily looked at her watch. "This is taking a long time, don't you think?
" Fran got up from the floor and sank down into the chair opposite Lily.

"Nana, you forgot to shut the door, " Greg said.

Fran obliged, making a clicking sound with her tongue.

"What else? " she said, looking at Lily.

Lily smiled at the kids.

"No, I mean you, hon. What else?"

"Well, " Lily said, taking a deep breath. "The other thing that may come
up at the hearing is completely irrelevant now, twenty years after the
fact." She motioned for Fran to come sit beside her, out of earshot of
the children. "When I was sixteen, I spent some time on a psych ward.
The police picked me up one day after school dodging cars on the West
Side Highway." She couldn't look at Fran as she said this.

She cocked her head, hoping, for a moment, to appear somewhat blithe.

"Statistically, a very unusual means for a young female to attempt
suicide. I couldn't have been very serious about it."

"Oh, God, " Fran said. She clutched her small hands together.

"What .. . precipitated it?"

"Adolescence, " Lily said, incapable, now that she had been successfully
healed, " of answering from the perspective of that sixteen-year-old
girl. Her grandmother had died in March of her junior year in high
school. The doctors told Lily's parents that Lily was suffering from a
"psychotic grief reaction." What she remembered now was that she'd been
inconsolable. She hadn't thought she could live without Shayna's love
and protection.

"So much pain and suffering, " Fran said.

"Nothing compared to what your son is putting me through right now."
Lily laughed.

"No, really. The girls and I always say how tough you are.

Rock-solid. You're rock-solid."

"I just didn't want you to be shocked during the hearing. The judge or
whoever might bring it up."

"You didn't feel free to tell me?"

"I was sixteen. It wasn't important. It's not like it was a secret."

"Your past is who you are." Fran stopped. Ben was standing beside them,
having appeared without warning.

Lily held out her arms to him and he sat down on the couch next to her.

"I thought maybe you got lost, " Dr. Melick said, from the doorway.

Lily looked up at him, confused.

"I sent Benjamin to fetch his brother." He looked down at his watch. "At
a half past a freckle, easily."

Greg laughed and Benjamin stared down at the floor.

"Greg, do you like blocks? " Dr. Melick asked.

Greg jumped up from where he had been playing with his sister and jogged
over to the doctor. "I'll be right back, " he said, pointing his index
finger at Lily. "Don't let Katie drive the car while I'm gone.

She could crash it."

Lily nodded. After he'd left the room, she tapped Ben's leg.

"Were you poking around this big old house?"

He shrugged.

"Did Dr. Melick send you to get Greg a long time ago?"

"Sort of " Lily looked over at Fran. She wondered if Benjamin had heard
their discussion.

At one - thirty it was Lily's turn. The office was at the front of the
house. One entire wall of the room was given over to a bay window, with
upholstered corduroy seat cushions. Everything in the room was white,
except for the well-worn blue armchair where Melick sat. The blocks were
just as Greg had left them, and Lily went over to look at what he'd
constructed. She could faintly hear her mother-in-law talking to the
children in the waiting room, telling them they were going to go on an
"adventure walk."

"Train station, " Melick said, nodding toward the blocks.

Lily nodded. "He loves trains."

"Your children are delightful, " the doctor said.

She knew enough to say thank you.

"You and your husband seem to have done a fine job with them."

That's why I'm here, then. Lily smiled.

"Your attorney mentioned on the phone that part of her preemptory strike
had to do with more closely examining your "history, " attempting to
discern whether, in fact, it really was now "history." Maybe we could
talk a little about that."

Lily wondered how much Snow had told him. "I had something of a
postpartum depression following the birth of my last child."

"The child who was burned. And that's the problem for which you sought
treatment last year?"

Lily nodded and sat down on the couch opposite his chair. She sank into
the gap between the two foam cushions and hesitated for a moment, not
knowing which side to slide toward.

"So, the birth of your daughter put you into some kind of tailspin?"

Lily held open her hands and looked down at her palms for a moment
before answering. "That was the diagnosis on the insurance form. A whole
lot of things happened in our lives at once, and I had trouble .. .
processing it all."

"What sorts of things?"

"My husband and I had a food business. We're both chefs.

Well, he still is a chef We had a gourmet shop. It was a huge part of
our lives. We invested everything into it, and in the end we just came
up empty."

"You lost your professional identity? " Melick said, adjusting himself
in the large wing chair.

"That and a lot of money. Not a good combination." She smiled.

Melick raised his eyebrows in seeming agreement. "So, perhaps, it was
more of an adjustment disorder?"

"I don't know. My therapist prescribed medication, and it worked.

So, it's hard to really say."

"How old was your daughter when you began the medication?"

"Seven months."

"And you stayed on .. . What was prescribed?"

cczoloft."

"Zoloft, " he said aloud as he jotted this in his notebook.

"Zoloft was the first medication you tried?"

Lily wanted desperately to confine the discussion to the recent past.
There was no reason to expect he was now asking about anything else.
"Yes, " she said.

"And you continued on the medication until .. . ? 1@ "April."

Melick poured himself a glass of water from a chrome pitcher on the
coffee table between them. He offered some to Lily, and she declined. "I
assume you continued in therapy after going off the medication?"

"I just stopped seeing my therapist about a month ago."

"Emerging studies of postpartum depression, of what happens chemically
to women after they give birth .. . we're finding that this is not a
period of time limited to six weeks, or even, say, six months."

"I've read that, too." Lily had four or five conflicting takes on the
intent of the statement. This interview reminded her far too much of the
endless variations of a game she used to play with her brother, their
own grade-school blend of all the cold war spy shows on TV, Mission
Impossible, The Gzrlfi-om U. N. C. L. E. The high point of the game was
always the attempted coercion of the confession. In the end the good
guys remained impenetrable, superhuman in their efforts to retain their
secrets in the face of both torture and temptation.

"You're obviously an intelligent, educated woman. Do you think this
accident could have something to do with your regaining your .. .

equilibrium?"

"Do you know Lucy Balsaam? She practices in Holloway. I was in therapy
with her for almost a year. She knows me, inside out. She'd be happy to
tell you I'm not a child beater. She seems to be out of the country-"

"You're angry."

"Wouldn't you be if you were in the midst of coping with an accident ..
. with a critically injured child, and all of a sudden somebody decided
you'd done the injuring and your baby should be taken from you? I'm
being unjustly accused of something really horrible."

Melick nodded. "Justice. Funny. That's a word that came up for your
husband, as well, different context. You look surprised."

"We're not always on the same wavelength, " Lily said.

"Does that bother you?"

"Of course, well, not always. He's my husband, I love him.

People can't always see eye to eye."

"You don't like conflict."

"Most people don't, " Lily said, crossing her legs beneath her skirt.

Melick nodded. "Toddlers create a lot of conflict. Actually, they are in
conflict themselves, almost continually."

Lily nodded. They were back to The Girl from U. N. C. L. E. again.

"The need for independence butts up against the fear of separation.. ..
Well, I'm sure you know all this. You have two other children who seem
to have mostly weathered that transition quite well."

"You are the first person in this whole process who seems to have
noticed that. I mean, if I were a child abuser, why wouldn't I have
abused my sons? If I am such a rotten mother .. . if I had abused the
older two, wouldn't that be apparent?"

"Perhaps."

"Do you have children? " Lily had never asked Lucy a direct personal
question. It was against the law, the law of the land of shrinkdom. As
the patient, her job was to answer, reflect, at most pose a rhetorical
question, which in essence was always a kind of answer in the mind of a
shrink.

Melick nodded.

"People don't go around telling you what a good job you're doing raising
them, do they?"

"I only have one. And I did tell you right off when you first came in
that your children were a delight."

"My children are my on-the-job record, I guess. But in this whole
nightmare, no one has given me one ounce of .. . whatever .. . I don't
want credit .. . but faith, faith." Lily was staring intently at the
condensation on the outside of the water pitcher. As she talked she
watched tears of water pool on the glass-topped table.

When she finally looked up, she saw Melick writing furiously.

"Would you mind if I made a few suggest-Ions, Mrs. Keliher?"

Lily smiled.

"You know when the women's magazines run these lists of the most
stressful life experiences, they go for the most common ones. But I
would venture that being investigated by DSS is right up there. You
might consider going back into treatment for a while with Dr. Balsaam.

This cannot have been easy. I would suggest the same for your husband.
But he struck me as being rather .. . resistant."

Lily laughed.

"He could probably use someone to talk to, as well."

Lily inched forward on the deep sofa, sensing that Melick was wrapping
things up.

"One other thing, " he said, as he tucked his pen into his composition
notebook. "Watch the kids."

"Of course, " Lily said, standing up.

"Oh, no." Melick held up his hand, iaughing. "No, no. I mean, watch them
for reactions to all this. It's a very, very scary thing to have a
sibling hurt so badly that your daily routine is upended for weeks and
weeks. Your older son .. . don't let things percolate too long with
him."

The hearing room was open. Jack took a seat at the long banquet table in
the center and put his copy of the summons in front of him as if it were
his place card.

Care and Protection Summons Trial Court of massachusetts. District Court
Department Docket Number 571195

Children) Named in Petition, Katherine Sterne Kelleher Name of
Petitioner, Virginia W. Thorns, Department of Social Services Name and
Address of Guardian, Custodian or Other Party.

John N. Kellehe and Lilian N Sterne, Checkerbury Lane, Winstead, Mass.

To the Party named above, A petition has been filed with this court
alleging that the child or children named above, being under eighteen
years of age and within the jurisdiction of this court, is or are in
need of care and protection pursuant to the authority of Massachusetts
General Laws, chapter 119, section 24.

You are hereby summoned to appear in this court on the appearance date
noted above to show cause why said child or children should not be
committed to the custody of the Massachusetts Department of Social
Services or other appropriate order made. If the box above labeled
"72-hour (emergency)" is checked, the court will also determine at the
hearing whether to extend any custody order now in effect.

You have the right to be represented by an attorney. If you are unable
to afford an attorney you may be entitled to have the court appoint one
for you. If you intend to ask the court to appoint an attorney to
represent you, you should contact the court immediately upon receipt of
this summons.

The law requires the judge to see ("identify") the children) named in
the petition. You are directed to bring the children) named above to
the court for identification.

The last quarter of the page was written in both Spanish and Chinese,
but the entire document read like a foreign language. In the last two
weeks Jack had fingered the paper over and over, an obverse rosary,
Yielding nothing but a continuous loop of pain.

Still, he'd been reluctant to part with it at the entrance to the
courthouse when the security guard motioned for him to walk through the
metal detector and remove his backpack for x-ray.

The summons was his passport, his compass in this hell.

The last time he'd been in a courthouse had been over twenty years ago.
His father had driven him down, and they'd met his lawyer, Dunleavy or
Donohue or Donnelly, he could no longer remember. Erin had called him
"the back-alley litigator, " because he was famous among certain groups
of high school students for making DWIS disappear. Jack was seventeen.
He'd been stopped while driving his grandmother home after his cousin
Paul's wedding. Jack's father had vilified the desk sergeant when he
came to pick him up. Kevin Keliher never drank to excess and was
incapable of believing that his son had. Jack had endured no more than
seven minutes in a peeling, dusty courtroom before the whole business
had been reduced to a "failure to keep to the right."

"No bleeding afterward, no chance of infection .. . what an operator, "
Erin had said when he'd come home that day. He'd felt guilty about the
arrest and unrelieved by the reduced charge.

Jack's father chose to see the whole incident as a victory over the
suburban police, who everyone knew were overly fond of beating on teens.
It was weeks before Jack could look at his father headon. He didn't know
which humiliation was worse, the fact that he'd fallen so far short of
his father's expectations or that his father was, seemingly, so ignorant
of the failure.

On the ride over this morning, his mother had called him an ostrich. For
over twenty-five minutes, he had listened, with extreme patience, he
thought, as Lily and his mother went round and round the minicrisis of
Ben's pilfering of Fran's crucifix.

Lily had noticed it only that morning, as they were getting ready to
leave for the courthouse. The six-inch silver crucifix had been removed
from above Fran's dresser and attached, with a good deal of Scotch tape,
to the wall above Ben's bed. The way the "discussion" of this crisis
unfolded reminded him of one of those manually operated railroad carts.
His wife and his mother worked like dogs together to emotionally prime
the worry machine, sufficiently launching it so that it ran ahead of all
reason, with no reliable means of stopping, other than crashing
violently into something or someone.

"Of course, " his mother had said to Lily, "you do know that I would
never intimate the religious, force it on a child that way?

You do know that, don't you?"

Lily, who was in the backseat entertaining Katie with a toy accordion,
countered with, "Of course, I don't object to the crucifix," which Jack
knew to be an out-and-out lie. "It's the .. .

surreptitious on Ben's part, his desire to have a secret, that bothers
me.

The great thing about the worry machine, Jack thought, was that it freed
his mother and Lily from the need to be honest. In fact, the worry
machine thrived on exaggeration and denial. Jack waited until he had
parked the car in the municipal garage across from the courthouse before
suggesting that the real issue here was one of stealing. Lily clicked
her tongue and shook her head, and his mother launched into this
ostrich-in-the-sand riff, keeping it up all the way through the
labyrinth of the parking garage until Lily said she was going to faint
or throw up or both.

"It's good and cold in here." Eleanor Snow swung her tan attache case up
onto the table in the hearing room and sat down next to Jack.

They'd talked daily since they'd met at her office, but he'd seen her
only that one time, and now, amid this sea of linoleum and fluorescent
lighfing, Jack thought she looked smaller and grayer, fallible.

Lily had wanted to dump Snow after it became clear that she wasn't going
to be able to move up the hearing date and they would have to abide by
the sloppy rules of the initial summons.

Jack had disagreed. "We have no possible basis of comparison," he'd
said. "I don't know who you think your dream-date defender is."

"That's rich, " Lily said. "You're willing to give her the benefit of
the doubt, but not me." They were upstairs in his mother's airless
bedroom, the mouthpiece of the phone smashed into the white chenille
bedspread as Jack repeated what Snow had said the night before and was
reiterating now on the other end of the line-that they should utilize
this time before the hearing, make it work for them in their attempt to
regain custody. They needed these additional ten days to pull together
the character witnesses who would present just the right sort of profile
of the family. The extra time might give them the opportunity to finally
get through to Lucy Balsaam, whose answering-machine message said only
that she was away until the end of July and gave the name of a covering
therapist.

Lily carried on then, and every other time he got on the phone with
Snow. She would walk around his mother's bedroom and pick up a book or a
brush or a pair of nail clippers, whatever she could find, and
periodically crack it against the dresser or the nightstand or the
windowsill. She'd mumble, too, slowly increasing the volume until he was
merely moving his lips, and the sounds coming out were all hers, as if
he were an actor in a poorly dubbed film. Finally, they'd taken to
communicating with Snow separately.

"We'll be starting in about five minutes, " Snow said, pressing her
thumbs against the metal locks on her briefcase. She looked around the
empty room.

"They're outside, on the steps .. . getting a little air, " Jack said.
He'd left Lily with her head between her legs at the bottom of the steps
leading into the courthouse. Fran insisted on staying with her, so he'd
been forced to pass Katie over to her.

"Feller? " Snow said.

Jack turned and saw Melick hesitating in the doorway. The shrink walked
back out, checked the room number, and then entered, patting himself
tenderly on the chest. It was unclear to Jack who was to play host in
this situation. He shoved his hands into his pockets, gave a "Hey,
how're you doing, " and wandered over to inspect the state flag in the
corner of the room. The ribbon of Latin around the Indian in the center
of the flag was beyond his high school reach, Ense petit placing'dam sub
libertate quietem. Peace and quiet?

"You'd better go get them, " Snow said suddenly. She looked up at the
clock on the wall and then down at her watch. "While you@re out there,
keep an eye out for Feller."

Dr. Feller was the pediatrician they'd used since Ben was born.

He'd been reluctant to get involved in any way that wasn't completely
mandatory. Snow had proved her worth by finally getting him to agree to
appear today, even without a subpoena.

Jack was barely out in the hall when Katie wobbled toward him. He
clapped his hands and she sped up, grinning broadly at her own
accomplishment. Jack's mother followed behind. She was talking
animatedly to an older black woman. When they reached him, his mother
introduced her as "the baby's lawyer, " and Jack began to laugh
uncontrollably. He tried to stop, shook his head, bent down to pick up
Katie, reminded himself of where they all were. The force of the
suppressed laughter caused his eyes to well up. He looked as if he were
crying.

"Jack, " His mother called his name loudly, as if to take him to task or
bring him to his senses, he wasn't sure which. He wanted to say
something, apologize to the lawyer, but he didn't dare open his mouth.
He had no idea what might come out.

"Jack, " his mother said again. He looked up, beyond their little group,
farther down the hallway. Lily and Father Paul were approaching,
painfully slowly, arm in arm, grieving widow and consoling vicar
returning from the cemetery. From sixty feet away Jack could see the
sandbagged look on her face, as if she expected nothing, except,
perhaps, a piling on of more sadness.

That "hit me again" look would only sink them here. Where had Father
Paul come from? Jack stopped laughing.

"And this must be Miss Katie herself." Snow looked over the tops of her
glasses as Jack sat down with Katie on his lap and everyone else filled
in on their side of the table. "I've heard a lot about you," Snow said,
extending her pinky to the baby.

"Who called the priest? " Jack whispered to Snow as she made a lame
attempt to ingratiate herself with Katie.

"Your wife, " Snow whispered back. "It can't hurt. He's a .. .

presence, that's all." She shifted her attention back to Katie.

"And I've brought a little treat."

Lily shook her head vehemently as Snow pulled a lollipop from her
briefcase.

"Maybe when my mother takes her out into the hall. After the judge has
gotten a good look at perfection, " Jack said.

Lily had obsessed over Katie's appearance for the hearing.

She'd bought and returned three dresses before finding one that she
thought neither hid nor called attention to the bandages.

She'd washed the baby within an inch of her life this morning.

She'd even washed Barney, taking it from the crib after Katie was asleep
and returning the scented but visibly dulled version to her side before
she woke up.

"Impressive stack, " Snow said. She pulled a file folder marked "Keliher
support letters" from her briefcase and slapped it onto the conference
table. "I sent copies ahead to the judge, along with an explanation
about the absence of a letter from your wife's therapist."

Lily had tried without success to reach Lucy Balsaam, who, it turned
out, was traveling for six weeks throughout Turkey. As far as Jack was
concerned, Snow had saved their asses by having arranged for the
evaluations by Melick.

"Okay, " Snow said, looking at Lily and Fran, then at Jack.

"Remember, the burden of proof is on them. Legally, the next step is an
enormous one. No judge takes lightly such major interference with
parental rights. They need to prove that Katie is still at risk in the
home-"

"She never was, " Lily said.

Snow ignored her. "Remember what I said-the judge is looking for
proactive changes in the situation."

More shoes clicked and squealed across the linoleum. Jack looked behind
him to see Mrs. Thorns enter with a middle-aged man and woman.

just behind them, Dr. Svanda strode in.

Svanda was the accuser from the ER who'd ignited this whole thing.

Snow had also neglected to mention he would be present today.

"Have the baby sit on Lily's lap, don't you think? " Jack's mother
whispered to no one in particular.

"Good morning, I'm Judge Pua." A small Malaysian-looking woman headed
toward the table, followed by a heavyset woman, the court recorder. As
the judge approached, Jack saw that she would be taking the seat at the
head of the table, closest to him.

He turned to Snow to trade places with her. His mother moved to the
second string of chairs, just behind him, with Melick and Father Paul.
Jack disliked having Father Paul at his back. He was beginning to
acknowledge that he disliked him, wherever he was and whatever he was
doing. What motivated the guy? He couldn't trust him when he didn't know
what he wanted.

"Did Feller call you? " Snow whispered to Jack.

"I'm going out to look for him, " Jack said.

Snow shook her head. "You can't leave now. Shit."

Lily stared at Jack. It was clear that Snow was nervous. She had no
business panicking yet, Jack thought.

"Let's ask Paul to call Feller's office, " Lily said.

"Paul? " Jack said, confused.

"Fatfier Paul, " Lily said.

Snow shook her head.

The judge placed her draped arms up on the table. "All the parties
involved, I trust, understand that this is not a trial. It is a hearing.
And it is a preliminary hearing, not an evidentiary hearing." She looked
around the room and sighed. "This is a closed hearing. All the records
will be impounded. We are here today to determine if the Department of
Social Services should retain custody while a full investigation is
undertaken."

She looked around the room again, somewhat dramatically.

The enormous black silk bow at the back of her head scraped loudly
against her robes. "I see a lot of people here, too many.

I will take a wild guess, now, and assume that the parents are
contesting." She looked up again. "A lot of people."

She opened up the folder in front of her. Without looking up she
continued, "Will each person present please identify himself.

Make sure to clarify your relationship to the child, as well."

When it came time for Katie's court-appointed counsel to identify Katie,
the judge stood up and walked over to where Katie was seated in Lily's
lap. She was a short round woman, and when she crouched down on the
floor in front of Katie, Jack thought she bore a striking resemblance to
the egg-shaped people who snapped so soundly into Katie's plastic school
bus.

Katie smiled at the judge, and reached out and pulled a fistful of her
hair from her bun. The judge inched closer, and allowed herself to be
inspected a few moments longer. "Okay, now, Katherine, you want to see
what I brought with me today?"

Katie wriggled down off Lily's lap and finally released the judge's
hair. Pua made no move to reconstruct her hairdo.

Instead, she unzipped the top of her robe, reached inside, and pulled
out a tiny plastic cat. It was small enough to have been dispensed from
a gumball machine, infinitesimal, bite-sized. Katie stared down at the
toy in the judge's palm, hesitating just long enough for Lily to have
the presence of mind to pluck it up.

"She still puts everything in her mouth, " Jack said, trying to soften
the gesture.

Katie banged her fists on Lily's knees and started screaming.

Jack tried to hold her. Fran moved to get her Barney from the diaper
bag. The judge walked back to her seat at the head of the table. "Now
would be a good time for the temporary guardian to please remove the
child."

Jack bundled the baby in his arms, her feet pumping madly in the air,
occasionally making contact with his shoulder. As he handed Katie to his
mother, Snow whispered for her to call Feller.

There was a long silence after they'd left the room. Pua read through
some papers in front of her and spent some time simply staring at Lily
and Jack. "I am glad to see that .. . Katherine is on the mend.

When I granted this emergency custody order .. ."

She raised her eyebrows, as if doing so might broaden her vision.

two weeks ago, the medical condition of this child was foremost in my
mind. You had a very seriously .. . wounded child."

"Wounded" came out of her mouth, Jack thought, like a low moan.

He could have made the same sound if he let himself.

"Second- and third-degree burns on one-twelfth of her body.

Dehydration, swelling, infection.

"The reporter, Dr. Svanda from Lincoln Hospital, is here, " she said,
now reading from the papers in front of her. She began addressing
Svanda, but continued to stare at Lily. Lily was sitting in such a way
that all Jack could see of her was the rapid flexing of one side of her
jaw.

"It just didn't add up, " Svanda continued. "She said-"

"The mother? " Pua clarified.

"Yes. The mother said the baby had pulled a big pot off the stove. How?
The child, well, you just saw her, she can't be more than three feet
tall. No, less. The mother never mentioned anything about her climbing
up, nothing like that."

Snow interrupted. "If I may just clarify. My client, Mrs. Sterne, has
stated, and I'm sure stated on that day in the hospital, that the child
was seated in a high chair at the time of the accident."

Svanda shrugged. Jack watched as the doctor unconsciously gripped the
table and tipped back his chair on its two hind legs.

"Is this correct, Mrs. Sterne?"

Lily nodded.

"Do you have that same information? " Pua looked in the general
direction of the group from DSS. It seemed to Jack she was still trying
to get the players straight.

"She placed the high chair along the same counter with the stove," Mrs.
Thorns said enthusiastically.

"Okay? " Pua asked, looking at Svanda. "So what else?"

"The mother struck me as .. . odd. She was quiet, very quiet.

Something was off."

Pua looked toward Thorns for corroboration.

Mrs. Thorns read from a paper on the table. "The mother was
uncomfortable, seemingly ill at ease in her own home, as if she had
something to hide." Jack wished he'd heard that interview, wished he
knew exactly how Lily had fucked it up for them.

"She seemed to be someone with a lot of anger, " Thorns continued.

"Mrs. Thorns, may I ask you if you are a licensed social worker?"

"No, I'm not, " she said, fingering the gold hoop in her ear.

Pua nodded. "But you will be one day, right?"

"I'm in the process of getting my degree, right now."

Jack wondered which one.

"Okay. What other physical, medical findings do you have for us today?
What do you know now that you did not know when you petitioned the
court?"

"The burns were of varying severity indicating a splash pattern," Mrs.
Thorns said, again reading from the papers in front of her.

"X-rays, old fractures?"

"None, " Mrs. Thorns said.

"Good. Can we be safe in assuming we're not dealing with a repeat
offender here?"

"Well, not exactly, " Mrs. Thorns said, opening up a very thick folder
that had been in front of one of her supervisors. "It seems that Mrs.
Keliher was consistently late in arranging for shots .. .

immunizations."

"Are they up to date? " Pua asked.

"The baby is not."

Jesus, Jack thought.

"I assume that one of the men over here is your family pediatrician,
Mrs.. .. Is it Sterne or Kellher? Can we clear this up now? " Pua
sounded impatient.

Snow whispered to Lily for a moment. "Mrs. Sterne kept her maiden name
after marriage to Mr. Keliher. Dr. Ronald Feller is the child's
pediatrician. He is supposed to be here today, as a general character
witness, attesting to the competence of these parents, as well as the
sound health-"

"And?"

Snow shrugged. "I imagine he got tied up."

"Why is your baby not properly immunized, Mrs. Keliher?"

For the first time, Jack thought something awful might be revealed to
him today.

"That must be a mistake. I'm usually-" Lily said.

"A mistake, meaning an oversight on your part, or on the part of DSS, or
of your absent pediatrician?"

"I'm pretty sure all my children have had all their immunizations.

Katie did have a bad reaction to her first DPT shot, and I decided not
to risk-"

"That's the one, " Mrs. Thorns called out.

"All your children? How many do you have? " Pua asked, as if Lily were
Mother Hubbard.

"We have three."

"First I've heard of it, thank you." The judge looked over at the DSS
side of the table. "You have been working for the Department of Social
Services for how long?"

Mrs. Thorns whispered to the older woman seated next to her.

The attorney for DSS shook his head. "This is my third case without
supervision, " Mrs. Thorns finally said.

Lily squeezed Jack's thigh under the table.

"What else? What else aside from the burns, themselves, was of concern
to you in this case? " The judge seemed to be talking more to herself
than to Mrs. Thorns.

"Her emotional instability, " Thorns said, almost as if it were a
question.

"The baby's? " Pua said. She widened her eyes, as if to swallow the
caseworker.

"The mother has a psychiatric history."

Pua tapped the top of her messed-up hair. "Yes, the all-important factor
in this case, thank you." She looked down and shuffled through some
forms. "Right, mother on medication for depression."

Lily turned toward Jack to pass him a note, and he smelled lemons.

Not real ones, but laboratory lemons. She was using his mother's perfume
or powder or something. He read the scrawl at the edge of her steno pad,
"God, how did we get here?"

Snow shook her head. "My client has not been on medication for some
time. Unfortunately the therapist she consulted during the past year is
out of the country on vacation. But Dr. Charles Melick, a psychiatrist
known to this court, has evaluated each member of the Kellher family,
and is here today."

Pua turned to Dr. Melick, who was seated behind Jack and next to Father
Paul. "What might you tell us that we don't already know, Doctor?"

Jack watched Melick slowly fold his hands in front of him as if they
were detached from his body. Unlike ever-y one else, he did not consult
a stack of papers before speaking. "I found these parents to be
conscientious, well informed about the various stages of child
development, and loving. There was some issue regarding the family's
adjustment to the husband's career change. Apart from that, I found no
more dysfunction here than in any other happy family."

The attorney for DSS spoke now for the first time. "I ask that it be
duly noted that this psychiatric evaluation was not impartial, but, in
fact, was ordered by parents" counsel. That's highly irregular at this
juncture." The lawyer for the department seemed to be addressing himself
directly to Eleanor Snow. "In fact, it's l'just not done." He cleared
his throat loudly.

"Thank you, Mr. Gallione. It seems that there is, then, nothing new
here-"

"Excuse me-"

"Yes, Mr. Gallione", I had assumed you were finished."

"Excuse me, the caseworker involved in this case has uncovered
information that is, I believe, crucially important." The DSS attorney
seemed excited now.

The judge moved great masses of air with her hands. "Let's have it, "
she said.

"We've done some research into the mother's medical history.

We feel it is important that information previously omitted by the
mother be made known. Mainly, that she has a serious history of mental
illness, including long-term hospitalization and attempted suicide."

"What's she talking about? " Snow leaned across Jack and stared at Lily
for a moment before addressing herself quiefly but urgently to Jack. He
could see a faint mustache of sweat above her top lip.

"Dr. Melick? " Pua turned toward him.

Melick looked down at his beard. "Neither Mrs. Sterne nor her attorney
told me anything of this."

"Excuse me, your honor, " Gallione interrupted. "This is precisely what
concerns DSS. This pattern of secrecy, on the part of the mother.

There well may be other things we just don't know."

He shook his head slowly.

"There always are, " Pua said.

Every one was talking now. Eleanor Snow scratched away on her pad while
Lily finally filled her in. Lily had convinced Jack that it was
unnecessary to divulge the distant past to Snow. Jack knew now that he'd
lapsed in his vigilance of her judgment. He'd gone along with the
decision, nostalgic for a wife who could actually make the right call.

Christ, he was a slow learner.

"Excuse me, clearly, I, too, have just Snow tapped her pencil rapidly.
"If I might just explain that these incidences being referred to
regarding Mrs. Sterne's background occurred over twenty years ago."

The judge looked toward Thorns and Gallione for verification.

"Yes, " Mrs. Thorns said, "but the nature of mental illness, well, it
tends to revisit in times of stress. Mrs. Sterne has already had .. .
there have been years of treatinent, and this recent, very recent
episode where medication was used. There has not been adequate time to
obtain the treatment notes for all these years.

A full investigation would allow for that. I think the child was lucky
this time. If we let this go-"

"Please, Ms. Thorns, no summations, " the judge said. "What else? Who
haven't we heard from?"

The )judge looked around with her barn-owl gaze. "The father, " she
said.

Jack had no idea what to say. Was he supposed to defend his wife's
sanity"@ Was he supposed to defend her mothering? Or was he supposed to
tout his own abilities as, as what, a caretaker, a protector?

"Yes, go ahead, Father, " the judge said, encouraging Father Paul to
speak.

He couldn't fucking believe it.

"Lily asked me to come here today as a .. . I believe what she said was
"a general character witness. "" He smiled and opened his large white
hands, then clasped them together, almost clapping them. He shook his
head. "I'm fairly well suited to the task.

Because I have been asked to bear witness during the past few weeks to
her character, and tr-just me, " he smiled broadly, "there is nothing
general, nothing common or commonplace about this woman. One only has to
have seen her with her daughter, who, as you said, was so critically
ill. One only had to bear witness to the two of them together in the
hospital. I work a long day in my parish. When I visited little Katie
Kellher at the Shriners Burns Institute, it was usually late in the
evening. Lily was always there.

I don't mean in the building. I mean by her daughter's side.

Under the most enormous stress one can imagine, she remained firm in her
commitment to her daughter, firm in her belief that a mother's love ..
."

Good Christ. Jack didn't think he could bear it.

"I've known her husband nearly all of my life. I played with him, I've
prayed with him.. ." Jack motioned for Snow to get him to stop, but she
seemed mesmerized. Every one was staring at him, raptly.

"Jack lives his life with a moral code, a set of values, that you'll
rarely encounter, frankly, not even among my colleagues."

He got his laugh.

"I just can't imagine anyone better suited to the task of nurturing,
guiding, providing for a child."

Judge Pua smiled at him. "Thank you, Father. Okay, okay, what am I
looking at here? More time for the Department of Social Services to look
into the mother's psychiatric history?

That would be the reason, am I right, for continuing the Order of Care
and Protection? I am greatly displeased that the mother kept this from
her own counsel, from the evaluating psychiatrist.

Poor judgment? I don't know. Do the parents not understand the
seriousness of all this? I dislike, intensely dislike, this disregard
for the truth. So, what to do?

"Let's look at everything else." Pua flipped through the file of support
letters Snow had passed to her earlier. "Some fancy letterhead here. Fat
stack. What else? Dr.. .. Svanda? Am I right?

Okay, you never mentioned seeing a line of immersion, neither did the
Shriners doctors." She shuffled all the papers in front of her as she
spoke, laying them out in a fan shape. "So, we're left with calling it a
splash burn. We need to rule out the deliberate throwing of the water.
Well, now this will be difficult." She stared at Mrs. Thorns. "The
container .. . a Pot .. . not available for measurement.

Weight of the child? Never included here.

Manual dexterity at this stage of development also omitted from this
report. What else? Nearly every name, every spelling, every date, every
birthdate in the 5 1 B I now see differs from the information received
from the two hospital staffs and the parents. So many inconsistencies,
on the part of the professionals involved.

The basic intake skills displayed here are absolutely appalling.

"No dry burn mark. High chair, if in fact it was a high chair that was
involved, never examined. And it was not until this business of the
vaccinations that I even knew there were other children in the home."
She lowered her voice, and it seemed to Jack she was t'wng to herself
and that if they wanted to eavesdrop it was of no particular consequence
to her.

"If this little one was in imminent danger, then why weren't the others
pulled? " She glared at Mrs. Thorns now.

"May V" Mrs. Thorns's face was bright red and her hands were trembling.
"We identified this child, the youngest, as the target of the mother's
irrational and aggressive behavior." She read from her notes.
"Temperamentally, Katherine is the most difficult, this was
acknowledged, more than once, by both parents during the hospital
interview."

Pua looked at her and said, "Go easy on the adjectives.

They're very costly, very costly. You write that "the relations between
the parents seemed strained, at best, possibly violent.

Mother has poor impulse control, inadequate coping skills, low
self-esteem, lacks social and emotional contacts outside the family."

Well, given the mother's psychiatric history, that does sound like a
recipe for abuse.

"It's a problem. So I'm left with Dr. Melick, who spoke with her for
probably, what, only thirty minutes, and a priest who's known the family
forever. The priest.. ." Pua turned now to face Father Paul.

"Father, you presented a very different picture of the family than the
picture DSS has been creating for the past few weeks. This is what
happens here. The department identifies a child at risk and then we are
all in the position of trying to illuminate the world that child lives
in, to get as clear a picture as possible as to the home life she will
return to. As Mr. Gallione, himself, said, there are things we just
don't know. Day-to-day domestic life defies satisfactory examination.
It's the heart of the mystery, as anyone who has cared for young
children knows. Am I right, Father, about the heart of the mystery?"

Father Paul smiled.

"Tell me something, Mom, Dad?"

Jack waited for her to ask the question. But she just shrugged.

There was a long silence, after which both Jack and Lily began speaking
at once. "We love our children, " Jack said.

"It was an accident, " Lily added. "I'm a good mother."

"Well, look, " the judge said, standing up. "It seems an improbable
accident, I'll be honest. A horrible accident.

Improbable, but not impossible. Important distinction. As for the other,
as far as I know, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts does not remove
children from the home of every mother on Prozac, not yet, anyway. Why
don't we just dismiss this whole mess.

Parental rights are reinstated."

Book 2.

It hadn't rained in nearly three weeks, not since the end of June.

In the suburban county where his mother lived there'd been a ban on
watering since the Fourth, but out here, where he and Lily lived,
everyone had a well. It was the homeowner's prerogative to let it run
dry. As Jack parked the car and got out he saw that the burned-out lawn
had spawned a pond, on which floated a sand pail, a couple of
waterlogged tennis balls, and an old shampoo bottle. Somebody had
arranged the sprinkler so it gave only a pathetic half wave, continually
watering the same four feet of turf. Katie's little plastic slide was
positioned so that the dumping-out point was directly into the ever
deepening mud puddle. A faded Budweiser beach towel and two old dishrags
lay like terry-cloth snakes in the grass.

Jack turned off the spigot at the side of the house and watched the last
bit of water pulse out of the chrome holes in the sprinkler, then slowly
cease to spurt from the twenty-odd rips that ran the length of the hose.

Once the water was off, he could hear them all in the kitchen.

He stepped around the deep orange tiger lilies they had planted when
they first moved here. The flowers had gone wild, multiplied and
thickened, their fat green leaves almost completely camouflaging the
house's patchy foundation. Through the back door, Jack could see that
they were all cooking something together.

Lily had the pastry marble out. She was talking in an accent, imitating
someone, Shayna, her grandmother. "Acch, who neets de oven in Jewlye? A
blintz you can cook eet on de top off derange. Dat's de beauty of de
blintz." The kids were laughing and the boys began a chant of "blintz,
blintz, blintz" as if it were a taunt. And she accused him of
embclllshing his childhood.

Nothing drove him crazier than when she did this Winchell Mahoney Hour
thing about her grandmother. With each installment the woman seemed less
like an actual ancestor and more like a pop-up peasant from a storybook.
She tried too hard, went over the top. He could hear it in her voice, a
kind of desperation that the kids cleave, no holds barred, to something
mythic from her past, that they love her family-even if for only six
minutes every bit as much as they embraced everything and ever-y one
Keliher. He sensed that the kids knew it too, that Ben, at least, was
wise to her need, and so responded as she wished, not wanting to hurt
her feelings.

He was asking his mother now if brass was like gold. Jack saw the
Sabbath candlesticks on the counter, by the sink. Lily never cleaned
them, and only remembered to light them four or five Friday nights a
year. The phone rang and nobody inside seemed to notice. Katie was
eating blueberries out of the container, handfuls at a time. The phone
rang again, and Lily uttered something he couldn't hear. When it rang a
fourth time he pushed open the back door. "The lights are on but
nobody's home, " he said as he walked into the kitchen.

Greg and Katie screamed, "Daddy, " and ran toward him. Ben started to
get up and then sat back down again. "Hey, Dad, " he said. "We're making
blueberry blintzes."

"What the heck kind of food is that", " he said, forcing a big oafy
expression.

"Jewish food, " Greg said, starting to climb up one side of him as if he
were a sheer rock wall.

"Isn't this great? All being back together in our house? " Lily said.

"We've been together in our house for a whole week, " Ben said.

"Since Tuesday, " Lily corrected.

"Can Nana come for dinner? " Greg asked, trying to get a foothold in
Jack's groin.

"We've been with her for a month, " Ben said.

"So? @l "Nan needs a little rest from us, " Jack said, as he swung Greg
down to the floor and moved past Lily at the stove.

"Isn't it nice to be just our family? " Lily said enthusiastically.

"You getting anything out of the tap? " Jack asked, as Katie grabbed his
hands and tried to attempt the climb her brother had just made.

"What do you mean? " The cast-iron skillet sizzled with grease.

"How long since you three little piggies were out there rolling in the
mud? The lawn is flooded and the well's-"

"Shit, " Lily said.

"Sorry." She put her hand to her mouth. "We got sidetracked."

"Didn't you hear the water running out there?"

"We came in to make Popsicles."

"Yeah, Dad. It's sooooo easy, " Greg said. "You take lemonade and you
put it in the ice thing with all the little boxes-"

"The ice cube tray, " Ben said disparagingly.

"But Mum didn't have like any sticks, so we went into the woods and got
sticks and then stuck them in and now there's sticks from the woods in
our freezer."

"Wild, " Jack said.

"Mum said we're going to eat in the dining room, " Greg continued.

"What's with the phone? " Jack asked, looking over on the kitchen
counter, where the answering machine flashed I I in the message number
box.

"It's Shabbes. On Shabbes, religious Jews don't answer the phone, " Ben
began.

"Yeah .. . "Jack said.

Lily laughed. "It hasn't stopped ringing since we walked in at
lunchtime. I would have spent all day on the phone if I'd picked it up
every time. I thought it was important to let it go-"

"Did it occur to you that it might be an emergency .. . that if it kept
ringing off the hook, maybe there was a damn good reason? " Jack said.

The kids got quiet. Only Katie seemed oblivious to the tension in the
room. She was back to the blueberries, humming to herself and bouncing
the green rejects down on the table.

"What sort of emergency? We're all here, " Lily said tentatively.

The phone rang again, and Lily stared at it.

"Well? " Jack said.

Lily made a dramatic, sweeping gesture with her arm, then bowed.

The kids laughed, with her, at him. It didn't usually go that way in
their household.

Jack grabbed the phone roughly and shouted hello into the mouthpiece.

"Is this the home of Mr. and Mrs. Keliher? " a frail voice on the other
end of the line asked.

"Yes, " Jack said.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, the both of you."

"Who is this? " Jack demanded. The voice was clearly female and old, but
he couldn't connect it with anyone he knew.

"God has designs, grand designs, for .. . perverts like you."

Jack slammed down the phone, but the woman's voice had already imprinted
itself in his mind. And for the next few seconds as Lily asked again and
again who had called, he felt his pulse speed up and his lips go numb.

"Obscene phone call, " he finally whispered to Lily. "A prank or
something."

"What did they say? " Lily asked, pulling the skillet off the burner.

"What's obscene, Dad? " Ben asked, as Katie began fingering some raw
dough.

"Not nice, " Jack said. He pulled a bottle of Absolut from the freezer
and poured it into an up glass, one of the two he and Lily had pocketed
one winter afternoon years ago from the bar at the Ritz. He carved a
curl of lemon peel from a shrunken lemon he'd stowed in the back of the
butter compartment for just this purpose, and walked over to the
answering machine. Before he pushed "play" he turned to the boys and
said, "If we're really eating in the dining room, you'd better start
setting up in there."

"Do that funny restaurant talk, " Greg said. "You know, that dinner at
Lilack's thing."

Lilack's was what Jack had named the restaurant he and Lily thought they
might one day own. Stupidly, he had let the kids in on what he now
considered the code word for his own failure.

"Please, " Greg said, jumping up and down.

"Party of five, at seven with a couple of ankle biters, " Jack said.

"What's that, what's that, Dad, ankle biters? " Greg said, convulsing in
laughter.

"You know? " Jack said to Ben.

Ben thought for a minute, then shook his head.

"Rug rats, " Jack said.

"Babies? " Ben offered.

Jack nodded. "Kids, yeah."

"Ha! " Greg said, slapping his little hand to his bare leg.

"Ankle biters! " He stopped for a minute and then looked up at Jack. "I
don't get it."

"It's a reference to height, or lack thereof, " Jack said, lowering his
hand down toward the ground. He walked over to the open shelves where
the placemats and napkins were kept, counted out four of each, and
handed them to the boys. When they had left the room, he pushed "play."
Lily turned from the stove as the messages rewound.

"It's Friday morning, where are you guys? It's Ellen, just calling to
see how you're all doing. Call me."

46 Burn. Burn.. ."

"Wait, wait, what was that? Play that back, " Lily said.

Jack ignored her.

The next message was from Julia Cozzi. "Why didn't you tell me?

Oh, I feel so awful.. ." After that was Mrs. Hines, an old customer of
theirs whom they occasionally still catered for. "What can I say?

I just opened the Rooster .. . is there anything I can do? I know an
excellent attorney in town." The Winstead Rooster was their town paper.
It came out every Friday.

"Stop them, " Lily said, walking over to the answering machine.

"No, " Jack said. "I want to hear the rest."

"Hi. Jack? I'm a friend of your mother's. I go to her church.

I make soft cloth dolls for girls, and I have one I'd love to give to
your little burned girl. May I drop it off sometime? My number is .. .

99 Too bad Hitler didn't take you all out .. . you baby boiler..

a teenage voice said tentatively.

"That's it, that's enough." Lily moved the platter of blueberry blintzes
to the counter. "Let's call the police." She shook her head and slammed
the skillet into the sink.

Jack motioned for her to be quiet. He listened to the last five
messages. Four were anonymous hate calls, and the last was from Ben's
camp counselor. He would need to bring in two dollars next week for a
party they were having.

"Don't erase these, " he said to Lily as he finished the last of his
drink and tucked in his shirt. "I'm going to run up to the General Store
and get the Rooster."

"I don't know, maybe we should call the police, much as I.. ."

"Let's see what's in the paper, first." He looked over at Katie, who was
now under the kitchen table with a box of markers and Lily's supermarket
coupons. "Don't say anything to the kids."

"Can't trust me as far as you can throw me, can you? " Lily said,
without turning to look at him.

She should have known better than to push him right now.

"Lay off." Jack walked toward the back door.

"I do nothing but." Lily turned around and leaned against the stove.

"Nothing is right, " he muttered.

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"Water running, phones ringing .. . who's in charge here? I mean, look
around. Christ, this room, this whole freaking house, is positively
scary. Look, look-" He pointed to Katie, who was now ripping grocery
coupons into little pieces and dropping them into her sagging diaper.
"She looks like she hasn't been changed in a couple of days." He leaned
over and picked her up, instinctively smoothing his hand over the new
skin on her leg.

"Jesus, " he said as he sniffed her bottom.

Lily held out her arms toward Katie, and she lunged for her mother.

"She's just wet, " Lily said tersely, trying to pull Katie away from
him.

"Mama, " Katie cried, and Jack relinquished her.

He turned his back on them and shoved his hands into his pockets, in an
attempt to stop himself. He took a few steps toward the door, then came
back, leaned across the table, and grabbed one of Lily's blintzes. It
was still hot enough to burn his palm. When it hit the window just above
the sink, the pastry burst open, smearing the screen with the thick
blueberry filling.

Jack didn't go to the General Store, which was less than a mile from
their house. Every one in there knew him, if not by name, then enough to
say hi, ask after the kids. Instead he drove the five miles to the
entrance to the interstate, where there was an Amoco. Nobody knew anyone
there. He pulled out a copy of the Winstead Rooster and leaned against
the ice cream case.

News was always in Section A. Jack carefully peeled back the front page
and scissored the inserts, "Horses" and "Summer Fun, " between his legs.
Page two was obits, page three was the police blotter. He looked there
first. According to the editors of the paper, nothing seriously bad ever
took place in their town.

Cars collided on wet roads, tools were found to be missing from unlocked
garages, minors sometimes removed car radios, and disturbances were
reported to be under investigation. The police blotter contained nothing
about them and their dealings with DSS. He knew that the hearing had
been officially closed, but he also knew enough about the legal system
now to realize that it didn't mean a damn thing.

He flipped through the articles about the addition to the library, the
permit being sought for a car wash in town, the problem of overcrowding
at the high school. They were on the last page, eighth column, just
above "Blackboard Notes."

The infant child of Lillian Sterne and John Keliher of Checkerberry Lane
has been removed from the custody of her parents by the Department of
Social Services pending an investigation of serious burns the child
received while under the care of the mother. The child was first
remanded to the custody of the Shriners Hospital in Boston and then to
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Kelihers have two older children
who have not, as yet, been removed from the Checkerberry Lane home.

Jack thought about driving over to Fred Stowe's house. The Stowe family
owned the paper. Every one knew the antique house they lived in on Main
Street, and everyone knew that tfieir news coverage was chronically
obsolete by the time the weekly hit the mailboxes.

Instead, he walked outside to the pay phone and left a message for
Eleanor Snow. The paper usually printed half a page of retractions each
week.

He came back inside and grabbed a few more papers. His mother had always
done that when any of them was mentioned in the paper. She'd buy five or
six copies and carefully cut out the page with their winning run, or
field goal, or chorus solo, careful to leave the date at the top clearly
visible.

The phone company wanted forty-five dollars to have their number changed
to a private one, and it would take five working days for the order to
go through. Lily complained that the boys" friends wouldn't be able to
call them, and that she'd have to spend most of next week letting people
know of the changed number, which she said she felt like doing about as
much as she had felt like scraping blueberry off the kitchen window.

When Jack finally unplugged the phone around nine that evening, there
were eighteen messages on the tape. After the kids had gone to sleep, he
listened to the first two, then turned the volume off. Lily continued to
refer to the messages as "evidence, " so he didn't erase them. Evidence
of what, he wondered, but he wasn't talking to her, so he didn't ask.
After she went up to bed, he stayed down in the living room reading.

For the better part of a month he'd lived in the house without Lily, and
he'd come to think of the whole of the place as his own, as if she no
longer existed. Lily's arrival back in the house felt like an intrusion.
He didn't want it to. He had intended to ignore his anger, hoping that
if he waited it out it would diminish, and she would painlessly slip
back into his life.

He'd been sleeping in the living room since Tuesday night, since they'd
all moved back into the house together. On Wednesday morning, Ben had
found him on the couch and asked if he had slept there all night. He
said he'd fallen asleep watching TV, but after that he had been careful
to set the alarm for six and bundle his sheet and pillow back into the
linen closet upstairs before the kids woke up.

There was no peace in the house tonight. He could hear the creaking of
their bedsprings upstairs as Lily rolled and turned.

The hard shells of flying insects beat against the old metal screens all
around the downstairs windows. And the voice on the phone sounded again
and again, each time he inhaled, "God has designs, grand designs, for
perverts like you."

It was hours after the sun had set, but the temperature was still in the
eighties outside, and higher in the house. Both the front door and
kitchen door were open for cross-ventilation, as was every single
window. Jack shut the doors first and turned the deadbolts. He pushed
the kids" easel up against the kitchen door and then slid shut all the
first-story windows. Before turning off the lights, he went down to the
cellar and grabbed a baseball bat.

Then he lay down on the living-room sofa and sweated himself to sleep.

It was still dark out when he woke up to find Ben shaking him roughly
with both hands. "Get up, Dad. Get up."

"What? " He reached around to his sore back and felt the knob of the
bat.

"Why are you here?"

"Why are you? " Jack said, digging at the crust in the corners of his
eyes. Fucking allergies. He put his hand on Ben's shoulder.

He was wearing his Red Sox pajamas.

"I heard something, " Ben said.

"Me, snoring, probably, " Jack said, closing his eyes as Ben reached
over to the end of the couch and switched on the floor lamp.

"It's hot down here, Dad."

"It'sjuly."

"The windows are all shut, " Ben said.

"Bugs."

"I'm scared, " Ben said.

Jack propped himself up on one sweaty elbow and slid as far back into
the couch as he could. He patted the cushion and pulled Ben down toward
him. "Scared of what, buddy?"

"Bad things, " he said.

"We're all scared of bad things, " Jack said.

"It's not funny, Dad."

"I'm not trying to be funny, Ben."

"What's a firestorm? " Ben asked after a long interval during which Jack
was pretty sure he'd fallen asleep again.

"Hmm? " Jack said, trying to wake himself.

"On the radio, I heard them say there were firestorms somewhere and they
were spreading."

"Oh, like forest fires. I guess they're like big fires, huge ones that
burn out of control. It happens sometimes out in the West in the summer
when it's very windy and it hasn't rained in a while."

"Do people get burned, too?"

"There are these rangers, " Jack said, unsure of the information he was
disseminating now. "They fight these kinds of fires."

"Can it burn up a whole town?"

"Well, mostly, I think these things happen in wilderness areas."

Jack closed his eyes again.

"Never here?"

"It would be unlikely, buddy, improbable."

"But people burn in hell, right?"

"You want me to carry you up to your room? It's been a long time-"

"If you have a cross, then you won't go to hell, right, Dad?"

Jack reached up and swept Ben's damp blond curls off his forehead.

Ben grabbed his hand. "We should go to church, Dad. On Sunday."

"Don't worry about hell, buddy. When you're seven you don't have to
worry about hell, okay? You really want to go to church on Sunday?

Maybe you and me will go down to the cathedral in South Boston. It's a
beautiful place with enormous stained-glass windows, all blue and red
and yellow, just like in Europe."

Ben seemed to relax a bit. He leaned back against Jack, let his hand
rest on top of his father's for a minute. "Were you watching the Sox on
TV, Dad? " Ben said, glancing at the baseball bat as Jack picked him up
off the couch to carry him up to bed.

"Yeah, " Jack said.

"Oh, " Ben said, as they started up the stairs. "I thought you said at
dinner that it was a travel day for them."

Somehow his trying to stretch his legs, which he couldn't do, seemed to
cause the doorbell to ring, again and again.

He'd forgotten he was on the couch. His shins were butting up against
the upholstered arm of the sofa and the cushions were damp with sweat.

The bell rang again, and he waited. The kids would get it.

It was bright outside, too bright. He looked at his watch on the coffee
table. It was eight-thirty. The kids never slept this late.

Lily never slept this late. When the bell rang again, Jack wandered into
the downstairs bathroom and grabbed a towel and tied it around his
waist. It wasn't until he'd already unlocked the door and begun to open
it that he remembered about the harassing phone calls, the wackos out
there.

"Mamie Dowd." A tall stout woman thrust a ring-filled hand out toward
him. "From your mum's church, St. Stephen's."

Jack ran his tongue around his teeth a few times and then said, "I-11."

"I left a message on your answering service. I'm the doll maker.

I fixed up one special for your little girl. She's got a bandage on her
leg. They say that helps the little ones not to feel so queer about
themselves." She handed Jack a grocery bag with something gift-wrapped
inside.

Jack nodded and thanked her.

"I'll keep praying for you all, " she said, as she carried herself back
to her car on her wedge-shaped shoes.

"As in the event of further catastrophe, " he said when she was out of
earshot. "God bless you, " he yelled out disingenuously, giving her a
big beefy wave.

Later, when Katie woke up and opened the package, he felt like a real
shit. The doll was intricately designed, with dark hair like Katie's,
blue eyes, a blue-and-white-striped dress, and Ace bandages on the
entire right leg and the top of the left foot.

Lily pointed out what had been hand-stitched and where the woman had
used a machine. Jack couldn't conceive of spending so much time on a
gift for a kid he didn't know. What caused people to do things like
that? It was a grand gesture. In general, grand gestures made him
uncomfortable. How were you supposed to respond to something like this?

He didn't like to think he was uncharitable. He knew he wasn't, really.
As a kid he'd liked to shovel the driveway of the old man who lived at
the end of the cul-de-sac. He would get out there on a snowy morning
before his mother asked him to. He liked to change the oil in his
father's car as a surprise. And every year he worked the dinner to
benefit the food banks and soup kitchens of Boston. But none of that
measured up to this. He watched as Katie unrolled the doll's bandages.

In place of a scar, the woman had sewn in tiny purple hearts.

"What are you going to call her? " Jack said, picking up Katie and
kissing her.

"Boo-boo, " Katie said.

"Yes, she has a boo-boo. But what are you going to name her?"

Katie squirmed to be put down. "Boo-boo, " she said loudly, as if he
were deaf.

Over the next few weeks, other gifts arrived. Flowers were sent to Lily
with no note attached. Five tickets to a Red Sox game were
hand-delivered by an old waiter at Angelo's, a restaurant Lily had baked
for when they'd first opened their shop. Cards came from old customers,
friends of his mother's, aunts, uncles, the pharmacy in town, and the
small print shop they'd used back when they'd had their store. Katie
received a lot of books. Some were overtly religious, some just thinly
veiled "morals."

Members of St. Stephen's sent jewelry, a couple of St. Christopher's
medals, and four er-ucifixes, all of which Lily quickly hid away.

"One accident isn't enough for these people, " Lily said, dangling a
tiny golden cross from a chain. "It would be a miracle if an
eighteen-month-old didn't lodge this thing in her trachea."

A box of rosary beads arrived with a note, "Please have your little
angel of God radiate her spirit onto these and return them in the
package enclosed. We, too, have sickness in our house and are praying
that you will share your healing with us." Lily had opened that box
while Jack was at work, and had left it on the dining room table for him
to "handle." Jack waited a few days, then taped some bubble wrap around
the beads and mailed them back.

The hate calls dwindled after the next issue of the Rooster was
published. The front-page story and accompanying photo were of rwelve
kittens found in the dumpster behind the Purity Supreme. Two weeks
later, the paper reported that the pastor of the Episcopal church in
town had been defrocked for adultery.

Then the calls to Jack and Lily ceased altogether. Either their
neighbors now had bigger and better targets or they'd actually been
influenced by the Rooster's one-sentence retraction stating that the
information regarding the Keliher family had been incomplete and
unintentionally printed in the issue two weeks prior.

Jack started to leave all the downstairs windows open again.

He'd lie on the couch at night and allow himself to think about the
present, even plan a little. He wished he could take the kids to the
beach for a week, rent a cottage at the Cape, the way his family had
always done. But money was more than tight. Eleanor Snow's bill had
finally arrived, $2, 400. He needed to pay back his brother-in-law for
soccer camp for Ben. They were trying to scrape together $500 every
month to pay down the Visa cash advances from two years ago. And the
van. He still hadn't finished repaying Jean's interest-free loan.

He wanted his kids to love summer as much as he had. He wanted them to
be happy. He couldn't see how they could be very content hanging around
the house with Lily all morning, dutifully trooping off every afternoon
to that sinkhole they all called a lake, then back again at five to
watch "Tv. She let them watch too much "Tv. He hated that, "Tv in the
summertime.

They should have been outside on summer evenings playing flashlight tag,
looking for Venus. He worried that Lily wasn't enough for the kids. She
cared for them, looked after them, intendy now, but was she really
carving them into vigorous and sociable individuals?

Lily. She'd been making a conscious, almost conscientious effort to
touch him lately. When they found themselves crossing paths in the
kitchen, she'd place her hands on his hips as she passed. She kissed him
goodbye when he let her. And in the evenings, after the kids were in
bed, she'd follow him out to the front steps with a glass of wine and
force out some amusing anecdote about her day, trying to engage him in
some way, as she skimmed his arm, clapped his bent knee, stretched out
her own tanned legs.

One night she'd found him in the backyard wandering around and had
turned the sprinkler on him. "Let's get naked and get wet, " she'd said.
He'd shaken his head and walked back into the house. The harder she
pushed, of course, the worse it was. It wasn't a matter of a lack of
physical attraction, because he could no longer even see her body.

Each time he looked in her direction he saw right through her clothes,
her skin, her blood and bones. She'd become a vessel of defeat, hers as
well as his.

Some weeks after the threatening calls had stopped, he dreamed he heard
a scratching on the screens of the kitchen windows. It was quiet at
first, but as it grew louder he knew he'd have to get up from the couch
and take a look. In his dream he turned on the fluorescent light in the
kitchen, which illuminated him and obscured the source of the noise
outside. He knew he needed to turn off the light if he wanted to see who
was outside.

In the dream he stood, for what seemed like an eternity, with his hand
on the toggle switch, and slowly he felt something beginning to press in
on him. He half woke up to find he had an erection and that Lily was
lying on top of him. He thought he said, "What are you doing? " But he
mustn't have, because she just kept repeating, "It's me, it's me."

He tried not to let himself surface too far above sleep. He was aware
enough to know that if he became too conscious, he wouldn't let this
happen. He closed his eyes, shut them tight.

Her breasts hung down over his face, grazing his eyelids. She'd put on
perfume, flowers, vanilla. She brought herself down on him, suddenly,
slipping herself over him so quickly he was startled and wondered for a
moment if this was going to be violent, a punitive fucking. But she was
slow then, rocking back and forth, moving herself all along the shaft of
his penis, as if she cared greatly about the result. Her fingers
fluttered continuously up and down his sides, then slid down under him,
between his buttocks and the down of the sofa.

She pulled him to her again and again. He listened to the chittering of
the bugs outside, the rattling of a truck somewhere down the road, their
wet stomachs coming rhythmically unstuck.

When it was over, he rolled his face to the back of the couch and pulled
the sheet up over him. He could feel her standing there for a while,
before turning and heading back up the steps to the bedroom. He didn't
mention it the next day, and to his amazement, neither did she.

"Pink little Piglet, " Greg said, reaching over and touching the
lighter-colored skin on his sister's leg as they sat in the bathrub
together.

Lily poured in the oil she'd been using for six weeks now to soften the
new tissue on Katie's leg and feet. She massaged the area with a
washcloth to remove the flaking skin. The skin was whole, but not the
same. The texture was different, its chemical makeup altered.

The melanin was slow to return to the new tissue. Dr. Wheeler had warned
them that it could take years.

But Katie was healing. Lily and Jack had even received the papers
formally dismissing the action against them by DSS. Still, Lily couldn't
seem to move on. It was as if the accident, the hospital stay, the
hearing were happening again and again, causing everything else to fade
into the background. She'd look up and find she was halfway to Fran's
house, kids in the backseat of the car, and no memory of having driven
there. She had been busy rewriting the end of June.

Why had she made egg salad? No one ate egg salad anymore. Why hadn't she
taught Katie to learn to tolerate the playpen? Because if she had been
in the playpen .. .

She'd find herself standing by the washing machine listening to the
water rush into the basin, heart pounding at the remembered sound of
those whirlpool tubs in the hospital where they'd done the debridement.
She could smell the room, the faintest residue of metals and salts
coming across the tip of the tongue. And the screaming.

Screaming that could be heard from anywhere.

It's a storm, " Greg said. "A very bad storm, with lots of waves."

He chopped the water with his hands, splashing his sister.

Katie leaned over and bit him in the meaty part of the shoulder.

He looked at her and laughed, and she clamped her teeth down and
growled, "NO."

"Cut the crap, " Lily yelled. Father Paul was coming for dinner in
twenty minutes, and she'd done nothing to prepare so far.

except pick up toys. Jack had been away since Wednesday and wasn't due
back until Monday. The partners were using him and Cyn for some off-site
event, out on Nantucket.

Lily was delinquent in having properly thanked Father Paul for all he'd
done, visiting Katie in the hospital, testifying on their behalf at the
hearing, calling since then three or four times to check up on them all.
She suspected there was a more appropriate means of showing her
appreciation, one involving a monetary donation, but that was out of the
question. Besides, she was lonely for adult company. Fran was in
Montreal with Erin and Pete.

jean and her kids were up in Bar Harbor visiting her in-laws.

Julia and Ellen would be gone for the rest of the month. Life in
Winstead seemed to have ebbed away. The lake was at its lowest level in
five years and had taken on a truly pathetic appearance, as if it had
finally become the glorified mud hole Jack always said it was.

There had been so few cars in the lot there this afternoon that the ice
cream truck hadn't even bothered to stop.

Lily drained the bath water and watched, with towels in hand, as Greg
and Katie slid up and down the porcelain tub on their round wet bellies.

"We're fish, " Greg yelled. "We need water to zist."

Lily nodded. She glanced at her watch on top of the toilet tank.

She hadn't even set the table yet. She swooped down on Katie and plucked
her from the tub, grasping her under her slippery armpits.

"I'm a pelican, a pelican, " she said less than enthusiastically.

"Pretend I'm a pelican and you're my supper." She gently patted the new
skin dry and knelt down to massage in a palmful of lotion. "Good girl,
Katie, " she said as the child stood perfectly still on the bath mat.

"Good Mumma, " Katie mumbled, her thumb in her mouth, her other hand
patting Lily lightly on top of her bent head.

The phone rang just as Lily was helping Greg into his pajamas.

She felt the vibrations of the ringing bell reverberate somewhere
between her chest and her throat. The phone calls had started again on
Wednesday afternoon, after Jack had left for Nantucket. It was the same
person each time, a woman with a tremulous voice, elderly, Lily thought,
unless that was put on.

The phone rang again, and Ben yelled from downstairs that he would get
it.

"No, " she screamed. "No, I've got it." She picked up the phone in her
bedroom and said "Yeah" into the mouthpiece in her most threatening
voice.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, " the woman began.

"God granted you those three beautiful children, but you've perverted
his design, haven't you? You don't deserve them, your children. Your
punishment shall be just and swift-" Lily hung up before she could
continue. It never occurred to her to respond. For three days now she
had been listening to the woman, often to her entire threatening
message, like a child who covers her eyes and believes that no one can
see her. If she didn't speak, or even audibly breathe into the receiver,
then maybe this woman would not be able to finger Lily's very soul.

Lily chastised herself for not having the strength or the will to stop
the caller. Certainly there were things she might do-notify the police,
trace the call, change the number. She couldn't simply unplug the phone.
Jack would worry. She hadn't told him about the calls.

These messages were clearly directed at her, and she was ashamed.

"Why are we always doing this now? " Ben grumbled as they stood by the
sideboard in the dining room to light the Shabbes candles. It was far
from sundown, but Lily wanted to light the candles before the children
went to bed. In the summer, when Lily was a child, her grandmother would
stay up until one or two, whenever the flames would die down by
themselves. Lily's mother had thought it ridiculous. "I'm not altogether
sure God cares if you light them to begin with, " she would say. "He's
going to care if you blow them out so that you can go to sleep? " Lily
loved those summer Shabbats, when she knew for a fact that no matter how
long it took her to fall asleep, her grandmother would still be awake,
sitting in the living room, "keeping the candles company."

Lily lit the candles and began reciting the blessing. "Baruch ata,
Adonai .. ." Greg chimed in on a few of the more memorable syllables.
Lily beamed at him and he beamed back.

"You don't even know what you're saying, " Ben said, staring at his
brother.

"We're thanking God for the light .. . and that can mean lots of
different things, " Lily said.

"Fire, " Ben said, rolling his eyes.

"Good Shabbes, " Lily said, bending down to kiss Katie and then Greg.
Ben pulled away from her when his turn came. Katie insisted on kissing
everyone three times.

"Push them back, Mum, " Greg said, staring at the flames.

"You know who might, you know.. ." Lily nodded and nudged the brass
candlesticks back slightly toward the wall.

"Great, " Ben said as he started to walk out of the room. "Now the whole
house will go up."

Lily didn't have the energy to do anything other than ignore him.

He'd been acting strangely for the past few weeks, but on Sunday he'd
come home downright hostile after camping for the weekend with Jean and
Erin and his cousins.

Lily and Paul drank gin and tonics at the kitchen table while the kids
ate their dessert. Paul told a story about an old priest he had trained
under who was so fat that he'd actually broken a chair one Sunday
morning during Mass, simply by sitting down in it.

The kids all laughed, even Ben. So he went on with a tale about an altar
boy with a gas problem. Benjamin went into paroxysms of laughter. And
when it was time for bed, even he agreed to let Paul take them upstairs,
as long as he told one more story.

Paul was still upstairs with the kids and Lily was shaving Parmesan into
the salad when the phone rang again. She picked it up on the first ring
and hollered "Yes? " into the receiver. The adrenaline surged toward her
head, making her limbs feel weak.

"Lily?

It was Jack. The connection was poor. She could hear people talking in
the background, and something else, a kind of a white noise, like some
New Age music.

He was on a cellular, doing a clambake down on the beach.

"Kids behaving for you?"

"Mostly, " she said.

"Where are they? It's so quiet."

"Father Paul. I invited him for dinner. He's reading to them upstairs."

"Serves him right. Lily? Are you still there? You wouldn't believe this
house." He had said the same thing the two other times he had called.

"Guy, Guy Waller, actually put in a cart path from the house down to the
beach. And he's got golf carts. It's great for us. We can just drive all
the stuff down here."

"Good, " she said.

"Something wrong?"

She heard Cyn's voice in the background. Maybe Lily should have asked to
work this event with Jack. It would have been good for them.

"Oh, yeah, " he said. "Before I forget, we're doing a banana ice for
dessert at lunch tomorrow. Does the rum go in on the first or second
freeze?"

"At the end, " she said. "Otherwise the alcohol would keep it from
freezing up enough, you know, the consistency." She knew he knew this.

"Good. Thanks. Take care. Love to the kids. Talk to you .. .

tomorrow."

When Paul came downstairs, he poured them each some more gin and asked
if he could set the table. She dragged the barbecue grill near the
outlet by the kitchen door and plugged in the electric starter.

The grass was so dry that it was painful to walk on with bare feet. Tt
had been a dry summer, too dry. She looked up at the sky and the
darkening haze. She figured it would still be light enough when it was
time to put on the halibut.

"Mom?

Lily)jumped and let out a short scream.

Benlaughed.

She hadn't seen or heard him approach, but here he was, right next to
her. "God, you scared me, honey."

"Sorry."

"What's wrong? " He was wearing one of Jack's old T-shirts, which
covered his legs to below his knees.

"Do I have to go to sleep now?"

Lily bit the inside of her cheek. She wanted to be done with kids for
the day. "Are you tired?"

He shook his head.

"Okay. Do you want to go in and watch TV for a while?"

He nodded and walked away as silently as he'd come, entering the house
through the front door.

In the few minutes she'd been outside, the edges of the yard where the
grass gave way to woods had dropped into darkness. It was muggy and
still, too still. She swept the backyard with her eyes again, the swing
set, the shed, the soccer goal, the row of white pines.

At around nine she asked Ben to shut off the TV and go up to bed, and
she and Paul sat down to dinner. It was quiet as they ate.

Paul seemed shy to her now that it was just the two of them. She
listened to the sound her fork made as it scraped against the bottom of
the wooden salad bowl.

"Your parishioners have been wonderful, sending Katie things.

Very thoughtful, " she said after a while.

He nodded intently. "This is marvelous." He gestured toward his plate.

"Oh, good, I'm glad, " she said, almost surprised to receive a
compliment.

"I'm very fortunate to be at St. Stephen's." He nodded again.

"It's a warm, caring parish, small enough to feel intimate."

"We did get one really odd-well, it wasn't really a gift, it was a
request, I guess. Very strange, to me, anyway. Somebody sent us their
rosary beads with a note asking Katie to bless them. I don't know .. .

holy hands or something, I guess."

Paul knitted his brow. He reached for some bread and continued to eat.

Lily poured them both more wine. Maybe her cynicism had been too thick.
"Butter, " she said, getting up from the table.

"Was it somebody from St. Stephen's? " he asked when she came back from
the kitchen.

"I think so. The note mentioned a sick family member. I don't know, it
just seemed unusual .. . desperate, I guess."

He nodded vigorously, and his straight black hair fell forward into his
eyes.

"I mean, given the demographics of your parish, that seemed, to me, kind
of out there on the fringe-"

"If you thought you were about to lose the person you depended upon most
in the world, I'm not sure you'd be concerned with how you appeared to
others. How far would be too far to go? " He brushed the hair from his
face and looked directly across the table at her.

Lily shifted in the dining-room chair and tucked one leg up underneath
her. She didn't know him well enough to know whether the question was
rhetorical or real. What a strange man.

He'd appeared far more relaxed preaching to a church fall of people and
speaking in a courtroom full of animosity than he was here in her dining
room. He could tell fart jokes to the kids one minute, then advocate the
excesses of love to her the next.

"To what lengths would you go to hold on to Jack? " Paul asked, slicing
neatly through the tip of a crisp green bean.

"You mean, if I was dangling from the twelfth floor? " She laughed and
sipped her wine. "I'm sorry if I insulted anybody's idea of faith.

It's just, when someone asks you to have an eighteen-month-old touch
their rosary beads so she can transfer her healing powers .. . that's .

.

"Irrational?"

"Fantastic, " Lily said. "It's like the magical thinking of childhood ..
. that someone can touch something and transfer a kind of power."

"Physical touch can be extraordinary@" He crossed his long thin arms
over his black shirt. In the candlelight, the white of his clerical
collar stood out against his Adam's apple like a beacon.

"I don't know. I don't know what I think about that, " she lied.

"I know a lot of people do believe in that sort of thing. I mean, Katie
certainly did improve. Just given my background, I can't really chalk up
her improved health to your laying your hands on her body."

Paul laughed and smiled broadly. "What about physical love?

You of all people, I would think, would appreciate the potency of skin
on skin."

Lily leaned back from the table and pulled her other leg underneath her
so that she was now sitting Indian-style in the chair.

She disliked the way this conversation was going. Was he obsessed with
sex? Of course, people who never had any always were. She poured more
wine and pulled her glass to her chest.

"Lily, " he said, leaning over his plate toward the purple candles in
the center of the table, "I'm talking about mother love.

The healing touch I was referring to was yours. The power of mothers to
heal through touch, that's the extraordinary power."

"Oh, " she said. "When you said physical-"

"Well, what's more physical than that relationship?"

Lily shrugged.

"What's the matter? You look .. . skeptical. You don't believe me."

"No. It's just this tendency people have, some people, anyway, toward
idealizing motherhood. I mean, real life's just not like that."

"And by real life, you mean-"

"Everyday life. My everyday secular life."

He nodded thoughtfully. "Do we need to make the separation? It's all
one. It's all sacred."

"For you, " she said, stroking the fringes on her napkin.

"For anyone, if they choose to make it so."

She shook her head. "Most people don't make choices. They just endure.
They put one foot in front of the other .. . and if they're lucky, maybe
they get apportioned these .. . scattered moments of joy, or something."
She twisted up her face in an attempt to mock her own blurry insight.

"You're really pissed off, aren't you? " He pushed his empty plate to
the side.

She laughed. "Coffee? " she said, about to stand up.

"No, no, wait." He patted the table with his long slender fingers. "Tell
me."

She stood up, slightly unsteady from the gin and the wine.

"Lily." He stretched his pale uncovered arms across the table.

"There is a .. . brokenness .. ."

She felt her face flush, and she looked down under the table for the
sandal she'd kicked off. She wasn't about to talk to a priest, even this
one, about her marriage. She had no interest in making herself
vulnerable before him. "We have dessert." She began to clear the table.

"Sit down for a minute, " he said. "I want to do something."

"What? " She laughed nervously. She was no longer able to read the
situation or predict what would happen next. And she resented him for
it.

"I only want to do this if you'll be comfortable with it. So, be
honest."

She looked across at Paul, sure he was about to engage in something so
foreign and so lacking in integrity that she would be embarrassed for
him.

"Let me pray over you, just for a minute."

"What does that .. . involve? " she said, finally locating her sandal
and dragging it toward her with her big toe.

"Your head and your heart, " he said. "First I'll lay my hands on your
head and pray and then on your heart."

She laughed again. She'd had enough to drink to agree to it.

"What should I do? Should I.. ."

Paul walked around the table. Lily sat back down in her chair,
cross-legged.

"Close your eyes, " he said. "Breathe in slowly through your nose and
then out through your mouth a few times. Right. Relax.

Think of something."

"What?

"What's the matter?"

"What do I think op" He was tall, much taller than Jack, and she could
feel him behind her and above her.

"I'd like you to think of a light. Sunlight, firelight, the light of a
candle. Maybe even picture those candles on the server.

They're Sabbath candles, right?"

She nodded. She could feel the heat of his palms above her hair, but he
hadn't touched her yet. She hoped he would get this over with quickly.
Candles, fire, burns. Light was not going to be a calming image. She'd
never successfully meditated, always too conscious of the process to
yield to it. She was capable, though, of giving herself over thoroughly
and entirely. Sometimes when she cooked, something intricate and
potentially excessive, she could lose herself And sex, of course, she
used to be able to lose herself in the concentric circles of that
building pleasure.

He hadn't touched her head yet, so why were his hands now hovering over
her breasts? This was a mistake, a colossal mistake.

She'd had too much wine-that must be why she was actually willing his
healing priest hands to caress her.

"Okay, " he said. "Did you notice anything? " He tapped her shoulder
lightly. "You can open your eyes now, Lily. Some people experience a
kind of warmth or heat radiating from the part of the body I prayed
over."

"Something, " she said. "I'm not sure what, but I definitely felt
something."

She was releaved when Paul finally left. She stacked the dishes in the
sink and checked the Shabbes candles on the sideboard to make sure they
were out. She was appalled at her own fleeting attraction to Father
Paul, a by-product of deprivation, no doubt. She remembered having left
the cover off the grill outside. She'd have to take care of that before
locking up and going to bed. Paul's appeal wasn't physical. It was his
faith that was so enticing. Maybe if you slept with someone who really
thought that all of life was sacred, you'd catch that belief, like a
virus, and you'd believe so, too.

She walked barefoot onto the back steps. A breeze had come up and the
night was turning cooler. The stone stairs had lost all their warmth
from the heat of the day. She looked up at the clouds pulling themselves
across the night sky. Yesterday at the lake she'd been holding Greg and
Katie in the water, one on each hip, springing up like a
lack-in-the-box, again and again, as they laughed and screamed. And
during one of those moments, as she was bending her knees for the tenth
time, pushing off the sandy bottom of the lake on the balls of her feet,
she felt a surge of gratitude that they were still small enough to be
held and still young enough for their mother to be the source of so much
happiness.

Maybe that was joy.

She must have dropped the spatula on the grass when she was done cooking
the fish. She reached down now by the barbecue to get it, and when she
stood up, she saw the doll on the grill. The coals must not have been
that hot. It was still recognizable to her as her doll, the one her
grandmother had placed on her own bed each morning atop the two little
crocheted pillows. Glynda, her grandmother had called her, the good
witch, the fairy. Her yellow hair had been all but singed off, and the
arm that had held the wand was dripping down through the slats of the
greasy grill.

But parts of the golden brocade dress and the too-blue eyes were still
visible.

She threw the dome-shaped cover over the grill and rolled it away from
the house, thinking the doll might still ignite. She ran up the back
steps and pulled both doors closed behind her. She couldn't even
remember where she'd seen the doll last. After the accident she'd hidden
it somewhere. She'd been worried about the wand, that Katie would suck
on it and choke or poke her eye out.

She poured herself the last of the wine from dinner and dialed the
number Jack had given her in Nantucket. It was eleven-forty.

The man who answered the phone sounded as if he'd been sleeping.

Lily was asked to "kindly hold the wire" while he buzzed the kitchen.

There was a long silence, then a few clicks, and finally Jack's voice
competing with the sounds of clinking glasses and running water.

She told him about the burning doll, and then, as if it were all one
story, the phone calls.

"Why didn't you tell me about this before? " he said.

On his end she could hear doors sliding open and shut. He was outside
now, she guessed, maybe on a deck. "I was sick of being the bearer of
bad news."

"Are the kids okay?"

"What do you mean? " Lily asked too loudly. She broke into a sweat that
started at her hairline and seemed to run down the inside of her thighs.

"I don't know, " Jack said defensively.

Lily closed the blinds on the kitchen windows. "God, " she said.

"I'd better go up and make sure."

"I'll call you back, " Jack said.

"No, " Lily yelled into the phone. "Sorry, I mean, don't hang up.

Hold on while I go upstairs."

"Okay, " Jack said.

She rested the phone receiver in the dish rack and walked slowly out of
the kitchen. She wanted to move quickly, but she could barely get
herself across the threshold into the hall. She realized after a few
moments that she was holding her breath. By the time she reached the
hallway and was about to start up the steps, she was convinced that
someone else was in the house. She cursed herself for never having
gotten around to covering the two skinny windows that flanked the front
door. The metal rods for hanging the long sheers everyone else seemed
able to buy were still there from the previous owners. Anybody could
have been standing outside with a clear view into this rickety house and
the woman inside who wove her way up her own staircase as if she were
losing oxygen with each step.

She grabbed onto the molding outside the boys" room and swung her head
in, half expecting it to be met with a blunt object. She toed open their
closet door from the hall and then jumped into the center of the room.
Greg rolled over at the noise, but the top bunk was empty.

Lily's heart pounded. Katie was in her crib naked, her diaper tossed
onto the floor. Lily moved quickly past the linen closet and down toward
her room.

The light was on. Benjamin was asleep on top of the bedspread with a
flashlight in his hand.

Lily walked downstairs. The house was hers. The walls were once again
formidable, the doors true barriers to the outside.

"I'm going to call the police, " Jack said when she picked up the phone
again. "Cyn thinks I should call the police and that I should come home
now. The next ferry isn't until tomorrow morning."

"Well, what do you think? " Lily said, angry now that she was no longer
frightened.

"A prank. A sicko prank. Bush-league shit-blackened Barbie."

"It wasn't a Barbie. That was Shayna's doll."

"I know, " he said. "I was just trying to get you to laugh. I thought a
good laugh-"

"Well, I'm not in a big mansion by the ocean with a pile of people all
yukking it up."

"Yeah, " he said. "Yuk, yuk, yuk. Cyn and I are on our third sinkful of
glasses. The rental place out here only takes them back clean. And these
people are still out there creating more dirty ones."

"I'd trade with you in a heartbeat, " she said.

"I know, " he said, his voice soft, almost warm. "It sucks."

"Should I be scared? " she said.

"No. The worst is over, " he said confidently.

"You mean you don't hate me anymore." She built a pyramid out of the
baguette crumbs on the counter. She'd had too much to drink.

"I mean Katie's burn, the accident, her injury."

"I know, " Lily said.

"Would that you really did, darling. Would that you did."

Lily hung up the phone before he could say anything else. She poured
herself some Heaven Hill from the bottle she'd bought last Christmas for
baking fruitcakes. She left the fatty fish skins to congeal on the
plates in the sink. The bread, the biscotti, the dill already wilted-she
left it all out on the counter. She didn't bother to shut the
silver-ware drawer or close the cupboards. She walked out of the kitchen
and into the hall, never even double-checking the locks on the doors. She
was too sad to be scared. As she climbed slowly up the stairs to her
bedroom she thought, Whoever wants to get me has to wade through all
this first.

It was light out when she woke up, and someone was knocking at the door,
not her bedroom door, but the door to the house. Ben was still asleep
beside her in the bed. From her bedroom window she could see a police
car in the driveway. She pulled on a pair of gym shorts and went
downstairs.

She recognized the officer. He was one of the younger policemen in town.
He'd come into the shop a few times. She could tell he was trying to
place her ever-y time he looked up from his metal-covered notepad.

"Please, " she said. "Come in." It seemed wrong to make him stand in the
already blazing sun hitting the front steps. As he started to wipe his
feet unnecessarily on the doormat, she remembered the kitchen, the mess.
The house smelled of fish.

The food out on the counter must have jogged his memory.

He pulled out a kitchen chair and said, "Station Break, right?"

She smiled.

"Chefs are always experimenting. That's the difference between a cook
and a chef, I'll bet." Lily asked if he wanted coffee. What she really
wanted was to run upstairs and put on a bra and a longer pair of shorts,
and depending on why he was here, lock her children in a secret
passageway he would never find. She rinsed out last night's coffeepot
and filled the canister with cold water.

"Did you report these threatening phone calls when they first started? "
Right. That's why he was here. She combed her fingers through her
unbrushed hair. It was dawning on her that she had a hell of a bad
headache.

"No, " she said. "I mean, I didn't think it would go on. We thought if
we ignored it .. . Well, they stopped for a while, three or four weeks."

The cop pushed aside the bottle of balsamic vinegar and the crusty
garlic press and opened up his pad. She was glad he was so young.

Maybe that accounted for his being unfazed by the state of the kitchen.

"Does the caller use your name when she calls?"

"She knows who we are." Lily swept her thumbs under her eyes.

She'd probably never taken off her eye makeup last night.

"She refers to an incident-"

"The child abuse thing? " the cop said indifferently.

Lily stared at him for a moment. She wished this were already over. She
didn't want the kids to wake up and see a cop in the house.

"We know the story, " he said.

"We were mistakenly accused, " she said.

He shrugged. She poured him some coffee and pulled away the bowl of
day-old green beans in walnut oil from under his nose.

"When your husband called us this morning, he said there had been some
incident with this caller last night."

Lily opened the back door and led the policeman into the yard.

She pointed toward the grill, but remained on the steps as he walked
across the yard.

He looked around the grass for a stick, the grill cover still in his
hand. He picked up one of Greg's plastic golf clubs and prodded the doll
with it. "Grill rack's shot, " he said. After a while he tossed the golf
club back onto the grass and replaced the lid on top of the barbecue.
"Hear any cars last night, anything? You're up a long driveway here." He
followed Lily inside and sat down in front of his coffee.

Lily looked up from pouring herself some coffee and saw Ben standing at
the edge of the kitchen.

"Ben, this is Officer .. . Blaise?"

"Blaisedell, " he corrected and stuck out his hand.

Ben just stared at him from across the room.

"Everything's okay, " Lily said.

"Can I watch "M." he asked, looking at both Lily and the cop.

She nodded, and he turned silently and went into the diving room.

"Sorry. You know, when they just wake up..

"Could I trouble you for some milk?"

"Oh, sorry." Lily looked around the room for a creamer and then just
placed the plastic half gallon on the table.

"Where was the doll before? " he asked.

"In the house, in a closet, I think."

"It was definitely a one-of-a-kind type of doll?"

Lily nodded.

"Someone would have had to come into the house, then."

"I think so, " Lily said.

"Lost any keys lately? Have any new sitters, cleaning people?"

"No."

"Service people, repairmen?"

Lily shook her head.

"You and your husband estranged? " he said, looking down at his pad.

"No, why? " Lily asked, raising the blinds slightly.

"Oh, sorry, " he said. "It's just that he called from ..

"Business trip, " Lily said.

"Do you have an alarm system? " he said, looking toward the door.

"No."

"Dog?"

"Should I be concerned? " she said, getting annoyed.

The policeman finished his coffee and stood up from the table.

"Mostly kids pull this kind of a thing. Could be a teenager putting one
over on you on the phone."

"And that's good, if it's a teenager? I mean, that makes it less
serious, less of a threat?"

"I was over at a house on Rose Lane yesterday. People got back from
vacation and they'd been cleaned out, everything." He shook his head.
"Thanks for the coffee. Call if you have any more trouble."

While the kids were eating their cereal, Lily went to the basement and
brought up a couple of suitcases. She was sick of waiting, waiting for
Jack to come home, for the kids" friends to get back from vacation, for
the summer to be over, for the cooler weather, for rain, for enough
money to buy an air conditioner, for more threatening phone calls, for
something else awful to happen, for Jack to stop hating her. "You guys
want to go down to the Cape this weekend? " she called out to the kids
from the basement steps.

Ben and Greg screamed and whooped, and Katie started crying, alarmed at
the noise.

There was $870 of credit left on one of their Visa cards. Lily would
drive them all down to Wellfleet. There had to be a room available in
one of those millions of motels along Route 6.

They'd bring a beach umbrella, and she'd triple-bandage Katie's leg and
feet, maybe even slip Ben's athletic socks over the bandages to be sure.

"What about Dad? " Ben asked, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen.
"Will Dad meet us there?"

"Dad's working, " Lily said, as if that were explanation enough.

"Well, I know that, " Ben said.

"Then why did you ask? " Lily put down the suitcases in the hall.

"When he's done working? " Ben said.

"When he's done working it will be Monday. And on Monday it will be time
for him to start working all over again, in Boston.

We'll leave him a note."

"We want Daddy, " Greg started chanting, happily banging his spoon on
the side of the kitchen table. "We want Daddy.. ."

"Da, Da, Da, " Katie said, going along with Greg and pounding her fists
on the high chair tray.

"Maybe I'll get you all a baby-sitter and go myself, " Lily said,
lifting Katie out of the high chair.

"How about Nana? Nana can baby-sit. Nana, we want Nana.. .

Greg said.

"Fuck it, " Lily said loudly. "I try to do something mice for you.

.

She kicked the old plaid suitcases out of her way and started up the
stairs. Katie was crying and yelling, but Lily couldn't tell whether she
was saying "Nana" or "Mama."

She threw herself on her bed. She was hot and hungover, and she didn't
want to do this job today. Maybe she just couldn't. It was all doing and
making and giving when you had kids. It had to come from somewhere, and
she was tapped out. Her own parents had regularly taken sabbaticals,
from home as well as from the university. She needed a sabbatical.

What would happen if she walked out right now, leaving them behind? What
would it feel like to get in the car all by herself@ How did people do
it when they abandoned their kids? Did they put on a video and slip out
the back? Maybe she should just do something completely irresponsible,
let the other shoe drop, satisfy the supposition that she was, in fact,
a bad mother.

When Ben was one week old she had stared down at him in the bassinet. He
was awake, quiet, looking back at her with his blue eyes wide open. And
for a moment, somewhere between fatigue and exhaustion, she'd caught
this objective glimpse of the two of them, new mother and new baby, and
she'd wondered whether she was doing it right. How did she know if she
was loving him properly? How much love was enough?

During the past seven years she'd thought back to that moment no less
than a thousand times. How could she possibly have realized way back
then what would develop over time between mother and child, how every
day this mad love increased, doubling and tripling, then growing beyond
any possible means of quantification? And once in a very rare while,
like today, she'd think back to that moment that first week, and she'd
acknowledge the particle of raw truth in that novice mother's fear.

How much love was enough?

The sitter biked over. Lily hadn't left Katie since the accident.

She watched Samantha come up the front walk. At least she was tall. Lily
figured that the children would be better off today with a
fourteen-year-old who came highly recommended than they would with their
agitated mother. She gave Samantha twelve dollars to have a pizza
delivered, and she told her she'd be home before it got dark.

When she got to the car, she saw Ben sitting in the front seat.

He'd been crying'so, " she said. "You want to go to the beach?"

Jack had never before felt trapped by water, but then he'd never been to
Nantucket before with its ferry and its all-controlling ferry schedule.
He'd waked up at four after talking to Lily the night before and had not
been able to get back to sleep. He'd said something about catching the
first ferry back to Hyannis, but Cyn really couldn't manage the
Saturday-night dinner by herself At five he tiptoed down the stairs of
the servants" wing. The towels in this place were so big and thick he
could barely tuck one under his arm. Somebody in the Waller household
must have shunned the cart path, because there was a narrow but well
worn path down to the beach through the dune grass. He probably should
have told Lily to put the kids in the car and come over for the weekend.
He could have found a motel room for them somewhere.

But everything out here had to be over two hundred dollars a night in
August. And besides, she'd never be able to get the car over on a
Saturday. Fucking island.

It was light out, even though the sun wouldn't rise for another hour.
The Wallers had a "marine info" wall in their kitchen, as if their
island lives were really rule'd by such natural forces as ebbing tides
and waning moons. The tide was low, just coming in again. Jack hadn't
been swimming yet, not in the four days he'd been here. Work was work.
Swimming was personal. He didn't want Waller to see him enjoying himself
in any way. Waller had the annoying habit of offering Jack drinks and
telling him to help himself to the very food that Jack had just finished
preparing, as if he were another one of his moneyed buddies just over
for the weekend, as if the sweat pooling at the back of his waist was
the product of a round of golf rather than evidence of an afternoon
spent in an airless kitchen. Jack knew he should have insisted on
uniforms for Cyn and himself. "No, not out at the house," Waller had
said when Jack broached the idea last week. "We're casual out on the
island." Fucking island.

Jack stripped, balled up his shorts, and tossed them against the dune.
He ran through the almost cool air rising off the Atlantic and dove in.
He surfaced for a breath and grunted and gasped. It was cold, even now
in the middle of August. The Gulf Stream.

These people loved to kid themselves. His paternal grandfather had owned
a house in Rockport when he was a kid. And Jack and his sisters used to
sit on the beach there and watch him take his twenty-minute daily swim.
He'd stretch a salt-faded red racer's swim cap over his bald head and
walk into the water with no visible reaction to its always frigid
temperature and its often choppy surf Then he'd swim, parallel to the
beach, and Jack and Erin and Jean would jog alongside him. He'd swim
just to the jetty, then turn and come back.

At the turn they'd always yell out to him, neither a cheer nor a snicker
but something in between, something ambivalent, something, Jack realized
now, that mirrored his own feelings toward them.

The ocean here was nowhere near as cold as the water off Cape Ann, but
as Jack surfaced again and again, exposing his naked backside to the
warmer air, he felt himself chilled from the inside out, as if the blood
in his veins had been iced and transfused. Jack swam a few long laps
parallel to the shore, hoping to get used to the temperature. He floated
on his back facing the beach and Waller's palace. Gulls swooped down for
what had been left behind at last night's clambake.

Jack let the water lap at his head, filling his ears. The sound of his
own breathing transmuted through the salt water reminded him of the
remote, yet ambient sound of a doptone amplifying his children's
heartbeats in utero. Maybe he should have gone home.

He wrapped himself in the towel and waited for the sunrise.

He'turned around a couple of times, sensing someone behind him, but it
was only the gulls. He tried to pretend for a moment that this was his
beach, his house behind him, his escape, his fucking island.

Of course, he'd do it differently. He picked up a rock and sketched out
a compound in the wet sand. Who didn't want a slice of the Atlantic?
Every New Englander did. The compound would consist primarily of a
restaurant, his restaurant, then off to the side some cabins, maybe a
lodge with a screened in porch and a place to play basketball. The
housing would be for them, the family, nothing fancy.

The restaurant would be as open as possible, wide plank floors, timbered
walls, logs, with cutouts for windows every few feet. No, that wasn't
right. He'd worked at place north of Portland, Oregon, once that looked
like that.

That wasn't right for here. It bothered him that he didn't have a vision
at the ready.

He looked up and realized he'd missed the actual moment the sun had
emerged from behind the ocean. It had happened while he was doodling in
the sand. The sun was up and barely visible, bleeding into the low
clouds. An imperfect sunrise, and he had missed it. He tossed his
drawing rock out into the sea.

The land here, Waller's lot, must have cost in the millions.

Basting and braising wasn't going to get him a spot on the fucking
island. He slipped on his shorts and headed toward the cart path, He
wanted to remember to call the police, tell them about the business with
the doll. He knew Lily was scared.

It was going to be another hot one. They might even want lunch served
inside today. Fucking sit-down lunch just so Waller could clinch some
deal. The Wallers" requisite black Lab was heading through the dune
grass toward him. He'd have to watch where he stepped. Jack had tried to
tell Waller that they needed to vary the settings for the meals. The
clambake had been a good idea. The damn dog was probably a crotch
sniffer too, just like the master. Jack watched as the dog came
galloping toward him.

He was so focused on the dog that he didn't realize at first that he had
stepped into the covered pit from last night's clambake.

Cursing, he jumped onto the cool sand and ran down to the water.

The dog followed, darting at him as if it were all a game.

Jack sat for a long time at the edge of the water with what little surf
there was breaking on him in the front and the dog sniffing at his back.
He watched, waiting for the blisters to form and fill.

He and Cyn had started that fire at noon yesterday, a little less than
twenty hours ago. The pit he'd just walked into could not have been that
hot. It wouldn't be a serious burn, he told himself It hurt like hell,
but it wasn't serious.

C y n had a flowered hatbox filled with vials and creams. None were what
he was looking for. "Thank God you didn't forget your extract of
primrose, huh? " he said, fingering the strange assortment of
supplements and herbs. "Codeine, Demerol, Valium, Extra Strength Tylenol
.. . that's the stuff I'm after." He was sitting on the edge of the
bathtub with his feet in a shallow pool of cool water.

"That bad, huh?"

He'd made it up from the beach by wrapping each foot in one end of his
towel and walking as much as possible on his heels.

"There might be some other pressure points on the body@"

"Believe me, the pain is in my feet, " he said.

She squinted at him, as if he were trying to put one over on her.

"Nothing is ever that simple, Jack. Pain is complex." She put the top
back on her hatbox. "Anyway, I thought you were going home this
morning."

"How can I possibly? I need this job, you know. I mean, I have to
physically protect them and financially protect them."

"You're joking, right? " she said.

"Why? " he said, confused.

"You're so retro sometimes, " she said.

"Well, you know what, Cyn, that's life as a guy."

"What? Being retro?"

He twisted his body from the edge of the tub and looked at her in the
mirror above the sink. She was wearing kid's pajamas. For the first time
since he'd knocked on her door fifteen minutes ago, he noticed she had
Barbies all over her nightshirt. "You don't add up," he said.

"Add up to what? To your stiff idea of who I should be? " she said,
starting to leave the room.

"Hey, I'm not that interested, " Jack said.

I't was the walking back and forth from the kitchen to the deck to set
up the omelet station that was the problem. His right foot was worse
than his left. After he'd insulted Cyn, who was now slamming
stainless-steel bowls against the stainless-steel counter, he'd found
some aloe vera gel in a medicine cabinet.

He'd slathered the soles of his feet and then put on some thick socks.
Each time he stepped he consciously raised his foot without flexing it,
as if he were a marionette, his toes on an axis with the front of his
knees.

He realized now how carefully he'd been insulated from Katie's physical
pain. She was too young to say, "It hurts like .. . it hurts like .. ."
Like what? he thought now. He didn't know what it hurt like. It hurt
like the devil, as Fran would say.

A few early risers were already on the deck, rattling chairs, looking,
Jack thought, too closely shaven, too well rested, too content in their
golf shirts and TopSiders. There was grumbling today, as there had been
each morning, about the newspaper delivery. Mercifully, the market was
closed, and the cellular phones had been left upstairs.

Egg Beaters. Jack had known enough to bring over a case, of course, that
was something that was probably readily available on the fucking island.
He'd set up the portable burners so that he could sit on the deck
railing and take the pressure off his feet.

He flicked some water onto the nonstick saute pan and watched for it to
bead up.

"You're way too pretty to be frowning, " one of the many venture
capitalists on the deck said loudly to Cyn as she brought out a tray of
juice. Jack rolled his eyes as she passed by on her way back to the
kitchen, but she didn't choose to return the conspiratorial look.

"What's the story with that one? " the man said, striding over in a way
that made even this well-built deck shake. He was tall and fit, his
gelled hair combed back over his head. Kind of downtown for a financier
in his fifties, Jack thought.

"What can I fix for you this morning, sir? " Jack asked brightly.

69 Eggs again, huh? Waller pays you the big money to scramble eggs? "

"I'd be happy to prepare anything you like, " Jack said. He was going to
charm this guy out of an argument.

"Anything? Well.. ." He exhaled and blew a cloud of mouthwash over a
layer of last night's scotch in Jack's general direction.

Jack realized slowly that this was the same drunken fool who'd boasted
at dinner on Thursday that he never, but never, bought California wine.
What was Waller doing, saving the real stuff, the French stuff, for the
30 percent players?

"I thought everyone in this neck of the woods ate finnan haddie?"

Jack smiled.

"Well?"

"I do have some smoked salmon out in the kitchen, " Jack said.

"I'm not talking about Jew food, " the man said, leaning in toward him.
"I'm talking about a proper New England breakfast."

"Jew food?"

Jack repeated. The last time he'd heard that expression he'd been eight.
He'd gone with his great-aunt Claire to a delicatessen in Brookline,
where the shiny golden fish in the case were labeled "whitefish." He'd
asked about it, and she'd crinkled her nose. "NVHO knows, " she said.
"Jew food."

"You know what I mean, bagels and lox, " the man said.

"Oh yeah. Us Jews eat nothing but, " Jack said, the pain in his feet
fueling his tongue. "Now, " he said, gesticulating with his spatula,
"you're supposed to say, "Funny, you don't look.. ."

" The man smiled and shook his head. "Hey, I can spot a mick a mile
away."

"If I were you I wouldn't breathe directly over an open flame," Jack
said, tapping the saute pan with his spatula.

"You little shit, " the man said. It wasn't his volume that alerted the
others on the deck but his sudden lunge across the burners for Jack's
ear. Jack jumped back into the deck rail, and the youngest and Icanest
of the money men called off the drunk and suggested to him that they
all go into town for breakfast.

High drama Cyn said after he'd finally finished breaking down the omelet
station and had limped back into the kitchen with everything. "What'd
you do? Insult him, too? You've really got a problem, you know that?"

"I was defending your honor. The guy's an ass grabber."

"No, he's a tit rubber."

"He's a pig, " Jack said, relieved that Cyn was speaking to him again.

"So, we cook for pigs, we serve pigs, what else is new? Doesn't mean you
have to act like a pig."

"I didn't, " Jack said.

Waller let out a low whistle to let them know he was coming.

Chop, chop, the king.

He stuck his silver head into the kitchen. "I heard Ambi got a bit ugly
this morning."

Jack shrugged.

"There are a couple of mountain bikes in the garage. Help yourself It's
a spectacular ride out through the dunes. Get out of this kitchen. Enjoy
yourselves. Have some fun." He pulled his arm over his head and
stretched until his back cracked. He was on his way out the door when he
slapped his hand to his forehead and turned around. "We'll be a few
extra tonight."

"How many"" Jack eased himself into a chair.

"We've got a few neighbors joining us, some of the wives are coming over
this afternoon. I'd say twenty-five. Nothing you can't handle. I've been
getting a lot of nice feedback on the food, very nice." He stared out
the window contemplatively and tapped his lips.

"How about something with blueberries for dessert? They grow wild all
over the island." He swept his arms out around him, and then sauntered
out of the kitchen.

"I'd rather have my left nut cut off right now than go berrying and
biking, " Jack said after he heard the front door slam.

"Well, I'd love to ride a mountain bike and pick blueberries."

Cyn untied her apron and folded it neatly on the counter. "And if it
removes me from your presence, all the better. I've decided that you're
toxic, like .. . burning rubber. You give off noxious fumes."

She pulled her Walkman from a drawer under the center island and left.

At twelve-thirty@ Waller called from the club and said they'd all
decided to eat there. Jack slid the chicken salad with fresh raspberries
and fennel into the refrigerator, along with the julienned vegetables,
the aioli, and the focaccia. He poured himself a fist of Absolut and
settled down in the "library" to watch the Sox on Waller's big-screen Tv.
In the middle of the third inning, he called Lily and got some girl who
didn't know who he was, even after he identified himself.

"She took the big boy somewhere for the day, " she said, before telling
Jack she had to go because the baby was crying.

He poured another drink, adding tonic this time. It felt wrong to be
inside on a summer day, wrong to be drinking in the middle of the
afternoon, even if the vodka had extinguished the worst of the fire on
the bottoms of his feet. It felt wrong to be so far from his kids, and
even from Lily. He missed Lily. He hadn't seen her since Wednesday and
he hadn't talked to her since June.

Since they'd stopped working together, Lily regularly accused him of
getting off easy, skipping off to work, leaving it all behind him.

But he would much rather put up with shit from his kids than shit from
the likes of Ambi or even Waller. It was all wrong to be taking this
kind of crap from strangers when he could have been taking it from his
family. Watching Greenwell miss a popup in the sixth, he decided he
hated his life. By the top of the eighth, he understood that it was
really his )oh that he hated, but right now his job felt like his whole
fucking life.

He was good and buzzed when he switched over to all tonic and began
mixing the marinade for the sea bass. Something "oriental," Waller had
told him last week when they'd roughed out the menu for this weekend.
"Asian, Pacific Rim, " Jack had said, nodding, as if they spoke the same
language.

The bass was delivered by a guy in a banged-up Olds who, Jack figured,
had spent the postdawn hours out on his fishing boat, the middle of the
day behind a fish counter, and the end of the day driving his catch
around the island. He wondered what a guy like that could bring in
during a year-figuring his year only lasted five or six tourist months,
the government could shut down fishing grounds at any time, and he
probably didn't own his boat outright. Fishing was like cooking, people
romanticized it as a profession, wistfully sighing at the road not
taken, as if fishermen and chefs got paid to play. Unlock the equity in
your hobby, get paid to fish, get paid to fuss with food.

Jack signed for the fish and handed the guy a Sam Adams from Waller's
refrigerator. The fisherman looked at Jack and then at the beer, as if
it were a trick, and Jack noticed that he was young, not underage, he
didn't think. Guys who worked outdoors, Jack reasoned, were either young
or old. Nobody who spent his life outside six to eight hours a day ever
looked middle-aged.

"All right! " the kid said, by way of thanks for the beer. He looked
around the kitchen for a moment. "Big enough, huh?"

Jack saw that he was searching for an opener, on the wall, as if he were
standing behind a bar.

"You must go to lots of cool places with the Wallers, huh?

They travel all over, Japan, Florida, everywhere."

Jack handed him a church key. He saw no point in correcting the boy. He
was probably all wrong about his life, as well. The kid had probably
never set foot aboard anything other than his green Olds, bobbing up and
down these bad roads, a trunkload of fish on ice.

"I could never wear a uniform, though, " he said. "You'd never get me in
any kind of a get-up."

"Well, we all wear uniforms.. ." Jack began, philosophically.

"Bummer, " the kid said. "That's when you know they've really got their
hooks into you. See ya."

Jack sliced the scallions and crushed the garlic. "It's like going to
graduate school, only free, " he'd told his parents when he'd graduated
from BC and informed them that he was going to work his way through as
many great kitchens as possible. A means to an end, he'd said. The end
being working for himself And now at thirty-eight, he was a bit player
in an episode of Upstairs, Downstairs.

He'd suffered far worse indignities in past jobs than he had here today.
One summer evening when he was working at the Lawn and Racquet Club,
he'd been ordered by the manager to carry his ice sculpture of a swan
out of the air-conditioned dining room and onto the patio in front of a
phalanx of fans, so that the cocktail hour following the member-guest
could be "aircooled." The sculpture had become unrecognizable as a bird
in about twenty minutes. That swan had taken him four hours to carve and
no one but the dishwasher had really gotten to see it.

He placed a cookie sheet of pine nuts in the just-warm oven.

When he'd worked downtown at La Fortuna, he'd been asked to cater a
"postoperative party" in the owner's father's private room at Beth
Israel. He'd had to use the little bathroom off the old man's room as
his base of operation and had smuggled the liquor onto the surgical
floor in Depends boxes. There'd been the chef in Sonoma, an ex-marine,
who called him "faggothead" every single time he addressed him. All of
that was worse than this. But all of that had happened before he was
twenty-six. You could put up with almost anything when you were young.

The idea of the future hung out there, a giant balm. You could tolerate
all kinds of injuries because the rest of your long life offered endless
chances for regeneration.

He soaked the skewers for the lamb sates. There was no other
explanation. He'd fucked up. He would turn thirty-nine at the end of
next month. He was $24, 000 in debt on his credit cards, not to mention
attorney's fees he owed, and here he was, in service, a fucking domestic
without one single glimmer of a plan as to how to turn it all around.

Shrimp toast. Waller insisted on shrimp toast. Jack pulsed the food
processor filled with crevettes. It was inexplicable. He'd done well his
entire school career, had gotten some scholarship money to go to BC.
He'd never been fired or let go. He'd received excellent recommendations
from every boss he'd ever worked for. Even the vet up in Maine who'd
locked him in the freezer had, in the end, helped him to get the head
chef's job at Bellemeade. All signs had pointed toward success, and yet,
here he was. It was like a fucking miracle in reverse.

Cyn walked in at five-thirty, sunburned and stoned. She took off her
Walkman, and Jack saw a perfect white disk on each beet-red ear. He
wasn't even in the mood to tease her. He popped four "Fylenol and opened
a Coke, covered the bass in a double thickness of foil, and put it in
the refrigerator. He wondered what his children would think of him when
they grew up.

He'd always thought his own father could have done better. He knew he
hadn't cared to. He'd done well enough without working too terribly
hard, and that had suited him fine. "Dad's missing the motivation gene,
" Erin had said on more than one occasion. Maybe Jack was, too. He
thought of how hard he and Lily had worked in their own business, back
when he cared. Bad luck.

Bad luck had happened to him, and now he was out here on the edge of the
Atlantic waiting for the bad luck to just keep on happening.

His foot began to throb again, and he poured himself a glass of wine
from an already opened bottle of Ferrari-Carano. He pared away the thick
brown skin from the ginger root and pressed the flesh against the
grater. All those days when Katie had been in the hospital, he'd been
either too scared or too angry to think of how it felt to be inside her
skin. He'd had a million tricks for distancing himself from her. She was
little, she was a girl, she had her mother. She was, ultimately, so
different from him in every respect that it was impossible to know how
she felt.

Now his own physical pain shamed him into admitting that he'd abandoned
her. Pain was like an artery. Pain could deliver you straight to the
heart of just about anything or anyone.

By the time he left, the entire meal was prepared. The bass was on the
grill, the shrimp toast and sates were being passed around.

The lo mein and the gingered eggplant were done. The coconut halves had
been hollowed out, ready for the cold curried soup. Even the creame
fraiche for the dessert had been whipped.

The last ferry was at nine. He told Cyn he'd give her his last day's
pay-there'd only be breakfast to do on Sunday. He didn't ask if she
minded or even if she could handle it. He called Waller into the kitchen
from outside, where he was busy directing the unfurling of a customized
screen cap over the deck. Jack told him about the threatening phone
calls and the burning doll. He postdated the story, rationalizing to
himself that the news had just reached him, too, out here on this
fucking island. ily and Ben never made it to the Cape. At the end of the
driveway, Ben turned to her and said, "When Daddy's not here, it's like
he's dead."

"I know it seems like a long time to you, " Lily said, wondering why
death was such a recurring theme with this kid. "But you know he's
coming back, two more days."

"I practically haven't lived with him all summer, " Ben said.

Lily laughed at the exaggeration, realizing too late what a misstep that
was. "It's been a hard summer, " she offered. "Because of Katie's
accident, it hasn't been a regular summer, has it? " She stopped the car
at the end of the driveway, unsure where to go.

"Why are we just sitting here? " Ben said impatiently. "Just go, Mom."
He kicked the dashboard with his high-tops as he tried to reposition
himself in the seat.

"Well, " she said slowly. "I don't know where we should go. I'd like to
go to the beach.. .. Would you like-"

"There's lots of things you don't know, lots, " he said, kicking the
dashboard again, this time on purpose.

Lily turned right. They could go to the diner out by the highway.

She certainly wasn't going to drive two hours with a kid who seemed on
the verge of falling apart. For a moment it seemed that she was the
mother of an infant again, at the mercy of his unpredictable needs,
scared to put too many miles between themselves and home base. "I'm
sorry I got so angry, back at the house, before."

"I didn't care, " he said.

"It's been a hard summer for me, too. I thought we could all use a
change of scene. My father believed that salt water could cure
anything."

"What does that mean? " Ben said.

By the time they pulled up in front of the diner, Benjamin's mood had
completely overridden whatever need she'd thought she'd had forty
minutes before. He walked toward the restaurant without looking at her,
head bowed, his long skinny arms bumping into his torso with each step.
In the mirrored cake case at the front of the diner, she could see that
his eyes were dull and flat.

He'd lost all animation. She thought of how Jack used to tell her that
she was "gathering" her "darkness" when she felt herself slipping and
sliding into depression.

She wasn't hungry, but she ordered pancakes, knowing it would take a
long time to eat. When Ben didn't respond to the waitress, she ordered
the same for him. As the waitress took the menus she looked at Lily with
a mixture of pity and disgust, certain that something was wrong with the
boy, but unsure who should bear the blame.

"We could call Dad, if you like, " Lily said, sliding down the booth,
trying to get out of the way of the sun, which was pouring into the
smoky diner. She was hoping that at seven his problems were still easily
remedied, that the cause of his increasing sadness was removable, that
he could be distracted into happiness, that somehow it wasn't her fault.

"This is really kind of nice, in a way, " she said stupidly as the
waitress poured her coffee. "Getting to spend the day together, no
littles around."

"Dates, " Ben used to call their outings together when Greg was an
infant and Lily would make a big show of leaving the baby with Jack
while the two of them went off together. She knew not to use the word
now.

"I hate myself, " Ben said suddenly.

Lily reached across the table, and he pulled back into the booth.

"Wait. You're going to hate me, too. So's Dad."

"You're our boy, " Lily said, panicked at where this was all heading.
"We'll always love you, no matter what."

"Don't say that! " he demanded. "When I tell you .. . I'm going to have
to go to, like, some jail for kids. I'm that bad."

"Benjamin, calm down, " she said impatiently, his theatrics reminding
her unpleasantly of herself. "You are not bad."

He shook his head. "You don't know, Mom. You don't really know me.
There's lots of things about me that you don't know. I did that to your
doll. I burned that doll you loved so much."

Lily stared at him. Two minutes ago he'd seemed on the verge of tears,
but as he told her this his voice grew stronger, clearer, almost proud.

She sipped her coffee, looked out the window. The parking lot was in
constant motion. She had no idea how to proceed here.

She should have known, should have figured it out. She cursed Jack for
sficking her with this all by herself After a long time she said, "Why?"

He looked up at her with those flat eyes and shrugged.

"That doll was my grandmother's, Shayna's. It was important to me." The
desire to smack him coursed through her. She thought back on how
frightened she'd been last night in her own house, looking over her
shoulder, running from room to room, reduced to a child. She'd wasted
the police department's time.

More important, they'd attracted public attention to their private life
once again when they'd called the police.

"You need to tell me why you did that, " she said, cycling back to the
fact that something awfly had happened while her attention had been
elsewhere. While she'd spent her summer picking over her marriage, her
son had been buckling and twisting beyond recognition.

The waitress slid the plates from her forearm down onto the table.

"Hey, cheer up, " she said to Ben as she placed a caddy of syrups
between him and Lily. "School don't start for two more weeks yet."

She chuckled and winked at Lily.

Ben picked up his fork and started to tear large chunks out of the
steaming pancakes.

Lily reached across and squeezed his hand, pressing it to the table.
"You need to tell me why you did that."

"Owww, " he said. "You're hurting me. Why did you even have kids anyway?
" He pushed his plate into hers and ran from the table. Lily took a bite
of food and remained in her seat. She could see most of the parking lot
from the window. He wasn't outside yet. This was her child, still
reluctant to walk two body lengths apart from her at the mall and
unwilling to run into the Red Brick General Store by himself for a jug
of milk. He wasn't going to run away on her.

The young couple across the aisle stared at her. The waitress came up
and asked if she wanted the check. He would come back to the table and
er-y or apologize, because that's what he did, that was the kind of kid
he'd always been, embarrassed to have made a scene. She watched the
syrup run down the sides of her pancakes. How had he uncovered the
grill? He'd always been scared of fire. He'd been scared to help her
light the candles on Greg's last birthday cake, panicked at the warmth
of the dripping wax.

The grill had still been hot, the cover heavy, unwieldy for someone of
his height. Somehow he'd overcome his fear to make his point.

Lily left ten dollars on the table and ran to the vestibule of the
diner, half expecting to see Ben pulling at the knob of one of the
pinball machines. She walked outside and scanned the parking lot.

Church Hill Road was busy with cars pulling off the highway for gas and
food on a summer Saturday. She turned around and went back inside.

She cracked the door to the men's room. An elderly man was just coming
out. She smiled and he tapped the men's room sign with his yellow
fingernail as he stepped past her.

When he was out of sight, she opened the door again. "Ben, if you're in
there, just tell me, okay? " There was no answer. She walked back to the
entrance of the diner, then to where they'd been sitting, then back to
the parking lot again.

She pushed open the door to the men's room all the way this time and
yelled into the tiled room, I mean it, Ben. Come out here right now.
This is enough." A man with a ponytail was standing at the urinal. She
looked in the direction of the sinks, but didn't move.

Benjamin finally emerged from the last stall. "Stay away from me.

I hate you."

The man at the urinal zipped up and stared at her. He was wearing
leather pants and a leather vest with no shirt, a biker.

She looked across the length of dirty blue tile, past the man, now
washing his hands, toward her son. The biker looked first at Ben, then
at Lily. He dried his hands, pulled out a cigarette from his vest
pocket, and lit it.

"Everything okay? " he said to Ben. He nodded in Lily's direction. "You
know her?" 4Tm his mother, " Lily said.

The man cocked his head and looked at each of them one last time.

Ben said nothing.

"Can't be too careful these days, " he said, rubbing his nose with the
same hand that held the cigarette. "Men, women .. . you got all kinds
taking kids .. . molesting them .. . doing God knows-"

"Everything's fine, " Lily said, walking past the man and placing her
hands on Benjamin's shoulders.

She guided Ben out of the bathroom, down the steps of the diner, and
into the parking lot. She kept her hands on him, remembering Father
Paul's praying over her last night. She could no longer lift Benjamin
and she didn't think that she could even hold him tightly enough so he
couldn't break free. She doubted that her touch could heal him.

"It's hot, " he whined.

"You need to talk to me, Benjamin." She prodded him past their car and
around the red and white geraniums planted along the side of the diner,
as if the forced march would get him to confess. "We're not leaving this
parking lot until you tell me what's going on. You're scaring me, " she
said, inadvertently. She hadn't meant to reveal herself, hadn't wanted
him to hear even one vulnerable breath.

"You're hurting me, " he yelled, twisting his shoulders underneath her
hands. They were at the back of the restaurant now.

Two men who worked in the kitchen were leaning against the dumpster
smoking.

"Can I at least sit down? " he said, trying to shake off her hold, one
more time.

Lily led him over to the edge of the pavement where it was almost shady.
She sat down on the curb and pressed him down beside her.

"I don't know why I did it, " he said suddenly. "Sometimes I just do bad
things. Lots of people do bad things and they don't know why."

"I've never known you to do anything like this."

"It )just happened."

"Did you think about it for a long time before? " Lily asked.

"No, " he said, looking right at her. "It was an accident."

She surveyed him, from his skinny brown legs to his black knit shorts to
his Bruins T-shirt. He was so familiar and so foreign.

"I still don't know why you did it, " she said.

"So? " He stood and grabbed a fallen branch a few feet away, at the edge
of the woods.

"Don't be fresh."

"I'm not being fresh."

"Well then, why did you do it?"

"Why did you burn Katie? " he said, looking down at the ground, his toe
in the crook of the stick.

"Is that what you really think, Benjamin? Or are you just trying to be
cruel?"

"It's why Daddy left, right? " he said, almost sympathetically.

"Daddy didn't leave, honey." She wanted to stand up next to him and hug
him, but she knew that an embrace would only be comforting to her. "He's
just gone for a few days, on a catering job, a big party, you know that.
I thought you understood that. I guess there are lots of things I just
assumed you understood."

"I'm not stupid, " he said.

"God, I know, Benjamin. I know. Do you think I would ever hurt any of
you? I'd sooner hurt myself. You're my .. . blessings, my children. What
happened with your sister was an accident. I was upstairs. She pulled
that pot down herself."

He stepped into the crook of the branch, and it broke easily.

He tossed both pieces back toward the woods, and with his hands free he
covered his eyes.

Lily moved next to him and stood very close. "You're so sad, " she said,
starting to cry herself He lurched one step forward into her chest and
heaved a few soundless sobs.

"I'm your mother, " she whispered to herself "Mothers don't hurt their
children. They love them, that's their job."

"Mostly, " he said.

Nantucket Sound was still and dark. Jack limped through the rows of
empty seats to the bow of the ferry. The air was cool, the sky was
starless, and it seemed to him that he alone was spearheading the
crossing, the very first one to feet the bow slice through the wave
always just ahead.

If Waller canned him it would be for the best. In fact, he should have
canned him months ago. He hadn't been working hard enough. Jack couldn't
think of anything more deadening than having a job that demanded so
little. He thrived on humping, pressure, performance. In the corporate
dining room, he was never expected to outdo himself, only to show up.
And the lower the expectations, the more difficult it had become to meet
them.

Working for the Quabbin Group was a rebound job. Like a recent widow,
he'd taken it as much for the distraction from the loss of his own
business as for the salary.

It was a death that never got discussed. The last of the refrigerated
cases had been carted away over a year ago, and neither he nor Lily ever
broached the topic of what had gone wrong at Station Break, what they
might do differently in the future. It was as if they hadn't really
failed, and there never would be a next time. They could have saved the
business if they'd put all their energies into catering.

There was little local competition. No one in their league. But they'd
been ambivalent about catering, which always meant stashing the kids
with Fran or his sisters for most of a day and a night, always on a
weekend at the end of a long work week.

Jack leaned over the railing on the side and looked back at the
grayish-white wake. It all had to do with the kids. They'd tried to make
it work out for everyone. They'd stolen time, mixed family life with
kitchen life, and thought they were one up on everybody else because of
it. But it hadn't worked, and they'd been forced to play the American
game of one on one. One with the kids all day, one with the job all day.
And that sucked almost as much as not having enough money.

But of course, nothing sucked as much as being deep in debt.

Every transaction was tainted when you owed a lot of money.

Every workday was retroactive. There was only the past, the ironclad
fact of the squandering, and the future, the gauzy possibility of
solvency, redemption. The present, which most people filled up with
desire and satisfaction, had to be denied. When you owed the kind of
money they did, you couldn't covet a goddamn thing.

Maybe that had been his problem as much as anything else.

No wishes could be fulfilled, so he'd stopped wishing all together. He'd
organized his days and weeks and months around actively abstaining. He
suffered from the crabbed and inevitable fantasy that somehow the
consumption that was life could be frozen, put off, for a year or two,
just until they could catch up.

He could just make out the wharf in Hyannis now. From where he stood, it
was impossible to tell if the lights running up and down the beach on
either side of the docks were illuminating waterfront estates or wet,
one-room bungalows. He could picture the cottages, chock-full of
hardworking couples who'd taken on double shifts for fifty-odd weeks so
that they could spend seven nights making love with the sound of the bay
lapping just beyond the edge of the bed.

The sex and the money had run out at about the same time.

After the shop had closed, he'd come home from a day at the Quabbin
Group to find Lily working the toaster oven, making the kids dinner. He
hadn't seen her in chef's whites in months.

She never looked so promising to him as when she was dressed in a
freshly starched jacket, the two rows of knobby embroidered buttons
perfectly aligned with her breasts. She was different when she cooked.

A kind of physical confidence flushed through her. It was the only time
she walked purposefully on the ground, rather than on her toes, like
someone habitually in doubt of her stature. The bedroom didn't compare
to the nook in the back of the shop, where they had occasionally
unrolled the deep blue rug purchased just for that purpose. Their whole
life together had once been based on parity, and now it was gone. He
wasn't particularly interested in having sex with someone whose life he
would find it miserable to live. The synchronization of their interests
and their abilities acted as the charged circuit that wrapped around
their marriage. The possibility that they were interchangeable had been
thrilling for Jack. But that possibility was gone. They had all but
passed through one another's skin, and now they didn't even touch. For
the first time it occurred to Jack that Lily must be mourning the loss
every bit as much as he was.

He could hear the engine being thrown into reverse as the ferry began to
dock. They'd made a terrible mistake, and he wondered if he had the
power to even begin to undo it. Entering his bedroom tonight, Lily
asleep in the cross-breeze of two fans, he wanted to be overcome with
desire-for her and for the rest of their life together. More than
anything, he wanted to be able to offer her that.

In her sleep she heard the scritch, scratch of Mr. Mcgregor's hoe. The
sound grew louder, and she realized that somebody was trying to break in
downstairs. Filing the lock, that's what it sounded like. The sitter
said that the phone had rung a few times during the evening, but when
she answered, the person on the other end of the line had hung up. A
wave of heat passed through Lilys already damp body. She knew she should
pick up the phone and dial 911.

Everybody would want to know how she could have let it happen. Why
hadn't she called for help?

What could she possibly have been thinking? She turned on the light,
picked up the receiver, and pulled back the curtains from the window.
There was a van in the driveway, Jack's van.

Lily grabbed a clean T-shirt from the top of the pile of unfolded
laundry and went into the bathroom for some baby powder and a drink of
water. She heard Jack drop his shoes by the front door and walk quietly
up the stairs.

When she and Ben had left the diner this morning, he had asked if they
could please just go to the movies. As she watched the baby-faced
cartoon ghost from her own childhood materialize on the big screen, she
realized that Jack would find Benjamin's behavior further proof that she
was lacking as a mother. She didn't know how to talk to him about
Benjamin outside of the adversarial framework that had sprung up so
tightly around their marriage. She was engaged in a perpetual pretrial
hearing of her character without the dubious relief of sentencing, let
alone the chance for acquittal.

When the movie was over, Ben asked if they could see another. So they
reentered the lobby, bought two more tickets, and stopped again at the
candy counter. While they were waiting for the next movie to begin, Lily
thumbed through her wallet for Lucy Balsaam's number. She had called
Lily when she returned from Turkey. She'd been sorry she'd been unable
to help them back in July, but glad to hear that everything had turned
out fine.

Lily refiled the card amid the money and the grocery-store receipts.
Jack wouldn't want his kid going to a shrink on any kind of regular
basis.

Only two people were seated in the theater. Ben stood at the top of the
aisle, unable to choose a seat.

"Anywhere, " she said after a while.

When a few more minutes went by, and he had not moved at all, Lily
walked a little ahead and said, "This looks good." He followed her,
slowly dragging his knuckles across the tops of the red metal seats.

He wasn't talking to her, but at least he had the good grace, she
thought, to pick a place where silence was appropriate, even demanded.

They sat side by side in the theater, he watched the screen and she
watched his face. When he was younger, she'd been able to get the whole
story just by looking at his face. It would be right there-if he was
hurt or scared or angry, full of himself or of some brilliant, yet
forbidden, plan. Of course, that's the way young children were-open,
readable, accessible, vulnerable in every way. Hiding came unnaturally
to them. Over time they learned how to cloak themselves, to stand behind
doors, inside closets, soundless in the stretch of a shadow so that even
their expressive young faces were cast in the shade. Adults fingered the
secret nugget of themselves obsessively, privately, their whole lives.
It had to start somewhere, sometime, age six, seven.

Lily's mother had always mocked the mothers who cried at graduations.

Growing up is what's supposed to happen to your children, she would say.
"Could you possibly imagine anything more wretched than having someone
remain dependent upon you your whole life? " Watching your children grow
up was liberating, she said. Lily always wondered for whom. Her parents
had never pried. They'd respected her privacy so much that she'd felt
cut loose from life, alone and drifting.

Ben's eyes were glassy from a day spent staring at a screen. His breaths
were shallow, few and far between. He didn't trust her anymore. He
didn't trust her to protect him, to cherish him beyond her own demons.
How had that happened? She couldn't spend one more second worrying about
what Jack would think about sending Ben to a shrink. He needed a
surrogate, someone he could tell ever-y one of those secrets-the
exquisite ones she hoped he'd harbor forever, and more important, the
horrifying ones that ran alongside him, setting the pace, the ones that
could chase you into oncoming traffic on the West Side Highway.

The bathroom door was ajar, and Lily could see Jack undressing-his
shirt, his pants. Next he'd be getting his pillow and his sheet from the
linen closet. She'd called Lucy at five, and had gotten the name of a
child psychologist. Benjamin had an appointment lined up for Monday. She
would simply tell Jack this is what happened.

This is what needed to be done. She was the mother, and she'd taken the
necessary steps.

"It's not so bad in here, " Jack said. "The heat. It's not so hot in
here."

Was he intending to sleep up here? She sat down on the bed.

"What happened? I thought you weren't coming home until tomorrow night
or Monday?"

"I missed you, " he said.

"No, really, " Lily said. "Why are you home early?"

"I was worried about you. V'at happened last night .. . what you told me
over the phone was pretty creepy."

"Yeah, well.. ."

"There's only a brunch tomorrow, " he said, letting his torso fall
across the bed so that he could reach her leg, place his hand on her
knee. "I'd had enough, you know? Enough of one fucking shitty summer.
Action was called for." He slapped her knee and laughed.

She nodded.

"We need to do something, " he said, pulling himself closer to her.

What was this all about? Why was he touching her now that it seemed to
matter so little? What he thought of her, whether or not he still
desired her, was no longer relevant. She looked at him with a kind of
contempt. He didn't know what had happened today with Benjamin, hadn't a
clue, and his ignorance made him seem preposterous.

Jack kicked down the sheets with his knees and let one leg flop on top
of the spread. He moved as if to put his head in her lap.

"Jesus, what did you do? " she said. Both of his feet were wrapped in
strips of cloth.

He sat up and unpeeled the bandages.

"I've seen worse, " she said, after a while. The tough skin of the soles
had only blistered in two spots.

"It was just stupid." He followed her into the bathroom while she poked
through the medicine cabinet. "I stepped into my own goddamn fire, " he
said, sitting down on the toilet seat lid and telling her the story.

When they went back into the bedroom, he lay down and she sat at the
edge of the bed with her back toward him. She looked at his foot, eyed a
length of gauze, then cut the cloth with a pair of nail scissors. "This
might hurt, " she said, as she gently dabbed some ointment onto one
heel. She bandaged one foot, and as she started in on the other, she
began to tell him about her day, about their Benjamin.

He didn't answer, but she could sense him behind her as she worked. She
could feel the heaving of his chest against the mattress, and long after
she had slipped into bed beside him and turned out the light, she could
hear him crying.

The drugstore, the supermarket, and even the gas station had stocked
their shelves with pens and pencils, notebooks, and extra-large bottles
of Elmer's. The school bus route was mailed home, and the cafeteria menu
for the first week appeared in the Rooster The phone calls had stopped,
the woman had lost interest in them again.

The occasional leaf on the occasional tree had even turned color, and
Ben had met twice with Carmella Tallent.

She had called Lily after the first session and said that she wanted to
see him twice a week for a while, given that school would soon be
starting, a time of increased stress for all children. She said she
liked to get to know a child a bit before talking with the parents,
discussing strategies, accruing additional information.

Ben "worked" well with her. He was open, articulate, and intelligent.
She and Jack were very fortunate to have such a terrific kid.

Lily was worried about him. Greg preferred to set up his trains under
the kitchen table rather than in the bedroom he shared with an older
brother who could read chapter books but insisted on crawling into the
bottom bunk with him now ever-y night and once had even wet the bed.

Mostly, Greg was Captain Hook. As soon as he woke up, he'd put on one of
Lilys old ruffled shirts and then he'd get the stapler and mend his
black paper three-cornered hat. When he walked around with his fierce
hook, a soup ladle, protruding from the sleeve of his blouse, Katie
became Tinker Bell, Lily turned into Wendy, and Ben was invisible.

When Katie wasn't staring at Ben, she was busy bringing him raisins,
cut-up pieces of paper, tennis balls, her boo-boo doll.

She wasn't used to being ignored by the big brother who'd always catered
to her. One night while Lily was on the phone and cooking dinner, Katie
tugged on Benjamin's sleeve and pointed to the refrigerator, something
she'd done a hundred times before when she was hungry or thirsty. He was
drawing with markers at the kitchen table.

It seemed to Lily that he kept drawing the same scene over and over
again, the Santa Maria manned by Indians with campfire-like bombs
exploding all around. When Benjamin ignored Katie, she stamped her foot
and whined, which had always worked in the past.

"Just because you got burnt doesn't mean I have to care about you, " he
shouted. "I don't have to do things for you. I don't have to like you."
Katie moved toward him with her open mouth, and just as she was about to
bite him, Ben looked around, almost frantically, Lily thought, for a
means of protecting himself. He reached for a marker, the one he'd used
to draw the bombs, and began scribbling wildly in red on her forehead
and over her eye and down her cheek. By the time Lily grabbed the marker
from him he had just reached her throat.

Just before bed that night, Greg handed Lily a picture. "It's a card, "
he said. "It's a rainbow with birds and God and stuff.

Things he likes. You can't see God, " he said, pointing to a blank space
on the paper.

"It's beautiful, honey." She held out the card for him to take back.

"You give it to him, Mum, " he said.

"Well, don't you want to?"

He looked up at her, shoved his hands into the waistband of his shorts,
and walked away.

The Saturday of Labor Day weekend was cold and rainy.

The cookout they'd been invited to at jean's was canceled. So they did
what everyone else did, they went to buy clothes for school.

The mall was so crowded that they had to park in the spillover lot on
the far side of Route 17. As they crossed the two-lane highway, Jack
with Katie in the stroller and Lily with the two boys, a truck managed
to splash them all. And when the whining ensued, Jack turned to the kids
and said that if they all cooperated for the rest of the afternoon, he
would take everybody to Pizzeria Uno for dinner. The only thing Jack
hated more than shopping at the mall was eating there.

Lily looked over at Jack and Jack looked over at Ben. Anything for
Benjamin, she thought.

saw these in town the other day, " Jack said, pointing to a table
setting in the window of Crate and Barrel.

"We can't afford new dishes."

"Not for us, " he said, leading them toward a fall display, plates
overflowing with what looked like hay, set next to bandannas rolled up
in horseshoe napkin rings. Katie leaned over the side of the stroller
and grabbed some of the hay. Greg wheeled her away to distract her, and
Ben followed.

Lily stared down absently at the brown crockery plates with the glossy
white china centers, then looked over to where the children were
standing, a few feet away in front of a display entitled "When in Rome
.. ." Ben was tying Katie's shoe. "For work? " she asked, turning back
toward Jack. "You couldn't run these through a dishwasher."

"Lilack's." He ran his finger around the deeply grooved lip of the
plate.

Neither of them had talked about their old fantasy, their ideal
restaurant, in over two years. Hearing him mention it now was as if he'd
summoned a pagan god in whom they'd long ago agreed no longer to
believe.

She looked at him studying the plates, and she felt a rush of
hopefulness for which she was immediately ashamed. They were in no
position to indulge in anything, especially unreality.

"It sets kind of a .. . rustic, earthy tone." He seemed to be looking
for her to agree.

She nodded. "They're beautiful. Impractical, but-"

"No, Katie," Ben yelled.

Lily turned to see Katie lean over the edge of the stroller to reach the
arm of an immense mock-up of a pasta machine. Ben moved to grab her
hand, and as he did, he bumped an oil-and vinegar set. The cruets hit the
floor. Glass shattered. Green extra Virgin olive oil flowed slowly and
steadily onto a display of wrapped gift boxes.

"It wasn't my fault, " Ben shouted.

Lily ran up to him.

"It wasn't my fault, " he repeated, his voice rising and cracking as if
he were going to cry.

"Don't worry about it, " Lily said. "No big deal."

People in the kitchen gadgets section stopped and stared. A young man in
an apron came over with a dustpan and broom and audibly muttered,
"Jesus."

"It's all right, " Jack said, staring at the mess on the floor. He
picked up one of the boxed sets of cruets and turned it over.

"Are you going to make me pay for that, Dad? " Ben cried.

"Do we have to pay for that? I can't pay for that. I can't. It was an
accident."

"Benjamin, " Lily said, putting her hands on his shoulders as if to
force the emotions back inside. "It's all right."

"Everybody's staring at me. They know I did it, " he yelled.

"We'll be in Sears, " Lily said, opening her eyes widely at Jack.

"In the boys" department."

They stepped out of the store and into the main concourse of the mall.
"Would you like to push the stroller for me, Ben? " she asked.

Ben was behind them, walking slowly, his fists balled up and his chin to
his chest. Greg was holding on to Lily's right leg.

Every few seconds he would stop and turn to look at his brother.

"I think he's gonna cry, Mum, " he said.

"That's okay. He feels sad."

"Well, not if you're in second grade."

"Would you like to push Katie? " Lily said again to Ben.

"Yeah, right down the escalator."

Katie started screaming and kicking her legs in the stroller.

"Cut the crap, Benjamin, " Lily said, startling herself. She'd planned
on ignoring him, had even been sifting through her brain for a change of
subject, but she just couldn't do it. "It was a piece of junk, Ben. It
shouldn't have been plied that way, teeteringy on a tray. Kids break
stuff all the time in stores." She was yelling now.

"Just forget about it. Get over it."

She began walking a little faster, dragging Greg on her leg, not
bothering to keep track of Ben. "Now, how many pairs of jeans do you
think you'll each need?"

"I don't know, " Greg said. "Seventeen?"

"Okay, " Lily said. "That's good."

"See, " Ben said, racing up from behind and grabbing onto one handle of
the stroller. "You say "Okay" to everything. You don't even listen. You
don't listen to us."

"I was thinking, " Lily said. "Thinking how long I could go without
doing the laundry if we really did buy each of you seventeen pairs of
pants." She could do it. She could control herself, keep from yelling at
Ben, keep from feeling the need to shock him out of this vortex he'd
been sucked into. She could walk up and down this mall all day and allow
him to say whatever he wanted. She would maintain a consistent, upbeat,
cheerful, semidetached tone, if that's what it took. She couldn't make
things better for him, obviously, so she'd have to settle for not making
them any worse. She didn't know who to be with him. But clearly she
could no longer be herself It was different for Jack. He could glide
along for hours on a superficial plane, make joke after joke, pun after
pun. He stayed with Ben in the boys" department, until enough pants and
shirts and socks, the ones on sale, had been selected.

Lily took Greg and Katie into the toddlers" department and distractedly
picked out clothes Greg thought would be "right @) for the second year
of nurser-y school. They bypassed the shoe store. They'd have to wait
until the next pay period for that trip.

In CVS they all bought notebooks and lunch boxes, although only one of
them could write and would be eating lunch somewhere other than home.
Lily consented to going into the pet store, something she hardly ever
did. If depression had a smell, she thought, it would smell like a pet
store.

Katie hopped from the stroller and pressed her nose up against the
plexiglass that separated her from a St. Bernard puppy. Lily listened to
the chirping, the bleating, the tussling of newspaper, and the sound of
claws on metal all around her. The puppy licked the divider, and Katie
pressed her own pink tongue up to her side of the glass.

"You shouldn't let her do that, " Ben said. He was standing behind some
other children, looking at a pile of white ferrets.

Lily smiled at him and shrugged.

"Maybe we should get one, Dad? " Greg said, lowering his arm down into
the world of the St. Bernard puppies.

"Mom hates dogs, " Ben said, not bothering to look in her direction.

96 That's Mum for you, " Jack said. "Wife, mother, dog hater."

Greg turned around and stared at her. "Someday could we?"

"Forget it. They'll never let us get a dog, " Ben said, still staring at
the family of ferrets.

"I don't hate dogs, " Lily finally said. "Uncle David and I had Frank
when we were little. He was a beagle."

"Beagles are little dogs, " Greg said.

"Well, we lived in an apartment."

"Dad had big dogs. This kind of dog gets very big, Dad, doesn't it? " he
said, tapping on the glass.

"Too big, " Jack said.

"Normal families have dogs, Greg. Believe me, we'll never get a dog, "
Ben said.

Jack gave Lily's shoulder a little squeeze.

"What kind of families? " Greg asked, still puzzled after a while.

"Just forget it, " Ben said.

"What does "normal" mean? " Greg said, turning around to Jack and Lily,
as Katie gave the glass another once-over with her tongue.

"Regular, " Lily said.

"Average, " Jack said.

"What? " Greg asked. He pulled his cheeks apart with his fingers.

"Do dogs laugh? " he said.

There was a long line outside Pizzeria Uno.

"Let's bag it, " Jack said to Lily.

"I knew it, " Ben said, kicking the base of a ficus tree.

So they sat on a green wrought-iron bench and waited for their name to
be called. Lily wanted a drink. And then she wanted this to be over. She
wanted to be walking out of the restaurant having survived the next
hour, all of them together. No, that wasn't accurate. She wanted to
survive the next hour with Benjamin.

In its entirety, time with children sped by. They grew up so quickly,
forced you to acknowledge the passage of time in your own body's cells.
But in its component parts, life with children could be made to stretch.
Days, hours, even moments elongated to the point of grotesquery. The day
was never over with Benjamin now.

She wondered if he would even be able to start school next week.

Maybe this trouble with him wasn't a phase or a reaction as much as an
inception. Maybe he'd have to be carted off to one of those schools in
the Berkshires, where he'd be housed with small groups of children who'd
seen their fathers kill their mothers. She and Jack would spend every
weekend until they died visiting him there. Every penny they earned
would go to this place, where the psychiatric nurses and occupational
therapists had discovered that allowing the children to help run a farm,
feel responsible for the lives of animals, was immensely therapeutic.

Maybe they should get a dog.

Lily fanned her face. She was drenched in perspiration down to the soles
of her feet.

"What's the matter? " Jack asked.

She fished through her pocketbook for a sliver of a Xanax.

"Do you mind she said, still looking, now in her change purse, if we
just go?"

"You don't look too good, " he said. "Hey, guys." He stood up and
cracked his knuckles and then his back, making Katie and Greg laugh.

"We're going to go get a movie, get a pizza, and we can all eat together
in the living room, in the dark. Now what's a movie we'd all-"

"I knew it, " Benjamin said, as they started to walk toward the exit.

It was drizzling and a dense, cool fog had settled all around the mall.
It was later than Lily had realized. The parking lot was mostly empty
and quiet, except for the sound of Katie's stroller wheels on the wet
pavement and the occasional splash of Benjamin's foot landing purposely
in a puddle. Jack was walking with Ben and Katie somewhere to the left
in the mist. Lily could hear his voice murmuring to one or both of the
children. Greg gripped Lily's hand. She sensed he was looking up at her,
but she didn't know for sure. She had all she could do to keep walking
and breathing.

If what had happened to Katie truly was an accident, then what was
happening now to Benjamin must be a bequest-bad genes or bad nurturing,
depending upon how you looked at it, but a legacy all the same. His
losing his equilibrium was either a disease he'd contracted via a
microscopic chromosome, or one she'd infected him with because she'd
been injudicious in allowing him to drink for so long from her cup.

She could see now as they walked through the fogged-in parking lot that
this damage to Benjamin was not simply a spin-off of what had happened
to Katie. This uninaking of the boy she had once known was solely her
own work, the product of her motherhood and her mothering.

The scream was so loud, so desperate, that at first Lily thought it was
coming from inside herself. But it wasn't. It was coming from across
Route 17, in the overflow lot. In between patches of fog, Lily saw the
woman. Clearly, she was crazy. She wondered how they might avoid her.
She was hysterical, very nearly ululating as she waved her arms wildly
through the dusky fog. She was pointing. Lily looked behind her. No, the
woman was Pointing at her, jumping again and again, her shopping bag
hitting the pavement each time she came down.

Lily looked over at Jack, about ten feet to her left. He had Katie in
the stroller and he was running at Lily. Lily watched as he let go of
the stroller, let Katie roll toward her, and ran in the direction of the
woman. He headed straight into the traffic, cars going forty, forty-five
miles an hour in the fog. He held up his hands as if he might really
stop the vans and the sports cars, the wagons and the Jeeps. As cars
honked and veered, flashed their lights, Lily saw that Jack was t-unning
toward a boy.

Benjamin was walking down the double yellow line in the middle of Route
17.

Approach your victim head on Jack remembered from the senior lifesaving
course he had taken when he was sixteen.

Talk to them, reassure them. Drowning people sometimes panic when being
rescued. He had learned all these holds for subduing a struggling
victim, and ways to disentangle himself in case a drowning person tried
to drown him, too. Car horns were piercingly loud when you weren't in a
car yourself His heart pounded each time someone honked. He didn't know
these people, these drivers. How could he trust them not to fuck up and
kill his son? All he could think about now was that Benjamin might die.
Whoever had said you didn't register fear in the face of imminent danger
had lied, or else hadn't almost lost a child two months before. The
worst case could happen, even to people like him and Lily, maybe
especially to people like him and Lily.

Ben was walking slowly, arms dangling, head down, seemingly oblivious to
the cars. He was dressed in dark colors, blue shorts, blue soccer shirt.
The word "Winstead, " outlined in white on his chest, and a few reckless
spots of bleach on the back were all that illuminated him. Jack walked
the center line, pivoting on one foot, then the other, trying to face
the oncoming traffic, no matter what the direction. Ben's blond hair
blew about his face every time a car passed. His oversized soccer shirt
billowed up around his skinny torso like a sheet.

"It's Dad, " Jack said. "I'm right behind you, buddy. I'm right here."
Jack stretched his arm taut and reached out to feel Benjamin's bony
shoulder beneath his wet shirt. Ben stopped and turned and let Jack pull
him in close. He was still so little. How had Jack forgotten that? It
was only in relation to Katie and Greg that he seemed big, but compared
to Jack he was small, fragile, precious. They walked back toward the
crosswalk single-file, Ben in front of Jack, Jack's arms draped over
Ben's shoulders and down the front of his chest like a life jacket. A
mixture of sweat and rain trickled down Jack's forehead into his eye. "I
love you, " he said. "Know that I love you."

The Jeep was forest green and the Honda was silver. Brakes squealed,
rubber burned. The Honda slid forever, until metal hit metal.

Traffic stopped. People got out of their cars. A yellow light spun
closer and closer as a mall security car pulled up, illuminating a
sparkling pile of red and white safety glass.

Blood was everywhere, it seemed, some of it Jack's, most of it
Benjamin's. It was bitter to see that his boy was made of finite
physical properties, and not the limitless stuff of Jack's heart and
mind. Lily was there now, stroking Ben's head, murmuring to Katie and
Greg, and talking to someone in a uniform. "You're going to be fine,
just fine, " she kept repeating, mostly to Ben, but occasionally, it
seemed, to Jack as well. "You have a few cuts, that's all."

Jack sat down on the running board of the mall security vehicle, with
Ben still in his arms, stretched partway across his lap.

Ben said he was okay and begged them not to call an ambulance.

A woman stepped into the bloody circle with a first-aid kit. She pulled
on a pair of plastic gloves and pulled back on Ben's little boy skin, the
faint blond hairs all flattened down and pink with blood.

The wounds would need to be probed, cleaned, stitched, she told them.

In the meantime, she handed Lily some bandages for Benjamin, and told
her to make sure to put one on the back of Jack's hand.

Li 1 y wanted Jack to have hishand looked at, too, but he refused.

He pulled up to the entrance of the emergency room, and they helped
Benjamin out.

"Call Dr. Tallent, " he whispered, pulling her close. "Don't let the
shrinks in there get near him."

The waiting room at Lincoln was filthy. Where the carpet wasn't worn
through, it was bloodstained. The plastic chairs were nicked or gouged
or broken. Lily had completely bypassed the waiting area that morning
back in June when she'd been here with Katie. Tonight the triage nurse
seemed in no hurry to help them. Lily took the clipboard full of
paperwork and sat next to Ben, who had parked himself in front of the
wall-mounted TV, his leg up on the chair beside him.

Momentarily, it occurred to her to lie, give herself and Ben another
last name, claim she had no insurance. But they probably wouldn't treat
him without proof that she could pay, and for that she would need to use
her credit card, and then her identity as the former child abuser would
be known. Besides, this world she lived in was small. They'd probably
get the same nurse, maybe even Dr. Svanda.

"Does it hurt? " she asked, looking up at the television, as if she
might make eye contact with him there, on the screen.

He shook his head.

"Good, " she said.

The form asked that she describe the "onset of the illness or accident."

"I'm writing that it happened in a parking lot, " she said softly to
Ben. "That it was dark, the car pulling out didn't see you or the car it
hit. Embedded flying glass."

Ben said nothing.

At least she was with him. At least she and Jack had been there when it
happened. He hadn't been brought here by EMTS or police officers. He
wasn't alone. There was comfort in that.

There had to be.

She pulled Dr. Tallent's card from her wallet. It was a holiday weekend.
She wouldn't be home. She'd have to leave a message.

"Incident." Ben has had an incident, she said into the phone. He seems
subdued now. He's getting stitches. She and Jack would take turns
watching him for the rest of the weekend, sleeping outside his room each
night, inside maybe, if that's what he wanted. School was supposed to
start on Wednesday. Some decision would have to be made about that.

Ben sat ramrod-straight on the examining table as the doctor switched on
the small lamp attached to his forehead and studied the wound. It was a
different doctor, a resident. He didn't have many questions, and those
he had he addressed to Lily. "I want to make sure we get everything out
of here before we sew him up. 9) The nurse returned with a tray of
instruments, and the doctor bent over Ben's left shin with a shot of
novocaine and said, "Bee sting." When he was finally done mining, he
handed Ben the small square tray filled with the little bits of bloody
plastic and started stitching.

When they were all done, Lily called Jack to come pick them up.

She bought two sodas and a bag of Twizzlers from the machines in the
waiting room, and then she and Ben went to sit on the bench outside.

The neon from the "Emergency Entrance" sign made their skin look green
in the dark. Ben shivered, and Lily took off her jacket and put it
around him. He made no move to shake it off.

She had to say something to him, but she was scared it would be the
wrong thing. Anything could cut him now.

"How come I don't have to stay? " he said, looking at her.

"Here? " she said, confused.

"You had to, right? " He sounded small and as young as he really was.

"When I had you, you mean?"

"No. When you were a girl, and it happened to you."

She stared at him, let him go on, hoping he was inventing all this.

"You had to go to a doctor like Carm, and you had to stay in a hospital
when you walked in the middle of the road, like I did, right?"

"That was a long time ago, Benjamin. How do you even know that story,
honey?"

"When we were camping with the cousins, I couldn't sleep. I pretended to
sleep. I lay in the sleeping bag in the tent and I could hear Auntie
Jean and Auntie Erin talking." He stopped and looked out toward the
street. "Then I knew it was true-what I heard you say to Nana once, back
when Greg and I had to talk to that doctor." He touched the tape on top
of his bandaged leg. "A police car came to get you. That guy with the
uniform at the mall, he was a kind of policeman, right?"

Lily nodded and stroked his bare arm. "Does it make you sad that I did
that when I was a girl?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. You didn't want to be alive anymore, which
means you didn't want us.. ."

"I didn't even know about you then, " she tried to explain.

"But didn't you want to, I mean, grow up, and have us?"

"Well, I did. That's what I did."

"But only because the police caught you. What if they hadn't?

"What if Daddy hadn't gotten you, today? " Lily said, after a while.

"I knew he would. I just knew he would. But your parents were already
dead, right? Maybe that's why you did it, because you were sad about
your parents?"

"What are you sad about, Ben? " she asked.

"Nothing, " he said, sliding closer to her on the bench. "I'm just
cold." He moved up onto her lap.

"Dad will be here any minute, " she said, hugging him and staring out
into the hospital parking lot. "I'll keep you warm, buddy. I'll keep you
warm."

Dr. Tallent's office reminded Jack of a tree house. It jutted off the
second story of her home straight into the woods, and for that reason
alone, he could understand why Ben liked coming here. The room was all
knotty pine, with broad beams that ran the width of the ceiling. The
windows were cut in at strange angles, framing views of the woods into
circles or diamonds or trapezoids.

Jack wondered if maybe Ben didn't have just a little crush on Carm, as
he called her. Each time Jack had met her, she'd slipped across the
rough-hewn room draped in the kind of silk that made you want to touch
her. She wore a flowery perfume that wafted around the woodsy office.
When she was concentrating very hard she had the childlike habit of
twirling her pen in her hair.

And if that wasn't enough to captivate Ben, the entire waiting room and
part of the office were lined with shelves full of what Lily called "kid
tchotchkes."

"When I met with Ben back on Tuesday, " Dr. Tallent said, "he mentioned
that he didn't think you especially cared about him."

Jack watched her flip through the pages of the small notebook, which she
had slid into a leatfier cover just as the session began.

"He feels you don't talk much to him? " Dr. Tallent continued.

Jack looked over at Lily for corroboration.

"I don't mean to give that impression, " he said.

"Of course not." Dr. Tallent crossed the legs of her silk pants.

"He needs additional reassurance right now. We need to brainstorm as to
how best to give him that."

"I've been telling him I love him. I mean, making a point to say it out
loud."

Dr. Tallent nodded.

"Maybe he needs to see it. You might just need to show it."

Jack stared out the diamond-shaped window. It was getting darker
earlier. There was just barely enough light left in the sky now to see a
baseball coming toward you. "This is going to sound awful, " he said.
"But how do I do that? He knows me to be a certain kind of person, a
certain kind of father, who behaves in a certain way."

64 You might have to change? " Dr. Tallent reached down and fiddled with
her gold ankle bracelet.

"I think we've all suffered here because of change. I mean, we've had
nothing but change, and it's sucked-"

"That was external change," Lily interrupted. "I think what Carm means
is-"

"I'm not suggesting you change because there is something wrong with who
you are, Jack," Dr. Tallent said. "I'm talking about a shift in style to
meet a pressing, immediate need your son has, that's all."

He nodded. "I understand. I just don't know how to do it. Do you know
what I'm saying? I can't be fake. I mean, it won't work."

"Your son is exceedingly open, at least with me, " Dr. Tallent said. "If
he opens a subject, don't close it. Keep talking until he gives the cue
that he's had enough. That's what he wants, that's what he needs from
you."

What Jack wanted, what Jack needed, was for everything to go back, he
didn't know exactly how far, but back to when they were happy. "Is this
a short-term thing? I mean, eventually we'll be able to join up with our
old selves?"

Dr. Tallent smiled. "I think there is a tendency, " she said, "when
there's a trauma, when there's been a trauma, such as the accident with
your baby, to separate the events in our lives into "before" and
"after." Sometimes we even go so far as to separate ourselves, our
identities, into "before" and "after." It's natural.

It's our means of protecting, conserving, but ultimately I think it's a
fallacy."

"Because there is no more before, " Lily said softly, as she turned
toward Jack.

Dr. Tallent nodded.

"What are you talking about? " Jack said. "That's like saying the past
wasn't real or true, somehow. That only the crappy present is what's
real."

"What I'm saying is that our identity, our reality, shifts and expands,
it's always changing. We get into a great deal of hot water emotionally
if we make the assumption that reality is fixed or that there is one
reality that everyone in a family shares."

"You're telling me I need to change for good."

"I'm telling you that the reality of your family life has already
shifted and you both need to catch up with it."

This doctor was wrong, Jack thought. Not everything was vulnerable to
change. There were fundamental, bedrock truths that, no matter how
disfigured they might appear on the surface, were still recognizable,
embraceable.

The night of Ben's accident, he'd dropped Greg and Katie with his mother
and driven back to the emergency room, exhausted. A parking attendant
had directed him all the way to the visitors" lot, forcing him to walk
what felt like miles back to tl-ie emergency entrance. His back and legs
and neck ached. For the three or five minutes it had taken to reach Ben
he must have contracted every muscle in his body, and now he could
barely move. As he passed by the main entrance, he saw that the lights
that lit up the 12s in "Lincoln" were out. A big masking-tape X covered
a crack in the lobby window. God, he hated this place, doctors and
nurses and patients in wheelchairs out in the parking lot smoking in the
rain. Everything and everybody was sick and sorry-looking, including
himself, with glass in his hair and blood on his clothes.

He was afraid to see Benjamin. How could he father a little boy who had
gone somewhere he hadn't, knew something that Jack didn't or couldn't
know?

Lily and Ben were already outside the waiting room, sitting together on
a bench. Lily was holding him on her lap, his bandaged legs stretched
out to one side, his hair mixed in with hers as he lay with his head on
her shoulder. Their eyes were closed, and Lily was rocking him very
gently, singing in a low voice.

This was all you could do and it was everything. Jack moved in closer to
them. This was the only truth you needed to know.

Everybody was dancing, Lily thought. Katie and Greg were dancing around
Ben, and Lily was dancing around the three of them, and Jack was just
behind Lily night and day, bumping and grinding to a rhythm only he
could hear. A few weekends after school had started, and with Carmella
Tallent's consent, Lily finally agreed to leave the kids with Fran
overnight so that she and Jack could go up to Vermont.

For the past three Sundays, Jack had driven into Harvard Square to Out
of Town News and bought every northern New England paper that got sent
down to Boston with its real estate and business sections still intact.
He spent his evenings circling, clipping, and calling about restaurants
up for sale. He'd race home from work, open the mail, and fan out color
photos before her as if he were about to attempt a sleight of hand on
their future. By the time they set out on their road trip, he had five
sets of directions to restaurants that were on the market. He'd called
ahead for a motel room in Fairlee and made dinner reservations at a
restaurant in Hanover owned by an old coworker of his.

She knew it was a seduction, as was the surprise picnic along the
Charles, and the suggestion that she fill in for Cyn at the end of
September when Cyn took her vacation. She knew he was luring her, not so
much toward a particular destination, a specific plan, as toward change
itself She leaned back and allowed herself to succumb.

"Let's not talk about this in front of the kids, " she said, on their
way back home. "Don't say anything to your mother, not until we've been
to the bank, had the house appraised."

Snowfields, as the restaurant was now called, was the only one of the
five places they saw still in business. They had spent most of Saturday
afternoon there, and Jack had insisted that they drive back over this
morning and walk around, before heading for home. The restaurant was
housed in a rambling old farmhouse, which Lily was sure needed a lot of
work. The couple who owned it had raised their family in the living
quarters on the second floor. Lily had seen water damage on the ceiling
of almost every room. "It's probably a great big firetrap, " she said.
"Anyway, we've got to go up in the off-season when they're doing a
whopping seven dinners a night. When the leaf peepers have gone and the
skiers haven't yet come."

"We need to do this, Lily." Jack took a long drink of his soda, then
wedged the can back between his thighs. "We need to throw ourselves into
this together, get all sucked up into it and overwhelmed and scared and
ecstatic. I hate this." He waved his arm around the inside of the car.
"Christ, I hate the way our life has been eaten away by .. . what? By
fucking shitty circumstance."

"Don't yell, " she said. She'd been scared to go away with him for the
weekend, scared to leave Benjamin and scared that she and Jack could
manage only small amounts of intimacy.

"I'm excited. I'm not yelling, " he said. "Don't shrug like that at me."

"Well, what do you want me to do, Jack?"

"I want you to talk as loudly as I am in this car right now. I want you
to take up a lot of room, more than your allotment. I want you to spill
over-"

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"We're cowering, and I hate it. I can't tell you how much I hate it.
We're tiptoeing around Ben, around each other, around our whole fucking
lives. And that's not who we are. It's like we're in the backseat, " he
said, turning around to look at the empty seat behind them, "and the car
is roaring down a hill and no one's driving-and it's our car. It's our
fucking shitbox."

"It's easy for you, " she said, without looking at him. "But why would I
want to be full of myseip" She pressed her nose to the window and
watched a dairy farm fly by. "I want to be full of the kids.

Sometimes I even want to be flill of you. But it's impossible to try to
fill up on myself without choking."

"How can you say that? " He leaned toward her and stroked her leg.

They'd come down out of the mountains. The trees were shorter here and
the road was beginning to flatten out. "You weren't there when it
happened. You don't have to-" He reached over and put his fingers across
her lips. She knew it to be an act of kindness, but she grabbed his hand
away. "You can't flip a switch and say it doesn't matter anymore, just
because it doesn't matter to you. It doesn't work like that. We can't
just move on, excise the whole summer like it was some kind of benign
tumor and skip ahead to the future." She turned now and shook her head
at him in disbelief. "Benjamin ought to be a clue that we can't do that.
We're saddled with this thing. It's what's taking up the room. It's
sucking up the air in this car right now."

He was biting down on his lip so hard it was white. She knew he was
going to tell her he understood, but she doubted he really could.

"You're wrong, " he said. "You're so wrong, Lily. That accident is no
match for us, no match for you. I watch you with the kids.

And every day I see that the guilt is nothing compared to the love."

"It's not guilt, " she said. "Just knowledge. Terrible knowledge."

It was late when they got home. The kids were asleep. As Fran moved
around collecting her things, Lily could hear Jack cooking in the
kitchen.

"So really, " Lily said, as she helped Fran out to the car with her bag,
"how were they?"

"Good as gold. Truly." Fran opened her car door and looked at Lily.
"He's going to be fine, you know. He's not himself, but he's going to be
just fine."

"Did anything happen? You could have told me on the phone." Lily heard
the squeaking of baby bats in the distance.

Fran shook her head and got into her car. "Nothing happened.

In fact, we had a good time."

Lily watched Fran go down the driveway and then stood staring at the
house for a while. She walked through the door, so relieved to be home
she began to cry.

"Thank you, " Lily said. She dipped her finger into the last bit of
mushroom risotto on her plate.

Jack nodded, slipped down slightly in his chair, and scissored one of
her bare ankles between his feet.

The wind blew hard outside and the old screen in the window above the
sink rattled. The candles flickered, then flared. Jack pulled his chair
next to hers. He lifted her hair and kissed her neck, the tops of her
shoulders, the backs of her arms. He reached over and swatted at the
light switch. The kitchen was now totally dark except for the light from
the dripping candles in the center of the table.

"What are you doing? " She laughed.

He tried to pick her up.

"Let's go upstairs."

The wind blew violently, and the screen in the window above the sink
pushed past the thumbtack that had been holding it there all summer.
There was a clattering and then a splash as one edge of the frame
dropped into the pot soaking in the sink.

Jack was at her feet now, his hand sliding up her leg, up under her
skirt.

His eyes were closed, and she stared at him, trying to remember who
she'd thought he was a month ago, a year ago, ten years ago. No one told
you that about married love, that it constituted a continually, but not
constantly, shifting perception of reality, that it was every bit as
mutable and organic as a living being.

The floor was hard, the tile almost cold against her. Jack pulled a dish
towel from the oven door and rolled it up under her naked hips.

"I love you, " he said.

She listened to the tree branches scrape against the windows upstairs.
The spirea out by the open kitchen door whipped against the clapboards.
He hadn't said he loved her in months, not even the other night in the
motel. The wind blew from the woods, across the yard, straight through
the unfiltered window.

It sped across their bodies again and again. And, if she tried very
hard, she could smell the cultivated scents of crab apple and grass,
spruce and pine, and even more faintly, the original, moist smell of
the soil, itself.

Everything was laid out in front of Jack in small white monkey dishes,
each of the ingredients he needed for making the first course,
pan-roasted trout, already prepped. Lily was at the far end of the
kitchen. She had trimmed the beef and was studding it with slivers of
garlic and fresh rosemary. The water was at a rolling boil for the
gnocchi. The oven creaked and popped as it cranked itself up to 450
degrees. The purposeful din in the kitchen made his eyes water. He
stopped for a moment and listened to the sound of Lily's shoes as they
sashayed under the counter, the rhythmic contact of her knife on wood,
the slap of her peppered hand on the roast. Wordlessly they inspected
the purple basil, tasted the vinaigrette, grated the cheese. All this
industrious silence was their brilliant repartee.

Ben now met only once a week with Dr. Tallent. Sometimes Jack and Lily
joined him. Once in a while they met with Tallent alone.

More and more, it seemed to Jack that she was mining their psyches, and
finally Jack called her on it.

"No, no, " she said. She was only asking what she needed to know in
order to help Benjamin. That was the object ben)amir. She said this so
often that Jack had actually, and inappropriately he knew, laughed out
loud one night.

Tallent had thought his laughter a show of cynicism. He'd shaken his
head and put a handkerchief to his eyes. All these people who worked
with kids, the social workers, the child psychologists-so few of them
had any sense of the absurd. It floored him. As they were driving home
after that appointment, Lily had asked him why he'd laughed. He shook
his head. She smiled and said, "I think she thinks you're insensitive."
The tires of the Subaru hit the iron grating of Black Bridge. He
wondered for a moment if he'd heard her correctly.

"You think I'm insensitive? " he asked as they reached the other side.

"On the contrary, " she said, shaking her head. "I think it's all too
much for you."

During the appointments they had with Ben, Jack was reluctant to talk.
When he was in that office with his son he felt as if he'd stepped into
someone else's version of reality@ He wondered if that was how he'd feel
twenty years into the future, visiting Ben in the apartment he shared
with his girlfriend. Lonely. As those sessions unfolded he was shocked
to see his son glance again and again at Dr. Tallent, as if she were his
referent, his touchstone.

The child was the instructor in this setting and the parent the one in
need of remedial education.

In the sessions they attended without Ben, Tallent spoke to them of
Ben's faulty belief system and the need, on the part of all three of
them, to offer him a new one, a different possibility for himself But as
soon as the four of them got together, Jack invariably felt as if Ben
were sitting at the right hand of God, and he, the father, were
prostrate, repentant, silent before the son.

Jack scraped the pile of minced parsley into a small cloth and squeezed
it dry. This week they'd mentioned to Dr. Tallent that they were looking
into buying a restaurant up in Vermont.

She appreciated their telling her, she said.

"Obviously, you're concerned with the effect this kind of change might
have on Benjamin." She nodded and smiled at them. "Well, let me ask
you, " she said, stating at Jack. "What do you think?"

What he really thought was that for the past three or four months a
number of professionals, mostly women, had been guiding, even dictating,
the most intimate aspects of his life, and he wondered if the personal
would ever again be private.

"We haven't put our house on the market yet, " he said. "We haven't
mentioned it to the kids, though they may have overheard us.

.. . Lily and I have been discussing it a lot, at home. You know how
those things go, kind of obsessional.. .." The truth was that when they
weren't talking about it, he was thinking about it. It reminded him,
sometimes painfully, of the way he and Lily had talked about Benjamin
when Lily was pregnant with him. It was an unquenchable need, the cense
to finally plan aloud the part of your life you'd secretly craved and
that now appeared to be within your grasp.

"The impulse, " Jack said to Dr. Tallent, "is not purely selfish, not
all career-oriented. We both think the kids were happier back when we
were working together. We certainly were. You'd have to tell us about
the timing of switching schools."

Dr. Tallent nodded. "Your son certainly needs to continue treatment, "
she said, twirling the capped end of her pen in the fine strands of her
hair.

"Sure, " Jack said.

"He needs continuity right now-in as many aspects of his life as are
possible. But more important, I think, he needs to be the focus."

She smiled at them both. "Let's see how I can put this.

You're a chef .. . he needs to be the entree. Not to the exclusion of
your other children .. . but, for now, he needs to be the focus of your
energies to the exclusion of your own professional lives.

He's your project right now. And perhaps you could look at him as an
endeavor as challenging as the business you're planning to start."

It wasn't yet sundown. Lily didn't want to start serving the Yom Kippur
break-fast until then. Jack covered the fish and turned off the heat. He
heard his family in the next room, his sisters and mother, his
brothers-in-law, nieces and nephew, Lily and the kids. He could hear
them laughing and shouting. They were playing charades.

Late yesterday afternoon he'd taken the kids apple picking.

His mother had met them there. It was cool and shadowy by the time they
found a row of trees with apples still to be picked.

Jack lifted Katie onto his shoulders so that she could reach high up
into the tree where it seemed the best apples remained. The boys had run
up ahead, looking for a tree they could scale themselves.

"Do you think it's some kind of test? " Jack said after a while.

His mother stood below them, holding open one of the big white shopping
bags supplied by the orchard.

"Or is God just punishing us? " he said.

His mother laughed and said, "You can't really think that?"

"I don't know, " he said, pressing his palms into Katie's back so she
wouldn't topple from his shoulders.

His mother looked down into the almost full bag. "You're just getting a
fat chunk of real life served up to you, that's all.

It's called growing up, Jack. You need to grow up."

He'd been telling himself the same thing every morning since the middle
of August. It was a taunt he used to propel himself from his bed to his
job. But that was easy, disingenuous even. It involved nothing more than
a kind of relinquishing, a daily letting go of an idea of himself. This
other maturation she was talking about, that Benjamin's doctor had
implied, demanded that he embrace a portion of himself that had always
been too small and slippery to grasp.

"I am grown up, " he said to his mother, as he tossed an apple high into
the air beyond where he stood. Then he ran, with Katie still on his
shoulders, his feet seesawing over the rotten apples on the ground.

He positioned himself perfectly, head tilted back, to receive the gift
of the fruit, directly into his mouth.

Katie climbed up onto a kitchen chair, struggling to free her legs from
under the unfamiliar trap of a dress. Lily had the oven door open, the
rack pulled out so that she could check the thermometer in the roast.
She kept one eye on Katie as the baby's fingers walked across the table
in the direction of the two Yahrtzeit candles.

Katie leaned forward to inspect the burning glass jars.

"No. No, " Lily said. The candles were nearly out, Yom Kippur almost
ended.

"Mine, " Katie said.

"Those are special candles, " Lily said.

"Hot, " Katie said.

Lily nodded.

Katie tried to blow.

Lily shook her head. "For my mama and daddy and my nana, " she said.
"And this one is for baby Pearl." One of the nurses from the Shriners
had called last week to say that they were having a memorial service for
Pearl. She had died of pneumonia. It was in the Globe, the nurse said.
Her mother was going to be tried for murder.

Katie pulled up her dress. Lily stared at the scar trailing up the front
of her right leg from her ruffled ankle socks nearly to her knee. The
depigmented skin was so shockingly white compared to Katie's natural
color that Greg had wondered aloud whether they couldn't use Katie as a
kind of light when it was dark. Lily had wanted to go to the memorial
service. And she would have gone, had it been held anywhere but in that
building.

"The candles help us remember them, " she said to Katie, who tickled her
cheek with the hem of her dress and setded her thumb deeply into her
mouth, as if Lily were about to tell her a story.

"So long as we live, they shall live, for they are now a part of us, as
we remember them, " Lily said, reciting the one memorial prayer she
knew.

Katie looked up at her, removed her thumb from her mouth, and stroked
the side of Lily's arm with her wet hand. "Mama, " she said softly.
"Mama."

Lily bent down and kissed her daughter on top of the head.

The cousins were calling Katie. She looked up at Lily once more, then
scrambled down from the chair and ran out of the kitchen.

Lily had scavenged a ticket to Kol Nidre services the night before.
Avinu Malkeinu, the cantor had sung, inscribe us in the Book of
Happiness. Avinu Malkeinu, inscribe us in the Book of Deliverance.

Avinu Malkeinu, inscribe us in the Book ofmeiit.

Avinu Malkeinu, inscribe us in the Book of Forgiveness. The rabbi at the
Reconstructionist Synagogue had cautioned them on Rosh Hashanah that it
was the sins against their sisters and brothers, against the community,
that they needed to atone for in the week before Yom Kippur.

"It is the sins you commit in your interpersonal lives, " she'd said,
"that you need to work out with your friends and family, your spouses
and children. The forgiveness must come from them, not God."

Guilt, apologies, forgiveness all bore very little relationship to one
another in the real life of the soul. She was guilty of having broken
the covenant she'd made with each of her three babies, the covenant to
love them perfectly, keep them perfectly safe. That guilt was useless in
summoning an apology. How did you apologize to children? And
forgiveness, certainly that could only be offered to her once she had
ceased to so desperately hunger for it.

Jack carried the marzipan top of her honey cake up from the cellar where
she'd stored it in the ice chest. He poured each of them a glass of wine
and watched as she unrolled the golden top onto the cake. He opened the
small square container on the counter and gently, with his two
forefingers, lifted the honey bee, replete with wings and a burgeoning
striped body, which they'd fashioned together.

She'd done an awful thing in synagogue last night. She'd propositioned
God. She laid out a proposal, a bargain. If he could make Benjamin fine,
keep them all safe and happy and healthy, she would .. . give up .. .
what? She'd relinquish .. . ? As she was threshing her mind for an
adequate sacrifice, something to make God sit up and take notice, she
realized that children made bargains with God, not grown-ups. Adults,
wives, workers, mothers could only make bargains with themselves.

"We did it, " Jack said, safely placing the sculpted confection in the
center of the cake. "Let's put it out, on the sideboard."

"Careful, " she said, watching him cross the hallway into the dining
room. The cousins were running through the house, looping in and out of
doorways. Jack's sisters and their husbands were in the living room
looking at Fran's pictures from Canada.

Lily walked past them all, following Jack and the cake. She had set the
dining room this morning, a white tablecloth, the good plates, in the
center a round challah with raisins.

"You should be very proud of yourself, " Jack said. He laid the cake on
the sideboard and kissed her on the cheek.

"Take a picture of it, Mom, " Ben said, sneaking up behind them.

Lily shrugged and Ben ran from the room. She could hear him in the hall,
hear his voice above the tapping of the girls" patentleather shoes and
the clinking of the ice cubes in the adults" glasses.

She could hear him say, "Every one, come in and see what my mom and dad
made."

the end.